SF

[hankhank at ccwf.cc.utexas.edu]

In spite of Craig's and Doug' wonderful sfuff on Siggy and nose candy 
I will ponder here more run-of-the-mill Freudianisms.

To be more precice: could PiratE PRenticE with his Banana Breakfast also
refer to PleasurE PRinciplE? 

But as SF wanted to go "beyond pleasure principle", _GR_ goes "beyond
Pirate Prentice". Beyond "immediate gratification of instinctual needs",
which the breakfast might signify, among other things, "to reduce pain"
pain which the nightmare has caused, among other things.

Because there surely is some restricting "reality principle" working in
the text, too, and it will never become *pure* pleasure (like Barthes
wanted to see the free play of jouissance, or,  pure fantasy in the sense 
of marvelous). Or pure pain, pure unpleasure, on the pre-side of the
apocalypse. Or pure oceanic pre-Oedipal nirvana without tensions, which
Freud also calls "entropy" in _Jenseits des Lustprinzips_. This is, of
course, connected to the longing to the infant's homoerotic symbiosis with
the mother in what Lacan calls "imaginary", and Kristeva "semiotic".

Still, the utopian masculine homoeroticism, or homosociality, of Melville's 
whale sperm episode, which was compared to the BB on the list last week, is 
closer to Lacan's phallic "symbolic", I suppose. The Banana Breakfast
might be a more problematic case. First of all, it goes back to the era of 
pre-Raphaelite Rossettis, and many of those decadent fin-de-siecle
characters lived in the neighborhood, too. It has a queerer genealogy than
Melville's sperm episode's self-fertilizing manly pantheism. There are
lots of feminine ingredients in that" unbelievable black topsoil", starting
from Christina Rossetti. Admittedly, the attainments of her and many other
influential Victorian women were soon belittled, but still they keep hiding 
there in the soil.

The Banana Breakfast presents itself in the narrative present as a manly
togetherness, though. However, as many have pointed out, it is a rare 
moment in the novel. Much later we can read something that may parody
American masculinity, among other things: "Let the village idiots 
celebrate. Let their holiness ripple into interference-patterns till it
clog the lantern-light ofthe meeting hall. Let the chorus line perfom
heroically: 16 ragged staring oldtimers who shuffle aimlessly about the
stage, jerking off in unison, waggling penises in mock quarter-staffing,
brandishing in twos and threes their green-leaved poles, exposing amazing
chancres and lesions, going off in mountains of sperm strung with blood
that splash over glazed trouser-pleats, dirt-clored jackets with pockets
dangling like 60-year-old breasts, sockless ankles permanently stained
with the dust of the little squares and the depopulated streets. Let them
cheer and pound their seats, let their brotherly spit flow." (Vik, 743)    


However, if _GR_ will not surrender to pleasure principle, it will not
obey reality principle, either. Rather it will tensely and unexpectedly
oscillate between categories like these. Surrender neither to fantasies,
nor to some flat 'reality' conceived as 'base'. Fantasies like those
proxy-fantasied by Pirate can never be innocent: "fantastic" and
"realistic" levels always contaminate and haunt each other. "Spirit" and
"matter" haunt each other. "Ego" and "id" haunt each other, and the
narrator surely cannot act as any kind of a "superego" between them.

So the novel moves ceaselessly 'fort/da' (there/here) (like the the
grandson Ernst's spool in the game on which Freud speculates in _BPP_
and tries in vain to reduce it to the main thread of Oedipality. I draw 
here on a certain Frenchman's speculations on Freud's speculations.) It
is, of course, hard to tell in _GR_ just what's 'here' and what's 'there',
but more important is in my view that the tension between something called
"fictionality" and something called "reality" is maintained. In the
process the novel becomes a kaleidoscopic weave, in which it seems
impossible to wholly internalize things, like psychologize Pirate's dream,
nor wholly reduce them to some - sociologistic, e.g. - "outside": from the
start the novel subverts the division between Private and Public, too.

Oh shit, my effusions just go on and on (at last I've been able to spend
some time on the internet), but I guess I have to stop now and try to
prepare myself for the next part of the reading, and contribute to it, 
if possible. I thank those who have read this for being patient therapists. 

Heikki