Gazes of Trauma, Spots of Trust: Wordsworth’s Memorials in The Prelude

Abstract

“Father don’t you see I’m burning?”—the sternness of the son’s question in Freud’s dream of the burning child marks, for Lacan, the “stain” on the father’s account of the dream. Through the dream, the father can experience his child as alive again, but at the cost of always remembering the failure of consciousness at the time the dream was unfolding. This notion of stain enables Lacan to elaborate the functioning of the gaze. On the one hand, the father certainly “saw” that his son was burning up from fever while the boy lived. Indeed, Freud iterates this mode of perception at the start of his analysis. On the other hand, the son’s question in the dream introduces the father to a way of “being seen” that he could not have contemplated until after the boy’s death. Above all, this “being seen” by the son is logically prior to the father’s actually seeing the son because the former must first imagine himself as addressed by the latter in order for the “seeing” of the son in the dream to take place. For this reason, seeing the child correlates with the blindness in the father to the actual circumstance of the candle’s burning the boy’s corpse. Falling under the son’s gaze, the father awakens. He desires his son precisely at the moment when he realizes the boy is no longer there. Emphatically, this desire cannot be mastered and fully represented in language.