The child Elias follows his father with his eyes. He follows his advice, laps up his words. There is no question of challenging what he says. At the very least, Elias finds him a bit weird. Since the beginning he has been wearing “a camouflage hunting-jacket with a crazy number of pockets”[1]. In the evening when he goes up to Elias’room before his sleep, he repeats his words: “the only dangerous animal is the deer, you hear me, it is the deer”[2].
The father has a hut at the bottom of the garden which is full of devices the child is not allowed to touch: magnetic stones, wave recorders, Horus sticks… Objects that allow access to the fifth dimension or to the fields of vision. One day, the father threw a Horus stick at Elias’face because he had inadvertently dropped it “while the stick was ‘charging its power’”[3].
Regularly, the father imposes on the child “the exercise of the great cold”[4] in order to free him from the waves: he must completely immerse himself in the lake, head included, even in winter. Elias doesn’t like it very much but he doesn’t flinch: “What is strange is that I was aware of the abnormality of all of this, but at the same time I wanted to please my father”[5].
The “waves” is a “password”[6] for Elias, a word in his tiny suitcase of children’s words, the family’s suitcase, the one he forms with his father. The word is not an enigma. It is a word that conceals the father’s knowledge, a knowledge available from one side only. There is no question of challenging the father’s words since they form his foundations, and their meanings are his cradle. There are no other words.
The father explains his theories but refuses to teach Elias anything. Neither to read, nor to write, nor to ride a bike[7]. Knowledge is a block. It is not transmitted, it does not move back and forth between parent and child. It does not circulate or sway. It is not a little bit there with one, and a little bit here with the Other.
What is the version of the father that Victor Pouchet portrays in his novel Self-Portrait as a deer? A version of a father, and not one “père-versely oriented; that is to say, [who] makes of a woman, object a that causes his desire”[8]. He is a father of principles that do not make up the moral lot. He is a father steeped in certainties, not in beliefs that could leave room for a subject’s division and where the Other would interfere. A father inflated with assertions, far away from the symbolic function.
He is the law and the truth, a paranoid version of the father. His will of jouissance on the child can be read. This child whose body, gaze, and assumptions must feed his world, which holds together only through this delirious reading.
It is because Elias encounters other little others, other words, other glances. It is because he hears “Elias’s daddy is a wacko [,] Elias’s daddy is a wacko”[9] that the dissonance becomes apparent. Thus, under the law he believed in, appear the caprice and the jouissance of the father, “a tyrant-father who makes his jouissance an unbearable and arbitrary law”[10].
From this father who thinks he is God[11], Elias will keep the marks, marks in the body – a wobbly, unstable body. And Elias will also keep some oracular and frightening signifiers, like his animal spirit blown by his father at the end of a sort of shamanic hypnosis: the deer. “Often, the hunt for deer ends in a pond, where there is no way to break the tracks, as too great is the exhaustion. […] Our paths may be tangled, and our sense of smell may not allow us to find our way, but I don’t lose hope, I haven’t fallen into the pond yet”[12].
References from the author:
[1] Pouchet V., Autoportrait en chevreuil, [Self-portrait as a deer] Paris, Livre de Poche, 2022, p. 17. Our translation.
[2] Ibíd.
[3] Ibíd., p. 19.
[4] Ibíd., p. 36.
[5] Ibíd.
[6] Ibíd., p. 37.
[7] Cf. ibíd., p. 18.
[8] Lacan J., Le Séminaire, livre XXII, «R.S.I.», leçon du 21 Janvier 1975, Ornicar?, n°3, mai 1975, p. 107. Our translation.
[9] Pouchet V., op. cit., p. 27. Our translation.
[10] Laurent É., «Parentalités après le patriarcat», Quarto, n°133, mars 2023, p. 66. Our translation.
[11] Cf. ibid.
[12] Pouchet V., op. cit., p. 122.
Translation: Cédric Grolleau
Proofreading: Eva Reinhofer
Picture : © Marie Van Roey
