Polona Petek

‘Narcissus and Echo at the movies’

While having rather different objectives, all these employments of the myth do have at least one thing in common. They are reductive in that they are all limited exclusively to Narcissus; to be more specific, none of them makes any mention of Echo, the equally fascinating, and arguably even more complex, female protagonist of the ancient story. My objective in this paper is, therefore, to demonstrate the importance of Echo in contemporary investigations of doubling in cinema. Without ignoring, silencing or erasing Narcissus, I want to argue that Echo can serve as an alternative and, in the present theoretical climate, more fruitful paradigm for interpreting the doubling of contexts.

Hal Hartley’s Flirt (1995) is a very fitting text to illustrate my argument. The film, which actually features no traditional doppelgängers, is composed of three consecutive stories. Each story functions as an independent unit, spatially and temporally detached from the other two; characters have no diegetic connection with the characters in the other two scenarios and they are different with regard to gender, sexuality, class, race and age. Yet, the stories replicate each other through dialogue, which is repeated three times almost word by word. The basic narrative structure—in short, the trials and tribulations of an unfaithful lover being given an ultimatum—is thus not only doubled but tripled.

What could a Freudian account of the double (based on Narcissus) do with Flirt? At first sight, this framework seems more readily applicable to a more tangible type of doubles, that is, to doubled (be it identical, diametrically opposed or split) characters within a single story. But, lest we forget, for Freud (1953–1975b), the double is but one manifestation of the uncanny, which in fact does include phenomena such as déjà vu or, more broadly, doubled contexts. However, whatever form it actually assumes, the uncanny, according to Freud, always signifies re-emergence of narcissism because of the failure of castration complex, which should have, so to speak, transformed Narcissus into Oedipus.(2)This framework would thus interpret Flirt as entrapped in, or staging, a circuit which always leads back to the beginning and which, incidentally, incites a feeling of strangeness, the uncanny. If Flirt failed to produce uncanniness, Freud would ascribe this to the fact that we are dealing with fiction, which is not subject to the so-called ‘reality testing’.(3) In any case, the mise-en-abîmic structure of the film would be seen as its inability or refusal to overcome this narcissistic infatuation with itself (which, in fact, is Linda Hutcheon’s (1984) argument concerning mise en abîme in literature).

I do not intend to argue that there is nothing unsettling about Flirt; however, I disagree with the argument that this discomfort—which is, I must emphasise, also quite playful—arises from an unsuccessful resolution of castration complex. To elaborate my disagreement, I could draw on numerous text detailing limitations of Freud’s framework that would yield this reading, but the literature offering this critique is too vast to explore here.(4) (One could almost say this would entail a historical survey of the development of psychoanalysis beginning with feminist interventions and ending with poststructuralism. It is interesting, however, that none of these interventions engaged specifically with the double and hardly any attempt has been made to shift attention to Echo.)(5) For my purposes here, let me simply summarise that the key problem of Freud’s conceptualisation of the uncanny and his utilisation of the myth of Narcissus is their implication in what Luce Irigaray (1985) called phallomorphic patterns of thinking. Or as Derrida (1982) would have it, the problem of Freudian uncanny doubles and déjà vus is that they are too deeply embedded in Western metaphysics based on the opposition of presence and absence, giving rise to thinking in binary oppositions and buttressing Western phallogocentrism. In other words, if one embraces poststructuralist line of reasoning, Narcissus can hardly serve as an adequate paradigm for thinking about doubling in Hartley’s film. Echo, on the other hand, seems more productive.

I have assumed that my audience and readers would be at least roughly familiar with Narcissus’s fate. When it comes to Echo, however, considering the history of silence surrounding her ‘side of the story’, a brief summary is justified. As Ovid narrates, Echo was a water nymph, who had a special gift; she was a storyteller and her stories were so beautiful that no one could resist listening to her and becoming totally oblivious to everything else. Jove, the sovereign of gods and Juno’s fornicating husband, made the nymph tell her stories to his wife so he could freely carry out his adulterous pursuits. Juno of course was not so gullible and she soon realised what was going on. So she punished the nymph with a curse: ‘You will not hold your peace when others speak, yet you will not begin to speak unless others have addressed you!’ (Ovid, op. cit., 149) Deprived of her unique gift, Echo was devastated, so she left her home and spent days in solitude. Then one day she saw Narcissus and, like many before her, instantly fell in love with him. She knew she could not approach him on her own initiative, so she patiently waited for him to speak first. When this finally happened, the nymph joyfully echoed his call ‘Let us meet’ and came forth with her arms spread wide open. But Narcissus rejected her. To his cruel refusal ‘Hands off! Embrace me not! May I die before I give you power over me!’, Echo responded with her sad confession, ‘I give you power over me’ (ibid., 151–2). Heartbroken and humiliated, she pined away until her body melted into thin air and her bones were turned to stone, but her echoing voice remained.

Echo thus also experiences doubling, however, hers is a significantly different kind of doubling from that of Narcissus. The drama of Narcissus’s encounter with his double is played out—for the most part—in the visual register, whereas Echo is doubled through speech (and this of course is the obvious aspect of affinity between Echo and Hartley’s Flirt). What is more important, however, is another difference between Narcissus and Echo; namely, while Narcissus’s doubling clearly reinforces, and relies on, the presence / absence dichotomy, Echo’s doubling defies any such economy. Her doubling has no original of its own;(6)her voice emerges and differentiates itself only in relation to what it doubles—hence, no need to ignore Narcissus for his role is as imperative for Echo as hers is for him.(7) Echo’s doubling thus neither confirms nor threatens her discursive or, if you prefer, social identity; it rather constructs it spatially as well as temporally. Of course someone might argue that Echo has no proper identity, that she merely echoes other people’s utterances. In response to this objection, it cannot be overemphasised how important it is that Echo’s speech does have an agency; her freedom to choose whether to repeat the entire sentence or merely a part of it endows her seemingly ineffective echoes with political power. Echo’s identity is thus established discursively through the difference between Narcissus’s and her own utterances and, as such, it is only recognisable retrospectively, through deferral, in short, as Derrida’s différance (op. cit.).

Hutcheon (op. cit., 34) described Derridean deconstruction as a critique of representation and the notion of différance as ‘anti-representational’. In opposition to this contention, I would rather argue that this concept allows us to conceive of representation outside the economy of presence and absence. As Derrida (op. cit., 7) put it, ‘only on the basis of différance […] we can allegedly know who and where “we” are’. Lacan (1977b) argued that any self-knowledge is to some degree an illusion. We are always, in a sense, ‘someone else’ because one needs an image of one’s self in order to be able to impose a structure on the visible world and to locate oneself in relation to this world and other beings and objects in it; yet, this image never coincides with the self, it is always a representation. While I agree that self-knowledge is always necessarily mediated through some sort of representation, one’s social identity is not an illusion but a very real condition of one’s existence, a continuous process of change, choice and negotiation. And I want to argue that this process, despite its fluidity, can be represented. As I see it, Echo’s doubling offers itself as a possible means for conceptualising representation which neither fixes the self in presence nor tricks it into misrecognising itself in an external image. Echo’s doubling (particularly through her survival as a voice after her disembodiment) functions as representation of an identity that is neither absent nor present. Echo establishes and recognises herself in ‘echoes’, in fluid, shifting, always negotiating discursive replications, indeed replicating her interlocutors but also replying, responding to them. These replications offer her a ‘discursive mirror’; however, while offering a temporary confirmation or anchorage of one’s identity, this mirror does not facilitate misrecognition but rather foregrounds the fact that one’s identity is never innate, fixed or stable.

To return to Flirt, I would argue that this film enacts Echo’s type of doubling. The stories echo one another through dialogue while also bringing into play differences between participants engaged in these dialogues. Unfortunately, an exploration of the consequences of these differences exceeds the scope of this paper, but I would suggest that the fact that the film’s narrative structure is not doubled but tripled might be seen as a strategy for avoiding binary oppositions, as the film’s anti-essentialist statement that one’s identity is established discursively and continuously re-negotiated, adapting or defining itself in relation to differences that are made meaningful in a particular context.

I suggested earlier that I find the mood of Hartley’s Flirt somewhat unsettling yet also playful. Now I want to add that this mood might be a postmodernist form of uncanniness, or rather what is left of the uncanny after poststructuralism: the statement that there are no immanent, guaranteed meanings and identities might appear threatening or at least disorienting, but its playfulness suggests that this epistemological change is in fact quite liberating and welcome.

Notes

1. The first scholar to discuss the double in cinema was Freud’s student Otto Rank. Although he was interested predominantly in the double in literature, Rank opened his study of the double (1971: 3–7) with a reference to Rye and Wegener’s silent film The Student of Prague (1913). Examples of the Freudian account of the double in cinema include Braudy (1977), several essays in Crook (1981), Fischer (1983), Thomsen (1990), Dolar (1991), Causey (1999), Schneider (1999).

2. The function of castration complex is to sever one’s narcissistic libidinal attachment to oneself and to redirect libido towards ‘objects’. Successful resolution of the subsequent Oedipus complex ensures the socially sanctioned choice of ‘objects’.

3 Freud (1953–1975b: 247) argued that ‘nearly all the instances that contradict [his] hypothesis are taken from the realm of fiction’. Because ‘the realm of phantasy depends for its effect on the fact that its content is not submitted to reality-testing […] a great deal that is not uncanny in fiction would be so if it happened in real life’ (ibid., 249).

4. Classic examples include Cixous (1976), Kofman (1980) and Todd (1986).

5.Exceptions include Brenkman (1976), Culler (1982: 251–7), Segal (1988), Lawrence (1991), Nouvet (1991) and Spivak (1993).

6. Michel Foucault’s distinction between resemblance and similitude is useful in this context:
Resemblance has a ‘model’, an original element that orders and hierarchizes the increasingly less faithful copies that can be struck from it. […] The similar develops in series that have neither beginning nor end, that can be followed in one direction as easily as in another, that obey no hierarchy […]. Resemblance serves representation, which rules over it; similitude serves repetition, which ranges across it. Resemblance predicates itself upon a model it must return to and reveal; similitude circulates the simulacrum as an indefinite and reversible relation of the similar to the similar. (Foucault 1983: 32)

7.It is significant that Narcissus recognises the youth in the water as his own reflection because he speaks to him but receives no reply. It is, therefore, because of the absence of Echo/echo that Narcissus is able to realise his delusion.

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Filmography

Flirt (1995, USA / Germany / Japan, dir. Hal Hartley)
The Student of Prague (1913, Germany, dir. Stellan Rye and Paul Wegener)