Frederick Crews
Out of My System: Psychoanalysis, Ideology, and Critical Method
(1975)
[x]
...the effort to work out a consistent attitude toward radicalism in its newest guises proved to bear directly on the methodological inquiries I kept postponing. Essays that were written as acts of political self-scrutiny, exploring why I felt uneasy about movements I might have been expected to applaud, also amounted to partial reappraisals of psychoanalysis as a "radical" doctrine. At last I realized that instead of being continually diverted from my book, I had nearly completed it. Its true subject, I discovered, was not psychoanalytic method per se, but the difficulty of mediating between empirical responsibility and urges toward deep and revolutionary explanation.
Discontent with my successive attempts to marry evidential circumspection and explanatory zeal has made this book an evolving document, an oblique case history of sorts. Rather than try to disguise that fact, I have emphasized it by printing the essays in order of composition, leaving them substantially unchanged, and adding headnotes that point to unsolved problems and shifts of attitude. But the "case" that thus emerges, I submit, is not just my own. Many people who don't share my interest in Freud have been temperamentally drawn toward interpretive schemes parallel in motive and habit to psychoanalysis in its most ambitious mood. They too face the pitfalls involved in asking a critical method to serve as a general philosophy . The impulse to make that leap—to stretch a skeptical technique of analysis into a sufficient conception of meaning and value—is what my book examines from various angles and finally rejects.
Purveyors of iconoclastic critical doctrines appear generally to be animated, not just by rational considerations, but by an intuitive anti-authoritarianism, a penchant for unearthing "real" significance that the established sages have been too timid or prudish or servile to acknowledge. ...
[xi]
...an attempt to dismiss the whole prevailing framework of interpretation and to recast problems in "deep" terms may end by revitalizing a field in which taxonomic or configurational models have been carried to a point of diminishing returns. ...the fact that a student of history or politics wants to expose the hidden interests of seemingly benign officials doesn't necessarily make him a less rational analyst than someone who lacks that compulsion. ... What matters isn't whether the analyst can achieve perfect disinterestedness, but whether he sees the situation clearly and isn't carried by his antagonistic sentiment into thinking in clichés.
Quite often, however, intellectual rebels don't escape this peril. The animus that enables them to look on ruling paradigms with total disbelief also takes them beyond empirical caution and into circular and dogmatic reasoning—even, sometimes, into a more genuine authoritarianism than the mild eclectic reign they are spurning. ...
[xii]
...
... People ...who have skimmed Freud and noted his modest and scrupulous airs, may not perceive the extent to which he too licensed a spirit of dogmatically rebellious interpretation. In his writings vast presumption—a wish to expose all hypocrisy, unify all knowledge, assume a godlike distance from deluded mankind—is pitted against empirical and mundane loyalties that make such ambitions look unrealizable. The result is continual production of that most unrevolutionary effect, irony . Within the orthodox psychoanalytic tradition, shielded as it is by medical respectability and ego-psychological circumspection, it is difficult to grasp the naked daring of the original Freudian vision. ...
Though the Freudian radicals caricature psychoanalysis, their caricature is assembled from real features of the doctrine: an extreme distrust of manifest ideas and altruistic aims, a championing of instinct against inhibition, a deterministic emphasis on a handful of hidden factors, an imperious merging of biological and mental categories, and a claim of special insight based on possession of a desublimating, counterdeceitful technique of interpretation. These are intellectual staples of revolutionism in most of its modern forms. Their prominence in Freudian thought may indicate that psychoanalysis is less a science than a world view asserting that what society has tried to bottle up is more significant than what it has left uncensored.
[xiii]
...—if psychoanalysis is essentially an illusion-shattering movement which tends to overturn received values and affirm the primacy of the repressed—then someone hoping to use Freudian method for straightforward exegetical purposes may have some serious reassessing to do. ... ...Freudian method invariably turns up traces of the themes that Freudian doctrine declares to lie at the roots of psychic life, and those themes typically subvert the intended or naively apparent meaning of a text or action and replace it with a demonic excavated content,... Of course a Freudian needn't ideologize that content in Reichian or Lawrentian style. But neither can he avoid placing an a priori stress on it, for his whole system obliges him to regard cultural objects as products of a dynamic contest. ...
Doubts like these have gradually wrought a change of focus in my essays about method. ... Now I see, for example, that exclusive attention to conflict is itself an "ideo-
[xiv]
logical" choice, one dictated less by the self-evident nature of art works than by a wish to regard them in a certain tough-minded light. ...I find that my most binding loyalty is not to a particular system but to the empirical attitude an attitude that psychoanalysis honors in spirit but only fitfully exemplifies. And the experience of the sixties has left me convinced that a refusal to have one's outlook bounded by a closed interpretive system is not just a necessary intellectual stand, but also a political one of extensive consequence for the defense of free institutions.
...
[7] ... Before turning to literary applications I shall deal with prevalent objections to psychoanalysis as a body of knowledge:
1. Being unverified and unverifiable by experiment, psychoanalysis cannot be called a science at all. It is simply a technique of therapy, or a system of metaphors.
It is in the nature of all experiments that variables be kept to a minimum and that the path of inference from effect to cause be fairly direct. Any theory of complex and dynamic mental acts, and especially one that includes an idea of unconscious "overdetermination," must therefore remain largely unverified by experiment. Yet it is questionable whether this is a telling point against psychoanalysis. The psychological school which most insists on laboratory verification, namely behaviorism, has necessarily confined most of its researches to animals and to relatively simple problems of stimulus and response. The gain in verifiability is achieved at the cost of never approaching the complexity of uniquely human motives.
...
[11]
This analogy rests on the supposition that both art and neurosis originate in conflict and may be conceived as ways of managing it. But whereas the neurotic's solution is the helplessly regressive and primitive one of allowing repressed ideas to break into a disguised expression which is satisfying neither to the neurotic himself nor to others, the artist has the power to sublimate and neutralize conflict, to give it logical and social coherence through conscious elaboration, and to reach and communicate a sense of catharsis. The chief insistence on creative strength—on the artist's innate capacity for sublimation, his ability to handle dangerous psychic materials successfully—has come from within the psychoanalytic movement, not from outraged traditionalists. In truth, the theory that the artist is an especially morbid type antedates psychoanalysis and serves the very un-Freudian purpose of exaggerating the common man's freedom from conflict. It is thus a form of philistinism—one to which bad psychoanalysts have been susceptible but which is contrary to the whole spirit of the movement. "Of all mental systems," Lionel Trilling has justly written, "the Freudian psychology is the one which makes poetry indigenous to the very constitution of the mind. Indeed, the mind, as Freud sees it, is in the greater part of its tendency exactly a poetry-making organ."
...
[14]
...
As for the author's stated intention, the subtlest modern critics have rightly placed little value on it—but not always for good reasons. The most celebrated dogma of the New Criticism has been that statements made before or after the literary fact must be considered less reliable than statements inferred from the text. All too often, however, this sound principle allows the critic to overstate the work's unity of effect or to drain off its passion and leave behind only a fragile tissue of symbols. By invoking the Intentional Fallacy the critic may fail to consider divisions of intention that are intrinsic to the work's structure and effect. I submit that we are entitled to consider both overt purpose and the perhaps contradictory purpose (or purposes) that may emerge from imagery or the shape of a plot.
Well sure. You are free to consider whatever you damn well please. But, for the hundreth time: what urgent question is authorial purpose the answer to?
...
[35]
... As men begin to articulate their feeling of slavery to the tools and the inorganic surroundings they cannot stop creating, reason itself is chosen as their scapegoat. Dispassionately considered, [Norman O.] Brown's works ought not to strengthen this prejudice; one of his cardinal points, after all, is that unreason lies at the base of our money and production systems. ...
...
[41]
... The academy, that home of disinterested taste, cannot be appealed to as a referee; there a swelling GNP of discreet praise for every "major author" is bound to be heard, and one author may be favored over another simply because he lends himself to a more labored approach . Joseph Conrad is a case in point: he was trilingual, he was influenced and influential, he did some obscure things that need to be "researched," he studded his works with symbols, and he exuded a moral portentousness that both invites and resists analysis. Most "Conradians" would find it hard to separate these professional conveniences from the question of Conrad's ultimate merit. Those of us who are involved in the quaint modern industry of explaining literature are assailed sometimes by a doubt as to whether we even know what we like. To say what some future generation would like is quite beyond our power; the closest we can come is to try to define for ourselves the shape and limits of an author's imaginative world.
...
[46]
...
Paradoxically, I suspect that a certain iconoclasm toward the beauty of artists' lives may be conducive to an honest respect for their art. However eager we may be to look up to a novelist for moral guidance, this wish is clearly not what involves and holds us in his fiction. If fiction teaches a lesson it is only as a by-product of something more crucial, a shared experience; not ideas but fantasies entice us into someone else's imaginative world. ...
...
[64]
The critical essays in this book have in common an overt reference to hypotheses and rules of procedure that were neither derived from literature nor primarily meant to apply to literature. Such criticism can go wrong in several ways: by using weak hypotheses, by using strong and pertinent ones in too mechanical a fashion, or by warping literary evidence to meet presuppositions. The recourse to "extraliterary" theory is not in itself, however, a methodological error. The simple fact that literature is made and enjoyed by human minds guarantees its accessibility to study in terms of broad principles of psychic and social functioning.
Mere accessibility to study is a pretty low bar. Does this not ensure results so broad as to be perfectly useless?
To what urgent questions are the result of this study the answer?
This point would seem too obvious to dwell on, but it is widely resisted among the very group to whom it should be most axiomatic, professional students of literature. Most literary scholars observe an informal taboo on methods that would plainly reveal literary determinants. Such methods are considered intrinsically antihumanistic, and criticism systematically employing them is regarded as ipso facto shortsighted. Academic critics often circumvent the taboo by disguising or compromising their explanatory inclination, thus earning a hearing at the expense of some consistency and clarity. But the prohibition itself deserves scrutiny, not only because it is intellectually indefensible but also because its operation has grave consequences for the teaching of literature.
The majority view of deterministic schemes was aptly conveyed by Northrop Frye, one of the most influential of living critics, as he gave assurance that his own theory of literature would not borrow its conceptual framework from sources outside literature itself. Any extrinsic system, he said,
[65]
gives us, in criticism, the fallacy of what in history is called determinism, where a scholar with a special interest in geography or economics expresses that interest by the rhetorical device of putting his favorite study into a causal relationship with whatever interests him less. Such a method gives one the illusion of explaining one's subject while studying it, thus wasting no time. It would be easy to compile a long list of such determinisms in criticism, all of them, whether Marxist, Thomist, liberal-humanist, neo-Classical, Freudian, Jungian, or existentialist, substituting a critical attitude for criticism, all proposing, not to find a conceptual framework for criticism within literature, but to attach criticism to one of a miscellany of frameworks outside it. The axioms and postulates of criticism, however, have to grow out of the art it deals with. The first thing the literary critic has to do is to read literature, to make an inductive survey of his own field and let his critical principles shape themselves solely out of his knowledge of that field.Insofar as this statement pleads against replacing sensitive criticism with a crude ransacking of literature to illustrate hypotheses about other matters, it is beyond dispute. More is meant, however. Frye is asserting that the critic, if he is to retain his objectivity, must derive his principles "solely" from his inductive survey of literary works. The point recurs insistently in Anatomy of Criticism and is extended into a cautionary view of all "axioms and postulates," whatever their source:
There are no definite positions to be taken in chemistry or philology, and if there are any to be taken in criticism, criticism is not a field of genuine learning. . . . One's "definite position" is one's weakness, the source of one's liability to error and prejudice, and to gain adherents to a definite position is only to multiply one's weakness like an infection.
The modern student of critical theory is faced with a body of rhetoricians who speak of texture and frontal assaults, with students of history who deal with traditions and sources, with critics using material from psychology and anthropology, with Aristotelians, Coleridgeans, Thomists, Freudians, Jungians,[66]
Marxists, with students of myths, rituals, archetypes, metaphors, ambiguities, and significant forms. The student must either admit the principle of polysemous meaning, or choose one of these groups and then try to prove that all the others are less legitimate. The former is the way of scholarship, and leads to the advancement of learning; the latter is the way of pedantry.These lines seemingly welcome, but actually discourage, the use of explanatory ideas in criticism. "Polysemous meaning" is recognized only in order to close off the possibility that any one line of investigation might be fruitfully pursued to its end. To have a definite position, no matter how correct, is to be "infected" with weakness, prejudice, and error, whereas to be tolerantly indifferent toward all definite positions, presumably including mistaken ones, is "the way of scholarship." Frye is quite emphatic about this. "All that the disinterested critic can do," when presented with the "color-filter" of an externally derived critical attitude, "is to murmur politely that it shows things in a new light and is indeed a most stimulating contribution to criticism". Frye himself illustrates his recommendation by glancingly alluding to a variety of frameworks, always with an understanding that they lie beyond the true business of criticism.
Professor Frye's widely accepted imperative, Do not stray outside literature, must be seen as territorial rather than intellectual. The avowed idea is to avoid indebtedness to other people's specialties, "for in that case the autonomy of criticism would . . . disappear, and the whole subject would be assimilated to something else". Once this apprehension is grasped, one can predict the degree of Frye's actual hospitality toward different lines of study. Works can, for example, be safely classified according to their patent resemblances and differences, but in order to say how those features came into being we would have to talk about motives, and there would be no assurance that the motives in question would prove
[67]
properly "literary." Beneath, let us say, the urge to write an epic or a masque we might come across other urges at once more private and more universal than the literary taxonomist could account for. Thus it is not surprising that Frye repeatedly admonishes the disinterested critic to beware of all psychological explanations.
But this causal vacuum cannot be sustained; a critic who forswears deterministic thinking will inevitably fall back on a covert, wishful determinism bordering on tautology. In Frye's case this is particularly clear. "Poetry can only be made out of other poems," he says, "novels out of other novels. Literature shapes itself, and is not shaped externally . . .". "The true father or shaping spirit of the poem is the form of the poem itself, and this form is a manifestation of the universal spirit of poetry"; ". . . the central greatness of Paradise Regained, as a poem, is . . . the greatness of the theme itself, which Milton passes on to the reader from his source"; "the real difference between the original and the imitative poet is simply that the former is more profoundly imitative". Literature makes literature which makes literature; tradition itself is the fount of all inspiration and value. No questions need be asked about how the world's great stories gained their appeal, for the stories themselves are motivational forces. Indeed, Frye dares to hope that even the idea of the Oedipus complex will someday be exposed as nothing more than a misplaced compliment to the power of the Oedipus story: perhaps we shall decide "that the myth of Oedipus informed and gave structure to some psychological investigations at this point. Freud would in that case be exceptional only in having been well read enough to spot the source of the myth".
This vision of literature as its own progenitor is very far from being a unique indulgence. It is, in fact, a common fantasy among writers, a wish that art could be self-fathered, self-nurturing, self-referential, purified of its actual origins in dis-
[68]
content;
Hmm. I'm a musician and not a writer , but I wonder if this is not actually the wish .
What I wish for, periodically, is for critics to realize that discontent and all the other things supposedly lying concealed beneath the manifest content of artworks, these feelings can be voiced any number of other ways; dare I say they usually are, but that the critic, even if they do happen to have some intimate/private knowledge of the artist that the audience is not privy to, is nonetheless bound to interface with the audience largely/wholly through the lens of the manifest content, i.e. the work, which is the only "public" basis for their whole enterprise.
Saying that art has origins in discontent is a bit like saying that it has origins in metabolism. Sure enough, a person made this art. No bones about it. Surely that person also made some methane and some CO2...
Cue a certain repertory of sarcastic remarks, about both critics and online oversharers, usually strictly rhetorical:
"gee, today I had eggs for breakfast, then I took a shit, then..."
Milo, re: a certain over-self-documented avant-garde culture-hero:
"...every fart documented..."
The simple fact that literature is made and enjoyed by human minds guarantees its accessibility to study in terms of broad principles of psychic and social functioning.
BUT WHAT ABOUT DIGESTIVE FUNCTIONING?
Crews' introduction to this volume
shows him beginning
(later)
to see that
the mere "breadth" of this "accessibility to study"
does not in and of itself recommend
any one
of the innumberable "broad principles"
that the critic might choose to hone in on;
rather,
given such a breadth of competing methods
and the need/tendency to specialize,
it's not super believable
that
critics really are allowing
the demands of the moment
and of the work itself
lead them
to a method;
more likely
they have
led themselves
there
,
as artists lead themselves
to certain mediums, styles, techniques,...
;
also that
the assumptions
upon which defense
of
this choice of method
might be based
can almost never
be conclusively justified.
"That's what intimacy breadth is, Joel."
For better or worse, fellow human beings find it more interesting, more noteworthy, more worth the study , that we are "discontent," e.g., and less noteworthy, etc., that we piss and shit. This focus is explicable, understandable, and inescapble. Now, I myself am a bit of a nutrition fanatic and I am very susceptible to chronic fatigue and general malaise, and so ever since adolescence I have been on a journey of discovery to "hack" my own metabolism. I only began to figure it out in my late thirties. So, if you were going to respond that metabolism, piss and shit, etc. actually have nothing (and "discontent" everything) to do with artmaking, then you're directing that argument to the wrong person. I can sincerely say that both discontent and metabolism have been determinative of my work. I could not possibly say which more and which less so, nor which in what respects as against other respects.
But you, the critic, don't care about degrees of determinativity. You care about "poignance." You care (somewhat) about the discontent, and not (at all) about all the pissing and shitting.
[The] rational argument [for the algorithms] is compelling, but it runs against a stubborn psychological reality: for most people, the cause of a mistake matters. The story of a child dying because an algorithm made a mistake is more poignant than the story of the same tragedy occurring as a result of human error, and the difference in emotional intensity is readily translated into a moral preference.
(Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow, p. 229)
And again...
I was convinced by [Meehl's] argument that simple, statistical rules are superior to intuitive "clinical" judgments. I concluded that the current interview had failed at least in part because it allowed the interviewers to do what they found most interesting, which was to learn about the dynamics of the interviewee's mental life. Instead, we should use the limited time at our disposal to obtain as much specific information as possible about the interviewee's life in his normal environment. Another lesson I learned from Meehl was that we should abandon the procedure in which the interviewers' global evaluations of the recruit determined the final decision. Meehl's book suggested that such evaluations should not be trusted and that statistical summaries of separately evaluated attributes would achieve greater validity.
(ibid, p. 230)
It would be absurd to put this forward as an alternative "critical" method in the literary realm, but that doesn't mean it isn't relevant. The point is: don't critics just tend to "do what they find most interesting?" Don't they love groping towards "global evaluations" in ignorance of "separately evaluated attributes"? And if so, might we do well to notice that even mild empirical checks on these pretensions have shown them to be wayward? What are criticism's empirical checks? It has none. Although criticism's claims are formulated and presented as claims, their truth or falsity hardly matters aside from the crudest kind of libel or slander.
The symbolic interpretation of prophecy makes the interpreter a prophet; spiritus per spiritum intellegitur. All the Lord's people to be prophets. Prophets, or poets: sing unto the Lord a new song. The song must be new, or it is no song; the spirit is the creator spirit, making new creations. The spirit is understood by the spirit; by the same spirit, i.e., in the same style. The proper response to poetry is not criticism but poetry.
(Love's Body, p. 205)
Is this
self-fathering?
Self-referenence?
What it is
is
self-determination,
that's all
.
[68] and it is no less common among critics. Frye found a use for it in his brilliant study of Blake, virtually annihilating his identity as a critic while fusing himself with Blake's obscure private reality. In that case a rapt surrender to the poet's wish for total imaginative control over the world provided an opportunity for valuable clarification. But such reverence for the all-sufficient text is obviously too narrow a foundation for a whole theory of criticism, and when Frye turns lawgiver he ends by providing an apology for more timid work, indeed for the most routine academic drudgery.
This is a rather breathtaking accusation, akin to the reproach of Coltrane for subjecting us to his countless more timid imitators.
It is important to see that such a result is dictated by the very project of severing literature from its determinants.
Everything is a determinant of everything else. Lavishing attention on this or that isolated determinant is fundamentally dishonest and mystifying (and usually motivated).
... Frye's novelty is to fortify the supposedly "anagogic" universe of a poem, not with overt dogmas, but with the rest of literature itself, considered as a great phalanx of works aligned by genre and period. The receding sea of faith has at least left this much behind. But as Freud said of Dostoevsky's final piety, lesser minds have reached the same position with less effort. Frye's emphasis on the autonomy of tradition and his simple equation of merit (as in Paradise Regained) with borrowed thematic content are all too congenial to critics who could never have written a page of Fearful Symmetry. While few professors would say outright that "literature shapes itself," fewer still have ventured beyond the confines of tradition and convention. Indeed, the fear of "going too far" with any hypothesis about literature has proved considerably stronger than the fear of arriving nowhere.
Sorry bro, nowhere is precisely where we're headed. You were expecting Mandrake Falls?
...
[71]
... To say that an author has endowed his hero with Freudian traits is no more psychoanalytic a statement than to say that he has evoked a pleasant landscape; in both cases the question of unconscious influence over the whole text is being avoided. And this avoidance is the minimal condition a critic must fulfill if he doesn't want to be regarded as unbalanced.
... While Freud may seem politically less iconoclastic than Marx, his method is in one sense more radical; it leaves the critic with less ground on which to strike a righteous attitude. Psychoanalytic principles bring into question the very possibility that a critic's relation to his texts could be fundamentally rational and disinterested.
Well of course. Be as interested or disinterested as you want. Speculate. Conjecture. Straw Man it up. Just be honest about what you're doing.
Criticism seems to me fundamentally dishonest. That is the basic issue that I can't get past.
...
[73]
...
Since good criticism appears to be largely a matter of sympathy, sensitivity, and pertinent learning, one might reasonably ask whether such vagueness over theory has much importance. Yet it does not seem too venturesome to propose that all scholars, even literary ones, could profit from being clear about what they believe and what they are doing.
No shit.
There is also a possibility that what many of them are doing is wrong both in its premises and in its educational impact. Behind the public façade of eclecticism there may lie a dogmatic avoidance of unacknowledged aspects of literary experience; behind the tactful withdrawal from theories, a disregard for knowledge; behind the celebration of traditional themes, an intolerance toward students who want to come to grips with their deepest responses.
These possibilities are in fact widely realized. The cardinal features of professional critical training as most of us know it are a suppression of affect and a displacement of attention from artistic process onto motifs, genres, literary history (conceived not as the study of how books are influenced by objective conditions, but as chronology, borrowings, gossip, and a disembodied "history of ideas"), and the busywork of acquiring the skills and attitudes needed for circumspect research. Actual criticism, in the familiar sense of making a case for the superiority of some works to others , is frowned upon as amateurishly subjective. Since sheer acquaintance with the body of Anglo-American literature is supremely valued, emphasis is laid on "working up" the designated genres and periods without concern over how literature moves us.
At this point I've had about as much of this as I can take.
The important thing is that something moves us . How is a question for homicide detectives and manipulative romantic partners. For them, how is an urgent question. The reasons for this urgency are informative here.
What does it mean to come to grips with one's deepest responses ? Of course it depends on the responses. The shallowness of my "responses" to Bjork and David Bowie, e.g., scarcely matter inside of my apartment, where I am writing this. However, as soon as I leave to go just about anywhere with anyone, I begin to run the risk (distant in probabilty but with potentially grave consequences) that my non-"responses" could become very important.
...
[75]
... What is meant by humanism? The humanism that purports to defend classical and Judeo-Christian values by cherishing the texts in which those values supposedly reside is indeed jeopardized by extraliterary knowledge, but such a humanism amounts to little more than the confusion of a book list with an education, and its practical results are hardly worth preserving. Suppose, however, humanism were taken to mean a concern for knowing (and protecting) man as an evolved species , embarked on a unique and possibly self-abbreviated experiment in the substitution of learning for instinct. In that case there would be no need to build walls between one discipline and all others out of fear that the alleged autonomy of one's specialty might be challenged. On the contrary: the search for universals underlying all cultures and traditions would be everyone's business, and proof that one category of human production, such as literature, is functionally consistent with others would be welcomed as significant.
Ah, the 1960s.
Sorry, I've just...had enough. See previous comments?
...
[79]
...
...the psychoanalytic anticipation that even the most anomalous details in a work of art will prove psychically functional. Being at bottom a theory of how conflicting demands are adjusted and merged, psychoanalysis is quite prepared for literature's mixed intentions , dissociations of affect from ideational content, hints of atonement for uncommitted acts, bursts of vindictiveness and sentimentality, and ironies that seem to occupy some middle ground between satire and self-criticism. In much literary commentary such phenomena are either overlooked or treated as nuisances to be forgiven or condemned, yet they are pervasive. ("A novel," said Randall Jarrell, "is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.") The fact that we can be moved by literary elements that are rationally incoherent or formally clumsy is puzzling to the nonpsychoanalytic commentator —so much so that T. S. Eliot, finding no adequate manifest referent for the clogged emotionality he perceived in Hamlet, reluctantly declared the play an artistic failure.
Admittedly, it is indeed stunning (stunning!), even/especially now, to realize that this inability/unwillingness to confront anomalous details was in fact a real thing.
It is less altogether stunning but nonetheless notable, I think, also, that the sheer madness of all of this mainstream puzzlement did indeed make the time ripe for something like psychoanalysis, and that there was, improbably, great potential in psa despite its high bunkum quotient. It was not more wrong than were so many prevailing views, and it had their number.
...
[85]
... The crucial difference between literary creation and symptom formation resides in the extra demand we make of literature, that it confirm and extend our sense of truth. Whereas symptoms are rigidly stereotyped, are usually accompanied by guilt, and subtract from an individual's rapport with his surroundings, in the highest literary enjoyment we feel that our pleasure is being sanctioned by reality itself, whose principles have been set for us. This is an illusion, but the illusion can be practiced only by artists whose perceptiveness has not been obliterated by ego needs. A work that flouts our conscious intelligence, as symptoms do, may have an "escape" interest but will be soon rejected for its crudeness or empty conventionality.
To recognize the importance of cognition is not, of course, to say that doses of unadulterated social or historical truth are found in literature and account for its power. Neutral-seeming literary material always conveys unconscious apologetics , and the latter turn out to be more compelling than any amount of faithful description. Hence the shallowness of criticism that evaluates books by their correspondence to approved political facts , and hence the folly of assuming that literature naïvely mirrors the conditions of the age in which it was written . Whatever historical knowledge we can glean from literature is knowledge of the way objective circumstances were apprehended by one sensibility at the sufferance of all other psychic demands . This awareness can be illuminating once its restricted province is understood, but here again the proper point of vantage is neither fantasy nor facts, but the negotiating ego .
...
[93]
...
... the liberal rule of thumb is self-interest for others' motives, altruism for ours. ...
...
[97]
...
... Whether the conditions of student life have worsened is doubtful, but amenities do not appease a feeling of revulsion. If anything, they exacerbate it. Consider the opening sentence of Tom Hayden's prescient Port Huron Statement of 1962: "We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit." The question has not been how to gain one's withheld rights but whether to accept one's legacy—a moral or spiritual problem rather than a practical one.
For this reason Feuer's psychosocial method of explanation remains useful, irrespective of his prejudices. Students often
[98]
engage in what Feuer calls "projective" politics, as opposed to the relative realism and materialism of class and ethnic groups. They seek out symbolic issues distant from their immediate situation in order to express or resolve ambivalence about authority and identity. Among students a kind of claustrophobia at the thought of membership in a too pervasive, too predictable, and too discriminatory order gets translated into fraternal and ascetic identification with those who are exempt from any charge of being its heirs: the black proletariat, migrant farm workers, NLF peasants. And this identification requires a mistaken perception of political realities or even a provocation of repressive malice from authorities.
...
...
[111]
...
... American social science is united in its lack of serious interest in American power. It willingly follows what Martin Nicolaus has called "the one and only general sociological law that has ever been discovered, namely that the oppressors research the oppressed." ...
...
[114]
...
As soon as we look a little more closely at the imperative to prostrate ourselves before literature's autonomous emanations of meaning, we begin to see that here, too, ideology has been at work. It can hardly be coincidental that in socialist countries an exactly opposite attitude prevails. A revolutionary society or one that still feels its existence imperiled by class enemies finds the meaning of literary works in the social dynamics they express or promote. To be sure, officially sanctioned socialist criticism is almost always simpleminded and venal, like any other mental effort that must flatter a bureaucracy and meet a doctrinal test; our criticism seems to do better if only because it is less closely supervised. Yet the root assumption that literature conveys class meaning is, as a Georg Lukács can show, both true and important. A criticism neglecting the historical struggles behind art's genesis and stressing the formal harmonies, resolved differences, and sententious wisdom that
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emerge at the other end of artistic process is well suited to a prosperous and entrenched society. Such a criticism is certainly less ideological than one that makes political correctness the touchstone of aesthetic value, but it does have an ideological aspect in its very neglect of social forces. It rests upon, and helps to foster, the illusion of present classlessness—an illusion whose effective function is to ensure compliance with disguised class governance.
Likewise, criticism's neglect of the metabolic helps to foster the illusion that artists don't actually piss and shit like the rest of us do. We almost never encounter criticism which reports the pissing and shitting of artists. But that is not the same thing as actively promoting the view that artists do not piss and shit. If writers could be held accountable for every disclaimer they fail to make, there quickly would be no more writers.
The question is: what is relevant? What is so relevant about social forces ? What is irrelevant about pissing and shitting?
...
American literary criticism has many conflicting strands, but over several decades one can make out approximate shifts in spirit that correspond to the vicissitudes of the economy. No one would dispute that the thirties were a time of ideological debate among critics and that from the forties until very recently that debate has seemed increasingly quaint and embarrassing. Many of us, like our social science colleagues, have been ready to believe that the end of ideology has arrived and
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that the leftist squabbles of the past were pointless and immature. Those squabbles were indeed strident, and the current revival of their excommunicative hairsplitting gives one cause to doubt that history teaches anything at all. Yet it could be argued that the very best American discussions of literature were generated by the political ferment preceding World War I.
Causation? Or correlation?
Critics like Wilson, Trilling, Burke, Kazin, and Howe had to ask themselves where ideology ended and art began. Their urgently personal efforts to accommodate their sense of aesthetic complexity to their politics, which seemed to be falling in ruins at the end of the thirties, yielded apprehensions of literature that were full of a clarifying passion. One need not agree with the accommodations themselves in order to grant the importance of the effort and the excitement it generated for others. When we compare such criticism with the formalism and static didacticism that have characterized much of the intervening period, we may wonder whether a certain political anguish may not be essential to good criticism. Perhaps our most challenging criticism is more indebted to the Depression and the shock of Stalinism than to the theoretical efforts of Eliot and Richards.
It is widely acknowledged that much recent criticism has been characterized by a primness of tone, a spirit of dry routine, and a preoccupation with abstracted formal patterns. The New Critics, with their generally nostalgic politics and their ostentatious piety, are usually blamed for this arid development, but the accusation is unfair, for most of the men who have been called New Critics were artists and thinkers with a clear sense of their commitments. The hallmark of most criticism produced today is precisely its low degree of commitment, its air of occupying a niche rather than of claiming some territory. ...
...
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...
In the oddly segregated portion of our field known as "scholarship," things have changed much less over the past four decades than one could gather from following the "critics." For most literary scholars there has been no end of ideology because there was never any ideology in the first place; as in the social sciences, a posture of neutrality before facts has obviated questions of political value. Yet this very unconcern has ensured a hospitality to the assumptions ingrained in our system , and in some cases those assumptions can be blamed for shallow thinking about literature. It is, for instance, an absence of feeling for historical dynamics that allows some scholars to account for one author's work merely by the "influence" of another's, as if his life situation did not contain features that readied him for one sort of guidance. Much history-of-ideas scholarship commits the same error; it is Hegel's error of taking the verbal precipitates of power relations to be power itself, so that material circumstances can be altogether discounted. Or again, note the political up-to-dateness of commentaries that mistake an era's dominant value system for its whole play of social forces .
Indeed. But where tf does any "critic" get off thinking they are fully grasping and explaining this whole play ? That is a totally absurd piece of pretense.
If "the Renaissance" believed in holy kingship or the Great Chain of Being, the problem of any single case has been settled in advance. The scholar, occupying a post in an institution whose purposes and values are by now sensitively attuned to those of
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the state, perhaps even having sworn his ideological loyalty on pain of firing and blacklisting, is undisposed to imagine that a writer might have questioned the myths by whose means the ruling families stayed in power.
...
... While the challenges to obscurantist scholarship are sometimes uninformed and even anti-intellectual, it is becoming possible in several fields, including literary study, to perceive that the old legitimations for conventional work—objectivity, neutrality, humanistic values, "culture"—are not what they once seemed. Whereas many critics of thirty years ago were prompted by political disillusion to seek a truer order within art, I suspect that the best critics in the immediate future will reject such escapism and demand that works be understood, not as transcendent icons and refuges from the world, but as contingent, imperfect expressions of social and mental forces . ...
What exactly does understood mean here?
In any case, I have quite enough social and mental forces bearing down upon me from every direction, thank you very much. That is the least interesting aspect of art precisely because it is not special, and because we already have too much of it. If that outlook betokens mere escape then I guess I'm on the run.
...
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The pivotal question for anyone attempting to characterize the New Left is whether it began as an upwelling of revulsion against unusual episodes of war and racism or as an expression of the anxieties and unmet needs of young people in a time of prosperity. ... Now, in the Movement's evident decline, we can perhaps accept the "conservative" case without the politics that accompanied it .
The Movement's campaign against segregation began after the Supreme Court had undertaken the most dramatic gain for civil rights since Emancipation, and in those days the Vietnam war was of no concern to activists. The possibility that the war "caused" the Movement is belied not only by chronology but by the striking absence of any such response to a similar war in the early fifties. And if we read the Port Huron Statement attentively we cannot fail to see that its emphasis falls on problems of collegiate identity and on distaste with the apathetic bourgeois millions . Here was a dissatisfaction in search of issues that would allow a stifled idealism to burst forth. The New Left was given its issues, it tried vainly to fashion a stable identity around them, and it spun apart as activists learned one by one that politics could not contain their clamorous feelings.
...
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... Many student radicals of the sixties, especially among the orthodox Marxists, were relatively exempt from Movement style. The mere fact of having an articulated political vision set the Marxists apart, and their vision was pointedly antipathetic to the visceral politics practiced on the campuses. ... Marxism's notion of history fosters patience; the Movement is apocalyptic and opposed on principle to postponement of action. The Movement's appropriation of Marx's terms often blurs these distinctions, but radicals who learned their politics from the classic Marxist texts or from scholars such as Mandel, Deutscher, Mills, Williams, Baran and Sweezy, and Magdoff generally lack the Movement's habit of treating personal and public issues as if they were interchangeable .
The New Left as I construe it has always trafficked primarily in symbolism. ... "Their specific grievances," says [Peter]Marin of the young, "are incidental; their real purpose is to make God show his face, to have whatever pervasive and oppressive force makes us perpetual children reveal itself, declare itself, commit itself at last." ... When the task is to make God show his face the nearest surrogate will do, and it usually turns out to be some hapless college president or dean.
I vividly recall hearing Noam Chomsky plead with Berkeley leftists, in January 1967, to bear in mind the difference between their situation as privileged students and the plight of the decimated Vietnamese. The students listened politely but
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they were already tired of the "liberal" peace movement and absorbed in fighting imperialism at home by protesting campus rules. A year and a half later Chomsky was shouted down by the striking students at Columbia, who by then were losing all willingness to attach their impulses to commonly accepted goals. In the Weatherman an ultimate disgust with politics emerged. "What was significant for them as revolutionaries," says the Marxist David Horowitz, "was not the political consequence of the deed, but its karma. What was important was the will to bomb. Revolution here has almost ceased to be a strategy for social change and has become instead a yoga of perfection."
...
...
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... "Even when the humanities and the high culture to which they are devoted are most radical in content," says one New Leftist, "they are essentially a leisure-class luxury and an enticement away from the necessity for radical political action." There is so much penance to be done for "our ineradicable bourgeois upbringing"; we had best "absent ourselves from cultural felicity awhile" and try to become more like "Huey Newton or Regis Debray" ("Down with Culture," p. 32). Or perhaps like Savonarola.
There is, however, a rival notion of culture that catches the activists' enthusiasm. "We appear to have forgotten in our schools," says Peter Marin, "what every primitive tribe with its functional psychology knows: allegiance to the tribe can be forged only at the deepest levels of the psyche and in extreme circumstance demanding endurance, daring, and awe; that the participant must be given direct access to the sources of cultural continuity—by and in himself; and that only a place in a coherent community can be exchanged for a man's allegiance" ("The Open Truth," p. 4). By seeking out "extreme circumstance" and courting danger among a few like-minded friends, the activist can form a magnetic field of meaning around his deeds. Instead of abasing himself before objects and ideas he will be caught up in the energies of his own psyche and feel himself part of "a live organism" (The Movement, p. viii). The Movement itself will be his culture.
...
...
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...
...the most famous New Left cultural manifesto, John McDermott's "'The Laying On of Culture." Univerities, says McDermott, are prime reinforcers of the "hierarchic tendencies implicit in the social and economic system" (p. 299), and one of their chief instruments is the idea of culture specifically, the belief that culture "includes the Western Heritage, the Western Tradition, the Literary Tradition, the traditions of reason and civility, etc., and that these are most fully embodied in the profession of academe and the written treasures of which academe is priestly custodian and inspired interpreter" (p. 300). Before this sentence is halfway finished we have realized that "culture" is an unspeakable affront to the people. But McDermott is politic. He is not, he says, attacking Western culture and scholarship, but only their implications for working-class students who are being systematically humiliated by their teachers in community colleges. These students are essentially colonials, destined to fill deadening jobs near the base of the technocracy, and their introduction to cultural masterpieces is really intended to strip them of local and class pride. To avoid this fate they will require "critical universities, liberation courses, seminars in local and working-class history" (p. 301), and similar measures
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which, as McDermott implies, can be stimulated by the Movement teachers who are fanning across the country from their graduate schools.
The beauty of this argument is its semblance of egalitarianism. McDermott has found a real phenomenon that bears scrutiny, the use of community colleges as implements of social channeling, and he seems eager to help a neglected group of citizens become whatever they please. Oddly, however, his harshest comments are directed not against policies but against diffuse "hierarchic tendencies" that are chiefly instanced in the teaching of literature. Like all New Left anti-authoritarianism, McDermott's is at once global and parochial, challenging all oppression everywhere (in the capitalist world) while coming down hardest on the relatively insignificant abuses that are closest to home. What he has brought to the academic hinterlands is simply his concern to put down the English professors back at the university.
I doubt whether much animus against hierarchy as such is harbored by the upwardly mobile working people who have made their way into the community colleges; this passion is restricted to disaffected intellectuals in search of proletarian moorings. A leftist who pondered such a difference of outlook and admitted the class basis of his own unfocused rage would immediately graduate from the Movement, but McDermott's course is rather to consider how the children of workers can be brought around to his sophomoric ideas about liberation. These students are, for the duration of his essay, not real people but agents of a shadowy campaign against power. The abstract severity of the analysis forecloses any possibility that some of them might want to expose themselves to nonlocal culture or to occupy a different social class. They are domestic "natives" one and all, and if they are reluctant to resent this status it must be because they have not yet found their Che Guevaras, namely McDermott and the other radicals he is addressing. McDermott encourages the knowledgeable activist to
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become a missionary, bringing Samuel Gompers and John L. Lewis to the unwashed while casting out the heathen idol Shakespeare. Who, then, is laying what on whom?
...
...
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...
...an essay on Cuban literature by Roberta Salper, who was recently elected to the Executive Council of the MLA. Her argument is framed with sayings of Marcuse's from An Essay on Liberation and "Repressive Tolerance," and she adopts Marcuse's view that freedom of imagination in our time is threatened, not by anything so crude as censorship, but by rationality in the service of profit, by consumerism, by the near-impossibility of mounting an effective political protest, and by tolerance itself. Tolerance, she has learned from Marcuse, is the principle under which "a magazine prints both a negative and positive report on the FBI" (p. 29) and thereby disguises its oneness with that very organization. "In
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aesthetic terms," she explains, "this ethic of objectivity or 'benevolent neutrality' has meant an ability to absorb and neutralize even the most radical of formal experiments. Socialist Realism is an overreaction to this liberal tolerance and credo of 'impartiality'" (p. 29).
Socialist Realism, which became the Union of Soviet Writers' fearsome theme in 1932, happened in fact to be a bureaucratic "overreaction" to the last vestiges of artistic freedom in Russia. It is strange to find this doctrine, under which thousands of writers and artists were exiled and murdered, interpreted as a wholesome though possibly imprudent reply to Western eclecticism. What the author means, however, is that she herself is prepared to overreact to the maddening blandness of American policy toward dissent. True aesthetic freedom as expounded by Marcuse, she says, is simply the freedom to imagine a society entirely different from our own—but how can we realize such freedom when our government refuses to manifest its essential bias? ". . . A free society in Marcuse's terms," explains Salper, "demands a sensitivity free from the repressive satisfactions of the unfree societies . . ." (p. 17). Still following Marcuse, she concludes that left-propagandistic art is really the freest sort because it helps us to picture a better social order.
With her definitions thus squared away, Salper can give an unclouded survey of the Cuban literary scene. She finds it heartening that Cuban writers are sometimes forced to work in the factories and fields "'so they will learn what needs to be communicated and to whom" (p. 30n.); she marvels at Fidel's magnanimity in proposing not to suppress any books that are loyal to the revolution (no others can be published); she sympathetically explains the Culture Council's objections to Heberto Padilla's scandalous "concern with 'individualism' and 'liberty' in a pre-revolutionary sense" (p. 24); and she hails Cuban censorship for its hearty openness, so unlike the "more or less hidden censorship" (p. 30) which, in our own country,
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takes the insidious form of protecting dissident statements without offering them prime media time. "Censorship in Cuba still serves to protect and preserve society," she concedes, "but it is not a repressive society, vitiating life instincts and isolating human beings from one another, from their political existence" (p. 30). Unlike Castro himself, who until recently was apologetic about the need for any antilibertarian measures, the author is thus disposed to favor them on principle as constituting part of a thoroughgoing antithesis to her surroundings. No one actually living under a dictatorship could imagine that official control over the arts is a boon to the life instincts. This soap bubble can only be lofted in a climate of bourgeois individualism, when radicals have begun to confound freedom with the overcoming of loneliness.
...
...
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...
Literary study... may not yield especially useful findings, but at its best it fosters an important kind of engagement, a disposition to risk being changed by lending oneself to a problematic experience. This quality is what Sartre means by "generosity":
Reading is an exercise in generosity, and what the writer requires of the reader is not the application of an abstract freedom but the gift of his whole person, with his passions, his prepossessions, his sympathies, his sexual temperament, and his scale of values. . . . But he does not stop there; he also requires that [readers] recognize his creative freedom, and that they in turn solicit it by a symmetrical and inverse appeal.Where such generosity is lacking we find either pedantry or its left-wing counterpart, relevance . That is, we find one way or another of ensuring that nothing will be learned but inessential reinforcements of what one already knows, or thinks he knows.
...
...
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Anyone who believes, as I do, that principles of Freudian psychoanalysis can be usefully applied to literary criticism must find himself repeatedly assailed by doubts: about the theory itself, about methodological pitfalls, above all about the weak and sometimes comical record of the Freudian critical tradition. The partisan of literary psychoanalysis is likely to be busier apologizing for that tradition than improving it with contributions of his own. And no matter how many scrupulous distinctions he may draw between responsible and "wild" uses of Freud, he can never quite dispel the suspicion that psychoanalysis is, as its opponents have always said, inherently reductionistic. The record all too clearly shows that a special danger of dogmatism, of clinical presumption, indeed of monomania, accompanies a method that purports to ferret out from literature a handful of previously known, perennially "deep" psychic concerns. It must be admitted that Freudian criticism too easily degenerates into a grotesque Easter-egg hunt: find the devouring mother, detect the inevitable castration anxiety, listen, between the syllables of verse, for the squeaking bedsprings of the primal scene. A critic who may have been drawn toward Freud by the promise of a heightened sensitivity to conflict in literature may, without ever knowing what has happened to him, become the purveyor of a peculiarly silly kind of allegory.
If some academic Freudians are slow to recognize the hazard of reductionism, it is not for lack of advice from their nonpsychoanalytic colleagues. On the contrary, a Freudian hears so much sermonizing against Freudian reductionism that he may come to regard that term as a provocation to battle. Secretly, in
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fact, he may even agree with his detractors that psychoanalysis "robs literature of its autonomy"—for that may be just what he wants it to do. Psychoanalytic criticism in its recent American phase has deliberately set itself apart from a certain mystique of literary autonomy, championed first in New-Critical formalism and later in the taxonomic theory of Northrop Frye. Rightly or wrongly, that theory has been attacked (by myself among others) as implicitly sponsoring an affect-stifling approach to literature. Insofar as the Freudian critic resents the "civilizing" claims that have been put forth in behalf of the academic literary curriculum, his worry about reductionism is going to be mitigated by a certain satisfaction he can take in brushing past formal or generic or ironic or (above all) morally uplifting aspects of literature and showing instead that even the sublimest masterpiece traffics in unconscious wishes. Though in practice most Freudian criticism is far from invigorating to read, its practitioner may feel that in writing it he is conjuring the Lawrentian dark gods and setting them loose on the "English" establishment.
Anyone who is not blinded by such vengeful intent, however, would have to grant that literature is autonomous in one important sense. However strenuous its birth pangs, a poem or novel exists independently of the emotions that went into it. Regarded autobiographically, it points back to those emotions; but in another light, the one cast by Eliot's notion of aesthetic impersonality, the work is what it is precisely by virtue of having put those emotions behind it . On temperamental grounds we may incline toward one critical attitude or the other, but on evidential grounds we have to acknowledge that a poem can mean many things besides the poet's psychomachia. A good part of its significance, furthermore, derives from its intricate relations with other poems—from its place in a tradition whose laws of development have very little to do with the psychic vicissitudes of individual poets.
Some guardians of literary autonomy would take this point
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as a repudiation of all Freudian criticism, which they regard as reductionistic in its very essence. Psychoanalysis, they would say, is exactly a technique for making reductions from verbal manifestations to the psychic factors that supposedly determined those manifestations. If art is not mere behavior, wholly explainable by reference to the troubled minds that made it, then psychoanalytic criticism is always bound to falsify both the ontology and the multivalence of literature. What we want from criticism is not reduction to causes , but recognition of the inexhaustible and irreducible vitality that somehow inheres in the works themselves .
Expressed in such seemingly open-minded terms, the proscription against Freudian discourse sounds quite different from what it is, a denial of our right to pursue a certain range of problems. That psychoanalysis tends to treat a manifest text as an embodiment of psychic conflict cannot be doubted. But is this always and necessarily an unfruitful attitude for a critic to adopt? Authors do assuredly reveal wishes and anxieties when they write, and the experience of reading does have something to do with conflict management, if only in a simulated mode. Using psychoanalytic assumptions, a critic can show how a writer's public intention was evidently deflected by a private obsession. He can deal with blatant or subtle appeals to fantasy, as in the habitual practice of a genre like science fiction or the Gothic novel. He can reveal a hidden consistency behind shifts of tone or characterization, or make a new approach to a puzzle that has resisted commonsense solutions. Or again, he can draw biographical inferences on the basis of certain recurrent themes that the author hadn't consciously meant to display. Whatever its risks and deficiencies, Freudian reasoning has shown itself well adapted to such undertakings, which, though sternly denounced by purists, are established and useful critical enterprises.
In order to meet the real issue of reductionism without dismissing legitimate applications of psychoanalysis, it is neces-
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sary to realize that the mere proposing of a reductive idea doesn't in itself constitute reductionism , the effective denial or denigration of all meanings but the reductive one that is being revealed. Reductive inferences are normal, though not equally prominent, in many schools of criticism. A critic is reducing—that is, diverting attention from the text to something that purportedly lies behind the text and helps to explain it—whenever he asserts that a work can be understood in relation to its author's social background or didactic intent or cultural allegiance, or even his literary tradition. Reductionism proper is a certain bigoted way of advancing such points, with the result that the work in its singularity is sacrificed to the interpretive scheme instead of being illuminated by it.
Thus it is reductive, but possibly quite justifiable and helpful, to maintain that a common current of homosexual feeling for "the Handsome Sailor" runs between Claggart and Vere in Billy Budd; although the point might not originally occur to anyone but a Freudian, he could show other readers that his reduction makes sense of otherwise obscure features of the text. If the same critic were to say or imply that homosexuality is "the meaning" of Billy Budd, he would be not only reductive but reductionistic as well. Or again, to cite a recent example, when Michael West argues a connection in Thoreau's writings between excremental imagery, punning, distaste for women, contempt for philanthropic sympathy, and fear of tuberculosis, he is making reductions that would have been unthinkable before Freud. Yet West's article is not in my opinion reductionistic, for Walden in his hands, instead of dwindling to an illustration of theory, becomes richer and stranger than ever.
The fact remains, however, that the greater part of Freudian criticism is not just reductive, as it is bound to be, but reductionistic as well, and to a degree unmatched in any other school. When we ask why this should be the case, we find the answer immediately in the root assumptions of Freudian metapsychology. I have in mind the axioms that all psychic
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events are determined; that the deterministic chain originates in biological drives whose frustration and deflection eventuate in mental structures, ideas, and sublimated aims; and that the infantile and the prior therefore explain the adult and the contemporary. These notions together yield a picture of man as a creature chiefly occupied with fending off disturbing stimuli, both from his own soma and from external sources of disequilibrium. Alienated from his instinctive needs, absorbed in trying to appease a superego which has been precipitated from parental taboos, this rather sneaky fellow is conceived as being always on the lookout for ways to bootleg a little gratification, to give sway to the eternal baby within. And this narcissistic project, however petty and ridiculous it may appear to the uninitiated, is considered the quintessentially human activity, for man is above all the animal who turns against himself and then chafes against his self-inflicted unhappiness. Thus, no matter what action or text is being examined, the essentials of metapsychology dictate a mode of analysis in which persistent infantile factors will be stressed at the expense of nonconflictual ones—cognitive, conventional, formal, or ethical,
When man creates art, psychoanalysis disposes us to view that art as the product of a provisional unburdening, and to regard a work's meaning as coextensive with the thoughts or fantasies that were discharged in the act of composition. Hence the inevitable biographical orientation of all Freudian critics who haven't explicitly pledged to leave authors' minds out of account . However variously they may draw up the ground rules of criticism, psychoanalytic commentators tend to agree in taking a poem to be a need-satisfying, as opposed to a meaning-generating, device. Their one concession to multivalence is the idea of overdetermination—a principle which, as the name implies, allows several needs to be met by a single expression but does not depart from the basic Freudian orientation to conflict settlement. Interpretation, in short, remains a
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question of building bridges between the poem and the psychic conditions from which it arose, and of which it must be a manifestation. The fact that other people besides the artist respond to the poem is taken to indicate, not that a symptomatic interpretation is uncalled for, but that it can be applied to both parties in the transaction: author and reader are thought to communicate only in the sense that they both take the same words as their pretext for assuaging the tension with which they must continually live.
The narrowness of vision resulting from such assumptions is apparent even in highly refined statements of Freudian literary theory , the most imposing of which remains Norman N. Holland's The Dynamics of Literary Response. No Freudian has taken greater pains to make psychoanalysis accountable for subtle differences of genre and effect, and none has shown greater diffidence about armchair diagnosis of authors. Yet the rules set forth in the Dynamics, if followed to the letter, could hardly fail to result in reductionist criticism. For Holland asserts, merely on the basis of an extrapolation from the Freudian approach to dreams and jokes, that one infantile fantasy lies at the origin and heart of each literary work. Although he makes gestures of coexistence toward many styles of criticism, Holland nevertheless declares that "the psychoanalytic meaning underlies all the others"—a fact which can be announced in advance of any given instance, since, in Holland's view, the true purpose of even the most artifice-laden work is to enable a "core fantasy" to manifest itself in a respectable disguise. Holland even provides us with a "dictionary" of such fantasies—each pertaining to one of the classic erogenous zones and modes of gratification—in the certainty that he is cataloguing the very wellsprings of literary expression.
Holland is correct in believing that no one but a Freudian critic will be able to arrive at a work's "underlying meaning" in his sense of the term. What he does not realize, or hadn't yet realized in 1968, is that this is a handicap rather than an
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advantage. The handicap is at once social and intellectual, for the critic following Holland's lead can have no hope of gaining wide agreement to his readings and no opportunity to be chastened by reasonable objections from the unanalyzed, whose resistance is predicted and discounted by the theory. Above all, the critic will have locked himself into a rigid set of procedures: stripping each work to its supposed core and then presenting its other thematic and formal aspects as so many defensive strategies, whether or not they are experienced as defensive in the act of reading. Such overcommitment to a method prior to examining a given work can only diminish the critic's receptiveness and adaptability, meanwhile leaving the disagreeable, and finally incredible, impression that great literature is merely a subterfuge for venting such forbidden thoughts as "if I am phallicly aggressive and do not submit to my mother, she will castrate me."
Although Holland's theory of literature is not the only one that might be drawn up from Freudian premises, it is disturbingly loyal to those premises—so much so that we must ask whether a full-scale commitment to psychoanalysis can make a critic anything but a reductionist. Here, however, I must attend to a strong objection from advocates of modern psychoanalysis. They would remind me that Freud's narrow determinism, with its exclusively male perspective, its overrating of the Oedipus complex, its neglect of interpersonal as opposed to intrapsychic dynamics, and its billiard-ball notion of cause and effect, has long been superseded within the psychoanalytic tradition. (In fact, I have previously been taken to task in print for using the very adjective "Freudian," which is thought to lend the movement an unnecessarily quaint air.) It is the psychoanalysts themselves, after all, who now warn against reductionist interpretation in the form of "originology," the automatic ascribing of determinative significance to infantile factors. Can't we, instead of appealing to nebulous and suspect ideas of critical sensibility, find a remedy for reductionism within contemporary psychoanalysis?
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The hope for such a remedy rests with what is loosely called ego psychology: the totality of post-Freudian developments stressing the adaptive and integrative capacities of the mind. I refer to such theorists as Anna Freud, Heinz Hartmann, Rudolf Loewenstein, Ernst Kris, Robert Welder, David Rapaport, and Erik Erikson. In different degrees all these analysts recognize that Freud's psychic model exaggerates the individual's helplessness to govern his life. All seek to loosen the strict determinism of infantile trauma and to deny or mitigate Freud's antithesis between libidinal impulse and the forces of civilization. By and large, the ego psychologists retain Freud's interest in drives and their derivatives, but by invoking such concepts as identity, neutralized energy, multiple function, and the conflict-free sphere of the ego, they try to make room within the Freudian system for an acknowledgment that the mind is not exclusively concerned with combating anxiety.
These developments, however, though they have certainly rendered psychoanalysis less dogmatic, do not seem to me to constitute a reliable antidote to reductionism. Most ego psychologists, despite their awareness that all-purpose explanatory universals really explain nothing, are scarcely more prepared than Freud himself was to acknowledge the prospective (not regressive) and meaning-creating (not confessional) aspects of art. Indeed, it would not be altogether perverse to suggest that ego psychology makes the problem of reductionism harder to recognize and address. The very sophistication of recent doctrine may allow its spokesman to forget what Freud usually remembered, that the secret of artistic genius is beyond his science. A theory like Ernst Kris's, which depicts creativity as playfully controlled regression, comes just near enough to accommodating artistic freedom to convince the critic that he can put reductionism behind him and deal with art in all its fullness. In actuality he is still bound to a largely passive and defensive conception of mind—one that omits or minimizes exactly that drive toward perfection of form that distinguishes the artist from the ordinary neurotic.
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The ego psychologists' regard for a wide variety of social and historical factors unquestionably marks an advance over Freud's unvarying emphasis on the universal Oedipus complex. Again, however, we must ask whether the multiplying of considered determinants overcomes, or merely complicates, the functionalistic habit of interpretation. Isn't literature still being treated as a vector of the influences that attended its composition? And aren't some influences still being given an arbitrary precedence over others? The recent scholarly fashion of psychohistory, which has not yet had much impact on literary studies, provides some distressing examples of what happens when a commentator increases the number of potential determinants without relinquishing the priority afforded to infantile ones: the result is simply to widen the range of phenomena he thinks he has accounted for in classic Freudian terms. Ego psychology as we see it in, say, Erikson's writings is profoundly ambiguous, pointing simultaneously toward and away from the early crises of libidinal life. Such ambiguity does afford the ego psychologist some room in which to follow the promptings of common sense. Too often, however, ego psychology amounts to little more than a shift of mood or ideology on the critic's part, enabling him to give a positive, upbeat emphasis to the same data that used to be taken as signs of neurosis.
This scarcity of firm propositional content may help to explain why, in literary studies, "ego psychology" has been frequently invoked but almost never satisfactorily illustrated. Psychoanalytic reviewers, finding that psychoanalytic critics are still unearthing "id-psychological" infantile fantasies, regularly accuse those critics of not having incorporated the insights of ego psychology into their method. The implication is that the reviewers themselves do better in their own criticism, but this—to judge from the daisy chain of chiding reviews is rarely the case. Each critic apparently hopes that by analyzing fantasy content he will be manifesting the adaptive
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and integrative power of the authorial ego that managed to put all this primitive material to aesthetic use. But since psychoanalysis offers no means of studying the transcendence of conflict, there is no way the critic can discuss that power without interrupting himself. Even if he pauses to toss off some handsome compliments to the author's flexibility before returning to the nitty-gritty of unconscious themes, those themes in all their rawness will probably govern the tone of his criticism. And if they don't—if the critic successfully represents his author as having reconciled multiple pressures on his equanimity—he may still be writing reductionistically, for reductionism comes precisely from the illusion that one has said all that bears saying .
There are, to be sure, some currents within ego psychology that look exceptionally salutary for the psychoanalytic critic who is as mindful of fallacies as of phalluses. Thus the post-Kleinian British theorists of "object-relations," such as W. R. D. Fairbairn, Edith Jacobson, and D. W. Winnicott, have been deservedly cited as fostering a subtle and constructive view of literature. In studying childhood these writers depart from the standard account of incestuous and patricidal conflict and offer instead a detailed picture of the child's efforts to survive the loss of maternal symbiosis—a project that predates sexual roles and continues beyond the so-called passing of the Oedipus complex. By focusing less on drives and defenses than on ego-stabilizing feats of introjection, the post-Kleinians succeed in connecting the terms of Freud's intrapsychic model to the real human figures—parents and their surrogates—who impinge on a subject's formation of identity. In consequence, a critic following their lead can consider works of art, not as symptomatic expressions, but as "transitional objects"—that is, as productions that both reconstitute a destroyed inner world and enact a new competence and a new mode of relatedness to the forbidding outer world. And this view in turn restores to literature some of the dignity it lost when Freud con-
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ceived of the writer as escaping from reality to self-aggrandizing fantasy. Now the artistic process appears as a special version of the way "reality" is continually constituted by each mind as it attunes itself to objects of longing and rage.
These are welcome potentialities, but they leave the problem of reductionism unresolved. A post-Kleinian is as likely as a Freudian to see a literary work not as an independent aesthetic structure but as a product of the forces that happen to interest him. When art is analogized to the "transitional" teddy bear instead of to the dream, it is still being treated as something other than itself, and its biographical genesis is still favored over its public import. The shifting of explanatory focus to an earlier stage of childhood, and from mechanisms of repression and displacement to those of projection and introjection, makes for a new set of insights but not for relief from the translating of literature into the preexisting terms of a system. And the system, again, is one whose orientation to need fulfillment leaves little room for appreciating the abundance and extravagance, the sheer surplus of invention, to be found in, say, a Shakespeare or a Dickens. The essential fact is inescapable: methodological provisos alone cannot ensure that a reductive style of interpretation won't result in reductionistic criticism .
If, despite all recent complications, psychoanalytic hermeneutics still give greatest weight to infantile themes, we must recognize that the method itself blocks the path of a critic who would avoid reductionism. For that method is at once reductive in impulse and uniquely minute in focus, entangling its user in line-by-line decodings that other readers may regard as entirely mad. (Marxist criticism, for instance, is just as zealous for explanation, but having no fondness for infancy and no technique for breaking statements into their alleged hidden components, it tends to come up with global formulations that can be accepted or shrugged off without much violence to our sense of what a given poem or novel contains.) To
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be a nonreductionist Freudian requires an extraordinary detachment from the very assumptions that allow one to perceive unconscious themes in the first place.
It is little wonder that few psychoanalytic critics are willing to endure the vertigo that accompanies such self-division. The alternative, however, is not simply dogmatism but if the critic has an inkling of his plight—a special bewilderment that stems from prolonged reductive practice. A conscientious Freudian is bound to begin wondering, sooner or later, whether his conclusions say more about the text under discussion or about his own temperament. Here he is ill served by the notoriously compliant rules of exegesis that psychoanalysis has provided him. The very ease with which one critic can diagnose Keats's orality, and another Ben Jonson's anality, must leave each of them with the haunting fear that he has been taking those authors' works as projective ink blots and composing, not literary criticism, but cryptic fragments of a libidinal autobiography. When the critic appeals to the guidance of ego psychology, he gets only further cause for worry: if that school tells him anything at all, it is that minds, including his own, necessarily indulge in just such imperious misapprehensions in the interest of imposing a bearable stamp upon experience .
Well, here is the whole literary conundrum in a nutshell! It applies as well to readers and their experience of reading.
Jorn: "Critique is a secondary reaction to something primary which already exists. What one expresses through artistic creation is joy of life. Art is primary action in relation to the unknown."
Brown: "The proper response to poetry is not criticism but poetry."
Momentarily taking Brown at his word re: the tyranny of "Protestant literalism," perhaps we can be indulged to parse this last bit somewhat loosely. The "literal" parsing long favored by cultural radicals is that everyone (or perhaps no one) should actually become an artist. That may or may not be a good idea, or even a possibility; but in any case it is not necessary.
It is not necessary because there is a certain kind of "primary action" available to the reader as a reader. But "critique" is not of this kind. Critique is secondary; not because it is intellectualized, but because it is parasitic, intermediary, bureaucratic, progressive, fragilista,... It takes some already-existing object, hones in on the unbearable parts, and works them over real good.
What else
is critique
but
imperious misapprehension,
indulged
precisely
in the interest of imposing?
a bearable stamp upon experience
On behalf of the author's own imperiousness, we can at least say, with Jorn, that the work of "creation" is done "in relation to the unknown", and that this produces a text. The reader too, at least the first time around, cannot be certain of their own response. And the critic? The better the critic knows the work, the more astute their criticism is said to be. A frequent and damning charge against a critic is that they didn't actually read the book, listen to the record, attend the show... The critic is a knower. That is the whole problem with criticism.
The fierce rationalizations for the necessity of critics and criticism indeed reflect the fierceness of an ego grasping at "primary" validation by way of "secondary" action. That is how we ended up with people born in the 1940s holding forth about which literary treatment of the 1840s is truest to life.
The farther he gets beyond the provincial this-equals-that symbology of early psychoanalysis, the more vulnerable the critic becomes to misgivings about the rationale of his work. Now he may suspect, not simply that he has been a reductionist, but that his reductionistic statements have had himself as their secret object.
Some such realization appears to have struck Norman Holland, whose most recent pronouncements shed a new and surprising light on the whole question of Freudian reductionism. Holland, tacitly abandoning the mechanical fantasy-defense model of mental activity that underlay The Dynamics of Literary Response, has simultaneously made his peace with ego psychology and tried to face up to the shaky philosophical status
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of psychoanalytic interpretations. The two developments are intimately bound together. As soon as Holland replaces the search for a work's "core fantasy" with an ego-psychological search for its "identity theme" —that is, for the unalterable style of being-in-the-world that characterizes the work's author— he finds himself paralyzed by the thought that he too, as a critic, has an identity theme which is warping all his perceptions. The old Freudian exercise of compensating for one's bias, Holland decides, is futile, for even the most skeptical critic is exercising his identity in the very act of trying to neutralize it. Which is to say, in my terms, that psychoanalytic critics along with all others have been reductionists in a hitherto unsuspected sense: they have reduced literature to the rigid and narrow outlines of their own personalities.
Less sanguine Freudians than Holland, arriving at this evident impasse, might infer that their method must have been faulty from the start, or perhaps that life is too short to be squandered on such a chancy vocation as literary criticism. But if all critics, and not just psychoanalytic ones, write projectively, perhaps a Freudian can use his special insight to mark the way toward a new candor. The proper subject matter of criticism, Holland now sees, is not literary works at all, but the critic's private digestion of those works, whose actual properties, if any, can never be grasped. Let us (says Holland) continue being critics and redouble our study of psychoanalysis, but let us also purify our discourse of old-fashioned predications about the content of books. We Freudians, specifically, should henceforth eschew such statements as "the poem transforms this fantasy into that meaning" and "The poem strikes a good balance between fantasy and defense" and confine ourselves instead to such statements as "Here are my associations to the poem" and "For me the poem seems to hang together." Although Holland doesn't offer this proposal as a retreat from reductionism—indeed, he doesn't grant that his earlier scheme
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raised that problem—we cannot fail to notice that the curse of reductionism is being summarily lifted here, along with every other liability that attends the making of definite statements about literature.
Whether or not Holland's new reasoning is sound, it does inspire a utilitarian question: who will want to read the confessional criticism he now advocates? Why, if we must forgo criticism's traditional goal of making empirically adequate remarks about texts, should we take an interest in one another's ruminations about "how it feels to me"? The doubt is made more urgent by Holland's way of expounding his position. In his soon-to-be-published book Five Readers Reading, he exhaustively analyzes the responses to certain pieces of literature by anonymous college students known to us as Sandra, Seymour, Samantha, et al., who are variously reminded, when they read a certain poem, of a telephone call from home, a case of sunburn, and a judgment that the Pacific Ocean is placid. Granted, these revelations are not offered for their intrinsic value but as proof that the student readers are in some sense not apprehending the same poem. Yet Sandra and Seymour cannot help but impress us as disquieting harbingers of the new personal criticism recommended by Holland.
I for one would expect Holland's meditation in the presence of a poem to be more enlightening than Seymour's. All the same, I might become fatigued after a while by Holland's protestations that I needn't suppose his thoughts to apply to my perceived poem, as if I couldn't notice the differences without his help. Furthermore, and more fundamentally, Holland seems to me to be forgetting the entire raison d'être of critical activity. We don't go to criticism to discover Seymour's identity theme, or Holland's, or Frank Kermode's, or anyone else's. We go to criticism because we hope to learn more about literature than we could have figured out for ourselves. A critic who rejects that hope on philosophical principle, while neverthe-
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less urging us to adopt an interpretive apparatus which is now guaranteed to yield no results, can only be regarded as conducting a highly unusual going-out-of-business sale.
But what about Holland's epistemological challenge? Isn't it the case that we can only know our own subjective construction of the world? And if so, mustn't we literary critics admit that our only basis of communication is to take turns displaying how we have each assimilated a poem to our private needs? Perhaps we are all incurable reductionists who have no means of mediating the inconsistencies between our readings.
This pessimism indeed follows from the tradition of epistemology in which Freudianism squarely resides—the "school of suspicion," as Paul Ricoeur has aptly named it—which mounts a merciless critique of other people's social or psychic bias while holding out the prospect that the individual demystifier, armed with a special technique of self-correction, can get at the truth on his own. When that individual eventually begins to doubt his own objectivity, he typically becomes stranded, as Holland now is, with the feeling that knowledge is altogether chimerical; and then his one solace is that he has dared to look farther into the abyss than those simple Cartesians who still think they can make statements about objects—for example, about poems.
I can't disagree! I'll have to leave that task for the author himself.
All this chagrin, however, rests on a fundamental mistake about the basis of knowledge. Knowledge is a social project, not a personal one. It has nothing to do with the individual investigator's efforts to purge himself of unconscious bias, and everything to do with shared principles of validation.
So when do we actually get to do the validating??
In Karl Popper's philosophy of science, for example, adequate (though not provably true) statements are considered possible thanks to a friendly-hostile social effort to falsify those statements according to agreed-upon empirical criteria; and Popper, as it happens, devotes some scathing pages to the claim of Freudians, among other self-analyzers, to possess unique insight and hence a special insurance against error. Although knowledge of a poem is
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admittedly more problematic than knowledge of, say, a molecule,
Gee, ya think?
Actually, a certain kind of knowledge of a poem is perfectly achievable. But that is not the kind that critics are interested in. Some determinants are elusive...and that's why they fascinate us! We are drawn precisely to that which is difficult to know or prove, and then we get uppity. That's the whole problem.
Once again the analogy to Taleb's hated forecasters suggests itself, to those who defend bad economic models as "the best we've got." But even there we can at least see the pragmatic side of forecasting, the crying need for some/any knowledge of our material survive-and-thrive prospects. We can see how it would be nice to have some certainty in that department, even if the news was not particularly good. The critic's search for artistic determinants meanwhile is not even pragmatic. The insistence that whatever is turned up this way can only enhance the reader's experience is itself an untested and untestable piece of egotism and hubris.
in each instance the hope of approximating that knowledge rests with a community of people who can be counted on to reject patently wrong ideas and eventually to prefer relatively accurate and useful ones.
We're sorry, the human community you're trying to reach is not at this number. In fact, it has never existed. See: Becker, E.
They can be counted on, that is to say, provided their concern for distinguishing between plausible and frivolous statements hasn't been eroded by a commitment to subjectivism.
Subjectivism, however, is in the air, and not just among captive freshmen who want to escape judgment by declaring each reading to be as valid as every other. As I indicated at the outset, American psychoanalytic criticism has drawn some of its energy from a wish to rescue literature in all its affectual intensity from the classifying and formalizing academicians, the high priests of objectivity. In announcing that no reader perceives the poem except as an extension of his ego, Holland withdraws the much-resisted "elitist" implication that some people are more careful readers than others; and this remission then permits all readers to trade associations to the poem on a relaxed and equal basis. As one of Holland's supporters remarks of the new attitude, " This in-mixing of self and other makes interpretation a potentially private affair, but it also can lead to a more inclusive sharing of emotional as well as intellectual dynamics than is now available." Don't we have here the ethos of "encounter," with a trading of isolated acts of introspection ("shared dynamics") replacing a concern for the object under discussion?
Why indeed we do. But what has this really to do with more and less careful reading? I say: read with abandon! The "care" is to be taken in the construction of knowledge claims, something critics are no better at than myriad freshmen .
I know from my own experience in psychoanalytic seminars that a poem or story can trigger highly intuitive responses of the sort that Holland wants to make central to criticism. Some of the most exhilarating moments in my teaching have come when, during a pooling of free speculations about unconscious themes in a piece of literature, a sentiment of adventure and catharsis has swept across the classroom without anyone's being able to state what the apparent consensus was. Of
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course there wasn't any consensus; we were merely allowing one another a license to fantasize aloud in the aftermath of reading. I myself have hoped, as Holland's school does, that some of that subliminal excitement, that sense of having one's feelings brought into sudden and total coherence, could be carried directly into critical discourse. The hope, however, is illusory. For shared dynamics, as Sandra and Seymour remind us, lose a good deal in transposition to print, and readers of criticism will not be persuaded to accept their remnants in lieu of reasonable statements about literature.
I can't believe that's really the reason. I think Crews has already answered his own question: this pooling of subliminal excitement is a subjectivist project to its core, which means that even the selection pressures of academia are woefully insufficient to select for "encounter groups" who are truly all on the same wavelength. MacCannell: "The group does not produce the world view, the world view produces the group." The coldness of print is precisely what allows us to know if we really agree with something or not; whereas shared dynamics are notoriously unreliable in this way. So there can be great catharsis in the group, but not strategic or epistemological coherence...again, dare I say, notoriously so.
What little essential role remains for formal "criticism" to play is a wholly "objectivist" role. It cannot be reconciled with feelings . Feelings ought to matter to your friends. If they don't, then get some new friends! But don't just pretend you're friends with everyone who likes the same writers as you do! (I suppose that's "parasocial." I have only recently started seeing that term. Google says it was coined in 1956 "to describe the kind of psychological relationship experienced by members of an audience with regard to performers in the mass media, especially television." Generally critics and artists have been very aware of each other, and perhaps too closely involved personally rather than the reverse, but it's interesting to consider that parasociality must, somewhere, have come about long before TV.)
Whatever excitement criticism can generate must rest with the force and justice of those statements—must rest, in other words, with a propositonal risk-taking that Holland now explicitly abjures.
Holland's new position may stand as an extreme example of the attempt to keep following psychoanalytic procedures regardless of the cost—to solve the problem of reductionism, not by adopting a broader outlook than that of psychoanalytic functionalism, but by ceasing to claim that one's reductive ideas are valid for other readers. My own preference is the more ordinary one of assuming that critics and their readers are apprehending approximately the same poem; of trying to narrow the differences of perception that do exist ; and of coping with reductionism by explicitly recognizing Freudian inferences as reductions that will have to justify themselves on evidential grounds.
I'm just howling at the moon at this point, and repeating myself...but here again I must ask, what is really gained by narrowing the differences of perception ? I can more easily say what is lost: individuality and soul.
This "narrowing" seems more calculated to salvage the profession of criticism and less to actually evince any concern for the audience that critics supposedly serve. The concern, rather, is that this audience should be more tractable. Isn't that the clearest tell of them all?
If a critic remembers that psychoanalysis reduces as a matter of course, he may contrive ways of either using the method sparingly for limited ends or, if more ambitiously, then at least with cognizance of the factors that are automatically being excluded from his argument.
A critic who wants to avail himself of psychoanalysis would be well advised not only to seek out the most defensible and unmechanistic concepts within the system but also to think unsparingly about what is provincial and intolerant in that system. If he understands that Freudian reasoning ascribes key significance to its favorite themes, and that its supple rules
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of interpretation make the discovery of those themes a foregone conclusion; if he sees that the method tends to dichotomize between manifest and latent content even when the border between them is undiscernible; if he knows that psychoanalysis can say nothing substantial about considerations that fall outside an economics of desire and defense; and if he admits that it has a natural penchant for debunking—for sniffing out erotic and aggressive fantasies in the "purest" works and for mocking all pretensions to freedom from conflict—the critic may be able to borrow the clinical outlook without losing his intellectual independence and sense of proportion. He could hardly be blamed if, after weighing all these hazards, he decided to exchange Freud for, say, Fredson Bowers. But if not—if he recognized that Freud in his often questionable manner grasped some essential truths about motivation—he would at least see his rhetorical task in a clear light. He would realize, that is, that in order to communicate with other readers he must look past psychoanalysis and establish a common ground of literary perception.
The Text
evidently
is
not nearly
common
enough
.
This counsel, I know, downgrades Freudian criticism in the orthodox sense of rendering texts into psychoanalese, as if they were just so many illustrations of clinical patterns. But that criticism has always violated the spirit of Freud's writings, which, though sometimes reckless and confused, were never simply the consequence of "applying the method" to new materials. Freud was forever testing his ideas, looking for the edges of their scope and drawing back in deference to the unknown or the inexplicable. In a word, Freud was not a doctrinaire Freudian; he was a man provisionally taking a reductive posture toward phenomena in order to find whether anything plausible and important might be learned that way .
I'm here for it. But if we're serious about all the Popper sort of stuff, then provisionally means "out of public view," or at least "without implying any authority such as attaches to formal academic publiction and prestige media." And that has not been how critics have gone about this. More like the opposite.
(Gee, I wonder why?)
(Gee, remember blogs? The kind that didn't charge or earn money? Gosh, blogs sure were ideally suited to the task of provisionally taking a reductive posture towards this or that thorn-in-the-side-of-knowledge. They made these thoughts available without carrying the authority of "prestige" or "mainstream" media. Barriers to access were torn down. Initiative (or the lack of it) became more decisive than access. Boy, that was a time, wasn't it?)
The nearest equivalent in literary criticism wouldn't be a consistent psychoanalytic reading of an author's works, but a book like Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence, which, for all its arch mannerisms, emulates Freud at his most inquisitive: the
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Freud, I mean, who set aside cultural piety in order to look for psychic lawfulness where people would least have expected to find it.
The fact that a critic's thesis is reductive—for example, Bloom's thesis that a poet's real business is to render his predecessors less intimidating by misrepresenting them as mere forerunners of himself—is no reason to reject it out of hand. The question must always be whether we are better or worse readers for having attended to the critic's argument. By that criterion even an argument that oversteps itself at certain points may earn the right to be remembered. We owe more, after all, to an Empson or a Burke—both of them indebted to Freud's example but unbound by his "methodology"—than to dozens of exegetes who have never once strayed onto the forbidden ground of the extraliterary. Though Empson and Burke and Bloom all make reductions, none of them is to a significant degree a reductionist. For their reductions, however startling and even outrageous, are put forward as reductions, as intellectual thrusts that needn't be confounded with the essence or value of the literature being scrutinized. These critics constantly imply a humility before the poems which, with seeming arrogance, they are temporarily turning inside out.
The present disarray of psychoanalytic criticism is no doubt a cause for satisfaction among people who never cared for "deep" interpretation and who now feel confirmed in their resolution to allow literature to speak for itself. The only way to do that, however, is to remain silent—a sacrifice beyond the saintliest critic's power. To be a critic is precisely to take a stance different from the author's and to pursue a thesis of one's own.
I mean...okay! I've got little to add to that. It speaks for itself as fully as any artwork ever has.
"Just because you can doesn't mean you should."
Among the arguments it is possible to make, reductive ones are without doubt the trickiest, promising Faustian knowledge but often misrepresenting the object of inquiry and deluding the critic into thinking he has cracked the author's code. To forswear all reductions, however, is not the answer: that is the path of phobia. A critic can avoid reduc-
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tionism, yet still give his intellect free rein, only by keeping his skepticism in working order. If psychoanalysis, originally the most distrustful of psychologies, has by its worldly success and conceptual elaboration become a positive impediment to skepticism, we need be no more surprised than Freud himself would have been at such all-too-human backsliding. A critic's sense of limits, like Freud's own, must come not from the fixed verities of a doctrine but from his awe at how little he can explain. And that awe in turn must derive from his openness to literature from his sense that the reader in him, happily, will never be fully satisfied by what the critic in him has to say.
...
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[Notes]...
16. Indeed, the theoretical difference between Chomsky's linguistic rationalism and Skinner's linguistic behaviorism is entirely parallel to the difference between a psychoanalytic view of literature and an antimotivational view that treats any given work as a product of "influences" derived in an unknown manner from previous works. Like innate linguistic capacity, innate psychic disposition must be posited to account for ascertainable regularities. This is not, of course, to say that Chomsky's refutation of Skinner justifies Freud. The point is that a relatively "constrained" notion of psychic uniformity may prove flexible where a relatively "free" notion breaks down. Skinner's shunning of hypotheses about linguistic capacity leaves him with no choice but to ascribe an incredible causative weight to the mere hearing of words and sentences; so, too, literary theorists who side-step the unconscious often end by deifying tradition and memory. ...
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