You live by toxic masculinity, you die by toxic masculinity. This was my thought when reading a recent column by Never-Trump conservative Matt Lewis about the current GOP. For years we watched politicians like former House Speaker Paul Ryan waving Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged in the air as they heaped scorn on people who can’t pull themselves up by their own bootstraps but rely on government services. These moochers want to use the social safety net as a hammock, Ryan sneered as he aspired to be a John Galt, a Nietzchean Ubermensch, an alpha male.
When people like Ryan encounter someone who is even more alpha, however, they invariably crumple like a cheap suit (to use an analogy that shows up frequently in hardboiled detective novels). Ryan thought he was a master of the universe until he encountered a man who boasted about grabbing women by the pussies. Then, when he objected that this was going too far, Trump cut him off at the knees, and that was the beginning of the end for Paul Ryan.
According to Lewis, the current Republican Party is full of Paul Ryans:
The Republican Party says it wants to be a working man’s party, but this feels more like wine than beer to me. The only John Wayne they have left is Donald Trump. He’s the alpha male, and the betas all cower before him. What we’re left with is a GOP full of neutered opportunists—snowflakes paying their dues, biting their tongues, and hoping to retire with a gold watch.
Lewis singles out Ted Cruz, who now pals around with Trump “despite Trump implying Cruz’s wife is ugly—and alleging that Cruz’s father was involved in the JFK assassination.” Cuz thinks he can reclaim his manhood by degrading others, most recently America’s “woke and emasculated” military, whom he said Democrats are trying to turn into “pansies.”
By lashing out at others while sheltering under Trump’s umbrella, Cruz reminds me of various toadies in literature. Tolkien’s Wormtongue comes to mind, as do Vincent Crabbe and Gregory Goyle, the two bullies who follow in Draco Malfoy’s wake in the Harry Potter books. And of course, Malfoy himself folds like our cheap suit when Voldemort turns against his family. Being a bully is a losing proposition.
Crabbe provides an object lesson. Having discovered Harry, Hermione and Ron in the Chamber of Secrets, he thinks he can destroy them with a curse, only to discover a curse can backfire:
A roaring, billowing noise behind [Harry] gave him a moment’s warning. He turned and saw both Ron and Crabbe running as hard as they could up the aisle toward them.
“Like it hot, scum?” roared Crabbe as he ran.
But he seemed to have no control over what he had done. Flames of abnormal size were pursuing them, licking up the sides of the junk bulwarks, which were crumbling to soot at their touch.
Crabbe perishes in flames he himself has unleashed. Take heed, Sen. Cruz.
The alternative to toxic masculinity is seeing society as interdependent, with each of us contributing our gifts to the whole. That means respecting others and being tolerant of human frailty. This is also the best way to govern a country, as it turns out. Unfortunately, it not in the GOP’s current playbook.
While some people are into bird sightings, I’m into literature sightings. (Okay, so I do some bird watching as well.) The latest is Pramila Jayapal, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, mentioning Waiting for Godot on Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC show Friday night.
The reference was to the way Republicans keep stringing Democrats along on the possibility of compromise, only to back out when agreement is near. They did this constantly with Barack Obama, and they’ve been trying to do it again as Democrats craft an infrastructure bill and set up a Congressional committee to investigate the January 6 insurrection. When Nancy Pelosi agreed to House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy’s conditions about the investigation, McCarthy refused to take “yes” for an answer and backed off.
Normally people mention “Lucy and the football,” a gag that recurred for years on Peanuts when Lucy assured Charlie that this time she wouldn’t pull the football away when he ran up to kick it–only to, once again, pull it away at the last moment so that Charlie, once again, falls flat on the ground. While the Peanuts episode captures the situation well, so does Samuel Beckett’s play.
In it, we see Vladimir and Estragon awaiting the arrival of one Godot, whom we can think of as bipartisan compromise. They’ve been waiting for a long time and they are still waiting at play’s end. The play has such interchanges as the following:
ESTRAGON: Let’s go. VLADIMIR: We can’t. ESTRAGON: Why not? VLADIMIR: We’re waiting for Godot. ESTRAGON: (despairingly). Ah! (Pause.) You’re sure it was here? VLADIMIR: What? ESTRAGON: That we were to wait. VLADIMIR: He said by the tree.
And this:
ESTRAGON: He should be here. VLADIMIR: He didn’t say for sure he’d come. ESTRAGON: And if he doesn’t come? VLADIMIR: We’ll come back tomorrow. ESTRAGON: And then the day after tomorrow. VLADIMIR: Possibly.
At the end of Act I, a boy messenger shows up and informs them, “Mr. Godot told me to tell you he won’t come this evening but surely tomorrow.”
In Act II, some time has passed—we know this because there are a few more leaves on the tree—and Estragon and Vladimir are still waiting. Every time they seem on the verge of giving up, a tiny vestige of hope flairs up:
VLADIMIR: We’ve nothing more to do here. ESTRAGON: Nor anywhere else. VLADIMIR: Ah Gogo, don’t go on like that. Tomorrow everything will be better. ESTRAGON: How do you make that out? VLADIMIR: Did you not hear what the child said? ESTRAGON: No. VLADIMIR: He said that Godot was sure to come tomorrow. (Pause.) What do you say to that? ESTRAGON: Then all we have to do is to wait on here.
At the end of act II, the boy—or maybe a different boy, it’s not clear–shows up again:
VLADIMIR: You have a message from Mr. Godot. BOY: Yes Sir. VLADIMIR: He won’t come this evening. BOY: No Sir. VLADIMIR: But he’ll come tomorrow. BOY: Yes Sir. VLADIMIR: Without fail. BOY: Yes Sir.
The boy could be both the same and not the same if we think of the first as John Boehner—head of GOP House Republicans during the Obama administration—and the second time as current head McCarthy. In neither case is the identity of the boy important.
So is bipartisan compromise our Godot? Will GOP members of Congress enter into responsible governance. We can look to Beckett’s words for the answer:
VLADIMIR: What does he do, Mr. Godot? (Silence.) Do you hear me? BOY: Yes Sir. VLADIMIR: Well? BOY: He does nothing, Sir.
Some say the play is about waiting for God. We can read it as waiting for Gop.
I love this Scott Cairns poem, which seems appropriate for Christians celebrating Pentecost. In “Possible Answers to Prayer,” Cairns shows God as a slightly bemused but infinitely patient administrator reassuring fallen humanity that their petitions “have been duly recorded.” He knows who is praying by the anxieties that show up in our prayers. Their “constant, relatively narrow scope and inadvertent entertainment value” give us away. (Cairns’s God is throwing a little shade here.)
In the battle between repentance and resentment, resentment at first seems to have the upper hand. Thankfully, God can penetrate resentment’s “burgeoning yellow fog.” (Cairns borrows the yellow fog image from T. S. Eliot’s lost-in-a-fog Prufrock.) Fortunately God can see that we have “intermittent concern for the sick,/ the suffering, the needy poor,” even though the sick, the suffering, and the needy poor may not see our concern. (More shade)
And as for all those people who offend us—after all, it feels “lipsmackingly” good to be indignant about them—well, God adores them. God is close to them, which means that God must be close to us as well, judgmental though we may be. Once we burn away our angers, our zeal, and our righteous indignation and begin loving those we passionately hate, we will apprehend how near God is.
This discovery is what Pentecost is all about.
Possible Answers to Prayer By Scott Cairns
Your petitions—though they continue to bear just the one signature—have been duly recorded. Your anxieties—despite their constant,
relatively narrow scope and inadvertent entertainment value—nonetheless serve to bring your person vividly to mind.
Your repentance—all but obscured beneath a burgeoning, yellow fog of frankly more conspicuous resentment—is sufficient.
Your intermittent concern for the sick, the suffering, the needy poor is sometimes recognizable to me, if not to them.
Your angers, your zeal, your lipsmackingly righteous indignation toward the many whose habits and sympathies offend you—
these must burn away before you’ll apprehend how near I am, with what fervor I adore precisely these, the several who rouse your passions.
With the onset of summer and the ebbing of the pandemic, America will start traveling again. Many will head for our national parks, which took a hit under four years of Donald Trump. When I think of his assault on our natural treasures, an angry John Clare poem comes to mind.
The National Park Conservation Association lists 145 ways the Trump administration degraded our parks. Jonathan Jarvis and Gary Machlis, two men long associated with the National Park Service, single out some of the low points:
We watched in dismay as the Trump administration systematically dismantled the last 50 years of conservation successes for our national parks and public lands and waters. Focused on grift and privatizing what belongs to all Americans, Donald Trump and his appointed officials took advantage of weak laws, a distracted public, hard-to-follow administrative actions, and their own deep animus against science and professional land managers to profoundly harm American conservation.
We should all be shocked by how easy it was. In just four years, Trump opened 9 million acres to oil and gas development, made it easier to kill migratory birds without consequence and opened drilling next to Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico. His administration made it legal to shoot female grizzly bears with cubs in their dens, undermined scientific integrity and decimated the professional and scientific workforce. He reduced Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument to an inadequate remnant. That is far from a full list of the administration’s inventory of harms.
John Clare (1793-1864) was a peasant-turned-writer who has been described as “the quintessential Romantic poet.” Until his collection Rural Life gave him a financial alternative to farming, he made his living by gardening, ploughing, threshing, and lime-burning.
In his lengthy poem The Village Minstrel (1817), he inveighs against the enclosing of the commons, which was land that had long been used as communal property. The despoliation is witnessed by Lubin, a peasant poet, whose use of the word “improvement” refers to how those confiscating the land trumpeted enclosure as progress:
But who can tell the anguish of his mind, When reformation’s formidable foes With civil wars ‘gainst nature’s peace combin’d, And desolation struck her deadly blows, As curst improvement ‘gan his fields inclose: O greens, and fields, and trees, farewell, farewell! His heart-wrung pains, his unavailing woes No words can utter, and no tongue can tell, When ploughs destroyed the green, when groves of willows fell.
There once were springs, when daisies’ silver studs Like sheets of snow on every pasture spread; There once were summers, when the crow-flower buds Like golden sunbeams brightest luster shed: And trees grew once that sheltered Lubin’s head; There once were brooks sweet whimpering down the vale: The brooks no more — kingcup and daisy fled; Their last fallen tree the naked moors bewail, And scarce a bush is left to tell the mournful tale.
I came across Clare’s poem while reading Wendell Berry’s Remembering, the subject of Tuesday’s post. Berry is attacking big agriculture, which is engaged in its own version of enclosure. The National Parks are our commons, and we need every poetic voice in the struggle to beat back these “formidable foes.”
One of humanity’s enduring political questions is why leaders who have made people’s lives worse escape accountability. Donald Trump still rules over the GOP, even though any of those he beat out in the 2016 primaries would have handled the Covid pandemic better than he did. In the figure of the pharmacist in Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary we get some insight into Trump’s enduring popularity.
Homais, who claims to be Charles Bovary’s friend, decides it will be to the village’s glory if the town’s mediocre doctor can operate successfully on the club foot of Hippolyte, the local porter. Forget the fact that Bovary lacks the surgical skills to pull off such a feat. Homais, acting like a Trump publicist (which is to say, like Trump himself), cares only about the newspaper article he will be able to write:
[A]s he was a partisan of progress, he conceived the patriotic idea that Yonville, in order to keep to the fore, ought to have some operations for strephopody or club-foot.
“For,” said he to Emma, “what risk is there? See—” (and he enumerated on his fingers the advantages of the attempt), “success, almost certain relief and beautifying of the patient, celebrity acquired by the operator. Why, for example, should not your husband relieve poor Hippolyte of the ‘Lion d’Or’? Note that he would not fail to tell about his cure to all the travellers, and then” (Homais lowered his voice and looked round him) “who is to prevent me from sending a short paragraph on the subject to the paper? Eh! goodness me! an article gets about; it is talked of; it ends by making a snowball! And who knows? who knows?”
Weak-willed Charles is pressured into go along while Homais persuades Hippolyte to vote for Trump undergo the operation. “You will scarcely feel, probably, a slight pain,” he tells him, adding, “it is a simple prick, like a little blood-letting, less than the extraction of certain corns.”
How Bovary botches the operation is indescribably painful to read. Then, before seeing the results, we get Homais’s press release announcing success. It’s like Trump awarding his administration an A+ for its handling of the pandemic while demanding the Nobel Prize:
Monsieur Bovary, one of our most distinguished practitioners, performed an operation on a club-footed man called Hippolyte Tautain, stableman for the last twenty-five years at the hotel of the “Lion d’Or,” kept by Widow Lefrancois, at the Place d’Armes. The novelty of the attempt, and the interest incident to the subject, had attracted such a concourse of persons that there was a veritable obstruction on the threshold of the establishment. The operation, moreover, was performed as if by magic, and barely a few drops of blood appeared on the skin, as though to say that the rebellious tendon had at last given way beneath the efforts of art. The patient, strangely enough—we affirm it as an eye-witness—complained of no pain. His condition up to the present time leaves nothing to be desired. Everything tends to show that his convalescence will be brief; and who knows even if at our next village festivity we shall not see our good Hippolyte figuring in the bacchic dance in the midst of a chorus of joyous boon-companions, and thus proving to all eyes by his verve and his capers his complete cure? Honour, then, to the generous savants! Honour to those indefatigable spirits who consecrate their vigils to the amelioration or to the alleviation of their kind! Honour, thrice honour! Is it not time to cry that the blind shall see, the deaf hear, the lame walk? But that which fanaticism formerly promised to its elect, science now accomplishes for all men. We shall keep our readers informed as to the successive phases of this remarkable cure.’”
Now for the reality:
The strephopode was writhing in hideous convulsions, so that the machine in which his leg was enclosed was knocked against the wall enough to break it…With many precautions, in order not to disturb the position of the limb, the box was removed, and an awful sight presented itself. The outlines of the foot disappeared in such a swelling that the entire skin seemed about to burst, and it was covered with ecchymosis, caused by the famous machine.
And further on:
At last, three days after, Hippolyte being unable to endure it any longer, they once more removed the machine, and were much surprised at the result they saw. The livid tumefaction spread over the leg, with blisters here and there, whence there oozed a black liquid…
Gangrene, in fact, was spreading more and more. Bovary himself turned sick at it. He came every hour, every moment. Hippolyte looked at him with eyes full of terror, sobbing—
Hippolyte loses his leg and is lucky not to lose his life. Yet despite all that has happened, he does not bring charges against Charles. He even protests that his new artificial leg—which is covered with cork, has spring joints, and ends in a patent-leather boot—is too fancy for everyday use. His faith in authority is such that he looks past what has happened to him. As Emma observes later, “He doesn’t even remember any more about it.”
Trump is the smooth talking Homais and the incompetent Charles rolled into one. Perhaps Charles too would prescribe bleach for Covid. On second thought, however, Charles at least reads medical journals prior to surgery, and he also feels guilty for what he has done. Nor does he toot his own horn. So it’s actually Homais we should focus on.
We realize that the pharmacist has has been undercutting Charles just as Trump undercuts former allies. (“Everything that Trump touches dies” is how former Republican consultant Rick Wilson memorably phrased it.) Charles is more the Mike Pence in this set of parallels. Homais, on the other hand, suffers no consequences, despite his hand in the debacle, and the book ends with the following announcement:
Since Bovary’s death three doctors have followed one another at Yonville without any success, so severely did Homais attack them. He has an enormous practice; the authorities treat him with consideration, and public opinion protects him.
He has just received the cross of the Legion of Honour.
It’s as if people are making pilgrimages to a Florida resort to pay homage to him. For the moment, the bullshit artist has won.
I’m shaken today, having just learned that an old friend has died. I vividly remember my last conversation with Judy Rhodes, who was my wife’s high school senior English teacher and a formative influence on her. We would look up Judy and her husband Steve whenever we visited Julia’s Iowa relatives.
Judy had severe allergies, which in retrospect may have had some connection with the kidney and brain cancer that broke out suddenly this past year and killed her. I vividly remember her talking about how Monsanto herbicides have polluted all of the state’s drinking water and her difficulty with finding non-contaminated fruits, vegetables, and meat. (Jane Smiley talks about farmers polluting the water table in A Thousand Acres.) Judy would have liked the book I’m currently reading, Wendell Berry’s novel Remembering, which takes an axe to current farming practices.
The protagonist is a former agricultural journalist who has gone back to his roots and started farming, just as his parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents did (we learn about them all in the book). Andy’s lightbulb moment occurs when he is writing a Scientific Farming feature on a successful farmer. What he sees so appalls him that he falls out with his editor and quits rather than write the piece.
The farmer, Andy notes,
was the fulfillment of the dreams of his more progressive professors. On all the two thousand acres there was not a fence, not an animal, not a woodlot, not a tree, not a garden. The whole place was planted in corn, right up to the walls of the two or three unused barns that were still standing. Meikelberger owned a herd of machines. His grain bins covered acres. He had an office like a bank president’s. The office was a carpeted room at the back of the house, expensively and tastefully furnished, as was the rest of the house, as far as Andy saw it. It was a brick ranch house with ten rooms and a garage, each room a page from House Beautiful, and it was deserted.
As he interviews Meikelberger, Andy discovers all is not well. Meikelberger is deeply in debt, and the stresses of his job have led to severe ulcer problems. Nevertheless, the farmer ignores all warning signals and pushes on:
[T]here was nothing, simply nothing at all, that Meikelberger allowed to stand in his way: not a neighbor or a tree or even his own body. Meikelberger’s ambition had made common cause with a technical power that proposed no limit to itself, that was, in fact, destroying Meikelberger, as it had already destroyed nearly all that was natural or human around him.
Shortly after the interview, Andy chances upon an Amish farmer and sees farming from a different perspective. The man has only 80 acres but, as he points out, it’s enough to take care of everyone living on it. When Andy is invited to share supper, he notes a dramatic contrast between the man’s house and Meikelberger’s:
It was a pretty place, its prettiness not so much made as allowed. It was a place of work, but a place too of order and rest, where work was done in the condition of acknowledged blessedness and of gratitude. As they ate, they talked, making themselves known to each other.
Remembering has special import for my wife, who grew up on a small Iowa farm. Unfortunately, her father, who once dreamed of going to college and who had a reverence for learning, was victimized by the scientific farming mentality. He listened seriously when agricultural professors preached that
bigger was better and biggest was best; that people coming into a place to use it need ask only what they wanted, not what was there; that whatever in humanity or nature failed before the advance of this mechanical ambition deserved to fail; and that the answers were in the universities and the corporate and government offices, not in the land or the people.
Because of ag professors, Lawrence didn’t collect his pig and cattle manure—petroleum-based chemical fertilizers were all the rage—and he built a special hog confinement shed. Most seriously, he expanded the farm at just the moment when both land and petroleum prices were at their height (the late 1970s), after which they plummeted, causing a full blown depression in America’s heartland. Because Lawrence died of a heart attack around that time, he didn’t see the family lose the farm.
Julia contrasts him with a cousin of hers who went the natural route, not confining the hogs but letting them roam free, as her family had when she was growing up. As a result, this cousin now sells to specialty markets at premium prices, and his farm, though small, is still thriving forty years later. Julia’s brother, on the other hand, had to give up his dream of farming and instead went to college and became a nurse (so that he could stay in the area and live in the family home). He has, however, held on to a few acres, which is under a government conservation program. He plants wild oats and various clovers to provide a habitat for pheasants and other birds, thereby staying in touch with the land. It’s not, however, what he envisioned.
We don’t know for certain that the stresses of big agriculture killed Julia’s father or that polluted water and food led to Judy’s cancer. If they were characters in a Berry novel, however, those factors would loom large.
Suddenly it’s not only liberal bloggers like myself who are invoking George Orwell’s 1984 to depict today’s GOP. About Donald Trump’s recent contention that Arizona’s Maricopa County erased its voter registration database to hide election fraud, Maricopa County recorder Stephen Richer, a Republican, tweeted,
Wow. this is unhinged. I’m literally looking at our voter registration database on my other screen. Right now. We can’t indulge these insane lies any longer. As a party. As a state. As a country. This is as readily falsifiable as 2+2=5. If we don’t call this out….
GOP math also proved too much for those responsible for overseeing Maricopa’s election. Boston University history professor Heather Cox Richardson reports on their response to those Republicans attempting to throw out recount the results:
In a remarkable Twitter thread, the Maricopa County official account destroyed the effort by the private company Cyber Ninjas to recount the 2020 votes in that county. “The 2020 elections were run w/ integrity, the results certified by the county & state were accurate, & the 2 independent audits conducted by the County are the true final word on the subject,” the account said. “We know auditing. The Senate Cyber Ninja audit is not a real audit.” The account went on to list all the many ways in which this audit is simply a propaganda effort to shore up the Big Lie that the election was stolen.
I quote Richardson, whose daily e-mail posts on contemporary politics have become must reading for thousands, because her historian’s perspective is useful. When a party engages in shenanigans to overturn elections and shrink the electorate while failing to discipline out-of-control members (Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Green), it will alienate a critical number of its voters. Pushback from such members as Richer and principled conservative Liz Cheney, recently stripped of party leadership for telling the truth about the election, will take its toll. “The Republican Party,” she predicts, “is nearing the end of its dominant run in our democracy.”
Whether Richardson is right or not, it’s worth returning to Richer’s 2+2 allusion to understand how the Trump cultism operates. Winston at one point writes in a journal which he thinks is private,
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
Later, right before he and Julia are arrested, he has a momentary vision of hope. Bleak though their own prospects are, they can share the future with children yet unborn if they pass along this vision of freedom:
You were the dead, theirs was the future. But you could share in that future if you kept alive the mind as they kept alive the body, and passed on the secret doctrine that two plus two make four.
Orwell’s novel then blots out this hope as Winston, under torture, surrenders that freedom. To be sure, he resists at first as O’Brien (a.k.a. Big Brother) questions him. Think of the electric shocks administered as the equivalent of Trump threats to any Republican that defies him:
“Do you remember,” he went on, “writing in your diary, ‘Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four’?”
“Yes,” said Winston.
O’Brien held up his left hand, its back towards Winston, with the thumb hidden and the four fingers extended. “How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?”
“Four.”
“And if the party says that it is not four but five–then how many?”
“Four.”
The word ended in a gasp of pain. The needle of the dial had shot up to fifty-five.
By the end of the session, Winston is responding to the fingers question, “I don’t know. I don’t know. You will kill me if you do that again. Four, five, six–in all honesty I don’t know.”
O’Brien then explains his rationale to Winston:
Shall I tell you why we have brought you here? To cure you! To make you sane! Will you understand, Winston, that no one whom we bring to this place ever leaves our hands uncured? We are not interested in those stupid crimes that you have committed. The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about. We do not merely destroy our enemies, we change them.
By the end of the book, Winston has changed:
Almost unconsciously he traced with his finger in the dust on the table:
2+2=5
“They can’t get inside you,” she had said. But they could get inside you. “What happens to you here is FOR EVER,” O’Brien had said. That was a true word. There were things, your own acts, from which you could never recover. Something was killed in your breast: burnt out, cauterized out.
I have a sense that something has been cauterized out of the current GOP. As some have noted, many appear to believe in nothing but their own reelection. In today’s Republican Party, one can be pro-free trade or anti-free trade, pro-infrastructure spending or anti-infrastructure spending, pro-regulation or anti-regulation. One can be elevated to a leadership position even if one voted against the Republican 2018 tax cuts, as we see with New Yorker Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, once a moderate Republican and now a Trump sycophant and election truther. The one thing Republicans are not allowed is to think for themselves.
In other words, with occasional exceptions, they have been cured. There was massive voter fraud in 2020, Trump was the real winner, the January 6 insurrection was tourists strolling through the Capitol, and 2+2=5.
I share today another section from Does Literature Make Us Better People? A 2500-Year-Old Debate, a book project currently undergoing revision. In the previous chapter I look at what Marx and Engels say about literature’s impact on people’s lives. In this chapter I look at Freud and Jung’s thoughts. Here’s what I say about Freud.Any feedback is welcome.
If Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud are sometimes paired in the history of thought, it is because Marx sees unseen forces moving the course of history and Freud sees unseen forces moving the lives of individuals. If literature helps us understand these foundational forces, then it does indeed have the potential to change lives. It’s just that where literary Marxists see literature making lives better in the aggregate, literary Freudians and Jungians see it doing so one person at a time.
Freud (1856-1939) was a Jewish psychologist practicing in Vienna. After receiving medical training at the University of Vienna and the Vienna General Hospital, Freud went into private practice, where he stumbled on “the talking cure” when his severely neurotic patient Anna O discovered that her symptoms were reduced when she recalled and recounted traumatic incidents from her childhood.
Other of Freud’s theories include the damage inflicted by repression, the dynamics of patient transference (from the love object to the analyst), the significance of dreams and (controversially) the existence of a subliminal death wish. Freud attracted a set of noteworthy followers, who spread the word about psychoanalysis, although some would evolve away from him and set up other schools. He spent his final years in London, having left Vienna to escape the Nazis.
Although he is considered the founder of psychoanalysis, Freud today is often taken more seriously by the literary community than by fellow psychologists. Some of the latter regard him more as a poet than a scientist—this is not a compliment—and it is true that he attributes many of his discoveries to the literature he encountered growing up, especially Shakespeare and the great Greek tragedians.
Psychoanalysis, in the words of Freudian psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, “was created to enable man to accept the problematic nature of life without being defeated by it, or giving in to escapism.” Works of art enter into the process, meanwhile, both by articulating our problems and by helping us achieve (in the words of sociologist and cultural critic Philip Rieff) “emotional stability” and “self-mastery.” Literature does this at two levels of engagement. Simply reading poems and stories and attending plays (in other words, immersing without significant reflection) takes us into and through debilitating inner conflicts. Literature delights us because we feel we can control psychological challenges.
On a more conscious level, however, when we analyze literature from a Freudian point of view, we come to better understand these conflicts and see our options. Furthermore, by studying our psychological responses to various works, we can diagnose what ails us. Literature, at this point, becomes instructive.
Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex is a good place to begin a discussion of Freud, in part because it allows us to further explore the study of audience response initiated by Aristotle, in part because we can see how Freud uses the play to formulate a number of his major ideas.
We have already noted that Aristotle attributes the intense emotional responses generated by Oedipus to pity and fear. We speculated that, for Athenian audiences, the intense emotions arose from identifying with characters who (consistent with Athenian optimism) thought they could control their destinies, only to discover that certain aspects of existence were beyond them. Freud, while fascinated by the intense emotions evoked by Oedipus and interested in Aristotle’s pity-fear dynamic, has a different explanation for why the play would have evoked such intense emotions.
For him, Oedipus articulates desires so socially taboo that we can’t even acknowledge we have them. The male child, who doesn’t think in nuance, desires to kill that father, who is usurping his rightful place as the center of his mother’s attention. Because the father is so powerful, however, the child imagines being punished for his murderous wishes, perhaps by castration. For self-protection, therefore, the child represses them, and what we repress becomes toxic. Freud may or may not have said, when asked to describe his theories, “secrets make us sick,” but in any event the formulation functions as a useful summation. Taboos have such a hold on our mind that we can feel nauseated at the mere mention of them, and when Oedipus discovers that he has actually acted them out, he symbolically castrates himself, poking out his eyes with Jocasta’s brooch to override the mental pain.
Therefore, when Greek audiences watched him slowly but inexorably learn that he has acted upon taboo desires, they would have been both horrified and relieved at seeing these desires expressed. They acknowledged the desires through identification (pity) and distanced themselves through denial (fear). In sum, they felt cathartic relief at the realization that they could approach and survive that which they dared not name. While Plato doesn’t specifically mention Oedipus in The Republic—the literary scenes he mentions are Hesiod’s misbehaving deities and Odysseus’s encounters with Hades and with food—one can see why he doesn’t want the great tragedians in his rational utopia. The emotional dynamite with which Sophocles is playing exceeds the capacity of philosopher guardians.
Without literature, however, society cannot achieve psychic health, which is why Aristotle lauds the emotional effects of catharsis. Renaissance playwright Christopher Marlow provides us a great example of this with his Doctor Faustus, who uses Homer and the lyre musician Amphion (from Greek mythology) as anti-depressants and suicide prevention treatment. Faustus is finding himself torn between his desires and religion’s strictures when he speaks of poetry’s benefits:
My heart’s so harden’d, I cannot repent: Scarce can I name salvation, faith, or heaven, But fearful echoes thunder in mine ears, “Faustus, thou art damn’d!” then swords, and knives, Poison, guns, halters, and envenom’d steel Are laid before me to dispatch myself; And long ere this I should have slain myself, Had not sweet pleasure conquer’d deep despair. Have not I made blind Homer sing to me Of Alexander’s love and Oenon’s death? And hath not he, that built the walls of Thebes With ravishing sound of his melodious harp, Made music with my Mephistophilis? Why should I die, then, or basely despair?
For Freud, repressing our socially forbidden desires takes such a mental toll that we must figure out ways to manage the situation. One way is through sublimation, in which we find a lofty substitute. Art fulfills this function so that, to take a famous literary example, the tormented protagonist in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice transmutes his unacceptable desire for an adolescent boy into poetry. When we read such works, rather than allowing ourselves to be pulled down by our guilt, we feel ennobled by our suffering.
Our dreams also come to our rescue. While our forbidden desires do damage when we push them into our subconscious, our dreams provide an outlet, transforming our mental distress into fictional narrative, poetic images, and dramatic enactments. That’s not the end of the process, however. Because, even when asleep, we still regard our desires as dangerous and unacceptable, our dreams disguise them. If we are to identity what troubles us, therefore, we must interpret them, and in Interpretation of Dreams, Freud contrasts the actual or “latent” content of our dreams with their surface or “manifest” content. He also tracks the dreamwork process, explaining why dreams take the shape that they do. According to Carl Jung, Freud had a remarkable ability to help patients interpret their dreams, an important step in lessening the effects of toxic repression.
Jocasta is partially right, partially wrong when, in response to Oedipus’s fears, she tells him, “Do not worry you will wed your mother. It’s true that in their dreams a lot of men have slept with their own mothers, but someone who ignores all this bears life more easily.” She is right that the incest wish is the stuff of dreams (although Freud would say it is usually disguised) but wrong that such desires can be ignored. Repressed, they return as neurosis, which in the play is symbolized by the plague that has broken out in Thebes. Only by facing up to the dark desires can we keep them from tearing us apart. Sophocles captures this in the sequel to Oedipus that he wrote at the end of his life, Oedipus at Colonus. Oedipus may be overwhelmed by self-horror at the end of the first play, but by the end of the sequel he has achieved spiritual mastery.
Literature has a special relationship to dreaming. As Rieff puts it, a work of art, like a dream, works in part as “a safety valve, a form of exhibitionism, in which the tension accumulated by private motives is drained off in public display.” That being said, a work of art is also different than a dream, in ways which Freud lays out in his essay “Creative Writers and Day Dreaming.”
As the title indicates, Freud describes imaginative writing as a form of conscious dreaming. In other words, creative authors tap into the same repressed desires that lead to dreams, only in this case they can consciously shape the dream material. As Freud describes the process in his essay on “The Uncanny,”
In the main we adopt an unvarying passive attitude towards real experience and are subject to the influence of our physical environment. But the storyteller has a peculiarly directive influence over us; by means of the moods he can put us into, he is able to guide the current of our emotions, to dam it up in one direction and make it flow in another.
The author achieves a certain mastery over emotional turbulence by composing the work and audiences achieve that inner mastery by reading it.
Freud spells out some of the turbulence in his daydreaming essay. Look carefully at stories, he says, and you will see them dealing with sides of ourselves that shame us: ambition phantasies for men, love phantasies for women. Repression has entered in because (at least at the time Freud was writing)
the well-brought up young woman is only allowed a minimum of erotic desire, and the young man has to learn to suppress the excess of self-regard which he brings with him from the spoilt days of his childhood, so he may find his place in a society which is full of other individuals making equally strong demands.
Although such phantasies are to be found in all literature, Freud says they are particularly evident in what Freud kindly calls works by “less pretentious authors.” Today we may refer the genres as “chick lit” and “dick lit.” Literature, like dreams, disguises these shameful desires so that readers can approach them without revulsion or shame, thereby robbing them of their toxic power and allowing us to achieve stability and mastery. Sounding like Plato, who regards poets as “deceivers” who trick us through beauty, Freud says writers “bribe” us with formal technique: they soften “the character of [our] egoistic daydreams by altering and disguising it.” This allows us “to enjoy our own day-dreams without self-reproach or shame,” thereby liberating the “tensions in our minds.” This release, as Freud sees it, is one of a novel’s chief pleasures.
It sounds as though Freud’s only distinction between greater and lesser literature is that great writers bribe us better. If so, I would disagree: as I argue in the feminism and Jane Austen chapters, great literature serves us better psychologically than “less pretentious” potboilers because one is far better off if one reads substantive treatments of underlying anxieties (such as, say, Sophocles’s Oedipus). One may get momentary tension relief from reading about the girl getting the guy or the guy getting the bad guys, but that’s it. The work you put into a great work returns dividends in the form of better understanding your state of mind. In short, you get the literary therapy you pay for.
I conclude my summation of Freud with a quick glance at literature’s therapeutic process as it occurs in two genres. People generally read fairy tales and horror fiction without looking for deeper meaning, which gives us the opportunity to look at the benefits literature bestows (from a Freudian point of view) at both the pre-reflective and reflective levels.
In The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, prominent Freudian psychologist Bruno Bettelheimtalks about how children need folk fairy tales to find meaning in their confusing lives:
Just because his life is often bewildering to him, the child needs even more to be given the chance to understand himself in this complex world with which he must learn to cope. To be able to do so, the child must be helped to make some coherent sense out of the turmoil of his feelings. He needs ideas on how to bring his inner house into order, and on that basis be able to create order in his life. He needs…a moral education which subtly, and by implication only, conveys to him the advantages of moral behavior, not through abstract ethical concepts but through that which seems tangibly right and therefore meaningful to him.
Folk fairy tales, Bettelheim says, confront children with basic human predicaments—maturation, conflict, aging, death, the limits of our existence—respecting them for their anxieties and reassuring them that they can achieve satisfactory resolutions. Different fairy tales specialize in different anxieties, as a quick glance indicates. In “Hansel and Gretel,” for instance, children replay (among other things) abandonment fears; in “Snow White,” conflict with the mother; in “Jack and the Beanstalk,” conflict with the father; in “Cinderella,” sibling rivalry; in “Little Red Cap,” anxieties about growing up; in “Sleeping Beauty,” turbulent adolescence. The child instinctively recognizes that these stories speak to primal concerns, providing images and a language for what otherwise would feel like murky chaos.
“Hansel and Gretel,” for instance, sees the panicked children, confronted with adult problems, reverting to an infantile state, so that they gorge themselves on the gingerbread house. In the witch’s cannibalism, however, they come to recognize “the danger of unrestrained oral greed and dependence.” To survive, they must develop initiative and realize that their only resource lies in intelligent planning and acting. They must exchange subservience to the pressures of the id for acting in accordance with the ego.” By the end of the story, they have acquired new treasures: “new-won independence in thought and action, a new self-reliance which is opposite of the passive dependence which characterized them when they were deserted in the woods.” Bettelheim conducts similar analysis of the other fairy tales he mentions.
Freud’s essay on the uncanny (a.k.a. the spooky) is particularly useful to understanding why we often find ourselves simultaneously repulsed by and attracted to the works of E.T.A. Hoffman, Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Stephen King, and other masters of gothic horror. It’s because we sense something recognizable in the monsters. “We have met the enemy and he is us,” Pogo cartoonist Walt Kelly once wrote, riffing off an Admiral Perry quote, and Marlow in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness talks of “the fascination of the abomination.” The energy we put into denying our commonality comes back to us in feelings of dread, what Freud calls “the return of the repressed”: the more we deny, the greater the horror. We see this dynamic played out in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde where Jekyll does all he can to deny his hidden Hyde self, which is at odds with his sense of himself as a civilized gentleman. Jekyll uses strong drugs to suppress the self he “hides,” but as a result Hyde only grows in power, trampling on children and clubbing people to death. Reading such fiction allows us to approach, acknowledge, and thereby defuse our guilt and shame over our unsavory selves.
All this occurs at the pre-reflective level. Once we understand the process, however—once we begin applying Freud’s tools to understand why we respond as we do—we open up new windows into the psyche, both our own and those of others. Watching a child responding to a favorite fairy tale gives us a better grasp of his or her fears. With horror, meanwhile, we can probe the literary monster that we find the most frightening because this one will give us the deepest understanding of our own anxieties. If we interpret our responses to literature as Freud interprets dreams, we can achieve at least a modicum of self-knowledge and self-mastery.
This past week Christians celebrated the moment when Jesus, after having spent time with his disciples following the Resurrection, ascended into heaven. This is a prelude to Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit, the “advocate with the Father” that Jesus promised his followers, descended upon them, causing them to discover the god within.
One of the best Ascension poems I know is that of the 17th century Welsh mystic Henry Vaughan, who laments that, while others (including his recently departed brother) have ascended, he is still on earth. As is often the case with Vaughan, crystalline imagery contends with “dull and hoary” complaints. (See my post on “The World.”) The dead, he says, are like stars that glow and glitter above “some gloomy grove,” trying to penetrate Vaughan’s “cloudy breast” and ignite his “cold love.” Vaughan laments that, when he tries to look past the dust of death, he has trouble imagining the shining mysteries. It is like looking at a bird’s nest and trying to imagine the fledgling bird that has flown. (“But what fair well or grove he sings in now/That is to him unknown.”)
Unknown, perhaps, but at least Vaughan can catch glimpses. Angels send bright dreams that allow us to peep into glory. It is as though we are tombs in which a star is confined. If we could only fully acknowledge her (Vaughan genders the soul female) “she’ll shine through all the sphere.”
The last stanza has Vaughan begging God to disperse the mists that “blot and fill my perspective.” Either that or allow the poet to ascend, like Christ, so that he may see God face to face.
They Are All Gone into the World of Light By Henry Vaughan
They are all gone into the world of light! And I alone sit ling’ring here; Their very memory is fair and bright, And my sad thoughts doth clear.
It glows and glitters in my cloudy breast, Like stars upon some gloomy grove, Or those faint beams in which this hill is drest, After the sun’s remove.
I see them walking in an air of glory, Whose light doth trample on my days: My days, which are at best but dull and hoary, Mere glimmering and decays.
O holy Hope! and high Humility, High as the heavens above! These are your walks, and you have show’d them me To kindle my cold love.
Dear, beauteous Death! the jewel of the just, Shining nowhere, but in the dark; What mysteries do lie beyond thy dust Could man outlook that mark!
He that hath found some fledg’d bird’s nest, may know At first sight, if the bird be flown; But what fair well or grove he sings in now, That is to him unknown.
And yet as angels in some brighter dreams Call to the soul, when man doth sleep: So some strange thoughts transcend our wonted themes And into glory peep.
If a star were confin’d into a tomb, Her captive flames must needs burn there; But when the hand that lock’d her up, gives room, She’ll shine through all the sphere.
O Father of eternal life, and all Created glories under thee! Resume thy spirit from this world of thrall Into true liberty.
Either disperse these mists, which blot and fill My perspective still as they pass, Or else remove me hence unto that hill, Where I shall need no glass.
