The Illusion of Fulfilment: Objet Petit a and Romantic Desire in Anna Karenina and Salt and Saffron

Abstract

This research positions Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Shamsie’s Salt and Saffron within Lacan’s theoretical framework to analyze the interplay of desire and subjectivity. Through the lens of the objet petit a, the unattainable object-cause of longing, both works depict protagonists—Anna and Aliya—whose desires for love and belonging expose deeper psychic and cultural fractures. Anna’s fixation on Vronsky and Aliya’s negotiation of diasporic displacement exemplify Lacan’s claim that desire is structured by absence and perpetuated through deferral. In each narrative, the beloved serves as the objet petit a, the residue of an impossible plenitude that drives the subject toward self-dissolution. Tolstoy and Shamsie thus reimagine romance not as fulfillment but as a dialectic of loss, where the Real of desire intrudes upon the Symbolic order, revealing the enduring impossibility of psychic or cultural wholeness.