FATE OF PLEASURE
191
awesome paradoxes of
Beyond The Pleasure Principle,
we may under–
stand why the indications of this change should present themselves
as perverse and morbid, for the other name that Freud uses for the
ego instincts is the death instincts. Freud's having made the ego
instincts synonymous with the death instincts accounts, more than
anything else in his dark and difficult essay, for the cloud of
mis–
understanding in which
it
exists. But before we conclude that
Beyond
The Pleasure Principle
issues,
as
many believe, in an ultimate
pes–
simism or "negation," and before we conclude that the tendencies
in our literature which we have remarked on are nothing but per–
verse and morbid, let us recall that although Freud did indeed say
that "the aim of all life is death," the course of his argument leads
him
to the statement that "the organism wishes to die only in its own
fashion," only through the complex fullness of its appropriate life.
to say, a person who, "having lived through tragic destruction . . . become.
divine, a daemon." I understand Mr. Abel to be saying that the tragic
destruction is the extirpation of "merely" hwnan feelings, that the daemonic
existence comes with the protagonist's survival of the death of the pleasure–
seeking instincts. Kurtz and Aschenbach become daemons, or nearly, but our
emotions don't take into account the "destruction" or fall as the traditional
emotions in response to tragedy were supposed to do.
For a full and detailed account of the modern devaluation of that good
fortune the destruction of which once pained us in tragedy, see Thomas Munro:
"The Failure Story: A Study of Contemporary Pessimism,"
The Journal 01
Aesthetics and Art Criticism,
Vol. XVII, No.2, December 1958.
