Lacan, Marechera & psychosis

I am starting to question what that crazy shaman, Lacan, is really doing with his obscure and labyrinthine paradigms. Marechera, who gobbled down everything like a garbage bin, no doubt came into at least cursory contact with the ideas, during his time of English study in Oxford, Great Britain.

There are sections of The House of Hunger that strike a note almost histrionic, as if a great deal of intellectual padding was being imported in, to bolster the writer's intellectual credentials. This is not so much an act of dishonesty so much as evidence of sophistication and extreme innovation in appropriation, thus in a situation where the persona of the author is 'lost for words', this theoretical import -- this recourse to Lacanianism -- can still give him the chance to speak.

Seen in this light, the writing is a patchwork quilt -- an image which in no way violates the overall epistemic claims or aesthetics of the novel, for it is constantly insinuated that the language that holds together the author's reality is "stitches", keeping together a fragile mind that is in the process of falling apart. Thus, underlying a certain level of eclecticism in the writing is the striving of a subjectivity towards a process of direct or indirect honesty.

The direct honesty of the text is in claiming the reality for what it is: It is a hard to come to terms with reality. It is so violent and violating that one's mind needs "stitches" to put it all together in some reasonably coherent form.

The honesty of the text is in the tacit admission that the reality must be conveyed through a language (and through theoretical paradigms) not his own; not native to his own consciousness or values. Thus, a certain degree of artifice is necessary to hold the text together -- and this implies a form of poetry, or "stitches" (which can later be published and forgotten about).

The writer's appropriation of Lacan (or at least a theory to do with the supra-rational, autonomous nature of language as a reality-determining device) reads like a "stitch" within the text because the sudden imposition of a deterministic culture at the age of puberty seems somewhat too clean-cut and too absolute not to have been aesthetically contrived.

The author is protesting that: "the images and symbols I had for so long taken for granted had taken upon themselves a strange hue; and I was losing my grasp of simple speech." ( p 30.) Whether or not this event actually occurred as an autobiographical fact -- and that we do not know -- the idea of the author losing touch with the Lacanian Symbolic Register of language is invoked in the educated reader's mind. Yet this is not the unconscious refusal of the child to respect the dominant social order -- which is really what the Lacanian Symbolic Register is. This is an adolescent's conscious refusal to be forced to speak about either of the dominant cultures' values:  he will not speak as a traditional Shona would, nor as a colonial master (only he does, in fact, later, speak in turn as both.)"When I talked it was in the form of an interminable argument, one side of which was always expressed in English and the other side always in Shona." (p 30). The author is consciously rejecting both social systems because neither of them satisfy his spiritual hunger. In so doing, according to Lacanian theory, he seems to be -- if rather belatedly, as an adolescent already -- rejected reality in its socially necessary forms. He is thus inviting psychosis, according to authoritarian ideas about where reality's limits lie.

Looked at in the opposite way, in terms of how political hierarchies of race and gender structure our psychological states, the author/shaman is reacting against the societal mores and in terms of his own rational self interests, whilst being in hot pursuit of an artistic, intellectual life -- one that would be denied him if he were not to rebel against his conditioned state of servitude.