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The Humble in 19th- to 21st-Century British Literature and Arts

 | 
Isabelle Brasme
, 
Jean-Michel Ganteau
, 
Christine Reynier

Part Five. Self-Effacement

From Humiliation to Humility: Graham Swift’s Aesth/et(h)ics of Self-Effacement in The Light of Day

Pascale Tollance

Résumé

In his seventh book, Swift chooses to return to suburbia and entrusts his narrative to a man of few and simple words—a sharp contrast with the glib and garrulous narrators of novels like Waterland or Ever After. The Light of Day’s economical prose reflects the necessity to accommodate the unsayable; it also asserts, through its bare and unadorned style, the virtue of form as self-effacement which matches a dire experience of dispossession. Humility cannot be separated in this case from the exposure to humiliation which is at the heart of the book. At the same time, humility can be seen as the transformation of infamy and erasure into a creative form of effacement, where strength is drawn from the ‘nothing’ one has been reduced to.

Texte intégral

  • 1 Graham Swift, The Light of Day (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2003) 66.
  • 2 I have examined this particular aspect in a previous article (Pascale Tollance, ‘“You cross a line” (...)

1In the wake of Last Orders, which marked Graham Swift’s return to the small world of The Sweet Shop Owner, The Light of Day seeks its inspiration in modest characters and ordinary lives. The Light of Day also turns out to be Swift’s most economical, minimalistic, or one might say, low-key, novel. George Webb stands out among Swift’s narrators not just as a man of few words, but as one who professes his belief in what sounds very much like the value of humility: ‘In life there’s a sound principle: make a little do for a lot. Don’t expect much. This may be all you’ll get.’1 Interestingly, The Light of Day is also a novel about excess, built around a leitmotiv which is ‘You cross a line.’2 It presents us with the image of a fall, a plunge which brings down in a different manner the two main characters and gives them a taste of the ‘humus’: George is struck off from the police force on the grounds of corruption (he is accused of having extracted a confession by force and later jumped at the throat of the man who tried to retract himself); Sarah, the brilliant academic and wealthy wife, is now the inmate of a prison (having planted a knife in the heart of her unfaithful husband). George’s profession of humility thus finds itself connected with the experience of humiliation, rejection and abjection. The policeman’s fall into disgrace means he has become a man of the shadows and a shadow man, ‘a private eye’ who, by the same means, had to transform himself, as he likes to point out, into ‘a private ear.’ (29) At the same time as his voice finds itself considerably toned down compared to previous Swiftian narrators, he gets to occupy in different ways the place of the listener, the recipient of the confessions of others who also learns to open his ears to his own words. Humility implies here a self-effacement through which the position of the subject is questioned. By allowing himself to be dispossessed in the very act of speaking, George seems somehow to assume what was thrust upon him when he was scored out and excluded from the police force. The man who suffered infamy, the man who has become the receptacle of all the seedy tales exposing the other side of marital bliss, accepts not only to deal with the dirt of humanity and its rejects, but puts himself in the position of being an effect, a product or a residue of his own text.

  • 3 Will Cohu, ‘Graham Swift,’ Daily Telegraph 8 March 2003: 12.
  • 4 Julia Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l’horreur, (Paris: Seuil, 1980) 13. ‘La chrétienté mystique a fait de c (...)
  • 5 Jacques Lacan, ‘Lituraterre,’ Littérature 3 (1971): 3. Lacan makes clear at the beginning of his pr (...)
  • 6 Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre VIII (Paris: Seuil, 1991) 46. ‘L’amour c’est de donner ce que l’ (...)

2Whilst there is a clear trajectory from humiliation to humility in the novel and whilst George would not be the man he is without his exclusion, it is important to stress that humility does not take the form of self-abasement here, but imposes itself as a strength, the very source of the text’s creative power. In an interview to The Telegraph, Swift described The Light of Day as ‘a love story.’3 Love takes many forms in the novel, but the woman to whom George becomes devoted happens to be also a teacher of sorts to whom he sends what he calls his homework, or what we understand to be his experiments with words. Having experienced what it is like to be nothing, George is the man who discovers he has something, who is actually told by Sarah: ‘You’ve got something’ (132). It is perhaps at the point where ‘nothing’ and ‘something’ meet and connect that humility finds its meaning in George’s story. One way of exploring the knot they form may lie first in the recognition of the uneradicable presence of the abject in the subject’s experience. Kristeva explores at length that question in Powers of horror, reminding us of the different ways in which the subject can deal with the abject, including through self-abjection—i.e. the identification with the reject—which Christian mysticism turned into ‘the ultimate proof of one’s humility before God.’4 Lacan’s multiple elaborations of ‘objet a’ also invite us to think the subject in relation to an object which remains fundamentally heterogeneous whilst being at the heart of the drive (hence its ‘extimacy’). Among other things, it can be experienced as what is left over when the object of desire suddenly falls from its idealised position, or through the void that resonates when the speaking subject stops to make sense in the very act of speaking. ‘Agalma,’ the treasured object coveted by desire can turn at any moment into ‘palea,’ the reject, the refuse, the dung. But conversely palea can become what is most valuable, what sustains desire and the desire to inscribe the lack on which it rests—‘litter’ that can be transformed into ‘letters,’ humus from which something precious can grow.5 Rather than simply ‘making a little go a long way,’ humility can be considered to make do with what is fundamentally lacking—just as love may be thought as the gift of what one does not have.6 As George welcomes and transforms the ‘nothing’ to which he has been reduced in his fall and turns erasure into a creative form of self-effacement, it is this vision of humility as powerful existential and ethical position which The Light of Day invites us to ponder.

  • 7 Christian Gutleben, ‘Entre vanité et art poétique: l’esthétique du rien chez Graham Swift,’ Études (...)
  • 8 Georges Letissier, ‘La hantise du rien comme envers de l’H/histoire chez Graham Swift: Waterland et (...)
  • 9 Graham Swift, Ever After (London: Picador, 1992) 55.
  • 10 Laurence Tartarian, ‘Graham Swift’s Vocal Silences,’ Voices and Silence in the Contemporary Novel i (...)
  • 11 On the question of voice and enunciation, see Pascale Tollance Graham Swift. La Scène de la Voix (V (...)

3In a 2011 issue of Études Britanniques Contemporaines devoted to ‘the nothing,’ ‘le rien,’ we find, interestingly, two articles on Graham Swift’s fiction. Christian Gutleben looks at the fundamental void at the heart of Swift’s novels, or what he calls ‘le vertige de l’abîme,’7 and quotes in particular the moment in Ever After when Matthew Pearce feels himself falling, ‘He feels something open up inside him [. . .] feels himself starting to fall, and fall through himself [. . .]. No one will even know how he is not himself, how far he has fallen through himself.’ (Gutleben 83) George Letissier, as for him, centres his discussion on both Waterland and Ever After and shows how, in the former novel, history tries to conceal a ‘haunting nothing,’ ‘la hantise du rien,’ which lurks in the ‘nothing-landscape’ of the Fens, whilst in Ever After it is the encounter with the remains of a prehistoric beast which bores a hole in the narrative, a Sartrian ‘néant’ or ‘trou d’être.’8 It is not surprising that Ever After should feature so largely in both articles, as it is the novel where Matthew Pearce, the Victorian land surveyor, sees the ground open under his feet after coming face to face with the ichthyosaurus staring at him through the layers of million years and is then left with nothing to hold onto but ‘a groundless ground.’9 In one way or another, the spectre of what Christian Gutleben calls after Pierre Fédida ‘une absence sans absent,’ ‘an absence without any absentee’ (Gutleben 83) looms in all the novels. Equally striking is how widespread the motif of the fall turns out to be in Swift’s fiction. As Laurence Tatarian pointedly notes, the moments of crisis that Swift’s novels depict are often conveyed by the impression of finding oneself both ‘suspen [ded] in time’ and ‘suspen [ded] in space.’10 One may add that the sense of having no anchor, of being tied to nothing manifests itself in the narrative situation constructed by each novel and in a mode of enunciation in which voice itself becomes free-floating.11

  • 12 At the beginning of Powers of Horror, Kristeva mentions that the disgust felt in front of something (...)

4The experience of falling has nevertheless another side to it which is not always stressed enough: even as they land in the middle of nowhere, Swift’s characters come into contact with the soil, the dirt, the body and its rejects or the body as reject. They get to see, to touch or taste a ‘nothing’ which is not just a void but which possesses an all-too material reality. In what sounds like an echo of Ever After, The Light of Day presents us twice with the same picture of its main character feeling the ground give way under his feet. In chapter 12, having mentioned his ‘ [fall] into disgrace,’ (46) George describes the effect produced by his wife’s brutal announcement that she ‘could not be his wife anymore:’ ‘And I still remember the feeling—until then I hadn’t had it, even if the ground had been opening up—of falling. Just falling, in the way you know there is nothing to land on, endlessly falling, the way people must fall in outer space.’ (49) George ‘still [has] dreams of falling,’ which may explain the fact that the scene should be taken up again, as in a close-up, so to speak, in chapter 18, a chapter entirely devoted to that particular moment. This time, the image of the fall is placed in prominent, climactic position at the close of the chapter: ‘Then I felt myself falling. Doubly judged—and for the double drop. Falling though I sat there at the kitchen table, toast stuck in my throat, sat there not moving, but falling all the while.’ (73) Instead of the earth or the humus, we may remark that it is once more the ‘groundless ground’ which the character feels in his fall. Yet in this second passage, George mentions how he remained transfixed and speechless in front of his wife: here the ‘toast stuck in his throat’ stands for the voice that won’t come out, but also reminds us of the humiliation he has never been able to swallow:12

The word that got used was ‘corrupt.’
A strangely physical word. A black taste welling in your throat, a thickness on your tongue, as if you have a disease. As if they’ve rooted some foul stuff inside you and it’s you, it’s yours now, you’re stuck with it for good. (134)

5And as his wife ‘dumps’ him, so to speak, it is from the shame he has brought upon himself in his fall, from all the dirt and the filth that came with it that George imagines she wants to protect herself:

That was the word: damned. Judged—doubly judged now. Worse than being simply left. [. . .]
Didn’t even want to stay where there’d be my taint.
No taint. That was all mine now. And I could keep it [. . .]
A clean slate. (71–72)

6George insists throughout the narrative that he has always been dealing with the seedier, dirtier side of humanity as a member of the police force or as one of ‘the pigs, the fuzz, the filth’ (130) as they came to be called: ‘A dirty job sometimes. Things you have to clean up. A filthy job sometimes—and the police were sometimes just the Filth. And sometimes you’d bring it home with you [. . .] like a smell in your clothes, in your hair. Home to your wife and daughter.’ (135) When George finds himself rejected by his wife, it is the same thought that occurs to him, with a difference: ‘Though for twenty years we’d lived with it, the taint I’d come home with, the slow creeping taint. Married to the Force, as they say, and all that goes with it. But hold on, the taint was the taint—the taint wasn’t me.’ (72)

  • 13 I borrow this image from Jakob Winnberg (An Aesthetics of Vulnerability. The Sentimentum and the No (...)

7In the eyes of Rachel, George no longer just has the taint but is the taint. He has not just become nothing, he has become a nothing that threatens her, an abject thing that needs to be rejected and whose very name must be ‘ditched’ (72). Like George, Swift’s characters often get ‘stuck’ with or weighed down by a number of things which take on bodily form, or feel ‘strangely physical’ even as all that is solid and familiar dissolves. ‘La hantise du rien’ (95) does not sum itself up to ‘the threat of nothingness,’ ‘la menace du néant,’ (96) to quote George Letissier. In Last Orders, more clearly than any of the previous novels, the entire narrative economy is fuelled by a waste that cannot be destroyed but that cannot be recycled either. If the story revolves around Jack, the ‘black hole’13 of the novel is June the daughter who is neither alive nor dead and who cannot be easily discarded, although she has been placed or ‘binned’ in an institution. In this respect it is ironic that the sole monologue of Jack, the father who rejected his own flesh, should consist in the repetition of a lesson given by his father about avoiding wastage. Similarly, the humble economy of The Light of Day is rooted in the impossibility to get rid of ‘the foul stuff’ which ‘is yours now,’ which cannot be transformed, but which may enable you to transform yourself. George is fully aware of having been sacrificed to preserve appearances and fully aware too that no real cleansing can be expected from this:

Look at it this way, they said—or I could read it in their eyes—you’re being sacrificed for the good of the Force, a bigger thing than you, for the sake of its reputation, for the sake of keeping its grubby face clean. [. . .]
Not just a cop who’d overstepped the mark. I’d sinned. (134)

8In becoming a private detective, George finds a way of making himself useful after all, but he resolutely chooses his own separate way—assuming somehow the fate of the banished. He chooses to inhabit the shadows, to hunt and follow those who ‘cross a line’ at the same time as he faces the anxiety and despair of those who risk lowering themselves in hiring his services. George accepts to receive the secrets that cannot be confessed in the open light, not knowing that he will learn yet another lesson in humility with the Nash couple, the man he fails to protect from his wife’s knife and the woman he fails to protect from herself. The private eye has seen nothing coming; the man who prided himself on being able ‘to read a face’ has to confess he failed when he tried to see what Bob Nash saw in the girl with whom he betrayed his wife:

There was only that brief moment when the light from the open door caught them, I could hardly see her face. I looked for some dizzying, devastating factor that might in an instant explain everything.
But didn’t I know, by then, there’s no telling how it strikes. (125)

9Whilst nothing could be more real than what destroyed or maimed three lives, George is forced to admit that it comes down to nothing, that there is nothing to see.

  • 14 Daniel Lea, Graham Swift (Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 2003) 191.

10Thus, far from being a simple form of meekness, humility in The Light of Day has to be connected with the recognition of something literally ob-scene that cannot be accounted for and that cannot be denied either. It may be from the acknowledgment of this kind of nothing that small things, ‘les petits riens’ get to be valued in the novel. George describes how, after his fall into disgrace, he learned to enjoy the small pleasures of life, how he learned about food and wine—multiple nuances of taste that can be seen as antidotes to the ‘foul stuff’ and the ‘thickness on the tongue’ brought by the accusation of corruption. His indulgence in small rituals becomes perhaps a means of protecting himself from ‘the taint.’ But the ‘black taste in [the] throat’ finds itself also replaced by the pleasure George takes in words. Daniel Lea pointedly underlines George’s ‘instinctive attention to detail, learnt in the police and practised in the kitchen’14 and notes when describing George’s style his ‘dispassionate neutrality,’ ‘meticulous precision,’ and ‘a scrupulous loyalty to concrete detail’ (203). Yet, beyond ingrained professional habits and the discretion that befits a private detective, George’s manner when he handles words can be seen as a response to the experience of erasure, the response of a man who knows about the crushing power of one mere word and bows to that power.

11We can list a number of stylistic characteristics which allow us to describe the art of the novel as ‘humble: ’ to the focus on detail, one should add the choice of simple, unpretentious or, one might even say limited, vocabulary; an extensive use of repetition; plain syntax; pared down description; sparse commentary and extreme restraint in the communication of emotion; concision and formal tightness. But what proves more delicate is to determine the ethical stance which sustains these aesthetic choices. Are words just one instance of the ‘little nothings’ that George is left to hang on to? Are they just a means to keep afloat and is the detective’s method in this area just a way of warding off madness? Whilst we can argue that there is something protective or even defensive in George’s manner, the narrator insists on the fact that he has discovered something quite new, quite different in becoming Sarah’s pupil:

‘The truth is she’s taught me to say things, to say all this, to put things down in words. It’s been an education, really.’ (8) ‘Before Sarah became my teacher I never used to think much about words—hold them up to the light’ (131)

12Having learnt to listen to others (instead of extracting confessions by force), George seems to have also learnt to listen to his own words. In the same way as he now lends his ear to the tales of the wounded and desperate who come to him, the detective who has chosen to become a pupil again carefully weaves a tale where words are not just a tool but are allowed to resonate or can be ‘held up to the light.’ Although we don’t know what George’s experiments really consist of, we are told that they are ‘something else’ or ‘something more’: ‘More than just letters. A correspondence course. Homework. Something more than just begging letters dropped into the dark’ (131).

13While on the one hand we cannot ignore the importance of ‘not expecting too much’ in The Light of Day, on the other hand we would be mistaken to underestimate George’s aspirations. In typical Swiftian manner, the narrative appears like a dense web of words (George’s family name is ‘Webb’), where meanings and connections grow and multiply along the way. All Swift’s novels are built on the same principle: whether his narrators are voluble or reserved, assertive or prudent, the prerogative ultimately falls to the words around which the narrative forms itself and the potentially infinite space of significance they open. George’s self-effacing approach means that the challenge of the narrator’s control by the autonomous logic of words takes places with him rather than in spite of him. Of course the detective has not given up trying to make sense of things or finding answers in what he can read around him. But by turning himself into an ‘ear,’ George also withdraws and puts himself in the position of the recipient, opening himself to what words have to offer him, welcoming what they have in store. By stripping the narrative to a bare minimum, the narrator allows the words he chooses to gain greater resonance and does ‘make a little go a long way’ to quote him. But the excess or supplement which appears is not just the gain afforded by efficiency and economy. It is what makes room for the unpredictable, the unknown, the never to be known. Reserve and understatement may be considered to become the expression of humility when they are not just a clever way of saying less in order to say more but when language acknowledges its limits or marks the existence of something which falls beyond its control in the excess it produces.

14It is no incident that George’s teacher also happens to be the woman he loves. It seems hasty to dismiss George’s feelings as not entirely convincing because, as Daniel Lea argues, they might not be ‘reciprocated’ and this love altogether is ‘impossible’ (Lea 192). Rather than being simply what happens to preserve the relationship, the impossible is something which seems woven in the equation, as one of George’s few aphorisms suggests: ‘To love is to be ready to lose, it’s not to have, to keep.’ (108) The limit that the character encounters also comes from the fact that the woman with whom he has ‘fallen in love’—the cliché gains in this case a particular relevance—needs to be dragged out from the hole into which she has fallen:

Not prison but burial. As if she were in that grave with him. I couldn’t drag her out. I couldn’t smuggle out earth, I could only carry in air. How many lungfuls, how many deliveries—a whole cellful? —before the hatred started to die? Before she came back to me. And back to herself. (146)

15As loving and writing get intimately connected, they also become connected with and through loss and the experience of hitting bottom, of touching the earth, of having nothing and being nothing. The multiform and indeterminate ‘something’ which befalls George and pervades the text bears the mark of that nothing. And yet not only does it turn out to be as vital as the air which George tries to bring into Sarah’s grave, it also seems to have power to lift him up in the air:

The day she said, about my latest effort (I’d wait for the verdict, like
when Helen tasted my cooking): ‘I think you can do this, George;
I think you’ve got something. You don’t need me anymore.’
‘That’s where you’re wrong,’ I said.
But I walked out that day—out of prison—my feet floating on air.’
(132)

  • 15 Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre VII, L’éthique de la psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1986) 133–34.

16Daniel Lea makes an interesting point in labelling the story ‘a parody courtly love,’ (193) although we can dispute his choice of the word ‘parody’. Courtly love presents us with what is considered by some as the paradigm of sublimation, which Lacan once famously defined as the movement by which ‘the object is raised to the dignity of the Thing’ (‘l’objet élevé au rang de la dignité de la Chose15). If we try to put this into George’s simpler and plainer language, this ‘something’ which has come over him, or this ‘something’ he is told he has, is something he will never own, something he must be ready to lose because somehow it is already lost or comes instead of what was lost in the first place. On the other hand, while it does not conceal from itself that it does not amount to much, this thing is also felt to be far more than itself. In George’s description of his elation, we seem to get a literal transcription of a sublime defined as that which ‘rises up or stays up in the air’.

  • 16 In the words of Alain Juranville, ‘sublimation is a means to endure or to “suffer” lack as it resul (...)

17This takes us straight back to where we started, to George Letissier and Christian Gutleben’s description of Graham Swift’s fiction as a bridge over nothing or over the ‘groundless ground’. It is worth noting first that in Swift’s novels this nothing is not simply ‘a pure nothing’ but takes on a bodily dimension in the form of the abject. Besides, The Light of Day emphasises the power of a number of small things or small nothings to sustain those who threaten to be swallowed by the void. Among them, words have a particular status. Christian Gutleben argues that Swift can be considered to offer us, through his ‘presentation de l’imprésentable,’ ‘an aesthetics of the sublime’ (Gutleben 92). But, interestingly, it is on sublimation that the accent is placed in The Light of Day: the words which the ‘storytelling animal’ throws over the abyss have the power to sustain and lift him even as they give him a glimpse of what gapes at his feet. They are shown to become as vital as food and air and light although they are built around a void and bear the mark of lack or absence.16 The aesthetics of humility in The Light of Day reflects far more than a shift of tone and mood in Swift’s œuvre. The change of emphasis from a big Nothing to small nothings can be felt to express a growing distance from the predominantly tragic mode of Waterland and Ever After. To make a little go a long way, we could finally use George Webb’s modest stance to reflect on this question: far from any notion of submission or resignation, might not the aesth/et (h) ics of the humble be considered as a momentous form of resistance and powerful antidote to tragedy?

Notes

1 Graham Swift, The Light of Day (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2003) 66.

2 I have examined this particular aspect in a previous article (Pascale Tollance, ‘“You cross a line”: Reticence and Excess in Graham Swift’s The Light of Day,’ Voices and Silence in the Contemporary Novel in English, ed. Vanessa Guignery [Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009] 63–73). Looking at the novel through the notion of humility gave me the opportunity to adopt a new angle, to focus on the all-pervading motif of the fall and to take into account the crucial role played by abjection in this text.

3 Will Cohu, ‘Graham Swift,’ Daily Telegraph 8 March 2003: 12.

4 Julia Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l’horreur, (Paris: Seuil, 1980) 13. ‘La chrétienté mystique a fait de cette abjection de soi la preuve ultime de l’humilité devant Dieu.’

5 Jacques Lacan, ‘Lituraterre,’ Littérature 3 (1971): 3. Lacan makes clear at the beginning of his presentation that he is building his analysis on James Joyce’s pun: ‘l’équivoque dont Joyce glisse d’a letter à a litter, d’une lettre à une ordure’; he also mentions the rich ambiguity of the word ‘litter’ and its resonance with Thomas Aquinas’s words, whose ‘sicut palea’ he himself likes to quote: ‘À faire litière de la letter, est-ce saint Thomas encore qui lui revient, comme l’œuvre en témoigne tout de son long?’ (‘Lituraterre,’ 3).

6 Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre VIII (Paris: Seuil, 1991) 46. ‘L’amour c’est de donner ce que l’on n’a pas.’

7 Christian Gutleben, ‘Entre vanité et art poétique: l’esthétique du rien chez Graham Swift,’ Études Britanniques Contemporaines 42 (juin 2012): 83.

8 Georges Letissier, ‘La hantise du rien comme envers de l’H/histoire chez Graham Swift: Waterland et Ever After,’ Études Britanniques Contemporaines 42 (juin 2012): 98.

9 Graham Swift, Ever After (London: Picador, 1992) 55.

10 Laurence Tartarian, ‘Graham Swift’s Vocal Silences,’ Voices and Silence in the Contemporary Novel in English, ed. Vanessa Guignery (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009) 41.

11 On the question of voice and enunciation, see Pascale Tollance Graham Swift. La Scène de la Voix (Villeneuve d’Ascq: PU du Septentrion, 2011).

12 At the beginning of Powers of Horror, Kristeva mentions that the disgust felt in front of something one cannot bear the thought of swallowing is the most elementary form of abjection (‘la forme la plus élémentaire et archaïque de l’abjection’, 10). Lacan, as for him, talks about object a as what cannot be swallowed, ‘l’objet inavalable’.

13 I borrow this image from Jakob Winnberg (An Aesthetics of Vulnerability. The Sentimentum and the Novels of Graham Swift [Göteborg: Göteborg University, 2003] 173).

14 Daniel Lea, Graham Swift (Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 2003) 191.

15 Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre VII, L’éthique de la psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1986) 133–34.

16 In the words of Alain Juranville, ‘sublimation is a means to endure or to “suffer” lack as it results in the advent of a letter in the empty space that presents itself to the subject as a blank page’ (‘La sublimation permettrait de supporter, desouffrir”, ce manque, en faisant advenir la lettre au niveau du lieu vide qui s’offrirait au sujet comme une page.’) The idea that the object is ‘raised to the dignity of the Thing’ nevertheless means that this object is not allowed to work as a stopgap but is ‘bypassed to expose the subject to castration, i.e. to the lack of the Other’ (‘Passant outre à l’objet, le sujet se confronte alors à la castration, soit au manque de l’Autre’), (Alain Juranville, Lacan et la philosophie [Paris: PUF, 1984] 285–286).

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