Encountering the real: A Lacanian reading of Faulkner and Morrison (Jacques Lacan, Toni Morrison, William Faulkner)

In Ecrits, Lacan states that "It is in the name of the father that we must recognize the support of the symbolic function which, from the dawn of history, has identified his person with the figure of the law" (67). The Name and the Law of the Father, specifically white, phallocentric ideology that has shaped America, frustrates African American attempts at achieving subjectivity and disallows African American manhood. To study the causes and effects of this problem, I have chosen four novels that, in one way or another, refer directly to slavery in the United States: Go Down, Moses; Song of Solomon; Absalom, Absalom! ; and Beloved. What I found as I worked with the novels was surprising: white men are depicted in these novels as being profoundly, if not equally, bound by this phallocentric ideology. The Name of the Father, then, even as it allows one to become a subject, controls that subject through the Law. Where Faulkner and Morrison are both interested in illustrating the ways in which ideology defines and limits its subjects, Morrison presents her characters and readers with a way out of its strictures. Through double consciousness, her characters are enabled to encounter the Real, that which lies beyond both symbolization and ideology. In each case, this encounter exposes the artificial nature of the ideology that would define them as its subjects and thereby gives them the power to redefine themselves as subjects.