Naomi Segal

The Fatal Attraction of The Piano

All fictions of adultery rely on the structure of triangularity. Their principle is that desire is always circuitous, that either disruption or indirection is its very essence. But triangularity is an extremely complicated and variable phenomenon. In the discussion that follows, I want to compare two fictions produced in the last ten years. Both were immensely popular films, breaking box-office records in the USA and elsewhere, and provoking critical and general interest beyond anything their directors had received before. Prior to Fatal Attraction, Adrian Lyne was known for Flashdance and 9½ Weeks, both reckoned to be glossy and essentially superficial exercises. Jane Campion’s Sweetie and An Angel at my Table had won critical acclaim and awards, but were unpopular or unknown by the general public. Fatal Attraction (1987) and The Piano (1991, 1993) caught the attention of the moment and speak, it seems, very powerfully to the preoccupations of the last two decades of this century.

From Literature to Cultural Literacy

In recent years, the academic field of literary studies has changed radically. Literary scholars are now working on objects other than poems, dramas or fiction. This essay presents an ongoing strategic project, Cultural Literacy in Contemporary Europe, which was founded in 2007 and run in 2009-11 as an European Science Foundation & Cooperation in Science and Technology (ESF-COST) synergy. Its aim is to investigate and celebrate the range of research currently being conducted in the field we have renamed “literary-and-cultural studies”, or LCS. This research aims to enhance cultural literacy. Cultural literacy is an attitude to the social and cultural phenomena that shape our existence—bodies of knowledge, fields of social action, individuals or groups, and of course cultural artefacts, including texts—which views them as being essentially readable: it is a way of looking at social and cultural issues, especially issues of change and mobility, through the lens of literary thinking. The project focuses on four academic fields—cultural memory, migration and translation, electronic textuality, and biopolitics and the body—and four concepts: textuality, fictionality, rhetoricity and historicity. It stresses multilingualism and is part of the movement of interdisciplinarity within the humanities and between the humanities and other disciplines, but remains a distinctive activity within that larger movement.

‘That’s my son’: replacement, jealousy and sacrifice in Un Secret

Philippe Grimbert’s autobiographical novel Un Secret (2004) tells the tale of the gawky son of athletic parents who hide both their Jewish origins and his. He dreams of a brother in their image who both fascinates and torments him; later he discovers the family past and the guilts and losses that lie behind his parents’ relationship. Claude Miller’s film adaptation crosses from a black-and-white present to a highly coloured past in which desire is enabled by the first wife’s dramatic decision – impulsive or planned, we cannot know – to go with her child into captivity. Replacement of a child, a name, a husband, a wife, a dog, a culture and a genre, all pivot on the enigma of a mother’s suicidal embrace.

‘An eye for an eye’ or ‘a mile to a mile’: versions of replacement

An eye for an eye is one kind of replacement – not punishment replicating the crime but fines on a scale of equivalences. A mile to a mile is Lewis Carroll’s reductio ad absurdum of how a map represents the world. Can an imitation or a translation ever be faithful? For replacement children, there is no escape from the second skin of another life that was unlived. Whether the same or the other sex, having the same or a different name, they may experience survivors’ guilt, intense jealousy or hopelessness. Similarly, the impossibility of exact replacement does not console any of the actors in the triangle of sexual rivalry; serial monogamy leaves many bodies behind. We end with Mrs de Winter cutting flowers in Rebecca’s garden.

‘A Petty Form of Suffering’: A Brief Cultural Study of Itching

‘Itching is a petty form of suffering,’ wrote André Gide in 1931. Itching may be occasional or obsessive; it positions a person inside a body that exists in familial and social contexts; it can be evoked in debates about righteousness and justice. This article begins with discussion of the work of Didier Anzieu, psychoanalyst author of The Skin-ego: among the nine ‘functions’ of the skin-ego that Anzieu describes, the last is ‘toxicity’, the skin turned against itself in a gesture of self-destruction. In my discussion of three other texts, I connect Gide’s diary entry to his sexuality; Lorette Nobécourt’s novel to the social world; the book of Job to the metaphysics of virtue; and to these I append two semi-comic moments from Jean-Paul Sartre and Sarah Winman, and discussions of ‘leprosy’ and psoriasis, two versions of feeling (in both senses) that one has a skin.

The Principles, Pleasures and Realities of Translating Psychoanalysis

Are all translators murderers, pests or parasites? Are they humble or the spokespersons of a community? Are they trustworthy or traitors, or even ‘faithful bigamists’? And do translations have to be beautiful or faithful, never both? Might translation be a feminine/ feminised activity because most translators are women, or because the target-language is maternal or because it embodies the paradox of the multi-skilled serving the monoskilled? The second half of this essay focuses on the translation of psychoanalysis, especially Strachey’s brilliant yet much-criticised translation of Freud. translation, fidelity, psychoanalysis, Freud, Strachey DOI: 10.26485/ZRL/2017/60.2/1

Running in Circles: My Best Friend’s Wedding After 19 Years

ABSTRACT This essay revisits My Best Friend’s Wedding (Hogan, 1997) 19 years later. It compares its way of combining laughter and tears with 2 genres of literature: Marivaux’s (1964) 18th-century comic theatre and the 19th-century novel of adultery, with its overtones of classical tragedy. In each, an outsider observes, envies, and seeks to destroy a “happy couple”: the 2 genres end, respectively, in a wedding or in death. How do 3 women view this film, and its ending, in 2016?

To Love and Be Loved: Sartre, Anzieu and Theories of the Caress

This essay is an examination of how love may be theorized in relation to the meeting of two skins in the caress. Starting and ending with the theories of psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu (1923–1999), it presents his theory of the moi-peau (skin-ego) and its development in the infant through experiences of primary care, the fantasy of a ‘common skin with the mother’ and the taboo on touching, and looks in detail at how this relates to the psycho-sexual experience of love. The writings of Sartre on love and the caress are compared with Anzieus, and the essay ends by proposing a theory of ‘consensuality’ derived from their common ideas.

The Adulteress’s Children

Women in the novel of adultery are doubly mothers — first because they function in the phantasy-triangle that brings the adultery story out of the oedipal motive, and secondly, more literally but no less complicatedly, because they actually have children in the texts, through whom they suffer and sin. The texts I will look at in this essay are all written by men; in none of them are the mother-child relations casual or tangential: rather, they work within a motivated structure that is at once filial and paternal, in which the woman stands between generations and between the positions of the implied author and the intended reader, in the place where the mother stands in the oedipal triangle, at a point that has to be surpassed. How is she used by her author as a version of that textual reproduction by which he intends to evade the use of the body? How does her desire and its punishment function in his structure of desire, designed according to the masculine mode to win pleasure out of failure? What difference does it make to all this if the text is focalised upon the figure of a man or a woman, or if the desired mother in the text has a daughter or a son?1

The Unintended Reader: Feminism and 'Manon Lescaut'

Acknowledgements Note on references Introduction Part I. Prose pour Des Greieux: 1. In which we meet Des Greieux and he meets Manon 3. In which Des Grieux practises to deceive 4. In which Des Greieux parts from father and fatherland 5. Love and death in America Part II. Themes: 6. Money 7. The woman 8. Doubles 9. Fatality Part III. Theory: 10. Freud: Lacan 11. Manon Notes Bibliography Translations of the passages in French Index.