Page 6-Sunday, January 22, 1978-The Michigan' Daily The Michigan Doily-Sunday, For Gael Greene, the "Skies'' are grey By Jeffrey Selbst Lacan: T HE INFLUENCE of Sigmund Freud has penetrated just about every aspect of Ameri- can culture. The impact of Freudian- ism crops up everywhere, in every- thing from our best literature to Better Homes and Gardens, from college lectures to situation come- dies, from advertisements to folk protest songs. And we tend to assume that in the other industrialized Western coun- tries, Freud is viewed in the same way as he's viewed here, as the grand figure in psychology. But that's not the case. Only in England does Freud enjoy nearly the kind of stature he enjoys.in America. In France, another man occupies the position of the grand figure of psychology. His name is Jacques Lacan. A radical return to I THE PICTURE ON the back cover of Gael Greene's novel Blue Skies, No Candy, is of a beautiful woman with long hair and narrow cheekbones. The beauty seems to have been ephemeral; today, Gael Greene is another jowly author in her mid-40s. Her hair is blonde-by- choice, wrinkles beginning to insin- uate themselves on her face. Greene was in Detroit this past week on yet another leg of a promo- tional tour for the just-released pa- perback printing. The novel was ori- ginally published in 1976; it is Greene's first. One thing is certain - Greene doesn't agree with the critics, who scorned her noved almost uni- laterally as nothing more than a mindless, unfunny food - and - sex romp. "When I read the reviews," she said breathlessly, "I was devastated. I called my ex-husband - he has such good taste - and said how can you let me do this? How can you let me publish such a terrible thing?" But that was just a momentary re- action. "I had just the greatest experi- ence. I got a letter from a woman who said that reading the book had just made all the difference in her life." Greene is now working on two more books. One was commissioned by the publisher of Blue Skies, No Candy. It is a novel entitled The Sexual Archives of Dr. Barney Kin- caid, and it concerns a man who has difficulties putting love and sex together in the same package. "I showed it to a man, an editor friend of mine, and he said there's just one teeny spot in it that doesn't sound like a man." She has about 100, pages of it finished, and doesn't know how it will end. Jeffrey Selbst is a former Daily arts editor. Lacan is a Freudian - in fact, he insists that he and his disciples are more loyal to the theories of Freud than are pupils of any other Freudian school. But people in France don't talk much about Freud himself. Psychoanalysis, as it is popularly ECRITS By Jacques Lacan ,New York: Norton & Co., $16.75 known there, is Freudianism inter- preted by and filtered through La- can. When psychoanalysis was estab- lished as a social institution in France, it was Lacanian psycho- analysis which was adopted. About two-thirds of the psychoanalysts in that country now are Lacanians, members of The Freudian School of Paris, the institute founded by La- can. Says philosopher and University professor Michel Pierssens, "In France currently, Freud as such doesn't exist any more. Psycho- analysis is Lacan. When one dis- cusses Freud, it's .always through Lacan's citations of Freud, Lacan's readings of Freud." Pierssens, a Frenchman, is director of the Eng- ligh-language philosophy journal Sub Stance, which he describes as "pos- sibly the only Lacanian journal in the United States." A condensed version of Lacan's major work, Ecrits (the title means "writings"), has recently been trans- lated into English. The new volume is a collection of essays written in the E The other is entitled The Prince of Porn is a Happy Man, and it is a series of interviews and diaries of a porn star she met at a party who's trying to make it in .the world of straight movies. "When I met (Ja- mie) I thought to myself, 'Here is a man who really loves what he's doing. Cultured, loves good food and wine, good music.' But he has the same problem as Barney, and that's tragic. In a porno film, you're a star if you can come on command. But to be able to come on command and not in private - that's a sad thing. "He really doesn't like the title very much." Greene made a name for herself as a food critic for New York Magazine. "(Former editor) Clay Felker liked a piece I'd done on a New York res- taurant, and he got it into his head that I was a food critic. So when he offered me the job, it wasn't really what I'd had in mind, but the thought of having someone pay you for something you like to do was more than I could pass up." She seems to have used her ex- periences as a food * writer in the novel, which contains lavish descrip- tions of dinners eaten by Kate Alex- ander, the heroine. Kate is a thirty- eight-ish screenwriter who eats and sleeps her way through a number of .adventures, parties and situations. CRITICS ALSO complained be- cause the book is excessively status-conscious. One reviewer re- marked that it sounded as though she went to parties and checked the labels on everyone's clothing. This criticism wounds her deeply. "I just thought it was ironic that Kate, who'd made it to a kind of minor celebrity, would still be impressed with things like that." And what is a minor celebrity? "A' minor celebrity is one whom other Ja The i work of See LACAN, Page 7 ' Daily Photo by BRAD BENJAMIN Gael Greene 012 authors might know, or the public might know by name. A major celebrity is one whom everyone knows - the ones who go to a party and it becomes an 'A'- list party. "An 'A' list party would have at it, say - Barbara and Walter." Bar- bara Walters and Walter Cronkite, that is. A 'B' party has lesser celeb- rities. This is Gael Greene's own theory. "I want to make it clear that no such list actually exists," she has- tened to add. Greene is a native of Detroit, grad- uating from Central High in 1951. She went to the University of Michigan and then to New York to look for a job. Finding none, she came back to Detroit to work for UPI. "I wanted to get to New York somehow," she said, "and I asked them'to transfer me to their New'York bureau and they said, 'Look, we have people here ten years waiting to get transferred to New York,' and I decided that wasn't for me." So she went to New York on long weekends looking for a job. "The New York Post agreed to try me out for a week if I could get a vacation from UPI. They wouldn't give me one, so I just quit and staked everything on the tryout. "If that didn't work out I was going to Rome and make a new life for myself," she said, with the air of one delivering a punch-line. She paused. "I never got to Rome." After Detroit, Greene was to visit "Memphis, Dallas, and Atlanta," and a host of other cities before she makes it back home for four days. "No one is ever forced to make these promotional tours," she said, "and some authors just flatly turn them down. But I thought, well, if I'm going to put so much time into writing it, I can certainly put some time into trying to push it. "It's going to be on the New York Times Bestseller List on the-22nd, I think," she said, "and it's already made "Publisher's Weekly." GAE L GREENE HAS a lot to be happy about, but she seems dis-, turbed that the literary world didn't take her more seriously. "I've al- ways wanted to write novels," she said. "Even when I was in Ann Arbor I had a college novel. I kept a few pages around me wherever I moved for years. Everybody hated it. Then I rewrote it. Then only the publisher hated it." "I think," said Gael Greene, growing pensive for just a brief mo- ment, "that a lot of people just didn't stop to see what was there." Il C.,' -~ rif41 o r\ /4 - ~-~ .*1, IH t1g ROOK!4 Biattlegn( of the m Revolt revisio" By Stephen Hersh _ (i. ,'' ! f 4V From left: Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud, Gilles Deleuze anti-oedipus Anti-Oedipus': A nti-anal (Continued from Page 3) repressions) became part of the Parisian intellectual vocabulary. "And, recalls Pierssens, "there were universities where suddenly there were movements of people who called themselves Schizo's" in loyal- ty to schizoanalysis. "You had to do a schizoanalysis of everything. It be- came a fashion." In addition to teaching at the University, Pierssens, a Frenchman, edits a philosophical journal, Sub . Stance, and is author of the philo- sophical work Le Tour de Babel [The Tower of Babel], which was pub- lished in the same series of editions as the French version of Anti-Oedi- pus. N HIS OFFICE at the top floor of the Modern Languages Building, Pierssens explains in raid French.. thif Anti-dedipus buifds' from a critique of the "establishment" school of psychology in France to a critique of all The large and small structures that make up human society. He says that Deleuze and Guattari advise people "to refuse psychoanalysis and to accept individ- uality. They say psychiatry is an in- strument of domination and repres- sion. Whoever submits to psycho- analysis, they say, is refusing indi- viduality, is refusing himself, and is in a way sacrificing himself to a to- talitarian idea aiming at the aboli- tion of differences. They say that it's all right to be crazy, just as it's all right to be a member of a minority. "All of that is a politicalcritique," Pierssens continues. "Democracy, in the traditional sense, is represenp- tive democracy. One person is repre- sented by another, And in tbe:name of this. representation, -the. person being represented is dominated, crushed, by the person doing the rep- resenting." How it is that domination follows from the social structures we take for granted is difficult to explain - much of the book is devoted to an ex-. planation of exactly that. Anti-Oedi- pus is a sort of map of the emotional imprisonment which the authors say permeates society, and it goes some distance in sketching the pathway to liberation from the inhibition and suffocation that comes from being socialized. - The basic building block of human experience, say Deleuze and Guat- tari, is desire. The process of being made into a civilized person, they assert, is a process of having one's desire denied, frustrated, diverted, and, re-routed .into. pathways. that support societal structures. Accord-., ing to the authors, the powers-that-be in society are afraid of anything which liberates desire or threatens to do so, because freeing up desire is revolutionary - it threatens the sup- porting superstructure of the status quo. "What Deleuze and Guattari say," says Pierssens, "is that we should start with affirmation, with will, with multiplicity, with play." D eLEUZE and Guattari sketch an image of the human being as a factory whose function is to produce desire. And the style of the prose reflects the authors' concern with liberating raw feelings - the lan- guage of the book is highly charged; it brims with energy. And despite the book's careful organization it seems to reach out simultaneously jn~pyery See ANTI-OEDIPUS. Page 8 :" I N 1972, TWO French experts in psychology, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, became the talk of Paris when they published a book called Anti-Oedipus, placing them- selves in opposition to the orthodox French school of psychology. Anti- Oedipus was seen as a manifesto for a revolution in psychology and social a sober re-evaluation of accepted social and psychological thought; others represented a radical-psycho- logical - anthropological - philosophi- cal chic. ANTI-OEDIPUSI By Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari thought - and it created a sensation. New York: Viking Press, 16.95 For a while, just about every French- man and Frenchwoman who talked While all this was going on, hardly about new ideas was talking about a whisper about it was heard in uAnti-Oedipus. America. This was due partly to the In challenging the French main- fact that Anti-Oedipus was unavail- stream psychology of Jacques Lacan able to American audiences; it and his Freudian School of Paris, wasn't until just recently that the Anti-Oedipus set off a phenomenon book was translated into English and which was a cross between a published here. movement and a fad. Some of the UT EVEN NOW, hardly anyone partisans of Anti-Oedipus advocated Bhere knows or cares about the book. And that's largely because it's Stephen Hersh is a former Sunday a book that's very hard to penetrate. t Sa. .k gihe ebk. _.' . .. - i ' o -understand-Anti-Oedipus; -you have to ha tation of I Lacan, you And even requisites, follow. But in F a furor. S2 fessor of l "The book about a lc years ago first anti suddenly People we many mor tions fron and phras such as ' the name to free p Deleuze prison of 4See A