Melancholic poetics: The vagaries and vicissitudes of identity in three Canadian poetic novels and various psychoanalytical works

In our current cultural climate, melancholia is most likely to be medicated, considered unproductive and without purpose. Yet, in poetic novels such as Kristjana Gunnars's Substance of Forgetting, Audrey Thomas's Blown Figures, and Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red, it is essential to the subjects' ontological quest to express themselves and mediate the fraught border between their inner realities and the vagaries of the external world. For these three novelists, a melancholic perspective is a site of affirmation and resistance against dominant discourses that constrain and repress the subject's gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and history.

This study adopts Jacques Lacan's triple dimension of reading, “practice (clinical event), concept (theory), and metaphor (literature)” (Felman, Insight 13) in order to bring literature and psychoanalysis (two constrained bedfellows with a bad history) into a conversation with one another. This tripartite structure to the chapters is intended to encourage dialectical readings and challenge the psychoanalytical texts' position as “presumed to know.” The poetic fictions explored here give a voice to melancholia and speak against psychoanalysis's drive to explain and cure.

In search of solitude, in search of witness, in the quest to speak the unspeakable and silenced aspects of themselves, the subjects of these three poetic novels are overwhelmed by affect. The melancholic perspective in all its ambivalence and passion permits the subject to “unlatch” herself from social and cultural hegemonic discourses, to find herself in the margins.