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Nancy Armstrong
Nancy
Armstrong is a Nancy Duke Lewis Professor of English, Comparative Literature,
and Modern Culture and Media at
I want to think about the novel as something that thinks. More specifically, I want to think about the
novel as a collective process that thinks through conflicts among a culture's
major categories to solutions that simply can't be achieved in real life, at
least not at the time they are imagined.
I realize, of course, that such a definition of the novel comes very
close to the way in which Claude Lévi-Strauss defined myth in Pensée Sauvage. It comes even closer perhaps to the
definition of narrative that Fredric Jameson appropriated from Lévi-Strauss and
made into the psycho-cultural substratum of literary production in The
Political Unconscious. The linear
axiological process that Lévi-Strauss discovers at work in primitive cultures
and to which he grants the status of myth is the same thought mode that Jameson
identifies as the "deep structure" of modern literature. Whether they call it "primitive" or
"deep," both Lévi-Strauss and Jameson describe as magical thinking
the problem-solving logic that seeks and finds a purely symbolic resolution
beyond the categories organizing modern realism. Moreover, both set their own problem-solving
thought mode in opposition to precisely such magical thinking. In so doing, both repeat the move that Freud
makes in his famous explanation of uncanny phenomena. That is to say, they put what was once
outside and constitutive of individuals--namely, a collectively disavowed
wish--on the inside, where it can be filtered through the sublimating apparatus
of modern culture and converted into socially acceptable behavior. I will argue that this theoretical move
reproduces the very kind of magical thinking that it disavows.
In
thinking about how fiction thinks, I will first try to persuade you that modern
fiction performs precisely the form of magical thinking we attribute both to
primitive peoples and to members of our own culture who are very young,
undereducated, or simply mad. From their
early attempts in the late 17th century to pass as travel writing, autobiography,
or conduct literature to their celebration of fictionality
in the late 20th century, novels have cleverly adjusted the boundaries between
life and death, public and private, male and female, and so forth. In other words, novels do for modern cultures
pretty much what Lévi-Strauss claims that myth does for tribal cultures. As they carry out the task of reproducing the
cultural boundaries within which we dwell, novels naturalize the rules that
maintain the essential difference between culture and nature necessary to
distinguish what is outside from what comes from inside the individual. By translating these differences into what we
call common sense, novels allow us to go about the business of daily life.
Should
you find this comparison holds up after further elaboration, you will have to
conclude, along with me, that the same group of people
who believe they have surmounted magical thinking actually consume great and
regular quantities of such thinking in novels.
Fiction displays its problem solving magic so as to suggest that what
the human sciences have identified as elemental wishes, fantasies, and even
drives may not in fact have a natural source deep within each and every member
of the human species. On the contrary,
given that fiction remains the privileged medium of modern cultures,
its open display of magical thinking suggests that such thinking may very well
have an external cultural source. If
this is true, then , contrary to prevailing opinion,
magical thinking does not threaten the internal coherence of modern cultures so
much as provide the semiotic glue holding them together. To understand how much is indeed at stake in
identifying the source of what we designate as magical thinking and how
difficult that source is to discern, one need look no farther than Freud's
essay on "The Uncanny."
Here,
Freud draws on his theory of repression to relocate what was once outside and
collectively embraced by pre-modern cultures inside the mind, where it forms
the deepest layer of modern consciousness.
To achieve this radical transformation of external culture into internal
nature, he turns to E.T.A Hoffman's story 'The Sandman." The appearance of the protagonist's double in
this story is so disturbing, Freud maintains, because, the double is a
"creation dating back to a very early mental stage, long since left
behind, and one, no doubt, in which it wore a more friendly aspect." This creation once wore a more friendly
aspect, he proceeds to explain, because there was once a time when the "ego
was not yet sharply differentiated from the external world and from other
persons." Before an individual
understands the difference between his fantasy of the world and the world
itself, that individual has no basis for distinguishing subject from object, or
self from other. Hoffman's story strikes
readers as so disturbing, Freud concludes, because it validates an infantile
way of thinking that challenges the difference between inside and outside. All well and good.
When
Freud turns from fiction to life in the form of a personal anecdote, however,
his essay on the uncanny begins to erode the very difference on which adult
thinking depends, and his essay momentarily takes on some the features of its
uncanny subject matter. Freud recalls
that he was once strolling through a foreign city, when he inadvertently
entered
"a quarter the character of which I could not long remain in
doubt. Nothing but painted women were to be seen at the windows of the small houses, and I
hastened to leave the narrow street at the next turning. But having wandered about for a while without
being directed, I suddenly found myself back in the same street, where my
presence was now beginning to excite attention.
I hurried away once more, but only to arrive yet a third time by devious
paths in the same place."
At
the moment, Freud was apparently convinced that the street was not just another
street in a foreign city but one that directed his movement back to a place he
wished to leave. The loss of agency that
accompanied this conviction is preserved in the curious intransitivity of his
description of the street, where nothing but "painted women were to be
seen," to which he had "wandered without being directed," and
where he "suddenly found myself" against his will. The street seemed not only
"devious" but also capable of controlling his movement, he concludes,
because the force that animated the city was not something foreign and outside
his body after all, but rather something within him that he had repressed. Indeed, something at once so foreign and yet
familiar can only be one thing. As he
explains several pages later in the essay, "whenever a man says to himself
[in a dream], 'this place is familiar to me, I have been there before," we
may interpret the place as being his mother's genitals or her body. In this case, too, the unheimlich is what was once heimish,
home-like, familiar."
Those
who smile quietly as Freud recounts the circuitous journey that returned him
for a third time to the forbidden sex zone of a foreign city
have been successfully enlisted as his partners in a joke. The Freud who temporarily regresses to an
infantile thought mode plays the butt of the joke. But the Freud who objectifies and debases
magical thinking tells the joke, thereby recovering his interpretive authority
over material that had once troubled him.
It is possible, however, to give this particular joke one more turn of
the screw. Let us suppose that instead
of the unacknowledged fantasies that form the elemental core of modern consciousness,
what we encounter in those moments Freud characterizes as uncanny is not of the
core but at the periphery of individuated consciousness, something inherently
foreign, with the capacity to change our very nature. Let us suppose, moreover, that whatever it
is, this phenomenon is not working undercover.
In this event, the explanation for Freud's circular itinerary would have
to take that experience at face value.
We would have to concede that there is something about the city itself
that directs foreign visitors into its red light district. Perhaps it is not, after all, a degraded
version of his own sexuality that Freud encounters there but an alternative
sexuality that does not understand itself in relation to the bourgeois family
and therefore has no interest in reproducing it--or not. If so, as an inexpert reader of the
situation, Freud is in over his head. He
is the butt of the joke, not because he has wandered into foreign territory but
because he refuses to recognize cultural difference, preferring to see it as a
degraded element of himself.
Freud
was not completely happy with this attempt to ground the literature of the
uncanny in real life instances of the "return of the repressed." He may well have recognized that his uncanny
subject matter did more to challenge than to support his theory of repression,
when he went to natural history for the means of grounding his real-life
examples in nature. Drawing on the
evolutionary principle that each species, in its own development, recapitulates
the evolutionary phases of species lower on the phylogenetic
tree, Freud argues that each member of a modern culture passes through the
stages of collective thought embraced by his primitive forebears. By surmounting those earlier ways of thinking,
human consciousness is not only modernized but also individuated. Lodged within the modern individual as
infantile fantasies, old thought modes occasionally emerge, as when one finds
himself involuntarily returning to the same location in a foreign city. In so doing, such thought modes destabilize
our adult perception of reality. Having
moved from literature to life and from life to natural history in hopes of
confining magic to the primitive recesses of modern consciousness, Freud all
but admits that the truth could be just the other way around. He all but admits that the difference
between inside and outside on which the very existence of modern consciousness
appears to hinge might well be a product of magical thinking rather than a fact
of nature that can be subjected to scientific analysis.
In
this case, moments when magical thinking seems to triumph would have to be
understood as moments when modern beliefs can't explain events and old beliefs
take over. At these moments, such
infantile fantasies as "the omnipotence of thoughts, instantaneous wish
fulfillment, the secret power to do harm, and the return of the dead" not
only transgress the limits of individuated consciousness, but also expose the
fact that those limitations are as much a cultural acquisition as the old
belief in omnipotent thinking. The more
he tries to differentiate the feeling we get when repressed material wells up
within us from the feeling we get when only old collective thought modes can
explain the world, the more Freud undermines the difference between the
individual's internal nature and the culture supposedly external to him. As if ready to throw in the towel in this
effort, he makes one last attempt at clarifying the difference: "We might
say that in the one case what had been repressed was a particular ideational
content and in the other the belief in its physical existence." But this last way of putting it, Freud
admits, "strains the term 'repression' beyond its
legitimate meaning."
What
happens to the concept of the "return of the repressed" once the
concept of repression is called into question?
The model of subject formation that Foucault somewhat playfully calls
"the repressive hypothesis" can point us toward an answer. According to this model of subject formation,
modern culture put the outside--in the form of any sexuality that did not
reproduce a modern family--on the inside and discovered it there, in the form
of repressed desires that threaten adult respectability. Thus we can regard Foucault's "repressive
hypothesis" as the perfect structural inversion of Freud's "return of
the repressed." Foucault claims
that rather than discover the deep meaning beneath an opaque surface, we
actually implant our own cultural categories as the truth that preceded and called
for a veil of opacity. Thus mistaking
our culture's definition of nature for human nature itself is a self-defeating
way to proceed if we want to understand how another culture thinks. To do so tends to
make us feel we are controlled by another's desire, whenever circumstances
refuse to mirror our normal explanation for them. This comes pretty close indeed to the way
Freud describes the sensation of discovering that he had circled around for the
third time to the red light district in a foreign city. He felt at the time as if someone or
something else compelled him to return to this forbidden zone, he reasons
later, simply because he was directed by desires that he had not acknowledged
as his own. The uncanny feeling vanished
as soon as he owned up to being the source of this mysterious agency.
But
what if, as Foucault claims, we do not discover the operations of the
unconscious in our lives so much as produce explanations for certain events,
explanations that invariably return agency to the interpreter? To observe this alternative epistemology, we would
have to regard Freud's personal anecdote as a mechanism that inverts outside
and inside, relocating an external desire within himself, where he can claim it
as his own and restore the autonomy necessary to his sense of agency. Having thus turned the so-called "return
of the repressed" inside out, we can then proceed to recast Freud's
explanation for uncanny occurrences in terms that challenge his primary
distinction between nature and culture. Instead
of saying, I feel that I am controlled by someone else's desire because that
someone is myself only I don't know it, he would have to say, I feel as if I am
being controlled by someone else's desire, because I have disavowed the fact
that my true identity comes from outside and thus perhaps from someone else
after all. Just as it is self-affirming
to discover that our own cultural categories can explain individuals who would
appear to think differently from ourselves, so we are likely to find it profoundly
destabilizing to confront evidence that suggests that what we consider most
ourselves does not in fact come from somewhere deep inside us. We feel queasy when someone else's desire
appears to be acting on and through us, because such an occurrence exposes our
individuality as the fragile, even illusory thing it is. Thus, for Freud, the difference between
hanging onto the idea of repression or giving it up boils down to the
difference between pollution, which is to ingest something that makes one other
than oneself, and self-expression, which is to objectify one's individuality in
culturally acceptable forms.
From
the beginning of the rise of the novel and the consolidation of the group of
people for whom it was the privileged reading material, novels conscientiously
distinguished themselves from other forms of magical thinking. In The Female Quixote, Charlotte
Lennox fills her heroine's head with romantic nonsense and allows that material
to direct her heroine's desires, only to show that externally induced desires
lead to embarrassing categorical mistakes.
Arabella's preference in men is no less at
odds with the values that ought to define a woman of her social position than
her sense of fashion and idea of how courtship ought to proceed. By allowing her heroine to acquire her every
motive from a cultural source, Lennox demonstrates 1) that desires originating
outside the individual won't help him or her negotiate a social world in a
state of flux, 2) that in acting on desires that come from outside him or
herself, the individual betrays those desires which come from within, and 3)
that fiction is absolutely necessary for purposes of distinguishing mere
convention from genuine desire, precisely because fiction makes those who give
into wishful thinking the butt of a culture-wide joke. Don't trust romances, this novel says. Romances are
fictions that provide misleading roadmaps to social life. But because I emphatically disavow romance
conventions, claims the same novel, you can rely on me for information that
will help you negotiate an otherwise misleading world of signs.
Careful
consideration of what novels accomplish by peddling themselves as pedagogy is
essential to understanding how novels think.
The Female Quixote first floods a rather satisfactory social
situation with wishes, wishes that expose the limitation of prevailing literary
conventions. The novel quickly proceeds
to turn those wishes sour, as if to convince readers that all such wishing has
been done to teach us not to make wishes that we don't want to live out. To learn from the novel, however, readers
must, like Arabella, accept certain cultural
assumptions. We have to believe that
dangerously artificial wishes come from the culture external to the heroine,
while reliably genuine wishes were there all along, buried in her heart and
awaiting definition as such by Lennox's novel.
This, I would argue, is the novel's point--not to strip us of what
I
have suggested that the primitive core within ourselves
is not the source of our individuality in that it, too, has a source--a source,
moreover, that is external and purely cultural.
I have come pretty close to equating the novel with that someone or
something else who thinks us into being as thoughtful creatures, but I have
refrained from making this equation in so many words, because, as
To
arrive at an answer to this final question, let us consider the institution of
"the novel" in terms of the act of disavowal that allowed Freud to
make sense of his wandering through a foreign city. It is just too coincidental to be merely
coincidental that Brown should use the same trope to launch the concluding
paragraph of his book: "I have tried to follow the wandering adventures of
the Defoe text, more complicated but not unlike Yorick's
sermon in Tristram Shandy. I think it is safe to assume that these
restless wanderings, not unlike those of Robinson, have not yet returned
home and perhaps never can."
"Wandering" is the word Freud uses to describe what happens
when he has neither motive nor destination of his own. "Wandering" is
Brown's descriptive term for an institution created retrospectively, as
successive acts of displacement move fiction farther from rather than closer to
home. As Freud himself admits, however,
his "wandering" was neither motiveless nor misdirected. Rather than give any credence to the
possibility that alternative cultural beliefs were in operation, Freud
discovered a source for those residual beliefs within himself, in the infantile
fantasies that resemble primitive thought.
Whenever we institutionalize a novel, Brown implies, we are placing a
similar limit on the genre, if not on each and every text, a limit that compels
readers to look within that novel for the principle behind its apparent
wandering. If the compulsion to relocate
the outside on the inside is, as I have argued, the signature gesture of novelistic
thinking, then the who or what that authorizes the novel is nothing more nor
less than such novelistic thinking. This
disavowal of its institutionalizing power is essential to that power. This disavowal, however, also guarantees that
every attempt at institutionalization will produce an excess destined to
disturb the closure thereby achieved.
This excess tells us that any novel depends for generic identity upon
the very primitive thinking it routinely disavows. Modeled on the novel and curiously dependent
on reading novels, modern individuals are quite probably the vehicles and
products of this magic rather than its cause.