Page 132 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes to reconsider this view of dreams in the light of traumatic events like shell-shock where the patient
"recurred in his dreams to the very situation, distressing as it was, which had precipitated his
neurosis" . There is no "hedonistic intent" to and very little distortion of such dreams in that the
patient "recurred to the terrible initiatory situation with great literalness". This was also true of
children's games which, in some cases, "far from fulfilling wishes, seemed to concentrate upon the
representation of those aspects of the child's life which were most unpleasant and threatening to his
happiness" . To solve these problems, Freud posits the existence of a "repetition-compulsion which
goes beyond the pleasure principle" , the "intent" of which is the "developing of fear" . That is, the
dream is the effort to reconstruct the bad situation in order that the failure to meet it may be
recouped; in these dreams there is no obscured intent to evade but only an attempt to meet the
situation, to make a new effort of control. And in the play of children it seems to be that 'the child
repeats even the unpleasant experiences because through his own activity he gains a far more
thorough mastery of the strong impression than was possible by mere passive experience.'
There are implications of this for our understanding of tragedy. The pleasure involved therein is an
"ambiguous one", partly a "glossing over of terror with beautiful language rather than the evacuation
of it", partly the "stark" expression of this terror. However, there is another "function for tragedy" :
"tragedy is used as the homeopathic administration of pain to inure ourselves to the greater pain
which life will force upon us" . From this perspective, tragedy affords us a "sense of active mastery" of
an unpalatable reality. Also in this essay, Freud suggests that there is a "human drive which makes of
death the final and desired goal", a view of "grandeur" and "tragic courage in acquiescence to fate".
Freud offers, in Trilling's view, a vision of man allied to that of Copernicus and Darwin and partly
designed, seemingly, to undermine human pride. Yet, he avers, the "Freudian man is . . . a creature
of far more dignity and far more interest" than any other modern model. For Freud, man is not to
be conceived by any simple formula (such as sex) but is rather an inextricable tangle of culture and
biology. And not being simple, he is not simply good; he has . . . a kind of hell within him from
which rise everlastingly the impulses which threaten his civilisation. "His desire for man is only
that he should be human, and to this end his science is devoted".
Self-Assessment
1. Choose the correct options:
(i) Trilling discusses the relationships that exist between Freud and ............... .
(a) language (b) literature
(c) poetry (d) none of these
(ii) Trilling proceeds to remark on the obsessions of the period with ............... whose mental
life, it is left, is less overlaid than that of the educated adult male by the properties of
social habit.
(a) children (b) women
(c) peasands and savages (d) all of these
(iii) The aim of psychoanalysis is the control of the ............... .
(a) bright side of life (b) bad side of life
(c) night side of life (d) none of these
(iv) For Trilling, Freud’s rationalistic positivism has both ............... .
(a) good and bad (b) day and night
(c) strengths and weaknesses (d) positive and negative
11.2 Summary
• Lionel Trilling's masterly essays mapped the terrain where literary, political, and social
questions overlapped. His friend and colleague Quentin Anderson also remembers him as a
devoted teacher and mentor who was fiercely loyal to Columbia.
• Liberal politics, Trilling argued, while itself rooted in sentiment and concerned with asserting
the importance of human emotion, also tended to deny the concrete reality and individuality

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