10. This relates, of course, to another ‘reel’, namely the child's one of the Freudian fort/da: see Freud, Sigmund, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Standard Edition, XVIII (London: Hogarth Press, 1955)Google Scholar. Madan Sarup offers a succinct summary: ‘The child had a cotton reel with a piece of string tied to it. Holding the string he would throw the reel over the edge of his cot and utter sounds that Freud interpreted as being an attempt at the German fort, meaning “gone” or “away”. He would then pull the reel back into his field of vision, greeting its reappearance with a joyful da (“there”). This game allowed the eighteen-month-old child to bear without protest the painful experience of his mother's absence, to cope with her disappearance and reappearance. It illustrates the birth of language in its autonomy from reality and allows a better understanding of how language distances us from the lived experience of the real. The distancing is effected in two stages: the child moves from the mother to the reel and finally to language’. As Sarup goes on to point out, Lacan ‘interprets the story as being more about the disappearance of the self than that of the mother’. Both, however, see fort/da ‘as an allegory about the linguistic mastery of the drives’. Hence, the reel, as the first most basic indication of narrative, epitomizes the process by which the human subject becomes codified. See Sarup, , Poststructuralism and Postmodernism (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), p. 8, 23Google Scholar.
