4. This chapter gives a detailed account of LTMKs significance, unveiling important new influences and contexts. It provides an original reading of the novel centring on idiocy.

3. This chapter considers Waiting for the Barbarians with relation to a thematics of impasse and bafflement. It argues Coetzee designed the novel to stall the emergence of meaning.

This chapter focuses on the romance of Apollonius of Tyre, a late antique text that is perhaps the successor of a lost Hellenistic original. At the very outset of that work—whose Nachleben extends from a fragmentary eleventh-century Old English translation, through Gower’s Confessio Amantis, to the Shakespearean Pericles, Prince of Tyre—circumlocution of the incestuous rape that sets the plot in motion structures the entire narrative around a double bind of desire that cannot be named but is signified in the silences that continually call the reader’s attention to it. Preterition is both repeatedly performed by the characters themselves and governs the entire work as a kind of master narratological trope, akin to the unconscious logic of dreams as understood by Freud and Lacan.

While English-speaking readers were the first to have access to a complete translation of Freud’s works, problems remained: apart from deviations like rendering Trieb as ‘instinct’, the Standard Edition was marked by tone distortion, medicalization or loss of idiomaticity. Freud himself insisted that terms like Es (Id or It) were above all common language expressions. Bettelheim and Lacan posited that a critique of translation was a prerequisite before serious work could be done on the texts of psychoanalysis. However, translation had been less a problem than a method for the young Freud, whose polyglotism, quite visible in his youthful correspondence, allowed him to work creatively with the effects of the unconscious by going from transference to translation. Today, new translations of Freud are following these hints and pay more attention to both the fluidity of his vocabulary and the specificity of his concepts.

The absence of lyrical voice in pieces such as Schumann’s Manfred and Ballads for Declamation may point not only to the absence of the other but also to the absence of the subject itself. ‘Absence of the Self’ explores the potential loss of self implied by the absence of lyrical voice, highlighted in the missing silent ‘inner voice’ of the Humoreske, which forms an apt exemplification of later twentieth-century accounts of the illusory, ‘barred’ subject proposed by such thinkers as Lacan, Kristeva, and Žižek, or the empty centre at the heart of the Eichendorff Liederkreis that results from the absence of a unified subject position and any sense of narrative continuity.

Janet Malcolm famously described psychoanalysis as “the impossible profession.” Writing about “The Varieties of Psychoanalytic Experience” is an equally impossible task. Although the discipline of psychoanalysis was founded by Freud, it has altered dramatically since. I have chosen to focus on the following key issues and concepts: transference, countertransference, and intersubjectivity; the shift from oedipal to preoedipal concerns; the transformations wrought by feminism, social and political studies, and continental theory. These converge on questions of psychoanalysis in relation to history and culture, especially in regard to theories of trauma and mourning. In this sense, psychoanalysis (like literature and literary studies) demonstrates its flexibility, variability, and relevance to contemporary life. The very instability of Freud’s narrative method, as demonstrated in his Dora case history, insures its significance and continuity over time.

Since the 1980s, the theories of subjectivity that have most influenced literary studies have shared an antihumanist perspective, one that posits that both human selfhood and the experience of authentic contact with another are merely illusions born of a modern Western ideology. Along with other subfields, the domain of literature and psychoanalysis has been affected by this bias toward antihumanist theories of subjectivity. But it is not because these represent the most sophisticated, best validated theories available to us. As I here argue, practicing psychoanalysts have taken a very different conceptual path, grounded in their own clinical findings and in recent experimental work in psychiatry. In fact the most influential current psychoanalytic theories support the idea that some form of self-integration is valuable. Ironically, then, scholars working in literature and psychoanalysis adhere to our profession’s default antihumanism at the expense of hiding out from the most important conversations in psychoanalysis today. What keeps this system in place is a widespread form of intellectual intimidation, which in fact depends conceptual trickery. In explaining the trickery, I hope to help to clear the way for a more capacious theoretical conversation within this subfield.

This chapter explains the relevance of literature to understand psychoanalysis, and the importance of thinking psychoanalytically when reading literature. Paying attention to Freud's interest in Oedipus, Hamlet, and the theatre, and his fascination with the uncanny, which shows itself particularly in literature, I distinguish between Freud's sense of the unconscious as what psychoanalysis addresses itself to, and Lacan on the importance of language, as that which the individual subject enters into and which structures existence as the "symbolic order." The debates this produces with Derrida, critiquing Lacan for phallogocentrism, and also with varieties of feminist analysis, and with the place of sexual difference within psychoanalytic theory, are outlined as topics for further study. Suggestions too are made of literary texts that offer themselves for discussion in the light of psychoanalysis, Freudian, Kleinian, Lacanian, and post-Lacanian.

This chapter considers the significance of the psychoanalytic concept of melancholia to queer theory and literature, using James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room as a case study. The chapter traces the ways in which queerness – particularly queer love – is haunted by melancholia by highlighting the manner in which melancholia is inextricable from the passionate relationship between David and Giovanni, the lovers at the novel’s core. Yet Baldwin arguably also universalizes melancholia by demonstrating that all of the novel’s characters, including David’s girlfriend Hella, are deeply melancholic. Melancholia, then, is not merely a queer predicament but rather – as the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan also claimed – a part of the human condition. The chapter consequently draws a distinction between constitutive (existential) and context-specific (socially imposed) forms of melancholia, illustrating that queer melancholia tends to fall into the latter genre of melancholia due to the discrimination, persecution, and shame that often characterize queer lives and loves.

This essay formulates a critical response to scholars’ Freudian-Lacanian understanding of Ovidian desire in terms of frustration, futility, absence and lack. It focuses on the Remedia Amoris, a poem it takes as paradigmatic and culminatory in Ovid’s elegiac project, and attempts to give an account of what is meaningful and productive about the rhythmic process of Ovidian amor in and of itself, through the lens of Jean-Luc Nancy’s recent book on jouissance (Coming, 2017). The Remedia, it argues, performs absence not as tragic loss but as an undoing-remaking that continually regenerates desire and teaches investment in the pleasure of process. The second half of the essay explores how the poem’s temporal instabilities and dislocated subject positions produce a series of imagined inter-relations and ‘elsewheres’ that move readers away from Lacanian desire as continually projected into an ungraspable future, and into the experience of jouissance in the elegiac present.

This chapter examines Freudian psychoanalysis as a source of inspiration and ambivalence for Surrealism. Freudian postulates such as the centrality of subconscious activity in human behavior and its manifestation through automatic processes helped determine surrealist methods of art-making and poetical practice in the movement’s early years. Yet surrealists would gradually reappraise their reliance on automatism and other key psychoanalytical concepts which had been appropriated into the movement’s theoretical body, mainly by André Breton. Breton and his coterie developed forms of creative activity based on a looser interpretation of the inner life; in doing so, they helped provide inspiration for new psychoanalytic concepts – the most notable example was Jacques Lacan and Salvador Dalí’s iterative notion of paranoia. This novel understanding of the disorder illustrated how the same idée fixe could appear to manifest itself in different external phenomena by virtue of the subject’s delirious projections. The chapter demonstrates that, while Surrealism was influenced by psychoanalysis at its inception, in its later years it was Surrealism that influenced psychoanalysis.

Chapter Four examines the emergence of detective fiction in relation to real-world crime and how the reporting and mapping of it within newspapers bears upon fictional representations. It offers a sceptical (critical cartographic) reading of the map as something not to be trusted in the search for truth. This issue is considered in relation to the work of Agatha Christie which contains multiple maps. A final section on maps and human geometry (relations between people and place) analyses the social and human dimensions of such maps in the work of Christie and Margery Allingham. (95)

The chapter moves from these positions of textual paranoia and frustration and makes the case for a Kleinian theory of aesthetics. It outlines how that theory would operate. It surveys the relatively scarce body of work on Klein and aesthetics and elaborates a framework for understanding the problems the previous chapters raise.