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Literary Analysis and the Critique of Culture
- Minnesota Review
- Duke University Press
- Number 8, Spring 1977 (New Series)
- pp. 157-160
- Review
- Additional Information
REVIEWS 157 LITERARY ANALYSIS AND THE CRITIQUE OF CULTURE review of E. H. Miller, Melville. New York: Brazilier, 1975. 382 pp. $15. "The son may have triumphed in the epilogue to Moby Dick, but life rarely conFirms fantasy." E.H. Miller, ???7/. "This psychology has no other objective standards of value than the prevailing ones: health, maturity, achievement are taken as they are defined by the given society." H. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization That a work of art is neither fully reflective of the socio-economic conditions of the particular historical period in which it was created, nor fully autonomous, has been a recurrent theme in neo-Marxist analysis of culture. An entire body of work (which in the field of literary analysis includes the writings of Theodor Adomo, Lucien Goldmann , Jean-Paul Sartre, and Walter Benjamin) has been directed in an effort to rewrite the traditional Marxist paradigm of a strict dichotomy between substructure and superstructure which had fixed the analytic status of a cultural creation as a component of the superstructure, formed as a result of the historical exigencies of the given means of production of a particular society. So too, the effort to create a theory of culture that strives to understand the nonidentity (Adomo) of art and an eternalized dichotomy of substructure and superstructure has also pointed to the inadequacy of a theory that reduces art to the reflection of the particular individual personality structure of the artist. Though the neo-Marxist tradition has attempted to show the necessity of understanding the experience of the individual, particularly by making apparent the internalization of societal demands within the very structure of the individual psyche, it has also pointed to the dangers of a reductionistic psychology that claims to isolate and define a "self," and refuses to recognize the connections between social and psychological categories-connections between the personality and the particular social world within which it exists. Perhaps the general question that these considerations raise can be asked in this way: how can one understand the status of a piece of literature by reducing it neither to an ideological reflex of class interests, nor to a manifestation of the unconscious conflicts of an individual psyche? Can one describe a social totality that fully expresses the contingency of myriad aspects of the life/world acting upon one another which loses neither the particularity of the work nor of the author? The example of a recent biography of Herman Melville by Edwin H. Miller (Melville, Brazilier, 1975) could be helpful in beginning to think about this problem. Miller's explicit interest is with Melville, the man. His intricate and valuable analyses of novels, correspondence, and poems are all intended to make public the life of a man who was drawn to an ultimate privacy. "This man of silences revealed his longings, his depressions, his hunger, his excitement, in the pages of his books." (p. 16) Miller's project is the task of the biographer-to piece together various clues to a life and show them to ultimately constitute a pattern that points to the presence of an individual self. Yet, what makes Miller's particular project instructive is that "beneath" his biography lies an un-articulated theory of the artist, the work of art, and their relationship to the social world. It is the intent of this essay to thematize this set of theoretical presuppositions which inform Miller's analysis. The central focus of Miller's analysis is Melville's experience within his family. It is as a part of this limited social universe of mother, father, and older brother that Miller has found the key to the pattern that forms young Herman and constitutes the basic foundation of his future life experience. Although it sometimes seems that he deals only rarely and then indirectly 158 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW with the human cosmos-the family with its relationships and interactionsactually the family and the child in relationship to his parents occupy a central place in his books through a unifying Biblical myth. (p. 54) The human dynamic found within the story of Abraham, Sarah, Hagar, Ishmael, and Isaac, parallels the pattern of interaction within the Allen Melvill family and more specifically serves Herman as a myth within which to define his own experience as the fatherless wanderer in the wilderness. "Call Me Ishmael" becomes the outcry of an orphan: abandoned by a bankrupt father who dies when Herman is twelve, attached to a "tyrannical" mother who is both "emasculating" and "worthy of love" (p. 56), and second to a brother who is described by their father as "rather more than a genius." (p. 90) It is Herman's experience of this family nexus which can be traced in all of its intricacies from his first published work, "Fragments From A Writing Desk," (which appeared in The Democratic Press and Lansingburgh Advertiser on May 4 and 18, 1839), to his last, Billy Budd, Sailor (finished in 1891). The re-establishment of the son's relationship with the father, or friendship, was Melville's subject matter. The youths are fatherless and searching for the lost male model. Arrested in adolescence, the young men in story after story struggle towards man's estate, repeating the same struggles, fumbling and failing to complete the same rite of passage except in arbitrary conclusions imposed upon the text. They remain orphans, (p. 1 17) The elucidation of this biblical family myth thus serves a dual function. Explicitly , it allows us the possibility of reconstructing Melville's basic identity. It also implicitly defines the relationship between the artist and his text. For Miller, the work of art is the objectification of psychological projections, formed of the deepest emotional conflicts of the author. Melville's texts re-state his mythic family pattern in various "mystified" forms ("His subject matter would not change, only the treatment . . . .") (p. 1 1 7) The task of the literary analyst is to see through the author's self-concealment and to unveil the hidden and "troubling emotional materials," which together form the author's identity (p. 46); thus, Miller describes Melville's review of Hawthorne's Mosses From An Old Manse, "where amid hyperbole and extravagance emerge patterns of personal needs." (p. 44) "That there is not a definable Melvillean style only points up the fact that Melville's is an elusive personality." (p. 46) Yet, this relationship between the identity of a self and its objectifications is not granted to "Everyman." The connection between text and personality flows from the privileged status of the artist. It is he who has the "opportunity. . . to reconstitute his cosmos and to repair his damaged self-image." (p. 52) The text, then, not only reflects the basic identity of its author, but takes on the status of wish-fulfillment -the fantasy of a self that has transcended the conflicts which deny the self its desires and needs. The artist "reconstitutes his cosmos, peoples it to suit his purposes and pleasures, and restores himself to the central position all too briefly held in his earliest years before the unwelcome appearance of additional rivals in the form of brothers and sisters." (p. 54) FOr Miller, just as Ahab "restores an egocentric infantile world" through his monomaniacal search for Moby Dick, the artistic genius relives the infantile "perversity " of perfect pleasure through his creation, (p. 195) Melville is able to create a text which satisfies his unconscious need to deny the harsh reality of the rejected soni What lies beneath Miller's presuppositions as to the definition of the artist and the meaning of his creation is a false distinction between fantasy and reality-between inner and outer-between self and world. If the privilege of artistic genius resides in its success in transforming reality into fantasy, the content of art as well as of fantasy loses all objective reference. Not only is the meaning of a work of art not exhausted by its identification with the socio-economic conditions of its historical epoch (an understanding which could offer a critique of a socio-economic reductionism), but any significant relationship between the text and the "true" social reality is denied. The grime and stench, the almostunendurable monotony and the rigors of battling nature's caprices Melville never made as much of as Dana and others who lacked his genius but surpassed him in faithfulness to dull, harsh, reality, (p. Ill) REVIEWS 159 Less of a "genius" (that is, less of a "true artist") would be more "faithful" to "reality ." Melville's fictional world is so insistently peopled with characters either scarred and dismembered or fearful of mutilation that it is reasonable to suggest that he was not reflecting reality so much as his own hurt inner landscape, (p. 1 67) Art-as-projection of the unreality of a neurotic self denies both the reality of art (its reference to a real world) and the reality of the neurotic's dream (its reference to "real" conflicts in reality). What is significant is that Miller's unthematized understandings of "art" and "self are systematically connected by their reliance upon a particular definition of "reality." The meaning of this connection and the choice of this particular "reality" can become clearer in the recognition of the common theoretical foundations of Miller's analysis and a neo-Freudian ego-psychology which shifted the focus of psychoanalysis from the explication of psychic structures to the elucidation of the development of both normal and abnormal personality structures (character structures). As described earlier, the family serves Miller with the site-of-origin of Melville's deepest emotional conflicts. His identity was molded by his particular response to his first twelve years within the Allan Melvill family. In Miller's application, Freud's psychoanalytic insights into the lasting effect of the earliest sexual experiences of the infant upon the adult personality have been broadened to include the child's experience within the family through adolescence. By extending the self-formative years, Miller (whose analysis follows the conceptual model of psycho-social development of Erik Erikson found in his psycho-biographies of Luther and Gandhi) intends to emphasize the influence of the social reality upon the formation of the personality. What is assumed to be Freud's undue emphasis upon the vicissitudes of the sexual instincts (his lack of attention to the cultural sphere), is replaced by a description of a dynamic internal to the family constellation. Yet, Miller's analysis of this internal familial dynamic lacks both an understanding of the sexual determinants inhering within inter-personal familial relations, and an understanding of the family as a social institution within a larger social totality. By analyzing the Melville family as a timeless structure of personal interaction modeled upon the pattern of relations found within the biblical story of Abraham's family, Miller wrenches the family and the relations within it from their connection to a particular historical world. Within the parameters of this understanding, the meaning of all family interaction only makes reference to the model of interaction itself, thereby creating a closed universe in which the search for the origin of social institutions and personal relations is exhausted within the bounds of its own description. Though claiming to emphasize the effect of the social world upon the developing individual by locating him within the family, Miller has instead locked the self into a heuristic device that accepts the "reality" of a set of inter-personal relations which are devoid of historical and social mediation. Just as the social sphere is reduced to a reified model of inter-personal dynamics, so too are bodily needs- the instinctual structure of the self, divested of any connection to a particular historical world. But for the 'chopping Boy' (Herman), fondled and catered to by presences he could not see, the world existed not in terms of man-made or natural fluctuations of business and epidemics, but in the more immediate fluctuations of satisfied and unsatisfied needs of his small body. (p. 54) Here, basic libidinal needs are defined by natural (and neutral) demands of a physical body. That bodily impulses and their satisfaction are not fixed, but are pliable, responsive to the structure of relations within a particular society, is denied in Miller's analysis . By purporting to focus his description solely upon the child's immediate visceral experience of fulfilled or unsatisfied needs, Miller claims to show analytic concern for the sanctity of his subject's experience; contrasting the reduction of the infant's experience to an undifferentiated conglomeration of external forces, with the "reality" of the experience of "his small body." This false contrast hides the very methodologi- 160 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW cal presuppositions which inform the distortion and minimization of both the sexual and the social. As the sexual is reduced to the "reality" of neutral bodily needs, so the social is reduced to unmediated man-made or natural processes. More importantly, the separation of the two spheres is concretized -de-sexualizing the social and de-socializing the sexual. This separation also informs Miller's understandings of Melville's writings. Although he acknowledges that "The Tartarus of Maids," a short story which appeared inHarper's in April, 1855, "is an attack upon the evils of the nineteenth-century industrial system," more frightening than the exploitation of virgins. . . is the equation of the paper mill with coitus and birth. The machines are vaginas with teeth, the pistons are destructive phalluses, and the nine minute process of paper manufacture is bloody and horrifying, (p. 261 ) Not only is the "attack" upon the industrial system eclipsed by the "frightening" sexual content of Melville's story, but more significantly, the sexual meaning is entirely cut off from any connection to the social realm. They stand, for Miller, as antagonistic interpretive frameworks. In the end, the definition of "reality" that informs both the ahistorical nature of Miller's analysis and his reliance upon a theory of sexual identity which is devoid of social mediation, accepts the truth of the social world as it is given. Literary analysis becomes the counterpart of a conformist psychology and history that unreflectively demands adherence to the values of a particular social world, and relegates all forms of negativity to individual pathology or misunderstanding of society. Identifying Melville himself with the narrators of his short stories written in the 1850's, Miller comments: Instead of embodying social norms, the narrators like their non-characters are closer to the non-sense of a world without reason. They discard objectivity or detachment, conspire to befuddle issues and norms, and, like Ahab, make reality a mirror image of their anguish and flawed lives, (p. 258) The "objectivity" that is demanded of the narrator could only be one that transforms the "non-sense" of a "befuddle(d)" description of a "world without reason," into a description of the true social norms of the society as they exist. Individual neurotics, whose origins lie outside of any social world, distort the description of true social reality. Miller's identification of "reality" with the given-ness of the social world is explicitly defined at the conclusion of the above paragraph where he criticizes Melville's "comic" tales. Comedy, he writes, "no longer fulfills its traditional role as a custodian of social values." (p. 258) Miller's example of literary criticism denies art (as well as the criticism of art) its negative role as critic of the system of needs defined by society-as a "custodian of social values" left unfulfilled by the distorted relationships between human beings and nature that are formed through the exigencies of a particular economic, political, and cultural system. "Bourgeois art has become the refuge for a satisfaction, if only virtual, of those needs that have become, as it were, illegal in the material life-process of bourgeois society." (Habermas) What is neglected by Miller is the Herman Melville whose life in nineteenth century America not only is significant in defining and understanding the development of the novel as a major literary genre, but whose experience is instructive in beginning to critically comprehend the rationalization of areas of life (especially of family life) once regulated by tradition. Importantly, our effort to understand Melville, his own selfunderstanding as well as his writings, gains in value when placed within the broader context of an on-going project of reflection upon our own participation within contemporary society; a project oriented to a critique of existing needs and forms of interaction . It is in this way that literary analysis itself can become an integral aspect of the beginnings of the development of a theory of culture. Alan Mandell ...