David Copperfield, Jacques Lacan and Me

Here it is! At last! I know that you have all been waiting with bated breath for this long awaited post on David Copperfield. How can you stand it? To have such a long awaited wish fulfilled--it must be like a dream come true. Or the Oprah show.

Kidding!

Seriously, though, sorry for taking so long. It's something that's been knocking around inside my head for close to a month now and then I chickened out of writing it because I thought that the comments section would fill up with "DUH!"s and then I talked the thing to the Lovely Whimsy while she was here and she said, "Dude. Who cares? Who cares if everyone says 'Duh!' Who cares what anyone thinks, this is cool and you need to write it!"

So here I am.


Back in March I started David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (of course). Anyone who's been in my house knows that I have the complete novels of Charles Dickens all in the Penguin edition. I generally love the penguin editions of classics, they're well annotated and the introductions are usually really good. I say usually because this one was unusually BAD. I mean BAD. The author (I am refraining from naming him because it's hard to be a scholar) is disjointed and all over the place, it's almost as if he can't decide what he wants to write about and so he writes some of everything but never gets around to saying anything meaningful about the text as a whole.

He completes this disjointed mishmash of opinions of David Copperfield by talking about identity. Now. I think that most anyone knows that David Copperfield is a coming of age story. It starts with the title character's BIRTH (for crying out loud!) and then follows the progress of his life and his growth into manhood. That said, doesn't it seem fairly self-explanatory that his identity would...oh, I don't know...CHANGE? I thought so, but that could also just be me.

Please forgive me while I quote directly from the text at this point. Unnamed Author writes,

"People often talk about searching for an identity, but the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan referred to 'the armor of an alienating identity'--which implies that having an identity, grasping at one, is the problem, not the lack of it. Identity, which means that the individual knows him or herself to be a single subject, with marked characteristics, alienates the subject from him or herself because it excludes things which are 'other' to that single formation. By acting as armor, as a carapace, identity is something which has been wrested from the category of 'otherness', so that the subject has made, or is making, a fetish of its own separate existence."
(David Copperfield, introduction, xxviii)

I'll be honest with you. I was in Bed Sweet Bed reading and I read that and sat bolt upright like I had been shocked. I immediately put the book down, only to pick it back up again and reread that paragraph. I put it down again and sat and thought. And I thought and I thought and I thought for a good long while. Into the small hours of the morning I thought. The next day I pulled down one of my literary theory text books, looked up Jacques Lacan and read the original. After which, I put that book back on the shelf. I went about my life, I tended the Boy, I did the laundry, I emailed and I blogged. But this nagging thought would not leave me be.

I was guilty of that. I was guilty of armoring myself as a single entity. For so long I had been Scholar. When I was no longer in school, I started this blog and became The Wife. After the Boy was born I became a Mother. For months I have been driving myself mad by drips by being unable to reconcile all the pieces of my fractured self. And as I thought and festered, I remembered.

Many and many a year ago I had this fantastic professor of South Asian literature. She drilled into us again and again and again that identity is fluid, almost liminal, suspended between those fixed roles. How is it that I forgot? And she's right. Jacques Lacan is right. Our identities aren't FIXED. We aren't a single thing, title, role. Who we are is like water, it's fluid, it's changing and shifting all the time. It flows into other places, it shifts into other forms, it soaks into all aspects of our life and takes all of the different pieces of our life into account.

I never stopped being a Scholar. I will never stop being The Wife. I am those things. All parts of me are those things. But now I am also a mother. An editor. A friend. A sister. A daughter. A lover. A mirror. A confidant. A runner. An aunt. A writer. And who knows what I may become in the future. Who I am is all of those things and at the same time none of those things--only M.

I've been more than usually depressed in the past few months. But as I accepted that--as I let go of my need to define myself as one entity, I found a certain peace. A friend of mine once said that your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. He's right. It's a painful thing to let go of that armor. To allow who you are to become fluid again. To strip away your self-imposed labels and accept that who you are is constantly changing and simultaneously always the same.

I've spent far too much time and energy trying to fit in. Apologizing for my quirkiness, my eccentricities, my neuroses if you will. I've silenced myself in an effort not to offend, but the outcome of that is only frustration and depression. I'm not sure when I started to care so much what other people thought of me. I didn't used to care. I don't particularly want to care now, but underneath it all, I do. But. BUT! I'm also done. I refuse to apologize anymore for who I am. I'm done trying to explain it away so that everyone feels comfortable. Discomfort is not an evil, it's a necessary part of life.

Whimsy is always reminding me that pain makes you beautiful.