"Memory Believes Before Knowing Remembers": The Insistence of the Past and Lacan's Unconscious Desire in Light in August (Jacques Lacan) (Critical Essay‪)‬

According to the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, the subject is an "effect of language" or discourse, created "by a signifier for another signifier," produced by intersubjective social construction (Evans 196). That is, people relate to each other not in their full complexity as living, feeling individuals, but in terms of significations that have come to represent them in their essential absence. Thus, a subject only appears in relationship to the socially constructed symbolic order or cultural symbolic of a particular community. This cultural symbolic, defined through history and thus welded to the past, reinforces psychic structures of repetition and repression. For example, in Faulkner's Light in August, characters repeat past patterns of a cultural symbolic order based on Southern patriarchy, operating in relationship to a signifying chain of Southern culture. Lacan suggests that enjoyment comes from the repetition of the past because doing so represses the anxiety of lack. This psychic enjoyment from the repetition of the past explains to a great extent the "past that will not pass" in much of Faulkner's work. Lacan theorizes that the act of repressing a sense of lack gives rise to desire, which can drive subjects to repeat outmoded and even dangerous behavior or, in more open conditions, lead to changes in signification. Lacan's theory of desire and subjectivity explains why and how the past, both cultural and personal, refuses to pass for a character such as Joe Christmas, who functions in a "circle" he cannot escape. In contrast, Lena Grove and Byron Bunch resemble what I might term post-analytic subjects who are able to reconfigure their relationships to lack and the cultural symbolic so as to embrace new signification, allow the past to pass, and strive for an altered future in the symbolic order. Before analyzing the persistence of the past in Light in August, one needs to summarize the plot, as well as to define Southern patriarchy and Lacanian desire. The novel juxtaposes the stories of Joe Christmas (an outsider whose possible mixed-blood parentage prevents him from choosing to be black or white and results in his tragic death); Joanna Burden (a descendant of Northerners who befriends and educates blacks and who has an affair with Joe Christmas); Gail Hightower (an ostracized member of the community who fixates on the heroics of his ancestors); Lena Grove (a country girl who sets out in her eighth month of pregnancy to find a father for her child and escape the drudgery of life in her brother's household); and Byron Bunch (an upstanding citizen, withdrawn bachelor, and friend of Hightower who falls in love with Lena). These characters are brought together when Joe Christmas kills Joanna Burden and the Southern community exacts justice by castrating and killing Joe.