Identification, Sign, Fantasy : Unsettling the Greek Romantic Body through Psychoanalytic Theory
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Cambridge
Department Name: Classics
Abstract
This project attempts to answer a series of questions on the problem of bodies-especially gendered bodies-which a reading of the Greek romances might pose, but which have not yet been properly answered. First, if the acquisition of a body can be understood through the Lacanian perspective of imaginary identifications (Butler 1993), what happens to those disjunctions and horrors which such identifications might engender (Lacan 1966)? Daphnis and Chloe pairs a gradual discovery of the body through identifications (Alvares 2012) with terrifying tales of bodily metamorphosis, and the Lacanian perspective allows us to explore the connection between the two. Secondly, can the body be understood on the model of the Lacanian sign, which not only signifies but participates in a wider unpredictable and preexisting network of signs? In the digressive and ecphrastic texts of the romances, bodies are metaphorically substituted for one another, or signified by other corporeally described objects, to which they in turn point back. What happens to the body in each substitution, and how might the uncontrollable aspect of this network again relate to the horrors of the body? Finally, how can a relation of the body as fantasy (motivated by absence) coincide with embodiment? This project aims to disrupt a stable conception of the body, by exploring alternative models by which the body (in the romances and in general) can be understood. Locating these transformative models in the seemingly normative sphere of the romances provides additional perspectives on the disruptive within the normative.
In order to reimagine the romances as sites for radical reformulation of our understanding of the body, psychoanalysis provides a particularly useful starting point. Within a narrative framework, the body can only be approached as part of the narrative, and thus becomes temporalised. Hence psychoanalysis' focus on the uncertainties of development will be employed, and complemented by perspectives from queer theory (Stockton 2009; Salamon 2010; Halberstam 2011). Since the narrative writing-into-being of the body is anything but simple, psychoanalytic concepts of the unsymbolised Real, abjection (Kristeva 1982), and the unconscious of the text (Zeitlin 2012) are additionally useful.
The wave of 90's scholarship, inspired by Foucault (1984) in which the romances are viewed either as enforcing a new normativity (Winkler 1990; Konstan 1993; Perkins 1995) or as ironising normative discourses (Goldhill 1995) still exert a strong influence on the scholarship of the genre (Haynes 2002; Morgan 2003; Montiglio 2012; Alvares 2014). Both perspectives, however, fail to take into account the instability of the gendered body as it comes into being narratively. If we resist closure as governing meaning (Whitmarsh 2011), we see that the basis of normativity is being unsettled, in more than ironic ways. Hence, notions of simple enforcement can no longer stand. In dialogue with psychoanalytic concepts (Fink 1995), this project attempts a closer reading of the body in the romances, an approach which will prove both more faithful to the texts, and more transformative in our time.
In order to reimagine the romances as sites for radical reformulation of our understanding of the body, psychoanalysis provides a particularly useful starting point. Within a narrative framework, the body can only be approached as part of the narrative, and thus becomes temporalised. Hence psychoanalysis' focus on the uncertainties of development will be employed, and complemented by perspectives from queer theory (Stockton 2009; Salamon 2010; Halberstam 2011). Since the narrative writing-into-being of the body is anything but simple, psychoanalytic concepts of the unsymbolised Real, abjection (Kristeva 1982), and the unconscious of the text (Zeitlin 2012) are additionally useful.
The wave of 90's scholarship, inspired by Foucault (1984) in which the romances are viewed either as enforcing a new normativity (Winkler 1990; Konstan 1993; Perkins 1995) or as ironising normative discourses (Goldhill 1995) still exert a strong influence on the scholarship of the genre (Haynes 2002; Morgan 2003; Montiglio 2012; Alvares 2014). Both perspectives, however, fail to take into account the instability of the gendered body as it comes into being narratively. If we resist closure as governing meaning (Whitmarsh 2011), we see that the basis of normativity is being unsettled, in more than ironic ways. Hence, notions of simple enforcement can no longer stand. In dialogue with psychoanalytic concepts (Fink 1995), this project attempts a closer reading of the body in the romances, an approach which will prove both more faithful to the texts, and more transformative in our time.