Hovey and Ralph minimize the presence of fathers in The ‘‘Genius,” but this judgment needs revision. Eugene finds them in his bosses, and evades them with the same regularity with which he invites confrontation with his surrogate mothers. Among Eugene’s father figures are the art dealer M. Charles, and then later (and more importantly) Mr. Kalvin, the wise and benevolent head of his Philadelphia company, whose knowledge of Eugene is greater than Eugene’s own and whose advice is always good. The aforementioned Hiram Colfax finally gives Eugene a comeuppance, dismissing him from his job when his affair with Suzanne threatens to become a scandal. In addition, we should not overlook Eugene’s
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natural father, and also his father-in-law Jotham Blue, whom he loves dearly but nevertheless allows to slip from his circle. Jotham’s fate is typical of Eugene’s male mentors. He lets these men recede from view, usually as silently as possible.
Carrie’s father lives only in recollection. Because he does not accompany Carrie to the train station, we never see him. He comes into view later, however, as the focus of the most important of her conscious memories in the novel. She sees men working on the streets, and reflects:
Toil, now that she was free of it, seemed even a more desolate thing than when she was part of it. She saw it through a mist of fancy — a pale, sombre half-light, which was the essence of poetic feeling. Her old father, in his flour-dusted miller’s suit, sometimes returned to her in memory, revived by a face in the window. A shoemaker pegging at his last, a blastman seen through a narrow window in some basement where iron was being melted, a bench-worker seen high aloft in some window, his coat off, his sleeves rolled up; these took her back in fancy to the details of the mill. She felt, though she seldom expressed them, sad thoughts upon this score. Her sympathies were ever with that under-world of toil from which she had so recently sprung, and which she best understood. (SC 108)
We see Carrie’s artistic sensitivity here (the narrator remarks upon her tenderness and the delicacy of her feelings in the continuation of this passage). More important, Dreiser shows us the source of her deepest empathy. This loving memory suggests, among other things, that Carrie did not leave Columbia because of ill will toward her absent father, but absent he remains. For all we know, he may even be dead. Why does Carrie reflect so little about him? Dreiser shows her turning away from her own history, the only possible source of her own understanding of her unconscious self.
Lacan calls this “foreclosure.” Because of it, Dreiser’s characters overflow with aggressivity that harms both themselves and others. It persists because they show an alarming resistance to seeking its cause. Instead, they unconsciously repeat their actions, with ever more serious consequences. In healthy people, says Lacan, “Subjective experience must be fully enabled to recognize the central nucleus of ambivalent aggressivity …,” a core exposed through repetition.35 In other words, one must learn the truth of one’s own unconscious through one’s own personal history. Psychoanalysis, Freud’s great practical contribution, uses ‘‘the talking cure” as a way to expose the workings of the unconscious. It thus
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becomes, in Felman’s words, “a life usage of the death instinct — a practical, productive use of the compulsion to repeat.”36
Dreiser’s characters invariably run from this sort of recognition, and so desert the possibility of self-discovery. His descriptions of repression anticipate Freud. Witness Carrie:
[S]he had not the mind to get firm hold upon a definite truth. When she could not find her way out of the labyrinth of ill-logic which thought upon the subject created, she would turn away entirely. (SC 71)
And Eugene, who refuses to delve into his feelings for Angela: “[H]e did not permit himself to realize just what that meant — to take careful stock of his emotions” (‘‘G” 159). Clyde, of course, is Dreiser’s most overtly repressed character, a tangle of unacknowledged emotions that are so tightly locked out of his consciousness that they cloud his mind and even pain his body at times. For example:
[S]o disturbed was he by the panorama of the bright world of which Sondra was the center and which was now at stake, that he could scarcely think clearly. Should he lose all this for such a world as he and Roberta could provide for themselves — a small home — a baby, such a routine work-a-day life as taking care of her and a baby on such a salary as he could earn, and from which most likely he would never again be freed! God! A sense of nausea seized him. (AAT 414)
Clyde’s reaction recalls Freud’s famous case studies of hysterical paralysis, where repression has serious physical consequences. Lacan also speaks of the unconscious being detectable in the body as well as in language and memory.37
Dreiser’s protagonists willfully ignore the unconscious at their own peril. The incessant and insatiable desires that we see in them are merely the tip of the iceberg, the end of a chain of signifiers that has pushed the original desire beneath the surface of consciousness. But the conscious tip still connects to that underwater ice mass, linking that unconscious want to its conscious substitute. We see this link in Eugene: his belief that the artist is special and so can do anything he likes is very much a conscious one, while his sexual inconstancy (which he sees as an exercise of his specialness), coupled with the need to rebel against authority (symbolized by his mother and father figures), sends its roots down to his unconscious narcissism.
Clyde Griffiths certainly wants to be rich. But why? For what? To satisfy whom? Clyde never tries to track this desire down
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into himself — he will not admit to what Dreiser points to: that his childhood humiliation has marked him, that the taunting he received because of his poor evangelistic background has shaped his wants. His occasionally incisive views of other people contrast with a strikingly poor perspective of himself. In Lacanian terms, his longing for riches and status is a metaphor for another, deeper, undefined longing.
Dreiser’s tacked-on ending to the 1900 edition of Sister Carrie, though described with some justification as drivel, suggests that Carrie is a seeker who won’t look into herself:
Oh, Carrie, Carrie! Oh, blind strivings of the human heart. … In your rocking-chair, by your window, shall you dream such happiness as you may never feel. (SC 369; emphasis added)
Carrie’s verbal and emotional reticence leads to something of a superficial existence: she chases her dreams without “reading” them, and therefore without reading herself. She is as devoid of introspection as any character in fiction, even for a writer like Dreiser, who created many characters with a similar reluctance to explore their own longings. For Carrie, wants are always dreams, products of an unconscious which she actively (that is, consciously) refuses to explore.
Her active refusal supports Lacan’s pronouncement that “the ego represents the centre of all the resistances to the treatment of symptoms.”38 This is very much the case with Hurstwood, Eugene, and Clyde as well as Carrie. Their repression leads to destructive behavior that springs from the unconscious, the seat of identity, contradiction, and alienation.39 Aggressivity operates within constraints, says Lacan. He ties it to neurosis in the context of social living and its discontents. But the balance can be hard to maintain. In a frequently quoted speech from Jennie Gerhardt, Lester Kane speaks for many of Dreiser’s protagonists in lamenting that, “The best we can do is hold our personality intact.’’40 Such is the difficulty in maintaining an integrated sell. When the accommodation between the symbolic and the imaginary breaks down and the latter can no longer be contained, aggressivity operates out of control. We see the results in the thieving, philandering, even murderously negligent behavior of Dreiser’s protagonists.
Such compulsive behavior is almost never accompanied by self-reflection in Dreiser’s narratives. In Hurstwood’s case, “The true ethics of the situation never once occurred to him, and never would have, under any circumstances” (SC 193). Clyde’s blow is “accidentally and all but unconsciously administered” (AAT
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493). Eugene, though clearly the most reflective character under consideration here, is no champion of introspection, either:
[His physical passion] seemed to overcome him quite as a drug might or a soporific fume. He would mentally resolve to control himself, but unless he instantly fled there was no hope, and he did not seem able to run away. He would linger and parley, and in a few moments it was master and he was following its behest blindly, desperately, to the point almost of exposure and destruction. (“G” 172)
The narrator later describes him as “a rudderless boat in the dark” (“G” 286).
“To bring the subject to recognize and name his desire,” says Lacan, ‘‘this is the nature of the efficacious action of analysis.”41 This psychoanalytic tenet offers especially compelling insight into Dreiser’s characters, for they are especially reluctant to name their desires, partly because they usually do not even know what they are. Carrie’s “voice of want” never stills, for example. Her deepest desire is repressed, with a series of signifiers inserted in its place. What she wants is an unspeakable, unreadable thing, a part of the unconscious discourse of the Other, about which we can only speculate.