178
PARTISAN REVIEW
the subject's genius lay not in his achievement but in his person–
ality and intellectual habits, which combined boldness and origi–
nality with eccentricity. Somewhere in his make-up was an essential
flaw, perhaps in his intelligence, but he had what might be called
a neurotic predisposition toward ideas.
Strictly speaking, a neurosis is an insoluble conflict within the
unconscious that may lead to aberration in one's behavior or state
of mind.
In
this technical sense, neurosis would be pertinent to art
only
if
we thought of art itself as an aberration or sublimation.
But using the term more loosely, in neurosis, as well as in psychosis,
there is often a distortion of experience, so that certain human events
and relations are given an undue-sometimes obsessive-emphasis.
In
someone who is not creative, a distorted view of reality is part of
his illness and inability to adjust and may be of no intellectual inter–
est: indeed, the paranoia of a trivial mind is incredibly boring.
In
someone like Kafka, however, the paranoid twist in both the life
and the writing was coupled with a gift of a high order and a mind
capable of original and striking observations. The same was true in
D. H. Lawrence, whose sexual dreams would have had only a
clinical interest without his intellectual powers.
Now much modern writing is centered in some obsessive
theme or some biased image of human affairs, growing out of the
fixations of the author. Take even so constructed a work as
The Waste
Land:
its meanings would seem to be mainly cultural and re–
ligious; but what Eliot is concerned with, in oQ.r culture and
religion as well as in our personal lives, is the breakdown of identity,
and the image of breakdown is provided by the sexual ambiguity
of Tiresias,
S
which I take to be the psychological core of the poem.
The homosexual theme crops up constantly, usually in an explicit
way, but I think it is also expressed symbolically in the perversion of
feelings and the spiritual impotence running through
The Waste
Land.
One would have to know more about Eliot's private pre–
occupations to speculate further about the effect of his neurosis on
his
entire vision, but I think it is reasonable to assume that this vision
reflects the more personal elements in his writing.
3 Despite Eliot's own note on the importance of Tiresias in the scheme of
The Woste Land,
most commentators have not given him more weight than
any other element in the poem, perhaps because their methods precluded a
psychological approach.
