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between plasir and jouissance by providing a new vision: the existence and the working of an ultimate jouissance, as presented in the diagram below:
With the aim of this diagram, we can then understand what Barthes means when he suggests “what pleasure wants is the site of loss, the seam, the cut, the deflation, the dissolve which seizes the subject in the midst of bliss” (7). While Barthes has never made clear the definition of bliss, the structure of the double pleasure, the two kinds of bliss—the area Jouissance and the ultimate jouissance— could solve the confusion of the term. It is at the “seam,” the “cut,” the transiting, the shifting process from mere release (the area marked as Plasir) to mere sexual excitation (the area marked as Jouissance) –or vice versa— that can bring the subject the ultimate
Plasir/
release of excitation (law of homeostasis)
Jouissance/
intensified excitation/
sexual desire
(The shades of color represent the greatness of pleasure.)
The Basic Format of Double Pleasure
Where the ultimate
jouissance exists
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jouissance, which gives him the greatest effect of pleasurable experience. The double
pleasure can also solve the riddle-like description of pleasure when Bathes says“‘pleasure’… sometimes extends to bliss, sometimes is opposed to it” (19), and the ambiguity of the Lacanian definition for pleasure/desire as “the repetition in order to reach the perfect oneness in the past… a process of the searching for pleasure that already contains the discontent, anxiety, and excitation” (Chen 153), since Plasir and
Jouissance are both contained in one circle, representing their tendency to become a
“onenss,” to extend to each other, to neutralize the qualities in each other, and to create the ultimate jouissance so as to achieve the greatest pleasure.
Connor’s annotation could be supportive for the existence of the ultimate
jouissance (bliss): “Barthes’s text of bliss is orientated towards extremity rather than
containment… an extremity of nonfinality. As opposed to the centered, genital finality of texts governed by the pleasure principle and the sense of an ending, the text of bliss perversely resists or turns aside from centered pleasure… this is a claim for the absolute value of bliss over mere pleasure” (Connor 211-12). What should be specifically added here is that, the term “bliss” here should not be equalized as theJouissance group of pleasure—for even the plain intensification of sexual excitation
can only be a fixed, centered form of pleasure. Instead, it should be realized as the ultimate jouissance that is unpredictable (because it is always in a shifting status between two kinds of fixed pleasures), unrestrained by any centered pleasure or an ending, a finality.A discussion for the pleasure attainable in romance novels can also help us understand the non-finality in the ultimate jouissance. As Barthes has also wondered
“passionate love as bliss?” (25), we may find it not so hard to understand the working of double pleasure in the pattern of most romance novels. While passionate love is a necessary element in romance fictions, happy ending is another crucial element for
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the romance readers. In most cases, the heroine, originally living in a mundane reality, experiences the passionate, violent, or even destructive love with the hero, and together they welcome a happy ending that guarantees a happiness that is peaceful, harmonious, and relieved, totally different from the love they have experienced in their love adventure. From the general pattern we can suggest that the reader, along with the heroine, gains the ultimate jouissance exactly from the switching from one kind of pleasure to another: she enjoys to the fullest when being rescued by the hero from the mundane reality into the thrilling and sexy adventure (from area Plasir to area Jouissance); yet when the adventure becomes too excited and even problematic to bother her, she is extremely happy as well when being promised an anxiety-relieved, peaceful future with the hero (from area Jouissance to area Plasir).
Ien Ang points out in her research that the romance readers actually enjoy such a pattern in which the heroine is being passionately wooed by the hero especially under the promise of a happy ending:
When the reader is sure that the heroine and the hero will finally get each other, she can concentrate all the more on how they will get each other. Finding out about the happy ending in advance could then be seen as a clever reading strategy aimed at obtaining maximum pleasure: a pleasure that is orientated towards the scenario of romance, rather than its outcome. If the outcome is predictable in the romance genre, the variety of the ways in which two lovers can find one another is endless.
… After all, it is more than striking that romance novels always abruptly end at the moment that the two lovers have finally found each other, and thus never go beyond the point of no return: romantic fiction generally is exclusively about the titillating period before the wedding!
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This could well indicate that what repetitious reading of romance fiction offers is the opportunity to continue to enjoy the excitement of romance and romantic scenes without being interrupted by the dark side of sexual relationships.
(Ang 528-29) Such preference of the readers shows as much the work of the double pleasure, in which the greatest pleasure is obtained in the fluctuation between two kinds of pleasure, the Plasir and the Jouissance, instead of the finalities, the ends in either of these two. It is by living such contradiction, by being a “living contradiction,” that the reading subject can reach the maximum of his pleasure from the endless uncertainty of selfhood, as Barthes describes: “… this subject is never anything but a ‘living contradiction’: a split subject, who simultaneously enjoys, through the text, the consistency of his selfhood and its collapse, its fall” (Barthes 21). The source of the subject’s enjoyment is the feeling of the unpredictable, the inconsistency of the selfhood that brings the subject into the forever-shifting status which provides him with the greatest pleasure.
One may doubt here that the romance readers who tend to find out a happy ending in advance actually prefer to walk into a fixed ending instead of accepting the unpredictability of the storyline. But to look at it in a different way, we can also suggest that, what those readers truly search for is not exactly what happens in the ending but rather the pleasure of the whole reading experience, something they have to make sure that will not be ruined by the sad endings that are notorious for their sheer, realistic unpleasantness, as Radway concludes in her field study: “[sad endings]
negate the romance’s difference and distance from [readers’] day-to-day existence, dominated as it so often is by small failures, minor catastrophes, and ongoing
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disappointments” (Radway 73). As Ang indicates, readers focus more on “the variety of the ways in which two lovers can find one another is endless” (Ang 528), it is obvious that the process of the romance, in which the unlimited possibilities of the romanticity contained within, is the real source of pleasure in a romance novel. This corresponds to the double pleasure structure: the greatest feeling of pleasure occurs not at the end of Plasir but the area between Plasir and Jouissance. Happy endings being read in advance provides readers with a free space to enjoy the romanticity of the process, defended from the disappointment and the unpleasant sad endings that can only make romances “failed romance,” “the garbage-dumped romance” (Radway 76-77).
The working of double pleasure can be presented in romance novels not only in the sphere of psychoanalysis but also in the research of mass culture. The pleasure theory raised by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer introduces the idea of
“complicit pleasure,” the tendency in people to search for relief and comfort, has made people into a bunch of conservative cowards that are dumbly controlled by the capitalists with their invention of culture industry. Since “pleasure always means not to think about anything, to forget suffering even where it is shown. Basically it is helplessness. It is flight; not, as is asserted, flight from a wretched reality, but from the last remaining thought of resistance” (Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of
Enlightenment, John Cumming, trans. 144. 1997), the group of people who hold the
economical power learn to use this feature of pleasure to advertise commercials to people, and to build up a false model of culture so as to spread the legitimacy of the products:Culture today is infecting everything with sameness. Film, radio, and magazines form a system… The conspicuous unity of macrocosm and
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microcosm confronts human beings with a model of their culture: the false identity of universal and particular… The truth that [films and radio] are nothing but business is used as an ideology to legitimize the trash they intentionally produce. They call themselves industries, and the published figures for their directors’ incomes quell any doubts about the social necessity of their finished products.
… The standardized forms, it is claimed, were originally derived from the needs of the consumers: that is why they are accepted with so little resistance. In reality, a cycle of manipulation and retroactive need is unifying the system ever more tightly. What is not mentioned is that the basis on which technology is gaining power over society is the power of those whose economic position in society is strongest.
(Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Edmund Jephcott, trans. 94-95) Adorno and Horkheimer view the concept of pleasure in a much pessimistic way, asserting that the pleasure in the mass culture is but the wish for mental relief, and is used as a tool by the capitalists to take the advantage for the expansion of their business. Death-instinct is the notorious origin of the complicit pleasure. Since “the repetitiveness, the relief of excitation in the pleasure of mass culture is linked with death instinct,” Adorno criticizes mass culture as “deadly, valueless, and even conservative in cultural and political concerns, which turns mass culture’s pleasure into a ‘complicit pleasure’ with the propaganda, the tool of the authority to maintain the established social orders, to paralyze and to cheat the mass readers” (Chen 153-54). While romance novels are nominal for their successful sales in the mass culture, the romance genre becomes a target despised by Adorno, Horkheimer and
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other traditional Marxists with a specific negative prejudice for romance readers as merely dupes who enjoy being manipulated by the book market that produces novels advertising patriarchal social values.
Objections have risen of course. While “Barthes’ pleasure theory points out the diversity of sensual pleasures and indicates the possibilities of the positive meanings of popular culture” (Chen 157), the idea of “resistive pleasure” is then brought up as the contrary to “complicit pleasure,” suggesting women readers’ agency in the interpretation of romance novels, as Mary Ellen Brown introduces: “[r]esistance theory comprises a body of work which addresses the issue of how ordinary people and subcultural groups can resist hegemonic, or dominant pressures, and consequently obtain pleasure from what the political, social and/or cultural system offers, despite that system’s contradictory position in their lives” (Brown 12).
Modleski takes numerous textual evidences from best-selling romances to point out the “female resentment,” “heroine’s anger and frustration,” “women’s revenge fantasies” between the lines in romance’s texts (The Women Who Knew Too Much 43;
47). However, as much as it seems that the female readers’ resistive pleasure is brought up against the complicit pleasure, Modleski and other scholars in the study of popular female romance have not denied the ambiguity of the position of female readers, who can never be simply judged as the believers of feminism or the supporters of patriarchy. The major paradox exists in that, romance novels often show female sexuality as a sort of danger or sin yet at the same time intend to discover the sexual desire for the readers (Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much, 51).
Female readers do not surrender to patriarchy wholeheartedly; their rebel, their discovery of sexual desire, is quietly actualized inside the domestic family. Their reading pleasure is ambiguous: it does not completely belong to the extreme of resistive pleasure (that of the radical feminism) or totally to the extreme of complicit
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pleasure (that of the absolute obedience of patriarchy). Female readers have escaped from the fixed identifications to gain pleasures that cannot be easily classified under either social extremity.
On the other hand, the Frankfurt School scholars like Adorno and Horkheimer seem to be too assertive in their distaste of mass art and in their preference of high art (Modleski, Loving with a Vengeance, 26-27). Irony exists in their own definition of pleasure: while the culture industry advertises the relief of excitation, it is actually a relief “prolonged,” as Adorno and Horkheimer admitted themselves: “[t]he culture industry endlessly cheats its consumers out of what it endlessly promises. The promissory note of pleasure issued by plot and packaging is indefinitely prolonged:
the promise, which actually comprises the entire show, disdainfully intimates that there is nothing more to come, that the diner must be satisfied with reading the menu”
(Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Edmund Jephcott, trans. 111).
Since the final relief of excitation will never be reached, it can be speculated as well that in order to reach this illusory pleasure, people have to endure endless excitation.
The most controversial part is that there must be pleasurable feelings contained in this excitation as well, since, after all, people have to feel content blindly and endlessly while being manipulated by the social propaganda: “[i]t seems like, therefore, the pleasure in the mass culture consists not only of the relief of the excitation, but also the continual existence of anxiety and excitation, the frustration and discontent of the relief, which proves the insufficiency of the clear distinction between pleasure and the excitation” (Chen 154). It is from this sense that we can notice again that the borderline between the complicit pleasure and the resistive pleasure is indistinct, which can be explained as well in the double pleasure model, and be grouped under the two areas of pleasure, the Plasir and the Jouissance, as presented below:
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excitation, can be linked with the Jouissance area.1 Take a female reader’s situation for instance: when reading a romance novel, she can sense two kinds of reading pleasure at the same time: one is the pleasure coming from the liberation of social duties by experiencing the exciting sexual adventures (the Jouissance/resistive pleasure), and another is from the sense of security when being provided with a happy1 In this chapter, Freud’s theory of “death instincts” and “life instincts” will only serve as the starting point of the discovery toward the distinction between two kinds of pleasure: the pleasure originating from the intensification of excitations and the pleasure originating from the release of excitation.
Freud’s ideas about the death drive and life instinct concern many issues, but this thesis focuses only on
Plasir/
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ending (the Plasir/complicit pleasure). However, the crucial point is that, in order to enjoy the liberation or the sense of security, one must compare the situation in the now-moment with the situation in the past time, since one can only be liberated from some restrictions that strained him before, and can only be secured by something that has not protected him before. The point is clear now: the real enjoyment cannot simply originate from an eternally exciting adventure or plainly from a fixed happy-ever-after. Instead, it is always between the shifting of these two that the greatest pleasure can be created. Therefore, as presented in the diagram, it is only when a reader who learns to appreciate both kinds of pleasure, who submits herself into both of the identifications in these two pleasures/social values, and who freely switches her position from one to another, that she can enjoy herself to the upmost, to obtain the ultimate jouissance. The greatest happiness occurs in the process when she gradually liberates her sexual desire with the heroine, and the process when she is gradually given a sense of security under patriarchal social orders when the heroine is guaranteed a happy marriage with the hero. It is only during the changing process that is free from the restrictions of the fixed type of social value that the ultimate
jouissance can be actualized.
Radway’s field study towards real romance readers would be the most representative source to enlighten the importance of such shifting process of identifications:
Romance reading… is a strategy with a double purpose. As an activity, it so engages [women’s] attention that it enables them to deny their physical presence in an environment associated with responsibilities…
Reading, in this sense, connotes a free space where they feel liberated from the need to perform duties… At the same time… they escape
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figuratively into a fairy tale where a heroine’s similar needs are adequately met. As a result, they vicariously attend to their own requirements as independent individuals who require emotional sustenance and solicitude.
(Radway 93) Romance novels serve the function of fulfilling women readers’ hidden desire exactly because they help women readers to escape from their original identification and free themselves from social responsibilities. However, what is not often discussed is the tendency in women readers towards the sense of security, and an awareness that the interest for mere excitation could be eventually worn out. The term “liberation” could fall into the same dilemma as the term “jouissance” did: once it is fixed into a classical, strict type of term that tends toward an end, or finality, it will immediately lose its original meaning: the freedom originates from a breakthrough, and the pleasure created from within. This issue of liberation will be brought to the next chapter with a more detailed analysis of how pleasure and sexual liberation have worked in the novel Rebecca, in which the two important female characters’s pleasures can be explained under the working of double pleasure, presenting the endless entanglement of Plasir/complicit pleasure and Jouissance/resistive pleasure in women’s search for pleasure.
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Chapter Three
The Double Pleasure in Rebecca
This chapter aims to discuss how the theory of double pleasure has actually worked in the novel Rebecca. The discussion will be mainly divided into two parts, analyzing the double pleasure working on the two most important characters of the novel: Rebecca and the narrator/protagonist. What makes these two characters specifically representative is not only because they are the most important two female characters of this story but also because they have more apparent pleasurable experiences in the story than other characters. As this chapter goes on to discover the original source of their pleasures, it will also be revealed that their pleasures in fact work under the structure of the double pleasure theory; that is, through their search for pleasure, there can be clearly seen an endless entanglement between Plasir/complicit pleasure and Jouissance/resistive pleasure.
Case 1: Rebecca
Rebecca might be the most impressive character for the readers with her strong personalities and her bold attitude in search for sexual pleasure. Although Rebecca is publicly remembered as a beautiful and elegant mistress: “beautiful, talented, and loved by all who knew her” (Rebecca 301), under the surface, she secretly holds
Rebecca might be the most impressive character for the readers with her strong personalities and her bold attitude in search for sexual pleasure. Although Rebecca is publicly remembered as a beautiful and elegant mistress: “beautiful, talented, and loved by all who knew her” (Rebecca 301), under the surface, she secretly holds