qui
parle

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For the briefest of instants, scarcely apprehensible, before Gilda erupts onto the diegetic scene of Gilda (Charles Vidor, 1946), the camera broaches her physical presence as a mere somatic possibility. Attaching itself yearningly to Ballin's searching glance, seeking out for luxurious illumination the object of his question––"Gilda, are you decent?"––it manages only to frame instead, for less time (it's true) than it takes to bat an eyelid, a vacant room, redolently feminine, surprisingly light, into which the till-now-invisible bride then suddenly tosses her all but glowing head. There––but where?––where this woman's body ought to be, there in the light-world that ought by all rights to display it to rich advantage, all eyes are trained for one anxious moment on the sumptuous nothingness of an empty frame, the lavishly curtained backdrop of a bare-because Gilda-less-bedchamber. The film thus suspends on the brink of predication the hermeneutic sequence that's initiated, at least explicitly, by its first mention of women (Ballin to Johnny: "This I must be sure of: that there is no woman anywhere"), but that's been evoked anyway, however discreetly, by the very extent of a diegetic dilation that withholds from sight for a full fifteen minutes the movie's eponymous heroine.

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In 1924 Andre Gide published the final version of his memoirs, Si le grain ne meurt (If It Die), which he had been working and reworking for a number of years. It is hard not to read these memoirs as a form of self-analysis, a place in which Gide tries to construct in narrative form an explanation of his own sexual development, or perhaps we should say a place where he confronts the difficulties that kind of explanatory effort inevitably causes. It is in the context of such difficulties that one feels drawn to read the following scene, described by Gide on only the second or third page of his book. The Gides are on a visit to his father's side of the family in Uzès, and on this particular day they are visiting "les cousins de Flaux":

“My cousin was a very beautiful person and she knew it .... I remember very well the dazzling whiteness of her skin-and I remember it especially well because the day I was taken to see her she was wearing a low-necked dress.”

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So we were told, my brother, sister, her husband, my mother and I, in September, during the macabre two weeks it took to get my father's body home. He died in Leningrad, and between the 2 a.m. phone calls to Russia and the daily conferences with Seymour, our friendly if not so benign funeral director, not to mention the calls to our pals at the airlines––conversations which took on a luminous quality all their own (the good news is he's back in the States; the bad news is he's stuck in a hangar at JFK)––the episode gradually assumed the bleakly, blackly comic contours of what Harold Bloom calls Faulkner's agon. For two incredulous weeks, we were the Bundren's en route to Jefferson, each of us whirring away in formless reflections; our minds blind, depthless. We were occupying the same space, our "home," the house I grew up in, spending bleary hours with yellow legal pads and the telephone in what we were calling "the nerve center," perhaps to avoid calling it my father's study, coming together, fitting together with fits of laughter only.

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If it were only in dreaming that she could have, then it was dreaming that made her greedy. There must have been, too, a need for a secret, a shelter in which to wait for words that she could live by. For a long time, the unsaid swells and stains its bearer with its shadow. It is what we see surging forth––in the space between narrative and text, between confession and the hidden subject––making the shape we know this novel by, the narrative inside, the critique of the given.

What then is this gap between narrative and text? What haunting? Why do almost all readers of Villette respond to Lucy Snowe with either ressentiment or a disturbing insistence? Why do we find her voice so dispossessing when she is offering us her autobiography, a seemingly confessional narrative?

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While the subject of this paper is Swift, the text I present will also have been a reading of Lacan's essay, "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud." I tell you this in order not to mislead you––in order to make my direction clear to you. Yet this rhetoric of revelation on my part may already be misleading, for I want to argue that the subject exposes itself precisely through the act of hiding. Swift's satire, insofar as it announces itself as a game of hide and seek, will ultimately direct us to the domain of this hidden and exposed subject––to Swift as a subject and to the agency of the letter in the ruses of literary subjectivity.

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What is the value, assuming there is any, of Lacan's theory of feminine jouissance for contemporary feminist sexual and textual politics? What are the politics of a Lacanian reading of femininity, and what way of re-reading Lacan does a certain political position, call it a post-humanist feminism, demand or perhaps make imperative? If, with Terry Eagleton, we define the political as "the way we organize our social life together and the power relations which this involves," do the kinds of power relations implied by a text such as Encore enable or disable contemporary feminist theories? Inevitably, Lacan's discourse does both. And although there is always the possibility that I might "use it in order to signify something quite other than what it says," my purpose is to attempt to spell out how, and why.

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A review of Rosenberg, David. The Book of J. With commentary by Harold Bloom. (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990).

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A review of Bartkowski, Frances. Feminist Utopias. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989).

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