12. Bernard
Paris1
[1.
The key to Paris quotations is: HAR: Experience of
Thomas Hardy (1976); HEA: “Hush, Hush! He's a Hurnan Being!”: A
Psychological Approach to Heathcliff (1982); JA: Character and Conflict
in Jane Austen's Novels (1978); PAF: A Psychological Approach to Fiction
(1974); and 3FL: Third Force Psychology and the Study of Literature
(1986).]
During the last century
or so, psychological research was dominated by two major "forces.” "Behaviourism"
viewed the human being as an “organism” whose activities are shaped by
“conditioning” in repeated encounters with its environment. Freudian
“psychoanalysis” viewed the human being as a "psyche" whose
activities are patterned by infantile experiences within the family (cf. Ch.
10).
Both views were heavily pessimistic and reductive, suggesting human life is
formed by powerful agencies we can scarcely control or change -- - and thereby
providing alibis for human inadequacy. The creativity of the intellect was
considered a marginal or compensatory superstructuring on top of one's
biological constitution. Hence, neither view had much to say about the utopian
imperative of art toward an enlarged understanding of the human situation (cf.
Ch. 2).
"Third force psychology”
is a “humanistic” alternative to these two “forces." Its
"different philosophy of human nature" projects “greater
optimism" and “a more holistic approach to human behavior” (3FL 11).
Its emphatic concern is the
"evolutionary constructive force" that “urges
us to realize our given potentialities. " We should seek
"self-knowledge” as a “means of liberating the forces of spontaneous
growth” (Horney 1950: 15). The ultimate goal is “self-actualization,"
an "episode” in which “the powers of the person come together in a
particularly efficient way" (3FL 35).
The “third force” is
utopian (in the sense of Ch. 1) because it is always moving toward realization.
Unlike Freud, third force psychologists assert that our “basic needs are not
in conflict with civilization and our higher values" (3FL 30). A
"conflict" between “reason and impulse” only “comes from
deprivation.” Hence, the “possibility of health, of being “happy,
harmonious, and creative" (PAF 36) is not foreclosed, though it can
certainly not be taken for granted (cf. JA 36). “Basic needs" are
“built into the nature of all men” and “must be gratified” if
"development” is to be “healthy” (PAF 31). But these needs are
“easily suppressed, repressed," "masked, or modified by habits,
suggestions, by cultural pressure, by guilt, and so on" (Maslow 1954: 129).
The “real self” is continually threatened, and every choice made against its
“interest" incurs “self-hatred” (3FL 52). Hence, the optimism of
third force psychology, often reproached with shallowness, for instance, by the
pessimistic Fiedler (NT 310), is quite subdued and far from naive.2
[2. Naive optimism is indeed critiqued through Homey's analysis of the
“idealized images” that impel people to “reach out for greater knowledge,
wisdom, virtue, or powers than are given to human beings” (3FL 53f).. This
“falsification of reality” is contrasted with how the “healthy individual
reaches for the possible” and “works within cosmic and human limitations”
(3FL 54). Horney quaintly equates “pride” and “the search for glory”
with “the devil's pact" wherein “the individual" “loses his soul
-- his real self” (3FL 54).]
Deciding the “truth” in the
theories of Skinner, Freud, Horney, or Maslow is quite problematic. In the human
sciences, to which psychology irretrievably belongs, every theory entails a
decision to regard the human being in a certain way. The vital question is what
consequences a particular view entails. The behaviourists produced a simple and
unified theory by purporting to assert only what anyone can directly observe who
does an experiment. They resolved the problem of the mind by ignoring its
essentially mentalist aspects. Freudians preferred to see the mind as complex
and divided; they postulated, and concentrated on, another mind, beyond (or
“under”) the conscious one, which cannot be directly observed but only
detected through certain channels, such as dreams and slips of the tongue.
The methods of proof accredited
by these two forces were correspondingly different. Behaviourism used brief,
timed stimulus-response experiments with tight controls and immediate results.
Freudianism used long-term analyst-patient therapy in informal settings and with
very gradual results. Both approaches assumed deterministic causalities, but the
Freudian one interposed an elaborate hermeneutics for images and emotions in
between an experience and a patient's action. Hypotheses were accordingly
vulnerable if taken as factual statements about the patient's life history. And
as I noted, later empirical tests have disconfirmed some of Freud's major
theses.
Third force theorizing seeks to
navigate in between simplicity an complexity, between unity and division.
Indeed, its humanism and optimism includes the tenet that just such a balancing
of extremes leads toward mental health. In place of the predestined triumph of
biological or infantile determinism, a “hierarchy” of human needs is
postulated that “will determine what we want, but not how we will act” (3FL
27). “Most behaviour” is recognized to be “multi-motivated.” Hence,
third force analysis does not purport to predict or uncover causalities between
the personality and some specific action or incident (such as the
“stimulus" or “trauma” of the older psychologies). Its hermeneutics
remains fully heuristic, a mode of understanding motivations rather than an
explanation of causes and effects.
Turned back on themselves, the
three psychologies look very diverse. Behaviourists would believe in their
theory because they have been conditioned to do so. Freudians would believe in
theirs in order to gratify wish-fulfilment fantasies of knowing more about us
than we do. Third force theorists would mount projects to actualise themselves
by perceiving the world through the perspectives of other people. Hence, the
third force approach can apply to itself with more plausible motives and
authority than can the two older approaches.
In the third force vision, the
personality is a unit containing conflicts, yet more coherent than shattered.
“Needs" form an orderly “hierarchy,” all of whose constituents
require gratification, the lower ones (“physiological satisfaction,”
safety," “love," etc.) before the higher ones (especially
"intellectual issues"); the latter are not, however, simply
“reducible to the lower" (PAF 3iff, 37; HM9f).. The personality develops
in a healthy way by balancing as many needs as possible, and becomes fixated or
neurotic when it ceases to do so. Freud's pleasure principle” (focused on
“lower needs," PAF 34) is revised to include the “pleasure and
fulfilment found in the encounter with an expanding reality and in the
development, exercise, and realization'" of "growing capacities,
skills, and powers"“ (Schachtel, 1959: 9) (3FL 42). These new
“values” are “conducive to a fuller realization of human
potentialities" (3FL 34).
"Self-actualizing”
persons feel no "inhibition" in "experiencing and expressing the
real self” (3FL 39). They “press toward" “good values”:
"truth, goodness, beauty, wholeness," “uniqueness, perfection,"
“justice, order, simplicity, richness, effortlessness, playfulness,
self-sufficiency,” "serenity, kindness, courage, honesty, love,
unselfishness" and so on (3FL 37, 39). These values reflect the standards
people would choose if “their natures" “were highly enough evolved to
give them the opportunity for choice" (3FL 34). “The rewards of
self-actualisation" are the driving impulse in human motivation, rather
than the striving for sensory rewards envisioned in Freudian and behaviourist
approaches.
Also utopian is the description
of “essential human nature” via the "observation" of "the
people in whom this nature has achieved its fullest growth,” giving .an idea
what would be good” for “all people."3 [3. Paris
does not want the "intrinsic conscience" implicit in this standard to
be associated with the “superego“ (3FL 37), perhaps because the latter
prohibits more often than animates.] Paris sees some “difficulties” with the
notion that "an adequate conception of human nature and human values can be
derived only from the perspective of the most fully evolved people" (3FL
28). He "believes" this notion “but doesn't know how you validate
your selection” of people (letter to me). The "misguided values of
individual societies” make it hard to define "a universal norm of
psychological health whose values are generated by the nature of the
species" (3FL 93).
Paris notes that “all value
systems” based on an “essential human nature" entail a “leap of
faith"; “there is no one perspective which does not involve some
distortion” (3FL 34, 28; PAF 34). Moreover, one's "values”
“shift" as certain "needs” are "gratified" and their
"satisfiers” are "underestimated" or "derogated” (PAF
33). These reservations are fully reasonable, but it is hardly reassuring to
contemplate that “the vast majority” are “imperfectly developed
people" who “do not constitute the essential nature of man” (PAF 31).
In Maslow's estimate in fact, "self-actualising people comprise no more
than one percent of the population and perhaps less" (PAF 36). Again, we
sense how wary the optimism of this approach really is.
“Self-actualising persons”
are the most likely to be “objective,” that is, their "thought"
can "'contemplate its object fully and recognize it in relative
independence from the thinker's needs and fears" (Schachtel 1959: 273) (3FL
40). This “allocentric” viewpoint enables “complete openness and
receptivity” toward "the object” "perceived in its suchness” and
a "clearer perception of what is there,” including "seeing other
people as they are in and for themselves" (3FL 40f). “Defensive
people,” in contrast, are "subject-centered” and “autocentric”:
they do not “focus on the object in its own right” (3FL 40). This opposition
prolongs the old subject-object dichotomy only too readily (cf. Ch. 1); we might
say instead that in processing new experiences, .allocentric” perception seeks
evolution, whereas "auto centric” seeks confirmation.
Opposite this brighter prospect
of an “allocentric" realization of human potential lies the darker
prospect developed by Homey of “the neurotic processes which occur as a result
of the frustration of the needs for safety, love, and self-esteem" (PAF
35). She devised a typology of "defenses" with “three main
ways" a person can “establish himself safely" “in a threatening
world” (PAF 55). A “bargain” is struck with “fate” to act a certain
way in exchange for certain advantages.4 [4 Bargains with
Fate is a phrase from Homey (1950) and figures in the title for Paris's book
on characters of Shakespeare, whom I have never seen so lucidly analysed. It
appeared after this book, however]. A person can “adopt the compliant or
self-effacing solution and move toward people” by seeking “affection and
approval, ; “he can develop the aggressive or expansive solution and
move against people” by seeking “mastery”; “or he can become detached or
resigned and move away from people" by "seeking privacy” and
“secrecy" (PAF 55, 57, 59, 63). The “expansive” type is further
subdivided. The “narcissistic person seeks to master life “by
self-admiration and the exercise of charm" and is firmly convinced of
"'his greatness and uniqueness" (Homey, 1950: 194) (PAF 60). The “perfectionistic
person “feels superior because of his high standards, moral and
intellectual." The “aggressive-vindictive person” is
“ruthless and cynical” in pursuing "triumphs” over every
“rival" (PAF 60f). These three subtypes contrast starkly with the “compliant”
person, who strives to be "good, self-effacing, loving and weak,” needing
to be “part of something larger and more powerful than himself; and with the
“detached” person, who “disdains the pursuit of worldly success and
has a profound aversion to effort" (PAF 57, 62).
"In order to gain some
sense of wholeness and ability to function," an “individual"
"will emphasize one move more than the others," which then “operate
unconsciously” and “manifest themselves in devious and disguised ways” (PAF
55f) -- thus entering and controlling the domain Freudians call "the
unconscious.” The “neurotic” nature of the three “character types”
results from “overemphasizing” one "element” of “basic
anxiety": “helplessness," “hostility,” or “isolation,"
respectively.
All these types and subtypes
are seldom found in pure form either “in “literature" or “in
life" (PAF 56). More common are mixtures situated within “an
indeterminate range of intermediate structures" (Horney 1950: 191). We
should therefore use terms like “healthy” and “neurotic” not for people,
but for tendencies and episodes in human life and for the accompanying processes
of interpretation. In healthy episodes, experiences are used constructively to
improve the scope and coherence of one's understanding of life. In neurotic
ones, experiences are used destructively to draw lessons about the insensitivity
or perversity of “fate.”
The neurotic impulse is thus to push
one's problems outside oneself, “externalizing" them so as to “not be
aware” of them (3FL 58). One “interprets personal problems” as
“historical or existential" (3FL 32). Or, one avoids conflicting insights
by means of "projection”: “choosing those whose personalities and value
systems are parallel to one's own" (3FL 35) and avoiding any others. As
such impulses suggest, we might subsume all neuroses under the general concept
of a denial of occasions for knowing and evolving,
a refusal of to make connections as the dominant malaise of modern
society (Beaugrande 1997). Therapy would then be a process of transcending that
refusal; and. the chance that art might offer one such therapeutic occasion will
be the theme of this chapter.
Conceiving the personality to
be a spectrum of tendencies, episodes, and mixed types provides a less drastic
view of it. Admittedly, defensive persons suffer significant drawbacks: being
prone to "distortion"; accounting for all needs in terms of the ones
in focus"; being “alienated from their spontaneous desires”; or tending
to “overrate their capacities,” make “exaggerated claims," and
“equate standards and actualities” (3FL 29, 51, 49). Nonetheless, recognized
social virtues can be attained and can even become “necessary” to one's
“defense system" (3FL 47). The “compliant defense” favours the
“values" of “goodness, sympathy, love, generosity, unselfishness,”
and the “belief in the goodness of human nature.” The “values" of the
"aggressive" person include "success, prestige,”
“recognition,” “efficiency,” “resourcefulness,” and a “zest for
living” (3FL 48f). The .narcissistic” person attains “buoyancy,”
“perennial youthfulness,” and “optimism," and wants to be “the
benefactor of mankind” (3FL 49). The “perfectionistic” person “strives
for the highest degree of excellence” (PAF 60). The “detached” person is
capable of “serenity,” “imagination,” “ironic humour,” and
"stoical
dignity," and respects “freedom," “individuality,” and
“self-reliance" (3FL 51f). Only “arrogant-vindictive” persons have
scant virtues, beyond being .competitive” and "self-sufficient” (3FL
50).
These descriptions alleviate
the pessimistic vision of a society in which self-actualization is extremely
rare. Apparently, defensiveness, however alienating its origins, can be
productive and positive in its effects -- one such effect being attainable
through art and literature. We find a related outlook, though for
wholly
incompatible
very different
rationales, in the theories of Holland and Bloom. Those two scholars propose
that psychic defenses determine the specific forms of art works. Paris proposes
rather that defensive personality strategies affect the representation of human
character in the works, and "the author's interpretations, rhetoric, and
fantasies” (letter). The three approaches complement rather than exclude each
other.
Third force psychology is
“humanistic" in the sense of fostering an understanding of human
interests and values and asserting the human capacity for self-realization.
Literature supports this message of humanism, this broad horizon wherein
"all rubricizing” is “an attempt to freeze the world," to “stop
the motion of a moving, changing process world” “in perpetual flux” (Maslow,
1954: 212f). “There can be no closed system of beliefs, no unchanging set of
principles" (Rogers, 1961: 27). The “satisfaction of any one need
produces no more than a momentary tranquillity" (PAF 37).
Indeed, as Paris argues,
literary authors typically represent more of the human situation than they are
able to interpret explicitly. They offer us alternative realities to
contemplate, without being able to foreclose for us what those realities can
mean. Hence, the literary experience moves toward the “enriching” and
.vitalizing” "allocentric" mode; and reveals that “the immediate
live contact with the ineffable object of reality is dreadful and wonderful at
the same time" (Schachtel, 1959: 177, 193). We recognize "existential
problems" in “the disparity between our natural wants” and “the
unalterable cosmic and historical conditions of our existence" (3 FL 3 1)
(a view also held by Fiedler, NT 7). Or, we are beset by the "unmitigable
sadness” and “poignancy of the limitations of time, age, and death,"
and of the “gap between aspiration and opportunity" (3FL 310. And so on.
A range of literary issues
might be addressed within the third force approach, although, as Paris concedes,
the latter was not intended to support a theory of art. “Maslow includes
aesthetic needs” “among our basic requirements, but he does not integrate
them into his hierarchy” (3FL 12). Hence, Paris has been obliged to
contemplate conventional literary categories and devise his own explications for
them. His basic motivation came from a dilemma inherent in the nature of art,
which, even more than reality. is a complex interaction of representation and
interpretation, of showing things and judging meanings. The artist has special
privileges of selection and formation and might thereby seem free to make the
two activities correspond exactly. In practice, though, a disparity can appear
precisely in the most esteemed works: the artist does better in presenting
things than in telling us what they should mean. The drive to “account” for
such "disparities" originally stimulated Paris's research (PAF x).
The history of literature shows
authors trying to correlate representation and interpretation in various ways.
Within what Auerbach (1957) calls “the classical moralistic” perspective,
“life” was "represented" “in terms of” “a priori and
static” ´canons of style” and "ethical categories” (PAF 6).5 The
work could be a pretext for illustrating some moral or lesson the author would
usually announce. But the works which survived were those whose experience kept
exceeding or escaping the moral. The didactic openings of Gottfried's Tristan
and Wolfram's Parzifal are so woefully
inadequate for the import of each epic that I have always suspected them of
being camouflages or ritual tributes to a narrow-minded convention no work of
epic scale could affirm throughout.
The alternative is what
Auerbach calls the "problematic existential perspective," the
"conviction that the meaning of events cannot be grasped in abstract and
general forms of cognition" (PAF 7).5
[5. See Auerbach (1957: 391, 27 and 433f) for the original formulations cited
here and below (on "inferior social groups").] Here, we encounter “a
stylistically mixed, ethically ambiguous portrayal which probes “the social
forces underlying the facts and conditions" (PAF 6f). Though this
“perspective” may be obvious enough in modern trends -- Fiedler, for
instance, makes it a central aspect of literature (Ch. 6) -- the moralistic one
was slow to yield, at least as an official guideline. It was doubtless more
congenial to narrow, superficial notions of the social “usefulness” of
literature. Also, it could serve the classic aesthetics insisting on a
“harmony” the work must clearly display (cf. Ch 1). A moral code acted as a
unifying device to ensure that the entire work would be understood as ultimately
conveying the same idea.
Yet the disadvantages were
severe. To the degree it genuinely was one, the moralistic work collapsed into
oblivion when morals changed. As Iser demonstrates, societies evolved into
steadily more complex forms, wherein it became increasingly hard to assert that
reality should serve as a moral lesson; hence, realism and mimesis conflicted
with moralist canons and eventually undermined them. Authors often resorted to
the subterfuge of paying tribute to morality without making it an exclusive or
controlling factor. “In many realistic novels," “the classical
moralistic perspective continues to exist alongside of, and often in disharmony
with, the concrete” “representation of life" (PAF 7).
Criticism too has been
reluctant to abandon the moral aspect, again perhaps because the latter helps to
justify the social usefulness of literature and to demonstrate harmonious unity.
Wayne Booth (1961: 112), for instance, claims that “a story will be
“unintelligible" “unless the reader is made clearly “aware of the
value system which gives it its meaning" (PAF 17). “The author,
therefore, must not only make his beliefs known; but he must also make us
willing to accept that value system, at least temporarily." If, for Booth,
“the rhetoric of fiction” brings about “a concurrence of beliefs of
authors and readers," then authors have the responsibility to organize a
work explicitly according to a valid, convincing systems of values and
beliefs-thus affording an ideal aid to the critic's search for a unifying and
valid interpretation.
Karen Horney (1950: 330f) also
tends toward this standard. For her, "art may resemble dreams” wherein
"our unconscious imagination can create solutions for an inner
conflict" (PAF 178). Whether these “solutions” are “constructive or
neurotic" “has great relevance" "'for the value of an artistic
creation" (PAF 128f). "If an artist presents only his particular
neurotic solution," then the work's "general validity" may be
"diminished," "despite superb artistic facility and acute
psychological understanding" (PAF 129). "Artistic presentation can
help many wake up" to the "existence and significance" of
"neurotic problems" and "clarify" these. Horney appears to
demand a "consistent and healthy" "moral norm” which
“identifies neurotic solutions as destructive and suggests constructive
alternatives."
Paris goes in a different
direction from Booth and Horney. His arguments improve upon theirs by uncoupling
the success of the literary process from the author's adherence to a binding
moral norm.6 [6. Fiedler
solves this problem by using “moral” in a favoured sense for the author, and
in a disfavoured sense for society as a whole (p. 79). Bleich decries the
“moral" but supports the ethical “which turns out to be centred on
“the human body" (SC 260 (p. 187ff). lser and Jauss regard moralizing as
a mark of trivial literature. He thereby pays due homage to the basic insights
of third force theorizing that one's “present position” is always .most
likely an incomplete one"; and that "there is no one perspective which
does not involve some distortion" (3FL 28; PAF 34). He concludes that
mimesis resists a representation that can be exhausted by any interpretation
delivered along with it. "The mimetic impulse that dominates most novels
often works against total integration and thematic adequacy” (PAF 9).
“Mimetic characters" who are "truly alive" “tend to subvert
the main scheme of the book,” "to escape the categories by which the
author tries to understand them, and to undermine his evaluations of their life
styles” (PAF 11; 3FL 15). This effect is especially likely when (in Auerbach's
words) "'more extensive and socially inferior human groups" become the
“subject matter" (PAF 6). Readers must then integrate into their
experience characters for whom older literary types are less readily available,
and can thereby develop a broader and more flexible concept of personhood.
As Fiedler and Iser
also stress (Chs. 6, 8) literature allows the appreciation of values society
officially rejects. Becky Sharp can be “a monster" and yet "the most
fascinating character in the novel," “exciting admiration and sympathy”
(PAF 83). Thackeray himself “unremittingly makes her represent evil" and
yet takes “obvious delight in the pomp and splendour”
she attains (PAF 83, 103). Of course, as Paris notes, many of Becky's
defeated adversaries are either "powerful enemies" who embody
“oppressive social institutions," or else “caricatures and
grotesques” (PAF 83f). Yet evidently, we can empathize through literature with
values we do not endorse in life, without becoming –a s simple-minded
moralists assert-- 'immoral" persons. This multiplicity of rnotivations
should restrain critics from passing judgment from a single vantage point and
charging, for instance, that Heathcliff is "an unsatisfactory
composite," or that Becky is an “unremittingly evil monster," or
that Maggic Tulliver is “immature" (HEA 101; PAF 83, 165).7
[7. Compare Tilford (1959); Leavis (1950). Bleich's students defended Becky even
against Thackeray, e.g.: “Poo on him, she is MY heroine” (RF 83).]
Whereas Holland and
Bleich focus on readers, Paris concentrates more on "the minds of the
implied authors and the minds of the leading characters” (PAF 1). Typically,
he gets to authors by projecting from the inferred personalities of those
characters. Since, in principle, the latter “are more frequently
self-alienated than self-actualizing,” “Horney's theory” of “the
defensive strategies that arise in the course of self-alienation" is the
"most useful” of the third-force theories "for the study of
literature” (3FL 12). The “absence" of self-actualizing types in
literature could be “accounted for” by the “widespread feeling that health
is uninteresting” (3FL 62). But then too, Paris's favoured genres, the novel
and (more recently) the drama, depend on conflict, and are therefore likely to
represent disparate characters, whose attacks and defenses, expansions and
self-effacements move the plot along. Narrative and dramatic interest is
maintained by the interactions of “aggressive” types with each other or with
their “compliant” counterparts, often leading to reversal and revenge (cf.
PAF 93ff, 116ff). A world of exclusively self-actualizing characters could
scarcely sustain a plot, nor would it seem mimetic to many readers. Such a
character, such as Sir Thomas More in A
Man for All Seasons, soon comes into conflict with a social order that
fosters self-alienation (3FL 62ff).
Paris offers to restrict his
method to “realistic characterization” (3FL 13). “Not all literary
characters are appropriate objects of psychological analysis. Many must be
understood primarily in terms of their formal and thematic functions in the
artistic whole of which they are a part.” If the “characters" of a
“realistic novelist” are "subordinated to their aesthetic"
“function, they will be lifeless puppets" (PAF 11). Conversely, "a
highly realized mimetic character whose human qualities are not compatible with
her aesthetic and thematic roles," such as Austen's Fanny Price, may be
hard for readers to “identify" with (JA 22). Paris concludes that we
should not “go to novels looking for unified aesthetic systems” (HAR 212).
The implication that aesthetic considerations can compete with characterization
might seem puzzling: virtually by definition, “character" is a unifying
conception for a person's diverse actions and attitudes. However, Paris is
contesting the more classical aesthetics of harmony (PAF 2f).8
[8 Holland is said to subscribe to this thesis of harmony (PAF 20, but as
remarked (p. 162), his approach is hardly aesthetic at all and makes no
provision for beauty. Though Paris seems to identify aesthetics with harmony
(compare Note 16), he links “the aesthetic perspective” with “a free,
contemplative, non-needing mode of perception” (3FL 66), thus reaching back to
Kant's (1790) definition.] He follows the typology of Scholes and Kellogg
(1966), who distinguish between “aesthetic,
illustrative, and mimetic characterization" (PAF 11f; JA 18).
“Aesthetic types" "exist mainly to serve technical functions or to
create formal patterns and dramatic impact." “Illustrative
characters" act as "concepts in anthropoid shape" in “works
governed by the classical moralistic perspective.” "Mimetic characters”
are "'highly individualized figures who resist abstraction and
generalization"“; their “motivation” can be seen in terms of “the
ways in which real people are motivated.” If so, only
these “individualized" characters -- Forster (1927) called them
“round" -- would be construed to "have an internal motivational
system” (3FL 13).
This typology implies that the
old aesthetics of harmony would have led critics to neglect characterization as
a domain more dominated by conflict. This avoidance could explain why such
schools as the New Critics would "'retreat from character" and devote
their attention to "'imagery, symbolism, or structural features"
instead (PAF 2f).9 [This
“retreat" was diagnosed by W.J. Harvey, who “intended to halt it”
with his Character and the Novel. (PAF
2). Holland is named among the retreaters.] Along with Scholes and Kellogg,
Paris is uneasy lest a character be conceived merely to even out “formal
patterns” (PAF 11) -- a principle which, to say the least, is unrealistic
compared to the development of human personalities in life.
But the danger is probably not
acute if we adopt a more encompassing conception of “aesthetic" standards
demanding from the author not so much “harmony" as a balance between
authorial freedom and closure. The author is free to invent "facts"
for a literary world, but not to supply or foreclose all their meanings. In any
work of genuine human interest, formal structures are filled in with characters
who function as much more than bits of a pattern. Consider, for instance, the
symmetry when the aggressive characters in novels by Dickens of Thackeray pursue
their goals unchecked up to a point and then abruptly collide with characters
previously portrayed as compliant or detached. The aggressor's goal
disintegrates, but for 19th-century authors or readers, the compensation feels
integrative: they can now “enjoy" “without guilt or reservation"
the "aggressive behaviour" of wronged characters rising up in revenge
(PAF 95). This "release of tension” helps balance the personality without
"violating the taboos" against .aggression." Hence, the
characters both fill in a pattern and powerfully involve the reader.
Despite what Paris suggests (PAF
11F), “realistic” or “mimetic" literature is not the only kind
wherein readers interpret characters in motivational terms. The inferring of
plans and goals is a basic condition for participation in all narrative and
dramatic literature: a “protagonist" is a character whose goals readers
favour and use as a standpoint for comprehending and evaluating the events of a
literary world; an "antagonist" blocks those goals. Nonrealistic
characters, even gods, wizards, and heroes, still have motives which real people
might share and which are therefore psychologically intelligible.10
[10. For detailed discussion and examples, see Beaugrande and Colby (1979).]
Otherwise, reading would lack involvement. If motives in a work seem flimsy or
contrived, I would tend to judge the work not as unrealistic, but as poorly
executed or alienating.11
[11. Compare the “critics" who judge Heathcliff an
“unrealistic” character because “his behaviour has escaped their
comprehension” (HEA 102). I would rather just say he is the Supreme Bastard of
His Time.] Yet I should bear in mind that the motives of complicated or
unorthodox characters may not be transparent or compelling for everybody, for
example, those of Monsieur Teste, Malte, Leopold Bloom, Randle McMurphy, and so
on; and this opaqueness can be a realistic trait of interesting, complex
personalities.
If “fiction" is a
complex mixing of real and unreal to challenge our capacities for integration
(Ch. 2, 8), motives can easily seem realer than the characters who harbour them.
What non-mimetic literature mainly presents, I think, is not the absence of
believable motives, but the pursuit of believable motives with unbelievable
means. Magic is an appealing force for attaining goals without the usual effort
or conflict. Yet the plans of gods and wizards do not triumph simply, and
sometimes not at all, being out of step with those of humans. This tension lends
non-realistic characters their human interest, at least as literature rather
than as theology or cosmogony. We can, as Paris does, perform a motivational
analysis on a fantastic character like Prospero, who enlists his magic for the
fairly ordinary goals of being avenged on his old enemies, getting his daughter
properly wed, disciplining his servants, and so forth. Shakespeare himself can
solve the "problem” of “how to take revenge and remain innocent"
-- a wistfully “unrealistic” prospect reserved for “romances" (3FL
84f).12 [12. Frye would define “romance” as having a
“hero” “superior in degree to other men and to the environment” (AC 33).
Paris implies that such a superiority may rest on fragile devices for evading
guilt.]
Literary "realism”
obliges the author to accept a mimetic orientation as a [,constitutive artistic
principle. Events and characters cannot be so openly used as illustrations for a
teleological structure of supernatural provenance. However, the artistic task
and intent imposes upon the selected elements a different order of teleology, as
when Balzac intends his Human Comedy to
be a resumé
of the human situation at large (cf. PAF 7). In non-realistic literature, such
an artistic teleology is supported with a non-mimetic principle, but with the
same intent: the author pursues reality through unreality just as fantastic
characters pursue believable goals with unbelievable means.
In realistic literature, the
characters' own
teleologies encounter conflicts, and unbelievable means of resolution are hard
to justify. Here, the tension is less between real goals and unreal powers, as
in the fantastic, than between real powers and unreal goals. Characters command
no superhuman knowledge that guarantees success, but only their several partial
perspectives that leave the outcome uncertain. A “great” realistic work
retraces this shifting of perspectives without insisting on any harmonious
teleology. The “great realist," says Lukács
(1964: 11), “will, without an instant's hesitation, set aside” "his
most cherished prejudices or even his most sacred convictions" and
“describe what he really sees"; only “the second-raters” “nearly
always succeed in bringing their own Weltanschauung into “harmony” with
reality" (PAF 10). The workings of "fate" are inscrutable not
only to the characters, but, in some degree, to the author, even though he or
she is playing the role of “fate" by inventing the sequence of actions
and events, deciding outcomes, and allotting rewards or punishments (cf. 352f).
In realism, this role is specifically restricted; causalities cannot be simply
abridged or skipped over with miraculous devices. At most, the author can decide
whether the linkages will make “fate” seem “just” or “unjust,”
"tragic" or “comic," and so on.
Playing “fate" generally
turns out to be less fun and free than expected -- it's an old story. In early
times, authors could draw fairly directly on myths, whose authority, as Frye and
Fiedler note, is unconsciously taken for granted and whose origins seem to reach
back to the very beginning of things. Changing the myths or inventing new ones
may have once been a sacrilege in some cultures. But myth passed into mythology
and became literary (Chs. 5, 6); authors gained freedom but lost authority. They
might confront their predicament head-on and treat myth as exactly what is not
believed. They can then claim their story deserves a hearing because it is
extraordinary, incredible -- a pervasive refrain in the “Arabian Nights,"
where even an evil genie or a despotic caliph can't resist a rousing tale. This
tradition lived on in the gothic mode and down into science fiction of the
present and of course the cinema.
But already in the
gothic, authors were busily forging sources and justifications to supplant the
function of myths. Indeed, the history of the novel is replete with devices
pretending to explain how the author came to know the "facts"
represented by the work. The author might appear as a character, either as
narrator or as a person to whom the narrator told the story. Or, the author
might purport to be editing someone else's manuscript or reproducing letters or
diaries the characters wrote. Such ritual gestures for delegating responsibility
were often patently transparent, the hypothetical narrator displaying knowledge
or stylistic skill he or she could not have possessed. The ritual gesture alone
was evidently enough, and nobody minded being asked to believe a person could
report the lengthiest episodes and conversations in exact detail many years
after they had supposedly taken place.
Still, the large middle-class
readership that had gathered to consume the novel wanted to be assured in their
own terms that they were doing something worthwhile. The “moralistic"
perspective mentioned above offered one solution. The author could claim to be
instilling exemplary precepts, especially in the young. “Interpretation”
would thus tend to “outweigh” and “govern representation” (PAF 7). Yet
as I said, this tactic also often retained the character of ritual gesture, much
like the faking of sources. The author would provide explicit interpretations
without really expecting them to cover the story. Quite a few novels claimed to
be socially or morally edifying and yet, as Fiedler likes to show, were in fact
disturbing and subversive. Novelists must have guessed that too much straight
moralizing dooms the work to a speedy obsolescence and to an inadequate grasp of
reality.
At all events, representation
is in principle less vulnerable than interpretation. Readers might implore an
author not to let the pure heroine or the innocent child die, or not to forbid
the union of lovers; but once the author has done so anyway, we can't say,
“no, that's not what happened.” However, we can demur if the same author
tells us that the story proves our world is but a vale of tears, or whatever. We
don't quarrel with Thackeray if he says that Amelia Sedley preferred the aloof
George Osborne over the devoted William Dobbin; but we can well dispute his
moral that "'it is those who injure women who get the most kindness from
them"“ (PAF 78). We've agreed to let him make up his plot, but we reserve
the right to contest what it demonstrates, particularly if his conclusions seem
objectionable, as in this aggressive-vindictive author’s accusation of women
drawn from a single example.
What is called
“modernism" is in part a tactic of evading this whole dilemma by
minimizing authorial interpretations.13 [13. Booth finds
“the central problem of modern fiction to be the disappearance of the
author," yet asserts that the author "can never choose to
disappear" (PAF 16f). This contradiction reflects Booth's implicit plan to
advocate “proscriptively” that “interpretation” “should always be
present” for “moral and aesthetic reasons” (PAF 17). lser gives a
historical explanation for the author's retreat (IR).] Or, refuge is sought in
“irony,” “the means by which the implied author negates what he has
affirmed and protects himself from the consequences of commitment" (PAF
87). Our reality no longer seems to illustrate any moral, or at least none we
want to go on record for approving (Ch. 8). Moralizings and interpretings now
seem obtrusive where they wouldn't have to an earlier reader. We find them
incomplete, unsatisfactory, or partisan alongside the literary world
represented. Paris's research was prompted from the start by this very
uneasiness, as he felt it when confronting a work like Vanity Fair (PAF
x), which irritated Bleich's students for comparable reasons. 14
[14. The responses of Bleich's students to the novel are reported and analysed
in RF 81-95. He thinks the author's intrusions are typical of “Victorian
novels” in general (RF 90). Compare Note 16 to Ch. 11.] Paris turned to third
force psychology for a model of authors and characters that would account for
his experience without alienating him from the works or their creators.
Paris accordingly
resigned his ambition to regard literature as a source of “ethical
guidance" (PAF 20). He conceded that “realistic fiction itself” enacts
a “conflict of values”; “some of its effects” are naturally
“incompatible with others” (PAF 283f). “The writer of realistic fiction is
doomed to leave somebody, and perhaps everybody, unsatisfied” (PAF 22). Hence,
it becomes less disturbing that in many "novels,” “interpretations are
not only inappropriate or inadequate to the experience dramatized, but they are
also inwardly inconsistent” (PAF x). "Inner conflicts” can render
“the author's attitudes toward his characters self-contradictory” (3FL 16).
In this outlook, the structure
of the authors” personalities influences their control over the creative
process. Their “value judgments are bound to be influenced by their own
neuroses" (PAF 13). Their works reflect their “recurring preoccupations,
the personal element in their fantasies, the kinds of literary characters they
habitually create, and their rhetorical stance" (3FL 84). Their “rhetoric
will affirm the values, attitudes, and traits of character which are demanded by
their dominant solution, while rejecting those which are forbidden by it” (3FL
84; JA 169). “Rhetoric” can also be enlisted to “glorify" or
“romanticize” particular "strategies of defense" or "neurotic
solutions” (PAF 279; 3FL 16; HAR 234).
Evidently, “wisdom and health
are not essential to great art" (PAF 22). Artists are more often than not
“self-alienated” -- another reason why “Horney's theory" of
“defensive strategies” is so “useful for the study of literature” (3FL
12). Only rarely does “the implied author emerge as a deeply integrated and
coherent being" (PAF 14). More frequently, “implied authors" are
“no wiser or more consistent” than anybody else; and “as interpreters of
experience" they “usually do not know what they are talking about” (PAF
20). Paris has to conclude that “great psychological realists have the
capacity to see far more than they can understand” (PAF 8; 3FL 15; HAR 215).15
[15. Conceptual” rather than “intuitive” “understanding" is meant
here (cf. HEA 102).] However, they may be able “to resolve their inner
conflicts by showing themselves, as well as others, the good and evil
consequences of the various trends that are warring within them” (3FL 84).
They may “glorify unhealthy attitudes, while at the same time showing their
destructiveness” (PAF x).
For such reasons, the variety
and divergence of attitudes subverting valid interpretation is no genuine
disadvantage, but a crucial aspect of the intent to be realistic and literary at
the same time. Whereas the "rhetoric” of the “great realist” “may
be a reflection of his conflicts or a justification of his predominant
solution,” his “mimetic” achievement in “portraying reality” is “a
triumph of healthy perception” (HAR 236). “Even if we cannot accept the
implied author's values as adequate either to his fictional world or to life
outside, we have a marvellously rich portrayal of a particular kind of
consciousness making ethical responses to a variety of human situations” (PAF
24). “The implied author, too, enlarges our knowledge of experience.” We
become “phenomenologically aware of his experience of the world. When we see
him as another consciousness, sometimes the most fascinating one in the book, it
becomes more difficult to regret the technical devices by which it is revealed,
even when they produce aesthetic flaws.” In, third force terminology, we
approach allocentric perception by experiencing idiosyncrasies in an author's
autocentric orientation.
Accordingly, many benefits can
be derived from the incongruities of literature. Despite “thematic confusion
and a troubling disparity between interpretation and representation” in Vanity
Fair, "no other technique could have produced the same brilliance in
social satire and comedy" (PAF 132). Even so bizarre
and
execrable
a character as Heathcliff can “show us some very real potentialities of our own
personalities” (HEA 116). Jane Austen's "inner conflicts contribute” to
“her remarkable understanding of a wide range of psychological types” (JA
198). She “is constantly trying to achieve an equilibrium between opposing
forces; she has a need to criticize each solution from the point of view of the
others, and a strong movement in any one direction tends to activate the
opposing trends" (JA 199). She “longs” “for aggressive triumph”
despite “her insistence on goodness and her criticism of expansive values”
(JA 181). She has to maintain a freedom of perspective that lends her novels
“immediacy" even for readers who find her “morality quaint and her
themes outdated" (JA 21).
Despite these positive aspects,
Paris knows his portrayal of the personality conflicts of authors may be taken
as sacrilege against personages our culture widely reveres. "We are
disturbed by a critical perspective which frustrates" the “craving to see
our great authors” as “sages” or "god-like figures" (PAF 280).
When an author's “attitudes, judgments, and world views are seen as
expressions” of a “defense system," they may “lose weight as truths
about the human condition and as guides to life” (PAF 286). Paris retorts that
the mythologizing of authors really makes us underestimate their achievement. If
we merely “rationalize their inconsistencies,” we tend “to remain unaware
of the richness of their personalities” (PAF 280). Moreover, “if we judge
them as authorities, we are likely to make much of the fact that they so
often” give "interpretations" we find "confused, too simple, or
just plain wrong”; we then have to “condemn them as false prophets” (PAF
280, 276), for instance, taking Thackeray's silly generalization about women to
be a lapse of understanding.
But no such condemnation is
implied if we see in the author a "dramatized consciousness whose values
can be as subjective and confused as those of an ordinary” person (PAF 25).
Even an author as momentous as Shakespeare may owe “the richness and ambiguity
of his greatest art" to his own "inner conflicts" (3FL 85).
Paris's "psychological approach” “suggests” we can
“appreciate" authors “best if we lay aside our own value hungers and
needs for authority and see them allocentrically, as utterly fascinating objects
of contemplation” (PAF 280). Their "genius in characterization” appears
all the more impressive alongside their "deficiencies in analysis” (3FL
16).
Paris's critical move whereby
psychological analysis uncovers disparities and then explains them, perhaps as
mimetic triumphs, in terms of human motives, retraces the move whereby third
force psychology recovers a guarded optimism out of pessimism. The author's
failure to deliver the “right” interpretation or evaluation of what is
represented holds the work open to the continued participation of diverse
readerships. We might feel reminded of de Man's dialectic of "blindness and
insight” (Ch. 14), a motto Paris in fact borrows (3FL 88). For both critics,
an author's blindness is not mere error that could be set right once and for
all, but a constitutive aspect of a significance no author can conclusively
grasp. Yet Paris situates in the conflict-solution structure of the personality
a problem that de Man, who de-emphasizes the self, situates in the rhetoricity
of language. For de Man, the text's undermining of its own required premises
leads to its “unreadability." Paris's critiques rather enhance
readability by demonstrating coherence even within that tendency to undermine.
In his view, the authorial self is not disseminated, but actualized and
consolidated while remaining partly blind to the work's implications and
achievements.
However much it affirms of the
values of literary fiction, the third force outlook may not be welcomed by
criticism in general. The huge investment in adulative biographical criticism
seems misplaced when the greatness and insight of the work are systematically
uncoupled from the author's image as a sage and interpreter. It no longer seems
so urgent to “preserve the glory of the author by demonstrating the perfection
of his creation"; or to “attribute" to authors a “higher degree of
integration," “greater wisdom, and a more coherent set of values than
other people have” (3FL 17).
Calling in question
the author's own interpretations undercuts not only Hirsch's plan to lend them
the highest authority for “validation” (Ch. 7), but also any critic's intent
to give a single, complete interpretation of the motives and meanings in a
novel. All exponents of constant or authorized meanings and values will be
disturbed by a model wherein "human needs and conflicts" (JA 21)
enforce a process of continually projecting diffuse meanings from shifting
angles.
Worse yet, third force
psychology implies that critics as a group can be studied to see how their
literary responses are influenced by their own personality with its conflicts or
solutions. This enterprise would advance the epistemology of criticism, but
would weaken the critics’ traditional claims to accurate judgment based on
disinterested discernment and good taste alone. Such judgments might now be
found to reflect the critic's “recurring preoccupations," “the personal
element in his fantasies,” and the preference for “value systems"
“parallel to one's own" (cf. 3FL 84, 35). The critic would “tend to
glorify" authors or characters whose “strategies are similar to his own
and to criticize those who embody his repressed solutions" (cf. 3FL 84; JA
20). A gallery of defensive critical types might emerge: aggressive ones like
Fiedler, narcissistic ones like Bloom, perfectionistic ones like Hirsch,
detached ones like de Man, and so on. But this gallery would be far too simple,
the more so as such terms are better applied to episodes than to persons. “It
is a very risky business" “to psychoanalyze one's fellow critics on the
basis of their criticism” (3FL 87).
For the time being, Paris has
discreetly confined his probes of critics” responses to his own. case. In his
early criticism, George Eliot's “self-effacing solution” was given a
"full, accurate, and sympathetic exposition” (3FL 88). But he failed to
see the “destructiveness of the solutions at which her characters arrive”
(3FL 89). Only later, when he began “trying to exorcise the self-effacing
trends” that "got in the way of his self-actualization,” did he notice
how he failed to “distinguish between her representation of a character, which
is usually complex, accurate, and enduring, and her interpretation, which is
often misleading, over-simple, and confused” (3FL 89f, e.d.). His
“psychological evolution” impelled him to revise his evaluation of literary
works. A similar change occurred when he was first “attracted" to the
novels of Thomas Hardy and later “disenchanted" by them (HAR 203). These
personal stories have happy endings though16 [16. Even so,
Paris sees the “happy ending,” however "aesthetically pleasing,” as
“sacrificing” plausibility and realistic detail” (PAF 277). For lser and
the early Fiedier, the “happy ending” is so affirmative it properly belongs
to entertainment fiction.], because, thanks to the new insights, the
novelists” lack of “coherent moral vision” no longer clouds his
appreciation of their "great genius in the observation and portrayal of
human experience" (HAR 209, 203).
As far as I know, Paris has not
given much consideration to the converse possibility that literary response can
alter one's personality rather than reflect it -- a prospect also neglected by
Holland, but entertained by Bleich. If whole cultures alter their personality
concepts under the impact of characters like Saint-Preux and Julie, Werther and
Lotte, Clarissa and Lovelace, as Jauss and Fiedler demonstrate (EH, LD), the
individual obviously can do so too. “Literary figures” can “provide a
ready-made formulation of the idealized images toward which their imitators are
tending" (letter to me).
Yet this consideration seems to reintroduce the authorial responsibility for cogent and healthy interpretation Paris rejected against Horney and Booth. Few critics, and certainly not Paris, would want to proclaim that literary authors must place their works explicitly in the service of the mental health of society. That degree of control over audience response could not be maintained even if all authors pledged to try. We would merely revert to the old “moralistic" imposition whose drawbacks we examined using Auerbach's critique. Literature must protect its freedom of perspective against any one system of criteria for normality.
Opposition can also be
anticipated from the critical schools who believe that the proper
“psychology” is the one derived from Freud or Lacan. Due to the rhetoricity
(and dubious ideologies) of these two psychoanalysts, their reputation in
literary criticism has outdistanced that in psychology. Freud moves away from
language, whereas Lacan moves just as resolutely toward it. But both analysts
have inspired methodologies of allegorical rewriting that displace the literary
text with another text purporting to be somehow more basic, closer to human
nature. Typically, this new text reflects the prevailing fascination with
pessimism, regression, deformed sexuality, and bodily dismemberment (cf. Chs. 6,
9, 14-16).
Third force interpretation goes
directly against these tendencies. It is not a rhetorical approach with a
vocabulary of primal or archetypal symbols and images. Striving to be
“faithful to the distribution of interests in the work itself” (cf. PAF 4),
it contacts the work only at certain points with explanations that leave the
imagery and content intact, indeed looking more forthright than ever. Whereas
Freudians regularly confirm the author as a "neurotic” (TL 82), Paris
attains a more optimistic, though still mixed judgment: the work itself is an
occasion of potential health, whatever the state of the author. In place of the
autocentric experience of enjoying hidden fantasy content dictated by libidinal
phase fixation, Paris's reader moves toward an allocentric release from his or
her habitual perspectivism. Finally, third force analysis is not attuned to a
dark thematics of pain, violence, and atavism. In fact, the method is too
reasonable to bank on the controversy and sensationalism that makes the other
psychoanalytic approaches so conspicuous in bookstores and at MLA meetings. A
method with no madness in it is handicapped indeed on the current scene (Ch.
20).
On the other hand, some
traditional critics might complain that the third force approach merely
supplants literary criteria of validity with psychological ones. But Paris's
work does not claim to offer any new system for making "correct"
interpretations to replace some critics’ “wrong” ones. Such an ambition
could only repeat the limitations and ultimate failures that plague the author's
interpretive intrusions. "The psychologist enables us to grasp certain
configurations of experiences analytically, categorically, and (if we accept his
conceptions of health and neurosis) normatively” (PAF 26). But the results do
not constitute binding standards for the art work. They are drawn from
"categories and abstractions” which could never "replace the values
of literature,” and they “interfere with the immediate response by putting
the reader into an analytical frame of mind” (PAF 25; 3FL 21). Unlike such
critics as Fiedler and the Yale group, Paris upholds this separation of
criticism from literature.
The real grounds for resisting third force criticism would be an
unwillingness to place an unprecedented expansion of techniques onto the agenda
of academic criticism, even though the ultimate effect would be to consolidate
the literary experience rather than dilute it. Paris's model goes well beyond an
account of what critics have always been doing. His hierarchy of values largely
abstracts away from the usual bases of critical judgments by refusing to
monumentalize the author or to objectify the text. It is not so much the artist
or the art work that is self-actualizing as the occasion of encountering art and
performing "repeated acts of perception employing a variety of
perspectives" within which "one thing" is seen "clearly”
and “the others" are “relegated” “to the background” (PAF 284)
(cf. Iser in Ch. 8). That experience implies a utopian foreshadowing of what it
might be like to escape "the limitations of human perception." Surely
this dynamic disparity merits our consideration as much as the conventional
critic's formalized unity.
For Paris, the
“illumination” that "art supplies" is not “wisdom,” but a
"phenomenological knowledge of reality,” “an immediate knowledge of how
the world is experienced by the individual consciousness, and an understanding
of the inner life in its own terms" (PAF 23). “Mimetic characters” have
“universality and perpetual relevance” and are “endowed with the human
interest which real people always have" (PAF 281). Just as the human
personality must encompass diverse skills and impulses, “a novel's weaknesses
and strengths are often complementary”; it is "impossible to realize all
the values of fiction simultaneously” (PAF 132).
In sum, third force criticism
expounds the function of literature as a means for experimenting with
"allocentric perception” difficult to encounter in ordinary life, but
constituting “the healthiest component of literature" and attainable by
experiencing major “mimetic achievements” (3FL 66; PAF 286f).. The diversity
of characters, including many unhealthy or “immoral" ones, encourages us
to read with variegated perspectives, freely questioning or revising the
author's own judgments and perhaps eventually appreciating that we create
“fate,” not vice versa. “What third force psychology has to offer" is
“a sense of selfhood without magic” (3FL 65).
I therefore thought it worthwhile to juxtapose the method of Bernard Paris with Holland's Freudian one and Bleich's Piagetian one. Paris's approach gives a fresh opportunity to see “highly individualized human beings, with different histories, problems, inner lives, and human qualities" (PAF 285). His method also allows a sense of “empathy and concern for the peculiarities” of an author's .own situation” (3FL 20). Then, since the “values” of any criticism "can be experienced only in the aesthetic encounter,” we can “go back to the work" for the “immediate experience” no criticism can "replace," but only “enrich" (PAF Z6, 285).
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