Page 128 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes upon Freud". As Freud himself admitted, the "poets and philosophers before me uncovered the
unconscious" , what he "discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be
studied".
Trilling argues that what is at stake here is less "particular influences" than a "whole Zeitgeist, a
direction of thought". He traces it in particular to a widely admired text, which Freud himself cited
approvingly, Diderot's Rameau's Nephew (1762). Trilling sees in it a "perception which is to be the
common characteristic of both Freud and Romanticism, the perception of the hidden element of
human nature and of the opposition between the hidden and the visible". This "idea of the hidden
thing went forward to become one of the dominant notions of the age" in the work of Rousseau,
Burke, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Schiller, and even others later like Arnold and Mill who were
"aware of the depredations that reason might make on the affective life". Autobiography, an important
element of this "tradition", hints at the way in which the mind progressively became more complex.
The Romantic poets, "making poetry by what seems to them almost a freshly discovered faculty, find
that this new power may be conspired against by other agencies of the mind".

Psychoanalysis, he contends, is "one of the culminations of the Romanticist literature
of the nineteenth century", suggesting a "contradiction in the idea of a science
standing upon the shoulders of a literature which avows itself inimical to science".

Trilling proceeds to remark on the obsessions of the period with "children, women, peasants, and
savages, whose mental life, it is felt, is less overlaid than that of the educated adult male by the
proprieties of social habit" , the rise of the bildungsroman in the wake of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister and
the attendant "revolution in morals" and the view that "we may not judge a man by any single moment
in his life without taking into account the determining past and the expiating and fulfilling future".
Trilling says that the "further we look the more literary affinities to Freud we find". He mentions
the increasing demands for and discussions of a "sexual revolution" by Shelley, Schlegel, Sand,
Ibsen, Schopenhauer, Stendahl and others. Again and again we see the effective, utilitarian ego
being relegated to an inferior position and a plea being made on behalf of the anarchic and self-
indulgent id. We find the energetic exploitation of the idea of the mind as a divisible thing, one
part of which can contemplate and mock the other.
Trilling lists Dostoevsky's emphasis on ambivalence, Novalis' "preoccupation with the death wish",
the "fascination by the horrible" in Shelley, Poe and Baudelaire, the pervasive interest in dreams
on the part of thinkers like Nerval, and the concern with "metaphor" in Rimbaud and the later
Symbolists, "metaphor becoming less and less communicative as it approaches the relative autonomy
of the dream life".
If Freud is a product of this zeitgeist, Trilling wonders in turn "what it is that Freud added that the
tendency of literature itself would not have developed without him" . Proust's Les Fleurs du mal
springs to mind, suggesting as it does an "enterprise of psychoanalysis" , not least in terms of its
method: the "investigation of sleep, of sexual deviation, of the way of association, the almost
obsessive interest in metaphor" . Though writers like Proust denied even having read Freud,
Freud's impact on the study of literature is enormous. A psychoanalytically-oriented criticism
offers students of literature a "lively sense of its latent and ambiguous meanings, as it were, as
indeed it is, a being no less alive and contradictory than the man who created it" . It has had an
important impact on literary biography in particular where, notwithstanding the "dangers of
theoretical systematisation" of which no one is more aware than the psychoanalytically-inclined
critic, the goal is "not that of exposing the secret shame of the writer and limiting the meaning of his
work, but, on the contrary, that of finding grounds for sympathy with the writer and for increasing
the possible significances of the work". Many contemporaneous writers have cited their debts to
Freud: the Surrealists, Kafka (who "explored the Freudian conceptions of guilt and punishment, of
the dream, and of the fear of the father" , Thomas Mann, and James Joyce, among others.

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