Zizek on Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath

If, in the story of modern literature, there was ever a person who exemplifies ethical defeat, it is Ted Hughes. The true Other Woman, the focus of the Hughes-Plath saga ignored by both camps, is Assia Wevill, a dark-haired Jewish beauty, a Holocaust survivor, Ted’s mistress on account of whom he left Sylvia. So this was like leaving a wife and marrying the madwoman in the attic—however, how did she get mad in the first place? In 1969, she killed herself in the same way as Sylvia (by gassing herself), but killing along with her also Shura, her daughter by Ted. Why? What drove her into this uncanny repetition? This was Ted’s true ethical betrayal, not Sylvia—here, his Birthday Letters, with their fake mythologizing, turn into an ethically repulsive text, putting the blame on the dark forces of Fate which run our lives, casting Assia as the dark seductress:“ You are the dark force.You are the dark destructive force that destroyed Sylvia.”

(The psychoanalytic notion of the Unconscious is the very opposite of this instinctual irrational Fate onto which we can transpose our responsibility.) Recall the line from Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Ernest: “To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness”—does not the same go for Ted Hughes? “To lose one wife through suicide may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two wives looks like carelessness. . . .” Hughes’s version is one long variation on Valmont’s “ce n’est pas ma faute” from Les liaisons dangereuses: it wasn’t me, it was Fate—as he put it, responsibility is “a figment valid only in a world of lawyers as moralists.” All his babble about Feminine Goddess, Fate, astrology, and so forth, is ethically worthless; this is how sexual difference was connoted here: she was hysterical, probing, authentic, selfdestructive; while he was mythologizing and putting the blame on the Other.

In Kant’s terms, as we have seen, I am determined by causes, but I (can) retroactively determine which causes will determine me: we, subjects, are passively affected by pathological objects and motivations; but, in a reflexive way, we ourselves have the minimal power to accept (or reject) being affected in this way—that is to say, we retroactively determine the causes allowed to determine us, or, at least, the mode of this linear determination.

― Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View

The Zizek Calendar

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