Gender as Superposition;

or, Negotiating the Twist of the Law of the Father

in Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory

Gabriela Rangu
“Ştefan cel Mare” University, Suceava

One of the greatest puzzles in quantum mechanics,

springing directly from the well-known particle/wave
duality, is to find a way to reconcile “the crazy wave-like
behaviour of matter” (Barrett, 1999: 14) with the
determinateness of experience. Experiments have shown
that particles behave mischievously behind one’s back,
following their wave-like way(s), when no one is looking.
Left on their own, particles defy both classical laws of
continuous motion and human understanding, tracing a
superposition of different trajectories and ending up in a
superposition of states precluding the determination of a
single precise position of the wave.
The great paradox is that, whenever one looks for the
particle, making a position measurement for instance, one
is always rewarded with a definite value, an eigenvalue, on
quantum mechanical parlance, strictly corresponding to a
determinate position, i.e. an eigenstate. While quantum
mechanics is reputed for making the right empirical
predictions, it provides no clear account for the
discrepancy emerging between its description of the
quantum world and human experience. As Sam Treiman
points out, “[t]here seems to be nothing within quantum
mechanics that tells how to convert probabilities into
facts” (1999: 174).
Besides, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle stipulates
the impossibility of making precise measurements of both
properties of a conjugate pair, such as momentum and
position. If one is determined, the other will automatically
resist measurement, but a complete model would
presuppose both variables. Peter Kosso asserts that the
term ‘uncertainty’ is misleading, pointing to
“epistemological fuzziness” (1998: 133) when it actually
refers to a metaphysical condition. According to him, it
would be false to assume that the principle of uncertainty
governing quantum mechanics would make
epistemological quests collapse inward and doomed to
appearance. “It’s not the end of the world. It’s not even
the end of our knowledge of the world. It’s just the end of
the world as we knew it” (ibid: 186).
The standard von Neumann-Dirac formulation of
quantum mechanics stipulates that, whenever it is under
surveillance, “that particle’s state instantaneously and
randomly collapses to a state where the particle has a
determinate position (is in an eigenstate of position)”
(Barrett, 1999: 6). The trouble is that a superposition of
states cannot be reduced to either/or choices, no binary
solution being apt to sort out this ‘outrageous’ behaviour.
The standard von Neumann-Dirac theory tries to overcome
this paradox by formulating two dynamical laws, the
former stipulating the deterministic behaviour of
unobserved systems, described by the linear wave
equation, the latter maintaining the random collapse
dynamics in the case of measurement. Barrett notices that
these laws do not apply only to microscopic systems, being
formulated to account for the behaviour of unobserved
systems.
If the theory is right, then chairs are typically in
superpositions of different locations, cats are typically in
superpositions of being alive and dead, etc. as long as no
one is watching (ibid: 14).

This discovery boggled the physicists’ minds, making

them state what is known as the quantum measurement
problem, according to which, given the fact that the first
law is deterministic and continuous and the second
stochastic and discontinuous, they are considered as
mutually incompatible, their simultaneous action upon a
system being deemed inconceivable. Bohr’s principle of
complementarity, meant to encompass and reconcile
mutual exclusivity by deconstructing “both classical
physics and classical metaphysics” (Plotnitsky, 1994: 1),
was refuted at the time as a mere rule of thumb.
Contrary to this view, Plotnitsky (1994) correlates
Bohr’s principle of complementarity to Bataille’s concept
of general economy as two influences that have shaped the
epistemological, or, as he puts it, anti-epistemological
movements in modern times. He further complicates this
framework by coupling the two notions with Derrida’s
deconstruction, Bohr’s and Derrida’s theories being seen
as “the culminations of general economic anti-
epistemology in their respective fields” (1994: 2). Relating
various configurations to the loss of meaning, the principle
of general economy discloses the untenability of the claims
made by restricted economies – or master discourses, in
Lyotard’s view – that their objects are contained within
meaningful patterns that are exempt from unproductive
expenditure, hence keeping multiplicity and indeterminacy
under control.
A great debate, with Einstein and Bohr the main
opponents, started in the late 1920s, one of its sides being
focused on circumventing stochasticism and discontinuity
and formulating “an empirically adequate theory that
satisfied the principle of sufficient cause (that was
deterministic)” (Barrett, 1999: 34). Actually, the debate in
quantum mechanics evolved around the question whether
the state described by quantum mechanical probabilities is
ontological or epistemological in nature. Einstein sided
with the latter alternative, advocating the existence of a
hidden variable and, consequently, of an epistemological
limitation, which would reduce any superposition to a
collection of predeterminate values that are not
conspicuous to human perception. The fatal blow to the
hidden variable theory came from John Bell in the mid-
1960s, who, endorsing Einstein’s view, tried to clarify and
support it but ended up with an opposite outcome, his
experiments evincing that indeterminacy and
superposition are actually ontological characteristics (cf.
Kosso, 1998: 139). Yet, predictions in quantum mechanics
are based on a principle of non-locality. Particles in a
superposition influence one another from a distance. As
Kosso notices, “Bell’s proof rules out any theory of local
hidden variables, but we should note it does not rule out a
theory of non-local hidden variables” (ibid: 149), an
alternative which explicitly violates the special theory of
relativity, as it presupposes speeds faster than the speed
of light. In any event, Bell’s proof leaves us with “spooky
actions at a distance and with inherent indeterminateness
of properties”, as Kosso, paraphrasing Einstein, concludes
(ibid: 139). For Kosso, Bell’s discovery is good news for
epistemological realism. Since the claim in quantum
mechanics that there cannot be any determinate value of a
certain property prior to the measurement is to be taken
ontologically, Kosso assumes that to allow for such
metaphysical anti-realism “some degree of epistemological
realism “ (ibid: 180) is definitely called for.
Epistemological anti-realism would forestall not only
metaphysical anti-realism, but also “metaphysical
anything” (ibid.).
Kosso’s effort to preserve the integrity of our habits of
thinking is not in the least singular. Physicists themselves
have been taken aback, even petrified, by the
epistemological and ontological implications of quantum
mechanics. For Schrödinger, for instance, whose equation
was involved in experiments leading to the theoretical
consolidation of quantum mechanics, the idea of
superposition and collapse was simply outrageous: “[i]f
one has to stick to this damned quantum jumping, then I
regret having ever been involved in this thing” (q. in
Barrrett, 1999: 43). His indignation led him to imagine a
cat caught within a diabolical device that would kill it with
a probability of ½ within an hour, while the system was
unobserved. At the end of the experiment, the cat would
be, according to quantum mechanics, in a superposition of
being both dead and alive and the whole responsibility for
the cat’s collapse either in life or in death would be on the
part of the act of observation.
It is indeed one of the main mysteries of quantum
mechanics to state what exactly happens upon
measurement. It has been demonstrated that the mere
interaction with a macroscopic system does not precipitate
any collapse, but what seems to affect the quantum
system is, as many physicists speculate, the intervention
of human consciousness.
Very much like the standard theory in quantum
mechanics, Frank’s warning systems in Iain Banks’s The
Wasp Factory make the right predictions. Thus, the Wasp
Factory announces fire and, at the climactic point of the
story, when Frank finally gets access to ‘his’ father’s study
and discovers the specimen-jar containing what ‘he’
misinterprets as being the proof of ‘his’ castration by ‘his’
father, devastating fire displaces the irresolvable conflict
at the heart of the novel, shifting the focus from the scene
of grotesque reversal and, at the same time, reinforcement
of the law of the father to the disruptive force unleashed
by the return of the prodigal son, threatening the stability
of the house and, therefore, of the name of the father,
Cauldhame, with its resonance of ‘called home’ (<OE hām),
intimating the connection between the order of the
signifier and the realm of the Law symbolised here by the
island. Similarly, Frank’s Sacrifice Poles, ‘his’ “early
warning system” (Banks, 1993: 10), as long as they are
vigilantly watched and checked for the same variable,
allow for neat answers concerning Frank’s immediate
future.
Despite ‘his’ awareness of the quantum reality of ‘his’
world, Frank is definitely an agent of collapse. In realist
fashion, ‘his’ narrative observes and registers the smallest
detail of ‘his’ whereabouts, as though ‘he’ strove to
prevent any loss in representation and to assert ‘his’ sense
of mastery over the contingency inherent in ‘his’ world.
Whatever intrusion threatens the accuracy of ‘his’ smooth
system of prediction and control is subjected to the
ultimate collapse, death, and, thereby, made to coalesce
into an eigenstate and to yield the right probabilities.
Prevented from growing into an adult, ‘he’ reflects this
stagnation in the slow, almost catatonic, pace of the
narrative. Ontological uncertainty would thus be handled,
but this power is predicated upon the presupposition of a
coherent and unitary self, able to secure the conditions of
intelligible interaction with the world. Conceiving of
reality as a pattern of symbols, Frank distinguishes
between “the strong” making “their own patterns” and
“the weak” having “their courses mapped out for them”
(117) and it is with the former that ‘he’ identifies ‘himself’
on account of ‘his’ management of the Wasp Factory, an
all-encompassing pattern of ‘his’ own making. “The Wasp
Factory is part of the pattern because it is part of life and –
even more so – part of death. Like life it is complicated so
all the components are there” (ibid.). A complex of
complementary relations, the Wasp Factory is described by
both causal and non-causal behaviour, favouring the latter
upon watching.
The reason it can answer questions is because every
question is a start looking for and end, and the Factory is
about the End – death, no less. Keep your entrails and
sticks and dice and books and birds and voices and
pendants and all the rest of that crap; I have the Factory,
and it’s about now and the future; not the past. (117-8)

Frank’s power emerges directly from ‘his’ “uncastrated

genes” (118) ensuring ‘his’ strong sense of identity that
‘he’ believes exempt from the complementarity ‘he’ reads
into the Wasp Factory. ‘He’ assigns to ‘himself’, therefore,
an exterior and authoritative position that, in the end, that
end The Wasp Factory was all the way about, turns out to
be the precarious place on the face of the Factory, a
narrative superposition where the truth of the unreliable
father enforces a new collapse. Gender follows the same
trajectory as the narrative unfolding on undecidable
corridors.
 Inside this greater machine, things are not quite so cut
and dried (or cut and pickled) as they have appeared in my
experience. Each of us, in our own personal Factory, may
believe we have stumbled down one corridor, and that our
fate is sealed and certain (dream or nightmare, humdrum
or bizarre, good or bad), but a word, a glance, a slip –
anything can change that, alter it entirely, and our marble
hall becomes a gutter, or our rat-maze a golden path.
(183-4)

By the same token, every textual (super)position

inscribed on the surface of the novel is subjected to
complementary forces that, in their play, resist the
approach by any restricted economy. Such is the case of
the place occupied by the father as regulative mechanism.
Insulation, constant watching, and measurement ensure
the preservation of the order imposed by the father. His
“Measurement Book” (12) carefully records “the height,
length, breadth, area and volume of just about every part
of the house and everything in it” (11) and he finds it
“useful and character-forming” (ibid.) to pass all this
knowledge to his ‘son’. Yet, Frank finds room for
transgression not only by tearing off all the stickers
“[a]ttached to the legs of chairs, the edges of rugs, the
bottoms of jugs, the aerials of radios, the doors of
drawers, the headboards of beds, the screens of
televisions, the handles of pots and pans” (ibid.) giving the
appropriate measurement of each object in inches, but
also by insisting on switching to a metric standard and
thus offending the paternal sense of the world based on
the conviction that “the earth was a Möbius strip, not a
sphere” (12) and, therefore, inadequately described by a
system based on the measurement of the globe. This
outlook constitutes one of the numerous allusions to the
Lacanian symbolic brought to bear on the constitution of
the subject in TheWasp Factory. Lacan draws an analogy
between the Möbius strip and what he calls the signifying
chain (cf. Morris, 1975: 70; Slethaug, 1993: 20; Metzger,
1995: 80) and employs it to describe the indistinctness of
the conscious and the unconscious, language as “an all-
encompassing but autotelic medium” (Morris, 1975: 72),
the subject caught within the paradox engendered by the
“incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier”
(Lacan, 1992: 87) that splits him “between a refusal of
meaning or a lack of being” (ibid: 97), making his place as
subject of the signified ex-centric to that occupied as
subject of the signifier, a situation that occasions for
Lacan’s reformulation of the Cartesian dictum as “I am not,
whenever I am the plaything of my thought; I think of what
I am whenever I don’t think I am thinking” (ibid.). To this,
Frank in The Wasp Factory objects by repeatedly asserting
“I’m me and I’m here and that’s all there is to it” (13), only
to find ‘himself’, in the end, a victim of the literalness that
‘his’ father pursued in applying Lacan’s letter. Yet, if, in
final analysis, “The Truth about Frank” is the truth of
psychoanalysis, what Derrida calls “castration as truth”
(1999: 151) presupposing the celebration of the “fixed and
central place, away from any substitution” (ibid: 152),
ensuring the place of the phallus in a “transcendental
topology” (ibid.) and if, in Lacan’s reading, “[f]eminity is
the Truth (of) castration” (ibid.), it is, ironically, what in
Lacan’s distortion of the Cartesian pronouncement echoes
a principle of non-locality that is adduced by Frank to make
this truth disseminate. After having mockingly
psychoanalysed ‘his’ previous behaviour in light of this
truth, Frank frees ‘himself’ from “the constriction of the
ring” (Derrida, 1999: 151), ‘his’ gender resisting to being
articulated by any of the formulas: neither male nor
female, either male or female, both male and female,
presenting itself instead as a superposition, the random
collapse of which into a determinate state is
indeterminately postponed by being assigned to Eric, the
irrational brother, “a force of fire and disruption
approaching the sands of the island like a mad angel, head
swarming with echoing screams of madness and delusion”
(125). Besides, Eric’s earlier vexing twisting of deictics,
playfully meant to tease Frank’s sense of self-identity and
self-positioning, indicates him as a trustworthy negotiator
on behalf of multiplicity.
Gender in The Wasp Factory is rendered as a “structure
of impersonation” (Butler, 1998: 722), a parodic copy
without any original, an immense trick engineered by the
Father, functional precisely because it relies on a notion of
gender mimetically naturalized. As Judith Butler notes, the
“naturalized gender mime” (1998: 724) does not
presuppose the xistence of a volitional subject behind but,
on the contrary, it is the gender mime that produces, “as
its effect” (1998: 725), the illusion of a subject that it,
otherwise, “appears to express” (ibid.). Thus, the gender
that Frank performs and protectively circumscribes on the
basis of sexual opposition turns out to be the effect of the
Father’s Law inasmuch as this Law is a fictional construct.
The conditions of possibility for the gender designation are
the careful emplotment – the Father literally regulating
gender by precipitating the child into language, creating a
story to assign his ‘son’ a gendered identity – and the
shrewd naturalisation of the Law by insinuating its own
terms as bedrock of their necessary configuration as the
unquestionable Law. As Judith Butler points out, “ ‘It is
the law!’ becomes the utterance that performatively
attributes the very force to the law that the law itself is
said to exercise” (2000: 21).
Frank underwrites the Law by dutifully playing the role
entrusted by the Father, setting into motion a whole
mechanism of psychotic response to his alleged sexual
trauma, while preserving the patrilineal heritage, his
‘uncastrated genes’, as the intact, ‘real’ self, free from
accidental distortion. This notion fails him in the end,
leaving him with a sense of hollowed identity. A gullible
reader of ‘his’ own story, Frank does not negotiate its truth
and does not doubt the Law of the Father as its ground of
legitimation. Nevertheless, he conceives of gender as a
superposition prone to probabilistic calculus, violently
reduced to a fixed place by the intervention of the
symbolic. For him, “[c]hildren aren’t real people, in the
sense that they are not small males and females but a
separate species which will (probably) grow into one or
other in due time” (87). The assumption of gender is
accounted for by “the insidious and evil influence of
society and their parents” (ibid.). Yet, Frank dislodges this
indistinction, usually associated with the fusion with the
mother, from the family scene and gives it a quantum
description that questions the potential of the symbolic to
“set (…) limits to any and all utopian efforts to reconfigure
and relive kinship relations at some distance from the
Oedipal scene” (Butler, 2000: 20). The bracketing of the
probabilistic character of gender hints at its
supplementarity that, in Derridean fashion, conflates
addition and replacement as the two movements that
question the notion of origin, the status of kinship
relations as giving shape and expression to the primordial
law. In Joseph Riddel’s terms, the Oedipal crossroads
takes the place of the origin, “proving finally to be the only
mark of origin – the sign of the beginning as distortion or
maiming and of writing as a strange, wayward walking, or
as the bridging of an abyss that indelibly marks the abyss
as the vertiginous meaning. A chiasmus signifying
catachresis” (1984: 145). Conspicuously situating the
mark of the origin at the intersection of “two texts which
never meet” (ibid: 146), the narrative loosens the grips of
the analytical machine, placing itself in that abyss opened
up by the branching of a superposition behind and beyond
determinate experience. Doubling disguises and, at the
same time, discloses its own mimetic illusion, as illustrated
by the chiastic rehearsal with Eric dressed in girl clothes
by his father that the latter claims to be an effect of the
gender performance staged for Frank. Likewise, Frank –
who, whenever accidentally scuffing his right heel on a
paving stone, for instance, has to scuff the other foot as
well in order to “keep balanced” (88) and who, after he
has killed two boys, feels compelled to kill “some woman”
to “tip the scales back in the other direction” (ibid.)
without the slightest idea of what causes his distorted
proclivity for equanimity – employs the double as a
meaningless device mirroring its own reworking of the
random collapse in terms of the symbolic.
The scene of this performance of gender, the island
looking onto the town’s dump across the river and the
house in the middle that for Frank represents “the centre
of my power and strength, and also the place I had the
most need to protect” (164), reduplicates the geography
that Lacan associates with secondary revisions of the
formation of the I in the mirror-stage that resurfaces
through images of fortified structures, “a fortress or
stadium – its inner arena and enclosure, surrounded by
marshes and rubbish-tips, dividing it into two opposed
fields of contest where the subject flounders in quest of
the haughty and remote inner castle, which, in its shape
(sometimes juxtaposed in the same scenario), symbolises
the id in startling fashion” (1994: 97).
For Lacan, the conception of the mirror-stage sheds
light on the formation of the I in a way that opposes “any
philosophy directly issuing from the Cogito” (1994: 93).
The activity of the child involved in fashioning relations
between his reflected image and the mirrored
environment, on the one hand, and between this global
image and the reduplicated reality, on the other, is
construed by Lacan as identification, registering the
transformation of the subject as he associates an image to
himself. The significance of the mirror-stage lies in the
irreducible fictional direction inscribed in the ego before
its constitution as a subject. Given the fact that the total
form of the body is perceived, on the one hand, as fixed
size and, on the other, as symmetrical inversion, the I is,
paradoxically, simultaneously permanent and alienated.
Conceived as the “threshold of the visible world” (ibid:
95), the mirror-stage signals an “organic insufficiency”
(ibid: 96) in natural reality that it compensates for by
manufacturing a “succession of phantasies from a
fragmented body-image to a form of its totality” (ibid.),
called “orthopaedic” by Lacan (ibid.) and by assuming “the
armour of an alienating identity which will stamp with the
rigidity of its structure the whole of the subject’s
development” (ibid.). The end of the mirror-stage
inaugurates the precipitation of the I into socially
elaborated situations, relegating human knowledge to
“mediatization by the desire of the other” (ibid: 97).
When Frank fantasises about the total form of ‘his’
body, making clear its alienated character, ‘he’ gives voice
to a notion of subjectivity where the Lacanian ingredients
take their duly place, from the illusion of the fragmented
body to the imaginary monumental form.
I saw myself, Frank L. Cauldhame, and I saw myself as I
might have been: a tall slim man, strong and determined
and making his way in the world, assured and purposeful.
(48)

This vision of ‘himself’, occasioned by the ritualistic

interrogation of Old Saul’s skull – both a reminder of the
presumed fragmentation of Frank’s body and a specular
device of misrecognition – far from reflecting the ideal I,
turns out, in retrospect, to be a double “double-bluff” (88),
a phrase employed by Frank to describe ‘his’ strategy of
covering up the traces of ‘his’ murder. This phrase exerts
its full disseminative power on subject and narrative alike,
expressing a mock slip of the tongue, a bluff self-assertion
of not being bluff, and, consequently, of not being Frank.
Therefore, “the same (appalling) crimes to my name”
(182), a chain of substitutes for Frank’s loss, literally turn
out “to have been for nothing” (183), no object of the
primal repression being present in the imaginary to
account for the development of the subject in the symbolic
order. Frank’s self-reflection is indeed a process of
misrecognition, but misrecognition is denied a stable
pattern, the imaginary here being rendered as an effect of
the symbolic, part and parcel of the Father’s machinations,
and, consequently, challenging the opposition between the
imaginary and the symbolic.
As a narrator, Frank is split from the very beginning.
‘His’ narrative, as analytical account of ‘his’ deviant
behaviour revolves around “the wrong reasons” (88), while
the language he employs, always predictive of the final
revelation, veils and unveils its slid signified as a
superposition, the collapse of which at the level of the
signifier is always affected by uncertainty relations. Thus,
the quantum reality of both self and narrative
surreptitiously branches beyond the scope of any
(psycho)analysis undertaking the task of unravelling the
hidden mechanisms of subjectivity and their linguistic
transfiguration.
Frank’s main mirroring device, ‘his’ Wasp Factory,
covering “an area of several square metres in an irregular
and slightly ramshackle tangle of metal, wood, glass and
plastic” (120), the most important part of which being the
face of an old clock, minutely reduplicates each decisive
experience in Frank’s life, the topography of the island,
and the structure of the novel with its twelve chapters
corresponding to the twelve corridors a wasp may enter to
find its inevitable death. That a WASP reader may find as
many interpretative dead ends is one of the novel’s most
obvious ironic moves. Once the wasp has been let into the
Factory through “the hole in the dead centre” (121) of the
clock that, having its hands disconnected, shows time
literally “out of joint” and a centre that does not hold, it
may either “wander about the face for as long as it likes,
inspecting the tiny candles with its dead cousins buried
inside if it likes, or ignoring them if it would rather” (ibid.),
or it may enter one of the corridors. In either case,
whether it chooses to keep to the surface of the
Factory/text and to treat it in its textuality or
intertextuality, or to delve into the meaning of Frank’s
experiences, as detailed in each corridor/chapter, the
wasp/reader is denied any way out of the deadly
mechanism.
As a metaphor of the novel’s unreadability, the Wasp
Factory functions rather as what Gordon E. Slethaug calls a
“metadouble”.
 The designified double becomes a concrete metaphor
for metonymical displacement of value amid the desire for
unified meaning. By demonstrating that the double is
really only a linguistic device, a metaphor, authors can
demythologise it and appropriate it for the very process of
deconstruction; they can create a metadouble. The double
in postmodern fiction can serve to remind the readers that
people as social animals are an assemblage of feelings,
linguistic habits, and cultural assumptions with no special
core identity and that fiction is a linguistic construction.
(1993: 27-8)

This self-reflexive double, used to parody dualistic

assumptions, to disentangle the subject from the self-
contained frames of history, psychoanalysis, and
metaphysics, and to explore the play of the signifier,
results in an irreducible multiplicity of doubles that
proliferates in every direction, “doubling for the sake of
doubling” (Slethaug, 1993: 157), obliterating the
significance of the double and rendering it “a decidedly
entropic state” (ibid.).
It is not only the Wasp Factory that functions as a
metadouble multiplying death as meaning and death of
meaning, but also each object invested by Frank with
totemic value shows its distorted self-reflection, such as
Old Saul’s image is reduplicated insanely by the dogs set
on fire by Eric, or Frank’s attempt to identify ‘himself’ with
Eric, to have him in ‘his’ grasp and, at the same time, to be
part of him and see the world through his eyes, is doomed
to failure in front of the “conflagration” (127) in Eric’s
head, dispersing the double under the pressure of the
“marshalling of forces” (128) inside. Like the other face of
the clock that, despite ‘his’ efforts, Frank was not able to
retrieve and assumed it had been melted down years ago,
the play of the multiple doubles is “part of the mystery of
the Factory – a little Grail legend of its own” (121), a
present absence and an absent presence always already
invoked as supplement.
Thus, despite the obsession with precise
measurements, the ‘mirrors’ in The Wasp Factory distort
and disseminate the fixed size, the monumentality of the
total body envisioned by Lacan in the mirror-stage,
questioning the “orthopaedic” form and placing instead an
always already dissolved I upon which future mental
development is predicated. As Frank puts it when
intoxication makes ‘him’ collapse in a parodic prelinguistic
state, “I seemed to have a separate brain for each limb,
but they’d all broken off diplomatic relations” (79).
According to Lacan, what ensures the conditions of
intelligibility for the symbolic order is the structure of
kinship, where “the whole of the logic of combinations”
(1998: 85) is to be found and where the primordial law is
the Oedipus complex, “that which in regulating marriage
ties superimposes the kingdom of culture on that of a
nature abandoned to the laws of mating” (ibid.).
Ironically, in The Wasp Factory, what prevents the Father
from having access to the Wasp Factory is his limping, the
precise Oedipal mytheme that Lévi-Strauss associates with
“the autochtonous origin of mankind” (1963: 215), falling
in irresolvable contradiction with the theory of bisexual
reproduction. This disability of the father, engendered by
the incommensurability of sameness and difference, makes
the Wasp Factory out of reach and uncontrollable, as “he
wouldn’t be able to negotiate the twist you have to make
to get from the top of the ladder (…) into the loft proper”
(10-1). Similarly, if one maintains the imaginary/symbolic
opposition, one finds it difficult to negotiate the twist
operating the Father/Mother difference in terms of their
proper names, Angus/Agnes. The twist, reminiscent of the
Möbius strip as image of neither one nor two, employed by
Lacan to refer to the paradox of language as discourse of
the Other, excluding the subject from any possibility of
signification (cf. Moris, 1975:70), emerges here as vertical
articulation attached to the already twisted signifying
chain, suggesting its splitting and interlacing, which the
paternal metaphor, relying as it is on the presupposition of
the indivisible phallus, should deny in order to conceal its
own twisting and its own “Möbian compulsion”
(Baudrillard, 1988: 176), its own inscription in an order of
simulation. According to Baudrillard, once divided, the
Möbius strip “results in an additional spiral without there
being any possibility of resolving its surfaces (…) Hades of
simulation, which is no longer one of torture, but one of
the subtle, maleficent, elusive twisting of meaning” (ibid.).
Thus, what ensures the correct functioning of gender is
already split in itself, having the centre nowhere and being
unable to overcome the twist that precludes the
designation both of the proper name and of the proper
place.
As substitutive sign for the ‘loss’ the Father simulates
Frank has suffered, the Wasp Factory as “vertical
dependenc[y]” (Lacan, 1992: 95), does not perform a
proper metaphoric substitution. As a connective tissue, it
does not stand in proper metonymical relation to Frank’s
murders, as it either replaces or connects to a
manufactured signifier that finds its place in the signifying
chain by force of a catachresis. For Derrida, the “new kind
of proper sense” produced by catachresis, by virtue of its
middle place between the primitive and the figurative,
escapes their opposition, deconstructing it at the same
time.
When the middle of an opposition is not the
passageway of a mediation, there is every chance that the
opposition is not pertinent. (Derrida, 1986: 256)

The use of catachresis is what enables the Father to

impose his “bogus bower” (16), to control the structure of
kinship, and, implicitly, to regulate gender. It is by making
Frank believe that “Pathos was one of the Three
Musketeers, Fellatio was a character in Hamlet, Vitreous a
town in China, and that the Irish peasants had to tread the
peat to make Guinness” (14) that he tries to maintain his
symbolic position. Yet, his abusive usages question the
truth about Frank he discloses in the end and set the new
identity he attributes to Frank on the loose, within an
order of simulation where the transition from one pole to
another is mediated by the “fake set of male genitals”
(181), convincing precisely because they are false, a copy
without the original, a double mirroring its own
dissemination, and threatening the Law of the Father by
inserting itself in its place and reflecting what is missing
from its place as a superposition.
The Father’s catachrestic regulation of gender
reverberates in Frank’s catachrestic manipulation of the
narrative, the echo of the Father’s word as mark of the
symbolic resisting identification in the proper name, or, by
virtue of the proper name. Such is the twisted relation
between The Wasp Factory and the Wasp Factory, as
Oedipal patterning turns back upon itself and cannot
negotiate the difference splitting its sameness.
Thom Nairn, signals Banks’s eclecticism in terms of
genre (cf. 1993: 127), contending with the general
designation of The Wasp Factory as horror, tenable just
insofar as one misses Bank’s subtle humour.
Loading his text with symbols, images, cross-
references and tangled coincidences, Banks allows
settings, events and characters to filter from one narrative
to another, undermining our assumptions until we begin to
lose track of which of these narratives can be accepted as
the real one. Banks makes us play detective as we try to
pin down links in a chain which, as well-trained readers,
we are convinced must exist. (ibid: 130)

Like gender, genres in The Wasp Factory present their

mark under the sign of the “double-bluff,” both eliciting
and resisting identification by force of self-parody and
inherent duplicity. Killing “God’s creatures” (13) as a mark
of horror is intimately connected with Frank’s
appropriation of the discourse of psychoanalysis adduced
to account for and legitimate ‘his’ behaviour. Both
discourses are subjected to a play of mutual reflections
that displaces both the traces of horror and their tracing
as marks of the repressed brought to the fore by analysis.
Frank arguments ‘his’ need to kill by advocating the idea
of organic insufficiency and the propensity to the fictional
reconstruction of the image of the total body.
 Of course I was out killing things. How the hell am I
supposed to get heads and bodies for the Poles and the
Bunker if I don’t kill things? There just aren’t enough
natural deaths. (13)

The Poles are invested with fetishistic value, being

conceived as the ramifications of ‘his’ own body, “[m]y
dead sentries, those extensions of me which came under
my power through the simple but ultimate surrender of
death” (20), but the Poles and the Bunker, as landmarks of
the geography of the text, also allude to the misleading
‘corridors’ of textuality, standing in unequal equation both
to the Wasp Factory and to its other, The Wasp Factory.
Furthermore, these systems of surveillance, while bearing
witness to the quantum reality they measure, are
permanent reminders of the reductionist character of their
measurement, perpetuating indeterminacy along any line
of association they subtend.
Any sense of horror is dispelled in Frank’s rendition of
‘his’ murders – and here the possessive conflates both
passive and active involvement – in the technical
vocabulary of psychoanalysis. Employing such phrases as
“our continuance of the species” (182), “my angry
innocence and emasculation” (183), “irrevocable loss”
(ibid.), “penis envy” (ibid.) and giving his account the
shape and weight of expert diagnosis, beside achieving an
unmistakably comic effect, Frank suggests that ‘his’
mastery of this kind of discourse, even when confronted
with the utter confusion of its privileged signified,
originates in its self-reduplicative capacity, or, in Niall
Lucy’s terms, in the potential of this auto-generative
discourse to create its own object by deploying “a
paranoiac process of making sense” (1997: 12).
It is the evanescent background of Frank’s undecidable
gender, its configuration as a superposition, that provides
the outside for the discourse of psychoanalysis, shedding
light upon its totalising practices. The Law of the Father
as gender regulator is ultimately revealed as “only a lie, a
trick that should have been exposed, a disguise which
even from the inside I should have seen through” (183) but
what seems to ensure its effectiveness is the lure of the
power that might be exacted from the process of
subjection. As Frank confesses, “I was proud; eunuch but
unique; a fierce and noble presence in my lands, a crippled
warrior, fallen prince” (183). As ‘he’ inserts ‘himself’, via
the discourse of psychoanalysis, within a literary
patrilineage, ‘he’ subjects ‘himself’ to a form of power
that, as Foucault points out, “categorises the individual,
marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his
own identity, imposes a law of truth on him which he must
recognise and which others have to recognise in him”
(1984: 420). This form of submission to ‘his’ own identity,
congenial with ‘his’ permanent watching, is, at times,
disturbed by the realisation that multiple selves coexist
within ‘him’, not exactly on speaking terms with each
other, and finds its resolution in Frank’s apprehension of
the undulatory quantum character of everything around
‘him’, including the sea, ‘his’ fierce adversary, that ‘he’ has
previously opposed by implementing a politics of
segregation, or, to employ an unintentional pun ‘he’
attributes to ‘his’ uncle, “apart-hate” (28), but that has
always defeated ‘him’ by demolishing ‘his’ protective
shields. Contemplating the waves as forces of disturbance
echoing ‘his’ sense of nontotalisable identity, Frank
relinquishes any oppositional patterning, suggesting a
(non)concept of alterity touching upon J. Hillis Miller’s
notion of the “wholly others” (1999: 165) resisting the
neutralisation that is possible within any dyadic form of
otherness, being inassimilable to logical or dialectical
synthesis, signalling their demand on the subject by the
very disturbance that precludes the “fiction of personal,
group, or national identity” (ibid.) .
Delivered from any constriction of the self, Frank is free
to welcome that that cannot be observed and to recast
‘his’ narrative in its radical alterity, where no negotiation,
be it of truth, gender, or genre, will ever reach consensual
resolution without reserve. Like Schrödinger’s cat, ‘he’ is
both dead and alive, “now that my father’s truth has
murdered what I was” (182), indiscriminately twisting in
his mind the warmth of the summer day and “the howlig
gale born in Siberia” (ibid.) in a non-causal, non-local,
complementary movement, reminiscent of Wallace
Stevens’s last lines of “In the Element of Antagonisms”,
And the north wind’s mighty buskin seems to fall
In an excessive corridor, alas! (1950: 33)

To foreground such an economy of unmanageable

excess and to disentangle the ‘given’ from its most
celebrated matrix, so that it could reach for its other
across radically different discourses; to position a ‘father’
of psychoanalysis in front of his mirror, wherefrom a
disinherited ‘father’ of quantum mechanics makes wry
faces at him, is to give the postmodernist text a
supplementary twist, which would re-locate the signified at
the panoptic table of negotiation, if only one knew where
to look, so as to track it down and observe it.

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