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access to Criticism
Transactive Criticism:
334
Pascal, most recently in the late sixties in the excited cries of people
like Timothy Leary that one had to get mixed into the landscape, in
Tompkins' and Bird's The Secret Life of Plants, and in the practices
of the various yogas and gurus abroad in the land today. Yet
something of the same wish for total fusion and merger appears in
the writing even of sophisticates like Gregory Bateson, Norman O.
Brown, or R. D. Laing. All want to deal with a gap between nature
and mind by an ethical or mystical cry that we have to fuse mind
with nature. All proceed by tacitly assuming that there is such a
gap between mind and nature to close.
That, however, is precisely the question I want to raise: Is there a
gap? I think not. I think rather that whenever we experience
something ostensibly outside ourselves we do so by re-creating our
selves through that something. Or to state it more abstractly: a mind
re-creates identity through experience. I shall explain what I mean
by that very abstract statement of fact, but for the time being, notice
that it implies that whenever someone says there is a gap between
nature and mind or mind and body he has himself created that gap.
From my point of view, the seventeenth century cleaving of res extensa
from res cogitans is itself a historical and personal strategy which is
governed by psychological principles and can be described in philo
sophical terms by phrases like Alfred North Whitehead's "in-mixing
of self and other," John Dewey's "having an experience," Ernst
Cassirer's " myths," or Husserl's " intentionality." Similarly, psycho
logists of perception and cognition have been showing experimentally
for many years that perception is a constructive act. That is, reality
does not simply impinge on our senses—rather, we actively construe
even the simplest of events through complex information-processing
systems.
Now, however, the psychoanalytic psychologist can give his
particular precision to what the philosophers and the experimental
psychologists have adumbrated. We can turn these epistemological
and physio-cognitive abstractions into psychoanalytic statements
about particular people interpreting particular events, for that is the
forte of the psychoanalyst—the study of the individual. Psycho
analytic psychology enables us, as it were, to go by means of science
through science—to cross the gap between mind and nature by means
of a psychological principle that itself explains why men created that
gap. Namely: any way of interpreting the world, even Cartesian
dualism, meets some individual's needs, for interpretation is an in
Such a central theme is highly abstract, yet one can quickly move
from key words of the theme to particular details of the play. For
example, the idea that " supernatural and natural things mix... in a
man's mind" could embrace all the various hallucinations and pro
phecies which are so uniquely a feature of Macbeth. It could include
even the schoolbook reading of the play as a tragedy of political
ambition ("commonwealth"). An order mixing supernatural and
natural implies the Elizabethan world-picture but also such details as
the recurring images of birds, as beings between heaven and earth,
as things that rise ("grow out"), or as domestic, nest-building
animals (" family"). Similarly, the idea that things " grow out" from
a man at their center would encompass the recurring images of titles,
theatre, and clothing. A word like " germinate " unifies for me not
only the large theme of parents, children, lineage, and inheritance but
also a tiny detail like the sequence of a half dozen or so images that
compare Macbeth's rise and fall to the life cycle of a plant (brought to
a sudden, supernatural end as Birnam Wood marches to Dunsinane,
escorting Macduff who is not of woman born). One arrives at such a
theme by a process of successive abstraction: grouping the details
of the work into themes, then grouping those several themes into one
large center. Therefore, one can reverse the process and go from the
center back to the periphery of detail.
Although such an interpretation uses logic, it is as intuitive and
imaginative as it is rational. And it is highly individual. Each reader
will choose the details he thinks important and group them into
themes that matter to him. At this point, someone is likely to object,
" But this makes all interpretation subjective!" Actually, I am
saying that all literary interpretations interrelate " objective " features
of the text in a "subjective" way. Further, the interpretation and
the style of the interpreter are so intertwined that one cannot isolate
" objective " features from the subjectivity of the person doing the
isolating. (Merely pointing to a detail expressses a choice of that
detail in preference to some other.) The question is not whether
interpretation is objective or subjective but how it is both.
To answer it, I wish to introduce that complex psychological term
"identity." The person who has written most precisely about it is
Heinz Lichtenstein. From his work as a psychoanalyst (and his
earlier philosophical studies), he has suggested the following way of
accounting for the sameness in a person. A newborn child is born
with a great (but not unlimited) range of potentialities. In all the
'■Ibid., I. IS.
giving and being given to, bigger and less powers, being part of
magical world and having a separate, broken self—I come out with an
identity theme like this: By giving myself, I show I am part of
world that magically gives me infinite supplies of talent and grace;
but by not giving I show I can stand alone, even at the risk of being
broken. Thus, this writer always headed in two directions at once
to give infinitely and so prove he himself had been infinitely given t
to withhold and so show that he had not been given to, that therefor
he had a right to be angry and to break into that magical source
or to be broken himself. In his own words, "I have no patience
and when I want something I want it. I break people. I am part o
the break-up of the times."
Thus, he was always involved in one of two cycles, giving or
withholding. He was driven from one to the other as it became
apparent that he was not going to receive infinitely (after all nobod
does), or as he needed to assert his own separate identity apart from
the era in which he lived. He always created expectations but onl
sometimes did he live up to them. If any one word could sum hi
up or the way he saw his world, it would be promising.
Given that he existed between these two cycles of giving to be
given unto and withholding to be withheld from, he saw his talent
as a writer, and indeed everything else he had, as a fluctuating stor
of supplies. "We feel so damned secure," he wrote of himself an
others like him, "as long as there is enough in the bank to buy the
next meal, and enough moral stuff in reserve to take us through th
next ordeal." Curiously—not so curiously, really—at his death, he lef
in his typewriter a final bit of doggerel:
There was a flutter from the wings of God and you lay dead.
Your books were in your desk
I guess and some unfinished chaos in your head
Was dumped to nothing by the great janitress of destinies.
than be known "—that is, than receive personal recognition. " The
purpose of a work of fiction," he wrote, " is to appeal to the lingering
after-effects in the reader's mind." Even as a boy, he would attend the
old Teck Theatre in Buffalo, take in long sections of dialogue, and
then with his prodigious memory repeat the performance for the
other children in the neighborhood.
One could only give something to the reader, though, if one had
taken it into oneself. Our writer thought the artist's purpose should
be to express in some palatable disguise emotions he had himself lived
through. In this sense, he saw the purpose of fiction as "to re
capture the exact feel of a m,oment in time and space, exemplified by
people rather than by things... an attempt at a mature memory of a
deep experience." "It was necessary for Dickens," he said, "to put
into Oliver Twist the child's passionate resentment at being abused and
starved that had haunted his whole childhood." And the idea
turned up in one of his own early stories, set in Elizabethan times. A
fugitive rushes in to hide in his friend's quarters. The guards come
looking for him and tell the friend that a lady has been raped, but
they do not find the fugitive. His friend reproaches him, but the
fugitive insists that he is responsible only to himself for what he
does. Then, after his friend has gone to sleep, he sits down and
writes The Rape of Lucrece.
The same thing, this writer felt, applied to character as to content:
" It takes half a dozen people," he maintained, " to make a syn
thesis strong enough to create a fiction character." And also to style.
" A good style simply doesn't form unless you absorb half a dozen
top-flight authors every year." Your style should be "a subconscious
amalgam of all that you have admired."
His creativity functioned well in this mode of being given to by
the world and giving in turn to his readers. Yet there was a failure
built in simply because of the magnitude of the demands he made.
At the beginning of his career he saw himself entering a world of
" ineffable toploftiness and promise," and he himself having " a sense
of infinite possibilities that was always with me whether vanity or
shame was my mood." Not to have that relation to infinity was to be
fatally flawed—as he described a woman who he felt had failed, " She
didn't have the strength for the big stage." As for himself, however,
being inspired gave him an infinite power: " I can be so tender and
kind to people in even little things, but once I get a pen in my hand
I can do anything."
For him, writing could balance discrepencies between the real and
the fantastic, the finite and the infinite, the loving and the aggressive
For example, he advised a fellow writer, "Try and find more
' bright' characters; if the women are plain make them millionairesses
or nymphomaniacs, if they're scrubwomen, give them hot sex attractio
and charm. This is such a good trick I don't see why it's not mor
used—I always use it just as I like to balance a beautiful word with a
barbed one." "Reporting the extreme things as if they were th
average things," he once noted, " will start you on the art of fiction."
Thus, his writings are full of marvelous aphorisms achieved by movin
from human details to the grand scale, for example, " The faces o
most American women over thirty are relief maps of petulant an
bewildered unhappiness." Or moving from the planetary force to
the helpless human, as in this closing of a letter: "Pray gravity t
move your bowels. It's little we get done for us in this world."
Yet these attempts to get from the finite to the infinite were
inevitably, doomed from the start; and the deepest strain in this man's
life and works is the sense of inevitable loss and failure. "The utter
synthesis between what we want and what we can have," he wrote,
" is so rare that I look back with a sort of wonder on those days of my
youth when I had it, or thought I did." " Again and again in m
books I have tried to imagize my regret that I have never been as good
as I intended to be." It was this sense of inevitable loss that gave rise
to his " tragic" sense of life and a feeling for the chanciness and
precariousness of existence: "You have got to make all the right
changes at the main corners—the price for losing your way once is
years of unhappiness."
The way out of this doomed effort to climb into the infinite was
to separate himself from it. Thus, breaking up an affair with a marrie
woman, he wrote her: " The harshness of this letter will have served
its purpose if on reading it over you see that I have an existence
outside you—and in doing so remind you that you have an existence
outside me." It is in this sense of a stoic separateness, I think, that we
have to understand his strong artistic conscience. "Work wa
dignity and the only dignity." "To me," he wrote, "the condition
of an artistically creative life are so arduous that I can only compare
to them the duties of a soldier in war-time."
The image of the soldier suggests some of the violence he felt in
being separate from that infinitely giving source. A word he use
even more for such catastrophes was "broken." Thus, of a woman
who could not work, he said, " She broke and is broken forever. He
advised a would-be writer, "If you want to be a top-notcher, you
have to break with everyone. You have to show up your own father."
And indeed, his father's being fired seems to have laid down for this
man the prototype of the loss of inner resources as a breaking: " That
morning he had gone out a comparatively young man, a man full of
strength, full of confidence. He came home that evening an old man,
a completely broken man." And somehow the son, even at the age
of twelve, had known for a long time that that was what happened to
you when you were cut off from a source of money—you were emptied
and broken, like the " dish " he himself became when he hit bottom.
How can I sum him up? His identity theme, as I re-create him,
consists of two cycles set in a world he perceived as consisting of a
large, even infinite, force and a self at its mercy. You could state the
cycles as variations on the Golden Rule: Give out from yourself as
you would be given to and so unite with the giver. Withold in
yourself as you are being withheld from and so become separate.
In his life, he worked—and played—very hard at making himself into
a legend, the very embodiment of his age, and other ages too: he
insisted on an exalted genealogy for himself as one way of uniting
himself with a larger past. In another mode he carried on fabulous
parties and debauches, many of them marked by recklessness and
violence. Sober, our man was the picture of grace, gentility, and
generosity, but when he was drunk, out came a mean streak of
rudeness and cruelty that appeared in his sober self mostly as a liking
for boxing and other contact sports and a persistent hobby of
military history. But perhaps this violence was implicit in his sense
of the conflict between the giver and the receiver—as in his imagery of
breaking and cracking. He could say, for example, of his wife's
career, that she was working " under a greenhouse which is my money
and my name and my love She is willing to use the greenhouse
to protect her in every way.. .and at the same time she feels no
responsibility about the greenhouse and feels that she can reach up
and knock a piece of glass out of the roof at any moment."
Finally, however, what interests me about this man is not his life but
his literary legacy, an achievement which must necessarily spring from
the same identity theme as his life. If my hypothesis about inter
pretation re-creating identity is correct, then we should be able to
see in the ego choices embodied in his work the same identity theme as
in the ego choices with which he interpreted his life. Let me reprint
And for the same majestic theme of " uncommunicable " wonder and
loss, read this, to me, one of the finest bravura passages in all American
literature:
Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were
hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a
ferry boat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher
the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I
became aware of the old island here that flowered once for
Dutch sailors' eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world.
Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's
house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest
of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment
man must have held his breath in the presence of this con
tinent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither