Leo Bersani
THE ANXIOUS IMAGINATION
Only when language loses its meaning does it achieve the
status of literature. This enigmatic but by now familiar remark of
Gerard Genette's about Flaubert is, among other things, a way of
proclaiming the irrelevance to literature of psychological content and,
on the part of criticism, of psychological analysis.
In
an essay printed
in
PR
(Summer, 1966) , Nathalie Sarraute strongly rejected this
approach both to literature and to Flaubert, offering
Madame Bovary
as "proof that what is important in writing is the unearthing, or
re-creation of a new psychic substance...." Curiously enough, Mme.
Sarraute's affirmation strikes me as a fine starting point for some–
thing like a justification of Genette. For the dramatization of certain
"expanded" or hyperbolic states of consciousness, of moments when
the stimulated mind is "producing" in excess of what can be ac–
counted for by its environment or even by its past, exposes - or
proposes - what might be called the anxiously autonomous imagina–
tion. The uneasy relationship between psychoanalysis and literature
can perhaps be explained by the fact that literature doesn't simply
compensate for those anxieties from which psychoanalysis would
relieve us by making them intelligible, but perhaps thrives on ex–
ploiting an essential imbalance between the self and the world.
Psy–
choanalysis is the clinical version of realism: its aim is to adjust
consciousness to the world. But realism may be the pathology of
literature since, as the example of Flaubert shows, it attempts to deny
the exuberantly irrelevant, arbitrary and even insignificant richness
of imagination.
In
the history of the novel, Flaubert is perhaps the
most subtly clinical observer of the "disease" of imagination. It's
therefore not surprising that his work is almost a handbook of ana-
