This paper doesn’t attempt a general appreciation of her poetic appreciation, but restricts itself to examining the desperation that colours a single, fairly typical poem, ‘Composition’, which appeared in1973 in the volume titled The Old Playhouse and other poems. This interpretation is based on Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytical theory of signification.Thus it is necessary, first, to provide a summary of this poem, and thereafter, an introduction of Lacan’s reinterpretation of Freud.
The poem has different stanzas of varying length. In the first stanza, the speaker says that she faces the sea, heard long ago as a ceaseless whisper in a shell; thereafter heard at night as breaking surf while she lay beside her grandmother. The house has since crumbled and the old woman is deadThe second stanza speaks of the loss of innocence, the tragedy of growth, the discovery of horror, the speaker’s removal from the sea, and the sea’s recurrence in her dreams.The third unit tells of marriage, and sexual interactions with both men and women, none of which appease, and most of which require play-acting. It ends with the speaker saying that she misses her grandmother.The fourth stanza reiterates the futility and sameness of all sexual encounters, and the indifference of the external world to the soul.The fifth stanza recalls the time when the speaker’s grandmother invited her to spend a night in the old family home and waited for her with a lit lamp, but the speaker did not/ could not go.The sixth stanza presents the tawdry, jumbled world of prostitution, marriage, friendship, and enimity. Nothing is better or more than anything else. It closes with a call of despair and a longing for a walk into the sea for rest.The seventh and final stanza declares this to be impossible.
Even the crumbling of the self brings no rest; the pains continue; the cells cannot escape; immortality of the consciousness is a certainty. The only freedom is the freedom to ‘discompose’, a word that acquires weight in the light of the poem’s title ‘Composition’. Before embarking on a reading of this poem, it is necessary to outline Lacan’s picture of the self. This has been done even if it digresses from the discussion of the actual poem.
Following Freud's death, psychoanalytic practice split into many differing schools of thought. Against the backdrop of these divergent currents of psychoanalytic theory, Lacan called for a "return to Freud". Lacan accused later psychoanalysts of a superficial understanding of Freud (who encountered a similar problem himself on his first trip to North America, where his interpreters appeared to have "sugar-coated" his theories to make them more popular to the masses), claiming they had so cautiously adhered to his ideas that they had served to block rather than to induce scientific investigation of the mental process. Lacan wanted to return to Freud's thought, and expand it in light of its own tensions and currents.The steps in the divisive process of the self as understood by Lacan, a confirmed Freudian, are first briefly mentioned.
The lacanian subject is defined almost entirely by lack or loss. Before birth there is no seperation, but birth leads to seperation, thus loss or lack. This lack characterises the infant before it has access to language. This is termed as ‘real’ lack by Lacan. The real lack is what the living being loses, that part of himself qua living being in reproducing himself through the way of sex. Subsequent lacks occur within languahe which is a system of signs, something structured. The mirror stage is described in Lacan's essay, "The Mirror Stage as formative in the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience". In this stage, the self misrecognizes the world which beams back a sense of unity. Lacan's emphasis here is on the process of identification with an outside image or entity. This process of identification is the first step towards the manufacture of the subject because all whichlows it – the transition into the Imaginary and the Symbolic order – is based on this misrecognition . This is the start of a lifelong process of identifying the self in terms of the Other. The Imaginary is the realm of spatial identification that begins with the mirror stage, and is instrumental in the development of psychic agency. The Imaginary refers to the non-linguistic aspect of the psyche. When the infant acquires the ability to use language – that is, to realize his or her desire through speech, the infant passes from the non-verbal stage of ‘the imaginary’ into the ‘symbolic order’ created by language. The child has passed from a full imaginary world of possesion into the the empty world of language, and it moves from one signifier to another in an endless chain. Such movement constitutes ‘second order’ lack or loss. Desire is the result of this lack. The subject is destined to wander through the system of signifiers in the ‘field of the other’, seeking or longing for a never-to be- attained reabsorption into a whole.
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