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... for loneliness implies precisely the lack of and desire for an other. "Too hot" to be "at ease, " Williams, playing the voyeur, finds this other in the form of the sexually budding girls. In his role as voyeur, Williams is paradoxically trapped between his narcissistic desire to identify with the girls and an irreconcilable need to reassert the presence of his ego. As Freud recognized, its active counterpart accompanies every passive perversion.
He who is a voyeur in his unconscious is concomitantly an exhibitionist (575). And that quintessential assertion of the ego, "exhibitionism, " Freud contends, "is strongly dependent upon the castration complex; it would emphasize again the integrity of ones own (male) genitals and repeats the infantile satisfaction of the lack of the penis in the female" (569). Rather than envisioning voyeurism and exhibitionism as complimentary opposites, Lacan finds them to be fundamentally identical: "What the voyeur is looking for and finds is merely a shadow, a shadow behind a curtain. There he will fantasize any magic of presence, the most graceful of girls, for example, even if on the other side there is only a hairy athlete. What he is looking for is not, as one says, the phallus but precisely its absence... " (182). And yet what does the voyeur of "The Lonely Street" find?
It is the girls who have the phalli of "pink sugar, " while he, himself, has perhaps been castrated. After all, whose phalli could the girls be holding? In a sense, the male observer becomes "one of the girls, " while the girls, like the observer, are paradoxically "the boys. " This, however, is not so much a triumph over dualism, as it is an expression of ambiguity and anxiety over the nature of duality and the status of the ego. Confronted by his disconcerting phallic position construction of the anatomical distinction between the sexes, symbolized for him by castration anxiety, the voyeur / exhibitionist is left with two options. He can deny that the difference exists at all, narcissistically identifying with his object either by assuming a feminine role himself or phallic ising the female (responses which tend to intensify the very castration anxiety against which they are supposed to defend); or he can reassert his ego by stressing the supposed "superiority" of his own equipment, further alienating himself from his object in the process. In fact, to varying degrees both options are taken, leaving the voyeur / exhibitionist in an agonistic relation to intimacy, craving it as a cure for his loneliness while dreading to give up the protective distance of the unseen observer.
As Kohut suggests, the voyeur attempts to alleviate loneliness by replacing narcissistically invested lost objects; yet this attempt is ultimately frustrated by what Joel Rudinow calls the "paradoxical centre of voyeurism": the "wish to be in two places at once, both in and out of the presence of the object of interest" (177). In "The Lonely Street, " Williams projects his loneliness onto the street and his passions, which he longs to have acknowledged, onto the girls, finding them returned in "sidelong, idle look[s]" and in the way in which they touch "their avid mouths" with "pink flames. " But if through this projection Williams identifies with, and mis recognises himself in, the street and the schoolgirls, there is no universe of non-differentiation. The transient moment of almost coital intimacy (and for the voyeur the act of looking canada frequently does represent the act of coitus), when the girls "mount the lonely street" (my emphasis), is also the moment of absolute loss. The voyeur is left alone to redirect whatever exhibitionistic desire he had once projected onto the looked-at girls. For Williams the publication of this poem was plainly an act of exhibitionism, exposing his sexual desires before the very schoolgirls who inflamed them.
Far from being the work of sexual re-pression, poetry, claimed Williams, is the product of sexual ex-pression. On the first page of his Autobiography, he announces: "I am extremely sexual in my desires: I carry them everywhere and at all times. I think that from that arises the drive, which empowers us all. Given that drive, a man does with it what his mind directs. In the manner in which he directs that power lies his secret. Yet Williams distinction between repression and expression almost suggests a (much too simple) precept for distinguishing between the psychoanalytic "neuroses" and "perversions.
I would like to propose it is the natural, raw instincts that motivate Williams poems and thoughts, which help us identify his work as complying with the maxim no ideas but in things; the plain ordinary poem content has no pretence or illusion as a result. While Williams poetry clearly is the product of sexual expression, his argument is also the classic alibi of the voyeur / artist : "I am not looking at something forbidden; on the contrary, I am permitting myself to be looked at" (Bergler 270). Bibliography & Referencing -By, Nina. The Norton Anthology of American Literature 5 th Edition, Volume 2.
New York, London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998. -Bergler, E. "Psychoanalysis of Writers and Literary Productivity. " Psychoanalysis and the Social Sciences. Ed.
G. Rim. New York: International Universities Press, 1947. 247 - 296. -Freud, Sigmund. Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex. The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud. Trans.
A. A. Brill. New York: Modern Library, 1938. 553 - 632. -Kohut, Heinz. The Analysis of the Self. New York: International Universities Press, 1971. -Lacan, Jacques.
The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1978. -Mariani, Paul. William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked.
New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981... William Carlos Williams: The Poet and His Critics. : American Library Association, 1975. Miller, J. Hillis. " Introduction. " William Carlos Williams: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.
J. : Prentice-Hall, 1966. 1 - 14... Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth-Century Writers. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1965. Rodgers, Audrey T. Virgin and Whore: The Image of Women in the Poetry of William Carlos Williams. Jefferson, N.
C. : McFarland, 1987. Rudinow, Joel. "Representation, Voyeurism, and the Vacant Point of View. " Philosophy and Literature 1979: 173 - 186. Stevens, Wallace. Opus Posthumous.
Read. ed. New York: Knopf, 1989. Stoller, Robert.
Perversion: The Erotic Form of Hatred. New York: Pantheon, 1975.
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