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20. Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism Overview Freudian criticism takes many forms. The sexual imagery can be analysed, but sheds little light on this poem. More useful is Freud's approach to dreams and fantasies. The processes of condensation, displacement, representation and secondary revision disclose elements that would have escaped traditional criticism. Introduction Freud was a cultivated man and, while not entirely approving of the artists, did take a close interest in artistic production and appreciation. Psychic energy (libido) was sexual at base, but was not channelled wholly into sexual activity. Amongst its expressions were dreams, fantasies and the personality disorders that arose when instinctual drives were constrained by exterior reality: the pleasure principle versus the reality principle. Desire was the motivating force of the artist — an inordinate desire to win honour, power, wealth, fame and the love of women with a corresponding lack of means of doing so. Notoriously, the artist was an introvert, and not far removed from a neurotic. Nonetheless, Freud did not confuse daydreams and artistic creation, did not reduce aesthetics to wish fulfillment, and admitted that psychoanalysis could not say how the artist achieved his inmost secret. Dreams and art both employed strategies to transform primitive desires into the culturally acceptable, and indeed the artist masked and sweetened his daydreams with aesthetic form. Even Freud's much-criticised essay Leonardo and a memory of his childhood is more a psycho-biography than art criticism.{1} Freudian literary analysis comes in various degrees of subtlety. At its most elementary, the novel or poem may be analysed simply in terms of phallic symbols: the assertive male organ or receptive female organ. More usually there is some attempt to see these as the secret embodiment of the author's unconscious desires. More penetrating is the psycho-biographic approach which seeks to explain an artist's life and work through childhood events, the Oedipus conflict and repression. Sometimes the psychic energy is regarded as the life-force, as in D.H. Lawrence's study of American nineteenth century literature, where a lust for power is attributed to a repressed Puritan conscience. {2} Different again is ego-analysis, which attempts to show that the pleasure of artistic creation and performance lies in the controlled play with primitive material, both artist and audience entering into the process. Art for Kleinians continues the encounter between infant and mother, contentment at the breast and separation, harmony and rebellion: the unconscious creates the form of the artwork through the interaction of artist with medium. {3} Anton Ehrenzweig saw the work of art as a womb which received fragmented projections of the artist's self. {4} Julia Kristeva talks of a "potential space" leading to language acquisition. {5} Andr?Green extended analysis to reader and writer, so involving two sets of conscious and unconscious minds. {6} There are many schools, of varying plausibility, which lead to or become involved in Structuralism or Poststructuralism. {7} The straightforward psychological approach is unpopular. The New Critics concentrated on textural analysis, and declared biography to be irrelevant. The Poststructuralists believe that authors have less control over their writing (or at least the import of their writing) than is supposed: all that authors can do is manipulate a language fraught with ethnic and political repressions, with indeterminacy and cultural imperialism. Even among traditional critics, psychology has earned itself a bad name by crudely fitting the novel or poem into some straight-jacket of psychoanalysis. The terminology of psychoanalysis is abstruse and/or repugnant. And too many of the psychoanalytic critics have no literary sensibility. {8} More damaging still is the plethora of psychoanalytic theories: all wildly different and all claiming the truth. Perhaps none is acceptable, as psychoanalysis evades scientific testing and has an indifferent therapeutic record. Examples of Freudian Literary Criticism Sigmund Freud's Leonardo da Vinci and a memory of his childhood (1910) Edmund Wilson's The Turn of the Screw (1948) Marie Bonaparte's The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe (1949) Henry Murray's In Nomine Diaboli (1951) Aubrey Williams's The 'Fall' of China in John Dixon Hunt's (Ed.) Pope: The Rape of the Lock (1968) Maud Ellmann's Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism (1994) Analysis: Sexual Symbols Readers may wish to analyse themselves, or their whole body of work, dwelling in particular on obsessions and any favourite or repetitive imagery. But for the limited purposes of this exercise, it may be best to adopt something basic to Freud and start with a crude stocktaking. Suppose we identify (or hazard a guess at, these matters being somewhat conjectural) the imagery of sexual congress and the sexual organs — male and female: But, as you'd expect, they are very Impatient, the buildings, having much in them Of the heavy surf of the North Sea, flurrying The grit, lifting the pebbles, flinging them With a hoarse roar against the aggregate They are composed of — the cliffs higher of course, More burdensome, underwritten as It were with past days overcast And glinting, obdurate, part of the Silicate of tough lives, distant and intricate As the whirring bureaucrats let in And settled with coffee in the concrete pallets, Awaiting the post and the department meeting — Except that these do not know it, at least do not Seems to, being busy, generally. So perhaps it is only on those cloudless, almost Vacuumed afternoons with tier upon tier Of concrete like rib — bones packed above them, And they light — headed with the blue airiness Spinning around, and muzzy, a neuralgia Calling at random like frail relations, a phone Ringing in a distant office they cannot get to, That they become attentive, or we do — these Divisions persisting, indeed what we talk about, We, constructing these webs of buildings which, Caulked like great whales about us, are always Aware that some trick of the light or weather Will dress them as friends, pleading and flailing — And fill with placid but unbearable melodies Us in deep hinterlands of incurved glass. © C. John Holcombe 1997 In themselves the identifications tell us very little. But keeping them in mind, we now adopt Freud's approach to dreams and fantasies, employing his four processes of condensation, displacement, representation and secondary revision. Application: Condensation In condensation, two or more elements combine in a composite image. The first such image here is buildings. They seem unusually important, indeed the whole poem on one level is about buildings. We learn that have much of the North Sea in them, being composed of aggregates that derive from the land they occupy. That North Sea is somehow oppressive. When the aggregate is heaped up in cliffs, those cliffs become burdensome, underwritten by past days. Not created, note — which is literally true — but in some way guaranteed by past, stormy days. That past, moreover, spreads into and colours the present. It is glinting, obdurate and part of the stony lives of bureaucrats who occupy the levels of our modern buildings, described here as concrete pallets. The word "silicates" is another composite image. Silicates are minerals making up all rocks except limestones, and thereby enter into the great mass of buildings, even those of glass, which is of course silica. But silicates, which have a complex crystal structure, are also used as an image for the rigid and unfeeling lives (tough, distant and intricate) of the bureaucrats who inhabit the buildings. Not just their inhabitants, moreover, but the buildings themselves are also seen as dead (with tier on tier / Of concrete like rib bones). Finally, the buildings are regarded as whales, not only large and isolated (Caulked like great whales about us) but taking on their behaviour — their attitudes (pleading and flailing) and their sonic signalling to each other (placid but unbearable melodies). There are many other condensations, but let us concentrate on those above and ask: what psychological purposes do they serve, i.e. why were they written? The author will initially say that he does not really know: they seemed intriguing at the time, and even now, after extensive analysis, they continue to carry some emotional charge. Attempts to make them more rational and explanatory led to what seemed to be a weakening of the poem. Perhaps the reason is inaccessible to us. But note the preoccupation with sea and death. The buildings have something of the sea in them, but it is of past days. The bureaucrats' activities are likened to inert minerals. The buildings are described as concrete pallets or as possessing bare rib-bones. Even the whales are doomed animals, pleading and flailing (close to failing). The death instinct seems very strong. Now look at the sexual symbols. The male symbols (buildings, grit, pebbles, obdurate) all carry something of the detrital, of a resistance to being worn down. They are not permanent or life-enhancing. The female symbols (surf, sea, burdensome, vacuumed, webs, deep, incurved) are again heavy and unregenerative. The images of sexual congress (impatient, flurrying, fill) are certainly not lusty and confident. In all there seems an air of sadness, even dejection, about the poem's symbolism. Only "impatient" runs against this trend, and that impatience, if buildings to reassumed the restless past of their constituents, would end in the buildings shaking themselves to pieces. Application: Displacement Why is this? The second of Freud's processes was displacement, whereby an image is replaced by a psychologically more significant one. We have one in the bureaucrats' lives, which are replaced by a silicate frigidity. We have another in vacuumed — the afternoons being not merely clear but evacuated, vacuum-cleaned. And the buildings that metamorphose into whales is perhaps another displacement. Indeed, in some ways, the whole process noted above is an extended displacement — of the useful (buildings), orderly (bureaucrats), structurally necessary (rib-bones) and purposeful (constructing these webs of buildings) by the defeated, the inert, the wearing away to nothing. Is this symbolism maintained? It seems to be. The bureaucrats are time-wasters (awaiting the post and the department meeting). They are not aware either of the past history of the materials making up their building, or that their own lives are intricate but inert. Even the light-headedness of living in high buildings (the bureaucrat's, presumably, or just possibly the personified afternoon's: the syntax is confused) is not exhilarating, but brings on a neuralgia described either as troublesome and inconvenient (Calling at random like frail relations) or pointless (a phone / Ringing in a distant office they cannot get to). Application: Representation Suppose we move on to Freud's representation, in which thoughts take the form of images. We have seen that the poem views the world as inert, cyclic and pointless, so that we need to investigate the images employed. Why were they chosen? Are they apt? What deeper psychological need is served by them? As to the first, the author replies that he cannot remember. The work is unusual for him, but was no doubt an attempt at making the worlds of rocks, natural processes and construction into a poem. There are no early drafts to hand, so that he cannot now see how the work progressed. But very probably it was from the first line, which then lead him into thinking about the constituents of buildings — natural for someone who spent many years as a professional geologist. But that is not a very full answer. The natural world is not necessarily sad. Indeed, for most who study it, even geology is immensely fascinating and invigorating. The trail again ends in matters not understood — unless the author was writing of his dissatisfactions with geology and reasons for leaving it, which is possible. Are the images apt? That depends. If the poem intended was a sort of Arnold's Dover Beach, but without the sustaining power of love, then the answer is surely "no". There is imagery much closer to home than this — more vital, better grasped, impinging more directly on lives. If the poem is an oblique criticism of the stultifying way geology is addressed, then the answer is again "no". The approach is very obscure indeed. But if the poem is an attempt to extend the content of poetry and see the world as the product of forces that carry meaning and emotional significance, then analysis moves to another sphere, to the subject of poetry, where psychoanalysis does not pretend to arbitrate. Application: Secondary Revision Freud's fourth process was secondary revision, where the disparate elements are combined into an intelligible, coherent whole. Freud's terminology of course applied to dreams rather than literature, but it is noteworthy that the poem does have a dreamlike quality. The content appears by image association, and there are sudden shifts: from "they" to "we", and from buildings to whales. More pertinently, the need for an intelligible, coherent whole is the old demand for artistic autonomy and form. This fourth requirement is better examined under other approaches: traditional, textural or stylistic criticism. All we need do here is to summarize those findings and note that the poem is unbalanced, unnecessarily dreamlike and requires more suspense in plot and argument. Conclusions: Suggested Corrections Psychoanalysis does not have an aesthetic remit. Its claims are for a psychological truth; if a poem seems significant and carries a strong emotional charge, then the poem is operating on the hidden drives of the unconscious. The writer created the work in answer to some deep personal instincts, and the work appeals because it finds similar or equivalent instincts in the reader. There are no corrections indicated by psychoanalysis, only the proviso that the writer must ensure that in correcting along other lines that his corrections do not weaken that appeal. Further than that, of course, he has an obligation to examine what psychoanalytical criticism is suggesting, about his work, and about his fundamental nature.