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House Of Leaves And Infinite Jest Analysis

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I plan to follow the notion of desire through four concerns in House of Leaves and Infinite Jest: the function of the mother, the role of the films, the structure of the novels/ process of reading, and the relation of addict and reader. Desire is a notion at stake in Deleuze’s and Guattari 's departure from the Lacanian and Freudian model of the unconscious. However, the Deleuze-Guattarian conception of desire is not grounded in antagonism with the Lacanian model, but in a completely different tradition and is in fact closer to the psychoanalytic notion of drive. These two separate registers of desire will function as a basis for reading both novels and the four areas of concern will operate as points of entry into the two novels.
1. Context …show more content…

His problem is primarily with Brooks’ reliance on metaphor as desire for an end (via Freudian death drive) and the value Brooks places on endings despite his concession regarding the fictive nature of interpretation, which Clayton feels to be perfunctory (Clayton, 66). I claim that Clayton misses the importance of Brooks’ insight here, in that Brooks not only captures desire as a process by locating the tension between metonymical sliding and metaphorical closure- though he restricts it to the movements within narrative- but also asserts the essential retrospective nature of interpretation. By locating these two functions of desire in Lacan’s Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious, I should be able to suggest how Lacan’s insight both conjoins with and exceeds Brooks’ notion of desire. Further, the gap between Brooks and Deleuze is that for the latter desire does not end in metaphorical fantasy, but production; a novel is a machine that links to other machines in multiple ways. The Oedipal fantasy-metaphor, for example, becomes actual function instead of fantasy and is marginalized as one function among many. In a review of Clayton’s work, Gregory Jay argues that he has missed key figures in the debate about desire, such as Fredric Jameson and his The Political Unconscious, instead surveying a list of moderate theories of desire that help to support his own framework (203-4). Similarly, though Clayton listed Deleuze and Lacan in his overview of theories of desire, there was no treatment of Deleuze and Lacan was placed under the model of

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