Page 130 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes well as bad, helps create its reality by selection andevaluation. In this view, reality is malleable
and subject to creation". However, Freud also shares another conception of the mind that is
derived from his "therapeutic-practical assumptions" and according to which the "mind deals
with a reality which is quite fixed and static, a reality that is wholly 'given' and not (to use a
phrase of Dewey's) 'taken'".
Trilling is baffled why Freud insists on the second view even though the "reality to which he
wishes to reconcile the neurotic patient is, after all, a 'taken' and not a 'given' reality", to be precise,
the "reality of social life and value, conceived and maintained by the human mind and will. Love,
morality, honour, esteem - these are the components of a created reality" . From this point of view,
"we must call most of the activities and satisfactions of the ego illusions" , just as art is an illusion,
which is not something that Freud wants to do at all. Trilling then asks what is the difference
between the dream and neurosis, on the one hand, and art on the other. Unconscious processes are
at work in both, they share the element of fantasy. But the difference between them is that the
"poet is in command of his own fantasy, while it is exactly the mark of the neurotic that he is
possessed by his fantasy" . Secondly, the "illusions of art are made to serve the purpose of a closer
and truer relation with reality" . Freud's "assumption of the almost exclusively hedonistic nature
and purpose of art bar him from the perception of this". Freud does admit that there is a distinction
between the artist and the neurotic in that the former "knows how to find a way back from the
world of imagination and 'once more get a firm foothold in reality'". But this means simply, in
Trilling's view, that the artist returns to the real world "once he suspends the practice of his art" .
All in all, Freud does not deny to art its function and its usefulness; it has a therapeutic effect in
releasing mental tension; it serves the cultural purpose of acting as a 'substitute gratification' to
reconcile men to the sacrifices that made for culture's sake; it promotes the social sharing of highly
valued emotional experiences; and it recalls men to their cultural ideas.
III
Trilling summarises his argument by saying that his point has been that "Freud's ideas could tell
us something about art" but that "Freud's very conception of art is inadequate". Freud, Trilling
suggests, is very aware of the limits of the "application of the analytic method to specific works of
art". However, Freud does believe that it accomplishes two things:
"explain the 'inner meanings' of the work of art and explain the temperament of the
artist as man". Freud's and, later, Jones' interpretation of Hamlet, for example,
"undertakes not only the clearing up of the mystery of Hamlet's character, but also the
discovery of 'the clue to much of the deeper workings of Shakespeare's mind", as well
as "what Freud calls 'the mystery of its effect'". Given that, according to Freud, the
"meaning of a dream is its intention" and that the meaning of a play is also its intention,
Jones sought to "discover what it was that Shakespeare intended to say about Hamlet".
This was "wrapped by the author in a dreamlike obscurity because it touched so
deeply both his personal life and the moral life of the world". What Freud and Jones
asserted is that "what Shakespeare intended to say is that Hamlet cannot act because
he is incapacitated by the guilt he feels at his unconscious attachment to his mother" .
Similarly, Freud asserts that the "meaning of King Lear is to be found in the tragic
refusal of an old man to 'renounce love, choose death, and make friends with the
necessity of dying". However, in Trilling's view, this is "not the meaning of King Lear
any more than the Oedipus motive is the meaning of Hamlet".
Trilling is of this view because he believes that there is "no single meaning to any work of art" as
attested to by "historical and personal experience":
Changes in historical context and in personal mood change the meaning of a work and
indicate to us that artistic understanding is not a question of fact but of value. Even if
the author's intention were, as it cannot be precisely determinable, the meaning of a
work cannot lie in the author's intention alone.
It must also lie in its effect. . . . In short, the audience partly determines the meaning of the work.
Freud seems to hint at this but assumes that the effect of a play like Hamlet is "single and brought

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