‘Meet Mrs. Bundren’: As I Lay Dying – Gentility, Tact, and Psychoanalysis

l.fl. J-\UA.1VIUVV~~1 'Meet Mrs. Bundren': As I Lay Dying - Gentility, Tact, and Psychoanalysis I The critic who finds it necessary to employ psychoanalysis is in the position of an infantryman who finds himself in the middle of a minefield : to turn back is as risky as to go on. He cannot step back into a pre-Freudian world because he realizes that literature is, among other things, a network of desires, fears, and motives. Thus he will be uneasy at any suggestion that such emotions - simply because they are 'textual' rather than the emotions of lived experience - can be understood as though psychoanalysis did not exist or as if, at the foot of Mount Parnassus , a 'No Trespassing' sign had been erected by those who may recognize the 'clinical value' of psychoanalysis while, at the same time, they wish to keep it in its place. Moreover, he will doubt that any homebrewed , common-sense psychology will be a sufficient supplement to his effort to understand that congeries of fears, desires, and motives that is his special concern. The claims of common sense must always be heard with respect, but they cannot be allowed to generate taboos. Finally, when he considers the various psychologies that stand as rivals to psychoanalysis and encourage a certain kind of literary senSibility in its resistance to all 'extra-literary' aids to criticism, he will agree that what Sartre once wrote of 'corrections' to Marxism applies also to them: every post-Freudian thought reveals itself, upon closer examination, to be a pre-Freudian thought. But how to go on? How, when so much ofpsychoanalytic criticism is so shabby? The literary practitioners too often display, gracelessly and with much sweat, their 'mastery' of psychoanalysis. The analysts, by far the drearier of the practitioners, too often display,. arrogantly and with much presumption, their mastery of literature. Higher in the scale of being are the Delicate Ones, whose prose is courtly and genteel. Their analytical model is likely to be Erikson, their critical model Trilling. Each is concerned to give no offence to the other, and in this process of mutual accommodation the analysts forget the unaccommodating spirit of the unconscious; and the critics, ever eager to write of the sobering implications of Freud for criticism, seem unwilling to labour in the fields of practical criticism. More recently there have appeared subtler forms of delicacy that often find their models in the higher Alexandrianism that is sometimes called 'French Freud.' Although many of these critics were UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME XLIX, NUMBER 3, SPRING 1980 0042-°247/80/°500-02°5$01.5°/0 © UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS 200 T.H. ADAMOWSKI raised by 'new critical' fathers, they have now digested their Freud and have turned the tables on Freudian 'reductionism' by reducing (or dilating ) Freud's scientific papers to the status ofliterary 'texts' and making of his concepts mere metaphors for their critical activity. A case in point is Harold Bloom (who seems to care neither for French nor 'new critical' voices), whose studies of the 'anxiety of influence' often rely on an imaginative and carefully sanitized version of Freud's notion of the 'family romance.' Nevertheless, gentility and subtlety each recognize the terrible problem that has plagued psychoanalytic criticism since it began in a footnote in The Interpretation of Dreams: the tactics of rhetoric. How does one go about writing psychoanalytic criticism in such a way as to respect the dialectic of psychoanalysis, the dialectic of criticism, and the dialect peculiar to each discipline? The question grants that the first concern of psychoanalysis is something other than literature - and that criticism is, first, something other than whatever supplement may be added to it. At the same time, the question assumes that a psychoanalysis that limits itself to its patients is not the bold and imperial discipline created by Freud - and that a criticism that turns its back on extra-literary forms of knowledge is not humanistic. Ifone recognizes, however, that the problem is to deal adequately with literature, with, that is, a certain form of health, and not with an ill patient, one may recognize that this problem vf tactics is a...