8
PARTISAN REVIEW
flooded in every nook and cranny with the personal being of the
author-can only be revealed by the searchlight of psychoanalytic
exploration.
How then
is
authenticity-this strange and central power of
a fantasy to
convince
us-achieved? A first and principal point:
it seems to involve a fairly complete, if temporary, identification with
the objects of fantasy. The difference between Kafka and most of his
imitators becomes a
crucial
instance here. When Kafka writes about
a hero who has become an insect, about a mouse or an animal in a
burrow, he is, during the course of the lucid hallucination which is his
story, that insect, mouse, or animal; it is he himself who lives and
moves through the passages and chambers of his burrow; while his
imitators, even when they are fairly successful, strike us as simply
using so much clever machinery borrowed from
him
and often more
ingeniously baroque than his, but which lacks precisely that authenti–
city of identification. But this identification with the objects of fan–
tasy is also in the direction of insanity; and perhaps this is just what
the ancients knew: that the poet in inspiration ventures as close to that
undrawn border as he can, for the closer he goes the more vitality
he brings back with him. The game would seem to be to go as close as
possible without crossing over.
Now imagine, for a moment, Swift in the modem pattern. Mter
the downfall of the Harley ministry he retires to his wretched, dirty
dog-hole and prison of Ireland, has a nervous breakdown, a crack-up,
is patched together by several physicians and analysts, continues in
circulation thereafter by drinking hard but spacing
his
liquor carefully,
and dies at an earlier age of cirrhosis of the liver. Shall we call this:
Living on the American Plan? It is the violence of the new world,
.after all, that has made a system of violent drinking. Now to be drunk
and to go mad are both ways of overcoming the world.
If
in the
interests of human economy we are left no choice but to prefer the
American Pattern, would we not, however, feel a little cheated had
Swift's actual history been different? Before the ravening gaze of
his miserable species he flings down his madness as the gage of
his
commitment and passion, and it has now become an inseparable part
of the greatness of the human figure that rises out of history to–
ward us.
When Simon Dedalus Delany, amiable and easygoing, remarked
of a mutual acquaintance that "He was a nice old gentleman," Swift
retorted, "There is no such thing as a nice old gentleman; any man
who had a body or mind worth a farthing would have burned them
