WRITERS AND MADNESS
II
Here at last we come close to the secret:
if
one characteristic
of neurosis is always
-a
;displacement somewhere, then perhaps the
test of a writer's achievement may be precisely the extent and richness
of displacement he is able to effect. In the process of literary expres–
sion, the neurotic mass acquires energies which are directed toward
reality and seek their satisfaction in reality. As the writer displaces
the neurotic mass further afield he is led to incorporate larger and
larger areas of experience into his vision. Everything begins to appear
then
as
if
the world he pictures were itself sufficient to generate this
vision( which we may know, in fact, to have been rather the product
of quite unconscious compulsions and conflicts);
as
if
the ego,
really master in its own house, were simply responding appropriately
to the world as seen in the book. Thus the peculiar sense of conquest
and liberation that follows literary creation cannot be analyzed solely
as that fulfillment of wishes which normally occurs in daydreaming
or fantasy. Why in that case would it be necessary to complete the
literary work at all? And why should the liberation it gives be so
much more powerful and durable? No; this conquest is also one for
the ego itself, which now seems momentarily to have absorbed the
unconscious into itself so that the neurotic disgust itself appears an
appropriate response to reality. And if this is an illusion from the
analyst's point of view, it may not always be an illusion from the
moralist's point of view. The world as it appears in Swift's writings is,
in the end, adequate to his madness.
2.
Power and Guilt
Now Swift's (unlike Cowper's, to cite another literary madman)
was a very strong ego, and the fact that he broke in old age only
tells us how great were the visions, tensions, and repressions he had
to face. We do not know enough to establish his "case," but we know
enough to say that his madness probably did not have its source in
the literary condition at all-however much incipient madness may
have informed and made powerful his writings.
Do we build too much on his example then? Perhaps; but his
figure, in its broad strong outlines (and the very simplicity of these
outlines is to our advantage here), takes such a grip on the imagina–
tion that, pursuing this rather nocturnal meditation, I am loth to let
him
drop. He has taken us so far already that it seems worthwhile
to journey a little way with
him
still into the darkness.
Certainly there is nothing, or very little, about Swift to make
him
a modem figure. He sits so solidly amid the prejudices and vir-
