“I Was the Subject of the Sentence Written on the Mirror”: Angela Carter's Short Fiction and the Unwriting of the Psychoanalytic Subject

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Merja Makinen also discusses Mulvey's article, but in relation to Carter's depiction of Tristessa in New Eve (159). The article "Le Probleme du style et la conception psychiatrique des formes paranoiaques de l'experience" (1933); in the same issue, Dalí quoted Lacan's thesis in his essay, "L'Interprétation paranoïaque-critique de l'image obsédante." The fact that both Dalí and Lacan were trying to arrive at a "paranoiac theory of art" (Marini 141) led Lacan later to make disparaging remarks about Dalí (203). For an excellent introduction to the links between Lacan and various intellectual and artistic movements of the twentieth century, including surrealism, see Marcelle Marini's Jacques Lacan: The French Context.. Carter exploits and critiques the narcissistic circuit of desire implied by the mirror stage constantly throughout her work: the Doppelgänger motif is in just about every novel, and she repeatedly uses the image of the uroborus, the snake that eats its own tail—yet another traditional mythological symbol of perfection or unity—such as when The Passion of New Eve's Leilah refers to the transvestite Tristessa as having "an atomised, fragmented existence, his cock stuck in his asshole so that he himself formed the uroborus, the perfect circle, the vicious circle, the dead end" (173). Tristessa is a uroborus in himself, but also as the projected mirror image of Eve's self. For Carter, the imaginary unity of the mirror stage and the subsequent "fragmented" structuring of the symbolic order always imply a complete solipsism. It is possible that Carter encountered Lacan in Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, in which de Beauvoir writes the following passage: "[the infant] discovers finiteness, solitude, forlorn desertion in a strange world. He endeavors to compensate for this catastrophe by projecting his existence into an image, the reality and value of which others will establish. It appears that he may begin to affirm his identity at the time when he recognizes his reflection in a mirror—a time that coincides with that of weaning: his ego becomes so fully identified with this reflected image that it is formed only in being projected." De Beauvoir footnotes Lacan's Les Complexes familiaux dans la formation de l'individu (1938), in reference to the mirror stage and claims that "[t]his observation, one of primary importance, would explain how it is that in the course of its development 'the ego retains the ambiguous aspect of the spectacle,'" though I cannot help but wonder how approving she would have been had she referenced "Le Stade du miroir comme formateur de la fonction du Je, telle qu'elle nous est revellee dans l'experience analytique," which contains Lacan's rather bilious reduction and rejection of existentialism: "existentialism must be judged by the explanations it gives of the subjective impasses that have indeed resulted from it; a freedom that is never more authentic than when it is within the walls of a prison; a demand for commitment, expressing the impotence of a pure consciousness to master any situation; a voyeuristic-sadistic idealization of the sexual relation; a personality that realizes itself only in suicide; a consciousness of the other that can be satisfied only by Hegelian murder. These propositions are opposed to all our experience" (Ecrits 6). Sage even goes so far as to claim that Carter's anorexia, from which she suffered as an adolescent, was rooted in this reflexive mindset: "Self-consciousness had been her bane from the start, hence the anorexia" (Angela 29). This interpretation and the story itself may have come from a reworking of a passage from The Second Sex, where de Beauvoir writes of Otto Rank's discussion of the mirror's function in myth and dreams: "In woman particularly, the image is identified with the ego…. Man, feeling and wishing himself active, subject, does not see himself in this fixed image; it has little attraction for him, since man's body does not seem to him an object of desire; while woman, knowing and making herself object, believes she really sees herself in the glass. A passive and given fact, the reflection is, like herself, a thing; and as she does covet female flesh, her flesh, she gives life through her admiration and desire to the imaged qualities she sees" (594). The notion of the possibility of a freedomization of the will rather than an absolute free will is key for Carter, as she was versed well enough in the social sciences to be skeptical that one could completely eradicate deterministic factors. For example, discussing who she was in her twenties, she referred to herself as a "person in the process of becoming radically sceptical, that is, if not free, then more free than I had been (Shaking 38). Skepticism is seen here as a positive trait, which makes problematic the contention that Jack Walser's skeptical position at the beginning of Nights at the Circus is something that must be overturned. Much of "Flesh and the Mirror" seems caught up in a dialogue not only with Lacan, but with a well-known section in Sartre's "The Transcendence of the Ego." Compare the story with the following Janet-at-the-window passage: "A young bride was in terror, when her husband left her alone, of sitting at the window and summoning the passers-by like a prostitute. Nothing in her education, in her past, nor in her character could serve as an explanation of such a fear. It seems to us simply that a negligible circumstance (reading, conversation, etc.) had determined in her what one might call 'a vertigo of possibility.' She found herself monstrously free, and this vertiginous freedom appeared to her at the opportunity for this action which she was afraid of doing. But this vertigo is comprehensible only if circumstances suddenly appeared to itself as infinitely overflowing in its possibilities the I which ordinarily serves as its unity" (285). In The Merchant of Venice, Launcelot plays on this line when his father, Gobbo, does not recognize him: "it is a wise father that knows his own child" (II.2). Carter either was not aware that the quote was from The Odyssey, or she was covering her tracks (which I find more likely), as she attributes the quote in Wise Children to an "Old Saw.". Lorna Sage quotes a letter Carter wrote to her in 1977: "The notion that one day the red dawn will indeed break over Clapham is the one thing that keeps me going. Of course, I have my own private lists prepared for the purges but…I'm more interested in socialist reconstruction after the revolution than the revolution itself, which seems to mark me out from my peers" (Angela 22–23). Clare Hanson sees this as revealing a tension "between a radical will and a sceptical pessimism" (59). Paulina Palmer has similarly pointed out that even while the novels present "a brilliantly accurate analysis of the oppressive effects of patriarchal structures" the lack of a potential for change brings them at times perilously close to "making these structures appear even more closed and impenetrable than, in actual fact, they are" ("From 'Coded Mannequin,'" 180–1). Additional informationNotes on contributorsScott DimovitzScott Dimovitz is an assistant professor of English at Regis University in Denver, Colorado, where he specializes in postmodern British/postcolonial literatures. His Angela Carter and Paul Auster research has appeared in MFS and other journals.