Word: edell
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STUFF OF SLEEP AND DREAMS: EXPERIMENTS IN LITERARY PSYCHOLOGY by Leon Edel; Harper & Row; 352 pages...
...Analysis, we all plead innocent with an explanation. Literary critics have remained productively blameless by fitting books and authors to psychoanalytic theory. Leon Edel, 74, knows the limits of this approach. In his new work, the teacher, critic and prizewinning biographer of Henry James explains: "We take from Freud perhaps the richest part of his work, his insights into man's ways of thinking, dreaming, imagining-those elements which have also an influence on motivations and behavior...
...Edel's search for meaning in the sleep life of other literary figures turns up some choice curiosities. A Henry James dream begins in fear and ends in exhilaration as the author of The Turn of the Screw and other ghost stories chases a terrified phantom down a great hall that resembles a gallery in the Louvre. The unconscious of most writers remains a dark nursery of anxiety and chaos. But James, one of the most controlled novelists in history, can symbolize discipline and order in his sleep. This is the triumph of art at its most intimidating...
...Auden is a textbook case drawn largely from the poet's autobiography-of-sorts, A Certain World. The book is an alphabetical listing of subjects close to Auden's heart, and the psychological evidence is so blatant that one should expect an ambush. Edel plunges ahead. Under "Castration Complex," he finds a reference to "The Story of Little Suck-a-Thumb," whose mother warns him that he will lose his favorite fingers if he does not stop his infantile habit. He does not, and in comes "the great, long, red-legged scissors-man" to carry out the sentence...
Under D, Auden describes a dream in which his appendix is to be removed. Instead, the doctor cuts off "the arm of an old lady who was going to do me an injury." Mommy dearest? Of course, and Edel does not fail to evoke the emasculating female. How much weight Auden, a homosexual, gave to primal imagery is open to question. An artist must care more about what he makes than what he is. Auden put it right when he told a friend, "I am a poet first and a queen second...