Perry Meisel

Forthcoming, 2012

2012-01-27T16:17:00.000-08:00

"Woolf and Freud: The Kleinian Turn." In Virginia Woolf

in Context. Co-ed. Jane Goldman and Bryony Randall.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Books

2011-07-05T08:51:00.001-07:00

Course in General Linguistics. Trans. Wade Baskin. Co-ed. with

Haun Saussy. By Ferdinand de Saussure. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.

The Myth of Popular Culture from Dante to Dylan. Oxford: Blackwell Manifestos, 2010.

The Literary Freud. New York and London: Routledge, 2007.

The Cowboy and the Dandy: Crossing Over from Romanticism to Rock and Roll. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

The Myth of the Modern: A Study in British Literature and Criticism after 1850. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.

Bloomsbury/Freud: The Letters of James and Alix Strachey, 1924-25. 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.)

Freud: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1981.

The Absent Father: Virginia Woolf and Walter Pater. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980.

Thomas Hardy: The Return of the Repressed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972.

Dylan and the Critics

2011-03-05T14:57:00.000-08:00

by Perry Meisel

Chronicles, Volume 1. By Bob Dylan (Simon & Schuster).

Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads. By Greil Marcus (PublicAffairs).

Dylan's Visions of Sin. By Christopher Ricks (Ecco).  

Many years ago, in a review of Bob Dylan's Tarantula (1971) in the New York Times Book Review, 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 Dylans music – miss the full effect.  

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.  

Even a brief survey is dispiriting. For Dylan's political observers, everything is social allegory. Mike Marqusee's Chimes of Freedom (2004) turns Dylan's work into a quest for the "unconventional"; David Hajdu s social history of Dylan in the Village, Positively Fourth Street (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, Bob Dylan with the Poets and Professors (2002), is self-congratulation. Betsy Bowden's Performed Literature (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 A Darker Shade of Pale (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.  

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.  

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 mise-en-scène 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, figura nonetheless came to obey its typological shape. Auerbach's history of the use of figura 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.  

Typology, or figura, 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.  

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, John Wesley Harding (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.  

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.   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 Song and Dance Man III (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.  

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.

The academic-in-exile is Greil Marcus, a critic for whom all emanations of American culture are the same. Mystery Train (1975) established this critical terrain long before Marcus embarked on his study of Elvis (1991) and on his first study of Dylan (1997). In Mystery Train, 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 Mystery Train, 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.  

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, Dylan's Visions of Sin, 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.  

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.  

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.  

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 – Dylan's Visions of Sin – 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.  

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 Nashville Skyline (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 New Morning (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.   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 Oh Mercy (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 Slow Train Running (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.  

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.   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.  

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 Performed Literature, 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.  

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 Bringing It All Back Home (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.  

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, Milton's Grand Style (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 Paradise Lost 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.   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.  

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.  

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 Love and Theft (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.  

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, Like a Rolling Stone (2005). Invisible Republic (1997), Marcus's study of Dylan's Basement Tapes (released in 1976), began the trend in Marcus's career that has crystallized in Like a Rolling Stone: 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 Invisible Republic involved Dylan's recuperation from his motorcycle accident, it flirted with typology. But as a result of its greater sensitivity to form, Like a Rolling Stone 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.  

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."

  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.  

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.  

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 Love and Theft, "is already a thing of the past." The famous lines on "My Back Pages" on Another Side of Bob Dylan (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.  

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 Chronicles (2004) is both a description of this kind of textual behavior and a fine example of it. Chronicles 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. Chronicles 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 Chronicles is that because of the intractable porousness of his work, Dylan is as distant from himself as the rest of us are.

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 Time Out of Mind (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.  

For a text that documents how the unconscious works, Chronicles 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.  

This instability has its technical counterpart in Dylan's deliberate use of melisma. In Chronicles, 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. Chronicles 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 Chronicles 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.

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.  

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.

Originally published in Raritan, Winter 2007

Psychology and Modern Literature

2011-02-26T21:46:00.000-08:00

by Perry Meisel

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 locus classicus – 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.

James and James

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 The American (1877) with that of The Ambassadors (1903). The shift from outside to inside is manifest. The American 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 The Ambassadors. 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.

It is often to Henry’s brother, William, author of Principles of Psychology (1890), that historians turn to find terms to describe Henry’s prose. Here is an influential passage from the Principles: “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).

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 An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (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 The Ambassadors, the transposition of the self’s fluctuating impressions by language into social myth or ideology is the Essay’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.

Neither Bergson nor brother William will do to describe brother Henry’s fiction. The Ambassadors – and The American, 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.

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.

Freud

“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.

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 Observations, strove to connect physical stimulation with events in the mind using the “association” as the mediator among sensation, ideation, and feeling. Erasmus Darwin, in Zoonomia (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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 neurotica. . . . 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)

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.

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 Project for a Scientific Psychology (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 Marius the Epicurean: His Sensations and Ideas (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.

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 récit and histoire 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 Group Psychology (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.

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 Project and Studies on Hysteria and cresting with The Interpretation of Dreams, 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 Standard Edition of Freud (1953–74), translates the German “Trieb” 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).

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 Degeneration (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).

The doctrinal decade – the first decade of the century – saw the exemplification of psychoanalytic theory in clinical studies such as The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), and Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuallity (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 Totem and Taboo (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 Totem and Taboo 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).

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 Essay, 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 The Ego and the Id 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.”

The Three Modernisms

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.

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 Women in Love (1921) rests on making conscious this deep instinctual core as a path towards human salvation. Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1921a) lays out the doctrine behind Women and Love, 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).

To be sure, Lawrence’s great trilogy – Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915), and Women in Love (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 Aaron’s Rod (1922) or Lady Chatterley’s Lover (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.

T. S. Eliot’s influential review of James Joyce’s Ulysses, published in The Dial in 1923, discovers in Joyce’s novel what Eliot called the “mythical method” (Eliot 1923). Based on the Odyssey, Ulysses, 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 sine qua non 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.

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 “anima” – that part of the mind filled with vital, procreative energy. R. F. C. Hull, Jung’s translator, frequently translates Jung’s “Seele” 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. Anima, 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 The Golden Bough (1890–1915), and by Jessie L. Weston, in a book that influenced Eliot deeply, From Ritual to Romance (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.

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 The Waste Land, are the instrument of this timeless purity, its emanations, as it were, in historical time. Allied with Eliot’s mythic fascination with the Vedas – 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.

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. The Waste Land’s extraordinary suppleness as a poem is challenged by its rude impositions of mythic doxa 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.

Real history, alas, interferes, as in Joyce, with the neatness of a “continuous” mythic history. Ulysses, 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 The Waste Land 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?

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, émigrée 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.

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 The Renaissance (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.

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 O Pioneers! (1913), or to ideology, as in the focus on business law in A Lost Lady (1923), can the self’s materiality and sociality come into being. A Lost Lady 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 Mrs. Dalloway (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 Jacob’s Room (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 To the Lighthouse (1927).

Mrs. Dalloway and the first volume of Freud’s Collected Papers 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 Standard Edition 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 habitués like Joan Rivière, who served as first translator of both “Mourning and Melancholia” and The Ego and the Id. 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.

References and Further Reading

Bergson, Henri (1889). Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L Pogson. Rpt. New York: Dover, 2001.

Cather, Willa (1922). “The Novel Démeublé.” In Willa Cather on Writing. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988.

Cather, Willa (1936). “Katherine Mansfield.” In Willa Cather on Writing. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988.

Chaudhuri, Amit (2003). D. H. Lawrence and “Difference.” Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Derrida, Jacques (1967). “Freud and the Scene of Writing.” In Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.

Eliot, T. S. (1922). Collected Poems 1963. Rpt. Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970.

Eliot, T. S. (1923). “Ulysses, Order, and Myth.” In Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1975.

Ellenberger, Henri F. (1970). The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry. New York: Basic Books.

Freud, Sigmund (1897). Letter to Wilhelm Fliess. September 21, 1897 (no. 69). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74. 1: 259–60.

Freud, Sigmund (1915). “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74. 14: 111–40.

Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar (1979). The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.

James, Henry (1877). The American. Rpt. New York: Holt, 1967.

James, Henry (1903). The Ambassadors. Rpt. Cambridge: Riverside, 1960.

James, William (1890). Principles of Psychology, 2 vols. Rpt. New York: Dover, 1950.

Laqueur, Thomas W. (2003). Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation. New York: Zone Books.

Lawrence, D. H. (1921a). Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious. Rpt. New York: Viking, 1962.

Lawrence, D. H. (1921b). Women in Love. Rpt. New York: Viking, 1966.

Lawrence, D. H. (1936). “Study of Thomas Hardy.” In Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence. Rpt. New York: Viking, 1980.

Leavis, F. R. (1932). New Bearings in English Poetry. Rpt. London: Penguin, 1967.

Mann, Thomas (1930). “Freud and the Future.” In Essays of Three Decades, trans. H. Lowe-Porter. New York: Knopf, 1947.

Nordau, Max (1892). Degeneration. Rpt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993.

Richardson, Alan (2001). British Romanticism and the Science of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ricks, Christopher (1988). T. S. Eliot and Prejudice. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Sulloway, Frank (1979). Freud: Biologist of the Mind. New York: Basic Books.

Trilling, Lionel (1950). “Freud and literature.” In The Liberal Imagination. Rpt. New York: Doubleday, 1953.

Valentine, Kylie (2003). Psychoanalysis, Psychiatry, and Modern Literature. New York: Palgrave.

Whitehead, Alfred North (1925). Science and the Modern World. Rpt. New York: Free Press, 1967.

Originally published in A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture, edited by David Bradshaw and Kevin Dettmar. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006.

From Bebop to Hip Hop: American Music After 1950

2011-02-20T12:54:00.000-08:00

By Perry Meisel

Jazz Myth, Jazz Reality

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 primitivism. In the process, they had to slander the very achievement that they praised. For Carl Van Vechten, 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.
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 “blackface” 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 Ackroyd in the 1980 film The Blues Brothers. Unlike their blackface 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.
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.

Although since the twenties, many jazzmen 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 jazzman 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.

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.

Jazz and Rhythm and Blues

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 danceability 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.
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.
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 breathiness. 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.
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 Minton’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 saxist Earl Bostic. If Parker invented bop out of swing, then Bostic, with his raucous transformation of swing vibrato into rock and roll flatulence, invented r & b out of swing.
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 via media for a music enduringly beset by the burdens of Parker’s precedent. Bop had often used Afro-Cuban instrumentation; the presence of conga and timbales 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. LeRoi 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.
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 Blakey—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 Ornette Colman, Eric Dolphy, Archie Shepp, 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.
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 miscegenating 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 churchy urbanity of African American writers from W. E. B. Du Bois 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.
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 Bostic. Here he finds a means of inspiration in Bostic’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 Bostic at a date in Cincinnati in 1952, when he was also touring with the altoist Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson and hard bop organist Jimmy Smith.
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 Ascension, 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 Meditations, a fearsomely shy and hesitant work. The epochal A Love Supreme 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 saxist before or since, although he does so, inevitably, by negotiating with the very history he transforms.

Soul

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 “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie,” was still in the tradition of swinging jazz vocalists, chief among them Cab Calloway. 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 antinomies, in this case the secular” and “dirty” stance of the blues and the stance of black religiosity derived from spirituals.
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 Rainey. When Dorsey first heard the music of Charles A. Tindley at the annual meeting of the National Baptist Convention in Philadelphia in 1929, his own compositional instincts found both kinship and a foil. Tindley, 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, Tindley’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.
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 pre-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 Rainey 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 Redding, 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.
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 doowop. While doowop’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 doowop’s a cappella sound.
By the late 1940s, doowop had grown into a full-scale ghetto genre. By the middle-1950s, its recordings finally crossed over racial marketing lines with hits by the Cleftones, the Flamingoes, the Moonglows, and Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers. The next generation of doowoppers—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.
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 doowop 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.
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 Stax house sound of Booker T. and the MGs; 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 The Waste Land, 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 doowop-inspired vocal back-ups as backdrop and collateral for an astonishing array of solo singers that included Gaye, Robinson, and Stevie Wonder.
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 doowop device—the devastating falsetto, with roots in the ancient history of fieldhouse blues—and remakes it into a vocal strategy central to the subsequent history of r & b singing as a whole. Wilson’s 1957 hit, “Reet 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.
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.

Urban Blues

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.
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 par excellence.
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.
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 prima facie 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.

Rock and Roll

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

The Myth of Popular Culture

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 Introduction to the Sociology of Music, published in 1962:

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 serve for compositional organization. The substance withers and at the same time belies the forms, which no longer serve for compositional organization.

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.
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 Mary Tyler Moore and The Dick Van Dyke Show or I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched, 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.

Works Cited

Berry, Chuck. Chuck Berry: The Autobiography. New York: Harmony Books, 1987.

Charters, Samuel B. The Country Blues. New York: Rinehart & Co., 1959.

Davis, Miles, with Quincey Troupe. Miles: The Autobiography. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989.

Ellison, Ralph. Shadow and Act. New York: Random House, 1964.

George, Nelson. The Death of Rhythm and Blues. New York: Pantheon, 1988.

Giddins, Gary. Riding on a Blue Note: Jazz and American Pop. Boulder: Da Capo Press, 2000.

Gillett, Charlie. The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll. New York: Pantheon, 1970.

Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Gitler, Ira. Swing to Bop: An Oral History of the Transition in Jazz in the 1940s. New York: Oxford University Press: 1985.

Gordy, Berry. To Be Loved: The Music, the Magic, the Memories of Motown, an Autobiography. New York: Warner Books, 1994.

Guralnick, Peter. Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom. New York: Harper and Row, 1986.

Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Meuthuen, 1979.

Jones, LeRoi. Blues People: Negro Music in White America. New York: Morrow, 1963.

Keil, Charles. Urban Blues. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966.

Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Malone, Bill C. Country Music U. S. A. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985.

Marcus, Greil. Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music. New York: Dutton, 1975.

Murray, Albert. Stomping the Blues. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976.

Palmer, Robert. Deep Blues. New York: Viking, 1981.

Robinson, Smokey, with David Ritz. Smokey: Inside My Life. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1989.

Russell, Ross. Jazz Style in Kansas City and the Southwest. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.

Schuller, Gunther. The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz, 1930—45. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Shaw, Arnold. Honkers and Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues. New York: Macmillan, 1978.

Southern, Eileen. The Music of Black Americans: A History. New York: Norton, 1971.

Stowe, David W. Swing Changes: Big-Band Jazz in New Deal America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994.

Originally published in A Concise Companion to Postwar American Literature and Culture. Edited by Josephine G. Hendin. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.

Review of "Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Public of Two"

2011-02-08T13:35:00.000-08:00

by Perry Meisel

Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Public of Two. By Angela Smith. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999. 238 pp.

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 Jacob's Room (1922), and that comes to fruition in Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927). Mansfield's writing, said Woolf when Mansfield died, "'was . . . the only writing I have ever been jealous of'" (p. 5).

Although Angela Smith's new book, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Public of Two, 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.¹Mansfield 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 "liminality" (pp. 4, 10) – of borders and border states.² 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 Beauchamp, 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 "liminal" bond of all, that of being ill.

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 liminality. Drawing on Julia Kristeva's 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 Lacan, Kristeva 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 defamiliarization, 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).

Smith gives us a key to reading Mansfield's strategies by showing how her narratives are composed of modular units. Like the Woolfian 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 given socioeconomic regimes. (Smith does not, however, point us to either Lacan or Louis Althusser 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 "destablilizing" (p. 151) the "script" (pp. 175, 180) of patriarchy that even female character is forced to read.

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).³ If "Prelude" (1918) is, with its "empty house" (p. 106), "the model for To the Lighthouse" (p. 93), then "At the Bay," with its action limited to a "single day" (p. 151), is the model for Mrs. Dalloway. As in Mrs. Dalloway, "linguistic motifs link . . . characters" (p. 158), motifs whose frequent psychopolitical imagery, like the phallic monumentalism of London's imperial architecture or the blade of Peter Walsh's knife, show the extent to which language itself is, as Lacan suggests, the symbolic order. In "At the Bay," "constructions of human experience" are "subjected to scrutiny and revealed as inadequate" (p. 163). While the Burnell family's women and children enjoy the jouissance of fluid relation when husband and father Stanley is in town at business, his return, like Mr. Ramsay's bluff appearances in To the Lighthouse, 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.

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 Burnell household; they are also the technical contrivance upon which the narrative seizes in order to "disrupt . . . the prescripted 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.

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 Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighhouse, Smith's handling of Jacob's Room 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 "Kew Gardens" (1919), prepares the ground. In Jacob's Room, "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 tropologies. "The narrator plays with . . . archetypal roles," both "undermining" and sustaining them (p. 210).

Liminality 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 Kristeva also 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 Kristeva again and again. The cranky machinery of the Kristevan system confuses more than it clarifies. Even the distinction between the semiotic and the symbolic leads to an epistemological cul-de-sac that a critic with structural presuppositions like Smith, or, indeed, like Kristeva herself, should be suspicious of. It requires valorizing 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 unreflective side of French feminism and the point at which it cannot sustain the ironies that brought it into being. Kristeva's 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 Lacan in her critical unconscious. Above all, it valorizes the very anthropomorphism – the romantic practice of prosopopoeia – that Mansfield, Woolf, and late romantic modernism as a whole characteristically put into question.

Such a difficulty points to a larger problem. We have reached a moment of uncanniness in literary criticism as a whole today, when the interrogation of the hegemonic has, with some irony, itself become the rule. A Public of Two is both an investigation of such uncanniness 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 stentorianly when when its tenets are now common knowledge?

Notes

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, Literature and Living: A Consideration of Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf (London: Covent Garden, 1972); Nora Sellei, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Personal and Professional Bond (Frankfurt: Lang, 1996); and Patricia Moran, Word of Mouth: Body Language in Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996).

2. Victor Turner and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978).

3. Both were included in The Garden Party (1922); Smith, however, does not date the stories despite the biographical demands of her argument.

Originally published in Modern Philology, Volume 100, Number 1, August 2002

In Exile

2011-02-05T21:42:00.000-08:00

by Perry Meisel

I met Robert Christgau 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 Crawdaddy and The Boston Phoenix, and had had excellent editors – John Swenson and Ben Gerson. Christgau, however, was different; he was the Dean of American Rock Criticism. Nor was it, as every rock critic knows deep down, an inappropriate moniker.

As I crossed Eighth Street that afternoon, going from my office at NYU up University Place to the Voice, 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.

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.

He kindled. The conversation had begun. He sent me off to review Larry Coryell at the Village Gate. Talk about ambivalence! I sweated like hell, almost as much as Coryell 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.

I pored over Any Old Way You Choose It 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.

But to think of Christgau 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, Christgau 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 epistemologies matched, just like our glasses.

Trained at Dartmouth as a New Critic, Christgau joined a tradition beginning with Marshall Stearns 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. DuBois and the (let us not forget) anthropologically trained Nora Zeale Hurston, 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.

The Voice was, and still is, an academy in exile. If, as Bob avers, Richard Goldstein 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 Goldstein, the paper's influence includes that seachange 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 Christgau, 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 Renaissance Quarterly or Representations.

Invariably operating to the latter's discredit, the divide between "high" and "low" has a long history, from Matthew Arnold, who largely invented it, to F.R. Leavis, who gave his prejudices an avuncular twist so as to make them appear common-sensical and benign. This history's apogee is Clement Greenberg's 1939 essay "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" in Partisan Review. Even T.W. Adorno, friend of the worker, is a brick-headed snob on the subject. The assumption that the "popular" is kitsch," or trash, to use Greenberg's 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 Partisan Review. 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.

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-assed 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 MOR. 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 Banacek, Miami Vice, and Law and Order for a very considerable historical dialectic that the shows themselves act out in dramatic terms.

"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 roll's original poet, the first Buddy Holly or Brian Jones. The continuity between "high" and "pop" is often exact to a fault.

Originally published in Don't Stop 'til You Get Enough: Essays in Honor of Robert Christgau. Edited by Tom Carson, Kit Rachlis and Jeff Salamon. Austin: Nortex Press, 2002.

Plugged

2011-02-03T23:18:00.000-08:00

by Perry Meisel

Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan. By Howard Sounes. Illustrated. 527 pp. New York: Grove Press. $27.50.

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 Bob Dylan: An Intimate Biography (1971) is polite to a studious fault, embarrassed by its own potential for overstatement, like the first guest at a party. Robert Shelton's No Direction Home (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 Dylan (1989) also lets critical formulation slip away even when it is in hand, while Clinton Heylin's punctilious Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades (1991) sometimes crashes trying to find a ''real'' Dylan amid the masks that define him.

Now comes Howard Sounes's Down the Highway. 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.

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 Blood on the Tracks (1975), Shot of Love (1981) and even Empire Burlesque (1985) as he does to classics like Bringing It All Back Home (1965), Highway 61 Revisited (1965) and Blonde on Blonde (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.

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.

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.

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 The Basement Tapes (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 Slow Train Coming (1979) are redeemed by less phlegmatic ones like Infidels (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 Time Out of Mind.

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 Confidence Man.

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 Time Out of Mind, 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.

Originally published in The New York Times Book Review, June 10, 2001

Psychoanalysis and Aestheticism

2011-02-01T20:44:00.000-08:00

by Perry Meisel

Freud as Literature

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”:

Freud is not simply the author of The Interpretation of Dreams or of Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious and Marx is not simply the author of the Communist Manifesto or Capital: 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)

Foucault's animosity toward Freud in the latter phase of his own career, particularly in the first volume of The History of Sexuality (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.

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.

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 Studies on Hysteria (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 Civilization and its Discontents (1930), for example, or in An Outline of Psychoanalysis (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.

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.

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 Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 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 The Question of Lay Analysis (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.

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).

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 The Ego and the Id (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 Studies on Hysteria to the dream book, from the dream book to the occlusions of the metapsychological phase, and from the metapsychology to the high ground of Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), by which time Freud's system has been well enough refined to sustain shocks of any kind.

“Constancy” and Chiasmus

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.¹ 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 Studies on Hysteria and the Project for a Scientific Psychology. 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 Studies on Hysteria, 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 Project, 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 Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

“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)

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 Studies on Hysteria. 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 Beyond the Pleasure Principle brings to Freud's thinking.

“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.² Otherwise, it would threaten to spill out the contents of the very self it means to protect. Thus, its central role in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and, later, in The Ego and the Id. 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.

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 The Interpretation of Dreams, “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 The Interpretation of Dreams, and that intimates the later structural model of Beyond the Pleasure Principle and The Ego and the Id. 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:

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.”

(1900, 536-37)

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.

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.

Psychoanalysis and Aestheticism

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 Studies in the History of the Renaissance, 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).

Freud's friendliness toward Pater is manifest in his 1910 study of Leonardo, in which he discusses Pater's essay on Leonardo in The Renaissance 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 The Prelude. 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).

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.³ 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.

But the most far-reaching similarity between Freud and Pater is to be found in a comparison of the “Conclusion” to The Renaissance and Beyond the Pleasure Principle. 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:

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)

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).

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.

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 Elements of Psychophysics 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).

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.

Here, meanwhile, is a Paterian Freud, describing the birth of consciousness in Beyond the Pleasure Principle:

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)

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 The Interpretation of Dreams, dramatized in living terms.

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:

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)

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).

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 Project or Studies on Hysteria. Now the form of self-realization is one that absorbs and expunges stimulation in a reciprocal rhythm. Beyond the Pleasure Principle 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 Beyond the Pleasure Principle 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.

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.

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 Beyond the Pleasure Principle: 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.

Notes

1. Fechner, despite more than three years of illness and seclusion from 1840 to 1843—well before the publication of his epochal Elements of Psychophysics 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).

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).

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.

References

Amacher, Peter. 1965. Freud's Neurological Education and Its Influence on Psychoanalytic Theory. Madison, CT: International Universities Press. Psychological Issues, Monograph 16.

Bazin, André. 1945. "The Ontology of the Photographic Image." In What is Cinema? Vol. 1. Trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967, pp. 9-16.

Bloom, Harold. 1978. "Freud and the Poetic Sublime." In Poetics of Influence.Ed. John Hollander. New Haven: Henry R. Schwab, 1988, pp. 187-212.

Brooks, Peter. 1985. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York: Random House.

––, ––. 1994. Psychoanalysis and Storytelling. Oxford: Blackwell.

Ellenberger, Henri F. 1956. "Fechner and Freud." Bull. Mennin. Clinic., 20:201-4.

––, ––. 1970. The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry. New York: Basic Books.

Fechner, Gustav. 1860. Elements of Psychophysics. Vol. 1. Trans. Helmut E. Adler. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1996.

Foucault, Michel. 1969. "What is an Author?" In Language, Counter Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Ed. Donald F. Bouchard. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977, pp. 113-138.

––, ––. 1976. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon, 1978.

Freud, Sigmund. 1892. "Letter to Josef Breuer." Standard Edition, 1:147-48.

––, ––. 1895. Project for a Scientific Psychology. Standard Edition, 1:295- 397.

––, ––. 1900. The Interpretation of Dreams, Standard Edition, Vols. 4 and 5.

––, ––. 1910. Leonardo da Vinci and A Memory of His Childhood. Standard Edition, 11:57-137.

––, ––. 1920. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Standard Edition, 18:1-64.

––, ––, and Josef Breuer. 1895. Studies on Hysteria, Standard Edition Vol. 2.

Grünbaum, Adolf. 1984. The Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Inman, Billie Andrew. 1981. Walter Pater's Reading: A Bibliography of His Library Borrowings and Literary References, 1858-1873. New York: Garland.

––, ––. 1990. Walter Pater and His Reading, 1847-1877. With a Bibliograpy of His Library Borrowings, 1878-1894. New York: Garland.

Jakobson, Roman, and Morris Halle. 1956. Fundamentals of Language. The Hague: Mouton.

Jones, Ernest. 1953. The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 1. New York: Basic Books.

Laplanche, Jean. 1970. Life and Death in Psychoanalysis. Trans. Jeffrey Mehlman. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.

Masson, Jeffrey M. 1984. The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Meisel, Perry, ed. 1981. Freud: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

––, ––, ed. 1984. "Freud's Reflexive Realism." October, 28:43-57.

––, ––, ed. 1987. The Myth of the Modern. New Haven: Yale University Press.

––, ––, and Walter Kendrick, eds. 1985. Bloomsbury/Freud: The Letters of James and Alix Strachey, 1924-25. New York: Basic Books.

Pater, Walter. 1873. The Renaissance. Originally published as Studies in the History of the Renaissance. New Library Edition. 10 vols. London: Macmillan, 1910.

––, ––. 1874. "Wordsworth." In Appreciations (1889), pp. 39-64.

––, ––. 1878. "The Child in the House." In Miscellaneous Studies (1895), pp. 172-96.

Solms, Mark. 1997. "What is Consciousness?" J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., 45:681- 703.

Spence, Donald. 1982. Narrative Truth and Historical Truth: Meaning and Interpretation in Psychoanalysis. New York: Norton.

Stephen, Leslie. 1875. "Art and Morality." Cornhill Magazine, 32(July):91-101.

Sulloway, Frank J. 1979. Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend. New York: Basic Books.

Trilling, Lionel. 1940. "Freud and Literature." In The Liberal Imagination Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1953, pp. 32-54.

Woolf, Virginia. 1919. "Modern Fiction." In Collected Essays. 4 vols. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967, 2:103-10.

Originally published in American Imago 58, Winter, 2001.

Let a Hundred Isms Blossom

2011-01-30T20:07:00.000-08:00

by Perry Meisel

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.

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.

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.

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 Is There a Text in This Class? (1980), Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) and Harold Bloom's Anxiety of Influence (1973). The terrain they map out is actually a common one, despite what you may hear around the Fiji cooler or at Starbucks.

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.

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 Paradise Lost in his 1967 book, Surprised by Sin, 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.

If Fish empowered the reader, Edward Said empowered ''the other'' – the marginalized, the oppressed – with Orientalism, the father text, if I may be a little ironic, of postcolonialism. The reach of Orientalism 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.

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 The Souls of Black Folk (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.

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 Psychoanalysis and Feminism 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.

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 Paradise Lost. 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.

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.

The desire to stake out new territory is particularly obvious in Anne McClintock's Imperial Leather (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.

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.

Originally published in The New York Times Book Review, May 28, 2000

Sample view:

The Definitive Hipster

2011-01-27T23:01:00.000-08:00

by Perry Meisel

Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs. Edited and with an introduction by James Grauerholz. 273 pp. New York: Grove Press. $25.

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 Naked Lunch (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.

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.

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 Last Words a synthetic whole. Burroughs published only one full-scale journal previously, The Retreat Diaries (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.

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?''

But unlike many literary diaries, Last Words 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:

No one is perfect.

No, but by the flaws in the picture the truth will emerge.

Any[way] – last night, vague dream I was somewhere, couldn't stay long – I packed laundry sack with drawstring . . . .

What else?

The lake, a Moroccan, Jewish, German slum.

So I must let everything all the way in, a vast wind to blow everything that doesn't belong away.

(I am transparent.)

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:

I feel chilly and grown old.

I feel like Tiresias,

"[a] fortnight dead, and the waves

pick his bones in whispers"

– the old, old words.

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.

But Last Words 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.

It is Burroughs's priceless fascination with Mario Puzo's Last Don 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.

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.

Originally published in The New York Times Book Review, February 13, 2000

Postcards From the Edge

2011-01-26T19:37:00.000-08:00

by Perry Meisel

Friends and Apostles: The Correspondence of Rupert Brooke and James Strachey, 1905-1914. Edited by Keith Hale. Illustrated. 304 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press. $35.

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.

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.

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.''

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.

Originally published in The New York Times Book Review, January 17, 1999

Scenes From an Unusual Marriage

2011-01-25T17:06:00.000-08:00

by Perry Meisel

You Are Not I: A Portrait of Paul Bowles. By Millicent Dillon. Illustrated. 340 pp. Berkeley: University of California Press. $27.50.

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.

Millicent Dillon's biography of Bowles, You Are Not 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.

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?

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.

But the links between Bowles's life and art remain, like all else in Tangier, elusive. You Are Not 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?

Originally published in The New York Times Book Review, May 17, 1998

Attention Must be Paid For

2011-01-23T20:20:00.000-08:00

by Perry Meisel

Truth Games: Lies, Money, and Psychoanalysis. By John Forrester. 210 pp. Cambridge, Mass.:

Harvard University Press. $22.95.

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, Truth Games (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.

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.

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.

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, Dispatches From the Freud Wars, 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.

Originally published in The New York Times Book Review, March 15, 1998

The Unanalyzable

2011-01-22T14:20:00.000-08:00

by Perry Meisel

Jacques Lacan. By Elisabeth Roudinesco. Translated by Barbara Bray. Illustrated. 574 pp. New York: Columbia University Press. $36.95.

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, Jacques Lacan, 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.

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 Écrits in 1966. He died in 1981.

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 stade du miroir 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.

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 méconnaissance 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.

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, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (University of Chicago, 1996), The Other is the condition for the One. 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.''

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, Writings on Psychoanalysis: Freud and Lacan (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.

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.

Originally published in The New York Times Book Review, April 13, 1997

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In League With the Bandits

2011-01-21T16:35:00.000-08:00

by Perry Meisel

Romantic Outlaws, Beloved Prisons: The Unconscious Meanings of Crime and Punishment. By Martha Grace Duncan. 272 pp. New York: New York University Press. $29.95.

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 Great Expectations, or Shakespeare's Prince Hal turn away from old Sir John Falstaff in Henry IV, Part 2?

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.

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 Romantic Outlaws, Beloved Prisons. 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.

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.

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.

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 Les Miserables. Here Shakespeare's Macbeth 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.''

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.

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.

Originally published in The New York Times Book Review, January 26, 1997

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The Mad, Mad World of R.D. Laing

2011-01-19T10:44:00.000-08:00

by Perry Meisel

The Wing of Madness: The Life and Work of R. D. Laing. By Daniel Burston. 275 pp. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. $35.

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 The Wing of Madness. 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 The Legacy of Erich Fromm, 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.

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.

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.

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.''

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, The Divided Self (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 Sanity, Madness and the Family (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.''

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.''

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.

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 The Politics of Experience (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.

Originally published in The New York Times Book Review, September 8, 1996.

Sample view:

The Form of Politics

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by Perry Meisel

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 Neo-conservatives why and how deconstructive relativism is actually very systematic indeed, but also to distinguish deconstruction from the neo-centrisms of the Left (a self-contradictory description that is itself an example of the problem). These latter impulses, astonishingly enough, reconstitute the binarisms of black/white, male/female, power/oppression that gird tyranny, and that are under presumable siege as categories.

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 deracinating essences, absolutes, transcendental categories of all kinds is not in the service of an anarchic play of signifiers. 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.

American criticism may perhaps wake from its dogmatic slumbers by remembering what Anselm Haverkamp states in his introduction to this conference – that America is difference. This is the crucial tie between deconstruction and America despite deconstruction's 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).

As Jonathan Culler points out, the performative or constitutive nature of discourse, together with its chiastic 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 originary ground for American life at large, based, not on European – read logocentric – 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.

Hence the ease with which we allow ourselves to be swayed by the language of the singular – of the essentiality 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 reimagination of the categories involved, a dangerous epistemological lassitude will continue despite the need for its correction.

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 ethnos, I argued at that time, emerges in the Septuagint as a means of translating the Hebrew goyim, 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 ethnos as designating biosemiotic traits, sometimes derived iconically 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 nationalisms, from Mazzini to Herzl, sought a justifying physicalism 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 ethnos and ethos, 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.

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 goyim 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 goyim – is also the trope designed to signify the pure, the essential, the very opposite of the unclean or the improper that it originarily signifies in the history of its usage. It should be noted, too, that ethnos also originarily 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 properness, the inherence that structures what is included.

If a narrative were to be constructed from this play of the trope's senses, it would find its telos 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.

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 revalorization 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.

II.

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.

The unconscious is the conference's enabling notional secret, an Althusserian notion of the unconscious that understands subjects and ideology, texts and their reception, in reciprocal rather than exclusive terms. Avital Ronell's "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 Ronell, linking Kant with Freud and Lacan, and linking epistemology with psychoanalysis.

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 ideology 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.

III.

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 Orlando (1928). And yet no twentieth-century text is also more strategically plain about its own deconstructive rather than irreducible notion of gender than Orlando is. Everyone knows the popular conception of Orlando – 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 Orlando's apparently synthetic project is the book's hommage to androgyny, borrowed from Coleridge's picture of a harmonious imagination in the Biographia Literaria (1817). Woolf literalizes, 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-throated ease of both the plot and Woolf's seamless use of language.

Culler's notion of performativity is dazzlingly evident as Woolf's text provides a virtual object lesson in how semiosis makes subjects from the ground up. What language brings into being in Orlando is gender as such. Even to call it "as such" is, of course, problematic, since gender's suchness or givenness is the function of a difference or a relation. Under the pressure of Woolf's language, Orlando's presumably central notion of gender splits its husk.

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).¹ 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."

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 nonidentity 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.

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.

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 illusionism. 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 Orlando – both invoke history and deny it.

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 nonrelation – to time. And history can be thought of only in relation to a timelessness that is its foil or counterpart. In Orlando, 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.

Woolf theorizes cross-writing in Orlando 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 Mrs. Dalloway (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).² 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).

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).

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, Shelmerdine), 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).

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.

Far, then, from being a self-evident singularity, gender – like ethnicity, or like subjectivity itself – is always already the function of a relation in Orlando. 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?

Notes

1. All references are to Virginia Woolf, Orlando, rpt. (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1973).

2. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, rpt. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1953).

Originally published in Deconstruction is/in America: A New Sense of the Political, ed. Anselm Haverkamp (New York: New York University Press, 1995).

Introduction to The Turn of the Screw and Other Short Novels

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by Perry Meisel

The Turn of the Screw and Other Short Novels. By Henry James. New York: Signet Classics, 1995.

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 The American (1877) and The Ambassadors (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.

In the autumn of 1897, the year before The Turn of the Screw 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 The Aspern Papers (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.

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. The Turn of the Screw (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. The Turn of the Screw 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. The Turn of the Screw is the turn, as it were, that reveals the archaeology or the unconscious of James's own sense of himself as a writer.

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 Jane Eyre in The Turn of the Screw, 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 The Aspern Papers 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.

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 The Turn of the Screw 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.

In The Aspern Papers (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.

If James's career is one of continuity and refinement, then even the early Daisy Miller (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, Daisy Miller 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 The Aspern Papers, are essential to everyone's interior life, the shared assumptions or "pretexts," as he calls them in Daisy Miller, 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.

An International Episode (1878), as early a work as Daisy Miller, 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 The Aspern Papers, 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.

While The Altar of the Dead (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:

There were subtle and complex relations, a scheme of cross reference. . . . In this way, he arrived at a conception of the total, the ideal.

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.

If an early tale like Daisy Miller is epistemological as well as moral, a late one like The Beast in the Jungle (1903) is moral as well as epistemological. Indeed, The Beast in the Jungle 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 The Beast in the Jungle and The Altar of the Dead in his film The Green Room), 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. "She," says James, "was what he had missed." Marcher is "fit indeed," says James in his postscripted preface to The Altar of the Dead 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."

What the Reader Knows; or, The French One

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by Perry Meisel

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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 are the case are not 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 Howards End, 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.

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.

"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 The Prelude. 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."

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.

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.

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.

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 hommages 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."

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.

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?

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.

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 not 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Originally published in Centennial Essays on Katherine Mansfield. Ed. Roger Robinson. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994.

Lives on the Couch

2011-01-06T22:49:00.000-08:00

by Perry Meisel

Uncovering Lives: The Uneasy Alliance of Biography and Psychology. By Alan C. Elms. 315 pp. New York: Oxford University Press. $25.

Few topics in the history of ideas are as provocative as psychobiography, and few are as vexing. Mindful of widespread popular opinion about psychobiography's notorious reductionism (the notion, say, that Shakespeare's psychosexual organization engendered the content of his plays), Alan C. Elms states without reservation that "psychobiography has become a dirty word." In Uncovering Lives he sets out to vindicate the practice with a series of his own psychobiographical portraits - of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, B.F. Skinner, Isaac Asimov, Jimmy Carter, George Bush, Saddam Hussein, Henry Kissinger, and Alexander Haig.

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 Erikson) and academic psychology (based on the work of Gordon Allport, the personality psychologist, and on that of Allport's 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 Uncovering Lives throws psychobiography's difficulties into relief all over again.

Mr. Elms first looks at Freud's 1910 study of Leonardo da Vinci to find the classical source of historical psychobiography. 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 psychobiography 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. Elms's point - that it is impossible to write anything, even a psychobiography, without unconscious motivation.

Mr. Elms is nonetheless an admirable scholar. He impressively documents the history of what he calls "one of the autobiographical masterpieces of the 20th century," Jung's posthumous Memories, Dreams, Reflections (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.

But it is Mr. Elms's chapter on the behaviorist B.F. Skinner that steals what show there is in Uncovering Lives. 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. Elms's telling, Walden Two, Skinner's 1948 utopian 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 "restitutive function" of work - the way that writing or scholarship, for instance, can provide the individual a psychological link to the objective world, the glue that allows him to put the elements of his life together.

Mr. Elms's chapters on the fantasy writers Isaac Asimov and L. Frank Baum (the author of the 1900 children's classic The Wonderful Wizard of Oz) are also rich with fresh biographical material, and they carry more psychoanalytic punch than the other psychobiographical readings in the book. Mr. Elms argues that the galactic spaces of Asimov's 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 restitutive response to his childhood anxiety.

However, Mr. Elms's attempt at "applied political psychobiography" is far less effective. The "restitutive function" is apparently not at work in the careers of Jimmy Carter, George Bush, Henry Kissinger and (not surprisingly) Alexander Haig and Saddam Hussein.

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 psychobiologists, for instance, restructured the fields in which they work? Mr. Elms seems to believe that psychobiography is designed to demonstrate psychological laws rather than to enrich the study of culture as a whole.

Can one assess Mr. Elms's book psychobiographically? Do the book's formal characteristics reveal anything about its author? Does Mr. Elms's 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 psychobiography is a sufficiently restitutive enterprise for Mr. Elms himself is, of course, beyond the judgment of literary criticism.

Originally published in The New York Times Book Review, November 27, 1994

Introduction to It Can't Happen Here

2011-01-05T22:00:00.001-08:00

by Perry Meisel

It Can't Happen Here. By Sinclair Lewis. New York: Signet Classics, 1993.

It Can't Happen Here 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 - Main Street (1920), Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith (1925), Elmer Gantry (1927), and Dodsworth (1929) - Lewis now celebrated America by writing a cautionary tale rather than a satiric one.

The urbane Europe of Dodsworth was no longer urbane when Lewis began work on It Can't Happen Here in 1934. His wife, Dorothy Thompson, was a journalist, and had published a book called I Saw Hitler 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"), It Can't Happen Here 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.

Although It Can't Happen Here is as a rule compared to George Orwell's 1984 (1949) and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) in its representation of a totalitarian future, its best analogue is Nathanael West's A Cool Million, 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.

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," The Iron Heel). 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.

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 A Cool Million (they dress in Davy Crockett uniforms), use the virtues of a pioneer image in order to refashion it.

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.

It Can't Happen Here 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 It Can't Happen Here 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.

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 Arrowsmith 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 Main Street and Babbitt by opposing, plainly and absolutely, the will to truth and the will to dominion.

The simplicity of the opposition - indeed, the opposition itself - is no longer an assumption in It Can't Happen Here. 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 It Can't Happen Here, 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.

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 Zero Hour, Windrip's version of Mein Kampf, "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."

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.

Hence It Can't Happen Here 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 Zero Hour, 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.

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 It Can't Happen Here, 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.

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 It Can't Happen Here 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.

Sweet Ottoline

2011-01-03T21:53:00.000-08:00

by Perry Meisel

Ottoline Morrell: Life on the Grand Scale. By Miranda Seymour. Illustrated. 452 pp. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $30.

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 Ottoline Morrell, niece of the Fifth Duke of Portland and wife of the Liberal politician Philip Morrell, ranked among London's chief literary hostesses from 1907 until her death in 1938. Lady Ottoline 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 esthetic circles.

D.H. Lawrence's portrait of Ottoline as Hermione Roddice in Women in Love (1920) is just the kind of image Ms. Seymour wishes to challenge in Ottoline Morrell: Life on the Grand Scale, although it is the Bloomsbury set that she holds principally responsible for Ottoline's bad historical reputation. Virginia Woolf, her sister Vanessa Bell, Lytton Strachey - all flattered Ottoline, then joked about her behind her back. With full access to Ottoline's papers for the first time, particularly her letters to Bertrand Russell (an earlier biography by Sandra J. Darroch appeared in 1975 without benefit of them), Ms. Seymour tries to produce a fresh Ottoline beyond the haze of Bloomsbury distortion.

Born in 1873, Ottoline Violet Anne Cavendish Bentinck 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, Ottoline's half-brother Arthur became the Sixth Duke of Portland, and the family moved to ancient Welbeck Abbey in Notthinghamshire.

Educated at home, Ottoline 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.

The conflict between Ottoline's spirituality and her love of sensual beauty found a perfect resolution in a religion of art based on the estheticism of Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, then still fashionable. By 1907, Ottoline 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 Morrell had moved into 44 Bedford 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.

Her marriage to Philip Morrell 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.

If Bedford Square was Ottoline's court, then Garsington, the country house in Oxfordshire which the Morrells acquired in 1914, was her Forest of Arden. Like all of her houses, Garsington was, as Juliette Huxley put it, "a habitual work of art" (Ms. Seymour's book is illustrated, and the proof is manifest). Garsington was a "romantic theater," as Ottoline 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 Garsington that, on a good day, Ottoline could talk books with Lytton Strachey, then fetch D.H. Lawrence for a walk through the countryside.

Ottoline's sincerity and her capacity for suffering are Ms. Seymour's chief evidence in a case that is unnecessary to make. Ottoline 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.

This potential Ottoline 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 Ottoline's friend Lytton Strachey 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 Strachey's own words on the subject in Eminent Victorians), only to be swallowed up by a mass of evidence whose organization is beyond his powers unless he succumbs to generic melodrama.

The melodrama to which Ms. Seymour succumbs is drab hagiography. Bloomsbury's "duplicity," she argues, hurt Ottoline, 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 Ottoline. It also leaves the reader free to make an independent response. How indeed?

Ottoline Morrell was really a female dandy in the grand 19th-century tradition. She feminized estheticism as surely as Virginia Woolf did. She 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 Ottoline. Like any good biographical subject, she eludes the hand that tries to grasp her.

Originally published in The New York Times Book Review, June 13, 1993.

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Freudian Trip

2011-01-02T20:16:00.000-08:00

by Perry Meisel

Freud, Jung, and Hall the King-Maker: The Historic Expedition to America (1909). By Saul Rosenzweig. Illustrated. 477 pp. Seattle. Hogrefe & Huber Publishers. $27.50.

Among the few official distinctions awarded Sigmund Freud during his lifetime was an honorary degree from Clark University in Worcester, Mass. in 1909. The occasion was the 20th anniversary of Clark's opening, a celebration for which the university's president, G. Stanley Hall, had organized an international scientific conference and invited Freud as a speaker. It was a landmark event not only for Freud but also for Carl Jung, who was given an honorary degree, too.

For Hall, a pioneer of American psychology and an early enthusiast of psychoanalysis who was designated the "kingmaker" by Freud himself, it meant being host to a historical figure, "the source of it all," as he later put it. For the embattled Freud, who was then 53 years old, it meant vindication. After facing years of criticism, he had gained some form of world recognition. "As I stepped onto the platform at Worcester to deliver my 'Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis,'" he wrote in his Autobiographical Study in 1925, "it seemed like the realization of some incredible daydream; psychoanalysis was no longer a product of delusion. It had become a valuable part of reality." For Jung, who was only 34 at the time, the conference confirmed his status as Freud's presumable heir; on returning to Zurich he changed his stationery to reflect his honorary degree.

Saul Rosenzweig, a professor emeritus of psychology and psychiatry at Washington University in St. Louis, has written an extraordinarily rich and absorbing account of Freud's only American trip that reveals unexpected patterns in the history of both psychoanalysis and American psychology. For Freud, Jung, and Hall the King-Maker, Mr. Rosenzweig not only did 40 years of research but also edited the correspondence between Freud and Hall and retranslated the five lectures that Freud gave at Clark.

Freud arrived in New York Harbor by steamship on Aug. 29, 1909, accompanied by two of his disciples, Jung together with Sandor Ferenczi. Although the exact details of the invitations are irretrievable, even to Mr. Rosenzweig, we do know that Hall invited Freud twice before he accepted, that Freud himself asked Ferenczi to join him, and that Hall invited Jung only after he had already invited Freud - not simultaneously, as Jung maintained in his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963). While the weeklong event at Clark did not focus on psychology alone (there were 27 other guest speakers and degree recipients besides Freud and Jung, including two Nobel laureates, the physicists A. A. Michelson and Ernest Rutherford), Mr. Rosenzweig says that "Freud was to Hall the leading light of the celebration."

Beneath the manifest camaraderie, however, an unconscious storm between Freud and Jung was gathering. With a candor refreshing in psychoanalytic studies, Mr. Rosenzweig shows that even in 1909, when their mutual opportunism kept them friendly, the differences that would drive the two men apart by 1913 were already emerging.

In 1906, three years before the Clark visit, Freud, who was then often lampooned as a Jew bent on corrupting Aryan ideals, welcomed Jung's eager and appreciative response to his theories. Indeed, he prized the pastor's son from Zurich as his potential successor - his "crown's prince," as he began to call him in 1909 - largely because Jung was not Jewish.

But if Freud "overvalued" Jung's "non-Jewishness," so did Jung. Although Jung's "Aryan sympathies during the Hitler regime" are well known, says Mr. Rosenzweig, he demonstrates just how early what he calls Jung's "Aryan bias" really was, and how central it turned out to be in his thinking. In a stunning set piece, he also shows that the rise and fall of Freud and Jung's friendship, from 1906 to 1913, roughly coincided with the years of Adolf Hitler's residence in Vienna; he also compares prose passages from Hitler and Jung, with provocative success.

The book's key dramatic moment is the walk Freud and Jung took in Central Park on Aug. 30, 1909, the day after they landed in New York and a few days before they set off for Worcester. Freud reported to his wife that they had observed the city's ethnic mix, including signs in the park in German, Italian and Yiddish as well as English. But Jung reported to his wife that they had talked about "Jews and Aryans," and how "one of my dreams clearly pointed up the difference." Jung's Aryan bias, his love of the occult and his belief that the unconscious was a spiritual rather than a sexual or social realm all put him at odds with Freud's fierce secularity and historicism. So did Jung's constitutional inability to play the role of follower.

The power struggle is certainly evident in a story Jung related to Mr. Rosenzweig with "special satisfaction" in 1951, about a mishap he saw Freud suffer while in New York on Sept. 2, just before leaving for Worcester: Freud, while gazing at the Palisades across the river from the city, accidentally wet his pants. He told Jung he was afraid he would wet himself during his upcoming lectures and agreed to let Jung analyze the event. But when Freud produced a telling dream, and Jung, who had already interpreted Freud's pants-wetting as a need to draw attention to himself whatever the cost, pressed Freud for more intimate details, Freud declined and said he could not "risk his authority."

The differences between Freud and Jung are remarkably similar to those between Hall and his principal American rival, the psychologist and philosopher William James. Once again, Mr. Rosenzweig's historiography is both sound and ingenious. James and Hall - "the two great pioneers of early American psychology," as he calls them - were old friends, and represented the two opposing directions of the young science in the United States. James, like Jung, favored psychical research, whereas Hall favored earthly experimentalism.

Hall, who received the first American doctorate in psychology in 1878, from Harvard, was an avid Freudian. His correspondence with Freud shows a genuine devotion. Originally trained as a minister, he concluded that "spiritism," as he called the belief in a spiritual realm, was "ruck and muck." He was, however, fascinated by the experimental verification of psychological concepts.

James, on the other hand, was, like Jung, searching for a "cosmic consciousness" or the sort of "universal spiritual realm" that Freudian thinking prohibited as a wish fulfillment. Despite, or perhaps because of, pragmatism, James, like Jung, wanted something "larger than the mundane individual life that Freud invoked." And, like Jung, James took a momentous walk with Freud in 1909.

James came to Clark for the conference "to see," as he put it, "what Freud was like." This is Freud's recollection of their private meeting: "I shall never forget one little scene that occurred as we were on a walk together. He stopped suddenly, handed me a bag he was carrying and asked me to walk on, saying that he would catch up with me as soon as he had got through an attack of angina pectoris which was just coming on." Mr. Rosenzweig interprets this famous attack as an unconscious response to Freud's theory - an anxiety attack over an extramarital affair, stirred up by one of Freud's lectures.

Although much of the drama of Freud's visit to America seems to have taken place outside the conference, Freud's lectures - delivered more or less extemporaneously, in German - were a delightful performance. The Boston press covered them; Emma Goldman attended them; Hall described them as "masterpieces of simplification, directness, and comprehensiveness."

The lectures, the first popular exposition of Freud's theories, are luminous largely because of the marvelous images and metaphors that Freud employed to dramatize his concepts. Mr. Rosenzweig says that "they still represent the best available outline by Freud of his theory in its essence." Unfortunately, though, Mr. Rosenzweig's new translation of the lectures loses some of the linguistic specificity of James Strachey's translation in the Standard Edition, which captured both the cohesiveness and the extravagance of Freud's narrative devices. Perhaps Mr. Rosenzweig retranslated the lectures in order to include them legally in the present volume. If that is so it was well worth the effort, since the inclusion of the lectures lends his book poetic unity and makes it a pleasure to read.

Originally published in The New York Times Book Review, January 24, 1993.

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Introduction to The Moon and Sixpence

2010-12-31T15:49:00.000-08:00

by Perry Meisel

The Moon and Sixpence. By W. Somerset Maugham. New York: Signet Classics, 1993.

Although W. Somerset Maugham's three principal novels - Of Human Bondage (1915), The Moon and Sixpence (1919), and Cakes and Ale (1930) - have all garnered the praise they deserve, Maugham's remarkable popular success over an extraordinarily long and prolific career has also made generations of critics nervous about just how good a writer he is. Modern novelists, like modern poets, are supposed to be difficult, as T.S. Eliot once observed; if they are too readable, something must be wrong. Ever since the publication of Maugham's first novel, Liza of Lambeth, in 1897, a crisp realist account of a young woman's tragic fate in the slums of London's East End, Maugham has been eminently readable. The book's success convinced him to throw over the career in medicine for which he was to qualify only a few months later, and to take up writing full time. By 1907, he had become a hit London playwright as well as a respected young novelist. By 1908, he was famous on both sides of the Atlantic for his plays, underscoring the dramatic efficiency so central to the power and attractiveness of his fiction.

This virtue has dogged Maugham's reputation as though it were a vice, and has put Maugham's achievement as a master of the modern English novel under a shadow despite his enduring popularity and the readerly satisfaction that both his novels and his short stories continue to afford. Maugham's presumable shortcoming is his apparent failure, by contrast with James Joyce, say, or Virginia Woolf, to innovate formally or stylistically. Our understanding of twentieth-century fiction has, in the years since World War II, valued literary modernism for its antagonism toward the Victorian past and for its departures from Victorian literary conventions, chief among them the unembarrassed compulsion to tell absorbing stories. Maugham's presumable failure to innovate lies in his seeming unwillingness to check, or at least to question, this compulsion.

The Moon and Sixpence, however, shows Maugham to be not only an enormously fluent and compelling writer; it also shows the notion that Maugham is simply a plain and straightforward writer of absorbing tales to be a mistaken one. Like Joseph Conrad, a major influence and still a securely canonical modernist, Maugham is actually a complex and ironic writer of fiction who combines a storytelling ease with profound self-consciousness. The result is an artist whose work both conforms to the protocols of modernist orthodoxy and outstrips them.

Based on the life and legend of Paul Gauguin (1848 - 1903), the Postimpressionist French painter who crucially influenced modern art with his shocking primitivism and daunting use of color, The Moon and Sixpence helped to inaugurate the Gauguin mythology that is the story of a willful man who scorned material comfort in life, and who fled to the South Seas in pursuit of a natural warmth and directness of feeling that found expression in his painting. The tropics, whether African, American, or Asian, had long symbolized a freedom of imaginative expressiveness in the history of Romantic aesthetics, and Gauguin came to represent this symbolism perhaps more clearly than any other single modern artist. Like Conrad, Maugham had a lifelong fascination with the South Seas, although as a writer he, like Conrad, distances himself from this mythology even as he represents it.

Maugham's novel transforms Gauguin into the fictional Charles Strickland, an English stockbroker who, one day, abandons his wife, children, and career because, as he puts it, succinctly enough, "I want to paint." Despite a history of loyalty to his family, Strickland turns out to be rude, callous, and indifferent, the very reverse of both his record of domestic devotion and the depth of feeling presumably reflected in the warm colors and natural expressiveness of his art. After a journey through the garrets of Paris and the underworld of Marseilles, Strickland eventually makes his way to Tahiti, where, poor but happy, he lives, works, and dies. The actual facts of Gauguin's life are a bit more complicated than the rather simpler ones that Maugham uses to structure Strickland's fictional biography (some of them make their way into the Parisian sequences in Of Human Bondage), although the basic outlines of the story are the same.

Like Cakes and Ale, The Moon and Sixpence reads with uncommon smoothness, even though it is structured by flashback and discontinuity. The temporal complexities of Maugham's story, together with the foregrounded, first-person narrator who gathers information about his subject belatedly, after the fact of his death, are devices Maugham surely owes to Conrad, particularly the Conrad of Heart of Darkness (1899), whose narrator, Charlie Marlow, pursues the visionary enigma of Kurtz deep into the Congo with questionable interpretative success. The Moon and Sixpence's elliptical, Conradian structure mirrors its theme.

Strickland's decisive quality as an artist is, in Maugham's own word, "simplification," although the irony is that this "simplification" is anything but simple. It is extraordinarily hard to understand. It is almost as though Maugham is poking fun at his own presumable simplicity as well as at the myth of the modern artist whose rejection of all that is conventional turns out to be obfuscating rather than clarifying. Modern art, whether Gauguin's or Maugham's own, is indeed difficult, although one need not be hit over the head with it for its subtleties to emerge. The directness that Gauguin represents mythologically is, in Maugham's rendering, actually the reverse of what it seems to be – inscrutable, oblique, without the manifest meaning it appears to offer. Rather than find and disclose a fugitive secret that will explain Strickland and his art, Maugham's narrator is faced instead with an interpretative impasse. The more he learns about Strickland, the less he knows. To the question, "What is the secret of modern artistic creation?" there is no available reply. "It is a riddle," says Maugham at the book's start, "which shares with the universe the merit of having no answer." Contrary to the very mythology he narrates, Maugham finds Strickland's, or Gauguin's, vaunted directness of purpose and expression to be utterly mysterious, altogether unobliging to analysis despite the endless temptation to engage in it. Strickland and his work are not as simple as they look.

The innovative complexities of The Moon and Sixpence are not, however, limited to temporal experimentation or the refusal to allegorize. If the novel resembles Conrad in narrative structure and tropical site, it also departs from Conrad in its suspension of sympathy for the visionary. Maugham's first-person narrator does not construe his relation to Strickland along the familiar lines of the secret sharer or double (the narrator who recognizes his own dark or repressed side by identifying with his perplexing subject), the combined technical and psychological device that Maugham borrows from Conrad and turns on its head. Unlike Conrad's Marlow, Maugham's narrator is drawn to the visionary not by sympathy but by mere curiosity, circumstantially created by the entreaties of Strickland's abandoned wife, whom he meets in London at the book's start, and, later on, by the circumstances of World War I, when he finds himself in Tahiti after Strickland has died. Even though Maugham's narrator is himself an artist (a professional writer), he does not glorify the artist's pain and suffering, as Thomas Mann does with the composer Aschenbach in Death in Venice (1912), or as Joyce does, with considerably more sarcasm, with Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). "I have nothing but horror," says Maugham in a 1917 entry in A Writer's Notebook, "for the literary cultivation of suffering which has been so fashionable of late." Despite the narrator's fascination with Strickland, there is no kinship, nor is there antagonism. There is instead a preposterously cool neutrality, made convincing by the charming avuncularity of tone that is Maugham's stylistic signature.

This charm is what makes the Maugham narrator the central force in The Moon and Sixpence, and a special voice in English fiction as a whole. Nameless in The Moon and Sixpence, this persona came to be used more and more by Maugham over the years, acquiring the name of Ashenden in many of Maugham's stories (including his famous spy stories, based on his work as a British agent during World War I) and Cakes and Ale; he even survives his incarnation as Ashenden with the publication of The Razor's Edge (1944), when he takes on Maugham's own name. Endearingly paradoxical, the Maugham narrator is sophisticated and cynical, but also affable and companionable; dry and indirect, but also vivid and straightforward. While it may appear that his exact descriptive powers in The Moon and Sixpence contrast with the lack of an explanation to the puzzle of Strickland, his unwillingness to offer allegorical answers to aesthetic, existential, or metaphysical quandaries is of a piece with his trenchant exactitude. If something cannot be described, what is its status? Maugham had little use for the ineffable, not because his sympathy for Romantic vision was nil, but because the realist in him bridled at the excessive poeticity to which the description of inward states of mind might lead. He mocks the dangers of such rhetorical self-indulgence in the opening chapters of The Moon and Sixpence, finally throwing up his hands in the face of the bad writing that results from it in order to get on with his story.

These playful tensions suggest that Maugham's unique narrative voice owes its strength to the strategic resolution of the two major and contradictory influences that determine his writing. One is the social realism of the late Victorian novelist George Gissing, which has its initial expression in Liza and Lambeth, and which, historically, is a literalization of Dickensian melodrama. The other is the late Romantic aestheticism, or "impressionism," of Walter Pater and his disciple Oscar Wilde, whose wide appeal Maugham describes at length in the autobiographical Of Human Bondage, and which has its initial expression in the novel's unpublished first version, "The Artistic Temperament of Stephen Carey." Pater's aestheticism stressed the sensuality of visionary apprehension, identifying the privileged moment with a state of grace. Maugham went to the same school as Pater, the King's School in Canterbury, and also studied at Heidelberg, where Pater's two sisters, one of whom later tutored the young Virginia Woolf, had completed their educations. Historically, aestheticism is an appropriation of Romantic poetic diction to prose, and, as a literary stance, bespeaks the stylistic profligacy of which Maugham was most afraid as a writer. Wilde learned to distance himself from his master Pater by scrubbing down Pater's lush rhetoric to an almost parodic concision, turning to the theater, like Maugham after him, as a means of protection from descriptive excess. Blanche Stroeve's suicide in The Moon and Sixpence even recalls Sybil Vane's suicide in Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). Both deaths symbolize the protest of realist heroines, and of realism as a literary mode, against the dominion of aesthetic antiheroes, and of aestheticism as a rival and threatening literary practice. The title The Moon and Sixpence is also an expression of these antithetical strains in Maugham's imaginative temper. Its terms come from the assessment of the hero in Of Human Bondage in a review in the Times Literary Supplement ("so busy yearning for the moon that he never saw the sixpence at his feet"), with "the moon" representing the visionary or aesthetic impulse and "sixpence" the commonplace wisdom that is its opposite.

The superb psychological realism of Of Human Bondage is the first genuine resolution of these contradictory influences in Maugham's career as a novelist. A masterpiece from either point of view, it allows the strengths of each of these rival modes of apprehension to supplement rather than impede one another. Paterian inwardness finds its place in the psychology of the book's autobiographical protagonist, while the external world of social realism finds its place in the environmental factors that shape his psyche. The Moon and Sixpence, like Cakes and Ale, carries this achievement to a new level as the voice of Maugham's narrator knowingly balances these contradictory approaches to life and letters alike with an ease that comes from the overt and self-conscious resolution of this conflict. Using the plain speech of the social realist, he denudes the visionary extravagance of aestheticism; using the rhetorical richness of aestheticism, he simultaneously heightens the drabness of social realism. Unlike Pater's modernist heirs Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, and D.H. Lawrence, all of whom seek meaning, however ironically, in visionary figures, Maugham suspects the visionary gleam even when it beckons, as it does in the riddle of the exemplary but maddening Strickland.

The result is not a rejection of aestheticism but a hollowing out of aestheticism's belief in the privilege of beauty. What remains is a graceful but severe aesthetic stance with little to enjoy but a pipe before bed and a shake of the head. It is instructive that chief among Ashenden's literary heirs are the had-boiled detectives and spies of Raymond Chandler, Ian Fleming, and John Le Carré, all of whom have testified to Maugham's influence, and whose heroes summarize, albeit in reduced form, the admixture of swagger and sweat that makes up Maugham's characteristic and durable narrative voice (Chandler even goes so far as to suggest Ashenden's source in Conrad's Marlow by naming his own dogged hero Philip Marlowe).

The antagonistic visions of the aesthete and the realist combine rather than compete in The Moon and Sixpence, granting the novel an astonishingly double estimate of life. The suspension of judgment that is its moral implication is likewise astonishing. Life is enormously rich, colorful, full of beauty and emotion, while, at the same time, altogether without meaning. This double vision gives Maugham his continuity with Victorian realism while also placing him among his modernist contemporaries. It also reverses our normative understanding of literary history by rendering modernism a source of affirmation and Victorian realism a source of doubt and emptiness. This formidable balance and revisionary power make Maugham distinct among English novelists, and will allow his fiction to endure.

When We Were Young and Surreal

2010-12-27T21:29:00.000-08:00

by Perry Meisel

View: Parade of the Avant-Garde. An Anthology of View Magazine (1940 - 1947). Edited by Charles Henri Ford. Compiled by Catrina Neiman and Paul Nathan. Illustrated. 287 pp. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press. $35.

After the Germans occupied Paris in 1940, much of the Parisian avant-garde relocated to New York. Charles Henri Ford, an American writer who in 1929 had founded an experimental literary magazine called Blues and who had then gone on to live in Paris, North Africa and other venues, decided to start View, a magazine designed to reflect New York's new international status. Whole issues were devoted to Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp; André Breton became a regular contributor. View published and assessed a polymorphous assortment of writers and artists. It had competition from the magazine VVV, which Breton founded in New York in 1942, but it was View that was most manifestly the Surrealist organ in America.

Ecumenical by virtue of its sheer open-mindedness, View paraded nearly everybody; it published Wallace Stevens' "Materia Poetica," a series of apothegms and prose meditations; portions of William Carlos Williams' "Paterson"; criticism by Kenneth Burke, Harold Rosenberg, and Meyer Shapiro; and fiction by Albert Camus, Jorge Luis Borges, and Henry Miller.

View lasted until 1947 and published 36 issues, beginning as a six-page tabloid in 1940 and, by 1943, becoming an elegant commercial magazine notable for spectacular color covers by artists like Ernst, Duchamp, René Magritte, Man Ray, and Georgia O'Keeffe. Mr. Ford has now edited an anthology of its articles, generously illustrated with a selection of cover reproductions, plates of paintings, drawings and photographs, and facsimile pages and period advertisements for jazz concerts and new books. "View: Parade of the Avant-Garde" provides a vivid and dramatic history of the movement from prewar Surrealism to postwar existentialism and, more obliquely, of the electric play between estheticism and political engagement that structured the history of criticism during these transitional years.

The magazine's contributors fall into two main groups: Mr. Ford and his circle, particularly his associate editor and designer, the critic and poet Parker Tyler; and the émigré celebrities whom Mr. Ford befriended and purveyed. While these major figures are well known, the work of Mr. Ford and his followers adds a fresh chapter to the history of American bohemia in the years before the Beats established the protocol. As critics, Charles Henri Ford, Parker Tyler, and their younger contributors shared a kind of house style that ranged from woozy to astute; they tried to balance cultivation and hipness.

A muted romance with Hollywood also runs like a thread through the volume's American contributions, and it is often at conscious odds with suspicions about commercial film's integrity as a mythology. This tension can be productive, however, especially in the case of Tyler's enormously prescient essay on The Maltese Falcon, "Every Man His Own Private Detective." Tyler, who wrote a book about Hollywood in 1944, exposes the allegorical resonance of Bogart's detective-hero, Sam Spade, by reference to Dostoyevsky.

It was, however, on the European superstars that View staked its claim to fame. Among the most impressive documents in the entire volume is Breton's superb, and unlikely, essay on Duchamp, "Lighthouse of the Bride." Like Stevens' "Materia Poetica," it gives intellectual muscle to artistic states of mind normally assumed to be spontaneous and transcendent. Breton is technical, secular, and hard-nosed, explaining Duchamp as a sieve of influences, a powerful processing machine who, like Ernst, is a "meeting place" of historical forces, a "crosspoint of . . . tendencies" organized by "negation." "Originality," writes Breton, "is in no way, as many seem to believe, a matter of instinct and intuition; to find it, one must generally seek it laboriously." Even "automatic writing," one of Surrealism's most abused legacies, becomes necromantic as a result of the specific mechanisms it unlocks, rather than despite them.

Once the war ended, View's contributors, and the issues they dealt with, began to change. Surrealism gave way to existentialism. In 1946, View published Camus and Jean Genet in English for the first time. Mr. Ford also published "The Nationalization of Literature" in English, in which Jean-Paul Sartre sets out to re-imagine the nature and role of literature after the war, trying to sort out the political from the esthetic and realizing how difficult it is to do that. Now, almost 50 years later, criticism is once again caught between the presumable antinomies of formalism and advocacy. This anthology shows just how little things have changed.

Originally published in The New York Times Book Review, March 1, 1992

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A Dirty Young Man and How He Grew

2010-12-20T16:43:00.000-08:00

by Perry Meisel

Henry Miller: A Life. By Robert Ferguson. Illustrated. 397 pp. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. $24.95.

The Happiest Man Alive: A Biography of Henry Miller. By Mary V. Dearborn. Illustrated. 368 pp. New York: Simon & Schuster. $24.95.

Somewhere between art and ideology, Henry Miller's contributions to 20th-century culture are undeniable, chief among them the free speech that we now take for granted in literature. Even before the first publication of Tropic of Cancer in France in 1934 (its notorious obscenity kept it illegal in the United States until 1961), Miller had also perfected one tradition of bohemian mythology that made poverty and exile guarantees of professional integrity. Miller's literary influence is real enough, too, principally his "irrigation" of American prose, as Norman Mailer described it in 1976, his establishment of a certain literary tone. The complaints are familiar as well: that Miller is a sexist, an anti-Semite and an antistylist, whose historical role in the liberation of sexuality and self-expression is more than offset by the virulence such a struggle inspired.

This is the centennial year of Miller's birth. The publication of two new biographies - together with the publication by Grove Weidenfeld this fall of Miller's third novel, Crazy Cock (Tropic of Cancer, his fourth novel, was the first to be published) - should provide some finer account of what we may owe to Miller's life and work. The distinction between life and work, however, is a problem in Miller's case, writing as he did in an autobiographical vein that thwarts the contrast between art and experience. This makes the biographer's job particularly difficult, a difficulty that Miller scholarship has tended to ignore because of too uncritical a sympathy for its subject. Both new biographies, however, maintain a distance from Miller, though in different ways, each one calculating the discrepancies between Miller's own narratives and an almost endless abundance of published and unpublished source material in order to sort out fact from fiction. Robert Ferguson's Henry Miller: A Life is irreverent, although Mr. Ferguson sometimes borrows his sarcasm from Miller himself. "If there is one thing worse than having an artistic temperament," he quotes Miller as saying, "it is thinking you have one." With Miller, the difference between the two is never entirely clear. Mr. Ferguson, the author of a previous biography of the Nobel Prize-winning author Knut Hamsun, one of Miller's own literary heroes, renders Miller as a crafty liar and buffoon, revealing traits of his personality for which he sought justification in art.

Born in 1891 to hard-working parents, Miller was a precocious child, finding relief from domestic surveillance in the streets of Brooklyn. His mother's Germanic strictness and his father's passivity provided the psychic polarities that would structure his life for almost 90 years. Mr. Ferguson is especially good at filling in the historical context of Miller's boyhood, the turn-of-the-century cultural climate that featured Teddy Roosevelt as America's rough-and-ready hero, the promoter of a cult of manly athleticism designed to respond to a medical climate that regarded masturbation as detrimental to physical health. The Portnovian Miller enrolled at City College in 1909, but Spenser's Faerie Queen did him in during his first semester. Quitting school, he began a round of dreary and menial jobs, meanwhile ogling burlesque and reading Dreiser, Jack London, Frank Norris and, of course, Whitman.

Miller was already nursing literary ambitions when he succumbed to his mother's wish that he join his father's tailoring business in Manhattan. He later talked his way into a job he actually held for five years at Western Union, supervising and streamlining its messenger service. By now Miller had married for the first time (there would be five wives in all and three children, two daughters and a son), although he was also frequenting the city's dance halls. There he met June Smith, a dime-a-dance hostess who encouraged him to be an artist and who became the subject of much of his writing. June introduced Miller to the world of Greenwich Village in 1923, a context that Henry Miller: A Life also brings to life. With a bohemian atmosphere swirling about him - and living with June in a series of cheap or borrowed lodgings - Miller began to write again. In 1922, he had written Clipped Wings, a book now rejected and forgotten. With June, however, he had the strength to complete Moloch, then Crazy Cock, although he signed them in June's name. He did so to allow her to collect money for the manuscripts from one of her numerous male patrons who believed her to be a writer and had offered to support her while she worked on a novel. These early manuscripts received harrowing responses from the friends and editors to whom Miller showed them.

With none of the books published and with no real prospects, Miller moved to Paris in 1930. June shuttled between Paris and New York. Miller blossomed. In 1931, he met Anaïs Nin. In 1934, he finished Tropic of Cancer. Mr. Ferguson less than adequately describes the nature of this presumable artistic breakthrough. Tropic of Cancer cleared the deadness from Miller's prose by using a first-person narrator skilled at bestowing visceral metaphors upon inanimate things in order to render their feel and movement; due process meant assigning machine metaphors to living things, including sex and its component parts. The result was both a freer and a more galvanizing style than that of the earlier books. Even if Miller used more, not less, poetic language to do so, this was the irrigation job on the literary sentence for which he is supposedly responsible.

Tropic of Cancer was published by the Obelisk Press in Paris in September 1934, financed by Nin with money supplied by Otto Rank, the Austrian psychoanalyst and writer. Miller's knack for self-promotion prompted him to send the book to Pound, Eliot and others, receiving their endorsements soon after the novel was printed. Tropic of Cancer and the books that followed, Black Spring (1936) and Tropic of Capricorn (1939), earned him an underground reputation, but not much cash. To raise money he began peddling his letters, watercolors, and manuscripts to friends and collectors, with greater success than his father had ever peddled suits. The "religion of instinct," as Mr. Ferguson calls Miller's doctrine of spontaneity - what Miller and his friend Alfred Perlès dubbed the New Instinctivism - had won out over his old, bad writing and given rise to a growing cluster of fans. Miller settled in Big Sur, California, after the war had driven him out of France, and moved to Los Angeles in 1963.

Mary Dearborn's version of Miller in The Happiest Man Alive: A Biography of Henry Miller (the book's title comes from Tropic of Cancer) emphasizes more than Mr. Ferguson's biography Miller's depression in these later years, probably the result of his growing awareness of the contradictions that beset him. The man who loathed commercialism in art had always been an expert at privately merchandising both his reputation and his relics. By the same stroke, having money and real fame now bothered him, too, since he could no longer pose as the impoverished and neglected genius. Ms. Dearborn's keenness for this kind of paradox suggests the decidedly interpretive nature of her book, a considerably more exciting account of Miller's life than Mr. Ferguson's, although it fails to complete what it promises.

Ms. Dearborn's perspective on Miller's childhood is especially rich, since it is a feminist and mildly psychoanalytic one. According to her, Miller is important, not surprisingly, because he is the very paradigm of modern male sexuality in literature. Miller's mother is not just strict but downright abusive; his docile father is inclined to homosexuality. Henry becomes "conflicted" and is required to "compensate." Though sex, according to Dearborn, is often an indifferent factor in Miller's writing, Miller's later proclivity for sharing women and feeling ambivalent about it (an endless theme in his prose) signals the homoeroticism at the root of the patriarchal attitude that Miller embodies. Ms. Dearborn, the author of Pocahontas's Daughters: Gender and Ethnicity in American Culture and Love in the Promised Land: The Story of Anzia Yezierska and John Dewey, takes Miller's complicated anti-Semitism seriously, adjudging it, like his sexism, to be compensatory, a response to the takeover of his boyhood Williamsburg by the flood of immigrant Jews. Once the figure of June appears, however, her interpretive balloon sags. Ms. Dearborn cannot account for her. Henry is June's "pimp," plain and simple.

Ms. Dearborn's energy returns when she takes up Miller's literary career. She sharpens our sense of the birth of Miller's literary style in Paris, focusing on his discovery of the "conversational quality that the clanking prose of Moloch and Crazy Cock sorely needed." As a principle, the spontaneous mode - Miller's stand "against thinking," as Ms. Dearborn puts it - compensated for his increasing hatred of literature, a hatred that came originally simply from the fact that he was, as his early works show, "no good at it." Miller may still be the familiar writer-as-outlaw, but Ms. Dearborn is, mercifully, less inclined than Mr. Ferguson to take Miller's "esthetic of spontaneity," in Mr. Ferguson's phrase, with a straight face, noting, for example, his immersion in Henry James and Walter Pater, and his careful construction of a persona on the Left Bank. Miller's Instinctivism found a perfect audience in Nin. Though personally charming and soft, Miller was also lewd and raucous. Disdaining the rudeness that accompanied Miller's buffoonery, Nin also loved it, just as the compensating Miller loved Nin's "icy hauteur." What each lacked, the other supplied.

This fall's publication of Crazy Cock, which Miller finished in Paris in 1931, will show both how much and how little progress Miller made in the passage from failure to infamy. A third-person tale based on his fumbling ménage à trois with June and Jean Kronski, the lesbian artist with whom June fell in love in 1926, Crazy Cock is a peripatetic, diarylike montage of Village life whose habits of style prefigured those of the later Miller despite the difference in tone and flow. Crazy Cock is clogged, bombastic, contrived, so self-conscious that it is unconscious. Miller had not yet discovered the anti-esthetic stance of Tropic of Cancer that gave his writing jump and nerve. But the propensity for windiness and the use of flying bricks for metaphors is what makes the Miller of Crazy Cock continuous with the Miller of the Tropics. To write, Miller always required an air of the literary, and Crazy Cock supplies the blueprint.

In the retrospect of 1991, Miller is no longer unmannered; he is too mannered. This quality Miller shares with his colleague Nin, whose Diary is charming - like Miller's own writing - because of its preciosity, not despite it. Miller strains for literary effect, even in the breezy Tropics, though it is a kind of effect that he refines, including making the strain somehow ennobling, testimony to the suffering a writer endures, not so much from experience as from the burden of past literature. It is Mr. Ferguson who shows the defensive reason. Miller saw life from the start in terms of his favorite literary heroes, especially the heroes of Dostoyevsky and Hamsun. Miller was always, argues Mr. Ferguson, "identifying people he met with characters from books." Instinctivism, spontaneity, buffoonery, all were necessary to repress the active estheticism at the very heart of the real life that Miller like to contrast with "literature." Despite Miller's declarations of irony in Tropic of Capricorn, this wish to separate what cannot be separated, especially to separate art from life, is the real irony of his writing and Nin's alike. Experience was interesting to them because it reminded them of the books they read and the films they saw; they thought, however, that it was because their naturalness allowed them to live more intensely than other people did. They got their estheticism backwards. They mandated the assumption that anything that happens to you is interesting if you write it down in an energetic or poetic manner. We are still suffering the effects of that decree.

Originally published in The New York Times Book Review, June 23, 1991

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