clayton

Fall 1989
Volume 16, Number 1

Excerpt from
Narrative and Theories of Desire
Jay Clayton

In Philip Roth's The Professor of Desire(1977), the protagonist, who is planning a lecture for a course he calls Desire 341, suggests that his students try not to think of literature in terms of plot, character, structure, or form; that they try to forget the critical terms that they have learned with such difficulty, words like symbol, epiphany, and persona; and that they try instead to talk about novels in the language they would use with their grocers or their lovers. Roth's character hope that the students' familiarity with erotic impulses will help them "locate these books in the world of experience" rather than in "a manageable netherworld of narrative devices."1 The unstated assumption is that desire itself is a language that all men and women speak. To be knowable, our longings must conform to some conceptual model, but at least it is a model that we have all proved upon our pulses. Rather than refer to narrative devices, we can point to the complexities of actual experience, to the subtle structures of desire. The dream, in Roth's version, is to find "a more referential relationship" to literature.2 To dream, in more general terms, is to use the exploration of desire as a way to move beyond formalism.
The hope of moving beyond formalism is one of two things that unites an otherwise diverse group of literary theorists who have begun to explore the role of desire in narrative. Peter Brooks, for example, in Reading for the Plot, says in more than one place that his interest in desire "derives from my dissatisfaction with the various formalists that have dominated critical thinking about narrative."3 Leo Bersani sees desire as establishing a crucial link between social and literary structures. Teresa de Lauretis faults structuralist models for their inability to disclose the ways in which narrative operates, through the desire it excites and fulfills, to construct the social world as a system of sexual differences. . . .
In truth, the word "desire" seems to have no single, stable meaning in contemporary criticism. The term names a range of concepts, running from Brooks's usage, which is essentialist in character, to that of Lacan, Laplanche, and Bersani, which represents a more structuralist orientation. Brooks sees desire as a creative force, aligned with Eros or the life instincts, an energy that fuels our most basic projects toward the world, including that of narrative. Bersani, the only narrative theorist among the latter figures, sees desire by a lack that lies at its origin, the absence of any possible object of satisfaction; less an energy than a displacement of energy, it is inherently insatiable, condemned to a restless search for an absent object. De Lauretis, whose vision of desire is closer to Bersani's than to Brooks's end of the spectrum, attempts to historicize the concept. This attempt introduces important qualifications that may call the model itself into question.
If the word "desire" designates no single idea or model of human behavior, then why attempt to bring these diverse thinkers into dialogue with one another? The excercise will clarify the complex, often contradictory notions that are sometimes confused under the same term. Opposed views, such as those of Brooks and Bersani, compete for a term whose privileged status lends a glamour to the arguments that successfully employ it. The term is popular because it provides a way of discussing both the individual pleasure of a literary text and the social regulation of that pleasure. In psychoanalytic-oriented discourses, it functions in new historicist criticism influenced by Michel Foucault. In fact, desire and power can be seen as contemporary rephrasings of an older way of talking about the function of literature--the idea that literature must please and instruct. What this new vocabulary adds, however, is an emphasis on the way in which both pleasure and knowledge are socially constructed.
All three narrative theorists take sexual desire as their paradigm. This choice follows its own economy of pleasure, as critical texts promising instruction compound their interest by capitalizing on readers' fascination with all matters pertaining to sexuality. For obvious reasons, psycho-analytic critics are oriented toward the sexual model. One might expect some theorists, however to represent desire in other than sexual terms--as craving for money, power, knowledge, or God--but narrative theorists almost never stray from the sexual paradigm. This emphasis retains the emphasis on sexual desire for two reasons: first, the sexual example has the advantage of allowing us to compare a cultural product, the literary text, with an apparently "natural" process, sexuality; second, sexuality provides us with a limit case with which to test de Lauretis's attempt to historicize desire. Sexuality is more often regarded as a universal, unchanging aspect of human character than, say, the desire for material possessions. It might be easier to see the longing for consumer good in a historical perpective; Marxists, for example, relate changes in what we desire to the evolution of capitalism.7
Before turning to my three exemplary figures, I want to pose several questions that will guide our inquiry. Are there connections between the interests displayed by critics in moving beyond formalism and their preoccupation with violence? Does challenging the boundaries of form help us to see the violence in our world that form has all along contained? Alternatively, has form itself been the violence that formalism managed to conceal? Or finally, does the attempt to break the limits of form arouse in us a violence--manifested by our fascination with violence--that only the return to form can assuage?
The World According to Brooks
. . . .For Brooks, the cognitive dimension of narrative is complexly related to the question of desire. The latter is defined as a force, a blind and uncomprehending pressure, rather than as a mode of understanding. Nevertheless, without the pressure of desire, we would not have the dynamic movement that is essential to narrative understanding. In the first step of an analogy that will become a governing principle of his entire book, Brooks compares desire to "a motor" (RP, p. 41). Desire is the motive force of a narrative, a self-contained motor that propels the plot. He justifies this analogy by referring to the nineteenth century novel's fascination with motors and to Freud's use of the same analogy to explain the force of pressure of an instinct. In subsequent arguments, Brooks extends the analogy until he can maintain that the text of a narrative is a dynamic system analogous in all its parts to Freud's dynamic model of the psyche. Brooks is able to find narrative principles that correspond to Freud's concepts of Eros, the death instinct, the repetition compulsion, working through conflict, and transference.
. . . .
The Mobile Home of Desire
. . . .In one of his most recent books, The Forms of Violence, Bersani argues a thesis diametrically opposed to that of Brooks. Bersani maintains not that desire propels narrative, but that narrative contains, directs, and subdues desire. Like Brooks, he views narrative as one of our culture's principle ways of organizing experience, but he sees this power as largely pernicious.17 He criticizes the "sense-making orders of narrative" (FV, p. 89). As these comments suggest, Bersani is above all an ethical critic, and his prose is laden with value judgements. He tends to reduce the world to opposed groups, sorting all phenomena into positive and negative categories. Narrative ranks high on his blacklist, as do realistic art and the concept of a stable, unified self. On the positive side, he puts mobile desire, nonmimetic strategies of art, and a discontinuous or "shattered" self.
. . . .
Historicizing Desire
I began this essay by saying that Brooks and Bersani respresent two poles of contemporary thinking about desire, one humanist and essentialist, the other structuralist and largely "posthumanist." We might also associate these positions with the twin utopia visions that psychoanalysis has fathered: the theraputic and the apocalyptic. Brooks's conception of desire enables him to believe in the beneficial agency of sublimation, to trust that by disciplining desire we can create an enduring civilization. Bersani's conception aligns him with a group of psychoanalyic visionaries--Norman O. Brown and Deleuze and Guattari are his closest precursors--who look to the polymorphous perversity of desire to overturn the very structures of society.21
Despite their differences, these opposed models of desire have one great thing in common. They both view desire as ahistorical, a timeless phenomenon, which has taken the same shape in all people, places, nations, and cultures. This congruence might at first seem surprising. One would expect the "posthumanist" vision of desire to represent it as historically differentiated, since this view sees desire as socially constructed. But such is not the case. The societies that construct desire somehow always end up constructing it according to the same model. The problem may be fundamental to a psychoanalytic approach to the topic. Even when psychoanalysis casts desire as a social penomenon, the discussion still has recourse to invariant models--principally the Oedipus Complex. These models are indeed social, but they are not historical. As a way of connecting the text to the world, psychoanalysis attempts to challenge formalism, but the connections it draws are to stable, synchronic patterns, not to history. The dream of moving beyond formalism, through the study of desire, has so far remained just a dream.
Teresa de Lauretis seems at first to present an answer to this problem. She frames the argument of her essay "Desire in Narrative" as an attack on ahistoricism. She complains that recent work on narrative theory, in spite of its shift away from structuralism, still ends up "dehistoricizing the subject, and thus universalizing the narrative process" ("D," pp. 105-6). Her complaint is directed at narrative theory, however, not at psychoanalysis, and she herself ends up dehistoricizing the subject by accepting a unitary notion of desire, eternally ensnared in the toils of Oedipus. This acceptance of desire as inescapably the same ultimately limits her arugment.
Like both Brooks and Bersani, she sees narrative as a fundamental way of making sense of the world. The work of narrative, for de Lauretis, is neither cognitive as it is for Brooks, nor repressive, as it is for Bersani. Rather, the work is one for producing distinctions, and the chief distinction it produces is that of gender. Narrative organizes the world by mapping sexual difference onto every text and hence onto culture. It accomplishes this immense task by reconstructing the diversity of human experience into a two-character drama, in which the man is cast in the role of subject and the woman in the role of object. . . .
Perhaps the most interesting part of her theory is its account of how narrative gets readers to accept this two-character drama. Rather than generalize about a vague "complicity" between social and narrative structures, she attempts to talk explicitly about the specific mechanisms through which narrative achieves social domination. She argues that the structure of narrative offers various categories of readers a limited set of "positions" within the plot space. To receive pleasure from the act of reading, each reader must assume the "positionalities of meaning and desire" made available by the text. For the period that one assumes those positions, one's subjectivity is "engaged in the cogs of narrative and indeed constituted in the relation of narative, meaning, and desire" ("D," p. 106). The pleasure of the text comes only at a price. That price is our participation in a circumscribed network of relations, a network that must be described in ideological rather than purely structural terms.
To explain how readers are led to assume those positions, de Lauretis turns to the concept of identification. This notion forms a nice bridge between aesthetic and psychological processes, for it is fundamental both to the activity of reading and to the creation of the self. In identification, we internalize the image of another person, setting up that image within ourselves as an ideal model. According to both Freud and Lacan, the act of identifying with someone--with the Other--is crucial to the formation of the self. Their paradoxical conclusion is that our very subjectivity is derivative of the Other, our "unique" selfhood dependent on a prior social relation. The identifications involved in reading also have a social dimension. The fact that narratives must appeal to us not only as individuals, but also as members of social groups suggests that "patterns or possibilities of identification" ("D," p. 136) for every class of readers must be built into the text. This leads de Lauretis to ask what kinds of identification are available for women, if they are always constructed by narrative as obstacle and Other.
. . .What do these models suggest for the study of narrative? To view desire as historical requires that one not merely say that the way we desire is invested in narrative changes, but that the economy of desire changes too. One would have to turn to historians for evidence of specific practices of desire in specific historical periods, and one would have to relate those practices to observed changes in narrative. Alterations in narrative would include changes in formal features, such as genre and conventions, but they could not be restricted to such features. They would also have to include alterations in the social functions of narrative, because the way literary forms are used by a culture is an important determinant of their nature--and is just as variable as literary structure. One could not take for granted either that changes in the organization of desire infuenced changes in narrative, for the influence could just as easily flowed in the other direction. Thus one would be forced to engage in a two-fold, reciprocal analysis. Both desire and narrative would be seen as variable social phenomena, either one of which might influence the behavior of the other at a particular historical moment, or more likely still, each of which might work simultaneously on the other in a mutually enriching exchange. The task might then be determining not only the nature of the exchange, but also the place, the particular locus in the social world, where the negotiations between narrative and desire are carried out.
1. Philip Roth, The Professor of Desire(New York, 1977), p. 183.
2. Ibid.
3. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative(New York, 1984), p. 47; hereafter abbreviated RP.
7. See Adrian Forty, Objects of Desire (New York, 1986), a social history of consumer products.
17. For a discussion of Bersani's recent work that shares some of the same perspectives as this one, see Robert L. Caserio, "Mobility and Masochism: Christine Brooke-Rose and J. G. Ballard," Novel21 (Winter/Spring 1988): 292-310.
21. See Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History(Middletown Conn., 1959), and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis, 1983).

Jay Clayton, associate professor of English at Vanderbilt Universtiy, is the author of Romantic Vision and the Novel(1987) and coeditor of Contemporary Literature and Contemporary Theory(forthcoming). He is currently completing a study of contemporary American literature and theory, Narrative and Power.

Editorial Office main page * Back Issues * Subscribe to CI