18
PARTISAN REVIEW
ney. The writer objectifies his fantasies (that much of Freudian form–
ula we have to use in any case) but he must return to view them with
the analytic eyes of daylight and criticism. But this reality to which he
submits is not what he meets if he gazes out into the world with the
naked eyes of the first-born man; the reality principle for the writer
is one qualified by the works, the recorded experience and knowledge
of man, already in existence. After Proust no one can write about love
with the old charming simplicity of Prevost. It would be pastiche:
archaic and unauthentic. In Prevost it charms us, it is real and con–
vincing. At his cutural moment, love-as the simple lovely disease of
sensibility-was itself an extraordinary
donnee,
and the writer could
find such release in it that he was capable of the necessary identifica–
tion with
his
fantasy. (Even when a form like the novel swings back
momentarily into a simpler pattern, the new simplicity is quite dif–
ferent from the old; the simplicity of Gide is not the old simplicity of
the classical French novel, but a new one-self-conscious, difficult,
refined, defining its slender line from the sum of its rejections.) Hence
it appears that Pound's manifesto, and Eliot's recommendation of a
complication to parallel the complication of modern life, formulate
effect rather than cause; we ought instead to put it that the writer,
existing in his time, in
his
place, and with his past must make such
discoveries as to secure the completeness of release necessary to achieve
authenticity.
If
he repeats what is already discovered, he has no chance
of making it
his.
That is why his existence is relentlessly historical and
he has to travel AytrC's journey. Now the reality principle functions in
life chiefly (or its function is felt more forcibly there) to inhibit the
gratification of desire. Its literary analogue functions in the same
way: it checks the writer from releasing himself into. the fantasies
that are unreal, trivial, or superficial. To find
his
authenticity, a ma–
terial into which he is completely released, the writer has now to dig
ever deeper, the unconscious that is released must be at deeper and
deeper levels. So he
finds,
like Aytre, the literary "knack" become ab–
sorbing and terrifying. Hence the burden of neurosis that weighs more
and more heavily upon the modern man of letters.
4.
Increasing Burdens.
The more gifted the writer the more likely he is to be critically
conscious of his literary tradition-the more conscious, that is, of the
reality principle as it operates in the literary sphere-and the Jiarder
it becomes for
him
to fall into one of the easy publicist styles of his
day. Recently I read about a young writer who had written a best-
