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What does Macherey mean by the unconscious of the work? How can a text have an
unconscious?

Defined as the part of the mind which is inaccessible to the conscious mind but
which affects behaviour and emotions1, the unconscious was a term first identified
and explored by Austrian neurologist and pioneering founding father of
psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. In this essay I am going to explore the French
Marxist literary critic, Pierre Machereys expansion on Freuds theories of the
unconscious in a literary context, identifying the unconscious that lives within
literature with close reference to Angela Carters 1979 collection of short fairytales
The Bloody Chamber, and more specifically the short narrative of Wolf Alice, the
tale of a small girl suckled by wolves but taken to live in a convent when discovered
by humans. I will be looking closely at the work of not only Pierre Macherey, but
also the ideas of other leading thinkers in the fields of psychoanalysis and literary
criticism such as Sigmund Freud, Jacques Riviere and Charles Du Bos, in order to
come to a conclusion about the unconscious of literature.
One of the most revolutionary ideas in the field of psychoanalysis is the
unconscious. For Freud, human nature represses certain desires and drives that can
never be fully contained but instead always have the potential to resurface,
threatening the return of the repressed2. He stated that: We obtain our concept of
the unconscious, therefore, from the theory of repression We see, however that we
have two kinds of unconscious that which is latent but capable of becoming
conscious, and that which is repressed and not capable of becoming conscious in the

Oxford English Dictionary online, <http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/unconscious?


q=unconscious> [accessed 20th November 2012].
2
Doreen Fowler, Faulkner: The Return of the Repressed, (Virginia: The University Press of Virginia,
1997), p.4.

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ordinary way.3 Freud believed then that these repressed desires became evident
through certain human behavioral habits such as repetition compulsion and used his
theories of repression to explain neurotic symptoms in humans. Parallel to these
ideas, Freud believed such forms of thoughts as dreams also provided evidence of the
return of the repressed, prompting his 1899 work The Interpretation of Dreams. The
medium of literature also seemed to air and bring to the surface the repressed desires
of humans and it is this idea which seemed to primarily influence Machereys theory
that pieces of work; literature, also possessed an unconscious.
For Pierre Macherey, Freuds theory that the unconscious was evident in
literature was one that he expanded further on, claiming that in order to say anything,
there are other things which must not be said. Freud relegated this absence of certain
words to a new place which he was the first to explore, and which he paradoxically
named: the unconscious.4 In his work A Theory of Literary Production (1978),
Macherey explains his understanding of the unconscious of the work, primarily that
the book is not self-sufficient; it is necessarily accompanied by a certain absence,
without which it would not exist. A knowledge of the book must include a
consideration of this absence. This absence therefore is the books unconscious, and
the work encloses a meaning which must be released5, so although a reader may
gather given information from the text that has been put into physical form by the
author of a book, they still glean meaning from what is not said; what is implied. This
is what Macherey interpreted as the unconsciousness of the work. Charles Du Bos,
French critic and essayist, is in agreement with Macherey in saying that the
3

Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, (New York: Norton, 1962), p.353.
Pierre Macherey, from A Theory of Literary Production, in A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader,
ed. by Antony Easthope and Kate McGowan, 2nd edition, (Berkshire: Open University Press, 2004),
p.17. All other references to this text will be given parenthetically.
5
Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, (London: Routledge, 1978), p.76.
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unconscious assumes a primary function in literary creation6. Du Bos also goes on to
state that it is not even the author of the novel or work that has control over this
unconsciousness, but instead that it is a much more organic development; a product of
the authors own unconscious superimposed onto the work. Of his own writings, Du
Bos has stated that: My own texts tend more and more to appear to me as messages
launched by my own self, the sense, direction and reach of which the me who
projected them was semi-conscious: and it is the ulterior me- the one himself that,
by a process also semi-conscious, have contributed to form- who, as a result of
continued scrutinizing, understands the message perfectly. 7 Critic, novelist and
editor Jacques Riviere interestingly wrote something similar of his own work: Before
explaining my book to others, I want that others explain it to meAnd what interests
me especially is that which I have put in it without knowing it8. Macherey believed
that speech eventually has nothing more to tell us: we investigate the silence, for it is
the silence that is doing the speaking(p.17). Therefore, in its every particle, the
work manifests, uncovers, what it cannot say. The silence gives it life (p.16).
After exploring Machereys theories of the unconscious in literary works, I
now intend to use the ideas previously explained in close reference to Angela Carters
1979 collection of fairytales The Bloody Chamber. Macherey wrote in his Theory of
Literary Production that: For there to be a critical discourse which is more than a
superficial and futile reprise of the work, the speech stored in the book must be
incomplete; because it has not said everything, there remains the possibility of saying
something else, after another fashion (p.15). This seems to be certainly true of
Carters The Bloody Chamber as Simpson stated: My intention was not to do
6

Ferdinand Vial, The Unconscious in Philiosophy, and French and European Literature, (Amsterdam:
Editions Rodopi B.V, 2009), p.284.
7
Ibid.
8
Ibid, p.139.

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versionsbut to extract the latent content from the traditional stories and to use it as
the beginnings of new stories9. Therefore, Carter has taken the original stories of
Perrault and the Grimm brothers, and reworked them into revised tales that do indeed
take on another fashion; a hybrid of genres and literary forms. Simpsons statement
that studentsare outraged when they recognize the bedtime stories of their
childhood newly configured as tales of sex and violence. But as Carter said, I was
takingthe latent content of those traditional stories and using that; and the latent
content is violently sexual10, does seem to support Machereys idea that we must go
beyond the work and explain it, must say what it does not and could not say 11. The
original versions of Carters fairytales were never explicitly violent or sexual, but as
Carter ascertained, the unconscious of the works implied these themes throughout.
Therefore, literary works such as the original fairytales have the potential to emit their
unconscious ideas to different audiences and readers, only to be understood by a
select few, unlike those who are too underdeveloped to pick up on the unconscious of
the work (children). As Macherey stated then: this truth is not there in the work, like
a nut in a shell; paradoxically, it is both interior and absent.12.
One of the tales in The Bloody Chamber in particular seems to highlight both
Freud and Jacques Lacans theories of the tripartite of the human psyche. This is
important in regards to Machereys theories as the unconscious seems to become
evident in some texts through certain characters representation of each part of the
tripartite. In this case, the character of Alice in Carters Wolf Alice is an interesting
example. As stated in the introduction of The Bloody Chamber (of Carter): She
knew from the stories that she was drawn to Gothic tales, cruel tales, tales of wonder,
9

Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber, (London: Vintage, 2006), pp. vii-viii.
Ibid, p.viii-ix.
11
Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, (London: Routledge, 1978), p.78.
12
Ibid.
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tales of terror, fabulous narratives that deal directly with the imagery of the
unconscious13. For Freud, the tripartite of the mental structure is divided in to three
parts: the Id, the Super-Ego and the Ego14, where as for Lacan, these become the
Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic.15 In both cases however, the first is more
associated with the unconscious, where as the latter becomes progressively more to do
with the conscious. The character of Alice in Wolf Alice could be seen at the
beginning of the tale to be representative of the Id, the unconscious, as she assumes
a mental state akin to that of a child- in the narrative, she is likened to a pup that
cannot speak, although she howls16. Without speech or self-recognition in the
human process, Alice becomes Freuds Id. Alice passes through the mirror stage17
when she physically sees her own reflection in the Dukes mirror: Wolf-Alice looked
at herself in the mirror and wondered whether there she saw the beast who came to
bite her in the night.18 and thus becomes the Super-Ego after which she develops
into the Ego. As Ferdinand Vial states, this is not a distortion of the authors
intentions but instead a self-revelation of intentions that are real even though they
were not aware of them.19 Through the character of Alice, Machereys point that a
work contains an unconscious is proved through both Freud and Lacans theories of
the psyche.
After establishing that Pierre Machereys idea of the unconscious in a text was
what the author never wrote, that information that a reader gathers only through the
implications of the text; the silence within it, it becomes easier to identify the ways in
13

Carter, p. vii-viii.
Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, (New York: Norton, 1962).
15
Philippe Julien, Jacques Lacans Return to Freud, (New York: New York University press, 1994),
p.74.
16
Carter, p.140.
17
Julien, p.48.
18
Carter, p.145.
19
Vial, p.284.
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which a text may indeed have an unconscious. When referring back to the founder of
the term the unconscious, Freud, it is clear that not only can the unconscious of the
text be found through the unwritten word but also through a character/characters
representation of the Id,Super-Ego, or Ego. This idea, reinforced with the later
ideas of Lacan about the Real, Symbolic and Imaginary, highlights within a text
where the authors own unconscious may have been superimposed on their text
without their even realising so. To again cite Macherey, the job of the critic is to
identify this unconscious as commentary establishes itself at the heart of the work
and delivers its secret20 (p.17).

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Bibliography

Carter, Angela, The Bloody Chamber, (London: Vintage, 2006).


Fowler, Doreen, Faulkner: The Return of the Repressed, (Virginia: The University
Press of Virginia, 1997).
Freud, Sigmund, The Ego and the Id, (New York: Norton, 1962).
Julien, Philippe, Jacques Lacans Return to Freud, (New York: New York University
press, 1994).
Macherey, Pierre, from A Theory of Literary Production, in A Critical and Cultural
Theory Reader, ed. by Antony Easthope and Kate McGowan, 2nd edition, (Berkshire:
Open University Press, 2004), pp. 15-23.
Macherey, Pierre, A Theory of Literary Production, (London: Routledge, 1978).
Vial, Ferdinand, The Unconscious in Philiosophy, and French and European
Literature, (Amsterdam: 2009).

Internet Sources
Oxford English Dictionary online,
<http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/unconscious?q=unconscious>
[accessed 20th November 2012].

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