14
PARTISAN REVIEW
strength or strain in the Oedipal relation. But whatever our specula–
tion as to its source, the point of power remains clear; and if he
seeks it by a detour, the writer's claims are nonetheless total: it is
power of the most subtle kind that the writer wants, power over the
mind and freedom of other human beings, his readers.
Such extraordinary claims of power, and particularly their
indirectness of gratification, suggest immediately an ambivalent con–
nection with that more than usually acute sense of guilt with which
writers as a class seem to be endowed. (That Swift suffered from
extraordinary obsessions of guilt toward the end of his life, we know
by accounts of several sources; but most of his life, since he accepted
Christianity without question, these guilt feelings were tapped and
drained off into religion; hence it is that in his writing we usually
encounter the aggressive and outgoing parts of his personality.)
Georges Blin in "The Gash"
(PARTISAN REVIEW,
Spring 1946), has
presented very eloquently some of the sadistic motives that operate
in the artist. We should expect-in accordance with the usual ambi–
valence--a masochistic pattern to be equally operative, and perhaps
even more to the fore because of the essential indirectness of the
artist's drives toward power and sadism. What else explains the wri–
ter's extraordinary eagerness for the painful humility of his yoke as
he crouches over his desk stubbornly weaving and reweaving his own
being hundreds of times? "Thought, study, sacrifice, and mortifica–
tion"-how he trembles with joy to put on these hairshirts of his
solitude and calling! These punishments he inflicts upon himself over
his desk will help to make clear then why writing should satisfy the
claims of guilt upon him; why he should ·search so passionately for
redemption upon the written page, and why as the paragraph takes
shape beneath his pen he can feel for moments that his step has
become a little less heavy on the face of the earth. But we should
also know this ambivalence of power and guilt from phenomenological
scrutiny. We never live in a purely private world, our consciousness
is penetrated at every point by the consciousness of others, and what
is
it but one step from seeking redemption in one's own eyes to seeking
it in the eyes of others? The movement by which we stoop to lift our–
selves out of the pit of self-contempt is one and unbroken with that
thrust which would carry us above the shoulders of our fellowmen.
And is not this ambivalent urge to power-guilt but the sign of
that excessive need to be loved which has driven the writer into a
profession where he must speak with
his own
voice, offer to the public
gaze of the world so much of his own existence? Love to be con-
