First, before I say anything else, I want to say HOORAY! Happy Day After Election Day! Everything turned out quite nicely if I do say so myself...
Ok, so... Mantissa.
I could not help but notice that the first few pages of this novel connect quite well to Lacan's "Mirror Stage." the first lines where the "he" is experiencing something resembling the pre-mirror stage moment where the child has yet to realize the reality of themselves as an "I." Fowles writes "It was conscious of a luminous and infinite haze, as if it were floating, godlike, alpha and omega, over a sea of vapor and looking down." This quotation connects us well to the pre realization. Before a person realizes that they are an I they are in stuck in the haze of nonrecognition. They have no sense of their symbolic reality. From here Fowels goes on to tell more of "his" experience. "With the swift fatality of fall, the murmurs focused to voices, the shadows to faces. As in some obscure foreign film, nothing was familiar; not language, not location, not cast. Images and labels began to swim... these collocations of shapes and feelings, of associated morphs and phenoms, returned like the algebraic formulas of school days....It was conscious, evidently; but bereft of pronoun, all that distinguishes person from person." In this passage the character in the novel is experiencing the moment of the mirror stage. Where things are beginning to make sense. What was once bleak obscurity, is now beginning to take a form with solid borders. He is beginning to realize his identity, however what he is lacking "the pronoun" is his symbolic place. "All that makes a person a person" can refer to Lacan's idea of how a subject gains their subjectivity through language and through the rules and regulations of a culture. Without knowing these things the subjects can not realize their identity.
The Mirror Stage similarities continue when the subject finally does come to realize (at least in part) his symbolic place. "In a kind of mental somersault it was forced to the inescapable conclusion that far from augustly floating in the stratosphere, it was actually lying on its back in bed." He has realized his surrounding, and the reality that comes along with them.
The rest of the chapter is also a reflection of the mirror stage because he slowly beings to understand more and more of the social and symbolic reality that he has woken up into. As he makes more revelations he begins to discover himself further as he sorts out his thoughts from those that the people in his "new world" are telling him..
15 years ago
2 comments:
I agree with you that the beginning of the novel, Mantissa, is very much representative of Lacan's mirror-stage for exactly the reasons that you have listed. At the start of the novel, the narrator refers to himself as an "it"...is it almost as though his experience in that moment is outside himself. Although he is physically present he talks about lying in the hospital bed as though he were someone else looking in on the scene. It isn't until he realizes who he is that he is then able to refer to himself as an "I" and at this point portions of his identity are introduced to him such as his wife, etc. Although this book is rather different from anything I've read before I really enjoy how it connects much of what we have discussed in class regarding theory. Thanks for your insights Ms. Bean!
The passage dealing with the "I" really stood out for me. I think you did a fantastic job of explaining it's significance. The way his experience is explained as he is lying in his hospital bed is so disconnected and it actually helps to explain the mirror-stage for me. It is one of the best passages I have come across in the novel so far. And the new first family post above this one - they are going to look great in the White House, won't they? ;-)
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