I can't believe this story is making me talk about Lacan and Kristeva: "Seeing Through Maps" by Madeline Ffitch

I swore that when I dedicated some of my time between last year's aborted BASS blog-through and this year's to shoring up my relative paucity of understanding of literary theory, that wouldn't mean that every blog post I was going to write would get neck-deep in theory. I still think a plain-old close reading that never mentions any theory can produce a perfectly good reading, and theory isn't de rigeur. Moreover, I realize that my somewhat shored-up theoretical understanding is still not exactly professional-grade, and I'm as likely to make a mess of things by bringing theory into the picture as I am to clarify anything. Nonetheless, here we are with the third story already in BASS this year that I've read and found I cannot approach without thinking about some theory. "Seeing Through Maps" by Madeline Ffitch has the smell of Lacan and French feminism all over it, the way the protagonist's log has the smell of cat urine on it.  Maybe I'll start with the theory I'm thinking of before I get to the story. 

French feminism and Lacan, badly but somewhat succinctly explained

Historians of feminism sometimes claim that in the 1970s, there were three broad schools of feminism: French, British, and American. The last two don't concern us now, but one of the characteristics of the French school was its focus on language. One philosopher who really appealed to them was Jacques Lacan, who combined a modified version of Freudian psychoanalysis with the linguistics that was hip at the time. According to how Lacan understood early childhood development, children start to learn language at the same time that they are realizing that they are separate from their caretaker mothers. The hard logic of language (e.g., "This is a dog, not a cat," or "This is neither a cat nor a dog, it is a tree") is associated with the father, the avatar of culture. Obviously, there are some assumptions about family structure here that many of us may no longer recognize, but I continue. 

Boys end up identifying with the father, and so language becomes associated with separation from the mother. So hard logic is a male point of view, which gives women some hard choices. They can act like men and adopt the logic of language, or they can be silent, or they can seek to develop l'écriture féminine, i.e. women's writing. This isn't just writing using male logic done by women; it's an entirely reimagined kind of relationship to language. Here, Lacanian French feminist theory is likely to invoke someone like Julia Kristeva, but instead, I'll summarize in my own words. Most linguistics at the time thought that language worked largely by exclusion. A word is this and none of the other things. That's how language means something, how it keeps from becoming anarchy. And males, the keepers of the law, protected the exclusionary logic of the system. But l'écriture féminine broke away from that. It was more inclusive and in many ways pre-linguistic, like the pre-linguistic babble of a child. 

An aside for skeptics and other non-professionals

Even this half-assed introduction to Lacanian feminism is enough to make any reader of "Seeing Through Maps" stand up an shout, "Aha! I see it! The father is the austere keeper of language! The mother wants to preserve the son's pre-linguistic relationship to the world!" But you might also think," So what? Who cares about some abstruse French theory from 50 years ago? Why should I even think there's any validity to such a theory?

I hear you.

When I was in grad school, I hated Lacan, because he combined the two types of literary theory I thought were the dumbest: psychoanalysis that took Freud seriously and linguistic theory that attacked human confidence in language. Did these people not know how thoroughly debunked Freud had become? I thought. What responsible therapist still quoted Freud? What non-quack of a cognitive scientist cared at all what he thought? So wasn't anything built from his thought likely to be junk? As for the linguistic theories of the post-structuralists and the deconstructionists, they seemed to have an idea about what language was that was both much lower and also more grandiose than one I, as a former and future translator, had. I tended to think about language in a sort of rough-and-ready way, where I never expected transcendent truth of it and knew it was always kind of messy, but as long as I kept talking and people's heads kept nodding, it was good enough. Deconstructionists seemed to base their attacks on language on 1) claiming people had assumptions about language I never had, and 2) showing how language didn't meet those assumptions. 

Lacan and Kristeva seemed particularly noxious to me because they blended these two kinds of bullshit.

However, let me now say at least this much in defense of this kind of theory. Yes, Freud is mostly discredited now, at least as science about human cognition, but I think we can rescue one proposition, which he was at least partly responsible for making known: humans have a part of their consciousness that is inaccessible to them, that part of their consciousness is influential, and it operates with a different kind of logic and language from the conscious mind. So reading that makes use of how this part of the brain works and ties it to what is going on linguistically--the text of the story--can still be interesting. And really, making a text more interesting is the whole value of applying theory to reading. Freud might be bad science, but the vocabulary of id, ego, and superego can be very valuable for reading a story like, say, Lord of the Flies. So while I can't believe this story made me bring up the theorist I maybe hated the most, let's go with this Lacanian reading.

Father the keeper of language

From the moment we first hear of the narrator's ex-husband, her "neighbor" in the woods she lives in, it's as a self-appointed guardian of the right use of language: "He says I should be more careful about language. He says that words have power. My hope every day is that he will leave me in peace." The neighbor also criticizes the narrator about not prepping her firewood at the right time. In fact, nearly everything seems to be subject to the neighbor's judgements about right and wrong. The neighbor tries to stave off disaster through a disciplined attachment to order, whereas the narrator is more willing to take life as it comes: "All winter, I stay one fire ahead of the cold. I’ve never been good at planning. I don’t know what’s going to happen and I don’t know why. I am, however, curious."

Curiosity killed the what, now?

This curiosity is a sly way of setting up a new feminist symbolism in the story. Cats are associated with the feminine, and dogs with the masculine. There are many places, however, where the dichotomy is a lot less subtle, including the opening paragraph. The woman sees a cat pissing on her wood she is splitting, and the narrator joins the cat in pissing on the ground. Cats are not really rule-bound, which is why you can't own one. 

The son recognizes this split, and when he is at a stage where he calls all objects either "cat" or "dog" (enraging the father who wants words to mean what they mean), he is careful to call foxes "dogs" when his father is listening and "cats" when his mother is. 

 

A loophole in the father's system?

The woman finds a map written in the wood she is cutting. It immediately makes her think of a book that her neighbor/husband used to own, called Seeing Through Maps. As a semiotic system (a sign or group of signs that convey meaning), it's obvious why the father's world would include information on the right use of a map. But the book seems to suggest that maps might actually be a loophole, one in which right use of signifiers isn't so important: "There are no rules for making maps," the book boasts, but the narrator isn't buying it. "Of course there are rules," she thinks. "As with a journal, or any cavalier use of text, a map may help you remember things, but also invent a way of remembering them that makes you forget everything important."

This is the heart of the quest for l'écriture féminine. Male language is limiting. It will make you see one thing only by forgetting others. The narrator tries to counter this with her own form of l'écriture féminine, which is a kind of baby talk: she writes lists. Early verbal children do the same thing, naming whatever they see. One of the two passages she approves of from the book is that if the map is for your own purposes, then it doesn't matter if others can understand it. This is a revolt against the linguistic system of the father, the one tied to logical language that allows for sensible discourse. The narrator thinks associatively about language. The word "salary" doesn't conjure up words like "money" or "bills" for her, but words like "salad" and "salal." 

Not a loophole but a trap

It turns out that the map on the log is just such a "for your own use" map, because she can't understand it at all. It's not an intelligible sign, but it is almost a magical device, because it summons the neighbor/ex-husband, who has cut off his thumb and needs a ride to the hospital. The arrival of the husband/father causes a rupture in the narrator's private language. For the first time, she explains that her "neighbor" is her ex-husband. She had re-signified him and taken away his authority by calling him her "neighbor," a neighbor she confined to the edges of her property, but now, he has reclaimed his original meaning, although with "ex" attached to it. Soon after, she explains that her other "neighbor" is her son. As she leaves the woods, enters the world outside the woods, and spends a few hours with her ex, a clearer narrative begins to emerge, which is helpful for the reader, but it also erodes the boundaries of her écriture féminine. The map seemed like a loophole from the father's system, but it has had the opposite effect, allowing the father's language to reinvade her territory. 

He's no sooner inside than he's straining to bring even random acts under the rule of logical male language. When he discovers that a cat has pissed on her wood, he chides her for not reading it as a sign: “When animals act like that, you should stop what you are doing. You should call it a day. You should go inside and shut the door tightly and stoke your fire.” He indulges in a train of thought that accuses her failure to read omens as the cause of his thumb's amputation. 

Part of the father's logical system of language is the insistence on causality. Everything must have a cause. That seems sensible if one is a detective, but for the narrator, it's another trap. It's a religion, an attempt to assert order where it does not apply. Worse yet, it's an attempt to find a place to assign blame. 

I always knew that map was fucking trouble. 

The son refuses both languages 

While in the ER waiting, the narrator sees a mother changing a baby's diaper. She tells aloud a story she should only have thought to herself: “When my son was a baby,” I told her, “I told him I was going to change him. I meant his diaper. But my husband at the time said, Don’t tell him you’re going to change him because then he’ll believe we don’t accept him as he is. He’ll wonder if the universe fashioned him wrong.”

This seems like another struggle between the two linguistic systems, the mother's less demanding one and the father's hyper-exacting one. It leads the narrator to a series of memories in which the father obviously did not "accept the son as he was." The father was an extremely tough disciplinarian. He made the son sleep in a nap tent even when the son was terrified. He went ballistic when the mother tried to velcro the son's shoes for him instead of making him do it himself. The most upset the father got, though, was when the son, Duncan, insisted on calling everything either "cat" or "dog." 

Maple: cat. Elm: dog. Persimmon: dog. Dogwood: cat. Axe: dog. Hatchet: cat. Truck: dog. Creek: cat. Train: dog. Cat: cat. Squirrel: dog. Raccoon: dog. Spider: cat. It was a small thing, but it enraged my neighbor. Malingering, he called it. It was not honest, nor was it accurate. The one thing that stumped Duncan was a fox. To his father, he’d say that a fox was a dog. But to me he’d say a fox was a cat, because he knew I loved cats and he knew I loved foxes, although it’s been so long since I’ve seen one that I think they might not live in our woods anymore, and Duncan doesn’t live in our woods anymore either. 

At this point in his linguistic development, Duncan is clearly in the pre-paternal linguistic stage. He's calling things names based on some internal logic only he can understand. The father rejects both the system and Duncan's attempts to placate him within the system by calling a fox a dog when the father is around. 

Duncan has gone off and left the woods, left his family, left the lean-to he lived in as soon as he was able because he didn't want to live with either parent. He blames his mother for not stopping his father from being so tough, but she remembers a time she actually tried to run away with him. She threw her list of shopping items in the fire, grabbed Duncan, and ran for a train, jumping on a boxcar with him. But she saw the smoke of the fire she'd started as she left, so they came back. She had destroyed even her own language she'd created as a revolt to the father's, but it wasn't enough to save Duncan. 

Some small reconciliation?

I've gone and done a whole reading of a nice short story with a heavy reliance on theory, proving that even a little bit of theory ruins everything and everyone. I don't like Lacan, but I do like this story, even though it seems to cry out for a Lacan-based feminist analysis. I dislike language-centric theory even more than Lacan, and yet there's something in the story that has me ultimately liking the way language is portrayed. 

Earlier in this essay, I said that I thought a lot of language-centric theorists treated language as both higher and lower than I usually thought of it. Compare that to what the narrator says of her relationship to the neighbor/husband/father: "After that I stopped taking him seriously or I started taking him too seriously. Either one is the death of a marriage."

The two haven't lived together in decades when they visit the ER, but they are taken aback by the word "divorce." The best thing in the woods, the persimmons, are right on the border between their properties. It sounds too pat to say that the best use of language is somehow a marriage of Lacanian "masculine" and "feminine" languages, but as much of a feud as the two are in, they do still seem to have some commitment to each other. Even the father's language isn't totally worthless. He's the one who understands things like creosote. He's the one who finally cracks the riddle of the map, which is that it isn't a map at all, but spalting. 

The two don't reconcile at the end, at least not enough that they come together and live in one house happily without strife. The reconciliation between the two linguistic systems isn't to come to an end of conflict, but to live constantly in a productive conflict. Neither is the happiness type, the type to put all their differences behind them, but they can "build a life" out of the conflict.

I feel like this should end with a PSA about how friends don't let friends get into theory. 

 See also: Karen Carlson, who really loves maps, talks about this story.