Desiring Alterity: A Lacanian Reading of Three Modes of Being in Mervyn Peake’s Boy in Darkness

Abstract

Mervyn Peake’s Boy in Darkness (1956) is a novella that consistently develops the tension among modes of being which are inextricably linked to our notions of identity and alterity: the human, as presented in the complex networks of culture; the nonhuman, as given in nature; and the posthuman, as a combination of human and nonhuman through technological or magical influences. Concerned with the conflicting relationship between people and the world they inhabit, the Peakean narrative depicts such a relationship through a phenomenon that at once separates and binds together all three modes of being: language. While the nonhuman diversity—animals, fungi, nonliving matter—does not exhibit speech, the human and its complementary yet feared alterity—genetically modified individuals—interact within what Lacan calls the symbolic order, from which subjectivity emerges. It is within this order that desire, the roots of which are found in a perpetual sense of lack, unites linguistic beings in a shared experience of nostalgia. The insistence on a return to an idealized former state motivates the entire narrative, in which the protagonist is torn between the desire to be altered and the desire to restore his sense of self. Using Lacan’s theory of object lack in his Seminar IV, this paper aims to explore the paradoxical quality of desire in Peake’s novella, where the conflicting relationship among the three modes of being results from the subject’s endless yearning for the absent and the unattainable.