“Nothing survives its telling,” Zadie Smith warns us in the first pages of NW. There are two logical questions that might arise in response to such a claim: first, who is doing the telling and who (or what) is doing the listening? Second, what is “it” and how does “it” die? We can use psychoanalytic analysis as both a tool to address these questions, as well as to enrich and nuance our reading of NW. Smith’s blending of tenses, voices, and stream of consciousness narration throughout the novel serves as a deliberate choice, to not only convey the factual lives of several working-class Northwestern Londoners, but to force the reader to experience the workings of their psyches. This, of course, is no small task for either the author nor the reader, and is infinitely compounded by the nature of our (the humble reader’s) thoughts, both conscious and unconscious. The novel serves as a tabula rasa onto which the reader may, through transference, project his or her expectations and neuroses; though, this is not entirely accurate, as the processes of the unconscious Other work in tandem and in conversation with the (very much not blank) narratives and dialogues in NW. Thus, it is through the lens of Lacanian reading analysis, by way of Felman, which we go “beyond Freud” and delve into the processes that govern our reading (and therefore, experiencing) of the lives before us on the page. 

Reading NW, it may strike one that there are multiple discourses occurring at once; the literal dialogue between characters is frequently interrupted and morphed by the mental space of the narrator: “Leah spins her spoon in her tea, a drink she never takes, especially in this weather. She has pressed the bag too hard… Shar keeps talking… –Sorry, what?… –I said, can I have that tea?” This running consciousness underneath dialogue and action is sometimes conveyed in the first person and sometimes in the third, but is always present, communicating that the narrative space of Visitation occupies the inside of Leah Hanwell’s psyche. In her analysis of The Turn of the Screw, Felman notes a similar phenomenon, noting that James’ framing of the reader as a member of a campfire hearing the ghost story which becomes the novella, “pulls the outside of the story into its inside by enclosing in it what is usually outside: its own readers.” Instead of assigning the reader a physical space in the narrative, Smith invites her reader into the jumbled, sometimes erratic thoughts that preoccupy Leah’s mind; thus, the Lacanian Other, governed by its own “logic of the signifier,” becomes in its own right, a narrator and a teller of Leah’s tale. We catch a glimpse of those processes that inhibit Leah’s successful conversion of her intentions and desires into language throughout Visitation: “Leah sighs, loudly. It’s childish but she can’t help it… -Can I be excused? I think Olive needs a shit and I don’t want her to do it on your perfect lawn… Leah and Michel are left sitting in the grass, cross-legged, like children. This house makes her feel like a child.” These feelings and associations served to make the reader privy to her internal discourse, but also place us external to her, as it signifies “the storyteller’s transference on the reader [so that we] become the storyteller’s ghost (the addressee of his unconscious) … the reader, in his turn, transfers on the storyteller… the authority and prestige of the “subject presumed to know.” We, and our own unconscious processes, are the receivers of Leah’s unfiltered thoughts (and thus, her unconscious) and Leah is the ultimate subject through which we process our expectations and experience of reading the novel. 

In fact, these roles do not remain constant throughout the section, as Smith (who in turn has her own discourse, separate from, but still incorporated into the novel) strategically draws on Leah’s role as the “subject presumed to know” to draw the reader into the reality of Smith’s experience through the fictional one on the page; that is, through transference, Smith is “acting out the reality of the unconscious,” in much the same way the reader does, all while hinting at the deeper, unfathomable process within Leah. Smith paints the scene of Leah and Michel lying in bed, contemplating why “the husband can’t understand the woman’s preoccupation. Of course, he is missing a vital piece of information. There is no way for him to follow the submerged, feminine logic. He can only try to listen as she speaks. I just want to know if I did the right thing, says the woman, I just can’t work out if I… But here the man stops her to say…” Here, Smith uses the shifting of tense from third person to first person to bring us inside and simultaneously outside of the narrative; by framing a story within a story in Chapter 5, the preverbal “man and woman” become divorced from Leah and Michel and become more about the reader’s expectations of what the signifiers of “man and woman” mean, the response they illicit in the reader, and Smith’s challenge or affirmation of that conceptualization. All the while, the “I” intimately refers to Leah and her earlier ordeal with Shar. The “vital information” that Michel is missing is Leah’s inner machinations, which we are privy to; however, while Leah would use this access to express her desires and anxieties to us (her ghosts), Smith uses it for her own purpose, ascribing it the status of feminine. Coupled with the textual divorce of Leah from “woman,” Smith leads the reader to experience sentences like “the man is more beautiful than the woman,” on a different realm than simply Leah’s thoughts, as those exist in the realm of “she” and “I,” rather than “the woman.” This scene highlights what Felman refers to as a “frame of mirrors… in which the narrative is both reflected and deflected through a series of… glances of couples looking at themselves looking at themselves.” However, Smith takes the idea a step further by gendering, racializing, and class-consciously injecting the element of “seeing,” moving it away from the realms of individuals and to various identities. Thus, it is important to include Smith’s voice as a separate discourse taking place distinctly apart from Leah’s or the reader’s, and having ultimate power over the denizens of NW. This power is manifest in Smith’s control over what Felman calls the “textuality of text.” While a Freudian reading might seek the “truth” of a reading in the content itself, Felman and Lacan urge us to consider that the text being printed text is, itself, important to our understanding and the process of transference in our reading. Smith, in Visitation more than any section, is acutely aware of the role the reader’s literal reading experience plays in the unconscious discourse we make with the text. By crafting a typographical layout that resembles an apple tree while we are (presumably) reading Leah’s wandering thoughts, or even free association with the tree, Smith draws our attention to the underlying physical image which is occupying Leah’s mental space. This has the effect of making the reader internal, “seeing” Leah’s “logic of the signifier,” that vital information which Michel misses, play out amongst her stochastic associations; “the more the worms. The more the rats…apple tree. Which way forward? Tick, tock. Three flats. One apple tree…heavy with seed.” This internality is constantly undercut by the persuasive reminder, through the text’s “textuality,” that we are reading the signifiers chosen by Smith, but which are distinctly Leah’s. Smith asserts her role as the “true” author, effectively minimizing character space throughout with her control of the font, typography, and punctuation. For example, Smith makes dialogue font smaller throughout the section; making it physically more difficult to read, drawing less attention to words spoken and more Leah’s mental context. The reader experiences this as a ‘ghost,” melded with the deeply internal and simultaneously kept at a distance.

If we were to take the Visitation narrative at face value, the story of a woman who experiences a robbery, struggles with pregnancy, aging, her marriage, the loss of her closest friendship, the disapproval of her mother, and the harsh economic reality of her life would a captivating, yet straight-forward to read. These themes and narratives are not entirely unfamiliar to our conscious mind and to a strictly non-psychoanalytic reading of the text. This story, however, very much does not “survive its telling;” when we include a Lacanian interpretation of the intersection of literature and the unconscious processes of language, we find ourselves more removed yet closer to the text than we were before. A rich sea of words becomes struggles between discourses seeking dominance or understanding over the other, and whose very position and size on the page reveals the inner machinations of the narrator’s latent desires manifest as misunderstood language. Suddenly, the experience of the reader reading the text and his or her interaction, consciously and unconsciously, is fundamental to the search for “truth” within it. 

Endnotes

1. Smith, Zadie. NW. Penguin Books, 2013, p. 16. 

2. Smith, p. 13. 

3. Felman, Shoshana. “Turning the Screw of Interpretation.” Yale French Studies, no. 55/56, 1977, p. 123.

4. Clark, Michael P. “Lacan, Jacques.” The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism | Login, 2005, litguide.press.jhu.edu/cgi-bin/view.cgi ?eid=162.

5. Smith, p. 74.

6. Felman, p. 134.

7. Felman, p. 133.

8. Smith, p. 25.  

9. Felman, p. 132.