21~
PARTISAN REVIEW
remediably sick, renouncing it would be a small price to pay for
general psychic health, just as Hegel was prepared to slough off art
as
an inferior form of communion when the stage of perfect com–
munion was realized. Even within our limited experience at present,
we can see how much our great literature depends on and is informed
by the patterns of neurosis in our culture. To an unacculturated
Cheyenne, King Lear would be simply an old man behaving very
badly; to those gentle socialists the Mountain Arapesh, the whole
disordered story of ungrateful children and rival claims to power
and property would be meaningless. In real life, we are sure, Mr.
and Mrs. Othello have no problem that a good marriage counselor
couldn't clear up in ten minutes, and any of our clinics would give
Iago some useful job around the grounds, allowing him to work off
his aggressions in some socially useful fashion.
Unfortunately, Mr. and Mrs. Othello do not exist in real life
but in art, where their deadly misunderstanding is essential to our
own well-being, and Iago is permanently out of the therapist's
clutches. The psychoanalytic good society seems no nearer of achieve–
ment now than it did in Vienna in 1900, and to many of us it seems
further off. Meanwhile all the Cheyenne are acculturated and apt
to behave almost as badly as Lear, given similar provocation.
If
the
Mountain Arapesh have not yet learned the joys of private property
and early toilet training from our movies, they soon will, and one
day they will all wear pre-faded blue jeans and know what bites
sharper than the serpent's tooth. The trouble with the revisionist
Freudians is not that they would give up
art
for the psychoanalytic
good society, but that they pretend that it is already here, that we
are well when we are in fact desperately
ill,
and they drive out art
when it is almost the only honest doctor who will tell us the truth.
If
Freud showed us that human life was nasty, brutish, and
short, and had always been, he was only holding the mirror up to
our own faces, saying what the great philosophers and the great
tragic writers have always said.
If
we are serious, our reaction to
this bitter truth is neither to evade it with one or another anodyne, nor
to kill ourselves, but to set out humbly through the great tragic
rhythm of pride and fall, so curiously alike in psychoanalysis and
literature. At the end of this hard road we can see faintly beckoning
that self-knowledge without which, we are assured on good authority,
we live as meanly as the ants.
