pynchon-l-digest V1 #393

[hankhank at ccwf.cc.utexas.edu]

On Thu, 13 Feb 1997, Paul Murphy wrote:
> And for God's sake, who can
> take seriously the claim that the
> shattering-of-the-mirror-in-the-motel-bathroom sequence (precipitated by
> the rocketing hairspray can) is a comment on Lacan's mirror stage. 

As I don't have _Lot 49_ Companion at hand, I don't have it at all,
I'd like to know: has somebody really suggested that this episode is
Pynchon's *conscious* comment on Lacan's mirror stage? While that 
wouldn't be completely impossible, I wouldn't easily buy that, either.

Another thing is that one may well relate Lacan's ideas to _Lot 49_,
when the novel may well be seen (to some extent at least) to question
them: Oedipa-subject having got stuck permanently in the mirror stage 
-- estranged from America's official symbolic system, which has in her
eyes become an empty "zero" instead of some phallic, fatherly, supposedly
Meaningful "one" as tradition wanted to have it -- incapable of getting
back to the full "one" of some primordial imaginary state, either.
And perhaps not only Oedipa.

Still, imho Lacan's monolithic "symbolic" (cf. Althusser's all-powerful
"ideology") is highly problematic to begin with, and while the Kristeva 
of the 70s radicalized Lacan's imaginary, naming it semiotic, at that
time at least the symbolic area as such was something quite homogenous to
her, too. But I feel too tired to plague you with this more than I have
done already, and why do I always forget to take my Finnish-English
dictionary with me into this computer lab, anyway?

Heikki