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University of Tuzla Faculty of Philosophy English Language and Literature
University of Tuzla Faculty of Philosophy English Language and Literature
Faculty of Philosophy
English Language and Literature
Eldina Jahi
Since the paper revolves not only around Lacans theories relevant for the paper itself, but
also on the work of the Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy, it is important to present a brief
biography of the poetess, as her poems will serve as a medium through which I will attempt to
tackle the subject matter of the paper objet petit a in poetry.
Carol Ann Duffy is an award-winning Scots poet who, according to Danette DiMarco
in Mosaic, is the poet of "post-post war England: Thatcher's England." Duffy is best known
for writing love poems that often take the form of monologues. Her verses, as
an Economist reviewer described them, are typically "spoken in the voices of the urban
disaffected, people on the margins of society who harbour resentments and grudges against
the world." Although she knew she was a lesbian since her days at St. Joseph's convent
school, her early love poems give no indication of her homosexuality; the object of love in her
verses is someone whose gender is not specified. Not until her 1993 collection, Mean
Time, and 1994's Selected Poems, does she begin to write about homosexual love.
Duffy's poetry has always had a strong feminist edge, however. This position is especially
well captured in her Standing Female Nude, in which the collection's title poem consists of an
interior monologue comprising a female model's response to the male artist who is painting
her image in a Cubist style. Although at first the conversation seems to indicate the model's
acceptance of conventional attitudes about beauty in artand, by extension, what an ideal
woman should beas the poem progresses Duffy deconstructs these traditional beliefs.
Ultimately, the poet expresses that "the model cannot be contained by the visual art that would
regulate her," explained DiMarco. "And here the way the poem ends with the model's final
comment on the painting 'It does not look like me'is especially instructive. On the one hand,
her response suggests that she is naive and does not understand the nature of Cubist art. On
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the other hand, however, the comment suggests her own variableness, and challenges
traditionalist notions that the naked model can, indeed, be transmogrified into the male artist's
representation of her in the nude form. To the model, the painting does not represent either
what she understands herself to be or her lifestyle." Duffy, who is currently the United
Kingdom's poet laureate, was seriously considered for the position in 1999. Prime Minister
Tony Blair's administration had wanted a poet laureate who exemplified the new "Cool
Britannia," not an establishment figure, and Duffy was certainly anything but establishment.
She is the Scottish-born lesbian daughter of two Glasgow working-class radicals. Her female
partner is also a poet and the two of them are raising a child together. Duffy has a strong
following among young Britons, partially as a result of her poetry collection Mean Time being
included in Britain's A-level curriculum, but Blair was worried about how "middle England"
would react to a lesbian poet laureate.
There were also concerns in the administration about what Britain's notorious tabloids would
write about her sexuality, and about comments that Duffy had made urging an updated role for
the poet laureate. In the end, Blair opted for the safe choice and named Andrew Motion to the
post. After Duffy had been passed over, Katherine Viner wrote in the Guardian Weekend that
her "poems are accessible and entertaining, yet her form is classical, her technique razorsharp. She is read by people who don't really read poetry, yet she maintains the respect of her
peers. Reviewers praise her touching, sensitive, witty evocations of love, loss, dislocation,
nostalgia; fans talk of greeting her at readings 'with claps and cheers that would not sound out
of place at a rock concert.'" Viner lamented that Duffy only came to the attention of many
people when she was caricatured and rejected as poet laureate. However, the poet got some
satisfaction when she earned the National Lottery award of 75,000 pounds, a sum that far
exceeded the stipend that poet laureates receive. After the laureate debacle, Duffy was further
vindicated when her next original collection of poems, The World's Wife, received high
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acclaim from critics. In what Antioch Review contributor Jane Satterfield called "masterful
subversions of myth and history," the poems in this collection are all told from the points of
view of the women behind famous male figures, both real and fictional, including the wives
and lovers of Aesop, Pontius Pilate, Faust, Tiresius, Herod, Quasimodo, Lazarus, Sisyphus,
Freud, Darwin, and even King Kong. Not all the women are wives, however. For example,
one poem is told from Medusa's point of view as she expresses her feelings before being slain
by Perseus; "Little Red-Cap" takes the story of Little Red Riding Hood to a new level as a
teenage girl is seduced by a "wolf-poet." These fresh perspectives allow Duffy to indulge in a
great deal of humor and wit as, for example, Mrs. Aesop grows tired of her husband's constant
moralizing, Mrs. Freud complains about the great psychologist's obsession with penises,
Sisyphus's bride is stuck with a workaholic, and Mrs. Lazarus, after finding a new husband,
has her life ruined by the return of her formerly dead husband. There are conflicting emotions
as well in such poems as "Mrs. Midas," in which the narrator is disgusted by her husband's
greed, but, at the same time, longs for something she can never have: his physical touch. "The
World's Wife appeals and astonishes," said Satterfield. "Duffy's mastery of personae allows for
seamless movement through the centuries; in this complementary chorus, there's voice and
vision for the coming ones." An Economist reviewer felt that the collection "is savage,
trenchant, humorous and wonderfully inventive at its best." And Ray Olson, writing
in Booklist, concluded that "Duffy's takes on the stuff of legends are . . . richly rewarding."
Duffy has also written verses for children, many of which are published in Meeting
Midnight and Five Finger-Piglets. The poems in Meeting Midnight, as the title indicates, help
children confront their fears by addressing them openly. "They explore the hinterland in a
child's imagination where life seems built on quicksand and nameless worries move in and
will not leave," explained Kate Kellaway in an Observerreview. Kellaway also asserted that
"these are real poems by one of the best English poets writing at the moment."
In addition to her original poetry, Duffy has edited two anthologies, I Wouldn't Thank You for
a Valentine: Poems for Young Feminists and Stopping for Death: Poems of Death and
Loss, and has adapted eight classic Brothers Grimm fairy tales in Grimm Tales. Not intended
for young children but for older children and young adults in drama and English
classes, Grimm Tales includes adaptations of such stories as "Hansel and Gretel" and "The
Golden Goose," which are rewritten "with a poet's vigor and economy, combining traditions
of style with direct, colloquial dialogue," according to Vida Conway in School Librarian.1
I Introduction
I am not a poet, but a poem. A poem that is being written, even if it looks like a subject.
Jacques Lacan (1981, viii)
Words. We all rely on the mere strings of ready-for-use sets of letters that somehow,
regardless of so many rules imposed on them, still fail to convey the thoughts, let alone
feelings. However, poetry here comes as a rescuer who mediates between the metaphorical
and literal, calms the conflicts, and serves as an equaliser between the visible and invisible
connects the reason and feelings, and mirrors the human psyche. On the surface of things
floats, of course, the language as a bridge between what is thought, and what is said, selfishly
retaining the essence of the two somewhere in the middle. Along the same lines, language is
essential medium when it comes to psychoanalysis. Also, if one wants to understand human
behaviour translated in ones actions or thoughts, one as well have to be fluent in the
language of the both realms psychoanalysis and poetry. Additionally, language wise,
psychoanalysis and poetry go hand in hand for them both help understanding something that
is hidden in images, pauses, rhythm, and rhyme.
Language of poetry, thus, makes it perfect means of communication between the psyche and
the listener. Verses, in this case, are put to bed and being listened to. It is not a strange thing to
pay such a close attention to the written word and why poetry, indeed? Where does this
strange romance between psychoanalysis and poetry come from? Namely, the practice of
writing in verses to a great extent facilitates the imagination, deeply rooted in the
unconscious, and translates the thoughts into words that like paint stains the sheets like
canvas, crating the portal into the human mind. We should bear in mind that poems can be
analysed in a number of ways. For instance, we can analyse the speaker or as the poet as it
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mirrors something that stems from the unconscious. Brostoff (2011) states that poetry serves
as a perfect medium between the subject and analyst primarily because of its nature. Namely,
according to Brostoff, poetry emanates impulses toward presence: it seeks to embody itself
in the moment of its activation as it is read, to embody and unfold itself in voice, breath, and
rhythm, and in the particularity of the world.
This paper will address Lacans notion of the objet petit a, and how it manifests in the realm
of poetry. Theoretical background of the paper will provide a solid basis for the analysis of
carefully chosen poems written by Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, from several collections.
The field of psychoanalytic literary criticism is very broad, but nonetheless important
when it comes to the analysis of any piece of literary work. Berry provides a rather simple
definition of psychoanalytic criticism, where it is seen as a form of literary criticism which
uses some of the techniques of psychoanalysis in the interpretation of literature (96). The
Concise Oxford Dictionary defines psychoanalysis as a system of psychological theory and
therapy which aims to treat mental disorders by investigating the interaction of conscious and
unconscious elements in the mind and bringing repressed fears and conflicts into the
conscious mind by techniques such as dream interpretation and free association. Also, Barker
states that psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic literary criticism are both interested in
answering the question of human identity (98-99). There is, of course, a number of
theoreticians preoccupied with providing a valid answer, however, we must bear in mind that
there is no one valid interpretation of any piece of writing. In other words, there is a number
of schools with different approaches to this type of textual analysis.
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In order to outline the relation between the poetry and psychology demands addressing
several crucial points that Jung (1971) addressed in his essay The Spirit in Man, Art and
Literature. At first glance, it may seem that the two has nothing in common, however there is
a close connection between that seeks attention. Jung (ibid.) stated that connections between
poetry as the form of art and psychology heavily rely on the fact that poetry like a number of
human activities derive from psychic motives which, according to Jung, are a proper subject
for psychology. In this care focus on the fact that the process of artistic creation as a subject
for psychological study. Jung (ibid.) here called for attention when it comes to submitting
poetry as an art form to psychological scrutiny, and emphasized that verses would undergo
psychological analysis without violating its nature. He also said that in order to do justice to
a work of art, analytical psychology must rid itself entirely of medical prejudice; for a work of
art is not a disease, and consequently requires a different approach from the medical one
( Jung 1971). In accordance with what Jung proposed here, an analysis of a work of art
should not be conducted regarding investigation of human determinants, but the light should
be shed on determinants that enable fully understanding of the art in this case poetry.
Jacques Lacan's Ecrits (1966) is considered the most influential work of structuralist
psychoanalysis. According to Lacan, we are all shaped by the Symbolic order into which we
are born, an order that determines our gender identity and our place in our families. He
explained that the very moment we learn to make symbols; we also learn to separate from our
ambient childhood world of objects and achieve an independent selfhood that is experienced
as loss. Also, the lack, as Lacan stated, can never be filled, and all human desire circulates
around it, yearning to hark back to the lost unity which results in yearning. The conception of
the mirror stage proposed by Lacan focuses on the formation of the I, the experience opposing
any philosophy that leans on the notion of the Cogito. Namely, Lacan noticed how children
between the ages of six and eighteen months experience a moment of self-discovery, or selfrecognition, by looking in a mirror. The mirror stage can be understood as an identification,
the moment when the subject assumes an image. The process of self-recognition, the mirror
stage, creates an existential image which means that we are actually identified by otherness, a
reflection, and not the actual Self. As a result, the I in this case is formed from something that
Lacan calls mconnaissances ( misunderstanding), that results in a subject assuming an
illusion as an image of the Self, which makes it impossible for the subject to know the real
Self. He viewed the mirror stage as a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from
insufficiency to anticipation and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of
spatial identification. Additionally, it was also viewed as the succession of phantasies that
extends from a fragmented body-image. As a result, the fragmented body usually manifests in
dreams through a number of images, as well as the formation of I, which in dreams is
symbolized through a variety of closed or fenced facilities (Lacan, 2001, pp. 441-447).
Lacan claims that the Mirror Stage initiates something what he calls the Imaginary Order.
Namely, the Imaginary Order is the world of images, a world of perception, where the child
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experiences the world through images, and not words. It should be noted that the childs sense
of the Self comes from an illusion. Still, the child does not experience itself as one, but as a
union with a mother. This experience Lacan calls the desire of the mother. Acquiring language
is another important stanza where a child enters the world Symbolic. This, for Lacan, plays an
important role for a child, where one finally eneters the world of I, and not us (union). For
Lacan, this separation constitutes our most important experience of loss, the lack, a vast abyss
that can never be filled. Unfortunately, we spend a lifetime trying to fulfil something that can
never be fulfilled, without realizing it. Finally, this loss is referred as the lost object of desire,
objet petit a. It is worth noting that objet petit a can take a number of forms, where each one
puts the subject in touch with the repressed desire for something that can never been obtained,
but always desired (Tyson 1999).
I Remember Me
There are not enough faces. Your own gapes back
at you on someone else, but paler, then the moment
when you see the next one and forget yourself.
It must be dreams that make us look different, must be
private cells inside a common skull.
One has the others look and has another memory.
Despair stares out from the tube-trains at itself
running on the platform for the closing door. Everyone
you meet is telling wordless barefaced truths.
Sometimes the crowd yields one you put a name to,
snapping fiction into fact. Mostly your lover passes
in the rain and does not know you when you speak.
(Standing Female Nude, 1985)
Even from the title of the poem we might hear the echo of the Lacans the mirror stage and the
creation of the lack; the birth of the loss. Nonetheless, we will focus on the objet petit a that,
as it is already explained, can take many forms, but with the same meaning the lack. From
the very first glance at the title, we cannot but notice the usage of first person pronouns, I
and me, in the title, linked with the verb remember. Here, remember links I that to
some extent might be perceived as something that we think we are, something rather symbolic
and residual. On the other hand, me here is timely distant and obviously more complete, as
the verb remember denotes the loss of something that existed before. Also, this selfreflection that is embedded in me is closely related to the verb remember, which echoes the
voice from the abyss of the past.
There are not enough faces. Your own gapes back
at you on someone else, but paler, then the moment
when you see the next one and forget yourself.
The objet petit a in the lines 1-3 can be explained through Lacanian gaze, that it to say, the
gaze as the objet petit a. In his The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1978),
Lacan addressed - as he called it - the privilege of the gaze as objet, and said that the moment
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when one sees oneself seeing onself there is no such sensation of being absorbed by the
vision (80). In lines /Your own gapes back /at you on someone else, but paler, then the
moment/ when you see the next one and forget yourself./ shows certain awareness of the split.
Let us take a look at the following lines from the poem that are more graphic, and dare I say
exemplary when it comes to the perception of the gaze as objet a:
One has the others look and has another memory.
Despair stares out from the tube-trains at itself
running on the platform for the closing door.
Lacan proposes that the interest that the subject takes in his own split is bound up with that
which determines it - , namely, a privileged object, which has emerged from some selfmutilation induced by the very approach of the real, whose name, in our algebra is the objet a
(83). He also said that from the moment that the gaze appears the subject tries to adapt to it, to
adapt to the point of complete disappearance. The objet a is, as Lacan explains, something
from which the subject, in order to constitute itself, has separated itself off as organ (103).
Consequently, this serves as a symbol of the lack, which by definition relates to objet petit a.
Here, we are focusing on something that it not there, and as Duffy writes /One has the others
look and has another memory./ and you are not yourself, just a residue of someone else you
recall.
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grew in my mind,
which turned the hairs on my head to filthy snakes
as though my thoughts
hissed and spat on my scalp.
My brides breath soured, stank
in the grey bags of my lungs.
Im foul mouthed now, foul tongued,
yellow fanged.
There are bullet tears in my eyes.
Are you terrified?
Be terrified.
Its you I love,
perfect man, Greek God, my own;
but I know youll go, betray me, stray
from home.
So better be for me if you were stone.
I glanced at a buzzing bee,
a dull grey pebble fell
to the ground.
I glanced at a singing bird,
a handful of dusty gravel
spattered down.
I looked at a ginger cat,
a housebrick
shattered a bowl of milk.
I looked at a snuffling pig,
a boulder rolled
in a heap of shit.
I stared in the mirror.
Love gone bad
showed me a Gorgon.
I stared at a dragon.
Fire spewed
She was originally a golden-haired, fair maiden, who, as a priestess of Athena, was devoted to a life of celibacy;
however, after being wooed by Poseidon and falling for him, she forgot her vows and married him. For this
offence, she was punished by the goddess in a most terrible manner. Each wavy lock of the beautiful hair that
had charmed her husband was changed into a venomous snake; her once gentle, love-inspiring eyes turned into
blood-shot, furious orbs, which excited fear and disgust in the mind of the onlooker; whilst her former roseate
hue and milk-white skin assumed a loathsome greenish tinge.
Seeing herself transformed into such a repulsive creature, Medusa fled her home, never to return. Wandering
about, abhorred, dreaded, and shunned by the rest of the world, she turned into a character worthy of her outer
appearance. In her despair, she fled to Africa, where, while wandering restlessly from place to place, young
snakes dropped from her hair; that is how, according to the ancient Greeks, Africa became a hotbed of venomous
reptiles. With the curse of Athena upon her, she turned into stone whomever she gazed upon, till at last, after a
life of nameless misery, deliverance came to her in the shape of death, at the hands of Perseus.
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Medusa is a poem from Duffys collection of poems titled The Worlds Wife, published in
1999. This dramatic monologue offers us an unusual perspective on the myth about Gorgon
Medusa. The poem serves as a perfect canvas where we can see the gaze as the objet petit a.
First of all, we will focus on the parts of the poem that best exemplify the phenomenon of the
Lacanian gaze as objet a.
The first stanza describes the emotional state of the speaker and we follow the transformation
(lines 1- 17). The transformation, or in this case distortion, is triggered by strong emotion of
jealousy. Actually, the audience is very well aware that the self-perception of the speaker is
not the reflection of the physical, but of the psychological state of the speaker. The reflection
the speaker sees is not real, is not really there, so to say.
I stared in the mirror.
Love gone bad
showed me a Gorgon.
I stared at a dragon.
The image of something the speaker wants to see, and believes to see are two different
representations. Lacan (1978, p.99), addressed Cailliois Medusa et compagnie who brought
three headings that are of vast importance when it comes to explaining the relation of the
subject and the domain of vision, and one of them being intimidation. Namely, the
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phenomenon known as intimidation involves over-valuation that the subject tries to attain in
the appereance (lines 31-34). At the bottom of things, here in question is the reproduction of
an image. Lacan (1978, p.102) also addressed the reference to the unconscious, where the
lacking in the real might be attained in the sexual goal. In other words, the gaze as the objet a
a lure is captured in the dialect of the eye (of the speaker) and the gaze (that stares back at
her), which is perfectly capture in the last line of the poem:
Look at me now.
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In the poem River, Duffy juxtaposes nature and love as they complement each other. Nature
can be both gentle and cruel, and is as unpredictable as human emotions. Nature is personified
and given a role of someone whose power is to wether condemn or bless: I part the leaves
and they toss me a blessing of rain. In the second stance the mighty river is portrayed as
playful and clean (of everything, somewhat divine and filled with grace greeting the lovers,
being greeted by the heron.
In the second stanza, the speaker free oneself from the past, the burden as heavy as the
heavens above, experiencing pain I drop my past on the grass and open my arms, which
acheas though they held up this heavy sky. Here the speaker resembles Atlas, whose
punishment was to carry the Heavens on his shoulder. With this myth Duffy managed to, very
modernist of her, present the pain and persistence. Regardless of how difficult it is to endure
the pain, to thread the troubled waters, the speaker still manages to reach to ones final
destination the lover.
We are not only given a story about love, but we are given a journey. We learn about the
speakers past that was not filled with happiness, and who spent many a night gazing at the
stars, praying for love, for someone who is being loved for too long. Against window glass
all night as my eyes sieved the stars here through the eyes of a speaker we can see what
mouth shy of a prayer failed to convey; it is difficult to translate the pain into words, or any
emotion for that matter, so it is not strange that we are given a perfect display of bond
between emotions and nature.
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Feel my soul swoop and ease itself into my skin, like a bird
threading a river. Then I can look love full in the face, see
who you are I have come this far to find, the love of my life.
However, it should be noted that unlike in other two poems where the gaze is the object petit
a, here the desire is portrayed through the absence of love as simple as that. Objet petit a is
never simple to explain and takes many forms, is never here, nor there, it is an ever-present
lack that one hope to fulfil, but miserably fails.
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V Conclusion
There is a strange love affair existing between the poetry and psychology. Both address the
same issues, but from a different point of view. The underlying question is where we find the
common ground. Namely, poetic expression holds the power of uncovering something that
stems from the deepest caves of human psyche and brings it to the very surface to the reader.
Regardless of the voice we hear, be it the speakers or the echoes of our own hidden desires,
the voice is given to something that is not even there, hence, we might be found in fields of
dreams where our desire is never ours, for we are never certain of our own Self, nor the very
existence of it.
Since the self is incomplete, residing in the realm of Symbolic, as it is explained in the section
of the paper that deals with the theoretical background, the void, or the lack once created can
never actually be filled no matter how hard we try. Our desire is never ours, simply because it
was never there in the first place. However, with the persistent feeling of the lack that resides
in the subject, it can take many shapes, love, food, the absence of someone, the gaze, the
reflection in the mirror that never reflects the real, but the construct. According to Lacan, the
objet petit a does not have objective reality, that is to say, does not exist outside the subject
and as Lacan points out, this supposedly lost object can never really have been lost by the
subject, since the subject can never have possessed it in the first place. Consequently,
the objet petit a may as well be defined as an object that has come into being in being lost. In
all of the poems analysed in the paper, we can see that the gaze may function as objet petit a,
as well as the absence of something that was never there, like in the poem River, the lover
who is being missed, but was never there in the first place
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Works cited
Brostoff,
Richard.
"Some
Thoughts
on
the
Relationship
between
Poetry
and
Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch et al. New York: W. W. Norton & Company,
2001. Print. 441-447.
Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis. New York: Norton,
1978. Print.
Tyson, Lois. Critical Theory Today: A User-friendly Guide. New York: Garland Pub., 1999.
Print.
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