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various methods were used for making the book innocuous. One way would be for the offending passages to be thickly crossed through so that they were illegible. In that case the book could not be transcribed, and the next copyist of the book would produce a text which was unexceptionable but which had gaps in certain passages, and so might be unintelligible in them. Another way, however, if the authorities were not satisfied with this, but wanted also to conceal any indication that the text had been mutilated, would be for them to proceed to distort the text. Single words would be left out or replaced by others, and new sentences interpolated. Best of all, the whole passage would be erased and a new one which said exactly the opposite put in place. The next transcriber could then produce a text that aroused no suspicion but which was falsified. It no longer contained what the author wanted to say; and it is highly probable that the corrections had not been made in the direction of truth.23

With this dispassionate and chilling, proto-Orwellian vision (1984 would be written ten years later), Freud presents his analogy, one he wants to insist should not be pursued too strictly, between the operations of repression and the operations of literary censorship, forgery, and bowdlerized editing. The text conceals a secret, or a series of secrets, that have occurred as a result of a process of concealment. The censor is the pleasure principle, which does not want unpleasure to be experienced, and so overwrites, deletes, or defaces the text.

Can we use Freud’s analogy to understand the way in which closure is both sought and deferred, claimed and mistaken, in literature and literary interpretation?

The objection that psychoanalysis is not like reading and writing is answered in a way by Freud’s own text, which takes as its image for psychic repression or withholding the idea of a defaced or edited book. Although for Freud, the main topic is repression, and the image of the book occurs only as a comparison, a metaphor, or an illustration, the process he is describing can be turned on its head, since the image of unconscious rewriting is at once the story of literary history and the story of reading and interpretation. But where Freud is trying to account for a psychic economy of pleasure for the individual, an allegorical understanding of his analogy might point toward the inevitability of a reading and a writing that not only overwrites and defaces but also continues the editing process until it is newly “legible.”

Writing on the Wall

When texts and authors bring this practice to consciousness, the activity of rewriting and defacement is not always or reliably in the direction of pleasure. The most striking example from George Orwell might not be 1984 but, rather, Animal Farm, in which the apparent victory of the animals over their human oppressors leads to the painting on a wall “in great white letters that could be read thirty yards away,” the Seven Commandments that “would form an unalterable law by which all the animals on Animal Farm must live forever after.” These were the commandments:

Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy.

Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.

No animal shall wear clothes.

No animal shall sleep in a bed.

No animal shall drink alcohol.

No animal shall kill any other animal.

All animals are equal.24

One by one, as these commandments are breached or broken by the animal leadership now in power, the commandments are mysteriously rewritten. Pigs begin to sleep in the beds left vacant by the previous human occupants, and the Fourth Commandment is found to say, “No animal shall sleep in a bed with sheets.”25 After false confessions of treason are forced from some of the animals and they are summarily executed, the Sixth Commandment is discovered to read, “No animal shall kill any other animal without cause.”26 When Napoleon, the tyrant pig, develops a taste for whiskey, the animals come to realize that they must have misremembered the Fifth Commandment: “there were two words that