Freud and literature: Eleven ways he did it

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Poetics 13 (1984) 361-380 North-Holland

FREUD AND LITERATURE: FRANCESCO

ORLANDO

ELEVEN WAYS HE DID IT

*

The aspects of Freud’s work which may in any way interest the literature scholar are many and very disparate, hence the plurality of the approaches derived from it, their heterogeneity. the persistent confusions between them. The author attempts to list and distinguish all these approaches, supporting each with the more significant Freudian texts. Thus, the survey moves gradually from the examples of more traditional procedures - such as the psychoanalysis of the writer’s biography, of the fictive character, or of literary creation and fruition, etc. - to the examples of less vulgarized. but maybe more promising procedures: such as taking advantage from the revolution accomplished by Freud, not only in the psychological. but also in the semiological, rhetorical. logical orders.

This essay is an attempt to determine which and how many approaches are contained in the whole production of Freud that may in any way interest the literature scholar. By ‘approach’ or ‘procedure’ I mean either the example or, at least, the conceptual assumptions of an intellectual procedure that can be imitated by others - whether this has already been done or not and whether, in my opinion, it is desirable or not. No attention has been paid to whether Freud himself actually referred each of the procedures in question to the study of literature, nor, except where necessary, to their position in the development of Freud’s thought. The distinctions that I make should, of course, not be considered as rigid, but simply gradated; some overlap is unavoidable.

1. The privilege of poets as precursors of science: general wisdom In the longest and most complete analytical study that Freud ever dedicated to a single work of art - that is, the tale Grudiua (1903) by W. Jensen - we read that the truly creative writer “has from time immemorial been the precursor of science, and so too of scientific psychology” (1907: 44). Freud expresses in extremely general terms a conviction, developed very early and subsequently manifested in many other works, which was bound to lead directly to the

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question: “How was it that the author arrived at the same knowledge as the doctor ~ or at least behaved as though he possessed the same knowledge?” (1907: 54). This question points to an approach which is so general as to constitute ~ for literature scholars ~ more of a premise for every possible procedure than the example of one specific procedure. The truths formulated by psychoanalysis filled a crucial gap in man’s knowledge about himself. The highest degree of similarity to these truths had always been reached in the asystematic and peripheral knowledge, both heterogeneous and heterodox, which was to be found in the discourse of poets. And Freud is careful not to ignore a concordance which, scientifically. is so open to suspicion: indeed. he makes the most of it, and exploits it, like he does with the concordances with everyday intuition and with popular wisdom. But it is as if he could see only one aspect of it clearly, the aspect which I would call its content. We can describe psychoanalysis by the title Vito chose for the third part of the second book of his masterpiece: On poetic logic. Yet, finding some concordances of truth in the discourse of poets, Freud paid attention to what they said, and not to TOM.they expressed themselves in order to say it. He never realised that, if it was said by them, this was because they had free access to that other logic, which it was his task to begin to define scientifically: to that hobo. which is the true meeting-point of the discourse of poets with the discourse of the unconscious, and from which, in his attempt to understand the what of the latter, Freud himself had had to start. His synthetic definition of the “special characteristics” of the unconscious system came relatively late (1915:186). Even later. he wrote that “the logical laws of thought do not apply in the id. and this is true above all of the law of contradiction” (1933:73). Only with the arrival of Lacan will a rhetoric of the unconscious be explicitly proclaimed, albeit without any rigorous development: with Matte Blanc0 we come to an (unti)logic of the unconscious, defined with meticulous precision (Matte Blanc0 1975).

2. Poetic expression at the service clarifying formulations

of psychoanalysis:

specific

insights

and

Deriding the inversion between the natural and the social in the bourgeois economists’ conception of merchandise, Marx quotes a character from one of Shakespeare’s plays. the police officer Dogberry: “to be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune; but to write and read comes by nature” (Marx 1887:55). Deriding the fear that doctors who were hostile to psychoanalysis had of discovering negative urges or ugly defects behind neuroses. Freud in turn paraphrased the advice given by Dogberry to the night watch patrol in the same scene: “to avoid all contact with any thieves they might happen to meet: ‘for such kind of men, the less you meddle or make with them. why. the more is for your honesty”’ (1909:586). It may not be a coincidence that both Marx

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and Freud chose, as the best caricature of their respective opponents, the same imaginary guardian of the law, conscientious and ignorant, prudent and stupid. But both these quotations are a normal part of humanistic cultural customs; while acknowledging that literature had the privilege of providing - for the most diverse extra-literary circumstances - incisive and clarifying formulations, these customs stopped far short of the discovery referred to in the first procedure. Their limitations were already displayed in the shift of meaning that, with elegant lucidity, they imposed on the quotations. Dogberry does not actually make any mention, in Shakespeare’s play, either of neuroses and timorous doctors, or of merchandise and interested economists; yet, the application is perfect in both cases, and its semantic routes would deserve further study. However, the most interesting case is found when the shift is not total. That is to say, when it does not substitute, with a different sense, a sense which is already complete in itself, but rather is inserted. as an unexpectedly prevalent hypothesis, within the boundaries of hypothesis offered by an open or vague sense; and it fills and defines it in a plausible way. Quotation re-interprets its text in the act of using it, psychoanalysis takes poetic expression into its service but in exchange offers its illuminations. It is understandable that this happens mostly with poetic expression in its strongest and densest form, which is that expressed in verse; and more so with the forms where we find contents of a supernatural kind, which whether religious or magical, mythological or modern, seem to be simply voids of sense waiting to be filled, before the probing intransigence of Freud’s materialism. No other distinction can be made between a more traditional kind of quotation and the quotation of the verse by Virgil which is used as an epigraph to The Interpretation of Dreams, and which returns - re-interpreted by the context which immediately precedes it - in the last chapter of the book: “Since I cannot move Supernal Gods, I will raise Acheron” (19OO:ix, 608). Juno’s intention to resort to the powers of the underworld, after losing all hope of stopping Aeneas by means of her own divine power, certainly cannot, without an enormous shift of meaning, be re-interpreted as follows: that which is psychically restrained during the waking hours and dominated by the principle of contradiction, takes advantage of the night life and the formations of compromise, as ways and means of imposing itself on the conscience. But the audacity of the shift is favoured by the limited literal reality that can be given to referents like the Gods and Acheron. In other places, psychoanalytical contents can serve even better to fill with sense the mystery of poetic contents which are not merely supernatural but indefinite. This is the case with the chorus of spirits that weeps over the destruction of the world, due to the curse of Goethe’s Faust; it is likened by Freud to an external projection of the “internal catastrophe” of the paranoiac (1911: 70-71). There are a few other, analogous examples (verses of Shakespeare, 1913b:155; of Goethe, 1911:29, 1916-1917: 418-419, 1930: 209;

of Riickert, 1911:65; of Heine, 1914b:85); however, we will find the expansion of this procedure at the expense of the supernatural in a subsequent one (8).

3. Fictional exemplification

at the service of psychoanalysis

The distinction between the preceding approach and this one corresponds to the difference between a lyrical discourse and the narrative or dramatic genres. While some truths revealed by psychoanalysis could be formulated in lyrical discourse, a fictional tale or dialogue could go even further and represent them: covertly yet unmistakably, with or without comments, under other names or without giving them any names at all. This was another case where the newly formed doctrine sought confirmation with the privilege of poets, but this time in the form of exemplification instead of expression. What happens when Freud admires the truth of the literary contents in various writers? Whether referring to the phenomena of dreams, slips. or behaviour taken as a symptom, it is always the intrinsically semiotic nature of these phenomena, which guarantees the privilege of poets. In the various amplified editions of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life the fictive slips, that is. those taken from novels or plays represent a large percentage compared to those taken from real life. Freud attributes the same importance to each of them: “1 have already

been able again and again to produce evidence that creative writers thmk of parapraxes as having a meaning and a motive. just as I am arguing here. We shall not be surprised. therefore. to see from a fresh example how a writer invests a clumsy movement with significance. (1901: 176). too, and makes it foreshadow later events”

In his analysis of the dreams in Gradiva (1907:54-63, 73-84) it is as if Freud ended up demonstrating that the narrative context consists merely of the necessary and sufficient associations for these fictive dreams, in the absence of those associations which assist the analyses of real dreams. The strange behaviour of the protagonist is also analysed, in its symptomatic aspects, in a no less persuasive way. As far as symptomatic behaviour is concerned, at least two types out of three in Some Churacter-Types met with in Psycho-Analytic Work are exemplified by “figures which great writers have created from the wealth of their knowledge of the mind” (1916:318); Freud motivated his choices by the argument of discretion. But at the time this was written, the ambition of psychoanalysis to be of service to literary studies had already overtaken its need to use them.

4. Psychoanalysis

at the service of biography

Psychoanalysis as an advanced and particularly at the service of biographical studies, considered

useful branch of psychology, as a precisely defined field of

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literary and artistic studies: what approach could seem less open to discussion? Yet. on the contrary, there is no other procedure which raises so many immediate complications and obstacles. The poles between which the relationship of service, always reversible, may function are three this time, and not two. Freudian psychoanalysis is at least as much a question of semiology as of psychology, since the unconscious can be known only through its semiotic manifestations. On the one hand, then, any biographical fact may become a symptom or semiotic manifestation: any behaviour may assume the role of a text. On the other hand, in the life of an artist, the most important text-symptoms will be works of art. Freud insistently declared his own incompetence and respect for the aesthetic sphere as if it were a taboo. He writes most succinctly in Dostoevsky and Parricide: “Before the problem of the creative artist analysis must, alas, lay down its arms” (1928:177). And yet. psychoanalysis at the service of biography “can supply some information which cannot be arrived at by other means, and can thus demonstrate new connecting threads in the ‘weaver’s masterpiece’ spread between the instinctual endowments. the experiences and the works of an artist” (1930:212: Freud alludes to v. 1923 of Fuust ). In the essay Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood the inexplicable nature of artistic creation becomes the starting-point for a discussion of the relationship which exists between individuality and determinism, or between determinations that exist outside and those that exist inside the individual (1910a:134-137). And all the most important pages go beyond the hypotheses about Leonardo: they speak about the passage, by repression and sublimation, from infantile sexual exploration to the adult’s desire for knowledge (77-78); and then there are those dealing with the psychogenesis of male homosexuality, through narcissism, role exchange, and unconscious faithfulness to one’s mother (98-101; cf. also 1905a:144-147). In the same way, the facts about the life of Dostoevsky mainly serve as the occasion for a discourse on psychogenesis and on the Oedipal associations of epilepsy (1928:179-188); the clarification between work and biography becomes mutual only for a brief moment, when Freud observes that the author attributed his own epilepsy to the Karamazow brother who was a murderer, “as though he were seeking to confess that the epileptic, the neurotic, in himself was a parricide” (189).

5. The psychoanalysis

of literary creation and fruition

The languages of the dream, of the slip and of the symptom always speak to somebody, even if it may not be clear who it is, not even to the ‘speaker’ himself. These languages are always in search of an addressee, even though they are generally doomed not to find any (unless they find one, who is an expert but impersonal, in the psycho-analyst). In his new systematic work, Jokes und their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud passed from the non-com-

municative realm to the sphere of communication; from that which is not necessarily verbal to that which definitely is: from that which finds its text only retrospectively, in the meta-language of words (telling the dream, reconstructing the slip. describing the symptom), to that which finds in the language of words its exclusive, original, and, when written, stable text. It is my contention that several conceptions contained in Freud’s book about jokes, which were developed on the basis of a rigorously limited category of discourses, either can be or else already have been extended to the relationship between the unconscious and verbal language in general. They give more than just a hint of a new general rhetoric of discourse, whose very existence might depend on the existence of, and interference from, the unconscious; they might describe all the forms of verbal language that are called literary. Freud did write an essay of ten pages on this topic. two years later: Creative Writers und Day-Dreuming; but this leaves us disappointed. Their comparison makes it clear: if jokes could still be, as non-communicative languages had previously been, the object of extraordinary semiological elaborations, these were favoured by the prevalently humble. anonymous nature of the materials. In the field of literature, where materials can only be works of art. they are for that reason bound to remain hidden. What makes art a compromise-formation, related to dreams. comes to be reduced to a psychological model: abstractly correct, but frail, and rather narrow here and there. At the beginning, the poet may be compared to a child that is playing, since “the opposite of play is not what is serious but what is real” (1908:144); then to the adolescent or the adult who “builds castles in the air and creates what as being are called day-dreams “, but who “is ashamed of his phantasies childish and as being unpermissible” (145-146). He is, however, a neurotic who is endowed with exceptional compensatory capacities. As the deprivations from which he suffers are shared by so many others, the poet, in presenting to others the compensation for these, “softens the character of his egoistic day-dreams by altering and disguising it”. “bribes us by the purely formal that is, aesthetic - yield of pleasure” (153); thus his detachment from reality and his sojourn in the realm of fantasy make it possible for him to return triumphant to the field of reality, thanks to his success. The values that are desired at the beginning and conquered at the end of the circuit are called “honour, power. wealth, fame and the love of women” (1916-1917:376). This model appears to us indeed typical of the nineteenth century: above all. because of the inevitable final role played by success. One of the conditions of such success is linked to that historical period, namely to a kind of poetics based on verisimilitude and decency, on the restraint of what is too personal and unreal or too selfish and immoral. I am referring to the negative or privative aesthetic function assigned to form: to that form which, for dreams, Freud had claimed was an unsuppressible part of signification; the word ‘dream’ can only be used for the manifest form and not

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for its latent contents (1916-1917: 177, 182-183). In the literary work, however, instead of adding something to signification, form, like dream-censorship, seems rather to subtract from communication something which is socially, and therefore aesthetically, unacceptable. It is like the price that must be paid for the privilege of poets, who “cannot reproduce the stuff of reality unchanged, but must isolate portions of it, remove disturbing associations, tone down the whole and fill in what is missing” (191Oc:165). In Beyond the Pleasure Principle. the ancient problem of how it is possible to enjoy tragedy is neither the cause nor the object of second thoughts for Freud: it is simply re-proposed, remaining on this side of the principle of pleasure itself (1920:17). It had. moreover, already been noted many years before that “the sexually exciting effect of many emotions which are in themselves unpleasurable” was favoured by the fact that they occurred “in an imaginary world, in a book or in a play” (1905a:203-204).

6. The psychoanalysis

of the character as a real person

“So far we have treated Rebecca West as if she were a living person and not a creation of Ibsen’s imagination” (1916:329). Only the poetics of the great realism of nineteenth-century narrative prose could allow Freud to make such an assumption: that poetics’ claims imply that verisimilitude is not the prerogative of a single slip or dream, but of a broader semantic entity such as the character. On the other hand, psychoanalysis was born as the interpretation of dreams, that is to say of the hallucinatory satisfaction of one’s desires: and it was based on the possibility of substituting psychic reality for external reality in the unconscious. Thus it was no less predestined to serve as a support to a kind of poetics of the desired, of the imagined, of the unreal; and this is how surrealists will interpret it. Neurosis, like the supernatural and like everything which is presumed to be irrational, appears to be a void of meaning; but the void of meaning reveals itself to be a full reality of pain, as soon as it is recognized that neurosis is its hidden basis. Far from being unable to act, on other occasions Hamlet displays violence both in sudden and in premeditated ways; there is only one action which truly inhibits him: taking that revenge on his uncle, which would be the punishment for a crime which he obscurely feels is his own, the double realisation of his own infantile desires to kill his father and take his mother away from him. Use evecy man after his desert, and who should ‘scape whipping? becomes, in his mouth, a confession of his participation in original Oedipal sin, and, at the same time, of the universality of it (1917:246; 1928:189); the excuse for not taking action (I think especially of the occasion when his uncle is praying, unarmed) becomes a rationalisation of the true reason. Hamlet’s reasons are neither kept secret, nor openly expressed. It is left to

the spectator or the reader to develop and complete them; if he were to stop at the surface of what is said, or if he were told everything, he would not be able to sympathise with characters who are too evil or too ill. In the case of Macbeth, who, in turn. is an example of “those wrecked by success”. the lack of any motivation is such that Freud ends up by abandoning the attempt to fill the void - though not without making textual connections between the curse of childlessness and the regicide/parricide (1916:318-323) and even a hypothesis of complementariness between Macbeth and his wife, through succession and inversion of roles, which goes beyond all reification of the character (3233324). Let me observe here that an idea so rich in promise for interpretation as obscurity or a void of sense in the physiognomy of characters, may run aground in that euphemistic, defensive function which the preceding approach assigns to poetic elaboration. The behaviour of the protagonist of Grudiuu is symptomatic for compromise-formation. In this analysis, we find one of the clearest illustrations, in all Freud’s works, of how opposite psychic tendencies are compelled to share a single semiotic manifestation, of how the return of the repressed chooses the same means as repression itself (1907: 34435. 40, 49, 51-52). Freud dwells on the frequency of double meanings in Gradiuu. and explains this by “the malleable nature of the material of speech”, since the discourses themselves are at the same time symptoms and compromises (83-86). Only, here ambiguity and compromise-formation appear as the objects of psychologically correct literary representation, and not as literarily specific ways of representation; they function inside the character or between characters, and not between the author and the text and the reader. With a similar reservation, the sense of the short essay on The Moses of Michelungelo is discovered to be typical. The minute analysis of the respective positions of the fingers, of the beard and of the Tables of the Law in the statue may seem to be superfluous, and not at all Freudian; but what interpretation does it lead to? To the substitution of the emotional univocality of an imminent outburst of anger, with an internally conflicting situation in which a vigorous counteraction of self-control has just prevailed. Thus the figure becomes a compromise-formation, with “three distinct emotional strata”: while the passion has already been conquered on the face, while it is still evident at the other extremity in the raised foot, “the middle of the figure shows the traces of suppressed movement” (1914a: 230, 233). That is to say. there is a passage from an undivided semiotic manifestation to a split and ambivalent unity: nothing could actually be more Freudian. As regards the smile of Mona Lisa, in the essay on Leonardo, the psychological-biographical origin of “two distinct elements” is explained, and not their textual proximity. “The promise of unbounded tenderness and at the same time sinister menace” express, in a single signified, two successive phases of the old individual story: first, the experience of totalizing maternal love; subsequently, fixation on the mother as a condemnation of homosexuality.

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Leonardo’s ephebic figures “gaze in mysterious triumph, as if they knew of a great achievement of happiness, about which silence must be kept”; a beautiful formulation, but we have returned to the mutual service existing between interpretation and biography, since Leonardo represents “the wishes of the boy, infatuated with his mother, as fulfilled in this blissful union of the male and female natures” (1910a: 108, 115. 117-118). Freud never passed from a psychoanalysis of character, even when it was most legitimate and interesting, to an overall interpretation of a text, so as to involve every other character and every part of the text.

7. Themes and myths as psychoanalytical typical and the particular articulation

motives:

the tension

between

the

The pages about Oedipus and Hamlet in The Interpretation of Dreams are to be found in a section entitled Typical Dreams; and Jocasta herself in the tragedy by Sophocles, as Freud does not fail to quote, reminds her son that: Many a man ere now in dreams hath lain - With her who bare him.. The typicality in question is opposed to the historicity of oneiric materials, to its particularity. The part of a universal symbolism is what remains when the ‘free’, that is to say individual, associations of the dreamer are taken away (1900:241, 350-353; 1916-1917:150-151): the same tension exists for the symptoms (1916-1917: 270-272). However, associations are indispensable for interpretation, as is energetically reaffirmed, against temptations to give way to symbolic interpretations as being the most facile (1916-1917: 1866187). Sometimes it even has the last word. We read that “often enough a symbol has to be interpreted in its proper meaning and not symbolically”; when oneiric activity is in a position to make a choice, it decides for the symbol “which . has individual grounds for its acceptance in addition to the typical ones” (1900: 352-353). It is well known that, faced with this fundamental choice of psychoanalysis, Jung, as opposed to Freud, preferred a symbolism of archetypes. This is static for two reasons: firstly, because it does not account for historical evolution and, secondly, because it is without any internally conflicting articulation which is what, in Freud’s work, is the semiotic-logical dimension. In the fields of literature and art, with very few exceptions, Freud recognised only one myth or theme that recurred through the centuries: that of Oedipus. But it never recurs in exactly the same form: it seems that only a historical evolution - “the secular advance of repression in the emotional life of mankind” (1900: 264) can explain its literary variants. Hence the differences between the involuntary parricide of Oedipus, which was represented “by projecting the hero’s unconscious motive into reality in the form of a compulsion by a destiny which is alien to him”; the sense of guilt reflected in Hamlet through another person who was responsible for it and who was in vain detested; and the intricate

sharing of passional. intellectual and factual responsibilities between three of the four Karamazow brothers (1928: 188189). Historical evolution is in turn made possible by an internally conflictin, 0 articulation; this casts. on the dramatic reality of the Oedipus complex, a model which is very close to logical abstraction. It was possible to conceive of substituting. in the place of the concrete affective relationships of the child with his parents, relationships that are ideally expressed by the auxiliary verbs to he and to hate. In addition, Freud makes a distinction - or even a contrast - between. on the one hand. the “tragic effect” or “secret sense and content of the legend” and. on the other. what he calls the moral - and we might call the ideology ~ of tragedy. In The Ut~cunn~, the array of uncanny themes ~ animation of the inanimate, doubles or second self, obsessive repetitions, wishes that come true. the evil eye, the return of the dead, burial alive ~ is not taken directly from literature. But afterwards it is re-considered in its relationship with literature. It is literary fiction which, Freud believes, prevalently contains the return of the surmounted ~ an approach which will be considered separately (section 9). He instinctively apprehends that the uncanny effect of some texts is inversely proportional to the degree to which the supernatural has been taken up by the code of the literary genre; and that it is dependent on the narrative viewpoint or the identification that favours or excludes a particular character, and on the greater or lesser degree of knowledge of the reader, as well as on the seriousness of the tone selected (1919:249-252: also cf. 1907:17). Attention to formal characteristics is, on the contrary, exactly what The Theme of the Three Caskets lacks. What is under discussion here is not the mythical derivation of the triad of women and the choice between them. to be found in two Shakespearian scenes: the marriage competition in The Merchant of Venice and the competition for love of their father in King Leur. It is that Freud proceeds as if the conversion of a myth into a text were not mediated by any specific literary code; and thus a reconversion into the myth could only deepen the reading of the text, without forcing it. Of course, this reconversion is not immediate, inasmuch as it passes through logicaL(anti-)logical rules of the unconscious such as the interchangeability of opposites. But here a rule like this only serves to compare various textual situations and mythical versions: components which are not homogeneous on planes which are badly defined (1913a:291-301). Freud’s most uncertain experiment proves to be the closest, because of the unconvincing mobility of the mythical data, to Jung’s archetypal immobility.

8. Manifest unreal content and latent primary contents The distinction between is a semiotic conception

the manifest content and the latent content of a dream which is doubtless incompatible with the idea of the

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ineffable, untranslatable - nowadays: intransitive - qualities of poetry. Freud himself, being aware that poetry is not a dream, pays a very indirect kind of homage to this idea: he tends to reserve an interpretation for those cases where, in the letter of a text, it seems to him that a void of sense is created. This is the same case as the lack of motivation in the behaviour of a character, mentioned above (section 6) as well as that of contents of a supernatural kind in quotations in verse (section 2). When latent contents should be found among the few fixed primary symbols - phallus and castration, father and mother, prenatal state and birth, life and death, food and excrement - I am, for my part, of the opinion that their perpetual deciphering presents the properties of tautology: never being mistaken and not contributing any information. The fact is, however, that sometimes these primary contents actually are in the text; even if they are not ostentatiously displayed on the surface of the text, they are there, at least, covered by a symbolic layer, which only masks in order to be unmasked. Here we come face to face with the ‘supernatural’: within the unreality of those mysterious or metaphysical contents which are the only ones that the letter of the text mentions, we will find hidden contents of an experience that is physical and infantile, nothin g more than natural (Orlando 1978:134-135). Indeed, only contents of the latter type can be hidden within that unreality of the former type of contents. Far from breaking the text up into two layers, this distinction means that only a certain latent substance may be properly conceived for the manifest content; and that the latent content literally relies only on a certain form to manifest itself. In taking the supernatural back to the infantile. the illuministic vocation of psychoanalysis returns to the beginnings of a very early illuminism, which was still engaged in an ontological demystification of the supernatural. Speaking about condensation in dreams, Freud is spontaneously in agreement with passages of Galilei and above all of Descartes, when he makes the comparison with “the centaurs . . . and the fabulous beasts which appear in ancient mythology”: and he commnets: “The ‘creative’ imagination, indeed, is quite incapable of inventing anything; it can only combine components that are strange to one another” (1916-1917:172). Knowing why we like to accept (hence, believe) the existence of the devil in any fictive situation for example, is something completely different from accepting or not accepting it in a real situation. Acceptance in fiction cannot be explained at all by itself; nor can it be explained by referring to sources or precedents which are also fictive - that is to say, by entering into that vicious circle thanks to which the literary code is sufficient to explain the whole of a single work. Even the interpretations which are psychoanalytically most foreseeable will be so much the less obvious and superfluous, the more fantastic or irrational or regressive the context is which they try to motivate. Thus Freud refers the figure of The Sand-Man, in the

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short story by Hoffmann, to an extremely menacing father. and the fear of having one’s eyes pulled out to a terror of castration; in this context, he is not wrong to judge the relative ideas as “arbitrary and meaningless” outside that interpretation, and “intelligible” on the basis of it. And above all he is not wrong to raise, repeatedly, with reference to precise textual contingencies, that question which it is never wrong to ask: “Why . .?” (1919:230-233). The most that one may object’ is that it is the arbitrary and senseless nature of certain ideas which represents a part of the reason why; if it is true. as we shall see Freud himself assuring elsewhere (section lo), that there is a pleasure in regression itself, which is linked with logical-(anti-)logical forms. But the guiding thread and the possible sense of what appears to be arbitrary and senseless also belong to the text. even if it is only in the form of lacunas.

9. From the ‘uncanny’ to literature: the return of the surmounted If it is typical of psychoanalysis to work towards the nucleus or the centre. starting from the offscourings or from the periphery. then the generalisation that I propose as a comment on the essay will be no surprise. The sensation or emotion of the ‘uncanny’ is soon identified by Freud with “that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar” (1919:220), but which has not been familiar anymore for almost as long, for, as we learn later, it is “something repressed which recurs “. At the point where this definition is presented in terms of the return of the repressed, Freud has already recognised in most examples the persistence of archaic or infantile beliefs which may be summed up in the “old, animistic conception of the universe”. narcissistic and magical. Most of all in our relationship with death. “our thoughts and feelings” have barely changed since primordial times, but remained under a “thin disguise”; almost all of us “still think as savages do”. Then where is the repression here, which is necessary for the re-emergence of the uncanny? Freud’s answer does not at all fit in well with a strict definition of repression: “all supposedly educated people have ceased to believe officially that the dead can become visible as spirits” (241-242). Far from contrasting an unconscious as repressed with consciousness, we must contrast, in full consciousness, official beliefs with beliefs that are only rationally restrained; which, perhaps, we are only officially ashamed of. Freud’s reconsideration of his terminology arrives a few pages later: in the case of a return of the repressed which proceeds not from “infantile complexes” but from infantile beliefs. the definition “no doubt extends the term ‘repression’ beyond its legitimate meaning”. Neither during individual evolution from childhood to adulthood, nor during social evolution from magic to a scientific civilisation have certain beliefs ever been forgotten, much less repressed. They have, rather. been ‘surmounted’: more or less completely, so as to find regularly appearances of confirmation (248-249).

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Even if he does not actually coin the expression, Freud conceptually and virtually authorises the use here of an analogical expression such as the return of the surmounted; which means that he treats certain contents, whether or not typical of the unconscious, as variants, related to a model which is without doubt typical of the unconscious, and which is treated as a constant. Whether it is improperly called something repressed, or generically something restrained, or specifically something surmounted - what 1 would like to emphasise is simply the constancy of a model which is a priori empty. Freud created it in order to regularly fill a part of it with unconscious contents: but he was induced to transfer it from cases of psychic conflict leading to repression to cases which have nothing in common with repression except that model. And for this reason he was induced to give as explicit an account as possible of the discussion which is implicit in all his psychoanalysis, of the boundaries between an affective zone and an intellectual one. The fact is that the logic of the so-called unconscious will not let itself be reduced to the same opposition between unconscious and consciousness, and with it into the ambit of repression; nor, above all, does it allow itself to be excluded from those intellectual procedures which it is, by its nature, associated with, albeit in its own particular way. A short-lived terminological hesitation betrays a fundamental indecision of far-reaching importance. Between two conceptions: either there is only one rationality, the western scientific one Freud was guided by, and which he made capable of taking as its object the irrational; or there is more than one rationality, and then the only one which can explain another. which can recognise reasons in an irrationality, is the one which is the more advanced. It is not by chance, in the example in question of involuntary extrapolation of the model - from repression to something else -, that this something else is the rational surmounting of outdated thought. In other words, the same process as illuminism; and the Freudian definition of the uncanny presupposes the permanent lability of this surmounting, the reversibility which is hidden at the heart of the process of illuminism; that is to say, the Freudian conception of civilisation (19161917:22223). But a second necessary premise may also be extended to the whole field of art. What is true for the survival of outdated thought will be true for the subsequent illuministic or critical moment. It is necessary to oppose a prejudice of far-away, and yet at the same time near, romantic origin (strengthened nowadays by the fortune of Nietzsche); and it is necessary to realize that the logic which has rationalised the world - from the period of what was strictly defined as illuminism onwards - has, ever since this period, been indispensable for the existence of literature. A logic is negatively indispensable in the same way as an (anti-)logic is positively so, though no one would have defined the latter in these terms before Freud and Matte Blanco, since it is so much easier to speak of the irrational, or feeling, or fantasy, or intuition. If Heine’s story,

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quoted by Freud (1919:236), of the repudiated Gods who change into demons and ghosts is exemplary for the uncanny, there are only gradations that arrive up to the romantic moment of a surmounted which returns, accepted with nostalgia - instead of being suffered with horror. It is possible to recognise in the ‘post-illuministic’ situation the condition, if not the theme par excellence, of a Freudian study of all romantic bourgeois literature; even more so than in the themes of The Romantic Agony (Praz 1970). Freud paid attention to Ibsen’s Rosmersholm, and Rebekka West’s incest (1916:324-30). But if he had returned to it in his essay on the uncanny, the ambivalence of Rebekka when facing the mortal superstition of the “white horse” - against a background of a violent contrast between conservatism and free thought - could have guided him from the psychoanalysis of the character towards an overall interpretation of the drama (not to mention the intellectual Ivan Karamazow and his devil).

10. From jokes to literature: ludic regression and prohibited tendencies On the one hand, this book is the only case where the semiotic manifestations of the unconscious are found in an act of conscious, voluntary, socially institutionalized verbal communication. On the other hand, Freud never dared to propose a complete correspondence between the language of literature and art, and the unconscious and its semiotic manifestation, but, rather, examined it, from the biographical (section 4) or psychological (sections 3, 5, 6, 7) point of view. It is the approach - which is not at all biographical, and only impersonally psychological - that distinguishes his book about jokes from writings about literature and art; it is also linked with works about non-communicative languages by the power of its semiological and logical-(anti-)logical elaborations. Freud uses reduction in order to establish that the character of a joke is irreparably lost in every new formulation: in the case of ‘verbal’ jokes, which are based on the signifier itself, this happens as soon as the ‘wording’ is altered; only when a certain limit of alteration is passed, that is when ‘the train of thought’ is changed, in the case of ‘conceptual’ jokes which play on just this (1905b:16-17, 52). What Freud calls ‘technique’ and analyses with great precision and perspicacity, is in fact the sum total of the characteristics which in a reduction are suppressed every time - together with the character of the joke itself. But the distance between the qualified and unalterable form and the reduction which disqualifies it with its alterations, is not a space occupied by the ineffable, but is, on the contrary, the most fertile for analysis. It is the ancient movement of rhetoric which Freud spontaneously rediscovers, after almost a century of obsolescence, thus anticipating the recent neorhetoric - whose subtle progress has made it possible to reconsider the conclusion he had reached using instruments that were partly traditional and

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partly improvised (Todorov 1977). But our interest in this convergence would be no more than historical if Freud did not’renew from its roots what he had re-discovered, surpassing in advance what he anticipated. This same process of reduction - which we could connect with the semiotic concept of ‘content-purport’ (Orlando 1978:146-157) - provides the premise for two different distinctions between jokes. Freud specifies that these do not coincide, just as neither of the two coincides with the distinction between verbal and conceptual jokes. And the fact that there are two distinctions which do not coincide, although both of them set up a hypothesis of self-sufficiency of the form against something else, is a happy deviation compared with the usual aesthetisizing results of the hypothesis. One distinction is between “trivial” and “profound” jokes - that is, literally, jokes that are “with” or “without valid content” (1905b:92-94). The value in question we give to the thought contained in the joke, after laying it bare by reduction; thus, it cannot be identified with the value of the joke as such, that is, including its techniques. Extending this thought to the whole of literature, we obtain the acknowledgement that the judgement on the thought contained in a text is independent of the formal, or aesthetic, or literary judgement on the same text. Independent, and not therefore secondary; recognising this is the first step in overcoming the incompatibility of the two judgements, which would produce either bad taste or a bad ideological conscience if a conciliating schizophrenia were not normal in practice. And it is also the first step, perhaps, towards the possibility of understanding, in an empirical, though elastic and hazy way, when and why one begins to speak of literature, when and why one stops doing so (Orlando 1978:161-175). Yet, the other distinction indirectly provides a more decisive answer to the eternal question what is literature. ? This is the one between “innocent” and “tendentious” jokes (1905b:90-91). Its theoretical importance is confirmed by the reconsideration that it is subject to throughout to book. In the chapter on tendencies, these appear as “primary possibilities of enjoyment, which have now, however, been repudiated by the censorship in us”, for which certain jokes offer “a means of undoing the renunciation and retrieving what was lost” (101). Freud subdivides them into “hostile” and “obscene” tendencies, depending on whether they strike at the expense of social restraint in the field of sexuality or aggressiveness (97). Aggressiveness, however, does not necessarily pick on individuals as its direct target: Freud demonstrates (103-115) that the tendentious joke is inclined to attack people in positions of authority, and therefore is apt to become critical or rebellious towards authority itself. The attack may also be aimed at “institutions, people in their capacity as vehicles of institutions, dogmas of morality of religion, views of life which enjoy so much respect that objections to them can only be made under the mask of a joke and indeed of a joke concealed by its facade”. Thus, there arises the category of “cynical”

jokes, whose protagonists’ most secret thought is that they “would like to say seriously ‘the man is right’, but, owing to an opposing contradiction. does not venture to declare the man right except on a single point. on which it can easily be shown that he is wrong”. One rarely finds Freud anywhere else so audacious and passionate in his denunciation of an established order. But 1 shall also emphasize the logical model that allows for the simultaneous presence of a wrong and a right. in such a compromise that the right tends to be covered by the wrong. The nature of harmless jokes may be guessed, in contrast to that of tendentious ones: those in which the uncovering of the ways of thinking (or of dealing with words) of the unconscious allows us to enjoy a moment of licence in itself, without combining them or endowing them with sexual or aggressive tendencies. Techniques without tendencies: just pure form? Techniques appeared to be necessary, but not sufficient for the existence of the joke (2X. 41-42, 73-74. 79-80). Later. Freud ends up by recognising as a separate tendency. in the broad sense, that which we may call irrational or anti-logical and is no less deeply rooted than the others in the unconscious and in infancy (1322133). Freud says that the pleasure of the witty “short circuit” seems “to be the greater the more alien the two circles of ideas that are brought together by the same word - the farther apart they are” (120). This can be compared to the Munifrsto of surreulism: among various images, “the most powerful is that which appears to be arbitrary in the highest degree”; compare all the rest of the famous sentence (Breton 1962:53-54). Freud says that “children. who, as we know, are in the habit of still treating words as things, tend to expect words that are the same or similar to have the same meaning behind them” (1905b:119-120). While Jakobson (1973:216) writes: “This tendency to infer a connection of the meanings from a likeness of the sounds. is a distinctive feature of the poetic function of language”. A primary, concrete insubordination, one might say, against Saussure ~ against the abstract rational truth of the arbitrary nature of the sign. Compare certain poetic metaphors which are not only surrealistic: they connect extremely different orders of ideas with a deep pertinence. on the basis of similarities which are rationally no less accidental than homophony; and thus they satisfy an infantile expectancy, which is unceasingly prolonged in the unconscious. For Freud. the psychogenesis both of plays on words and of plays on thoughts ~ the two sources for the techniques of the joke - is none other than the most dramatic postulate of its paradoxical rationalism. That is, first of all. that the human conquest of reason and of the sense of reality implies a heavy cost in restraint, and then it involves a permanent risk of the return of the restrained. A language which is communicative and at the same time a tributary of the unconscious may or may not be tendentious in its purport, but it cannot help being so in its form. But like those jokes which are greeted with the most irresistible laughter to crown their success (1905b:96), great literature is probably always doubly tenden-

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tious. On discovering a return of the restrained in the decisive element of the form, Freud, with a stroke of genius, ensures a solidarity with the other return of the restrained, the tendentiousness in its narrow sense - which is optional depending on whether or not certain contents appear.

11. Compromise-formation

as a semiotic manifestation

In one of the first lessons of the Introductoty Lectures we read: “It is important to begin in good time to reckon with the fact that mental life is the arena and battle-ground for mutually opposing purposes or, to put it non-dynamically, that it consists of contradictions and pairs of contraries” (1916-17:76-77; italics mine). Repression is merely a result - even though for the new science it is the most radical, the most exemplary and the most important to study - of a chronic conflict: that which begins again for each individual from the moment he enters human civilisation as a child, and which is a conflict that is chronically identical to civilisation (22-23). We have already seen briefly (sections 9, 10) that all this leads to generalisations where a theory of literature takes its place. The above-mentioned quotation continues: “Proof of the existence of a particular purpose is no argument against the existence of an opposite one; there is room for both. It is only a question of the attitude of these contraries to each other, and of what effects are produced by the one and by the other”. This last sentence may be read as if it assigned to a theory of literature some of its tasks; a theory which has incorporated the model of compromise-formation not only for its formal tensions, but also for the reciprocal position and the respective effects of contrary contents. We use compromise-formation to define a semiotic manifestation - which is linguistic in the broad sense - that makes room by itself, simultaneously, for two contrasting psychic forces that have become contrasting signifieds. According to Freud, all the semiotic manifestations of the unconscious are compromise-formations: dreams, symptoms, slips and jokes. Slips “constitute a half-success and a half-failure for each of the two intentions” (1916-17:66). Symptoms (to which the most precocious relative qualifications can be traced back: 1896:170; 1950:223-229) “arise from the mutual interference between two opposing currents; they represent not only the repressed but also the repressing force which had a share in their origin” (1916-17:301). A little later, Freud shifts the attention from the energetic to the semantic contrast, and defines the symptom as “an ingeniously chosen piece of ambiguity with two meanings in complete mutual contradiction” (358-360). This distinguishes a literary work, even the most decisively committed in ideological terms, from a work of pure and simple ideology. Only an ideological discourse can limit itself to a rational, exclusive choice between two intentions or two opposing currents or two forces, and therefore between two meanings. A literary discourse tends to

leave enough space for the intention that is in the wrong as well, to achieve almost hal’u success; and thus a little more than hulfcr fuilure is inflicted on it. It is unusual for a literary discourse not to allow the enemy to speak: even if it is only in a temporary. tendentious. indirect and ambiguous manner. And since the discourse will nevertheless remain a single one, it will have to become entirely ambiguous in one way or another. We have seen (section 6) in the study of Gradim. that an exemplary discussion of the symptomatic compromise-formation does not neglect the ambiguity of discourses or the flexibility of words. In the Antithetid Mewing of Primal Wordy, the credit Freud gives to the etymological speculations of the glottologist Abel - which is undeserved according to a linguist like E. Benveniste - cannot be explained only by the mirage of man’s beginnings, which is rightly criticised by Benveniste (1966:79-84): but also by the flattery of a linguistic confirmation for “the dream-work’s singular tendency to disregard negation and to employ the same means of representation for expressing contraries” (Freud 1910b:155). Fifteen years later, Freud himself was to provide a linguistic confirmation whose authenticity was quite different and which was not primordial but visible every day, namely in his short but extremely dense article on Negution. To be more precise. on that kind of negation - exemplified in a direct manner in the field of therapy ~ which affirms by denying, confesses by forestalling, gives away a secret by defending it: “You ask who this person in the dream can be. It’s not my mother”. A negation like this “is a way of taking cognizance of what is repressed; indeed, it is already a lifting of the repression, though not, of course, an acceptance of what is repressed” (1925a:235-236). It was, again, Benveniste who observed that the model is implied by language itself, by the grammatical construction in question: “The property of linguistic negation is that it cannot annul but what is expressed, that it must explicitly state in order to suppress. that a judgment of non-existence has also necessarily the formal status of a judgment of existence. So negation is at first admission” (Benveniste 1966:84). On the one hand, then, what we may call the Freudian negation is firmly anchored in the verbal dimension: it occupies the place of a rhetorical figure, as has been recognised by the six authors of Rhktorique g&&de (Groupe p 1970: 140- 142). On the other hand, it only reflects. in a limited number of words, a model whose proportions may be extended indefinitely, which may ultimately be considered as identical to that of compromise-formation. In this same well-defined verbal field, not only rhetorical falsifications such as irony, antiphrasis, euphemism, litotes, preterition or reticence - can be used in order to say things without saying them. or not to say things while saying them; but it is also possible, when the opportunity arises, to use the distortion of the signifier of a word, the twisting of a syntactic structure, the disguise of a signified in a metaphor. It becomes so much the more difficult to distinguish between Freudian negation and compromise-formation, the more

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one passes from microfigures expressed in a limited number of words to those macrofigures, extended or scattered over a whole text, which a rhetoric inspired by Freud ought to teach us to perceive better (Orlando 1982:38-43. 128-34; 1978:163-66). At the end, we no longer look on the totality of the text as being composed of successive parts, but as being founded on the single premise of literary fiction: that which suspends the examination of reality, and neutralises the opposition between true and false. At this point it does not matter which of the two descriptions we choose. In terms of Freudian negation, we will only have to relate to the institution of art Freud’s comparison between the psychic realm of fantasy and parks for the protection of nature: reserves created “where the requirements ,f agriculture, communications and industry threaten to bring about changes in the original face of the earth which will quickly make it unrecognizable”. It should be remembered what was said (section 9) about art or literature and illuminism or rationalisation of the world. In the institutional park of art, there is. according to this comparison. room both for ludic regression and for prohibited tendencies: “Everything, including what is useless and even what is noxious, can grow and proliferate there as it pleases” (1916-17:372; cf. 1925b:64-65).

References Benveniste, E. 1966. ‘Remarques sur la fonction du Iangage dans la decouverte freudienne’. In: E. Benveniste, Problkmes de linguistique gCnCrale. Paris: Gallimard. Breton, A. 1962. Manifestes du surrealisme. Paris: Pauvert. Freud. S. 1896. Further remarks on the neuro-psychosis of defence. In: S.E. III. 162-185. Freud, S. 1900. The interpretation of dreams. In: S.E. IV and V. Freud. S. 1901. The psychopathology of everyday life. In: S.E. VI. Freud, S. 1905a. Three essays on the theory of sexuality. In: S.E. VII, 130-243. Freud, S. 1905b. Jokes and their relation to the unconscious. In: SE. VIII. Freud, S. 1907. Delusions and dreams in Jensen’s ‘Gradiva’. In: SE. IX, 7-95. Freud, S. 1908. Creative writers and day-dreaming. In: SE. IX, 143-153. Freud, S. 1909. Analysis of a phobia in a five-year-old boy. In: S.E. X, 5-149. Freud, S. 1910a. Leonardo da Vinci and a memory of his childhood. In: S.E. XI. 63-137. Freud, S. 1910b. The antithetical meaning of primal words. In: SE. XI, 155-161. Freud, S. 1910~. A special type of choice of object may by men. In: S.E. XI, 165-175. Freud, S. 1911. Psycho-analytic notes on an autobiographical account of a case of paranoia (Dementia paranoides). In: SE. XII, 9-82. Freud, S. 1913a. The theme of the three caskets. In: S.E. XII, 291-301. Freud. S. 1913b. Totem and taboo. In: S.E. XIII, xiii-161. Freud, S. 1914a. The Moses of Michelangelo. In: S.E. XIII. 211-238. Freud, S. 1914b. On narcissim: An introduction. In: S.E. XIV, 73-102. Freud, S. 1915. The unconscious. In: S.E. XIV, 166-204. Freud, S. 1916. Some character-types met with in psycho-analytic work. In: S.E. XIV, 311-333. Freud, S. 1916-17. Introductory lectures on psycho-analysis. In: S.E. XV and XVI. Freud, S. 1917. Mourning and melancholia. In: SE. XIV, 243-258. Freud, S. 1919. The ‘uncanny’. In: SE. XVII, 219-256.

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Freud. S. 1920. Beyond the pleasure principle. In: SE. XVIII, 7-64. Freud, S. 1925a. Negation. In: S.E. XIX, 235-239. Freud, S. 1925b. An autobiographical study. In: S.E. XX: 7-74. Freud, S. 1928. Dostoevsky and parricide. In: SE. XXI, 177-194. Freud, S. 1930. The Goethe prize. In: S.E. XXI, 207-212. Freud. S. 1933. New introductory lectures on psycho-analysis. In: S.E. XXII, 5-182. Freud, S. 1950. Extracts from the Fliess papers. In: S.E. 1. 173-280. Groupe p. 1970. RhCtorique g&Crale. Paris: Larousse. Jakobson, R. 1973. Questions de poetique. Paris: Seuil. Marx, K. 1887. Capital. 1. Swan Sonnenschein: Lowrey. Matte Blanco. I. 1975. The unconscious as infinite sets. An essay in b&logic. London: _Duckworth. Orlando, F. 1978. Toward a Freudian theory of literature. With an analysis of Racine’s ‘Phedre’. Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Orlando. F. 1982. Illuminismo e retorica freudiana. Torino: Einaudi. Praz. M. 1970. The romantic agony. Oxford: Oxford University Press Todorov, T. 1977. ThCories du symbole. Paris: Seuil. Francesco Orlando was born in Palermo in 1934. From 1953 to 1957 friend and pupil of Tomasi dl Lampedusa. the author of The Leopard. Between 1962 and 1982. teacher of French Literature first at the Scuola Normale of Pisa, then at the Universities of Piss, Naples and Venice; since 1982 in Plsa again. Of his four books which aim at criticising literary psychoanalysis and at developing Freudian literary semiotics (published by Einaudi in 1971, 1973, 1979 and 1982), the first two have been translated into English and issued together as: Towards a Freudian Theq of L~reruture. Wlrh un Analysis of Racme’s ‘Phtidre’.