Literary Theory and Criticism, Part-VIII

Poststructuralism

The Essence of Poststructuralism

The name says everything and nothing. It comes after structuralism; it is a reaction against structuralism. But, in its critique of structuralism, it was not conducting a postmortem. Structuralist influence continued to be very much alive and kicking. It was also a very complex phenomenon, which cannot be explained just by its relationship to structuralism. It must also be stressed that poststructuralism and deconstruction theory are parts of a continuum and that it is mainly for the sake of clarity that they have been allotted separate sections. Many of the theorists too are relevant, not only to poststructuralism and deconstruction theory, but also to psychoanalysis and feminism. Names such as Jacques Lacan, Paul de Man, Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva and others will recur. However, examining what poststructuralism found to be wrong with structuralism is as good a place to start as any. The great guru of the structuralists, Saussure,was about to be dethroned, because a signifier was no longer perceived as signifying anything any more. Or not quite as Saussure envisaged it, at least.

With every ‘sign’, Saussure had posited, ‘signifier’ and  ‘signified’ were two sides of the same coin. Although they were in an arbitrary relationship, they stuck together through thick and thin. The word ‘dog’ and that furry creature there wagging its tail were permanently wed (at least, in the English language they were).Then poststructuralism came along and threw doubt on this whole cosy little arrangement. For them a ‘sign’ is a very temporary coming together of ‘signifier’ and ‘signified’: a one-night stand. The very dictionary itself, the fount of all certainty about language, proves the point. When you seek the meaning of a word in a dictionary you are indefinitely deferred. Look up that word ‘dog’ and you find ‘a common four-legged animal, especially any of the many varieties kept by humans…’ etc. Look up ‘animal’ and you find ‘a living creature, not a plant.’ Look up ‘living creature’… and so on ad infinitum. For poststructuralists, signifiers form complex patterns of meaning with other signifiers and their meanings can never be pinned down. Many of these ideas are expounded in full by Jacques Derrida but, as he is closely associated with the concept of ‘deconstruction’, his ideas will be examined in that section.

Saussure’s concepts of ‘parole’ (language as utterance) and ‘langue’ (language competence) were also under attack by the poststructuralists. Structuralists were interested primarily in ‘langue’, the deep structure which makes communication and meaning possible. But poststructuralists saw ‘langue’ as a kind of myth. Language does not have an impersonal structure underlying utterances. It is always and only an articulated system, which interacts with other systems of meaning and with human social existence. This concept of language poststructuralists prefer to call ‘discourse’.

According to poststructuralists everything is discourse. Objective reporting of things and events in language is simply impossible. All language, meaning everything we can potentially say, pre-exists our utilisation of it. Subject and object cannot be sharply distinguished. This not only applies to our use of language but to all systems of knowledge, including science. New knowledge is attained when there is a jump from one accepted form of discourse to a completely new one, a paradigm-shift.

This blurring of the distinctions between subject and object also throws the whole notion of personal identity into doubt. When I use the pronoun ‘I’ or refer to myself as ‘me’, these are also signifiers which are unstable. It implies that ‘I’ can never be fully present to ‘you’, and consequently ‘you’ can never be fully present to ‘me’. The notion of a stable, unified self is a fiction. Another interesting aspect of this is that, according to poststructuralists, when we speak we have a greater sense of being at one with the ‘I’ who speaks, than we do, when writing, with the ‘I’ who writes. Writing is second-hand, at one remove from consciousness. It is alienated from the self. This is why the identity of the ‘I’ in writing is always suspect. However, one should be cautious of granting this belief universal validity, as there are people who claim to be more at one with their self when writing than when speaking.

Roland Barthes (1915–1980)

A central tenet of Barthes’ thought is that all forms of communication and representation are conventional. He despises the writer who deludes him/herself and his or her readers into thinking that language can be a transparent medium, through which it is possible to transmit clear unambiguous ideas or images of reality. A writer should be honest about the artificiality of what he or she is doing.

Something which characterises much poststructuralist thought is the occurrence of infinite regress or doubt. In Elements of Semiology (1967), Barthes expresses the belief that structuralism can be applied to all sign systems. However, he thinks that, by the same token, structuralism can also be subjected to a structural analysis, and indeed to other modes of analysis. Following upon this he cannot avoid the conclusion that metalanguages (processes of thought that reflect on other modes of thought or processes) can be subject themselves to analysis by other metalanguages ad infinitum. All forms of thought are by this token, therefore, fictions. No ultimate truth is ever discernible.

The most famous of Barthes’ works is, undoubtedly, The Death of the Author (1968). In this essay, he rejects the view that an author is the originator of his text and the sole authority for its valid interpretation. A work in no way and on no level reflects an author’s intentions concerning the work. The author is nothing more than the location where a verbal event takes place. The reader can therefore approach the text from any direction whatsoever, and can interpret the text (the ‘signifier’) without respecting any intended meaning (the ‘signified’).

In The Pleasure of the Text (1975), Barthes pursues this self-indulgence on the part of the reader even further. For him, there are two kinds of pleasure to be gained in reading a text. The first is simple ‘pleasure’. We feel this when we perceive something more than the simple and obvious meaning of what we read. We make an association, draw an inference, recall an image etc. This disrupts the linear flow of the text. Something, in a sense unjustified, is brought into association with the basic meanings of a text. We gain pleasure also from the rhythm of the narrative and from allowing our attention to wander. All this is acceptable and non-provocative in the context of normal cultural pursuits.

Barthes’ second type of pleasure is what must appear to be an odd interpretation of the concept for most people. For many it is difficult to identify it as a kind of pleasure at all. The word he uses for it is jouissance, which means ‘pleasure’ in French, but which is usually translated as ‘bliss’, as he clearly envisages a stronger, virtually orgasmic form of pleasure. For Barthes, it is clearly something akin to the thrill of revolutionary feelings or actions. A text which provides a sense of ‘bliss’ ‘unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions’. It is the thrill of discovering the new, the dangerous, that which threatens chaos, anarchy. If the reader is not receptive to such an experience, he or she will feel only boredom but surrendering to it will bring the sense of ‘bliss’. It seems a little like the effect which Franz Kafka required of a good book: that of an ice-axe breaking the frozen sea of the mind.

One of Barthes’ most notorious books, which many consider to be his most impressive, is the oddly named S/Z (1970). In this work he starts with a thorough critique of structuralist attempts to trace common basic structures in all stories. He is more interested in what makes them different than what they have common. Every text refers back, in different ways, to all other texts that have ever been written. For Barthes, there are two types of text: that which allows the reader only to comprehend in a predetermined way and that which makes the reader into the producer of his or her own meaning. The first type of text he calls ‘readerly’ (lisible) and the other ‘writerly’ (scriptible). It is clear that Barthes prefers the second kind: ‘this ideal text is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds.’ It is possible for a reader to apply an infinite number of interpretations to such a text. None of them needs to be compatible nor part of an overall unity.

Barthes demonstrates his approach to actual texts by breaking down a novella by Honoré de Balzac (Sarrasine) according to specific codes. He first divides the story into a random number of reading units (581 ‘lexias’). Each of them is then subjected to analysis according to five codes:

1. Hermeneutic (relating to the enigma or mystery in the story).

2. Semic (relating to associations evoked).

3. Symbolic (relating to polarities and antitheses in the story).

4. Proairetic (relating to basic action and behaviour).

5. Cultural (relating to commonly shared cultural knowledge between text and reader).

The Balzac story is commonly regarded as a realist work and Barthes, in Terry Eagleton’s words, ‘drastically rewrites and reorganizes it out of all conventional recognition’. Sarrasine thereby becomes what Barthes terms a ‘limit text’ for literary realism. His analysis reveals the limits of the realist mode of writing.

Michel Foucault (1926–1984)

The post that Michel Foucault held at the Collège de France, Paris, at the time of his death, aptly sums up his unique specialist field: ‘Professor of the History of Systems of Thought’. He can justifiably be described as poststructuralist in one important sense. The structuralists used  linguistics as their model of analysis but Foucault considered this inadequate and focused instead on the history of social and political systems and discourses. Because of this, he has been very influential in the field of literary history. His concept of ‘discourse’ needs some clarification.

Foucault’s use of the term ‘discourse’ is closely related to his concept of power. The power of the human sciences (eg psychology, economics etc) derives from their claims to be knowledge. They expect respect for their claims and thereby exert power and influence. Practitioners in these fields set themselves up as experts and it is through their claimed expertise that power is exerted. For Foucault, a discourse is a loose structure of interconnected assumptions which makes knowledge possible. He expounded this idea most clearly in his work The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972), in which he asserted that discourse can be defined as a large group of statements belonging to a single system of formation, what he calls a ‘discursive formation’. He cites the examples of ‘clinical discourse, economic discourse, the discourse of natural history, psychiatric discourse’. One of the main reasons why knowledge can be a form of power is that it is a method of defining and categorising other people. It leads eventually to disciplining those who do not conform or, in the case of psychiatry, those who are defined as unsocial or criminal. It also leads to surveillance, what Foucault calls ‘panopticism’. This is realised, for example, in the form of policing and the setting up guards in prisons to observe every move of the inmates. Of course, when considering the latter part of the twentieth century, one might want to add the advent of widespread CCTV surveillance.

Foucault was greatly influenced by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and his concept of power. Nietzsche argued that all forms of knowledge are expressions of the ‘Will to Power’. On this assumption it is not possible to assume the existence of absolute truths or any kind of objective knowledge. An idea or theory is only ‘true’ if it accords with notions of truth held by the prevailing authorities of the day, whether intellectual or political. For Foucault, what it is possible for an author to say changes from one period to another. What is considered normal or rational in any given period is confirmed by rules, tacit or otherwise. Those who do not abide by the rules are excluded from the prevailing discourse, and are either suppressed or condemned as mad. The education system is also important in institutionalising these  rules and inculcating them into the minds of new generations.

Foucault points out that different forms of knowledge have arisen in different historical periods and been replaced eventually by new systems of thought. For him, history is such a series of disconnected discursive practices. Specifically he was interested in the fields of psychiatry, medicine, sex and crime. It must be stressed that the rules governing such discourses are not consciously employed. We can understand the bodies of discourse of earlier eras only because we are governed by different discourses and are remote from that era. As we view past discourses through our own unconscious discourses, we can never possess an objective knowledge of history.

The work of Foucault which deals most explicitly with writing and authorship is the essay What is an Author? (1969). In this essay, he recognises the importance of Barthes’ essay The Death of the Author but views the question of authorship as being more complex. However, the idea of an ideal society in which literature could circulate anonymously appeals to him greatly. It would seem that, for Foucault, the aim of writing is not to express the self or to fix a meaning but to create an individual object behind which the writer can efface him or herself: ‘Writing unfolds like a game that invariably goes beyond its own rules and transgresses its limits. In writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject within language; it is rather a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears.’

In one sense, Foucault does consider the author to be dead, but this death is one in which the author is complicit. The author of fiction especially attempts to deny his or her presence (it would seem that Foucault is thinking of realist fiction in particular): ‘Using all the contrivances that he sets up between himself and what he writes, the writing subject cancels out the signs of his particular individuality. As a result, the mark of the writer is reduced to nothing more than the singularity of his absence; he must assume the role of the dead man in the game of writing.’

Literary Theory and Criticism, Part-VII

Postcolonial Theory

For the purposes of the study of literature the most relevant concern of postcolonial thought has been the decentralization of western culture and its values. Seen from the perspective of a postcolonial world, it has been the major works of thought of Western Europe and American Culture that have dominated philosophy and critical theory as well as works of literature throughout a large part of the world, especially those areas which were formerly under colonial rule. Derrida’s concept of a ‘white mythology’, which has attempted to impose itself on the entire world, has lent support to the postcolonial attack on the dominance of western ideologies. The postmodern rejection of ‘grand narratives’, universalizing western modes of thought, has also been very influential (see the section on postmodernism).The most important writers among postcolonial theorists are Edward Said, Homi Bhabha and G C Spivak.

Edward Said (1935–)

Said is concerned to relate poststructuralist theories of discourse, especially that of Foucault, to real political  problems in the world. His most important work in this respect is Orientalism (1978). Said distinguishes between three usages of the term ‘orientalism’. Firstly, it refers to the long period of cultural and political relations between Europe and Asia. Secondly, the term is used to refer to the academic study of oriental languages and culture which dates from the early nineteenth century. And thirdly, it is used to refer to the stereotypical views of the Orient developed by many generations of western writers and scholars, with their prejudiced views of orientals as inherently criminal and deceitful. He includes evidence, not only from literature, but also from such sources as colonial government documents, histories, studies of religion and language, travel books etc. The distinction between ‘the Orient’ and ‘the Occident’ exists, in Said’s view, only in ‘imaginative geography’. Said’s analyses of various social discourses are therefore essentially deconstructive and ‘against the grain’. His aim is to ‘decentre’ awareness of the ‘Third World’ and provide a critique which undermines the dominance of ‘First World’ discourses.

For Said, all the representations of the Orient by the West constituted a determined effort to dominate and subjugate it. Orientalism served the purposes of western hegemony (in Gramsci’s sense): to legitimize western imperialism and convince the inhabitants of such regions that accepting western culture was a positive civilizing process. In defining the East, orientalism also defined what the West conceived itself to be (in the way of binary oppositions). Stressing the sensuality, primitiveness and despotism of the East underlined the rational and democratic qualities of the West. In the light of Said’s theories, literature written by native populations could now be seen in a new light. Did the writers comply with western hegemony or oppose it? In his essay, The World, the Text and the Critics (1983), Said criticised all modes of textual analysis which considered texts as being separate from the world in which they exist. The notion of it being possible for there to be infinite possible readings of a text could only be entertained by such severing of the text from the real world.

Homi Bhabha (1950–)

Homi Bhabha is essentially interested in exploring noncanonical texts which reflect the margins of society in a postcolonial world. He explores the subtle interrelations between cultures, the dominant and the subjugated. Of especial interest to him is the way in which subjugated races mimic their subjugators. These ideas are explored especially in the volume The Location of Culture (1994). There are examples of such ‘mimics’ in several wellknown works of literature which trace the relations between the British and the Indians: in the works of Rudyard Kipling, such as Kim, and in E M Forster’s A Passage to India. They exist in between cultures and, neither fully of the one nor of the other, are in fact hybrids.

Bhabha argues that the interaction between colonizer and colonised leads to the fusion of cultural norms, which confirms the colonial power but also, in its mimicry, threatens to destabilise it. This is possible because the identity of the coloniser is inherently unstable, existing in an isolated expatriate situation. The coloniser’s identity exists by virtue of its difference. It materialises only when in direct contact with the colonised. Before that, its only reality is in the ideology of orientalism, as defined by Said.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1942–)

Spivak has been described as the first truly feminist postcolonial theorist. She criticises western feminism especially for focusing on the world of white, middle-class heterosexual concerns. She is also interested in the role of social class and has focused on what in postcolonial studies has become known as the ‘subaltern’, originally a military term referring to those who are in a lower rank or position. Its usage in critical theory is derived from the writings of Gramsci. Spivak uses the term to refer to all the lower levels of colonial and postcolonial society: the unemployed, the homeless, subsistence farmers etc. Of course, she is especially interested in the fate of the ‘female subaltern’. She is concerned that the ‘female subaltern’ is not misrepresented (in Can the Subaltern Speak?, 1988). Spivak argues that, in the traditional Indian practice of burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands, neither the Indians nor the British colonisers allowed the women themselves to express their own views. She combines Marxism and a deconstructive approach in analysis of colonialist texts, showing how they create false oppositions between a united colonialist consciousness and a fictional primitive chaos. It is possible, she argues, through deconstruction of the text, to reveal the instability of these oppositions, the hollowness in fact of the colonial power structure.

Literary Theory and Criticism, Part-VI

Feminist Theory

What unites the various kinds of feminist literary theory is not so much a specific technique of criticism but a common goal: to raise awareness of women’s roles in all aspects of literary production (as writers, as characters in literature, as readers etc.) and to reveal the extent of male dominance in all of these aspects. Women’s attempts to resist the dominance of a patriarchal society have a long history but the actual term ‘feminism’ seems not to have come into English usage until the 1890s. In general, feminist criticism has also attempted to show that literary criticism and theory themselves have been dominated by male concerns. In fact, some feminists have reacted against all theory as an essentially male-dominated sphere. Theory, for them, is associated with the traditional male/ female binary opposition: theory being essentially in the male domain and embracing all that is impersonal and would-be objective. Against this, they have placed the female world of subjectivity and primal experience. There is general agreement among most authors that, apart from recent developments, feminist theory can be divided into two major stages: The First Wave and The Second Wave.

The First Wave

The earlier phase of modern feminist theory was very much influenced by the social and economic reforms brought about by the Women’s Rights and Suffrage movements. Two writers in particular stand out in this period for first raising many of the issues which would continue to preoccupy later feminists: Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir.

I. Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)

Apart from her novels, Virginia Woolf also wrote two works which contributed to feminist theory: A Room with a View (1927), and Three Guineas (1938). In the former, Woolf considered especially the social situation of women as writers and, in the latter, she explored the dominance of the major professions by men. In the first work she argued that women’s writing should explore female experience and not just draw comparisons with the situation in society of men. Woolf was also one of the earliest writers to stress that gender is not predetermined but is a social construct and, as such, can be changed. However, she did not want to encourage a direct confrontation between female and male concerns and preferred to try to find some kind of balance of power between the two. If women were to develop their artistic abilities to the full, she felt it was necessary to establish social and economic equality with men.

II. Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986)

Simone de Beauvoir is famous not only as a feminist but as the life-long partner of the French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre. She was a very active fighter for women’s rights and a supporter of abortion. Her most influential book is, without doubt, The Second Sex (1949). In this work, she outlined the differences between the interests of men and women and attacked various forms of male dominance over women. Already in the Bible and throughout history Woman was always regarded as the ‘Other’. Man dominated in all influential cultural fields, including law, religion, philosophy, science, literature and the other arts. She also clearly distinguished between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’, and wrote (famously) ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.’ She demanded freedom for women from being distinguished on the basis of biology and rejected the whole notion of femininity, which she regarded as a male projection.

The Second Wave

The second wave of feminist theory was very much influenced by the various liberationist movements, especially in America, in the 1960s. Its central concern was sexual difference. The theorists of this second wave criticized especially the argument that women were made ‘inferior’ by virtues of their biological difference to men. Some feminist critics, on the other hand, celebrated the biological difference and considered it a source of positive values which women could nurture, both in their everyday lives and in works of art and literature. Another area of debate has been the question of whether white women and men perceive the world in the same ways, and differently to black women. Another much disputed question has been whether there exists a specifically female language. This has arisen from the sense that one reason for the oppression of women has been the male dominance of language itself. Some feminists have decided not to challenge dominance directly but rather to celebrate all that has been traditionally identified as the polar opposite of maleness. All that is disruptive, chaotic and subversive is seen as female, in a positive, creative sense, in contrast to the restrictive, ordering and defining obsessions of maleness.

I. Kate Millett (1934–)

Kate Millett’s book Sexual Politics (1969) was probably the most influential feminist work of its period. Her central argument is that the main cause of the oppression of women is ideology. Patriarchy is all-pervasive and treats females universally as inferior. In both public and private life the female is subordinate. Millett also distinguishes very clearly between ‘sex’ (biological characteristics) and ‘gender’ (culturally acquired identity). The interaction of domination and subordination in all relations between men and women is what she calls ‘sexual politics’. Millett also reveals a special interest in literature, arguing that the very structure of narrative has been shaped by male ideology. Male purposiveness and goal-seeking dominate the structure of most literature. To show up the extent to which the perspectives in most works are those of the men, she deliberately provides readings of famous works of literature from a woman’s perspective. However, she reveals a misconceived view of homosexuality in literature (especially in the works of Jean Genet), which she could only comprehend as a kind of metaphor for subjection of the female.

II. Sandra Gilbert (1936–) and Susan Guber (1944–)

Gilbert and Guber’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) is famous for its exploration of certain female stereotypes in literature, especially those of the ‘angel’ and the ‘monster’. The title refers to the mad wife whom Rochester has locked in the attic in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. They have been criticised for identifying many examples of patriarchal dominance without providing a thorough criticism of it.

III. Elaine Showalter (1941–)

One of the most influential books of The Second Wave is Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of their Own (1977), which provides a literary history of women writers. It outlines a feminist critique of literature for women readers as well as identifying crucial women writers. She coined the term ‘gynocriticism’ for her mode of analysing the works of women writers. She also argues for a profound difference between the writing of women and that of men and delineates a whole tradition of women’s writing neglected by male critics. She divides this tradition into three phases. The first phase was from about 1840 to 1880, and she  refers to it as the ‘feminine’ phase. It includes writers such as George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell. Female writers in this phase internalised and respected the dominant male perspective, which required that women authors remained strictly in their socially acceptable place. From this perspective, it is significant that Mary Anne Evans found it necessary to adopt the male pen name of ‘George Eliot’. The Second Phase, the ‘feminist’ phase, from 1880 to 1920 included radical feminist writers who protested against male values, such as Olive Schreiner and Elizabeth Robins. The Third Phase, which she describes as the ‘female’ phase, developed the notion of specifically female writing. Rebecca West and Katherine Mansfield exemplify this phase.

IV. Julia Kristeva (1941–)

The central ideas of Julia Kristeva have already been outlined in relation to the influence of Lacanian psychoanalysis on her work. She considered Lacan’s ‘symbolic’ stage in a child’s development to be the main root of male dominance. When a child learns language, it also recognizes principles of order, law and rationality associated with a patriarchal society. Lacan’s pre-Oedipal ‘imaginary’ stage is referred to by Kristeva as ‘semiotic’, and literature, especially poetry, can tap the rhythms and drives of this stage. The pre-Oedipal stage is also associated very closely with the body of the mother. When the male child enters the ‘symbolic’ order, however, the child identifies with the father. The female child is identified with pre-Oedipal, pre-discursive incoherence, and is seen as a threat to the rational order. As has been already explained, Kristeva advocates a kind of anarchic liberation, in which ‘poetic’ and ‘political’ become interchangeable.

V. Helène Cixous (1937–)

Helène Cixous’ essay, The Laugh of the Medusa (1976), argues for a positive representation of femininity in women’s writing. Her mode of writing is often poetic rather than rational: ‘Write yourself.Your body must be heard.’ There is a paradox at the heart of Cixous’ theory in that she rejects theory itself: ‘…this practice can never be theorized, enclosed, encoded – which doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist.’ Her notion of a specific écriture féminine is intended to subvert the symbolic rational ‘masculine’ language. Like Julia Kristeva, she also links écriture feminine to Lacan’s pre-Oedipal ‘imaginary’ phase. She advocates also what she refers to as ‘the other bisexuality’, which actively encourages and relishes sexual differences. It must be said that her writing is full of contradictions: rejecting a biological account of the female but nevertheless celebrating the female body; including binary oppositions but denying their importance; encouraging a specifically female form of writing but celebrating pre-linguistic, non-verbal experience. It is a position which one is tempted to describe as full of much sound and fury but signifying, in both Saussurean and Shakespearean senses,

nothing.

VI. Luce Irigaray (1932–)

Luce Irigaray is especially critical of Freud’s view of women. In Spéculum de l’autre femme (1974) she argues that Freud’s ‘penis envy’ envisages women as not really existing at all independently but only as negative mirror images of men. Male perception is clearly associated with sight (observation, analysis, aesthetics etc), but women gain pleasure from physical contact. The eroticism of women is fundamentally different to that of men. For Irigaray, all this implies that women should celebrate their completely different nature to men, their otherness. Only in this way can they overcome the traditional male-dominated perception of women.

VII. Ruth Robbins

The general concern of Marxist Feminism is to reveal the double oppression of women, both by the capitalist system and by sexuality within the home, and to explain the relationships between the two. The ideas of Ruth Robbins provide a good example of the combination of feminist concerns and Marxist principles. In Literary Feminisms (2000), she advocates a Marxist feminism which explains ‘the material conditions of real people’s lives, how conditions such as poverty and undereducation produce different signifying systems than works produced in conditions of privilege and educational plenty’.

Literary Theory and Criticism, Part-V

Marxist Theory

The Essence of Marxist Thought

There is no scope in the present context to expound Marxist theory adequately. All that can be done is to stress the aspects of it, the essential concepts, which are relevant to understanding a Marxist approach to the study of literature. For Karl Marx, and those closest to his way of thinking, all those modes of thought, including literary creativity, are ideological and are products of social and economic existence. Basically Man’s social being determines his consciousness and the material interests of the dominant social class determine how all classes perceive their existence. All forms of culture, therefore, do not exist in an ideal, abstract form but are inseparable from the historical determining social conditions. They exist, in other words, as a superstructure to the basic economic structure of a society. This view was the exact reverse of the Hegelian belief that the world was governed by thought and the application of reason, whether it be human or divine. Philosophising about the world alone was insufficient for Marx; the most important thing was to change it. In The German Ideology (1846), Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote of religion, morality and philosophy as ‘phantoms found in the brains of men’. But in letters which he wrote in the 1890s Engels acknowledged that both he and Marx recognised that art, philosophy and other forms of human consciousness could alter the human condition and had a degree of autonomy. The special status of literature was also recognised by Marx in the Grundrisse. Greek tragedy was for him an anomaly because it seemed to represent a timeless, universal achievement but was actually produced within a society with a structure and ideology which he could no longer consider valid. How could such a phenomenon continue to give aesthetic pleasure and be regarded as expressing universal truths?

Socialist Realism

Socialist Realism is the term usually applied to the statesanctioned theory of art favoured predominantly in the Soviet Union, and therefore known as Soviet Socialist Realism, but it was also the dominant party aesthetic in other Eastern European countries under the political domination of Russia after the Stalinist period and the Second World War. Basically the ideal of nineteenth century Russian realist literature was set up as the most suitable norm for a communist aesthetic but it was given a doctrinaire edge. All other forms of modernist experimental art and literature were considered to be the decadent offspring of late capitalism. Only lip service was paid to the notion of artistic freedom. In practise, a writer could not hope to get his work published if he or she did not write to please the party. Lenin had made this explicit in his essay Party Organisation and Party Literature (1905), in which he asserted that writers were free to write whatever they wanted but, if they wanted to get their work published in party journals, they would have to toe the party line. As all journals were soon to become affiliated to the party, this provided writers, effectively, with only Hobson’s choice. Literary critics were encouraged to praise those writers of the past who had revealed insights into the social problems and developments of their time, even though they might have been of bourgeois origin themselves. Leo Tolstoy, Honoré de Balzac and Charles Dickens therefore came in for special praise. All literature had also to address the interests of the people as a whole. This quality was known as narodnost. And it had to present a progressive and, of course, communist outlook for the future of society.

Georg Lukács (1885–1971)

One of the most admired Marxist critics is Georg Lukács, a Hungarian-born philosopher and critic. He is associated with socialist realism but reveals great subtlety in his arguments. He greatly admired many of the great Realist works of the 19th century, especially when they revealed underlying contradictions in society. It was for this reason that he praised the novels of the Prussian writer Theodor Fontane, especially his short novel Schach von Wuthenow (translated as A Man of Honour), which provides a disturbing critique of the Prussian code of honour. For Lukács, it was ‘the pinnacle of German historical narrative art’. In Lukács’ eyes, true Realism did not just depict the appearance of the social world but provided ‘a truer, more complete, more vivid and more dynamic reflection of reality’. A Realist novel does not provide an illusion of reality but is ‘a special form of reflecting reality’. A truly realistic work provides a sense of the ‘artistic necessity’ of the scenes and details presented. The writer reflects, in an intensified form, the structure of the society depicted and its dialectical development. Lukács’ ideas are expounded most fully in two major works: The Historical Novel (1937) and Studies in European Realism (1950). In The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (1957), he attacks especially modernist literature. He rejected the static, ahistorical epic structure of James Joyce’s work, and found modernist writing, in general, lacking in historical awareness. Beckett and Kafka were condemned for these reasons. For Lukács, modernist writers were too concerned about evoking an inner stream of consciousness and the obsessions of isolated individuals. This he related to the effects of living in late capitalist societies. One of the few contemporaries he did admire was Thomas Mann, whom he considered an exponent of a genuine ‘critical realism’. During a stay in Berlin in the 1930s he also attacked the use of modernist techniques in the writings of left-wing radicals. His attack on the playwright and theorist Bertolt Brecht has become particularly famous.

Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)

After reading Marx in the 1920s, Bertolt Brecht, the German-born playwright, focused his earlier anarchistic attitudes into more clearly defined communist convictions. He wrote many clearly didactic plays (the Lehrstücke) and more complex thought-provoking plays, mainly in exile from Nazi Germany. His theoretical works on theatre practice revolutionised modern drama. He rejected entirely the Aristotelian tradition of theatre: plot, fate and universality were out. He employed techniques to bring about what he called a Verfremdungseffekt, meaning literally ‘the effect of making strange’ and usually translated as ‘alienation’. It has much in common with the concept of ‘defamiliarisation’ coined by the Russian Formalists. By such methods he attempted to show up the contradictions in capitalist society as something strange and unnatural, requiring change. His actors were not to create the illusion of real people with whom audiences could identify but should present caricatures revealing the inner contradictions of the characters, the ways in which their behaviour was moulded by social forces and their need to survive.

One aspect of Brecht’s theory, which brought him into conflict with Lukács, was the rejection of formal unity in a work. His ‘epic’ theatre consisted of a series of loosely related episodes, rather than an all-embracing structure. The unities of time and place were rejected. He did not believe in any ‘eternal aesthetic laws’ and, for him, any dramatic device was acceptable if it served his purpose. He strongly opposed what he saw as Lukács’ attempts to establish ‘purely formal and literary criteria of realism’. He demanded constant adjustment to the ever-changing nature of political reality: ‘to represent it the means of representation must alter too.’

The Frankfurt School

The name ‘The Frankfurt School’ has come to be applied to a group of philosophers and thinkers of other disciplines who were members or were associated with The Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main in Germany. They practised what they called ‘Critical Theory’. The leading figures in the group were Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse. The institute moved to New York during the Nazi period but settled back in Frankfurt again in 1950. Their analysis of modern culture and society was very much influenced by their experience of Fascism.

Theodor Adorno (1903–1969)

The leading and most influential writer on aesthetics in the Frankfurt School was undoubtedly Adorno. He criticized Lukács’ view that art could have a direct relationship with reality. For Adorno, art, including literature, is detached from reality and this is the very source of its strength. Popular art forms only confirm and conform to the norms of a society but true art takes up a criticalstance, distanced from the world which engendered it: ‘Art  is the negative knowledge of the actual world.’ He saw the alienation evident in the writings of Proust and Beckett as proving such ‘negative knowledge’ of the modern world.

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)

Walter Benjamin was closely associated with the Frankfurt School but he was very much a maverick thinker. His early writing was on Goethe and German Baroque drama. His best known essay is undoubtedly The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, in which he argued that modern means of reproducing works of art, especially photography and film, have changed the special status of a work of art. This is also true, of course, of the reproduction of musical performances. Benjamin argues that works of art once used to have the quality of uniqueness which he calls their ‘aura’. Even in the case of literature which, of course, had long been available in multiple copies, this aura had been maintained. Many kinds of modern works of art are actually designed with a view to reproducing them, as is the case with art prints, for example. In the case of the cinema there exist multiple copies without there being a real original from which the film is derived. Benjamin believed this to be a good and beneficial development, making art no longer something remote and awe-inspiring but accessible to intelligent lay analysis. One might argue against Benjamin, of course, that the result has been only to make much art more remote, obscure and unfathomable. In another essay, The Author as Producer, he stresses the need for socialist writers and artists to take full advantage of the potential of the new possibilities of reproduction, and to use them consciously to political effect. There is no guarantee of changing people’s thought merely through the ready availability of works of art.

Lucien Goldmann (1913–1970)

Lucien Goldmann was a Romanian by birth but lived in France. He rejected the notion of individual genius in the arts. He believed that works of art and literature reflected the ‘mental structures’ of the class which engendered them. Great writers possessed the ability to formulate and express these structures and enable people to perceive them through the works. He developed a distinctive form of Marxist literary theory he called ‘genetic structuralism’ which, as the name suggests, also owes much to structuralist thought. He was interested in tracing the relationships between a work of literature, predominant modes of philosophical thought and ideology and specific social classes. There may be no obvious surface parallels but they share structural similarities on a deeper level. For this process of comparing parallel deep structures he used the term ‘homology’. His most famous working out of the procedure was in his study of the French dramatist Racine (Le Dieu Caché). In Pour une Sociologie du Roman (1964), he provided a ‘homological’ study of the modern novel compared with the structure of market economy.

Louis Althusser (1918–1990)

Louis Althusser’s ideas are also clearly indebted to structuralism. He abhorred the notion of order and systems with central controlling principles. Social structures consist of various levels in complex interaction with each other and often in mutual conflict. One level may dominate the rest at any time but this is itself determined by economic factors. In A Letter on Art, Althusser considers art to be located somewhere between ideology and scientific knowledge. A work of literature he sees in a somewhat negative light: it neither provides a full understanding of the real world, nor does it simply lend expression to the ideology of a specific class. But it does make us aware of the ideology which governs both its and our own existence in society.

In fact, Althusser presents in his writing two theses concerning ideology. The first is that, ‘Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence’. The second thesis relates ideology to its social origins. For Althusser ideology works through the so-called ‘ideological state apparatuses’. These include the political system, the law, education, organized religion etc. Ideology has a material existence in the sense that it is embodied in material systems. Thus, everything we do and everything we involve ourselves in is, in some way, ideological. When we believe that we are acting according to free will it is really in accordance with the dominant ideology. In accordance with his belief that social structures are not systems with central controlling principles, he also asserted that ideology in capitalist societies was not dominated by the self-interest of a small group who use it to exploit others. Those who profit from the system are as blind to its effects as others. One of the causes of this blindness is the very force of ideology itself. It convinces us that we are real ‘concrete subjects’. We see as natural whatever ideology wants us to see as part of the natural order of things.

Critics influenced by Althusser’s ideas have attempted to show how, in novels, readers are often invited to become part of a world which is depicted as essentially free, peopled by individuals who behave in autonomous ways. Such novels also give the reader the illusion that he or she is free when, in fact, they are also in the grip of an ideology. Many Marxist critics, however, have not been happy with the implied deterministic view of ideology set down by Althusser. He seems to allow no scope for nonideological thought or action.

Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937)

The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci did not contribute specifically to literary theory but his ideas have influenced many Marxist literary critics, notably the British critic Raymond Williams. Gramsci’s concept of ideology is less deterministic than that of Althusser and allows room for dissent. Writing in the 1930s in Fascist Italy, Gramsci was fully aware of the power of ideology and of ‘the consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group’. For Gramsci, it was possible for the individual to resist what he called the ‘hegemony’: the domination by a ruling ideology through ‘consent’ rather than ‘coercive power’. Under ‘hegemony’ the citizens of a state have internalised what the rulers want them to believe so thoroughly that they genuinely believe that they are expressing their own opinions. But this hegemony does not, as Althusser believed, blind all members of the society to the truth of the situation. It is possible to become aware of the dominance of ‘hegemony’ and resist its effects, even if it is impossible to escape completely its influence. This is the loophole of which the artist can take advantage.

Pierre Macherey

Another important influence on British critics in the 1960s and 1970s was Pierre Macherey. In A Theory of Literary Production (1966), Macherey considered a text not as something ‘created’ but as ‘produced’. Whatever authorial intentions might be and whatever aesthetic standards might prevail at a given time, the literary text is never completely ‘aware of what it is doing’. He regarded literary texts as being pervaded by ideology and it was the job of the critic to look for the cracks and weaknesses in the surface of the work, caused by its own internal contradictions. The title of a later essay summarises this view as The Text Says What It Does Not Say. In order to reveal the ideology in a text the critic must focus on what the text represses rather than overtly expresses. The cracks are the gaps where the author failed to make a thought conscious. To some extent, this approach pre-figures that of poststructuralism but, whereas Macherey considered his approach to be scientific and leading to objectively true interpretations, poststructuralists believed that there was no such thing as objective truth.

Raymond Williams (1921–1988)

The British critic Raymond Williams took as his task a complete reassessment of the British tradition of cultural thought. In Culture and Society 1780–1950 (1958), he defined culture as ‘a whole way of life’. He was very much aware that in any given society there is more than one single culture, each with its own ‘ideas of the nature of social relationship’. The coexistence of different cultures does not mean that there cannot also be a common culture: ‘…there is both a constant interaction between these ways of life and an area which can properly be described as common to or underlying both.’ While granting the ‘vital importance’ of literature, he was instrumental in establishing a broader base for cultural studies: ‘For experience that is formally recorded we go, not only to the rich source of literature, but also to history, building, painting, music, philosophy, theology and social theory, the physical theory, the physical and natural sciences, anthropology, and indeed the whole body of learning.’ Williams’ work is sometimes compared and contrasted with his contemporary Richard Hoggart, who also broadened the base of literary studies to include popular literature. Hoggart has a warm engaging style and a strong sympathy for working class culture, as evidenced in his study The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life with Special Reference to Publications and Entertainments (1957).A major difference between Hoggart and Williams is that of the nature of their political commitment. Williams’ approach was determinedly historical and materialist and in fact he eventually described it as ‘cultural materialism’. It was only in Marxism and Literature (1977) that he finally identified himself as a Marxist.

Terry Eagleton (1943–)

In Criticism and Ideology (1976), the British critic Terry Eagleton revealed the influence of Pierre Macherey’s concern to find the cracks and contradictions in a text. In this early work, Eagleton was interested not in what made a text coherent but what made it incoherent. The influence of Althusser is also evident. There may be apparent freedom in a text but it is not free in its reflection of the dominant ideology. In this work Eagleton analysed a number of canonical British novels, exploring the relationships between literary form and ideology.

In the late 1970s Eagleton was greatly influenced by poststructuralism. He came to believe that deconstructive theories could be used to undermine all absolute forms of knowledge, although he also rejected the deconstructive denial of the possibility of objectivity. He now believed that it should be the role of the critic to analyse critically accepted notions of what constituted literature and reveal the ideologies behind them. He thought that the critic should interpret non-socialist works ‘against the grain’ to reveal a socialist perspective.

Eagleton shares with Walter Benjamin an admiration for Brecht. Benjamin admired Brecht’s own re-reading of history ‘against the grain’, and this inspired Eagleton to devote a whole book to Benjamin: Walter Benjamin or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (1981). Benjamin viewed history as always obscuring the significance of events by selective reactionary memory, and Brecht made audiences see history from the perspective of the downtrodden.

Eagleton’s ideas undergo constant change. He has utilised the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan and the ideas of Jacques Derrida. His own Literary Theory, An Introduction (1983, second edition 1996) provides a witty and perceptive analysis of major literary schools, concluding with doubts about the very viability of literary theory as an independent discipline. A recent book by Eagleton, After Theory (2003), takes a whole new perspective on the future of cultural theory. I shall take up some of these issues in my own final chapter.

Fredric Jameson

The American theorist Fredric Jameson has been greatly influenced by the Frankfurt School. He explored Marxist theories of literature, especially with reference to their dialectical aspects, in his Marxism and Form (1971). He returns, in fact, to a reconsideration of Hegel’s philosophy, in its investigation of the part to the whole. Any object is bound up in a larger whole, is part, for example, of a specific historical situation. The aspects of literature that a critic analyses must also always be seen in relation to the critic’s own historical situation.

In The Political Unconscious (1981), Jameson retains his earlier dialectic approach but also incorporates various other, often conflicting modes of thought, such as structuralism and poststructuralism. The influence of Althusser is also evident. Jameson sees ideologies as ‘strategies of containment’, providing acceptable explanations but suppressing contradictions. The solutions provided by works of literature also suppress historical truths. He also believes that the ‘story’ is an essential ‘epistemological category’ of the human mind. We can only understand the world in terms of stories. Scientific, cultural and historical accounts are all created narratives. Jameson took his title from Freud’s concept of repression which he extends from the individual to the collective level: ideology represses revolutionary ideas. He provides a complex rethinking of Marxist thought about social structure and follows the view of Althusser that society is a ‘decentred structure’ in which various levels retain some degree of autonomy. The heterogeneity of society is reflected in the heterogeneity of texts: literature is essentially a mirror of the society in which it is produced. All kinds of interpretative methods can be applied to a text, and will reveal something actually present in the text but each method of interpretation applied will also reveal something about the ideologies governing both the author’s and the critic’s worlds. In Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), Jameson maintains that postmodernism is not only a currently fashionable style but the ‘cultural dominant’, in Roman Jakobson’s sense, of our times. It conditions the way we perceive and interpret our entire world.

Literary Theory and Criticism, Part-IV

Psychoanalysis

The Essence of Freudian Psychoanalysis

As with Marxism, it is impossible to do justice to the complexity of Freudian theory in the small scope of this book. Those aspects alone which are of direct relevance to literary theory will be summarised here. It must be said at the outset that much that passes for psychoanalysis of literature often uses the concepts, terminology and methodology very loosely. Be that as it may, a whole range of literary analysis and theory has now come to be termed psychoanalytic by virtue of its practitioners proclaiming it so. Certain concepts and views on mental processes must be held in common for the term psychoanalysis to be justified. Sigmund Freud himself was quite clear about what those essential concepts are. In a short article for inclusion in an encyclopaedia, he stated, under the heading The Corner-Stones of Psychoanalytic Theory: ‘The assumption that there are unconscious mental processes, the recognition of the theory of resistance and repression, the appreciation of the importance of sexuality and of the Oedipus complex–these constitute the principal subject-matter of psychoanalysis and the foundations of its theory. No one who cannot accept them should count himself a psychoanalyst.’

Psychoanalysis was very much the product of one man’s mind, although Freud gradually gathered many followers about him who shared his convictions and developed aspects of the theory further. He developed psychoanalysis in the first instance as a means of helping mentally disturbed patients. While studying under Charcot in Paris, he had become convinced of the existence of an extensive unconscious area of the mind which can, and does, wield strong influence over our conscious mind. Through close study of mentally disturbed patients and their symptoms he discovered that knowledge of the unconscious was accessible through analysis of dreams, symptomatic nervous behaviour and parapraxes (the famous Freudian slips).The conscious mind cannot cope with some of the unsavoury truths buried in the unconscious and, when they threaten to surface, represses them, attempting in practice to deny their reality. The tensions caused between the need of such truths to surface and the determination of the self to repress them can lead to serious mental disturbance, what Freud called neurosis, involving compulsive behaviour and obsessive modes of thinking. Cure was effected by helping the patient to understand what had brought about the behavioural disturbance and by tracing it to its roots in the unconscious. The most common, but not the only, needs repressed proved to be sexual in nature. Freud also developed a theory of the development of infantile sexuality and extended the areas of psychoanalytic interest to include broader cultural and social phenomena, including primitive beliefs, superstition, religion, the nature of civilisation etc.

He did not delineate a theory of art or aesthetics but gave clear indications of how he saw art and literature fitting into a psychoanalytic scheme. Evidence for his views is spread throughout his writings and demonstrated in his frequent allusions to, and quotations from, works of literature. In his comments on E T A Hoffmann’s story, The Sandman, in the essay The Uncanny, and in his comments on Shakespeare’s Richard III and Ibsen’s Rosmersholm, he hinted at lines of analysis rather than followed them through. His one extensive study of a work of literature was of the novella Gradiva by Wilhelm Jensen, which happens to lend itself very well to a Freudian analysis. Many theorists and critics assume too readily that Freud equated creative writing with dreaming and the outpourings of neurotics, largely because they rely too much on the opinions expressed in one essay: Creative Writers and Daydreaming. In fact, Freud clearly regarded the artist as a unique individual who avoids neurosis and sheer wishful thinking through the practice of his or her art. The artist or writer is involved in a process of sublimation (refining basic drives, such as those of sex and aggression, and converting them into creative and intellectual activity). Art is not an escape but a means of dealing with inner contradictions and re-establishing a productive relationship with the world. A good writer enables his/her readers to establish a similar relationship to their world, often in a new and critical light. Art is an illusion but its effects are real: ‘Art is a conventionally accepted reality in which, thanks to artistic illusion, symbols and substitutes are able to provoke real emotions.’ (The Claims of Psychoanalysis to Scientific Interest).

The best model for a psychoanalytic aesthetics in Freud’s own writings is his work Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious (1905).This study of wit (sometimes translated as ‘Jokes’) explores not only the psychological state of the person being witty but also explains how wit affects the audience and why consideration of the social context is important. In creating and enjoying wit, we share a critique of the social suppression of instincts. Wit, as an aesthetic phenomenon, is very far from being a form of consolation or reconciliation. It enlightens us and enables to share in protest against the self-denial we have accepted as the cost of a civilised existence.

Jacques Lacan (1901–1981)

Jacques Lacan has greatly influenced recent psychoanalytic theory in general as well as literary theory in particular. He broadened and redefined several basic psychoanalytic concepts in ways with which many orthodox Freudians disagree. According to Freud, in the earliest phase of childhood, the individual is dominated by the ‘pleasure principle’, seeking unreflecting gratification, with no definitely established identity and gender. Eventually, the child comes up against the restrictions of the father. (In pure Freudian terms this involves preventing the child from realising Oedipal desires for its mother by threatening it with castration. All this, of course, takes place on a subconscious level.) The father thus comes to represent the ‘reality principle’, forcing the child to heed the requirements of the real world for the first time. Identifying with the father now makes it possible for the child to take on a masculine role and makes it aware for the first time of various forms of institutionalized law. The female child passes through slightly different stages in the Freudian scheme of things, which have been fundamentally criticised by many feminist writers. The personality is then split between the conscious self and repressed desire.

Lacan describes the earlier state of being, when the child is unaware of any distinctions between subject and object, as the ‘imaginary’. Then comes the ‘mirror phase’, when the child starts to become aware of itself as an individual (as though seeing an image of itself in a mirror) and identifies this self. It produces something identifiable as an ego. When it becomes aware of the father’s restrictions, it enters the ‘symbolic’ world and also becomes aware of binary oppositions: male/female, present/absent etc. Behind all this, the restricted desire persists.

Lacan then basically reinterprets Freud’s theory of the conscious and the unconscious in terms of Saussure’s theory of ‘signifiers’ and ‘signifieds’. Entering the symbolic order of consciousness, the child starts to link ‘signifiers’ and ‘signifieds’: developing language, in fact. The signifier ‘I’ however is never fully comprehensible and, like other signifiers, never fully corresponds to ‘signifieds’. To use Lacan’s metaphor, ‘signifieds’ slide under ‘floating signifiers’.

The whole of Freud’s dream theory is also reinterpreted by Lacan as a textual theory, using Jakobson’s concepts of ‘metaphor’ and ‘metonymy’ to explain the various structuring principles defined by Freud, such as ‘displacement’ (transferring emphasis from one element in a dream to another), ‘condensation’ (combining several ideas and images) and so on. The general effect of Lacan’s theories has been to sow seeds of doubt in the minds of many thinkers and writers about the ability of language to express anything with certainty. Meaning, especially in many modernist literary works, has become elusive and difficult, if not impossible, to pin down.

For Lacan, the whole of human life is like a narrative in which significance constantly eludes us. Consciousness starts out with a sense of loss (of the mother’s body), and we are constantly driven by a desire to find substitutes for this lost paradise. All narrative can, in fact, be understood in terms of a search for a lost completion.

Another important concept in Lacanian thought is that of ‘The Other’. This refers to the developing individual’s awareness of other beings, who are also necessary in defining the individual’s identity. ‘The Other’ is clearly a general concept for the entire social order. As the social context of every individual’s life is constantly changing, however, so is the individual’s sense of identity. It is always a process, never a state. Ideology is also part of ‘The Other’ and provides a ‘misrecognition’ of the self, a false interpretation which nevertheless becomes part of the self. But ideology gives us the illusion of filling the lack that desire is eternally seeking to fill, which is why it always has such a firm hold over us. When we read a literary text too, we allow it to dominate us in a similar way and to fill the lack in our being.

To read a text by Lacan is itself to be in constant pursuit of the obscure object of desire. Lacan’s writing is at the other end of the spectrum from Freud’s, whose clarity and clear argument won him the Goethe prize for good style in scientific writing.

The Psychoanalysis of Reader Response

Some critics have applied a psychoanalytic approach to the kind of satisfaction a reader feels when reading a work of literature. This may be interesting but it is rather limited in the insights it yields. The American Norman N Holland, in The Dynamics of Literary Response (1968), argues that we enjoy a work of literature because it enables us to work through deep anxieties and desires in ways which remain socially acceptable. Literature allows a compromise, which placates moral and aesthetic norms, while allowing realisation of what would normally remain repressed. This is little more than a restatement of Freud’s own views in The Creative Writer and Daydreaming. Simon Lesser, in Fiction and the Unconscious (1957), had already pursued a similar line, presenting literature as a form of therapy. In Holland’s book Five Readers Reading (1975), he explores how readers adapt their identities in the course of interpreting a text and discover a new unity within themselves.

Harold Bloom (1930–)

Harold Bloom applied psychoanalysis to the actual history of literature, interpreting developments and changes in styles and norms, in poetry in particular, as the result of a conflict between generations, akin to that envisioned in the Freudian Oedipus complex. As sons feel oppressed by their fathers, so do poets feel themselves to be in the shadow of influential poets who came before them. Any poem can be read as an attempt to shake off the ‘anxiety of influence’ of earlier poems. Poets reconstruct and reform earlier poems. Therefore, all poems can be considered to be rewritings of older poems, as deliberate ‘misreadings’ (or what Bloom calls ‘misprisions’) of them, to assert the younger poet’s own individuality in face of them. These ideas found expression in Bloom’s A Map of Misreading (1975), in which he was very much going beyond the implications of psychoanalysis. The work is already very much poststructuralist in its concerns. In it a poem is seen as containing a series of undermining devices. He also explicitly attacks deconstructive criticism, which he regards as ‘serene linguistic nihilism’, and endeavours to reaffirm the notion of author’s intention. For Bloom, criticism is itself a form of poetry and poems incorporate literary criticism of other poems. It is one poetic and critical continuum.

Julia Kristeva (1941–)

Julia Kristeva combines Lacanian psychoanalysis with politics and feminism. In her book La Révolution du langage poétique (1974), Kristeva redefines and renames Lacan’s concept of the ‘imaginary’ from a feminist perspective. In the Lacanian scheme, when the child enters the ‘symbolic’ phase and starts naming things and heeding principles of order and law, its whole existence takes as its centre the ‘transcendental signifier’, the phallus, the father as embodiment of law. Kristeva wishes to destroy the omnipotence of this male order. She posits a form of language as existing already in Lacan’s ‘imaginary’ pre-Oedipal stage, which she calls instead the ‘semiotic’ stage. The ‘semiotic’ is a vague almost mystical concept. The underlying ‘semiotic’ flow is artificially broken up into units when the ‘symbolic’ order is imposed on it, but it persists as a kind of force within language. It is clearly associated with an essential femininity but it also occurs in a period of development when no distinctions of gender have yet taken place.

Kristeva finds confirmation of her theories not only in the ill-formed language of children and the language used by the mentally ill but also in certain kinds of poetry, such as that of the French Symbolists, in whose language, she argues, ordinary language is stretched to the limits of its conventionally accepted meanings. Such works, and such criticism, are essentially anarchic, a reaction against fixed signifiers of power, order and control, everything that is in any way associated with masculine dominance. All clear distinctions are broken down, as are all binary oppositions. There seems to be in her writing an assumption that the  anarchy created by her mode of reading texts also implies a political anarchy, and thereby a political critique. Terry Eagleton has revealed this to be a rather naïve and simplistic notion of the political: ‘…she pays too little attention to the political content of a text, the historical conditions in which its overturning of the signified is carried out…’

Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961)

Strictly speaking C G Jung is not a psychoanalyst but what he himself preferred to call an analytical psychologist. He is included here, however, for three important reasons: his theories have been very influential in the interpretation of literature; they have a lot more in common with Freud’s theories than either of them would have been willing to admit; and they do not really fit into any other broad category utilised in this book.

It has become commonplace to stress the differences between Freud’s and Jung’s theories but it must also be remembered that, when compared to other kinds of psychological theory, they can be shown to share many common fields of interest: the study of schizophrenia, neuroses and psychoses, the nature of psychological complexes, the interpretation of dreams, and unconscious mental processes in general, to name only the most important fields.

Freud and Jung differed especially over the so-called libido theory. Jung thought that Freud related libido (the Latin for ‘desire’ or ‘lust’) too closely to sexual drives. He preferred the notion of ‘psychic energy’. He developed a general theory of character types, broadly defined, in two terms which have entered common parlance, as extroverted and introverted personality types. Jung also believed in the existence of a collective unconscious, which is common to the whole human race and contains universal archetypes. These are primordial and universal images, revealed in dreams, artistic and literary productions, primitive religions and mythologies. One of the most important archetypes is that of the animus/anima. The animus is a woman’s archetypal image of man and the anima is the man’s archetypal image of woman. The animus often appears as a wise old man, and the anima as a virginal girl or a mother goddess. The general aim of Jungian psychology is what he called ‘individuation’, a process by which the individual is helped to harmonise his/her ‘persona’ (the self as presented to the world) and ‘the shadow’ (the darker potentially dangerous side of the personality that exists in the personal unconscious). It could be said that the failure of individuation is represented symbolically in Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous story Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in which Dr Jekyll is the ‘persona’ and Hyde is ‘the shadow’.

Jungian psychology has contributed little to the study of literature as text, but much to the interpretation of symbols and images in texts. The Jungian theory of archetypes has been influential on the French philosopher of science and literary theory Gaston Bachelard. He combined Freud’s views on daydreaming with Jung’s conception of archetypes in The Poetics of Reverie (1960). The theory of archetypes was also taken up by the Canadian literary theorist Herman Northrop Frye in his book, Anatomy of Criticism (1957).