Stories of Space

Lauren Elkin

Clem MacLeod and Lauren Elkin discuss the research and writing of Elkin’s complex Lacanian love story Scaffolding.

INTERVIEW BY: CLEM MACLEOD

PHOTOS BY: ISABEL MACCARTHY

The book itself is not complex, but in Lauren Elkin’s latest work of fiction, we enter into the minds of two couples living in the same apartment almost five decades apart, experiencing myriad relationship complexities. For the psychoanalysis issue of Worms, Clem chats with Lauren Elkin about the influences behind the novel and why she chose to write a fictional narrative about two female psychoanalysts, as well as the energies of physical space and the stories that are held within us and that we leave behind. 

Clem MacLeod: Where did the idea of writing a book about psychoanalysis come from?

Lauren Elkin: I started writing the book in 2007 when I was in grad school and we were reading Lacan in a graduate seminar. It's so strange looking back at it, why was I reading Lacan for a PhD in English literature? I think maybe they do less theory now in graduate programmes than they used to, but I was trained in the nineties and noughties, so theory was still very much a part of the curriculum back then. I was reading Lacan and thinking about his conception of how we are formed as subjects through lack, through originary experience; which he calls ‘the mirror stage,’ of realising that we are separate entities to our mothers. We initially feel oceanic and infinite and endless, and then one fateful day we look in the mirror and see, oh, I'm finite and separate from her and from that feeling of wholeness. That's the moment when the young baby/child/toddler person enters into language. That subjectivity coincides with the entrance into what Lacan calls a ‘symbolic order’ and separation from the mother. And for some reason, maybe because I was living abroad very far from my own mother and trying to make my way in a place where I had no connection, no family, no reason to be there except my own stubbornness, it really resonated with me. I think I was using love and sex and shopping and grad school and all of these things to compensate for that kind of originary feeling of loss. So I just realised that desire was going to be what it meant to be a person and that I could never assuage or satisfy my desire. There would always be something else that I was after. Reading Lacan really helped me accept that, but it still remained interesting to me as an intellectual idea, but also as a life philosophy. So for various reasons, I think I wanted to write a book about Lacan but didn't have the authority to do so not being a psychoanalyst or as someone who had any business writing about psychoanalysis except as a critic and as a novelist.

That's really interesting, this idea of accepting our finiteness and desires. Something that came up for me while reading was the idea of the stories that we tell ourselves. I was left questioning how important language is to the stories that we tell ourselves. Do you think that it's imperative that we communicate our stories and desires, and that they exist through language in order for us to process them and to make peace with them? Or do you think that they can peacefully exist within us?

What I take from Lacan is that language is so tricky and that we can end up telling other stories than the ones we intended to. So in the context of the novel, the characters are coming to terms with the idea that they think they're saying one thing, but their lover or their friend is understanding something else. For instance, in Lacan’s therapeutic context, he thought it was more important to cut someone off from talking, than to let them go on telling a story that might actually be a construction - that something closer to the truth of what we're living or experiencing might actually take place beneath the surface of the conscious mind. He believed the unconscious is structured like a language, language is obviously an important part of differentiating between one thing and another, but he thinks that that work is happening in another kind of language that is not our conscious language.

So there’s a conflict in trying to give language to our stories?

Well we’re trying, when we're talking like we are right now, to be as specific as we can be to pin down this impression that we have, but language is an imperfect medium and it's always getting away from us.

For Lacan, that means playing with that and with wordplay and puns and things like that. And for me, it often takes the form of words that I can't quite think of. I often find myself speaking in a state of . I can kind of imagine what it is I'm trying to say or what the word is that I'm looking for, but I can't put my finger on it. I feel that often as a writer, even just as a person talking to other people, I live in this kind of linguistic imaginary and I'm just gesturing at something that I'm trying to get across.

It’s almost claustrophobic to think of. The idea of being trapped by language and not being able to communicate. It's like being a baby.

Yeah, completely. It’s panicky. 

I read a book by Alan Watts and he says this thing about accessing your mind, and how everything that you need, all of your language and ideas and mechanisms for communication, are always within you, but unless you ‘still your mind’ you can’t access them fully. So as soon as you start thinking about these things, these barriers go up in your mind and you get stuck in stagnant communication. It's like a spiderweb situation where the harder that you push, the more stuck you become.

Exactly. And if you're a writer then ideally you have the time and the space to let the right words come, or to look for them, but orality is so challenging.

Do you feel like the precise communication of your ideas is a pressure that you feel the more that you produce and the more successful that you become? Do you feel the stickiness increasing? 

Yeah, totally. I listen to someone like Maggie Nelson who's incredibly articulate and thoughtful and as interesting to listen to talk about her work as it is to read her work. And I feel like that's not at all true for me. I would hope that I'm interesting to read, but I don't feel like I'm as interesting to listen to unless I'm having this kind of conversation with the back and forth. I don't feel very good at spouting interesting thoughts off the cuff, I'm much more of a writer's writer than a writer's talker.

What did your research process look like for Scaffolding? Did you find yourself psychoanalysing yourself during the process of writing the characters? 

Yeah, 100%. I mean, I started the book in 2007 and only finished it in the last year. One of the reasons it took 16 years to write is because I kept thinking I needed to read all of Lacan and as much of Freud or Winnicott or Melanie Klein or whoever else I could get in there. It’s not possible to take in everything in that way. So I read what I felt was important to read of Lacan and then said, this is the best I can do. I read a great book by Jamieson Webster called Disorganisation and Sex, which was very helpful. I read a lot of Darian Leader who's just wonderful at applying Lacan to everyday life, and I was in therapy for much of the time that I was writing.

Coming back to that second part of your question, it can be difficult to keep yourself out of things. But I've tried to focus on psychoanalysing these imaginary people that I've made up, who obviously have a lot in common with me and with people that I've known in my life. I find it hard to make up people out of nowhere, but you can get the outline of who a character is or could be, and then you can psychoanalyse them on the basis of some suppositions that suggest themselves. With Cleméntine, I was trying to figure out what makes her the way she is. It was almost like psychoanalysing in reverse – inventing things that could have happened to her that could have caused these symptoms.

There's also a bit of dream analysis. Henry not being able to dream, and Florence’s dream of white space – that felt really specific. Is that a dream that you have had?

No, not at all. That came out of reading this French psychoanalyst called Nathalie Zajde, who had done all of this writing in the nineties and noughties thinking about the ways in which the families or descendants of Holocaust survivors had the same dreams, and had the same nightmares without even necessarily being told about them. So the specific dream that Florence has was just something I made up, something I could imagine.

Would you say that you'd be able to analyse your dreams now?

Having spent all of his time reading psychoanalytic literature made me better at doing it. In fact, I did have a really disturbing dream the other night about my partner cheating on me and this morning I was realising what all of the specific moments in the dream might mean, connecting to how they're all networked together with my writing and trying to carve out time for my writing during the school holidays. I feel really guilty about that and I'm almost being untrue to him or betraying him by taking this time to sit in a cafe and work, but I have the right to spend this time doing it and it's not taking something away from him, it's him giving me something as a gift. Anyway, I think having done all of this research probably got me to a point where I could think about that dream in that way, rather than being afraid my boyfriend's going to sleep with someone else. 

I have a recurring dream that I've probably had around 70 times where I’m on an aeroplane and it crash lands but it’s no big deal and I just kind of get off and walk around, usually a desert, have kind of a nice time and then get back on another flight. Someone said to me that it was my subconscious telling me that I can handle anything and remain calm.  

That makes a lot of sense. You're sort of staging the catastrophe for yourself while you're sleeping, but you see that it's okay and then you just get right back on the plane. I'd need to hear more to know about what different images might connect up with the specific things, but that seems like a good basic reading. But I’d be really interested if you do start an analysis to hear how that develops.

What's the purpose of that? Would it help me understand myself?

Yeah, I think it has as much of a purpose as any research that we do. I think if you’re a creative person or a researcher, it can help you with blockages in your work; the way that you're thinking about your work or even help you with the fear of doing the work. What's interesting about your dream is the absence of fear. It feels like a reassuring dream or an exploration of what it would be like if you did the thing that you're so scared of. So maybe you should just do the thing and then just see what it's like on the other end. It's almost like guides to life or guides to figuring out what's preventing us from living our lives with more bravery.

Something that comes up in the book is this idea that we can’t see each other ‘plain’, but do you think that a therapist is really able to look at us plain? Do you think they can see us without their experiences or ego playing into their view? I have a fundamental belief that everyone's experiences make up every way that they interact in the world, every way they think about things. But do you think that a therapist is able to completely cut off their own personal experience in order to be with patients?

No, definitely not. But I think that they're the closest we can come to that. They're really trying either to use their own experience productively to help or they're trying to be as neutral and objective as anyone can be.

So true objectivity is impossible?

Yeah, exactly.

There's also this concept of ‘the things that we leave behind.' The stories, the choices, and the energies of the apartments in the book. Do you think that setting the stories in the apartment block was imperative for this? Do you think that we pick up pieces from others in history in non-domestic spaces as well?

Yeah, completely. I think there's no space on the cultivated earth that hasn't already been run through by other people and other passions. I think that's what psychogeography is about, right? Charting the psychic landscape of a given place, whether it's indoors, outdoors, country or city; you're trying to be receptive to the psychic charge of the space. I hope that doesn't sound too woo woo, but I think places do have personalities, and I find it really interesting to try to attune myself to them and to understand them. There are obviously places where I feel right at home and places where I don't feel welcome. It’s about trying to understand how the place itself and the people and the structures that are there might be combining to make you feel a certain way. Obviously that has incredibly important social implications as well. As a woman, if I don't feel welcome somewhere, or if a person of colour didn't feel welcome somewhere, you have to look to how that space is producing that feeling of alienation.

How important do you think it is to understand those kinds of feelings and energy versus feeling them? Do you think that it's necessary to really be able to comprehend them and understand why? 

I think it depends on what the stakes are of the place. For example, for me in London, it's a long complicated story, and there were times when I felt really uncomfortable here and out of place, and then I had to move here, so I've had to make my own version of London that feels liveable. It feels like it's a London of my own, but that was hard. That doesn't really matter to anyone other than me, but it's important for me to be able to do my work in a place I feel at home in.

Do you think that writing has played a role in making you comfortable in London?

No, I think that being able to become comfortable in a metaphysical way has made it possible for me to write in London. I couldn't really write here before. We were living in Belsize Park in a mansion block before this, and I was just miserable there and somehow managed to finish Art Monsters and Scaffolding. I did a lot of writing in cafes, a lot of escaping the home. I don’t know why I needed to escape that living space to get my work done, but I just couldn't work in that flat.

I wanted to ask you a bit about the form of the book. The short fragmented chapters were really effective in making the reader feel like we were inside the mind of the characters, was this the reason for it?

Well there is this Lacanian idea of the short session, where you might talk to him for 40 minutes, or you might talk to him for 40 seconds before he cuts you off. I think it's about this idea that a lot can happen in the blank space on a page. A lot can happen by suggestion or inference. So I think I was trying to leave space for that. I was trying not to overwrite the situation. I don't want to make any grandiose statements saying that writers write too much, but for this particular book, it felt like there was a lot more I could get done by suggesting things rather than spelling them out.

It did really feel like each chapter was the perfect amount of insight into the situation before switching to the other person's situation. If someone were to come to psychoanalysis and reading about psychoanalysis for the first time, what would you recommend?

Oh, wow. That's such a good question because Lacan is really like being thrown into the deep end. I think his essay on the Mirror Stage, you really have to work through it, but it's worth doing. I think Jamieson Webster is great. I love Disorganisation and Sex. There's also a couple of critics who've written about Lacan who I think really helped me understand it. One is Kaja Silverman, her writing on Lacan is incredibly lucid and helpful. And Elizabeth Grosz. I remember reading those two critics years ago and that really helped me a lot. Then Julia Kristeva does some really interesting reworking of Lacan in her early writings on language.

Okay. I'm furiously writing all these down. What's next? Are you working on another book?

Yeah, there's a book that I'm under contract to write with Chatto about singing and the power of the female voice. That sort of grew out of Art Monsters. A lot of writing I'd done about Bikini Kill, The Slits, The Raincoats and feminist art pop that ended up not having a place in Art Monsters has found a new home in a book called Vocal Break. I trained as a singer a million years ago and looked at the art and cultural history of the female voice.

Very cool. What an exciting project to be working on.

Yeah it's fun. It’s so different to Scaffolding, so it's a little bit of a gear shift to be getting back into it. I’ve tried to not envisage what it's going to be before I've done it but the scholar in me is like, no, this is my argument and these are my subsections. And so I'm always fighting against that training. Trying to set my voice free.

How fitting! Thank you, Lauren.

Lauren Elkin is a writer, essayist and translator. She is known for her book, Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art and Flâneuse, which was among the list of notable books by The New York Times Book Review and a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.