Word: guerard
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...compulsive concern with things creative may contrast strangely with an intense interest in varsity basketball and football, but for Albert J. Guerard, 41-year-old professor of English, the contrast is merely one of many that fill both his career and his personality. A Californian who wears a checked jacket but carries a staid green book bag, an American with an intimate knowledge of the wartime French underground, and a writer of fiction who also is a critic of writers, Guerard humorously regards himself as a "controlled schizophrenic...
...Guerard began to split his personality at an early age, for with an American mother and a famous French father--a well-known professor emeritus of history and literature--he grew up with a natural knowledge of both languages and cultures. At the age of ten, he left the schools of Houston, Texas, for a Parisian ecole, which was a "nightmare" and "prison" with its 5:30 a.m. rising bell. A return to America and then another short stay in Europe eventually led Guerard to enter Stanford University, where he received his doctorate after graduate study at Harvard...
...Guerard also rejected what he called the "ruthlessly psychoanalytic" novel as being as bad as all didactic novels. Such novelists substitute text-book situations for real creativity, he explained, letting psychological theorists such as Carl Jung think for them...
...elaboration on the novel's relationship to psychology Guerard said that the novel can contribute little to academic psychology. It can, however, throw some light on the common events of life, he continued, if the novelist has an accurate psychology. "The important thing is the story-the pattern of the world-occurring in novel after novel," he said...
This pattern may be conscious or unconscious, Guerard said. "An author's rational intentions are as irrecoverable as his sources," Guerard declared...