Psychoanalysis and American Fiction: The Subversion of Q.E.D.

Abstract

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND AMERICAN FICTION: THE SUBVERSION OF Q.E.D. Claire Kahane and Janice Doane* On board ship to America to deliver a series of lectures, Sigmund Freud turned to his companions and remarked, "We are bringing them the plague."1 Although many Americans probably did and still do agree with Freud's gloomy characterization, Americans accepted psychoanalysis so readily that we might question, as Freud himself did, our understanding of its implications. Certainly psychoanalytic practice has flourished here more so than in any other country, and Freudian concepts have influenced a host of related disciplines, including literary criticism. Today, however, that initial enthusiasm is being tempered, not so much by external resistance to its application, as by a period of what Geoffrey Hartman calls "constitutive doubt,"2 a doubt from within the field that both informs and enriches psychoanalytic practice. There has always been internal discord among psychoanalysts themselves, but criticism now seems specifically aimed at the American practice of psychoanalysis, a criticism calling American revisions and interpretations of the Freudian model into question. For the literary critic, moreover, this criticism, proffered in the name of the most profound insights of psychoanalysis, puts into question the security of an interpretive position. If not exactly a "plague," psychoanalysis has proven lately to be a troubling venture, not least of all to we who would practice it. Even this essay is plagued by the fact that psychoanalytic criticism does not constitute a coherent field of theory or practice but is fragmented by different voices. Nonetheless, these difficulties are also proving to be a source of attraction. "In recent years," as Hartman remarks, "psychoanalytically oriented criticism has become increasingly difficult to do. Yet more and more people are doing it" (p. 345). 'Claire Kahane is an Associate Professor of English and a member of the Center for the Psychological Study of the Arts at the State University of New York at Buffalo. She has published articles on Gothic fiction and feminine identity, the comic-grotesque, Virginia Woolf, and Flannery O'Connor. She is currently completing a book on Flannery O'Connor. Janice Doane, a part-time instructor at Canisius College and at Buffalo State College, has published articles on D. W. Winnicott and Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism and has recently completed a book on Gertrude Stein's early work. 138Claire Kahane and Janice Doane From its inception, psychoanalysis has sought to uncover what it had already discovered: the primary significance of the unconscious in human expression. That fundamental proposition still remains the common denominator in the proliferation of psychoanalytic criticism. Assuming a structure of duplicity in discourse, psychoanalytic critics have sought to discern gaps, inconsistencies, and contradictions which signal the operation of unconscious motives. The more ambiguous and problematic a text appears, the more tempted are psychoanalytic critics to engage and master it by applying the laws of psychoanalytic detection. These laws, however, have not presented so much a methodology as an "orientation," or as L. Tennenhouse has put it, a "perspective or mode,"3 that is, a set of assumptions, a place from which the critic approached the text. Initially one's place and direction were fairly certain. The "psychoanalytically oriented" critic placed himself outside the text and gazed downward, penetrating beneath the words, images, and narrative events to reveal the depths of unconscious fantasy, the latent—and real—meaning. The interpretive project was to bridge the gap between figurai notation and latent meaning, to reestablish the continuity of a repressed prior reality and its manifestation in present language. Paradoxically, that required keeping the categories of fiction (the manifest) and truth (the latent) distinct, and moving or translating from one realm to the other. If truth lay in the silence of the unconscious , that unconscious was not assumed to be problematic but rather eminently readable, for Freud's own transparent texts provided critics with the master keys. As an object of this kind of classic Freudian enterprise, American fiction seemed particularly well-suited. From Charles Brockdon Brown to Melville, Poe, and Hawthorne, from Faulkner and Djuna Barnes to John Hawkes and Flannery O'Connor, our most provocative novelists have probed the contradictions of experience and desire, creating a...