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Post-Freudian dialogues: "Mystery" and the rhetorical resistance to meaning in Flannery O'Connor's fiction and Jacques Lacan's theory
Abstract
The study reveals the rhetorical goals and strategies of O'Connor and Lacan to be startling similar, despite their disparate cultures (French and American-Southern) and seemingly incompatible critical classifications ("post-structuralist theorist" and "religious fiction writer"). Both writers, each with an unknowable but nevertheless sensible "mystery" (God or the unconscious, respectively), sought to undermine their contemporaries' obsession with ego-mastery and logocentrism. By resisting their audiences' meaning-making tendencies, the rhetorics of O'Connor and Lacan decenter readers from their egos and objectify them to "mystery." Through the art of detournement, both writers circulate key symbols and signifiers throughout their texts. As these elements are displaced from context to context, they accumulate significance, thus sabotaging readers' cognitive control (i.e., containment in any one meaning). The study is articulated in the manner proposed by Shoshana Felman in Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise. Rather than applying psychoanalysis to literature (i.e., Lacanian theory to O'Connor's fiction), literature and psychoanalysis are placed on the same discursive level, as texts with equal potential for reciprocal implication. From the point of view of a reader who is familiar with both authors, the dissertation explores not only what Lacanian theory has to say about O'Connor's text, but also what a rhetorical analysis of O'Connor's fiction implies about Lacanian theory. Lacan's Seminar on the Psychoses illuminates the "psychotic" structures in O'Connor's portrayal of characters' mindsets or ways of seeing. These radically fragmented and hallucinatory perceptions, in addition to disorders at the level of characters' language, symptomize the dismantling of characters' egos (and, ideally, effect the ego-disassembly of O'Connor's readers) and mark their humbling preparation for grace. Just as Lacanian theory points to the implications that O'Connor's ("psychotic") art of distortion might have for her religious intentions, so does O'Connor's fiction (and its divergence from Lacan's paradigm of psychosis) prove to be a valuable resource--not only for revising Lacan's thinking, but also for uncovering the absolutist attitudes informing his theoretical motivations.
Subject Area
Comparative literature|American literature|Philosophy
Recommended Citation
Ritchason, Shelly J, "Post-Freudian dialogues: "Mystery" and the rhetorical resistance to meaning in Flannery O'Connor's fiction and Jacques Lacan's theory" (1996). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI9637078.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI9637078