Content area
Full Text
Applying a Lacanian approach to Orwell's narrative strategies in Nineteen Eighty-Four, this essay analyzes the protagonist's attempt to evade the Symbolic by resurrecting archaic memories of preoedipal union through a repetitive triadic play of signifiers. Engaging Freud and Deleuze, the essay views his masochistic behaviour as a challenge to patriarchy via identification with the feminized position.
Anovel filled with dreams and deeply concerned with the disinterment of archaic memories, Nineteen Eighty-Four displays a narrative mastery of subjectivity that begs for psychoanalytic readings. Yet there have been only two psychoanalytic studies of Orwell's work: Gerald Fiderer's 1970 "Masochism as Literary Strategy: Orwell's Psychological Novels" and Richard I. Smyer's 1979 Primal Dream and Primal Crime. Fiderer's discussion, while insightful, suffers from the biographical reductionism to which classical Freudian literary criticism is prone; for instance, "All of Orwell's life and career was thus the preparation for writing Nineteen Eighty-Four, but the template upon which the wounds were laid down was the whipping he received at Crossgates" (8). Smyer's monograph shows greater awareness that "the unearthing of psychological meanings in the novels is not an end in itself but rather part of an attempt to determine the extent to which he was able to integrate various modes of reality into an artistic whole" (7). He argues that in the nineteen-forties Orwell moved away from sociopolitical concerns to "a more pronounced interest in the moral-even spiritual and religious-dimension of human existence" (118) and that Orwell's perception of the pervasiveness of evil in his own time, "the fact of a Europe suddenly transformed into a totalitarian slave empire," eventually turned his attention to "the darker regions" of the psyche "and even to a frightening encounter with his own irrationality" (122), which culminated in the writing of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Smyer's analysis of the novel, however, results in a rather bizarre application of Erich Fromm to his reading of Winston at the end as "cured" by O'Brien, who facilitates his "egoextinguishing drive wombward," which Smyer interprets as "a radically religious act that, as O'Brien promises, will gain the initiate an impersonal immortality," an "oceanic oneness" after death as "Big Brother's hostility is now revealed to have been love" (154- 59). This reversal seems to strain the limits of the text; nevertheless, I...