Using Lacan and BOllas to elucidate Woolf's To the Lighthouse

What is it about?

This article traces the ways in which the mother-son relationship between Mrs Ramsay and James reflect the processes Christopher Bollas distinguishes as a child learns to use objects to develop his own personal idiom. These processes can be further nuanced by using Lacan’s three registers of the Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic, which, stressing the rhythmical, iconic and verbal aspects of language respectively, each yield distinct object uses. First, James learns to deal with affects, then with emotions and finally with values, thus developing a grammar of interiority. This leads him to his final epiphany of the Lighthouse, linchpin of the three registers, which reveals his idea of self, reconciling paternal and maternal aspects of his internal objects.

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Why is it important?

Great writers are in the first place fine stylists, and we need more tools to discover the play of layers in language. The combination of Lacan's focus on verbal language and that of Bollas on objects seems to offer a good methodology to read complex literary texts.

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