ART AND THE WARPED VISION
179
This is not to say that
T he Waste Land
is a neurotic poem,
any more than, say,
Gulliver's Travels
or even
The Trial
are
neurotic works, though Swift and Kafka were known to be mentally
disturbed to the point of partial breakdown and inability to function
in.
crucial areas of their lives. What then does it mean to say that
Swift's or Kafka's writings contained some central distortion of ex–
perience traceable to the neuroses of the authors? The answer, I
think, is that their neurotic impressions of the world coincided with
impressions that were not neurotic and served to organize and
energize the latter. In the case of Kafka, the paranoia, for example,
that colored his personal and sexual relations became in his fiction
a kind of psychological focus for a world in which the characters
are the victims of organized ignorance and authority; and the living
Kafka's search for his psychic identity becomes in his writing a
search for a religious and metaphysical identity. The work of
neurotic writers can be characterized as neurotic only by reducing
its total meaning to its seemingly neurotic components-which, in
turn, are assumed to be identical with the neurosis of the author.
Thus Kafka's novels can be considered neurotic only if we interpret
them, as some analysts and critics actually have done, as fictionalized
projections of Kafka's own derangements.
Now we come to another paradox: for the unique combina–
tion of neurotic experience with some apparently objective or
plausible view of the world, such as we find in writers like Kafka
or Eliot, seems to be characteristic of much modern literature. Indeed,
it is this combination that we designate as the
modern experience,
and this experience, though seemingly shared by a sufficient number
of readers and writers to make up .a tradition, has at the same time
certain affinities with neurotic experience. Such themes as loneli–
ness, self-doubt, hypersensitivity, loss of identity, estrangement from
the community-all have their counterparts among the common
neuroses; and the two modes of experience, normal and abnormal,
often have been joined in such a way that it becomes meaningless to
distinguish between them. How can we set Swift's neurotic misan–
thropy apart from the powerful satire of his writings, which, iron–
ically enough, are assigned to school children for didactic as well
as literary reasons?
If
Gide's homosexuality was a "sickness," what
