20. Felman, Adventure of Insight, p. 65. Philip Rieff (among others) documents Freud’s frequent analogies of himself to Copernicus and Darwin (Freud: The Mind of the Moralist [Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1959; 3d ed. repr. 1979], pp. 24, 76, 398, 401). Felman describes the Copernican comparison eloquently: “Just as Copernicus discovers that it is not the sun that revolves around the earth but the earth that revolves around the sun, so Freud displaces the center of the human world from consciousness to the unconscious” (Adventure of Insight, p. 64). Freud saw himself in an intellectual line with Copernicus and Darwin, with the contributions of all three serving to remove the human being from the center of things. Felman’s reworking of Freud’s Copernican metaphor is revealing: “In Lacan’s explicitly and crucially linguistic model of reflexivity, there are no longer distinct centers but only contradictory gravitational pulls” (65).
21. See Lacan’s “Function and field of speech and language in psychoanalysis,’’ (Ecrits, p. 51), and “The agency of the letter in the unconscious …” (Ecrits, p. 175).
22. Lacan, “The Freudian Thing,” (Ecrits, p. 118).
23. These “elective vectors” include “castration, mutilation, dismemberment, dislocation, evisceration, devouring, [and] bursting open of the body” (Lacan, “Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis,” [Ecrits, p. 11]).
24. Freud also allowed that the death drive could be directed towards others, but in his view, its primary focus is the self.
25. Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” trans. James Strachey, The Standard Edition of the Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth, 1953–1974), Vol. XIV, pp. 73–102. (Quotation, p. 74.) Further quotations will be given parenthetically within the text.
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26. This observation covers the 1900 published edition of Sister Carrie; the recently published “unexpurgated” University of Pennsylvania Press edition reveals more sexual desire on Carrie’s part.
27. Dreiser’s protagonists repeat without gaining mastery, which often makes the repetition appear imposed from without (especially in the case of An American Tragedy). This offers a context for the preponderance of teleologically deterministic readings of Dreiser.
28. Richard Lehan, Theodore Dreiser. His World and His Novels (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1969) and Lee Clark Mitchell, Determined Fictions, have authored the best, most comprehensive discussions of repetition and doubling in An American Tragedy, both in support of deterministic arguments.
29. The unexpurgated edition of Sister Carrie documents Hurstwood’s affairs more unflinchingly than the version originally published. Dreiser portrays him as periodically unfaithful, a regular visitor to meeting places of ill repute.
30. See Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Standard Edition, Vol. XVIII, pp. 3–64. Lacan’s rereading of Beyond the Pleasure Principle does not revise content the way, for example, his mirror stage moves the Oedipal trauma back further in infancy than Freud originally placed it; the difference in this latter case is largely one of emphasis. Lacan’s focus on the form of the discourse (the structure of the signifying chain) leads to his close study of repetition and broader reading of the death drive.
31. Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (New York and London: Norton, 1970; 1st ed. repr. 1900), p. 194. Future citations refer to this edition, and will be given parenthetically within the text.
32. Buttressing this point is the sympathy that mixes with Clyde’s other contradictory feelings when he sees Roberta’s house for the first time. Though she is pregnant by then and Clyde wishes to be rid of her, his reaction (communicated in indirect discourse by the narrator) to this “lorn, dilapidated realm” is full of pity for her, even as he fears that this fate could be visited upon himself (AAT, pp. 426–7).
33. Theodore Dreiser, The “Genius” (New York: New American Library, 1981), p. 644. Future citations refer to this edition, and will be given parenthetically within the text. The “Genius” was first published in 1915.
34. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), p. 50. Lacan studies the structure of repetition compulsion very closely in his ‘‘Seminar on the
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Purloined Letter,” trans. by Jeffrey Mehlman, in The Purloined Poe, ed. John R. Muller and William Richardson (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), pp. 28–54.
35. Lacan, “Aggressivity” (Ecrits, p. 21).
36. Felman, Adventure of Insight, p. 139.
37. Lacan, “Function and Field” (Ecrits, p. 50).
38. Lacan, “Aggressivity” (Ecrits, p. 23).
39. Ibid., p. 11.
40. Theodore Dreiser, Jennie Gerhardt (New York: Penguin Books, 1989), p. 401. The passage is the same in the restored edition of the novel edited by James L. W. West III (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), p. 392.
41. Jacques Lacan, Seminaire II (Paris: Seuil, 1978), p. 267; quoted in Felman, Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Psychoanalysis, p. 131.
42. I wish to thank Dr. Gary Rosenberg of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Science for his aid and insight in the preparation of this essay.
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On Language and the Quest for Self-Fulfillment: A Heideggerian Perspective on Dreiser’s Sister Carrie
Paul A. Orlov
During the 1970s and 1980s, the ideas and methods of philosopher Martin Heidegger on hermeneutics increasingly influenced the work of many critical theorists in literary studies. My interest in Heidegger’s writings, however, centers not on the hermeneutical methodology they reveal for interpreting texts, but on the thematic content that some of them offer as an innovative basis for extended readings of various modern American literary texts. In particular, I am concerned with the ways that Heidegger’s ideas on “authenticity” and ‘‘inauthenticity” within the ontological inquiry “into the question of the meaning of Being” in his masterwork, Being and Time (1927),1 provide a unique paradigm for a critical approach to the fiction of Theodore Dreiser. In the rather limited scope of the present discussion, I hope to give a suggestive illustration of one facet of this approach, while tracing a Heideggerian perspective on the relation between “language” and the quest for self-fulfillment in Sister Carrie (1900).
It is initially worth noting that traditional misconceptions about Dreiser (his purely naturalistic worldview, his own weaknesses as a thinker, and — above all — his supposed lack of fictional artistry) would seem to make him an improbable novelist to be discussed in terms of concepts drawn from a major twentieth-century philosopher such as Heidegger. Moreover, there can be little doubt that Dreiser, who was not especially well read in philosophy, never studied Being and Time;2 and given the chronology, he obviously could not have heard of it when he wrote Sister Carrie. But much recent criticism has finally recognized the complex vision and artistic merits of Dreiser’s novels. And just as some criticism (for example) has applied psychoanalytic concepts to the works of Hawthorne — who could not have read the writings of Freud — and by doing so has shed new light on his art, it is surely valid to
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use various Heideggerian concepts, despite Dreiser’s unfamiliarity with them, in interpreting his fiction. In fact, this interdisciplinary approach to Dreiser’s famous first novel can help disclose new meaningfulness in the literary text.
In Heidegger’s Being and Time, the human existent is by nature uniquely an ontological creature, ever engaged in the process of defining itself as it (also) discovers and discloses Being and the beings in the world. (Remarkably, Heidegger’s description of human existence makes no use of the terms “man” or “woman,” or references to ‘‘people.” Rather, to signify the special ontological role and nature of human beings as that place or “clearing” in which Being discloses itself, the philosopher uses the term “Dasein” — literally in German, “being-there.”) The meaning of things or even truth itself can be disclosed only when and as long as Dasein, which is essentially disclosedness, is (B and T, 269). But how Dasein understands the disclosure of the things and beings it encounters in its individual “Being-in-the-world” depends on the nature of its sense of the meaning of being a Self. And this sense or mode of existence may be either “authentic” or “inauthentic.”
The assumption underlying the entire enterprise of Being and Time is made explicit at many points in the philosophical text — that “authenticity” is much more a potential than an actual state for Dasein in day-to-day existence. For to be in the “authentic” mode, Dasein must “project” itself in terms of “primordial” thought — comparable to the thinking of “fundamental ontology” most intensely embodied as well as expressed in Heidegger’s work — making possible the genuine disclosure of Being and truth. For Heidegger, it must be stressed, rejection of all forms of subjective metaphysics that have made the transcendens a super-thing existing beyond our world or have given anthropomorphic conceptions of it, means that Being “is” in fact “no-thing,” though it is certainly the transcendent and Absolute. Indeed, as John Macquarrie, a major authority on Heidegger who served as cotranslator of Sein und Zeit into English has stated (1968), “He is careful never to formulate the question of the meaning of Being in the form ‘What is Being?’, for to ask this question would be to imply that Being ‘is’ a ‘what’, a thing or substance or entity.”3 Yet while it is essential to note the sharp distinction Heidegger makes between Being and beings/entities, and his insistence on “authentic” Dasein’s eschewing of concern with “things” and the thinking of thinghood — to anticipate a point crucial to the link I will seek to illuminate between the philosopher’s vision and Dreiser’s in the novel — it will suffice here to conceive of Being as broadly analogous to the transcendent principle of thought and existence. As I shall also show,