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A year or so ago, while waiting in line to pay at a London Waterstone bookstore, I
overheard a young man asking one of the staff: 'I just finished <i>Mrs de Winter</i>. Is it true
that this is the sequel to another book?' This was for me a depressing encounter with the
illiteracy of the younger generation-how can anyone not know about <i>Rebecca</i>?<br><br>
Or is this oblivion perhaps deserved? There is something radically untimely about
Daphne du Maurier: her prose seems marked by a melodramatic excess that often comes
dangerously close to the ridiculous-after reading one of her books, it is difficult to avoid
the vague sentiment that it is no longer possible to write like that today. <a name="1"></a><a href="#1x">1</a> She tells stories without truly being a writer; in what, then, resides the secret of the undisputed
tremendous power of fascination exerted by her stories? What if these two features are
somehow connected? What if her lack of style, her pathetic directness, is the formal
effect of the fact that du Maurier's narratives directly, all too directly, stage the fantasies
that sustain our lives? The notion of fantasy has to be taken here in all its fundamental
ambiguity: far from being opposed to reality, fantasy is that which provides the basic
coordinates of what we experience as 'reality' (as Lacan puts it, 'everything we are
allowed to approach by way of reality remains rooted in fantasy' <a name="2"></a><a href="#2x">2</a>) - however, in order to fulfil this function, it has to remain hidden, it must exert its efficiency in the background:
'If what [neurotics] long for the most intensely in their phantasies is presented them in
reality, they none the less flee from it'. <a name="3"></a><a href="#3x">3</a> And it is this properly shameless, often
embarrassing, direct staging of fantasies that makes du Maurier's writing so
compelling-especially when compared with aseptic 'politically correct' feminism. <a name="4"></a><a href="#4x">4</a><br><br>
According to the Jewish tradition, Lilith is the woman a man makes love to while he
masturbates alone in his bed during the night - far from standing for the feminine identity
liberated from the patriarchal hold, her status is purely phallic: she is what Lacan calls <i>La
femme</i>, the Woman, the fantasmatic supplement of the male masturbatory phallic
<i>jouissance</i>. Significantly, while there is only one man (Adam), femininity is from the
very beginning split between Eve and Lilith, between the 'ordinary' hysterical feminine
subject and the fantasmatic spectre of Woman: when a man is having sex with a 'real'
woman, he is using her as a masturbatory prop to support his fantasizing about the non-
existent Woman... And in <i>Rebecca</i>, her most famous novel, du Maurier adds another
twist to the Lilith myth: the fantasy of Woman is (re)appropriated by a woman - what if
Lilith is not so much a male fantasy as the fantasy of a woman, the model of her
fantasmatic competitor?<br><br>
So where does du Maurier belong? Properly speaking, she is flanked, on one side, by
Romanticism, with its notion of radical Evil ('pleasure in pain'), and, on the other side,
by Freud, and the direct impact of psychoanalysis on arts - why? It is interesting to note
that Lacan identified the beginning of the movement of ideas that finally gave birth to
psychoanalysis as being that of Kantian ethics (particularly his <i>Critique of Practical
Reason</i>) and the Romantic notion of 'pleasure in pain'. <a name="5"></a><a href="#5x">5</a> It is this epoch that provides the only proper ground for what is deceitfully called 'applied psychoanalysis'. Prior to this
moment, the universe was one in which the Unconscious was not yet operative, in which
the 'subject' was identified with the Light of Reason as opposed to the impersonal Night
of drives, and not, in the very kernel of its being, this Night itself; afterwards, the very
impact of psychoanalysis transformed artistic literary practice (Eugene O'Neill's plays,
for example, already presuppose psychoanalysis, whereas Henry James, Katherine
Mansfield and even Kafka do not). It is also within this horizon that du Maurier moves-
this space of the heroic innocence of the Unconscious in which irresistible passions freely
roam around.<br><br>
There is one term that encapsulates everything that renders this space-and du Maurier's
writing itself-so problematic for contemporary feminism: feminine masochism. What du
Maurier stages again and again in a shamelessly direct way is the different figure of
'feminine masochism', of a woman enjoying her own ruin, finding a tortured satisfaction
in her subjection and humiliation, etc. So how are we to redeem this feature?
The ultimate point of irreconciliable difference between psychoanalysis and feminism is
that of rape (and/or the masochist fantasies that sustain it). For standard feminism, at
least, it is an a priori axiom that rape is a violence imposed from without: even if a
woman fantasizes about being raped, this only bears witness to the deplorable fact that
she has internalized the male attitude. The reaction is here one of pure panic: the moment
one mentions that a woman may fantasize about being raped or at least brutally
mishandled, one hears the objections: 'This is like saying that Jews fantasize about being
gassed in the camps, or African-Americans fantasize about being lynched!' From this
perspective, the split hysterical position (that of complaining about being sexually
misused and exploited, while simultaneously desiring it and provoking a man to seduce
her) is secondary, while for Freud, it is primary, constitutive of subjectivity.
Consequently, the problem with rape for Freud is that it has such a traumatic impact not
simply because it is a case of such brutal external violence, but because it also touches on
something disavowed in the victim herself. So when Freud writes, 'If what [neurotics]
long for the most intensely in their phantasies is presented them in reality, they none the
less flee from it', his point is not merely that this aversion occurs because of censorship,
but, rather, that the core of our fantasy is unbearable to us. (Of course, this insight in no
way justifies rape along the infamous lines 'she just got what she fantasized about...' - if
anything, it makes it more violent: what could be more brutal than to impose on someone
the traumatic core of his/her fantasy?)<br><br>
What this means is that, paradoxically, the staging of what appears to be a masochist
scenario is the first act of liberation: by means of it, the servant's masochistic libidinal
attachment to his master is brought into the light of day, and the servant thus achieves a
minimal distance towards it. In his essay on Sacher-Masoch, <a name="6"></a><a href="#6x">6</a> Gilles Deleuze elaborated this aspect in detail: far from bringing any satisfaction to the sadistic witness, the
masochist's self-torture frustrates the sadist, depriving him of his power over the
masochist. Sadism involves a relationship of domination, while masochism is necessarily
the first step towards liberation. <a name="7"></a><a href="#7x">7</a> When we are subjected to a power mechanism, this subjection is always and by definition sustained by some libidinal investment: the
subjection itself generates a surplus-enjoyment of its own. This subjection is embodied in
a network of 'material' bodily practices, and, for this reason, we cannot get rid of our
subjection through a merely intellectual reflection-our liberation has to be staged in
some kind of bodily performance, and, furthermore, this performance has to be of an
apparently 'masochistic' nature, it has to stage the painful process of hitting back at
oneself. Did Sylvia Plath not adopt the same strategy in her famous poem 'Daddy'?</font></p>
<font size="3">
</font><blockquote>
<p align="justify"><font size="3">
What she does in the poem is, with a weird detachment, to turn the violence
against herself so as to show that she can equal her oppressors with her self-
inflicted oppression. And this is the strategy of the concentration camps. When
suffering is there whatever you do, by inflicting it upon yourself you achieve your
identity, you set yourself free. <a name="8"></a><a href="#8x">8</a></font></p><font size="3">
</font></blockquote>
<font size="3">
</font><p align="justify">
<font size="3">This also resolves the problem of Plath's reference to the holocaust, i.e., the reproach of
some of her critics that her implicit equation of her oppression by her father to what the
Nazis did to the Jews is an inadmissible exaggeration: what matters is not the (obviously
incomparable) magnitude of the crime, but the fact that Plath felt compelled to adopt the
strategy of turning violence against herself as the only means of psychic liberation. For
this reason, it is also far too simplistic to dismiss her thoroughly ambiguous hysterical
attitude towards her father (horror at his oppressive presence and, simultaneously, her
obvious libidinal fascination by him - 'Every woman adores a Fascist, the boot in the
face...' <a name="9"></a><a href="#9x">9</a>): this hysterical knot of the libidinal investment of one's own victimization can never be undone. That is to say, one cannot oppose the 'redemptive' awareness of being
oppressed to the 'pathological' enjoyment the hysterical subject gains from this very
oppression, interpreting their conjunction as the result of the 'liberation from patriarchal
domination as an unfinished project' (to paraphrase Habermas), i.e., as the index of a split
between the 'good' feminist awareness of subjection and the persisting patriarchal
libidinal economy which chains the hysteric to patriarchy, making her subordination into
a <i>servitude volontaire</i>. If this were the case, then the solution would be simple: one would
enact what, apropos of Proudhon, Marx characterized as the exemplary petty bourgeois
procedure of distinguishing in every phenomenon a 'good' and a 'bad' aspect, and then
affirming the good and getting rid of the bad-in our case, struggling to keep the 'good'
aspect (awareness of oppression) and discard the 'bad' one (finding pleasure in
oppression). The reason this 'untying of the knot' doesn't work is that the only true
awareness of our subjection is the awareness of the obscene excessive pleasure (surplus-
enjoyment) we gain from it-which is why the first gesture of liberation is not to get rid
of this excessive pleasure, but actively to assume it. If, following Franz Fanon, we define
political violence not as opposed to work, but, precisely, as the ultimate political version
of the 'work of the negative', of the educational self-formation, then violence should
primarily be conceived as self-violence, as a violent re-formation of the very substance of
subject's being.<br><br>
Consequently, the first thing to do in every case of masochism is to look for the
'collateral damage' that generates the accidental side-profit. In one of the anti-Soviet
jokes popular after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, a fairy-queen
approaches a Czech and tells him that she is ready to grant him three wishes; the Czech
immediately offers his first wish: 'The Chinese army should occupy my country for a
month and then withdraw!' After the fairy-queen asks him for the other two wishes, he
says: 'The same again! The Chinese should occupy us again and again!' When the
bewildered queen asks him why he chose such a strange wish, the Czech answers with a
malicious grin: 'Because each time the Chinese were to occupy us, they would have to
pass through the Soviet Union on their way here and back!' The same holds often for
'feminine masochism', and especially for du Maurier's stories whose heroines enjoying
their painful passions: they follow the logic of displacement, i.e., to interpret them
properly, one should focus attention on the third (male) subject who is targeted when a
woman is repeatedly 'occupied by the Chinese army'.<br><br>
This, then, is what du Maurier is doing when she is staging elementary fantasmatic
narratives, and, perhaps, nowhere is this clearer than in six of her short stories: 'The
Birds', 'Monte Verità', 'The Apple Tree', 'The Little Photographer', 'Kiss Me Again,
Stranger' and 'The Old Man'. <a name="10"></a><a href="#10x">10</a> They are to be read in the same way that Claude Lévi- Strauss interpreted myths: instead of directly searching for a hidden meaning within each
of them, they should be interpreted through each other, read side by side-the moment
one does it, one perceives that they form a precise structure. The central four stories
present four versions of why sexual relationship fails. In 'Monte Verità', a beautiful
young Anna abandons her husband and potential lover for the 'Truth Mountain', a remote
resort in the Swiss Alps, the seat of an initiatic group who lead there a secluded life of
immortality, a life of eternal ecstatic satisfaction exempted from the traumas of our
'world of men and women'-in short, she chooses what Lacan called the Other
<i>Jouissance</i> over ordinary phallic <i>jouissance</i>. In 'The Apple Tree', an older husband
whose neglected wife died a while ago suddenly notices how a malformed apple tree
close to his house bears an uncanny resemblance to her; the tree starts to haunt him and
he dies, entangled in its fallen wings in a winter storm. In 'The Little Photographer', a
lone, bored beautiful wife who married into rich nobility becomes involved in a weird
and humiliating love affair with a poor crippled local photographer while on holiday at a
seaside resort. In 'Kiss Me Again, Stranger', a young mechanic spends a long evening
with a mysterious girl who is the following day revealed to be the serial murderer of
several RAF pilots. In all four stories, the intrusion of an unexpected dimension disturbs
the 'normal' run of things and ruins the prospect of a satisfied, calm life of a couple: the
fantasmatic Other Place of non-phallic <i>jouissance</i>; the return of the dead wife in the guise
of the tree as a conversion-symptom that haunts the husband; the strange lure of the low-
class, doggishly faithful, repulsive lover; the unexpected lethal dimension of an ordinary
girl. The first and the last stories are, in clear contrast, the ones with a 'happy' couple.
'The Birds' (on which, of course, Hitchcock's film is based) tells the story of a
countryside family of tenants on the Cornwall coast who had to deal with attacking birds.
In 'The Old Man', the observer witnesses how a strange couple living in a cottage near
the sea maintains their secluded happiness by killing their intrusive son whose presence
started to disturb their idyll. The two 'happy' families are thus more than weird: the one
lives under siege by the attacking birds; the other has to secure its happiness by killing
their offspring...<br><br>
Especially instructive here is 'The Birds', especially if we compare du Maurier's original
story with Hitchcock's film: while both share the same fantasmatic cataclysmic event,
this event is in each case included in a different context that confers upon it an entirely
different meaning. In order to unravel Hitchcock's <i>The Birds</i>, one should first imagine
the film without the birds, simply depicting the proverbial middle-class family in the
midst of an Oedipal crisis-the attacks of the birds can only be accounted for as an outlet
of the tension underlying this Oedipal constellation, i.e., they clearly materialize the
destructive outburst of the maternal superego, one mother's jealousy toward the young
woman who tries to snatch her son from her. The same procedure should also be applied
to du Maurier's 'The Birds': her 'Birds without birds' would have been a sketch of hard
English peasant life, of tough characters who are aware that, ultimately, they can only
rely on themselves, and are able to keep their mind and provide for their survival even in
the most disturbing circumstances. The attacking birds here are thus to bring out the best
of the tough character of the 'ordinary' English peasant-against what? Hints scattered
throughout the story make it clear that the true target of the story is the post-World War II
Labour Welfare State: the state fails to react properly to the threat of the birds and,
towards the end of the story, simply ceases to function.<br><br>
And the same goes for the other stories: one should first imagine an alternate version
without the disturbing intrusion. 'Monte Verità without Monte Verità' would have been a
story about an apparently happy and prosperous young couple, in which the wife is
nonetheless not fully satisfied, haunted by visions of and longing for a different, more
emancipated, life. 'The Apple Tree' would have been a depressing story about an old
couple whose superficially calm life conceals silent despair and cruel ignorance. 'The
Little Photographer' would have been a vignette on a beautiful girl who married for
money but is now condemned to lead a suffocating, aseptic existence of empty family
rituals, cut off from the bustle of real life. 'Kiss Me Again, Stranger' would have been a
story of the everyday emotional misery of a young mechanic unable to find a stable love
relationship. Finally, 'The Old Man' would have been a portrait of utter immobility: a
couple isolated from society, living in a state of psychotic seclusion... The intrusive
Event (birds attacking, the twisted apple tree, the strangely attractive crippled
photographer, etc.) is then nothing but a fantasized escape from this misery, a figure that
renders all the more palpable the misery of its everyday background - can one imagine a
more devastating picture of the choices life is offering us today?<br><br>
The paradox of old gramophone recordings is that, today, we perceive the singing voice
whose clarity is obfuscated by scratches as more 'realistic' than the most faithful Dolby-
stereo or THX recording - as if the very imperfection of the rendering is a proof that the
'real voice' was there, while, in the second case, the very perfection derealizes what we
hear, turning it into an experience of a perfect fake. And, perhaps, this is how one should
read du Maurier's texts: their very scratches - what makes them old-fashioned, often
ridiculous-are also what keeps them alive.<br><br>
<font size="2">Notes;<br><br>
<a name="1x"></a><a href="#1">1</a> However, does the same not hold for many a great classic? Is it still possible
today to listen to the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony with the
naïve recognition of the persistent knocking of fate, or is this movement forever
lost on account of its later 'commodification'?<br><br>
<a name="2x"></a><a href="#2">2</a> Jacques Lacan, <i>The Seminar of Jacques Lacan XX: On Feminine Sexuality, the
Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972-73 (Encore)</i>, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller,
trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), 95.<br><br>
<a name="3x"></a><a href="#3">3</a> Sigmund Freud, 'Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria ("Dora")', in
<i>The Penguin Freud Library, 8: Case Histories I</i>, ed. and trans. James Strachey
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 151.<br><br>
<a name="4x"></a><a href="#4">4</a> Another more contemporary work that, although worthless in strict artistic terms,
provides a similar powerful staging of fantasies would be Colleen McCullough's <i>Thornbirds</i>.<br><br>
<a name="5x"></a><a href="#5">5</a> See Jacques Lacan, <i>The Seminar of Jacques Lacan VII: The Ethics of
Psychoanalysis, 1959-60</i>, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter
(London: Routledge, 1992), 24-25.<br><br>
<a name="6x"></a><a href="#6">6</a> See Gilles Deleuze, 'Coldness and Cruelty', in <i>Masochism</i> (New York: Zone
Books 1989), especially 123-34.<br><br>
<a name="7x"></a><a href="#7">7</a> Zizek develops this notion of 'liberating violence' at some length with particular
reference to David Fincher's 'Fight Club in 'Lenin's Choice', in <i>Revolution at the
Gates: A Selection of Writings from February to October 1917</i>, ed. Slavoj Zizek
(London and New York: Verso, 2002), 250-63.<br><br>
<a name="8x"></a><a href="#8">8</a> Claire Brennan, <i>The Poetry of Sylvia Plath</i> (Cambridge: Icon Books 2000), 22.<br><br>
<a name="9x"></a><a href="#9">9</a> Sylvia Plath, 'Daddy', in <i>The Collected Poems</i>, ed. Ted Hughes (New York:
Harper and Row, 1981), 223.<br><br>
<a name="10x"></a><a href="#10">10</a> This paper was originally written as an introduction to the Virago Modern
Classics edition of <i>The Birds and Other Stories</i> (London: Virago, 2004), but was
rejected 'for being too theoretical and disrespectful of du Maurier' (Zizek, private
communication). The six stories listed here were collected in this volume.
overheard a young man asking one of the staff: 'I just finished <i>Mrs de Winter</i>. Is it true
that this is the sequel to another book?' This was for me a depressing encounter with the
illiteracy of the younger generation-how can anyone not know about <i>Rebecca</i>?<br><br>
Or is this oblivion perhaps deserved? There is something radically untimely about
Daphne du Maurier: her prose seems marked by a melodramatic excess that often comes
dangerously close to the ridiculous-after reading one of her books, it is difficult to avoid
the vague sentiment that it is no longer possible to write like that today. <a name="1"></a><a href="#1x">1</a> She tells stories without truly being a writer; in what, then, resides the secret of the undisputed
tremendous power of fascination exerted by her stories? What if these two features are
somehow connected? What if her lack of style, her pathetic directness, is the formal
effect of the fact that du Maurier's narratives directly, all too directly, stage the fantasies
that sustain our lives? The notion of fantasy has to be taken here in all its fundamental
ambiguity: far from being opposed to reality, fantasy is that which provides the basic
coordinates of what we experience as 'reality' (as Lacan puts it, 'everything we are
allowed to approach by way of reality remains rooted in fantasy' <a name="2"></a><a href="#2x">2</a>) - however, in order to fulfil this function, it has to remain hidden, it must exert its efficiency in the background:
'If what [neurotics] long for the most intensely in their phantasies is presented them in
reality, they none the less flee from it'. <a name="3"></a><a href="#3x">3</a> And it is this properly shameless, often
embarrassing, direct staging of fantasies that makes du Maurier's writing so
compelling-especially when compared with aseptic 'politically correct' feminism. <a name="4"></a><a href="#4x">4</a><br><br>
According to the Jewish tradition, Lilith is the woman a man makes love to while he
masturbates alone in his bed during the night - far from standing for the feminine identity
liberated from the patriarchal hold, her status is purely phallic: she is what Lacan calls <i>La
femme</i>, the Woman, the fantasmatic supplement of the male masturbatory phallic
<i>jouissance</i>. Significantly, while there is only one man (Adam), femininity is from the
very beginning split between Eve and Lilith, between the 'ordinary' hysterical feminine
subject and the fantasmatic spectre of Woman: when a man is having sex with a 'real'
woman, he is using her as a masturbatory prop to support his fantasizing about the non-
existent Woman... And in <i>Rebecca</i>, her most famous novel, du Maurier adds another
twist to the Lilith myth: the fantasy of Woman is (re)appropriated by a woman - what if
Lilith is not so much a male fantasy as the fantasy of a woman, the model of her
fantasmatic competitor?<br><br>
So where does du Maurier belong? Properly speaking, she is flanked, on one side, by
Romanticism, with its notion of radical Evil ('pleasure in pain'), and, on the other side,
by Freud, and the direct impact of psychoanalysis on arts - why? It is interesting to note
that Lacan identified the beginning of the movement of ideas that finally gave birth to
psychoanalysis as being that of Kantian ethics (particularly his <i>Critique of Practical
Reason</i>) and the Romantic notion of 'pleasure in pain'. <a name="5"></a><a href="#5x">5</a> It is this epoch that provides the only proper ground for what is deceitfully called 'applied psychoanalysis'. Prior to this
moment, the universe was one in which the Unconscious was not yet operative, in which
the 'subject' was identified with the Light of Reason as opposed to the impersonal Night
of drives, and not, in the very kernel of its being, this Night itself; afterwards, the very
impact of psychoanalysis transformed artistic literary practice (Eugene O'Neill's plays,
for example, already presuppose psychoanalysis, whereas Henry James, Katherine
Mansfield and even Kafka do not). It is also within this horizon that du Maurier moves-
this space of the heroic innocence of the Unconscious in which irresistible passions freely
roam around.<br><br>
There is one term that encapsulates everything that renders this space-and du Maurier's
writing itself-so problematic for contemporary feminism: feminine masochism. What du
Maurier stages again and again in a shamelessly direct way is the different figure of
'feminine masochism', of a woman enjoying her own ruin, finding a tortured satisfaction
in her subjection and humiliation, etc. So how are we to redeem this feature?
The ultimate point of irreconciliable difference between psychoanalysis and feminism is
that of rape (and/or the masochist fantasies that sustain it). For standard feminism, at
least, it is an a priori axiom that rape is a violence imposed from without: even if a
woman fantasizes about being raped, this only bears witness to the deplorable fact that
she has internalized the male attitude. The reaction is here one of pure panic: the moment
one mentions that a woman may fantasize about being raped or at least brutally
mishandled, one hears the objections: 'This is like saying that Jews fantasize about being
gassed in the camps, or African-Americans fantasize about being lynched!' From this
perspective, the split hysterical position (that of complaining about being sexually
misused and exploited, while simultaneously desiring it and provoking a man to seduce
her) is secondary, while for Freud, it is primary, constitutive of subjectivity.
Consequently, the problem with rape for Freud is that it has such a traumatic impact not
simply because it is a case of such brutal external violence, but because it also touches on
something disavowed in the victim herself. So when Freud writes, 'If what [neurotics]
long for the most intensely in their phantasies is presented them in reality, they none the
less flee from it', his point is not merely that this aversion occurs because of censorship,
but, rather, that the core of our fantasy is unbearable to us. (Of course, this insight in no
way justifies rape along the infamous lines 'she just got what she fantasized about...' - if
anything, it makes it more violent: what could be more brutal than to impose on someone
the traumatic core of his/her fantasy?)<br><br>
What this means is that, paradoxically, the staging of what appears to be a masochist
scenario is the first act of liberation: by means of it, the servant's masochistic libidinal
attachment to his master is brought into the light of day, and the servant thus achieves a
minimal distance towards it. In his essay on Sacher-Masoch, <a name="6"></a><a href="#6x">6</a> Gilles Deleuze elaborated this aspect in detail: far from bringing any satisfaction to the sadistic witness, the
masochist's self-torture frustrates the sadist, depriving him of his power over the
masochist. Sadism involves a relationship of domination, while masochism is necessarily
the first step towards liberation. <a name="7"></a><a href="#7x">7</a> When we are subjected to a power mechanism, this subjection is always and by definition sustained by some libidinal investment: the
subjection itself generates a surplus-enjoyment of its own. This subjection is embodied in
a network of 'material' bodily practices, and, for this reason, we cannot get rid of our
subjection through a merely intellectual reflection-our liberation has to be staged in
some kind of bodily performance, and, furthermore, this performance has to be of an
apparently 'masochistic' nature, it has to stage the painful process of hitting back at
oneself. Did Sylvia Plath not adopt the same strategy in her famous poem 'Daddy'?</font></p>
<font size="3">
</font><blockquote>
<p align="justify"><font size="3">
What she does in the poem is, with a weird detachment, to turn the violence
against herself so as to show that she can equal her oppressors with her self-
inflicted oppression. And this is the strategy of the concentration camps. When
suffering is there whatever you do, by inflicting it upon yourself you achieve your
identity, you set yourself free. <a name="8"></a><a href="#8x">8</a></font></p><font size="3">
</font></blockquote>
<font size="3">
</font><p align="justify">
<font size="3">This also resolves the problem of Plath's reference to the holocaust, i.e., the reproach of
some of her critics that her implicit equation of her oppression by her father to what the
Nazis did to the Jews is an inadmissible exaggeration: what matters is not the (obviously
incomparable) magnitude of the crime, but the fact that Plath felt compelled to adopt the
strategy of turning violence against herself as the only means of psychic liberation. For
this reason, it is also far too simplistic to dismiss her thoroughly ambiguous hysterical
attitude towards her father (horror at his oppressive presence and, simultaneously, her
obvious libidinal fascination by him - 'Every woman adores a Fascist, the boot in the
face...' <a name="9"></a><a href="#9x">9</a>): this hysterical knot of the libidinal investment of one's own victimization can never be undone. That is to say, one cannot oppose the 'redemptive' awareness of being
oppressed to the 'pathological' enjoyment the hysterical subject gains from this very
oppression, interpreting their conjunction as the result of the 'liberation from patriarchal
domination as an unfinished project' (to paraphrase Habermas), i.e., as the index of a split
between the 'good' feminist awareness of subjection and the persisting patriarchal
libidinal economy which chains the hysteric to patriarchy, making her subordination into
a <i>servitude volontaire</i>. If this were the case, then the solution would be simple: one would
enact what, apropos of Proudhon, Marx characterized as the exemplary petty bourgeois
procedure of distinguishing in every phenomenon a 'good' and a 'bad' aspect, and then
affirming the good and getting rid of the bad-in our case, struggling to keep the 'good'
aspect (awareness of oppression) and discard the 'bad' one (finding pleasure in
oppression). The reason this 'untying of the knot' doesn't work is that the only true
awareness of our subjection is the awareness of the obscene excessive pleasure (surplus-
enjoyment) we gain from it-which is why the first gesture of liberation is not to get rid
of this excessive pleasure, but actively to assume it. If, following Franz Fanon, we define
political violence not as opposed to work, but, precisely, as the ultimate political version
of the 'work of the negative', of the educational self-formation, then violence should
primarily be conceived as self-violence, as a violent re-formation of the very substance of
subject's being.<br><br>
Consequently, the first thing to do in every case of masochism is to look for the
'collateral damage' that generates the accidental side-profit. In one of the anti-Soviet
jokes popular after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, a fairy-queen
approaches a Czech and tells him that she is ready to grant him three wishes; the Czech
immediately offers his first wish: 'The Chinese army should occupy my country for a
month and then withdraw!' After the fairy-queen asks him for the other two wishes, he
says: 'The same again! The Chinese should occupy us again and again!' When the
bewildered queen asks him why he chose such a strange wish, the Czech answers with a
malicious grin: 'Because each time the Chinese were to occupy us, they would have to
pass through the Soviet Union on their way here and back!' The same holds often for
'feminine masochism', and especially for du Maurier's stories whose heroines enjoying
their painful passions: they follow the logic of displacement, i.e., to interpret them
properly, one should focus attention on the third (male) subject who is targeted when a
woman is repeatedly 'occupied by the Chinese army'.<br><br>
This, then, is what du Maurier is doing when she is staging elementary fantasmatic
narratives, and, perhaps, nowhere is this clearer than in six of her short stories: 'The
Birds', 'Monte Verità', 'The Apple Tree', 'The Little Photographer', 'Kiss Me Again,
Stranger' and 'The Old Man'. <a name="10"></a><a href="#10x">10</a> They are to be read in the same way that Claude Lévi- Strauss interpreted myths: instead of directly searching for a hidden meaning within each
of them, they should be interpreted through each other, read side by side-the moment
one does it, one perceives that they form a precise structure. The central four stories
present four versions of why sexual relationship fails. In 'Monte Verità', a beautiful
young Anna abandons her husband and potential lover for the 'Truth Mountain', a remote
resort in the Swiss Alps, the seat of an initiatic group who lead there a secluded life of
immortality, a life of eternal ecstatic satisfaction exempted from the traumas of our
'world of men and women'-in short, she chooses what Lacan called the Other
<i>Jouissance</i> over ordinary phallic <i>jouissance</i>. In 'The Apple Tree', an older husband
whose neglected wife died a while ago suddenly notices how a malformed apple tree
close to his house bears an uncanny resemblance to her; the tree starts to haunt him and
he dies, entangled in its fallen wings in a winter storm. In 'The Little Photographer', a
lone, bored beautiful wife who married into rich nobility becomes involved in a weird
and humiliating love affair with a poor crippled local photographer while on holiday at a
seaside resort. In 'Kiss Me Again, Stranger', a young mechanic spends a long evening
with a mysterious girl who is the following day revealed to be the serial murderer of
several RAF pilots. In all four stories, the intrusion of an unexpected dimension disturbs
the 'normal' run of things and ruins the prospect of a satisfied, calm life of a couple: the
fantasmatic Other Place of non-phallic <i>jouissance</i>; the return of the dead wife in the guise
of the tree as a conversion-symptom that haunts the husband; the strange lure of the low-
class, doggishly faithful, repulsive lover; the unexpected lethal dimension of an ordinary
girl. The first and the last stories are, in clear contrast, the ones with a 'happy' couple.
'The Birds' (on which, of course, Hitchcock's film is based) tells the story of a
countryside family of tenants on the Cornwall coast who had to deal with attacking birds.
In 'The Old Man', the observer witnesses how a strange couple living in a cottage near
the sea maintains their secluded happiness by killing their intrusive son whose presence
started to disturb their idyll. The two 'happy' families are thus more than weird: the one
lives under siege by the attacking birds; the other has to secure its happiness by killing
their offspring...<br><br>
Especially instructive here is 'The Birds', especially if we compare du Maurier's original
story with Hitchcock's film: while both share the same fantasmatic cataclysmic event,
this event is in each case included in a different context that confers upon it an entirely
different meaning. In order to unravel Hitchcock's <i>The Birds</i>, one should first imagine
the film without the birds, simply depicting the proverbial middle-class family in the
midst of an Oedipal crisis-the attacks of the birds can only be accounted for as an outlet
of the tension underlying this Oedipal constellation, i.e., they clearly materialize the
destructive outburst of the maternal superego, one mother's jealousy toward the young
woman who tries to snatch her son from her. The same procedure should also be applied
to du Maurier's 'The Birds': her 'Birds without birds' would have been a sketch of hard
English peasant life, of tough characters who are aware that, ultimately, they can only
rely on themselves, and are able to keep their mind and provide for their survival even in
the most disturbing circumstances. The attacking birds here are thus to bring out the best
of the tough character of the 'ordinary' English peasant-against what? Hints scattered
throughout the story make it clear that the true target of the story is the post-World War II
Labour Welfare State: the state fails to react properly to the threat of the birds and,
towards the end of the story, simply ceases to function.<br><br>
And the same goes for the other stories: one should first imagine an alternate version
without the disturbing intrusion. 'Monte Verità without Monte Verità' would have been a
story about an apparently happy and prosperous young couple, in which the wife is
nonetheless not fully satisfied, haunted by visions of and longing for a different, more
emancipated, life. 'The Apple Tree' would have been a depressing story about an old
couple whose superficially calm life conceals silent despair and cruel ignorance. 'The
Little Photographer' would have been a vignette on a beautiful girl who married for
money but is now condemned to lead a suffocating, aseptic existence of empty family
rituals, cut off from the bustle of real life. 'Kiss Me Again, Stranger' would have been a
story of the everyday emotional misery of a young mechanic unable to find a stable love
relationship. Finally, 'The Old Man' would have been a portrait of utter immobility: a
couple isolated from society, living in a state of psychotic seclusion... The intrusive
Event (birds attacking, the twisted apple tree, the strangely attractive crippled
photographer, etc.) is then nothing but a fantasized escape from this misery, a figure that
renders all the more palpable the misery of its everyday background - can one imagine a
more devastating picture of the choices life is offering us today?<br><br>
The paradox of old gramophone recordings is that, today, we perceive the singing voice
whose clarity is obfuscated by scratches as more 'realistic' than the most faithful Dolby-
stereo or THX recording - as if the very imperfection of the rendering is a proof that the
'real voice' was there, while, in the second case, the very perfection derealizes what we
hear, turning it into an experience of a perfect fake. And, perhaps, this is how one should
read du Maurier's texts: their very scratches - what makes them old-fashioned, often
ridiculous-are also what keeps them alive.<br><br>
<font size="2">Notes;<br><br>
<a name="1x"></a><a href="#1">1</a> However, does the same not hold for many a great classic? Is it still possible
today to listen to the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony with the
naïve recognition of the persistent knocking of fate, or is this movement forever
lost on account of its later 'commodification'?<br><br>
<a name="2x"></a><a href="#2">2</a> Jacques Lacan, <i>The Seminar of Jacques Lacan XX: On Feminine Sexuality, the
Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972-73 (Encore)</i>, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller,
trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), 95.<br><br>
<a name="3x"></a><a href="#3">3</a> Sigmund Freud, 'Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria ("Dora")', in
<i>The Penguin Freud Library, 8: Case Histories I</i>, ed. and trans. James Strachey
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 151.<br><br>
<a name="4x"></a><a href="#4">4</a> Another more contemporary work that, although worthless in strict artistic terms,
provides a similar powerful staging of fantasies would be Colleen McCullough's <i>Thornbirds</i>.<br><br>
<a name="5x"></a><a href="#5">5</a> See Jacques Lacan, <i>The Seminar of Jacques Lacan VII: The Ethics of
Psychoanalysis, 1959-60</i>, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter
(London: Routledge, 1992), 24-25.<br><br>
<a name="6x"></a><a href="#6">6</a> See Gilles Deleuze, 'Coldness and Cruelty', in <i>Masochism</i> (New York: Zone
Books 1989), especially 123-34.<br><br>
<a name="7x"></a><a href="#7">7</a> Zizek develops this notion of 'liberating violence' at some length with particular
reference to David Fincher's 'Fight Club in 'Lenin's Choice', in <i>Revolution at the
Gates: A Selection of Writings from February to October 1917</i>, ed. Slavoj Zizek
(London and New York: Verso, 2002), 250-63.<br><br>
<a name="8x"></a><a href="#8">8</a> Claire Brennan, <i>The Poetry of Sylvia Plath</i> (Cambridge: Icon Books 2000), 22.<br><br>
<a name="9x"></a><a href="#9">9</a> Sylvia Plath, 'Daddy', in <i>The Collected Poems</i>, ed. Ted Hughes (New York:
Harper and Row, 1981), 223.<br><br>
<a name="10x"></a><a href="#10">10</a> This paper was originally written as an introduction to the Virago Modern
Classics edition of <i>The Birds and Other Stories</i> (London: Virago, 2004), but was
rejected 'for being too theoretical and disrespectful of du Maurier' (Zizek, private
communication). The six stories listed here were collected in this volume.
