Joyce Wexler

Freud's concept of the unconscious is the foundation of psychoanalysis, but it is also the primary obstacle to psychoanalytic literary criticism. The originality of Freud's method in The Interpretation of Dreams is to ask patients to free associate to each element of a dream as if it were a rebus rather than attempt to interpret the dream as a whole. He regards the dream itself as manifest content that screens latent and unconscious meaning. Unlike the analyst, however, critics lack a subject who can free associate or elaborate, so their first task is to define whose unconscious they seek. Then, since all textual evidence is manifest, critics must determine how to gain access to latent meaning. An early strategy of psychoanalytic literary critics was to treat the text as the author's dream and attempt to find repressed material by reading the text against the author's biography. More recently, reader-response critics such as Norman Holland have invited the reader to free associate to the text. In contrast, Peter Brooks distinguishes the unconscious of the text from that of the author or the reader. Brooks treats the relationship between the narrator and the reader as a version of the transference between analyst and analysand: The text conceived as transference should allow us to illuminate and work through that which is at issue in the situation of the speaker, or the story of the narrator, that is, what must be rethought, reordered, interpreted from his discourse. (345) Like the analyst, the reader must develop "hypotheses of construal," which are "valuable when they produce more text, when they create in the text previously unperceived networks of relation and significance, finding confirmation in the extension of the narrative and semantic web" (Brooks 346). Instead of associating to the text, the reader must associate in the text. Thus, the reader is limited to the associations textual "networks" support. Nonexplicit links between explicit passages become the source of latent content. I To speak of the unconscious of the text is to allow all its elements to count as manifest content and to allow links among any of them to count as latent content. If the unconscious in literary interpretation belongs to the text, how can we interpret it? A literary text is the product of codes of generic conventions that affect every formal structure - plot, character, narration, description, and diction. All these elements can be overdetermined, but dialogue is an especially rich site at which to seek unconscious meaning. Like the patient's speech in an analytic session, dialogue is governed by social conventions that provide the unconscious with a ready-made disguise. Since my reasoning is based on linguistic analyses of conversation and dialogue and their relation to the unconscious, the strategy I propose should be valid in any narrative or dramatic work to the extent that dialogue represents social usage. To illustrate the interpretive value of this claim, I have chosen two texts that express homosexual desire in contrasting ways - latently, in Henry James's story "The Beast in the Jungle" and manifestly, in Tony Kushner's play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes.(2) Although Freud emphasizes the importance of the individual's own associations to the elements of a dream, he also recognizes that certain symbols have common meanings. As Michel Arrive notes in Linguistics and Psychoanalysis, Freud affirms not only the capacity of the unconscious to create its own symbols, but also its ingenuity in expressing itself in preexisting, that is, conventional forms. While Freud explicitly rejects theories that posit a fixed relation between a symbol in a dream and a particular meaning, he nevertheless depends on the meaning of the dream-symbol that is, as Arrive says, "'always already there,' like the words of language, for the dreamer as for the interpreter of the dream. And it is precisely this which makes it possible for the dream to be interpreted, despite the silence which the person under analysis . …

D. H. Lawrence wrote the first version of Women in Love in 1916, the year of the battles of Verdun and the Somme. As much as he loathed the war, the text never refers to it directly, causing critics to disagree about the depth of his engagement in social issues. But if we compare the novel to later aesthetic responses to the war, the political dimension of the text is unmistakable. After eloping with Frieda von Richthofen in 1912, Lawrence was immersed in European avant-garde culture, and its ideas about politics, economics, sexuality, psychology, and art changed his writing. He adopted the Expressionist method of using abstraction to symbolize subjective experience, but after 1914 the new challenge was to convey the objective reality of war. Like his European counterparts, Lawrence registered the impact of the war by paying more attention to material conditions. Post-Expressionist artists continued to seek symbolic meanings, but located them in recognizable settings. (1) The same formal change occurs from The Rainbow to Women in Love. Although both texts are symbolic, Women in Love provides much more information about its social context. This combination of symbolism and realism justifies Keith Sagar's claim that Women in Love was the first modernist novel in English (19). The Expressionist elements of The Rainbow have been described in detail by Jack Stewart, Harvey Schvey, and others, but the resemblance between Post-Expressionism and Women in Love has received less attention, partly because the styles of the two novels are often conflated (Stewart 6, Schvey 125). (2) Although Lawrence originally planned a single narrative titled "The Wedding Ring" about several generations of the Brangwen family, he split the manuscript into two parts and emphasized the contrast between them. In 1916 he told his agent that he was writing "a sequel to the Rainbow, though quite unlike it" (2L 606). In 1917 Lawrence described the first part of the Brangwen saga as a "pre-war statement" (3L 142), whereas the second "actually does contain the results in one's soul of the war" (3L143). (3) The subtitle for the 1916 draft was "Dies Irae" [Day of Wrath and Last Judgment] (WL xxxi), and the 1919 Foreword to the revised text explicitly connects the personal conflicts in the novel to public events: the "bitterness of the war may be taken for granted in the characters" (WL 485). "We are now in a period of crisis," Lawrence explains. "Every man who is acutely alive is acutely wrestling with his own soul" (WL 486). This individual struggle has social consequences: "The people that can bring forth the new passion, the new idea, this people will endure" (WL 486). Lawrence speaks of a people rather than a nation, and Women in Love attempts to do more than examine the immediate conflict between Germany and Great Britain by analyzing causes of aggression between individuals and groups. He aligns lovers' oscillating feelings with generational, class, and national confrontations. Despite Lawrence's statements, critics dispute the social significance of violence in the novel. While some consider the personal relationships in the text to be an escape from public life, others regard them as symbols of political conflict. One of the most emphatic examples of the first position is Joyce Carol Oates's sweeping claim, "In Lawrence's work one is struck repeatedly by the total absence of concern for community" (31). She adds, "The human instinct for something larger than an intense, intimate bond, the instinct for community, is entirely absent in Lawrence, and this absence helps account for the wildness of his characters' emotions" (32). Michael Squires casts this isolation in a positive light, arguing that the novel's violence "abstracts characters from history; puts them in closer, elemental touch with their being; and offers them the chance of renewal even though, paradoxically, renewal may devastate the existing order and its human relationships" (93). …

Since the Romantic period, writers with literary aspirations have asserted that they write for themselves. But when Romantic writers claimed the right to express their inner vision rather than obey formal conventions, they assumed their original forms would be valuable to others, particularly to ordinary men rather than critics. Modernist writers characteristically reversed this objective. Because the common reader was part of bourgeois society, modernists felt that if they acknowledged rhetorical aims, they would reduce their art to entertainment. Defining rhetoric as writing that served society's economic, political, or moral purposes, they used the term to encompass all they opposed in literature. While the modernist attack on rhetoric was aimed at popular writers who seemed to pander to readers, postmodernist writers escalated the conflict by calling for a general boycott of all rhetorical considerations. They denied any concern with the effect of their work on a reader. Modernists' refusal to serve society devolved into postmodernists' refusal to serve the reader. Postmodernist critics tend to dwell on their idols' sublime indifference to readers. But while modernists' public condemnations of rhetoric are well known, their private confessions of longing for fame are often forgotten. In addition to the material rewards of fame, they wanted their work to have specific effects on a wide audience, not just a coterie. And to be famous they needed publishers. Although they easily could have written for themselves or a coterie, to realize their ambition to perform a social function, they had to enter the marketplace to reach readers. In their letters to publishers, agents, and friends, modernists indicated the extent to which their publishing experiences

The extremity in modernism signals indeterminate symbolic meanings. Now that the explicit sex and other forms of extremity that modernists used are no longer shocking, however, their symbolic function must be reconstructed. As Foucault, Freud, and Kandinsky argue, transgressive symbols evoke the immanence of non-empirical experience in empirical reality. Thus modernist extremity provides secular alternatives to materialism by symbolizing non-empirical experience that is not supernatural, not subjective, and not grounded in a particular belief. D. H. Lawrence's use of sex illustrates the symbolic indeterminacy of extremity. Although some critics argue that he regards sex as a new religion, Lawrence does not grant sex the stability of a creed or the efficacy of a ritual. In The Rainbow sex is an indeterminate symbol that accumulates contradictory meanings ranging from transcendence to degradation. By daring to write about the unspeakable, Lawrence and other modernists also represent the unsayable.

manee. These works (along with the Memos) are crucial to Ives's avant-garde appeal, and have influenced many later composers, even if Feder finds evidence of an increasingly disordered mind within them. This is not to say that no Ives composition is less than the sum of its parts. Although Feder's book is a "psychoanalytic biography," it is also a fine critical biography, offering a multitude of lessons in how to use psychoanalysis as an interpretive intellectual tool without losing sight of larger issues. It was exposure to Ives's music in the company of the Cowells, in 1950, that eventually led Feder to his twelve years of Ives scholarship. It has been time well spent. The result is a lodestone for those in search of a more complete picture of Charles Ives. Andrew Buchman

... Levitt is one of the few critics who links magic realism to modernism. (8) "An Interview with Salman Rushdie," Scripsi 3 (1985): 121. ... (13) Cited by Janet Barron, "Equality Puzzle: Lawrence andFeminism," in Rethinking Lawrence, ed. Keith Brown (Philadelphia: Open Univ. ...

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