Dylan Thomas's sui generis modernism: A Lacanian discussion

The aim of this study is to analyze sui generis modernism of Dylan Thomas with the late Lacanian theory of subjectivity and to discuss adeptness of the Late Lacanian psychoanalytic criticism in interpreting poetry and constructing the anatomy of poetry. Dylan Thomas's poetry has often been considered difficult to understand compared to his contemporaries in terms of style and content as well as how the poet positions himself in his work. This reading focusing especially on Thomas's early poems centers upon the knowledge of how a form of subjectivity is theorized through the discourse of the poet, the symbolic; the social world of linguistic communication and intersubjective relations, the order in the unconscious that gives rise to subjectivity where it is linked by sinthome to the Imaginary and the Real. In Thomas's poems, the poetic persona resists the nature of the language - the Symbolic - which is castrating, destructive and imprisoning through experiences of non-linear time. This resistance, in Thomas's poems presents to the reader the core of the Real that the Symbolic and the Imaginary cannot penetrate. It is also what ignites the creative act [poiein] that makes the poetic truth possible, which is also discussed in this study. The argument of this thesis is that concepts such as the late Lacanian sinthome, jouissance, the Borromean knot, the big Other, the Name of the Father; and post-Lacanian conceptualizations such as Badiou's understanding of anti-philosophy and truth, Kristeva's abjection, semiotic khora and Žižek's 'real Real' can provide insights into the ability to outmaneuver in asserting the idea of possibility of the poetic truth, understanding the process poetic that Dylan Thomas may have established only with his sui generis style, and constructing the anatomy of his poetry. Before attempting to speculate on Thomas's authentic style, the first premise of a late Lacanian reading here is that the reasons why Lacan in his late period brought his theory closer to mathematical abstractions and how the subject approached the Real that resists symbolization/Spinozian experience of a body can be interpreted in terms of poetic language. Similarly, despite that jouissances experienced through the poet's perceptions of his own or maternal corporeality in time and nature, which is frequently repeated in Thomas's process poetic, is only possible in a certain space, it can be stated that the emphasis in Thomas' poems is not on space but on the process itself. To clarify both this process and the poetic truth, in a Lacanian formula, it is possible to analyze the Platonic 'love'-desire that Lacan especially theorized in his X. Seminar on transference. According to Bodiou's idea of poetic truth, which is also mentioned in this thesis; it can only be understood through the poetic nature of language that the ontology of power or the 'absence of the object of desire' is the driving force of the process mentioned above. The carrier of this process is the speaking subject, who has the opportunity to express himself through poetic language. Standing exactly on this premise, this study argues that, based on the knowledge that Lacan's unconscious discourse and Thomas's poetry are constructed on the act of speaking/enunciation, it is this multi-layered poetic ecstasy of the languages of both speaking subjects that makes poetic truth possible. At this point, if there is truth, it is poetic, or in other words, this truth can only be the truth of poiein as poetic truth. From this point of view, this dissertation, within the framework of this poetic truth, argues that Thomas's modernism can be traced through the late Lacanian theory. Thomas's sui generis modernism takes its source from the domination of the impenetrable Real over the body and jouissance forcing the poet not fit the person in the moment he is and makes him experience the process in a non-linear time.