Desire and the Collapse of Fantasy in Surrealism : A Psychoanalytic Reading of David Lynch and Sadegh Hedayat Works

David Lynch, the profound contemporary filmmaker, is known by uncanny, dreamlike narrative of his works. To the extent that he is called the resuscitator of the Surrealism school of 1920s. On the other hand, Jacque Lacan, the controversial Freudian psychoanalyst, who was also largely influenced by the movement, decided to exert its ideas in his researches and innovations of psychoanalysis. Based on the hypothesis that Lynch represents psychoanalysis ideas in his corpus, we can discern intelligible narrative structure with appropriate Lacanian themes. In that respect, I would argue that both Lynch and Lacan seek to illustrate the unrepresentable. The realm Lacan named the Real, that which is outside language and that resists symbolization absolutely. I would show Lynch’s works can be read as the presentation of the unrepresentable. He does so, by the immersion of the viewer in fantasy world of cinema, as an object of our desire, but he also would sharply punctuates the transitory nature of this world. Hence the deadlock inherent in desire shows itself at the end: the Real. The subject/viewer in Lacan’s theory and Lynch’s works traverses the fantasy to face the threatening absence of the desire deadlock. The Blind Owl of Sadegh Hedayat, the Iranian writer of Modern prose fictions and novels, could illuminate the path for Iranian reader of this article to comprehend what we means by the surrealism style.