“Analysis” of other Dreiserian creations has yielded similarly equivocal results. When we examine Dreiser’s art psychoanalytically, we find the sources of desire not only in the culture that surroundys them — a main focus of current criticism — but also buried deep in the personal unconscious, at the end of an increasingly obscure trail of signifiers. We see only the top signifier, the first link of the chain, but its direction is important: the chain points into the characters’ unarticulated pasts.
Tracing the chain backwards, I have highlighted some of the patterns of alienation, repetition, and resultant aggressivity inherent in Dreiser’s portraits. My point has been to identify areas of ambiguity, gaps, losses: sites of repression that trail back into the subjects’ personal histories. Following Lacan, I have sought the unconscious by examining what is missing as well as what is there. When something is repressed, it becomes unreadable — but it leaves a trace in the form of whatever has replaced it on the signifying chain. To illustrate the effect of the unreadable means moving away from comprehensive readings of encrypted absolutes. As a way to read American naturalist literature, this perspective provides a source of multiplicity and indeterminacy on the level of individual personality. As such, it represents an important alternative to the socially oriented, culturally contextual readings
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that have predominated in the criticism of the literature of the period.
This “implication” of Dreiser with psychoanalysis will, I hope, invite further psychoanalytic readings of Dreiser’s canon. Such analysis is clearly not a question of isolating psychological “problems” to be “solved,” but of locating structural interrelationships, matrices of desire that combine in unpredictable — that is, nonteleological — ways. To treat Dreiser’s complicated psychological portraits as “poor egos” in distress cuts down on the possible variations in their behavior. The contribution of Freud is better served in naturalist criticism by readings that allow for the diversity, unpredictability, and complex past of the divided mind.
Lacan emphasizes the psychoanalytic ambiguities. So does Dreiser. In their blind strivings after desire, the motivated acts of Dreiser’s characters are signifiers, but the signified has been censored. Actions and speech are thus ambiguous, ‘‘unreadable.” Therefore, to reduce them to the sum of one or two psychic vectors is to deny the ambiguity of the signifying act, and of the discourse of which it is a part. The equivocal depth of Dreiser’s characters lies in their conflicting wants originating in their pasts, and cutting different ways into their presents. Lacanian analysis embraces this ambiguity, depth and complexity of the striving of the ego. It gives a density to behavior that does justice to Dreiser’s deeply layered fictional personalities.42
Notes
1. Dreiser first read Freud’s work around 1914–1915. In 1931, at a dinner honoring Freud on his 75th birthday, Dreiser said in his speech:
I shall never forget my first encounter with his Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex, his Totem and Tabu, and his Interpretation of Dreams. At that time and even now every paragraph came as a revelation to me — a strong, revealing light thrown upon some of the darkest problems that haunted and troubled me and my work. And reading him has helped me in my studies of life and men. …
See Theodore Dreiser, A Selection of Uncollected Prose, ed. Donald Pizer (Detroit: Wayne State University Press), p. 263.
2. Ellen Moers, Two Dreisers (New York: Viking, 1969), p. 228.
3. Gordon O. Taylor, The Passages of Thought: Psychological Representation in the American Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 13. Taylor is most concerned with the representation of
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moral analysis. Though psychological, his perspective is decidedly not psychoanalytic.
4. Lee Clark Mitchell, Determined Fictions (New York: Columbia University Press), ch. 1.
5. Ibid., p. 17.
6. American naturalist literature — Dreiser’s work included — is currently being examined by a new generation of critics as a literature of social (as opposed to psychological) concerns, especially those pertaining to the marketplace. For an overview of this body of work, see Eric Sundquist’s “The Country of the Blue,” his influential introduction to American Realism: New Essays (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), pp. 3–24. A recent example of such analysis is Bodies and Machines (New York and London: Routledge, Chapman and Hall, 1992), in which Mark Seltzer focuses on the nexus between the natural and the social/cultural, describing a system of “relays” between opposing forces. This continuous opposition creates a dynamic tension that he broadly terms “the miscegenation of nature and culture.” In the case of Dreiser, Seltzer is concerned with the way that desire is expressed in the marketplace. Seltzer’s argument is sweepingly synthetic, challenging, and persuasive; the characters in the stories scarcely matter to him, except as they illustrate the larger scheme. I think that Dreiser’s complex protagonists particularly merit individual attention.
7. An excellent influence study has already been done by Ellen Moers, augmented by the work of Donald Pizer. In Two Dreisers, Moers documents Dreiser’s discovery of Freud and his incorporation of Freudian ideas into An American Tragedy, while Pizer’s analysis in The Novels of Theodore Dreiser: A Critical Study (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1976) extends the historical frontier through the study of Dreiser’s drafts and holographs. Though he does not engage in full-blown psychoanalytic readings, Pizer’s exigesis is informed in places by Dreiser’s Freudian influences.
Dreiser has lately begun to get his due as a novelist of character as well as social texture. In “Dreiser and the Naturalistic Drama of Consciousness,’’ Journal of Narrative Technique 21 (1991): 202–11, a recent essay focusing on Jennie Gerhardt, Donald Pizer argues that one of Dreiser’s distinguishing features is the way that he depicts consciousness in concrete terms. Two psychologically oriented critical voices of significance are those of Barbara Hochman and Thomas P. Riggio. In her work on Dreiser (and also Norris and Wharton), Hochman has approached realist and naturalist fiction foremost as complex storytelling about complex characters (see “A Portrait of the
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Artist as a Young Actress: The Rewards of Representation in Sister Carrie,” in New Essays on SISTER CARRIE, ed. Donald Pizer [New York and Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1991], pp. 43–64). And in an important essay in the same volume, Riggio calls for recognition of Dreiser as a “psychological realist” (“Carrie’s Blues,” pp. 23–41; Quotation, p. 25). Riggio’s psychological reading of Carrie interprets her actions against the complex background of her mind.
8. Richard B. Hovey and Ruth S. Ralph, “Dreiser’s The “Genius”: Motivation and Structure,’’ Hartford Studies in Literature 2 (1970): 169–83.
9. Terry Whalen, “Dreiser’s Tragic Sense: The Mind as ‘Poor Ego’,” The Old Northwest 11 (1985): 61–80.
10. Ibid., p. 71. Traditional Freudian methodology of the sort that Whalen uses actually offers insight into Jennie Gerhardt — the anomaly in Dreiser’s fictional canon. Jennie’s balanced ego (nearly unique among Dreiser’s protagonists) strikingly contrasts with the dominant appetites of her lover Lester and the social stricture embodied by her father. See Leonard Cassuto, “Dreiser’s Ideal of Balance” (forthcoming in Jennie Gerhardt: New Essays on the Restored Text, ed. James L. W. West III [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995]).
11. Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy (New York: New American Library, 1964), I:169. Future page citations refer to this edition, and will be given parenthetically within the text. An American Tragedy was first published in 1925.
12. I would further suggest that the lack of psychoanalytic Dreiser criticism can be traced to the abundance of deterministic criticism of his work. The general reluctance to scrutinize the characters in his stories as “possible persons” is, I think, a result of the long-running debate on determinism that still centers on this group of texts; that is, it may be hard to perceive characters as having real psychological depth if they are seen to lack free will.
13. Shoshana Felman, Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Psychoanalysis (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 48.
14. Ibid., pp. 49–50.
15. Sherry Turkle, Psychoanalytic Politics (New York: Basic Books, 1978), p. 75.
16. Dreiser did not want to be constrained by Freudian determinism, either. Pizer relates how Dreiser revised An American Tragedy in order to keep it from becoming a Freudian tract (The Novels of Theodore Dreiser, pp. 213–4).
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17. My summary of Lacan’s theory of ego formation and the unconscious is informed and aided (one might say, “implicated”) most notably by those of Shoshana Felman (Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight [Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1987], Sherry Turkle (Psychoanalytic Politics), and Ellie Ragland-Smith (Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis [Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987]).
18. The mirror stage does not depend on the presence of a literal mirror; the important thing is that the infant comes to distinguish the presence of an-Other, and thereby realizes its own existence.
19. See, for example, “The agency of the letter in the unconscious or reason since Freud” (Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, trans. Alan Sheridan [New York and London: Norton, 1977], p. 147).