FATE OF PlEASURE
179
similar amusement we read the language in which the young Yeats
praised beauty in
The Secret Rose
(1896) -he speaks of it as
((the
sleep/Men have named beauty."5
In short, our contemporary aesthetic culture does not set great
store by the principle of pleasure in its simple and primitive meaning
and it may even be said to maintain an antagonism to the principle
of pleasure. Such a statement of course has its aspect of absurdity,
but in logic only. There is no psychic fact more available to our
modern comprehension than that there are human impulses which,
in one degree or another, and sometimes in the very highest degree,
repudiate pleasure and seek gratification in-to use Freud's word–
unpleasure.
The repudiation of pleasure in favor of the gratification which
may be found in unpleasure is a leading theme of Dostoevsky's great
nouvelle, Notes From Underground.
Of this extraordinary work
Thomas Mann has said that "its painful and scornful conclusions,"
its "radical frankness . . . ruthlessly transcending
all
novelistic and
literary bounds" have "long become parts of our moral culture."
Mann's statement is accurate but minimal-the painful and scornful
conclusions of Dostoevsky's story have established themselves not only
as parts of our moral culture but as its essence, at least so far as
it
makes itself explicit in literature.
Notes From Underground
is an account, given in the first person,
of the temperament and speculations of a miserable clerk, dis–
advantaged in every possible way, who responds to
his
unfortunate
5. Mr. Bloom's observation (which goes on to "shapely goddesses Venus, Juno:
curves the world admires" and "lovely forms of women sculped Junonian")
follows upon his lyrical recollection of his first sexual encounter with
Molly
j
Yeats's phrase occurs in the course of a poem to Maud Gonne. I think
it is true to say of Joyce (at least up through
Ulysses),
and of Yeats that
they were among the last devotees of the European cult of Woman, of a
Female Principle which, in one way or another,
ziegt uns hinein,
and that
Molly and Maud are perhaps the last women in literature to be represented
as having a transcendant and on the whole beneficent significance (although
Lara in
Dr. Zhivago
should be mentioned-it is she who gives that novel
much of its archaic quality). The radical change in our sexual mythos must
surely be considered in any speculation about the status of pleasure in our
culture.
It
is to the point, for example, that in Kafka's account of the
spiritual life, which is touched on below, women play a part that
is
at best
ambiguous.
