1There is currently a consensus in the reading community that Justin Torres’s We the Animals is the kind of novel that shows a pathway towards queer and post-colonial liberation. In “Discovering Existence,” Victorio Reyes claims that he did not know he existed as a Puerto Rican in contemporary United States until he has read this novel. He claims that in its nuance lies his story—one in which a subaltern like him has come to terms with his identity. In the most cathartic way possible, Torres’s exploration of nuance gave him voice and liberated him (Reyes). Marion Christina Rohrleitner in “Refusing the Referendum” is of a similar opinion. She claims that the novel’s portrayal of resistance and vision of queer life “unapologetically celebrates the possibilities of a queer planet” (2).
2Although most readings see a liberatory function to the novel, I will make a case for the contrary. We the Animals is not a coming-of-age novel that shows how a queer individual has resisted patriarchy by existing in a different plane of reality. It instead shows us a queer protagonist radically alienated by his confused social position resulting in a subject lost in the intersubjective relations of the symbolic order. Rather than the claims of various critical readings that he has transcended the limitations of a phallocentric social order towards utopian possibilities for marginalized people, I will show instead that the unnamed protagonist begins and ends his bildungsroman in a constant state of misrecognition and immersion into the realm of the Lacanian imaginary. Instead of finding his “authentic” self in the process of rebelling, he only slips further and further into a false fantasy where in the end he sees himself as a denuded “prince” (125) among a non-existent kingdom. We the Animals instead shows an ongoing reality—that the rule of the Father in the symbolic order remains prevalent and immersion in Lacanian imaginary results in psychological dysfunction. I will also show that any attempts by the protagonist to occupy a queer subject position apart from the man-woman binary would fail as the social order which he inhabits is dictated by the rules of the phallic signifier where there is only one sex—man and its disavowed Other (woman). As a queer subject though, the unnamed protagonist is in a far more abjected state as he occupies the hysteric position between castrator (by the virtue of having the phallus as a man) and castrated (by occupying a feminized position in the symbolic order) and this psychological tension becomes the central dilemma of the novel as he fails to locate the notion of the “self” he has projected in his mind.
3Recent scholarship done on We the Animals has focused on broader implications of radical queer rebellion demonstrated by the queer protagonist and his subaltern identity, as someone who grew up as Puerto-Rican in a rural, working-class environment. In Reyes’s essay, he recounts the power of fictional identification and encountering a narrative that mirrors one’s own life story. Reyes makes several philosophical musings about the nature of existence in relation to fiction. First, he makes a claim that it is possible not to exist if one’s own lived experiences are not mirrored by an Other (Reyes). If the notion of existence is defined by witnessing one’s story reflected by another person, then identities are formed and legitimized through narratives where we see an Other who is exactly like us. Reyes argues that hearing one’s narrative is a primary mechanism crucial to identity formation as it is in relational terms that we learn to fully grasp the notion of selfhood. From there, Reyes asks the reflexive question of how he finds himself in a narrative that has key differences with his life story. After all, Reyes and the protagonist do not share the exact same identity as he is not queer nor did they grow up in the same place. He discusses the concept of the subaltern and unhomeliness in relation to his alienation as a Puerto-Rican in modern-day United States. He strongly identifies as Puerto Rican yet he does not carry the same cultural heritage and upbringing to fully understand what his identity means in relation to his race. Hence, he arrives at the answer that it is in this gap in his identity where fictional representations of post-colonial subjects draw their power. It need not matter that your exact life is mirrored to you in fiction or through another individual, but it is in the nuances and differences in marginalized people’s narratives where one realizes the extent of alienation and oppression. It is in this reflection of shared struggle whether it be in race or gender where one is liberated. In the end, the most important aspect of identifying with narratives that depict the struggle of the marginalized is of course, the necessary affirmation that queer or post-colonial subjects are never alone and they exist.
4Rohrleitner is of a similar opinion. In “Refusing the Referendum,” Rohrleitner draws from an intersectional framework to argue that We the Animals is performing queer subversion towards a utopia for marginalized people. She elaborates on her argument by drawing parallels between the Puerto Rican citizenship referendum and the novel’s use of liminality. During the 1990’s, Puerto Ricans held a referendum to determine their political future whether to support commonwealth over statehood (3). What is interesting for her, however, is the fact that half of the people in 1998 voted “none of the above” (3). She reads this as a refusal by Puerto Ricans to be subsumed into limiting options. Likewise, the protagonist’s radicalism and state of in-betweenness mirrors the same rejection of the heteronormative world of his father and brothers and the simplistic and easy version of queer life contained within societal norms (3). His identification with the outcasts (the animals and mongrels of this world as he puts it) signifies a political stand that rejects hegemonic social structures in place, from the state to the nuclear family (4). His radicalism confirms Hannah Arendt’s budding conception of queer politics as directly opposing society itself (6).
5Rohrleitner also views the unnamed protagonist’s sexual fantasies and passivity as subversive in nature. His decision to differentiate himself from his brothers and position himself as the passive figure in sexual fantasies do not signify a quiet withdrawal or acceptance of imposed queer limitations. Rather, it heralds a self-aware queer individual who is in control of the pleasure he wants to be enacted on him in his sadomasochistic sexual fantasies (9). Paradoxically, by occupying the receiver of violent pleasures, he affirms himself as the one who is at the center of the experience (9). In the end, when he is violently outed by his family, Rohrleitner states that his active resistance to “socially sanctioned and predetermined choices allow[s] him to experience a diverse and contradictory ‘horizon of possibility’” (10). The shift in self-affirming and identifying language with the “animals” of the psychic ward—from the last line’s “I slur” to “I vow”—signifies a proud and defiant display of identity to not bend to anyone else’s rule (6).
6There are several gaps and points of contention that I would like to point out. Firstly, these readings do not give enough critical attention to the family complex and how it actively constructs the trajectory of the protagonist’s narrative arc. Indeed, any form of “queer rebellion” he demonstrates is ultimately a byproduct of the prison he has found himself in as a subject caught within internal family dynamics. He is both under the influence of a powerful imaginary figure through his mother and a father who possesses absolute patriarchal authority. Secondly, they focus so much on the socio-political ramifications of his queerness without considering the make-up of his character psychology, his behavior and how his fantasies are intimately tied to the self he conceives of. Ultimately, the figures of the Mother and the Father are crucial to the unnamed narrator’s construction of selfhood and any substantial discussion of his psyche and how it goes through the bildungsroman narrative is virtually inexistent. Hence, it becomes easy to misinterpret his neurotic behavior or obsessional fantasies as queer subversion without considering the narrative context within which his psychological issues of neurosis and hysteria increasingly manifest. My reading follows the tradition of meaningful psychoanalytic interpretations. In this case, I am more concerned with what the protagonist’s sexuality, violent sexual fantasies and state of mind obscure rather than what they signify in the broader socio-political discourse. The real meaning of a narrative (or the semblance of one) emerges by analyzing what is being repressed or concealed.
7In order to understand where the unnamed narrator’s alienation stems from, it is important to revisit Jacques Lacan’s narrative of what a standard family and childhood is like. The family complex and its insidious influence, after all, are crucial aspects of the protagonist and his siblings’ childhood and adolescent development. Prior to the advent and acquisition of language, Lacan proposes that all infants undergo a stage in psychic development called the imaginary order. It is a period in infancy where a sense of pure bliss and state of wholeness are conceived and felt by the child in relation to the mother who nurtures it. This phase is completely illusory as the mother and its child are separate beings yet the excessive pleasure that the child feels by being with its mother makes her one and the same with the child in its psyche.
8Once the child acquires basic motor skills to move on its own, Lacan theorizes that the subject will experience the mirror stage. It is the genesis of the ego; the stage in psychosexual development where the child glances at a mirror and sees a distinct subject apart from its mother. The infant would become subsumed under its own specular image, leading to an assumption that the subject is fully functioning and whole on its own. The ego that the child conceives though is built on a misnomer. The infant develops its identity under “a fantasized identification with others, particularly the mother (the child strives to be the object of the mother’s desire), and an illusory corporeal cohesion founded on a (mistaken) identification of the child with its visual gestalt in the mirror” (Grosz 32). This means all subjects anchor their identities on an ego-ideal that does not truly exist. In reality, infants are uncoordinated and helpless on their own—any sense of individuality that they may have in their developmental years is tied to the mother’s existence as the bearer of life. Because the imaginary order is a false fantasy world founded on excessive pleasure and the child’s perceived homogenous union with its mother, the acquisition of language is a haunting experience for the child.
9Language is not only an unstable medium, but it also poses issues to subjectivity because of its innately phallocentric quality. In Lacanian discourse, this means that the phallus governs the system of signification that we inhabit. The revelation of its existence splits up the child from its imaginary identity. It realizes that the mother is castrated because she lacks the phallus. Language is also ultimately male-centered in its conception and development. Any notion of selfhood that subjects have correlates to their subject positionality within the social order and their relationship to the phallus. In “The Signification of the Phallus,” Lacan tells us the real significance of the phallus which he understood differently compared to his predecessors in psychoanalysis:
The phallus can be better understood on the basis of its function here. In Freudian doctrine, the phallus is not a fantasy, if we are to view fantasy as an imaginary effect. Nor is it such an object (part-, internal, good, bad, etc.) inasmuch as ‘object’ tends to gauge the reality involved in a relationship. Still less is it the organ—penis or clitoris—that it symbolizes. And it is no accident that Freud adopted as a reference the simulacrum it represented to the Ancients. For the phallus is a signifier, a signifier whose function, in the intrasubjective economy of analysis, may lift the veil from the function it served in the mysteries. For it is the signifier that is destined to designate meaning effects as a whole, insofar as the signifier conditions them by its presence as signifier. (579)
10The emergence of language in the child’s psyche heralds the transitional period where the subject must abandon the imaginary space it shared with its mother to situate the newly formed ego in the social order ruled by the Father and the dictates of the phallic signifier. The convergence of language, ideology, culture and the indomitable figure of the Father forms Lacan’s concept of the symbolic order. For the child to exist in the symbolic order, it must also accept the Father’s ultimate prohibition—that it was never the mother’s love object as the mother ultimately belongs to the father. The child’s entrance into the symbolic also means internalizing the Name-of-the-Father and the power he represents through the phallus. In fear of castration, the male child will have to replicate the characteristics of his father in order to become a father of his own. This symbolic replication of paternal personage is what psychoanalytic feminists would conceive of as patriarchy’s stronghold. However, despite the dissolution of the child’s dyadic relationship with its mother, Lacan posits that remnants of the imaginary order hover in our consciousness even if the child transitions to the realm of the symbolic. After all, the dissolution of the Edenic relationship between mother and child is a haunting experience that fragments the child’s identity and this void left in the split subject never fully leaves the unconscious. Sex, unbridled passions, fantasies and love are all potential imaginary constructs that can sell us the false belief that we can assume a coherent sense of selfhood despite the reality of a fragmented ego.
11The novel begins predictably with a specter of the imaginary order as one would expect of a bildungsroman narrative rooted in the family complex. The reader is dropped amidst mundane childhood events featuring a nurturing mother and a father who is in between absentee and ever present. In the first crucial scene, the unnamed protagonist’s mother pleads with him to stop growing up at the age of six and to forever remain his “Ma’s baby boy” (16) as the mother regrets the fact that Manny and Joel are already “boys turning into Paps” (17). He tells us that his mother’s need is so vast and that pain lingers in her voice due to trauma from domestic abuse. This revival of mother-child imaginary relationship is so powerful that something sparks inside of him and he pulls her for a kiss (17). This is the first misrecognition that he commits post-mirror stage—the delusion that he can preserve whatever imaginary ties he has with his mother. It also highlights the fact that he has processed the oedipal complex differently from his siblings as he identifies more with his mother than his brutish father. The protagonist, from the very beginning, confirms Freud’s early hypothesis of how the homosexual comes into being. In classical Freudian psychosexual development, an inverse resolution of the Oedipus complex happens when the young male homosexual identifies with the mother rather than his same-sex parent and from there, diverts his libidinal cathexis unconsciously to the father. This Freudian framing of the unnamed narrator’s homosexual bildungsroman becomes important later as it becomes the unconscious driver of the erotics of his ego.
12Soon the narrative reveals that their father is physically abusing their mother and the children would also be subjected to violence and discipline, which the father would claim is necessary to make them more of a man. The father’s influence is so powerful that at some point their family is plunged into crisis when he temporarily leaves them. Their mother suffers from a mental breakdown and stops working or eating, leaving the siblings in a constant state of exasperation. While Manny and Joel argue, the protagonist begins processing his reality differently—he would see something sexual in the way his mother’s co-worker would assist his mother while she is psychologically incapacitated. He claims that she started kissing her all over “covering Ma’s whole face with them, even her nose and eyebrows. Then she put her lips on Ma’s lips and held them there” (32). His sexualization of the relationship between her Ma and Linda while his siblings do not notice anything is, I would posit, an effect of the imaginary order and his queer identity emerging from a failed replication of paternal characteristics.
13The novel eventually proceeds to standard bildungsroman developments and the Name-of-the-Father would slowly be replicated in his siblings. He, however, fails to identify with their father’s characteristics despite undergoing the same rites of passage expected of men in working-class communities (watching pornography and participating in neighborhood brawls). Their sibling bond remains, but his brothers would notice his marked difference. They start calling him a faggot and a pest and he gets beaten up black and blue (90). He would try to live up to the demands of phallocentric signification by still participating in his brothers’ activities. He tries watching pornography with his brothers and he would not share the same transfixed perspective as them. Eventually, he utters internally: “Why won’t you look at me, my brothers, why won’t you take my eyes?” (97), which hints at the beginning of alienation as he can no longer connect with his brothers who have, at this point, become replicas of their father. He, on the other hand, no longer knows if he is still the same man or something entirely different. As the novel progresses, everyone around him starts fixating on his visible femininity and queer tendencies. The bildungsroman happens. He accepts his queerness and says, “that they already smell my difference and hate me for it .... Look at us, our last night together, when we were brothers still.” (105).
14Trapped in a symbolic order he cannot identify with, the unnamed narrator demonstrates rebellion by writing his explicit sexual fantasies in a diary. In one of his late-night entries, he envisions himself going to a bus station and waiting for the opportunity to have a casual sexual encounter with one of the bus drivers. Eventually, someone discovers him lurking in the dim bathroom. The driver, at first, chastises him for being in the station by saying “get the fuck out of here” (113), but after this verbal assault, the driver locks the bathroom door and asks, “You want me to make you ... I’ll make you” (113). Post-sexual encounter, the unnamed narrator screams “I’m made!” (115) while desiring to look at a mirror to see himself.
15There are several reasons why I do not see this as a form of queer rebellion and identify it more as a deeper immersion in the Lacanian imaginary. First, the unnamed narrator says that this sexual experience was marked by paranoid behavior of him sneaking to the bus station while constantly being in a frenetic, nervous state. Prior to the sexual experience, he asks the driver if the building is closed with his heart pounding, doubting what to make out of this sexual encounter playing out in his eyes. Not only does this signify paranoid behavior, but he also demonstrates naivety and confusion during the sexual encounter. This puts it in sharp contrast to the perceived bold exploration of queerness. Second, is the fact that his queer fantasies still involve him being constituted as a subject by an alpha-male figure.
16My vision of embodying radical queer resistance is in line with Lee Edelman’s polemic in No Future. To be queer means to embody “the bar to every realization of futurity, the resistance, internal to the social, to every social structure or form” (4). It means being beyond and outside the political symptoms of heteronormative culture (3). Queerness becomes disruptive to the symbolic when it accedes to the place of abjection, “accepting its figural status as resistance to the viability of the social while insisting on the inextricability of such resistance from every social structure” (3). If queer rebellion were to become a real possibility, Edelman posits that the queer subject must embrace its role as the abject and reject the influence of the symbolic. It must also denounce imaginary identifications with the figure of the Child, which he sees as fundamentally opposed to queer existence and “central to the compulsory narrative of reproductive futurism” (21). As a Lacanian, Edelman acknowledges that the queer subject can never be truly integrated in the symbolic order and that for him is far from an ugly reality. Rather, it is a political advantage. By aligning the queer with the death drive and its life negating qualities, “it dismantles the subject from within” (9). It becomes “the negativity opposed to every form of social viability” (9). The queer subject accepting the negativity of its abjected subject position is what will unravel the symbolic and bring us to a different political future—not mere conformity to the symbolic and the false promissory identity it wishes to bestow.
17The narrative fails to reach this vision of queer resistance outlined by Edelman. Worse than that, the protagonist becomes complicit to the symbolic and the Name-of-the-Father. He envisions himself as a subject subsumed under the coordinates of the Other’s desire, the way females are forced to masquerade as the phallus for the consumption of the male subject in conventional patriarchy. The unnamed protagonist fails to escape Freud’s phallocentric vision of the homosexual. His sexual fantasies all revolve around personas of his father. It is no coincidence that he wants violent perversions to be enacted to him by men who resemble his father. As demanded by patriarchal signification, man’s notion of selfhood is always anchored to the father preceding him. In working-class literature, it becomes a running theme for sons to unconsciously seek their father’s approval for them to be heralded as a functioning and socially accepted individual in the symbolic order. Ironically, the unnamed protagonist fell into the same scheme of seeking paternal affirmation that his brothers were guilty of even though he believes that he is now embracing his real, queer identity. This is another clear sign that We the Animals alludes to the sheer ubiquity of the Name-of-the-Father’s influence and how the protagonist is far from authentic queer rebellion.
18The fact that his sexual fantasies invoke alpha-male figures to constitute his identity is indicative of a failure to move beyond the notion that to perform his desires, he must be constituted by another persona of his father. Lastly, post-sexual encounter he would conceive of a powerful desire to look at himself in a mirror and see a fully restored image of himself as he screams “He made me! .... I’m made!” (115). This is undeniably an unconscious re-enactment of the mirror stage where one gains the illusion of a complete, constituted self. This is not a Butlerian subversion where a feminized position in the symbolic bears the power of the phallus as it signifies the dialectic confirmation of identity the masculine subject desires in its lack and absence (Butler 59-60). Instead, the scenario here is Lacanian in nature—we have a subject in a state of constant misrecognition where he can no longer distinguish between fantasies and reality. He can no longer determine where to position himself between the binary of man and woman in conventional patriarchy; the one who has the phallus and one who reflects its image. The fact that he craves to be constituted through fantasies of another man representing his father signifies seemingly inescapable desire for a symbolic identity that his father can offer him. This unravels and undermines the seemingly queer ideological project that Rohrleitner argues for in her reading of We the Animals. In exhibiting fantasies that attempt to challenge heteronormative behavior, the protagonist merely falls back to the same pattern of thinking that young men possess when they revere the fathers ruling over them.
19The conclusion of the novel is as bleak as what Lacan predicts of people who cannot disentangle themselves from the remnants of the imaginary. Eventually, the protagonist’s mother discovers his diary and his entire family confronts him. He admits that he had written fantasies about the men at the bus station and all the violent perversions he wanted to be done to him and somehow the diary was on his mother’s lap (116). His entire demeanor changes and his thoughts would consume him—he mentions his vision blurring, his sex dropping, and how he collapses hard (116). And then he speaks calmly uttering “I’ll kill you” (116), before lunging at her. This is an ego shattering moment for him as he unconsciously clings to his connection with the mother, only to realize that she too is an accomplice of his father and brothers. This is the ultimate castration that would make him lose his sanity. He tries to rip the skin off their faces while his brothers subdue him and he says, “you morons, you sick fucks, I bet you liked reading it, I bet it excited you” as his voice spirals to hysteria (118).
20To inhabit the symbolic order means to abandon the fantasy world of the pre-verbal mother. In the symbolic universe of We the Animals, there is no place for an individual like the unnamed protagonist who failed to undergo the standard male Oedipal complex (complete paternal identification and maternal detachment) and allowed his sexual fantasies to consume him. Lacan posits that inhabiting the imaginary order while living in the symbolic would result to the resurgence of infantile neurosis and loss of language. It is a kind of psychological incapacitation where reality is distorted, and signifiers are jumbled up in the order of signification. The subject reverts to the mental state of an infant who processes the world through visual images instead of language. He exhibits the same confused infantile, neurotic behavior and incoherent deployment of language while residing in the mental institution his family sent him to. After his violent rampage, the next chapter jumps to a narration of his father bathing him in the psychiatric ward while his mother watches from a distance. He observes the scene in a state of disarray as his connection with language is distorted. Predictably, he starts relating to the world and his family the way an infant does. He becomes helpless while processing what is happening through visual images and sound more than communication: “Look at the son, lulled by the sounds of him, the ritual: whistle, water, suds, and splash. Now the father lathers the cloth. Now the son can only wait .... The boy closes his eyes. Listen to the slur, the tired confusion in the boy’s voice as he asks, ‘Please, Paps, please. Leave me alone to wash myself’” (119-120).
21He tries to resist, but his father eventually strips him naked, “the washcloth running over the balls of the boy’s feet, his heels and ankles, and down the bridge into the crevices between the boy’s toes” (122). Prior to washing his feet, he pulls his underwear and the father condescendingly evaluates his son and all he can do is search his father’s eyes (121). Ironically, his father talks about washing a man’s feet as paying another person the ultimate form of respect in different cultures (122). But the reverse is happening—the father mocks his castrated position specifically with the act of asserting control. Stripping him naked solidifies his symbolic position as the ultimate bearer of meaning and the Law. In his response to the initial protests of his son, he utters: “‘Everybody’s got rights. A man tied to a bed got rights. A man down in a dungeon got rights. A little screaming baby got rights. Yeah, you got rights. What you don’t got is power’” (120).
22The bildungsroman comes in full circle when we reach the end, essentially with another misrecognition. After his family vows that they will fix him (123), they eventually entrust the protagonist under the care of the mental institution. He relishes the fact that they leave him, but he also mourns the loss of his pack (125). His days in the mental institution involve him sleeping with caged animals—a prince among peacocks and lions (125). But again, this is a false notion of selfhood emerging from a buried fantasy of escaping the family complex. His narration of events already reflects fully-developed neurosis. Fantastical elements blur the line between imagination and reality. It reads like a colorful fever dream because in the end, his psyche has become so damaged by the mother’s betrayal that he finds himself slurring his words, insisting that he is “upright, upright” (125) when he can barely process his new reality in the psychiatric ward. He may play out another fantasy of escaping his family’s absolute influence while in the mental institute, but in the end even the mental institute is just another face of the symbolic order, another social institution to contain him if ever his father’s quest of rehabilitating him fails.
23Where then can a liberatory pathway be found when the narrative itself forecloses all possible modes of rebellion for the protagonist, as he is subsumed under the influence of the indomitable figure of the Father? Even in the most optimistic scenario of him managing to escape the psychiatric ward, it will still be under the terms of his father and he will forever carry the psychological strain inflicted on him by his family. Given the recurrence and progression of neurosis, of false fantasies, of hysteria and paranoia manifested in unclear sexual disposition (not knowing if one bears the phallus or is a phallus for the Other) and the inability to escape from this polarity evident in his perverted sexual dreams, We the Animals is a narrative that merely conforms to Lacan’s bleak perspective of instability in selfhood and the dangers of lingering in the imaginary order. If the author intended for it to be a narrative opening the possibilities of queer utopia, then it is a failed ideological project and it only confirms the reality that we have yet to transcend the society and culture built by the Lacanian Father.
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