140
PARTISAN REVIEW
pected turn where Phillips, after making hay of Ernest Jones, acknowl–
edges his own knowingness and asks, "What are the alternatives to
reading or listening as the knowing knower?" Or, as he alternately
phrases the question, "How can we describe this persuasively without
wheeling on glib assertions of the wonders of 'not-knowing,' or bad
readings of Keats's negative capability?" Even as he acknowledges that
knowingness is inevitable, Phillips is interested in puzzling out the epis–
temological paradox of making sense of things literary or psychoana–
lytic. "Everybody already knows something," he writes, "even if what
they know is that it is part of our intelligibility to ourselves-perhaps
the essential part-to notice that we are unintelligible to ourselves."
While Phillips, like others, is returning to Freud, he's interested in
accentuating the Freud who "made us more vivid to ourselves in our
mistakes than in our competence." Too often, says Phillips, psycho–
analysis betrays a discomfort with the unconscious and its fundamental
disorder. As he subtly argues in "Clutter: A Case History," this aversion
has made psychoanalysis take on something like the parental suspicion
of a son or daughter'S messy bedroom. ("The adolescent," Phillips wryly
notes, "rarely complains about the parents' bedroom.") From a
Freudian position, he argues, a human life is always about substituting
one sort of clutter for another. Although Phillips is commenting on
poetry when he writes that "novelty is defined by what it fails to
repeat," the same holds for life itself. The Oedipal drama-as Phillips
presents it in one of his best essays, "On Translating a Person"-is a
matter of taking what you've got and working with it: "The child can–
not 'have' the original parents, so he must defer his desire until he can
find a sufficiently good translation: close enough to the original to be
desirable, but different enough to be acceptably desirable." And yet, can
there be an "original" in a psychological sense? No, Phillips says,
though psychoanalysts often deny this, making the mistake of imposing
translations and aspiring to what Coleridge called "a presumptuous phi–
losophy" with a "rage for explanation." It's refreshing to hear a coher–
ent psychological argument against both expertise and the fashion of
being misunderstood . It should come as no surprise that Phillips would
champion someone like Fernando Pessoa, the Portuguese writer who
took on four main heteronyms (and many more besides) to express him–
self. Phillips is asking his reader not to allow the internal conversation
to degenerate into a monologue of self-satisfaction.
For all his originality, Phillips is finally a reluctant theorist of psy–
choanalysis. This may be one reason why he is foremost a writer of
essays. While there is nothing impressionistic about the way he weaves
