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Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes ladies. 'Look', says the brother, we're at the Ladies!' "Idiot", replies the sister, "can't you see we're
at Gentleman." Through this instance, Lacan projects the working of unconscious on the conscious.
The working of unconscious is exposed through the letters they uttered. The two words-'ladies'
and 'gentleman'-do not represent the doors of urinal as ladies and gentleman, but rather show
how human desires are discriminates in terms of dividing the urinal. Sexual division of the urinal
divides the needs of both the gender. The instance is the perfect representative of the working of
culture and social taboos in the formation of psychology. The two words represent the suppressed
desires of the boy and the girl, which get expressed in their conscious state of mind. From their
utterance, we can get a familiar idea of their unconscious. Lacan believes that words and letters
provide a clear view of the unconscious without knowledge of the speaker. Here in this process
one signifier leads to another signifier. The letter 'gentleman' signifies the gender discrimination,
socio-cultural taboos and the working of unconscious in the conscious. Derrida later studies this
theoretical process of signification and he propagates the doctrine of 'plurality of meaning' and
considers as 'free play of signs'.
Lacan alters the whole concept of signifier-signified established by Saussure and redefines the
arbitrariness of sign where 'tree' is not only a signifier of 'plant'; it signifies more than one signified.
Likewise, letters and words or verbal icons, lead to a signifying chain and explore the psychology.
In this context, we can make allusion to the fictional works of Poe, especially "The Fall of the
House of Usher" where protagonist suffers from hysteria and mental illness caused by the
suppressed desires and fantasies. The gloomy and uncanny atmosphere and his deeds are the
revelation of his unconscious in the story. Lacan celebrates the post modern concept of referentiality
his investigation of signifier and letter. He interprets dream as signifier and emphasizes on the
study of memory in psychoanalytical criticism.
Lacan's most celebrated dictum, 'the unconscious is structured like a language', implies that
psychoanalysis as a discipline must borrow the methods and concepts of modern linguistics; but
he also aims at a critique of modern linguistics from his psychoanalytical vantage point. Thus at
the outset of his essay Lacan questions Saussure's assumption that there is nothing problematic
about the bond between the signified and the signifier in the verbal sign, by pointing out that the
two signifiers, 'Ladies' and 'Gentlemen' may refer to the same signified (a WC), or be interpreted
in a certain context as apparently contradictory place names. In short, language, the signifying
chain, has a life of its own which cannot be securely anchored to a world of things. 'There is a
perpetual sliding of the signified under the signifier.' 'No meaning is sustained anything other
than reference to another meaning.' Such dicta were to have major repercussions on the theory
and practice of interpretation. Lacan's other principal borrowing from modern linguistics was
Jakobson's distinction between metaphor and metonymy , which Lacan identified with Freud's
categories of condensation and displacement, respectively. Here he seems to offer a revised version
of his linguistic model without acknowledging the fact. His equation of neurotic symptoms with
metaphor and of desire with metonymy is, however, quite compatible with Jakobson's scheme.
The points that emerge with most force from this dazzling, wayward, teasing discourse are:
1. that there is no getting outside language, and that language is innately figurative, not
transparently referential;
2. that the human subject is constituted precisely by the entry into language, and that the Christian-
humanist idea of an autonomous individual self or soul that transcends the limits of language
is a fallacy and an illusion. Both ideas (which are fundamental to the Deconstruction school of
criticism) can be traced back to Nietzsche, whose cryptic, idiosyncratic expository style also
seems to have been a model for Lacan.

15.2 Critical Appreciation

The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud is an essay by the
psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan, originally delivered as a talk on May 9, 1957 and later
published in Lacan's 1966 book Écrits. Lacan begins the essay by declaring it to be "situated

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