The New Psychoanalysis and Literary Criticism: A Reading of Hawthorne and Melville

Abstract

Psychoanalytic literary criticism has been, and one presumes will continue to be, under constant attack from literary critics. The main objection has always been that it reduces the work to a narrow set of configurations which do not do justice to the complexity of the text. The ambiguities of the text are said to go far beyond such a crude schematization. At best it was grudgingly admitted that a psychoanalytic interpretation might be allowed to stand as one possible interpretation among many. But this kind of concession is far from acceptable to the new movement and it is not hard to see why. The new movement is not especially interested in the elucidation of individual works, except inasmuch as they can help to validate its findings: that literature, far from presenting a unified consciousness, shows up the divisions of the self. Literary critics, on the other hand, are committed to the concept of ambiguity as product of an omniscient authorial consciousness, which undermines any notion of a work without a stable center. The old psychoanalytic criticism is really on the orthodox side, for it trades on an omniscient authorial unconscious, which smuggled in whispered meanings (I refer to the title of a recent book by one of its pioneers, Simon Lesser [1977]). This approach could be vastly entertaining and very subtle-witness D.H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature but too often it was boringly clear. Sometimes, however, one is assailed by a regressive longing for examples of its boring clarity. In the end most of us would rather be mystified by the work than by the explanation. Reading a text is no longer considered an innocent activitry. Post-structuralist criticism undermines the notion that the text contains a stable meaning. The author's intention is not only not recoverable but was never where he might have thought it was in the first place. The critic can at best transform the text so as to realize his experience of the author's experience, the author himself being engaged in an act of interpretation. It is a matter of sorting out what Paul De Man calls Blindness and Insight (1971), that