Hystery, Herstory, History: "Imagining the Real" in Thomas's "The White Hotel"

Abstract

The proper relation of art's forms to social facts has been a pressing problem for artists in this century, and so also has been the relation of psychoanalysis to political explanations of human behavior. For all their acute sensitivity to the society around them, the great modernist artists tended to give us survival by aesthetic escape into a contemplative and esoteric realm of imaginative creation. Yeats, for example, who is invoked in the epigraph of D. M. Thomas's The White Hotel, often worried about his poetry's responsibility for actual destruction, but he always reaffirmed, though with increasing self-irony, that the purged fantasies of art were his most adequate response to the brutal fantasies ruining the social and political life of Ireland. Likewise Freud personally experienced discrimination as a Jew both in the matter of appointment to a medical professorship and when he fled the Nazis to England, yet his psychoanalytic theory privileges intrapsychic fantasies as the source of sickness in civilization; finally he did not put much stock in social facts as the cause of neuroses and psychoses. Modernist art and psychoanalysis in its classical form share the prejudice that significant reality is to be found not in empirical fact but in a complex inference drawn from mediating and disguising signs. They do not believe that it is possible to tell the significant story straight, the story, for example, of a person's identity or a genocidal campaign. Both typically translate from a temporal series of events into a conceptual structure of explanation which is at least one remove from empirical facts. The postmodern artistic and historical temper is supposedly discontent with this consolation outside of history, but modernism in fact engendered two very different species of postmodern artistic reac-