Page 137 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Unit 12: Freud and Literature—Lionel Trilling: Critical Appreciation

We must also take into account the preoccupation-it began in the eighteenth century, even in the Notes
seventeenth-with children, women, peasants and savages, because their mental life, it is felt, is
less overlaid than that of the educated adult male by the pro- pretties of social habit. With this
preoccupation goes a concern with education and personal development, so consonant with the
historical and evolutionary bias of the time. And we must certainly note the revolution in morals
which took place at the instance (we might almost say) of the ildungsroman, for in the novels
fathered by Wilhelm Meister we get the almost complete identification of author and hero and
of reader with both, and this identification suggests a leniency of moral judgement. The
autobiographical novel has a further influence upon the moral sensibility by its exploitation of all
the modulations of motive and by its hinting 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.
It is difficult to know how to go on, for the further we look the more literary affinities to Freud we
find, and even if we limit ourselves to bibliography we can at best be incomplete. Yet we
must mention the sexual revolution that was being demanded- by Shelley, for example, by the
Schlegel of Lucinde, by George Sand, and later and more critically by Ibsen; the belief in the
sexual origin of art, baldly stated by Tieck, more subtly by Schopenhauer ; the investigation
of sexual maladjustment by Stendhal, the quaLty of whose observations on erotic feeling are in
the direct line of Freud. Again and again we see the effective, uditarian ego being relegated to an
inferior position and the 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 toling, one part of which can
contemplate and mock the other.
It is not a far remove from this to Dostoievsky's brilliant instances of ambivalent feeling. Novalis
brings in the preoccupation with the death-wish, and this is linked on the one hand with sleep
and, on the other hand, with the perception of the perverse, self- destroying impulses, which
in turn leads us to that fascination by the horrible which we find in Shelley, Poe and Baudelaire.
And always there is the profound interest in the dream-'Our dreams', said Gerard de Nerval, 'are
a second life'-and in the nature of metaphor, which reaches its climax in Rimbaud and the later
Symbolists, of metaphor becoming less and less communicative as it approaches the relative
autonomy of the dream life. But perhaps we must stop to ask, since these are the components of
the Zeitgeist from which Freud himself developed, whether it can be said that Freud did indeed
produce a wide literary effect ?
What is it that Freud added that the tendency of literature itself would not have developed
without him? If we were looking for a writer who showed the Freudian influence, Proust would
perhaps come to mind as readily as anyone else; the very title of his novel-in French more than
in English-suggests an enterprise of psycho-analysis and scarcely less so does hi s method-the
investigation of sleep, of sexual deviation, of the ways of association, the almost obsessive interest
in metaphor ; at these and at many other points the 'influence' might be shown. Yet I believe it is
true that Proust did not read Freud. Or again, exegesis of The Waste Land reads remarkably like
the interpretation of a dream, yet we know that Eliot's methods were prepared for him not by
Freud but by other poets.
Nevertheless, it is of course true that Freud's influence on literature has been very great. Much
of it is so pervasive that its extent is scarcely to be determined; in one form or another, frequently
in perversions or absurd simplications, it has been infused into our life and become a component
of our culture of which it is now hard to be specifically aware. In biography its effect was sensational
but not fortunate. The Freudian biographers were for the most part Guddensterns who seemed to
know the pipes but could not pluck out the heart of the mystery. In criticism the situation has been
sad, for reasons which I shall try to suggest later in this essay. The names of the creative writers
who have been more or less Freudian in tone or assumption would, of course, be legion. Only a
relatively small number, however, have made serious use of the Freudian ideas. Freud himself
seems to have thought this was as it should be: he is said to have expected very little of the
works that were sent to him by writers with inscriptions of gratitude for all they had learned from

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