Page 131 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Unit 11: Freud and Literature—Lionel Trilling: Detailed Study

about solely by the 'magical' power of the Oedipus motive to which, unconsciously, we so violently Notes
respond". The thing is, though, that Hamlet's appeal and impact is historically and culturally variable.
Trilling points out that just as Bacon "remarked that experiment may twist nature on the rack to
wring out its secrets", so too "criticism may use any instruments upon a work of art to find its
meanings" . However, one form of "research into the mind of the artist is simply not practicable":
the "investigation of his unconscious intention as it exists apart from the work itself". It is difficult
enough to determine the "artist's statement of his conscious intention", therefore how "much less can
we know from his unconscious intention considered as something apart from the whole work?". The
answer: "very little that can be called conclusive or scientific". The biggest hindrance is the absence
of the author himself: we must interpret the symbols which comprise his 'dream-text' without reference
to the "dreamer's free association with the multitudinous details of his dream".
Trilling then turns his attention to the view that an artwork reveals much about the mind of the
artist which in turn sheds light on the artwork. Jones credits, on the basis of only the flimsiest of
evidence, Hamlet with more importance in Shakespeare's oeuvre than it necessarily has and, on
these grounds, proceeds to claim that there is a link between the "inner meaning of the play" and
the "deeper workings of Shakespeare's mind".
Trilling hastens to add that it is not his intention to dismiss a psychoanalytic reading. Far from it.
Rather, he is of the view that the best practitioners of psychoanalytic criticism are those who have
"surrendered the early pretensions . . . to deal 'scientifically' with literature". More recent work
"pretends not to 'solve' but only to illuminate the subject". Such a nuanced approach produces
interpretations that are not "exclusive of other meanings" for the simple reason that it does not
assume that "there is a reality to which the play stands in the relation that a dream stands to the
wish that generates it and from which it is inseparable".
IV
What then, Trilling wonders, does Freud contribute to our understanding of art? The value of
Freud's approach lies in his "whole conception of the mind" . Freudian psychology "makes poetry
indigenous to the very constitution of the mind". The mind is largely a "poetrymaking organ",
notwithstanding the fact that "between the unconscious mind and the finished poem there supervene
the social intention and the formal control of the conscious mind". "Freud has not merely naturalised
poetry; he has discovered its status as a pioneer settler, and he sees it as a method of thought".
Though he sees poetry as "unreliable and ineffective for conquering reality" , he is forced to make
use of it himself, "as when he speaks of the topography of the mind and tells us with a kind of
defiant apology that the metaphors of spatial relationship which he is using are really most
inexact since the mind is not a thing of space at all" . Vico in the eighteenth century "spoke of the
metaphorical, imagistic language of the early stages of culture; it was left to Freud to discover
how, in a scientific age, we still feel and think in figurative formations, and to create, what
psychoanalysis is, a science of tropes, of metaphor and its variants, synecdoche and metonomy
[sic]". Moreover, Freud shows how the mind, in one of its parts, could work without logic, yet not
without that directing purpose, that control of intent from which . . . logic springs. For the
unconscious mind works without the syntactical conjunctions which are logic's essence; It recognises
no because, no therefore, no but; such ideas as similarity, agreement, and community are expressed
in dreams imagistically by compressing the elements into a unity. The unconscious mind in its
struggle with the conscious always turns from the general to the concrete and finds the tangible
trifle more congenial than the large abstraction.
Freud discovered in the very organisation of the mind those mechanisms by which art makes its
effects, such devices as the condensations of meanings and the displacement of accent. In addition
to this, Trilling writes, there are two other elements which have great bearing on art and its study.
In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Trilling contends, Freud offers both a "speculative attempt
to solve a perplexing problem in clinical analysis" and an important contribution to the study of
catharsis in tragedy à la Aristotle. Freud stumbles here upon certain facts that contradict his earlier
theory that all dreams "have the intention of fulfilling the dreamer's wishes. They are in the service
of what Freud calls the pleasure principle, which is opposed to the reality principle" . He was forced

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