So it’s both a loss – the wound of oedipal frustration has to be born, in order that we adapt to reality, for our sanity, for the survival of the human race – but it’s also a gain because frustration means we know about wishes, wants, imaginings, even magic. Frustration keeps hope alive. It’s the nature of the oedipal encounter and configuration, the roughness of the awakening, or the form the rejection took, that throws light on the reasons for our adult limitations; for why something may be unbearable.
Charles Foster Kane, an enormously wealthy media proprietor, was given up by his mother age five. Kane, now a recluse, lives out his final years in a palatial estate named Xanadu; a ‘No Trespassing’ sign on the gates. On the brink of death, he lies in bed clasping a snow globe and murmers ‘Rosebud’ as the globe slips from his dying hand and smashes to the floor. Kane’s death is a global news sensation. Reporter Jerry Thompson investigates Kane’s private life and attempts to unravel the enigma, the meaning behind his dying word. As the film ends, it’s revealed that Rosebud was the name of the sled from Kane’s childhood – an allusion to the only time in his life that Kane was truly happy.
Rosebud was Kane’s boyhood sled—the sled abandoned in the snow on the day his parents abruptly gave him up. Something profound eluded Kane, he is never satisfied; the man who had everything couldn’t get what he wished for, something he once had. As a substitute, or a protection from the unbearable knowledge that he’d lost something forever, Kane attempted to reconstruct it. Xanadu, Gracelands, Neverland; worlds of zero frustration, doomed attempts to magic the impossible, to re-enter a lost paradise.Perhaps the way Kane was frustrated, the crudeness and cruelty of the rejection, meant the cut was too deep, the wound remained open, and open wounds need regular attendance. One way Kane retraced, tried to return to that blissful state of primary satisfaction, was by creating a pleasure dome mansion Xanadu named after Coleridge’s Kubla Khan:
Stay awhile,
Poor youth! who scarcely dar’st lift up thine eyes—
The stream will soon renew its smoothness, soon
The visions will return!
(From Coleridge’s The Picture; or the lover’s Resolution, 1816)
Kane’s palace Xanadu is named after Coleridge’s Kubla Khan—a vision of paradise. Lacan’s mirror phase, (occurring around about the same time in the child as the Kleinian depressive phase ), when the child sees an illusion of something that’s complete, is the point at which Lacan might say, the child sets off on a never ending voyage of desiring what cannot be had.
And lo! he stays,
And soon the fragments dim of lovely forms
Come trembling back, unite, and now once more
The pool becomes a mirror (ibid.)
Kane’s attempt to return, ‘to make the dim and lovely forms unite’, was doomed to failure . Kane died a lonely death, all relationships trespassers on his grief. He may have lost the object of his desire in a riddle—the riddle of the unconscious – but he never lost his desire for it.