Page 181 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Unit 15: The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconcious—Jacques Lacan: Critical Appreciation

unconscious à la lettre - in other words, literally to the letter (or, more specifically, the Notes
concept of the letter which Lacan's essay seeks to introduce).
• Lacan aligns desire with metonymy and the slide of signifiers above the bar, 'indicating that
it is the connection between signifier and signifier that permits the lesion in which the
signifier installs the lack-of-being in the object relation...in order to invest it with the desire
aimed at the very lack it supports'.
• Moreover, Lacan ascribes to Jakobson's differential structure of language, in which each
signifier is reducible to phonemes, or differential elements, and these, operating in a signifying
chain, form the basis of meaning. Lacan makes a passage from these phonemes to the letter,
which is, as he defines it, "the essentially localized structure of the signifier."
• According to Lacan, "the subject is what is represented by the signifier, and the signifier can
only represent something for another signifier" .

15.4 Key-Words
1. Motonymy : A basic trope or figure of speech in which the name of an attribute of an object
is give for the object itself (e.g. in ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’, pen is a
metonym for writing; sword is a metonym, for fighting or war.
2. Metre : The pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in verse—one of the primary
characteristics which may be said to distinguish verse from prose.
3. Mimesis : (Gk. ‘imitation’) the idea that literature attempts to represent ‘life’ or ‘the word’
more or less accurately, as it ‘actually’ is, etc.

15.5 Review Questions

1. Discuss Metonymy, Desire and Metaphor in the Essays of Lacan.
2. What do you mean by the signifier and the signified? Discuss.
3. Critically examine The Insistence of The Letter in the Unconscious.
Answers: Self-Assessment
1. (i)(a) (ii)(a)

15.6 Further Readings

1. Malcolm Bowie, ‘Jacques Lacan’ in John Sturrock (ed.) Structuralism and Since.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979.
2. Sigmund Freud, (tanslated J. Strachey). Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis,
London: Penguin Books, 1973.
3. Jacques Lacan (translated A. Sheridan), Ecrits: A Selection. London: Tavistock,
1977.
4. Elizabeth Wright Psychoanalytic Criticism, London and New York: Methuen,
1984.

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