Jean-Paul Sartre, Elizabeth Bishop, and Unbecoming

Jean-Paul Sartre makes a compelling argument about the nature of self-consciousness. In the introduction to Being and Nothingness, Sartre states that "self-consciousness we ought to consider not as a new consciousness, but as the only mode of existence which is possible for a consciousness of something" (16). In this way, Sartre suggests that self-consciousness is not something that occurs after consciousness itself. That is, one does not retain a power of consciousness that subsequently gets turned upon the self.

What makes this such an intriguing idea is how starkly it contrasts with so many other important ideas. Lacan's mirror stage comes immediately to mind, because the mirror stage relies explicitly on the idea that the subject conceives of himself after he is conscious. He must see the image in the mirror and begin to shape a notion of himself. Any theories which describe how the self constructs itself seems to be demolished by Sartre's argument.

But it is fascinating that poets such as Elizabeth Bishop spend so much energy questioning the self and its operations. It seems that Bishop and others unravel the co-existence of consciousness and self-consciousness, and are therefore engaged in a sort of Undoing of the self that Sartre envisions. If consciousness is the "dimension of transphenomenal being in the subject" (10), as Sartre claims, then the excessive questioning of the being that exists through multiple phenomena seems to undo the unity of that conception. Or maybe another way to say it is that the subsequent consciousness of a split self is co-existent with a split consciousness -- despite our potential to be unsplit.

I'm thinking of Bishop's "The Gentleman of Shalott" in particular. In this poem, she writes, "But he's resigned / to such economical design." Especially in her early poetry, she very persistently questions the viability of consciousness, which has an obvious effect on self-consciousness. She is almost a fabulist in how frequently she reshapes the external world -- not to impose a self-willed order upon it, but rather to de-solidify the external world. Our consciousness of the world then is somehow inauthentic because it topples the transphenomenal being described by Sartre.

Jacques Lacan, the Mirror Stage, and the Double

"The Mirror Stage" must be the most productive few pages of theory ever written. I go back again and again to the ideas in this very short paper Jacques Lacan delivered in 1949 (though I understand its genesis came several years earlier). For me, the concept of the fundamental alienation at the heart of subjectivity caused by the gulf between the image of wholeness we see in the mirror as a baby and the ungainly mass of our uncontrollable somatic functions at that stage of development is widely applicable.

In an essay for school, I called the image in the mirror "that most thoroughgoing of all archetypes: the self." The image is that through which we conceive of ourselves. I have productively used this concept when looking at bildungsromans in which protagonists form an idealized image of their self sufficiency -- and then proceed to fail to reach that image in various ways.

But the mirror stage also seems productive in terms of the "double" that I've been yakking about recently in relation to Pound and Eliot. If the self and the image of the self are both selves, then by definition we're witnessing a doubling. The double is uncanny for the very reason Freud points out: "this uncanny element is actually nothing new or strange, but something that was long familiar to the psyche and was estranged from it only through being repressed" (Freud, "The Uncanny"). The double, in this sense, might often be seen as the return of the earlier assemblage of uncontrolled drives. One is confronted not just with a strange but familiar version of one's self; this uncanny interlocutor is by turns a terrifying and embarrassing eruption of one's own ghastly lack of control.

It seems this idea has some connection, in reverse, to one of the ideas in Herman Rapaport's Between the Sign and the Gaze. Rapaport is interested in the fantasm as a frame for the viewing of another thing. His example is Plato's allegory of the cave, which requires that one imagine a cave in order to understand something about reality. That is, it is not necessary that the cave itself actually exist; it is a stage upon which an intellectual drama unfolds. Rapaport feels that this fantasm, i.e. the imagined cave, must be offered in order to represent the unrepresentable. According to this view, philosophy and literature are filled with fantasms.

Rapaport reads the mountain in Percy Bysshe Shelley's Mont Blanc as more than simply an image; it is instead a frame that allows the staging of desire, which for Rapaport means an encounter with the libidinal experiences of our earliest years. It is not a signal of the return of the repressed, but more like a forum through which our desire is articulated.

It may not be any great insight that the double I've been discussing seems to exemplify Rapaport's fantasm, but it does seem useful to continue considering the mirror stage as a fundamental forging not just of an alienated self, but a self that carries the burden of another, less developed, self with it all the time. Though it always affects our ability to make meaning of our interaction with the world, the actual imago itself may appear from time to time to haunt us.