LITERATURE & HUMANITIES

Meetings chaired by Peter Rex Valentine unless otherwise stated

Freud & Modernism

Prof. David Punter

University of Bristol

16 March 2004

Introduction to Modernism

Modernism describes a literary and artistic period, from WWI to about 1960, characterised by difference from 19^th century norms of ‘literal’ representation. Its experimentalism is a response to living in a ‘modern’ world, and to scientific, industrial and technological change. Modernist writers and artists include Proust, Lawrence, Kafka, Joyce, Faulkner, Pound, Eliot, Yeats, Strindberg, Pirandello, Beckett, Brecht, Dali, Picasso, Mondrian, Henry Moore.

Eliot’s complexity has to do with the impossibility of holding together the fragments; Pound claimed to have ‘broken’ the traditional poetic form of the pentameter; Faulkner and Proust focus on the unreliability of memory. Lawrence and Woolf turned away from the fixed, conscious characterisation of earlier fiction.

James McFarlane in Modernism 1890-1930:

‘Initially, the emphasis is on fragmentation, on the breaking up and the progressive disintegration of those meticulously constructed ‘systems’ and ‘types’ and ‘absolutes’ that lived on from the earlier years of the (20^th) century, on the destruction of belief in large general laws to which all life and conduct could be claimed to be subject. As a second stage… there came a re-structuring of parts, a re-relating of the fragmented concepts, a re-ordering of the linguistic (and artistic) entities to match what was felt to be the new order of reality.’

1. Freud: the unconscious

Freud, in the late 19^th century had been pioneering a new approach to the ‘logical ordering of things’; Freud at once a scientist and an ‘artist’ famous for saying that ‘the great artists (e.g. Shakespeare) had been there first. His work is still very much still with us, especially in clinical practice (with children). What was Freud’s greatest assertion? The unconscious, to which we have access via dreams, parapraxes and analytic technique. Freud says of the unconscious (in Das Unbewusste) that:

It is necessary because the data of consciousness have a very large number of gaps in them; both in healthy and in sick people psychical acts often occur which can be explained only by presupposing other acts, of which, nevertheless, con-sciousness affords no evidence. These not only include para-praxes and dreams in healthy people, and everything des-cribed as a psychical symptom or an obsession in the sick; our most personal daily experience acquaints us with ideas that come into our head we do not know; from where, and with intellectual conclusions arrived at we do not know how.’ (And later in the same paper): ‘The content of the unconscious may be compared with an aboriginal popu-lation in the mind. If inherited mental formations exist in the human being – something analogous to instinct in animals – these constitute the nucleus of the unconscious.’

No matter how hard we try, we cannot fully understand ourselves – the notion of an intellectual or psychic totality is a myth, albeit a necessary one. In his assertion of the inevitability of gaps and fragments one can already see the parallels with the fragmentation of the modernists.

2. Woolf – stream of consciousness

One of the many ways in which this influenced modernist writers was ‘stream of consciousness’ – Joyce and Woolf. In To the Lighthouse, Mrs Ramsay and Charles Tansley pass Mr Carmichael as they are ‘going to town’:

He should have been a great philosopher, said Mrs Ramsay, as they went down the road to the fishing village, but he had made an unfortunate marriage. Holding her black parasol very erect, and moving with an indescribable air of expect-tion, as if she were going to meet someone round the corner, she told the story; an affair at Oxford with some girl; an early marriage; poverty; going to India; translating a little poetry ‘very beautifully, I believe’, being willing to teach the boys Persian or Hindustanee, but what really was the use of that? – and then lying, as they saw him, on the lawn. It flat-tered him; snubbed as he had been, it soothed him that Mrs Ramsay should tell him this. Charles Tansley revived. Insinuating, too, as she did the greatness of man’s intellect, even in its decay, the subjection of all wives – not that she blamed the girl, and the marriage had been happy enough, she believed – to their husband’s labours, she made him feel better pleased with himself than he had done yet, and he would have liked, had they taken a cab, for example, to have paid the fare. As for her little bag, might he not carry that? No, no, she said, she always carried that herself. She did too. Yes, he felt that in her. He felt many things, something in particular that excited him and disturbed him for reasons which he could not give.’

There is a relative absence of differentiation between speech and thought, and some uncertainty as to where these thoughts are going on. ‘Insinuating’, for example – but this is surely his view of her, the way in which her behaviour fits onto his ‘unknown’ image of himself. People’s thought processes here are very different from what we find in Austen or Eliot, where the characters are able to supply their own explanations for their actions. The role of the author thus changes, from a gesture towards totality to a series of impressions. The author thus, peculiarly, knows both more and less about his/her characters.

3. Freud: dream

I have said that dream is crucial; the theory of dream is

complex, to do with ‘aboriginal content’ and the day’s residues. It works by processes of condensation and displace-ment, which recent theorists have compared with metaphor and metonymy.’

Many dreams are analysed in Freud, including some of his own, although these demonstrate the difficulty of self-analysis. Here is something that Freud recounts himself in The Uncanny:

As I was walking, one hot summer afternoon, through the deserted streets of a small town in provincial Italy, which was unknown to me, I found myself in a quarter of whose character I could not long remain in doubt. Nothing but painted women were to be seen at the windows of the small houses, and I hastened to leave the narrow street at the next turning. But after having wandered about for a time without enquiring my way, I suddenly found myself back in the same street, where my presence was now beginning to excite attention. I hurried away once more, only to arrive by another detour at the same place yet a third time.

Is it a dream? The text is unclear. Certainly it has dream-like features – embarrassment, being trapped, being unable to control one’s self. And it is a small narrative about the unconscious, although Freud does not say so – why, after all, does he not ‘enquire his way’? Is there something in him that wishes not to leave this street of prostitutes? Unconscious desires are those that cannot be ‘held’ by the ‘respectable’ ego. How can one tell the difference (in representation, or in written narrative) between what is and what is not a dream?

Dali: ‘The Metamorphosis of Narcissus’ (1937)

Dali, the surrealists, André Breton, all had a profound interest in Freud. The composition of this painting was inspired by a conversation between two fishermen: one of them commented on a boy who spent all day looking at himself in the mirror, to which the other replied that he ‘had a bulb in his head’, a common Catalan expression for some kind of psychological complex. This made Dali think of Narcissus, who fell in love with his own reflection and fell into the pool and turned into a flower (bulb).

Dali wrote a poem: ‘Narcissus, in his immobility, absorbed by his reflection with the digestive slowness of carnivorous plants, becomes invisible. All that remains of him is the hallucinatory oval of whiteness of his head … his head held up at the tips of the fingers of water, at the tips of the fingers of the senseless hand’. There is here an emphasis on immobility, which Freud spoke of as characteristic of dream. But at the end of the day (or the night) there always remains the inexplicable – the ‘dream-knot’. ‘Fingers of water’ are perhaps only possible in the unconscious and in the poetic/artistic imagination.

Freud: The Uncanny

The notion here of the double returns us to The Uncanny.

Our analysis of instances of the uncanny has led us back to the old, animistic conception of the universe. This was characterised by the idea that the world was peopled with the spirits of human beings; by the subject’s narcissistic overvaluation of his own mental processes; by the belief in the omnipotence of thoughts and the technique of magic based on that belief; by the attribution to various outside persons and things of carefully graded magical powers, or ‘mana’; as well as by all the other creations with the help of which man, in the unrestricted narcissism of that stage of development, strove to fend off the manifest prohibitions of reality.’

Crucially, Freud traces this process of development through the individual as well as through culture, and that these old beliefs do not go away but survive in e.g., superstition. The notion of childhood omnipotence suggests that we still in some sense believe in this. The reality principle is thus constantly rejected by the unconscious.

The uncanny as heimich and unheimlich – what is welcome, what is private, what is secret, what reminds us of other things. One of the major examples is déjà-vu. Also ghosts, phantoms, spectres of every kind. The uncanny is not merely frightening, it is also inexplicable, beyond common explanation. The uncanny reveals that we are not in full control of ourselves, there are other forces at work – some of course would say that these are religious or mystical forces, but Freud claims that they come from within, from materials we have repressed but which will not go away.

Let us consider a literary example: Eliot – from The Waste Land:

Here we have gender confusion – cf. Woolf, Orlando – but also a more general ‘unfixing’ of the subject; a ghost – from the past, or from the future. Eliot himself in the infamous Notes says ‘The following lines were stimulated by the account of one of the Antarctic expeditions (I forget which, but I think one of Shackleton’s): it was related that the party of explorers, at the extremity of their strength, had the constant delusion that there was one more member than could actually be counted’. Modernists were in general interested in uncanny effects – we might think also of Eliot’s lines in ‘Little Gidding’ on the ‘dead patrol’.

Freud: on civilisation,

A passage from Civilisation and its Discontents:

It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilisation is

built up upon a renunciation of instinct, how much it pre-supposes precisely the non-satisfaction (by suppression, repression or some other means?) of powerful instincts. This ‘cultural frustration’ dominates the large field of social relationships between human beings. As we already know, it is the cause of the hostility against which all civilisations have to struggle... It is not easy to understand how it can become possible to deprive an instinct of satisfaction. Nor is doing so without danger. If the loss is not compensated for economically, one can be certain that serious disorders will ensue.’

This would be all too possible to apply this to the present age, but our concern is with Modernism. Possibly it is Freud’s most radical thought, although he rarely tackled sociological matters: civilisation is not the goal but a compromise. We cannot go around indulging in sexual and aggressive appetites – hut the question is, what happens to them? The Modernists recognised this in the case, for example, of life in the modern city – the ‘Waste Land’.

Let us consider a related visual image:

One of Picasso’s most famous paintings: Guernica

Whatever else it is, it is certainly a painting about the fate of civilisation, in its themes of death, the bullfight and the crucifixion. Like a dream, it picks up on incompatible images. Cubism in general seeks a visual rendition of this incompatibility. We can see it in art-historical terms, as related to artists from Uccello to Delacroix and Goya.

It was inspired by the German bombing of Basque Guernica, but the point is that it picks up on a whole repertoire of other narratives, which portray versions of ‘civilisation’ - the weeping woman, the horse, the bull.

I quote the art critic Robert Hughes: ‘The spike tongues, the rolling eyes, the frantic splayed toes and fingers, the necks arched in spasm: these would be unendurable if their tension were not braced against the broken, but visible, order of the painting. It is like a battle-sarcophagus, cracked and riven, but still just recognisable as a messenger from the ancient world – the world of ideal bodies and articulates muscular energy.

Note the newspaper features: the grainy black and white, the newsprint on the horse’s body – is this what civilisation and communication have come to? A political image certainly, but also an image of the psyche (‘ancient world’, ‘ideal order’) – the ego ideal, narcissism, and what happens when that is broken, which is inevitable.

Guernica perhaps represents a ‘psychic truth’ in all its incoherence, the impossibility of coming at a ‘total picture’; it also represents the primitive aggression which ‘civilisation’ tried to hold in check, and perhaps here we may see a different relation between Freud and Modernism, with Freud as himself a Modernist, representing fracture and breakdown – and, indeed, doing so through the ‘modern’ means of science.

Freud – return of the repressed

Nothing goes away from the unconscious. In Jensen’s Gradiva, Freud says that ‘dreams and delusions arise from the same source – from what is repressed. Dreams are, one might say, the physiological delusions of normal people’.

Here, though, is perhaps the moment at which to say something about the more positive side of Freud’s thinking, and again I quite from Jensen’s Gradiva: The process of cure is accomplished in a relapse into love, if we combine all the many components of the sexual instinct under the term ‘love’; and such a relapse is indispensable, for the symptoms on account of which the treatment has been undertaken have been nothing other than precipitates of earlier struggles connected with repression or the return of the repressed, and they can only be resolved and washed away by a fresh high tide of the same passions. Every psychoanalytic treatment is an attempt at liberating repressed love, which has found a meagre outlet in the compromise of a symptom.

What is repressed, then, in the infant? This is summar-ised in the Oedipus and Electra complexes – in the first case, desire for the mother and hatred for the father, in the second lust for the father and demolition of the mother. These are the ‘earlier struggles’ Freud refers to, and they are the basis of infant life. The psyche is an ‘economy’ – some things go down, others must come up – or alternatively it is ‘hydraulic’.

But in what sense are the ‘instincts’ universal?

De la Mare: what comes back

The example I want to give of the return of the repressed may seem a strange one, a story by de la Mare, ‘Out of the Deep’ (1923).

Jimmie inherits a great house from a rich and hated uncle; he has had childhood traumas there. There is a malicious butler called Soames who represents the ghosts of memory. Jimmie wants to ‘exorcise’ by selling off the house’s riches and by keeping up a constant blaze of candlelight, which doesn’t work; whenever he touches the bellrope in his bedroom he receives unseen visitors from the servants’ quarters. One night he wakes up:

The room was adrowse with light. All was still. The flitting horrors between dream and wake in his mind were already thinning into air. Through their transparency he looked out once more on the substantial, the familiar [NB the uncanny]. His breath came heavily, like puffs of wind over a stormy sea, and yet a profound peace and tranquillity was swathing him in. The relaxed mouth was now faintly smiling. Not a sound, not the feeblest distant unintended tinkling was trembling up from the abyss. And for a moment or two the young man refrained even from turning his head at the soundless opening and closing of the door.

There are reminders here of the womb, of a fantasy of safety. The ‘storms’ of the unconscious are held temporarily in check. And on this occasion, nothing ‘returns’, but the ‘visits’ become increasingly frequent, including a younger version of Soames. Then a young girl appears; Jimmie is rude to her and shouts down the stairwell for the inhabitants to send him more congenial company:

‘It had been a silly boast, he agreed – that challenge, that ‘dare’ on the staircase; the boast of an idiot. For the ‘congenial company’ that had now managed to hoof and scrabble its way up the slippery marble staircase was already on the threshold. All was utterly silent now. There was no obvious manifestation of danger. What was peering steadily in upon him out of the obscurity beyond the door was merely a blurred whitish beast-like shape with still, passive, almost stagnant eyes in its immense fixed face. A perfectly ludicrous object – on paper. Yet a creature so nauseous to soul and body, and with so obscene a greed in its motionless pig like grin that with one vertiginous swirl Jimmie’s candles had swept up in his hand like a lateral race of streaming planets into outer darkness.’

There are evidently childhood fears here. What is ‘congenial’? Is this his own former self, perhaps as seen by others, or even by himself? At any rate it is certainly the return of the repressed – of the unconscious, characteristic of Modernism.

David Punter

Discussion

Interestingly the Points of Discussion were mainly sceptical about Freud’s influence on Modernism suggesting Modernism pre-empted him. A member said Freud’s theories were incompatible with Communism or Buddhism and banned in China, and appropriate to Western Civilisation only. A member suggested Freud’s basic initiative was flawed and not empirical due to the problems of early experimental psychology.

It was pointed out that. Dreams mean different things to different cultures the speaker said Freud denied any omenistic properties in dreams, as thought by other cultures.

Although great scientific advances were made at the time of Modernism the speaker said he did not think there was much rapprochement between artists and scientists.

The Speaker said Freud facilitated the development of the internal monologue and that his influence was still present today. Although we like to think we control our lives with an unimpaired free will, we also know that in reality we are victim to forces outside our control; that he influenced D.H. Lawrence in his depiction of irrationality. (A member thought this was through his wife Frieda.) Freud showed that man was not in control of himself. As in Kafka’s Trial and The Castle.

The convenor commented that these morbid psycho-logical characteristics were very much in evidence in German Expressionist writers like Strindberg and Wedekind, yet most of them denied Freud’s influence. Was it an unconscious influence they were not prepared to admit?

Peter Rex Valentine