Novelistic Mimesis; or, Modalities of Cultural Modernity

This essay is an attempt to give a theoretical articulation of novelistic mimesis as the narrative form of modernity. With the passage to modernity, what assumes the locus of the symbolic authority is no longer God, Father, or tradition, but the cultural gaze or the ego-ideal. At the same time, this gaze paradoxically coalesces with the "spectacle of the world," on the side of the reified "other": the gaze is both the desexualized ego-ideal and its instantaneous transmogrification and resexualization in the opaque world of objects. The imaginary ego or the eye on the side of the subject of representation is held at abeyance in a state of perpetual fascination and desperation in relation to the gaze as the world of "others," which lies always at one remove from the purview of the imaginary ego. This understanding of the inadequation of the ego to the cultural gaze of the reified world provides a critical fulcrum upon which I base my theory of the modern narrative mimesis as the "perverse" field of spatial arrangement, in which the split of the subjectivity into the imaginary ego and the ego-ideal is suspended over the phantasmatic world of bodies and territories.