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The divided self: a psychoanalytic comparison between the fictional works of Catherine Lim and Margaret Gibson
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Type
Thesis
Author
Smith, Poppi
Supervisor
Lumsden, Robert
Abstract
Contemporary critical interpretation teaches us to become more aware of the subtle information in language that influences and affects our everyday lives and through it, we learn to perceive ourselves as subjects staging our lives in the register of language. The affect of seeing the world through the perspectives of these subjects is liberating in that it offers a peaceable end to physical violence and exclusion. It allows us to regard ourselves as interconnected to others through language and to simulate our desires through symbolic expression. The human mind has the capabilities to represent our aggression, compassion, love, and anguish through aesthetic means, and human societies have ways to convey and promote this knowledge among themselves. Despite knowing these possibilities exist for us, human beings are still representing these emotions through acts of war, genocide, and terrorism.
This thesis employs a psychoanalytic reading practice to restage this alternative means of expressing symbolic violence and exclusion through language. It is a demonstration and narration of literary schizophrenia that if pursued to its end can become a personal technique capable of making us stronger and more compassionate human beings. The subjective reading of symbolic violence and isolation upon the texts of two writers, Catherine Lim and Margaret Gibson, allows me to create a narrative that describes, as it performs, a physical investment of desire upon a text and draws liberally and seemingly hastily, at times, on the work of the psychoanalytic theorists, Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, the inspiration behind this literary schizophrenic experience, allow us to get beyond the dependency on our corporeal existence more directly. For a reader familiar with schizoanalysis, the question he or she should be asking is : Why go through the trouble of bringing up psychoanalysis, exploiting other texts, and not begin from Deleuze and Guattari more directly?
As psychoanalysis constantly reiterates to us, the difficulty lies in the fact that the human mind does not proceed directly. It does not respond well to radical and immediate change, but repeatedly circumnavigates and exhausts every alternative it already knows until it is satisfied that it is sufficiently bored.
Deleuze and Guattari describe unconscious desire as flowing between two poles: the schizophrenic and the paranoiac. In bodies whose flow is towards the schizophrenic pole, there is a desire to deterritorialize. In bodies where the flow of desire is towards the paranoiac, there is a desire to territorialize. Schizoanalysis asks us to deterritorialize the Oedipal structure (the paranoiac). This task cannot be performed unless we initially know how deeply embedded the Oedipal structure is in our lives as individuals.
This dissertation attempts a personal schizoanalytic interpretation of the paranoiac flow of desire. In an attempt to be a true schizoanalytic interpretation, it contains scant reference to Deleuze and Guattari or critical evidence of the schizophrenic flow of desire they have inspired. It purports to be nothing more than a true psychoanalytic reading that, hopefully, leads its reader to recognize his or her schizoanalytic potential.
This thesis employs a psychoanalytic reading practice to restage this alternative means of expressing symbolic violence and exclusion through language. It is a demonstration and narration of literary schizophrenia that if pursued to its end can become a personal technique capable of making us stronger and more compassionate human beings. The subjective reading of symbolic violence and isolation upon the texts of two writers, Catherine Lim and Margaret Gibson, allows me to create a narrative that describes, as it performs, a physical investment of desire upon a text and draws liberally and seemingly hastily, at times, on the work of the psychoanalytic theorists, Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, the inspiration behind this literary schizophrenic experience, allow us to get beyond the dependency on our corporeal existence more directly. For a reader familiar with schizoanalysis, the question he or she should be asking is : Why go through the trouble of bringing up psychoanalysis, exploiting other texts, and not begin from Deleuze and Guattari more directly?
As psychoanalysis constantly reiterates to us, the difficulty lies in the fact that the human mind does not proceed directly. It does not respond well to radical and immediate change, but repeatedly circumnavigates and exhausts every alternative it already knows until it is satisfied that it is sufficiently bored.
Deleuze and Guattari describe unconscious desire as flowing between two poles: the schizophrenic and the paranoiac. In bodies whose flow is towards the schizophrenic pole, there is a desire to deterritorialize. In bodies where the flow of desire is towards the paranoiac, there is a desire to territorialize. Schizoanalysis asks us to deterritorialize the Oedipal structure (the paranoiac). This task cannot be performed unless we initially know how deeply embedded the Oedipal structure is in our lives as individuals.
This dissertation attempts a personal schizoanalytic interpretation of the paranoiac flow of desire. In an attempt to be a true schizoanalytic interpretation, it contains scant reference to Deleuze and Guattari or critical evidence of the schizophrenic flow of desire they have inspired. It purports to be nothing more than a true psychoanalytic reading that, hopefully, leads its reader to recognize his or her schizoanalytic potential.
Date Issued
2005
Call Number
PR9555.9.L72 Smi
Date Submitted
2005