Let's talk names. First, Id. I am quoting J. Hillis Miller who is quoting Sigmund Freud:
If writing--which consists in allowing a fluid to flow out from a tube upon a piece of white paper--has acquired the symbolic meaning of coitus, or if walking has become a symbolic substitute for stamping upon the body of Mother Earth, then both writing and walking will be abstained from because it is as though forbidden sexual behavior were thereby being indulged in. The ego renounces these functions proper to it in order not to have to undertake a fresh effort of repression, in order to avoid a conflict with the id.
I'm not sure who that emphasis belongs to (Miller or Freud), but it doesn't belong to me. Anyway, Freud is basically saying a pen is like a penis and paper is like a vagina, or some such thing. The heteronormativity that is, I'm sure, inherent in that statement is not really important though. What's super interesting here is this imagery of text as sexual congress; text is embodied. Let me throw a text from Barthes into the mix and then I'll talk about Id.
The pleasure of the text is not the pleasure of the corporeal striptease or of narrative suspense. In these cases, there is no tear, no edges: a gradual unveiling: the entire excitation takes refuge in the hope of seeing the sexual organ (schoolboy's dream) or in knowing the end of the story (novelistic satisfaction). Paradoxically (since it is mass-consumed), this is a far more intellectual pleasure than the other: an Oedipal pleasure (to denude, to know, to learn the origin and the end), if it is true that every narrative (every unveiling of the truth) is a staging of the (absent, hidden, or hypostatized) father--which would explain the solidarity of narrative forms, of family structures, and of prohibitions of nudity, all collected in our culture in the myth of Noah's sons covering his nakedness.
This excerpt from Barthes'
The Pleasure of Text is dense as hell, and I can try to parse out the whole thing with you if you want me to (I don't know what it all means). But the important thing is that Barthes talks about two types of reading, although he only describes one here. The one he describes is what is typically thought of as reading--reading for plot, reading toward an end. This is a striptease--the following of a narrative arc in the hopes of encountering a Truth (or genitals) of the text upon its completion. Barthes doesn't like this so much. He's into the other kind of reading, reading for pleasure--if we're going to follow the bodily metaphors, this is like Freud's text-as-sexual-congress, I think. The pleasure of the text is not linear, it doesn't seek the Truth, it's not a clean arc. It's messy, bodily,
pleasureful.
Why is this important to Id? Well, let's think about Id's name. Freud structures the psyche into three interconnected segments: the id, ego, and superego. Ego is more or less consciousness. Superego is internalized rules and values--the conscience, socially constructed, that keeps your bodily impulses in check. The id is those impulses. Drives, urges, desires, etc.
Here's the catch.
The Grand Poobah's Id is actually a raging superego. He's so repressed (sorry about the masculine pronoun, I figured since we were being heteronormative already I'd just go for it). He hides away all of his impulses in favor of following the proper path that society has set out for him. He's the opposite of an id. He is the negative of his name, the opposite of his identity.
He is defined negatively. A confusion, a paradox.
He is constantly attempting to encounter the Truth via his text collecting. He thinks he will achieve transcendence via striptease. Much of the
Poobah is about his growing realization that he will not achieve capital T Truth Transcendence, but instead needs to let his id off the leash and have some damned pleasure in the text he is reading/writing/creating! He needs to give into the messy, gross, exhilarating, private, imperfect sexual congress of the embodied text. He thinks Paradise should mean Truth but it doesn't.
Now, X. I am quoting further from the rather postmodernist literary theorist J. Hillis Miller. He is talking about how readers cannot single out and compartmentalize different categories of interpretation in reading:
The same terms must be used in all regions. All the topoi overlap. Neither the critic nor the novelist can, for example, talk about sexual relations without at the same time using economic terminology (getting, spending, and so on), or without talking about mimetic representation (reproduction), or about topography (crossings), and in fact about all the other topics of narrative. The language of narrative is always displaced, borrowed. . . . Take, as an example of this, the letter X. It is a letter, a sign, but a sign for signs generally and for a multitude of relations involving ultimately interchanges among all nine of my places [ed: he gave nine example categories earlier in the essay]. X is a crossroads, the figure of speech called chiasmus, a kiss, a fish, Christ, the cross of the crucifixion, an unknown in mathematics, the proofreader's sign for a broken letter, a place marked on a map (X marks the spot), an illustration (as when we say, "See figure X"), the signature of an illiterate person, the sign of an error or erasure ("crossed out"), the indication of degrees of fineness (as in the X's on a sack of flour or sugar), the place of encounters, reversals, and exchanges, the region of both/and or either/or ("She is my ex-wife"), the place of a gap, gape, or yawning chasm, the undecidable, the foyer of genealogical crossings, the sign of crossing oneself, of the X chromosome, of crisis, of the double cross, of star-crossed lovers, of cross-examination, of cross-stitching, of cross-purposes, of the witch's cross, of the criss-cross (originally Christ-cross), and of the cross child. X is, finally, the sign of death, as in the skull and crossbones, or the crossed-out eyes of the cartoon figure who is baffled, unconscious, or dead: X X. In all these uses, the "ex" means out of, beside itself, displaced. The real and visible rises, exhales, from the unreal, or does the unreal always appear as the intervening veil or substitute for the absent real, as, in stanza 18 of Wallace Stevens's "Man with the Blue Guitar," daylight comes "Like light in a mirroring of cliffs,/Rising upward from a sea of ex."
This quotation might seem overwhelming, but the crucial aspect is that Miller is
playing. It just so happens that he's playing with a sign, X, that is particularly relevant to the
Poobah. Our very own X has a name that, like all names, has manifold, endless meanings. But unlike all names, X's name is the sign of signs, a meta-sign, a stand-in for all signs. X is a variable, a sign in the most abstract sense. X is all about play, X is all about signs.
I'm a little fuzzier on X's character arc than I am on Id's, to be honest, but let me spitball for a while. X has the opposite problem of our friend Id. X doesn't have any trouble letting loose with pleasure and embodiment. He's filled with all of the many interpretations of himself. His backpack contains everything he's ever encountered in his life, all his experiences that he hasn't let go, because he knows they're all a part of him. Unlike Id, he's letting himself become his own person. His issue is that he doesn't restrict himself at all--he's all the things all at once. Can one play too much? When one can no longer focus on what's important, or what could be important, then I suppose the answer is yes. X thinks Paradise is a full-on orgiastic bacchanalia, when what he really needs is a bit of direction.
You folks should talk to me about these character projections, and how they relate to the theoretical texts I'm foisting upon you. If you want. But to round things out, here is a picture re: The Grand Poobah in a really shitty bunny suit.
