Discourse in Psychoanalysis and Literature (Routledge Revivals)

Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317574750
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

The essays in this collection, first published in 1987, represent a collective attempt to listen with the third ear to the underhand ways the unspoken has of speaking, and to speak of these ways. By focusing on 'discourse' the volume is distinguished from traditional literature by its emphasis on rhetorical structures and textual strategies, and the investment of these structures with desire, power and other aspects of subjectivity, rather than the personality of the artist or the creative process. However, in this book the human dimension is not lost. By claiming that the structures in question are not merely linguistic, semiotic, or narratological (although they are all of these), the human dimension is returned- not 'in the raw', as in traditional approaches, but through the traces it leaves in the text, as activated by its reading. This book is ideal for students of literature and psychoanalytical theory.

I

The idea of a psychoanalytic literary criticism*

PETER BROOKS

Psychoanalytic literary criticism has always been something of an embarrassment. One resists labelling as a ‘psychoanalytic critic’ because the kind of criticism evoked by the term mostly deserves the bad name it has largely made for itself. Thus I have been worrying about the status of some of my own uses of psychoanalysis in the study of narrative, in my attempt to find dynamic models that might move us beyond the static formalism of structuralist and semiotic narratology. In general, I think we need to worry about the legitimacy and force that psychoanalysis may claim when imported into the study of literary texts. If versions of psychoanalytic criticism have been with us at least since 1908, when Freud published his essay on ‘Creative writers and daydreaming’ (1953a), and if the enterprise has recently been renewed in subtle ways by post-structuralist versions of reading, a malaise persists, a sense that whatever the promises of their union, literature and psychoanalysis remain mismatched bedfellows – or should I say playmates.

The first problem, and the most basic, may be that psychoanalysis in literary study has over and over again mistaken the object of analysis, with the result that whatever insights it has produced tell us precious little about the structure and rhetoric of literary texts. Traditional psychoanalytic criticism tends to fall into three general categories, depending on the object of analysis: the author, the reader or the fictive persons of the text. The first of these constituted the classical locus of psychoanalytic interest. It is now apparently the most discredited, though also perhaps the most difficult to extirpate, since if the disappearance of the author has been repeatedly announced, authorial mutants ceaselessly reappear, as for instance in Harold Bloom’s psychomachia of literary history. Like the author, the fictive character has been deconstructed into an effect of textual codes, a kind of thematic mirage, and the psychoanalytic study of the putative unconscious of characters in fiction has also fallen into disrepute. Here again, however, the impulse resurfaces, for instance in some of the moves of a feminist criticism that needs to show how the represented female psyche (particularly, of course, as created by women authors) refuses and problematizes the dominant concepts of male psychological doctrine. Feminist criticism has in fact largely contributed to a new variant of the psychoanalytic study of fictive characters, a variant one might label the ‘situational-thematic’ – studies of Oedipal triangles in fiction, their permutations and evolution, of the roles of mothers and daughters, of situations of nurture and bonding, and so forth. It is work often full of interest, but none the less methodologically disquieting in its use of Freudian analytic tools in a wholly thematic way, as if the identification and labelling of human relations in a psychoanalytic vocabulary were the task of criticism. The third traditional field of psychoanalytic literary study, the reader, continues to flourish in ever-renewed versions, since the role of the reader in the creation of textual meaning is very much on our minds at present, and since the psychoanalytic study of readers’ responses willingly brackets the impossible notion of author in favour of the acceptable and also verifiable notion of reader. The psychoanalytic study of the reader may concern real readers (as in Holland 1975) or the reader as psychological everyman (as in Lesser 1957). But like the other traditional psychoanalytic approaches, it displaces the object of analysis from the text to some person, some other psychodynamic structure, a displacement I wish to avoid since – as I hope to make clear as I go along – I think psychoanalytical criticism can and should be textual and rhetorical.

If the displacement of the object of analysis has been a major failing of psychoanalytic literary criticism, it has erred also in its inability to rid itself of the underlying conviction that it is inherently explanatory. The problem with ‘literature and psychoanalysis’, as Shoshana Felman has pointed out more effectively than any other critic, lies in that ‘and’ (Felman 1977, pp. 5–10). The conjunction has almost always masked a relation of privilege of one term to another, a use of psychoanalysis as a conceptual system in terms of which to analyse and explain literature, rather than an encounter and confrontation of the two. The reference to psychoanalysis has traditionally been used to close rather than open the argument, and the text. This is not surprising, since the recourse to psychoanalysis usually claims as its very raison d’être the capacity to explain and justify in the terms of a system and a discourse more penetrating and productive of insight than literary-critical psychology as routinely practised, which of course harbours its own, largely unanalysed, assumptions. As Simon O. Lesser states the case, ‘no “common-sense” psychology yet employed in criticism has been helpful’ (Lesser 1957, p. 297), whereas psychoanalysis provides a way to explore ‘the deepest levels of meaning of the greatest fiction’ (p. 15).

Why should we reject such a claim? Even if psychoanalysis is far from being a ‘science’ with the formal power of linguistics, for instance, surely certain of its hypotheses are so well established and so universally illustrated that we can use them with as much impunity as such linguistic concepts as ‘shifters’ or ‘the double articulation’. Yet the recourse to linguistic and to psychoanalytic concepts implies a false symmetry: linguistics may be universalistic, but its tools and concepts are ‘cool’ and their overextension easily recognized as trivial, whereas psychoanalysis is imperialistic, almost of necessity. Freud works from the premise that all that appears is a sign, that all signs are subject to interpretation and that they speak of messages that ultimately tell stories that contain the same dramatis personae and the same narrative functions for all of us. It is no wonder that Freud called himself a ‘conquistador’: he extends remarkably the empire of signs and their significant decipherment, encompassing all of human behaviour and symbolic action. Thus any ‘psychoanalytic explanation’ in another discipline always runs the risk of appearing to claim the last word, the final hermeneutic power. If there is one thing that post-structuralist criticism has most usefully taught us, it is the suspicion and refusal of this last word in the interpretive process and history, the refusal of any privileged position in analysis.

But if we refuse to grant psychoanalysis any position of privilege in criticism, if we refuse to consider it to be explanatory, what do we have left? What is the status of a de-authorized psychoanalytic discourse within literary-critical discourse, and what is its object? If we don’t accord explanatory force to psychoanalysis, what is the point of using it at all? Why do we continue to read so many critical essays laced with the conceptual vocabulary of psychoanalysis? What is at stake in the current uses of psychoanalysis?

I want to begin this inquiry with the flat-footed (and unfashionable) assertion that I believe that the persistence, against all the odds, of psychoanalytic perspectives in literary study must ultimately derive from our conviction that the materials on which they exercise their powers of analysis are in some basic sense the same: that the structure of literature is in some sense the structure of mind – not a specific mind, but what the translators of The Standard Edition call ‘the mental apparatus’, which is more accurately the dynamic organization of the psyche, a process of structuration. We continue to dream of a convergence of psychoanalysis and literary criticism because we sense that there ought to be, that there must be, some correspondence between literary and psychic process, that aesthetic structure and form, including literary tropes, must somehow coincide with the psychic structures and operations they both evoke and appeal to. Yet here we encounter the truth of the comment made by Jack Spector that, ‘Neither Freud nor his followers … have ever shown concretely how specific formal techniques correspond to the processes of the unconscious’ (Spector 1973, p. 118).

Part of the attraction of psychoanalytic criticism has always been its promise of a movement beyond formalism, to that desired place where literature and life converge and where literary criticism becomes the discourse of something anthropologically important. I very much subscribe to this urge, but I think that it is fair to say that in the case of psychoanalysis, paradoxically we can go beyond formalism only by becoming more formalistic. Geoffrey Hartman wrote a number of years ago – in Beyond Formalism in fact – that the trouble with Anglo-American formalism was that it wasn’t formalist enough (Hartman 1970, p. 42). One can in general indict Anglo-American ‘New Criticism’ for being too quick to leap from the level of formal explication to that of moral and psychological interpretation, neglecting the trajectory through linguistics and poetics that needs to stand between. This has certainly been true in traditional psychoanalytic criticism, which has regularly short- circuited the difficult and necessary issues in poetics. The more recent – rhetorical and deconstructive – kind understands the formalist imperative, but I fear that it may too often remain content with formal operations, simply bracketing the human realm from which psychoanalysis derives. Given its project and its strategies, such rhetorical/deconstructive criticism usually stays within the linguistic realm. It is not willing to make the crossover between rhetoric and reference and that interests me – and ought to be the raison d’être for the recourse to psychoanalysis in the first place.

One way to try to move out from the impasse I discern – or have perhaps myself constructed – might be through a return to what Freud has to say about literary form, most notoriously in the brief 1908 essay, ‘Creative writers and daydreaming’ (1953a). We would probably all agree that Freud speaks most pertinently to literary critics when he is not explicitly addressing art: the most impressive essays in psychoanalytical criticism have drawn more on The Interpretation of Dreams, the metapsychological essays and Beyond the Pleasure Principle, for example, than on Delusion and Dream, The Moses of Michelangelo or the essays on Leonardo and Dostoevsky. ‘Creative writers and daydreaming’ in fact gives an excessively simplistic view of art, of the kind that allows Ernst Kris to describe artistic activity as regression in the service of the ego (Kris 1952). Yet the essay may be suggestive in other ways.

Freud sets out to look for some common human activity that is ‘akin to creative writing’, and finds it in daydreaming or the creation of phantasies. Freud then stresses the active, temporal structure of phantasy, which:

hovers, as it were, between three times – the three moments of time which our ideation involves. Mental work is linked to some current impression, some provoking occasion in the present which has been able to arouse one of the subject’s major wishes. From there it harks back to the memory of an earlier experience (usually an infantile one) in which this wish was fulfilled; and it now creates a situation relating to the future which represents a fulfilment of the wish. What it thus creates is a day-dream or phantasy, which carries about it traces of its origin from the occasion which provoked it and from the memory. Thus past, present and future are strung together, as it were, on the thread of the wish that runs through them.

(Freud 1953a, pp. 147–8)

Freud will promptly commit the error of making the past evoked in the construction of phantasy that of the author, in order to study ‘the connections that exist between the life of the writer and his works’ (p. 151) – an error in which most critics have followed his lead. For instance, it is this phantasy model, reworked in terms of Winnicott and object-relations psychoanalysis, that essentially shapes the thesis of one of the most interesting recent studies in literature and psychoanalysis, L. Meredith Skura’s The Literary Use of the Psychoanalytic Process (1981); Skura, too, ultimately makes the past referred to in phantasy a personal past, that of author or reader, or both. Yet the phantasy model could instead be suggestive for talking about the relations of textual past, present and projected future, in the plot of a novel, for example, or in the rhyme scheme of a sonnet, or simply in the play of verb tenses in any text. I would want to extrapolate from this passage an understanding of how phantasy provides a dynamic model of intratextual temporal relations, and their organization according to the plot of wish, or desire. We might thus gain a certain understanding of the interplay of form and desire.

Freud is again of great interest in the final paragraph of the essay – one could make a fruitful study of Freud’s final paragraphs, which so often produce a flood of new insights that can’t quite be dealt with – where he asks how the writer creates pleasure through the communication of his phantasies, whereas those of most people would repel or bore us. Herein lies the poet’s ‘innermost secret’, his ‘essential ars poetica’ (Freud 1953a, p. 153). Freud sees two components of the artistic achievement here:

The writer softens the character of his egoistic day-dreams by altering and disguising it, and he bribes us by the purely formal – that is, aesthetic – yield of pleasure which he offers us in the presentation of his phantasies. We give the name of an incentive bonus, or a fore-pleasure, to a yield of pleasure such as this, which is offered to us so as to make possible the release of still greater pleasure arising from deeper psychical sources. In my opinion all the aesthetic pleasure which a creative writer affords us has the character of a fore-pleasure of this kind

(Freud 1953a, p. 153)

I am deliberately leaving aside the end of this paragraph, where Freud suggests that the writer in this manner enables us ‘thenceforward to enjoy our own daydreams without self-reproach or shame’, since this hypothesis brings us back to the person of the reader, whereas I wish to remain on the plane of form associated with ‘forepleasure’.

The equation of the effects of literary form with forepleasure in this well known passage is perhaps less trivial than it at first appears. If Lust and Unlust don’t take us very far in the analysis of literary texture, Vorlust – forepleasure – tropes on pleasure and thus seems more promising. Forepleasure is indeed a curious concept, suggesting a whole rhetoric of advance towards and retreat from the goal or the end, a formal zone of play (I take it that forepleasure somehow implicates foreplay) that is both harnessed to the end and yet autonomous and capable of deviations and recursive movements. When we begin to unpack the components of forepleasure we may find a whole erotics of form, which is perhaps what we most need if we are to make formalism serve an understanding of the human functions of literature. Forepleasure would include the notion of both delay and advance in the textual dynamic, the creation of that ‘dilatory space’ which Roland Barthes, in S/Z, claimed to be the essence of the textual middle, through which we seek to advance toward the discharge of the end, yet all the while perversely delaying, returning backwards in order to put off the promised end, and perhaps to assure its greater significance (Barthes 1970, p. 82).

Forepleasure implies the possibility of fe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on the contributors
• Introduction
• 1 The idea of a psychoanalytic literary criticism
• 2 Id is, is Id?
• 3 Interactions between textual analysis and related self-analysis
• 4 Myth à la lettre: Freud, Mann, Genesis and Rembrandt, and the story of the son
• 5 Transmission in psychoanalysis and literature: whose text is it anyway?
• 6 On the melancholic imaginary
• 7 Nadja, Dora, Lol V. Stein: women, madness and narrative
• 8 Tragic drama and the family: the killing of children and the killing of story-telling
• 9 Narration as repetition: the case of Günter Grass’s Cat and Mouse
• 10 Narrative recursion
• 11 ‘Transference’ as trope and persuasion
• Index