Metaphor and mental disturbance: the case of Lady Chatterley's Lover - novel by D.H. Lawrence

Style, Spring, 1996 by Gerald Doherty

This convergence of textual and psychical processes has profound implications for sexual narratives that, like Lady Chatterley's Lover, thematize the symptomatic blocking of satisfaction. In such texts, metaphor functions in a simple substitutive way, as the textual manifestation of a repressed sexual trauma for which it is the negative figural index. Thus metaphor "disfigures" both on the level of individual character (through physical malformation or maiming) and at a more general cultural level as the sign of apocalyptic decline and disintegration. When it dislocates at the surface level of representation, the cause lies in those buried meanings whose proper expression metaphor thwarts.

In such narratives, metaphor itself is "neurotic." Like the neurotic symptom, it too has a restricted operational range: it reproduces the same "degraded" configurations, the same sick and scarred images, the same signs of impairment. Thus it obeys the same compulsion to repeat that Freud associates with the obsessional neuroses ("Inhibitions" 275). The return of the same figures of maiming and mutilation enacts the return of the repressed. Such figures in turn solicit from the reader a diagnostic engagement with the text. They ask him/her to expose the source of the sexual malfunction the metaphor itself symptomatizes. In Lady Chatterley's Lover, as we shall see, such metaphors generate predominantly symptomatic narratives that inscribe images of defacement both on the (microcosmic) bodies of the individual characters and on the macrocosmic body of England itself.

If, for Freud, the neuroses represent one major form of psychic malfunction, the psychoses represent the other. His two late essays "Neurosis and Psychosis" and "The Loss of Reality in Neurosis and Psychosis" (1924) constitute his sole attempt to theorize the distinction between them. While neurosis entails a disavowal of a set piece of reality, for which the symptom appears as a substitute, psychosis, by contrast, entails a complete foreclosure of the real world.(3) The subject completes this psychical foreclosure in two distinct stages: first, a violent expunging of the external world blocks out its specific contours; second, the substitution of a "new external and internal world" - mythical, fantasmatic - fills up the primal hole left in reality ("Neurosis" 215). Employing a variety of near-synonymous terms to characterize this radical alteration, Freud says it involves a "reconstruction" or "remodelling" of reality, the fabrication of an "imaginary external world," a new phantasmagoric creation, qualitatively different from the one it repudiates. It does not completely obliterate old structures, however. Rather, as Freud insists, their literal residues - "the psychical precipitates of former relations ..., memory traces, ideas and judgements" - constitute the ruins upon which the new mythical world is erected ("Neurosis" 215-16; "Loss" 223-26).

This two-tiered psychical process has a close analogue in the second theorization of the metaphorical process, one developed by (among others) Paul Ricoeur in The Rule of Metaphor (indeed, The Rule may well be read as an urbane polemic waged against the substitutive, in favor of the redescriptive, conception of metaphor).(4) As in psychosis, the first stage of the metaphorical process for Ricoeur involves a violent expunging of literal sense-making. Conventional reference perishes; ordinary meaning collapses in the shattering of semantic norms induced by the metaphorical statement. Because of the "self-destruction" of literal meaning, the "primary reference founders" (Ricoeur's account of this first stage is replete with tropes of blocking, collapsing, auto-destructing). In the second stage Ricoeur describes, metaphor builds on the "ruins" of the literal language, foreclosing on one world to unleash another: "language," says Ricouer, "divests itself of the function of direct description in order to reach the mythic level where its function of discovery is set free" (Rule 230, 247). To describe this mythic level, Ricouer employs a terminology virtually identical with the one Freud used in his description of the world of psychosis (of course its pathological resonances are missing). For Ricoeur, the "ruins" of the literal reference disclose a "new referential design" that unites "manifestation and creation." In Ricouer's conception, metaphor remakes reality, reshaping and remodelling our view of the world (Rule 230, 239, 247). In both Ricoeur's rhetorical theory and Freud's psychological one, the foreclosure of a primary world unleashes an autonomous secondary one that refers back to the one it displaces by transcending it.