The real, the imaginary, and the symbolic : a lacanian reading of Ramita Navai’s City of Lies
Contemporary life writings of Iranian diaspora are often censured for promoting a universalizing, dehumanizing and hegemonic image of the nation. The common misgiving is that the narratives project Iranian women as archetypal victims and their male counterparts as essentially powerful subjects. T...
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| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
2022
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| Online Access: | http://journalarticle.ukm.my/18574/1/47057-178355-1-PB.pdf http://journalarticle.ukm.my/18574/ https://ejournal.ukm.my/gema/issue/view/1467 |
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| Institution: | Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia |
| Language: | English |
| Summary: | Contemporary life writings of Iranian diaspora are often censured for promoting a
universalizing, dehumanizing and hegemonic image of the nation. The common misgiving is
that the narratives project Iranian women as archetypal victims and their male counterparts as
essentially powerful subjects. The present study aims at problematizing this assumption by
arguing that Ramita Navai’s City of Lies (2014) portrays an anti-essentialist character sketch
of individuals with diverse identities and complex subjectivities. To pursue this line of
argument, this article examines the titular characters’ development in the face of the existing
tensions between the different psychic and social realities. Lacan’s triadic model of the Real,
the Imaginary, and the Symbolic is used in relation to his notion of the mirror stage to analyze
the ways in which the characters traverse between the three orders in the process of forming a
sense of selfhood. The notion of selfhood is explored in light of latent desires, anxieties, and
the feelings of loss as determining factors behind the psychic development of each character
within the prevailing normativities of a heteropatriarchal government. The findings reveal that
while Amir, Leyla, Asghar, Bijan, and Farideh find themselves permanently lost in the
unconscious tensions between different psychic orders. Dariush, Morteza, and Somayeh break
into the Symbolic order and reassert their subjectivity. In this manner, the life writing
challenges the grand narratives about Iranians as a homogenous group of people as it offers an
equal chance of attaining selfhood and subjectivity to both male and female characters. |
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