Literatura y crítica

Baring the device of reality

lunes 12 de septiembre de 2011

Baring the Device of Reality

A commentary on the PsyArt list, in response to Norman Holland's appreciation of Unamuno's metafictional devices in Niebla:

Unamuno is not a great novelist, he's too impatient with the trappings of fiction, but his writings are intense because of his very impatience to get to the core of existence. Fiction is, according to him, essential in the conduct of human lives. In another novel, "San Manuel Bueno, Mártir" he tells the story of an atheist priest, who keeps the secret of his unbelief in order to give the faithful the consolations he can't believe in himself: God, the immortality of the soul, etc. Humans live in a fictional world of their own making, and most of what passes with us for identity and reality rests on Coleridge's "willing suspension of disbelief"--that is, on the conventional basis of not breaking the illusions of belief. I suppose this crisis of faith, or this "baring the device" of reality, is at the origin of Unamuno's experiments with fictional form.

El autor implícito y el narrador no fiable

viernes 9 de septiembre de 2011

El autor implícito y el narrador no fiable—desde nuestro punto de vista

 En este artículo expongo mi punto de vista sobre dos figuras textuales estrechamente relacionadas en la ficción narrativa: el autor implícito y el narrador no fiable. Son dos conceptos narratológicos que surgieron en cierto modo a la par asociados a la obra de Wayne Booth, y que han tenido suertes diferentes en narratología: el autor implícito se bate en retirada en tanto que concepto teórico—con frecuencia se le suprime teóricamente o se le menciona de pasada de modo vergonzante—en tanto que el narrador no fiable, el que podría ser el malo de la historia, adquiere un protagonismo casi imperialista, aun a costa del que podría parecer su correlativo necesario. Con alguna nota histórica sobre la cuestión, pretendo mostrar que no es tan fácil librarse del autor implícito—y reiteraré su necesidad para una definición adecuada del narrador no fiable.

Continúa el artículo en uno de en estos repositorios:

Academia - SSRN - Zaguán - ResearchGate

Author, Death of the
 

To Thine Own Self Be True

To Thine Own Self Be True

 Notes on "Hamlet:The Poisonous Message"— in Nicholas Ray's Tragedy and Otherness: Sophocles, Shakespeare, Psychoanalysis. Oxford (etc): Peter Lang, 2009.

Ray notes that Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams was written in response to the death of Freud's own father. This book's reading of the protagonist's Oedipal conflict in Hamlet is well known, and it will come as no surprise that Ray's last chapter on Hamlet engages more directly with Freud. While it examines the play from an interesting and original perspective, I find that it is less suggestive and intense than the previous chapter on Julius Caesar. The main point is once again Freud's failure to adequately engage with otherness—in this case "leaving increasingly unacknowledged the significance of parental desire in the constitution of the subject's psychic life" (174).  Once again historical context plays a role—praying for the dead being at the time a Catholic custom recently banned under the new dispensations of the Church of England. The Ghost's call "Remember me!" rather than "Revenge!" should be interpreted in this connection, as well as Hamlet's general predicament, trapped in a mourning ritual without issue. Ray's reading complexly engages the critical literature on Hamlet understood (mistakenly, he argues) as a modern subject; Ray emphasizes the imagery of audition and "poisoning through the ear"—as symbols of excessive remembrance. Polonius' injunctions to Laertes are reread, paradoxically, as representing a quite modern self-fashioning, free from the excessive weight of fatherly instruction. There is no absolute freedom from the father in Hamlet, but it is only when Hamlet becomes more self-determined, like Laertes, that he achieves a measure of freedom from the weight of paternal overdetermination, and is able to fulfil his mission. "Auto-fidelity must, in the final analysis, override fidelity to any of the father's foregoing precepts" (207). But, as shown by the example of Polonius, this autonomy from paternal authority is also elicited and enabled by the father himself. As noted before, one might argue that there is in Ray's Hamlet an element of self-portrayal—as regards this distancing from the psychoanalytic Father, the better to fulfil his mission and also fashion one's own life path.

An afterword insists that Freud's approach was not "mistaken" but rather caught up in the exigency of his own ipsocentric focus on the individual psyche. Ray, with Laplanche, emphasizes the role of unforeseen, multiple, and irreducible others in the constitution of the self. Attention to the role of otherness in the de-centered subject, he argues, should make psychoanalysis more aware of the multiple dimensions of the cultural field, and transform itself into a more de-centered, and more complex, inquiry into the structure and constitution of human subjects and their cultural artifacts.

Resurrección simbólica de Hamlet Shakespeare

Tragedy and the Oedipal Subject: Shakespeare (and Freud)

martes 30 de agosto de 2011

Tragedy and the Oedipal Subject: Shakespeare (and Freud)

Notes on the second half of Nicholas Ray's Tragedy and Otherness: Sophocles, Shakespeare, Psychoanalysis. Oxford (etc): Peter Lang, 2009.

Chapter Two of Tragedy and Otherness is an excellent reading of  Julius Caesar. The relationship to the Freudian project is however much more indirect—the work is related via a comment by Harold Bloom to Freud's parricidal theory of ritual in Totem and Taboo. However, the explicit references to this tragedy by Freud are meager and indirect, and arguably Ray makes too much of them. However, the chapter stands on its own strength as an outstanding reading in the deconstructivist mode. It is also an example of the way Ray combines psychoanalytic insights with historical and contextualized readings—seeing Julius Caesar not merely as an instance of archetypal parricide, but as an intervention in the context of early modern debates on tyranny and kingship: "If the tyrannus of the fifth century BC marks out the (albeit aporetic) vector of an inaugural subjectivity, the figure of the tyrant proleptically deconsecrated by early modern tragic drama is a measure of the subjectivity which the sons of the realm are constitutively denied: their liberty and autonomy is to be attained at the cost of rising up against the the absolute Father, setting him on the 'scaffold' and cutting him off" (120).

But was Caesar a tyrant, or is tyrannicide a legitimate step in any case? Following Ernest Schanzer's reading, Ray argues that "the tragedy works to hold open the very question of just what it is that the assassination might mean" (122). The event itself was inherently ambiguous—the crux of the matter being that Julius Caesar was not yet a tyrant, although he seemed to be well on the way to becoming one. Therefore, his assassination could be described as tyrannicide only proleptically, casting the doubt that the actions of his murderers were caught in a vicious circle, or a defectively self-fulfilling prophecy. Alterity enters the argument as follows: everywhere the play resists attempts to oversimplify the significance of Caesar's assassination (although there is no lack of one-sided views coming from many characters, notably the contrasting public speeches of Brutus and Antony), What is more, the play "refuses to be assimilated to the model of anachronistic back-projection whereby the present context of its composition would impose, in terms of its own epistemological purview, an single and identifiable meaning in the past it represents" (124). Caesar is complex, inherently contradictory in his actions and purposes, and the play preserves the enigmatic core of his otherness—which could only have been dissipated by a non-existent future which was cut short by the murder. And the conspirators' actions also had unintended consequences, different too from the ideal restoration of the Republic they invoked as their purpose.  

Once again, Ray's reading is finely attuned to the narrative interplay of prospection and retrospection. In this case, too, he points out that Freud's reading of the play (to the extent that there is one) forecloses the play of difference, for example in the interpretation of  Brutus' character. Brutus too is complex, divided within, hesitating between two fathers or ancestors, Caesar himself (perhaps) and (or, rather, or) the ancient Brutus who expelled Tarquin from Rome and instaurated the Republic. Ray examines the way in which Brutus' "double coinage" is manipulated by Cassius and others, and the way the paradox of the self cannot be solved here either: "The moment of centring, the accomplishment of selfhood, is equally and necessarily one of decentring" (141), and so Brutus fashions himself as an inherently divided subject. The tragedy incorporates the double genealogy of Brutus with a greater tolerance for contradiction than is found in Plutarch—emphasizing the way Brutus is, like Rome, at war with himself. The difference between tyrannicide and tyranny is also deconstructed, as the logic of their actions drives the conspirators into mimicking the very gestures of "hermeneutic tyranny" they reject in the prospective tyrant.

According to Laplanche and Pontalis' entry on "Deferred action [Nachträglichkeit / Après-coup]", "It is not lived experience in general that undergoes a deferred revision but, specifically, whatever it has been impossible in the first instance to incorporate fully into a meaningful context" (153). (One might want to argue that deferred revision or retroactive fashioning is only especially visible or significant in these cases, and that anyway lack of comprehension is rarely the only cause for deferred action: an additional reason for revision is usually at work behind the subject's return to prior experience). Anyway, in formulating his seduction theory, Freud had to acknowledge that the original (now traumatic) event cannot be returned to exactly as it was, as the Same—and Ray uses this analogy to emphasize the element of otherness that the conspirators' actions and their interpretations add to Caesar's self and actions. Perhaps Hillis Miller's conception of the performative would be a useful complement to Ray's perspective here: the conspirators try to define Caesar as a tyrant, etc., and they don't recognize the constitutive and performative element in their own actions, due to the inescapable prematurity of their deed. As to the play itself, in Ray's reading it refuses almost eerily to determine the meaning of the events it portrays: one could perhaps say that its own performative intervention on the events is a deliberate self-dismantling one: "Shakespeare's metadrama seems to say that the deed can be repeated, the scene reconstructed, the words spoken translated, but that this alone will not give us access to what the scene means" (159). One could add that this view holds a suggestive potential of implications for the staging, one could almost say the performative performance, of Shakespeare's play. The conspirators themselves imagine the future representations of this event, but typically they assume their meaning will be nonambiguous. The playwright knows otherwise.

The Freudian connection comes almost as an afterthought to this chapter: in Totem and Taboo Freud assumes that the Father's murder is unequivocally an instance of tyrannicide, although a reactive performance of guilt will follow in the rituals developing from it. Ray makes Freud side with the conspirators in their tendentious denunciation of the tyrant—since Freud conceives of the archetypal patriarch as consistently tyrannical. But one wonders whether Freud, like Brutus, was not somewhat more ambivalent in his views on the patriarch, under the surface of his text.

"Complex, not the same as itself from the outset, the event, like the experience of trauma, makes possible and necessary the deferred and constant returns to it of which Shakespeare's [or Freud's?] text is only one of innumerable instances" (170). 
 

Julio César

Hemingway, días de vino y muerte

Hemingway, días de vino y muerte

Hemingway, días de vino y muerte es la traducción española de Hemingway Cutthroat, de Michael Atkinson (2010, La Factoría de Ideas, 2011), que me compré en un hiper. Quizá se venda bien, es una novela entretenida de leer, divertida con frecuencia, y una buena adición al género "ruedo ibérico grotesco en la Guerra Civil." Es la historia de Ernest Hemingway enterándose del asesinato de José Robles Pazos, viejo conocido suyo y de Dos Passos, más amigo de este último y traductor de sus novelas al español.  Era un miembro destacado de la Internacional, y víctima en España de las purgas estalinistas de tiempos de la guerra civil: se lo quitó de encima su propio bando (que no era ya su bando, claro, porque con Stalin había siempre un círculo más interno, que luego sería el siguiente en pasar por la piedra). Dos Passos se indignó con el asesinato de Robles, e intentó buscar explicaciones pero sólo encontró apparatchiks con rostro de piedra, mentiras y evasivas. Como para desengañarse del comunismo, pero esos años a muchos les costaba aprender la lección (aún hay quien sigue jaleando a Castro, vamos, que parece que no van a faltar en la vida de estos). Este asunto fue la ocasión de la ruptura entre Hemingway y Dos Passos, cuando éste intentó reclutar al camarada Ernesto para que usase su influencia y aclarase el destino de Robles y le ayudase a buscar responsables. Hemingway vino a decirle "son cosas de la guerra, y después de todo es nuestro bando, mejor no indagar mucho. Algo habrá hecho. Fuego amigo, etc." La historia de que Robles era un espía franquista la aceptó y se la tragó el Hemingway real entre copazo y copazo, y echó en cara a Dos Passos el que no se contentase con las explicaciones de los estalinistas y cerrase filas con ellos. Y Dos Passos se fue de España enfurecido; Hemingway aún seguiría brindando con el Frente Popular una temporada más.

Bien, pues la versión de Michael Atkinson, si la pasamos a considerar algo más que un inocente thriller de evasión, viene a ser una falsificación histórica de tomo y lomo. Tenemos a un Hemingway inflado de muscultatura y desbordante de virilidad, que los tumba bebiendo, confraterniza con el pueblo (mucha más gente habla inglés de la que cabría esperar, por cierto, en esta España del 38), y rueda por múltiples camas con numerosas putas, turistas americanas y hasta con una ginecóloga feminista llamada Florípedes, extraordinariamente salida. Es en suma una versión mejorada e idealizada del toro americano—un Hemingway broncas, hiperactivo, siguiendo la pista del asesinato entre brumas de alcohol, zurrando burócratas, peleando con toros y guardias, y bebiendo con viejos curtidos por la vida—comiendo como un camionero, tirándose fuertes pedos, y paseando por la guerra yendo a lo suyo, dejando un rastro de mujeres medio satisfechas medio quejosas.  La falsificación más seria no es ésta, que viene a ser una broma divertida, o una complicidad con el mito, sino la inversión total de la actitud de Hemingway hacia el asesinato de Robles y la postura ética personal que requería. Aquí Hemingway desenmascara a quienes decían que Robles era un espía franquista—precisamente lo contrario de lo que hizo. Vamos, que Atkinson prefiere darnos la versión de lo que debió haber sido, y precisamente nunca fue, porque Hemingway no era éste ente de ficción, sino una persona real muy diferente del retratado por Atkinson, con prioridades bastante diferentes por lo que se ve. Aparte de las capacidades añadidas de héroe de novela negra.  

También mezcla Atkinson, al gusto americano, la purga de Robles con el bombardeo de Guernica—que en un tris está Hemingway de llegar a evitarlo, aquí. Esto de la intriga de Guernica es una falsificación más impresentable todavía, pues la novela termina por atribuir el asesinato de Robles no al Frente Popular, sino a un infiltrado franquista, Posada, que ayuda a preparar el bombardeo desarmando Guernica, elimina a Robles e intenta sobornar a "Hemingway" sin éxito. Y al final recibe su merecido el traidor Posada, una víctima más de las purgas, pero ésta justificada, se lo dan de comer los comunistas a unos perros. No falta España abismal aquí, y eso me gusta, pero... como dice este Hemingway de Robles, se ignora la evidencia y se hacen en la propia novela unas maniobras de afiliación que son "un loable triunfo de la disonancia cognitiva"—atribuir el asesinato de Robles, modelo de puñalada trapera comunista, a un franquista, es vaciar de sentido esta historia. Para eso mejor inventarse otra, que de hecho es lo que pasa aquí, pero con unas etiquetas de realidad inaceptables. "Hemingway" también relata todo el caso en unos reportajes que, claro, "nunca fueron publicados" y ya los pueden ustedes buscar.  En cuanto a la ficción, medita "Hemingway", es imposible narrar esta historia como fue, y decide inspirarse en un brigadista que conoce para escribir lo que sería Por quién doblan las campanas.   

A Atkinson le pasa algo parecido. Imposible escribir la cosa como fue. Decide tomar el toro por los cuernos, engordar el mito y falsear la historia. Sobre este episodio escribió un libro Stephen Koch, The Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and the Murder of José Robles (New York: Counterpoint-Perseus Books, 2005), y otro Ignacio Martínez de Pisón, Enterrar a los muertos (Biblioteca Breve). Barcelona: Seix Barral, 2005). Allí Hemingway sale más bajo de testosterona, y peor parado a nivel ético y político. Pero la historia vende menos que las aventuras de ficción.

_________

Podemos contrastar la wishful fiction de Atkinson, mistificando el mito, con la perspectiva más sobria que encontramos en un artículo sobre Hemingway en la guerra de España, de Mauricio Aguilera (1). Traduzco un par de párrafos clave:

"Comparado con auténticos combatientes como George Orwell, la comprensión que tenía Hemingway de las causas que llevaron al conflicto español estaba seriamente lastrada por sus limitaciones emocionales y por su adhesión política a la agenda de los comunistas. En los capítulos titulados ’The Spanish Tragedy’ y ’The Politics of Desperation’, Lynn y Mellow respectivamente convienen en que el autor, uno de los nombres más notables que habían decidido mantenerse fuera de la política durante la Gran Depresión (de hecho fue fuertemente criticado por su igorancia de las lucha políticas de los 30), fue fácilmente engañado por la progaganda Roja, y por la inteligencia rusa que operaba en Madrid. Hemingway se negó a creer en ’la evidencia que se iba acumulando sobre el terrorismo y la traición con que los comunistas de línea dura subvirtieron la causa de los lealistas’ (Mellow, 1992, 50), y así los comunistas lo usaron como un nombre que le añadía un peso favorable a su causa.

     El descubrimiento en 1982 de un despacho que envió a Pravda el 1 de agosto de 1938 a petición de Mijaíl Koltsov, uno de los agentes de Stalin y más tarde una víctima más de las purgas, revela la limitada comprensión que tenía Hemingway de la guerra, viéndola básicamente como un conflicto entre los ’rojos’, o sea, el pueblo del país, y los ’terratenientes absentistas, los moros, los italianos y los alemanes’ (Lynn 1987, 449). El ensayo de Pravda deliberadamente elige mostrar sólo a las víctimas de los crímenes cometidos por los fascistas (...) Los despachos de Hemingway a Ken, la revista izquierdista americana que aspiraba a la objetividad y no era partidaria del comunismo, también insisten en las mismas perspectivas partidistas. El titulado ’Traición en Aragón’ (30 de junio de 1938) ridiculiza a Dos Passos, acusa a Robles de ser un traidor, y dice que Madrid bajo el asedio infernal está tan "libre de cualquier terror como cualquier capital de Europa" (Lynn 1987, 452).

     Su servilismo a la propaganda comunista queda bien probado en su actitud hacia la muerte de José Robles, un caso significativo que ningún biógrafo ha pasado por alto en el análisis del papel de Hemingway como corresponsal de guerra. José Robles era amigo íntimo de Dos Passos, traductor de sus novelas (Tres Soldados), profesor de la Universidad Johns Hopkins, y miembro de una de las familias aristocráticas bien relacionadas de Valencia. Su asesinato a manos de los espías comunistas (’sabía demasiado del Ministerio de la Guerra español y sobre el Kremlin y no era políticamente fiable’, comenta Mellow, 1992, 507) lleva a Dos Passos a emprender una investigación. El consejo de Hemingway (’dejar de investigar el asunto’, Lynn 1987, 447) y más adelante su creencia incuestionable de que Robles era un espía que había sido sometido a un juicio justo (Mellow 1992, 498), y que por tanto recibió su merecido, señalan el punto de ruptura de la larga amistad de los dos escritores. Añadido al impacto de la ruptura estaba que Hadley y Kate Smith, la esposa de Dos Passos, habían sido compañeras de habitación en Bryn Mawr. En palabras de Joe Herbst, Hemingway estaba ’abrazando al nivel más simple las ideologías de la época en el mismo momento en que Dos Passos estaba cuestionándolas urgentemente’ (cit. en Mellow 1992, 506). Para 1939, Dos Passos consiguió darse cuenta de que Robles ’se había dejado meter en una encerrona’: no en vano le habían avisado de que ’si a los comunistas no les gusta un hombre, directamente lo fusilan’ (Mellwo, 1992, 489). El status privilegiado de Hemingway como corresponsal de guerra en el Gaylord’s, cuartel general del contingente ruso (Enrique Líster, Juan Modesto, Dolores Ibarruri, Mijail Kltsov, Pepe Quintanilla, el llamado ’verdugo de Madrid’, etc.), su acceso a lugares y a bienes (coches, gasolina, comida) que no tenía ningún otro corresponsal (’Gaylord’s mismo había parecido indecentemente lujoso y corrupto’, Por quién doblan las campanas, 231), y su convicción muy enraizada de que sólo los comunistas podían salvar a la República (’Me gustan los comunistas cuando son soldados’) convierten al escritor en una marioneta al servicio de los rusos (Mellow 1992, 501-503). Tal como lo pone Robert Jordan, ’Aquí en España los comunistas ofrecían la mejor disciplina y la más fiable y más sensata para llevar adelante la guerra. Aceptaba su disciplina mientras durase la guerra porque, en su manera de llevar la guerra, eran el único partido cuyo programa y cuya disciplina podía aceptar’ (Por quién doblan las campanas, 163). Años más tarde, cuando a Castro le pidieron explicar por qué era inevitable que hubiese ejecuciones en Cuba, dijo, ’Déjenme que les diga lo que piensa de eso Hemingway: "Las ejecuciones de Cuba son un fenómeno necesario. Los militares criminales que fueron ejecutados por el gobierno revolucionario recibieron lo que se merecían" ’ (Reynolds 1999, 323)." (173-75)

Quizá las visitas "apolíticas" de Hemingway a la España de Franco en los años 50 y a principios de los 60 fueron una manera de dar a entender, o de darse a entender a sí mismo, que rojo y azul no eran blanco y negro sin más, y que había más tonos de gris de los que había querido creer él mismo, o se había esforzado por no ver. Gris, en toda esa época, mucho hubo.


___

(1). Mauricio D. Aguilera Linde "Chapter 3: Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)." En Writers of the Spanish Civil War: The Testimony of their Auto/Biographies, ed. Celia Wallhead (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011), 173-75.

Hemingway transexual

Tragedy and the Oedipal Subject: Sophocles and Freud

viernes 26 de agosto de 2011

Tragedy and the Oedipal Subject: Sophocles and Freud

Notes on the first half of Nicholas Ray’s Tragedy and Otherness: Sophocles, Shakespeare, Psychoanalysis. Oxford (etc): Peter Lang, 2009.

Tragedy and psychoanalysis have always been at work within each other—with major tragedies explicitly inspiring Freud’s work, and with psychoanalysis waiting to be unravelled out of the confict between next of kin in classical tragedians like Sophocles or Shakespeare. Nicholas Ray works from within the field of psychoanalytic criticism—a little askew, though, as the approach he favors is broadly that of  JeanLaplanche, and he casts a critical gaze on the Freudian concepts and on Freud’s account of the self—the Oedipus, notably, is here an object of interrogation, rather than a psychical process which is taken for granted. Ray stresses the complexity of the process by which self relates to other in both tragedies and psychoanalysis, a complexity which may be foreclosed by Freud’s own formulations. Or by an overly strict adherence to them.

One significant issue is Freud’s early formulation, and then abandonment, of the "seduction theory"—i.e., Freud came to believe that neurotic symptoms did not originate in an actual traumatic childhood episode, furthering instead the view that such traumatic episodes were retroactively created fantasies. This was a crucial step for Freudian psychoanalysis to take, all the more so from the point of view of psychoanalytical poetics, since the psychic material came to be treated as being analogous to fiction. These fantasies are grounded, according to standard Freudianism, on a universal and deterministic process of sexualization. The development of the Oedipal theory coincides with Freud’s use of Sophocles and then Shakespeare as illustrations. Ray’s book sets out to reexamine the relationship between the theory and the texts, to reread the texts askew from the Freudian view, watching the blind spots of Freud’s reading, and to challenge Freud’s totalizing and deterministic view of sexuality and fantasy.

This is an interesting project in many senses, not just as a critical revaluation of Freudian criticism or a new examination of tragedies by Sophocles and Shakespeare—it also provides suggestive insights for a theory of retrospection and of retroactive effects—what Freud called Nachträglichkeit. Ray’s reexamination of psychoanalysis is indebted to Laplanche’s critique of the Oedipus: according to Laplanche, Freud’s account of psychosexual development is misleadingly endogenous and deterministic and does not make sufficient allowance for otherness, for the unexpectedness and contingency of the encounter with externality and the other. Freud’s Copernican revolution of the human subject was also Copernican in a limited sense, that is, it didn’t consider the possibility that there might be no center whatsoever for the psyche. In his poststructuralist version of psychoanalysis, the self is radically de-centered, and this calls for a rewriting of the Oedipus. In abandoning the theory of seduction, and the role it gave to exogenous elements in the constitution of the self, Freud was conniving with the subject’s tendency to mask his heteronomy, his dependence on the intervention of the other. Laplanche insists on the fundamental otherness of the messages received by the infant: otherness as they are fundamentally misunderstood, coming as they come from an unassimilated adult world, and otherness because of their lack of self-transparency to the adults, the senders, as unconscious elements are involved in any message. Therefore Laplanche goes back to the seduction hypothesis with a difference—any interaction between the child and the adult world contains a potential for the element of retroactive traumatism that Freud had identified in his early formulation of the seduction hypothesis. And the subject, and his unconscious, are structured around these unassimilated or insufficiently symbolised elements—which is Laplanche’s own version of the Lacanian tenet that the unconscious is not so much within the subject as "between" subjects. These psychoanalytic models would of course benefit from an integration with a theory of social interaction and of the social constitution of the subject as an interiorized system of relationships—which was in part R. D. Laing’s contribution—although I am not aware of a a sustained and satisfactory integration of psychoanalytical work with, say, Goffman’s symbolic interactionalism.

Riding on the back of Laplanche’s theory of the role of alterity in the constitution of the subject, the self-stated aim of the book is "to endeavour to bear witness to the irreducible alterities which inhabit the three tragedies examined, and the specific ways in which they can be shown to resist the exigency of narcissistic closure to which Freud’s thought becomes more emphatically subject after the formal repudiation of the seduction theory" (42). Ray defines, in passing, what a Laplanchian hermeneutics of art might be: a nonprogrammatic encounter with otherness, given that the work of art or culture is one prime example of enigmatic otherness, an indeterminate message only partly controlled by the author, and one which will produce undeterminable effects, unforeseen by the artist. "In other words, the site of cultural production is a reopening of the subject’s originary relationship to the other" (44). And Freud’s own production of psychoanalysis was partly derived from his encounter with the enigmatic alterity of the Sophocles’ and Shakespeare’s tragedies. These texts (Oedipus Tyrannus, Julius Caesar, Hamlet) apparently narrate the protagonist’s assumption of an identity, a centring of autonomous subjectivity: "Oedipus the fifth-century philosopher, Brutus the revolutionary libertarian, Hamlet the frustrated figure of an ostensibly modern severance from paternal law". Ray seeks to identify in the tragedies themselves an originary de-centring at work, one which undermines the protagonist’s status as an autonomous subject. These are, too, tragedies about parricide, a subject central to Freud’s account of ritual and psychic life in Totem and Taboo. Parricide as a move necessary for the coming-into-being of the subject is ambivalent, and Ray further explores its intrinsic ambivalence, already prominent in Freud’s analysis, with an added emphasis on the role of pre-existing and external otherness in the constitution of the parricidal subject. That otherness is partly accounted for by "the contingent ideologies of the subject’s surrounding culture" (53)—the trajectory of the subject is irreducible to an intrinsic fate. As an analyst, Freud identifies with Oedipus, Brutus, Hamlet—while Ray dissociates himself from this identification and underlines those elements of the text which question the protagonist’s autonomy, those "forces which threaten the self-presence that Freud is led to assign to the primal, parricidal text" (55).

Ray’s reading of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, and of Freud’s reading of the same, emphasizes the elements of enigmatic otherness in the mythical story, an alterity which is not adequately addressed by Freud, who "remains blind to the troublingly enigmatic specificity of the tragedy" (59). Oedipus, an optimistic rationalist, relies on his own intellectual strength and minimizes the significance of the Sphinx’s challenge—Freud does likewise, calling it a "riddle", whereas the story resonates with more troubling and enigmatic overtones. Ray notes, for instance, that Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, which first addresses the Oedipal theme, was written according to Freud as "a portion of my own self-analysis, my reaction to my father’s death" (qtd. in Ray, 61). There is also a story told by Ernest Jones about a curious premonitory scene, in which Freud saw himself, like Oedipus, as a riddle solver, apparently without realizing the unconscious irony of this identification. Oedipus’ answer to the Sphinx was an answer to a riddle, but Ray notes that it should have been understood as an enigma, not a riddle. An enigma may require an answer, but "any response will be inadequate" (63)—and, moreover, the interpreter’s relation to his answer is an enigma in its own right. Oedipus was associated to the fifth-century philosophers by Hegel and then by Jean-Joseph Goux (Oedipus, Philosopher), as the emblem of the new humanist paradigm which saw man as the measure of all things, a symbol of Western thought, actually. Goux notes that contrary to Nietzsche, Hegel did not realize the troubling and ambivalent consequences that the tragic fate of Oedipus suggests for philosophy. Freud’s unconscious comes to symbolize, too, the dark, pulsional, parrincestual nature of this move, and it is not by chance that Freud "Freud discovers the unconscious and the Oedipal drives at the same time" (Goux, qtd. in Ray 75). Yet the reduction of fate to the unconscious, Freud’s own answer to the Oedipal riddle, only has the effect "of displacing the riddle elsewhere, namely ’back’ into the primordial constitution of the subject" (79). Freud’s partial blindness in reading the Oedipus story discloses for Ray "a great deal more about Sophocles’ play and, in turn, about psychoanalysis than Freud was fully able to grasp" (83). The Freudian theory of the subject minimizes the role of alterity in its constitution, to an endogenously determined unfolding, "no more than the manifestation of an initial centrifugal explosion" (86)—but Sophocles’ play is about Oedipus failure to secure himself as a self-sufficient source and origin of his own destiny. Ray’s reading of Sophocles emphasizes the way in which Oedipus enacts a fate which was not even his, but originally his father’s; an interesting intertextual allusion in the self-blinding scene, to Polyphemus’ blinding by "Nobody" in the Iliad, emphasizes the way Oedipus believes to the last that he can control his own actions—mistakenly. "Thus, against the tyrannus’ continued Oedipean assertions of his own autonomy, the fabric of Sophocles’ text allows neither Oedipus’ self-blinding nor, in its connection with it, the murder of Laius, to be dissociated from this prior scene of the inscription by the father on the son’s body" (99).

One should note the way that Ray’s own "killing of the father" is similarly inscribed within the logic of psychoanalysis. Michel Foucault argued (in "What Is an Author?") that Freud was a prime example (like Foucault himself, one might add) of a new mode of authorship: the authorship of discourse formations on the analysis of human phenomena, a peculiar type of discourse in which the disciples or followers need to refer continually both to the phenomena under discussion and to the foundational texts of the founding father. In this sense, Ray’s text is a prime example of Oedipal Freudianism, which makes it all the more suggestive.

Tragedy and the Oedipal Subject: Shakespeare (and Freud)

The True Vocation of Criticism

The True Vocation of Criticism

A commentary to Bill Benzon's post "Beyond Close Reading", on naive and sophisticated criticism:

You seem to argue that in the case of "'rithmatics", i.e. sophisticated criticism like structuralism, semiotics, etc., criticism which examines the text so to speak in spite or in disregard of its own knowledge about itself, "the delight is in the ‘rithmatic, not the text one is examining through the ‘rithmatic. One must cut the cord and take responsibility for one’s delight." Someone said that we should not read criticism in order to increase our enjoyment of literature (although that may happen too), but rather the other way round: we read literature so that we can enjoy the higher intellectual pleasures of criticism, which understands literature in a way it does not understand itself. This is a rather Wildean paradox (the mistress as servant to the maid, or life of the intellect considered as the most active form of life), but while it may be alien to the views of the New Critics, it is much more akin to deconstructive views on the autonomous dynamics of criticism. As a matter of fact one might argue that the practice, if not the theory, of criticism has always worked on this assumption: that the literary text is only a means or excuse the critic uses to have us read his own text. According to Anatole France, critics (should) say "Gentlemen, I am going to speak about myself on the subject of Shakespeare, on the subject of Racine, or Pascal, or Goethe, who provide me with a beautiful opportunity". Criticism, not to mention theoretically inflected criticism, is always a change of subject.

We are mysterious to ourselves
 

Kafka & Son

Kafka & Son

A comment on Poor Old Kafka, on the vexed relationships between Franz Kafka and his father as portrayed in Kafka's Letter to the Father—"Kafka was left carrying an intolerable burden of guilt and shame about himself: ‘I lost the confidence to do anything,’ he wrote"—

There's a story by Nadine Gordimer (I seem to remember it's in Something Out There), using Kafka's father as a narrator, and answering back to his son's letter. You might enjoy reading that–although Kafka comes out as a rather mawkish, self-pitying, ineffective and half-baked wimp. Which I suppose does justice, in a way, to Kafka's portrait of his father. But it's a good argument for the Other Side of the question. Anyway it's a good addition to the literature on this loaded issue, fathers' and sons' expectations and disappointments.

En el hombre del padre

Publicado por JoseAngel en 9:47 PM 0 comentarios Enlaces a esta entrada