FOR THE LOVE OF A FISH: A LACANIAN READING OF MARGARET ATWOOD’S SURFACING

Jennifer Murray (1)

1 CRIT - Centre de recherches interdisciplinaires et transculturelles - UFC (UR 3224)

This article proposes to analyse Margaret Atwood’s novel, Surfacing (1972), from a Lacanian perspective, as a myth of the origins of desire. Departing from dominant perspectives on the novel which situate its force in terms of the burning questions of the 1970’s, this reading of Atwood’s novel understands the unnamed narrator’s pervasive sense of guilt as an effect of having compromised on her desire. Emotionally deadened, the vital question which comes into focus for the protagonist is not whether or not she did the right thing but why she doesn’t feel anything; vaguely aware of something ‘missing’ in herself, she attempts to regain a lost ‘wholeness’. What she recovers, I will argue, is not some mythical missing ‘half,’ but the signifier of desire, the phallus, in the form of a fish. Indeed, throughout this quest narrative, the fish-signifier signposts the movement from self-betrayal to the return of ‘desirousness’.

Domaines: Littératures

Jennifer Murray. FOR THE LOVE OF A FISH: A LACANIAN READING OF MARGARET ATWOOD’S SURFACING . LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, 2015, 26 (1), pp. 1-21. ⟨10.1080/10436928.2015.996276⟩. ⟨hal-01119170v2⟩