16
PARTISAN REV, JEW
And at this point perhaps we ought to face openly the question whe–
ther there is not some original flaw-original sin, if you will-about
the profession such that the writer's struggle to live it out completely
must inevitably involve him in some kind of hubris; and whether,
after all, the game is really worth the candle. Freud at one earlier
point did suggest something like this: that art is a survival in our day
of primitive magic, with some of the magical still hanging about its
aspirations; which did not at
all
prevent him, we may notice, from
deriving very deep pleasure and insight from great works of literature.
The fault, the accumulating difficulty, seem to come from the
very advance itself of Western culture and history. In a story by Jean
Paulhan,
"Aytre qui perd ['habitude"
(Aytre Loses the Knack"), the
hero keeps a journal while leading a trek across Madagascar. En
route across the country the entries in the journal are very simple and
direct: we arrive, leave, chickens cost seven sous, we lay
in
a provision
of medicines, etc. But with the arrival in the
city
of Ambositra the
journal suddenly becomes complicated: discussions of ideas, women's
headdresses, strange scenes and characters in the street. The most
among literary men). But granting such widespread latent neuroticism (the wives
of businessmen could tell us a lot, if they chose), the point would be that with
the writer it is not latent but consciously exploited. My difference with Mr.
Trilling is that I do not consider the question as primari-ly statistical: whether a
certain group known as scientists contains as many neurotics as another group
called writers. My main point, rather, is one about the
literary process
itself:
that this process does, in a certain way, imitate the neurotic process and does
exploit neurotic material.
Here it is pertinent to indicate my principal disagreement with Freud, who
analyzes the effect of a literary work in terms of the pleasure obtained from
fantasies and daydreams. This may do justice to our childish delight in romances
--<>r to the level at which we read
Gulliver's Travels
in childhood. But it hardly
does justice to the power which the fiction of Kafka, Joyce, or Proust has over
us in our adult years. I hold instead that it is the writer's
identification
with his
fantasy, rather than the aspect of fantasy itself, which has power over us, con–
vinces us. (The phenomenon of identification, by the way, is very sparingly
discussed by Freud, probably because the psychic transaction involved in it is
still quite obscure. ) And in this identification with fantasy the writer imitates,
up to a certain point,
one of the deepest and commonest phenomena of pathology.
Since Freud speaks of the cathexis (i.e., charge of psychic energy) which
the child has toward the objects of play, he should have seen that the cathexis
of the writer toward the objects of fantasy is more significant than the aspect
of fantasy itself. We cited Kafka as a crucial case; equally crucial would be
the case of Joyce, who rarely moves us through the elaborateness, surprise, or
ingenuity of his fantasies, but by
the powerful charge h• is able to lay on the
most banal episode.
The second element in my analytic view is, admittedly, more speculative,
and concerns .the
psychic type
which now seems to emerge with the modern
writer.
If
we demand of the writer a deeper authenticity-identification with
