A Psycho-metaphoric Analysis of Childish Story: "Something from Nothing",Based on the Theory of Linguistic Unconscious

Jacques Lacan knows the language as the “Trojan horse” which is given to us by the “other,” but within it, there are some soldiers hiding and occupying all our existence. He not only considers a linguistic structure for the unconscious, but also believes that it is born of language. Unlike Freud’s theory of the unconscious, which is based on biological drives, the most important paradigm of Lacanian “linguistic unconscious” is the concept of “meta other,” which, during the child’s development, spreads in the imaginary order, symbolic order, and real order respectively and overshadows the existence of fundamental concepts such as unconscious, language, superego, ego-ideal, and desire. Since applying the theory of the linguistic unconscious to literature is a post-structuralist approach and the purpose of post-structuralism is to reread the text, the purpose of this study is to reread Phoebe Gilman’s Something from Nothing based on the paradigms of this theory and the metaphors in the visual text and written text of the book. Critics’ neglect of interdisciplinary approaches to children’s literature, their one-dimensional and merely figurative view of metaphor instead of using it to analyze stories, and most importantly, the scarcity of research in the field of analytical critique of children’s literature in Iran, call for research in this field. Thus, the present study employs Lacanian psychoanalysis to answer two fundamental questions regarding Something from Nothing: What are the metaphors and tropes based on the linguistic unconscious that make rereading of the text possible? Through what mechanisms do these metaphors and tropes lead to the production of meaning?