Leriano and Lacan: The Mythological and Psychoanalytical Underpinnings of Leriano's Last Drink

Abstract

signifiersSan Pedro makes physical contact through the proxy of Laureola's letters the necessary foundation for Leriano's last desperate gesture to gain the separate subjectivity required by language. Impelled by the need for reciprocated contact with the Other, Leriano initially reaches out to Laureola through mediated discourse, as his search for communion extends into the community, toward El Auctor. Upon coming into contact with El Auctor, Leriano tentatively emerges from the oppressive allegorical world he inhabits, joins the social order of language and becomes caught up in an exchange that both feeds his hunger for the Other and instructs him in how to read and write about it. At the end of the romance, as a period of silence follows Leriano's epistolary exchanges with Laureola, Leriano's nostalgia focuses not on the present mute connection with her but on the time of prior verbal enjoyment, on his delight in the letters written by her and on her words 4 In the chapter of The Severed Wordtitled Language and Incest, Marina Brownlee traces from an anthropological perspective the Oedipal discourses that sustain Juan de Flores's GriselyMirabella (191-210).