“Imperfectly Incarnate”: Father Absence, Law and Lies in Bret Easton Ellis’ Lunar Park and John Burnside’s A Lie About My Father

Abstract

Contemporary discussions emphasize crisis, fragmentation and reconstruction in the definition of the “new fatherhood.” In UK law, attempts to reinstate the “Name of the Father” into familial structures have appeared to shore up conventional family forms against the threat of dissolution. This article examines the difficulties of defining and describing legal and literary fatherhood through examination of two recent works, Bret Easton Ellis’ Lunar Park and John Burnside’s A Lie About My Father. It suggests that the father of memory and imagination possesses qualities of falsehood and emptiness which mirror the intangibility and symbolic overburdening of the paternal signifier as theorized by Lacan and more recently Žižek. Thus, remembered fathers abuse, neglect, and crucially, lie to sons who long both for the presence of the human father and for the magic of the signifier. It then examines the authors’ strategies for forgiveness of their fathers and their attempts to reconcile the liar with the lying signifier, discussing ways in which imagining the father as embodied individual aid in the rehabilitation of the paternal signifier itself, with implications for sociolegal conceptions of fathers and fatherhood.