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

Style, Spring, 1996 by Gerald Doherty

With the help of Lacan, we can make this crucial connection between metaphor and psychosis more explicit. Lacanian commentators frequently assert that in psychosis "a metaphor [is] lived as real," but they do not explain concretely what this means in rhetorical terms (full psychological explanations are, however, always forthcoming).(5) A story in Anika Lemaire's book on Lacan neatly illustrates this partial connection. Arrested by the police (who are metaphorically known as "swallows" because they suddenly swoop down on their victim), a drunk violently expunges this traumatic event from his memory. In a later delirium, however, he imagines that he is being attacked by flocks of aggressive swallows as he leaves home (Lemaire 232). Here the two-tiered process we noted in Freud and Ricoeur seems transparently clear. The expunging of the literal term (arrest by the police) unleashes the full force of the metaphorical one (attack by the swallows), which forecloses on the real, creating a "mad" hallucinatory world that the drunk mistakes for reality. The metaphorical is thus the source of his delirious fantasy. He recognizes neither its purely figural status nor its connection with the literal event out of which it arose. In psychosis, the subject lives the metaphorical as the real.

The same two-tiered rhetorical process underwrites the orgasmic trajectories in Lady Chatterley's Lover. There, the expunging of the primary world of the text unleashes the full force of the metaphorical one that proliferates in accord with its own special rules. By foreclosing on the literal world, orgasmic representation substitutes the metaphorical world for the real one. What it forecloses in the real, however, it recovers in fantasy, as the "ruins" upon which the hallucinatory orgasmic construction is raised. Thus the orgasm trades, not in the real, but in fantasies of complete wish-fulfillment, in, that is, wholeness and power. In this special sense the orgasmic episodes in Lady Chatterley's Lover represent a temporary psychosis, an evanescent delirium, a fugitive shutdown of the real. Indeed, the episodes themselves are overblown and exotic oases in otherwise desolate symptom-ridden stretches of text. Thus we can read Lady Chatterley's Lover both as a neurotic and a psychotic text. Before exploring its psychotic constitution in detail, however, I shall first read it as a neurotic text with its roots in metaphoric symptom-formations.

II. METAPHOR AND NEUROSIS

A poetics of substitution generates simple, conventional metaphorical transfers (one word for another), derived usually from commonplace usage (a poetics of redescription, by contrast, generates more creative and extended metaphorical transfers).(6) Metaphorical representations, for example, of the bodies of Clifford and Connie (before her orgasmic initiation) and of the socio-cultural body of England are all substitutive in form, and "neurotic" in type. Like the Freudian symptom, they are "degraded" configurations, substitutes "by distortion." Textual "neurosis" takes the form of the disfiguring metaphor, the symptomatic image of blighting or scarring that calls out for interpretation. To do a diagnostic reading, we must relate the manifest symptom to its latent source by detecting a likeness between them.