The Möbius Strip as a Theory of Narrative?: From Bessie Head’s Early Journalism to The Cardinals

This paper repositions Jacques Lacan’s model of the Möbius strip as a theory of literary narrative. I try to think about the literary reader’s meaning-making endeavours in topological, spatial terms. I equate these endeavours with the formation of the psychopathological symptom. I rethink the idea of the metaphor’s substitutability of terms as a foreshortening of the signifying chain. This foreshortening produces the symptom. Thus, the single surface of the Möbius strip allows me to challenge the usual understanding of metaphor as paradigmatically “deep”. I rethink the metaphorical mechanism of the symptom in terms of a lateral, “editorial” resequencing of the signifying chain. This repositioning of metaphor allows me to think through a literary case study—Bessie Head’s novella The Cardinals. I argue for The Cardinals as an accumulation of hyperinvested, initially banal signs first encountered in adjacent news features during Bessie Head’s early journalism. Head’s hyperinvestment of signs is part of a strategy of aesthetic amplification. The heroic, mythical destiny of gendered astrological protagonists (the Cardinals of the title) potentially outscales Apartheid’s grubby racial engineering of the everyday. Head equates the meeting of two sexualized and cosmically important protagonists with liberation. The paradoxical effect of her hyperbolic method is that every ordinary sign is enmeshed with and is submitted to the imminent risks of large-scale, cosmic power. The result is an assault upon the personality in which signification is not metonymic sequencing but a surfeit of metaphorical jouissance (overwhelming psychic pleasure experienced to the extent of suffering). I argue that the reader’s bid to make sense of the literary text amounts to a desire for depth or ulterior design across different expressive instances. Readerly desire for depth or ulterior design is, at root, an editorial foreshortening of the Möbian sequencing of the page. All reading, therefore, is symptomatic. Since readerly desire is intrusive and violent, since it restructures the signifying surface on a page, I equate reading with Lacanian perversion. I conclude that Head’s unfinished ending, with its withheld resolution, is an interpretive therapeutic cut that unravels the reader’s symptomatic meaning-making by confronting it with lack.