What is it about?
Lardner's story is incredible: it is narrated by a "dummy" (a supposedly "dumb" wife who can't stop talking, and is the dummy in bridge) who knows nothing and reveals all. How is that possible?
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Why is it important?
The dummy in contract bridge is Lacan's metaphor for the Other-capital-O in Schema L: knows all but can't speak or act directly. All "speaking" and all acting is indirect, channeled through the o' and o into the Subject. Lardner's story is a bridge game in which Tom is the Subject, his "dumb" wife is the dummy/Other-capital-O, and Tom's true but lost love and her husband are the other (love object) and o' (ego-ideal).
Perspectives
I taught this story to undergraduates in a literary practicum every semester for several years in Finland, all through the 1970s. Every time I taught it I marveled at how incredibly complex it was, how brilliantly layered the plot was--and kept trying to figure out how it worked so I could walk my practicum students through it. Then some time in the late 1980s I read Lacan's discussion of his Schema L and the bridge game, and it all came together. That experience generated the whole book--and it's encapculated in this chapter.
Professor Douglas J. Robinson
Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Voicing the Dummy, February 1993, Oxford University Press (OUP),
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195076004.003.0002.
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