American Narcissus: Lacanian Reflections on DeLillo’s Americana

Don DeLillo’s first novel, Americana (1971), is assembled from a toolkit of psychological tropes. Critics have long recognized the novel’s debts to (and parodies of) Sigmund Freud, leading one critic to dub protagonist David Bell as “the American Oedipus.” The present article reconsiders the novel from the perspective of Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theories. Several of Lacan’s key concepts—including his seminal articulation of the Mirror Stage, his revisions to Freud’s Oedipus Complex, his emphasis on lack as the engine of desire, as well as his reflections on dreams, fantasies, and the gaze—help shed new light on DeLillo’s splintered portrait of postmodern subjectivity in Americana . The article uses Lacan to explain how and why each of David Bell’s attempts at indulging his incestuous maternal desires ends in disappointment, with particular emphasis on his three failed attempts at restaging the primal scene. Lacanian psychology provides a conceptual framework and useful taxonomy for understanding the shifting desires, misrecognitions, obfuscations, deflections, projections, and self-reflections of the American Narcissus, David Bell.