'ARE WE CASTRATED?': LACAN FINDS ANSWERS IN ZADIE SMITH’S WHITE TEETH

Abstract

This article explores the journey of desire towards ‘castration’ in the context of Samad Iqbal’s migration from Bangladesh to London in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000). Drawing on Jacques Lacan’s theory, this article writes a psychoanalytic analysis of Smith’s text, focusing on Samad Iqbal’s psychic structures of desire in order to find answers to how he remains castrated in both native and host cultures. Contrary to the conventional understanding of ‘castration’, this article postulates that though Samad Iqbal tries to find the real object of desire, he cannot find the real lacking object of desire in anything attractive or desirable, and this leads his psychic state to fall into the domain of ‘castration’. Thus, this article reveals that both lack and the idealised fascinating images of the mind do not contain the real object of desire, but rather lead the psychic state of a character to ‘castration’ in Lacanian sense.