ABSTRACT

The goal of this chapter is to make sense of the Lacanian i.e. that a topological function of the letter is characteristic of literary language. When the unconscious speaks at the juncture where jouissance bends itself to the signifier, people refer it as the practice of the letter in literary art. The author says, literature is the home of the unconscious real. Lacan used the Borromean unit, to depict the ordering of the real of the drives, the symbolic field of language. The precise distinction between art and literature is that literature consists of the effects of such signification while the material specificity of the art object resists the effects. Lacan's saying in Seminar XX that the sinthome is a knot which is a writing of the sexual non-rapport. Literary fiction is most at home on the slope of metonymy, referring to the libido which language paradoxically cancels out and seeks to compensate with all the devices people call creative.