White Nights with Lacan

Greetings, my good people. Beware, the following has a spoiler.

Today I reflect upon a film that I recently got the occasion to watch, a film inspired by Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel “White Nights” and directed by Ivan Pyryev. Here, I will not give you the entire background and plot of the movie, how it is set in St. Petersburg and so on, rather I will just directly jump to the point of writing this blog. I wish to discuss two major things that I observed in this movie: Firstly, the ending of the story; and secondly, how the story is narrated by a nameless narrator.

The story has quite the dramatic ending, where we see the narrator and Nastenka (the girl he met four days ago) walking by the bridge. The narrator asks her to look towards the sky, which is clear, and gives the sign that tomorrow will be a beautiful day. At this very moment we see the lodger come back and Nastenka runs toward him, and the dream of our narrator, or “Dreamer” as Nastenka refers to him, is shattered. Now things start to get a bit difficult because here I will try to use the method of Lacanian psychoanalytical hermeneutics to interpret the position of these characters. For those who are unfamiliar with Lacan and Lacanian terminology, I have included a concise glossary at the end, so you can at least have something to try to comprehend what I am trying to convey. Coming back to the topic, our dreamer here is the “Subject of the Lack”, Nastenka can be seen as “The Object Cause of Desire,” and the lodger as “The Name-of-the-Father”. Our dreamer is the subject of the lack because he desires Nastenka not for what she is, rather for what she appears to be—an escape from his loneliness. Nastenka isn't the dreamer's lover, she is the dream itself. She isn't the one that our dreamer loves, but the promise that love, compassion, and belonging is still possible for the dreamer. This specifically is the reason I refer to her as the object cause of desire—it is to suggest that she is the cause of the dreamer's desire and not his very goal. The lodger is the boundary that prevents the dreamer from fulfilling his desire, this is to say that the lodger here functions like the symbolic law—the force that introduces rules and limits to our life. The dreamer does not desire Nastenka for who is she, but for what she represents: the very structure of absence, the object which he cannot possess—and therefore he must endlessly long for her, which he does and is very much established in the opening of the movie.

Now to talk about the namelessness of the narrator. I won't induce Lacan here, rather this is a bit of poetic interpretation of this occurrence. Dostoevsky very cleverly did this to his readers, by not naming the dreamer anywhere, and by writing the novel in first person narration, he forced us all to stand in the shoes of the narrator. He knew very well that many of us have been promised love, and many a time that love was taken away from us in the very next instance of the promise. He left the narrator nameless, so that we can become the narrators ourselves; the dreamer is nameless because he is every name. The dreamer is me, the dreamer is you, the dreamer is all of us.

Glossary

Subject of Lack

The human self, according to Lacan, is not a complete whole—but a being defined by something missing. We are stitched together by longing, shaped by what we don’t have. This “lack” is not a problem—it’s the very structure of desire. We are not empty vessels waiting to be filled; we are subjects propelled by what forever escapes us.

Object-cause of Desire

This is not the object we desire (a person, a thing), but the cause that sparks the desire. It’s the elusive, often imagined quality we attach to someone or something that seems to promise wholeness, completion, or salvation. The tragedy? We never really wanted them—we wanted what they stood for in our fantasy.

The Name-of-the-Father

More than a literal father, this is the symbolic law—the force that introduces rules, limits, and language into our lives. It breaks the illusion of perfect unity (with the mother, with love, with fantasy) and forces us into the world of society, order, and meaning.