Page 138 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes him. The Surrealists have, with a certain inconsistency, depended upon Freud for the ' scientdic'
sanction of their programme. Kafka, with an apparent awareness of what he was doing, has
explored the Freudian conceptions of guilt and punishment, of the dream and of the fear of the
father. Thomas Mann, whose tendency, as he himself says, was always in the direction of
Freud's interests, has been most susceptible to the Freudian anthropology, finding a special
charm in the theories of myths and magical practices. James Joyce, with his interest in the
numerous states of receding consciousness, with his use of words as things and of words
which point to more than one thing, with his pervading sense of the interrelation and inter-
penetration of all things, and, not least important, his treatment of fadar themes, has perhaps
most thoroughly and consciously exploited Freud's ideas.
II
Yet although it will be clear enough how much of Freud's thought has significant affinity
with the Romanticist tradition, we must see with no less distinctness how much of hi s
system is distantly rationalistic. Thomas Mann is at fault when, in his first essay on Freud, he
makes it seem that the 'Apollonian', the rationalistic, side of psycho-analysis is, while certain
important and wholly admirable, somehow secondary and even accidental. He gives us a Freud
who is committed to the 'night side' of life. Not at all : the rationalistic element of Freud i s
foremost; before everything else he is positivistic. If the interpreter of dreams came to medical
science through Goethe, as he tells us he did, he entered not by way of the WuIptrrgisnucht
but by the essay which played so important a part in the lives of so many scientists of the nineteenth
century, the famous disquisition on Nature.
This correction is needed not only for accuracy but also for any understanding of Freud's attitude
to art. And for that understanding we must see how intense is the passion with which Freud
believes that positivistic rationalism, in its golden age, pre- Revolutionary purity, is the very
form and pattern of intellectual virtue. The aim of psychoanalysis, he says, is the control of the
night side of life. It is 'to strengthen the ego, to make it more independent of the super-ego, to
widen its field of vision, and so to extend the organization of the id'. Where id was,'. . . that is,
where all the irrational, non-logical, pleasure-seeking dark forces were . . .' there shall e g o be, '.
. . that is, intelligence and control. It is', he concludes, with a reminiscence of Faust, 'reclamation
work, &e the draining of the Zuyder Zee.' The passage is quoted by Mann when, in toling up the
subject of Freud a second time, he does indeed speak of Freud's positivistic programme; but even
here the bias induced by Mann's artistic interest in the 'night side' prevents him from giving this
aspect of Freud its proper emphasis. Freud would never have accepted the role whch Mann seems
to give him as the legitimizer of the myth and the dark irrational ways of the mind. If Freud
discovered the darkness for science he never endorsed it. On the contrary, hi s rationalism supports
all the ideas of Enlightenment that deny validity to myth or religion; he holds to a simple
materialism, to a simple determinism, to a rather limited sort of epistemology. No great scientist
of our day has thundered so articulately and so fiercely against all those who would sophsticate
with metaphysics the scientific principles that were good enough for the nineteenth century.
Conceptualism or pragmatism are anathema to him, and this, when we consider the nature of his
own brilliant scientific methods, has surely an element of paradox in it.
From his rationalistic positivism comes much of Freud's strength and all of his weakness.
The strength is the fine, clear tenacity of his positive aims, the goal of therapy, the desire to bring
to men a decent measure of earthly happiness. But upon the rationalism must also be placed the
blame for his rather naive scientific principles which consist largely of claiming for his theories
a perfect correspondence with an external reality, a position which, for those who admire Freud,
and especially for those who take seriously his views on art, is troublesome in the extreme.
Now Freud has, I believe, much to tell us about art, but what- ever is suggestive in him is not to
be found in those of his works in which he deals expressly with art itself. Freud is neither insensitive
to art-on the contrary-nor does he ever intend to speak of it with contempt. Indeed, he speaks of
it with a real tenderness and counts it one of the true charms of the good life. of artists, especially
of writers, he speaks with admiration and even a kind of awe, though perhaps what he most

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