Madness in English-Canadian Fiction - ub-dok - Universität Trier

modes of psychic errancy in the floating signifier, Lacan thus bears witness to the
values of nonsense and cracked style.
That interpretation is not open to any meaning could just as well be applied to the
exegesis of Lacan's works as most of his main ideas and cherished controversial
positions are presented to the reader in a consciously ragged and inconsequential form.
If one looks at the insistent play of ambiguity which permeates his writing, it becomes
plain that even the basic psychoanalytic paradigms, and the habit of psychoanalytic
explanation itself, may be called into question from within. Lacan's theory seems to
necessitate a certain kind of literary performance. His prose is an elaborate mechanism
for multiplying and highlighting the connections between signifiers. Word-play
abounds. Wherever words collide and fuse an atmosphere of play prevails. If the
signifier plays and the signified slips beneath, then the unconscious is speaking in its
native tongue. Characteristic features of Lacan's style would include: ambiguity,
disturbances of conventional word order, literal and metaphorical senses interwoven,
ellipsis, leading notions alluded to rather than declared, abstractions personified,
persons becoming abstractions, widely different words becoming synonyms, synonyms
being given widely different meanings. All this keeps the signified as a feeble and
drifting presence behind the raging signifier.
It is plain that a writer who uses these devices so frequently and in such close
conjunction is not merely running the risk of writing nonsense, but is envisaging
nonsense as a positive literary goal. For Lacan irony and contradiction are inherent in
language and psychology, in so far as it studies discourse, is "the realm of the
senseless"97. Lacan was decisively influenced by Surrealism in the late 1920s and early
1930s, and to everyone familiar with Surrealist writing, it is easier to understand how
it is that nonsense may be thought of as a plenitude rather than as an absence of sense
and given a special role in exploring and proclaiming the truths of the unconscious.
Nonsense in the Lacan text appears as much as a heady atmosphere of meaning,
promised but not given, as an offensive intruder into the world of rational argument.
However, in both cases nonsense is an agent of intellectual provocation. In Lacan's
view every person who speaks and is satisfied with what he/she says is not simply
misguided but wrong. Every statement that does not provoke change and strangeness
within itself is wrong and truth which seeks to remove itself from the contradictory
process of language becomes falsehood.
Lacan offers us a new conception both of science and of truth and asks us to abandon
many of the procedures for verification or falsification on which the credibility of
97 Ibid., pp. 249 f.
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