【齐泽克】实在界的鬼脸，或菲勒斯显现之时

Grimaces of the Real, or When the Phallus Appears Slavoj Žižek October, Vol. 58, Rendering the Real. (Autumn, 1991), pp. 44-68. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0162-2870%28199123%2958%3C44%3AGOTROW%3E2.0.CO%3B2-4 October is currently published by The MIT Press. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/journals/mitpress.html. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers, and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. http://www.jstor.org Mon Jan 28 16:06:08 2008 Grimaces of the Real, or When the Phallus Appears SLAVOJ ZIZEK The "Phantom of the Opera": a Spectroscopy The coincidence of motifs between high art (and theory) and mass culture has become a theoretical commonplace. Do we not find the clearest figuration of the famouspe suzs un autre in the mass-culture tradition of vampires and the living dead which "decenters" the subject, undermining its consistency and self- control from within?' The main problem with this resonance is the notion of a Zeitgeist as its interpretive device. One way to avoid this is to play high art and mass culture against each other-that is, to interpret each with the help of the other, like Levi-Strauss's iVlythologzques, in which myths interpret one another. Let us take the "phantom of the opera," undoubtedly mass culture's central apparition, which has kept the popular imagination busy from Gaston Leroux's novel at the turn of the century through a series of movie and T V versions u p to the recent musical. In what does the repulsive horror of his face consist? There are four features that define it: The eyes: "His eyes are so deep that you can hardly see the fixed pupils. All you can see is two big black holes, as in a dead man's sku l l . "To a connoisseur of Alfred Hitchcock, this image instantly recalls the scene from The Birds in which, in a lonely farmhouse, Sfitch's mother (Jessica Tandy) stumbles upon the corpse whose eyes have been picked out. At the sight of it she emits a silent scream. On those occasions when we do catch the sparkle of these eyes, they seem like two lighted candles deep within the head, perceivable only in the dark; these two lights somehow at odds hith the head's surface, like lanterns burning at night in a lonely, abandoned house, are responsible for the uncanny effect of the "living dead." Sly first "free association" from the domain of high culture is Edvard Munch's paintings from the same period, primarily his Evenzng 1. For a detailed account of this parallel, see James Donald, "The Fantastic, the Sublime and the Popular; or, LVhat's at Stake in Vampire Films? in Fantas) and thr Cznema, ed. J . Donald (London: British Film Institute, 1980), pp. 233-52. 2. Gaston Let-oux, Thr Phantom of thr Opera (New k'ork: Hippocrene Books Inc., 1990), p. 12. Edvard Munch. The Scream. 1893. From Claude Brunet. Le progres de la mCdecine. 1698. David Lynch. Elephant Man. 1980. on Karl Johan (1892), where the stream of ghostly pedestrians moves toward the spectator, their goggling eyes at odds with their death-mask faces. The nose: "His nose is so little worth talking about that you can't see it side- face: and the absence of that nose is a horrible thing to look at.'13 Is it necessary to recall that Freud, in his article on fetishism, uses exactly the same words to describe the horror of castration: what horrifies the child is the very absence of the penis, the fact that there is nothing to see there where the gaze expects something? On this point, there is an interesting divergence between Leroux's novel and the recent TV miniseries on the "phantom." In the novel, the phantom's primordial trauma was that, as a child, he was so ugly that even his own mother found him repulsive. When he approached her for an embrace, she pushed him aside with disgust and asked him to put on his mask.4 But in the T V series, nobody could stand his distorted face with the exception of his mother, to whom he seemed nice and normal. She constantly caressed his face while entertaining him with her heavenly voice, and his later obsession with opera came out of a desperate search for the repetition of his mother's voice. Here one has to avoid the pseudoproblem of which version is "proper": they are to be read in the LCvi-Straussian manner as two complementary versions of the same myth that interpret each other. What did his mother see in his face 3. Ibid. The corresponding feature in Munch's paintings-if we are to continue the homology-is the absence of nose and ears from the homunculus's head in his most famous paint- ing, The Scream (1893). 4. According to Lacan's classical definition, the function of the mask is "to dominate the identifications through which refusals of love are resolvedn ("The Meaning of the Phallus," in Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the Ecole Freudienne, ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose [New York: Norton, 19851, p. 85); it is therefore not difficult to conceive the phantom's compulsive mask-wearing-another of his features-as a strategy to counter the refusal of maternal love. (in the second, TV version) that she found so irresistibly attractive, while the same face was so repugnant to the first mother? There is only one possible answer: the exact opposite-that is, an excessive phallic protuberance, repulsive to a "normal" gaze, in place of the absent nose-in short, the accomplishment of her (maternal) desire to obtain in the child her missing phallus, something resembling the case, famous during the eighteenth century, of the monster from Claude Brunet that has been analyzed by Alain Gro~richard.~ The amorphous distortion of the face: the flesh has not yet assumed definite features; it dwells in a kind of preontological state, as if "melted," as if deformed by anamorphosis. The horror lies not in his death mask, but rather in what is concealed beneath it, in the palpitating skinned flesh: anyone who catches sight of this amorphous life-substance has entered the forbidden domain and must therefore be excluded from the community. And herein consists the ultimate paradox of the "living dead": that death and the death stench it spreads are a mask sheltering a Life far more "alive" than our ordinary daily life. The place of the "living dead" is not somewhere between the dead and the living; it is precisely as the dead that they are "more alive than life itself," having access to the life-substance prior to its symbolic mortification. Lacanian psychoanalysis locates the cause of this deformity in the anamorphotic gaze, the gaze sustained by an incestuous enjoyment: the anamorphotic distortion of reality is the way the gaze is inscribed into the object's surface. One should recall here another case from the same period, that of the "elephant man," immortalized by David Lynch in the film of the same name. According to the mythology surrounding 5. See Alain Grosrichard, "Le cas Polyphtme ou Un monstre et sa mere," Omicar? 11 (1977), pp. 19-36, and 12/13 (1977), pp. 45-57. OCTOBER this figure, the grotesque protophallic protuberance on his forehead (the "ele- phant's nose"), as well as the general deformity of his body, designate the inscription of the maternal gaze onto the bodily surface. The myth of the "elephant man" is as follows: during a circus parade watched by his pregnant mother, an elephant went berserk and almost trampled her down; this "view from below" of the mad elephant affected the mother and caused the elephant-like distortion of the e m b r y ~ . ~ We encounter the same anamorphotic deformity of the face in a series of Munch's paintings where the face seems to lose its contours and "melt down" into a whitish slime. Let it suffice to mention Ashes, Vampzre, and The KZSS, three drawings in which, during sexual intercourse or in its aftermath, the man literally "loses his face." The exceptzonal status of hzs vozce: the phantom of the opera is first of all a being-of-voice. In the novel he is regularly addressed as "the man's voice," as if the "normal" relationship of voice and its bearer (its source) were inverted: instead of the ~ o i c e appertaining to the body as one of its properties, it is the body itself that, in its distortion, materializes an "impossible," originally bodiless, and as such all-powerful (all-present) voice baptized by Michel Chion "la vozx acourmatzque."' The first association here is again, of course, Munch's The Scream. In it, the energy of the hindered scream, which cannot burst out and release itself in the sound, finds an outlet (one is almost tempted to say "is acted out") in the anamorphotic distortion of the body in its "unnatural" serpentine wind- ings, and in that of the coast and water beyond the bridge-as if these spiral lines are here to materialize sound vibrations in a kind of effect of converszon of the hindered sound into a distortion of matter. The Voice Qua Object In his seminar on anxiety (1960-61), Lacan referred to Munch's The Scream in order to exemplify the status of the voice qua object. That is to say, the crucial feature of the painting is the fact that the scream is not heard. The point here is not the obvious fact that "paintings do not speak"; indeed, there are paintings that are definitely resonant and call sounds to mind-the paintings of street scenes bursting with life, of dancing, of stormy nature, etc. It is rather that the very essence of this picture is that the scream we perceive is mute since the anxiety is too taut for it to find an outlet in vocalization (August Strindberg 6. There is a piquant detail as to the elephant man's "true story": when the historians examined the sources, they discovered that the myth of his origins has a surprising foundation in fact: a local newspaper from his native town contains a small note according to which-precisely at the time of his mother's pregnancy-an elephant went mad and almost trampled down a pregnant woman during a circus parade! See Michael Howell and Peter Ford, The T n ~ eHzs toq of the Elepphant lLlan (New York: Penguin Books, 1980). 7. As to the concept of the "z~ozx acoz~smatique," see Michel Chion, La vozx a u cznema (Paris: Cahiers du cinema, 1982). Grimaces of the Real 49 totally missed the point when he prattled on about how, in order to enjoy Munch's paintings, one should imagine appropriate music to accompany them). As we have already pointed out, this structural muteness is indexed within the painting itself by the absence of ears in the desperate homunculus's head: as if these ears, foreclosed from the (symbolic) reality of the face, return in the real of the anamorphotic stain, the form of which recalls a gigantic ear. In everyday language, one could say that the scream "got stuck in the throat"; what is "stuck in the throat" is precisely the voice qua object, the voice that cannot burst out, unchain itself and thus enter the dimension of subjectivity. It is no accident that, in his Seminar XI, Lacan determines the object small a as the bone that got stuck in the subject's throat. If the exemplary case of the gaze qua object is a blind man's eyes, eyes which do not see, then the exemplary case of the voice qua object is a voice that remains silent, a voice that we do not hear.s The most famous scream in the history of cinema is also silent: the scream of a mother who powerlessly watches her son being shot down by soldiers in the scene at the Odessa steps in Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin. In a tracking 8. The opposition of voice and gaze as objects corresponds to the antagonism of life drive and death drive: the voice vivifies whereas the gaze mortifies. Sergei Etsenrtein. Battleship Potemkin. 1925. OCTOBER shot the camera approaches the mother, who is clutching her head in desper- ation, and it almost enters the black hole of her open mouth. The entire effect is again based on the fact that we do not hear her scream. The scream "gets stuck in her throat" like the silent scream uttered by Mitch's mother upon encountering the corpse with its eyes pecked out. To this silent scream, which bears out the horror-stricken encounter with the real of enjoyment, one has to oppose the scream of release, of decision, of chozce-the scream by means of which the unbearable tension finds an outlet. We "spit out the bone" in the relief of vocalization; in Hitchcock's oeuvre, the most famous case of this is Doris Day's scream in The Man Who Knew Too Much, a scream that, at the last moment, prevents the murder in the Albert Hall. One has to bear in mind here the contrast between this scream and the silent mother's scream from Potemkin. Although they are both placed within the mother-son relationship, the silent scream manifests the mother's resistance to cutting the umbilical cord that links her with the son, whereas the scream in The Man Who Knew Too Much signals that the mother, driven into a corner by a forced choice between her son and community, renounces the child and chooses community. This scream is there- fore in its very coarseness "an act of civilization." In other words, the opposition between the silent and the vocalized scream coincides with that of enjoyment and Other: the silent scream attests to the subject's clinging to enjoyment, to his o r her unwillingness to exchange enjoyment (that is, the object that gives body to it) for the Other, for the Law, for the paternal metaphor, whereas the vocalization as such corroborates the choice that is already made and the sub- ject's place within the community." The voice that obsesses the phantom is, however, not a scream, but a hypnotic operatic air-he falls in love with Christine after he recognizes in her seductive singing the resonance of the lost maternal voice. I n The Man Who Knew Too lMuch, this incestuous song that links the subject to the Thing (the maternal body), the song by means of which the Thing catches him with its 9. There is, however, a third type of scream that is neither silent nor vocal, but tlocalzzed wtth deferral. We find it, among other examples, toward the end of Coppola's The Godfather Part 111: it is uttered on the steps of Palermo's opera house by Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) after a mafia killer shoots his beloved daughter. At first the scream is silent; we witness the desperate opening of his mouth in complete silence. After a couple of seconds the sound strikes us with all its force. What is at work here is a kind of self-reflectivity, as if the scream were vocalized at the very moment when the subject perceives, becomes aware of, its silence. As long as the scream remains silent, we float in a kind of "stasis" of time (in Walter Benjamin's sense of this term)-the movement is suspended, the hero's entire life is condensed in three images superimposed in the timeless "now" (the murdered daughter, the murdered bride long years ago, the lost wife); when the scream resounds, Michael finds himself in the place homologous to that of Oedipus at Colonnus: by way of the scream, his "life force" evaporates, Michael is "emptied," his symbolic destiny is fulfilled- what remains of him is an empty shell, a burst soap bubble, a pure leftover of the real. It is therefore quite consistent that this scream is followed by a kind of reverse flashback, a jump into the unspecified future, when Michael, a lonely old man on a garden chair, suddenly falls down and drops dead: this utterly void figure drained of life is all that remains of him after the scream. Grzmuces of the Real tentacles, is, of course, none other than the notorious "Que Sera, Sera" sung by Doris Day in the embassy where her son is kept prisoner. It is a song through which the mother reaches, "catches," her son, that is to say, a song that expressly establishes the incestuous umbilical link (here Hitchcock makes use of a formal procedure whose audacity has not yet been fully perceived-the camera directly "tracks" the voice, "shows" its resonance on the staircase and its climb to the attic room where the son is locked up). Another crucial feature of this scene is the accentuated vulgarity and obscenity of Doris Day's singing-her voice is far too noisy, so that the distinguished guests at the reception avoid each other's gaze and look away, as if embarrassed by such an obscene exhibition. The third and final feature not to be missed is the content of the song itself, which directly exhibits its superego status: "Que Sera, Sera," what will be will be-how could one avoid noticing, in this answer to the child's question as to what will become of him when he grows up, the malevolent indifference that pertains to the very notion of the superego? This superego status is further confirmed if one locates "Que Sera, Sera" in the context of other Hitchcock films, as the middle term between Rear Window and P.~jcho.What we have in mind is, of course, a pecu- liarity of Rear Windoul's soundtrack.1° When, late in the evening, Grace Kelly approaches James Stewart, who is taking a nap in his wheelchair (first as an ominous shadow which overflows his face, then as "herself"), the background sounds-the rich texture of everyday noises-are suddenly suspended, and all we hear is the voice of an unknown soprano practicing scales, as if the mother is yet learning to sing (which is why she still tolerates the exchange of kisses between Stewart and Kelly). I n The Man Who Knew Too Much the mother already knows how to sing; her voice finally reaches the son-the ultimate result of which is then shown in Psycho: a son dominated by the mother's voice, so that one is tempted to risk the thesis that the boy from The Mun Who Knew Too Much is none other than Norman Bates in his childhood. In order to avoid the danger of the so-called "psychoanalytic interpretation of art" that lurks here (maternal superego as the "secret" of the voice-stain), one has to accomplish the properly dialectical reversal of the explanans into e.xplunandum. The point is not to inter- pret the unfathomable "acousmatique" voice as the maternal superego, but rather to turn it around, to explain the very logic of the maternal superego by means of this vocal stain. What we call "maternal superego" is nothing but such a voice, which smears the picture and disturbs its transparency Our procedure is there- fore strictly allegorical-"mother" qua diegetic personality is ultimately an agency that, within the narrative content of Hitchcock's films, stands in for, holds the place of, a certain formal disturbance, a stain that blurs the field of vision. The scream and the song thus form an opposition: the status of the song 10. See Michel Chion, "Le quatrieme cote," Cahiers du cznlma