No Saving Fictions of Masculinity: Subverting the Epistemic Will in Graham Swift's Shuttlecock

This essay examines the ways Graham Swift's novel Shuttlecock critically examines the dialectical construction of masculinity as the discourse of the patriarchal Other. Foregrounding a Lacanian reading of the text which locates the absence of signification at the level of the Symbolic which then paradoxically produces imaginary figurations and fictions of desire, I read the novel as using the paradigm of espionage (itself premised on possessing and inhabiting the secret of the Other) as a powerful way of interrogating Prentis' construction of his father's masculinity as well as his own understanding of power and violence within the social economy of patriarchy. I argue that Lacan's reading of psychoanalytic desire provides a useful paradigm through which to understand not only Prentis' unconscious projection of Oedipal ambivalence against father figures such as Quinn, but also Swift's deconstruction of the social and political constructs of masculine heroism as focalised through the war hero.