ABSTRACT
Narcissus The myth of Narcissus1 tells of a fate in sharp contrast with Oedipus’s. Where Oedipus’s tragedy recounts a man’s quest to know his origins and fate, Narcissus is condemned to die should he ever know himself. The essence of the tale presents Narcissus going to a pond to quench his thirst, discovering the existence of his reflection in the water and falling in love with it. Attempts at forming an erotic relationship with this image fail, causing Narcissus to understand aspects of his forming subjectivity. First, the image is his own, not an other’s he can exchange with. He is denied the intersubjective exchange he covets: touching the image in the pond destroys it and he cannot be touched by it. Second, Narcissus realises that the image, the sight of which initially fulfils him, is not stable, not even as mere vision: his falling tears cloud his eyes, make the surface ripple. Narcissus is then left with a quivering reflection of himself and discovers the instability of the specular image. Finally, he is unable to bear the separation between his body reality and his image reality and commits suicide. Interpretations of the Ovidian narrative vary. Within psychoanalytic thought, the view that narcissism is a normal stage of development and the later mark of a defined pathology prevails. The overarching image is that of Narcissus, the prototypical character who gives his name to a psychical phenomenon. Other characters are left in the shadow if not obliterated from analysis. In particular, feminist thinkers (Mitchell, Spivak, Nouvet, Lichtenberg Ettinger) have recuperated the tale to challenge psychoanalytic narratives by focusing on the role of Echo. Gayatri Spivak (1996) emphasises the motivations for the erasure of Echo’s narrative in more traditional psychoanalytic readings. Indeed, Spivak’s reading re-locates Narcissus: no longer the typified hero of a stalled process of (phallic) subjectivation, Narcissus becomes the account of the subject’s search for a lost origin, whose internal conflicts tell of the difficulty to testify to a narrative of the maternal within a phallocentric economy. Spivak’s opposition Narcissus/Echo, where Narcissus fixes and Echo disseminates, is reminiscent of Kristeva’s own symbolic/semiotic opposition. Indeed Spivak’s opposing of the two characters carries the image of narcissism as developmental and pathological stage between an objectless and object relating individual. For Narcissus, Echo is an invitation to relate to an other than himself, an invitation he rejects. Both Spivak and Kristeva
1 See: Ovid’s account; Kristeva, 1983: 131-4; Hamilton, 1993: 19-25; Cooper and
Maxwell, 1995: vii-x and 36.
