Post-Freudian dialogues: Mystery and the rhetorical resistance to meaning in Flannery O\u27Connor\u27s fiction and Jacques Lacan\u27s theory

The study reveals the rhetorical goals and strategies of O\u27Connor and Lacan to be startling similar, despite their disparate cultures (French and American-Southern) and seemingly incompatible critical classifications ( post-structuralist theorist and religious fiction writer ). Both writers, each with an unknowable but nevertheless sensible mystery (God or the unconscious, respectively), sought to undermine their contemporaries\u27 obsession with ego-mastery and logocentrism. By resisting their audiences\u27 meaning-making tendencies, the rhetorics of O\u27Connor and Lacan decenter readers from their egos and objectify them to mystery. Through the art of detournement, both writers circulate key symbols and signifiers throughout their texts. As these elements are displaced from context to context, they accumulate significance, thus sabotaging readers\u27 cognitive control (i.e., containment in any one meaning). The study is articulated in the manner proposed by Shoshana Felman in Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise. Rather than applying psychoanalysis to literature (i.e., Lacanian theory to O\u27Connor\u27s fiction), literature and psychoanalysis are placed on the same discursive level, as texts with equal potential for reciprocal implication. From the point of view of a reader who is familiar with both authors, the dissertation explores not only what Lacanian theory has to say about O\u27Connor\u27s text, but also what a rhetorical analysis of O\u27Connor\u27s fiction implies about Lacanian theory. Lacan\u27s Seminar on the Psychoses illuminates the psychotic structures in O\u27Connor\u27s portrayal of characters\u27 mindsets or ways of seeing. These radically fragmented and hallucinatory perceptions, in addition to disorders at the level of characters\u27 language, symptomize the dismantling of characters\u27 egos (and, ideally, effect the ego-disassembly of O\u27Connor\u27s readers) and mark their humbling preparation for grace. Just as Lacanian theory points to the implications that O\u27Connor\u27s ( psychotic ) art of distortion might have for her religious intentions, so does O\u27Connor\u27s fiction (and its divergence from Lacan\u27s paradigm of psychosis) prove to be a valuable resource--not only for revising Lacan\u27s thinking, but also for uncovering the absolutist attitudes informing his theoretical motivations