A Psychoanalytic Approach to Hooshang Golshiri’s “My Little Chapel”
Journal Title: Literary Text Research - Year 2024, Vol 28, Issue 100
Abstract
Hooshang Golshiri’s “My little Chapel” relates the story of a character who finds himself in possession of a toe-like protrusion from the beginning of his life, an abnormality which brings him into a never-ending conflict with his surroundings. The obsessional attachment of the narrator with his sixth-toe, however, poses significant questions regarding the nature of his symptomatic dependence on this apparently useless piece of flesh. Through a psychoanalytical reading of the story, the present article is an attempt to shed light on the psychological intricacies of this problematic relation. Drawing on the teachings of Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Zizek, it argues that the only solution to this enigma is to consider the toe as a materialization of the pure nothingness and lack which, from a psychoanalytical point of view, marks the very core of the subject in the symbolic universe and becomes the only venue for the safe flowing of jouissance. Through its inert presence, the toe embodies the Lacanian objet a as the most precious, albeit illusory, thing in the psychic life of the human beings, the removal, or the disclosure, of which could lead to irreparable consequences.
Authors and Affiliations
Ghiasuddin Alizadeh
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP723054
- DOI 10.22054/LTR.2023.76086.3761
- Views 51
- Downloads 0
A Psychoanalytic Approach to Hooshang Golshiri’s “My Little Chapel”
Hooshang Golshiri’s “My little Chapel” relates the story of a character who finds himself in possession of a toe-like protrusion from the beginning of his life, an abnormality which brings him into a never-ending conflic...
Basil Bunting and the Challenges of Literary Translation from Persian into English: A Case of Rūdhakī
The purpose of this study is to analyze Basil Bunting's literary translation. It turns to the theories of translation by Steiner, Benjamin, and Eco, among others, to study Bunting’s translation of Rūdhakī’s ‘Dandaniyyeh’...
The Novel in Contemporary Iran: A Sociological Reading of Selected Contemporary Persian Novels
In this article, the status of the Persian novel has been investigated via an interdisciplinary approach during the last hundred years. The research starts with the emergence of the Persian novel and continues up to the...
Sir William Jones and the Shahnameh
The second half of the eighteenth century was a period of transition in European aesthetics. It was also a time of increasing contact between Europe and Asia. The rise of Oriental literary scholarship was a natural outgr...
Broken Lyres: Epic, Performance, and History in Mehdi Akhavān Sāles’ “Ākhar-e Shāhnāmeh”
In “Ākhar-e Shāhnāmeh” by Mehdi Akhavān Sāles (1929-1990), one of the foremost representatives of “New Poetry” in Iran, a fictive orality is staged: The poem becomes decipherable only to a reader attuned to the tradition...