The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [74]
The pleasure of hating in this sense was a literary pleasure, however it might also function in politics or in social life. As such, it was also, arguably, a useful pleasure, in that it allowed for vicarious action, strong emotion without visible repercussion, the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings diverted, (almost) harmlessly, into the activity of reading—and into the development, without conscious awareness of its psychic utility, of a best-seller list and a literary canon.
Sigmund Freud made a similar argument when he came to describe the difference between Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Oedipus acts, however unwittingly, in killing his father and marrying his mother. Hamlet, famously, delays, contemplating the killing of the king (and, in Freud’s reading, having incestuous feelings for his mother), but failing to act. Inaction, mental conflict, delay; these were evidence of “the secular advance of repression in the emotional life of mankind.”43 Discomforting as these conflicts might be for the patient, their results when it came to literature were more ambiguously interesting. Repression produces neurosis; neurosis produces a compellingly conflicted modern character, torn between desire and inhibition—and so, by implication, becomes instrumental in the development of modern literature.
But this is an argument about the tensions within a literary character. What possible relevance can it have to the question of pleasure and unpleasure, or love and hate, when it comes to the writer and the reader? What’s love got to do with that? This, too, was a topic that Freud took up, notably in an essay called “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming,” first delivered as a lecture in the rooms of a Viennese bookseller and publisher and later printed in a literary magazine.44 If a daydreamer were to communicate his fantasies directly, Freud suggests, “he could give us no pleasure by his disclosures”—indeed his fantasies (wrote the analyst in a pretabloid, pre–Jerry Springer age) would “repel us or at least leave us cold.”
But when a creative writer presents his plays to us or tells us what we are inclined to take to be his personal day-dreams, we experience a great pleasure … The writer softens the character of his egoistic day-dreams by altering and disguising it, and he bribes us by the purely formal—that is, aesthetic—yield of pleasure which he offers us in the presentation of his phantasies. We give the name of an incentive bonus, or a fore-pleasure, to a yield of pleasure such as this, which is offered to us so as to make possible the release of still greater pleasure arising from deeper psychical sources. All the aesthetic pleasure which a creative writer affords us has the character of a fore-pleasure of this kind, and our actual enjoyment of an imaginative work proceeds from a liberation of tensions in our minds.45
This displacement of personal fantasies into an author’s imaginative writing speaks to the popularity of what is sometimes called personal writing—the appeal of memoirs, confessions, inspirational stories, survivor’s tales, and other self-revealing narratives that collectively constitute a genre of literary schadenfreude omnipresent in today’s tabloid journalism. At the same time, Freud’s erotic theory of literary enjoyment, the idea that “the purely formal—that is, aesthetic—yield of pleasure” which a writer offers us in the presentation provides a kind of fore-pleasure prior to a “release of still greater pleasure arising from deeper psychological sources,” proposes yet another kind of answer to the question of literature as love.
FIVE
So You Want to Read a Poem
In the middle years of the twentieth century, the methods of New Criticism (close textual analysis, attention to word