Danticat's the Dew Breaker, Haiti, And Symbolic Migration (Edwidge Danticat) (Critical Essay‪)‬

For Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud's stages of development play out as a syntactical discourse pivoting on lack. The individual's integration into the symbolic, that is, her/his arrival as a speaking subject and her/his relation to language determines the relative place she/he occupies as a functional member of "normal" social order. The symbolic represents the "final" stage of development, a barring from an imaginary limitlessness based on the "mother" (or the ego's hallucinated limitlessness established in the mirror phase). In Lacan's terms, a presence, not necessarily a biological father or father figure, blocks the individual from this position and forces her/him into a position of lack. He/she acquires a desire to find a place within society and thus become a part of the endless chain of signifiers known as symbolic order, or language. Such an exposition of the way Western subjectivity works seems like a transparency (the clear plastic sheets we all used before Power Point) that can be set atop any individual subject. Thus psychoanalysis, as "an exemplary manifestation of literary modernism" (Ian 60), or as a field of expertise, seems to arrive first, and is then applied to the other. Psychoanalysis seems eminently capable of transplanting its framework onto others, especially with its command of terms that support the parameters of its own introspective "science." Left behind is that subject position embroiled in additional burdens of racial difference, colonial heritage, or subaltern identity. Edwidge Danticat's The Dew Breaker, a "third world" (the designation is employed reluctantly) literary text, redirects the "high-culture" discourse that seems to require an indulgent modern subject: someone who suffers from alienation and has the luxury to inquire about it. With kings, queens, and princes setting much of the psychoanalytic stage (Oedipus, Hamlet, the Queen from "The Purloined Letter"), this novel is a gaze on other end, not on the ruler, but on the subject of rule. Set in an Other scene, here indicating the unconscious (Bergeron 61), Danticat's Haiti engenders the psychoanalytic subject differently because Haiti castrated the colonial father early on and this castration is immutable. Still, the "third world" subject already resides at the site of psychoanalytic inquiry. For it is the gaps or silences that demarcate the psychoanalytic cause--and therein speaks the Other. Carine M. Mardorossian suggests that the migration motif presents a more fitting discussions of an alienated "underdeveloped" subject (16). Rather than draping the subject in blackface, migration reflects the subject's ability to traverse the registers of imaginary and the symbolic (on the theory of migration and literature, see, e.g., McClennen). The subject of the oppressed intimates that the symbolic and must be initiated by loss, not lack. The difference hinges on lack as a deficiency as opposed to loss stemming from losing. Losing more closely approximates the colonized experience.