The Films of Woody Allen

“At the origin of Narrative, desire,” writes Roland Barthes, saving his for the end of the sentence. Partly because of Barthes's influence, this theory of the fusion of desire and narrativity has become central for many critics and students of literature and cinema, especially those who tend to emphasize the connection between semiotics and psychoanalysis. According to this theory, narrativity, as the organization of the processes of sign production and subjectivity in cinema, originates in the Oedipal experience of sexual difference. Desire – the establishment of sexual differences through the displacement of the unconscious upon language and symbols – finds itself in narrative. Desire and narrative function together as two ineluctable parts of the same process of the unending search for self and identity. All narrative emerges out of this basic, most personal of stories involving the interaction between unconscious forces and culture. Thus, Teresa de Lauretis sees “desire as a function of narrative and narrativity as a process engaging that desire.” She writes, “The work of narrative, then, is a mapping of differences, and specifically, first and foremost, of sexual difference into each text.”

In this formulation, desire, narrativity, and Oedipus operate interdependently and intertextually, thereby effecting an important movement of post-Freudian critical theory from drives and ego relations to language and signs. Oedipus provides the basis for character development, while the Freudian narrative of repression and return enables us to talk about the unspeakable and to see in disguised form the desire that remains hidden from personal consciousness and the moral imagination.