Seductions in Narrative: Subjectivity and Desire in the Works of ...

Chris Weedon argues that “[the] power [of Humanist theory] comes from its claim to be natural, obvious, and therefore true. It looks to ‘human nature’ to guarantee its version of reality. It is the medium through which already ‘fixed’ truths about the world, society and individuals are expressed” (77). With its postulation that language, as an expression of rationality, must be transparent and “undistorted by such things as ‘ideology’” (Weedon 77), by which the world can be discerned through the easy process of naming; together with its essentialist view that human identity is stable and, therefore, fixed and coherent, Humanism “offers a sense of security to individual subjects” which is, at the best of times, difficult to counteract (Weedon 83).

The notion of individuality climaxed with the American Constitution (1787) and the democratic tenets disseminated by the French Revolution (1789). During the nineteenth century, Romanticism opened new paths for the expression of the self, especially with the work of such philosophers as Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, who centred their judgements around the solitary individual (Porter 7). The ultimate disclosure in the unending quest for subjectivity, however, was provided by Sigmund Freud and his articulation of the widespread notion of the unconscious.

For the first time in the history of thought, and according to the precepts established by Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), part of the ‘real’ self lurked in what was safely concealed in the Bluebeard’s chamber of the unconscious mind.³ The repressed, dark desires which would only come to the surface in uncanny disguises such as hysteria were taken as a key to the categorical Freudian discerning of the human self. Roy Porter explains how “[s]elf-discovery had become a journey into inner space;” and “[e]xploration of this seemingly alien realm was to have the profoundest implications for modern psychiatry, art and literature” (7).

The key term in Psychoanalysis is difference (Belsey, Poststructuralism 56). Jacques Lacan’s poststructuralist reinterpretations of Freudian theory in the light of Saussurean philosophy, allowed him to articulate difference as a concept which was the basis not only of the relation of the subject with other subjects, but also of the relation of the subject with itself.