Freudian/Lacanian Support for H/H (long)

[Ebony]

No: HPFGUIDX 7284

WARNING:  This is extremely long.

--- In HPforGrownups at egroups.com, Penny & Bryce Linsenmayer 
<pennylin at s...> wrote:
 Ooh, please recap the discussion Ebony (if not too much trouble)!   

Well, this is what I *wanted* to say at chat Sunday.  We chatted 
about various pairings at one point and I mentioned a tiny bit of 
this.  There's only so much depth you can get with the pace of 
Cheetah and Yahoo Chat.

Here's the Freudian/Lacanian support for H/H.  Even if we never
see it in the canon, there is definite H/H subtext... so no, H/H 
shippers aren't insane or blind.  I've been working on finding the
evidence all semester.  The following is prewriting/brainstorming for 
the paper I talked about so much earlier this fall.

Let me precede this by saying that Peg, Aberforth's Goat/Mike, CMC, 
Amanda, and some of the others who have much more extensive 
background in literary criticism than I may feel free to shoot holes 
into this 23 yr. old first-semester Ph.D. student's analysis.  Freud 
and Lacan were my Waterloo this semester, and it took a long time for 
me to wrestle with their worldview and prevail.  :)

OK--quick English 701 recap/intro is necessary for any of this to 
make sense.  If there was any way to spare you, I'd do it.  The 
sentences that are triple starred are the main ideas of Freud/Lacan.

If you're already in the know, or don't care, SKIP THE STUFF
BETWEEN THE DASHES and hop to the bottom for the conclusions I drew 
from PoA, Freud/Lacan, and the background information that I have for 
JKR... but you may be a little confused.

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QUICK INTRO TO PSYCHOANALYTIC LITERARY THEORY

Remember Freud from Psych 101?

At the center of Freudian psychoanalytic criticism is the concept 
that the human mind is divided into three separate yet interacting 
parts.  Say them with me... the id ("inner child"), the ego 
("rational mind"), and the superego ("conscience"). 
***According to Sigmund Freud, our most selfish and infantile 
thoughts and feelings are constantly repressed, and only emerge in 
disguised form through neurotic behavior, dreams, and THE ARTS.***

Not long after Freud's theories were published, literary critics 
seized upon the idea of the unconscious.  They recognized that the 
unconscious mind, as expressed in literature, is a rich resource of 
repressed ideas and emotions.  For instance, Otto Rank stated that in 
literature, "the artist turns a powerful, secret wish into a
literary fantasy."  ***Thus began the trend amongst English types
to understand literature by determining the content of the
author's id.***

Then there were the neo-Freudians, led by Jacques Lacan.  (Why does 
75% of the theoretical basis of  contemporary *English* studies come 
from either Germany or France?  Had to throw that in.)  Lacan posited 
that identity and language were strongly correlated.  Children have 
no concept of self until they are able to understand the word
"I" 
(known as the Lacanian Mirror Stage), and once the word "I"
is 
understood, self image becomes a construct of how society perceives 
the individual.  Before this point, an infant's identity is
wholly 
wrapped up in a feeling of oneness with his or her mother.  Once the 
illusory nature of that relationship is realized, existence and  
identity become signified (think of Saussure here) by language.

Sadly, signification means separation, separation from the pre-
language imaginary world, and hence from a whole feeling of self.  
***In Lacan's logic an individual's unfulfilled desires are
an 
attempt to rejoin the inexpressible that is lost through linguistic 
signification.***  We may try to put the inexpressible mirror stage 
(known as the Lacanian Other) into words, but the inherent symbolic 
nature of words renders this an exercise in futility.  Even though 
language is inadequate for use as a representational paradigm, it is 
all we have.

***Lacanian lit-crit focuses on the tension that is continually
created between the desire to merge the unconscious self (always 
associated with the mother) to the self that has been linguistically 
constructed.  Additionally, Lacanian criticism will always emphasize 
the struggle that characters endure while trying to express 
themselves through metaphor that never captures the true essence of 
the unconscious concept.*** 

To sum up Lacan, I'm reminded of my favorite quote from Madame 
Bovary, where Flaubert states that "no one can ever express the
exact measure of his needs, his conceptions or his sorrows, and human 
speech is like a cracked pot on which we beat out rhythms for bears 
to dance to when we are striving to make music that will wring tears
from the stars."  Pure Lacanian observation, or vice versa, since 
Flaubert preceded him by about a century.
----------------------------------------------------

This is the bottom line, as simple as I can explain it.

>From all indications that I have, Joanne Rowling is not writing these 
novels in a detached, journalistic manner or as a work that can be 
analyzed via an abstract paradigm such as New Criticism.  Neither is 
this work very postmodern—postmodernism implicity states that you 
cannot make grand moral claims about good and evil or right and
wrong—
-postmodernism values localized narratives over metanarrative-—it
is plain that JKR is writing in old-fashioned, allegorical epic 
style.  

What we have here is a narrative that from all indications is 
personal.  It is fantasy, which means that it is highly symbolic—-
fantasy is pure imagination or *id*.  The last 6-7 chapters of PoA 
read like a dream to me, more so than any of the other sequences. 
(Here I inserted long paraphrases from Freud's "The Pleasure 
Principle" and "The Interpretation of Dreams" to prove my
point--I'll 
spare you.)  

The minute I re-read PoA through the eyes of an English grad student 
this summer and *not* as a middle school teacher, the Freudian and 
Lacanian connotations smacked me upside the head.

JKR says the character that is most like her is Hermione.  Hermione 
is not really a "Mary Sue" (as we term the concept in
fanfic).  She 
is rather a symbol (or a sign, if you want to be technical about it--
that's what in my notes) of JKR in the story.  I've heard her
called 
a "surrogate". Simply put, she is a place for the author
herself to 
enter the story milieu and resolve some of the Freudian/Lacanian 
conflicts she faces.  Hermione is JKR's rational self.

So who is Harry Potter (the main character, the viewpoint narrator 
and the unquestioned center of this particular fictional universe) in 
Freudian/Lacanian terms?

I hold that he is JKR's projected unconscious self.  More than
that, 
if the biographical material I've been absorbing is correct, he
is 
the expressed projection of her aggregate unconscious
desires-—for 
publication, for a change in socioeconomic status, for a place in the 
annals of time, for resolution to the deepest personal issues that 
she has and is experiencing.  He also represents the ever-retreating 
Other in Lacanian terms... since the preconscious self (Harry) can 
never be reunited with the literate self (Hermione).

It's interesting that while we're pretty sure that Harry has
no 
feelings for Hermione, and that Ron is beginning to "like"
Hermione, 
we have no idea how Hermione feels about the issue.  If we continue 
with the Freudian/Lacanian reading, Hermione (as the literate self) 
yearns for union (sex, of course-—you *know* Freud) with Harry,
but 
unconsciously knows that such a wish is impossible.  (Please do not 
flame me by saying they're just children—-remember, we're
talking 
about Sigmund Freud here.  Quite frankly, he could care less.)  
However, Hermione somehow knows that such a thing is like wishing for 
the moon... just like no human can re-enter his or her mother's
womb.

With those glasses on, H/H becomes obvious.  This is why I think that 
many of the adult fanfic writers are H/H.  Like JKR, creative writers 
must muck about in these characters' psyches quite a bit.  This
next 
statement will not make any sense to anyone who does not write 
fiction, but H/H just seems to "flow" in post-canon scenarios.  
That's because these writers are borrowing JKR's characters,
so to
speak, and in doing so are borrowing her Freudian/Lacanian issues.

Now, she may never write anything even remotely resembling H/H in the 
canon... Ron, from what I've read, is loosely based on her best 
friend.  R/H is thus psychologically safe for her to write.  No 
profound existential issues lingering in the subconscious inherent 
therein.

That's just the H/H part of the paper outline... but that alone
was 
exceeding my limit.  (This particular prof values the concise over 
the obtuse.)  I couldn't even get to the MWPP/Snape and 
Hagrid/Buckbeak analysis in the first ten pages.  :(

The biggest problem I have is that JKR has no authorized biographical 
material out there in book form.  The interviews from Publisher's 
Weekly, Time, etc. were accused by one of my colleagues as 
being "carefully constructed fabrications straight from Joanne 
Rowling's publicist."  There's no way to do this type of
analysis 
with credibility unless your sources are watertight. 

You see, it's easy enough to do a Lacanian analysis of a
fantastic 
work like say, Frankenstein... but then, Mary Shelley's been dead
for 
quite some time now and we know plenty about her.  JKR is still 
living and values her privacy.  I respect that... but this type of 
reading requires that you know some "dirt"... at least the
tinest 
speck.  Remember, you must fish around in the author's id
according 
to Freud and Lacan to make sense of anything they write.

Heck, I *may* just turn in the paper tomorrow, anyway, just to see 
what he says.  The professor won't kill me (I don't think).  I can
concentrate on Gates and Derrida after I get this out of my 
system.  :)

Whew.  Sleepy.  Time to go to bed.

--Ebony