Conrad, Faulkner, and the Problem of Nonsense by Maurice Ebileeni (review)
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Maurice Ebileeni's study of Joseph Conrad and William Faulkner sets out to reread their major works through a Lacanian interpretative frame and thereby correct a long-standing theoretical neglect. Suggesting that psychoanalytic negotiations of the works have so far followed Freudian or early Lacanian theory, Ebileeni proposes that by turning to Lacan's late work, particularly his concept of the sinthome, we might find new ways of conceptualizing the two writers' attempts to represent the chaotic world in which they situate their characters. The project is summed up as follows:
Conrad's and Faulkner's diametrically opposed narrative approaches are symptomatic reactions to the problem of nonsense. They produce contrasting but complementary versions of reality. The first escapes the consequences of nonsense through ideology whereas the latter engages them to preserve the ideological foundation of reality. The point of this study is to diagnose the transition in modes of subjectivity that takes place from Conrad's to Faulkner's major novels.
(14)
The linchpin on which this interpretation rests is the concept of "nonsense" which, defined somewhat abstractly in the introductory chapter, is helpfully unpacked in ch. 2, where it is reconfigured to accommodate the Lacanian framework. Here, Ebileeni associates nonsense with the "Real," "a dimension that halts the possibility for human subjectivity to emerge." An elusive core mod-Partial answers 15/2: 393–397 © 2017 Johns Hopkins University Press [End Page 393] eled on "das Ding (i.e., the Freudian Thing)," it functions as "the lost object of desire that is always missing and being missed" (41). This essential lack feeds the complex narrative drive that we find in both writers' work, whereby the constant need to narrate experience as a method of achieving epistemological mastery is collapsed with the inevitability of the failure to achieve said goal. While the frustrating reading experience that comes of the co-presence of these two contradictory strains has generated many critical studies, Ebileeni's turn to the Lacanian Real as a source of non-meaning or "nonsense" allows us to rethink the difficulty that underlies the two authors' poetics: their eschewing of authoritative narration, the prevalence of representations of sense impressions, and their turn to circularity and repetition rather than the realist conventions of linear development and plot design.
Ebileeni's insight on plot is particularly interesting in its divergence from Peter Brooks's Reading for the Plot (1984). Informed by Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Brooks sees plot as essential to narrative unfolding: "It is the role of fictional plots to impose an end which yet suggests a return, a new beginning: a rereading" (109). If desire underlies the linear and circular movements Brooks identifies in the workings of plot, what is at stake for Ebileeni's alternative approach is the measure of the Real in language. The difficulty attending such an examination lies in its being premised on a contradiction. The Real is a primordiality that is non-lingual and as such cannot be read. If we find the Real in the text, it is only through those aberrations in which language fails or is performatively subverted in some way so as to allow the Real to be felt, to be experienced. Josiane Paccaud-Huguet, a pioneer in Lacanian readings of Conrad and a significant precursor of The Problem of Nonsense, delimits the terms in which one might apply such a theoretical framework to critical analysis. In "Reading Shadows into Lines: Conrad with Lacan," she suggests that "psychoanalysis will be needed as a mode of thinking the constitution of subjectivity in the face of the Real after the fall of what Lacan calls the wall of semblance" (148). In illuminating "the structure of human desire in relation to death and language" (149) Paccaud-Huguet's analysis hinges on the concepts of symbolic castration, paternal metaphor, and jouissance.
Along with reference to the paternal metaphor, to jouissance, and to the mirror stage, the central Lacanian concept which serves Ebileeni's study is the sinthome. The difficulty underlying this term is...
