Fiction and human fantasy

FICTION AND HUMAN FANTASY

Fantasme:
Laplanche et Pontalis dans leur Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse définissent le fantasme comme un « scénario imaginaire où le sujet est présent et qui figure, de façon plus ou moins déformée par les processus défensifs, l'accomplissement d'un désir et, en dernier ressort, d’un désir inconscient ».
Pour user d’une métaphore qui sera tout de suite parlante, l’on peut dire que le fantasme est un bouchon qui vient combler un vide, un manque, disons une différence incommensurable, radicale.

Fantasy ?
A production of the human imagination which stages a human subject in the position of seeing/being seen by an object.
Cf. ça me regarde.
In TLH, an example of this in the children’s room where the skull is nailed on the wall.
The skull’s hollow eyes, sth unbearable.
The open eyes of the dead that seem to be looking at you.
The uncanny.
Fantasy requires a surface for projection : a stage, the pages of a book, a TV/video screen, the mind’s eye, a canvas, etc : some mirror/screening device in which one reflects oneself doing this and that, constructing a « heroi fantasy » for oneself…
Fundamentally, the screen (of the mind) is a mirror for identifications.

Mirror ?
A word derived from mirare: to look attentively, to gaze, in order to have a full vision of something : related to a mode of human desire, the scopic/epistemological drive : wanting to see/to know.
But mirare itself is also related to mirari, to wonder—in surprise, fear, amazement : which implies that there may be something disquieting/uncanny about the object one looks at.

Fiction,as a product of the creative imagination ?
A cultural function, to offer a mirror for reflecting human experience : since the birth of narrative fiction in 18th Europe, the novel has been considered as « a mirror held up to human nature ».
But a suspended mirror as well, which means that the world of fantasy is only a moment of « willing suspension of disbelief », an alibi, not real life.

I.MIRRORS AND MIRAGES :
The mirror stage ? A stage in the development of human beings, divided into two steps : discovering one’s own image, and giving a name to it.

The first step :
A visual moment when the human infant perceives itself for the first time not as a body made of separate fragments, but as a complete entity : either in a mirror, a puddle, or simply through the image reflected in the mother’s eyes (in the pupil, which means « little doll »).
This moment also applies metaphorically : our self image depends on the way in which our coming into existence was looked at/considered :

Au premier jour de ma vie il y avait une dame,
ses yeux étaient le premier miroir où je pouvais me voir.

The moment of mutual reflection is very important for the constitution of subjectivity : when for the first time, one has a sense of unity, intimacy ; of perfect reflection and completeness : the moment which Narcissus tried to perpetuate when he spent his time contemplating his image himself in a pool of water.
This first step is accompanied by a sense of bliss, of great happiness, then followed by anxiety since the image is unstable and immaterial.
All human beings long to recover that stage of bliss : the pathological manifestation of this longing : Narcissism, a disposition of the ego throughout our lives.
Part of human existence depends on our image under the other’s eyes in the social mirror : cf. Mr R worrying how long his image of a brilliant philosopher will last, when it will vanish.

- The novel : traditionally, a reflector of the problematic of human identifications in the social mirror.


1.WHOLENESS IN THE MIRROR :Mirrors, windows : important places in the topology of stories (diegesis).
Cf. the first part of TTL, « The window », with its main motif, « Motherandchild in the window », the object of Lily’s picture.

a) The picture in the window ? held on four sides by the frame, it offers something for the eye to gaze at with rapture.
Cf. Lily B : « […] as she saw […] Mrs R sitting with J in the window and the cloud moving […] how life, from being made up of little separate incidents when lived one by one, became curled and whole » (54).

Cf Mr R, who for comfort, after his failure with the letter R, « gazed at his wife and child in the window » (62).

b) Images have a soothing/power : they make you believe that you will always be the same, eternally young, beautiful, and powerful = one of the main functions of human fantasy/dream, which is to protect you against time, death, mortality, etc…
TTL : :
- Mr R fancying a heroic death for himself as a means of compensation for the failure to find a stable meaning for R = some sort of glorification of the ego :

He had ridden through the valley of death, been shattered and shivered […], 38
Yet he would not die lying down ; he would find some crag of rock and there, his eyes fixed on the storm, trying to the end to pierce the darkness, he would die standing. 42

- Charles T’s fantasy of triumphing on graduation day, seeing himself gowned and hooded under Mrs R’s eyes/the mother’s protective gaze.
- Mrs R and AC : looking together at the dish of fruit, feasting their eyes on an image of abundance from the sea, a horn of plenty, « united them » (105)
Nb : each time, Mrs R functions as the mirror for the other characters’ reflections : cf the first stage of the mirror stage.


2.THE METAPHYSICAL MIRAGE :Mirage métaphysique de l’harmonie universelle, abyme mystique de la fusion affective (C. Léger)

Mirages ? virtual reflections that attract human desire to an imaginary place, where thirst will be quenched (oasis), where bodily desires will be fulfilled (cf Celestial Jerusalem).
= nothing will be lacking/leaking, where there will be nothing to desire : the Promised Land of Bliss.
Mrs R’s/the mother’s presence : nurtures imaginary constructions, myth making and match making.

a) Myth making :
The function of myth ? To provide a narrative construction which solves the contradictions of human life, by giving « metaphysical » answers to the enigma of death and life. Lévi-Strauss
In nationalist myths, feminine figures are often associated with power : cf Marianne and the Republican myth ; the statue of liberty and the American myth ; Athena, the protector of the city which bears her name.

TTL : Mrs R built into the image of a goddess, the « lighthouse of the universe » (like the statue of liberty), through the prism of her guests’s eyes.
- A mythical goddess of natural cycles : WB sees her like someone
with « noble ancestry » (15), « at the end of the line, Greek » (36) ; she is Demeter (20), an « alma mater » (91) who patches up the wounds of human existence : « taking to her breast buds that had broken and lambs that had fallen » (20).
In Lily B’s fantasy, it is as if she held in her power the solution to the riddle of the universe :

did she lock up within her some secret which certainly LB believed people must have for the world to go on at all ? (58)

- The Great Absolute Mother, a « tower of strength, formidable to behold » (12), brandishing like Marianne « her sword at life » (68), possessing the force of a man like the Queen of England (20) : a queen-bee who seems to « pour erect into the air a rain of energy, a column of spray » (44) : here, the letter R is sounded.

b) Match-making : her presence seems to be the guarantee of a well-ordered world, where things seem to fit in safe binary oppositions, are safely wrapped together, « everything struck into stability ».

- The match-maker, fitting people and social relations together :
men and women, rich and poor, high and low : 32, 68, 86, 122.
[…] as if the walls of partitioçn had become so thin that […] it was all one stream […] and P and M would carry it on when she was dead, 122
It flattered her to think how, wound about in their hearts, however long they lived she would be woven. 122


- Her benevolent gaze presides over her chidlren’s destinies : she
helps them choose and cut out this and that picture for themselves, cut their way through life : she looks after James guiding his scissors (9), approves of Andrew dissecting crabs (34), gives her daughter Rose freedom to choose among her jewels (89).

- Her stories about Joseph and Mary : cuts are exquisite, not painful :
The air was shoved aside by their black wings and cut into exquisite scimitar shapes. She could neve describe it accurately enough to please herself. » (89)

- She is the queen of a fantasy world where the pain of loss/cutting is tamed/domesticated, into images of loss (castration imaginaire) :cf the one-armed man and the circus (17), James’ pictures of a mowing-machine, a knife with 6 blades (21) ; ¹ real mutilation, the mackerel in the sea between square brackets.

In short, her presence wraps things/holes into a whole, like the shawl flung over the picture frame, erasing the limits between the real world and the imaginary (34, 37, 73).

a) The aim of the artist, or what does a painter/writer want ? to
capture the rapture into a picture ; cf WB looking at Mrs R with rapture, and Lily painting by his side :
Once more under the power of that vision which she had seen clearly once and must now grope for among hedges and houses and mothers and children—her picture. » (61)

But it is here that problems begin :
a picture ? an object within a frame under the viewer’s gaze.
an image ? no frame, it floats and vanishes.

impossible to capture the whole thing into a picture :

‘But this is what I see ; this is what I see’, and so to clasp some miserable remnant of her vision to her breast, […] » (26)

The metaphysical mirage flickers and flutters away, the mirror is an empty looking glass (cf the mirrors in a lighthouse) : a gap opens in love relations.
TTL : Lily’s desire is inadequate to what she can achieve : cf her sense of social inadequacy (26).