John Sturrock

Sherry Turkle has written a reasonable, useful and heroically neutral book on the Lacan phenomenon: the sudden celebrity in France as maître à penser of Jacques Lacan, an elderly psychoanalyst whose writings are of a unique, some would say repellent difficulty. Venerated on the one side as the foremost agent of ideological subversion, reviled on the other as an intolerable, conceited obscurantist, Lacan is a living symbol of division between opposed temperaments, parties and generations. In order to account for his boisterous if tardy emergence into public life, Ms Turkle, who is a sociologist, recalls the remarkably unimpressive history of the psychoanalytical movement in France and Lacan’s own virulently dissident role within and without it. Sociology is not always so dramatic: she has made of Lacan an exemplary as well as a fascinating protagonist, and is both precise and comprehensive in her analysis of the radical cast of mind in contemporary Paris.

We semioticians who are also family men know well how to Say It With Flowers, commissioning long-distance posies and garlands to be the messengers of our good will or our condolences. Provided the It is not too deep or idiosyncratic a message, the fond blooms can carry it. But has the hour not now sounded to swap vehicles and Say It With Vegetables? We are recessing into straitened times, and should we not therefore value the nutritious above the emptily decorative? A trug-load of shallots or broccoli spears, gift-wrapped and delivered by Intergreens, would make a more practical birthday greeting than the customary inedible spray of irises. A nosegay of piquant radishes would be a healthier restorative for a wilting diva at the final curtain than those armfuls of cellophaned roses.

In the spring of 1920 Marcel Proust was fretting because the good ‘Gaston’ (Gallimard, his post-war publisher) had been unforgivably slow in arranging for translations of his now successful novel to be started. In the past 12 months Du Côté de chez Swann had been published for a second time (the little-noticed earlier edition was in 1913) and A l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs for the first time; and Proust had, strangely, won the Prix Goncourt, a corrupt award which he had wanted but which generally goes to works of uncomplicated mediocrity. There should, he thought, have been foreign editions pending of these first instalments of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, and an English edition mattered most of all. English was a language which Proust knew and had read in; with help, he had translated his dear Ruskin into French. His sense of symmetry, if not of justice, called now for his own deeply Ruskinian work to be turned into English, and if nothing had so far been done the fault must be Gaston’s because the English themselves were hugely enthusiastic about it: there had, he promised Jacques Rivière, been ‘eight or nine articles in the Times alone’.