Forms of Literary Pleasure

In The Writer's Voice, Al Alvarez makes the following complaint:

You may read the works of later psychoanalysts, like Melanie Klein and Wilfred Bion, for their ideas, but you read them with gritted teeth because they handle language so clumsily. Or rather, they handle it with distaste, like scientists on the far side of the divide between the two cultures, for whom language is a necessary but inadequate medium, not worthy of their attention, the straw from which they are grudgingly forced to make their bricks.¹

Compare this with an observation by Adam Phillips, a 'later' psychoanalyst who happens also to be widely regarded as 'one of the finest prose stylists at work in the language':²

These days, when we are not being told that psycho analysis is or is not a science, we are, perhaps unsurprisingly, being told that it is an art . . . When Freud suggested that his studies in hysteria seemed rather more like short stories, or was writing to Wilhelm Fliess about the inspiration he found in Sophocles or Shakespeare, he was acknowledging rig ht at the beginning of what would become psychoanalysis, something like a divided duty, a splitting of affiliations. The psychoanalytic theory he found himself writing was science that sometimes sounded like literature.³

My point is not that Alvarez's grievance is too sweeping. That Phillips writes well – even this short passage testifies to the delicate poise of his prose – might equally be taken as the exception that proves the rule about the clumsily cast sentences of 'later psychoanalysts'. What is instructive in comparing these excerpts is the different interpretation each places on the 'divided duty', the 'splitting of affiliations' 'between the two cultures'. For Alvarez, the more scientific in exposition, the worse; for Phillips, it is a matter of appropriateness, of writing in a form true to what psycho analysis is.

Alvarez presumes that, in the works to which he refers, 'ideas' are separable from their mode of presentation. As an old-fashioned New Critic, the rest of his book makes clear that he does not believe this to be the case for literary writing. Phillip simplies that this distinction might be naive: that psychoanalysis might be an art too. His own writing consistently attests to this possibility, not for the literary contexts in which he frequently places his arguments, nor even for the felicity of his phrasing, but in the extent to which that phrasing explores suggestions that resist para-phrase. In this sense, though reading him sometimes feels like being seduced, his facility with language amounts to more than sophistry ; one is not beguiled into believing something untrue, but pleasurably persuaded into thinking in original, often surprising ways.

Angela Leighton's On Form inhabits a space between two disciplines that are similarly, conspicuously divided in their duty, split in their affiliations between the two cultures. Her study of what 'form' is, why it might matter for literature in general and for poetry in particular, and why the word continues to trouble our accounts of art, engages both philosophical aesthetics and literary criticism. For these disciplines, the predicament is indeed even more acute than that described for psychoanalysis, in that language proves to be a necessary but also inadequate medium for exposition, while it is also itself an inescapable object of interest. Whereas, Alvarez claims, later psychoanalysts see language as 'not worthy of their attention', philosophers and critics face the opposite problem. Heightened awareness of the possibilities that attend language use threatens to prove so consuming as to make straight forward argumentation impossible.

Wittgenstein contends that 'philosophy ought really to be written only as a form of poetry',⁴ and his own work certainly expresses itself more by parataxis than by syllogism.⁵ Philosophy as a form of poetry is untypical, however, even within the sub discipline of aesthetics where one might expect the division, the split, if anything to have favoured the aesthetical. Like Victorian colonists...