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In this collection of critical essays on Lawrence, Hemingway, Sartre, Robbe-Grillet and Barthes, the author takes up several Lacanian ideas in the interpretation of his chosen texts.
If we start from the end of the volume, with the author's tribute to the postmodernism of Barthes and Robbe-Grillet, we can see the value this Lacanian critic places on language and the sense he has of an unbridgeable gap between language and human “reality.”
If language is fantasy because reality is elsewhere, and the signifier is not the signified, then language, although it veils the Other, also denotes itself. But its representational value is at best, approximate, and, at worst, suspect. If suspect, the reality of the world is an illusion because the signifying systems we use to apprehend it determine our perceptions of it. (p. 146)
The essential ideas in the passage are that language denotes itself, rather than pointing to psychic or material realities, and that language (a signifying system) determines our perception of reality. To say that language can shape or color, or defensively mask, or only approximate our perceptions of reality is what we all agree about and constantly explore. But to go this extra step to a position from which the “reality of the world is an illusion” is to attack the linking of perceived somatic and affective experiences and impulses with their psychologically symbolic elaborations in