tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22420276590573774962024-02-20T18:06:08.484-08:00Perry MeiselA Critic's ArchivePerry Meiselhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15136895284654246782noreply@blogger.comBlogger136125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2242027659057377496.post-84411375274091130062017-09-10T08:07:00.000-07:002017-11-29T20:11:40.834-08:00Books<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; margin: 0px;">
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<i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Course-General-Linguistics-Ferdinand-Saussure/dp/0231157274/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1328727863&sr=1-1"><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" />Course in General Linguistics</a>.</i> Trans. Wade Baskin. Co-ed. with</div>
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Haun Saussy. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">By Ferdinand de Saussure.</span> New York: Columbia<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>University Press, 2011. <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/course-in-general-linguistics-ferdinand-de-de-saussure/1117051159?ean=9780231527958">eBook</a>, 2011.</div>
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<span style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Myth-Popular-Culture-Blackwell-Manifestos/dp/1405199342/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_1">The Myth of Popular Culture from Dante to Dylan</a>. </span>Oxford: Blackwell Manifestos, 2010. <a href="https://play.google.com/store/books/details?pcampaignid=books_read_action&id=igLwTjrIpMEC">eBook</a>, 2010. Portuguese translation, 2015 (Tinta Negra).<br />
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<span style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Literary-Freud-Perry-Meisel/dp/041598145X/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_3">The Literary Freud</a>. </span>New York and London: Routledge, 2007. <a href="http://www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk/moreinfo.aspx?isbn=9780203944387&ISO=US">eBook</a>, 2013.</div>
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<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Cowboy-Dandy-Crossing-Over-Romanticism/dp/0195118170/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_4"><span style="font-style: italic;">The Cowboy and the Dandy: Crossing Over from Romanticism to Rock and</span></a><span style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Cowboy-Dandy-Crossing-Over-Romanticism/dp/0195118170/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_4"> Roll</a>.</span> New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. <a href="https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=mJ7nBt2eV-IC&rdid=book-mJ7nBt2eV-IC&rdot=1&source=gbs_atb&pcampaignid=books_booksearch_atb">eBook</a>, 1998.<br />
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<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Myth-Modern-British-Literature-Criticism/dp/0300045603/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_2"><span style="font-style: italic;">The Myth of the Modern: A Study in British Literature and Criticism</span></a><span style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Myth-Modern-British-Literature-Criticism/dp/0300045603/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_2"> after 1850</a>.</span> New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.<br />
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<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Bloomsbury-Freud-Letters-Strachey-1924-25/dp/0465007112/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1328727806&sr=1-1"><span style="font-style: italic;">Bloomsbury/Freud: The Letters of James and Alix Strachey, 1924-</span></a><span style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Bloomsbury-Freud-Letters-Strachey-1924-25/dp/0465007112/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1328727806&sr=1-1">25</a>. </span>Co-ed. with Walter Kendrick. With Introduction, Epilogue, and Appendices. New York: Basic Books, 1985; London: Chatto & Windus, 1986. Paperback, 1990 (Norton); French translation,1990 (Presses Universitaires de France); German translation,1995 (Verlag Internationale Psychoanalyse).<br />
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<span style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Freud-Collection-Critical-Perry-Meisel/dp/0133313972/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1328727836&sr=1-2">Freud: A Collection of Critical Essays</a>. </span>Ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1981. <a href="http://www.freepsychotherapybooks.org/">eBook</a>, 2014 (International Psychotherapy Institute).<br />
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<span style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Absent-Father-Virginia-Woolf-Walter/dp/0300024010/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_6">The Absent Father: Virginia Woolf and Walter Pater</a>.</span> New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980.<br />
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<span style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Thomas-Hardy-Repressed-Perry-Meisel/dp/0300014406/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_5">Thomas Hardy: The Return of the Repressed</a>.</span> New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972.</div>
Perry Meiselhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15136895284654246782noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2242027659057377496.post-14350586120700746312017-09-09T07:51:00.000-07:002017-12-05T10:42:29.074-08:00The Feudal Unconscious: Capitalism and the Family Romance<span style="font-family: inherit;">by Perry Meisel</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"> Psychoanalysis is not only a science of the individual; it is also a historical science. Well beyond Freud’s familiar excursions into psychohistory and psychobiography—one thinks of Moses, for example, or of Leonardo—lies another Freud, one whose texts make a surprising historical argument by virtue of their metaphors. Drawing from a series of wider historical dialogues, the vocabularies of psychical process exceed the history of the individual. Mikhail Bakhtin alerts us to their specificity and functions in <i>Freudianism: A Critical Sketch</i>, composed with his friend Valentin Voloshinov and published under Voloshinov’s name<span style="font-family: inherit;"> in 1927. There, Bakhtin demonstrates that Freud is a historical thinker because of the tropes he employs:</span>
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The family, that castle and keep of capitalism, evidently has become a thing economically and socially little understood and little taken to heart; and that is what has brought on its wholesale sexualization, as if thereby it were made newly meaningful or “made strange,” as our formalists would say. The Oedipus complex is indeed a magnificent way of making the family unit “strange.” The father is not the entrepreneur, and the son is not his heir—the father is only the mother’s lover, and his son is his rival!</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; vertical-align: 2.5px;">1 </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The fantasy world of the family romance and the real conditions of capitalism mystify or distort one another thanks to their different metaphors. They are distinct, they are systematic, and they are at odds. The father is, in bourgeois fact, an “entrepreneur,” but in infantile fantasy he is his son’s “rival” in a medieval romance, the antagonist in a quest-romance of love won and lost. </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> Bakhtin’s stunning description of the family as the “castle and keep of capitalism” is especially helpful. From a Marxist point of view, the family romance has a familiar structure. The grant of authority to the father for the sake of protection is, after all, feudalism. It is a feudalism of the unconscious, a mutualism of vassal and lord, knight and king. It is the baleful landscape of Harold Bloom’s Romanticism, the internalization, as Bloom puts it, of </span>quest-romance (1968).</span><span style="vertical-align: 2.5px;">2 </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: inherit;">For the modern subject—the subject as such—feudalism is the Imaginary mode of thought that misreads or represses the Symbolic order of capitalism. The family romance thus preserves feudalism in the bourgeois home by making every man a king. Value or authority, in wealth or in kinship, is in capitalism no more than a position in a system of exchange. The feudal unconscious—the term with which I concluded a discussion of representation at the close of <i>The Literary Fr<span style="font-family: inherit;">eud</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;">—masks the symbolic in a more grounded mythology of rule.</span></span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: inherit;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; vertical-align: 2.5px;">3 </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">Its sociality is radically historicizing. Freud—modernity—structures the psyche by putting the discursive modes in conflict. Their strife provides us with a picture of the psyche by providing us with a picture of the psyche’s social history. Primary process is feudalism; secondary process is capitalism. The tension between them is, from the point of view of literary models, the tension between, in Bakhtin’s terms, epic and novel.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Freud’s tropes describe what they declare. If the life of the family is the epic world of the “castle,” its “keep” is the modern world of contending tongues and the free marketplace that surrounds and isolates it—the world of the “entrepreneur,” of finance and exchange, of parliamentary democracy and applied science, and of colonialism, its source of raw materials or, in the psychoanalytic variant, of somatic impulses ready for conversion, like natural resources, into the products of the ego and modern trade. If Romanticism internalizes quest-romance, capitalism externalizes it in a new way. Freud’s well-known description of himself as a “conquistador” in a letter to Fliess in 1900 is a gaudy example of the second system of tropes that structure Freud’s description of the mind, the tropes of colonial conquest that inaugurate capitalism and dramatize the subordination of primary process by secondary process, of the id by the ego, of the past by the future, as the individual, like civilization, proceeds upon its rocky and dubious path of progress through repression.</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; vertical-align: 2.5px;">4 </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Andrew Cole’s reading of Hegel shows Freud’s historical argument emerging <i>in statu nascendi </i>at the dawn of Romanticism and the beginning of the passage into the industrial capitalism with which we customarily associate the nineteenth century. Hegel’s split subject is already Freud’s own. Hegel’s metaphors are no less historical and no less exact than Freud’s psychoanalytic ones. Indeed, Hegel’s metaphors signify the moment of their emergence in real time. For Hegel, the transition from the implacable reciprocity of lord and bondsman under feudalism to the plastic mutuality of self and other under capitalism is, as Cole points out, “the specific political structure and social arrangement within which modernity and freedom are realized.”</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; vertical-align: 2.5px;">5 </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">Like Freud, Hegel uses metaphor in more than an ornamental or supplementary way. It designates a specific historical regimen and mode of human <i>praxis</i>. Feudalism and the unconscious are the scaffolding upon which capitalism and consciousness are respectively propped. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Hegel enshrines his ghostly other as a permanent feature of subjectivity. Like Freud’s feudal unconscious, Hegel’s Middle Ages may slip away into time, but they do not disappear. This, of course, is Hegel’s “double-consciousness,” the alterity that is the condition of the psychological subject, or, in its historical variant, the feudal past that persists in the modern present.</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; vertical-align: 2.5px;">6 </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">Hegel’s feudal ghosts have their contemporary counterpart in the haunted tombs and graveyards of the Gothic Revival in England that accompany the High Romanticism of Wordsworth’s mournful churchyards. Freud has his own contemporary counterpart in the haunt- ed tombs and graveyards of German expressionism, particularly those of German cinema. No wonder “double-consciousness” is a premonitory version of Freudian melancholia, the implacable “shadow,” as Freud calls it, “that fell upon the ego”(1917) thanks to the infantile identifications of family life whose ghosts persist into adulthood.</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; vertical-align: 2.5px;">7 </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Nor is the melancholia of double-consciousness an individual affair. It has brutal results politically. A century after Hegel’s, W.e.B. DuBois’s “double-consciousness”—“this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others”—is what Paul Gilroy calls “post-colonial melancholia.”</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; vertical-align: 2.5px;">8 </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">The psychological other is also the colonial subaltern. In <i>The Ego and the Id </i>(1923), the great metaphor of the ego as a “frontier-creature” patrolling the boundary between the psyche and the external world is also the “frontier” between feudalism and the global capitalism that succeeds it.</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; vertical-align: 2.5px;">9 </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">The “romance” of Orientalism that serves as colonialism’s apology is another form of nostalgia for feudalism.</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; vertical-align: 2.5px;">10 </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">Orientalism, like feudalism, is a metaphor for primary process. Wearing the garments of global or anthropological feudalism—the costumes of the east or those of Africa, the Native Americas, or the black south—Orientalism is also a return of the feudal repressed, another way of making capitalism’s medieval past strange or unfamiliar. Its atavism is aristocratic. Like Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko or Cooper’s Native American heroes, its literary champions are, in Dryden’s memorable phrase, “noble savages.”</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; vertical-align: 2.5px;">11 </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Freud employs his two systems of metaphor to describe primary and secondary process throughout his career. Having introduced the terms <i>primary process </i>and <i>secondary process </i>late in <i>The Interpretation of Dreams </i>(1900) to refine what he at he time calls the difference between consciousness and the unconscious, Freud maintains his historical metaphors even after this difference becomes less important.</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; vertical-align: 2.5px;">12 </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">For the purpose of describing Freud’s two vocabularies and the historical argument they make, the difference between early and late Freud is therefore a negligible one. such continuity is rare in Freud: Typically notions from the first phase undergo major revisions, particularly regarding consciousness and the unconscious, and between the ego and libido. When, beginning with the metapsychological papers and formalized with <i>Beyond the Pleasure Principle </i>(1920), Freud shifts his system from a “topographical” to an “economic” or “dynamic” one, the ego becomes both libidinal and largely unconscious. What stands against it is no longer what is unconscious but what is repressed. yet Freud’s system of historical metaphors nonetheless conforms to both models. If the unconscious is feudalism in the first model and consciousness is capitalism, in the second model capitalism is the ego and feudalism the repressed. The feudal unconscious and the feudal repressed are one and the same. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The Freudian unconscious is a history of the terms of which it is composed conceptually. It is social, political, and linguistic, scarred by the influences it absorbs and redistributes.</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; vertical-align: 2.5px;">13 </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">It does so by making the psyche as a whole a system of unconscious agencies, each one obscuring the terms of the other, and each one reflecting the tropes of a historical period. As a tropology, psychoanalysis instantiates the phenomenology it describes. Indeed, it makes its literary and philosophical sources an example of the mental functioning it narrates by embalming them in its language, expunging its anxieties of influence by entombing them in what it represents. This is as true of Freud’s precedents in clinical psychology as it is of his philosophical precedent in Hegel, whose double-consciousness finds additional analogues in Pierre Janet’s <i>double conscience </i>and Charcot’s <i>condition seconde</i>, both of which furnish psychoanalysis with prototypes for its notion of the unconscious in scientific terms no less concrete than the historical prototype provided by Hegel.</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; vertical-align: 2.5px;">14 </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;"><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Psychoanalysis guarantees what it proposes not despite its literary form but because of it. Its <i>récit </i>is the residue of the tropes with which its <i>histoire </i>is identical. Clear and consistent to an unlikely fault, Freud’s double system of metaphor needs to be teased out of his texts in a careful way. If Bakhtin is too impatient to do so, and too tendentious with regard to his dialogical project to let Freud speak for himself, it is no matter: Freud does so on his own with little resistance.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;">Two Languages in <i>The Interpretation of Dreams</i></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>A brief survey of <i>The Interpretation of Dreams </i>will show us how the two vocabularies behave and prepare us for an examination of how their historicism functions in Freud’s work early and late. Although Freud revised <i>The Interpretation of Dreams </i>with each new edition, as he did the <i>Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality </i>(1905), both before and after the shift in his model, these revisions do not, as Strachey’s comprehensive footnotes show, import the vocabulary of either feudalism or capitalism into the dream book from a later point of view. They are there from the start. Primary process (or the realm of unconscious wishes) is feudal, and secondary process (or the machinery of consciousness or distortion) is capitalist. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;"><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>What secondary process adds to the dream by distorting the infantile or primary-process wishes beneath it is a system of a different metaphorical order than the feudal one of a “scene” in which, as in a play, something is “represented” or “experienced”—a system of “speculations” and “mutual relations,” of proposition and assignment (p. 534). This is the tropology of the capitalist marketplace and system of credit. Indeed, in “hallucinatory dreams”—dreams with striking iconic imagery such as the images of royal personages—“excitation moves in a <i>backward </i>direction” (p. 542). This backwardness is historical in both a real and psychological way—its imagery is feudal. By contrast, “the direction taken by psychical processes arising from the unconscious during waking life”—the distortions of secondary process—are “progressive” in their defensive impetus to mask what is “regressive” in their character (p. 542). Here distortion “might be described,” says Freud, as “a substitute for an infantile scene modified by being transferred on to a recent experience” (p. 546). The present moment screens or alters the past because it follows it, not because its nature is different. secondary process, that is, shifts the vocabulary or metaphoricity of primary process into another lexical register, replacing an earlier metaphorical system (feudalism) with a later one (capitalism). This substitution or transvaluation is not unlike a system of fluctuating values or credit of the kind familiar in modern money. Precious coins are the currency of kings; money and credit, the currency of capitalists. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;"><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Marx describes this movement as it unfolds in real time: </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">When a coin leaves the mint, it sets out on the road to the melting pot. During their <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>currency, gold coins get worn, some more, others less. The name of gold and the substance of gold, the nominal content and the real content, begin to part company. Gold coins bearing the same name come to have different weights. Gold as medium of circulation differentiates from gold as standard of prices, and thus ceases to be an actual equivalent for the commodities whose prices it realizes. The his- tory of coinage during the Middle Ages and during the modern era on into the eighteenth century, is the history of these confusions. The natural tendency of the process of circulation to transform the essentiality of gold in the coin into the semblance of gold, to transform the coin into a mere symbol of its official content in metal, secures recognition in the latest legislation concerning the degree of wear which will suffice to demonetize a gold piece, to make it unfit for legal tender. The fact that, as the outcome of the currency of money, a severance ensues between the real content and the nominal content of a coin, between its actual metallic existence and its functional existence, discloses to us a latent possibility that the function of metallic money in coinage may be taken over by tokens or symbols of some other material.</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; vertical-align: 2.5px;">15 </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">This transformation of “the essentiality of gold” into a symbol—the severing of “the real content and the nominal content”—is precisely the difference between primary and secondary process in the psychoanalytic model. While Freud is less sanguine about the natural status of primary process than Marx is about the sensuality of feudalism, the structural homology is nonetheless striking. These different systems of exchange signify “the progressive control exercised upon our instinctual life by our thought-activity” as time goes by.</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; vertical-align: 2.5px;">16 </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">Here one is “inclined to renounce as unprofitable”—this metaphor is decisive—“the formation and retention of such intense wishes as children know” (p. 552), much as coins lose their value. While the metaphorical differences may seem to be offhand—decorative rather than substantive, dramatic rather than systematic—the very reverse is true. A new system of value is required for both culture and the individual. The difference in metaphor augurs the historicism of Freud’s unspoken argument about the mind’s relation to the real events of a past broader than that of persons, and of a past whose own record returns with the history of each individual mind. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>E</span><span style="font-kerning: none;">ven Freud’s single figures of speech split in a way that allows them to con- tain the two metaphorical systems simultaneously. Most decisive is Freud’s term for representing the way in which primary and secondary process communicate or interact, the German <i>Bahnung</i>—the “pathway” or “facilitation,” as Strachey various- ly translates the term—between the two systems (p. 611). That <i>Bahnung </i>can be translated as both “pathway” and “facilitation” evinces the doubleness and pliability of Freud’s vocabulary in both the German original and in the interpretative splitting its translation requires. each translation is sound, although “pathway” leans toward the feudal, evoking a path through an imagined forest peopled by ogres, while “facilitation,” by contrast, is a technological metaphor drawn from the vocabulary of applied science. The same may be said for the connotative structure of the German <i>Schicksal</i>, which Strachey translates, in a quantitative flourish, as “vicissitude” in the key metapsychological essay of 1915, “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes.” and yet <i>Schicksal </i>also means, in high literary fashion, “fate,” “fortune,” or “destiny.” Once again, a quantitative or scientific metaphor coexists with a feudal one in the same signifier. Both examples recall, too, the infamous debate over the years about Strachey’s translation throughout Freud’s work of <i>Seele</i>— “soul”—as “psyche.”</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; vertical-align: 2.5px;">17 </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>More to the point is that the two models also account for the clinical behavior of the mind. In primary process, symbolization is fixed. In secondary process, it is mobile. This is why in the analytic scenario the fixed symbolizations of primary process or childhood may be reassessed and fixed bonds loosened and remobilized, allowing the patient to revise the determinations of primary-process ideation. Feudal wealth, as it were, becomes no more than another currency. As “capital” rather than as coin, primary process is fungible, subject to change through mature reflection as an accommodation to the sadness of bourgeois life rather than as a feckless capitulation to the brutal terms of the feudal unconscious. Psychical energy is “the quantity at the disposal of the entrepreneur”</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; vertical-align: 2.5px;">18 </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">(p. 561)— that is, of the capital supplied to him. Strachey’s footnote reminds us that “capital” is not to be construed as though the wish were simply an unconscious thought—as a quality—but as a quantity.</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; vertical-align: 2.5px;">19 </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">Unlike the feudal metaphor of royal <i>dramatis personae</i>, “capital” evokes no scene, even as it prompts the intensity of one. Feudalism’s tropology is evocative, imagistic, dramatic, painterly—its style is in accord with the passionate arts and iconography of its day. Capitalism’s tropology, by contrast, is dry, quantitative, dispassionate; its style, too, is in accord with its lack of spectacle and its measured protocols. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">Feudalism and the Family Romance </span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;"><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Freud’s feudal metaphors for primary process, particularly the personages whose images people it, take center stage in “Family Romances” (1909), a relative- ly early and brief essay on the subject originally published in a collection of essays on myth edited by Otto Rank. The term “Oedipus complex,” the customary synonym for the term “family romance,” makes its first appearance a year later, in “A special Type of Object-Choice Made by Men” in 1910, although “family romance” is more rather than less exacting, highlighting the fluid and situational way in which its positions come to be established. Clinically, the term explains the ease with which Oedipal formations occur regardless of anatomically conceived notions of gender, as, for example, with same-sex parents. Historically, it has the advantage of describing more accurately the role feudalism plays in Freud’s imagination. As he writes in “Family Romances”: </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">The liberation of an individual, as he grows up, from the authority of his parents is one of the most necessary though one of the most painful results brought about by the course of his development. It is quite essential that that liberation should occur and it may be presumed that it has been to some extent achieved by everyone who has reached a normal state. Indeed, the whole progress of society rests upon the opposition between successive generations.</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; vertical-align: 2.5px;">20</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;"><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The individual’s development—indeed, the emergence of the “individual” as such—is nothing less than his or her “liberation” from absolutist or religious authority. No wonder the “progress of society” as well as of the individual depends upon it. The very movement of history is one from a feudal or absolutist condition to a parliamentary or democratic one. It is therefore not surprising that “for a small child his parents are at first the only authority and source of all belief” (p. 232). Like a vassal under the dominion of a lord and master, the world is defined by a system of single allegiance to a single authority, an allegiance that is also “the source,” in a decidedly religious metaphor based on a notion of faith, “of all belief.” The child’s world is, simply put, a feudal one. When that world is sur- mounted over time, it nonetheless remains because it is the world in memory of infantile sexuality, the individual’s unconscious. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;"><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The “mental impulses of childhood,” which the world of the “family romance” both is and represents, also “enable . . . us to understand the nature of myths” because myths feature the same political arrangements as infantile sexuality (p. 238). Both are part of a world based on the absolute “authority” of a ruling family and “unquestioned belief” in its values. Christianity is nothing new, it simply refines the specifics of family interaction. even, perhaps especially, a child of “humble parents”—the baby Jesus, for example—will compare his parents to “aristocratic” ones (p. 240). Though this is done initially to begin the process of free- ing oneself from parental authority, the net result of the upwardly mobile fantasy is an ironic one. By means of the comparison, “the child is not getting rid of his father but exalting him” (p. 240). The images of the “new and aristocratic parents” for whom the child exchanges his real ones “are derived entirely from real recollection of the actual and humble ones” (p. 240). By deferred action, even “humble” parents therefore become feudal masters and mistresses. so absolute is this action of the unconscious as the child proceeds into presumable maturity that </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">the whole effort at replacing the real father by a superior one is only an expression of the child’s longing for the happy, vanished days when his father seemed to him the noblest and strongest of men and his mother the dearest and loveliest of women. He is turning away from the father whom he knows to-day to the father in whom he believed in the earlier years of his childhood; and his phantasy is no more than the expression of a regret that those happy days have gone. Thus in these phantasies the overvaluation that characterizes a child’s earliest years comes into its own again.</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; vertical-align: 2.5px;">21 </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;"><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Capitalist metaphors are, to be sure, present in “Family Romances,” but they linger at the horizon of the essay, and there are far fewer of them than when he about adult life, as in <i>The Interpretation of Dreams</i>. And if, in “Family Romances,” Freud’s feudal metaphors are blunt, so too are his capitalist ones, even if they are used only as passing figurations for maturity. The feudal unconscious, as one might expect, features <i>dramatis personae</i>, while secondary process resembles a face- less, assembly-line world of talk and mass production. The notion that the individual’s “progress” and that of society as a whole are both couched in the metaphor of political process—of “liberation” from “authority”—is the essay’s first alert that a parliamentary or democratic politics underwrites what seems to be a metaphor for the individual alone. The building of an unconscious based in infantile sexuality resembles the movement from feudalism to capitalism. “Dissatisfied” and “critical,” the individual “acquires the right to doubt,” especially “to doubt the incomparable and unique quality” once attributed to the parents in the individual’s psycho- logical prehistory (p. 237). Rather than given or implicit, as with kings, queens, princes, and princesses, individual “right” is “acquired,” much as capital or property is. Rivalry, originally of a sexual kind, predominates, not simply as a courtly affair but as a fully public mode of behavior and motivation. “Rivalry” leads to “get- ting free from the parents” (p. 238). Their authority is overcome in a world of competition between free individuals on a level field of play. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;"><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Development or “progress,” however, has, as any presumptions of chronology or objective time always do in Freud, a backspin or regressiveness attached to it. “Getting free” is enabled by fantasies the growing child develops. These are once again feudal, although now they are tainted by the language of capitalism. The child attributes to his mother as many fictitious love affairs as he himself has “competitors” for her attention (p. 240). “Competitors” is a term derived from the free marketplace, although by thinking of himself as “the hero and author” who “returns to legitimacy . . . while his brothers and sisters are being eliminated by being bastardized” (p. 240), the child also returns to the world of romance and the court. In the blink of an eye, competition becomes the stuff of “imaginative romances,” with the mocking result that the father who is to be gotten rid of ends up becoming once again the “noblest” of men, and the mother “the dearest and loveliest” of women (p. 241). “Progress” or “liberation” has as its regressive result the return of the feudal repressed. The unconscious of capitalist “freedom” is the vassalage of bondage to feudal models of feeling, the quality of attachment characteristic of infantile ideation. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The feudal trend in Freud’s metaphors well accords with classical accounts of feudalism. In Marc Bloch’s epochal <i>Feudal Society </i>(1931, 1939), the faith of the vas- sal to his lord is the model for family relationships, not, as one might expect, the other way around.</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; vertical-align: 2.5px;">22 </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">By the same token, vassals also came to wage war against their kings, just as kings might turn against their vassals (pp. 235, 237). From a modern point of view, one asks whether the ambivalence that structures the Oedipus complex finds its real source in these arrangements rather than prompts them. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="font-kerning: none;">Indeed, for Bloch, the presumably collateral bonds of vassalage in the “first” feudalism of the early Middle Ages “were,” as he puts it, “ordinarily put on the same plane” as those of kinship relations, “each one lending a fundamental authority to the other with equal precedence” (p. 124). For Perry Anderson, the “reciprocal ties of fealty” from which the lord drew his authority are feudalism’s key social achievement, and the moment at which its dialectical components coalesced.</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; vertical-align: 2.5px;">23 </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="font-kerning: none;">The political theology of divine right makes feudalism’s resemblance to the family romance clearer still. The conversion to Christianity across northern Europe not only drew tribal principalities together under monarchies in the “second” feudalism of the later Middle Ages. The doctrine of divine right that sustained them also formalized the structure of the family romance that it prefigures. For all its fine dress, divine right simply recapitulates the arrangements of early feudalism in a higher key. As Ernst Kantorowicz reminds us in <i>The King’s Two Bodies </i>(1957), the monarch represents not God but Jesus Christ—not the father but the son. The king’s lordship is defined not by his absolute authority but by his own subservience to another. He is, in other words, defined by his status as a son in his own right, owing fealty to the Creator just as his heirs owe fealty to him. A mystical conjunction of father and son from the point of view of religion, it is a constitutive paradox from a psychoanalytic point of view. The political and the religious are one and the same in the psychological sociology that both reflect. Much as the son is obliged to bow to the father in the family romance, the father is also obliged to bow to the son. As shakespeare is at constant pains to remind us, neither has his status without the other. “How art thou a king,” says York to the king in <i>Richard II</i>, “but by fair sequence and succession?” This is the logic of the Oedipus complex. Indeed, feudalism is arguably the source of the Oedipus complex in Freud’s Christian unconscious, to use Paul Vitz’s phrase, and undoubtedly its source, biography aside, from the point of view of intellectual history.</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; vertical-align: 2.5px;">24 </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="font-kerning: none;">By such a definition, feudalism applies not simply to medievalism but to any social structure guaranteed by religion, whether Western, African, or Asian. such relationships are what Freud means by the “universal.” The “universal” is historical not because it is unchanging but because it is Freud’s cipher for the feudal. Here Freud’s understanding of “primitive” systems of kinship in his “prehistorical” allegories, notably <i>Totem and Taboo </i>(1912), is not so much “universal” in a synchronic sense as it is a way of gauging the status of culture when it is infantile, when it is without the superimposition of the defense mechanisms of secondary process. even Bloch cannot disagree. Feudalism, he writes, citing Voltaire, is “a type of society.” It includes “Egyptian feudalism, Achaen feudalism, Chinese feudalism, Japanese feudalism—all these forms and more are now familiar concepts.”</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; vertical-align: 2.5px;">25 </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">For Bloch, Western feudalism and its other global and historical permutations recur as a rule to “a type of society” that remains universal in Freud’s own sense—one grounded in the filial faith between lord and vassal. Indeed, the brothers of the primal horde in <i>Totem and Taboo </i>aspire to the condition of feudalism in their wish to murder the father, and do so when they accomplish the deed. establishing the totem is the equivalent of inventing religion—in this case, a thinly veiled kind of Christianity—and of organizing infantile desire by attaching it to an image that socializes it in the child’s mind. This is the process that Freud describes in “On Narcissism” (1914) and the process that recapitulates in Freudian mythology the triumph of the “first” feudalism over the chaos of the Gothic tribes. No wonder feudalism appeals so strongly to our imaginations. Whether the kingdoms of the Middle Ages, the tribes of Africa, or the empires of ancient Asia, feudalism is a mirror of the gratifications of primary process. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="font-kerning: none;">It is worth pointing out that a familiar derogation of Freud’s feudal metaphors for the family romance, the term “romance” chief among them, is not so much a successful dismissal of an outmoded aspect of Freud’s conception as it is proof that what is outmoded in the metaphor is precisely the metaphor’s claim upon us. I have in mind, of course, Deleuze and Guattari’s <i>Anti-Oedipus </i>(1972). To Deleuze and Guattari’s objection that the family romance resembles nothing more than a vulgarized Holy Family, the response is a simple one. Deleuze and Guattari identify not a problem but the solution to why infantile sexuality is structured like a myth, romance, or fairy tale. It is structured that way because it is a feudal vestige, the residue of a form of thought and government left behind in the empirical life of the present but still alive in mind and in memory. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">“Constancy” and Capitalism</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="font-kerning: none;">Although Freud’s capitalist metaphors for secondary process are present throughout his work, they are, not surprisingly, foregrounded in the second phase, with its especially elaborate account of secondary process. Freud’s modern or “capitalist” metaphors derive from applied science and technology, the means by which industrial production regulates the constitutional state. They give indus- trial production its infrastructure and, in Freud’s language, give unconscious wish- es their motive force. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Freud’s chief metaphor for the nature of psychological drive, particularly in <i>Beyond the Pleasure Principle</i>, is the metaphor of psychical “energy.” Only coming into common use, in both German and english, in the nineteenth century, the term is rooted in scientific discoveries with specific applications to industrialism, particularly thermodynamics. Freud’s source for this vocabulary, of course, is Hermann Helmholtz’s notion of the conservation of energy, an application of the theory of thermodynamics to physiological and mental processes.</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; vertical-align: 2.5px;">26 </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">Helmholtz employs the notion of “energy” as both a scientific assumption about the behavior of the nervous system and as a metaphor regarding matter and motive force in life as a whole. Thermodynamics not only provides Freud with his principal scientific figurations but also provided capitalism with the theory required for the applied science that led to the technology of mass production. The link is direct—mass production leads to the concrete material conditions necessary for a market economy. Transformations between primary and secondary process are like a system of exchange based upon not only contract but credit. something is left over that accumulates in addition to its original value. Free, mobile “energy” becomes “bound” in <i>Beyond the Pleasure Principle</i>, depending upon circumstance and the agreement of affect and association. <i>Bindung </i>is one of Freud’s favorite words for the mind’s control of itself. Fixed, or at least momentarily fixed, value—price, as it were—is energy fixed on the run. Here Gustav Fechner’s addition to Helmholtz— “the principle of constancy,” by means of which energy seeks equilibrium rather than discharge—not only provides Freud’s dynamic notion of the mind a principle of equanimity but also an additional metaphor by means of which value can be stabilized. It seeks to bring constancy to a volatile marketplace. Like a good trader or investor, the ego is a manager or chief executive officer of its capital. Freud’s feu- dal vocabulary for primary process has its counterpart in his capitalist vocabulary for secondary process. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="font-kerning: none;">The relation of secondary process to primary—the movement of binding—is one of deferred action. It reflects the tale Freud himself has to tell. The future captures the past, reconfigures it to its own uses so that the past itself becomes “bound” as a function of the freedom of the present. The clinical implication is once again of a piece with its rhetorical presentation: No longer bound by the past, the patient undoes its determinations and revalues them.</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; vertical-align: 2.5px;">27 </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> Scientific metaphors introduce and sustain Freud’s description of the mind throughout <i>Beyond the Pleasure Principle</i>. Note this particularly decisive passage: </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">The phenomena of organic development must be attributed to external disturbing and diverting influences. The elementary living entity would from its very beginning have had no wish to change; if conditions remained the same, it would do no more than constantly repeat the same course of life. In the last resort, what has left its mark on the development of organisms must be the history of the earth we live in and of its relation to the sun. . . . The tension which then arose in what had hitherto been an inanimate substance endeavored to cancel itself out. In this way the first instinct came into being: the instinct to return to the inanimate state. It was still an easy matter at that time for a living substance to die; the course of its life was probably only a brief one, whose direction was determined by the chemical structure of the young life. For a long time, perhaps, living substance was thus being constantly created afresh and easily dying, till decisive external influences altered in such a way as to oblige the still surviving substance to diverge ever more widely from its original course of life and to make ever more complicated <i>détours </i>before reaching its aim of death. These circuitous paths to death, faithfully kept to by the conservative instincts, would thus present us to-day with the picture of the phenomena of life.</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; vertical-align: 2.5px;">28 </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">The biologistic description is at bottom a thermodynamic one. Its notion of “organic” elasticity (p. 30) rests on the assumption of an “energetics” among the instincts, to use Paul Ricoeur’s term, the measure, as it were, of their “vicissitudes,” as Freud calls this “elasticity” during the metapsychological phase.</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; vertical-align: 2.5px;">29 </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="font-kerning: none;">But despite the changes the new, “economic” model has wrought in his system, Freud also keeps his old “topographical” model in place and thereby does what he always does—he makes the earlier formulation a part of the unconscious processes he describes: </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">The ego now found its position among sexual objects and was at once given the foremost place among them. Libido which was in this way lodged in the ego was described as “narcissistic.” This narcissistic libido was of course also a manifestation of the force of the sexual instinct in the analytical sense of those words, and it had necessarily to be identified with the “self-preservative instincts” whose existence had been recognized from the first. Thus the original opposition between the ego- instincts and the sexual instincts proved to be inadequate. A portion of the ego-instincts was seen to be libidinal; sexual instincts—probably alongside others—operated in the ego. Nevertheless we are justified in saying that the old formula which lays it down that psychoneuroses are based on a conflict between ego-instincts and sexual instincts contains nothing that we need reject to-day. It is merely that the distinction between the two kinds of instinct, which was originally regarded as in some sort of way <i>qualitative, </i>must now be characterized differently— namely as being <i>topographical</i>.</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; vertical-align: 2.5px;">30 </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="font-kerning: none;">The shift in Freud’s thinking doubles the shift in the psychoanalytic system. Like the psyche, it is historical. The shift, or presumable shift, shows how Freud’s writing is a history of its own vicissitudes. Its earlier assumptions become its own unconscious. Clinically, it resolves a paradox less easily. Although secondary process frees or mobilizes the determinations of primary process or infantile ideation—much as capitalism is a liberation from the bondage of feudalism—it is also a distortion of the frightening clarity of infantile fantasy, its inhibition or repression as well as progress beyond it. This is the double bind in which the patient is situated, and the double bind that analysis as both a cure and a form of writing is designed to assess and accommodate. The book’s conclusion is, ironically, an accommodation of the new theory to the earlier one in almost comic fashion. By definition, the pleasure principle’s energy seeks discharge, and therefore a relief in quantitative excitation. This is precisely what the death instinct is—the consummate path to pleasure: </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The pleasure principle, then, is a tendency operating in the service of a function whose business it is to free the excitation or to keep the amount of excitation in it constant or to keep it as low as possible. (p. 62) </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">“Constancy” is a “business” whose “function” is “to free” the mind rather than restrict it. Thus “the pleasure principle seems actually,” says Freud, “to serve the death instincts” (p. 63). The circle is complete. Bondage and freedom engage one another reciprocally or dialectically. Past and present remain commingled despite the passage of time. The pleasure principle and the death instinct are both required to concede to the reality principle. Like the patient, the psychoanalytic system maintains constancy or stability by virtue not of discharging but of preserving the assumptions of its earlier theory as proof of—as capital for—its newer one. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">Freud, Marx, Keynes</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="font-kerning: none;">In <i>The Ego and the Id</i>, the shift from a feudal accent to a capitalist one is even more pronounced. This is because the shift in metaphor accelerates to include not only the sciences but the bureaucratic and political worlds as well. Here the ego— the new focus because so much of it is now understood to be unconscious, a function of secondary rather than primary process—is rendered in metaphors of a distinctly bourgeois kind. While the ego of the early phase reigns, or tries to reign, over a sovereign realm subject to the insurgencies of the unconscious, now the ego is drawn in managerial terms that modernize the unconscious of which it is a part. It “supervises” its “constituent” elements.</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; vertical-align: 2.5px;">31 </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">It manages, as a chairperson would. The metaphor is also parliamentary: The ego governs its assembly of representatives. And—before we can even reach the end of this sentence—these constituents also function, in a scientific metaphor, not as persons but as “processes”: </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">We have formed the idea that in each individual there is a coherent organization of mental processes; and we call this his <i>ego</i>. It is to this ego that consciousness is attached; the ego controls the approaches to motility—that is, to the discharge of excitations into the external world; it is the mental agency which supervises all its own constituent process- es, and which goes to sleep at night, though even then it exercises the censorship on dreams. From this ego proceed the repressions, too, by means of which it is sought to exclude certain trends in the mind not merely from consciousness but also from other forms of effectiveness and activity. In analysis these trends which have been shut out stand in opposition to the ego, and the analysis is faced with the task of removing the resistance which the ego displays against concerning itself with the repressed. (p. 17) </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">What is repressed is not primary process but the conditions of existence. It is these that analysis seeks to disclose. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="font-kerning: none;">Democratic epistemology, unlike feudalism’s, resembles secondary rather than primary process. It is based not on faith but on contract—on the consensual value of the signified rather than on an inherent meaning it may be presumed to have. It is a system of mobile valuation, like currency, which under capitalism has the form of fixity while retaining the function of change. even a gold standard, according to John Maynard Keynes, is a legal fiction because, as he puts it in <i>A Tract on Monetary Reform </i>(1924), “the value of gold depends” not on its inherent features but “on the policy of the Central Banks.”</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; vertical-align: 2.5px;">32 </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="font-kerning: none;">Marx remains the best guide. Under feudalism, social relations appear, oxy- moronically, “in their natural guise as personal relations” despite “the masks in which the different personalities strut,” in a shakespearean flourish, “upon the feudal stage.”</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; vertical-align: 2.5px;">33 </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">Under capitalism, by contrast, social relations become “dressed up”—as though they were not already—as commodities, “as social relations between things,” between the products rather than the processes “of labor” (p. 51). Despite Marx’s lingering naturalism—his nostalgia for a preindustrial human essence remains undiminished even in the shift from the 1844 manuscripts to the later <i>Capital—</i>the structural identity between the political and the psychical remains intact. Under capitalism, only the regulation of currency allows commodities to acquire “objective fixity” in the sea of exchange value, and therefore to acquire a “general social validity”:</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">When this happens, the particular kind of commodity with whose bodily form the equivalent form is socially identified becomes the money commodity, or serves as money. Thenceforward, the specific social function (and therefore the social monopoly) of this commodity is that it plays the part of a general equivalent among commodities at large. (p. 42) </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="font-kerning: none;">The objectification of labor in commodities, money chief among them, is the equivalent and insuperable condition in Marx of the splitting of the subject in Freud, a splitting that Marx, unlike Freud, is unwilling to accept or negotiate. Like libido, labor cannot be said to exist except in the objects it endows. They are witness to the subject that produces them, not the other way around. Like libidinal objects, labor’s objects retroactively constitute their makers, much as the objects of desire fashion the subject whose concrete dreams they are. Labor and libido are the life forces in Marx and Freud, respectively, each with the same epistemological structure and each with the same productive rather than expressive relation to empirical reality. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Keynesian capitalism, with its emphasis on the state regulation of money and the stabilization of economies through government policies, is the best instance of how the regulation of currency is capitalism’s chief metaphorization of secondary process. The stabilization of currency by the regulating agency of government doubles the regulation of the infantile drives by the ego. The vocabulary of science— of an energetics—mediates between the psychical and the economic, giving them a shared tropology and a common project. “The fluctuations in the value of money since 1914,” writes Keynes in <i>Monetary Reform</i>, reflecting on the dysfunction of economies after World War I, is a “disequilibrium,” as he puts it, from which the social order, like the ego in the psychoanalytic analogue, should be cured.</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; vertical-align: 2.5px;">34 </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">The stability in currency value throughout the nineteenth century, like the relative stability of endlessly shifting treaty arrangements in politics, rested on promises honored until the cataclysm of the Great War. The strong hand of government in stabilizing economic disequilibrium resembles the ego psychology of Freud’s second, postwar phase. “As always,” writes Keynes, “the balance of payments must balance every day.”</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; vertical-align: 2.5px;">35 </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">“Instability” (p. 141)—the pun is now obvious—is to be avoided at all costs. Like psychical mechanisms, inflation and deflation have their respective roles in the regulation of economy, financial or therapeutic, each one playing a part as specific circumstance requires, whether for the social formation or the individual psyche. “Violent shocks to the existing equilibrium”—trauma in the finances of postwar Europe as well as in its shell-shocked veterans—require “readjustment” (p. 161), whether the goal is economic or psychological stability. Indeed, Keynes’s <i>The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money </i>from 1936 revises “classical” political economy by controlling precisely those factors that free markets leave unattended—the surplus value, for example, that divides wages from profits—regulating them into a coherent, if perpetually fluctuating, whole. As in psychoanalysis, here, too, the topographical—a sharp divide between classes— gives way to the dynamic—a coherent economy with a presumable <i>rapprochement </i>between top and bottom. Both manage a fluctuating system whose fixities are illusory and ideal and require intervention for their functioning to proceed. It is worth noting that Keynes lived on the floor above his Bloomsbury friend James Strachey at 41 Gordon square while, for decades, Keynes presided over the British treasury and Strachey over the english translation of Freud. Keynes was, as it were, also translating Freud. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="font-kerning: none;">The scientific metaphors of <i>Beyond the Pleasure Principle </i>persist in <i>The Ego and the Id</i>, too, as does the new historicism of the psyche’s organization. “The character of the ego,” writes Freud, “is a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes and . . . contains the history of those object-choices.”</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; vertical-align: 2.5px;">36 </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">even the Oedipus complex—the family romance—now “originates” (p. 32) from these later mnemic structures rather than causes them. The feudal unconscious, in other words, is the retroactive product of the capitalist unconscious. Its power is held in check by the shift in metaphor by means of which the ego funnels its value from the feudal materials of its prior force. Its value is a dividend flowing from an accumulated wealth that now functions as capital. Historicity, even the historicity of the unconscious, is derived through the belated lens of a future looking back- ward. Time is beneficial as well as ruinous. As in shakespeare, history becomes the possibility of its own revision. The Oedipus complex is a “precipitate in the ego,” the “residue” of “the earliest object-choices of the id”—of infantile sexuality rather than their originals. This is because secondary process fuels the ego’s “energetic reaction-formations against these choices” (p. 34). The transit of the original Oedipus complex—its feudal character—into its modern or adult char- acter comes about only after the components of the family romance have been changed into modern terms. Now the family romance is known by virtue of what it leaves behind, that is, after its passing. The feudal character of primary process has been transformed into a modern enterprise for the purpose of ordering its overdeterminations and reducing its sway. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="font-kerning: none;">This “reaction-formation” is, of course, the newly invented “superego,” which now “confronts” the ego as capitalism does feudalism. This process is no less static than anything else in this decidedly historical dynamic. The superego is not only a “residue” of the Oedipus complex but one with an active relation to the past that it represents. As an “energetic reaction-formation” to the id’s original object-choices, it carries forward the parents’ prohibitions in a new way—as a manager in a system of exchange rather than as a vassal in a system of faith. Once again the metaphors are decisive, this time revealing the link between the language of science (“energetic reaction”) and the language of capitalism (“choices”). “The infantile ego fortified itself” against the father—here the metaphor is once again feudal (“fortified”) as the child moves forward in time—by “erecting,” amusingly enough, a barrier within itself by virtue of its identification with the father. “It borrowed strength to do this,” says Freud, “from the father” in the form of a “loan” (p. 34). The historical circuit is metaphorically complete. “Borrowed” and “loan” are financial metaphors that progress from simple moneylending to a more modern form of credit. even the id is less biological than it is historical. It is another kind of “residue” with an unexpected origin in the experience of egos past: </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The experiences of the ego seem at first to be lost for inheritance; but, when they have been repeated often enough and with sufficient strength in many individuals in successive generations, they transform themselves, so to say, into experiences of the id, the impressions of which are preserved by heredity. Thus in the id, which is capable of being inherited, are harbored residues of the existences of countless egos; and, when the ego forms its super-ego out of the id, it may per- haps only be reviving shapes of former egos and be bringing them to resurrection. (p. 38) </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Freud sums up the ego’s component relationships in metaphors that describe not only the history of the ego itself but the history, as it were, of history. The political metaphors are especially striking: </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Our ideas about the ego are beginning to clear, and its various relation- ships are gaining distinctness. We now see the ego in its strengths and in its weaknesses. It is entrusted with important functions. By virtue of its relation to the perceptual system it gives mental processes an order in time and submits them to “reality-testing.” By interposing the processes of thinking, it secures a postponement of motor discharges and controls the access to motility. This last power is, to be sure, a question more of form than of fact; in the matter of action the ego’s position is like that of a constitutional monarch without whose sanction no law can be passed but who hesitates long before imposing his veto on any measure put forward by Parliament. All the experiences of life that originate from without enrich the ego; the id, however, is its second external world, which it strives to bring into subjection to itself. It with- draws libido from the id and transforms the object-cathexes of the id into ego-structures. With the aid of the super-ego, in a manner that is still obscure to us, it draws upon the experiences of past ages stored in the id. (p. 55) </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The scientific metaphors—“processes,” “discharges,” “transforms”—produce a technological vocabulary with which to describe the mind, much as applied science produces the technological infrastructure of capitalism. The ego’s transformations, designed to control its energies and their sources, result in its being likened to “a constitutional monarch,” a feudal personage at the mercy of parliamentary oversight. No wonder the ego is “like a politician,” required “to mediate between the world”—the present and future—and “the id”—the past (p. 56). </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">To describe the ego as a “constitutional monarchy” is to describe it, of course, as a compromise-formation between feudalism and capitalism. Freud’s second model of mind makes his double tropology explicit. It resolves the difference between the topography of the first phase and the dynamism of the second by including the topographical within the dynamic as a graveyard—as the ego, “a precipitate,” in the language of the mortuary, “of abandoned object-cathexes” (p. 29). In “Mourning and Melancholia,” the figures of the patient’s past are ghosts, per- sons known to be dead. Presiding over this graveyard, the ego is a sexton, a night watchman, a gravedigger to its own Hamlet, who looks on in perplexed fascination at his own past. Late Freud retains landscape by reimagining it as a cemetery of lost causes. These include the pernicious idealizations of the family romance and feudalism alike. Feudalism and the family romance are one and the same. The presumption of a galvanized maturity based on mourning rather than melancholia is no presumption. What is dead is dead. What lives is a perpetually precarious present, mindful of the past and careful not to repeat its derelictions. </span></span></span><br />
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<br />
1. V. N. Voloshinov, <i>Freudianism: A Critical Sketch</i>, trans. I. R. Titunik (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 90–91. <br />
<br />
2. See Harold Bloom, “The Internalization of Quest-Romance” (1968), in <i>Poetics of Influence</i>, ed. John Hollander (New Haven: Henry R. Schwab, 1988), pp. 17–42. <br />
<br />
3. See Perry Meisel, <i>The Literary Freud</i> (London: Routledge, 2007). <br />
<br />
4. Sigmund Freud, Letter of February 1, 1900, in T<i>he Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904</i>, trans. and ed. Jeffrey M. Masson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 398.<br />
<br />
5. See Andrew Cole, <i>The Birth of Theory</i> (Chicago; University of Chicago Press, 2014), p. 71.<br />
<br />
6. G. W. F. Hegel, <i>The Phenomenology of Mind</i>, trans. J. B. Baillie (New York: Harper, 1967), p.<br />
251.<br />
<br />
7. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in <i>The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud</i>, vol . 14, ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1953–1974), p. 249.<br />
<br />
8. W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Penguin, 1996), p. 5; and Paul Gilroy, <i>After Empire: Multiculture or Postcolonial Melancholia</i> (London: Routledge, 2004).<br />
<br />
9. Sigmund Freud, <i>The Ego and the Id</i> (1923), in Strachey, vol. 19, p. 56.<br />
<br />
10. Edward said, <i>Orientalism</i> (New York: Pantheon, 1978).<br />
<br />
11. John Dryden, The Conquest of Granada (1672), in <i>Dryden: The Dramatic Works, vol. 3</i>, ed. Montague summers (New York: Gordian Press, 1968), p. 35.<br />
<br />
12. Sigmund Freud, <i>The Interpretation of Dreams</i> (1900), in Strachey, vol. 5, p. 601. <br />
<br />
13. As in Hegel, dialectic governs psychical activity. As in Fredric Jameson, the unconscious is “political”: <i>The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act</i> (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981). As in Jacques Rancière, its terms are “aesthetic” because desire, in a Lacanian object-les- son, is governed by language: <i>The Aesthetic Unconscious</i>, trans. Debra Keates and James Swenson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009).<br />
<br />
14. See Alfred Binet, <i>On Double Consciousness: Experimental Psychological Studies</i> (London: Open Court, 1890). <br />
<br />
15. Karl Marx, <i>Capital, Vol. 1</i>, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (London: J. M. Dent, 1930), pp. 105–06. <br />
<br />
16. Freud, <i>The Interpretation of Dreams</i>, in Strachey, vol. 5, p. 532.<br />
<br />
17. For summaries, see Perry Meisel and Walter Kendrick, eds., <i>Bloomsbury/Freud: The Letters of James and Alix Strachey, 1924–25</i> (New York: Basic Books, 1985); and Adam Philips, “After Strachey,” <i>London Review of Books</i> 29, no. 19 (October 4, 2007), pp. 36–38.<br />
<br />
18. Freud, <i>The Interpretation of Dreams</i>, in Strachey, vol. 5, p. 532. <br />
<br />
19. See Strachey in ibid., p. 561, n.2.<br />
<br />
20. Sigmund Freud, “Family Romances” (1909), in Strachey, vol. 9, p. 237.<br />
<br />
21. Ibid., pp. 240–41.<br />
<br />
22. Marc Bloch, <i>Feudal Society, Vol. 1: The Growth of Ties of Independence</i>, trans. L. A. Manyon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), pp. 232–33. <br />
<br />
23. Perry Anderson, <i>Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism</i> (London: Verso, 1978), p. 151.<br />
<br />
24. See Paul Vitz, <i>Sigmund Freud’s Christian Unconscious</i> (New York: Guilford, 1988). <br />
<br />
25. Marc Bloch, <i>Feudal Society, Vol. 2: Social Classes and Political Organization</i>, trans. L. A. Manyon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), p. 441.<br />
<br />
26. Hermann von Helmholtz, “The Conservation of Force: A Physical Memoir,” in <i>Selected Writings</i>, ed. Russell Kahn (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1971), pp. 3–55; and Helmholtz, “The Application of the Law of the Conservation of Force to Organic Nature,” in Kahn, <i>Selected Writings</i>, pp. 109–91.<br />
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27. The notion of Bindung is hardly new in second-phase Freud. It is also at the center of the early <i>Project for a Scientific Psychology</i>, which, well before Freud’s elaboration of his political metaphors, even in<i> The Interpretation of Dream</i>s, theorizes the way in which psychical energy is both “free” and “bound” because its nature is “mobile.”<br />
<br />
28. Sigmund Freud, <i>Beyond the Pleasure Principle</i> (1920), in Strachey, vol. 18, pp. 38–39.<br />
<br />
29. See Paul Ricoeur, <i>Freud and Philosophy</i>, trans. D. savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977).<br />
<br />
30. Freud, <i>Beyond the Pleasure Principle</i>, in Strachey, vol. 18, p. 52.<br />
<br />
31. Freud, <i>The Ego and the Id</i>, in Strachey, vol. 19, p. 17.<br />
<br />
32. John Maynard Keynes, <i>A Tract on Monetary Reform</i> ( London: Macmillan, 1924), p. 170. <br />
<br />
33. Marx, <i>Capital</i>, Vol. 1, p. 51.<br />
<br />
34. Keynes, <i>A Tract on Monetary Reform</i>, p. 2, p. 111, p. 193.<br />
<br />
35. Keynes, <i>A Tract on Monetary Reform</i>, p. 109.<br />
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36. Freud, <i>The Ego and the Id</i>, in Strachey, vol. 19, p. 29.<br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Perry Meisel, "The Feudal Unconscious: Capitalism and the Family Romance," <i>October</i>, 159 (Winter, 2017), pp. 19-36. © 2017 by October Magazine, Ltd. and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Reprinted with permission of the MIT Press. http://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/octo</span></span></div>
Perry Meiselhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15136895284654246782noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2242027659057377496.post-89421908748844055452014-01-29T06:24:00.000-08:002014-01-30T15:08:09.215-08:00Imitation Modernism: An Interview with Perry Meisel<h1 id="article_title" style="background-color: white; color: black; display: block; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px auto; padding: 0px 1px; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">Imitation Modernism: An Interview with Perry Meisel</span></span></h1>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">by Katie Da Cunha Lewin</span></span></h2>
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<section id="article_text" style="background-color: white; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 20pt; padding-right: 2px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>Perry Meisel is a professor of English at New York University. He has written and lectured for over 40 years and is a prominent thinker in critical theory. His work tackles a disparate range of subjects, from pop culture and Henry James, to rock & roll and the popular television show<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Law and Order: Special Victims Unit</i>. Most recently, he has authored<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></i>The Myth of Popular Culture from Dante to Dylan<i> and co-edited the first edition of Saussure's </i>Course in General Linguistics<i> to be published in English.</i><br /><b><br />What are the concerns of the contemporary novel?<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b><br />The contemporary novel seems to me to have three directions. First, a conventional one that is both popular and critically praised - the familiar novel of psychological inwardness, an inheritance from High Modernism, whose protocols have become conventionalized, together with a return to the generic plot structures of the kind of realist fiction High Modernism presumably superseded. I have in mind Paul Auster, Jennifer Egan, and even Jonathan Franzen, for whom the plight of characters is as a rule heightened by a pathos that is a given precondition of this sentimentalization of modernist inwardness, which is as a rule quite brutal, from Dostoyevsky and James to Woolf, Joyce, Faulkner, and even Hemingway. What is successful about this kind of fiction is also what is problematic about it. It has institutionalized what was in the first instance something very new. But if James and Dostoyevsky and their High Modernist heirs taught writers to go within, today's imitation modernists, as I like to call them, assume that everyone not only goes within but stays within, all the time.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br /><br />While in Woolf or Joyce inwardness always mixes with sociality, in imitation modernism it does not. This kind of irony was not lost on Katherine Mansfield, probably the most influential single High Modernist, however cloaked her influence still remains. Mansfield's assumption that everyone is a narcissist, preoccupied not only by death but by shopping and one's household, is shockingly prescient, and well ahead of the notion that in James, or Dostoyevsky, only the noble or the special among us suffer. This, too, is a misreading of early and High Modernism alike - many of James's characters are, ultimately, run-of-the-mill charlatans, while Woolf and, especially, Joyce and Faulkner assume that everyone suffers from within from the smallest as well as the largest social slights. To use a term from Marxist theory, they suffer from the imbrications of hegemonic expectation inscribed in subjects unconsciously and constitutively. Contemporary or imitation modernism has replicated the look but not the real performance of early and High Modernism alike.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br /><br />Second, the fantastical mode. Here I have in mind, not the work of magic realists like Garcia-Marquez or even Manuel Puig - still vivid enough to be considered contemporaries - but what I will call members of the School of Barthelme, notably Ben Marcus, for whom word play and the construction of imaginary kingdoms on the basis of familiar tropes taken in new and unlikely directions is enormously successful, if a bit beside the point. The formal achievement alone is impressive. This is, however - like Barthelme himself - a mode with no egress. Fiction's formal beauty is one of the last things this socially oriented mode of discourse can rely upon as fit meat for survival. I should note here, too, that a writer like Will Self combines, as does, in a less obvious way, Nicholson Baker, psychological inwardness with an extraordinarily playful, almost Barthelmean sense of language, a combination that saves both from the problems of this mode in its pure form and that elevates each to the more recognizably achieved status readers and critics have granted them both.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br /><br />Third, what I will call media fiction. This is the most promising new direction for fiction, though it is only just opening despite the many cultural pressures that make it an inevitability. David Foster Wallace, in a 1993 essay, ‘E Unum Pluribus,’ called for a ‘literature of the image,’ one based in media apart from fiction like television. Among the chief influences on young writers, truth demands that new media be given a place in fictional representation. While Wallace - a better critic than novelist - never wrote this kind of fiction, others have begun to, notably Jay Cantor, whose Krazy Kat takes a cartoon character as its focus; Mark Jacobson, whose Gojiro does the same with the Japanese movie monster; and Tao Lin, whose<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Shoplifting from American Apparel</i><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>explores the way fashion - another popular, and visual, medium - usurps the stage of what contemporary reality is. Like Taipei, his novel employing Google Chat, which explores the incursion of social media into our daily discursive universe, this kind of media fiction is not fiction about fiction in the old ‘metafictional’ sense - a story about a story - but is itself realist in the strictest sense: These presumably ‘other’ or distinct media are in fact the very stuff of the real. Dr Johnson’s original sense of the novel's specificity - that it represents the real languages of life by participating in them - is reinvented here. Representing media is, in the classic Johnsonian sense, the representation of the way we live now. It is, ironically, imitation psychological modernism that is, by contrast, metafiction in the weak sense - a story about a story of isolated inner space once told and now no longer alive because no longer true.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br /><b><br />Who do you consider to be the most important writer who is still writing currently?<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b><br />It is always unwise to designate a writer who is ‘the most important,’ especially today. This is because literary importance - canonicity is the dirty word for it - is a function of influence. And, as you can see from what I've said about the contemporary practice of fiction, these influences have now accumulated to the point of an overdetermination unparalleled in the prior history of the novel. To be sure, Jane Austen and the Brontës chart different courses for later nineteenth-century fiction, but, then again, the Brontës may be seen as a response to Austen, and Hardy as a response to the Brontës. This kind of dialectical clarity, however, is missing today because the influence of modernism has been so diffuse, as shown by the three very different paths of contemporary writing I've outlined above.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br /><br />Still, three novelists remain influential, one recently deceased, and the other two now gray-beards. I have in mind, of course, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, and Norman Mailer. Mailer's became media fiction when he began the New Journalistic side of his career with<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>The Armies of the Night</i><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>and his belief that history is itself the stuff of fiction, and vice versa. Pynchon gave us the rock and roll sentence - still largely unused - and Reed an equally musicalized kind of prose that combines the rhythms of soul and jazz with the argot, both high-literary and slang, that lie behind their enunciative patterns. Nonetheless, we have moved beyond that moment in literary history in which dialectical movement can be seen or traced from one major writer to another. Despite their importance, all three of these writers seem, for the time being at least, left unused by our contemporaries. Even Salinger, the most academically neglected of important writers, remains neglected in fictional influence because he finds his influence in New Journalism rather than in fiction proper.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br /><b><br />As you know from conversations we have had, I am very dubious about some aspects of postmodernism and its stultifying effect on metafictional studies. How do you see postmodernism as functioning in critical theory?<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b><br />Postmodernism is now a clear and delimited historical category. Whether Robbe-Grillet, Borges, or Barthelme, its goals were to call attention to the frames in which we read and to foreground them. Whether Wallace, Marcus, or Cantor, this is no longer what fiction does, even at its most extreme. Typically, metafiction is a word synonymous with the kind of postmodernism I have already described. As for its relation to theory, that is self-evident. This is also why noting the similarities between classic postmodernism and structuralism and deconstruction goes without saying, and deserves a passing remark of general assumption rather than the whole books that have been unnecessarily devoted to it.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br /><b><br />What aspect of structuralism needs further exploration in critical work?<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b><br />There seem to me to be no further routes structuralism and its heirs - deconstruction in particular - have to take. We now have a wonderfully synthetic method for literary study, and for discursive study in general. All the new, or supposedly new, approaches, from the New Historicism to archive studies, environmental criticism, gender studies, queer theory, the new lyric theory, surface reading, and distant reading are spins on structuralism, like it or not. Surface reading, for example, is simply Barthes in ‘From Work to Text.’ Distant reading is simply Foucault's<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>The Order of Things</i>. Archive studies is simply a combination of Foucault's<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Archaeology of Knowledge</i><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>and Derrida's<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Archive Fever</i>.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br /><br />As for gender studies and queer theory, they are all Freud, Lacan, and Klein. Postcolonialist theory seems to me the sole instance of a reasonably fresh conceptual development, though in its origins, it, too, is the function of Edward Said's use of classic theory - in this case Lacan - to clarify the nature of an ideological configuration regarding otherness as constitutive of psychological subjectivity in an overtly political way. Said is, of course, prefigured here by Fanon, and polished by Homi Bhabha and Paul Gilroy. This said, one should also note that we would be nowhere today without the work of Althusser and Raymond Williams, who accomplished in theoretical terms what the media novelists have accomplished later on in fiction - seeing how constitutive ideological formations are in the construction of the unconscious. These New Left theoreticians saw how, in a reversal of classical Marxism, base doesn't simply determine superstructure. Superstructure also determines base or infrastructure by creating states of mind that allow - or disallow - the means of production of goods and social services to be sustained.</span></span></section><aside id="article_author_bio" style="background-color: white; color: black; display: block; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 30px 0px 15px; padding: 0px; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span id="article_author_name" style="font-weight: bold;">Katie Da Cunha Lewin</span><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>is a London-based freelance writer and a PhD researcher with the department of English at the University of Sussex. She researches and writes on structuralism, modern and contemporary literature, and negative theology.</span></span></aside><aside id="article_author_bio" style="background-color: white; color: black; display: block; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 30px 0px 15px; padding: 0px; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"> <span style="font-size: small;">Originally published in Review31 in January 2014.</span> </span></span></aside>Perry Meiselhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15136895284654246782noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2242027659057377496.post-56141003781669517372013-03-31T16:03:00.000-07:002013-03-31T19:39:25.438-07:00Woolf and Freud: The Kleinian Turnby Perry Meisel<br />
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Woolf’s Journey from Freud to Klein</center>
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Everyone knows the popular conception of Virginia Woolf’s relation to Freud. It is anecdotal, and it is, presumably, diagnostic. Newly settled in London in 1939, Freud presents Woolf with a narcissus when she and Leonard Woolf come to pay their respects at his home in Maresfield Gardens, now the Freud Museum in Hampstead (Bell 1972, 2: 209). This privileged glance into history, however, is not forensic. Freud presents Woolf, not with a diagnosis, but, through the agency of a flower, with a mirror. The narcissus was a reflection less of Freud’s belief that Woolf was self-absorbed than of his belief that they shared a common shop. <br />
What do Woolf and Freud hold in common? Woolf’s familiar denunciation of psycho-analysis in ‘Freudian Fiction’ in 1920 is an attack, not on Freud, but on Freud’s vulgar followers, for whom psycho-analysis is brittle and reductive: <br />
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Our complaint is rather that the new key is a patent key that opens every door. It simplifies rather than complicates, detracts rather than enriches. The door swings open briskly enough, but the apartment to which we are admitted is a bare little room with no outlook whatever. (1920: 154)<br />
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Freud’s own writing calls into question its assumptions. Full of reversals, which are often regulated by rhetorical questions, Freud’s prose resembles Woolf’s own, particularly her non-fiction. The dialogism common to them both is a conversation not only with the reader—each regularly provokes the reader and asks the reader to argue—but a conversation of the writing persona with itself, especially with its own conclusions as they stand and then are made to fall. <br />
These formal similarities are also thematic ones. Indeed, they are thematic to the extent that they are formal. Woolf and Freud’s dialogism doubles or, rather, instantiates their shared notion of psychical process. Psychical process—Woolf’s similarities to Freud as a novelist now also come into focus—is not only a narrative; it is also narratological. Its penchant for self-revision breaks down its own coherence in the act of seeking it. The psyche is always in such a perilous conversation. It is social, and it is public-spirited. The world is an interplay, not simply of reader and text, but of psyche and the pressures exerted upon it by the demands of the external world. These demands take the form of reality, or, rather, reality takes the form of these demands, chief among them the constraints upon what one is allowed to say and to think. Here one is faced with the audacity of both writers in a surprising way. For Woolf and Freud alike, reality is identical with the permission to speak, which is a function of rationality rather than of fantasy or imagination. The writer exercises imagination by virtue of bringing his fantasies into line with reality. The irony is hilarious. The conclusion is inescapable. Reality and superego are one and the same. <br />
This is because the exigencies of life, as Freud likes to call them, are identical with knowing when to hold one’s tongue. Woolf’s feminism allows her to see this very easily. Because survival is bound to the laws of language and its sovereign ceremonies, psychical process, always in the service of survival, is an endless negotiation between law and desire. That the negotiation must take place within language is what dooms it even before the negotiation begins. For Woolf, the laws of survival include a room of one’s own in the strict material sense—a place to hang one’s hat if, indeed, one wears a hat. Material survival, in other words, is bound up not only with the laws of signification, but with the laws of patriarchy. <br />
The psyche is not a private affair; it is an elaborate dance, not only with language, but with the symbolizations with which linguistic functioning is identical. Signifier and signified are reciprocal, mutually constitutive from the very beginnings of life, when the infant, striving for survival at the mother’s breast, is disappointed to find that the simple materiality of the food that the breast provides is bound up with the need to calculate the breast’s itinerary moment to moment, day by passing day. The breast’s availability and the mother’s schedule, particularly her absences, require the infant to imagine the breast as a symbol, available or not—part of a signifying chain—at the same time that it need not be imagined at all, when it is the pure presence and glory of nourishment and satiety. The breast, like all the elements of future experience, is both real and symbolic, symbolic because it is real, and real because it is symbolic. It occupies a place that is simultaneously both inside the psyche and outside it, in the external world. <br />
Freud’s assumption that the psyche is social—its lack of emphasis in Freud has drawn a tradition of complaint—is understood by different psycho-analytic traditions in different ways. In France, it is made possible by Saussure’s influence on Lacan. In the United States, it is won, less persuasively, by readings of Freud as different as those of Erich Fromm and Karen Horney, and by the ego psychology that flows from Anna Freud’s influence on the interpretation of her father’s work. In Britain, it is accomplished by Anna Freud’s chief rival, Melanie Klein, for whom the fundamental significance of the breast is well-known. Klein’s influence enables the pediatrician D.W. Winnicott, one of James Strachey’s first psycho-analytic patients, and the school of object relations theory to which it gives rise, particularly the work of W.R.D. Fairbairn and Wilfred Bion. <br />
On 14 May 1925, the Hogarth Press published both <i>Mrs. Dalloway</i> and the third volume of Freud’s <i>Collected Papers</i>, James and Alix Strachey’s translation of Freud’s case histories (Meisel and Kendrick 1985: 265n). In 1926, Melanie Klein arrived in London under the Stracheys’ sponsorship. A dramatic change in Woolf’s writing followed with the publication of To the Lighthouse by the Hogarth Press in 1927. Like the change in Woolf’s writing from <i>Jacob’s Room</i> (1922) to <i>Mrs. Dalloway</i> that derived from Woolf’s friendship with Katherine Mansfield, this change was the direct result of Woolf’s exposure to Klein’s ideas. Alix Strachey had begun to translate Klein’s papers into English, some given at the British Psycho-Analytic Society, and they, too, were published by the Hogarth Press, beginning in 1932 with <i>The Psycho-Analysis of Children.</i> <br />
Beyond the reasonable assumption that Woolf, as she regularly did, read all work published by the Hogarth Press, often in excruciating editorial detail (for the symptomatic exceptions, see Abel 1989: 14-5), no record exists of either the inevitable fact of Woolf and Klein’s conversations, or of their precise terms of endearment, only an entry in Woolf’s diary describing a dinner in 1939 (1984: 209). But the textual evidence alone makes Klein’s influence on Woolf a foregone conclusion. If Mansfield requires Woolf to pay more attention to concrete detail so as to gain a firmer verisimilitude in the rendering of psychical process—the difference between Jacob’s Room and Mrs. Dalloway is its chief evidence—then Klein’s influence, propped inevitably upon Mansfield’s own, leads Woolf to an even more exact focus on objects, and on objects of a very specific kind. They are not simply the objects of public or consumer life (the chimes of Big Ben in <i>Mrs. Dalloway,</i> or the sadness of Mansfield’s Rosabel, who lacks the sexual satisfaction associated with the possession of commodities). They are objects of a more bodily kind, which peregrinate the unstable threshold between what is inside the mind and what lies outside it. <br />
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Part-Objects in <i>To the Lighthouse</i> </div>
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One has only to inspect the beginning of <i>To the Lighthouse</i> to see how Woolf takes the breast as her focus. What kind of symbolization can more readily serve Woolfian psychological realism at its most achieved? And what kind of symbolization can better serve to connect the mind of Woolf’s readers with the minds of her characters? Here what is not a mimetic but a dialogical kind of fiction takes its heightened turn, a Kleinian turn that allows reader and character to meet in a zone of symbolization common to them both and by means of whose vocabulary they can share. <br />
It is not, of course, Mrs. Ramsay’s breast that is Woolf’s focus. For all her fecundity, Mrs. Ramsay is not a particularly giving mother; she has the tendency to withdraw from those she loves, including her children (Dever 1998: 206-08). No, it is Mr. Ramsay’s ‘breast’ (Woolf 1927: 10), oddly enough, that draws the young James Ramsay’s attention. The choice of object is filled with irony. Although the breast is a property of the mother rather than of the father; James’s anger towards his father for always disappointing him is directed at this characteristically feminine ‘part-object’ (Klein, 1935). Though a natural enough anatomical place to be a target for his son’s anger, Mr. Ramsay’s ‘breast’ also has this ‘alien association’, to use Pater’s phrase (1889: 18), an attribute of the mother’s body displaced onto the father’s. It serves, strangely enough, as the object of James’s Oedipal rage rather than as a symbol for his dependence upon his mother and fear that she will depart. In Kleinian thought, the infant does indeed grow enraged at the breast as well as enamored of it, but this is because of its disappointment at the mother’s propensity for being absent as well as present. When the mother’s breast is absent, it is, concludes the infant, because the father has spirited her away. Thus the absent or ‘bad’ breast, as Klein calls it, citing Sándor Radó (Radó 1929: 420; Klein 1929: 204n1), is, in an unexpected but also real way, very much the father’s breast. No wonder it is the focus of James’s scorn. It allows him to conceptualise the bad breast at the level of cause. <br />
To make matters worse, by imagining a ‘poker’ in his father’s ‘breast’, James imagines his father’s penis, as Klein says the infant does (1928), inside the mother’s body. The phallic mother, as Lacan will call her, predominates. Mr. Ramsay, for all his kingly powers, is kingly only to the extent that he controls, or seems to control, the mother’s comings and goings. He does so by virtue of his complaints. He governs the mother’s first and most originary power of providing and sustaining life only because he wants it for his own. The Oedipus complex, in other words, is gynocentric—its power to make the mother present and absent rests with a father every bit as dependent on the mother as his son. The child believes the father to be powerful in his own right, even though he is powerful only as a relative agent in the mother’s travels. Either way, the father’s subjugation to the mother is clear. He is an infant, too. Mr. Ramsay, forever seeking pathos and the tragic status that presumably accompanies it, is only pathetic. The philological shift of the term ‘pathos’ from its Aristotelian to its vernacular meaning marks the shift from a world, like that of Jacob Flanders, in which educated men live, often in a double sense, according to Greek rules, to the colloquial world in which women, even educated women, also live. These two worlds are, from a psycho-analytic point of view, the world of fantasy and the world of reality. <br />
Woolf’s Oedipus complex, like Klein’s, is a feminist performance. Because James is, at the age of six, at the height of the classical Oedipal phase, he is also in the midst of a revival of the infant’s experience of the ‘depressive position’ (Klein, 1935)—the position of having to integrate the mother’s baleful comings and goings at the father’s presumable command into a single state of mind. No wonder Mrs. Ramsay dies in ‘Time Passes’. It is in order to make this kind of depression or melancholia the very condition of life itself in the novel’s concluding section. Mrs. Ramsay’s shadow, in the words Freud uses to describe melancholia, falls across everything, even ten years later, signifying a loss that no one can accept as real (Freud, 1917). Because Mrs. Ramsay remains idealised, her death leads, except perhaps for Lily, not to proper mourning, but to depression in both the Freudian and the Kleinian senses, and shows their common nature. <br />
This difficulty in distinguishing between external or real states such as death and internal or psychical states such as the status of feeling in relation to them is the boundary that the novel negotiates, and represents by doing so. In the novel’s third part, this mediation is still as difficult to accomplish as it is for James in the Oedipal position he occupies as a child at the novel’s beginning. Mrs. Ramsay remains a part-object even—indeed, especially—in death, and the novel’s characters grow more rather than less infantile as they grow older. Nor is Mrs. Ramsay alone a part-object. So, too, is Mr. Ramsay, though not in propria persona. Mr. Ramsay is, as a father, the ‘bad’ breast. That is what a father is. He is that element in the family romance required to account for the mother’s lack of attentiveness to the child, and remains so, unconsciously, in perpetuity. Mr. Ramsay embraces the role of the mother’s lover with renewed psychical gusto when he can no longer embrace his wife in point of fact. <br />
The novel’s Oedipal allegory is of a piece with its other allegories, which render additional foundational categories partial rather than absolute (Meisel, 1987). The novel’s epistemological allegory—Mr. Ramsay is a professional philosopher—deconstructs his positivism. Its aesthetic allegory deconstructs Lily’s expressive mimesis. As in the Oedipus complex, in which there is, properly speaking, no real father, only a symbolic one, there is neither ground in philosophy nor a stable original that art may be said to copy. Instead, there is only the transitional site common to them all as dubious shelters in a world at bay. <br />
One can only conclude that <i>To the Lighthouse</i> as a text is also a part-object. More keenly than most novels because of its focus on maternal loss, it is a heightened and calculated dialogue between what it withholds and what the reader desires, which is a state of completion that is foreclosed. As literary texts, Klein’s essays, too, are, in this sense, part-objects. Their limited focus on clinical detail leaves Klein’s reader perpetually unsatisfied. No whole theory emerges in Klein’s essays, which more often than not skip to case history as soon as they can. Like the recalcitrant milk of a reluctant mother—Klein’s intellectual modesty suffuses her writing and her biography—Klein withholds from her reader what her reader must go on to invent whole. Klein’s reader is always in search of what will provide a fully systematic Klein. Only those readers who have surmounted the frustrations of the ‘depressive position’ in which Klein places them can provide one. Juliet Mitchell remains the best example (1986). As a revision of Freud’s writing, Klein’s own is an ascesis, a curtailment of Freud’s expansive self-revision into a series of moments (see also Kristeva 2000: 197-99). Klein’s longest and most sustained piece of writing, the posthumous Narrative of a Child Analysis (1961), revisits Freud’s enabling case histories at their formal root, particularly the case of Little Hans (1909), and both recapitulates and revises them by being longer as narration and more withholding as theory. Unlike Freud, Klein provokes the reader, not to argue to gain a sense of wholeness and satisfaction, but to adjust to their lack. <br />
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Bloomsbury and the History of British Psycho-analysis </div>
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Unlike Woolf’s characters, Woolf’s readers may return to real history whenever they wish. Bloomsbury’s horizons included, beginning in 1912, when James Strachey attended a meeting of the British Society for Psychical Research featuring a presentation on Freud, the wisdom of psycho-analysis. Navigated by the younger Strachey, British psycho-analysis eventually came to mediate between the two principal trends in Freudian thought that survived the death of Freud in London in 1939. Strachey was left to manage the rival legacies of Klein, which included those of Karl Abraham and Sándor Ferenczi, and of Anna Freud, and to steer ego psychology in an American direction, even though Anna Freud remained in England. Once object relations theory came to regard the world as Woolf does in <i>To the Lighthouse</i>, as a transitional site between psychical process and external things and events, the shape of British analysis, including why it was open to the influence of Lacan and Althusser later on, was complete. To put it this way, of course, is also to suggest an unlikely similarity between British psycho-analysis and British Marxism as it, too, slowly changed. Raymond Williams’s refreshed understanding of superstructure or ideology comes to represent what the tradition of Bloomsbury psycho-analysis had known all along (Williams, 1973)—the social structure of what John Maynard Keynes called the ‘states of mind’ (1949: 83) that Williams was to criticise as the unenviably privatised focus of Bloomsbury life and Bloomsbury ideas (1978). As in Althusser (1964), the world as a whole, in Bloomsbury, and in British psycho-analysis, becomes a site of ‘transition’—Winnicott’s term is appropriate here (1953)—between thinking and doing, inside and outside, wish and possibility. <br />
This history of ideas also has a more exact literary history than the indifferent prose of both British psycho-analysis and British Marxism might lead one to believe. Here, the tradition of British literary physicians from Browne to Locke and Hartley has a vivid return. This is the fiery history of reaction to Winnicott’s work by Winnicott’s most extraordinary disciple, R.D. Laing (Winnicott, 1960; Laing, 1960), and the anxious reaction to Laing a decade later by Oliver Sacks, beginning with <i>Migraine</i> in 1970. <br />
Laing’s imagination of madness as a ‘world’ whole and on its own is a way of negating Winnicott’s belief in a world made only of transitional objects, coaxed into coherence by the ego. For Laing, this world of truce is to be damned as insufficiently frank about its own shoddy moorings. Psychosis, particularly schizophrenia, is as reasonable an alternative to its equivocations as the collective neurosis to which it gives rise in the ideology of a middle-class society founded on part-objects. As a writer, Sacks, reacting to Laing, negates Laing’s negation of Winnicott by returning to the rationalist’s sphere with overcompensatory enthusiasm. Sacks revises the champion of madness by transforming the psychological into the neurological, the psychical into the physical, and Laing’s sympathy for the insane into a robust renewal of reason and a belief in health. Freud’s own prehistory as a neurologist gives Sacks’s achievement a precursor authority, although it is one to which Sacks also returns as a way of aborting Freud’s own subsequent transformation into a psychologist who took both physical and psychical factors into account in assessing culture and the minds it produces. The capaciousness of subsequent British neuropsychoanalysis (Solms andTurnbull, 2002) brings this literary history full circle by regarding the psychology of the mind and the histology of the brain dialectically, as Freud himself did. <br />
The topic of Woolf’s own presumable madness brings our discussion full circle, too. Woolf’s sexual abuse as a teenager by her Duckworth half-brothers does not wholly explain her alleged fear of her body, which experienced stress not only for reasons of psychological trauma, but also because of somatic factors such as headache, exhaustion, and the kind of derealization most familiar clinically, not as psychological, but as partial epilepsy. Woolf suffered not from what is today called somatization—the mind’s use of the body for the production of psychological states such as depression and what used to be called conversion hysteria—but from a more strictly somatic disorder. Unlike the Ramsays’, Woolf’s transitional zone lay, not between memory and desire, but between the reality of her body and the reality of the page. <br />
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Works Cited </div>
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Abel, Elizabeth. 1989. <i>Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis</i>. University of Chicago Press.<br />
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Althusser, Louis. 1964. ‘Ideology and ideological state apparatuses’. <i>In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays</i>. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971, 127-86. <br />
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Bell, Quentin. <i>Virginia Woolf: A Biography</i>. 1972. Rpt. 2 vols. in one. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. <br />
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Dever, Carolyn. 1998. <i>Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud</i>. Cambridge University Press. <br />
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Freud, Sigmund. 1917. ‘Mourning and melancholia’. <i>The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud</i>, 24 vols. Ed. James Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953-74. XIV: 243-58.<br />
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Keynes, John Maynard. 1949. ‘My early beliefs’. In <i>Two Memoirs</i>. London: Rupert Hart-Davis. <br />
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Klein, Melanie. 1928. ‘Early stages of the Oedipus conflict and super-ego formation’. In <i>The Psycho-Analysis of Children</i> (1932). Trans. Alix Strachey. Rpt. New York: Delacorte Press, 1975. 123-48. <br />
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----- . 1929. ‘Personification in the play of children’. In <i>Love, Guilt and Reparation & Other Works</i> <i>1921-1945</i>. Rpt. New York: Delacorte Press, 1975. 199-209. <br />
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----- . 1935. ‘A contribution to the psycho-genesis of manic-depressive states’. In <i>Love, Guilt and Reparation & Other Works 1921-1945</i>. Rpt. New York: Delacorte Press, 1975. 262-89. <br />
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Kristeva, Julia. 2000. <i>Melanie Klein</i>. Trans. Ross Guberman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. <br />
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Laing, R.D. 1960. <i>The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness</i>. London: Tavistock Publications. <br />
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Meisel, Perry, and Kendrick, Walter. Eds. 1985. <i>Bloomsbury/Freud: The Letters of James and Alix Strachey, 1924-25</i>. New York: Basic Books. <br />
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Meisel, Perry. 1987. <i>The Myth of the Modern: A Study in British Literature and Criticism after 1850</i>. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. <br />
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Mitchell, Juliet. 1986. ‘Introduction’. <i>The Selected Melanie Klein</i>. Ed. Juliet Mitchell. Rpt. New York: The Free Press, 1987. 9-32. <br />
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Pater, Walter. 1889. ‘Style’. In <i>Appreciations</i>. New Library Edition. 10 vols. London: Macmillan, 1910. 5-38. <br />
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Radó, Sándor. 1928. ‘The problem of melancholia’.<i> International Journal of Psycho-Analysis</i>, 9: 420-38.<br />
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Sacks, Oliver. 1970. <i> Migraine</i>. Berkeley: University of California Press.<br />
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Solms, Mark, and Turnbull, Oliver. 2002. <i>The Brain and the Inner World</i>. New York: Other Press. <br />
<br />
Williams, Raymond. 1973. ‘Base and superstructure in Marxist critical theory’. In <i>Culture and Materialism: Selected Essays</i>. London: Verso, 1980. 31-49. <br />
<br />
----- . 1978. ‘The Bloomsbury fraction’. In<i> Culture and Materialism: Selected Essays</i>. London: Verso, 1980. 148-69. <br />
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Winnicott, D.W. 1953. ‘Transitional objects and transitional phenomena’. In <i>Playing and Reality</i>. London: Tavistock Publications, 1971. 1-30. <br />
<br />
----- . 1960. ‘Ego distortions in terms of true and false self’. In <i>The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development</i>. Ed. John D. Sutherland. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1965. 140-52. <br />
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Woolf, Virginia. 1920. ‘Freudian fiction’. In <i>Contemporary Writers</i> (1965). London: The Hogarth Press. 152-54. <br />
<br />
----- . 1927. <i>To the Lighthouse</i>. Rpt. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, n.d. <br />
<br />
----- . 1984. <i>The Diary of Virginia Woolf, V</i>: 1936-44. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. London: The Hogarth Press.<br />
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<i>Originally published in</i> Virginia Woolf in Context. <i>Edited by Jane Goldman and Bryony Randall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.</i>Perry Meiselhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15136895284654246782noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2242027659057377496.post-45500754241843382492011-03-05T14:57:00.000-08:002016-09-29T05:59:25.922-07:00Dylan and the Critics<div>
by Perry Meisel</div>
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Chronicles, Volume 1. <i>By Bob Dylan (Simon & Schuster).</i><br />
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Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads. <i>By Greil Marcus (PublicAffairs).</i><br />
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Dylan's Visions of Sin. <i>By Christopher Ricks (Ecco).
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Many years ago, in a review of Bob Dylan's <i>Tarantula</i> (1971) in the <i>New York Times Book Review</i>, Robert Christgau wisely cautioned that the book not be taken as a book of poems. To do so, he argued, would be to mistake the nature of Dylan's art, which is, book or song, pose or performance, something profoundly hybrid. For Christgau, Dylan's hybridity derives from rock and roll's enormous plasticity as a medium. Rock and roll includes everything – the history of world music, the history of world speech, the history of world movement and dress. It even includes Dylan. Dylanologists who concentrate on one thing instead of another – Dylan's words or Dylan's music – miss the full effect.
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Over the years, describing this full effect has been less of a problem than defining it. No one knows where to start. The tradition of descriptive Dylan criticism is for this reason the most distinguished; it requires no choices and a surfeit of splendid adjectives. Dylan's earliest observers – Paul Williams is probably the best example – combined exquisite observation with an interest in fact. All of the biographies are reasonably good because their aims are limited to portraiture and storytelling. None presents a case for much of anything, including those by gifted critics like Robert Shelton and Bob Spitz. Interpretive books about Dylan are no match for them. Whether they come from the academy or the academy-in-exile of rock criticism, such books are reductive to a fault.
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Even a brief survey is dispiriting. For Dylan's political observers, everything is social allegory. Mike Marqusee's <i>Chimes of Freedom</i> (2004) turns Dylan's work into a quest for the "unconventional"; David Hajdu s social history of Dylan in the Village, <i>Positively Fourth Street</i> (2001), turns it into a conversation among friends. For Dylan's formalist observers, things are taken in hand in less obvious ways. The goal of Neil Corcoran s effusive anthology of essays, <i>Bob Dylan with the Poets and Professors</i> (2002), is self-congratulation. Betsy Bowden's <i>Performed Literature</i> (1982), originally a doctoral dissertation in the Berkeley English Department, regards Dylan as a performance artist. Bowden does not wish to be reductive, but her notion of performance casts Dylan as a performing poet whose words come first despite their rock-and-roll frame. The English composer Wilfrid Mellers's <i>A Darker Shade of Pale</i> (1984) remains singularly provocative for a good reason: it is holistic, half musicology and half poetic analysis. (Mellers read English as a Cambridge undergraduate.) But this division of Dylan in two undoes the sense of unity that Mellers wishes to create; he can find no dialectic in Dylan's double enterprise.
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Perhaps one way to read Dylan, then, is not directly – not at first, anyway – but through his critics, particularly through their lapses. Reception histories are often unexpectedly revealing. More basic to Dylan's reception than the superiority of the descriptive to the analytic is that there is much agreement about Dylan's coherence as a majestic musical figure in his High or Classic phase. Everyone knows Dylan's early musical history. In his recent documentary, even the contentious Martin Scorsese suggests that the consensus about its shape and texture runs deep and true. We can feel the roots that clutch. A high-school rocker, Dylan became a ruggedly self-conscious folkie when he landed in Greenwich Village in 1961, exchanging Woody Guthrie for Muddy Waters and Dave Van Ronk for Bobby Vee. When he shocked the world with an electric band at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, Dylan was only returning to the wider theater of rock and roll, which the folk mode had allowed him to reimagine as more porous musically and more amenable to lyrical prodding.
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Half of the fans booed. For them, plugging in was a fall from grace. The music had nothing to do with this fall, and neither did the lyrics. So central is this moment in the history of rock and roll that it is easy to overlook its real significance: Dylan was being read typologically. In fact, the idea of the Christian Dylan was already in place at Newport in 1965, well before Dylan's actual conversion to Christianity in 1979. Typology is a pervasive mode of thinking, introduced by Tertullian's Christian reading of the Hebrew Bible and trickling down into popular assumption as the Church Fathers, beginning with Augustine, made it the best way to find hope and solace in life when faced with its difficulties. As a doctrine of interpretation, typology regards events of the Hebrew Bible as prophesying or prefiguring their repetition and completion in other spheres of action in the Christian Bible. "The persons and events of the Old Testament," wrote Erich Auerbach in 1944, "were prefigurations of the New Testament and its history of salvation." The Fall of Man from the Garden is its most familiar example; Christ's suffering both repeats and redeems it. Conversion narratives bring home the truth of typology for everyman. Augustine's great conversion scene occurs, in a splendid literary flourish, in a Roman garden. The pagan garden is fallen, but just as Augustine is redeemed by grace, so is the garden. Formally speaking, Augustine's conversion redeems his narrative's <i>mise-en-scène</i> and his soul in the same typological gesture. In other words, later events, in Scripture or in life, gain their meaning by being repetitions and fulfillments of earlier ones. Rhetorical rather than theological in its classical origins, and variable even in its later Christian schools of practice, <i>figura</i> nonetheless came to obey its typological shape. Auerbach's history of the use of <i>figura</i> in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages shows just how deeply typological thinking informs the foundations of Western judgment, giving to newly converted peoples such as the Goths and the Celts, for example, "a basic conception of history," as Auerbach puts it, superadded to and following from their new religious beliefs.
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Typology, or <i>figura</i>, structures both Dylan's popular reception and his critical interpretation. Its key trope emerges again and again: the trope of the fall, which Dylan follows, or seems to follow, with exceeding regularity, like a Christian soldier marching, inevitably, to the earlier Jewish drum. The fall from acoustic to electric at Newport in 1965 repeated the biblical fall from innocence to sin. Whether or not Dylan could redeem himself from this fall became the paradigm for thinking about him, for lining up with or against the devil's party. It not only set a standard of judgment with which to follow Dylan's career, but also gained additional weight from Dylan's American context. Typology's most familiar American pattern is, to use Leo Marx's phrase, the fall from the garden to the machine, a form of both progress and lament every bit as double edged as the one Augustine secured. Its secular terms describe Dylan's own presumable fall – plugging in – but in doing so they reveal once again their religious roots. Countercultural thinking reflects this doubly sedimented history with particular vividness, setting nature against culture at the level of value no matter the idiosyncratic experience of individual listeners.
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Nor, after Newport, was there long to wait for an encore. The following summer Dylan fell off his motorcycle near Woodstock and cracked a bone in his spine. The die was cast: Dylan was always falling. Scorsese's film concludes here, not because he wishes to serve this religious paradigm – he never does – but because he wants to describe its tenacity. In his view, <i>John Wesley Harding</i> (1968) is Dylan's last great recording, and one of its characters, Augustine, is as "alive," sings Dylan, "as you or me." Afterward came the Dylan Wars, wars of religion that have continued for almost forty years, pitting progress against decline, Dylan the mortal god against Dylan the mortal man. Forty years should be enough, at least according to the paradigm.
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Is there any help for the Dylanologist amid these typological ruins? The myth of Dylan requires Dylan to fall in order to continue being a myth. This is an apparatus, obviously, not an assessment. Marqusee is a typologist, even though he approves of Newport; his paradise is the freedom that Dylan leaves behind when he becomes a Christian. Bowden is a typologist; her paradise is Dylan's putative expressiveness. Mellers is a typologist; his paradise is a Europe with blue notes in its own folk music.
<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>There are alternatives to the lapsarian account of a fall from grace. The first Dylanologist, A. J. Weberman, scoured Dylan's garbage on MacDougal Street for clues to the meaning of Dylan s work. Weberman was a phenomenologist, not a typologist. Dylan chased him away nonetheless, objecting to Weberman's assumptions about intent: they did not take the unconscious into account. But Weberman came back, again and again, sometimes with demonstrators, sometimes with coffee. Michael Gray, Weberman's upscale counterpart, an academic-in-exile living in the English countryside, also prefers information to revelation, although of a tidier kind. Gray's encyclopedic <i>Song and Dance Man III</i> (2000) is superficially thorough, cataloguing Dylan's various sources as they flow through his songs and anatomizing both lyrics and music against this historical scrim. Weberman may have been tough, but Gray is a disciple of F. R. Leavis. Gray, like Leavis before him, believes that a careful reading of great poets will ensure the health of culture. For Leavis, it was T. S. Eliot; for Gray, it is Dylan. Almost typological, but not quite. For Weberman and Gray alike, a figure like Dylan is worthy of studious love not because of his pieties but because of his excess.
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span>If typology is reductive, however, excess is intractable. Gray has no argument to make; Weberman had arguments only on the street. All is lost. What is the pilgrim to do? Is there another trend in Dylan's reception besides typology and excess? Two figures are left standing, and they predominate as readers of Dylan because they are the only ones with unified critical programs and sustained critical approaches. Dylan's best reception is the imaginary conversation between them. One is an academic; one is an academic-in-exile. One is a close reader; one is a cultural critic. One is interested in the lyrics; one is more engaged with the music. But they share a diligence and a penchant for systematic thinking that makes their ostensibly different approaches to Dylan two parts of a larger, single perspective.</div>
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The academic-in-exile is Greil Marcus, a critic for whom all emanations of American culture are the same. <i>Mystery Train</i> (1975) established this critical terrain long before Marcus embarked on his study of Elvis (1991) and on his first study of Dylan (1997). In<i> Mystery Train</i>, Robert Johnson and Jonathan Edwards resemble one another because they share a preoccupation with solitary reflection. So, one inevitably observes, does everybody else in American culture, from Thomas Jefferson to Madonna. One appreciates the permission to be self-evident, but too little regard for context obscures the fact that such similarities arise from different historical circumstances. In <i>Mystery Train</i>, Marcus's ease of purpose allows him to range widely over the cultural terrain without being specific. Marcus's cultural criticism shares the goals but not the procedures of the academic New Historicism with which it is contemporary. Rock criticism recapitulates literary criticism's modes of reading, and one of the reasons for this is simple: many jazz and rock critics have studied in major departments of English at defining moments in the history of literary-critical method. The early jazz critic Martin Williams learned New Critical close reading at the University of Pennsylvania; the rock critic Christgau learned close reading decades later at Dartmouth University. Marcus himself may have fled graduate school at UC Berkeley, but he got a sip of early New Historicism when he was there as an undergraduate.
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>It is only the New Critical approach to Dylan, however, that has an overtly academic affiliation. Its avatar is Christopher Ricks. Although Ricks has lectured on Dylan for many years, his book, <i>Dylan's Visions of Sin</i>, appeared in the United States only in 2004. Ricks is most concerned with the extraordinary perfection of Dylan's work when it is viewed simply as verse. Unlike the many rock critics who eschew an affiliation with the academy, Ricks is an ex-Cambridge don who now teaches at Boston University. He is a fine critic of English and American poetry, particularly of Milton, and one whose work has remained useful over the years despite historical changes in critical method. The resonances of Marcus – and the grander tones of Dylan himself –stand out best if Ricks introduces them.
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Ricks's attraction to Dylan is idiosyncratic, an outgrowth of his love for poetry, not for rock and roll. He isn't really a rock critic, but despite his obsequious charm and disingenuous avuncularity – he must appeal to the rock critic as best he can – Ricks has a good deal to say. He makes no apologies for not talking very much about Dylan's music. Odd as it may seem, he does not regard it as his job. With the enthusiasm of an honors schoolboy, Ricks reads Dylan as poet, and in enormous technical detail, even if his exegesis – more so than that of Milton, Keats, and Tennyson in his earlier books – is often tiresome and unnecessarily digressive. He shows how richly structured Dylan's verse, considered as verse, really is. Dylan is not only a genuine English poet, argues Ricks, but as major a poet as Shakespeare or Milton.
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Although it is grandiose, Ricks s claim is less implausible than it may appear. Ricks never explains why he believes Dylan to be comparable to Shakespeare or Milton – he thinks that showing us the often astonishing patterns in Dylan's writing is proof enough – but the reasons for the comparison reside in a simple assumption. It is an assumption to which Ricks himself may or may not adhere because it takes us well beyond the study of poetry itself, and makes any claim for Dylan as poet alone inexact in conception. However stunning his verse may be, Dylan's own highly organized materials come from a quantitatively larger and denser database than that of literature alone. They include musical and literary tradition, as well as the iconography of the singer-star, a very different and expanded kind of achievement compared to that of the traditional poet, playwright, actor, or musician. With the exception of Freud, who mixes literature with science and philosophy rather than with music and iconography, Dylan's only technical counterpart in this quantitative respect is Shakespeare, who recombines, with a wider formal scope than the capacious Milton, more received knowledge than any writer before Freud. That Dylan combines musical and literary achievement might lead a critic less modest than Ricks to even more grandiose conclusions.
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Ricks's belief that apology is unnecessary serves him well. It allows him to work unimpeded by anxiety or by critical polemic, and to begin where we all begin with Dylan: our impressions. We all have our favorite Dylan tunes, our own sense of what a Dylan band sounds like, or what Bob sounds like bent over his guitar, alone. There is no "white-hot center" to Dylan, to use Paul Nelson's words (1976), but a specific "world of Dylan" that each of us has in our minds. No wonder it is folly to give pride of place to one phase of Dylan's career over another. No moment in Dylan's itinerary is any more or less Dylanesque than any other. The Christian conceit in Ricks's title – <i>Dylan's Visions of Sin</i> – has no reductive impetus; its only job is to get Ricks going. Ricks is not a typologist; he is a dogged reader. No matter its vicissitudes, Dylan's imagination, he shows, is highly organized, and works on the same principles, early and late. They proceed from a formal predilection in Dylan's way of writing songs, especially Dylan's use of rhyme. The play of masculine and feminine rhymes, for example, throws a stutter into Dylan's language that is unusual for a poet, but compelling for a rocker. Masculine rhymes land on the downbeat. But feminine rhymes – participles, for example, or rhymes using the copula "is" – fall a syllable short of a line's last poetic foot. This allows, of all things, a syncopated upbeat – a rock-and-roll beat--to emerge in the silence so created.
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Rhyme, however, has another pattern that serves Dylan's purposes even more: rhyme's curious way of creating repetition and difference in sound simultaneously. Ricks calls these moments "imperfect alignments," and argues that they represent Dylan's central formal strategy as a poet. Dylan's songs, says Ricks, are "founded on ... deviations, where a pattern is created and respected but then finds itself modified." Dylan's songs modify their patterns "by waiving," says Ricks, the "antithetical predictability" that they set up. On "Lay, Lady, Lay," from <i>Nashville Skyline</i> (1969), "a perfect continuity is intimated" by "lay" and "lay"; it foreshadows a presumable union between the poet-singer and his beloved. But then a singular pair of non-rhymes ("begin" and "love") breaks up this expectation in the third stanza. "Day of the Locusts," from <i>New Morning</i> (1970), where Dylan pronounces "singing" as "sanging," is a denser example. Here the same word does different things at the same time: Dialect ("sanging") exudes the raw timelessness of folk tradition, while usage ("sing" and "sang" are different tenses) distinguishes clearly between past and present.
<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Ricks can also resurrect less canonical songs from the later period of Dylan's career to show Dylan's continuity of purpose. "Disease of Conceit," on <i>Oh Mercy</i> (1989), can serve Ricks as a Dylan template, too. The song asks an instructive question, which Ricks translates as "How do you vary the unrelenting?" This is not a self-help question, argues Ricks; it is a technical question that reveals what is interesting about rhyming, particularly Dylanesque rhyming. The song's anaphoric repetitions – "down the highway," "down the line," "down for the count" – carry "differences of weight," shifting their presumable equivalence in meaning on the very ground of their similarity in sound. "Do Right to Me Baby," on <i>Slow Train Running</i> (1979), illustrates what else Ricks has discovered: The pairings "touch/touched" and "judge/judged" are not, as semantic items, identical either. "Judging" and "touching" are dissimilar.
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The repetitions of which rhyme is composed, in other words, are never exact. Rhyme is a good example of what Ricks calls (simplifying Wordsworth) "similitude and dissimilitude." The difference between "similitude" and "dissimilitude" is the "fraction," as Ricks puts it, that guides Dylan's poetic project. But it guides more than that. Beneath Ricks's trilling lurks an argument of very considerable power. Dylan's rhymes and the verbal arabesques to which they give rise are a miniature version of the wider patterns that organize Dylan's work as a whole. These do not include theme –Ricks remains a consistent formalist – but they do include the last thing one expects Ricks to explain: the relation of the music to the lyrics. In Dylan's songs, Ricks suggests, the music searches for the poem even as the poem searches for its music.
<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The perception of "similititude and dissimilitude" is the key to this relationship. "Dylan is always," Ricks claims, "playing his timing against his rhyming." "Dylan's vocal punctuation," he says, "is dramatically other than that of his page." Ricks argues that Dylan's voice is, as a rule, "thrillingly disagreeing with itself." This disagreement creates an effect that Eliot called, in relation to Swinburne's poetry, "diffuseness." Ricks acknowledges that in Dylan's songs, as in Hardy's poems, this "diffuseness" has a technical spur. Obliquity or directness of pronunciation are both open to – are functions of – vocal performance, even in the reader's mind. Dylan's songs juxtapose voice and page, warble and diphthong, yaw and pentameter.
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Ricks is no typologist, and, for him, such juxtapositions do not point to an opposition between nature and culture. Dylan weaves the elements of song – text and voice, poetry and music – into endlessly "imperfect alignments" in order to generate a hum of multiple relationships among them. "Melisma" is the technical name for the "fraction" or difference between performance and the page that sets it all in motion – "Something in the timing," according to Ricks, "that cannot be rendered by placing and space." The difference between text and performance is the subject of Betsy Bowden's <i>Performed Literature</i>, but melisma plays no part in her analysis. She believes that the text is somehow "realized," as though it were a stable object subject to transmutation. For Ricks, by contrast, stable textuality is always the function of indirectness or "diffuseness." "Otherness" – a "dissimilitude" – is the perpetual shadow against which "similitude" comes into the light.
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Melisma offers a way to understand the reciprocal relation between Dylan's words and music, between sound and sense. Dylan's voice is not simply an expressive medium for his page, nor is his page simply a dirigible excuse for him to sing. Rather, meaning emerges from the differential weave between text and voice. "Love Minus Zero" on <i>Bringing It All Back Home</i> (1965) is a good example: "My love, she's like some raven / At my window with a broken wing." The grammar of this sentence remains unclear until the last word of the second line. Will "broken" modify "window," leading us to expect "pane" at the end of the line instead of "wing"? Grammatical relationships among words are suspended, as in Latin, until the sentence is finished. We are most familiar with this kind of problem phonetically alone in a poet like Hardy. Thematically, we are most familiar with it in Whitman, who dissolves the very self he sings as the best way to celebrate it. Dylan, in the spirit of Whitman, does the same, dissolving signifier and self alike into the weave of language that gives each their moorings. Here, too, is the secret connection of aestheticism to historicism: The dissolving aesthetic self dissolves as a rule into the components that make up its specificity as a historical subject.
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Dylan's Latinate syntax recalls Milton's, but this does not prompt Ricks to link his study of Dylan with his first and best book, <i>Milton's Grand Style</i> (1963). Ricks's Milton book successfully countered a tradition of Milton criticism that acknowledged Milton's power while denying his exactitude. Ricks showed that Milton's language in <i>Paradise Lost</i> is, like the language of Dylan's songs, deeply and delicately systematic. Both poetic systems are based on exposing how easily language can shift its sense, and both topple the pretenses of the typologies that try to repress this linguistic play or, as Ricks calls it, "sliding." For Milton, this "sliding" is a basic consequence of the fall; for Dylan, it suggests that there was never an Eden from which to fall. Like Dylan, who, as an artist, says Ricks, takes "the path of most resistance," Milton, said Ricks in 1963, "writes at his very best only when something prevents him from writing with total directness." This "something" is "sliding," which shows how "directness," like Wordsworth's "similitude," is a function of indirectness or "dissimilitude." Milton's "greatest effects," like Dylan's own, "are produced," says Ricks, "when he is compelled to be oblique as well as direct." Milton (whose father was a composer) does within poetry what Dylan goes on to accomplish in the relation between poetry and music.
<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Both Milton and Dylan are of the devil's party because their poetic practices deconstruct the typology they mean to serve. This is not a mere effect of either s work, but the decided focus of each one. In Milton's case, it proceeds from his antithetical relation to the history of Christian doctrine. Language, not just poetic language, is necessarily fallen. What are the terms of its use when figuring divine or just things? In Dylan's case, this focus proceeds from his antithetical relation to the history of rock and roll. How can you chant freedom on the shoulders of muses like Woody Guthrie or Muddy Waters? The problem is one of influence, and, like Milton, Dylan can find freedom only in tradition.
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Musically, melisma is the source of Dylan's debt to gospel, soul, and early rock and roll. For Little Richard, bending the signifier applies equally to both sense and tonality. Rock and roll is not a semiotics of drama, in which performance interprets the text. Here the point is to sunder altogether the link between signifier and signified, although only – inevitably – to rejoin them. The arbitrariness of their relationship goes hand in hand with its social determination. This form of irony is particularly African American, especially raw in a majestic figure like Otis Redding. The minstrel myth of the "natural" black man is both sustained and exposed by the easy rupture of sound from sense. How do you pronounce "dock of the bay"? How many syllables does each word contain? What phonetic requirements are necessary for them to emerge as phonemes? Changing sound while retaining sense – Redding's song paints a memorable scene – is both outrageous and precise. The social norms of language are the only norms it has; all the rest is silence.
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Melisma – this unmooring of sound from a meaning that is left in place – brings us not only to the heart of Dylan's technique. It also raises difficult issues surrounding Dylan and his cultural status. Dylan may be "diffuse," as Ricks says he is, but he is also, in this sense, well, dirty. Not just his voice, but his clothes, his hair, his manners. He is one of Whitman's "roughs." But even his offenses to civility hold in prudent reserve a more recalcitrant one buried deep in the American grain. While it may be a critical commonplace to assign the cause of racism to sexuality, racism is more primarily a question of cleanliness, and of the establishment of proper borders. Anthropologists like Mary Douglas have shown that it is the fear of otherness that prompts cultures to indulge in rituals of purification. The segregated water fountains of the American South made this link abundantly clear. Psychologically, such practices create a common identity or sense of sameness by stamping someone or something else as dirty or unclean. Jacques Derrida likes to pun on the word proper – what is clean is also what is one's own. Dylan's scholarship is good; he names a recent album <i>Love and Theft</i> (2001) after the title of Eric Lott's deconstructive history of minstrelsy (1993). Lott shows that, after 1830, blackness had to be invented as an "other" in order to produce the "sameness" of whiteness. This hidden dynamic is the abiding irritant in American life and the one that Dylan, chief among rockers, has addressed by making miscegenation or hybridity the technical precondition of his sound.
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>If melisma – the difference between performance and page – raises questions about signification, it also raises questions about the status of the singing self, or, rather, about the self that sings. What is it? This is the bailiwick of cultural criticism and the subject of Marcus's most recent study of Dylan, <i>Like a Rolling Stone</i> (2005). <i>Invisible Republic</i> (1997), Marcus's study of Dylan's <i>Basement Tapes</i> (released in 1976), began the trend in Marcus's career that has crystallized in <i>Like a Rolling Stone</i>: the focus on a single text. Here the text is Dylan's 1965 hit single. Marcus's strategy creates a singular critical effect, suggesting his new theory of Dylan, which, however uneven its gait, is far more systematic than any Marcus has presented before. Because <i>Invisible Republic</i> involved Dylan's recuperation from his motorcycle accident, it flirted with typology. But as a result of its greater sensitivity to form, <i>Like a Rolling Stone</i> is not typological at all. Its descriptive terminology has a precise, analytic power. Like Ricks, Marcus is interested in Dylan's "diffuseness," although from a musical rather than a poetic perspective.
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Marcus's book evokes the musty recording session of "Like a Rolling Stone." Key to Marcus's description of the song is that it is "unstable." In the context of its later history, the song is always being revised when it is it heard again, read, inevitably, against a fugitive original hearing. Marcus's book, in other words, reconsiders something that is itself always being reconsidered. This is a superb mode of critical plotting. In order to produce the effect that will vouchsafe his contention, Marcus reduplicates in his own text what happens to Dylan's song over time. What is particularly illuminating about the approach is that it begins with a typological assumption – the belief that "Like a Rolling Stone" is "the greatest record ever made," the heart and soul of Dylan's work – that it goes on to disrupt, again and again. The superlative is what most superlatives tend to be: a type, as it were, of the typological, a very particular kind of rhetorical assessment and critical valuation. Unlike comparatives, superlatives posit an origin from which anything else is a fall, judged historically. The "greatest" is, as a trope, the baseline of history, not history itself, its defining rather than differential measure. For Marcus, "Like a Rolling Stone" is Dylan at his purest or most exactly original. The song is central because it is "the secret" of Dylan's "kingdom." </div>
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>But the mechanism of listening that Marcus identifies – the way in which later hearings redact earlier ones in order for both past and present listenings to take their proper, and unstable, places – makes such claims inappropriate. "Like a Rolling Stone" is significant not because it is Dylan when he is most himself, but because it capaciously exhibits the spectrum of Dylan's influences and the range of his purposes. It is just this capaciousness that puts in question the song's centrality. The song's porousness overwhelms and renders tentative any singularity it may be said to have. No wonder Marcus describes the many changes to which the song is subject, both on repeated hearings of the recording and when it is performed live. Such repetitions of the song are "utterly displacing," making the song the same and not the same. These changes are Marcus's real subject, not simply the song and the session at which it was made. Whatever these displacements do, they never allow the song to "play" simply "as a memory." Something else always happens.
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Marcus refers to Freud's notion of the uncanny to describe this double effect, in which something is at once familiar and strange. Adept at descriptive criticism, Marcus goes on to show what mechanism in Dylan's work determines this effect or feeling, and how it is identical with both theme and technique. It is, in Wordsworth's own words, "similitude in dissimilitude." The Freudian name for this mechanism is deferred action. Later events and impressions revise earlier ones, making memory a remastering, not a recording. In Freud, the primal scene the Wolf Man observed as a child becomes sexual only after he has gained a knowledge of sex and is able to revise the memory accordingly. This is typology demystified. Freud's target, like Dylan's, is a central interpretive paradigm in Western culture that he wishes to reveal and disrupt; targeting it reflects both the seriousness and the Jewishness of Freud and Dylan alike. In Marcus's Freudian reading, Dylan's song, like the Wolf Man's primal scene, is put in place by its later hearings over the years, not, as in a Christian reading, for once and for all in a moment of determining grace. The song can remain the "greatest" only if, like the more agonistic or classical epic hero, it can be judged again and again.
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>This approach has its advantages. The early doesn't really predict the later; the later requires it to have occurred. It is a send-up of typology, a revelation, not of its truth, but of its mechanism. The early – as it is in Christianity, too – becomes both foundational and obsolete. This insight animates Eliot's familiar description of poetic history: "When a new work of art is created...something...happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it." The endless changes that "Like a Rolling Stone" undergoes as one listens to it over time illustrate what both Freud and Eliot describe: the emergence of things against and only against a field of time. The present reinvents what precedes it: "The future," sings Dylan on <i>Love and Theft</i>, "is already a thing of the past." The famous lines on "My Back Pages" on <i>Another Side of Bob Dylan</i> (1964) describe this structure exactly: "I was so much older then, / I'm younger than that now." Any moment in Dylan is provisional rather than definitive, indexical rather than absolute.
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Like Shakespeare's art, and like Milton's, Dylan's is not one of statement. It is an art of "instability," to use Marcus's word, or of endlessly modulated "diffuseness," to use Eliot's. Like Shakespeare's plays, Dylan's songs are subject to any number of possible readings, all of them, however plausible, limited by their wish to foreclose further interpretation. Very recent, very readable, and very droll, Dylan's autobiographical <i>Chronicles</i> (2004) is both a description of this kind of textual behavior and a fine example of it. <i>Chronicles</i> does what Marcus cannot do in a wholly conscious way: dramatize Dylan's own labor. Of course, Dylan is not wholly conscious of himself either, but that is just the point. Dylan, like his critics, must also take himself as his own subject. He refers to other critics of his work as though he were part of their scholarly community. This is deadpan Dylan at its best, ironic and straightforward at the same time. <i>Chronicles</i> is important not because it is Dylan himself who is writing, but for the opposite reason. The man who has the seat on the stage is, like his critics, scratching his head, too. Dylan must also approach himself as a critic, puzzled, on the outside looking in. Even Bob Dylan wants to know who Bob Dylan is. The lesson of <i>Chronicles</i> is that because of the intractable porousness of his work, Dylan is as distant from himself as the rest of us are.</div>
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Dylan's work both is and is about this dislocation within the self, especially as he grows older. Dislocation is not inhibitive; it is enabling and productive. Temporal movement or deferred action is Dylan's active principle both poetically and musically, the very nature of his labor. No wonder Dylan, Marcus, and Ricks all recur to the uncanniness of hearing old Dylan songs played in concert many years later. That experience is the most palpable example of the self-revision with which Dylan is concerned. This apparently formalist assessment sharpens our sense of his central theme: the passage of time. This theme has become especially important in Dylan's later career. "It's not dark yet," he sings on <i>Time Out of Mind</i> (1997), "but it's gettin' there." Dylan's achievement is in league with time, not time's rival or enemy. As with different performances of the same songs, says Dylan, "circumstances never repeat themselves." Neither does the self that they endlessly reinvent. Dylan's career is not one of progression or decline but of retrospection. This is not a Christian or typological Dylan; this is a Freudian – a Jewish, a Talmudic – Dylan.
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>For a text that documents how the unconscious works, <i>Chronicles</i> is supremely self-conscious. Self-revision – and the porousness that requires it in order for both the self and the work to cohere – is Dylan's endless preoccupation. Whether he is reading himself or others, Dylan describes diffuseness in both music and poetry with nonchalant ease. Roy Orbison, he says, writes songs that have "songs within songs"; Dylan himself also writes songs that contain any number of possible relationships among their elements harmonically. As in Orbison, chord progressions inevitably stir unexpected relationships with harmonic patterns not included in the song's text. They also make new intertextual connections. "Blowin' in the Wind" is a previously unwritten bridge for "We Shall Overcome." An example of Dylan's determination by folk tradition, the song is also an example of Dylan's debt to Buddy Holly. Like Orbison, for whom he was the principal precursor, Holly wrote tunes defined by their propensity to spin such additional harmonic implications. That they spill into the songs of others is another example of their unlikely labor. Poetically, Dylan's songs do the same thing, both individually and as a body of work. An appropriate analogue here is D. H. Lawrence's poetry. Amit Chaudhuri has suggested that the chief activity of Lawrence s poems is their own rewriting, a motivating element in Lawrence's poems that Chaudhuri calls, following Ruskin, the Gothic. Dylan shares this stance with Lawrence and with Ruskin himself, the master of self-revision in English.
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>This instability has its technical counterpart in Dylan's deliberate use of melisma. In <i>Chronicles</i>, Dylan recalls discovering "a new vocal technique" in 1987, but this phrase is only a clarification of how he'd been singing since way back when, including on "Like a Rolling Stone." Dylan is quick to distinguish this "new technique" from "improvisation," which it somewhat resembles. As in scat, there are phonetic units to honor, not just phonemic ones. The point, however, is not to worry about the link or suture with what is signified, but to let it bleed. This blues technique is, in fact, melisma – the bending of the signifier, whether in pain, delight, or some combination of the two. <i>Chronicles</i> also provides an explanation of the anxiety that arose between the young Dylan and Dave Van Ronk, which was about hijacking melisma. Van Ronk, observes Dylan, "never phrased the same thing the same way twice." The only other nonjazz singer to merit this description in <i>Chronicles</i> is Woody Guthrie, who "would throw in the sound of the last letter of a word whenever he felt like it." Here the canonical precursor Guthrie masks the more burdensome, and accidental, precursor Van Ronk, who happened to be a contemporary.</div>
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Dylan resolves a larger problem of influence in a similar way, once again because of the advantage that retrospection and self-revision provide. When he arrived in New York in 1961, he traded in his electric guitar for an acoustic one. This was not the bland decision of a folk enthusiast, but a keenly dialectical act. It reversed Muddy Waters's founding gesture in blues history when Waters moved to Chicago from Mississippi in 1944 and exchanged his acoustic guitar for an electric one. His transition to electric was not a fall from grace, but a liberation from a pernicious myth – half sentimental, half oppressive – about how natural black life is in the South. Dylan turned Waters on his head. His acoustic guitar symbolized a musical history with which Waters himself was unconcerned, and one that allowed Dylan to reimagine nature through the lens of an additional kind of folk stance: the tradition of Guthrie and Van Ronk that stretched back to English and Celtic hymn and jig. (These regionalist and religious traditions count also among Shakespeare's sources.) Dylan's history, including the history of poetry in English to which it is adjacent and which it informs, is the supplement Dylan carries with him when he goes on to negate his negation of Waters with a screaming blues band of his own at Newport in 1965. Rhythm and blues had already synthesized blues, jig, and hymn into one music, as had country swing, but without Dylan's literary perspicacity. Bluesman and Anglophile, Dylan brings rock and roll into its classic phase by becoming wholly transatlantic. At Newport, the dialectic is complete. He crosses the Atlantic of the Middle Passage with the Atlantic of the Grand Tour.
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Who, then, is Dylan himself? The one who sings or the one who writes? The electric Dylan or Dylan unplugged? Is the real Dylan the one at Newport in 1965, or the Dylan on Scorsese's screen in 2005? The real Dylan is both at once, especially when we see him at Newport in Scorsese's film. If Marcus deconstructs Dylan by showing him to be a weave of past and present, Ricks deconstructs Dylan by showing neither Dylan's words nor Dylan's music to exist except in their interrelationship. The endless rearticulation of these relationships is Dylan's chief activity. The later Dylan is beneficiary to the clearings felled by Dylan early. It is one measure of Dylan's power that he inspires critics like Marcus and Ricks to write powerful books about him.</div>
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<i>Originally published in </i>Raritan<i>, Winter 2007</i></div>
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Perry Meiselhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15136895284654246782noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2242027659057377496.post-25946171943829132112011-02-26T21:46:00.000-08:002011-02-28T20:23:32.920-08:00Psychology and Modern Literature<div>by Perry Meisel </div><div><br /><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>As Michel Foucault has shown (1961), among the first great shifts to accompany the demise of religion and the emergence against it of Enlightenment rationality was the division of reason, not from religion, but from madness. A nosological shift – the creation of a new descriptive field available to medical diagnosis – was also an epistemological one: the mind was no longer partitioned into good and evil, but into the rational and the irrational. The religious antinomies that precede it historically shadow this new pairing, but its consequences are different. Reason’s domain was necessarily psychological. Reason was now the guardian of a soul that was by definition self-divided, turning the self into its first, and chief, object of scrutiny. So began, to use Christopher Lasch’s phrase, the culture of narcissism. The conventional critical emphasis upon madness in modern literature is a durable way of showing how clearly modernism descends from the Enlightenment split that Foucault describes (Gilbert and Gubar 1979; Valentine 2003). But modern literature’s transgressive energies and liminal orientations – Virginia Woolf is its <i>locus classicus</i> – merely heighten what is already at work in the comparatively stable if neurasthenic world of the later novels of Henry James: an emphasis on the self, and the difference between self-knowledge and self-regard. </div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">James and James</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>This shift in the history of modern literature is nowhere more evident than in the shift from James’s own early fiction to his later phase. It is a shift that has served generations of critics as an organizing assumption about the history of the novel as a whole. In fiction before James, the world predominates; in fiction after James, the mind predominates. Compare the opening sentence of <i>The American</i> (1877) with that of <i>The Ambassadors </i>(1903). The shift from outside to inside is manifest. <i>The American</i> begins with James’s fashionable hero in a pose of aestheticist lassitude that borders not only on exhibitionism but also on pretension: “On a brilliant day in May, in the year 1868, a gentleman was reclining at his ease on the great circular divan which at that period occupied the center of the Salon Carré, in the Museum of the Louvre” (James 1877: 1). It is the pose that is ambiguous, not the man. Whether or not a doubleness invades the soul of Christopher Newman we have as yet no idea. We do not know if he is as ambivalent about his mannerisms as the morally impatient reader of James may be about him. How different is the beginning of <i>The Ambassadors</i>. Once again the focus is on James’s hero, but the terms have changed, perhaps only slightly, but with enormous differences in implication: “Strether’s first question, when he reached the hotel, was about his friend; yet on his learning that Waymarsh was apparently not to arrive till evening he was not wholly disconcerted” (James 1903: 17). By the end of the sentence we are firmly established within Strether’s mind, even to the point of feeling his ambivalence about his friend’s absence (“not wholly disconcerted”). Strether is, it appears, relieved to have some time to himself despite missing his friend’s expected company. Nor are we asked merely to identify with Strether. This is free indirect discourse, with the narrator shaping the construction of Strether’s thoughts for our consideration as well as simply presenting them to us for the purpose of sympathy. What differences contribute to Strether’s ambivalence? If we are asked to know Christopher Newman where he does not know himself, we are asked to know Strether where he presumes to know more about himself than he really does. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>It is often to Henry’s brother, William, author of <i>Principles of Psychology</i> (1890), that historians turn to find terms to describe Henry’s prose. Here is an influential passage from the <i>Principles</i>: “Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. . . . It is nothing jointed; it flows. A ‘river’ or ‘stream’ are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life” (William James 1890, I: 239). Despite the combination of “comparison” and “suppression” (288) required to constitute an object’s “fringe” (258), as James puts it, or, in a splendid phrase, its “theatre of simultaneous possibilities” (288), James regards this process as one of “consciousness,” or, in the decisive assumption, “voluntary thinking” (259). Although the mind organizes “tendencies” (254) of thought rather than real perceptions, its agreements with other minds is considered an agreement about “the same object,” he concludes, making “thought cognitive of an outer reality” (272). </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>James’s descriptions of consciousness hardly do justice to the psychical processes that his brother’s novels both describe and provoke. William’s “consciousness” is too limited notionally to account for them. No wonder historians invoke Henri Bergson’s work to account for the techniques of modern fiction in more detail. Says Bergson in a passage from <i>An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness</i> (1889): “I do not see how . . . differences of sensation would be interpreted by our consciousness as differences of quantity unless we connected them with the reactions which usually accompany them, and which are more or less extended and more or less important” (Bergson 1889: 37–8). As in <i>The Ambassadors</i>, the transposition of the self’s fluctuating impressions by language into social myth or ideology is the <i>Essay</i>’s real subject. Unlike brother Henry, however, even Bergson cannot describe the state of perilous epistemological twilight in which Strether exists. It is because he cannot give up the idea of “consciousness” any more than brother William can. Nor can either give up the notion that the world is simply given. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Neither Bergson nor brother William will do to describe brother Henry’s fiction. <i>The Ambassadors</i> – and <i>The American</i>, too, for that matter – deal with states and data quite precisely not given to consciousness. Whether or not they eventually enter consciousness is the ethical drama that James’s novels customarily play out. Like Bergson, what brother William cannot describe in brother Henry’s prose is the unconscious – that which exceeds the grasp of any sense of awareness based on the presumption that one can see objectively, without the biases that make us, unconsciously, who and what we are. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Formulating the unconscious is the province of European psychology in the nineteenth century, the product of myriad influences reaching back to the Enlightenment. It is just this history that American clinical psychology, following brother William, represses; it is its enabling negation. This repressed history leads not to academic psychology, but to Freud and psychoanalysis. The tradition of the unconscious is what joins modern literature with psychology, particularly psychoanalysis, in a variety of ways, and not just as cause to effect, or even as mere parallelism. So rich is Freud’s own achievement that the different trends in modern literature actually unpack different trends in Freud himself. It is no surprise because Freud summarizes and reconfigures the numerous influences that overdetermine him.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre">Freud </span> </span></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span> </span>“The effect of Freud upon literature”, wrote Lionel Trilling in 1950, “has been no greater than the effect of literature upon Freud” (1950: 32). By the literature Freud had influenced, Trilling meant modern literature; by the literature that had influenced Freud, Trilling meant Romanticism and its Enlightenment antecedents. Here Freud’s own widest influences assemble both science and literature (Ellenberger 1970) and, with them, the influences that produce the psychology of modernism as a whole. Unlike English and French Romanticism, German Romanticism, which precedes them both, included Novalis, a doctor; British Romanticism counted a professional apothecary surgeon, Keats, among its chief poets, and among its intellectual sources the associationist psychology of David Hartley, medical doctor as well as philosopher. Indeed, the hard division between science and poetry that emerged in the early twentieth century with the rise of technical research (Whitehead 1925) was not yet in place when Fechner began a second career in the 1860s as Doctor Mises, journalist, spiritualist, and literary entrepreneur. Psychology’s earliest modern terrain is not science but philosophy, especially the sensationalism of John Locke, which prefigures Hartley’s associationism by more than a century. Psychology’s presumably intimate relation to idealism is already a problem in Locke, for whom sensory experience builds the mind as well as the body.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>The simple division between idealist and materialist never structures the history of modern psychology in the first place. Contemporary with Hartley is the development of interest in the brain and nervous system (Richardson 2001). Brain science is the link between the sensory philosophy of Locke and Hartley and the materialism of a literary tradition from Keats to Pater that takes body and brain to be continuous rather than at odds. By 1820, phrenology, despite its notorious future as a cult practice and locus of popular assumption about intelligence, had emerged as the first attempt to map the brain. Its background is the discovery in 1781 of “animal electricity” by Galvani and the notion that mental activity could be broken down into component parts and actually studied. The anatomy of the soul had replaced its salvation. In the hands of a physiological philosopher like Hartley, the notion of “association” therefore included the physiology that underlay the mind’s psychology. Like Galvani’s electricity, Hartley’s “vibrations,” as he called them in his 1749 <i>Observations</i>, strove to connect physical stimulation with events in the mind using the “association” as the mediator among sensation, ideation, and feeling. Erasmus Darwin, in <i>Zoonomia</i> (1794-6), gives us the term “sensorium” to describe a connectedness of brain and perception that is no longer simply ideal. Franz Joseph Gall in turn gives us the notion of the brain itself as a systematic organ. The emergence of the brain as the biological source of thought, feeling, and sensation therefore complicates the otherwise idealist air of Romanticism, British Romanticism in particular, and likens the neural atmosphere that surrounded Romanticism with the neurological atmosphere later in the century that surrounded the birth of psychoanalysis. Like Hartley, brain science had already made both Romanticism and psychology materialist affairs, not by becoming mechanistic, but by situating ideas in a relation to the “sensorium.” Keats’s hands-on involvement with the sciences of the body has produced generations of scholarship preoccupied by the connection between his emphasis on sensation and his experiences as a surgeon actually touching the material of his own metaphors. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Out of the cauldron of Romantic science and philosophy emerged in turn the distinct disciplines of neurology, psychology, and psychoanalysis; psychiatry, ironically enough, emerges, like psychoanalysis, as a late-nineteenth century response to neurology, although also as a response to the new psychoanalysis, with which it is largely contemporaneous. Here the descriptive insouciance of psychiatry as a discipline finds its own root – and literary – cause. Emil Kraepelin’s profuse nosographies of psychiatric disorders, like the more exacting ones of C. G. Jung’s chief at the Burghölzli Clinic in Zurich, Eugen Bleuler, functioned as the scrim upon which Freud painted a far richer specificity of mind, due in large part to the literary and philosophical reading that had spurred his own mind beyond the conventions of a purely descriptive medicine. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Freud’s teacher Ernst Brücke, in whose laboratory Freud worked as a young neurologist from March 1881 to July 1882, was the contemporary of Hermann Hemholtz, who had borrowed the term “conservation of energy” from mechanical physics to describe a regulatory principle in the nervous system in 1845 (Sulloway 1979: 66). Working under these assumptions in Brücke’s Physiological Institute as he dissected everything from crayfish to the nervous systems, including the brains, of human cadavers, the young Freud was taught to regard neurological processes as reflexive discharge, the body’s way of relieving buildups of tension. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>For Gustav Fechner of Leipzig, however, William James’s great rival, Hemholtz’s “conservation” was not a process of reflex or discharge but of “constancy.” The organism seeks equilibrium through absorption rather than through discharge, which, for Fechner, unlike Hemholtz, is a pathogenic state. The body expunges stimulation rather than absorbs it only when stimulation is toxic or inassimilable. But even more is at stake in Fechner’s recasting of “conservation” than the change from discharge to absorption. It is the old question of mind and body. Fechner moots the problem of a difference between mind and body – between idealism and materialism, psyche and soma – by regarding them as continuous. Sense perception and the internal production of images in memory or in fantasy are – as they were in Hartley and will be in Fechner’s disciple Freud – interdependent. What is their mediator? It is a “residuum” (Bergson 1889: 64), to use Bergson’s description of Fechner’s idea, of memory and assumption. It is what Freud will call the unconscious. Propped on the brain in a recapitulation of its development, the mind, says Fechner, is also a part of the body as a whole. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>The birth of psychoanalysis is customarily assigned to the moment that Freud abandoned his “seduction theory” in 1897 in a letter to his friend Wilhelm Fliess, moving within and discovering “psychical reality.” But this is not to say that Freud’s inwardness was ideal. <blockquote> I will confide in you at once the great secret that has been slowly dawning on me in the last few months. I no longer believe in my <i>neurotica</i>. . . . In every case the father, not excluding my own, had to be blamed as a pervert – the realization of the unexpected frequency of hysteria, in which the same determinant is invariably established, though such a wide spread extent of perversity towards children is, after all, not very probable. . . . There are no indications of reality in the unconscious, so that one cannot distinguish between the truth and fiction that is cathected with affect. (Freud 1950 [1897]: 1, 259–60)</blockquote> Like the shift from early to late James, the shift here is from the external to the internal, from the real, presumably, to the ideal, from events to representations. But this is to simplify matters. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>The difference between abreaction or catharsis – and between hypnosis and psychoanalysis proper – was precisely the difference between Hemholtz’s “discharge” and Fechner’s “constancy.” For Hemholtz, the nervous system could be expunged, or “swept clean,” to use the vocabulary of Anna O., Breuer’s first psychoanalytic patient. For Fechner, by contrast, discharge and catharsis do not function transparently. Real or not, thought leaves a trace of itself behind. Discharge never sweeps clean because a residue, or memory, whether physical in the case of reflex, or ideational in the case of the mind, is required to give a person a history, a mode of being in the world. For Freud the conclusion was plain. One had to assume a residue or trace – a memory –in, or, indeed, as the unconscious. Here emerges another key difference, the difference between neurology and psychology themselves, and the nature of Freud’s passage from the first to the second. Freud’s own terms in the posthumously published <i>Project for a Scientific Psychology</i> (1950 [1895]) are the clearest. It is the difference between a mere “quantity” of stimulation (by which we traditionally mean the “physical”) and the emergence, propped upon it, of “qualities,” or ideas (by which we traditionally mean the “psychological”). This vocabulary suffuses the period from Bergson to Pater. The difference is well stated by the subtitle of Pater’s <i>Marius the Epicurean: His Sensations and Ideas</i> (1885) – the difference between “sensations” (“quantity”) and “ideas” (“quality”). Only in the passage from quantity to quality does an organism achieve what we call personality – the quality, as it were, of having ideas as well as sensations.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Freud not only well represents the numerous elements that constitute the prehistory of modern psychology, but actually links all of these histories up in a way that makes psychoanalysis their veritable sepulcher. Psychoanalysis’s picture of the mind is also a picture of its own emergence as a discourse and of the ways it solves the problems it inherits from its precursors. This is the surest way of regarding Freud’s own achievement as a properly literary one. Its reflexivity – the exactitude with which <i>récit</i> and <i>histoire</i> coincide – is without precedent in the history of writing (see Derrida 1967). The more efficient grows Freud’s view of the mental apparatus, the more efficient grows the mental apparatus that psychoanalysis describes. When psychoanalysis gazes at itself in “On Narcissism” (1914), Freud sees that, like the infant child, it still requires the supplement of a theory of images, or, more precisely, of image-acquisition – of identifications, as they will soon be called – to people the mind with “ideas.” With <i>Group Psychology</i> (1921), the notion of “identification” coordinates this movement of “ideas” in the individual. The ego is given its determinations by the images produced by social interaction, beginning with the infant’s first moments of life. Here symbolization and primary process – “idea” and “sensation” – begin their work together. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>To facilitate the shift from sensation to idea, Freud’s work contains three distinct notions of the unconscious, each a function of the three principal stages through which psychoanalysis passes in its conceptual development, and each an overturning of the one before it. Each is also a function of strands in the historical overdeterminations that structure Freud as a thinker. How does Freud’s notion of the unconscious evolve? The early period, beginning with the <i>Project </i>and<i> Studies on Hysteria</i> and cresting with <i>The Interpretation of Dreams</i>, regards the unconscious for the most part as “topographical,” as Freud calls this first model of mind – a seething landscape of repressed instincts within us. James Strachey, editor of the <i>Standard Edition </i>of<i> </i>Freud (1953–74), translates the German “<i>Trieb</i>” as “instinct” rather than as “drive” – a notorious point of contention in debates about Strachey’s translation – because it designates the “frontier,” as Freud puts it, “between the mental and the somatic”; it is the “psychical representative of the stimuli originating from within the organism and reaching the mind” (Freud 1915: 122). </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Here enters a related strand in the crowded cultural history that Freud inherits. This is the discourse of race of which nineteenth-century science is a product and against which it is a reaction. Simultaneously among the direct progenitors of psychoanalysis and among its targets, theories of racial difference and valuation, often tied to the emergence after 1870 of an organic rather than a liberal notion of nationalism, abounded in both Europe and the United States. Weir Mitchell’s Western rest cures for East Coast neurasthenics were the consumer counterparts of decisive scholarly texts on the subject, the most popular and influential of which was Max Nordau’s <i>Degeneration</i> (1892), a comprehensive description of the causal relation between skull types and degenerate personalities, posture and sexual predisposition, facial features and morals. This form of thought has a familiar destiny in the discourse of Nazi eugenics (Gilman 1993; Mosse 1964).</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>The doctrinal decade – the first decade of the century – saw the exemplification of psychoanalytic theory in clinical studies such as <i>The Psychopathology of Everyday Life </i>(1901), <i>Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious</i> (1905), and <i>Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuallity </i>(1905). But in the next decade, this attempt to offer universal proof for psychoanalytic investigation led to a metaphor for the unconscious different from the instinctual ones of the early phase – the metaphor of primitive myth. Now the focus was on image rather than instinct, on the “representative,” to use Bergson’s terms, rather than on the “affect.” Here <i>Totem and Taboo</i> (1912) is the key text, with its view of the father as a rival to his sons. Drawing on the Cambridge anthropologists James Frazer, Jane Harrison, and E. B. Tylor, Freud found myth to be the universal reflection of unconscious process. This is also the version of the unconscious that most appealed to Freud’s disciple Jung, who rejected the libidinal theory of the instincts in precisely the year that <i>Totem and Taboo </i>was published. He goes on to produce an influential psychoanalysis of his own with a doggedly mythical rather than instinctual unconscious whose popular heirs include Joseph Campbell. Whatever shape it may take – the Greek, the Indic, the African – “myth is,” as Thomas Mann put it in “Freud and the Future” (1930), “the foundation of life; it is the timeless schema, the pious formula into which life flows when it reproduces its traits out of the unconscious” (422). </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Freud’s own reimagination of the unconscious during the metapsychological phase (1915–17) is what allows his third model of the unconscious to emerge with the amplitude that it does. In “On Narcissism,” Freud discovers that the child must find an image to connect to autoerotism in order to enter the human order. This is how the child constructs a relation between “sensations” and “ideas” (see also Laqueur 2004). A retroactive relation between body and mind is produced which is not there at the start of life. The temporality of this relation is precisely what Bergson cannot imagine in the <i>Essay</i>, and the reason he cannot solve the problem of the advent of “ideas” as Freud can. This temporal relationship is what Freud means by the unconscious. This unconscious is neither material nor ideal, but both at the same time. The mind that Freud goes on to describe in <i>The Ego and the Id</i> in 1923 is a history and partition of his own three views of the unconscious: “id” is “instinct”; “superego” is myth; “ego” is the attempt to manage the difference between them – between “sensations” and “ideas.” </div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">The Three Modernisms</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Modern literature inherits these three trends or tendencies in Freud in separate and distinct ways, which helps us to divide it into three versions or modes: the “instinctual” modernism of D. H. Lawrence and its gross materialism; the “mythic” modernism of T. S. Eliot and its crude idealism; and the “material” modernism of Katherine Mansfield, Willa Cather, and Virginia Woolf, with its notion of the unconscious as that which links the “instinctual” and the “mythic” – “sensations” and “ideas” – the way that the later Freud does: through language and society, particularly through the medium of identification. The work of Joyce forms an instructive double pathway between mythic and material modernism. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Nordau’s exorbitant physicalism finds no better literary exponent than D. H. Lawrence. Lawrence, at least in his conventional profile as prophet of liberation through the “instincts,” is in search of what he calls in the posthumous “Study of Thomas Hardy” (1936) “the primal soil” (417), “the unfathomable womb,” “the powerful, eternal origin” (418). Although he uses the term “consciousness,” Lawrence, unlike William James, has in mind a core of being that far exceeds awareness. Indeed, Birkin’s labor in <i>Women in Love</i> (1921) rests on making conscious this deep instinctual core as a path towards human salvation. <i>Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious</i> (1921a) lays out the doctrine behind <i>Women and Love</i>, and links it explicitly to a reading of Freud that emphasizes, to the exclusion of other factors in psychoanalysis, Freud’s focus on instinctual life. “We are,” says Lawrence, “too mentally domesticated” (Lawrence 1921a: 21): “We must discover, if we can, the true unconscious, where our life bubbles up in us, prior to any mentality. The first bubbling life in us, which is innocent to any mental alteration, this is the unconscious. It is pristine, not in any way ideal. It is the spontaneous origin from which it behooves us to live” (1921a: 13).</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>To be sure, Lawrence’s great trilogy – <i>Sons and Lovers</i> (1913), <i>The Rainbow </i>(1915), and <i>Women in Love</i> (1921) – exhibits technically what Lawrence describes as a “criticism” of its own “system of morality” (1936: 476) – a debate about Lawrentian doctrine among Lawrence’s characters. In a generous reading, the trilogy is not doctrinal but dialogical and reader-directed, measuring response, as do many of Freud’s own texts, rather than imposing doctrine. Lawrence’s poems are similarly self-correcting by virtue of their endless revision of earlier tropes (Chaudhuri 2002). Less articulated novels such as <i>Aaron’s Rod</i> (1922) or <i>Lady Chatterley’s Lover</i> (1928/32) garner no such dispensation. But a doctrine of the instincts leaves a heaviness behind, even in the great trilogy. Lawrence’s notion of the “star” “equilibrium” of the love-relation, as Birkin calls it (Lawrence 1921b: 139), is his version of the Mitchell rest cure from stress, the redemption from moral degeneration unavailable in Nordau. Birkin’s “star” “equilibrium” is idealist to the extent that the “being” it discovers is material and, in Lawrence’s self-frustrating epistemology, therefore distinct from it. Even awareness must die in Lawrence to vouchsafe the truth of the material to which it must, redemptively, submit. Sensations are valuable when they become ideas. But once they become ideas, they lose the Bergsonian purity that made them valuable. The “pure balance” (139) that Birkin wishes to achieve with those he loves is therefore the only qualified one within the novel’s story. For Lawrence, such a balance is achieved by the novel itself, which suspends in equipoise Birkin’s impassioned voice and the more conventional novelistic diction to which it is polemically – and constitutively –opposed. As a writer, Lawrence benefits from the very alienation that assails his characters. The gap between their lives and their self-understanding is, as it is in James, his very subject. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>T. S. Eliot’s influential review of James Joyce’s <i>Ulysses</i>, published in <i>The Dial</i> in 1923, discovers in Joyce’s novel what Eliot called the “mythical method” (Eliot 1923). Based on the <i>Odyssey</i>, <i>Ulysses</i>, by Joyce’s own testimony, is serious about what Eliot described as its mythical correspondences, from the manifest parallelism between the novel’s organization and that of Homer’s epic to the less obvious mythic alignments produced by Joyce’s naming techniques and his use of puns. “In using the myth,” says Eliot, “in manipulating the continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him” (Eliot 1923: 177). For Eliot, the “mythical method” is the <i>sine qua non</i> of modern literature because it allows the embattled present to find roots in the deeper strata of the Indo-European past – in its “mythic” unconscious. Eliot’s is, however, a somewhat restricted view of universality from a global perspective; not all civilizations, even ancient ones, are created equal.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Eliot’s polemical animus as poet and critic alike – what Christopher Ricks views as a strategy of provocation designed to engage the reader to wrestle with him (Ricks 1988) – has as its justification his belief in a beneficent mythical undertow to human experience. Its clearest psychoanalytic counterpart (if that is what it is) in Jung’s “<i>anima</i>” – that part of the mind filled with vital, procreative energy. R. F. C. Hull, Jung’s translator, frequently translates Jung’s “<i>Seele</i>” as “soul,” unlike Strachey’s rendering of Freud’s use of the same term as “psyche.” Jung’s, like Eliot’s, is a religious version of the unconscious. <i>Anima</i>, for Jung and for later disciples such as Joseph Campbell, is given expression in ancient myth and ritual of the kind described by Frazer in <i>The Golden Bough</i> (1890–1915), and by Jessie L. Weston, in a book that influenced Eliot deeply, <i>From Ritual to Romance</i> (1920). Jung elevates the mythic side of the Freudian unconscious in order to free himself from the doctrine of unconscious libido. Eliot elevates the mythic side of the unconscious in order to stem the tide of history.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>That Eliot had studied Sanskrit while a student at Harvard is emblematic of the assumption about cultural value with which his work is allied: that it is timeless and presumably universal. For Harvard students, learning Sanskrit was cultural capital. Sanskrit was the “original” Indo-European, “Aryan” language, a “pure” ancient language from which all others derived. The Semitic or the varieties of African or Asian languages were, by contrast, inferior, as were the skulls of their speakers, by phrenological standards. Myths, like the Hindu ones that Eliot equates with those of Greece and Rome in <i>The Waste Land</i>, are the instrument of this timeless purity, its emanations, as it were, in historical time. Allied with Eliot’s mythic fascination with the <i>Vedas</i> – the projective and compensatory aspect of Eliot’s colonialism – are the more manifestly idealist philosophical preoccupations exhibited by Eliot’s interest in the work of F. H. Bradley. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>This is also the program of Eliot’s poetry. Like Lawrence, he is doctrinal, although in a different way. He is, like Lawrence, also dialogical, and thereby provokes not only agreement with his program but also gives his program its own immanent critique. <i>The Waste Land</i>’s extraordinary suppleness as a poem is challenged by its rude impositions of mythic <i>doxa</i> upon its shifting materials. “A poem that is to contain all myths,” wrote F. R. Leavis, memorably, in 1932, “cannot construct itself upon one” (Leavis 1932: 81). The poem tries to recontain its polysemy by means of the “mythical method,” but the flooding of its mythic correspondences and their unmooring are the poem’s chief activities. Eliot separates dialects in value even as he mingles them in the poem’s narrative flow. The equivalences do not hold when the candidates are bourgeois or black. The poem becomes a site of contention rather than a movement toward the harmonization of its plural voices. Nor is the contention only political; it invades all the poem’s topoi. The nightingale in “A Game of Chess” is a universal symbol for “inviolable voice” (line 101), as in Keats, although it is precisely Keats’s use of the nightingale for rather more specifically ambivalent effects that makes Eliot nervous about the bird’s presumable universalism. The “reverberation” (line 326) of memory, as Eliot calls it in “What the Thunder Said,” is at one and the same time what allows the correspondences to be invoked, and what washes away or unseats the parallels they wish to stabilize. Indeed, the poem’s own constant movement corresponds rather exactly to the structure of the shift from sensations to ideas in Freud: the shift from difference to metalanguage, from dialogue to dialectic.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Real history, alas, interferes, as in Joyce, with the neatness of a “continuous” mythic history. <i>Ulysses</i>, despite Eliot’s review, regularly interrogates just this use of myth. Eliot, whose ultimately medieval and agrarian program grows clearer and clearer in his later criticism, can follow his hero Joyce only so far. While Joyce shares with Eliot’s classicist modernism a use of myth, he departs from Eliot in focusing on myth’s displacement in real time by ideology, much as our third mode of modernism will do. No wonder, then, Eliot’s lament at the end of <i>The Waste Land</i> that his myths are but piecemeal attempts to defend against the complexities of the real history he abjures: “These fragments,” he writes, “I have shored against my ruins” (line 431). Does a dialogical modernism ever take precedence over its rivals?</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>There is indeed a third kind of modernism that is not only resolutely dialogical but that takes its dialogism from a sense of life that corresponds to Freud’s third and most elaborated notion of the unconscious, the material and social unconscious. This third modernism, one emphasizing not only social interaction but also symbolization, is also a feminist modernism. Its tradition can be traced from Katherine Mansfield, <i>émigrée</i> New Zealander, through both Willa Cather in New York and Mansfield’s close friend Virginia Woolf in London. Cather’s essay on Mansfield shows how Mansfield’s particular focus is on what Cather calls the “double life” that everyone leads: “Even in harmonious families there is this double life: the group life, which is the one we can observe in our neighbour’s household, and, underneath, another – secret and passionate and intense – which is the real life that stamps the faces and gives character to the voices of our friends” (Cather 1936: 109). It is as though Mansfield – and Cather – have actually made James a novelist of the Freudian unconscious. Here is a theory of images and the way they connect sensations and ideas through the identifications that the social life of the family provides. The “double life” is the Freudian unconscious in its most mature form: “the material and social investiture,” as Cather puts it in “The Novel Démeublé” (1922: 40), out of which the self emerges as such. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span></span>An emphasis on Mansfield’s influence upon Cather and Woolf not only suggests a new way of mapping the history of modern fiction, particularly a sound relationship between British and American modernism. It also suggests that neither psychoanalysis nor the techniques of literary modernism are an extension of idealism either as a philosophy of mind or as an aesthetic practice. An aestheticist regard for inwardness is not at odds with the social sphere to which its concerns are presumably opposed. Mansfield, Woolf, and Cather draw common inspiration from Walter Pater. But neither is Pater an idealist; his sense of perception is resolutely material, especially in the “Conclusion” to <i>The Renaissance </i>(1873), where the vocabulary is very often a scientific one. Indeed, the materialism of Mansfield, Cather, and Woolf evidences a continuity with the materialist Romanticism of Hartley, Keats, and Pater all alike, a Romanticism from which the quite distinct careers of Lawrence and Eliot have led us astray.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Mansfield’s influence is key to showing us what Cather and Woolf share. The material and social “investiture” of the self is represented in Mansfield’s own stories as early as “The Tiredness of Rosabel” (1908) and as late as “Bliss” (1918) and “Prelude” (1918). Mansfield’s world is the shifting boundary between sensations and ideas, often among children, and the social identifications that allow children and adults alike to protect themselves against the very social order from which they are in symptomatic flight. For Cather and Woolf, this “investiture” is played out in different national settings and under the weight of different suns – for Cather the relation between country and city, for Woolf that between the normative and the transgressive. But the focus of representation is a common one that highlights the relation between sensations and ideas, as it does for Mansfield herself. For Cather, this relation is best studied in the young person’s inscription into the protocols of local community that may or may not be adequate to her. Some of Cather’s heroes simply change their surroundings like Thea Kronborg or Lucy Gayheart; others reinvent local community by recasting its terms, like Jim Burden or Tom Outland. Only in an active relation to landscape, as in the focus on farming in <i>O Pioneers!</i> (1913), or to ideology, as in the focus on business law in <i>A Lost Lady</i> (1923), can the self’s materiality and sociality come into being. <i>A Lost Lady</i> even provides the psychosexual grounds upon which these later modes of social inscription are propped. For Woolf, “investiture” is best studied in Clarissa Dalloway’s ambivalence, or Mrs. Ramsay’s fluctuation between Victorian hostess and Paterian aesthete. The striking of London’s clocks in an inexact relation to the strokes of Big Ben in <i>Mrs. Dalloway</i> (1925) is a fine emblem for the way in which the self’s particularity is a function of the separate peace it makes with the social order. As in Freud, this proceeds in Woolf’s novels through identification, with <i>Jacob’s Room</i> (1922) inaugurating this tendency in Woolf’s classic phase by regarding idealization as the source of depression, much as Freud himself does in “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917). This is the exact focus of <i>To the Lighthouse</i> (1927). </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span><i>Mrs. Dalloway</i> and the first volume of Freud’s<i> Collected Papers</i> in English were published by the Hogarth Press on the same day – May 14, 1925. Lytton Strachey’s younger brother, James, had begun his career as Freud’s chief translator and editor of what would become the <i>Standard Edition</i> of Freud’s works. Strachey’s career was carried out at the very center of the Bloomsbury Group’s daily life. Woolf’s brother Adrian Stephen was also a psychoanalyst, as were other Bloomsbury <i>habitués</i> like Joan Rivière, who served as first translator of both “Mourning and Melancholia” and <i>The Ego and the Id</i>. That the material production of English Freud was a physical labor of Woolf’s immediate circle of friends is the last and best historical instance of the very real relation between modernist literature and psychology.</div><div><hx><br /></hx></div><div style="text-align: center;"><hx>References and Further Reading</hx></div><div><br /></div><div>Bergson, Henri (1889). <i>Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of<span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></i><i>Consciousness</i>, trans. F. L Pogson. Rpt. New York: Dover, 2001.</div><div><br /></div><div>Cather, Willa (1922). “The Novel Démeublé.” In <i>Willa Cather on Writing</i>. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988.</div><div><br /></div><div>Cather, Willa (1936). “Katherine Mansfield.” In <i>Willa Cather on Writing</i>. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988.</div><div><br /></div><div>Chaudhuri, Amit (2003). <i>D. H. Lawrence and “Difference.”</i> Oxford: Oxford University Press.</div><div><br /></div><div>Derrida, Jacques (1967). “Freud and the Scene of Writing.” In <i>Writing and Difference</i>, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.</div><div><br /></div><div>Eliot, T. S. (1922). <i>Collected Poems 1963</i>. Rpt. Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970.</div><div><br /></div><div>Eliot, T. S. (1923). “Ulysses, Order, and Myth.” In <i>Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot</i>, ed. Frank Kermode. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1975.</div><div><br /></div><div>Ellenberger, Henri F. (1970). <i>The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and </i><i>Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry</i>. New York: Basic Books.</div><div><br /></div><div>Freud, Sigmund (1897). Letter to Wilhelm Fliess. September 21, 1897 (no. 69). <i>The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological</i><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre; "><i> </i></span><i>Works of Sigmund Freud,</i> ed. and trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. London:<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre; "> </span>Hogarth Press, 1953-74.<span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>1: 259–60.</div><div><br /></div><div>Freud, Sigmund (1915). “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes.” <i>The Standard Edition of </i><i>the </i><i>Complete Psychological</i><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre; "><i> </i></span><i>Works of Sigmund Freud,</i> ed. and trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. London:<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre; "> </span>Hogarth Press, 1953-74. 14: 111–40.</div><div><br /></div><div>Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar (1979). <i>The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman </i><i>Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination</i>. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.</div><div><br /></div><div>James, Henry (1877). <i>The American</i>. Rpt. New York: Holt, 1967.</div><div><br /></div><div>James, Henry (1903). <i>The Ambassadors</i>. Rpt. Cambridge: Riverside, 1960.</div><div><br /></div><div>James, William (1890). <i>Principles of Psychology</i>, 2 vols. Rpt. New York: Dover, 1950.</div><div><br /></div><div>Laqueur, Thomas W. (2003). <i>Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation</i>. New York: Zone Books.</div><div><br /></div><div>Lawrence, D. H. (1921a). <i>Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious</i>. Rpt. New York: Viking, 1962.</div><div><br /></div><div>Lawrence, D. H. (1921b). <i>Women in Love</i>. Rpt. New York: Viking, 1966.</div><div><br /></div><div>Lawrence, D. H. (1936). “Study of Thomas Hardy.” In <i>Phoenix: The Posthumous </i><i>Papers of D. H. Lawrence</i>. Rpt. New York: Viking, 1980.</div><div><br /></div><div>Leavis, F. R. (1932). <i>New Bearings in English Poetry</i>. Rpt. London: Penguin, 1967.</div><div><br /></div><div>Mann, Thomas (1930). “Freud and the Future.” In <i>Essays of Three Decades,</i> trans. H. Lowe-Porter. New York: Knopf, 1947.</div><div><br /></div><div>Nordau, Max (1892). <i>Degeneration</i>. Rpt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993.</div><div><br /></div><div>Richardson, Alan (2001). <i>British Romanticism and the Science of Mind</i>. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.</div><div><br /></div><div>Ricks, Christopher (1988). <i>T. S. Eliot and Prejudice</i>. Berkeley: University of California Press.</div><div><br /></div><div>Sulloway, Frank (1979). <i>Freud: Biologist of the Mind</i>. New York: Basic Books.</div><div><br /></div><div>Trilling, Lionel (1950). “Freud and literature.” In <i>The Liberal Imagination</i>. Rpt. New York: Doubleday, 1953.</div><div><br /></div><div>Valentine, Kylie (2003). <i>Psychoanalysis, Psychiatry, and Modern Literature</i>. New York: Palgrave.</div><div><br /></div><div>Whitehead, Alfred North (1925). <i>Science and the Modern World</i>. Rpt. New York: Free Press, 1967.</div><div><br /></div><div><i>Originally published in</i> A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture<i>, edited by David Bradshaw and Kevin Dettmar. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006.</i></div><div><br /></div>Perry Meiselhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15136895284654246782noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2242027659057377496.post-51574573247781157522011-02-20T12:54:00.000-08:002011-02-28T20:24:39.628-08:00From Bebop to Hip Hop: American Music After 1950By Perry <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">Meisel</span><br /><br /><div style="TEXT-ALIGN: center">Jazz Myth, Jazz Reality </div><br /><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="WHITE-SPACE: pre"></span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>The reception of jazz and its musical heirs, rhythm and blues and rock and roll, has always been the product of a deep ambivalence in the American grain. In the 1930s, the first professional jazz critics celebrated jazz for its redemptive <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">primitivism</span>. In the process, they had to slander the very achievement that they praised. For Carl Van <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">Vechten</span>, the more brutal the poverty of black life, the more authentic was the music to which it gave birth. The Yale-educated John Hammond, who drove through the South and the Midwest on the trail of legendary performers, valued musicians who could not read music more than those who did. Their illiteracy testified to the natural urgency of their expression. In the 1950s, Jack Kerouac and Norman Mailer honored jazz for similar reasons. For Kerouac, the spontaneity of jazz improvisation was proof of its mindless honesty. For Mailer, the power of black music lay in the presumably savage power of the black people who had invented it.<br /><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="WHITE-SPACE: pre"></span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>What is troubling about the modern reception of jazz is what is historically familiar about it. Behind it looms an earlier mode of reception that it recapitulates even as it overturns: the history of American minstrelsy, the practice by which “<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">blackface</span>” white performers, beginning in the North in the 1830s, parodied black American music even as they deigned to exalt it. The minstrel tradition persists well beyond the 1950s. Imagine, alas, the vexing performance of John Belushi and Dan <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">Ackroyd</span> in the 1980 film <i>The Blues Brothers.</i> Unlike their <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">blackface</span> inspiration, they cannot even sing or dance. Because of studio money, however, they are able to enlist as companion performers some of the greats of blues and rhythm and blues, from Ray Charles to James Brown. This is mockery, subtended by a domination based not only on the almighty buck, but on a racism rooted in minstrelsy that continues to accompany the mainstream appreciation of American music.<br /><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="WHITE-SPACE: pre"></span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Is there another way of assessing the history of jazz and its progeny that is free of racist presupposition? Ralph Ellison is the best guide. <blockquote>Although since the twenties, many <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">jazzmen</span> have had conservatory training and were well grounded in formal theory and instrumental technique, when we approach jazz we are entering quite a different sphere of training. Here it is more meaningful to speak, not of courses of study, of grades and degrees, but of apprenticeship, ordeals, initiation ceremonies, of rebirth. For after the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">jazzman</span> has learned the fundamentals of his instrument and the traditional techniques of jazz—the intonations, the mute work, manipulation of timbre, the body of traditional style—he must then “find himself,” must be reborn, must find, as it were, his soul.</blockquote><br />Jazz has a structure and a history, rooted not in the soil or in blind instinct, but in the self-conscious artistry of the musicians who play it. Jazz is a learned tradition. Like the history of any aesthetic form, it is defined by a complex interplay of convention and revolt. After 1950, the complexity deepens. Reactions to it produce a whole new epoch whose apotheosis is rock and roll.<br /><br /><div style="TEXT-ALIGN: center">Jazz and Rhythm and Blues</div><br /><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="WHITE-SPACE: pre"></span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>The history of American music after 1950 falls into a three-part sequence: the emergence of bebop as a response to swing, and bop’s eventual decline after Charlie Parker’s death in 1955; the emergence of rhythm and blues after 1955 as a response to bop, and r & b’s reinvention of swing’s easy <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">danceability</span> in a newer key; and the emergence of rock and roll as both a resolution of this prior history as well as the suppression of some of its key elements, particularly its African American foundations. To tell the story by focusing on representative or “canonical” figures will also provide a lesson about how so-called “popular culture” works by tale’s end.<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Swing music dominated New Deal America and kept spirits high in the canteens of World War II. But it had a history and its future had a horizon. If combo Dixieland had given way to the small-orchestra “jazz” of the 1920s and the Jazz Age ideology that appropriated it, then “jazz” had given way to the expansive vision of swing in the big-band sounds of Duke Ellington and Count Basie. By the end of World War II, however, swing’s infrastructure began to crack economically, and the mood of American culture at large had likewise become brooding and alienated in the shadow of the Bomb. Bebop was the music of the Beats, and Beat emphasized the solitary and the existential. The reflective bop soloist was its ideal emblem.<br /><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="WHITE-SPACE: pre"></span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Parker’s battle with the influence of Lester Young is the key site of musical struggle in the shift from swing to bebop despite the attempt by some historians to blame it all on Dizzy Gillespie and his milder revision of swing trumpet. Muting the horn and gravelling its tone (Gillespie also bent the bell of his instrument by accident one afternoon, leaving it that way because it looked cool), Gillespie was good for publicity. By contrast, Parker drastically alters the tone, attack, and harmonic choices of saxophone forever. He expunges the most saccharine of swing horn mannerisms, vibrato, and introduces a tonal amplitude to saxophone that never capitulates to Young’s <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">breathiness</span>. Parker also combines a technical appetite unmatched in jazz before or since with a depth of blues feeling second to none except for that of Louis Armstrong.<br /><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="WHITE-SPACE: pre"></span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Although Parker’s influence within jazz proper remains decisive well beyond his death in 1955—not until John Coltrane does a musician of peer power emerge to change the nature of saxophone again--by the late 1940s a new player appears on the jazz stage to challenge bebop’s dominance and take its place in popularity with the black listening public: rhythm and blues. Louis Jordan and his Tympani Five are the founding group, appearing at <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">Minton</span>’s in Harlem for the first time in 1938. Jordan himself sang in a swing style over the horn section’s jump riffs and played an early version of what is really rock and roll saxophone. The latter’s real father, however, is <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">saxist</span> Earl <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">Bostic</span>. If Parker invented bop out of swing, then <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">Bostic</span>, with his raucous transformation of swing vibrato into rock and roll flatulence, invented r & b out of swing.<br /><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="WHITE-SPACE: pre"></span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Rhythm and blues eventually crossed with bop to produce “hard bop”: a fusion of bop phrasing and harmonics with r & b rhythms, particularly the funky beat, that becomes the <i>via media</i> for a music <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14">enduringly</span> beset by the burdens of Parker’s precedent. Bop had often used Afro-Cuban instrumentation; the presence of conga and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15">timbales</span> added an extra layer of density to its experimentation with rhythms and time. But the reasons for hard bop’s emergence are more than circumstantial. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_16">LeRoi</span> Jones and Arnold Shaw both regard hard bop as an umbrella of protection from Parker musically and from bop ideologically. Shaw even suggests that hard bop was a way lesser musicians, especially sax players, had of swerving from the demands of bop technique. The same could be said of a black public that, as Nelson George has documented, had grown exhausted listening to Parker and Gillespie, and that wanted easier, groovier music that it could simply relax to.<br /><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="WHITE-SPACE: pre"></span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>The absence of a canonical center for hard bop—one could choose among any number of group leaders, chief among them Horace Silver and Art <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_17">Blakey</span>—is a perfect example of its sensibility. Hard bop seeks the erasure of personality in the very act of securing it through deliberately generic, even formulaic means. Whether it is Cannonball Adderley, who played with Miles Davis, or King Curtis, who played with both Lionel Hampton and the Coasters, all of jazz goes on to feed on the synthesis of hard bop. As a common point of origin, hard bop joins the sound of the roadhouses of the 1950s with the revolutionary music of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_18">Ornette</span> Colman, Eric <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_19">Dolphy</span>, Archie <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_20">Shepp</span>, and John Coltrane in the 1960s. Miles Davis’s inspired (and still criticized) brand of “fusion” jazz beginning in the early 1970s—a mix of jazz and rock—is hard bop’s greatest legacy, and the basis of virtually all later developments in jazz and rock alike. So significant is Davis’s jazz-rock fusion that his earlier role in the history of bop proper is often overshadowed by it. If Parker changes saxophone, it is Davis, not Gillespie, who changes trumpet. Not only does he take on the influence of the single most powerful influence in all of jazz, that of Armstrong, and modulate its enthusiasm into wariness. He also takes on the influence of Parker, for whom he served as trumpet sideman in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Davis' s invention of “cool” jazz after 1955—a calm, selective mode of solo improvisation—is his resolved response to Armstrong and Parker alike.<br /><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="WHITE-SPACE: pre"></span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Hard bop is a superb metaphor for the many tensions that American music and culture hold in suspension in the years that follow World War II. The consummate jazz trope for any resolving or <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_21">miscegenating</span> style, hard bop is the stance of any number of familiar American mythologies: the fusion of cowboy and dandy in the roughneck spiff of gangster heroes from Jay Gatsby to Michael Corleone; the fusion of country and city in the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_22">churchy</span> urbanity of African American writers from W. E. B. Du <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_23">Bois</span> to Alice Walker; the fusion of low-life vernacular and the learned vocabulary of English Romanticism in the fiction of Raymond Chandler. Philip Marlowe is not only a hard-boiled detective; with his combination of suavity, grit, and mischief, he is a hard bop detective, too.<br /><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="WHITE-SPACE: pre"></span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>John Coltrane, who served as Davis’s tenor sideman in the late 1950s, is the last of jazz’s major figures. Dead in 1967, Coltrane’s influence had replaced Parker’s, and remains the dominant style in jazz soloing even today. Like his contemporaries, Coltrane grew up in a climate that featured the consensus of hard bop; it also offered up hard bop’s resources for sale if you wanted to be original. Coltrane was always a dialectical musician. The biting cascades of sound represent both his debt to Parker and his flight from him; the replacement of finger-snapping by the graver blues tone-poem is his surest difference from the bop approach to phrasing, even as it is scarred by the desire to escape it. How does Coltrane win his originality and overcome Parker’s influence? By returning, not to Young, but to <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_24">Bostic</span>. Here he finds a means of inspiration in <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_25">Bostic</span>’s earliest of models for r & b phrasing, when it is still attached to the rigors of swing. As a youngster, Coltrane had actually recorded with <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_26">Bostic</span> at a date in Cincinnati in 1952, when he was also touring with the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_27">altoist</span> Eddie “<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_28">Cleanhead</span>” Vinson and hard bop organist Jimmy Smith.<br /><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="WHITE-SPACE: pre"></span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Coltrane’s revisionist propensities run so deep that they also required him to follow one album with a response in the next, especially in his last phase. The growling, squealing adventures of <i>Ascension</i>, for example, which became a kind of holy text for the “out” jazz movement of the late 1960s, is greeted, with almost preternatural haste, by <i>Meditations</i>, a fearsomely shy and hesitant work. The epochal <i>A Love Supreme</i> is the most fiercely self-conscious effort in the history of jazz recording: each of the album’s movements comments upon and alters the phrasing of the movement before. Here, Coltrane breaks free of jazz history as no <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_29">saxist</span> before or since, although he does so, inevitably, by negotiating with the very history he transforms.<br /><br /><div style="TEXT-ALIGN: center">Soul</div><br /><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="WHITE-SPACE: pre"></span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>If jazz made some measure of peace with itself with hard bop, a wider form brought together rhythm and blues with the “gospel” tradition of Thomas A. Dorsey, Jr. to produce an entirely different kind of synthesis. The result is what is often known as “soul.” Soul is rhythm and blues in a post-Jordan mode. Jordan’s singing, including the ensemble chorus behind it on hit tunes such as “<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_30">Choo</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_31">Choo</span> Ch’Boogie,” was still in the tradition of swinging jazz vocalists, chief among them Cab <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_32">Calloway</span>. Post-Jordan r & b is distinct from it thanks to Dorsey. It crosses the swing manner with another, and presumably opposed sensibility, the sound of the hymn. Soul is, like hard bop, also the result of the synthesis of two apparent <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_33">antinomies</span>, in this case the secular” and “dirty” stance of the blues and the stance of black religiosity derived from spirituals.<br /><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="WHITE-SPACE: pre"></span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>While always a religious man, Dorsey did not place the hymn on a pedestal, as did the earliest concert performers of the African American spiritual, the female Jubilee Singers of Fisk University in Nashville, who toured Europe in 1871. Dorsey the musician came belatedly to the invention of a religious or gospel music, having first been a blues musician who arranged for such luminaries as Bessie Smith and Ma <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_34">Rainey</span>. When Dorsey first heard the music of Charles A. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_35">Tindley</span> at the annual meeting of the National Baptist Convention in Philadelphia in 1929, his own compositional instincts found both kinship and a foil. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_36">Tindley</span>, too, was blues-based, but not confined to the strict, twelve-bar world of its musical grammar. Using the song models of Anglo-Irish spirituals, with sixteen-bar structures often supplemented by a bridge, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_37">Tindley</span>’s lyrics and moods were transcendent rather than circular and despondent. Dorsey joined the resources of this new discovery with the musical modalities of the blues itself. After 1929, he never looked back.<br /><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="WHITE-SPACE: pre"></span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Thus, gospel was from the start a synthetic sound, a transformation of the traditional Anglo-Southern hymnal by means of the “classic blues” of the 1920s that had also informed the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_38">pre</span>-histories of swing, bop, and r & b all alike. The discovery of a fresher realm from the belated vantage point of classic blues is not a surprising one in the history of blues tradition. Just as Dorsey discovers the sacred on the starboard hand of the secular, so <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_39">Rainey</span> had discovered the sound of the country blues that preceded classic blues only after she had thrived as a city musician. Nor does Dorsey himself cross only sacred and secular; he also crosses country and city. Like the storefront churches that sprang up in the poor neighborhoods of Northern cities that counted more and more southern emigrants among their populations after World War I, gospel is a theater of Southern inspiration within a Northern frame. By the time soul reaches its apex in the big-city studio sounds behind the voices of Otis <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_40">Redding</span>, Wilson Pickett, and Aretha Franklin (all gospel musicians who had graduated to the mainstream), the pattern was polished, and accounted for much of the music’s broad appeal.<br /><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="WHITE-SPACE: pre"></span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Dorsey’s gospel sound blends with the jump sound of early r & b, however, through a mediator: the magnificent sound of the 1950s and early 1960s that we associate with <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_41">doowop</span>. While <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_42">doowop</span>’s roots extend to the Ink Spots, an elegant vocal recording group of the swing era that emphasized tight harmonies, falsetto, and “tuba” bass, the sound’s imitators included kids without benefit of instruments, the necessity that became a virtue. It created <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_43">doowop</span>’s <i><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_44">a cappella</span></i> sound.<br /><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="WHITE-SPACE: pre"></span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>By the late 1940s, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_45">doowop</span> had grown into a full-scale ghetto genre. By the middle-1950s, its recordings finally crossed over racial marketing lines with hits by the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_46">Cleftones</span>, the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_47">Flamingoes</span>, the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_48">Moonglows</span>, and Frankie <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_49">Lymon</span> and the Teenagers. The next generation of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_50">doowoppers</span>—the Platters, the Coasters, and the Drifters—paved the way for a number of solo artists whose names we know far better than those of their ancestors.<br /><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="WHITE-SPACE: pre"></span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Now rhythm and blues hits its full stride. Sam Cooke’s career is a case in point. He was the first gospel star to cross over into commercial success. In 1957, after six years as lead singer of the Soul Stirrers, the country’s leading gospel group, he recorded “You Send Me,” a number-one hit and the watershed that marks the transition from gospel proper to soul. The course of Marvin Gaye’s career a few years later on is even more representative. Like Cooke, Gaye began by singing gospel music as a child, although his route to soul stardom included an explicit journey through <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_51">doowop</span> as a teenager. It also included marrying into the family of Motown founder Berry Gordy, Jr., who produced Gaye’s first hits in the early 1960s.<br /><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="WHITE-SPACE: pre"></span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>With Motown, all the elements in the history of jazz, rhythm and blues, and gospel come together in the most fully realized sound ever achieved in American popular music. Memphis had the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_52">Stax</span> house sound of Booker T. and the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_53">MGs</span>; Atlantic Records had an outpost of progress at the Muscle Shoals studio in Alabama. But the crown jewel of soul production was Gordy’s Motown label in Detroit. Motown was, as Smokey Robinson remarks in his autobiography, “a university.” Unlike “high culture” versions of urban art such as T. S. Eliot’s <i>The Waste Land</i>, the sound of Motown presents the components of tradition, not as fragmented and broken off from a whole, but as related in a multitude of ways. Gordy is a gleeful archaeologist of blues knowledge, using the shuffle beat of Chicago blues, the walking bass lines of hard bop jazz, and the harmonies of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_54">doowop</span>-inspired vocal back-ups as backdrop and collateral for an astonishing array of solo singers that included Gaye, Robinson, and Stevie Wonder.<br /><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="WHITE-SPACE: pre"></span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>After Sam Cooke, the epicenter of soul is Jackie Wilson. With Wilson, rhythm and blues singing becomes a school or strict canon. Wilson plays Milton to Cooke’s Shakespeare, structuring the diction of a newly unfolding tradition. Even more than Cooke, Wilson isolates a <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_55">doowop</span> device—the devastating falsetto, with roots in the ancient history of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_56">fieldhouse</span> blues—and remakes it into a vocal strategy central to the subsequent history of r & b singing as a whole. Wilson’s 1957 hit, “<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_57">Reet</span> Petite” (also Gordy’s first published song) features a voice in self-conscious dialogue with itself, jump-cutting from falsetto to natural register and back like the alternating dialects of Chandler's prose or the double style of Mark Twain's that lies behind it.<br /><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="WHITE-SPACE: pre"></span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>In Wilson’s train follow, like the Romantic poets following Milton, Robinson and Al Green, to name only two of the principal proponents of soul as it moves into the 1960s and 1970s. Smokey resolves Wilson’s influence by resolving Wilson’s self-dialogue between tenor and mezzosoprano into a single falsetto pitch. Green resolves it again by returning to the self-dialogue. Green agonizes, in the Greek sense of the word, over his relation to Wilson. Green’s preacher father actually dismissed him from the family’s gospel choir as a boy when he caught him with a Wilson record. To contain the anxiety of Wilson’s influence, Green, with some irony, continued to rely on religious tradition, taking much of his performance persona from its investiture of the Passion of Christ. In 1980, Green the soul star also became a minister of God.<br /><br /><div style="TEXT-ALIGN: center">Urban Blues</div><br /><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="WHITE-SPACE: pre"></span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>If Dorsey married the hymnal and classic blues, what kind of blues did gospel and doopwop marry to produce the synthesis of soul? They crossed with the sound of urban blues, particularly the sound of Chicago blues. Here, concrete history is symbolic. The emergence of Chicago blues can be dated with fair accuracy from the moment of Muddy Waters’s arrival in Chicago from Mississippi in 1943. Waters had already garnered fame as a Delta bluesman, and, in 1944, traded in his acoustic guitar for an electric one. The terms of his achievement expanded radically. Not only is his journey up Highway 61 reminiscent of the movement from country to city that defines much of the mythology of black American experience in the twentieth century. Through the electrification of his guitar, Waters adds to the journey the modernist lament of a fall into the nightmare of technology, away from the grace of nature. But this is to read him too jejunely. The most perpetually surprising thing about urban blues is that you sometimes can’t tell the difference between the singer’s voice and his guitar. Waters, characteristically, muddies the waters separating the two. Here the difference between blues tradition and the white culture that surrounds it is especially clear. Waters in effect deconstructs the presuppositions behind the most presumably natural difference of all—the difference between nature and culture.<br /><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="WHITE-SPACE: pre"></span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>The Southern urban bluesmen who emerge out of T-Bone Walker in Texas are a groomier bunch than their Northern colleagues (Walker actually precedes Waters, amplifying a swinging guitar with Charlie Christian’s help in the late 1930s), but the same deconstruction of the difference between the savage and the civilized is at work. B. B. King of Memphis is exemplary. The dialogues between voice and guitar do not just cast the guitar (Lucille) as having a singing voice of her own; by implication, they also cast King’s own sweet-as-can-be voice into an instrument <i>par excellence</i>.<br /><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="WHITE-SPACE: pre"></span>Coming as it does after Christian’s invention of electric jazz guitar in the 1930s as a light and supple-toned instrument, Waters’s brutal rhythm guitar of the 1940s is a self-conscious anachronism. It is deliberately atavistic. Its creation of a new, self-consciously primitive persona for the city blues carries the same irony as does any Romantic quest for beginnings. Its earlier African American counterparts include Du Bois’s notion of the “folk” and Zora Neale Hurston’s invention of a rich and fecund South designed to override historical trauma. In all three cases, a Northern perspective creates a rawer Southern appeal.<br /><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="WHITE-SPACE: pre"></span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Now Chuck Berry’s pivotal position in the early rock and roll canon comes into focus. Recording on Chess records in the mid-to late 1950s, Berry worked for the same Chicago label most closely associated with urban blues. But there the similarity ends. The pure singing voice right out of a boys’ choir, riding high over jump riffs of a kind unique for electric guitar, presents a <i>prima facie</i> case for a major new turn in the history of American music. A master at managing overdetermination, Berry is not just a combination of gospel and urban blues. A complex mediation hides the shift that they only enable. The guitar timbre may be that of Waters, who mentored his younger Chess colleague. Something else, however, is afoot. The jump riffs of “Johnny B. Goode” or “Maybelline” come from a plain source, even though the continuity involved is surprising. There is autobiographical testimony to confirm it, and the invocation of the “other” Dorsey’s name as well. It was, says Berry, Tommy Dorsey, the white swing bandleader, who most influenced him as a teenager, and it was Dorsey’s hit, “Boogie Woogie,” that haunted him most of all. In other words, Berry’s signature guitar rifts are really the horn section of a swing orchestra translated into the language and technology of electric guitar. Berry’s signature riffs retrieve the sound of the big bands suppressed by electric blues, but voice it in the latter’s new electric guitar mode. Canceling each with the other, Berry acknowledges and deflects his two principal influences simultaneously. In the process, he also shifts the center of American music from jazz to rock and roll.<br /><br /><div style="TEXT-ALIGN: center">Rock and Roll</div><br /><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="WHITE-SPACE: pre"></span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Gospel music not only created the tradition of soul. It also created the tradition of country music. While country began as an amalgamation of Dixieland, banjo, and picking blues guitar in the form of hillbilly bluegrass, it also began in Texas in the form of country swing. Country swing was an extraordinarily sophisticated music that joined the horn section with a fiddle to revise the sound of the black big bands of Kansas City. The Grand Ole Opry radio broadcasts from Nashville always counted black listeners among its audience; listeners and musicians both knew how thin a line separated, or failed to separate, white America from black, especially in the South.<br /><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="WHITE-SPACE: pre"></span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>No wonder Buddy Holly’s role in rock and roll history is decisive. Born in the Texas panhandle (he died in a plane crash in 1959), Holly blended country with rhythm and blues to produce a foundation for rock and roll that enabled the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and even Bob Dylan. It is Hank Williams’s voice together with the instrumentation of bluegrass that provides Holly and other white southern musicians with the mode with which they can cross or miscegenate rhythm and blues. Both r & b and country were too close to home. The invention of rock and roll allowed Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Elvis Presley to render the components of both traditions uncanny—something at once familiar and strange. Holly’s “Reminiscing” exemplifies the crossing. King Curtis’s highly manicured rhythm and blues horn dresses up Holly’s wailing vocals over a tight, funky studio band that is missing the one instrument that serves as the model for both the singing and the saxophone: the sound of the banjo that is common to country and blues alike.<br /><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="WHITE-SPACE: pre"></span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Much, then, as hard bop came to organize jazz by the mid-1950s, a synthesis of country and rhythm and blues came to organize rock and roll by the mid-1960s. The Beach Boys are its richest example. So strategic is their achievement, however, that the country dimension of their sound, unlike, say, that of the Everly Brothers, is neatly repressed. Southern white musicians cannot call in the definitive resource that the Beach Boys could: doowop. For the Beach Boys, it is the newer sound of the inner city that mediates between country and rhythm and blues. Surf music is a form of urban folk. If the Beach Boys' voices revise the wail of the Ozarks by virtue of doowop, surf guitar revises the sound of blues guitar by virtue of Chuck Berry.<br /><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="WHITE-SPACE: pre"></span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>The eventual model for folk rock, of course, is Bob Dylan. Dylan the singer joins the voices of Muddy Waters and Woody Guthrie; Dylan the songwriter joins Main Street and the Imagist lyric. Once Dylan went electric at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, the die was cast. He also joined, as Waters had, voice and instrument in a byplay of sounds that deconstructed the differences among them. The crossing of lines informs Dylan’s career as a whole. As a youngster playing New York’s Folk City, he sounded like a gnomish old man; as an aging country enthusiast moving towards religion, he sounded like a boy. No rock and roll songwriter has had the degree of Dylan’s influence as a composer, since no other rock and roll songwriter has controlled the overdeterminations of tradition so well.<br /><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="WHITE-SPACE: pre"></span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>But it is, with great irony, a non-American rock and roll—the music of the British Invasion of the early 1960s— that catapults it into the hysterical popularity that has defined it ever since. Jackie Wilson caused female fans to faint at his performances, but not until the Beatles did the phenomenon reach the world of white girls. Heirs to Buddy Holly, the Beatles were, even more than the Beach Boys, also heirs to Chuck Berry, who had transformed the sound of the big-band horn section into the sound of electric rhythm guitar. The rock and roll synthesis was nearing completion.<br /><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="WHITE-SPACE: pre"></span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>The Rolling Stones finished the job. Keith Richards’s rhythm guitar, like John Lennon’s, carried with it the whole history of the jazz horn section, although now it is reimagined in overdrive, with the help of the Chicago bluesmen. Not an ecumenical band like the Beatles, the Stones were less interested in doowop back-up effects than in taking on the entire history of jazz as amplification revised and refigured it. The distance from America made the British climate richer in invention. The most influential solo guitarists in rock history, Eric Clapton and expatriate American Jimi Hendrix, also found an imaginative home in England in these same years.<br /><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="WHITE-SPACE: pre"></span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>The school of Chuck Berry was by now paying staggering dividends. Hendrix was Berry’s most original disciple, hiding his dependence on the master with the groaning, shuddering swerves that define the very sound of his guitar. “Purple Haze” is an overt revision of “Maybelline.” Listen to the two songs back to back, or, better yet, “sample” them—play them at the same time and look out for the uncanny combination of repetition and difference that the relation between them produces. But the school had more than a valedictorian in Hendrix. It also featured guitarists such as the Yardbirds’ Jimmy Page, who, with the formation of Led Zeppelin in 1968, completed Berry’s transformation of swing horns into electric guitar by helping to invent the sound of heavy metal. The fashion of the ear-splitting trash guitar band is no fashion. It is the central fact in American musical history that joins the big-band sound of the last era of a popular jazz, swing, with the sound of rock.<br /><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="WHITE-SPACE: pre"></span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>The two major trends in rock and roll in the 1970s, disco and punk, have, at least on the surface, little in common. But the good-time party strut of disco and the engine-like thwack of punk rhythm guitar share one central thing: an overheated and overpressured beat, up-tempo and built deep into high-hat, bass, and bass drum. Their common legacy is likewise plain: it is hip hop. Whether it is the Ramones and Donna Summer, or the Sex Pistols and the Village People—sampling them together is a worthwhile exercise—the grinding overdrive of punk tempos and the syncopated oom-pah of disco cymbals are resolved by hip hop time and stance. Reggae—hip hop’s nominal source—provides a strategy to cover the anxiety of influence felt from both.<br /><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="WHITE-SPACE: pre"></span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Despite its seeming radicality, hip hop is a profoundly conservative form musically. Its radicality lies not in the diction of its lyrics, but in its fusion, or re-fusion, of rhythm and blues and rock and roll. It is a synthesis of the two. From Run-D. M. C. to 2 Live Crew, hip hop emphasizes a back beat as a heavy metal rock group would, but also resists it by its conversational vocal stance, which is temporally skewed in relation to it.<br /><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="WHITE-SPACE: pre"></span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Where does the back beat, the most recognizable of rock and roll tropes, come from? The marching band. Much as Armstrong bends the oppressor’s bugle and invents jazz, so rock and roll, following the tradition of black esquadrilles in New Orleans and throughout the South, discovers the back beat as an answer to the sharp cadence of rule. The back beat turns rule back on itself. In the process, it gains a rule of its own.<br /><br /><div style="TEXT-ALIGN: center">The Myth of Popular Culture</div><br /><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="WHITE-SPACE: pre"></span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>No discussion of postwar American music can avoid an eventual confrontation with Theodor Adorno’s infamous estimate of jazz in particular and “popular music” in general. Despite his allegiance to the Left, Adorno appears to think very little of the ability of African Americans to think very much at all. Nor is his dull Marxist contention that all “popular music" is lifeless and commodified sufficient intellectual cover for a palpable quality of hatred whose origins only an encounter with the street, or with a psychoanalyst, could explain. In his brackish essays on jazz, Adorno cannot keep bop separate from swing, or New Orleans separate from Chicago. Nor is he embarrassed by his Eurocentrism, which measures all things against classical time signatures and the authority of the maestro rather than the groove. But the crux of Adorno’s dismissal of jazz and, by implication, of blues tradition as a whole, comes in an astonishing passage on the difference between “higher music” and “popular” in the I<i>ntroduction to the Sociology of Music</i>, published in 1962: <blockquote>The higher music’s relation to its historical form is dialectical. It catches fire on those forms, melts them down, makes them vanish and return in vanishing. Popular music, on the other hand, uses the types as empty cans into which the material is pressed without interacting with the forms. Unrelated to the forms, the substance withers and at the same time belies the forms, which no longer <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="WHITE-SPACE: pre"></span>serve for compositional organization. The substance withers and at the same time belies the forms, which no longer serve for compositional organization. </blockquote>What a dazzling display of allusion. Adorno, the closet Platonist, is actually an aesthete, although a poor one whose appeal to Marx (“withers”) creates a smokescreen to keep the reader from reflecting on what he or she has just read. If the history of jazz and its legates is anything, it is “dialectical.” Far from using its “types as empty cans”—the metaphor is typically flattering—jazz and its musical heirs take the “forms” that enable them as their very subject. However, the distinction between “form” and “material” in any kind of music is misleading, since music has no semantic plane that it signifies, only an endless series of “formal” ones. The “vulgarity” that Adorno assigns to “popular music” is a projection. What is vulgar is the analysis and its presuppositions.<br /><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="WHITE-SPACE: pre"></span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Properly speaking, there is no difference between the “popular” and the “higher” for a simple reason. All traditions are structured dialectically. Whether it is the relation between <i>Mary Tyler Moore</i> and <i>The Dick Van Dyke Show </i>or <i>I Dream of Jeannie</i> and <i>Bewitched</i>, the revisionary ratios are manifest for any interested viewer. The ceaseless transfigurations in the history of “popular culture” reveal something else, too: the presence of the canonical master, who manages historical overdeterminations and anxieties of influence as the stock-and-trade of his or her business. Chuck Berry’s ability to transform big-band boogie woogie into the jump sound of rock and roll guitar is what makes him canonical, not the imposition upon him of a “moral” or “thematic” role from outside the terms of his medium. He is canonical because he transforms material, to insist on Adorno’s own vocabulary, dialectically. Like painting or literature—or, God forbid, like classical music—blues tradition is a self-conscious and learned tradition. To enjoy it requires education, too, although not, ideally speaking, at a German university.<br /><br /><br /><div style="TEXT-ALIGN: center">Works Cited</div><br /><br />Berry, Chuck. <i>Chuck Berry: The Autobiography</i>. New York: Harmony Books, 1987.<br /><br />Charters, Samuel B. <i>The Country Blues</i>. New York: Rinehart & Co., 1959.<br /><br />Davis, Miles, with Quincey Troupe. <i>Miles: The Autobiography</i>. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989.<br /><br />Ellison, Ralph. <i>Shadow and Act</i>. New York: Random House, 1964.<br /><br />George, Nelson. <i>The Death of Rhythm and Blues</i>. New York: Pantheon, 1988.<br /><br />Giddins, Gary. <i>Riding on a Blue Note: Jazz and American Pop</i>. Boulder: Da Capo Press, 2000.<br /><br />Gillett, Charlie. <i>The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll</i>. New York: Pantheon, 1970.<br /><br />Gilroy, Paul. <i>The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness</i>. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.<br /><br />Gitler, Ira. S<i>wing to Bop: An Oral History of the Transition in Jazz in the 1940s</i>. New York: Oxford University Press: 1985.<br /><br />Gordy, Berry.<i> To Be Loved: The Music, the Magic, the Memories of Motown, an Autobiography.</i><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="WHITE-SPACE: pre"> </span>New York: Warner Books, 1994.<br /><br />Guralnick, Peter. <i>Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom.</i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="WHITE-SPACE: pre"> </span>New York: Harper and Row, 1986.<br /><br />Hebdige, Dick. <i>Subculture: The Meaning of Style</i>. London: Meuthuen, 1979.<br /><br />Jones, LeRoi. <i>Blues People: Negro Music in White America</i>. New York: Morrow, 1963.<br /><br />Keil, Charles. <i>Urban Blues. </i>Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966.<br /><br />Lott, Eric. <i>Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class</i>. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.<br /><br />Malone, Bill C. <i>Country Music U. S. A.</i> Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985.<br /><br />Marcus, Greil. <i>Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music</i>. New York: Dutton,<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="WHITE-SPACE: pre"> </span>1975.<br /><br />Murray, Albert. <i>Stomping the Blues</i>. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976.<br /><br />Palmer, Robert. <i>Deep Blues</i>. New York: Viking, 1981.<br /><br />Robinson, Smokey, with David Ritz. <i>Smokey: Inside My Life.</i> New York: McGraw-Hill, 1989.<br /><br />Russell, Ross. <i>Jazz Style in Kansas City and the Southwest</i>. Berkeley: University of California<span class="Apple-style-span" style="WHITE-SPACE: pre"> </span>Press, 1991.<br /><br />Schuller, Gunther. <i>The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz, 1930—45.</i> New York: Oxford<span class="Apple-style-span" style="WHITE-SPACE: pre"> </span>University Press, 1989.<br /><br />Shaw, Arnold. <i>Honkers and Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues</i>. New York: Macmillan, 1978.<br /><br />Southern, Eileen. <i>The Music of Black Americans: A History.</i> New York: Norton, 1971.<br /><br />Stowe, David W. <i>Swing Changes: Big-Band Jazz in New Deal America.</i> Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994.<br /><br /><i>Originally published in </i>A Concise Companion to Postwar American Literature and Culture<i>. Edited by Josephine G. Hendin. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.</i>Perry Meiselhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15136895284654246782noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2242027659057377496.post-40204342563472909732011-02-08T13:35:00.000-08:002011-02-27T11:58:54.536-08:00Review of "Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Public of Two"by Perry <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">Meisel</span><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Public of Two. <i>By Angela Smith. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999. 238 pp. </i></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>The friendship of Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf has always been a provocative subject for critical speculation, particularly because the two share so much as writers. They met in 1916 and, by 1917, had begun an intense relationship that lasted until Mansfield died from consumption in 1923 at the age of only thirty-four. These years witness not just the production of the majority of the short stories upon which Mansfield's reputation is based, but also the change in Woolf's technique that begins in her own short fiction and in <i>Jacob's Room </i>(1922), and that comes to fruition in <i>Mrs. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">Dalloway</span></i> (1925) and <i>To the Lighthouse </i>(1927). Mansfield's writing, said Woolf when Mansfield died, "'was . . . the only writing I have ever been jealous of'" (p. 5).</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Although Angela Smith's new book, <i>Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Public of Two</i>, does not press its case for influence – it must be dug out – it nonetheless provides adequate formulations to describe and account for how and why Mansfield and Woolf shared a personal intimacy and a common shop.<sup>1 </sup>Mansfield and Woolf "mirror each other constantly," says Smith (p. 1), and they do so because both are preoccupied, in life and letters alike, by what Smith calls, following the anthropologists Victor and Edith Turner, an acute sense of "<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">liminality</span>" (pp. 4, 10) – of borders and border states.<sup>2</sup> While Mansfield's status as an outsider was the function of her colonial birth and upbringing in Wellington, New Zealand, Smith argues that, as women with a profession, both Mansfield and Woolf shared a preoccupation with being self-consciously on the edge. Nor did Woolf's privilege as Leslie Stephen's child matter much. Like the banker Harold <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">Beauchamp</span>, Stephen was a "roaring, brutal" father (p. 50) who made his daughter a colonial subject from within. Such commonality was exacerbated by the fact that both women were married to editors; Smith even shows how Leonard Woolf and John Middleton Murry carefully controlled their wives' posthumous reception. As Smith puts it, "the female writer could be rewritten by the male authority" (p. 52). They also shared what was perhaps the materially deepest "<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">liminal</span>" bond of all, that of being ill. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>The principal focus of Smith's study, however, is not the biographies but the fiction of her critical protagonists. Yet here too Smith discovers the same preoccupation with <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">liminality</span>. Drawing on Julia <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">Kristeva's</span> notion of "the semiotic," the fluid, undifferentiated world of the mother-child relation before the onset of the Oedipus conflict and its inscription of the child into what, following Jacques <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">Lacan</span>, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">Kristeva</span> calls the "symbolic" order, Smith shows how both Mansfield and Woolf not only experienced these two planes of life simultaneously but also juxtaposed their representation, with strategic intent, in their work. The result is nothing less than the invention of a new mode of writing and a new mode of reader response. Especially in the depiction of home life, it produces a feeling of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">defamiliarization</span>, or of what Freud calls (in an essay written in 1919, at the height, coincidentally, of Woolf and Mansfield's friendship) "the uncanny" (p. 2). </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Smith gives us a key to reading Mansfield's strategies by showing how her narratives are composed of modular units. Like the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">Woolfian</span> narratives that Mansfield appears to have influenced more decisively than we hitherto have believed, Mansfield's stories have no privileged center of consciousness, whether that of character or of narrator. Indeed, they have no "consciousness" as such at all, since the focus is on personality's "unconscious" and, by definition, on its links to common structures, particularly ideological ones, that gird all the "selves" fashioned under <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">given</span> socioeconomic regimes. (Smith does not, however, point us to either <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">Lacan</span> or Louis <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">Althusser</span> for such clarification of her critical program.) Hence Mansfield can, as a writer, actually strive to "transform the symbolic order from the inside" (p. 92) by "<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14">destablilizing</span>" (p. 151) the "script" (pp. 175, 180) of patriarchy that even female character is forced to read. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Smith's readings of Mansfield's "At the Bay" (1921) and "The Daughters of the Late Colonel" (1922) are her most vivid instances of such "feminist rewriting" (p. 120).<sup>3</sup> If "Prelude" (1918) is, with its "empty house" (p. 106), "the model for <i>To the Lighthouse</i>" (p. 93), then "At the Bay," with its action limited to a "single day" (p. 151), is the model for <i>Mrs. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15">Dalloway</span></i>. As in <i>Mrs. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_16">Dalloway</span></i>, "linguistic motifs link . . . characters" (p. 158), motifs whose frequent <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_17">psychopolitical</span> imagery, like the phallic <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_18">monumentalism</span> of London's imperial architecture or the blade of Peter Walsh's knife, show the extent to which language itself is, as <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_19">Lacan</span> suggests, the symbolic order. In "At the Bay," "constructions of human experience" are "subjected to scrutiny and revealed as inadequate" (p. 163). While the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_20">Burnell</span> family's women and children enjoy the <i><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_21">jouissance</span></i> of fluid relation when husband and father Stanley is in town at business, his return, like Mr. Ramsay's bluff appearances in <i>To the Lighthouse</i>, spells the doom of such playful exchange by centering everything, including the interpretation of speech acts, according to the code of the father's needs and demands. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>The "contradictory representations of the self" (p. 164) that such shifting domestic rhythms give rise to, especially among the female characters, is not only responsible for tensions in the world of the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_22">Burnell</span> household; they are also the technical contrivance upon which the narrative seizes in order to "disrupt . . . the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_23">prescripted</span> texts that the characters are trying to live out" (p. 165). In "The Daughters of the Late Colonel," the death of the imperial father allows the unmarried, middle-aged daughters to be "released from the patriarchal presence" (p. 217) as "one script becomes another" (p. 219). Because life is played out in representations, the fiction writer can intervene in its ordering premises at will by simply "destabilizing" the normative procedures of representation itself. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Smith's reading of Woolf offers little in the way of surprise, but the argument for influence is convincing. It does not impugn Woolf's own originality; rather, it shows how Mansfield helped Woolf to become herself. Unlike her rote feminist decoding of <i>Mrs. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_24">Dalloway</span></i> and <i>To the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_25">Lighhouse,</span></i> Smith's handling of <i>Jacob's Room</i> refreshes our appreciation of the novel by demonstrating its pivotal place in Woolf's development in a new way. What is new is the influence of Mansfield. Smith's account of the emergence of what she calls Woolf's "mobile method" (p. 140) in her transitional stories, particularly "A Mark on the Wall" (1917) and "<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_26">Kew</span> Gardens" (1919), prepares the ground. In <i>Jacob's Room</i>, "incongruous pictures jostle each other" (p. 194), notably the juxtaposition of Jacob's patriarchy and his consequent "security as a privileged reader" (p. 214), and the novel's "chorus of . . . women" (p. 120), who present alternative reading practices and whose representation is controlled by alternative <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_27">tropologies</span>. "The narrator plays with . . . archetypal roles," both "undermining" and sustaining them (p. 210). </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_28">Liminality</span> is, however, a largely self-evident way to describe what Woolf and Mansfield share, and a rather commonsensical way of approaching their relation. Apart from demonstrating Mansfield's preponderant influence, Smith's study carries few discoveries. But adding to it, as Smith does, the presumable authority of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_29">Kristeva also </span>makes her a bit wooden and uninspiring. It is one thing to borrow a useful distinction such as that between the semiotic and the symbolic in order to get things going. It is quite another to invoke <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_30">Kristeva</span> again and again. The cranky machinery of the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_31">Kristevan</span> system confuses more than it clarifies. Even the distinction between the semiotic and the symbolic leads to an epistemological <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_32">cul</span>-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_33">de</span>-sac that a critic with structural presuppositions like Smith, or, indeed, like <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_34">Kristeva</span> herself, should be suspicious of. It requires <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_35">valorizing</span> the notion of natural rhythms as opposed to social ones and linking the "rhythms of the female body with cyclic time" (p. 222). This is the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_36">unreflective</span> side of French feminism and the point at which it cannot sustain the ironies that brought it into being. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_37">Kristeva's</span> work is really a displacement of her literary anxieties; the opposition of the semiotic and the symbolic is really the opposition of Melanie Klein and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_38">Lacan</span> in her critical unconscious. Above all, it <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_39">valorizes</span> the very anthropomorphism – the romantic practice of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_40">prosopopoeia</span> – that Mansfield, Woolf, and late romantic modernism as a whole characteristically put into question. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Such a difficulty points to a larger problem. We have reached a moment of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_41">uncanniness</span> in literary criticism as a whole today, when the interrogation of the hegemonic has, with some irony, itself become the rule. <i>A Public of Two </i>is both an investigation of such <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_42">uncanniness</span> in the work of Mansfield and Woolf, and an instance of it in its own critical practice. Smith can read well enough when she is free of the shadow of the theoretical authority. Why invoke it so <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_43">stentorianly</span> when when its tenets are now common knowledge?</div><div><br /></div><div>Notes</div><div><br /></div><div>1. There have been combined studies of Mansfield and Woolf, but none, Smith argues, presents the full picture to which hers aspires. See Ronald Hayman, <i>Literature and Living: A Consideration of Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf </i>(London: Covent Garden, 1972); Nora Sellei, <i>Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Personal and Professional Bond</i> (Frankfurt: Lang, 1996); and Patricia Moran, <i>Word of Mouth: Body Language in Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf </i>(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996). </div><div><br /></div><div> </div><div>2. Victor Turner and Edith Turner, <i>Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture </i>(Oxford: Blackwell, 1978).</div><div><br /></div><div>3. Both were included in <i>The Garden Party </i>(1922); Smith, however, does not date the stories despite the biographical demands of her argument. </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><i>Originally published in </i>Modern Philology, Volume 100, Number 1, <i>August 2002</i> </div>Perry Meiselhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15136895284654246782noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2242027659057377496.post-63723403466773695072011-02-05T21:42:00.000-08:002011-02-07T13:35:21.660-08:00In Exile<div><div>by Perry <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">Meisel</span></div></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>I met Robert <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">Christgau</span> in the fall of 1975, fresh out of graduate school at Yale, and teaching as an assistant professor of English at NYU. I had written rock and jazz criticism for <i><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">Crawdaddy</span> </i>and <i>The Boston Phoenix</i>, and had had excellent editors – John <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">Swenson</span> and Ben <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">Gerson</span>. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">Christgau</span>, however, was different; he was the Dean of American Rock Criticism. Nor was it, as every rock critic knows deep down, an inappropriate moniker.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>As I crossed Eighth Street that afternoon, going from my office at NYU up University Place to the <i>Voice</i>, the autumn air was suddenly fresher. I had left my academic colleagues behind – puffy men gnawing their prejudices with ghastly satisfaction. Real criticism beckoned. We talked mostly about jazz-rock "fusion," a big but dubious thing at the time. Stanley Clarke. Grover Washington. The singing George Benson. "Do you really like this stuff?" he asked. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Not entirely, I replied. I'm ambivalent about it. It regrets its rocking impulses too much. But it's a historical inevitability. It simply hasn't been done right. There's a grammar of pop that demands it. Maybe somebody besides Miles Davis will figure it out.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>He kindled. The conversation had begun. He sent me off to review Larry <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">Coryell</span> at the Village Gate. Talk about ambivalence! I <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">sweated</span> like hell, almost as much as <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">Coryell</span> himself did, trying to reconcile his funk drives with his learning. This wasn't just the central tension in jazz-rock "fusion"; it was also the central tension in rock criticism, especially on my end. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>I pored over <i>Any Old Way You Choose It</i> umpteen times, languishing in its cadences and doing my damnedest to get "personal" the way Bob did. After all, I was, despite my earlier music writing and even my long experience playing saxophone in paying bands, an "academic" critic who had been taught to keep the hogs out back, where they belong. Now I wanted a snout of my own. God, could that man clear up a sentence! And my own voice more expressive! Hard to believe that I could learn to hit a ride cymbal in stride. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>But to think of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">Christgau</span> as a foil to the academy would be misleading. He reminded me, that first day, of my younger teachers at Yale – scrupulous, learned, but easygoing men with a wink in their eyes. The wink signaled a tacit understanding that the Shakespeare you were discussing today and the Howard Hawks film you'd seen last night were made of the same cloth. "High" and "low" culture were not just continuous; they had complex historical connections so overdetermined as to make your head spin. For all his ambivalence about the academy, and about the new literary theory in particular, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">Christgau</span> was, at heart, a structuralist, and had been long before structuralism was En Vogue. Whether it was James Taylor or Edward Taylor, performance was performance, scholarship was scholarship. John Milton was as worth your while as Little Milton. Bob called it "democratic culture." I called it "semiotics." Our <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">epistemologies</span> matched, just like our glasses. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Trained at Dartmouth as a New Critic, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">Christgau</span> joined a tradition beginning with Marshall <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">Stearns</span> at Yale and Martin Williams at Penn of "close readers" who, on their own, working with "pop" materials in a literary rather than an anthropological way, discovered that form was enabling rather than repressive. Literary rather than anthropological. That is key. While Yale drop-out John Hammond may have dabbled in racial stereotyping while promoting the blues, even Hammond was formalist in his leanings rather than moralistic. The "expressions" of black America, charted originally as the "folkways" of the sociologist W.E.B. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14">DuBois</span> and the (let us not forget) anthropologically trained Nora <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15">Zeale</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_16">Hurston</span>, were now a formal system – art, with all its self-consciousness, rather than the raw data of suffering. Ralph Ellison, as a critic, gave particular authority to this new approach. By the 1950s, jazz criticism had thereby prepared the ground for rock criticism. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>The <i>Voice </i>was, and still is, an academy in exile. If, as Bob avers, Richard <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_17">Goldstein</span> had invented rock criticism, he systematized and institutionalized it, using New Journalist techniques to describe its tensions firsthand. In addition to the birthing of the New Journalism, from Mailer to <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_18">Goldstein</span>, the paper's influence includes that <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_19">seachange</span> in cultural assumption represented by rock criticism as a whole. The very materials of rock criticism obliterate any presumable difference between "high" and "low." For <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_20">Christgau</span>, it is not just a question of gentlemanly winks. It is a public intellectual question to be played out and resolved in journalism rather than in the pages of <i>Renaissance Quarterly </i>or <i>Representations</i>. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Invariably operating to the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_21">latter's</span> discredit, the divide between "high" and "low" has a long history, from Matthew Arnold, who largely invented it, to F.R. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_22">Leavis</span>, who gave his prejudices an avuncular twist so as to make them appear common-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_23">sensical</span> and benign. This history's apogee is Clement <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_24">Greenberg's</span> 1939 essay "<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_25">Avant</span>-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_26">Garde</span> and Kitsch" in <i>Partisan Review</i>. Even T.W. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_27">Adorno</span>, friend of the worker, is a brick-headed snob on the subject. The assumption that the "popular" is kitsch," or trash, to use <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_28">Greenberg's</span> notorious appellation, is the same as the assumption that black artistic production is expression, not craft. Nor is Sontag's "camp" very much better. It assumes that someone still has a "superior" perspective. The elementary lessons of semiotics, apprehended early on by Ellison, a disciple of Kenneth Burke, somehow escaped the doyens of <i>Partisan Review</i>. All human activity is, to use Burke's prescient phrase, "symbolic action" – discourses with dialectical histories. No wonder the murder of the conservative approach to culture had come from "pop" music criticism, from its origins in jazz criticism to its apotheosis in rock.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>More and more I understand one of Bob's most singular remarks to me. One day, after I had sung the praises of some half-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_29">assed</span> band, he looked at me with a puzzled smile. "You see more in mediocre music," he said, "than anyone I know." I was moved. I took it as a compliment. I love the "mediocre" – not the bad, mind you, or the corrupt, but what the dictionary says the "mediocre" is: the "commonplace," the middle, etymologically, of the mountain; good old <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_30">MOR</span>. Here you see "genre," or form, at its purest, plus the tug-of-war between capitulation and revolt that comes from making its demands paramount. Hence my delight in jingles, in TV theme songs. Just check out the sequence of the themes to <i><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_31">Banacek</span></i>, <i>Miami Vice</i>, and <i>Law and Order</i> for a very considerable historical dialectic that the shows themselves act out in dramatic terms. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>"High" culture itself actually created the problem of "mediocrity" by making the artist's struggle against past forms the center of Romanticism. Keats in particular initiates this tradition; he is rock and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_32">roll's</span> original poet, the first Buddy Holly or Brian Jones. The continuity between "high" and "pop" is often exact to a fault. </div><div><br /></div><div><i>Originally published in </i>Don't Stop 'til You Get Enough: Essays in Honor of Robert <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_33">Christgau.</span><i> Edited by Tom Carson, Kit <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_34">Rachlis</span> and Jeff <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_35">Salamon</span></i>. <i>Austin: <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_36">Nortex</span> Press, 2002.</i></div><div><br /></div>Perry Meiselhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15136895284654246782noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2242027659057377496.post-42593294596738476742011-02-03T23:18:00.000-08:002011-02-04T14:22:50.216-08:00Plugged<div>by Perry Meisel</div><div><br /></div><div><div>Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan. <i>By Howard Sounes. Illustrated. 527 pp. New York: Grove Press. $27.50.</i></div></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>As a kid, I thought God looked like my grandfather; as an adult, I figure he looks like Bob Dylan. Dylan not only joined folk music and electric blues to produce modern rock 'n' roll; he also joined the traditions of the blues with those of literature. No wonder Dylan criticism is besotted with tendentiousness. No one knows where to start. Even biographies of Dylan come at a price. Anthony Scaduto's <i>Bob Dylan: An Intimate Biography</i> (1971) is polite to a studious fault, embarrassed by its own potential for overstatement, like the first guest at a party. Robert Shelton's <i>No Direction Home</i> (1986), which benefited from Shelton's friendship with Dylan, does not benefit from Shelton's critical powers, which are suspended in favor of narrative. Bob Spitz's often magnificent <i>Dylan</i> (1989) also lets critical formulation slip away even when it is in hand, while Clinton Heylin's punctilious <i>Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades</i> (1991) sometimes crashes trying to find a ''real'' Dylan amid the masks that define him.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Now comes Howard Sounes's <i>Down the Highway</i>. Sounes matches none of his predecessors in elegance, but he offers information that, in sheer quantity, supersedes prior accounts. Although there is no discography, Sounes, a British journalist and the author of a biography of Charles Bukowski, is a tireless schlepper of facts. Most have been gathered through interviews with friends, family and, most important, other musicians.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Sounes's sleuthing, however, yields only minor results, chief among them the discovery of a child fathered by Dylan in 1986. Nor does he add much detail to Dylan's conversion to Christianity in 1979. His real success lies in his re-creation of Dylan's recording sessions and rehearsals for tours. To his credit, Sounes gives almost as much time to later albums like <i>Blood on the Tracks</i> (1975), <i>Shot of Love</i> (1981) and even <i>Empire Burlesque</i> (1985) as he does to classics like <i>Bringing It All Back Home</i> (1965), <i>Highway 61 Revisited</i> (1965) and <i>Blonde on Blonde</i> (1966). No matter the time or place, Dylan comes alive, strumming his guitar in a studio in Nashville or hurrying down MacDougal Street with the collar of his leather jacket turned up against the wind.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Born in 1941 as Robert Zimmerman in Duluth, Minn., Dylan grew up in comfortable surroundings. Both parents were musical, but the tone of family life grew somber when they moved north to the mining town of Hibbing to live with Bob's grandmother after his father got polio and lost his job with Standard Oil. Sounes provides a vivid account of Dylan's boyhood by evoking the grim beauty of the Minnesota Iron Range and the contrast with it provided by the Southern rock 'n' roll that Dylan heard on the radio late at night. Major influences for his electric guitar bands in high school included Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Hank Williams and Muddy Waters. Dylan's teenage rock 'n' roll escapades have not escaped the attention of his earlier biographers, particularly Spitz and Shelton, but Sounes presents them in such detail that, even more than in prior accounts, we fall in love first with a boy who is already plugged in.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>As a freshman at the University of Minnesota in 1959, Dylan heard an Odetta record and – reversing what Muddy Waters did in 1944 – traded in his electric guitar for an acoustic one. After growing success as a folk performer in Greenwich Village beginning in 1961, in 1965 Dylan marched onstage at the Newport Folk Festival with an electric band. He was, famously, booed. Sounes's focus on Dylan's teenage bands makes this incident look different. To speak of Dylan's roots as folk is erroneous: the roots that really clutch are rock 'n' roll.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>But collapsing one myth does not prevent Sounes from succumbing to another. While he pooh-poohs the severity of Dylan's highly publicized motorcycle accident near Woodstock, N.Y. in the summer of 1966 (he has spoken to the doctor with whom Dylan stayed for six weeks), Sounes nonetheless regards it as a ''blessing'' that allowed Dylan to withdraw in a time of imaginative need. Beginning with <i>The Basement Tapes</i> (1975), the story becomes a familiar one. Moments of decline are followed by moments of redemption. Dylan is suddenly reduced to size. Dubious albums like <i>Slow Train Coming</i> (1979) are redeemed by less phlegmatic ones like <i>Infidels</i> (1983). The wider curve of Dylan's career follows suit. It is a story of Dylan losing his way, feeling ''guilt'' and, eventually, becoming a mensch again. He regains his form in 1997 with the triumphal <i>Time Out of Mind</i>.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Dylan is not, however, merely the Elizabethan stage Jew Sounes wishes him to be, despite his ''hooked nose,'' as Sounes puts it, and sympathy for Jesus. Sounes's book has a second story to tell, besides its Christian romance. Rather than spiritual melodrama, there is Dylan simply going about his business. ''He really hadn't changed all that much,'' the folk singer Dave Van Ronk says about a visit from Dylan in 1989. ''He was as nervous as ever.'' Even Dylan's Aunt Ethel agrees: ''He's very unassuming, and he's very quiet. As he has been all his life.'' Nor has his music changed in either passion or instinctive commitment to experimentation. As the drummer Jim Keltner says, Dylan's music is always extraordinary, even in the Christian period, when Dylan crosses generic boundaries again, this time into gospel and soul rather than the blues. He can, as Sounes acknowledges, ''go on indefinitely''; Dylan and his touring bands are ''Gypsy troubadours.'' As the critic Greil Marcus has suggested, Dylan's is a carnival world of hustlers and rustlers who cannot be pinned down, not unlike the motley crew of Melville's <i>Confidence Man</i>.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Sounes comes closest to rendering the uncanny juxtapositions that define his subject when his two stories of Dylan cross in his reader's mind. The effect, however, is unintentional. Unlike his newest biographer, Dylan himself is endlessly preoccupied by strategic contrast – of voice, of influence, of musical and poetic protocol – and by the way it provides structure for experience. The song ''Not Dark Yet,'' from <i>Time Out of Mind</i>, is a surpassing example of a privileged moment dependent upon its own ruin for its beauty. Dylan's surest analogue among poets is not T. S. Eliot but Thomas Hardy, just as his musical anxiety of influence is not, ultimately, Woody Guthrie or Muddy Waters or even Buddy Holly but Louis Armstrong. While Sounes has added a wealth of new information to Dylan studies, he has a tin ear when it comes to orchestrating what he has found.</div><div><br /></div><div><i>Originally published in </i>The New York Times Book Review<i>, June 10, 2001</i></div>Perry Meiselhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15136895284654246782noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2242027659057377496.post-6585889473961810322011-02-01T20:44:00.000-08:002011-02-05T13:48:54.648-08:00Psychoanalysis and Aestheticism<div><blockquote></blockquote><blockquote></blockquote>by Perry Meisel </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Freud as Literature</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Freud's influence—its nature, its history, its origins—is a complex affair. Michel Foucault, in his essay “What Is an Author?” (1969), describes it with extraordinary precision. Like Marx, he writes, Freud is the “initiator” of a “discursive practice”:</div><div><blockquote>Freud is not simply the author of <i>The Interpretation of Dreams</i> or of <i>Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious</i> and Marx is not simply the author of the <i>Communist Manifesto</i> or <i>Capital</i>: they both established the endless possibility of discourse.… In saying that Freud founded psychoanalysis, we do not simply mean that the concept of libido or the techniques of dream analysis reappear in the writing of Karl Abraham or Melanie Klein, but that he made possible a certain number of differences with respect to his books, concepts, and hypotheses, which all arise out of psychoanalytic discourse. (131-32)</blockquote></div><div>Foucault's animosity toward Freud in the latter phase of his own career, particularly in the first volume of <i>The History of Sexuality</i> (1976), is itself an example of Freud's influence as Foucault describes it. Foucault is a Freudian because he cannot help it. Freud is part of the air we breathe; indeed, he is the air we breathe, whether we like it or not.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>As Foucault suggests, Freud's customary stance as a narrator is really, to use a contemporary metaphor, an interactive one. He invites you to argue with him. He invites you, not to be persuaded, but to resist. It is not unlike the analytic situation. This rhetorical site is where the “truth” of psychoanalysis is, as it were, performed—in the agreement between reader and writer, patient and analyst, to disagree about something that is, presumably, already there. This is why it is not, in the first or the last instance, a question of the empirical truth or falsehood of Freud's claims. What matters is the structure of Freudian reader-response that puts those claims into place. No wonder the perils of psychoanalytic treatment include ignoring physical causes for suffering. The nature of Freud's institutional misreading is often, to use a tired but true metaphor, religious, the result of treating the Founder's text as though it were Scripture. This is also why Freud, like the Bible, is literature. His texts are polysemous, but his interpreters, not being literary critics, don't simply fail to celebrate Freud's endless posibilties of meaning; they reduce Freud's texts to meaning one thing rather than another. Arguments with Freud's “truth,” whether from Grünbaum's perspective (1984) or from Masson's (1984), fail to address this simple but decisive point. In so doing, such arguments also succeed, quite against their intentions, in actually promoting Freud's continued success. Disagreements with psychoanalysis maintain, rhetorically speaking, the disputable truth to which psychoanalysis does or does not properly refer. Indeed, the more disagreements the merrier. This is the situation that Foucault describes.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>It is therefore the constitutive elements of Freud's writing and the ways in which they shape the world of psychoanalytic process that deserve our primary attention. Freud's method of handling us as readers is so familiar that we tend to overlook the devices that structure it. Chief among them is Freud's famous irony, although it is never simply a withering existential contempt. Indeed, Freud's tone and manner are always genuinely ironic, since they say one thing while meaning another. The narrator can engage, and even persuade, the reader by appealing to his or her presumably superior judgment when the narrator's judgment seems to be weak or foolhardy. The deliberate comparison of the case histories in <i>Studies on Hysteria</i> (1895) to “short stories” (160), for example, makes the reader think that Freud is selling himself short. The reader responds with an involuntary sympathy. The ironic later Freud earns the reader's generosity in a similar fashion: by appealing, with extraordinary audacity, directly to the reader's unwillingness to accept his dark arguments, in <i>Civilization and its Discontents</i> (1930), for example, or in <i>An Outline of Psychoanalysis</i> (1938). The reader responds with a heightened sense of his or her own argumentative courage and fullness of heart. Such writing is, as we sometimes call it today, following Mikhail Bakhtin, dialogical, rich with contending tongues and defined by their collision. Nor is such a volatile kind of writing without its startling implications.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>If, as Foucault maintains, the key to Freud's texts is that they produce the endless possibility of argument with them, then, to use Harold Bloom's term, their “misreading” becomes their only and outrageous rule. This is not just the structure of your reading of Freud or mine; it is also, as Foucault notes, the institutional structure of psychoanalytic history itself, which, like our contemporary skirmishes, is defined by disagreement and debate. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Transference, of course, is the clinical trope for this mode of relation, and it regulates the economy of Freud studies as well as of Freudian practice. We see this aspect at its most charming in the <i>Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis</i>, the brief series of lectures that Freud delivered at Clark University in 1909, with a marketing purpose in mind. We see this aspect of Freud at its most pugnacious in <i>The Question of Lay Analysis</i> (1926), as Freud, with a mercilessness reserved for questions that fall, properly speaking, outside the realm of psychoanalytic theory, takes his reader through a series of breakdance confrontations that require a continuous reexamination of one's assumptions simply in order to keep one's feet. Here confrontation serves not to antagonize but to stabilize the reader in a new, wider field of reference and feeling that the presumed antagonism has actually created. Freud is a dialectician, provoking his reader to bring an entire trail of beliefs and assumptions into play—positively, negatively, or in between. Nor is transference the only mechanism that thickens the Freudian plot. There is also overdetermination. How can there be a “single” reading of a Freudian text—I emphasize the dubious status of the “single” in psychoanalysis by placing it in quotation marks—even when a “single” subject attempts one? There are too many vicissitudes at work in text and subject alike to vouchsafe it.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Rich similitudes between text and phenomenon don't just crop up in Freud. They positively structure his work. I have elsewhere (1984) called this dimension of Freud's texts Freud's “reflexive realism”—the way in which they tend to double the objects they describe. Freud's psychical mechanisms resemble the mechanisms of his text, and the mechanisms of his text resemble the mechanisms of his psychical apparatus. There are any number of doublings to discuss in addition to the reader's transferential relation to Freud's writing and the overdeterminations that condition it. Roman Jakobson's identification of condensation and displacement with metaphor and metonymy is perhaps the most well-known (1956). More recently, Donald Spence (1982) and Peter Brooks (1985, 1994) have elaborated the details that link the narrative mechanisms of the psychical apparatus, those of the ego in particular, with those of narrative as such, giving the final touches to a long tradition of regarding Freud's writing as literary that begins with Kenneth Burke and John Crowe Ransom (see Meisel 1981). </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Nor is allegory absent. The argumentative agons of Freud's writing often mirror their theoretical concerns. Narcissism is the central category of psychoanalysis during the intense self-scrutiny that characterizes Freud's metapsychological phase, much as Freud's concern with the authority of the new psychoanalytic model of mind in <i>The Ego and the Id</i> (1923) is bound up with a defense of the Oedipus complex. Indeed, as Harold Bloom has noted (1978), Freud's career is structured like a poetic quest-romance, with its movements guided by the trope of deferred action. Each major text overtly revises the one before it as we move from <i>Studies on Hysteria</i> to the dream book, from the dream book to the occlusions of the metapsychological phase, and from the metapsychology to the high ground of <i>Beyond the Pleasure Principle</i> (1920), by which time Freud's system has been well enough refined to sustain shocks of any kind.</div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">“Constancy” and Chiasmus</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Let me, however, focus on only two doublings or similitudes here, with the aim of drawing out an additional relation between Freud and literature. The first is the “principle of constancy,” a notion that the young Freud borrowed from the German empirical psychologist and philosopher Gustav Fechner, and one that turns out to be a principle of Freud's writing as well as of his theory.<sup>1</sup> Fechner's “principle of constancy” (or “principle of stability”) plays a role in Freud's attempt to imagine the psychical apparatus as early as 1895, in both <i>Studies on Hysteria</i> and the P<i>roject for a Scientific Psychology</i>. In an 1892 letter to Breuer, Freud refers to it as “the theorem concerning the constancy of the sum of excitation” (147). Breuer, who admired Fechner second only to Goethe (Jones 1953, 23), describes the mechanism three years later in his theoretical section of <i>Studies on Hysteria</i>, giving credit to Freud for the newer, psychoanalytic variation: “Here for the first time,” writes Breuer, “we meet the fact that there exists in the organism a ‘tendency to keep intracerebral excitation constant’ (Freud)” (Freud and Breuer 185, 197; Breuer's italics). In the <i>Project</i>, the principle of constancy is called “the principle of neuronal inertia: that neurones,” as Freud puts it there, “tend to divest themselves of quantity” (1895, 296). Freud gives credit for the idea to Fechner, however, only in 1920, when he quotes him directly in <i>Beyond the Pleasure Principle</i>.</div><div><blockquote>“In so far as conscious impulses always have some relation to pleasure or unpleasure, pleasure and unpleasure too can be regarded as having a psychophysical relation to conditions of stability and instability . . . . Every psycho-physical motion . . . approximates to complete stability, and is attended by unpleasure in proportion as, beyond a certain limit, it deviates from complete stability.” (Fechner 1873; qtd. in Freud 1920, 8)</blockquote></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Although Fechner allowed Freud to solve a major theoretical problem, his influence provoked anxiety. No wonder Freud for many years would not show exactly what he had taken from him. The principle of constancy is a way of explaining why “abreaction” or the “cathartic method” won't do in <i>Studies on Hysteria</i>. The mind cannot simply “talk” away its losses or seek discharge from tensions in pleasure; it must learn to absorb them. Abreaction is not sufficient to obtain a state of constancy or inertia. An increased sense of the mind's ability to act as a sponge for stimulation is necessary. This is the change that <i>Beyond the Pleasure Principle </i>brings to Freud's thinking.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>“Discharge,” as it turns out, is always incomplete. A residue of stimulation always remains behind, whether from within or without, as a material token of the self's experience. In this sense, memory has a physical dimension. “Constancy” must have more than “discharge” at its service.<sup>2</sup> Otherwise, it would threaten to spill out the contents of the very self it means to protect. Thus, its central role in <i>Beyond the Pleasure Principle</i> and, later, in <i>The Ego and the Id</i>. Here, we already have a good sense of the new structural model of mind that Freud formalizes in 1923, and of the way it solves problems that the earlier topographical model, relying on the discharge of stimulation to keep consciousness clean or constant, could not. It can represent the psychical apparatus as a machine designed to store influence and stimulation rather than to discharge or expel them. Consciousness can never be swept clean; its boundaries are open to question, even in the midst of full functioning. Pleasure, the grander version of what the early Freud calls simply wish-fulfillment, is no longer the organism's chief motivation in life. Survival is, or at least appears to be. Indeed, to invoke the “organism” rather than the self or subject is to measure what else has changed in Freud's theory: a shift away from the early focus not just on the ego, but on consciousness (see also Solms 1997). Freud's concern now is less with “consciousness,” and even psychical life, and more, to use Virginia Woolf's phrase, with “life itself” (1919, 107). Survival depends upon the existence of an organism stable enough as such to be an entity differentiated from the rest of the world. What does one struggle against in order to survive? The desire to rest, to be at one with an otherwise antagonistic alterity. This is the death instinct. Hence, constancy is not the discharge of stimulation in the release once known as pleasure. Constancy is the endless absorption of alterity, despite the fact that being has as its premise a distinctness from what it is not.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>If we look closely at Fechner's role in Freud's early thinking, it is already the possibility of a structural model of mind that interests him. Excess or discharge was even then to be regarded as symptomatic rather than as purgative. Another notion was required to give “constancy” a means of facilitation and representation. In <i>The Interpretation of Dreams</i>, “the great Fechner,” as Freud there calls him (1900, 536), provides him with it: the concept of psychical locality. Even in the book's first chapter, the latter concept allows Freud to imagine “a mental apparatus built up of a number of agencies arranged in a series one behind the other” (49; Freud's italics). The mental apparatus is, in other words, built for storage. This notion leads Freud in Chapter 7 to propose a model of mind that already moves beyond the topography of consciousness and the unconscious that is presumably dominant in <i>The Interpretation of Dreams</i>, and that intimates the later structural model of <i>Beyond the Pleasure Principle</i> and <i>The Ego and the Id</i>. Its metaphoricity is that of inside and outside, not of surface and depth. The operative term is “series,” as Freud gives us a psychical “apparatus” rather than a psychical archeology:</div><div><blockquote>I shall carefully avoid the temptation to determine psychical locality in any anatomical fashion. I shall remain upon psychological ground, and I propose simply to follow the suggestion that we should picture the instrument which carries out our mental functions as resembling a compound microscope or a photographic apparatus, or something of the kind. On that basis, psychical locality will correspond to a point inside the apparatus at which one of the preliminary stages of an image comes into being. . . . The components . . . we will give the name of “agencies,” or (for the sake of greater clarity) “systems.”</blockquote> <blockquote>(1900, 536-37)</blockquote></div><blockquote><div><blockquote></blockquote></div></blockquote><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>These “agencies” or “systems” transact stimulation between the inside and the outside, preserving balance or constancy in the system as a whole—between, that is, inside and outside as such—by using psychical localities as a “series” of storehouses, some closer to the surface than others. The path of Freud's career after 1900 is a path towards a model of the mind that will fulfill the requirements of the principle of constancy, not only as a principle of harmonious Freudian psyche, but also as a principle of coherent Freudian textuality. The psychical apparatus is a compensatory one designed to maintain the principle of constancy in relation to both past and present stimulation, just as Freud's text, through all the phases of his career, is a compensatory apparatus designed to maintain its own power and coherence in relation to the literary and scientific influences that threaten it—Helmholtz and Brücke's, for example, or, for that matter, Fechner's own—and to the potential for incoherence in the system itself. From a reflexive or literary point of view, constancy is the principle of each text's coherence, and of Freud's career as a whole as it moves forward.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Not unlike “constancy” in its reflexive or literary implications is the second doubling I wish to discuss. It is based upon the rhetorical figure of chiasmus, which Jean Laplanche (1970, vii) has identified as characteristic of both Freud's writing and his theory, although with an intent different from mine. Chiasmus is a loop or a crossing over—“the pleasure of art,” for example, and “the art of pleasure.” We see it often in writing, as a way of noting interdependence and, sometimes, paradox. My argument in this essay, for example, may be put chiastically: if we can read literature psychoanalytically, we can also read psychoanalysis literarily. Lionel Trilling likewise describes what he calls the “reciprocal” relation between Freud and literature through the use of chiasmus: “the effect of Freud upon literature,” he writes, “has been no greater than the effect of literature upon Freud” (1940, 32). On a clinical plane, chiasmus is sometimes the structure of psychical defense. The privileged kid becomes a delinquent in order to maintain his or her sense of difference or distinction. Chiasmus is also the structure of the analytic situation. In order to proceed with life, the patient falls ill. In order to fall ill, the patient in the meantime identifies, however symptomatically, all that he or she wishes to repress by producing symptoms. Chiasmus is also key to the conversation with the reader that Freud's writing inspires. Reader and text cross over one another constantly, thereby bringing the play of psychoanalytic discourse into being. Between them, they also mimic or simulate the structure of the Freudian subject. If as a reader one is always at odds with Freud's texts, the Freudian subject is constitutively at odds with itself. According to Freud's second, structural theory, one is likewise constitutively at odds with the world, as an organic precondition for hatching or nurturing the ability to be self-divided psychologically. The figure of chiasmus, in other words, structures both the phenomenology and the ontology of the Freudian subject. Chiasmus is, in effect, the rhetorical structure of the principle of constancy. The efficiency of Freud's reflexivity—the doubling or similitude between the themes and structure of his writing—is almost enough to lull us into a merely aesthetic appreciation of psychoanalysis as literature.</div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Psychoanalysis and Aestheticism</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Of course, that depends upon what we mean by “aesthetic.” Aesthesis means “perception,” and the originator of “aesthetic” criticism, the Oxford don Walter Pater, took as his own focus the structure of human apprehension. Like Fechner, although beginning some twenty-five years later, Pater had a wide appeal. His <i>Studies in the History of the Renaissance</i>, published in 1873, vaulted him into instant, if controversial, fame. The book divided its readers into two camps: those who agreed with Pater's endorsement of pleasure as the chief value in art and life alike; and those who, like Virginia Woolf's father, Lesile Stephen (1875), found it necessary to mount a moralistic counteroffensive. The rigors of Pater's presumably soft “impressionism,” however, are a perpetual surprise. Like psychoanalysis, aestheticism is a discourse of and about stability, transgression, and overdetermination; like psychoanalysis, it is also a discourse that searches out the nature and the origin of the boundaries that make up subjectivity as we know it. Not only that. The similarities between psychoanalysis and aestheticism lead to an unsettling question: How new is Freud's revolutionary formulation of subjectivity? Within his own fields of reference—neurology, oneirocriticism, empircial psychology—Freud is, given his formidable skills as a tendentious bibliographer, without peer. Juxtaposed with Pater, however, Freud finds a surprising double or mirror image. It is also Pater's disciples, the Bloomsbury Group, who will, quite literally, translate and publish Freud in English beginning in 1922 (see Meisel and Kendrick 1985).</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Freud's friendliness toward Pater is manifest in his 1910 study of Leonardo, in which he discusses Pater's essay on Leonardo in <i>The Renaissance</i> no fewer than four times (68n1, 110, 111, 115). Freud is especially impressed by the Englishman's ability to see in the Mona Lisa's smile the “sinister menace,” as Freud puts it, adopting Pater's language, of the “unbounded tenderness” of Leonardo's mother (45). As with Freud, Pater's emphasis is on “brain-building” (1878, 173), or self, and the influences that shape it, particularly the deferred action that fashions the self through retrospection (see Meisel 1987). Pater's prefiguration of Freud emerges in an even wider light in his essay on Wordsworth (1874), which estimates the poet's strength by focusing on his understanding of melancholy. Like the heroes of Pater's own imaginary portraits, Wordsworth's heroes suffer from reminiscences that shatter the ego and that often take on, despite the beauty of the language that renders them, an almost crudely material form. Wordsworth represents the cause of grief through apostrophe—in charged sites of mourning, real and psychological, such as the churchyard in “The White Doe of Rylstone,” or, on a grander scale, in the animation of natural landscape by the poet's own eye in “Tintern Abbey” or <i>The Prelude</i>. All apostrophe has mourning at its root. The churchyard, and even one's childhood home, are examples of what Pater calls “that pitiful awe and care for the perishing human clay, of which relic-worship is but the corruption” (1874, 49-50). </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Brooding on death, however, has its uses. Like Pater's Marius the Epicurean, rearranging with his hands the encrypted bones of his ancestors, Wordsworth's heroes, especially the poet himself, thereby succeed in moving beyond melancholy by virtue of its exaggerated exercise. This also allows Wordsworth to redistribute the pain he represents by evoking pathos in his reader.<sup>3</sup> Nor is it a “discharge” or cathartic model that informs this kind of Romantic pleasure. It is, rather, a model of “constancy,” as it were, since this mode of reading raises and enlarges the reader's appreciation rather than asks the reader to judge. It is a magic or “religious” (Pater 1874, 49) kind of melancholy, culturally productive rather than symptomatic. It allows the reader to see more.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>But the most far-reaching similarity between Freud and Pater is to be found in a comparison of the “Conclusion” to <i>The Renaissance</i> and <i>Beyond the Pleasure Principle</i>. Pater's views are already Freud's, from both a rhetorical and a phenomenological point of view. Pater's “Conclusion” contains an implicitly Freudian portrait of the psyche in a state of willful undress:</div><div><blockquote>Let us begin with that which is without—our physical life. Fix upon it in one of its more exquisite intervals, the moment, for instance, of delicious recoil from the flood of water in summer heat. What is the whole physical life in that moment but a combination of natural elements to which science gives their names? But these elements, phosphorous and lime and delicate fibres, are present not in the human body alone: we detect them in places most remote from it. Our physical life is a perpetual motion of them—the passage of blood, the wasting and repairing of the lenses of the eye, the modification of the tissues of the brain by every ray of light and sound. (1873, 233-34)</blockquote></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Where the line falls between self and world, inside and outside, is difficult to ascertain; it changes moment to moment in its effort to maintain a state of constancy in subject and object alike. As in Freud, the self is also construed, first and foremost, as a physical or material self, even though, in both writers, materiality is infinitely porous: “That clear, perpetual outline of face and limb is but an image of ours, under which we group them—a design in a web, the actual threads of which pass out beyond it” (234). Nor is Pater lacking Freud's ambivalence. The self's very separation from the world is both a triumph and a defeat. “In the narrow chamber of the individual mind,” says Pater, there is, for the most part, only “isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world.” Pater's solution to such melancholy is to recognize it, like a good Freudian, for what it is—a tissue of images and illusions: “When reflexion begins to play upon those objects they are dissipated under its influence; the cohesive force seems suspended like some trick of magic; each object is loosed into a group of impressions—colour, odor, texture—in the mind of the observer” (234-35). To “be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite,” says Pater, is “success in life.” “Our failure,” he warns, is “to form habits” (236).</div><div>Pater's scientific metaphors—“lenses,” “tissues”—are surprising, especially the way in which he uses them to break down the presumed division between the physical and the psychical, and to regard them as reciprocal categories. They form a chiasmus, or a crossing over; their play, or the lack thereof, is structured by a principle of constancy. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Pater, as it turns out, not only prefigures Freud; he also recalls Fechner. As far as we can tell, Pater did not read Fechner (see Inman, 1981, 1990), although their similarities, like Pater's with Freud himself, are abundant. Indeed, the first volume of Fechner's <i>Elements of Psychophysics</i> presents a model for the relation of body and mind that is an aesthetic as well as a psychoanalytic one. Much as the inner and the outer are, for Pater, interdependent perspectives, the inner and the outer are, for Fechner, “reciprocal” (1860, 59). “Kinetic energy,” Fechner says, “can be developed in a system through the mutual interaction of its parts.” Its “fluid media,” in a delectable phrase, are governed by structures of “mutual influence” (22). The “magnitudes” of given “stimuli are … representative of the extent of physical activities that are related to sensations dependent on them in some manner” (19). “Psychophysics” is not an oxymoron; it is a chiasmus. “We find on closer examination that in their most general and ultimate sense,” writes Fechner, “psychical measures are based on the fact that an equal number of equally strong psychical impressions are due to an equal number of equally large physical causes” (51). For a moment, Fechner intimates Pater with uncanny accuracy: “The number of these psychical units is determined by the number of psychical impressions, where the magnitude of the cause of the single impression, or any multiple thereof, serves as a unit” (51). Even the return to a purely scientific vocabulary, however, cannot keep the deep structure of Fechner's prose from changing: “Thus, just as we can make physical measurements only on the basis of the relationship of the physical to the psychological, so we can, according to our principle, derive psychical measures on the basis of the same relationship, only applying it in reverse” (51).</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Fechner's repeatedly chiasmatic figurations are in the service of a representation of organic systematicity whose structure is itself chiasmatic. It is also a structure regulated by a principle of constancy. Implicitly distinguishing his use of the term “conservation” from Helmholtz's, Fechner describes a system for which stability rather than discharge is the keyword: “The law of the conservation of kinetic energy then does not prevent the energy either of a system or of a part of the infinite system of the universe from temporarily changing, increasing, or diminishing, nor from changing permanently” (1860, 29-30). Fechner's idealism is manifest. In the first part of the sentence, his focus is on “the infinite system of the universe,” although, as his focus returns to change and measurement, his positivism also returns, as it does in the sentence following: “Only one thing is certain: the energy is restored when after any amount of preceding impulses, the parts of the system return to their original positions under the influence of their inner forces” (27). No wonder the notion of the “threshold” becomes useful (199ff.). As an empirical category, it is a representation of the condition for stability. As a rhetorical figure, it represents a site constituted by crossings—the vocabularies of Hegel and Helmholtz, for example—and regulated, like its empirical counterpart, by intensities of only a more or less bound kind. Fechner has solved the body/mind problem by reading each category as a function of the other.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Here, meanwhile, is a Paterian Freud, describing the birth of consciousness in <i>Beyond the Pleasure Principle</i>:</div><div><blockquote>What consciousness yields consists essentially of perceptions of excitations coming from the external world and of feelings of pleasure and unpleasure which can only arise from the mental apparatus; it is therefore possible to assign the system Pcpt.-Cs. a position in space. It must lie on the borderline between outside and inside; it must be turned towards the external world and must envelop the other psychical systems. It will be seen that there is nothing daringly new in these assumptions; we have merely adopted the views on localization held by cerebral anatomy, which locates the “seat” of consciousness in the cerebral cortex—the outermost, enveloping layer of the central organ. (1920, 24)</blockquote></div><div>This “borderline” is the site of a chiasmatic crossing of Fechner and Pater, although Freud has widened the terrain and deepened the focus. Freud is no longer much interested in consciousness. He is, like Fechner and Pater before him, interested in the formation of the “threshold” between mind as such, especially in its unconscious functioning, and the world of sense to which it is constitutively opposed. Nor is this model topographical; it is structural and dynamic. It is the full-blown elaboration of the “series” model of <i>The Interpretation of Dreams</i>, dramatized in living terms.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Like Fechner and Pater, too, Freud uses the traditions of idealism and positivism dialectically—mind and sense are reciprocal or supplemental rather than at odds. But Freud also wishes to go further. He wishes to widen his view to account for the very origin of animate life as we know it:</div><div style="text-align: left;"><blockquote>Let us picture a living organism in its most simplified possible form as an undifferentiated vesicle of a substance that is susceptible to stimulation. Then the surface turned towards the external world will from its very situation be differentiated and will serve as an organ for receiving stimuli. Indeed embryology, in its capacity as a recapitulation of developmental history, actually shows us that the central nervous system originates from the ectoderm. (1920, 26)</blockquote></div><div>Then one of Freud's greatest perorations, all the more moving because, as in aestheticism, its materials are of a grossly material kind: “A crust would thus be formed which would at last have been so thoroughly ‘baked through’ by stimulation that it would present the most favorable possible conditions for the reception of stimuli and become incapable of any further modification” (26).</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>The similarity with Pater's description of consciousness is not only dramatic; it also reminds us, in startlingly physical terms, that the principle of constancy and the structure of chiasmus are, in Freud, Pater, and Fechner alike, one and the same. Experience has the form of a specific trope, and a specific trope is, in turn, the very shape of experience in the world. The psyche is, by definition, an achieved balance between inside and outside; indeed, it invents this very difference in order to become itself. It no longer has to seek “discharge,” as it did in the <i>Project</i> or <i>Studies on Hysteria</i>. Now the form of self-realization is one that absorbs and expunges stimulation in a reciprocal rhythm. <i>Beyond the Pleasure Principle</i> also allows Freud to restructure his relation to intellectual history. Without his skill as a Paterian surfer, the waves of overdetermination might capsize his navigation of endless cross-disciplinary sites. Freud's originality outlasts the opposition by keeping it talking deep into the night. The new model of the psychical apparatus in <i>Beyond the Pleasure Principle</i> is, as one might expect, itself an instance of this new combination of sensitivity and absorptiveness. The distinction between inside and outside to which the response to stimulation of organic matter gives rise is a model for the retention of influences without the danger of debilitation by any among them.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>But Freud and Pater are not, it is also clear, of a single mind. Freud seems to champion the very “habit” towards which Pater casts a wary, drifter's eye. Pater is caught up, at least in the “Conclusion,” with the pleasure principle alone, while Freud has, presumably, moved “beyond the pleasure principle.” Are Pater and Freud at a crossroads? Certainly not. By moving “beyond pleasure,” Freud is not seeking to impose “habit” upong “flux”; he is, like Pater, seeking out what “flux” there may be in “habit” itself. Stability is, strictly speaking, a borderline condition. If the psychoanalytic component of aestheticism gives it a heightened precision of thought, the aesthetic component of psychoanalysis gives it a heightened poeticity. Each lends the other a supplement to sharpen the terms of its appeal.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Other questions, however, are near; they are of a more practical kind. Are there problems of influence regarding Freud that are left over in our account? Fechner's place in Freud's thinking is often clear, particularly the roles that psychical locality and the principle of constancy play in it. Fechner is inescapable. Freud shares with him the common shop of “German science.” But the question of Pater's influence upon Freud must also be raised. If Freud's relation to Fechner is motivated by the anxiety of influence, his relation to aestheticism, by contrast, is one not quite of parallelism or of congruence, but of overlap. Freud's relation to Pater, unlike his relation to Fechner, about whom he retains more “consciousness,” resembles the self's relation to the world in <i>Beyond the Pleasure Principle</i>: one in which the absorption of stimulation or “influence” becomes automatic or “unconscious.” It triggers no conflicts; it produces no symptoms. Pater is one of a series of impressions that Freud has absorbed. In contrast to the case of Fechner, there is no “scientific protocol,” however strategically it may be deployed, that requires him to use his name. Freud uses Pater's name for the sheer pleasure of doing so.</div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Notes</div><div><br /></div><div>1. Fechner, despite more than three years of illness and seclusion from 1840 to 1843—well before the publication of his epochal <i>Elements of Psychophysics</i> in 1860—maintained both a devoted scholarly audience and, as a pamphleteer, a devoted popular one. Fechner occupied the borderline between Romantic science and an emergent positivism; he crossed the vocabulary of Kant and Hegel with physical experimentation and quantification. In his popular work, a “spiritualist” orientation often predominated. Frank J. Sulloway (1979), citing a history of scholarship (65ff.), underplays the difference between positivism and Romantic science, althought he does so in some measure to resist the influence of his strongest precursor, Henri Ellenberger (1970), who puts the distinction very securely in place (241, 431, 535-36; see also Ellenberger 1956).</div><div><br /></div><div>2. Here is the point at which Freud abandons the “discharge” vocabulary of his official teachers, the positivist physiologists Helmholtz and Brücke, and exchanges it for Fechner's vocabulary. Although Fechner (1860) gives proper credit for “the great principle of the so-called conservation of energy” to Helmholtz (29), “constancy,” unlike the “conservation” in Helmholtz's mechanical metaphors, does not need to let out steam to function. See also Peter Amacher (1965) on Freud's teacher Meynert, who mediates between Brücke and Fechner as influences upon Freud by imagining reflex or discharge as implicity in the service of a principle of stability (36, 41).</div><div><br /></div><div>3. It is also worth asking whether this is the origin, too, of the allure of the photographic image, whose “ontology,” as André Bazin (1945) famously described it, is based on the metaphor of embalming the human body. The photographic image measures a gap between what was once present or alive and is now absent or dead, a structure identical with that of Wordsworthian melancholy and the pathos that it evokes.</div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">References</div><div><br /></div><div>Amacher, Peter. 1965. <i>Freud's Neurological Education and Its Influence on </i><i>Psychoanalytic Theory</i>. Madison, CT: International Universities Press. Psychological Issues, Monograph 16.</div><div><br /></div><div>Bazin, André. 1945. "The Ontology of the Photographic Image." In <i>What is Cinema?<span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></i><i>Vol. 1</i>. Trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967, pp. 9-16.</div><div><br /></div><div>Bloom, Harold. 1978. "Freud and the Poetic Sublime." In <i>Poetics of Influence</i>.Ed. John Hollander. New Haven: Henry R. Schwab, 1988, pp. 187-212.</div><div><br /></div><div>Brooks, Peter. 1985. <i>Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative</i>. New York: Random House.</div><div>––, ––. 1994. <i>Psychoanalysis and Storytelling</i>. Oxford: Blackwell.</div><div><br /></div><div>Ellenberger, Henri F. 1956. "Fechner and Freud." <i>Bull. Mennin. Clinic.</i>, 20:201-4.</div><div>––, ––. 1970. <i>The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of </i><i>Dynamic Psychiatry</i>. New York: Basic Books.</div><div><br /></div><div>Fechner, Gustav. 1860. <i>Elements of Psychophysics. Vol. 1.</i> Trans. Helmut E. Adler. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1996.</div><div><br /></div><div>Foucault, Michel. 1969. "What is an Author?" In <i>Language, Counter Memory, </i><i>Practice: </i><i>Selected Essays and Interviews. </i>Ed. Donald F. Bouchard. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977, pp. 113-138.</div><div>––, ––. 1976. <i>The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction</i>. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon, 1978.</div><div><br /></div><div>Freud, Sigmund. 1892. "Letter to Josef Breuer." <i>Standard Edition</i>, 1:147-48. </div><div>––, ––. 1895. <i>Project for a Scientific Psychology. Standard Edition</i>, 1:295- 397.</div><div>––, ––. 1900. <i>The Interpretation of Dreams, Standard Edition</i>, Vols. 4 and 5.</div><div>––, ––. 1910. <i>Leonardo da Vinci and A Memory of His Childhood. Standard </i><i>Edition</i>, 11:57-137.</div><div>––, ––. 1920. <i>Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Standard Edition</i>, 18:1-64. </div><div>––, ––, and Josef Breuer. 1895. <i>Studies on Hysteria, Standard Edition Vol. </i><i>2.</i></div><div><br /></div><div>Grünbaum, Adolf. 1984. <i>The Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical </i><i>Critique.</i> Berkeley: University of California Press.</div><div><br /></div><div>Inman, Billie Andrew. 1981. <i>Walter Pater's Reading: A Bibliography of His Library </i><i>Borrowings and Literary References, 1858-1873.</i> New York: Garland.</div><div>––, ––. 1990. <i>Walter Pater and His Reading, 1847-1877. With a Bibliograpy of His </i><i>Library Borrowings, 1878-1894.</i> New York: Garland.</div><div><br /></div><div>Jakobson, Roman, and Morris Halle. 1956. <i>Fundamentals of Language</i>. The Hague: Mouton.</div><div><br /></div><div>Jones, Ernest. 1953. <i>The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 1.</i> New York: Basic<span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Books.</div><div><br /></div><div>Laplanche, Jean. 1970. <i>Life and Death in Psychoanalysis.</i> Trans. Jeffrey Mehlman. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.</div><div><br /></div><div>Masson, Jeffrey M. 1984. <i>The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction </i><i>Theory.</i> New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.</div><div><br /></div><div>Meisel, Perry, ed. 1981. <i>Freud: A Collection of Critical Essays</i>. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.</div><div>––, ––, ed. 1984. "Freud's Reflexive Realism." <i>October</i>, 28:43-57.</div><div>––, ––, ed. 1987. <i>The Myth of the Modern.</i> New Haven: Yale University Press.</div><div>––, ––, and Walter Kendrick, eds. 1985. <i>Bloomsbury/Freud: The Letters of James </i><i>and Alix Strachey</i>, 1924-25. New York: Basic Books.</div><div><br /></div><div>Pater, Walter. 1873. <i>The Renaissance.</i> Originally published as <i>Studies in the History of<span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></i><i>the Renaissance. </i>New Library Edition. 10 vols. London: Macmillan, 1910.</div><div>––, ––. 1874. "Wordsworth." In <i>Appreciations</i> (1889), pp. 39-64.</div><div>––, ––. 1878. "The Child in the House." In <i>Miscellaneous Studies</i> (1895), pp. 172-96.</div><div><br /></div><div>Solms, Mark. 1997. "What is Consciousness?" <i>J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn.</i>, 45:681- 703.</div><div><br /></div><div>Spence, Donald. 1982. <i>Narrative Truth and Historical Truth: Meaning and </i><i>Interpretation in Psychoanalysis.</i> New York: Norton.</div><div><br /></div><div>Stephen, Leslie. 1875. "Art and Morality." <i>Cornhill Magazine</i>, 32(July):91-101.</div><div><br /></div><div>Sulloway, Frank J. 1979. <i>Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic </i><i>Legend.</i> New York: Basic Books.</div><div><br /></div><div>Trilling, Lionel. 1940. "Freud and Literature." In <i>The Liberal Imagination </i>Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1953, pp. 32-54.</div><div><br /></div><div>Woolf, Virginia. 1919. "Modern Fiction." In <i>Collected Essays</i>. 4 vols. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967, 2:103-10.</div><div><br /></div><div><i>Originally published in</i> American Imago 58, <i>Winter, 2001.</i></div>Perry Meiselhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15136895284654246782noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2242027659057377496.post-65785119821939897842011-01-30T20:07:00.000-08:002011-01-31T09:52:31.535-08:00Let a Hundred Isms Blossom<div style="text-align: left;">by Perry Meisel</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Don't believe everything you read in the newspapers. The revolution in criticism is over. Departments of literature are no longer in disarray. In the late 1970's and early 80's, of course, there was a lot of blood on the tracks, the price an earlier generation had to pay for today's intellectual abundance and sometimes perplexing freedoms. The old boys, particularly the biographers, took very badly to anything with a French name or an ''-ology'' attached to it. You had to watch your flank. But by the mid-80's, you could say ''Jacques Derrida'' or ''Harold Bloom'' at dinner and your colleagues didn't get heartburn; they got hip. They hired the onetime offenders.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>In fact, literary study in America has never been in better shape. Enriched by a variety of European methodologies since the early 70's, it has grown into a vast, synthetic enterprise characterized by powerful continuities rather than by disjunctions. Feminism, deconstruction, ''reader-response,'' ''New Historicism,'' ''postcolonialism'' – all share similar ends and similar ways of getting there in a momentous collaboration.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>The story begins in Paris, with the publication of Roland Barthes's essay ''The Death of the Author'' in 1968. A witty, Wildean performer, Barthes wasn't really dumb enough to believe that there weren't people writing the books that carried their names (Woolf, Shakespeare, Kathy Acker). He meant that writers labor unconsciously, and that larger forces shape them and their work. Michel Foucault's 1969 essay ''What Is an Author?'' took Barthes's structuralist argument a step farther by showing how whole periods of history are given their imaginative space through certain key texts that define those periods and their assumptions.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>But the French influence shouldn't be overestimated. American criticism has its own history. It's an open secret within the ranks that even before structuralism, deconstruction and Lacanian psychoanalysis had become the fashion, three books of enormous influence, all of them written in the 70's, had already paved the way: Stanley Fish's <i>Is There a Text in This Class?</i> (1980), Edward Said's <i>Orientalism</i> (1978) and Harold Bloom's <i>Anxiety of Influence</i> (1973). The terrain they map out is actually a common one, despite what you may hear around the Fiji cooler or at Starbucks.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Fish's book, a collection of essays in the reader-response mode, does what Barthes's essay does, although in a more systematic way. Fish's famous question is a dramatic instance of the American realization that there are obstacles to ''objective'' vision in the act of reading itself. The reader reads, or misreads, with his or her standards and assumptions, usually without even knowing it. Nor does the reader go it alone. He or she is always a member of what Fish calls an ''interpretive community,'' which governs one's very place in the world.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>The implications of Fish's method are ontological as well as political. What inhibits the self also enables it. The paradox is a deconstructive one. Fish's description of the reader of <i>Paradise Lost</i> in his 1967 book, <i>Surprised by Sin</i>, is a good example. Eve's ''wanton . . . tresses'' and ''coy submission'' are wholly inappropriate in the Garden of Eden. Nobody could have been ''coy'' or ''wanton'' then. And yet the irony is just the point: Like the poet, but unlike Adam and Eve, the reader is impure, postlapsarian. Neither he nor Milton has any other way of imagining the situation.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>If Fish empowered the reader, Edward Said empowered ''the other'' – the marginalized, the oppressed – with <i>Orientalism</i>, the father text, if I may be a little ironic, of postcolonialism. The reach of <i>Orientalism</i> has been vast, and it has, well, colonized and consolidated a whole new field of study. The interests of postcolonial studies are nonetheless familiar, especially its view of the self. Adding psychoanalysis to Said's perspective, the critic Homi Bhabha has shown that, like Fish's reader, the ''colonial subject,'' or self, is ''constructed'' – in this case, through a series of psychological ''identifications'' supplied by the slick hand of political oppression, whose ideology is often more effective than its rifle butts. The politically oppressed are a traumatic version of an interpretive community, a captive audience, so to speak.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Feminism and African-American criticism took the same lead even earlier. Both study oppression where it really lives – in the secret languages of the heart. Long before ''theory,'' W. E. B. Du Bois's notion of African-American ''double-consciousness'' – this sense,'' as he described it in <i>The Souls of Black Folk</i> (1903), ''of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others'' – had required critics like Robert Stepto and Houston Baker Jr. to formulate a model of the self as split at its very origin.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Like colonial identity, gender is also governed by a split introduced into the child's very being, this time as a consequence of its inevitable ambivalence toward its parents, who both nourish the child and frustrate and disappoint it. As Juliet Mitchell was among the first to point out for English readers in <i>Psychoanalysis and Feminism</i> in 1974, the family isn't just a private affair, but a microcosm of the larger social forces that divide the self in the act of creating it.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>We already have a name for this notion of the self in the brooding Anglophone poetic tradition, a tradition that is also political, even to the point of beheading a king more than a century before the French. This name is Romanticism, and its principal critical exponent since T. S. Eliot tried to obscure its real nature has been Harold Bloom. Bloom renames Romanticism ''the anxiety of influence'' and locates its beginnings with Milton, secretary to Cromwell as well as the visionary seer of <i>Paradise Lost</i>. Dr. Johnson later feared Milton because, as Johnson put it, he was a church of one. But the Romantic ''one'' is really a split self, too – a self that is divided, like Milton's Satan, at its origin, part the spitting image of a prior authority, part the self-creating desperado seeking freedom from its determinations. Like ''the death of the author'' or ''is there a text in this class?,'' ''the anxiety of influence'' is a trope for how the presumable originality or uniqueness of a given author is really the byproduct of the repression of prior authors – their ''misreading'' – who both serve and compromise the later writer in a murderous intrigue. Like Milton's Satan, we are all colonial subjects seeking to overcome the anxiety of influence of the interpretive communities that enable us.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>If a synthetic academic criticism has so many tools at its disposal, why isn't everybody happy? In part, rivalries are simply inevitable, and some critics persist in denying the obvious continuities. Foucault's immediate American child, the New Historicism, lost some of its respectability in 1997 when Stephen Greenblatt, one of its inventors, refused to engage Suzanne Gearhart's challenge to talk about Foucault's complex and repressed relation to Freud. There is some irony in this, since New Historicists are supposed to be groovy and politically correct.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>The desire to stake out new territory is particularly obvious in Anne McClintock's <i>Imperial Leather</i> (1995), as synthetic a work of scholarship as you will find, and yet one that aspires to an originality that's impossible now that the battle it fights has already been won. McClintock's conclusions are unassailable, and therefore no longer avant-garde. She combines Lacanian feminism with postcolonialism and Foucauldian close reading to show how, in the metaphors of Victorian novels as well as those of Victorian science, imperialism ''sexualized,'' as she puts it, the objects of its conquests, both human and geographical. That's what made dominion so attractive.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Ironically, a generation of critics who believe that the artist is neither independent nor solemn is having a hard time applying the same wisdom to itself. Many critics make routine conceptualizations difficult because they wish to purvey a culture of the expert rather than celebrate a climate of common sense and clarity. You could even say that the only problem with postrevolutionary critics is that they don't know a good thing when they see it. </div><div><br /></div><div><i>Originally published in </i>The New York Times Book Review<i>, May 28, 2000</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>Sample view:</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal; color: rgb(0, 0, 238); -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; "><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfcmdZK_QYz0r1oVIlmQmaH2XDm7vW9gO6oix_KyUiQ3LNKe-UJzDiYLhMm98qDTgTqwQy_qU7iYQ9kNZ8CQbuuZ71JMopZFZGGz9jCXgJSDXj5hyphenhyphen4LyByL0QNAveFTvx1iNODoFXddo5B/s320/isms.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5568201221443110994" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 240px; height: 320px; " /></span></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal; color: rgb(0, 0, 238); -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; "><br /></span></i></div>Perry Meiselhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15136895284654246782noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2242027659057377496.post-80650620897742129952011-01-27T23:01:00.000-08:002011-01-29T16:32:34.951-08:00The Definitive Hipster<div style="text-align: left;">by Perry Meisel</div><div><br /></div><div><div>Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs. E<i>dited and with an introduction by James Grauerholz. 273 pp. New York: Grove Press. $25.</i></div></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>With his canes, suits and absurd fedoras, William S. Burroughs was the dandy manqué who invented geek chic and made modernism available to the hippie masses. The last of the major Beats, Burroughs succumbed to heart failure in 1997 at 83. Though he is still best known for <i>Naked Lunch</i> (1959), Burroughs's later experiments in narrative technique earned him a place in classrooms. His aura earned him vast hosts of fans and the role of high priest and soothsayer that he always believed was his birthright.</div><div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Born in St. Louis in 1914, Burroughs was the grandson of the man who invented the adding machine. The Burroughs Corporation ultimately merged with the Sperry Corporation to create Unisys, although Burroughs himself failed to profit from the sale (his family had sold its stock in the company many years before). After graduating from Harvard, Burroughs eventually moved to New York and settled, with his parents' financial support, into the world of his real education, the world of boys, heroin and small-time grifters. The definitive hipster was sustained by his privileged background. As a writer, he was dependent on the High Moderns, particularly T. S. Eliot, without whose example he could not have purchased his own curious originality. The contradictions never bothered Burroughs; his arrogance thrived on them. In 1983, after sojourns in New York, London, Paris and Tangier, Burroughs retired to the university town of Lawrence, Kan., a sign, perhaps, of mellowing, even though his fun included frequent target practice with handguns and rifles. His hobbies were also star-crossed: he had killed his wife, Joan, with a pistol during a failed William Tell experiment in Mexico in 1951.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Now that Burroughs's ''final journals'' have been published, edited by his companion and literary executor, James Grauerholz, a comprehensive sense of the man and his achievement, for better and for worse, is at last available. Grauerholz's introduction and notes are a fine mixture of fact and feeling, and make <i>Last Words</i> a synthetic whole. Burroughs published only one full-scale journal previously, <i>The Retreat Diaries</i> (1976), the record of two weeks of Buddhist meditation, but that is a deliberate performance compared with this one. Moreover, ''final journals'' is something of a misnomer, since, as Grauerholz notes in his introduction, Burroughs had always used index cards for jotting down thoughts and dreams. He began composing a formal diary only in the last years of his life, after his ability to use both cards and his typewriter had diminished with the onset of physical difficulties and Grauerholz and other friends had made him a present of some bound blank notebooks. Burroughs eventually filled eight such volumes.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Burroughs's characteristic froideur has given way to a love of cats, if nothing else, in the face of death. At 83, he has become ''a kindly ruin,'' as one young pilgrim to the house in Lawrence describes him. With ''the stage . . . darker,'' a Shakespearean Burroughs says, he takes his inspiration for dying from his recently deceased friends, Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary. Their last words on the occasions of their own imminent deaths form a kind of litany. ''I thought I would be terrified,'' Ginsberg says to Burroughs; ''instead I am exhilarated.'' Leary, who videotaped his own demise, says, ''Why not?''</div></div><div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>But unlike many literary diaries, <i>Last Words</i> is rarely personal, even though the journals are an exploration in depth, and in sum, of Burroughs's personality and creative preoccupations. We learn very little that is new about the Beats or about Burroughs's habits in these last years of his life. Instead, we witness the rich repetition, with variations, of a string of half-conscious fancies, scenarios and literary allusions. The elements should be familiar enough to any reader of Burroughs: drugs, federal agents, international conspiracies, guns, murder, the Mafia, the Old West, spaceships, aliens and the witness protection program. The literary preoccupations, however, are surprising because they juxtapose appreciations of writers as different, or as seemingly different, as Joseph Conrad and Mario Puzo. Here is the text in action:</div><div></div><blockquote><div><br /></div><div>No one is perfect.</div><div><br /></div><div>No, but by the flaws in the picture the truth will emerge.</div><div><br /></div><div>Any[way] – last night, vague dream I was somewhere, couldn't stay long – I packed laundry sack with drawstring . . . .</div><div><br /></div><div>What else?</div><div><br /></div><div>The lake, a Moroccan, Jewish, German slum.</div><div><br /></div><div>So I must let everything all the way in, a vast wind to blow everything that doesn't belong away.</div><div><br /></div><div>(I am transparent.)</div></blockquote><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>The frequent bubbling-up of lines from ''The Waste Land'' recalls the surest source of Burroughs's inspiration as an artist, and the inevitable site to which he returns in the shadow of death:</div><blockquote><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>I feel chilly and grown old.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>I feel like Tiresias,</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>"[a] fortnight dead, and the waves </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>pick his bones in whispers"</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>– the old, old words.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div></blockquote><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>The sharp jump-cutting, short sentence to short sentence, quotation to quotation, creates the same effect that Burroughs creates in his novels. The journals are built out of such ''fragments,'' as Burroughs calls them, or, to use his old word for such modular writing, ''cut-ups.'' All literary work, Burroughs maintains, is really the rearrangement of bits and pieces of writing. The cut-up method shows just how easy it is to produce and manipulate literary response: by shifting the context in which something appears and altering the chains of association that give it meaning.</div></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>But <i>Last Words</i> is more than a primer in Burroughs's technique. It also presents fresh clues to the larger design of his imagination, and a means of gaining a renewed perspective on his work. When Burroughs confesses that he has become addicted to writing in his new notebooks, the metaphor is decisive. It is the key to a pattern that brings to light a parallel between writing and junk, and between writing and crime, especially murder. Nor is it because of the existential bravado that joins the writer and the punk. Far from it. Writing, drugs and murder come from the same shop because they are all forms of discipline. ''The gunfight,'' Burroughs writes, ''was a spiritual exercise.'' Being addicted to junk is both a spiritual exercise and a management concern, an enterprise that, like writing, requires organization and discipline. Each is a ''métier,'' a ''profession.'' The focus and scrupulosity of the addict, the gunslinger and the hit man render all of them disciples of form. The addict lays out his or her kit the way the crew lays out equipment in Conrad's romances of the sea. No wonder Burroughs's prose is excessive and minimalist at the same time. The simple presentation of what is weird or disgusting is the perfect instrument for showing the form in what is presumably formless.</div><div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>It is Burroughs's priceless fascination with Mario Puzo's <i>Last Don</i> and Puzo's estimation of criminality that brings everything together. Burroughs chuckles as Don Clericuzio indulges his ''bloody mouth'' hit-man grandson until, finally, he has had enough: ''Bad form,'' as Burroughs describes the Don's attitude toward murder, ''not to like it as a job well done – but when it comes to rutting around in it like a dog rolls in carrion, The Family draws a strict line.'' Then, a few pages later: ''A hit man has to be cool. It's just a job.'' The lesson is clear. Like the equipoise of violence and form – of violence as form – in Burroughs's own work, the hit man is obliged to be a perfect balance of passion and order. Like the writer, he or she is, like Conrad's captains, the epitome of the dedicated professional.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Burroughs, however, never fully heeded his own advice. The ideas are compelling, but their execution is lazy and shallow. Without enough drugs in his reader's system, Burroughs's prose falls flat on its face. The reader must supply the labor – and the good will – required to bring his writing to the level of fullness to which it aspires. This is too much to demand in the way of collaboration. Like geek chic, Burroughs is too hard to read. There was a time when men really did wear hats.</div></div><div><br /></div><div><i>Originally published in</i> The New York Times Book Review<i>, February 13, 2000</i></div>Perry Meiselhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15136895284654246782noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2242027659057377496.post-77752838423638498052011-01-26T19:37:00.000-08:002011-01-26T20:15:52.540-08:00Postcards From the Edge<div><div>by Perry Meisel</div><div><br /></div><div>Friends and Apostles: The Correspondence of Rupert Brooke and James Strachey, 1905-1914. <i>Edited by Keith Hale. Illustrated. 304 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press. $35.</i></div></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Rupert Brooke is remembered less for his poems than for his good looks and less for his good looks than for the way he abused his friends with them. On the receiving end first and longest among the men and the women Brooke loved before his death from blood poisoning en route to the Turkish front at Gallipoli in 1915 was James Strachey, the younger brother of Lytton Strachey and the future translator and editor of Freud. Although Brooke's correspondence was published in 1968, the exchange of letters between Brooke and Strachey was excluded by its editor, Geoffrey Keynes, one of Brooke's moralizing Cambridge friends. Now Keith Hale, an assistant professor of English at the University of Guam, has edited and introduced the correspondence with skill and thoroughness. It is almost impossible to read it without sensing Brooke's and Strachey's vivid feeling for each other and the extent to which the bond between them structured their lives. It will no longer be possible to speak of either one separately.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Brooke and Strachey met at Hillbrow School in 1897 when each was 10. They were extraordinarily competitive. In 1901, Brooke returned to Rugby, where his father was a housemaster; Strachey returned to his large family in London, where he became a day boy at St. Paul's. As Strachey had ardently hoped, he and Brooke were reunited at Cambridge in the autumn of 1906. There they made the passage from being precocious, overeducated English schoolboys to being self-impressed Cambridge undergraduates who did not even consider the question of their own identities until their election to the Apostles, or Cambridge Conversazione Society, the secret organization that had been created at midcentury to counter Oxford's control of English taste, and that now included Lytton Strachey and John Maynard Keynes among its principal members.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>These are love letters as well as missives of two Apostolic friends (indeed, the relation between lust and friendship was often among the topics of Apostolic discussion), and they flesh out, often in rough-and-tumble detail, what was regarded as a perfectly open way of life, even when both turned to the pursuit of women. While Strachey is ordinarily cool and rationalistic, he is, as a lover, fervent and passionate. And while Brooke is customarily ardent and passionate, he is, as a lover, demure and condescending. ''It's your soul that I long for,'' Strachey writes in 1909. ''We will not be sentimental about anything,'' Brooke replies, ''except nobility.'' The sadism lasts until the end, even though Strachey grows more relaxed and secure. Brooke, however, grows more and more unsettled, quarreling with Bloomsbury and wandering in America and the Pacific. ''I've loved you all the time,'' Strachey writes in 1913. A month later, Brooke replies, ''You'd better go on hating me.''</div><div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Despite Hale's exhaustive editorial work, his volume sheds little new light on Brooke as a poet. Like most critics, Hale believes that the jingoistic masterstrokes of Brooke's famous war sonnets represent a turn away from the ''decadent stance'' of Brooke's youth, even though their sharp relation to death and exile also makes them continuous with High Romantic schoolboy poems like ''The Bastille.'' Nor does Hale deal with Strachey's work. Translating Freud meant exchanging his older brother's authority for that of an even greater ironist, and letting fresh air of his own into Bloomsbury's pantry. Psychoanalysis gave Strachey an escape from English tradition that Brooke could not find, allowing him to reinvent its Romantic premises rather than trying to reimagine them.</div><div><br /></div><div><i>Originally published in </i>The New York Times Book Review<i>, January 17, 1999</i></div></div>Perry Meiselhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15136895284654246782noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2242027659057377496.post-16190873825639665282011-01-25T17:06:00.000-08:002011-01-25T17:17:01.565-08:00Scenes From an Unusual Marriage<div>by Perry Meisel</div><div><br /></div><div><div>You Are Not I: A Portrait of Paul Bowles. <i>By Millicent Dillon. Illustrated. 340 pp. Berkeley: University of California Press. $27.50.</i></div></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Paul Bowles is the bridge between the Lost Generation and the Beat Generation, even though his work exceeds Beat fiction in technical interest and even though he, as Norman Mailer was among the first to point out, was quick to foresee the craftiness inherent in any unvarnished stance. Now 87 years old, Bowles has lived in Morocco for more than 50 years. Like his wife, the novelist Jane Bowles (who suffered a stroke in Morocco in 1957 and died at a sanitarium in Spain in 1973), Paul Bowles emerged out of the New York art and social scene of the 1930's; he gained his own earliest reputation as a composer before rewarding himself with expatriation in the 1940's.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Millicent Dillon's biography of Bowles, <i>You Are Not I</i> (the title comes from one of Bowles's short stories), is not an attempt to narrate the events of Bowles's life or the histories of his influence; that has already been done in two earlier biographies and a documentary film. Dillon, the author of a life of Jane Bowles, is also a novelist and believes in evocation, not reduction. With implications well beyond what she intends, her new book is a strange and uncanny success. Using the atmosphere of Tangier to advantage, Dillon lights the chilly Bowles from a number of angles; she eschews even portraiture in favor of a dramatic strategy based on her many conversations with him in his Tangier apartment beginning in 1977. Bowles's sadness and the sense of opportunities lost suffuse Dillon's narrative and weigh it with emotion.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Beneath the tea and sympathy, however, beats a deeper purpose. Despite her impressionism, Dillon wishes to find a classical way to understand both Bowles's work and his relation to others. As Jane Bowles's biographer, she is particularly fascinated by the dialectic of the Bowleses' marriage and work. Why the contrast between the contempt and humiliation served up to opposite-sex characters in their novels and their love and respect for each other in real life? (Dillon is understandably preoccupied with the absurd rape sequences in Bowles's 1949 best seller, ''The Sheltering Sky,'' although she fails to press him about them.) How did these two homosexuals find sexual happiness in each other before Paul twice struck Jane and destroyed their intimacy forever? And why was it not until after Jane had asked Paul to edit the manuscript of her first novel in 1941 that he, too, decided to make prose fiction his primary metier? Was this a heightened dialogue between them or a form of violence and usurpation?</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Primal scenes tumble forth from the ordinarily reticent Bowles, who sits, befogged by kif, as he and Dillon explore the relation between art and experience. Bowles's father was a dentist in Jamaica, Queens, who wanted to be a violinist and who regularly hit his son on the back of the legs when the child did not move up the stairs fast enough. Paul was often left home alone at a very young age, too, growing so lonely that he tried to make friends with mosquitoes. He even recalls seeing his father in bed with his aunt while his mother stood alongside laughing.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>But the links between Bowles's life and art remain, like all else in Tangier, elusive. <i>You Are Not I</i> makes us reimagine the relation between life and art, and between art and its explanation. The book abounds with new notions if we look and listen, especially when Bowles's friend Mohammed Mrabet appears. He is a Moroccan storyteller whose ''performances,'' as Dillon calls them, force the realization that there is little difference between life and its narratives, no cause in the one for the other; they commingle. Both are performances. Given Bowles's influence on her, it is as if he had, as Dillon realizes, written his own biography. To be sure, Dillon brings insufficient material to the performance from her own life and desires. She has left her side of the dialogue out. Is she letting Jane Bowles do the talking for her? Or is she simply being too modest about finding in Bowles himself an unexpected quality of feeling?</div><div><br /></div><div><i>Originally published in</i> The New York Times Book Review<i>, May 17, 1998</i></div>Perry Meiselhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15136895284654246782noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2242027659057377496.post-59672823760114924952011-01-23T20:20:00.000-08:002011-01-23T22:10:01.672-08:00Attention Must be Paid For<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre;">by Perry Meisel</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre;"><br /></span></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Truth Games: Lies, Money, and Psychoanalysis</span>. By John Forrester. 210 pp. Cambridge, Mass.: </span></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre;">Harvard University Press. $22.95.</span></i></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Although some New Wave Freud historians – most recently Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen – have fallen off the psychoanalytic hayride despite their theoretical sophistication, John Forrester remains securely on it. The author of three books on psychoanalysis, co-author of another and a former editor of Jacques Lacan's published seminars, Forrester, who teaches the history and philosophy of science at Cambridge University, combines the stance of the Lacanian professional with that of the professional historian and leavens them both with the relaxed prose of the English man of letters. While at first glance grandiose, <i>Truth Games</i> (the title comes from Wittgenstein) is the odd but largely happy result of 20 years' research designed to produce an inquiry into two questions: whether psychoanalysis can really uncover a truth about the self; and whether one can speak with any imagination about the currency that secures the bond between analyst and patient, the bond – let us be frank about it, Forrester says – of money.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>The book is divided into two essays, each of which demonstrates how psychoanalysis is historically unique among the arts, sciences and religions because it ''transcends,'' as Forrester puts it, the customary patterns within which truth and debt take on their respective meanings. Truth as both a notion and a belief, Forrester tells us in his first essay, "Truth Games," is as a rule understood in much the same way from Augustine to Kant – as residing ''behind'' appearances, much as ''the liar conceals the truth in his heart.'' With Nietzsche, however, this way of thinking changes; the role of lying also changes. Truth becomes an effect of lying. ''Truths are illusions we have forgotten are illusions,'' Nietzsche says, ''coins which have been effaced and which from then on are taken to be, not pieces of money, but metal.'' ''To be truthful,'' he continues, ''means to employ the usual metaphors.'' Hence Nietzsche's vaunted continuity with Freud: psychoanalysis is ''the only science,'' Forrester writes, ''that does not find the prospect that the 'object' of its inquiry may intentionally deceive the scientific investigator subversive of its pretensions to truth.'' Indeed, it presupposes deception in the form of repression.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Forrester's history of symbolic exchange in his second essay, ''Gift, Money, and Debt'' – an ''insufficiently examined'' terrain, he says – serves a larger purpose: to connect Lacan's notion of the Oedipus complex with the status of money in analytic treatment. By means of an argument both too complex and too oblique to summarize (he does not organize his ideas well), drawing on Lacan and Derrida, Forrester contends that money is a system of signs that gives the psychoanalyst an instrument capable of addressing the patient's existential ''double bind.'' The self is understood as a function of a shared belief system or social currency – the ''Symbolic,'' to use Lacan's term – that acquires its values by means of the father's ''gift'' of language. But a gift by its nature is paradoxical; Forrester's point is that while you can pay your analyst, you can never pay back your father. On this uneasy ground, psychoanalysis constructs a perspective on the human condition.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>This is perhaps too good to be true. Forrester's view of the analytic setting sometimes sounds rather like a dental hygiene brochure: ''The well-regulated analysis will, then, manage to match the transference with the analytic fee in an equilibrated system where obligation, reciprocation and service are perfectly aligned.'' Forrester's language is defensive. It is actually an appreciation of psychoanalysis for what it is – an esthetic procedure, as Forrester himself described it in his last book, D<i>ispatches From the Freud Wars</i>, designed, as he put it there, ''to render'' the patient's life ''a work of art.'' Forrester's honest exuberance for his subject here is, like his allusions to Bob Dylan and the Beatles, well taken. He has the knack, like Freud's literary critics, for valuing psychoanalysis for its defining interest in the fictive world of wishes and dreams that its bashers take as evidence of its unworthiness. We should regard Freud's legacy as a literary one, and recognize Freud himself without embarrassment as the mythic hero he wished to be.</div><div><br /></div><div><i>Originally published in </i>The New York Times Book Review<i>, March 15, 1998</i></div>Perry Meiselhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15136895284654246782noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2242027659057377496.post-62928498573749773302011-01-22T14:20:00.000-08:002011-01-23T15:34:59.510-08:00The Unanalyzable<div style="text-align: left;">by Perry Meisel</div><div><br /></div><div>Jacques Lacan. <i>By Elisabeth Roudinesco. Translated by Barbara Bray. Illustrated. 574 pp. New York: Columbia University Press. $36.95.</i></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>A generation of yuppie avant-gardists has grown more bleary-eyed than usual from perusing – first with diligence, then with lagging attention, irritation and in some cases pure rage – the dazzling but often incomprehensible mumbo-jumbo of the flamboyant and influential French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. First published in France in 1993, Elisabeth Roudinesco's definitive biography, <i>Jacques Lacan</i>, is neither hagiographic nor vindictive; Ms. Roudinesco, a psychoanalyst based in Paris and the author of two previous books on the history of psychoanalysis in France, employs the wise strategy of the pre-emptive strike – she acknowledges Lacan's personal absurdity and literary extravagance while simultaneously showing why and how he matters. Although Lacan's technical shenanigans (shortening the length of the therapeutic session to a few minutes, for example, or analyzing patients in taxicabs) led to his expulsion from the International Psychoanalytic Association in 1963, Ms. Roudinesco reminds us that he is now an indisputable part of the psychoanalytic firmament, the bookend to Carl Jung in the structure of psychoanalytic thought. Most of all, as Ms. Roudinesco points out, he combined a reading of Freud and a reading of philosophy that had startling consequences for psychoanalysis and philosophy alike.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Born in Paris in 1901 to a prosperous Roman Catholic family of vinegar merchants, Lacan had a temperament and demeanor that reflected the source of his ancestors' rise to position. The missing limbs and dazed faces of World War I veterans that he saw as a schoolboy made him want to be a doctor, but he had, as a teen-ager, also begun to despise his family, and, as Ms. Roudinesco puts it, dress ''like a dandy.'' As a young psychiatrist, Lacan fell under the sway of Salvador Dali and by 1931 began to synthesize psychiatry, psychoanalysis and Surrealism. The result was his medical dissertation in 1932, the case history of a provincial woman, a postal worker, who had criminally assaulted a well-known actress with a knife. Although Ms. Roudinesco characterizes as brutal his effort to impose upon his patient his own system of delusional needs (Lacan's own analysis did not begin until 1932, and his analyst, Rudolph Loewenstein, eventually pronounced him ''unanalyzable''), the case nonetheless illustrated Lacan's belief in the determination of the self by unconscious social rather than biological forces. Lacan was thrust into the limelight not only for the turn he gave to medical psychiatry, but also for the social interpretation he gave to Freud, whose work after 1920 seemed to return to the biologism of his youth. By the 1960's, Lacan's performance seminars had become major weekly events in Paris, and a published version of his work was in great demand. But he remained reluctant to publish in any systematic form, requiring considerable hand holding by his editor while he assembled his <i>Écrits</i> in 1966. He died in 1981.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Accounts of Lacan's ideas tend to be either too simple or too elaborate; Ms. Roudinesco takes a middle course, focusing on the insuperable gap between image and desire as the basis for Lacan's notion of the psyche. Lacan's key concept, the <i>stade du miroir</i> or ''mirror stage'' of human development, was first presented at the 1936 psychoanalytic association congress in Marienbad in a paper that well describes his stance. The talk was cut off in the middle by Ernest Jones, who found it too outrageous. Lacan never recovered from that trauma, and was heartbroken a quarter century later when he was expelled from the association.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Combining Freud's concepts of narcissism and the ''specular'' ego with the observation that infants are fascinated by their own image in the mirror (an observation that Lacan stole, Ms. Roudinesco suggests, from one of his teachers, Henri Wallon), Lacan rooted the origin of selfhood in the ''mirror stage'': one is the image of oneself, with which one tries, like a perpetual child, to catch up. The shocking<i> méconnaissance</i> or ''misrecognition'' of another in the mirror that produces the self (or the ''subject,'' as Lacan calls it) is soon complicated by the Oedipus complex, which requires that the self also conform to the social laws of patriarchy and the family. This passage from what Lacan calls the ''Imaginary'' to the ''Symbolic'' also gives people their sexual identities, which become functions of conscious and unconscious customs and images rather than of innate characteristics.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Freud's idea of the unconscious had always been incompatible with classical assumptions about the rule of reason; Lacan gave the problem a whole new slant. As Ms. Roudinesco notes, Lacan's work ''was the only corpus in the world that provided Freudianism with a genuine philosophical framework.'' The ''mirror stage'' shows that alienation is not a condition that the self can overcome, even with the best therapy, but part of what fashions it from the ground up. The only other French thinker – despite his running squabbles with Lacan – to make this kind of connection between Freud and philosophy is Jacques Derrida, the inventor of deconstruction. As he puts it in his most recent meditation on Freud, <i>Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression</i> (University of Chicago, 1996), <i>The Other is the condition for the One</i>. The idea of the Other that the two men share reflects the long shadow of Martin Heidegger, but Ms. Roudinesco rejects the notion that Lacan also appropriated the way the young Jean-Paul Sartre used Heidegger's vocabulary to arrive at elements of his own system. Although she returns again and again to Lacan's obsession with plagiarism throughout his career and devotes an entire chapter to rivalry with Sartre in particular, she does not compare their writings to see just how much Sartre himself questions the freedom of the self he seems to champion. Still, she raises the fascinating possibility that intellectual history, like literary history, is structured by the same ''misreadings'' that structure personality – an especially real possibility if, as the Lacanian formula has it, ''the unconscious is structured like a language.''</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Lacan went even further, finding a persuasive link between Freud and Marx. ''You are the first thinker who has assumed the theoretical responsibility of giving to Freud veritable concepts worthy of him,'' Louis Althusser, the late French Communist philosopher who in the 1970's broke notably with Soviet Communism, wrote to Lacan in 1963. The esteem was mutual. ''I am quite honored,'' replied Lacan. The first night they had dinner together, they walked through the streets of Paris into the small hours of the morning, talking. Althusser's writings on psychoanalysis have now been collected in a single volume in English, <i>Writings on Psychoanalysis: Freud and Lacan</i> (Columbia University Press, 1997), that includes his legendary 1964 essay, ''Freud and Lacan,'' as well as two additional essays, some speeches and a selection of his correspondence with Lacan. For Althusser, the unconscious is (to put it perhaps too crudely) not unlike ideology in Marx's sense of the word – the false ideas that people have about social structures. Lacan gives social relations a place deep within the Freudian psyche, Althusser argues, and gives the psyche an active role in the perpetuation of social relations.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Lacan remains significant, then, because he provides an extraordinarily exact way of measuring our sanctimonies and our desires. This is likely why the ''structuralist'' legacy of which he is a part – the legacy of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida – is still too hot to handle. New sanctimonies have replaced older ones. Assessments of sexual identity, ethnicity and, indeed, identity itself that see all three as social fictions rather than as natural facts upset the very constituencies they were designed to address. Ms. Roudinesco captures the freshness of the intellectual world in which Lacan's developing notions were concocted, before the parochialism of his heirs rendered Lacanian thinking monolithic and humorless. Irony and dissonance are central to Lacan's achievement, even if the higher ironies of clarity never appealed to him. How to deal with an authority that asks you only to ''misread'' him remains an exasperating question. Ms. Roudinesco's biography, solidly translated by Barbara Bray, is a welcome aid to keeping him in perspective.</div><div><br /></div><div><i>Originally published in </i>The New York Times Book Review<i>, April 13, 1997</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>Sample view:</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal; color: rgb(0, 0, 238); -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; "><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCQbt86CxTbPOlyFEjqP89BQpoPn7nndozFk5d1wpm-nflGftJILTFqP_phlrqNbZJ2s64dH6whWLzeZX3D9yCzViz_OTYXO86VMl8v8kSmKkRy2Hsk8_t-d-SvjQLGDY3-VKA2vwnWLJZ/s320/Unanalyzable.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5565151119231168642" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 240px; height: 320px; " /></span></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal; color: rgb(0, 0, 238); -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; "><br /></span></i></div>Perry Meiselhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15136895284654246782noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2242027659057377496.post-48009000353206556172011-01-21T16:35:00.000-08:002011-01-22T14:18:25.667-08:00In League With the Bandits<div style="text-align: left;">by Perry Meisel</div><div><br /></div><div><div>Romantic Outlaws, Beloved Prisons: The Unconscious Meanings of Crime and Punishment. <i>By Martha Grace Duncan. 272 pp. New York: New York University Press. $29.95.</i></div><div><br /></div><div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Why did so many New Yorkers make a hero out of the subway vigilante Bernhard Goetz? Why did some inmates of Siberian prison camps find a boon in their confinement? Why does Charles Dickens's Pip turn away from his old friend and benefactor, the convict Magwitch, in <i>Great Expectations</i>, or Shakespeare's Prince Hal turn away from old Sir John Falstaff in <i>Henry IV, Part 2</i>?</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>These are not the same questions but they raise similar issues, and provide Martha Grace Duncan a fresh way of organizing and addressing them in her book on the unconscious meanings of crime and punishment. Ms. Duncan, a professor of law at Emory University, wishes to ''undermine'' customary legal and criminological assumptions about her subject, particularly the assumption that the law simply protects us from crime, and she does so with the aid of a psychoanalytic approach. Crime and punishment, criminality and noncriminality are really ''dyads,'' Ms. Duncan argues, an ''unforeseen partnership'' that cops and robbers, criminals and prosecutors, lawbreaker and citizen unconsciously – and uncannily – share. A complex web of repression, resistance and reaction-formation, she maintains, keeps the partnership hidden from us, and her book is an attempt to set us straight about our buried love-hate relation to prisons, crime and the metaphors of filth and slime with which we typically – and in vituperative accents – describe criminals and criminal behavior.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>While Ms. Duncan's topic is legal and her perspective psychoanalytic, literature is her chief focus and principal source. Although one wishes that she had spent more time analyzing the rhetoric of American case law than she does, she insists on her literary ground, which dominates her discussion well into the analysis of metaphor in the third and concluding section of <i>Romantic Outlaws, Beloved Prisons.</i> The literary focus, however, conveys her points with only mixed results as she moves through prison memoirs in the first part of her book before focusing more exclusively on literature in the second.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>The love of some prisoners for their imprisonment, Ms. Duncan argues, represents our yearning for the infantile, particularly the maternal (one of Ms. Duncan's prison memoirists describes herself as ''curled up in a little ball . . . immersed in dreaming fantasies''), while our repressed admiration for outlaws represents our desire for the kind of ''somatic'' freedom of movement that we also associate with childhood, notably our desire to flee from authority, especially the authority of the father. (This psychological distinction between mother and father is, however, only implicit; sometimes Ms. Duncan makes it; sometimes she does not.) With Dostoyevsky and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn among her witnesses, Ms. Duncan's conclusions about prison are often persuasive enough; they even have an authority, she reminds us, in Freud's essay ''Dostoyevsky and Parricide.'' They are nonetheless also dull by their very nature, and Ms. Duncan impedes the dramatic progress of her book by beginning it with a meditation on the unlikely glamour of the cloister.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Literature, by contrast, provides Ms. Duncan a rich field in which to explore our ''reluctant,'' ''rationalized,'' sometimes outright ''admiration'' for the ''noble bandit.'' The romantic outlaw has a long and familiar history, and one shrouded by misapprehension. Like Bernhard Goetz, even the legendary Robin Hood is a hero, alas, not because he helps the cause of justice but because he, too, is really breaking the law under the guise of a higher moral imperative. Indeed, from Moll Flanders to Long John Silver, such criminals represent a freedom of the body in the face of parental constraint, and prefigure their latter-day American counterparts like Billy the Kid and Bonnie and Clyde. Shakespeare's Falstaff, of course, is Ms. Duncan's inevitable centerpiece here, since he is the childhood exuberance that his onetime companion, the youthful Prince Hal, must repress once he becomes King Henry V.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>When Ms. Duncan turns to the examination of metaphor in the last portion of her book, she finds ample evidence in literature and history alike to show that we use images of ''filth,'' ''slime'' and ''scum'' to describe the criminal because these words express what it is we unconsciously prize about him. To call the criminal ''filth'' and to separate him from us, Ms. Duncan argues, is not only to affirm our own adulthood but also to maintain at the level of linguistic usage the criminal's particular allure, which is infantile. Slime is fecal, a childhood gift, a token of fun and freedom as well as an instance of soil and an occasion for the parent's intervention. This is why Dickens's Magwitch, for example, hides on the fetid moor, and why Victor Hugo's obsessive Inspector Javert chases Jean Valjean through the sewers of Paris in <i>Les Miserables</i>. Here Shakespeare's <i>Macbeth</i> is Ms. Duncan's literary centerpiece, and Macbeth's preoccupation with washing is part of the way the play's ''predominant image,'' as she puts it, ''changes from darkness to slime.''</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>The real drama of Ms. Duncan's discussion of metaphor, however, comes with the vivid historical pictograph that gives her book a stirring climax and its most persuasive and summary piece of argumentation. In 1786, the British Government created a penal colony at Botany Bay on the east coast of Australia, an experiment so curious that no one has ever been able to make much sense of it. Why deal with the ''urgent problem'' of criminals with the ''slow'' and ''expensive'' alternative of transporting them to the other side of the globe? Ms. Duncan readily solves the mystery by showing us how Botany Bay's incoherence as both a policy and a practice can be made sense of once we see it as an ''archetypal story, re-enacting with real people and real places an epic drama of self-purification through banishment of the filthy.'' Its bizarre sociological purpose obscured the deeper, psychological function it performed instead. Noncriminals, says Ms. Duncan, needed ''to use this Australian prison as a symbol of hell.'' England was ridding itself of its criminals as if they were ''a sort of excrementitious mass,'' as Jeremy Bentham (who objected to the policy) described it in 1812. Ms. Duncan's attentiveness to language seals her point here more than anywhere else in her book. Col. Godfrey Mundy, an official visitor to Australia in the mid-19th century, titled his three-volume account of his trip there ''Our Antipodes'' for a simple unconscious reason: ''our antipodes'' is a metaphor that identifies Australia's location in relation to England and that of one's anus in relation to the rest of one's body.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>But while Ms. Duncan's psychoanalytic perspective is her book's chief strength, it is also its chief weakness. Her failure to distinguish clearly between mother and father in childhood is the sign of a more fundamental flaw in the structure of her approach. What Ms. Duncan means by childhood itself is generally left vague, leaving us to wonder how a psychoanalytic perspective could describe it as blissful. Perhaps Ms. Duncan's insufficient discriminations are symptomatic. Is her notion of psychoanalysis as a system designed to ''transform'' the ''black and white'' distinctions required of legal discourse ''into gray'' the expression of another wish – an intellectual version of infantile yearning in relation to the adult stipulations of the law? Like literature, psychoanalysis has its ironies, and the practitioner, like the buyer, need beware.</div></div></div><div><br /></div><div><i>Originally published in </i>The New York Times Book Review<i>, January 26, 1997</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>Sample view:</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal; color: rgb(0, 0, 238); -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; "><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7kRMszrt0lLgX_E6B3_V3gSJ7XgGMROQODy8wF6iXEA7JF9MYBPxTNfS-jsZwIpD37HOBD8aXmfsMilzwsW3IM9iirK9L31HYF8QYgXfCE-D6iI7AZoqDa7Si5YneVtY-2yN9GQJnHoC8/s320/Bandits.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5564807352211517122" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 258px; height: 320px; " /></span></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal; color: rgb(0, 0, 238); -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; "><br /></span></i></div><div><br /></div>Perry Meiselhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15136895284654246782noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2242027659057377496.post-79915707079968729422011-01-19T10:44:00.000-08:002011-01-20T20:21:43.504-08:00The Mad, Mad World of R.D. Laing<div style="text-align: left;">by Perry Meisel</div><div><br /></div><div><div>The Wing of Madness: The Life and Work of R. D. Laing. <i>By Daniel Burston. 275 pp. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. $35.</i></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>By the time he collapsed and died of a heart attack while playing tennis in August 1989, R. D. Laing had devolved from one of the most compelling intellectual heroes of the 1960's into a gruesome purveyor of pop mysticism and bad poetry. Once the charismatic power behind a community of radical therapists and the influential author of several provocative books, the Scottish psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who had broken down the barriers between sanity and madness – in theory, in practice and even in the swagger of his own personality – had become ''yesterday's icon,'' as Daniel Burston describes Laing's last years in <i>The Wing of Madness</i>. Laing's impact is still with us, but what it was – and how seriously we are to entertain it – remain questions that Mr. Burston's comprehensive and extraordinarily readable study of Laing's life and work is designed to answer. Mr. Burston, who teaches psychology at Duquesne University and who previously wrote <i>The Legacy of Erich Fromm</i>, displays the kind of sympathetic generosity one expects from a biographer, although such sympathy is sometimes a questionable virtue when it comes to estimating the real nature and status of Laing's achievement.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Born in Glasgow in 1927, Laing was the only child of ''a quiet Presbyterian couple,'' as Mr. Burston calls them, whose behavior was anything but quiet. Laing's father and grandfather had ''brutal physical scenes in the parlor,'' while his mother was wont to burn the family's trash inside the apartment so as to conceal its contents from the neighbors and regularly destroyed her son's toys. Even in old age, she was ''sticking pins into an effigy of her son, called a 'Ronald doll,' with the express intention of inducing a heart attack.'' Laing was ''not a wanted child,'' Mr. Burston observes, and he is by no means hesitant to suggest the extent to which Laing's childhood prefigured his later professional focus on the actual social or ''interpersonal'' world in which people grow up. Both ''introverted'' and ''rebellious,'' Laing was, as Mr. Burston puts it, a product of ''complex tensions.'' As a schoolboy, Laing excelled at classics and dabbled in evangelical Christianity; he also maintained a schedule of reading that, by the time he was 15, included Voltaire, Marx, Nietzsche and, of course, Freud.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>As a young British Army psychiatrist in the early 1950's, Laing was already trying out his ''interpersonal'' approach (it derives, Mr. Burston reminds us, from Harry Stack Sullivan) by sitting with schizophrenics ''quietly . . . in their padded cells, a move assumed by his superiors to be dedicated research.'' It was. Like Freud, Laing questioned the traditional neurobiological view of schizophrenia and other disorders, but, like Sullivan, he was looking for sources in real rather than in fantasized quarters. In 1953, Laing set up the ''Rumpus Room,'' a day room for schizophrenic patients in a hospital near Glasgow that allowed them some possibility for social interaction. Later that year, he found the case that confirmed his views on the relation between brain and mind, neurology and psychiatry.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Nan, a 15-year-old girl with severe head injuries, had changed her personality after recovering from a coma. Before her accident, she had been a promising young hausfrau; now, Mr. Burston writes, she was a ''coquette.'' Although to the neurologists Nan's first attempts at speech and movement were incoherent, to the rest of the hospital staff ''they were construed . . . as deliberate humor,'' leading to the rewards of ''sweets and caresses.'' Laing ascribed the change to an interpersonal factor – ''the new 'Nan,' '' as he himself put it, ''began as a construction of the others.''</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>The Rumpus Room experiment brought Laing to the attention of J. D. Sutherland at the Tavistock Institute, and in 1956 Sutherland and his psychoanalytic colleagues John Bowlby and Charles Rycroft invited Laing to join them in London. Laing became a training candidate at the Institute of Psycho-Analysis in London, but was interested less in the doctrinal struggles between Melanie Klein and Anna Freud than in pursuing his own work. D. W. Winnicott was one of Laing's clinical supervisors, and he was warm in his response to Laing's first book, <i>The Divided Self</i> (1959), which he read in manuscript. To the vocabulary of the interpersonal, Laing had added the vocabulary of the existential. Emotional misery, he argued, has its roots in experiences with others, usually in the family, as he would go on to argue (with Aaron Esterson) in<i> Sanity, Madness and the Family</i> (1964). Falling ill is the first step in a ''self-cure,'' a process Laing later called ''metanoia,'' ''a term used in the Greek New Testament for atonement.'' Metanoia, especially in its schizophrenic form, is an existential journey, Laing argued; with safe surroundings, it can actually be a route toward recovery based on choice. ''Laing, like Sartre,'' Mr. Burston writes, ''construed the mad (or nearly mad) person as an active agent in the creation and perpetuation of his own misery, who must choose, finally, to abandon his schizoid isolation in favor of authentic relatedness to others in order to regain his sanity.''</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Laing's attempt to put these notions into the radical practice that made him famous came with the establishment in 1964 of Kingsley Hall, the controversial therapeutic community in London's East End in which staff and patients often exchanged roles. Laing's ''therapeutic utopia,'' as Mr. Burston amusingly describes it, was ''anarchic,'' and its legendary characters included Mary Barnes, the middle-aged Roman Catholic nurse who attracted wide attention after writing a book about her regression and recovery. Kingsley Hall was dissolved in 1970, at the beginning of the next phase of Laing's career, a showier phase frankly intended to cash in on his notoriety as a guru (Laing's money problems were endless) and to explore newer interests like the relation between shamanism and psychotherapy. Laing periodically sank under the task. Despite the Philadelphia Association – the umbrella organization he had helped to found in 1965, which was stocked with disciples who loosely oversaw a group of therapeutic communities – Laing's clinical movement also lost steam toward the end of the decade. By the 1980's, Laing was in decline. In 1987, he even lost his license to practice medicine in Britain because a patient alleged he had been ''intoxicated and unprofessional'' on two occasions. At the end, Mr. Burston writes, Laing was ''a once-famous man with no profession, no fixed address and no funds.''</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Mr. Burston intends not to bury Laing but to assess him. Laing's personal and intellectual agony betokens an exemplary role in the cultural history of the century, but for reasons different from the sometimes grandiose ones that Mr. Burston gives to make his case. Laing cannot, for example, be given credit for reconciling Freud and Sartre. As a good intellectual historian, Mr. Burston should acknowledge that this achievement belongs instead to Jacques Lacan, for whom the interpersonal raises a question that Laing (unlike Sullivan) always hesitated to ask: whether or not self and other even exist except in their relation. Despite his attentiveness to the structuring role of contrasts in the formation of identity, Mr. Burston's tired reliance on notions of the self's ''authenticity,'' garnered from Laing's own often tawdry rhetoric, suggests that, like Laing, he is unable, or unwilling, to integrate this paradox into his thinking. Nor does Laing rank in originality with Freud, or even Jung, as Mr. Burston shockingly proposes, because Laing grandly capitulated to influence – Freud's or Sartre's – rather than overcoming or skillfully rearticulating it.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>In retrospect, Laing's charismatic vexation derives from acting out his overdetermination (to use Freud's terms) as a thinker instead of working it through. Laing was a real and significant sufferer because he took tensions to the limit without managing to resolve them. ''If I could tell you,'' he wrote at the close of <i>The Politics of Experience</i> (1967), ''I would let you know.'' A crucible for the century's own overdeterminations, Laing's sorrows are a kind of sacrifice for our wider understanding after him – and in many ways because of him.</div></div><div><br /></div><div><i>Originally published in </i>The New York Times Book Review<i>, September 8, 1996.</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>Sample view:</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal; color: rgb(0, 0, 238); -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; "><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhA6VCNIySY-u5LY-bNL8LBQkzDkD1rBAGMvBvtPF2CHRvkeaQJ5BiGJfQClsz1jrmqPNnbouQlC4PjaOFpjDOXptSs6GvpI4SkD8erQ-rW6LYPDzZWZSRpwZwBK_hIJ3FEznM_feli7TUN/s320/Laing_1.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5563973062896096386" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 240px; height: 320px; " /></span></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal; color: rgb(0, 0, 238); -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; "><br /></span></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal; color: rgb(0, 0, 238); -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; "><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVCcJyryLSY45WWvhunqthQpp9QjYHVhuS15StWsy5JuCCBQUaB-GVCyUW2heGrtzJdj8ORhj_62ECMmQR5waETIJz3dG840suNs-I9a8PiOZq9_EpXDsw2XS-JPdjxHblZ0LF-qczYuAi/s320/laing_2.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5563973069847098914" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 259px; height: 320px; " /></span></span></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal; color: rgb(0, 0, 238); -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; "><br /></span></span></i></div><div><i><br /></i></div>Perry Meiselhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15136895284654246782noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2242027659057377496.post-69133135778854242322011-01-18T14:28:00.000-08:002011-01-19T10:36:41.160-08:00The Form of Politicsby Perry <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">Meisel</span><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">I.</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>It is, of course, a deconstructive commonplace to observe that the singular or the unique is the function or the effect of a relation. And yet a political and intellectual climate like ours in America today – a New Sanctimony, if you will, a recall of transcendental categories by Left and Right alike – too often propounds the singular as a value in itself, whether it is ethnicity, gender, or oppression as such. Our climate needs to be reminded of this deconstructive commonplace, not only to explain to <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">Neo</span>-conservatives why and how deconstructive relativism is actually very systematic indeed, but also to distinguish deconstruction from the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">neo</span>-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">centrisms</span> of the Left (a self-contradictory description that is itself an example of the problem). These latter impulses, astonishingly enough, reconstitute the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">binarisms</span> of black/white, male/female, power/oppression that gird tyranny, and that are under presumable siege as categories. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>What is perennially misconceived about deconstruction (Harold Bloom's term "weak misreading" well accounts for the surprisingly literal response to Derrida that we all know) is that its procedure for <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">deracinating</span> essences, absolutes, transcendental categories of all kinds is not in the service of an anarchic play of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">signifiers</span>. Nor is it designed to prioritize the historically repressed or marginalized side of an opposition. Deconstruction is a highly exact mode of reading designed, not to throw texts or the world into chaos, but to show how the world we think we find only gets – and has gotten – made in the shapes and terms that we take for granted as given, self-evident, natural.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>American criticism may perhaps wake from its dogmatic slumbers by remembering what Anselm <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">Haverkamp</span> states in his introduction to this conference – that America <i>is </i>difference. This is the crucial tie between deconstruction and America despite <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">deconstruction's</span> French (and Germanic) ground of philosophical emergence (here, too, though, we should recall that both America and deconstruction share, after all, a place in the tradition of the Enlightenment despite a difference in the epistemological deposition of the subject that Enlightenment Romanticism was invented to sustain following the first death of God).</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>As Jonathan <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">Culler</span> points out, the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">performative</span> or constitutive nature of discourse, together with its <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">chiastic</span> ground-making, is particularly plain in American life; indeed, it is American life's singular virtue. If marginal America constructs itself as a difference from dominant America, we should remember that dominant America constructed itself as an enabling difference from Europe, thereby preparing a common and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">originary</span> ground for American life at large, based, not on European – read <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">logocentric</span> – notions of identity or sameness, but, in principle if not always or altogether in practice, on difference. This common epistemology of American life ironically guarantees freedom by requiring everyone to deal with influence. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Hence the ease with which we allow ourselves to be swayed by the language of the singular – of the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14">essentiality</span> of the ethnic, the gendered, the this, the that – is precisely what a deconstructive reassessment of the political asks us to question. Without aesthetic theory – I use these terms with Kant in mind – and without a deconstructive <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15">reimagination</span> of the categories involved, a dangerous epistemological lassitude will continue despite the need for its correction.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Consider, for example, the category of the ethnic. What is its status as a notion? In 1992, the Poetics Institute of New York University and the Cardozo School of Law sponsored a conference with Jacques Derrida that allowed me to address the problem then. The Greek <i><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_16">ethnos</span></i>, I argued at that time, emerges in the Septuagint as a means of translating the Hebrew <i><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_17">goyim</span></i>, which has the sense of "heathen" – those who do not believe in the Jewish God. Only in the nineteenth century does the word gain the more specific sense of race with which we associate it still in this century. This way of reading <i><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_18">ethnos</span></i> as designating <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_19">biosemiotic</span> traits, sometimes derived <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_20">iconically</span> through or from the language a person speaks, well suited nineteenth-century ideological needs, particularly those of nationalism. The less-than-various array of ethnic <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_21">nationalisms</span>, from Mazzini to Herzl, sought a justifying <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_22">physicalism</span> familiar in nineteenth-century reasoning from phrenology to ethnography. Ethnography and ethnology alike emerge as disciplines of study contemporary with the growth of nationalist feeling, the first in 1834, the second in 1842. Lexicons record a hazy relation between <i><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_23">ethnos</span></i> and <i>ethos</i>, too, the latter meaning custom, although the nature of the relation is unclear. This muddy proximity is the very nature of the relation, which motivates what is merely customary among people by divining a mystic bond among them and elevating it, that is, reducing it, to the status of an innate rather than a derived characteristic. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>The ethnic as a trope, then, rests, or fails to do so, on a paradox whose structure is a familiar deconstructive site constituted by the play between inclusion and exclusion. That which is without value – those who do not believe, those who are <i><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_24">goyim</span></i> or heathen – becomes precisely that which is of, that which is, value – the inherent, often racially construed trait that assigns and defines one at a presumably fundamental level. The ethnic or racial – that denigration or impropriety that defines <i><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_25">goyim</span> </i>– is also the trope designed to signify the pure, the essential, the very opposite of the unclean or the improper that it <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_26">originarily</span> signifies in the history of its usage. It should be noted, too, that <i><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_27">ethnos</span> </i>also <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_28">originarily</span> signifies the notion of "one's own" – of what is, properly speaking, proper to one – a notion whose like paradoxical structure has also long been familiar to us. Curiously enough, then, the otherness that structures the heathen or the unruly – the excluded – is also the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_29">properness</span>, the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_30">inherence</span> that structures what is included.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>If a narrative were to be constructed from this play of the trope's senses, it would find its <i><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_31">telos</span> </i>in the scientific racism and eugenics of the Nazi era, even if it might also find an epistemological counterpart in soil-Zionism, African-American separatism, or feminism of the essentialist variety. Democratic thinking, by contrast, describes the truth of the universality it declares by virtue of its erasure. Freedom of worship, for example, has as its implication that which guarantees the possibility of its emergence: a constitutional indifference to the very religions it frees. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Any contemporary articulation of the ethnic rolls and rocks on the lip of this paradox. Its negation is the repressed that returns late in the twentieth century with the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_32">revalorization</span> of those ethnic categories that the century's civil and human rights revolutions, especially in the United States, supposedly put in question. The rise of multiculturalism in the United States and the end of the socialist ideal in the Soviet Union are, from this point of view, similar reactions against and repressions of the non-ethnic ideals of both political constructions. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre">I</span>I.</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Any deconstructive reassessment of the political depends today, then, on a series of new assumptions about both society and subjectivity. Here deconstruction maintains its historical relation to psychoanalysis and Marxism alike, although by now these relations are so implicit that the crucial term in each case remains largely silent throughout the conference.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>The unconscious is the conference's enabling notional secret, an <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_33">Althusserian</span> notion of the unconscious that understands subjects and ideology, texts and their reception, in reciprocal rather than exclusive terms. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_34">Avital</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_35">Ronell's</span> "testing" is a superb psychoanalytical representation of the subject. "Testing" suggests what the ego and any shape at all have in common – the doing and undoing of frames, edges, outlines, borders. "We exist in sway," says <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_36">Ronell</span>, linking Kant with Freud and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_37">Lacan</span>, and linking epistemology with psychoanalysis.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>The conference's second chief notion, ideology, is well described by Barbara Johnson without being named. By asking "what speaks?" rather than "who speaks?," Johnson efficiently points out the dynamic and constitutive relation between <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_38">ideology </span>and the unconscious, and the way in which this relation fashions the ground of self and society alike. When Judith Butler asks, "Why do words wound?," the answer is that the unconscious is structured like a language. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span></div><div style="text-align: center;">III. </div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>In order to elaborate a deconstructive reassessment of the political, let us read a familiar and even topical text at some length. No twentieth-century text is more alluring for its presumable gender allegory than Virginia Woolf's <i>Orlando</i> (1928). And yet no twentieth-century text is also more strategically plain about its own deconstructive rather than irreducible notion of gender than <i>Orlando </i>is. Everyone knows the popular conception of <i>Orlando </i>– even the movies attest to it: an allegory about how perfect a human being would be could s/he combine the qualities of both genders. The emblem for <i>Orlando</i>'s apparently synthetic project is the book's <i><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_39">hommage</span></i> to androgyny, borrowed from Coleridge's picture of a harmonious imagination in the <i><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_40">Biographia</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_41">Literaria</span> </i>(1817). Woolf <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_42">literalizes</span>, or so it seems, Coleridge's idealizing descriptions of rich imaginative figures such as Shakespeare by switching Orlando's gender about halfway through the book. Woolf thus simultaneously preserves and changes Orlando's character as the rival demands of soul and history struggle beneath the full-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_43">throated</span> ease of both the plot and Woolf's seamless use of language.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_44">Culler's</span> notion of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_45">performativity</span> is dazzlingly evident as Woolf's text provides a virtual object lesson in how <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_46">semiosis</span> makes subjects from the ground up. What language brings into being in <i>Orlando</i> is gender as such. Even to call it "as such" is, of course, problematic, since gender's <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_47">suchness</span> or <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_48">givenness</span> is the function of a difference or a relation. Under the pressure of Woolf's language, <i>Orlando</i>'s presumably central notion of gender splits its husk.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>The key to the novel, as the saying goes, lies in the sometimes odd structure of Woolf's prose, which as a rule is so well sutured that the means of its production slips by. In the novel's third chapter, the narrator announces, with an apparent straight face, that "everything, in fact, was something else" (143).<sup>1</sup> How can what is "in fact" be "something else"? By definition, a "fact" is what it is – just the fax, ma'am – but here, quite ironically, the self-evidence ordinarily associated with "fact" is also taken away from it by virtue of how its self-evidence is represented – as "something else." </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>This kind of rhetorical oddness occurs again and again in the texture of the book's language, often structuring sentences in uncannily similar – and equally disturbing ways. "Everything was different," says the narrator early on (27), trying to give us a picture of the Elizabethan past by negation, even in a catalogue of vegetables, climates, and poets. How can a statement of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_49">nonidentity</span> be a properly representational or descriptive one? "The arras" in "the hall" at Orlando's ancestral home "moved always" (45) – "moved always" is an oxymoron. Or, says the narrator, meditating on Orlando's future in the book's first chapter and thinking vaguely of official roles for him, he "was cut out for precisely some such career" (15). How can what is "precisely" also be "some such"? Similarly, if "openness . . . was the soul" of Orlando's "nature" (189), as the narrator says it is, then the outside – "openness" – and the inside – "soul" – are perilously and curiously identified.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>The seeming imprecision in Woolf's language is, in fact, a rhetorical pattern – a principal one throughout the novel, and the way the novel itself goes about estimating as well as representing oppositions such as fact and fiction, text and world, and, of course, one gender and another.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>The rhetorical pattern has as its counterpart the novel's larger structural pattern, which requires a similar transgression of the reader's assumptions once they have been put in place. Much as Woolf's sentences ask the reader to believe opposing or different kinds of propositions simultaneously, so, too, does the structure of the novel's fundamental <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_50">illusionism</span>. Orlando is at one and the same time the same person despite her change of sex midway through the book – her subjectivity is essential behind even gender. And yet Orlando is also a function of history, changing as she does in accord with the changes through which she lives. To define and represent gender, Orlando – and <i>Orlando</i> – both invoke history and deny it. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Rather than a problem, such structural irreconcilability is a strategy or device. Time must be invoked to describe something as timeless – Orlando's personality, for example – since the timeless can only be conceived of in its relation – its <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_51">nonrelation</span> – to time. And history can be thought of only in relation to a timelessness that is its foil or counterpart. In <i>Orlando</i>, everything, then – and remember, everything is something else – is as a rule put in place by its transgression. This strategy or device, both rhetorical and structural, I shall call Woolf's cross-writing – the transgression or crossing over of assumptions even as they are put in place.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Woolf theorizes cross-writing in <i>Orlando</i> by telling us that Orlando's own mind works in "violent see-saws" (46), not unlike Woolf's own clashing metaphors, "stopping at nothing," she says, "in between" (46). Sounding like Saussure (and Keats), Woolf gives cross-writing a differential model: "Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy" (45). Of course not: to know one means to know its difference from the other. To accent this relativist or relational semiotics, Woolf uses the same metaphor that she uses in <i>Mrs. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_52">Dalloway</span> </i> (1925) to show how difference works to constitute sameness: the clocks in London are off line, each ringing the same hour a bit differently from the others (1925, 60 - 61).<sup>2</sup> Woolf's description of Shakespeare early in the novel also matches the structure of her cross-writing: "his mind was . . . a welter of opposites" (22). Queen Elizabeth, too, is drawn according to the same plan: qualities such as "innocence" and "simplicity" were "all the more dear to her for the dark background she set them against" (23).</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Woolf tells us in the book's preface to be prepared for this double rhythm or movement. "The book," she says, "will inevitably wake expectations in the reader which the book itself can only disappoint" (viii). Expectation and disappointment, disappointment and expectation – this is a fair estimate of the semiotic rhythm the novel employs to have its way with us. The play of expectation and disappointment on the reader's part is necessary for any horizon or circumference – any edge or margin or frame that situates an object as such, whether animate or inanimate – to emerge at all, and as a function of compounding, of difference. Readers know, says Woolf, how to "make . . . up from bare hints dropped here and there the whole boundary and circumference of a living person; can hear in what we only whisper a living voice; can see, often what we say nothing about, exactly what he looked like, and know without a word to guide them precisely what he thought" (73).</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Woolf reminds us of the kind of rhetorical sleight of hand at work here by calling our attention to it and its mechanisms. "The most poetic" kind of "conversation," she says, "is precisely that which cannot be written down" (253). This creates not simply awe at the depth of the conversation in question (a conversation between Orlando and her nineteenth-century lover, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_53">Shelmerdine</span>), but also awe at the fact that such "repletion" or fullness, as Woolf puts it (253), can be the effect of "a great blank here" (253). Even the opposition between life and literature is handled – is simultaneously established and undone – by crossover rhetoric. While life and literature are on the one hand distinct ("Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another" [17]), on the other hand, the Queen "read him" – Orlando – "like a page" (25).</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>When Orlando's change of gender comes, the way in which Woolf represents it, rhetorically at least, slides over us without a hitch. "He was a woman" (137). The fictional illusion succeeds despite – perhaps because of – the rhetorical impossibility. This is, as it turns out, simply a hyperbolic instance of the mixed metaphors that Woolf uses to describe practically everything. Even the novel's plot is made, ironically, out of transformation.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Far, then, from being a self-evident singularity, gender – like ethnicity, or like subjectivity itself – is always already the function of a relation in <i>Orlando</i>. A commonplace of structural feminism, it is interesting to see it rehearsed as early as 1928. Even androgyny is not fusion, but a structure of difference. One doesn't fuse the genders by crossing them – one puts them in place that way, and always has. To be fused, the genders must be different. Gender is a difference, not an essential characteristic, an elementary semiotic activity in all cultures that, in one way or another, is part of the basis upon which a given culture's world, and its subjects, are formed. Gender is pure difference, a "pure performative," as Barbara Vinken puts it, whose role is merely paradigmatic, structuring a fundamental difference out of a formal necessity that is also necessarily political. As Orlando's confirmation of her new gender in the mirror suggests (138), form is itself always already political. The equivalence of politics and form is among the most provocative of the notions to which a deconstructive reassessment of the political leads. What is a politics of form? </div><div><br /></div><div>Notes</div><div><br /></div><div>1. All references are to Virginia Woolf, <i> Orlando</i>, rpt. (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1973). </div><div><br /></div><div>2. Virginia Woolf, <i>Mrs. Dalloway</i>, rpt. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1953).</div><div> </div><div> </div><div><i>Originally published in </i>Deconstruction is/in America: A New Sense of the Political, ed. Anselm Haverkamp (New York: New York University Press, 1995). </div>Perry Meiselhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15136895284654246782noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2242027659057377496.post-69840354785537996052011-01-09T17:14:00.000-08:002011-01-18T14:28:10.196-08:00Introduction to The Turn of the Screw and Other Short Novels<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal; ">by Perry Meisel</span></i><div><i><br /></i></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"></span>The Turn of the Screw and Other Short Novels<i>. By Henry James. New York: Signet Classics, 1995.</i><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Henry James's short novels provide a representative account of James's career as a whole, and serve as an excellent introduction to the peculiar unity of his singular imagination. Although the difference between James's early and later fiction is alone striking – simply compare the opening paragraphs of <i>The American </i>(1877) and <i>The Ambassadors</i> (1903) to see the movement from Victorian realism to the modern psychological realism of which James is the acknowledged master – it is probably more accurate to say that James's career is one of continuity and refinement rather than one of abrupt changes. Whether in his long novels or his shorter ones – nouvelles, as he liked to call the latter, six of which are collected in the pages that follow – James's fiction is always concerned with the play of impressions upon the mind and heart. While a gradual shift in perspective over the years heightens point of view and diminishes the description of faces, objects, and scenes at which the early James grudgingly excels, James's focus remains the extraordinarily specific circumstances that structure the self, and the ways in which the structure of experience and the structure of narrative are very often the same. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>In the autumn of 1897, the year before <i>The Turn of the Screw </i>was first published, James had moved into Lamb House, Rye, after more than twenty years of residence in London. James had settled in England in 1876 (he became a British subject in 1915, the year before his death), and soon achieved critical triumph within the same English tradition that had once burdened him as a young American writer. The influence of James's own writing upon twentieth-century fiction is, of course, inestimable. James's psychological realism remains so influential even today that it is, to use James's own description of the success of the fictional poet Jeffrey Aspern in <i>The Aspern Papers</i> (1888), "part of the light by which we walk." Almost every modern writer of fiction in English carries the scars of James's influence, and almost every major English and American novelist in the generation following James's own – E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, even Hemingway and Fitzgerald – can be measured by their respective turns from a strength at once enabling and potentially fatal in the decisiveness with which it reinvents the writing of fiction.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Why is James so influential? What is the nature of his power? The short novels collected here allow us to see what it is in efficient and delicious miniature. <i>The Turn of the Screw</i> (1898) is James's most famous and widely read short novel. Despite its unique extravagance, it contains the principal elements of James's customary world both early and late: interpretative uncertainty and an uncannily vivid sense of solitary and reflective human sadness. <i>The Turn of the Screw </i>shows us a writer fully at home with his powers, and one consciously concerned with central questions about the imagination and its determinations. Bly, the tale's country house, is a haunted house, and the tale a haunted tale. But haunted by what? Are the former governess and the former valet who loom as apparitions fantastic projections of the new governess's imagination? Or are they genuine ghosts, spirits of a past day? Ghosts represent both the past and a past way of thinking in as decisively secular a world as James's is. Surely the ironic brother of the philosopher William James, notorious freethinker and pragmatist, little fancied ghosts as such. Why, then, are we afraid? By means of what power does the tale promote the shudders that it does? We are afraid not only because James has the powers of illusion to do with us whatever he likes, but also because he has the power to do so while suspending all judgment as to what these witnesses of his power may mean. Testimony to James's audacity as a writer, the tale is poised between a series of interpretative alternatives that raise more questions than James thinks it right to answer. <i>The Turn of the Screw </i>is the turn, as it were, that reveals the archaeology or the unconscious of James's own sense of himself as a writer.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>As a literary allegory, the tale is also poised between two very real alternatives as it mediates upon questions of imaginative priority. Is James's writing merely a ghost of past writing, or is it testimony to the splendid originality of his own imagination? As a writer of fiction who began in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, James had to control Romanticism itself. Like his unnamed governess-narrator (what, by the way, is the status of gender in James?), James is tormented by Romanticism's representatives. Who are Peter Quint and Miss Jessel? They are strangely familiar figures; he is the Romantic male in the visionary tower and she the house-haunting madwoman, whose only place of repose seems to be the attic. Leon Edel, James's biographer, notes the indirect allusions to <i>Jane Eyre </i>in <i>The Turn of the Screw</i>, and the narrator herself wonders out loud whether "an insane, an unmentionable relative" is being "kept in unsuspected confinement." As the governess's fear and malaise attest, however, James himself is interested in neither figure; these Romantic counterparts represent ghostly and offensive burdens that his own fiction will circumvent in favor of a new kind of literary character based upon figures like the depressive governess-narrator here or the scholar-narrator of <i>The Aspern Papers</i> ten years earlier, milder figures for whom vision and madness alike are unacceptable, even unavailable alternatives. Life is after all too sedentary an affair for prose realism to give the glamor of either stance any credibility.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>What is left, then, for the novelist to do? Uncertainty and its causes and effects are the major and unifying concerns of James's career, and his use of them as materials allows him to link style and subject, form and theme in dauntingly clear ways. What James's other short novels share with <i>The Turn of the Screw </i>is the pressure of situations and the overriding question within them of what the truth in each case may be. Of course, what the truth is in James's world is a legal or juridical question – a question of evidence, argument, and negotiation among alternatives – not a metaphysical one. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>In <i>The Aspern Papers</i> (1888), the question of what the truth may be is the narrative's overt theme. Are the poet Aspern's papers hidden in the Missess Bordereau's house in Venice or not? What is the effect of each move planned by the now shrewd, now bumbling narrator as he tries to extract the truth from the situation? Toward the possession of what objects, as he himself wonders, are these feints directed? The very components of the story sound like the techniques involved in writing one. What frustrates the narrator thickens the illusion for the reader. It is the wonder that the story itself creates – the secret that it puts in place by not disclosing – that is both its motive force and its very subject. Concealing a secret is proof that there must be one. The sense of a fugitive truth gives the narrative and the lives of the characters within it goals that structure and organize both alike whether or not either receives a proper resolution. Tita Bordereau's admission at tale's end that she burned the papers after her aunt's death is part of the mystery, not an answer to it. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>If James's career is one of continuity and refinement, then even the early <i>Daisy Miller </i>(1878) – the book that made James famous – must, like Daisy herself, be far less plain and innocent than it seems to be. Here the early James is already exploring the interior as he paints a world presumably external to private states of mind, a world to which characters seem only to react. But the legendary split between an omniscient early James and an entirely subjective later James is partly a myth. Like all of James's work, <i>Daisy Miller </i>is a moral tale. Its lesson is that form does indeed matter; its nonobservance can lead, quite literally, to death. Daisy's flouting of the customs of Rome results in her dying from malaria. But this experiential moral is of a piece with the epistemological lesson that the story also presents, the kind of lesson we tend to associate only with the James of the late phase. With the "ruin" and "inscriptions" of Rome's archaeology serving as the story's site, James shows that "the common forms," as he calls them in <i>The Aspern Papers</i>, are essential to everyone's interior life, the shared assumptions or "pretexts," as he calls them in <i>Daisy Miller</i>, that are one's unconscious connection to the external world. There is some irony in the fact that even solitude and loneliness are made up of social materials (how do I measure myself, for example, except in relation to others?), but it is also this kind of irony that makes James so inconsolable and his world often so torpid. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span><i>An International Episode </i>(1878), as early a work as <i>Daisy Miller</i>, is by contrast a tale of ambiguity and questioning despite its fierce realism. What happens between the lovers at tale's end? It is hard to tell; many explanations are implied, but none confirmed. Ten years before <i>The Aspern Papers</i>, James is already writing a kind of interactive fiction, asking the reader to get involved in construing the story itself even though the reader may feel that he or she is simply observing it. However politically incorrect, one reacts, says James, according to one's "preconceptions." Thus "reference," he says, speaking technically of his use of language in the tale, is "reference to a fund of associations," "associations" or "preconceptions" that implicate the reader in the same network of assumption (the figure of the web or mesh is among James's favorite metaphors in his criticism) as the text and its characters. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>While <i>The Altar of the Dead </i>(1895) is likely James's most moribund tale of human loneliness and uncertainty, it is also among his frankest, since it provides an undisguised model for what narrative and subjectivity actually share. In the process, James's fiction also comes to discover the nature of its own technique, and dramatizes it with even greater clarity than usual. Its key is temporality, and it is the structure of temporality that identifies experience and narrative so exactly. When George Stransom, James's dubious hero, realizes that his female friend has been grieving for the old mutual friend who did him an unspecified wrong many years before, the shock of belated recognition changes his perspective, requiring him to drop her. "It had been all right so long as she didn't know," reflects Stransom, "and it was only now that she knew too much." The slightest difference can make an enormous one. Belated knowledge that alters one's view of the past is the crucial link between the structure of experience and the structure of narrative. Let Stansom explain:<blockquote> There were subtle and complex relations, a scheme of cross reference. . . . In this way, he arrived at a conception of the total, the ideal. </blockquote>Whether it is the self, a story, or an idea, if the parts shift their relation to one another, the whole shifts, although one sees it all only "afterward," as James describes it. So efficient is James that story and technique coincide with remarkable ease. The structure of Jamesian subjectivity is identical with the structure of Jamesian narration, and with the structure of the Jamesian sentence in particular. Like the relations among the elements in a character's life or among those in a porous Jamesian story, the components of a Jamesian sentence don't make entire sense or show surpassing beauty until the reader completes them. James's style and the effect of impressions upon the mind are structured the same way. This is James's reflexive realism, a realism whose representation of the self is at one with the active logic of the writing that describes it. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>If an early tale like <i>Daisy Miller </i>is epistemological as well as moral, a late one like <i>The Beast in the Jungle </i>(1903) is moral as well as epistemological. Indeed, <i>The Beast in the Jungle </i>joins the two, showing how the later James really is the refinement of the identity between narrative and experience, between the reflexive and the realistic, the formal and the thematic. The belatedness of John Marcher's shock of recognition is its primary characteristic, and the source of both the story's sadness and Marcher's own. What is the beast, the secret that Marcher fruitlessly awaits his whole life long? That there is no secret, that all is as blank as the face of a grave? Or is there also another, plainer meaning? Like Stransom (François Truffaut combines <i>The Beast in the Jungle</i> and <i>The Altar of the Dead</i> in his film <i>The Green Room</i>), Marcher has also grown old with a friend and companion without having the brains or the nerve to see that there is a durable love between them. "<i>She</i>," says James, "was what he had missed." Marcher is "fit indeed," says James in his postscripted preface to <i>The Altar of the Dead</i> in the complete edition of his works, "to mate with Stransom." The story shows us that Marcher is, in his own words, "an ass." Like the luster of the Jamesian sentence, the shock of Jamesian recognition comes only after the fact, securing some shard of memory and desire, but leaving behind forever, as the price of knowing it, the possibility of ever having actually held it. Even the most painful cases offer the sole and ironic compensation of belated appreciation for the losses involved. "Belated," writes James, "the pain . . . at least . . . had something of the taste of life." </div></div>Perry Meiselhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15136895284654246782noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2242027659057377496.post-45951100031613204492011-01-09T00:47:00.000-08:002011-01-09T11:00:54.845-08:00What the Reader Knows; or, The French Oneby Perry Meisel<div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Though we customarily honor Katherine Mansfield for her craft, we too often let its mechanisms elude or escape us. Let us pay homage to Mansfield, then, by trying to be clear – a little bit clear anyway - not only about how her texts provoke, assuage, upset, and pacify but also about the way they are made as narrative structures. Two stories will do better than one, especially if they are very different.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>First published in 1919, Mansfield's ironic and unforgiving tale "Je ne parle pas français" may strike us as galling and even cruel, certainly in comparison with the almost superhuman pathos of a tale like "Bliss," first published in 1918. If we read the stories in relation to each other, however – they were begun, by the way, less than two weeks apart, in late January and early February, 1918, respectively – we may be surprised by the kind of implicit dialogue they conduct, and in the process discover something precise about the way Mansfield's stories function, both as moral exercises and as narratological ones. Indeed, it may well be the case that narrative economy of the highest order – the kind of economy for which we customarily celebrate Mansfield's peculiar kind of genius - is the identity, or at least the parallelism, of the moral and the narratological. I will try to elaborate that identity or parallelism in Mansfield's work. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>While "Bliss" is, of course, well known, "Je ne parle pas français" presents special and unexpected complexities. The story itself is simple enough: Raoul Duquette, a twenty-six-year-old French writer of astonishing pretension and surprising success, befriends a foreigner visiting Paris, an English writer named Dick Harmon. Raoul secures rooms in Paris for Dick on his next visit, which he makes in the company of a beautiful and delicate woman - his fiancée, as it turns out - who, at least by her own testimony, does not speak French; as she puts it, in the only line delivered in French in the story, "Je ne parle pas français." The kick of the tale comes when Dick deserts her, leaving behind a letter that she shares with Raoul, and with us, giving as the reason for Dick's desertion his mother's unwillingness to accept the match. The beautiful and delicate woman - she is given no proper name, only the generic nickname Mouse - is left desolate and alone in Paris, with only the dubious friendship of Raoul. But though Raoul promises to return on the morning after Dick's flight, he fails to do so. He announces his decision to us with a perverse pride in collapsing all decency of feeling - the kind of pride that marks his attitude toward everything in his derisive monologue, which is at one and the same time out of all whack with our customary sense of Mansfield and yet somehow peculiarly representative of certain impulses in her fiction.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>The story's real tradition is not so much that of the reflexive or self-conscious récit –a story about writing a story, though it has sure elements of that – as it is of the bad or unpublished tale. The story is a sort of burlesque on both bad fiction and the pop mythology of the rakish aesthete which is among the very raw materials of the Parisian demimonde – the "submerged life," as Mansfield describes it - that the story represents. It particularly mocks the unsavory Raoul, against whose ugly nature we rather automatically react. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>In what direction does the story's viciousness cut? Where is its irony to be located? Or to put it another way, where does its irony locate its reader?</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>One way of answering such a question is to say that what the reader knows in "Je ne parle pas français" are all the things that the story itself derides: an innate sense of compassion, a sense of human worth, a sense of human sharing. All the things that the pretentious narrator maintains <i>are </i>the case are <i>not</i> the case, cannot possibly be the case; all our decency says no. Central here is Raoul's notion that people are, as he puts it, like portmanteaux, or suitcases. "I don't believe in the human soul," says Raoul. "I never have, I believe that people are like portmanteaux - packed with certain things, started going, thrown about, tossed away, dumped down, lost and found, half emptied suddenly, or squeezed fatter than ever, until finally the Ultimate Porter swings them on to the Ultimate Train and away they rattle." Echoing E.M. Forster's indictment of modern life as the "civilization of luggage" in <i>Howards End</i>, of 1910, Raoul's metaphor reduces people to inhuman parcels, and their mortal care, or lack of it, to a kind of indifferent and haphazard registry.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Only such a cynical belief would allow for the callousness of Raoul's behavior, and yet it is a belief that is sustained throughout by a consistent if distasteful vision of how experience is structured. Raoul elaborates, through the logic of his figures of speech, an entire theory of character that is extraordinarily cogent from an abstract point of view.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>"People are like portmanteaux," like pieces of luggage, devoid of innate or indwelling essence, because life, or at least our perception of it, is structured in or by a temporal chain whose functioning requires the contrast and comparison of what Raoul calls "moments" or "instants" one with another. "You never do recover the same thing you lose," says Raoul. "It's always a new thing. The moment it leaves you it's changed." While this may sound, on the one hand, like a lovely theory of the constant freshness of experience – and in some degree it is – it is, on the other hand, really a grindingly desperate theory of the evanescent flux of all things beneath our feet. Only by the play of relations, between one moment and another, or between one "habit" and another, can what we ordinarily call an essence or an absolute quality be established as such. The theory of signification implicit here is one familiar to structural linguistics under the name of difference, and to psychoanalysts under the name of deferred action, even though Mansfield's own vocabulary derives from the Romantic tradition of Walter Pater and his privileged moments, and, before him, of William Wordsworth and his "spots of time" in Book 12 of <i>The Prelude</i>. Raoul even explains, disparagingly though logically enough, that his bitterness against life is, as he puts it, the "direct result of the American cinema acting upon a weak mind" – that life is a function of the ideologies into which we are inscribed rather than of any indwelling sanctity it may be said to muster from beyond the bounds of culture. "Everything," says Raoul, "is arranged for you – waiting for you." Hence one's character is, from the ground up, a "pose," as Raoul puts it, which becomes a "habit"; even poor Dick doesn't just "look . . . the part," whatever part that may be; "he was the part."</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Such a perspective deracinates all notions of authenticity, not just in the temperamental way we might expect of Raoul but in a seriously persuasive way no matter our moral evaluation of Raoul himself. Authenticity of self – or of world – is no more than a fiction, no less real for being so but surely less secure metaphysically. Indeed, self and world are, from Raoul's point of view, almost entirely without any metaphysical dimension whatsoever. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>How far we are from the delectable universe of Bertha in "Bliss," where the human soul, as Mansfield puts it, has a "shower of little sparks coming from it." In Bertha's "bosom," says Mansfield, "there was still that bright glowing place." The difference could not be more exact; Bertha's tropes - "shower of sparks," "bright glowing place" – insist on a human essence, recalling Wordsworth's wishful image of the human spirit in the Intimations ode as well as a whole tradition of Platonic signs for the soul that stands behind it.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>At the same time, though, "Bliss," too, is structured by irony. If "Je ne parle pas français" makes us feel, by dint of the reactive thinking irony classically induces as a rhetorical device, that just the reverse of its assertions is true – that there is a human soul, not just people as portmanteaux – then "Bliss" also requires an equal and opposite reaction: the feeling that despite its manifest claims, there is no Wordsworthian or Platonic "shower of sparks." In fact, poor Bertha is disabused of precisely the comforting notion that there is when her recognition of Harry's secret arrangement with Miss Fulton – an almost high-Victorian moment of knowledge, perhaps the reason Virginia Woolf felt obliged to criticize it – punctures her bliss at tale's end. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>If in "Je ne parle pas français" the reader is all love and goodness, in "Bliss" the reader is all worldly guile and suspicion. The very first line of "Bliss" makes us prophets of contingency and caution; Bertha's pace is so breathless – like her running in the scenes she imagines – that we want to slow it down for fear she will fall and hurt herself, as she indeed does at the story's close. The story finds the suspicion in us by the force of its negation: "Although Bertha Young was thirty she still had moments like this when she wanted to run instead of walk, to take dancing steps on and off the pavement, and to bowl a hoop, to throw something up in the air and catch it again, or to stand still and laugh at – nothing – at nothing, simply." By contrast, the opening lines of "Je ne parle pas français" fill us with the kind of gray rain we later associate with Jean Luc Godard's early <i>hommages</i> to film noir; the story finds the sunshine in us by the force of its negation: "I do not know why I have such a fancy for this little café. It's dirty and sad, sad. It's not as if it had anything to distinguish it from a hundred others – it hasn't."</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>In "Bliss," what the reader knows is that people are indeed like portmanteaux. Despite Bertha's radiant optimism, they do not wear their essences on their sleeves; their sleeves are packed away in boxes of signification – in portmanteaux like those Raoul describes – that are the rhetorical tokens by means of which narrative allows us to know them and by which it allows Bertha to know them through a painful education. Bertha's fatal blindness or innocence of vision is in reading her surroundings, her husband included, too straightforwardly, reading them as though there were no necessity for reading – until the secret is made so palpable as to shock her into her realization. In this sense the story is an allegory of reading, disabusing the reader as well as Bertha of the notion that the notion of a human essence – whether in life or in a story – is secure.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"></span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>But in "Je ne parle pas français" what the reader knows is that people are not at all like portmanteaux; that is the tug of the heart against which the story works. We can go up and back like this all day. It is as though Bertha's wishes are fulfilled by the negation of Raoul's view of the world, and Raoul's wishes fulfilled by the negation of Bertha's view of the world. This kind of dialogical play between the two stories is endless. But how can both these claims be true? How can the reaction prompted by one tale be the opposite of that produced by the other? How can one writer exhibit so discordant, so internally divergent a sense of what we ordinarily call character? How can Bertha's naïve Platonism give way to a darker sense of the instability of essences, while Raoul's nasty sense of the instability of essences give way to a brighter, perhaps even genuinely Platonic, sense of the real stability of essences?</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Well, if each reaction produces its opposite in the play of the reader's mind, it is likely the case that each category in fact needs the other to be what is. Both can be true at the same time because each claim – so Mansfield's epistemology goes – needs the other for what coherence each may be said to have. One is reminded of Harold Bloom's paradox that if God created the world out of nothing, then he must have created the void at the same time that he created the world. In a curious but implacable logic, Raoul's irony requires its violation by a duplicitous world. Each notion of character depends for its sense upon the other.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>In both cases, too, what is dramatized is not so much discordance as the calculated disposition of the structuring trope of irony in a very precise sense: the enactment of the reverse of what is narrated in what the reader knows rather than in what the character shows or tells. Each story represents a falling away from the state that it names. "Bliss" is so named because that is <i>not </i>what the story transacts – not bliss but its sudden opposite. "Je ne parle pas français" is so named because what the story does is speak French, even while announcing that it does not.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Speak French, even while announcing that it does not. Mansfield thereby gives us a wonderfully appropriate figure for the operation that is responsible for what the reader knows. Recall that in the Parisian story the words spoken by the fiancée – "Je ne parle pas français" – are the only words spoken in French in a story that, by all logical implication and necessity, must of course be written in French. It is, after all, a story by the French writer Raoul Duquette, even though it is of course written in English, since it is really a story by the Anglophone writer Katherine Mansfield.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>The real but absent text of "Je ne parle pas français" – the French one – is, I would argue, a sign or cipher for the structure of Mansfield's reader, in whom resides the necessary illusion of a French text that finds its prior cause in Mansfield's English text. A French text is what the reader ultimately presumes – a text that exists nowhere but that has to exist everywhere if Mansfield's story is to sustain its illusion. The French one must be supposed: the real text that is missing, that has somehow been translated but that "retains" – the very word choice conveys the sense that there really is a French text – an aura of presence, like the one that attends the Greek whose authoritative absence Virginia Woolf will similarly lament, in a different context, some six years later.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>For Mansfield, moreover, the importance of the reader's activity cannot be overestimated. It is the reader that is the instrument or channel supplementing what is lacking in both texts. The reader is a kind of supplemental intersection between the text and the characters that it pretends, as part of its strategy, to be separate from, merely transcribing their self-sufficient essence, even though, as with all literary figures – as distinct from what we call historical ones – there are, strictly speaking, no such originals in fact. Bertha, Raoul, Harry, Mouse, even the Norman Knights, who humorously enough invade Bertha's home in "Bliss" – these are all figures in the reader's mind. They are the result of the work the reader does to exact from the text a stable illusion of character, which exists nowhere but in the reader's apprehension. By this unconscious work on the reader's part, the story takes on what mimetic attributes it may have, the result, not of an unmediated mimesis, but of Mansfield's technique of writing, and of writing her real text – her French one – through the orchestrated play of her reader's moral assumptions.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>After all, narrative at large – and Mansfield in particular – constructs readers and, through them, worlds; it does not express, through a discourse of simple correspondence, characters that it projects as real and with whom the reader, as the saying goes, identifies. Rather, narrative opposes, through a discourse of transaction, the image of characters against whom the reader measures himself or herself. It is this revisionary ratio – the one between the reader and the subjective others he or she confronts in the narrative – that structures what the reader knows, and it is here that narrative finds its true destination.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>What makes Mansfield so special, then, is the precision with which she both exploits this ratio and clarifies its nature as the active pivot or mechanism of the art of fiction. She shares with some of her contemporaries – D.H. Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis especially – an identifiable Modernist strategy of alienating her reader in calculated and specific ways. The difference, however, is that Mansfield's technique is finally a conservative one that exploits the reader's unconscious and its assumptions rather than upbraids them.</div><div><br /></div><div><i>Originally published in </i>Centennial Essays on Katherine Mansfield. Ed. Roger Robinson. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994.</div>Perry Meiselhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15136895284654246782noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2242027659057377496.post-61600762073351670032011-01-06T22:49:00.000-08:002011-01-07T23:00:19.049-08:00Lives on the Couchby Perry <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">Meisel</span><div><br /></div><div>Uncovering Lives: The Uneasy Alliance of Biography and Psychology. <i>By Alan C. Elms. 315 pp. New York: Oxford University Press. $25.</i></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Few topics in the history of ideas are as provocative as <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">psychobiography</span>, and few are as vexing. Mindful of widespread popular opinion about <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">psychobiography's</span> notorious reductionism (the notion, say, that Shakespeare's <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">psychosexual</span> organization engendered the content of his plays), Alan C. Elms states without reservation that "<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">psychobiography</span> has become a dirty word." In <i>Uncovering Lives</i> he sets out to vindicate the practice with a series of his own <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">psychobiographical</span> portraits - of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, B.F. Skinner, Isaac Asimov, Jimmy Carter, George Bush, Saddam Hussein, Henry Kissinger, and Alexander <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">Haig</span>. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Mr. Elms, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis, relies on a combination of ego psychology (modeled on the work of Erik <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">Erikson</span>) and academic psychology (based on the work of Gordon <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">Allport</span>, the personality psychologist, and on that of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">Allport's</span> mentor, Henry Murray, who pioneered American personality theory). But while Mr. Elms's eclecticism is refreshing, his research rigorous and his portraits sometimes stimulating, his book <i>Uncovering Lives</i> throws <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">psychobiography's</span> difficulties into relief all over again. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Mr. Elms first looks at Freud's 1910 study of Leonardo <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">da</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">Vinci</span> to find the classical source of historical <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">psychobiography</span>. The trouble is, he seems to expect that Freud, as a good scientist, would have been above it all. Mr. Elms, for instance, concludes that "Freud's 'Leonardo' is not representative of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14">psychobiography</span> in general because its crucial errors" - particularly Freud's identification with Leonardo - "derive from idiosyncratic factors bound up in Freud's personal conflicts." What else is new? Freud's errors only prove Mr. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15">Elms's</span> point - that it is impossible to write anything, even a <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_16">psychobiography</span>, without unconscious motivation. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Mr. Elms is nonetheless an admirable scholar. He impressively documents the history of what he calls "one of the autobiographical masterpieces of the 20<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_17">th</span> century," Jung's posthumous <i>Memories, Dreams, Reflections </i>(1963). Paragraph by paragraph, he describes the changes made to Jung's original manuscript, and then elaborates the stories behind the changes, especially the reasons for the bowdlerizations by Jung's family and supporters even before Jung's death in 1961.</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>But it is Mr. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_18">Elms's</span> chapter on the behaviorist B.F. Skinner that steals what show there is in <i>Uncovering Lives</i>. Mr. Elms not only provides intriguing biographical information (including Skinner's unfulfilled plan to write a book on the psychology of literature); he also gives a fascinating account of the psychological issues at work in Skinner's life and career. In Mr. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_19">Elms's</span> telling, <i>Walden Two</i>, Skinner's 1948 <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_20">utopian</span> novel, was "Skinner's response to a major midlife crisis," and behaviorism itself was the resolution of Skinner's inner conflicts. Skinner's life work happens to be a superb example of what Mr. Elms (silently building on a notion from Melanie Klein) calls the "<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_21">restitutive</span> function" of work - the way that writing or scholarship, for instance, can provide the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_22">individual a</span> psychological link to the objective world, the glue that allows him to put the elements of his life together. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Mr. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_23">Elms's</span> chapters on the fantasy writers Isaac Asimov and L. Frank Baum (the author of the 1900 children's classic <i>The Wonderful Wizard of Oz</i>) are also rich with fresh biographical material, and they carry more psychoanalytic punch than the other <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_24">psychobiographical</span> readings in the book. Mr. Elms argues that the galactic spaces of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_25">Asimov's</span> fiction are a well-wrought defense against his acrophobia, "a creative engagement between his talents and his fears." Elsewhere Mr. Elms posits that if one early Baum work - a manual on chicken breeding - signals an infantile fear of "maternal inattention," then Baum's invention of "Father Goose" in 1899 was a prescient and appropriate <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_26">restitutive</span> response to his childhood anxiety.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>However, Mr. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_27">Elms's</span> attempt at "applied political <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_28">psychobiography</span>" is far less effective. The "<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_29">restitutive</span> function" is apparently not at work in the careers of Jimmy Carter, George Bush, Henry Kissinger and (not surprisingly) Alexander <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_30">Haig</span> and Saddam Hussein.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>One of the book's most serious problems is that it is not sensitive enough to the implications of its most cogent idea. Mr. Elms suggests that restitution provided by work may well carry a person "beyond defensiveness." But he leaves one important question unattended: how have writers and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_31">psychobiologists</span>, for instance, restructured the fields in which they work? Mr. Elms seems to believe that <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_32">psychobiography</span> is designed to demonstrate psychological laws rather than to enrich the study of culture as a whole.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Can one assess Mr. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_33">Elms's</span> book <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_34">psychobiographically</span>? Do the book's formal characteristics reveal anything about its author? Does Mr. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_35">Elms's</span> studiously casual tone disguise anything troubling about his childhood? How can one test the validity of such claims? The question of whether or not the writing of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_36">psychobiography</span> is a sufficiently <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_37">restitutive</span> enterprise for Mr. Elms himself is, of course, beyond the judgment of literary criticism. <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"><br /></span></div><div><i>Originally published in </i>The New York Times Book Review, <i>November 27, 1994</i></div>Perry Meiselhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15136895284654246782noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2242027659057377496.post-24196016868779913372011-01-05T22:00:00.001-08:002011-01-09T18:55:35.900-08:00Introduction to It Can't Happen Here<div>by Perry Meisel </div><div><br /></div><div>It Can't Happen Here. <i>By Sinclair Lewis. New York: Signet Classics, 1993.</i></div><div><br /></div><div><i><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>It Can't Happen Here </i>is unique among Sinclair Lewis's major novels, and very likely among his best. Although the book's appearance in 1935 was a topical response to the advent of fascism in Europe (Mussolini had come to power in Italy in 1922, Hitler in Germany in 1933), its depiction of a fascist future for the United States has a force that grows stronger with each passing year. Rather than criticize America for its provincialism as he did in the novels that had made him the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930 - <i>Main Street </i>(1920), <i>Babbitt </i>(1922), <i>Arrowsmith</i> (1925), <i>Elmer Gantry </i>(1927), and <i>Dodsworth</i> (1929) - Lewis now celebrated America by writing a cautionary tale rather than a satiric one. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>The urbane Europe of <i>Dodsworth</i> was no longer urbane when Lewis began work on <i>It Can't Happen Here </i>in 1934. His wife, Dorothy Thompson, was a journalist, and had published a book called <i>I Saw Hitler</i> in 1933; Lewis obviously knew what was afoot. His predilection for moral disgust was doubtless kindled by tales of Hitler. He had little patience with presumptive authority, and now found that what he hated about American provincialism - its gullibility - was mirrored by the success of the Nazis. It gave him an entirely fresh aesthetic perspective. Despite received critical opinion (Mark Schorer, Lewis's biographer, has said that after 1930 Lewis was "finished" as a "serious writer"), <i>It Can't Happen Here</i> marks a singular advance in Lewis's art as a novelist that transforms the assumptions of his earlier work into the problems of the new, and that leads to a startling self-reassessment that crowns his career.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Although <i>It Can't Happen Here</i> is as a rule compared to George Orwell's <i>1984</i> (1949) and Aldous Huxley's <i>Brave New World</i> (1932) in its representation of a totalitarian future, its best analogue is Nathanael West's <i>A Cool Million</i>, published just a year before Lewis's novel in 1934. West narrates the rise of an American fascism by showing the grotesque violence that brings to power Shagpoke Whipple, a dishonest banker and former president modeled upon Ronald Reagan's preferred precursor, Calvin Coolidge. Whipple puts America - and West's hero, poor Lemuel Pitkin - under the boot of his Storm Troops to secure the triumph of his National Revolutionary Party.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Lewis's plot is not dissimilar, but it has a wonderfully logical ease compared to West's Kafkaesque fantasy (there is some irony in the fact, too, that Jack London, to whom the young Lewis had sold plots in 1910-11, had in 1907 published the first of what Erich Fromm later called the "negative utopias," <i>The Iron Heel</i>). Unlike Orwell and Huxley, Lewis portrays not an achieved state of totalitarianism whose protocols the novel's characters take for granted, but a slow, altogether believable process whereby the America we all of us know crosses a line that we didn't realize was there. While Orwell and Huxley largely override the specificities peculiar to British culture as part of the nature of the fascist nightmare, Lewis takes advantage of specificity by employing American customs and conventions that we know by heart to stoke the loud realism that makes his story so extraordinarily vivid. The novel charts the rise to power of Senator Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip, a right-wing demagogue modeled on Huey P. Long of Louisiana, and whose partisans, who call themselves the "Corpos," have persuasive heirs in today's New Right.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Lewis focuses on the American electoral process in an outlandish and uncannily prophetic way, presaging the media campaigns that we now expect in American politics, and mixing, like Norman Mailer or Tom Wolfe, fact and fiction when, for example, Windrip beats Franklin D. Roosevelt out of the presidential nomination at the 1936 Democratic national convention. The campaign, too, is utterly convincing to American readers of any generation, especially those who saw Ronald Reagan's presidency, although the climactic Democratic rally at Madison Square Garden in New York the night before the election adds to the clatter of familiar American sounds and images the ominous centrality of the Minute Men, Windrip's storm troopers who, like West's Storm Troops in <i>A Cool Million </i>(they dress in Davy Crockett uniforms), use the virtues of a pioneer image in order to refashion it. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>The story is told from the point of view of Doremus Jessup, a sixty-year-old newspaper editor in the small town of Fort Beulah, Vermont. Happiest when he is alone in his attic study amid "an endearing mess," as Lewis puts it, of books - novels, the complete works of Jefferson, the Bible, the Koran, the Book of Mormon - Doremus is, unlike Babbitt, say, or the more heroic Martin Arrowsmith, a fair surrogate for the novelist himself. What Doremus learns over the course of the novel is that the "cackle" of the world, as Lewis describes the clutter of contending voices and opinions that makes up America, is not at all unlike the "endearing mess" of books in his study. Society, too, is a motley of speech, a "mess" of variegated languages of thought and feeling that its members expound. The novel and the world are continuous rather than different in kind. America is a particularly manifest example of social life as a tissue of dialects in its own right. It is not a question of who is Right and who is Left, who is right and who is wrong. Each side needs the other for a sense of identity. America is like the "patchwork quilt" under which the fugitive Doremus sleeps in the house of strangers who at the novel's close give him refuge. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span><i>It Can't Happen Here</i> is an aesthetic breakthrough for Lewis because his novel shows us the real relation between politics and literature. They are overlapping worlds, not separate ones. Both are signifying pageants, dazzling patchworks of language. This is precisely what the novel as a form uniquely enjoys among other discourses. It is also what the novel as a form shares with democracy as a form. It is Lewis's achievement in <i>It Can't Happen Here</i> to have grasped, after a long and successful career as a satirist, this critical identity, and to realize the thickening of illusion that it can technically effect. No longer a sarcastic onlooker, Lewis has risen from the satirist's chair of the 1920s to a more farcical realist stance in which all the attitudes are equally credible and equally preposterous. He delights in a play of multiple idioms unknown to him before despite a history of critical reception that praises him for tuning single American dialects to perfection. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>The polarities that satire structurally requires (if something is stupid and evil, then I who show it to you must be smart and virtuous) are among the kinds of conflict or opposition that Lewis's shock of recognition leads him to override in favor of a more telescopic realism bent on discovery rather than judgment. Lewis now sees that his earlier satiric mode pivoted on the kinds of distinctions that he is no longer willing to make. In <i>Arrowsmith </i>in particular (Lewis had turned down the Pulitzer Prize for the novel in 1926 because, as Schorer describes it, he didn't believe in the legislation of taste such prizes represented), Lewis crystallized the implicit assumptions of <i>Main Street</i> and <i>Babbitt</i> by opposing, plainly and absolutely, the will to truth and the will to dominion. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>The simplicity of the opposition - indeed, the opposition itself - is no longer an assumption in <i>It Can't Happen Here</i>. Through Doremus, Lewis realizes that the languages that people speak - the satirist's included - are actually languages of belief rather than of any sort of established truth, each vying for a purely documentary priority, whether Karl Pascal's Marxism or Shad Ledue's resentment. In <i>It Can't Happen Here</i>, Communists and Corporatists, Left and Right, are alike "theocratic," as Lewis puts it, thereby dismantling the presumable opposition between the two, and finding instead a common bond between them in the wish to believe in something. As Orwell argues in his famous essay, "Politics and the English Language" (1946), no language is, despite our "belief" in it, a "natural growth." West's Shagpoke Whipple is blunter still: "This is not a matter of opinion, it is one of faith." Any "loyalty," Doremus concludes, is "religious." He, too, finds himself wanting "a church," as he calls it, to redeem America from fascism. Indeed, winning the Resistance is couched in overtly religious terms - as a redemption from tyranny in an inescapable typology based in a tradition of faith (the Communists refuse to join the Resistance in order to vouchsafe their own purity of belief). The world is dangerous not because people don't mean what they say, but because they do. Belief is somehow inevitable; theocratic piety even attends the use of language as such, since grammar presupposes a stability of relation between subject and object that the world itself may not possess, but in whose name it gets transfigured nonetheless. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Thus the political dangers that the novel shows us are also literary dangers. Lewis's focus on Lee Sarason, Windrip's secretary of state and chief adviser, is decisive in establishing the link between American life and American fiction that is the book's chief invention. Although Sarason is eventually unwise enough to seize power from Windrip as the book steams toward its end (he, too, gets toppled in turn), he is Windrip's speechwriter, press agent, and the real author of <i>Zero Hour</i>, Windrip's version of <i>Mein Kampf</i>, "the Bible," as Lewis calls it, of Windrip's "followers." Sarason's "smoking typewriter" is what is ultimately responsible for the fascism that Lewis describes. "It all made dazzling reading," thinks Doremus of the whole political situation late in the novel. "There had never been a more elegant and romantic fiction." </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Windrip is not, however, without his own skills, too. Like Sarason's bewitching typewriter, Windrip's oral ability to entrance his audience has its counterpart in the novelist's ability to absorb and fascinate his or hers. A politician with the rhetorical talents of Windrip is, like Sarason, a kind of novelist in his own right, although a very different one from the surrogate novelist presented by the figure of Doremus. This is the second model of authorship or governance that the novel offers, and it is clear which of the two it prefers despite the irony of having to choose. The danger, in literature as in life, lies in taking any illusionism, any language at all, for "gospel," as Lewis puts it - in believing in it rather than simply appreciating it and weighing its role in a balance of values. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Hence <i>It Can't Happen Here </i>is a particularly relevant text for any assessment of American culture at the present time. After all, Lewis portrays what we can very reasonably call a multicultural America in the book as a whole, and in its concluding image of the patchwork quilt. The principal question he raises is, how do you read a world, or a novel, full of contending tongues without succumbing to the fascism or theocracy of either Left or Right, or to the kind of "message" literature that <i>Zero Hour</i>, for example, recommends to control the polyphony? One guards against the fixities of belief to which Left and Right, and sociological literature, alike aspire by insisting, as Lewis does, on America as a poetic fiction - a poem by Whitman, if you will - and on its endless self-invention rather than on anything self-evident in its constitution. America's precise and paradoxical virtue is that it is decidedly artificial, imagined rather than found. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Lewis conjoins politics and the novel by showing that both are dialogues, unlimited conversations between readerly assumption and writerly surprise, conducted in order to make up what world there is. This is Lewis's reflexive realism - his ability to show the similarities between reading the world and reading a text. This is also a vision of politics itself as ultimately aesthetic, like his account of the campaign, a proleptic Warholesque view of life as television well before the fact. Lewis had been an aesthete in college, writing imitations of Swinburne as a Yale freshman before growing more topically inclined as a writer of prose. This repressed aestheticism returns in <i>It Can't Happen Here</i>, a presumably political novel from a sociological writer, but one in which the certainties of satire wane in favor of a renewed aesthetic irony poised enough to let the sensation of every position, every language, every belief have its effect.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Like its insistence on endless dialogue in both life and literature, the novel's own superb plot does not conclude with the melodrama of either a successful overthrow of fascism or its absolute dominion. Rather, it simply stops with the start of a struggle between the Corpos and New Underground, leaving the story's destiny open. The play of dominion and defiance in America's yielding to Windrip is reflected in the novel's own technique of engaging the reader in a dialogue or, if you prefer, a Socratic dialectic between belief and resistance, expectation and amazement. Debate is the only freedom and dialogue the only art. This is decidedly American writing. The grand image of the patchwork quilt not only links America; it also links Lewis with other American writers of his time such as Willa Cather, for whom the image of the quilt is like testimony to a shared vision of a multicultural America. Indeed, the patchwork quilt has become a popular image for such a vision during the last quarter of this century. If <i>It Can't Happen Here</i> is still real to readers more than half a century after it was written, it is because Sinclair Lewis has identified the precise tensions that structure both democracy and the art of fiction. </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Perry Meiselhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15136895284654246782noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2242027659057377496.post-39533699528897336822011-01-03T21:53:00.000-08:002011-01-05T10:52:19.605-08:00Sweet Ottoline<div style="text-align: left;">by Perry <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">Meisel</span></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">Ottoline</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">Morrell</span>: Life on the Grand Scale. <i>By Miranda Seymour. Illustrated. 452 pp. New York: <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">Farrar</span>, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">Straus</span> & <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">Giroux</span>. $30.</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">She was, said Virginia Woolf, "Helen of Troy." "She gave me a complete mental reorientation," said Aldous Huxley. She was, in a less hyperbolic assessment by Lord David Cecil, "a creative artist of the private life." With her mane of red hair, her six-foot frame and her dazzling and eccentric mode of dress, the beautiful Lady <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">Ottoline</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">Morrell</span>, niece of the Fifth Duke of Portland and wife of the Liberal politician Philip <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">Morrell</span>, ranked among London's chief literary hostesses from 1907 until her death in 1938. Lady <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">Ottoline</span> has, as a rule, also been subject to "grotesque caricature," says Miranda Seymour in her new biography, and it is time to rediscover the real woman behind the myth of the vain aristocrat seeking admission to <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">esthetic</span> circles. </span></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>D.H. Lawrence's portrait of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">Ottoline</span> as Hermione <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">Roddice</span> in </span>Women in Love<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> (1920) is just the kind of image Ms. Seymour wishes to challenge in </span><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">Ottoline</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14">Morrell</span>: Life on the Grand Scale</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">, although it is the Bloomsbury set that she holds principally responsible for <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15">Ottoline's</span> bad historical reputation. Virginia Woolf, her sister Vanessa Bell, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_16">Lytton</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_17">Strachey</span> - all flattered <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_18">Ottoline</span>, then joked about her behind her back. With full access to <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_19">Ottoline's</span> papers for the first time, particularly her letters to Bertrand Russell (an earlier biography by Sandra J. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_20">Darroch</span> appeared in 1975 without benefit of them), Ms. Seymour tries to produce a fresh <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_21">Ottoline</span> beyond the haze of Bloomsbury distortion.</span></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Born in 1873, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_22">Ottoline</span> Violet Anne Cavendish <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_23">Bentinck</span> weathered a painful Victorian childhood. After her father's death in 1877, her mother turned her into an emotional "slave," as Ms. Seymour puts it, passing along to her daughter a penchant for both nervous suffering and religious enthusiasm. Following the death of her uncle in 1879, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_24">Ottoline's</span> half-brother Arthur became the Sixth Duke of Portland, and the family moved to ancient <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_25">Welbeck</span> Abbey in <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_26">Notthinghamshire</span>.</span></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Educated at home, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_27">Ottoline</span> was free to roam in nearby Sherwood Forest after lessons. Here her awakening sense of physical beauty began to clash with her precocious religiosity, foreshadowing a series of tensions later in life between the "puritan" and the "artistic" sides of her nature, as Ms. Seymour calls them, and between her aristocratic background and her bohemian propensities. She felt, Ms. Seymour tells us, like an outsider in both of the worlds she inhabited. "I could never learn my proper part," she confessed to her diary. </span></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>The conflict between <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_28">Ottoline's</span> spirituality and her love of sensual beauty found a perfect resolution in a religion of art based on the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_29">estheticism</span> of Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, then still fashionable. By 1907, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_30">Ottoline</span> had discovered her true vocation as a patroness of the arts, "the chance," as Ms. Seymour describes it, "to live a life of active benevolence outside the conventions." She and Philip <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_31">Morrell</span> had moved into 44 <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_32">Bedford</span> Square, Bloomsbury, in 1906; by the following spring she was sending off invitations for what became her famous Thursday Evenings. By 1910, she was helping Roger Fry choose the paintings for the first Post-Impressionist exhibition in London; by 1911, she was in the opening rounds of a stormy relationship with Bertrand Russell that lasted for the rest of her life. </span></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Her marriage to Philip <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_33">Morrell</span> in 1902 was a devoted union but also an open one. "Too weak a character to dictate the form a marriage should take . . . he was putty in her hands," says Ms. Seymour. Of her serious lovers, however, only Russell was as important to her as her husband. With Russell, she could play out, openly and endlessly, the split in her nature between the spirit and the flesh, by turns enduring and enjoying Russell's vaunted sexual appetite, and always enjoying his mind.</span></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>If <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_34">Bedford</span> Square was <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_35">Ottoline's</span> court, then <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_36">Garsington</span>, the country house in <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_37">Oxfordshire</span> which the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_38">Morrells</span> acquired in 1914, was her Forest of Arden. Like all of her houses, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_39">Garsington</span> was, as Juliette Huxley put it, "a habitual work of art" (Ms. Seymour's book is illustrated, and the proof is manifest). <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_40">Garsington</span> was a "romantic theater," as <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_41">Ottoline</span> herself described it, renowned for its picturesque Italian garden and the "Shakespearean intrigue," as Ms. Seymour nicely phrases it, among the guests (during World War I, the house and surrounding farm also served as a refuge for conscientious objectors performing alternative service). So esthetically luxurious was <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_42">Garsington</span> that, on a good day, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_43">Ottoline</span> could talk books with <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_44">Lytton</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_45">Strachey</span>, then fetch D.H. Lawrence for a walk through the countryside.</span></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_46">Ottoline's</span> sincerity and her capacity for suffering are Ms. Seymour's chief evidence in a case that is unnecessary to make. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_47">Ottoline</span> vindicates herself, not as a journal writer (the extracts Ms. Seymour gives us are rather bland), but as a lovably infuriating character who would be far more comfortable, and far more vivid, in a crossover historical novel. </span></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>This potential <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_48">Ottoline</span> gets lost, however, amid all the documents on Ms. Seymour's desk. As estimable as Ms. Seymour's revisionary project may be, its successes and its shortcomings go, oddly enough, hand in hand. Ms. Seymour aspires to comprehensiveness rather than to shape, but the very abundance of her materials often turns her biography into an unwitting historiographical farce of the kind <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_49">Ottoline's</span> friend <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_50">Lytton</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_51">Strachey</span> specialized in writing: the sardonic romance of the wide-eyed historian looking to separate fact from fiction (in her introduction, Ms. Seymour refers directly to <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_52">Strachey's</span> own words on the subject in </span><span class="Apple-style-span">Eminent Victorians</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">), only to be swallowed up by a mass of evidence whose organization is beyond his powers unless he succumbs to generic melodrama. </span></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>The melodrama to which Ms. Seymour succumbs is drab hagiography. Bloomsbury's "duplicity," she argues, hurt <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_53">Ottoline</span>, making her feel the childhood dread of being the outsider all over again. Ms. Seymour wisely allowed herself novelistic liberties in her 1989 book on Henry James; here she takes advantage of the strategy only occasionally, although with superbly dramatic results when she does so. "How could it be designing," she has her hostess wonder, "to want to help people?" The indirect style is characteristic of Flaubert, and well suited to a persuasive representation of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_54">Ottoline</span>. It also leaves the reader free to make an independent response. How indeed?</span></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_55">Ottoline</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_56">Morrell</span> was really a female dandy in the grand 19<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_57">th</span>-century tradition. She feminized <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_58">estheticism</span> as surely as Virginia Woolf did. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_59">She</span> also gathered within herself the dandy's entire history by combining its aristocratic origins at the court of George III with its bohemian destiny after Baudelaire and Wilde. An aristocrat, she was languid and affected; a bohemian, she was passionate, flouting the very conventions that sustained her as Lady <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_60">Ottoline</span>. Like any good biographical subject, she eludes the hand that tries to grasp her. </span></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span></i></div><div><i>Originally published in </i>The New York Times Book Review<i>, June 13, 1993.</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>Sample view: </i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal; color: rgb(0, 0, 238); -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; "><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6oIcVyrwWtZztFo7925HoRYwAE2MgD_Fd1HdNJhjLs6yLYEYuP2uC-jSK9dj7mhkaQa6qUMk84gtgaOKOYoPexeV-LksfVEKaq9kbEECLboJuJBnqoXwtDwhUKSpljIDQpBEWM8Pfztkx/s320/literature_89.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5558216328891570898" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 240px; height: 320px; " /></span></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal; color: rgb(0, 0, 238); -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; "><br /></span></i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span></i></div><div><br /></div><div> </div>Perry Meiselhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15136895284654246782noreply@blogger.com