Canned

I've recently done a number of posts at Long Sunday that form something of a series. A friend has asked that I collect them in one place for his perusal. In order of composition they are as follows, with the last in the series (for now) reproduced in full).

A Crack in the Picture

Spectacles for the Gods

A Note on the World Picture

Theatrum Mundi

Gaze (i)

Gaze (-1)

'The Can':

Just as motionless images can contain narratives, so stories also paint pictures. This is hardly news: the careful selection, accumulation and arrangement of details, interpolations, parenthetical remarks; all of which delineate a scene while dictating the point from which we see it.



Lacan’s well-known story of the sardine can, with its pointedly pointless ‘joke’ is both a story about pictures and a carefully drawn composition in itself. These two things are, I think related. What follows tries to explain this relation.

I was in my early twenties or thereabouts – and at that time, of course, being a young intellectual, I wanted desperately to get away, see something different, throw myself into something practical, something physical, in the country say, or at sea.

The first element of the composition is this image of the young intellectual striving towards, thirsting for, the world of action and conflict. This is what young intellectuals do - an utterly recognisable, commonplace trope. Isn't this is part of the comfort of stories – they move forward under a kind of spell, a spell cast by elementary recognisable scenes that promise to unfold in more or less predictable ways. Not that the exact content is predictable, of course, but the structure is predictable, the ‘parameters’ secure, and precisely so we can surrender to the content. So once more, the young intellectual longing for the ‘remedy’ of action. We know that the ‘action’ dreamed by his sedentary life is nowhere to be found, that reality will outrun and educate him.


One day, I was on a small boat with a few people from a family of fishermen in a small port. At that time Brittany was not industrialised as it is now. Seen retrospectively, from the ‘now’ shared by L. and his readers, the fishermen are ‘innocent of industrialisation.’ We are looking at a lost way of life. Suddenly the scene is suffused with nostalgia; the actions of the crew are brushed with a rustic simplicity but also marked with the pathos of transience. Like the youthful ardour of the intellectual, this way of life is doomed. We, the reader, are the ones who know that these things come to an end – this is the reader the story has made us.

There were no trawlers. The fisherman went out in his frail craft at his own risk. It was this risk, this danger, that I so loved to share.

(No L., your ‘risk’ was the frisson of eyeballing reality as opposed to a sedentary everyday life; their risk was their everyday life. The fantasy of sharing: Imaginary.)

But it wasn’t all danger and excitement – there were also fine days. One day, then, as we were waiting for the moment to pull in the nets, an individual known as petit-Jean, that’s what we called him – like all his family, he died very young, from tuberculosis, which at that time was a constant threat to the whole of that social class –

Petit-Jean too is marked, marked with Fate; we see him as already ‘someone who died young’. Suddenly his face and words are pregnant with a Destiny he cannot know. This type of character is well known to the storyteller’s art. His end is in his beginning.

this petit-Jean pointed out to me something floating on the surface of the waves. It was a small can, a sardine can. It floated there in the sun, a witness to the canning industry,



‘Witness to the canning industry’ links with the earlier ref. to ‘not yet industrialised’. This sardine can is an emissary of the not-yet, an interpolation from the future. Is this why it cracks the picture? Yes and no. It is, simultaneously, the very prerequisite of the picture. How? Again, the scene painted by Lacan only appears as it does – framed and sepia-coloured by a certain nostalgia, from the point of view of industrialisation. Only from and for the industrial Now is the scene what it is. It is only imbued with sad charm, the pathos of the transient, because we view it from the other side of industrialisation, because we are marooned in the industrial present and cannot go back. And this industrial future winks at us from the sardine can. We see the place from where we are looking.

which we, in fact, were supposed to supply.

(Again with the ‘We’? Lacan is to be counted one with the pre-capitalist fisherman?)

It glittered in the sun. And Petit-Jean said to me ‘You see that can? Do you see it?

Petit-Jean, too, invites Lacan into a collusive looking. ‘You see that’, he says, making Lacan’s eyes to converge on the same object, mutually focused. ‘We,’ indeed. L and P-J are equal in relation to this Third. And then:

Well it doesn’t see you!’

It is this precisely pointless punchline which ‘punctures’ the young Lacan of the scene but, at the same time, punctures the scene carefully composed for the reader by the older Lacan. We, like him, are caught out, cheated. Where we expected wisdom or pathos there is only a lame joke.

Moreover does not this remark, in cheating both Lacan and ourselves, collapse the carefully composed distance between us, in the industrialised Now and those fishermen, under the sign of Fate, wresting their living from a ‘pitiless nature’?

He found this incident highly amusing – I less so. I thought about it. Why did I find it less amusing than he? It’s an interesting question. To begin with, if what petit-Jean said to me, namely, that the can did not see me, had any meaning, it was because in a sense, it was looking at me, all the same. It was looking at me at the level of the point of light at which everything that looks at me is situated – and I am not speaking metaphorically.


In Lacan’s version, his different reaction to the ‘punchline’ stems from a difference in knowledge: with his specialist knowledge he can see the place from which the line is true; he has a superior vantage point to P-J. It is this vantage point which is responsible for his not finding the line funny.

But doesn’t the very ‘puncturing’ effect of the anecdote reside with P-J occupying a position not anticipated by L., meeting Lacan’s expectation with a mockingly ‘pointless’ joke and a cackle of laughter, exploiting the naivety of the ‘young intellectual,’ making Lacan the object of a ‘punchline’ where he, lured into identification, expected to be a subject?

Indeed, is it just that L. found the joke ‘less amusing’, as if his own laughter were a dilute version of Petit-Jean’s, or is it that he himself was suddenly included in the joke? Isn’t it that L. thought that they both had the sardine can in their sights whereas L. himself was in the sights? Isn’t L.'s reaction one of discomfort that his position, and the ‘lines of sight’, have abruptly shifted? Doesn’t the point of P-J’s remark, ricochet off the sardine can and rebound into Lacan’s eyes; or is the empty unseeing gaze of the can that of L.?

In fact, Lacan seems to know all this, it is precisely his point:

The point of this little story, as it had occurred to my partner, the fact that he found it so funny and I less so, derives from the fact that, if I am told a story like that one, it is because I, at that moment – as I appeared to those fellows who were earning their livings with great difficulty, in the struggle with what for them was a pitiless nature – looked like nothing on earth. In short, I was rather out of place in the picture. And it was because I felt this that I was not terribly amused at hearing myself addressed in this humorous ironical way.

Lacan’s picture, of the fisherman and their struggle with nature, the pre-industrial way of life that touches something vital, the pathos of this, the clouds of Fate that hang over it, its naïve charm (one thinks of Berger’s peasants) is only so from a point that the picture itself cannot admit.