Gap and Trap

Gaps appear everywhere — in the speech of the subject under analysis, in the incomprehensible words of children, and in those uninterpretable parts of dreams; especially what Freud called the navel of the dream.

More fundamentally, causality itself is a problematic hypothesis. The chain connecting cause and effect is not always perfect. In our experience, there is always something wrong, something that interrupts the continuity between cause and effect — this is exactly what Lacan called the gap: something that exists but doesn’t function, and yet is indescribable.

A gap indicates the things behind a surface, enticing people to imagine a field they cannot enter. Like in the dream of the father whose son has died. When the exhausted father went to the room next to his son’s body to rest, he dreamt that his son was shouting at him, ‘Father, can’t you see I’m burning?’ He woke up, opened the door to his son’s room, and found that the person he had invited to pray for his son had fallen asleep, the candle had fallen onto the sheet covering his son’s body, and his son’s arm was burning.

A dream reveals an inevitable encounter with a missed reality. The death of the son is an irreparable loss for the father — a reality that has been forever missed. Yet such a reality can only be repeated in dreams, as an attempt to repeat the lost moment. However, there is a more profound encounter hidden in this dream. If the function of the dream is to prolong sleep by satisfying unconscious wishes, then what, in this case, woke the father? The fallen candle and the faint noise of the flames are too insignificant to rouse someone from sleep. In Lacan’s words, it is the flames that come to meet the father. But from where? Not from the room where the son’s body lies, but from somewhere else — a place Lacan calls the Real, the ultimate locus of the unconscious.

There is always a gap, like a door left ajar. Or that ‘Father, can’t you see I’m burning?’ is itself a gap: a brief glimpse into the indescribable field that lies behind the subject, an encounter that is, by its nature, destined to be missed.

A trap is a further development of the gap. Compared to a gap, a trap introduces an element of deception. In hunting, the hunter sets a trap along the path the prey is expected to take, waiting for it to activate the mechanism and be caught. Deception is key to this kind of capture. Same in the animal kingdom, mimicry functions like a trap: the quasi-plant animal inscribes itself into the picture constituted by its surroundings, becoming a stain, a mottle…Whether in the trap or in mimicry, there is always a deception, or a lure — something pretending to be something else.

Here, the dimension of desire enters. Among all the organs, eye is the most easily deceived — because of its voracity, always want to grasp and see everything around it. In the ancient competition between Parrhasius and Zeuxis, the two most famous painters of their age competed to determine the superior artist. Zeuxis, renowned for his lifelike painting of grapes, when he showed his painting a bird stopped on the painting and thought the grapes were real. Parrhasius, however, presented his painting covered by a veil. It was when Zeuxis came to the painting and tried to lift the veil that he realised the veil was part of the painting. 

There is always something hidden beneath the surface, tempting the fingers to dare lift the veil. The trap functions precisely through what is concealed behind the curtain, and through the gap created by its lifting. Moreover, the meaning of trap has also been revealed from another layer: whether it is the grapes that deceived the bird, or the veil that deceived Zeuxis, they both pretend to be something else. This is why Plato protests against painting. In Lacan’s words, it is not because painting gives an illusory equivalence to the object, but, the trompe-l’œil of painting pretends to be something other than what it is.

It is from here that Lacan begins his discussion of image and representation. The gap always exists, between being and resemblance, and painting serves as the mediation between them. This mediating function is what Lacan refers to as the screen. The relation between the painting as screen and the spectator is one of lure. It can be summarised as: ‘You want to see? Well, take a look at this!’ In this way, the relationship between painting and the eye is that the painting feeds the eye what it desires to see — laying down the gaze as one lays down one’s weapons. It is for this reason that, when Lacan speaks of the relation between gaze and eye, he says: ‘In the dialectic of the eye and the gaze, that there is no coincidence, but, on the contrary, a lure.’

In the matter of visible, everything is a trap.

The eye can never be fully satisfied, because there is an essential lack in the being. As in love, there is always something missing between the subject of love and the object of love: You never looked at me from the place from which I see you. This profound misalignment also arises in moments when one encounters the real, the moment when the father woke from the dream of his dead son.

In Hans Holbein the Younger’s painting The Ambassadors, isn’t the enigmatic shadow in the foreground the best explanation of the trap? An image that has captured the gaze of viewers for hundreds of years, leading to the ultimate answer – the shadow of death.

 

 

References:

Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan, W. W. Norton & Company, 1981

An Introduction Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Dylan Evans, Routledge, 1996

The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud, The Macmillan Company, 1913

 

10/2024

London

 

 

The Ambassadors, Hans Holbein the Younger, 1533