James, Henry. The Beast in the Jungle.
Project Gutenberg
Audiobook on youtube
Below are excerpts from an article by James Mellard, “A ‘Countable Unity’: The Lacanian Subject in ‘The Beast in the jungle'” Using Lacan, Reading Fiction. 1991.
If this analysis of “The Beast in the Jungle” accomplishes anything it should be the demonstration that the subject is a creation of a social relationship, the creature not only of language, but also of the Other in whom language resides for the subject. John Brenkman has discussed this aspect of Lacanian theory. ” Lacan’s project,” says Brenkman, “has been the attempt to give language and intersubjectivity primacy within the theory as well as the practice of psychoanalysis.” Brenkman goes on to consider that what Lacan calls “the Umwelt, the environment or outer world, of even the newborn is preeminently social . From birth,” says Brenkman, “the human being is affected by actions, gestures, wishes, and intentions that are already i mbued with the symbolic and that occur within the constraints of specific, historically determined institutions. In Lacan’s terms, the subject is, from the outset, radically dependent on the field of the Other-for objects of one’s satisfactions, for the benchmarks of one’s i dentity, and for the language that will make one’s interaction with others possible”.
It is easy enough to fit James’s tale into this model. As we have seen, May Bartram becomes the other, the mother, and the community of one within which john Marcher has his being as a subject. His extreme dependence upon her has the larger significance, one might suggest, of indicating just how dependent the individual subject is upon the community that provides him or her a place as a signifier within a system of signifiers. But his dependence also suggests that there must be a signifier beyond, above, or outside the community as well.
The dyad of the mother and child may represent the origin of the social community, but it must be breached by the signifier of the father if there is to be the Symbolic triangulation that will permit change, growth, transformation within that social structure. Neither a community nor a person should remain locked within a narcissistic self-worship. It is not that Paternity — the signifier of the Father — is “better” than Maternity — the signifier of the Mother; it is only that the subject, whether individual or community, must be able to see around the other, to envision possibilities of thirdness, of an other kind of otherness, to permit the transformations of culture that have marked human history.
*********************************
Figuratively, Marcher as subjectivity is at locus zero and awaits the countable unity conferred by another who bounds the set of zero and 1 ; in this move, he achieves “oneness.” As Ragland-Sullivan says, “One, by contrast [to zero], is the number marking the infant’s attainment of a sense of body unity by [its] mentally identifying with a Gestalt exterior to it. Therefore, it is the number of symbiosis, denoting both mirror-stage psychic fusion and corporal identification with the human form. 114
What Marcher has encountered in this metaphorical moment of his constitution as a subject is the phenomenon Lacan, borrowing the term from Ernest Jones, calls aphanisis. Aphanisis is the name Lacan gives to the moment in which the subject comes into being as a result of a signifier-and not j ust any signifier, either, but a signifier of/from the other-and simultaneously disappears under it. There is no a priori ego, in other words; there is only a subject represented as a signifier for another signifier. The subj ect is constituted, Lacan i nsists, in what can only be regarded as fundamentally a social relation. For Lacan, ”a signifier is that which represents a subject for another signifier” (FFC 207), and that other signifier is taken from the social order.
May Bartram is that other, of course, but the consequence of Marcher’s realization is his disappearance beneath that signifier she has provided. He is now, in May’s view, at an indeterminate place. “What we find,” says Lacan, “is the constitution of the subject i n the field of the Other . . . . If he is apprehended at his birth i n the field of the Other, the characteristic of the subject of the u nconscious is that of being, beneath the signifier that develops its networks, its chains and its history, at an indeterminate place” (FFC 208). Marcher counts to one reaches oneness, that is-by covering over a void, a zero, a locus that he is incapable of filling by himself or even of recognizing without the other – the second person – who calls him into being. The scene with May in Naples is momentous, then, not because it really exists-Lacan would say, Who cares?-but because it calls into existence John Marcher as a subject, Marcher as a subject for another, a subject for another signifier identified in May Bartram.
For it is castration-always subjective, rather than physical-that Marcher aims to evade. Indeed, one may say that virtually the entire tale after Marcher’s “birth” as a subject from the meeting with May at Weatherend is involved in Marcher’s determination to avoid castration, that is, the structure of alienation that embodies Lacan’s concept of castration. His aim is forever to live in the fullness of the eyes of the (m)other-here represented by May.
May thus is involved in Marcher’s denial of castration, not merely in permitting him to avoid anxiety, but also in permitting him to feel he has in fact avoided castration altogether. Thus May plays the role of the mother who permits the child to believe that he is all to or for her. 120
So, one asks, why is marrying a problem? James answers for Marcher: that about which Marcher, narcissistically, is obsessed-though that is not how James says it-is “a privilege he coul d [not] invite a woman to share” (79). In his narcissism and from the vantage of the Imaginary unity May has conferred upon him, Marcher thinks he has the privileged it, the phallus, the “little old thing.” But of course he neither is it nor has it; he may have only its replacement, and that replacement (part or part-object) is signified by or in May herself. What he ought to realize is that he can have “it” by having May. But to take her on as a lover would be to give her up as a figure of the mother. And that he works hard to avoid, for it would bring into the picture the necessity of a phallic father to replace the desire of the phallic mother. 123-124
Protecting himself from the spectre of the Oedipus and castration, he thus, in a complex transformation, turns May into the phallic mother who needs his protection […]
His anxiety before her answer is an anxiety of castration, of loss of the one in whom he woul d remain whole. Having decided that, indeed, she knows, that she possesses knowledge, he begs her for it before she departs from him forever. Again, he looks to her face, starting with her eyes, “beautiful with a strange cold light”, eyes “one of the signs” that she now possesses what he wants-knowledge of a fate even more “monstrous” than the beast he h imself had enfigured. He had thought that the two of them together had “looked most things in the face”, and he even thinks he could have “faced” the worst alone, but he fears what she must now know: ” I see in your face and feel here, in this air and amid these appearances, that you’re out of it. You’ve done. You’ve had your experience. You leave me to my fate”. His is the anxiety of the child “abandoned” by the mother before the child has realized that he cannot have her, cannot be her everything, cannot be the phallus for her. 127
This loss, in Lacanian terms, represents castration in the subject’s recognition not of its own lack, but the mother’s lack. Lacan says that the “signification of castration” is clinically important because it represents the “discovery [of] the castration of the mother” (Ecrits: A Selection 282). Castration also insists upon the differentiation of the subject from the mother, who as phallic mother has to this point in the subj ect’s life represented the object of every need, demand, desire. In these connections Julia K risteva has said, “As the addressee of every demand, the mother occupies the place of alterity. Her replete body, the receptacle and guarantor of demands, takes the place of all narcissistic, hence imaginary, effects and gratifications; she is, in other words, the phallus. The discovery of castration, however, detaches the subject from his dependence on the mother, and the perception of this lack [manque] makes the phallic function a symbolic function-the symbolic function” (47). In Lacan, the mirror phase and acceptance of castration are successive moments in the constitution of the subject. The latter moment-which Lacan sometimes calls “the phallic stage” (Ecrits: A Selection 282)-purs “the finishing touches on the process of separation that posits the subject as signifiable, which is to say, separate, always confronted by an other” (Kristeva 47). 129
Thus, it seems plain that while Marcher has entered the mirror phase of identification with an imaginary other, with May as imago and mother, he has yet to pass through castration and, therefore, overlay the Imaginary with the register of the Symbolic. Book 5 of James’s text, in its vitiating, “merely” Imaginary repetition of Marcher’s primary narcissism, illustrates profoundly the way in which Marcher is virtually trapped in the first, identificatory moment of the mirror phase, seemingly unable ever to give over his identity to the Symbolic, triangulating knowledge of castration.s As in the tale’s previous books, book 5 shows again and again how Marcher sees his life absorbed by May Bartram. Caught in his mirror-stage, narcissistic repetitions, he does not regard her as independent other so much as
merely an extension of himself. 129
… from his still narcissistic perspective, “she was dying and his life would end” ( 1 08; my emphasis). He begins to see some glimmering of what loss, loss of the desire of the (m)other, might mean, but he does not yet accede to such knowledge: “What could the thing that was to happen to him be, after all, but just this thing that had begun to happen? Her dying, her death, his consequent solitude-that was what he had figured as the Beast in the Jungle, that was what had been in the lap of the gods” ( 1 08). The Oedipal moment is out there, but Marcher shall deny as long as possible.
So long as Marcher is stuck in merely Imaginary relations as laid out in the mirror stage, May Bartram can be for him only a symbol of a mother assumed still to possess that phallus which can deny his own “deficiency.” She dies, true enough, and is lost to Marcher, but that does not prevent his assuming that somehow he can fill his lack and regain the totality of being she had represented. In this maternal guise, she is indeed-as K risteva says of the mother-the phallus for Marcher. Consequently, in a predictable metonymic transfer, May, who originally helped Marcher see the beast, but who then was to be saved from the beast, eventually becomes the beast.
What Marcher envies in the man is his acknowledged loss, his ability to feel lack, privation. Marcher finally understands, moreover, that what he has missed in life is knowledge of the lack and the passion that such knowledge permits-a passion associated, in his case, with loving a woman for herself and, it follows, the ability to mourn her for herself when that time comes, too: “what he presently stood there gazing at wasthe sounded void of his life. He gazed, he drew breath, in pain; he turned in his dismay, and, turning, he had before him in sharper incision than ever the open page of his story. The name on the table [of May’s tomb] smote him as the passage 132-133
of his neighbor had done, and what it said to him, full in the face, was that she was what he had missed” ( 1 25). To sound that void is not only to face the death of the other, but also to face the fact that one’s being is founded upon a void.
Marcher’s belated knowledge is that May Bartram was not only an other in whom he might see himself (as the child sees itself in the mirror of the mother’s face or gaze); she also might have signified an Other whose presence could have formed in him-instead of a law of narcissism, which was the “law that had ruled him” – a recognition of castration and the Law of the Father. We may see that inchoate recognition in his last scene with May while she is alive. There, Marcher persuades himself that she is indeed his “sibyl” who speaks with “the true voice of the law”, but he never understands what that law is until the stranger’s face-no doubt, as some Freudians have said, the resurrected image of the father-makes the “incision” that cuts him to the void. This knowledge of both the other and the Other casts Marcher back upon the tomb, no longer empty now and now destined to suffer under the sign of the phallic Law in which we see the final transformation of the beast: […] Thus, finally, in the beast, Marcher recognizes his castration and the Law of the Father, and therefore he learns, as it were, to count to three: moi, mother, and father; image, difference, identity myth. But it is a counting-or an accounting-too little and too late for Marcher to enjoy the fruits of his triumph, though, narcissistically, readers can do so in his stead.