Cather aside, for her notion of Catholic order differentiates her; but
antagonism to the culture which �nderson oppos�d, and i� or�er
in addition to Anderson himself, Dreiser, Waldo Frank, and Eugene
to make it compelling and effective Anderson remforced 1t with
O'Neill come to mind as men who had recourse to a strong but
what is in effect the high language of religion, speaking of salvation,
undeveloped sense of supernal powers.
of the voice that will not be denied, of dropping the heavy burden
It is easy enough to understand this crude mysticism as a protest
of this world.
against philosophical and moral materialism; easy enough, too, to
The salvation that Anderson was talking about was no doubt a
forgive it, even when, as in Anderson, the second births and the
real salvation, but it was small, and he used for it the language of
large revelations seem often to point only to the bosom of a solemn
the most strenuous religious experience. He spoke in visions and
bohemia, and almost always to a lowering rather than a heightening
mysteries and raptures, but what he was speaking about after �II
of energy. We forgive it because some part of the blame for its cruwas only the salvation oi a small legitimate existence, of a qmet dity must be borne by the culture of the time. In Europe a century
place in the sun and moments of leisurely peace, of not being nagged
before, Stendhal could execrate a bourgeois materialism and yet
and shrew-ridden, nor deprived of one's due share of affection.
remain untempted by the dim religiosity which in America in the
What he wanted for himself and others was perhaps no more than
twenties seemed one of the likeliest of the few ways by which one
what he got in his last years: -a home, neighbors, a small daily work
might affirm the value of spirit; but then Stendhal could utter his
to do, and the right to say his say carelessly and loosely and withdenunciation of philistinism in the name of Mozart's music, the out the sense of being strictly judged. But between this small, good
pictures of Cimabue, Masaccio, Giotto, Leonardo, and Michelangelo,
life and the language which he used about it there is a discrepancy
the plays of Corneille, Racine, and Shakespeare. Of what is implied
which may be thought of as a willful failure of taste, an intended
by these things Anderson seems never to have had a real intimation.
lapse of the sense of how things fit. Wyndham Lewis, in his attack
His awareness of the past was limited, perhaps by his fighting faith
in Paleface on the early triumphant Anderson, speaks of Anderson's
in the "modern," and this, in a modern, is always a danger. His
work as an assault on responsibility and thoughtful maturity, on
heroes in art and morality were few: Joyce, Lawrence, Dreiser, and
the pleasures and uses of the mind, on decent human pride, on
Gertrude Stein, as fellow moderns; Cellini, Turgeniev; there is a
Socratic clarity and precision; and certainly when we think of the
long piece in praise of George Borrow; he spoke of Hawthorne with
"marching men" of Anderson's second novel, their minds lost in
contempt, for he could not understand Hawthorne except as gentheir marching and singing, leaving to their leader the definitions teel, and he said of Henry James that he was "the novelist of those
of their aims, we have what might indeed be the political consewho hate," for mind seemed to him always a sort of malice. And he quences of Anderson's attitudes if these were carried out to their
saw but faintly even those colleagues in art whom he did admire.
ultimate implications. Certainly the precious essence of personality
His real heroes were the simple and unassuming, a few anonymous
to which Anderson was so much committed could not be preserved
Negroes, a few craftsmen, for he gave to the idea of craftsmanship
by any of the people or any of the deeds his own books delight in.
a value beyond the value which it actually does have-it is this as
But what hostile critics forget about Anderson is that the cultural
32
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situation from which his writing sprang was actually much as he
described it. Anderson's truth may have become a falsehood in his
hands by reason of limitations in himself or in the tradition of easy
populism he chose as his own, but one has only to take it out of his
Freud and Literature
hands to see again that it is indeed a truth. The small legitimate
existence, so necessary for the majority of men to achieve, is in our
age so very hard, so nearly impossible, for them to achieve. The
language Anderson used was certainly not commensurate with the
traditional value which literature gives to the things he wanted,
I
but it is not incommensurate with the modern difficulty of attaining
these things. And it is his unending consciousness of this difficulty
that constitutes for me the residue of admiration for him that I
THE Freudian psychology is the only systematic account of
the human mind which, in point of subtlety and comfind I still have.
plexity, of interest and tragic power, deserves to stand
beside the chaotic mass of psychological insights which literature
has accumulated through the centuries. To pass from the reading
of a great literary work to a treatise of academic psychology is to
pass from one order of perception to another, but the human nature
of the Freudian psychology is exactly the stuff upon which the
poet has always exercised his art. It is therefore not surprising that
the psychoanalytical theory has had a great effect upon literature.
Yet the relationship is reciprocal, and the 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," he said. "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 psychoanalysis; 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 rez.d their works until after he had formulated his own theories, we must see that particular
34
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Freud and Literature
35
___
H_,,_,,-1_.._l_l_l_l_ll-tl_l_l_ll-1-11-1--lllo-l-·
influences cannot be in question here but that what we must deal
far to find in Rameau Freud's id and in Diderot Freud's ego; yet
with is nothing less than a whole Zeitgeist, a direction of thought.
the connection does suggest itself; and at least we have here the
For psychoanalysis is one of the culminations of the Romanticist
>
perception which is to be the common characteristic of both Freud
literature of the nineteenth century. If there is perhaps a contradicand Romanticism, the perception of the hidden element of human tion in the idea of a science standing upon the shoulders of a literanature and of the opposition between the hidden and the visible.
ture which avows itself inimical to science in so many ways, the
We have too the bold perception of just what lies hidden: "If the
contradiction will be resolved if we remember that this literature,
little savage [i.e., the child] were left to himself, if he preserved
despite its avowals, was itself scientific in at least the sense of being
all his foolishness and combined the violent passions of a man of
passionately devoted to a research into the self.
thirty with the lack of reason of a child in the cradle, he'd wring
In showing the connection between Freud and this Romanticist
his father's neck and go to bed with his mother."
tradition, it is difficult to know where to begin, but there might be
From the self-exposure of Rameau to Rousseau's account of his
a certain aptness in starting even back of the tradition, as far back
own childhood is no great step; society might ignore or reject the
as 1762 with Diderot's Rameau's Nephew. At any rate, certain men
idea of the "immorality" which lies concealed in the beginning of
at the heart of nineteenth-ceritury thought were agreed in finding a
the career of the "good" man, just as it might turn away from
peculiar importance in this brilliant little work: Goethe translated
Blake struggling to expound a psychology which would include the
it, Marx admired it, Hegel-as Marx reminded Engels in the letter
forces beneath the propriety of social man in general, but the idea of
which announced that he was sending the book as a gift-praised
the hidden thing went forward to become one of the dominant noand expounded it at length, Shaw was impressed by it, and Freud tions of the age. The hidden element takes many forms and it is not
himself, as we know from a quotation in his Introductory Lectures,
necesarily "dark" and "bad"; for Blake the "bad" was the good,
read it with the pleasure of agreement.
while for Wordsworth and Burke what was hidden and uncon
The dialogue takes place between Diderot himself and a nephew
scious was wisdom and power, which work in despite of the conof the famous composer. The protagonist, the younger Rameau, is scious intellect.
a despised, outcast, shameless fellow; Hegel calls him the "disinte
The mind has become far less simple; the devotion to the various
grated consciousness" and credits him with great wit, for it is he
forms of autobiography-itself an important fact in the traditionwho breaks down all the normal social values and makes new comprovides abundant examples of the change that has taken place.
binations with the pieces. As for Diderot, the deuteragonist, he is
Poets, making poetry by what seems to them almost a freshly diswhat Hegel calls the "honest consciousness," and Hegel considers covered faculty, find that this new power may be conspired against
him reasonable, decent, and dull. It is quite clear that the author
by other agencies of the mind and even deprived of its freedom;
does not despise his Rameau and does not mean us to. Rameau is
the names of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Arnold at once occur to
lustful and greedy, arrogant yet self-abasing, perceptive yet "wrong,"
us again, and Freud quotes Schiller on the danger to the poet that
like a child. Still, Diderot seems actually to be giving the fellow a
lies in the merely analytical reason. And it is not only the poets who
kind of superiority over himself, as though Rameau represents the
are threatened; educated and sensitive people throughout Europe
elements which, dangerous but wholly necessary, lie beneath the
become aware of the depredations that reason might make upon the
reasonable decorum of social life. It would perhaps be pressing too
affective life, as in the classic instance of John Stuart Mill.
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Freud and Literature
37
.. -.. -··-·-··-··-··-··-··-··-··-··-"·-··-··-.. -·-··-··-··-··
-··-··-·-"'-··-·--·-··-··-·-·-·•-••-•11-••-••-··-··-··-··-·-··-••-..1
We must also take into account the preoccupation-it began in
--d·-- · g impulses which in turn leads us to that fascination
self- estroym
'
the eighteenth century, or even in the seventeenth-with children,
d B d 1 · A d
. h h horrible which we find in Shelley, Poe, an au e a1re. n
wit t e
women, peasants, and savages, whose mental life, it is felt, is less
s
"O d
"
ay there is the profound interest in the dream- ur reams,
al�
overlaid than that of the educated adult male by the proprieties of
d G
d de Nerval "are a second life"-and in the nature of
sa1
erar
'
social habit. With this preoccupation goes a concern with educah
hich reaches its climax in Rimbaud
d
an h
t e I ater
metap or, w
. .
·
tion and personal development, so consonant with the historical and
b I. ts metaphor becoming less and less commumcat1ve as it
Sym o 1s ,
evolutionary bias of the time. And we must certainly note the
J'£
a roaches the relative autonomy of the dream i e.
revolution in morals which took place at the instance (we might
P�ut perhaps we must stop to ask, si�ce these are the componen�s
almost say) of the Bildungsroman, for in the novels fathered by
f h Zeitgeist from which Freud himself developed, whether 1t
o t e
Wilhelm Meister we get the almost complete identification of
b
·d that Freud did indeed produce a "d
w1 e 1· iterary ff
e ect.
can e sa1
.
author and hero and of the reader with both, and this identification
If
What is it that Freud added that the tendency of literat�re 1tse
almost inevitably suggests a leniency of moral judgment. The
would not have developed without him? If we were lookmg for a
autobiographical novel has a further influence upon the moral
w ·
nter ho
w showed the Freudian influence, Proust would perhaps
sensibility by its exploitation of all the modulations of motive and
come to mind as readily as anyone else; the very .
title
·
1
_ of his nove ,
by its hinting that we may not judge a man by any single moment
in French more than in English, suggests an enter�nse �f p_sychoin his life without taking into account the determining past and the analysis and scarcely less so does his method�t�e mvest1gat10n of
expiating and fulfilling fut&re:
1
s eep, £
o Sexual deviation ' of the way of assoc1at1on, the almost ob-
It is difficult to know how to go o
n, for the further we look the
·
sess1ve · nterest
1
1· n metaphor· ' at these and at many other po· mts h
t e
more literary affinities to Freud we find, and even if we limit our
"influence" might be shown. Yet I believe it is true that Proust · d
d1
selves to bibliography we can at best be incomplete. Yet we must
not read Freud. Or again, exegesis of The Waste Land often reads
mention the sexual revolution that was being demanded-by Shelley,
remarkably like the psychoanalytic interpretation _of a dream, yet
for example, by the Schlegel of Lucinde, by George Sand, and later
we know that Eliot's methods were prepared for him not by Freud
and more critically by Ibsen; the belief in the sexual origin of art,
but by other poets.
, .
.
baldly stated by Tieck, more subtly by Schopenhauer; the investiga
Nevertheless it is of course true that Freud s mfluence on litera-
tion of sexual maladjustment by Stendhal, whose observations on
ture has been �ery great. Much of it is so pervasive that its extent is
.
erotic feeling seem to us distinctly Freudian. Again and again we
scarcely to be determined; in one form or anoth�r, frequ.ently m
see the effective, utilitarian ego being relegated to an inferior posiperversions or absurd simplifications, it has been mfused mto our tion and a plea b�ing made on behalf of the anarchic and self-inlife and become a component of our culture of which it is now �ard dulgent id. We find the energetic exploitation of the idea of the
to be specifically aware. In biography its first effect was sensat10nal
mind as a divisible thing, one part of which can contemplate and
but not fortunate. The early Freudian biographers were for the most
mock the other. It is not a far remove from this to Dostoevski's
part Guildensterns who seemed to know the pipes but co�ld not
brilliant instances of ambivalent feeling. Novalis brings in the prepluck out the heart of the mystery, and the same condem_nat10n apoccupation with the death wish, and this is linked on the one hand plies to the early Freudian critics. But in recent years, with the acwith sleep and on the other hand with the perception of the perverse, climatization of psychoanalysis and the increased sense of its re-
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