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This book is rich and eccentric, as much philological as psychoanalytic. The author draws on a wide range of learning in literature, critical theory (especially semiotics), Russian phonetics, and classic Freudianism to enlighten our understanding of Gogol's short story, “The Overcoat” (1842). The title plays on the nineteenth-century saying, perhaps by Dostoevsky or Turgenev: “We have all emerged from under Gogol's ‘The Overcoat’.” Rancour-Laferrier's study is unusually intricate, and his arcane and whimsical turn of mind may be seen in the chapter titles: “What it Means to be a Shoe,” “Oral Gratification: Feeding on the Idea of an Overcoat,” “What Else it Means to be a Shoe,” “Cat Fur and Kleptomania,” and “Digital Penetration and the Loss of Face.” It is obvious that this very short story is wildly overinterpreted, yet the interpretation itself has a Gogolian quality.
Perhaps the book demonstrates the ironic subterfuges of “skaz,” a form of artful foolishness and stupidity much cultivated by Gogol, which is brilliantly and learnedly defined in Section D of the Introduction: “In skaz, the reader receives the disarming impression that the narrator is incapable of speaking in a sophisticated manner. The narrator seems to fail miserably at expressing himself. He rambles, he makes mistakes …” (p. 18). From a psychoanalytic perspective, however, what is disguised is “fantasy material that might produce anxiety if expressed too directly or bluntly … skaz manages to hide meanings that are dangerous to the ego” (p. 19). These assumptions are central to Rancour-Laferriere's interpretation of the story, which emphasizes the fantasy material that has been suppressed and rendered covert.
This technique is not always subtle, as in the obviously anal connotations of the name of the protagonist, Akaky Akakievich. The author does some ingenious ono-mastic turns on the proper names, both here and elsewhere, so that we feel as if we are traveling the entire gamut from phonetic detail