Norman N. Holland

The Dean of American Psychoanalytic Literary Critics

Jeffrey Berman

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501372971
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Norman Holland was unquestionably the leading 20th-century American psychoanalytic literary critic. Long known as the Dean of American psychoanalytic literary critics, Holland produced an enormous body of scholarship that appeals to both neophytes in the field and advanced researchers, many of whom have been influenced by his writings. Holland was one of the first proponents of reader-response criticism, the theorist of readers' identity themes, and the author of fifteen books that have become classics in the field. Jeffrey Berman analyzes all of Holland's books, and many of his 250 scholarly articles, highlighting continuities and discontinuities in the critic's thinking over time. A controversial if not polarizing figure, Holland is discussed in relation to his closest colleagues, including Murray Schwartz, Bernard Paris, and Leslie Fiedler, as well as his fiercest critics, among them Frederick Crews, David Bleich, and Jonathan Culler, creating a dynamic and personal portrait. Insofar as this text illuminates the evolving mind of a premier literary critic, it produces a parallel profile of the American reader, the primary object of Holland's extensive work.

1

Writing Non-Psychoanalytically

The First Modern Comedies and The Shakespearean Imagination

Holland never wrote a memoir, but in 1999 his fourteen-page essay “The Story of a Psychoanalytic Critic” appeared in American Imago. The essay is not elegiac, as one might expect, but it represents a summing up of his life. He remarks in the opening paragraph that two discoveries shaped his intellectual life and career: New Criticism and psychoanalysis. The second discovery, he admits ruefully, proved the first one wrong, though it would take him decades to realize this.

New Criticism, a form of literary criticism that became popular in the 1930s and flourished until the 1960s, emphasized the organic “unity” of the text. “Always something of a rebel, I came to believe passionately in this way of reading” (246). Holland thought that New Criticism “democratized literature” by freeing it from the grasp of academic authorities who maintained they knew everything about the questionable facts of literary history. “New Criticism seemed to me a high point in Western writing about literature. It still seems so to me, even after several decades of reaction and discrediting. Yes, even though later critics have proved the assumptions of New Criticism wrong, in my eyes, too. We were mistaken, but we did good work, given our premises” (246).

“Jude the Obscure: Hardy’s Symbolic Indictment of Christianity”

That good work can be seen in Holland’s first published article, a study of suicide in Thomas Hardy’s 1895 novel Jude the Obscure. I find it odd, though, that his first publication was on suicide—odd in that there is often a personal reason why a scholar writes about this subject, as in my own case but apparently not in his. The article appeared in Nineteenth-Century Fiction in 1954, when Holland was only twenty-seven and still a doctoral student at Harvard. The essay is admirable in every way, reflecting the critical sophistication of a much more experienced scholar. I cited the article in my 1990 book, Narcissism and the Novel, though I was writing on different issues in Jude and arrived at different conclusions. In rereading the article for this book, I was startled to discover that he referred to himself as “Norman Holland, Jr.,” a name he did not use in later publications.

Holland began his literary career as a New Critic, as the article demonstrates. “The imagery in Jude reveals a unifying meaning that seems to have gone unnoticed” (50), he remarks in the opening paragraph. Arguing for the artistic unity of the novel, Holland disagrees with the critical consensus, as Irving Howe stated it more than a decade later, that the suicide of Jude’s son, Little Father Time, is aesthetically flawed: “botched not in conception but in execution: it was a genuine insight to present the little boy as one of those who were losing the will to live, but a failure in tact to burden him with so much philosophical weight” (145–6). Holland cites several scholars, including Magdalene Meusel’s 1937 dissertation Thomas Hardy und die Bibel, from which he quotes a long paragraph in German, part of which he translates into English. Holland analyzes in depth the characters’ names (including the name Jude, which means “Jew” in German), the symbolism of Arabella’s slaughter of a pig, the characters’ attitudes toward sexuality, the allegorical nature of Father Time, and the parallels between the boy’s suicide and the crucifixion of Christ. Particularly impressive is Holland’s discussion of the recurrent pagan, Jewish, and Christian religious imagery. I have taught the novel dozens of times, but I missed a subtle detail that Holland points out. Phillotson, the novel’s Philistine, “calls his wife ‘Soo,’ the traditional call for pigs, which symbolizes his sexual attitude” (56).

Holland makes at least one statement that can be challenged, the assertion that self-sacrifice is not part of Jude’s character. On the contrary: after the young Jude finds out that his mother drowned herself, he attempts suicide in the identical way by walking on a partly frozen pond, a striking example of suicide contagion. As I observed in Narcissism and the Novel, the “cracking ice manages to sustain his weight, temporarily thwarting his self-annihilation” (188). Holland also ignores Sue’s complicity in Father Time’s suicide. When the severely depressed boy asserts, despairingly, that “It would be better to be out o’ the world than in it, wouldn’t it?”, Sue morbidly agrees, instead of reassuring the scared boy that she and Jude love him. And when Father Time expresses the Job-like wish never to have been born, she responds, “You couldn’t help it, my dear,” heightening his worst fears about himself. Sue’s empathic failure triggers his inner violence, culminating in hanging his two young siblings and then himself.

In writing about the theme of self-sacrifice in Jude the Obscure, Holland had no particular interest in the theoretical or clinical research on suicide. Nor was he yet interested in how different readers respond to the novel’s crucifixion imagery. The closest he comes to offering his own perspective on the novel is in the following instructive sentence. “Hardy is saying through Jude and the others that the only part of Christianity worth saving is not an ideal of sacrifice, but rather the notion that somehow we can make this life under Fate’s rule more bearable by love for our fellow men” (57), a statement that reveals Holland’s own view of Christianity at the time.

The First Modern Comedies

Holland was only thirty-two when The First Modern Comedies: The Significance of Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve appeared in 1959, an accomplishment that becomes more remarkable in that he had a law degree before beginning graduate study in English. He wasted no time in launching his academic career. He was always a fast, prolific writer. He may have suffered from writer’s block in his short-lived career as a poet, as he discloses in Meeting Movies, but not as an academic writer.

One could not predict from The First Modern Comedies that Holland would emerge as the country’s leading psychoanalytic literary critic. Restoration comedy, also called comedy of manners, is English comedy from the restoration of Charles II in 1660 to 1710. It is not a literary period that lends itself to psychoanalytic theorizing, mainly because the plays are filled with stock or “humor” characters. Even the non-humor characters are two dimensional, lacking in psychological complexity. Holland presumably chose to study this literary age because of his lifelong interest in humor. His primary concern in discussing three Restoration comic writers, George Etherege, William Wycherley, and William Congreve, is to study the “intricate art” of their plays, not to make “moral, sociological, or aesthetic judgments about them” (The First Modern Comedies 208). Examining eleven comedies, Holland argues that they deal primarily with the contrast between appearance and nature. This may appear to be an overly general theme, but he explains why it is useful. “Both language and action represent human conduct split under the pressure of conformity into a visible, social appearance and a personal, private nature. Folly is the confusion of the two; wisdom is their separation and balance” (37).

Holland opens the book with a chapter called “Ground Rules” in which he rejects the prevailing view that Restoration comedy is immoral. “The purpose of literature is to me simply pleasure, the pleasure of understanding, first, the coherence and structure of the work itself and, second, the relation of the work to the reality it represents” (3). He could have stopped there, but he adds a personal remark that some readers might find provocative if not provoking. “If anyone these days is so thin-skinned that the comedies’ indecency does block the pleasure they can give, then we best part company here” (4). After acknowledging what he calls the book’s “modest plan and arrangement,” he then offers the “shamelessly grandiose hope” that it will produce a “total revaluation of” Restoration comedy (8).

Holland’s attitude toward earlier scholars is respectful but not deferential. The bibliography in the field is “mountainous,” he opines, “but the mountain has brought forth a mouse” (209). Holland doesn’t define himself in the book as a New Critic, but his literary assumptions and methodology point in this direction, as does his bibliography. He proceeds from the hypothesis that everything in each play—plots, characters, events, and language—all fit together into a unified whole. In seeing this unity, he admits, he has tried to be “over-ingenious rather than conservative, because I think the reader would rather have something he disagrees with than complete silence on a particular topic” (7).

Holland indeed succeeded in provoking critical disagreement, though he could not have been pleased about John Harrington Smith’s harsh review in Modern Philology. Smith faults Holland for overstating the claim that everything in the eleven plays begins and ends with language. He also criticizes Holland for the tendency to “set down the meanings that the plays evoke in him, as if he were a poet rather than a scholar or critic” (275)—a prescient remark that, in retrospect, may be seen as a strength rather than a weakness of the book. Smith, it turns out, is one of the mice to which Holland refers, naming him not in the text but only in a footnote (259, n. 32).

Early Comments on Freud

Holland refers to Freud four times in The First Modern Comedies; the only significant reference occurs in his discussion of Pinchwife in Wycherley’s The Country Wife, when the aging rake threatens to use his sword against his wife, Margery, in the letter-writing scene. “Write as I bid you, or I will write Whore with this Penknife in your Face,” Pinchwife snarls, which elicits Holland’s comment:

Wycherley, of course, had not read Freud; we cannot expect that he was aware of the overtones of swords and knives. Nevertheless, the insight here is brilliant. Pinchwife—his name is significant—fears and distrusts women; these fears create a hostility that tends to make him an inadequate lover: unconsciously, he satisfies his aggressive instincts by frustrating and disappointing women he makes love to. Disappointing women, in turn, creates further situations that increase his fears. Thus he falls into the typical self-defeating spiral of neurosis. As Pinchwife himself puts it, free of the cumbersome jargon of psychotherapy, “The Jades wou’d jilt me, I cou’d never keep a Whore to my self.” (74–5)

What’s significant here is not Holland’s reference to Freudian sexual symbolism, a subject that never awakened much interest in him, even after he became a psychoanalytic literary critic, but his attention to the second stage of psychoanalytic development, ego psychology. Thus, Holland implies that Pinchwife projects his sexual fears onto women, which only increases his hostility and mistrust of them. Holland also seems to be invoking projective identification, Melanie Klein’s term to describe how a person, after projecting hostile feelings onto others, then sees them as persecutory objects. As Glen O. Gabbard notes in Long-Term Psychodynamic Psychotherapy, “the projector exerts interpersonal pressure that nudges the other person to experience or unconsciously identify with that which has been projected” (159–60). After making this literary interpretation, Holland then draws an implicit contrast between Freud, the originator of this insight, and those clinicians, popular writers, and perhaps even psychoanalytic literary critics whom he judges guilty of using “cumbersome jargon.”

Holland’s most astute psychological insight in The First Modern Comedies appears in his discussion of Manly, the nominal sea-captain hero of Wycherley’s last play The Plain-Dealer. Like Pinchwife, Manly is a case study of guilt and aggression projected onto others, with disastrous consequences:

The one thing that makes us think of Manly as heroic is his raging, furious honesty. Because his own exterior is a true reflection of his inner self, he expects the same of others and is enraged when he does not find it. That rage is the only large, heroic thing about him, and even though it expends itself on absurdities, it is in some sense praiseworthy. A psychologist, I think, would say that Manly felt too guilty about own failings. His guilt makes him aggressive and hostile and makes him punish himself by attacking insincerity or “adjustment” in others. By these attacks he not only punishes himself by tempting others to dislike him, but at the same time he persuades himself that he is better than they are because he judges them. His concept of plain dealing is simply raw hostility. (99)

A subtle difference between the two interpretations, both based on ego psychology, is that whereas in the first passage Holland refers condescendingly to psychologists who are guilty of psychobabble (a word not yet coined), in the second passage his attitude toward psychologists is unambiguously positive.

Holland never addresses the question in The First Modern Comedies whether a fictional character can be treated like a real one, though he does raise this question in many of his later books. Interestingly, his ego psychology interpretations of characters like Pinchwife and Manly assume that they function like real characters, with the same or similar complexity of motivation, projective tendencies, and conflicted desires.

Holland’s interest in science is already evident in his first book. Seventeenth-century scientific discoveries demonstrated that “truths which not so long before had seemed blatantly obvious were in fact purely and simply not so. Men’s senses were not to be trusted, and it was science that had shown their falsity” (55). Holland’s faith in science never wavered, particularly in the emerging fields of cognitive psychology and neuropsychology. He points out that disguise, however frivolous, became in the seventeenth century a matter of “cosmic significance,” largely as a result of the new physics (45). Surprisingly, in “The Story of a Psychoanalytic Critic” he states that literary criticism is one of the social sciences (246) rather than part of the humanities.

Holland’s fervor for literature appears throughout The First Modern Comedies. He understands the conventions of art but questions why literature should falsify reality. “The underlying assumption that the dramatist ought to administer poetic justice is a childish oversimplification,” he writes: “it leads to the most magnificently absurd kind of ending, as any reader of eighteenth- or nineteenth-century drama can testify, or indeed anyone who sees many Hollywood films in which ‘good guys’ win and ‘bad guys’ lose. The drama ought to take some account of the fact that in life good guys sometimes finish last” (203). Not many scholars of Restoration comedy, or of any other academic period, are forthright enough to make this observation in their first book. The First Modern Comedies doesn’t give much indication of the trajectory of Holland’s future scholarship, but we can already see that his character and method of writing were uniquely his own.

Apart from his insights into literary character, Holland’s analysis of language is incisive and original, as can be seen in his commentary on Congreve’s The Double-Dealer. “Both in language and action everything goes in and out. The images of penetration or nonpenetration parallel on a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 Writing Non-Psychoanalytically: The First Modern Comedies and The Shakespearean Imagination
• 2 Becoming a Freudian: Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare
• 3 Theorizing Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism: The Dynamics of Literary Response
• 4 Developing a New Model of Reader-Response Criticism: Poems in Persons and 5 Readers Reading
• 5 Extending Identity Theory in the 1980s: “Re-Covering ‘The Purloined Letter,’” Laughing, The I and Being Human, and The Brain of Robert Frost
• 6 Speaking in a Lone Voice among the New Cryptics: Holland’s Guide and The Critical I
• 7 Penning Fiction: “A Cyberreader Defends” and Death in a Delphi Seminar
• 8 Exposing the Film Critic’s Free Associations: Meeting Movies
• 9 Venturing into a New Field: Literature and the Brain
• 10 Contemplating Endings
• Conclusion: Norman Holland’s Legacy
• Works Cited
• Index
• Copyright