346
LESLIE A. FIEDLER
by the Western World from the fifth century before Christ to the
seventeenth after his death, to give up its secret:
"It
may be that we
were all destined to direct our first sexual impulses toward our moth–
ers, and our first impulses of hatred and violence toward our
fathers; our dreams convince us that we were...." How calm and
objective he keeps
his
tone, as if the "we" were more impersonal than
confessional. Yet everyone knows these days that
The Interpretation of
Dreams
was not the product of a sudden revelation alone, but also
of a painful self-analysis, into which the death of his father had
im–
pelled Freud to plunge; and from which he liked to think of himself
as having emerged healed.
Unlike Kafka's
Letter to My Father,
Freud's great antipaternal
work is a solution not an exacerbation, or so at least he claimed. In
him (it is his proudest boast, and we believe it), obsession is turned
into vision,
guilt
into knowledge,
trauma
into
logos;
while in Kafka,
the end is paralysis, a kind of lifelong castration, memorialized by
the incomplete and bloody stumps of his most ambitious works. Freud's
major works are finished-their completion as much a part of their
final meaning as the incompletion of Kafka's were of his. Nonethe–
less, between them, Kafka and Freud, the crippled poet and the
triumphant savant (for, finally, not even a measure of the worldly
success of Joseph was denied to the father of psychoanalysis), have
helped to determine the shape of Jewish-American writing in the
first half of the twentieth century-the shape of the tradition from
within which (at the moment of its imminent demise) I write of
them both.
From the two, our writers have learned their proper function:
to read in the dreams of the present the past which never dies and
the future which is always to come; and they have, therefore, regis–
tered their vision in a form which wavers between the parable and
the discursive essay, art and science. For though the means of the
Jewish-American writers from Nathanael West to Norman Mailer
are poetic and fictional, their ends are therapeutic and prophetic.
Their outer ear may attend to the speech of their contemporaries in
the realist's hope of catching out life as it passes; but their inner
ear hears still the cry of Freud: "I am proposing to show that
dreams are capable of interpretation." And their characteristic tone
is born of the tension between the Kafka-esque wail of
"Oi geualt!"
and the Freudian shout of
"Eureka!"
