Flaubert and Kafka: Studies in Psychopoetic Structure 0300026331, 9780300026337

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FlaubeEfd

K.afill"

Studies in Psychopoetic Structure

CHARLES BERNHEIMER

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS New Haven and London

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Published with assistance from the Kingsley Trust Association Publication Fund

established by the Scroll and Key Society of Yale College.

Copyright© 1982 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

Designed by James J. Johnson and set in Palatino Roman type by Eastern Graphics. Printed in the United States of America by Halliday Lithograph, West Hanover, Massachusetts.

Acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint sections of this book originally published in shorter or somewhat different versions: The Gordian Press, for "Letters to an Absent Friend: A Structural Reading," In The Problem of "The Judgment": Element Approaches to Kafka's Story (New York, 1977) and "Symbolic Bond and Textual Play: The Structure of The Castle," in The Kafka Debate: New Perspectives for Our Time (New York, 1977), both volumes edited by Angel Flores. MLN, for "Crossing Over: Kafka's Metatextual Parable."

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Bernheimer, Charles, 1942Flaubert and Kafka: studies in psychopoetic structure. Includes index. Kafka, Franz, 1883-1924-Criticism and interpretation. 2. Flaubert, Gustave, 1821-1880-Influence-Kafka. I. Title. 1.

833'.912 ISBN 0-300-02633-1

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To the memory of my father

Contents

Preface ix Acknowledgments

xiii

INTRODUCTION Toward a Psychopoetics of Textual Structure 1 INTERCHAPTER Crossing Over: Kafka's Meta textual Parable 45 1 The Psychogenesis of Flaubert's Style: Matter, Metaphor, and Metamorphosis 56 Emma Bovary and the Wound of Memory 57 The Basic Fault 66 Of Virgins and Tombstones: Memoires d'un fou and Novembre 76 The Consciousness of Death and the Great Wall of Style 83 The Dismembering Temptation 92 2

Flaubert's Nameless Testament: Dea th and the Library in Bouvard et Pecuchet Fetishism and Flux 103 The Comedy of Indigestion 117 The Eschatology of a Monumental Erection

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102

126

Writing on Trial: Toward Kafka's "The Judgment"

13i2

Decaying Representations: From the Balcony to the Pavlatche 144 Intercourse with Ghosts: Kafka between Verbindung and Verkehr 152 The Eternal Torments of Dying 161 "The Judgment": Letters to an Absent Friend 167 Father Effects: Metaphoric Nomination and Psychotic Foreclosure 174 The Body of the Text: Giving Birth and Opening a Wound 184

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The Allegorical Structure of The Castle

189

The Sign-Scripts of Transience 189 The Last Earthly Frontier: Madness, Metaphor, Writing, and Death Mirror Effects: Official Texture and Private Compulsion 205 Unconscious Structures in Language and Desire 214 Childish Play and Textual Politics 220 The Subject as Supplement and Fictional Agent 227

CONCLUSION The Issue of Comparison Notes 249 Index 259

232

198

Preface

It may be precisely because Kafka appears to be such a profoundly solitary

and private writer that comparative criticism has been so eager to place him in a literary family. Whereas Kafka insisted that his loneliness was comparable only to itself ("I am as lonely as-as Franz Kafka," he once said to Gustav Janouch), critics have written innumerable books and articles showing Kafka's affinities not only with specific writers but with entire philosophical movements. Kafka's sense of himself as the most special of special cases has, paradoxically, made him into an exemplary figure, a standard for comparison. His idiosyncrasy is so powerfully expressed as a style that we begin to recognize him in a whole variety of texts from diverse literatures and periods. Thus, as Borges puts it, Kafka creates his own precursors, and his intensely defined individuality becomes a principle of resemblance. Although Borges himself, in another context, mentions Kafka's parables as carrying on in the manner of Bouvard et Pecuchet, critical studies to date have rarely included Flaubert in Kafka's expanded family. This is, I think, because Kafka's kinship has usually been defined thematically as a function of sensibility. For instance, Mark Spilka's insightful study Dickens and Kafka-: A Mutual Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963) demonstrates that the grotesque vision of the world these two writers share derives from their common experience of a home-society conflict resulting in sensibilities arrested at childhood levels of feeling. In studies such as Spilka's, Kafka's style is related to a vision of the world that distorts reality in response to private obsessions, dreams, guilt feelings, and so on. In contrast, Flaubert's style has traditionally been thought of as objective, ironic, distanced, famously the result of hard ix

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PREFACE

work with a recalcitrant linguistic medium. Whereas Kafka's obsessive, fantastic, anxiety-ridden narratives seem to derive their strength from their clos~ness to the inner landscape of dreams, Flaubert's style seems to be most perfectly achieved when everything is externalized and language absorbs both inner and outer into its homogenizing rhythms. The name Kafka is likely to evoke imagery associated with feelings of guilt, hopelessness, absurdity, while the name Flaubert evokes an abstract ideal of artistic perfection and an affectless portrayal of commonplace reality. Yet Kafka recognized that there was a significant bond linking him to Flaubert. In an early letter to his fiancee, Felice Bauer, Kafka wrote: "L'Education sentimentale is a book that for many years has been as close to me as are barely two or three people; whenever and wherever I have opened it, it has startled me and completely carried me away, and I have then always felt myself to be a spiritual son of this writer, albeit a weak and clumsy one." This statement obviously invites a closer analysis of the spiritual filiation from Flaubert to Kafka. A probing thematic interpretation of Sentimental Education, such as Victor Brombert' s in The Novels of Flaubert: A Study of Themes and Techniques (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), suggests that Flaubert's obsessions may not be as remote from Kafka's as they seem at first. Among the themes Brombert discusses in Kafka's favorite Flaubertian novel are many that hc:ve been of paramount concern to Kafka critics: "a feeling of temporal circularity and erosion" (p. 126), "a lasting nostalgia for innocence" (p. 128), "a pattern of substitution and profanation" (p. 137), a focus "not so much on the event as on the gap between events" (p. 179), fragmentation, discontinuity, absence of the conventional link between motivation and action (184-85). Moreover, Brombert, following Proust, realizes that the style which conveys these themes is by no means an impersonal method of objective mimesis but rather an instrument of pervasive authorial presence. The author he finds expressed in the techniques of style, however, is the same he finds embodied in the themes of the fiction. The thematic approach has trouble accounting for the possibility that themes may not mirror the subject immediately but may refer metaphorically to his displacement and fragmentation through the writing process itself. Flaubert and Kafka have in common an intense self-consciousness about the meaning and effects of this process. Indeed, Flaubert could easily have said about himself what Kafka wrote in a letter: "My life is determined by nothing but the ups and downs of writing." And for both authors life thus determined constitutes a perpetual erosion or withering of life, "a constitutional syphilis" says Flaubert, "the eternal torments of dying" says Kafka. It is only in terms of such a complete identification of the self with writing that Kafka's loneliness could open up to acknowledge "spiritual" kinship. For writing is a function of radical isolation:

PREFACE

xi

"Writing, in this sense," declares Kafka, "is a sleep deeper than that of death, and just as one would not and cannot tear the dead from their graves, so I must not and cannot be torn from my desk at night." In this study, I propose to show that the acute awareness Flaubert and Kafka share of the negativity of writing is the disguised arch-theme subtending most of the other themes of their fiction. · In order to penetrate this disguise, I have developed a theory of psychopoetic structure that enables me to recuperate a subject primarily in the rhetorical shape of his writing rather than in the obsessive themes of that writing (though the two are, of course, interrelated). The subject emerges for me in the act of writing as the locus of a play of forces, forces that can be described in both psychoanalytic and rhetorical terms. Relating metonymy to Eros and metaphor to Thanatos, I associate a text's constitutive tensions with a dynamic conception of the writing subject in conflict between opposing impulses. Since one of the most intellectually powerful trends in contemporary criticism deconstructs the very notion of the subject and uses, precisely, the activity of writing to demonstrate this subversion, an important aspect of my theoretical endeavor is to locate this radically negative argument within a broader understanding of subjective function. To achieve this understanding, I have brought together in the central section of my Introduction the seminal contributions of a wide variety of thinkers in the field of psychoanalysis, linguistics, rhetoric, philosophy, and criticism. My survey of this material is not meant to provide a rigid theoretical framework to be systematically applied to Flaubert and Kafka. Rather I conceive of the Introduction as a preliminary movement on a theoretical level through a set of ideas that will recur in different form in my discussions of the two writers. The four chapters of the book are organized symmetrically. The first chapter on Flaubert and the first on Kafka undertake a genetic analysis of each author's changing attitudes to writing and seek to establish a relation between these changes and the rhetorical tropes he privileges at different times in his career. I discover in both writers a strong narcissistic impulse toward unity, an impulse that problematizes writing insofar as it is the medium that simultaneously expresses narcissistic desire and blocks fulfillment of that desire. This blockage is experienced by both authors, I argue, in terms of the gaps, displacements, and duplicities through which metaphor undermines the desired unities and continuities of metonymy. Using his correspondence, journals, and early writings, I study the particular ways each writer articulates this negative experience of the scriptive medium. Then I focus on one text that I interpret as an indirect dramatization of this experience: Flaubert's La Tentation de saint Antoine

xii

PREFACE

and Kafka's "The Judgment." The second chapter on each author is devoted to a close reading of one novel, a reading to which all the relevant material gathered in the previous chapters is applied. For this purpose, I have chosen the book that I feel most comprehensively illustrates its author's implication in the psychopoetic tensions that generate the literary text: Bouvard et Pecuchet and The Castle. Most of the explicit back-and-forth comparison between Flaubert and Kafka is relegated to the Conclusion, where I undertake it within the context of a critical examination of the value each writer attributes to concluding. Since I cannot expect my readers to be fluent in both French and German, I have decided to quote Flaubert and Kafka in my own English translations. To reprint the numerous quoted passages in the original in an appendix would have made the book unwieldy and added to its expense. I have, however, furnished references to easily available editions of the primary texts and, whenever possible, to the standard English translations currently in print. Since the focus of my study is the function of writing within a psychological economy, I begin my book with a meditation on the role of writing in my own psychobiography. I realize that such an opening risks provoking the reader's irritation. After all, I am supposed to assume that the reader is interested in Flaubert and Kafka, not in me. But whatever I may contribute to an understanding of these writers is a function of my critical approach, and I hope to make the experiential basis of that approach more immediately present by means of a short autobiographical narrative. It is the story of a son's response to paternal writing and of his association of that writing with death.

Acknowledgments

This book has been a long time in the writing. Over the years, I received much valuable criticism from friends and colleagues who generously offered to read particular chapters. The Introduction has profited from the astute criticism of Howard Bloch, Bob Caserio, Barbara Johnson, Jeff Kline, and Bill Warner. Discussions of the Introduction by the Group for Applied Psychoanalysis at SONY-Buffalo and the Faculty Criticism Seminar at the University of Illinois were helpful in my revision and expansion of the argument. Jean Bruneau, with whom I began studying Flaubert at Harvard, helped out at a crucial point by sending me an accurate text of a Flaubert letter not yet published in his Pleiade edition. Richard Stamelman and Jeff Kline gave fruitfully critical readings of an early version of the first Flaubert chapter. The Kafka chapters, and indeed the entire book, benefited greatly from Stanley Corngold's patient reading and perceptive judgments. My interpretation of Kafka owes a great deal to his. From the beginning, Murray Schwartz has expertly guided much of my reading in psychoanalysis. I am also grateful for the support my work has received from Walter Sokel, the grand master of Kafka studies, and from Geoffrey Hartman, whose encouragement helped me write the first pages of the Introduction. By giving me a home away from home during my years as a commuter, David Willbern made it possible for me to continue work on this book despite my frequent displacements. Finally, in a gesture whose conventionality should not mask its sincerity, I want to thank my wife, Joan DeJean, whose exasperation with my slowness was always tempered by understanding and unfailing support.

xiii

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~ ~

~~:

INTRODUCTION

Toward a Psychopoetics of Textual Structure

"The fact that the present essay came to be written can be regarded as a minor symptom of our time. To investigate the function and inner structure of artistic representation, instead of concentrating upon the manner in which it is to be achieved, would not have occurred to thinkers of the past who had every reason for taking that function for granted." These are the opening sentences of Richard Bernheimer's The Nature of Representation (New York: New York University Press, 1961, p. 1). For many years, to read these words was an immensely painful experience for me, one that I preferred to avoid. They reminded me of the absence of their dead author, the man who had also fathered my existence. I wanted to hold on to my memories of my father's physical presence, to images of him swimming in the Starnbergersee, correcting blue books on the brown plush couch at home, most intensely perhaps to the picture of our walking together when I was fourteen, my hand grasping his index finger, on a path in the Bavarian Alps, my mother and sister lagging behind, he and I engaged in a dialogue that seemed to open the way for an exciting new mode of communication between us. My memories recreated this sense of promise, of a rich field of discovery that we could enter together, my father serving as guide and guardian. But in the reality of my life, this implicit promise was violently broken. My father took himself away; his death in 1958 made of my belief in continuity and communication a nostalgic dream. I resented the books he left behind, the written signs of his absence. These books could be considered his children too but only, I felt, of that part of him that was in touch with death. Had not writing always removed him from me to the mysterious, somehow sanctified, spaces of 1

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PSYCHOPOETICS OF TEXTUAL STRUCTURE

office, library, and museum? If Daddy was writing, that meant that he was absent. And Daddy was so often writing. My father's death radicalized for me the relation of his writing to absence. His books were tombs, inscribed crypts that denied my living memories, communications offered promiscuously to others but purely external to myself. My reluctance through four years of college to read his work was perhaps my revenge for his broken promise to me: I refused to substitute a printed text for the oral dialogue, man to man, that had been refused me. Such a revenge took its toll in guilt. The force of my refusal was matched by the power of my yearning. And all the while I was following in my father's footsteps. I, too, was becoming a professor and a writer. Moreover, my investigations were involved with the same problem that had concerned him all his life: "the function and inner structure of artistic representation." I first realized the remarkable closeness of our intellectual interests late in my career as a graduate student when it finally became possible for me to read The Nature of Representation. How much I could have learned from him! What an extraordinarily ambitious project, to differentiate three basic types of representation-categorical, legal, and mimetic-analyze the rationale and subject functions of mimetic representation, investigate the role of substitution in art, distinguish between r~presentation and sign function, discuss the viewer's perception of similarity and difference. But even as I admired the book's scope and intellectual rigor, I also felt it to be too abstract, not sufficiently fleshed out, lacking in examples, and a strangely isolated enterprise, almost totally devoid of references to the ideas of other thinkers. The book seemed to be the somewhat forced product of a will to abstraction so intense that the author had killed off not only the voices of others but his own voice as well. Who was speaking here? Having finally been able to open this tomb, I had expected to find there the traces of a recognizable presence. If this book had been something of an enemy brother for all these years, I felt that some blood relationship should still exist between us. However, what I found were not the traces of a presence but of a process, of a writing act that perpetually erased the voice I longed to hear. A link existed no doubt in our interests, yet I could not recuperate that link within the language of the text. Was it in any way biological or genetic? Perhaps it was only "a minor symptom of our time," the largely fortuitous result of a particular Zeitgeist. As I began to read the work of certain contemporary French critics dealing with the problem of representation, I became increasingly aware that what had at first seemed a special paternal inheritance was in fact the major concern of some of the most challenging thinkers of the day. Moreover, the investigations of Blanchot, Barthes, Foucault, de Man, and

PSYCHOPOETICS OF TEXTUAL STRUCTURE

3

Derrida connected a rigorous analysis of the structures of linguistic representation with a sustained meditation on the act of writing. Their ideas helped me to understand my private emotional response to my father's writing in intellectual terms which gave that response a general validity. I could now view my father's absence in his book as the inevitable authorial annihilation performed by any scriptive act. "The modern writer (scriptor)," says Barthes, "is born simultaneously with his text: he is in no way supplied with a being which precedes or transcends his writing, he is in no way the subject of which his book is the predicate; there is no other time than that of the utterance, and every text is eternally written here and now. . . . His hand, detached from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin-or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself, that is, the very thing which ceaselessly questions any origin." 1 This was comforting because it explained that no author could stand in relation to his text as a father to a child. My failure to hear a paternal voice in my father's book derived from the rupture in the genealogical metaphor enacted not just by his writing but by all textual production. With no originating authors to be found before and behind texts, all we readers were, in a sense, cast off as orphans. My dispossession was a common fate. It was emotionally reassuring, and intellectually stimulating, to find that the critical and philosophical minds I respected the most were those which insisted most strenuously on the universality of our loss of origin and the inevitable frustration of our desire for union. In terms of this thinking, my father's death could actually be considered to put me in a privileged existential position, the dead father being, according to Lacan's interpretation of Freud, essential to the genesis of the entire Symbolic order. It was almost as if the theory were acting as a maternal comforter to compensate me for the loss of my father. But I soon began to realize that this comfort was purchased at the expense of any viable connection between linguistic structures and the world of experience. These writers tend to valorize notions of lack, absence, rupture, fragmentation, multilation, castration, in such an abstracted manner that the pain involved if these ideas are allowed any physical reference is rarely if ever acknowledged. In the deconstructed dia-verse, free play is king. Wholes are out, pieces in; centers are displaced into margins; bricolage is the model for creation; the book itself, as a fiction of unity and coherence, is subverted by the corrosive action of its own textuality; the "self" is a comforting delusion, identity a mirage, the ego a slippery double agent; the father is more important as metaphor than as biological progenitor; language is not a medium of subjective expression and mastery but an instrument of the subject's "beneficent expropriation" 2 by an alien, impersonal structure. Although I recognized the liberating effect of many of these ideas, and

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PSYCHOPOETICS OF TEXTUAL STRUCTURE

found them useful in my own thinking and writing about literature, I became increasingly irritated by what I perceived to be the refusal of these thinkers to consider the experiential implications of their theories. I had been glad to join a community of dispossessed orphans, but my awareness of the pain of loss remained more acute than my pleasure in the shared company. The father's place in language might well be, as Lacan says, only a name designating a space itself empty of meaning, but the frustrated yearning accounted for intellectually by this "only" had in my own case a far more intense reality in terms of a desire for my father's physical presence. As I gained confidence in the validity of my emotional response, I began to perceive the lack of affective language in deconstructive discourse as part of an elaborate defensive strategy designed to ensure the personal invulnerability of its practitioners. It often seemed as if they had managed to remove all anxiety from the fantasy prevalent among schizophrenics of the body fragmented into pieces and to consider the unifying force of narcissistic identification simply a fictional illusion with no compelling power. Their desire to assimilate everything to textuality makes of the human psyche a kind of avoidance machine, constantly displacing, substituting, replacing, sliding and slipping away. A-void-dance, a dance around the void. For example, referring to a poem by \Vallace Stevens, J. Hillis Miller writes: "The self, for [Stevens], is deprived of its status as ground by being shown to be a figure on that ground. The self has the same status as the other elements with which it is equated. The self exists, but in the same fragile and groundless way as fruit, sun, poem, and geometrical diagram. It exists as icon, as image, as figure for the underlying nothing. " 3 As the rest of his discussion makes clear, Miller's analysis here is not meant to refer exclusively to Stevens. If one is endowed with the peculiar abysmal insights of deconstructive theory, it is right to view the self as "engulfed in the chasm of its own bifurcation" (p. 25). Miller is not disturbed by the fragile existential viability of what he nevertheless recognizes to be a "schismatic or schizoid" self, a "we" (p. 27). On the contrary, he seems to consider the capacity of such a self to view itself as perpetually "other" and, as such, inscribed in a potentially infinite series of horizontal displacements as a sign of what was once called "maturity." Thus he stresses that the evocations in Stevens's poem of the child's security in the warm enclosure of "the houses of mothers" and of the lovers' happiness in a noontime embrace are illusionary scenes that must be deconstructed by the abysmally enlightened adult. "Both the relation to the mother and the relation to the beloved," writes Miller, "are the experience of a perpetual distance, desire, dissatisfaction, an 'emptiness that would be filled' ('An Ordinary Evening in New Haven'). They are figures not realities" (p. 27).

PSYCHOPOETICS OF TEXTUAL STRUCTURE

5

This is the kind of defensive maneuver I find typical of the hyperrationalist strategies of deconstructive criticism. Feelings are "inscribed" as mere linguistic figures. The physical relationships of bodies are dissected to provide the pieces for intellectual play. A militant theory of uncertainty announces its aporia within a critical apparatus that functions with all the surety of a well-oiled machine. And with much -of its predictability. So insecurity is in fact contained, controlled, by being formalized as a strategy. No voice is ever heard expressing doubt in any but an impersonal manner, as a theory about the inevitability of doubt. If, in what has become an almost ritual gesture of deconstruction, the critic self-reflexively comments on the inevitable failure of his interpretive enterprise ("This essay," says Miller, "can only formulate and reformulate its mise en abyme"-p. 31), you know very well that for him the word failure carries no emotive weight. It is the inevitablity of the failure that is crucial, for that inevitability makes the critic's failure merely a repetition of the text's own constitutive procedures. Were the critical text to proclaim anything other than its own instability, its own groundlessness, then it could no longer claim to be constitutionally like literature, to actually be literature itself. In his brilliant reading of Rousseau's famous account of the purloined ribbon, Paul de Man takes the description of textual structure "as the radical annihilation of the metaphor of selfhood and of the will" 4 yet a step beyond Miller. Whereas for Miller textuality is the process by which the figurative absorbs all attempts to undo its subversive activity, for instance by assertions of referentiality, literality, or propriety, de Man demonstrates that the figurative is only one dimension of the text's function, a dimension, moreover, that reveals its partiality by the very fact that its structure is subject to understanding. Next to this structure of tropological displacement, which is essentially the subject of Miller's concern, de Man identifies a second textual function that radically suspends the text's referential determination and thereby systematically undoes understanding. This undoing, he is at pains to point out, has no bodily analogy. If the text is considered as a body, he argues, then the deconstruction of this metaphor must occur entirely within a figurative structure and is hence cognitively recuperable. Thus de Man considers the writing subject's response to its dispossession by the arbitrary play of the signifier, a response expressed in terms of "a dismemberment, a beheading, or a castration," to have only metaphorical importance as a cognition about "the undecidability of authorship" (pp. 296-97). Consequently he relegates these affectively laden metaphors of physical mutilation to the realm of "figural delusion" (p. 297), and passes beyond to describe the text not as a figural body but as a literal machine, "systematic in its performance but arbitrary in its principle, like a grammar" (p. 298).

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PSYCHOPOETIC3 OF TEXTUAL STRUCTURE

The consequences of such a conception are radical. "Far from seeing language as an instrument in the service of a psychic energy," de Man argues, "the possibility now arises that the entire construction of drives, substitutions, repressions and representations is the aberrant, metaphorical correlative of the absolute randomness of language, prior to any figuration or meaning" (p. 299). In other words, the human psyche produces feelings, such as guilt, which are analyzable within a system of tropes, in a desperate and futile effort to give meaning to the absolutely mechanical. If the cognitive, connected metaphorically to the body, is aberrant, then the performative, that function by which metaphor is radically estranged from its bodily allegory, is, by implication of the polar logic that de Man cannot escape, the norm. Hence I see him as implying that to be connected to the body is to be aberrant, deviant, crazy, whereas to function mechanically is to find safety within an arbitrary, meaningless sytem. De Man, of course, never makes such existential analogies, but the entire thrust of his essay, a commanding performance to which I will return at the close of this introduction, relates his interpretive activity reflexively to the performative function of the machine and thereby places him in the invulnerable position of a Deus in machina. The French psychoanalyst J.-B. Pontalis speaks of a similar defensive strategy used by patients "expert at coding and d~coding, inventive with plays of words, dreams, and interpretations, knowledgeable in all kinds of combinations and skillful in outdoing the most subtle analysts in the art of decorticating the signifier and in the genius of 'de-construction."'5 Instead of allowing themselves really to experience, to feel, their dreams, these patients manipulate them as objects. Recognizing that he is exaggerating somewhat in order to draw attention to this mentalizing procedure that denies affect and meaning, Pontalis calls it a perversion: "To make oneself master of the dream-object by manipulation," he comments, "by a seizure that breaks it up into elements, and to make of the analyst-witness the accomplice of his pleasure, does this not evoke the sexual pervert who treats the bodies of others as a machine for desiring his own fantasy?" (p. 31). Pontalis argues that too much attention has been paid by psychoanalysis to the meaning-structure of dreams, to their interpretable content, and not enough to the subject's use of the dream, to his relation to it as experience and to the manner of his recounting it to the analyst. The same, I think, could be said of the critic's interpretation of the text. Pontalis stresses, for instance, that the analyst should be aware of what aspect of oneiric activity is valorized by the patient and notes that the mechanism of displacement is particularly subject to intensified investment: "In effect, [displacement] offers the analysand the possibility of never having to remain at a fixed point but of identifying himself as an

PSYCHOPOETICS OF TEXTUAL STRUCTURE

7

elusive vanishing point, variable according to the perspective adopted, always at another place and thus ready to 'get out clean.' The subject identifies himself with displacement itself" (p. 32). Such an identification, I believe, is prevalent among deconstructive critics. Pontalis associates it with the analysand's desire to guard the dream space (read: textual space) as a private territory not to be shared, as an inner object to be defended against outside intervention. That object, Pontalis suggests, is closely associated with the mother: "Dreaming," he writes, "is above all an effort to maintain the impossible union with the mother, to preserve an undivided totality, to move in a space prior to time" (p. 27). Pontalis's hypothesis that "every dream, insofar as it is an object in analysis, makes reference to the maternal body" (p. 26) suggests an explanation not only of the analysand's but also of the critic's protective maneuvering. The critic who insists on the gaps in the text, on its undecidability or unreadability, on its resistance to interpretation, is defending the mother from penetration, refusing to let her be known, and thereby protecting his own primary relation to the nourishing textual body. The very notion of the autonomous, mechanical productivity of the text serves to obscure the maternal breast which, according to Bertram Lewin, is the bodily analogue of the screen onto which we project our dreams. 6 The text as machine protects the textual mother from carnal knowledge, but this protection is simultaneously a defense against the fear of engulfment by the mother, the fear of that "impossible union" which is the dreamed dream. This observation enables me to view my response to my father's book in a new light. I had thought that a certain mechanical or excessively abstract quality to the book had put me off, but now I wonder if I did not react so negatively to this abstraction precisely because I desired to be nourished by the book, sustained and mothered by it. I wanted my father to appear not as an imposing authority, defining boundaries, carving out distinctions, categorizing terms, chopping up, in other words, but as a beneficent agent of continuity and unification. Such a fantasy, it would seem, expressed a desire that there be no oedipal struggle in my relation to my father's writing. Since writing had necessitated my father's absence, my oedipal wish for his removal may have seemed to have had writing as its instrument. So my fantasy of relating to the product of that writing as a nurturing agency was perhaps the creation of a wish to see writing as benign rather than as murderously destructive. My guilt would be erased if the paternal text turned out to have nothing against me and to cheerfully envelop me in a warm embrace. Such, however, was not my experience. Not only could I not immerse myself in the paternal scripture, but it forcibly kept me at a distance. These meditations about my relationship to my father's book would be hard to justify if this particular relationship between reader and text

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PSYCHOPOETICS OF TEXTUAL STRUCTURE

were aberrant. On the contrary, I believe that my experience involves an intensification of the psychological forces at work in any critical response to a text. The articulation of my response involves my entire economy of desires, defenses, fantasies, and fears. Insofar as these have been structured most powerfully in relation to my parents, I respond to texts in terms of that primary relation. This means that I respond to certain linguistic functions as maternal and to others as paternal. It might seem that my feeling about which is which would be entirely private and subjective, dependent upon my internalized relation to my particular parents. But in this introduction I hope to demonstrate that by combining insights drawn from psychoanalysis, linguistics, and literary criticism it is possible to arrive at a more generally applicable theory. In what follows I wish to describe the psychic processes homologous to the linguistic functions that structure the text. My goal, in other words, is to outline a psychopoetics of textual structure. I proceed by systematically placing the contributions of a variety of thinkers in the fields of psychoanalysis, linguistics, philosophy, and literary criticism within a psychotextual spectrum extending from Eros to Thanatos and from metonymy to metaphor. The thinkers I have chosen to discuss are those I have found to be most illuminating because of the depth and rigor of their meditation on psychopoetic issues. Freud fig'.lres prominently among my cited authorities, but I have not attempted to sort out the "truest" Freud, be he German, English, American, Jewish, or French. Rather, I have tried to allow Freud's ideas and those of his interpreters to find their place within a chain of reasoning that I could accept as sufficiently comprehensive to account for the main features of psychopoetic structure. My presentation of this structure in terms of a polar opposition is consonant with the preference for duality shown by Freud throughout his career and shared by the linguist Roman Jakobson and the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, among many other contemporary thinkers. However, it must be understood that this structure is more a fiction necessary to bring a certain intellectual clarity to an area of knowledge characterized by the interimplication of its constitutive categories than it is a distinction firmly maintained in reality, whether psychic or textual. Neither metonymy nor metaphor, neither Eros nor Thanatos, ever exist in what one might call a "pure" state. The poles of the structure are themselves outside its domain. The literary analyses to follow will show the complex interaction of the two psychopoetic orientations. It will become evident that, despite my foregoing critique of deconstructive theory, I do not contest the validity of its insights. I do, however, consider that it accounts for only one of the two essential forces, the staging of whose conflict in

PSYCHOPOETICS OF TEXTUAL STRUCTURE

9

the texts of Flaubert and Kafka will be the subject of my subsequent chapters. I begin my analysis on the side of Eros not because the life instincts are prior to, or somehow more valid than, the death instincts-I believe neither to be true-but because the drives of Eros are generally closer to conscious experience than those of Thanatos and hence easier to grasp. Bluntly stated, the textual system of Eros is generated by the absence of the mother's breast. Hence the structures in this system are essentially recuperative, aiming either to recreate the symbiotic relation of infant to nurturing mother or to compensate for the loss of this relation by the intentional creation of alternative modes of continuity. It may be, however, that no particular textual strategy can come as close to fulfilling this restorative project as the experience of reading itself. Such, at least, would be the thesis of Georges Poulet, and since the goals of Erotic textual structures can be illuminated by a theory of reading that incorporates those goals as near-accomplishments, I propose to initiate my discussion here with a brief analysis of Poulet's phenomenology of reading. Poulet describes the reading experience as an invasion of the mind by a linguistic fiction that suspends one's perception of the external world. This immersion in language gives us, he claims, a marvelous sense of union between subject and object. "Doubtless," writes Poulet, "what I glimpse through the words are mental forms not divested of an appearance of objectivity. But they do not seem to be of a nature other than my mind which thinks them. They are objects but subjectified objects. " 7 A structuralist would object to this description that it treats language naively as a mere transparency and that the words on the page always maintain a certain material opacity and otherness that keep the reader aware of their difference. But Poulet is describing a mode of reading that is entirely trustful of the text, not anxious to uncover its duplicities but willing to be taken in and to enjoy. For Poulet, the text is powerfully nutritive. It flows into him like mother's milk and he even fantasizes that he becomes it, that the fusion is total. "When I am absorbed in reading, a second self takes over, a self which thinks and feels for me" (p. 61). The first self's questioning response to this take-over expresses the ambivalence of the ego toward the powerful mother: "Do I derive some comfort [from this dispossession] or, on the contrary, a kind of anguish?" (p. 61), Poulet asks rhetorically. Most readers would probably agree that the experience of fusion involves both pleasure and anxiety. But these feelings can enter consciousness only retroactively, after the experience itself has passed. The pleasure that is felt in this deferred manner derives from the attitude of

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PSYCHOPOETIC~

OF TEXTUAL STRUCTURE

complete trust that allowed the reader to give himself to the text, and be sustained, even absorbed by it. This attitude recreates the experience of early infancy when the baby feels the mother to be merged with itself, continuous with itself. As the English psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott points out, at this stage "there is no interchange between the mother and the infant. " 8 The "subjectified objects" that Poulet experiences in reading the text find their prototype in the breast as experienced by the infant. "A subjective phenomenon," writes Winnicott, "develops in the baby, which we call the mother's breast. The mother places the actual breast just where the infant is ready to create, and at the right moment" (p. 13). This fusion-illusion cannot be spoken by the reader anymore than it can by the infant. The reader's consciousness is completely filled by the work he is reading. He has no independent thoughts. The text articulates itself within him, and his pleasure is generated apres-coup as a response to the prior lifting of the burdens of self-consciousness and of critical distance. Norman Holland, adopting a phrase from Bernard Berenson, calls this experience "the aesthetic moment." "The literary work," says Holland, "finds in us a matrix reaching back through many, many experiences of gratification in fantasy to our earliest experience of passive satisfaction. That occurred prior to our recognition of ourselves as separate beings, and literature re-creates this undifferentiated self: we ahsorb and become absorbed into the literary experience." 9 Marion Milner's analytic treatment of children led her to believe that the experience of pure loss of difference and merging of boundaries is recurrently necessary to a creative adaptation to the external world. She stresses that it is essential for a productive interplay between self and world that "the environment foster this growth by providing conditions in which a recurrent partial return to the feeling of being one is possible" 10 and suggests that "the environment does this by the recurrent providing of a framed space and time and a pliable medium so that, on occasions, it will not be necessary for self-preservation' s sake to distinguish clearly between inner and outer, self and notself" (p. 102). The text offers just such an enabling frame and unchallenged medium for illusion.* However, it is obvious that we are only rarely able to take full advantage of the text's maternal offer. The fusion of self and other in the act of reading is the result of a temporary spell, of an aesthetic *So, of course, does a painting. My father calls the experience of absorption in the aesthetic object the "primary and arrested phase" of mimetic representation. "To the truly rapt spectator," he writes, "there is no such thing as resemblance to a subject or a choice of materials, since the painting has a glorious presence that radiates its own message . . . . Thus for him the relational framework ceases to point to a 'meaning,' its relational capacity dwindles, and it becomes one with the fabric of the painting" (The Nature of Representation, pp. 12