BOOKS
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feelings, but the total reversals of judgment are disconcerting. In a book of
this kind , one hopes to have confusions clarified, rather than merely re–
flected . What is particularly disturbing is the sense that a vocabulary of
issues and ideas is being used to cloak inarticulate sympathies and antip–
athies, emotional attitudes that are never really understood . Crews 's divided
sympathies work to better effect in chapters on Brown and Reich, largely
because the ambivalent feelings are explored and resolved in each essay. The
simplifications of Freudian theory proposed by both men are rejected;
history, repression, and rationality will not go away because we want them
to.
The most complex and interesting aspect of the Crews "case history"
is the evolution of his feelings about psychoanalysis, the principal "system"
of the title. Although Crews is the author of a psychoanalytic study of
Hawthorne,
The Sins ofthe Fathers
(New York; Oxford , 1966), his ambiv–
alence about psychoanalytic method seems to have begun early. The first
essay in this collection, " Can Literature Be Psychoanalyzed?" is a sort of
primer of psychoanalytic criticism, in which Crews answers the most frequent
objections to the method in a lucid and balanced way, although not without
defensiveness: he begins by deprecating Freud's views on art and his "com–
petitive and ambivalent remarks about artists." Apparently Crews feels the
need to apologize even as he evangelizes, and the mixture of intentions is
a somewhat uneasy one.
Unfortunately there is only one example here of the actual practice of
psychoanalytic criticism-a fine essay on Conrad . Another impressive piece
concerned with psychoanalysis, ••Anaesthetic Criticism," is an attack on the
intellectual timidity and the fear of extraliterary ideas in English depart–
ments, which Crews attributes partly to the influence of Northrop Frye.
Crews points out that the usual English curriculum is a random mixture of
literary history with various critical •• approaches," all assumed to be equally
valid . In order to become a coherent discipline, literary study would require
a "differential evaluation of various styles of inquiry according to their
relative success in making sense of the objects studied." In eclecticism and
withdrawal from theory, Crews sees a fear of unrecognized aspects of literary
experience, a disregard for knowledge, and a cause of the pervasive loss of
confidence in literary studies.
As a remedy, he proposes a concept of literary study as part of a larger
humanism concerned with "man as an evolved species embarked on a
unique ... experiment in the substitution of learning for instinct." In
this framework , the psychoanalytic conception of the work of art as
medi~
ating between the claims of instinct and culture would be of ctucial interest
to the literary humanist.
