Narcissism and the Literary Libido. Marshall W. Alcorn Jr.
from this perspective, writing offers a narcissistic compensation for a sensed failure in presence and being.31 Writing becomes a compromise formation that both expresses the ontological insecurity of being and ameliorates that insecurity through the production of signification. Writing allows a self to augment its anxiously depleted self-presence, by the supplement of the word. Writing is a libidinal investment whose form seeks to extend and increase libidinal investments. From a Lacanian perspective, the word is a particularly apt ontological gamble. Writing is a “want to be,” but it is a “want to be” that wants to be read. Writing always courts an other; writing seeks to be “the desire of the other.”
Writing produces, magnifies, and extends the presence of self-consciousness by seeming to represent it in language for others. In seeming to represent self-consciousness in language, writing converts it into a commodity and places this commodity (self-consciousness) outside the self for consumption. Writing thus offers an imaginary representation of self-consciousness as a commodity for recognition and appropriation. The text, as a “representation” of self-consciousness, provides a space, a habitation (in the form of signifiers), inviting an other to take up presence. It offers, in a subtle form, a verbal body to shore up the insecurity of a self’s presence. Writing, then, begins as a narcissistic crutch; it is a verbal, artificial prop for self. Successful writing, however, becomes much more than a prop or a crutch. It produces for the artist a kind of social recognition that mitigates narcissistic fears. As Freud points out, the reality of the artist’s social recognition is a very powerful force. We must understand why the artist is given such recognition and admiration.
Fundamentally, the text mediates between the narcissism of a writer and the narcissism of a reader. The text links the insecure presence of a reader to the insecure presence of the author. Both come to the signifier for substance and, according to their appetites, both find something of value. But this process is curiously paradoxical: The writer (among other goals) seeks to appropriate being and status by attracting the reader’s recognition; readers, on the other hand, seek to appropriate being and status by recognizing themselves in the signification produced by the writer. Both come to signification, the word, because of what they lack. Yet, when the libidinal shifting of the texts is fruitful, the interaction between the reader and author (at the locus of the text) seems able to manufacture a commodity, an experience of “satisfaction” not available to either. If both author and reader feel themselves “recognized” in a satisfactory way, the pain of inner lack is ameliorated and a certain mysterious absent commodity, “being,” is satisfactorily produced and consumed (even though it may or may not be, in a strict sense, shared).
If desire, as Lacan says, needs an other, then there is a fundamental reciprocity linking the producer and consumer of literary productions. An author’s desire is essentially an expression seeking to elicit and draw power from the desiring response of a reader. Just as the child seeks recognition and narcissistic support from the mother and gains such support through both self-expression and the expression of frustration, artists seek both to gain recognition and to express their conflictual consciousness.
Just as the writer’s desire gestures toward a reader, the reader’s desire gropes toward an otherness desired and apparently configured in the text. Both author and reader are divided from themselves by their turning toward an otherness beyond them, in the text. This divergence of the author and reader from themselves, however, becomes the basis for a convergence of both author and reader on a textual medium that dramatizes, problematizes, reformulates—and in some paradoxical way satisfies—questions of being and value. This convergence of both author and reader in the text provides the basis for a metaphysically complex community established by the fantastic nature of the text.
Writing, we want to say, produces a message. But some messages, the kind we like to call literature, seem to multiply their meanings and, further, survive temporal interpretive transformations. Readers keep coming back to the ancestral bodies of many texts, thus keeping them relevant as they comment on and reinvest something of themselves in them. We could outline a history of the natural selection of texts, including the historical, political, and psychological forces that determine their character, their survival, and mode of reproduction. But such an outline is not my purpose here. I do wish to suggest that as authors and readers experience the various effects of recognition through textual production and response, literary texts become forms for reformulating libidinal investments. Literature becomes a vehicle whereby feelings, thoughts, and social arrangements that may not be initially a part of the discourse of a culture can become expressed, debated, and made “real” via the libidinal power of literary expression.
As teachers, we often get to see the generative effects of literary discourse in action in the classroom. It is interesting to see how highly personal literary recognitions quickly become a medium for social bonds between students. In response to texts, students often come to recognize what they care about and with whom they share this feeling. Psychologists argue that recognition is a very powerful and important experience. Recognition gives legitimacy to aspects of the self that may be unacknowledged or disowned. But we do not often acknowledge the wider social implications of recognition. Personal images and social visions are not disparate and isolated phenomena; they are intertwined and interactive. As a result of textual identifications, people come to fantasize about themselves differently, to define themselves differently, to act differently, and to have different ideas about an ideal community. They adjust their self-images and form bonds with like-minded people and begin to argue with others. They engage in politics. They formulate new definitions of authority and morality to justify the new visions of self and society that they have come to embrace.
Both readers and authors, I suggest, come to texts for substance; the substantial text is one that fills a certain emptiness within the self. The ability of texts to fill a certain emptiness within selves is a purely imaginary event, an event of “vision.” Yet this event can have real and practical consequences.
As the imaginary “form” produced by texts takes up habitation in human bodies, imaginary “form” gives definition to very practical things: law courts, governments, armies. Texts are imaginary verbal artifacts, but they give a culture and a community a language to discuss its concerns. James Boyd White argues that “the community that a text establishes . . . has a real existence in the world.”32 We might say, then, that writing does not merely attempt to appropriate an imaginary entity—“being”—from an other by means of a circular and reciprocal act of empathy and communication; it often succeeds. Through the effects of recognition, social reciprocity, and shared fantasy, literary texts and other art forms produce linguistic codes necessary for the social reshaping—the libidinal rebinding—of communal being.
Ontological insecurity may be the center for the production of writing. But this unstable center produces an imaginary product that produces the metaphors of value necessary for every cultural change and identity. Rhetoric originates from an ontological emptiness, but it moves toward an imaginary and verbal structure that fabricates the true “material” of social and personal being. Readers respond to certain texts strongly because they feel they themselves are somehow “at issue” (as indeed they are) in the imaginative form and social consequence of that text; they respond to complete or define themselves; and they respond to banish the vertiginous and uneasy experience that the rhetoric of the text produces within them.
To understand textual rhetoric, we must appreciate its powerful emotional force. But we must also free ourselves from the immediacy of our initial response to it. As scholars we should do more than provide yet another reading or another ideological analysis of some particular text. We must seek to describe the nature of this entity, rhetoric, that produces the various contradictory sundering and repairing effects described here. The study of rhetoric should take a broad perspective on the subject. It should venture into a interdisciplinary investigation of its various mechanisms and operations.
Writing creates rhetoric and puts pressure on libidinal attachments as it dramatizes sites of psychological conflict, demands recognition from an other, and compensates the neediness of the self. A theory of rhetoric,