Clouds and Clearings: the Other Novels

Abstract

Julia Kristeva has suggested that the modern novel generates a ‘continuous lay analysis’ of the problems that beset our society, of the cultural and individual neuroses that intersect in literary texts.1 If we assign any validity to Freud’s analysis of religion as a mass neurosis, then Compton-Burnett’s sustained (through twenty novels) critique of religion as a dangerous delusion and an instrument of the powerful to justify their power, provides a ‘continuous lay analysis’ of the moral superstructure of culture and literature. Both Freud and Compton-Burnett recognised that the origins of guilt lay in the parent-child relationship and that this relationship might later be transmuted into religious feeling. Yet whereas Freud analysed this societal neurosis in general terms in his later cultural criticism, particularly in The Future of an Illusion and Civilisation and its Discontents, Compton-Burnett’s novelistic analysis dramatises specific family conflicts. According to Kristeva literature may be ‘a more powerful tool’ than therapy in identifying and grappling with problems ‘because at times it presents us with situations that rarely appear in psychoanalytical treatment’.2