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SIRI HUSTVEDT, Pace, Space and the Other in the Making of Fiction

searcher described what he called “vitality affects,” elusive qualities
of feeling in a baby that escape the vocabulary we generally apply
to emotion. He suggested “kinetic terms” instead —“‘surging,’ ‘fad-
ing away,’ ‘fleeting,’ ‘explosive,’ ‘crescendo,’ ‘decrescendo,’ ‘burst-
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ing,’ ‘drawn out.’” He characterized the early conversations be-
tween infant and mother as symphonic, rhythmic, wave-like struc-
tures with a unified emotional arc, wordless, pre-symbolic interac-
tions that create what he called “proto-or pre-narrative envelopes”:
“The pre-narrative envelope is a subjective experience that unfolds
in time [….] This unit is like a musical phrase that loses its sense
when cut up further and like a musical phrase moves, with an in-
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evitability to its end state.” Notably, Stern was indebted to Langer,
an influence he acknowledged. She clearly marked the language he
used to describe his forms of vitality and pre-narrative envelopes.
Stern transported Langer’s thoughts about the rhythmic under-
ground of “emotive life” to the infant-mother relation and detected
in the exchanges between the two the progression of a vaguely plot-
like, pre-narrative form.
Similarly, D.W. Winnico reconfigured Jacques Lacan’s famous
paper Le stade du miroir, in which Lacan made a Hegelian argument
about reflective self-consciousness that turned on a child’s recognition
of herself in the mirror. Lacan’s reading of Charlo e Bühler’s work on
mirror self-recognition in children led to thoughts about a crucial de-
velopmental turn at this moment: I see myself as an other. Winnico
took Lacan’s insights, pushed them back in developmental time, and
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replaced the mirror with the mother’s face. Around eighteen months,
human children recognize themselves in the mirror. More and less has
been made of this moment; it is also significant that this “stage,” once
regarded as exclusive to humans, is also “passed” by some other mam-

38 Daniel Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View From Psychoanalysis
and Developmental Psychology (London: Karnac, 1998), 54.
39 Daniel Stern, “The Pre-Narrative Envelope: An Alternative View of ‘Un-
conscious Fantasy’ in Infancy,” Bulletin Anna Freud Centre 15 (1992): 291.
40 D.W. Winnico , “Mirror Role of Mother in Child Development,” in Playing
and Reality (London: Routledge, 1982), 111-118.

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