FATE OF PLEASURE
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principle
is, after all, not merely an event of a particular moment
in culture. It is, as Freud made plain in his famous essay, a fact
of the psychic life itself. The impulse to go beyond the pleasure
principle is certainly to be observed not only in modern literature
but in all literature, and of course not only in literature but in the
emotional economy of at least some persons in all epochs. But what
we can indeed call an event in culture is that at a particular moment
in history, in our moment, this fact of the psychic life became a
salient and dominant theme in literature, and also that it has been
made explicit as a fact in the psychic life and forced upon our con–
sciousness by Freud's momentous foray into metapsychology. And
this
cultural event may indeed be understood in political terms, as
likely to have eventual political consequences, just as we understood
in political terms and as having had political consequences the
eighteenth-century assertion that the dignity of man was to be found
in the principle of pleasure.
We deal with a change in quantity. It has always been true of
some men that to pleasure they have preferred what the world called
unpleasure. They imposed upon themselves difficult and painful tasks,
they committed themselves to strange, "unnatural" modes of life,
they sought out
distressin~
emotions, in order to know psychic
energies which are not to be summoned up in felicity. These psychic
energies, even when they are experienced in self-destruction, are a
means of self-definition and self-affirmation.
As
such, they have a
social reference-the election of unpleasure, however isolate and
private the act may be, must refer to society if only because the
choice denies the valuation which society in general puts upon
pleasure; and of course it often receives social approbation in the
highest degree, even if at a remove of time: it is the choice of the
hero, the saint and martyr, and, in some cultures, the artist. The
quantitative change which we have to take account of is: what was
once a mode of experience of a few has now become an ideal of
experience of many. For reasons which, at least here, must defy
speculation, the ideal of pleasure has exhausted itself, almost as if it
had been actually realized and had issued in satiety and
ennui.
In
its place, or, at least, beside it, there is developing-conceivably at
the behest of literature !-an ideal of the experience of those psychic
energies which are linked with unpleasure and which are directed
