Lacanian Psychoanalysis
in
The Sound and The Fury
The Imaginary: According to Lacan, from our birth until somewhere around 6 months, we function primarily in the Imaginary order—that is, the part of the psyche that contains our wishes, our fantasies, and most importantly, our images. It is when there is no clear distinction between subject and object, itself and the external world, a condition in which we lack any defined centre of self; that is, what 'self' we have seems to pass into objects, and objects pass into it, in a ceaseless closed exchange. In other words, the child does not know that its body is not the world. In this pre-Oedipal state, the child lives in a 'symbiotic' relation (in Kristeva's terms) with its mother's body which blurs any sharp boundary between the two: the infant is joyfully united with its mother. In this pre-verbal phase, the infant relies on images as a means of perceiving and interpreting the world. Consequently, its image of itself is always in flux because it is not able to differentiate where one image stops and another begins.
Benjy’s developmental stages of infancy have been deferred as a result of his retarded mind. The Imaginary stage of his infancy has prolonged to an extent that even at the age of thirty-three he seem to have blurred distinction between himself and the external world. He has been caught up somewhere between the Imaginary and the Mirror stage. As a result, he has an illusive sense of oneness between himself and the mother, here Caddy, and the nature. His inability to speak a language and his naïve style of narration in the first section of the story reveal his lack of understanding of any social codes designated by language in the Symbolic order. Moreover, in this pre-verbal, pre-Oedipal stage, Benjy tends to identify with his beloved sister, Caddy, since it the mother figure who dominated the Imaginary and the Mirror stage.
His tendency for an illusive wholeness with the ideal world brings about in him a sensitivity to whatever which is against it: anything which intends to separate him from Caddy, from the blissful nature, or anything in contradiction with unblemished codes of conduct such as Caddy’s promiscuous relationship with menlead to his ‘moaning and slobbering’.
For Lacan the unconscious is structured like a language: it is a continual movement and activity of signifier whose signifieds are often inaccessible to us because they are repressed; it is a sliding of the signified beneath the signifier, a fading and evaporation of meaning, a bizarre modernist text which is almost unreadable and which will certainly never yield up its final secrets to interpretation. If this constant sliding and hiding of meaning were true of conscious life, then we would of course never be able to speak coherently at all. If the whole language were present to us when we spoke, then we would not be able to articulate anything at all. The ego or consciousness can, therefore, only work by repressing this turbulent activity, nailing down words to meanings, signifiers to signifieds. In fact, this ambiguity can only be apparently removed when the ego or consciousness is at work. In mentally retarded people whose ego is latent, inactive or indolent, the process of language is slippery and ambiguous.
For Lacan the subject of enunciation differs from the subject of enunciating; in that, the subject of enunciating, the actual speaking, writing human person, can never present themselves fully in what is said. Here we can make an analogy between what we say, acts of enunciation or literature.
The "enunciation" itself refers to the realist literature which has a curious resemblance to human ego which tends to repress the process of its own making. On the other hand, "act of enunciating" is associated to with the content of the piece of literature. Many modernist works make the act of enunciating, the process of their own composition, part of the actual "content".
By having been presented with four accounts of the same story in the Sound and the Fury, each account being a different "act of enunciation" from the rest, the reader is engaged mentally in the active process of reading and is encouraged to reflect critically on the partial, particular ways the story is narrated and so to recognize how it might all have happened differently.