Art and the Hope Chest

In Which a Protest Is Filed Against Certain Freudian Critical Limitations

KENNETH BURKE

SUPPOSING that A is a lover of flowers, and that I present him with a flower . . . and supposing further, that instead of examining my flower, arranging it tentatively against the landscape, and putting it to his nose, A asks me where I got the flower, why I got it, and how much I paid for it. In other words, let us suppose that A talked of all the accidental features of the flower, and quite neglected the central matter, a judgment of the flower itself. In that case A would be a thoroughly representative modern critic of the type I am about to discuss.

Now, some of our most skilful disciples of this extrinsic criticism find Freudian methods very well adapted to their ends. That is, with the help of psycho-analysis, they will take some honest devil who wrote a book, who just sat down and wrote a book, and they will show precisely why the book should have been some other book. Or, failing that, they will show why the book is the book that it is. The book itself comes in for only the most cursory examination. It is not significant as a fact, but as a symptom; we must learn how much of it came from the heart, the stomach, the groins, and above all, from the author's neighbors. The book is a pimple, which must be diagnosed for acne or measles.

As a very brilliant, but typical, work of this sort, I should mention Van Wyck, Brooks's The Ordeal of Mark Twain. Mr. Brooks sees Mark Twain exclusively in terms of biography. Yet Mr. Brooks is not a biographer, but a critic of literature; his very evident purpose in this work is, in Waldo Frank's term, to find a "usable past." He holds up Mark Twain as a bogey to coming generations. He shows us how a genius was dissipated. And his plain purpose is to prevent such dissipation of genius in die future. Hear, for instance, the closing message:

"Read, writers of America, the driven, disenchanted, anxious faces of your sensitive countrymen; remember the splendid part your confreres have played in the human drama of other times and other peoples, and ask yourselves whether the hour has not come to put away childish things and walk the stage as poets do."

The Fault with the Freudian Technique

THUS, Mr. Brooks is not a biographer, but a critic. Yet he sees his subject purely in terms of biography. In his study of Mark Twain's ordeal he has given us a very convincing interpretation of Clemens's spiritual background. He has shown us the author's repressions and compromises, shown us their traces in his works. He has pointed out such things, for instance, as the fact that Mark Twain was waging a continual battle between his real self and his self in society, and that this battle manifested itself in a frequent recurrence of dual personality as a fulcrum for his plots. He has established exactly why Mark Twain was forced into the role of a humorist against his will. He has vividly reconstructed for us the pioneer element and the pioneer attitude which determined the complexion of Twain's production. All told, we have many astute psychological observations here bearing on the internal and external forces which went into the work we now know as Mark Twain.

But there is a prominent leak in this method of attacking the matter of art, and it is just this leak which I wish to talk about. But before going further, I should point out that I am not interested primarily in the truth or falsity of psychoanalysis. What I am interested in is the validity or failure of psychoanalysis when removed from the psychopathic ward to the consideration of art. Thus, I should begin by granting the complete accuracy of psychoanalysis, and then examine some aspects of its one fatal limitation. This limitation exists in its extrinsic handling of art, in the fact that it neglects to smell the rose because it is so busy explaining how the rose came to be there.

In other words, psycho-analysis concerns itself with the genesis of the art product rather than with its status quo. In this respect it is quite in keeping with the last century's great awe of evolutionism, a form of knowledge which we have not yet learned how to handle. By the evolutionist's exaggerated interest in origins the conception of a spiritual morality is found quite unnecessary, and is thrown overboard. Morality becomes, aufond, a higher expediency. Similarly, such a phenomenon as national idealism becomes purely a subject for economics. And the machinery of virtue and vice is allowed to grow rusty, although the less enlightened of us still cling to some vague remnants of it in our admiration for certain actions and our disapproval of others.

The Iliad as a Social Document

NOW, in the same way, aesthetics—art's own peculiar morality—disappears when we devote our time to examining how the work of art came to be, rather than examining the work of art as it is. Evolution, in other words, has nothing to do with a system of judgments. Consider the Iliad. I, being a producing scholar, prove that it was written by seven poets who were all blind and who met in a cave to glorify a type of magnificent, sun-lit life which was denied them. I show how the unusually brilliant quality of the Homeric epic results purely from the sublimated yearning for sunshine. Or let us suppose on the other hand that I am able to establish how a drunken merchant bought thirty thousand Greek alphabets made of ivory, tossed them on the floor out of a jug, and behold! produced thereby the Iliad. In neither case has my discussion of origins touched upon the valuation of the Iliad. We have the Iliad in its status quo, and only when we take it in its status quo do we come to the critic's true business of judgment. This is the limitation of the Freudian method.

The Freudians—and, in general, all purely psychological methods of criticism—have supplanted for a system of excellence some vague faith in the "representative." The Iliad by this system becomes significant for its meaning in the life of the Greeks. Waldo Frank, in his Our America, pursues this method throughout. Contemporaneity becomes looked upon as a force, a more or less blind agent, a universal mould; while the artist is a mouthpiece of this force. Whitman is vaunted as representative of an epoch. We get the formula for the spirit of a city: If Chicago is a hog-butcher city, then some,one who writes a representatively hog-butcher poem is glorified for his reproduction of the times. The attempt is not made, for instance, to prove so much that Sherwood Anderson's work is beautiful, but that it is an authentic spiritual re-giving of the Middle West. Excellence becomes lost in the idea of the representation; and there is almost a demand that a broken, unbeautiful age produce broken, unbeautiful books.

Some day we shall receive the apotheosis of this attitude when a critic steps forward to demand that, since his age is boring, all writers must strive to make their works as representatively boring as possible. Thus, so surely do the "genetic" critics avoid a system of excellence in their method that they have actually sought a substitute for beauty. Further, such criticism is really better adapted for other fields. Why take Walt Whitman or Henry James as subjects for diagnosis, when we have Carrie Nation and Billy Sunday? If one is looking for representative symptoms, let him consider whether these two great bar-wreckers are not positive monuments to the American mind. They are certainly points of extreme concentration. Sunday's sermons are documents of a rich representative character; and when studied, not for their excellence, but for such an extrinsic matter as their causes, they should be found of both interest and value.

As to the Freudian "message," it is, quite baldly, that the artist must express himself without bondage, without; repressions and compromises. Strangely enough, in Mark Twain's case we have a peculiarly apt disproof that this is the royal road to art. Consider, for instance, the complete lack of distinction of Clemen's early letters, written in all sincerity, before he was forced—in Mr. Brooks's interpretation—by his pioneer public to make the compromise of humor. Or again, consider the documents of truth he has left us posthumously. Here again we see the untrammeled expression, and here again it is without distinction. Such things would not even be worth considering if they had not been written by our supreme humorist. And one might almost offer a vote of thanks to the pioneer civilization which forced Clemens into this role.

The Autobiographical Novel

A CRITICISM which leaves us with nothing but freedom has left us all dressed up and nowhere to go. The artist is turned loose to lay an abnormal importance on his own personal minutiae. Guided by a system of criticism which entirely ignores discipline, training in the craft, he is gloriously free to tell us the kind of toothpaste he uses and the manner in which he licks a postage stamp. Our prevalent glut of inartistic autobiographical novels is the result; here the matter is not arranged in accordance with principles of beauty, but by the sheer accidents of experience. Each man has but one story to write, as he has but one to live; and there is nothing on the Freudian horizon beyond James Oppenheim and Floyd Dell.

(Continued on page 102)

(Continued from page 59)

But there is, in fact, as much restraint requisite to the artist as freedom. That particular phase in the artist's life which is known as "getting his stride" is nothing other than a laborious set of compromises, a gradual adapting of what he wants to say to what he can say with elegance. Mark Twain may have resented being court-jester to the world; but that was the capacity in which he could excel. He would have been a strange artist if he had not fitted his expression accordingly.

The Freudians make self-expression all of art; they want to clear the way for the artist to give himself freely and without stint; in some vague way a complete selfexpression is allied with beauty. But they do not take into account that self-expression is the mere beginning of art, the simple desire which the artist shares with every non-artist, the common denominator between King Lear and Mrs. O'Grady talking behind Mrs. O'Leary's back. King Lear departs from Mrs. O'Grady's conversation in the artistry of the selfexpression, which is a matter of technique and aesthetic standards. But it is precisely those qualities marking Shakespeare's departure from Mrs. O'Grady that Freudianism chooses to ignore in its discussions.

There is another phase of the Freudian attitude which brings out how mal a propos is the examination of sources. This is the emphasis laid on hungers and vengeances, on art as a vicarious method —like dreams—for settling those disturbances which are found too much for the artist in real life. Art performs here precisely that same function for society as the hope chest of a few decades back performed for the unplucked spinster. Art becomes a substitute for living. It is a sickly wish-fulfilment, a species of daydream. It would be rash to deny that there is a strong element of this in the artist. In Catullus we read of the chaste poet with his vile poetry; Ausonius tells us that "our life is pure, but lascivious our books." We have also the phenomenon of cerebral libertinage in men like Flaubert, Nietzsche, de Gourmont, all of whom had a powerfully Puritanical side to their lives. But this, again, is the mere beginning of their work. Where the Freudian formulas leave off, there the true problem of criticism begins. If a man happens to be suffering under an incest complex, this element might conceivably be discernable in his work. Similarly, if he had lived in Australia, he might have written a novel around his Australian impressions. Such things are facts, but hardly points of critical exegesis. The essential matter is the forms, the proportions, the use of value and counter-value, the technical discipline, with which the artist utilizes this purely accidental background.

Engulfing Emotions

FURTHER, as to the great emphasis on engulfing emotions, on mad temperaments, on pure inspiration which this type of criticism has fostered ... it should be pointed out that the aesthetic joy is something quite apart from this. The excessive appetite is of itself positively inimical to the production of beauty; in a sense art almost involves the negation of it. If one, for instance, were thirsting in a desert, a discussion of aesthetics would be peculiarly pointless. To the thirsty man a painting of water would be a mere mockery; he would not care for the beauty of water, or for some interesting quality of water or function of water in a picture; he would want water itself. Cur spiritual hungers are less absolute, but here too the aesthetic emotion tends to disappear behind the actual one. Thus, when we overlook in our criticism this independent artistic activity, this abundant curiosity which is freely and positively excited over the possibility of new beauty, when we substitute for this element an over-emphasis on suppressions and yearnings—which are undeniably there, but are the point which the artist works away from, the point beyond which the true study of art begins . . . when we do this we are pursuing a side-issue.

It must be granted that the followers of this method have made it more worth while for us to draw our oxygen. They have, in short, given us son e very vigorous contributions to the sum total of culture. But only in a sense that a study of the Greek enclitic is a contribution to culture. That is, they have assembled documents, the have produced focuses, they have approached a subject from another angle. The work of art merits such varied angles of approach. We must be grateful for any new light thrown upon it. But at the same time we must remember that such criticism is not criticism at all in the true sense, that it shifts the centre of gravity from judgment to orientation, that it interprets rather than weighs, that it furthers our knowledge but offers no clear guide to the formation of tastes and standards.