Introduction: Lacan and Narration

Jacques Lacan as narrative theorist? A Lacanian narratology? The answer to both questions, as this collection advances generally, is a qualified yes. Jacques Lacan's concern with the Freudian subject suggests a position in regard to narration-an approach, even (with some elaboration) a narratology. It is an approach derivable from his view-his central insight into psychoanalysis-that l'inconscient est structure comme un langage. It says simply that narration, too, operates like a language, is a language, and manifests linguistic operations in various ways. Narration exists, finally, within the context of an unconscious discourse, within the bounds of what Lacan calls the discourse of the Other. Since the early 1970s, though earlier in France, literary theorists have busily sought to understand this central insight of Jacques Lacan's rethinking of psychoanalysis-in a sense to reverse it, not to disprove it necessarily, but to grasp how language in literary texts is constituted, buoyed up, permeated, and decentered by the unconscious. The aim has been to understand (reversing Lacan's statement) how literature, in Shoshana Felman's words, .... is the unconscious of psychoanalysis.' In this regard, the studies of this collection, focused as they are on narration, mark another step, possibly an advance, in the literary appropriation of Lacan. This collection as a whole experiments in the situating of narration as an effect (or product) of the unconscious-narration (in a sense) as already Lacanian even before or apart from, even in spite of, Lacan. Indeed, the theoretical melding of l'inconscient and le langagepsychoanalysis and linguistics-does take place before Lacan, as Lacan himself insists, in Freud, particularly in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), Jokes and