Page 136 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes effect of Freud upon literature has been no greater than the effect of literature upon Freud. When,
on the occasion of the celebration of his seventieth birthday, Freud was greeted as the
'discoverer of the unconscious', he corrected the speaker and disclaimed the title. 'The poets
and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious ; what I discovered was the scientific
method by which the unconscious can be studied.'
A lack of specific evidence prevents us from considering the particular literary 'influences ' upon
the founder of psycho-analysis; , and besides, when we think of the men who so clearly anticipated
many of Freud's own ideas-Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, for example-and then learn that he
did not read their works until after he had formulated his own theories, we must see that
particular influences cannot be in question here but that what we must deal with is nothing less
than a whole Zeitgeist, a direction of thought. For psycho-analysis is one of the culminations
of the Romanticist literature of the nineteenth century. If there is perhaps, a contradiction in the
idea of a science standing upon the shoulders of a literature which avows itself inimical to science
in so many ways, the contradiction will be resolved if we remember that this literature, despite its
avowals, was itself scientific, for it was passionately devoted to a research into the self.
In showing the connection between Freud and this Romanticist tradition, it is Mi cult to know
where to begin, but there might be a certain aptness in starting even back of the tradition, as far
back as 1762 with that dialogue of Diderot's called Rameau's Nephew. At any rate, certain
men at the heart of nineteenth-century thought were agreed in finding a peculiar importance in
this brant little work: Goethe translated it, Marx admired it, Hegel-as Marx reminded Engels in
the letter which announced that he was sending the book as a gift-praised and expounded it at
length, Shaw was impressed by it and Freud himself, as we know from a quotation in his
Introductory Lectures, read it with the pleasure of agreement.
The dialogue takes place between Diderot himself and a nephew of the famous composer. The
protagonist, the younger Rameau, is a despised, outcast, shameless fellow ; Hegel calls him
the ' distintegrated consciousness' and credits him with great wit, for it is he who breaks down
all the normal social values and makes new combinations with the pieces. As for Diderot, the
deuterogonist, he is what Hegel calls the 'honest consciousness', and Hegel considers him reasonable,
decent and dull. It is quite clear that the author does not despise hi s Rameau and does not mean
us t o ; Rameau is lusty and greedy, arrogant yet self- abasing, perceptive yet ' wrong', like a
child-still, Diderot seems actually to be giving the fellow a kind of superiority over himself, as
though Rameau represents the elements which, dangerous but wholly necessary, lie beneath the
reasonable decorum of social life. It would, perhaps, be pressing too far to find in Rameau
Freud's id and in Diderot Freud's ego; yet the connection does suggest itself; and at least we
have here the perception which is t o 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 From the self-exposure of Rameau to Rousseau’s account of hi s own childhood is
no great step; society might ignore or reject the idea of the 'immorality' which lies concealed in the
beginning of the career of the 'good' man, just as it might turn away from Blake struggling to
expound a psychology which would include the forces beneath the propriety of social man in
general, but the idea of the hidden thing went forward to become one of the dominant notions
of the age. The hidden element takes many forms and it is not always 'dark' and 'bad'; for,
Wordsworth, Coleridge and Burke what was hidden and unconscious was wisdom and power,
working even in despite o f the conscious intellect, and for Matthew Arnold the mind was fed
by streams buried deeper than we can know.
The mind has become far less simple; the devotion to the various forms of autobiography-itself an
important fact in the tradition-provides abundant examples of the change that has taken place. Poets,
malign poetry by what seem to them almost a freshly discovered faculty, find that this new power
may be conspired against by other agencies of the mind and even deprived of its freedom; the names
of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Arnold at once occur to us again, and Freud quotes ScMe r on the
danger to the poet which lies in the merely analytical reason. And it is not only the poets who are
threatened; educated and sensitive people throughout Europe become aware of the depredations the
reason might make upon the affective life, as in the classic instance of John Stuart Wl.

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