The theories of Freud were at
the vanguard of the development of the Modernist novel in the early 20th
century. It was to be in this literary form that many of the themes of
alienation, dislocation and the restless probing of inherited values and norms
would be played out. Modernism entailed a perpetual, almost uneasy, stylistic
exploration, a rejection of the forms, conventions and syntax of the expressive
realism found in the 19th novel. Art, it was determined, could no longer hold
the mirror up to nature.
The old certainties were beginning to vanish along with the generations who had sacrificed themselves in the trenches of the Great War upholding an outmoded concept of loyalty to monarchy. This was to be a turbulent period were there was unleashed that great flood of almost primeval emotion that gave birth to the destructive nationalisms of interwar Europe. The primacy of the id was ever resurgent and it was lurking in the shadows, but it needed to be understood and controlled.
The revolutionary thrust of this new mode of artistic representation, wherein the medium itself became the message, is perhaps signalled in the introduction to Freud's "Interpretation of Dreams" (1900) where he quotes from Virgil's "Aeneid" - "If I cannot move the higher powers, I will bend the infernal regions". Wishes rejected by the higher mental authorities will instead move subversively and find their answers in a subjective mental underworld.
In "Neurosis and Psychosis" Freud provides us with a succinct picture of the processes that he regards as the main features of extreme alienation - a psychotic break;
"The ego creates, autocratically, a new external and internal world; and there can be no doubt of two facts - that this new world is constructed in accordance with the id's wishful impulses, and that the motive of this dissociation from the external world is some very serious frustration by reality of a wish - a frustration which seems intolerable. The close affinity of this psychosis to normal dreams is unmistakeable. ..."
This is when Freud' writing is at his best, when he has momentarily forgotten his role as physician and instead concentrates on the analysis of a phenomenon. Here, he conceives the psychotic break - the ultimate form of alienation - in terms of the withdrawal of libidinal interest from the external world and its narcissistic recathexis of the ego, a process which will eventually account for the "symptoms" characteristic of his paraphrenias.
In Kafka's "Trial" the protagonist is brought to the attention of the authorities on account of suspicions raised by his libidinal withdrawal, his refusal to grease the wheels of normative discourse and play by the standard rules of the language game. It is his interior monologue which apprehends the inconsistencies of the narratives issuing from the dominant regime and it is this loyalty to his own unconscious, that private domain of freedom, which signals his subversive credentials to the ever watchful, censoring authorities.
This autocratic creation of a new world is a mechanism which foreshadows Freud's post-war thoughts on "negation", an operation that he describes as the subject, "disowning the experience, abolishing it as though it did not exist". Why should a subject "abolish" anything? Isn't the abolition involved here to be envisaged as a particular stance, a registration of a profound objection towards an asymmetry in power relations; a rejection of monarchy, feudalism, class - even nationalism itself. Isn't this precisely the stance taken by Daedalus in the "Portrait of the Artist", where only those initiated into the 'sacred' circle of his acquaintance were given the privilege of his thoughts on Aristotle's theory of aesthetics. Or, how he "allowed" his mother to wash behind his ears. Ultimately, he will fly by those nets of nationality, language and religion but it is this stance of begrudging intimacy that should interest us here.
Later in Ulysses, Buck Mulligan declares that "the sacred pint alone can unravel the tongue of Daedalus". Indeed, the favoured method adopted by Joyce's protagonist will be "silence, exile and cunning" from which suitably sequestered vantage point he declares, (rather modestly), his intent; "to forge the uncreated conscience of my race from the smithy of my soul". The fact that he actually managed to do so shouldn't be the source of a 'neither here nor there' type dismissal from the psychiatric vanguard, who would nevertheless be justified, if they were so inclined, to apply their own categories to the Joycean "triplets" and baptise each, I suggest, successively as;
1.The Portrait of the Artist (Neurotica); There is a problem with the world, it doesn't make any sense, perhaps it's my fault.
2. Ulysses (Post-psychotica, enlightenment, mania, excitement); I see now the world of stories. I shall lampoon their narrative base, presenting them in multitude and thereby subverting their authority. Man will learn from his mistakes.
3. Finnegan's Wake (Depression, retreat into the underworld. Few have understood me, it is in vain. Exclusive interior monologue with occasional forays into communicative wideawake language)
The nightworld draws to a close and the curtain opens on the fury of the atomic age. The task is complete, the artist has spoken and presaged.
But few have listened, they seldom do.
The old certainties were beginning to vanish along with the generations who had sacrificed themselves in the trenches of the Great War upholding an outmoded concept of loyalty to monarchy. This was to be a turbulent period were there was unleashed that great flood of almost primeval emotion that gave birth to the destructive nationalisms of interwar Europe. The primacy of the id was ever resurgent and it was lurking in the shadows, but it needed to be understood and controlled.
The revolutionary thrust of this new mode of artistic representation, wherein the medium itself became the message, is perhaps signalled in the introduction to Freud's "Interpretation of Dreams" (1900) where he quotes from Virgil's "Aeneid" - "If I cannot move the higher powers, I will bend the infernal regions". Wishes rejected by the higher mental authorities will instead move subversively and find their answers in a subjective mental underworld.
In "Neurosis and Psychosis" Freud provides us with a succinct picture of the processes that he regards as the main features of extreme alienation - a psychotic break;
"The ego creates, autocratically, a new external and internal world; and there can be no doubt of two facts - that this new world is constructed in accordance with the id's wishful impulses, and that the motive of this dissociation from the external world is some very serious frustration by reality of a wish - a frustration which seems intolerable. The close affinity of this psychosis to normal dreams is unmistakeable. ..."
This is when Freud' writing is at his best, when he has momentarily forgotten his role as physician and instead concentrates on the analysis of a phenomenon. Here, he conceives the psychotic break - the ultimate form of alienation - in terms of the withdrawal of libidinal interest from the external world and its narcissistic recathexis of the ego, a process which will eventually account for the "symptoms" characteristic of his paraphrenias.
In Kafka's "Trial" the protagonist is brought to the attention of the authorities on account of suspicions raised by his libidinal withdrawal, his refusal to grease the wheels of normative discourse and play by the standard rules of the language game. It is his interior monologue which apprehends the inconsistencies of the narratives issuing from the dominant regime and it is this loyalty to his own unconscious, that private domain of freedom, which signals his subversive credentials to the ever watchful, censoring authorities.
This autocratic creation of a new world is a mechanism which foreshadows Freud's post-war thoughts on "negation", an operation that he describes as the subject, "disowning the experience, abolishing it as though it did not exist". Why should a subject "abolish" anything? Isn't the abolition involved here to be envisaged as a particular stance, a registration of a profound objection towards an asymmetry in power relations; a rejection of monarchy, feudalism, class - even nationalism itself. Isn't this precisely the stance taken by Daedalus in the "Portrait of the Artist", where only those initiated into the 'sacred' circle of his acquaintance were given the privilege of his thoughts on Aristotle's theory of aesthetics. Or, how he "allowed" his mother to wash behind his ears. Ultimately, he will fly by those nets of nationality, language and religion but it is this stance of begrudging intimacy that should interest us here.
Later in Ulysses, Buck Mulligan declares that "the sacred pint alone can unravel the tongue of Daedalus". Indeed, the favoured method adopted by Joyce's protagonist will be "silence, exile and cunning" from which suitably sequestered vantage point he declares, (rather modestly), his intent; "to forge the uncreated conscience of my race from the smithy of my soul". The fact that he actually managed to do so shouldn't be the source of a 'neither here nor there' type dismissal from the psychiatric vanguard, who would nevertheless be justified, if they were so inclined, to apply their own categories to the Joycean "triplets" and baptise each, I suggest, successively as;
1.The Portrait of the Artist (Neurotica); There is a problem with the world, it doesn't make any sense, perhaps it's my fault.
2. Ulysses (Post-psychotica, enlightenment, mania, excitement); I see now the world of stories. I shall lampoon their narrative base, presenting them in multitude and thereby subverting their authority. Man will learn from his mistakes.
3. Finnegan's Wake (Depression, retreat into the underworld. Few have understood me, it is in vain. Exclusive interior monologue with occasional forays into communicative wideawake language)
The nightworld draws to a close and the curtain opens on the fury of the atomic age. The task is complete, the artist has spoken and presaged.
But few have listened, they seldom do.
No comments:
Post a Comment