Читать книгу In Defense of Lost Causes - Slavoj Žižek - Страница 22

There is, however, a more fundamental question to be raised apropos the family myth as interpretive tool. It seems obvious that the first task of the critique of ideology is, of course, to treat the family narrative as an ideological myth which should be handled like a dream’s explicit text, which should be deciphered back into the true struggle obfuscated by the family narrative. What if, however, one follows here the homology with the Freudian logic of dreams to the end, bearing in mind that the true focus of a dream, its “unconscious desire,” is not the dream-thought, but something that, paradoxically, inscribes itself into a dream-text through the very mechanisms of the transposition of the dream-thought into the dream-text? In other words, the unconscious desire in a dream is not simply its core which never appears directly, which is distorted by the translation into the manifest dream-text, but the very principle of this distortion—here is Freud’s unsurpassed formulation of this paradox:

The latent dream-thoughts are the material which the dream-work transforms into the manifest dream. [. . .] The only essential thing about dreams is the dream-work that has influenced the thought-material. We have no right to ignore it in our theory, even though we may disregard it in certain practical situations. Analytic observation shows further that the dream-work never restricts itself to translating these thoughts into the archaic or regressive mode of expression that is familiar to you. In addition, it regularly takes possession of something else, which is not part of the latent thoughts of the previous day, but which is the true motif force for the construction of the dream. This indispensable addition [unentbehrliche Zutat] is the equally unconscious wish for the fulfillment of which the content of the dream is given its new form. A dream may thus be any sort of thing in so far as you are only taking into account the thoughts it represents—a warning, an intention, a preparation, and so on; but it is always also the fulfillment of an unconscious wish and, if you are considering it as a product of the dream-work, it is only that. A dream is therefore never simply an intention, or a warning, but always an intention etc., translated into the archaic mode of thought by the help of an unconscious wish and transformed to fulfill that wish. The one characteristic, the wish-fulfillment, is the invariable one; the other may vary. It may for its part once more be a wish, in which case the dream will, with the help of an unconscious wish, represent as fulfilled a latent wish of the previous day.¹³

Every detail is worth analyzing in this marvelous passage, from its implicit opening motto “what is good enough for practice—namely the search for the meaning of dreams—is not good enough for theory,” to its concluding redoubling of the wish. Its key insight is, of course, the “triangulation” of latent dream-thoughts, manifest dream-content, and the unconscious wish, which limits the scope of—or, rather, directly undermines—the hermeneutic model of the interpretation of dreams (the path from the manifest dream-content to its hidden meaning, the latent dream-thought), which runs backwards the path of the formation of a dream (the transposition of the latent dream-thought into the manifest dream-content by dream-work). The paradox is that this dream-work is not merely a process of masking the dream’s “true message”: the dream’s true core, its unconscious wish, inscribes itself only through and in this very process of masking, so that the moment we retranslate the dream-content back into the dream-thought expressed in it, we lose the “true motif force” of the dream—in short, it is the process of masking itself which inscribes into the dream its true secret. One should therefore turn around the standard notion of the ever deeper penetration to the core of the dream: it is not that we first penetrate from the manifest dream-content to the first-level secret, the latent dream-thought, and then, in a step further, even deeper, to the dream’s unconscious core, the unconscious wish. The “deeper” wish is located in the very gap between the latent dream-thought and manifest dream-content.¹⁴

A perfect example of this logic in literature is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. A standard Marxist critical point about the novel is that it is focused on the dense family-and-sexuality network in order to obliterate (or, rather, repress) its true historical reference: history is eternalized as a family drama, larger socio-historical trends (from the “monstrosity” of revolutionary terror to the impact of scientific and technological revolutions) are reflected/staged in a distorted manner as Victor Frankenstein’s troubles with his father, fiancée, and monstrous progeny . . . While all this is true, a simple mental experiment demonstrates the limitations of this approach: imagine the same story (of Dr Frankenstein and his monster) told as a story of the scientist and his experiment, without the accompanying family melodrama (the monster as the ambiguous obstacle to the sexual consummation of marriage: “I’ll be there on your wedding night,” and so on)—what we would end up with is an impoverished story, deprived of the dimension which accounts for its extraordinary libidinal impact. So, to put it in Freudian terms: it is true that the explicit narrative is like a dream-text which refers in an encoded way to its true referent, its “dream-thought” (the larger socio-historical dimension), reflecting it in a distorted way; however, it is through this very distortion and displacement that the text’s “unconscious wish” (the sexualized fantasy) inscribes itself.

The Romantic notion of monstrosity is to be understood against the background of the distinction, elaborated by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, between Imagination and Fancy: Imagination is a creative power which generates organic and harmonious bodies, while Fancy stands for a mechanical assemblage of parts which do not fit each other, so that the product is a monstrous combination lacking any harmonious unity. In Frankenstein, the story of a monster, this topic of monstrosity is not limited to the narrative content; it somehow spills over and pervades other levels. There are three levels of monstrosity/fancy.

1. First, most obviously, the monster reanimated by Victor is mechanically composed of parts, not a harmonious organism.

2. Then, as the novel’s social background, social unrest and revolution as a monstrous decomposition of society: with the advent of modernity, traditional harmonious society is replaced by an industrialized society in which people interact mechanically as individuals, following their egotistic interests, no longer feeling that they belong to a wider Whole, and occasionally exploding in violent rebellions. Modern societies oscillate between oppression and anarchy: the only unity that can take place in them is the artificial unity imposed by brutal power.

3. Finally, there is the novel itself, a monstrous, clumsy, inconsistent composite of different parts, narrative modes, and genres.

To these three, one should add a fourth level of monstrosity, that of the interpretations provoked by the novel: what does the monster mean, what does it stand for? It can mean the monstrosity of social revolution, of sons rebelling against fathers, of modern industrial production, of asexual reproduction, of scientific knowledge. We thus get a multitude of meanings which do not form a harmonious whole, but just coexist side by side. The interpretation of monstrosity thus ends up in monstrosity (fancy) of interpretations.

How are to find our way in this monstrosity? It is easy to show that the true focus of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is the “monstrosity” of the French Revolution, its degeneration into terror and dictatorship. Mary and Percy Shelley were ardent students of the literature and polemics regarding the French Revolution. Victor creates his monster in the same city, Ingolstadt, that a conservative historian of the Revolution, Barruel—Mary read his book repeatedly—cites as the source of the French Revolution (it was in Ingolstadt that the secret society of Illuminati planned the Revolution). The monstrosity of the French Revolution was described by Edmund Burke precisely in the terms of a state killed and revived as a monster:

out of the tomb of the murdered monarchy in France has arisen a vast, tremendous, unformed spectre, in a far more terrific guise than any which ever yet have overpowered the imagination, and subdued the fortitude of man. Going straight forward to its end, unappalled by peril, unchecked by remorse, despising all common maxims and all common means, that hideous phantom overpowered those who could not believe it was possible she could at all exist.¹⁵

Furthermore, Frankenstein is dedicated to Mary’s father, William Godwin, known for his utopian ideas about the regeneration of the human race. Godwin entertained millennial expectations in An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Political Justice (1793), where he exulted in nothing less than the coming of a new human race. This race, to emerge once over-population had been scientifically brought under control, was to be produced by social engineering, not sexual intercourse. In the novel, Victor says:

A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs.

The symbolic association between Godwin and monsters was forged in 1796—1802, when the conservative reaction against him reached its peak. During those years, demons and the grotesque were frequently used to deflate Godwin’s theories about the utopian regeneration of humanity. Conservatives depicted Godwin and his writings as a nascent monster that had to be stamped out, lest England were to go the way of revolutionary France. Horace Walpole called Godwin “one of the greatest monsters exhibited by history.” In 1800, The AntiJacobin Review, which championed the attack upon William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, denounced the couple’s disciples as “the spawn of the monster.”

Frankenstein does not directly approach its true focus; instead, it tells the story as a depoliticized family drama or a family myth. The characters of the novel re-enact earlier political polemics on the level of personal psychology. In the 1790s, writers such as Edmund Burke had warned of a collective, parricidal monster—the revolutionary regime in France; in the aftermath of the revolution, Mary Shelley scales this symbolism down to domestic size. Her novel re-enacts the monster trope, but it does so from the perspective of isolated and subjective narrators who are locked in parricidal struggles of their own. In this way, the novel can maintain its true topic at a distance, invisible. As we have noted, this is also the standard Marxist critical point about Frankenstein: it is focused on the dense family-and-sexuality network in order to obliterate (or, rather, repress) its true historical reference.

But why must Frankenstein obfuscate its true historical referent? Because its relationship to this true focus/topic (the French Revolution) is deeply ambiguous and contradictory, and the form of the family myth makes it possible to neutralize this contradiction, to evoke all these incompatible attitudes as parts of the same story. Not only is Frankenstein a myth in Lévi-Strauss’s sense, an imaginary resolution of real contradictions. One should also follow Lévi-Strauss when he claims that Freud’s analysis of the Oedipus myth is another version of the Oedipus myth, to be treated in the same way as the original myth: further variations of a myth try to displace and resolve in another way the contradiction which the original myth tried to resolve. In the case of Frankenstein, one should therefore treat as part of the same myth, as its further variation, the cinematic versions (of which there are more than fifty), and the manner they transform the original story. Here are the main moments:

1. Frankenstein (the best-known, James Whale’s classic from 1931, with Boris Karloff as the monster): its main feature is that it leaves out the subjectivization of the monster (the monster is never allowed to tell the story in the first person, it remains a monstrous Other).

2. In Frankenstein: The True Story (1973), Frankenstein creates a handsome young man whom he educates for society, but the creature’s body begins to degenerate, turning him against his maker.

3. In The Bride (1985), after Frankenstein abandons his original creature as a failure, he creates a beautiful female and educates her to be his perfect mate; but she also escapes his control.

4. In Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, after the monster kills Victor’s bride, Victor in a desperate move reassembles and reanimates her (the scene culminates in Victor dancing with his reanimated wife).

5. Finally, although it does not directly refer to Frankenstein, in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), Police Lt. Deckard is assigned to hunt down and eliminate a group of “replicants,” super-human creatures genetically engineered for slave labor, who have rebelled against their creators and are hiding in Los Angeles. The showdown between Deckard and “Batty,” the replicant leader, obviously refers to the conflict between Frankenstein and the monster—here, Batty, in the final act of reconciliation, saves Deckard from certain death.

What all these films have in common is that they all reproduce the basic prohibition of the original novel: none of them directly approaches the political topic (the “monstrosity” of social rebellion); they all tell the story through the frame of family/love relations. So in what does the novel’s contradictory attitude to its central topic consist?

The motif of the monstrosity of the revolution is a conservative element, and the novel’s form (a confession of the principal character at the point of death) is clearly related to a conservative genre popular in Shelley’s time, in which, after they are forced to confront the catastrophic results of their dreams about universal freedom and brotherhood, repentant ex-radicals renounce their reforming ways. However, Shelley does here something that a conservative would never have done: in the central part of the book, she moves a step further and directly gives a voice to the monster himself who is allowed to tell the story from his own perspective. This step expresses the liberal attitude of freedom of speech at its most radical: everyone’s point of view should be heard. In Frankenstein, the monster is not a Thing, a horrible object no one dares to confront; he is fully subjectivized. Mary Shelley moves inside the mind of the monster and asks what it is like to be labeled, defined, oppressed, excommunicated, even physically distorted by society. The ultimate criminal is thus allowed to present himself as the ultimate victim. The monstrous murderer reveals himself to be a deeply hurt and desperate individual, yearning for company and love.

So it is crucial to see in what consists the monster’s own story. The monster tells us that his identity as a rebel and murderer was learned, not innate. In direct contradiction to the Burkean tradition of the monster as evil incarnate, the creature tells Frankenstein: “I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend.” Surprisingly, the monster proves to be a very philosophical rebel: he explains his actions in traditional republican terms. He claims to have been driven to rebellion by the failings of the ruling order. His superiors and protectors have shirked their responsibilities towards him, impelling him to insurrection. Monsters rebel not because they are infected by the evils of the godless radical philosophy, but because they have been oppressed and misused by the regnant order. Mary Shelley’s source was here her own mother’s study, An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (1794), in which Mary Wollstonecraft, after agreeing with the Burkean conservatives that rebels are monsters, resolutely insists that these monsters are social products. They are not the living dead, nor are they specters arisen from the tomb of the murdered monarchy. Rather, they are the products of oppression, misrule, and despotism under the ancien régime. The lower orders are driven to rebellion, they turn against their oppressors in parricidal fashion. It is here that the novel comes closest to politics: the monster develops a radical critique of oppression and inequality: “I heard of the division of property, of immense wealth and squalid poverty; of rank, descent, and noble blood.” He speaks in the manner of revolutionary-era radicals:

I learned that the possessions most esteemed by your fellow-creatures were, high and unsullied descent united with riches. A man might be respected with only one of these acquisitions, but without either he was considered, except in very rare occasions, as a vagabond and a slave, doomed to waste his powers for the profit of the chosen few.

Here Mary Shelley effectively develops the “dialectic of Enlightenment” 150 years before Adorno and Horkheimer. She goes much further than the usual conservative warnings about how scientific and political progress turns into nightmare, chaos, and violence, how man should retain proper humility in the face of the mystery of creation and not try to become a master of life, which should remain a divine prerogative.

The monster is a pure subject of the Enlightenment: after his reanimation, he is a “natural man,” his mind a tabula rasa. Left alone, abandoned by his creator, he has to re-enact the Enlightenment theory of development: he has to learn everything from zero-level by reading and by experience. His first months are effectively the realization of a kind of philosophical experiment. The fact that he morally fails, that he turns into a murderous vengeful monster, is not a condemnation of him but of the society which he approaches with the best intentions and a need to love and be loved. His sad fate illustrates perfectly Rousseau’s thesis that man is by nature good, and that it is society that corrupts him.

The very fear of progress is not necessarily a conservative motif. Recall that, in Mary Shelley’s England, “Luddites,” gangs of desperate workers, were destroying industrial machines in protest against the loss of jobs and the greater exploitation that machines meant for them. Furthermore, feminists read Frankenstein not as a conservative warning about the dangers of progress, but as a proto-feminist critique of the dangers of masculine knowledge and technology which aim to dominate the world and gain control over human life itself. This fear is still with us today: the fear that scientists will create a new form of life or artificial intelligence which will run out of our control and turn against us.

There is, finally, a fundamental ambiguity that pertains to the very motif of the son’s rebellion as a monstrosity—whose rebellion is this in the novel? Rebellion is redoubled: the first rebel against paternal order is Victor himself, and the monster rebels against the rebellious son. Victor rebels against the proper paternal order: his creation of the monster is asexual reproduction, not the normal succession of generations in a family.

This brings us to the Freudian notion of the Unheimliche (the uncanny). What is the most unheimlich thing, that closest to us and at the same time the object of horror and disgust? Incest: the incestuous subject literally stays at home, he does not need to look for his sexual partner outside, and he engages in a secret activity which inspires fear and shame in all of us. No wonder, then, that hints of incest occur twice in Frankenstein: Walton writes his letters (and, at the novel’s end, decides to return) not to his wife, but to his sister; in the first edition of the novel, Victor’s bride is his half-sister. (So when the monster is really “there at [the] wedding night” and kills the bride, he prevents at the last moment the consummation of an incestuous union.)

Walton’s and Victor’s urge to leave home and engage in a risky transgressive act is thus more ambiguous than it may seem: they both do it not out of some pathological blasphemous ambition, but in order to escape the incestuous stuffiness of their home. There must be something wrong at home. Mary’s husband, Percy, described what was wrong in his famous sonnet “England in 1819”:

An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king,

Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow

Through public scorn—mud from a muddy spring,

Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,

But leech-like to their fainting country cling,

Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow,

A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field,

An army, which liberticide and prey

Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield,

Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay,

Religion Christless, Godless—a book seal’d,

A Senate—Time’s worst statute unrepealed,

Are graves, from which a glorious Phantom may

Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.

A conservative would reply, of course, that this phantom which may burst from a grave “to illumine our tempestuous day”, may turn out not to be so glorious at all, but rather a phantom of murderous revenge like Frankenstein’s monster. This brings us to Mary Shelley’s contradiction: the contradiction between “oppression and anarchy”, between the stifling and oppressive home and the murderous consequences of our attempts to break out of it. Unable to resolve this contradiction, and not willing to confront it directly, she could only tell it as a family myth.

The lesson of all these impasses is not that one should bypass the family myth and turn directly to social reality; what one should do is something much more difficult: to undermine the family myth from within. The key testimony of a struggle to achieve this goal is Kafka’s letter to his father.