The Rage for Analysis
Freudianism and the Literary Mind (Second Edition). By Frederick J. Hoffman. (O.U.P., 40s.) MR. HOFFMAN, Professor of English at Wisconsin, works steadily on through one modern writer after another, retelling the novelists' stories with a running commentary on the influence upon sub- stance or method of parts of Freudian theory that have been assimilated into general culture. The long book ends because the quota of writers has been finished, not with the completion of a theme. A theme that does crop out from time to time and might have been developed into a more interesting book is the impact of psychoanalysis on the social life of American writers and those for whom they purveyed the smarter culture. The chapter on the wild spread of Freudianism in the America of the 1920s (when, said Susan Glaspell, 'You could not buy . . . a bun without hearing of someone's complex') makes the interesting point that the intellectual revolt of that post-war period was `dominated by a personal soul-searching' and had not given way to the conveniently external generalities of Marxian theory. And a later section on Sherwood Anderson, Waldo Frank and Scott Fitzgerald does something to relate the author's concern with psychology to their lives in the social situation of the period. But this partly formulated topic deserved closer study and more penetrating insight.
The literary aspects of the book show too plainly that the mechanical academic study of `influences' can proceed on traditional lines how- ever modern the writers and the topic, and that it can be carried" out competently according to the usual standards and yet lack the discrimination on which the vitality of literary studies depends. All is grist : Joyce and Conrad Aiken, Lawrence and Sherwood Anderson, Kafka and Thomas Mann, Henry Miller, Scott Fitzgerald, Dylan Thomas, Ludwig Lewisohn, they all go through the mill of summary and appreciative commentary. The lack of concern with discrimination that makes this approach possible rules out at the same time any deep insight into the writers individually. The exposition is painstaking, the quotations well selected, and the treatment of difficult authors like Joyce and Kafka provides a helpful introduction for readers at the level of American university students (presumably the target audience).
It is these readers who will take seriously the academic laboriousness : 'But the stream of con- sciousness is not a sharp enough category to in- clude all the diverse forms of writing which. it ordinarily labels. Further classification should be made, . . .'—to what purpose?—`. . . so that one can see on first examination what a particular example of the "school" purports to do.' They, too, will no doubt welcome the ponderous elaboration of the obvious (with diagrams) in the chapter on 'The Problem of Influence.' Much of it is a smooth run of commonplace. But now and then, and apparently without knowing it, Mr. Hoffman interrupts this placid stream of nothings with vast, unsubstantiated and improbable gener- alisations, as in the unqualified statements that 'The artist differs from other men primarily in the intensity of his need for security' and the modern artist 'distrusts or scorns traditional knowledge.'
The kind of weakness evident here—the lack of closely considered argument—prevents him from dealing adequately with the fact that several of his most interesting authors, notably Joyce, Law- rence and Kafka, repudiated the Freudian doc- trines as wrong or insufficient although they had been influenced by them. He discusses the point but never comes fully to grips with the problems it raises : the possibility, for instance, that these authors resisted the fuller insight into themselves that analysis might have given, and the other pos- sibility that Freudian doctrine had inadequacies which their different kind of insight could detect. Mr. Hoffman is far from giving an effective answer, for instance, to Lawrence's contention that if repressed incest-craving is at the root of neurosis the Freudian position would seem logi- cally to demand its gratification. Instead, he endorses the recipe of sublimation and 'the re- formation of one's conscious controls over the early sex life' (not seeming to see how different, strictly indeed incompatible, those two processes are), and endorses it on the ground of 'the impracticability of incest as a regulating factor in the patient's life.' There are others besides Law- rence to whom this would not be a sufficient
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