Unleashing the Third Force

Unleashing the Third ForceA Psychological Approach to Fiction: Studies in Thackeray, Stendhal, George Eliot,Dostoevsky, and Conrad by Bernard J. ParisReview by: Mark SpilkaNOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Winter, 1976), pp. 165-170Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1345372 .

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Reviews

Unleashing the Third Force

BERNARD J. PARIS, A Psychological Approach to Fiction: Studies in Thackeray, Stendhal, George Eliot, Dostoevsky, and Conrad (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1974), pp. xii + 304, $10.95.

Though psychological studies of fiction are now legion and have acquired at least the

gloss of critical respectability, there are in fact only a few studies which might legiti- mately be called "approaches." Leslie Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel

(1960), which amalgamates Jung and Freud in its amazing mythic swirl, is perhaps our finest if not our most responsible example of archetypal analysis, especially as applied to pop-culture artifacts and those major novels which affirm its gothic bias. Simon Lesser's Fiction and the Unconscious (1957), a meeker and more sober text, is our only Freudian account of any magnitude of how fiction per se works on our subliminal

responses and lends itself accordingly to depth analysis. These aging standbys (and a few others like them) have influenced enough critics in their time to qualify as ex-

emplary approaches, and it is with them that Paris's book must be compared. It is easily more systematic and responsible than either standby in setting forth its

wares-more lucid and consistent in its theories, more comprehensive and judicious in its readings; and happily its theoretical wares-if not its readings-are genuinely new. Paris offers a departure, that is, from traditional Freudian and Jungian studies. His

advocacy of the "third force" psychologies of Abraham Maslow and Karen Homey is

an attempt of some consequence to break with the old dispensation and its monopoly of literary fields. Maslow's theory of self-actualization is Paris's norm for judging fictive neurosis and-despite demurrers to the contrary-prescribing for its cure. Homey's more practical psychology allows him to deal with fictive types. He believes that it

applies more aptly than other systems to the realistic fiction of the nineteenth century on which he concentrates-the kind of fiction which, in its thick social context, tends to elude Fiedler's mythic swirl, though it is not unamenable to Lesser's depth analysis.

Thus, in his impressive opening chapters, Paris holds that the mimetic nature of realistic fiction is more important than its thematic or formal aspects; that it provides us

with a phenomenological grasp of character and society, and of the character of im-

plied authors, which is its chief value; and that a psychology of personality-that is

to say, an ego-centered psychology like Horney's-will help us to appreciate that

value. Horney's categories for neurotic types-the compliant or self-effacing person who meets basic anxieties by moving toward other people; the aggressive or hostile

person who moves against them; and the detached or withdrawn person who moves

away from them-might almost be said to derive from nineteenth-century fiction; her

stress on the ego and its social choices is shared by the novelists of that period; and

her notions about pride systems, dreams of glory, "shoulds" (i.e., governing expecta- tions), and self-hatreds are familiar nineteenth-century fare. Indeed, the great literary



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drawback of her psychology may be its closeness, its too obvious relevance, to what these writers make so evident themselves, to what is already accessible through their own observations.

Paris slides over this problem by exploiting the greater organizational efficiency of

Horney's system. He selects five novels in which the authors are demonstrably con- fused about what they tell and what they show-novels in which interpretation conflicts with representation, novels with damaged endings or other glaring defects over which critics have long agonized. His method is to use such conflicts of theme and form with mimetic matter to bring out the psychological coherence of such matter. With

Vanity Fair, for instance, he tries to show how the implied author "is troubled by inner conflicts," and how the novel's aesthetic inconsistencies are made comprehensible by the structure of his troubled psyche. He delineates these inconsistencies with some

care, then hypothesizes an implied author whose "compliant tendencies predominate but are continually at war with a powerful, though submerged, aggressiveness." The

hypothesis accounts for Thackeray's ambivalence toward Amelia Sedley, whose com-

pliance he values yet sharply undercuts; and for his ambivalent treatment of Becky Sharp, whose aggression he sharply criticizes yet secretly supports, as when he employs her as a sympathetic agent for satirizing faults in those around her. Thackeray's ironic stance is meanwhile the sign of his less prominent tendency for detachment or with-

drawal, a defensive device which allows him to negate what he affirms and otherwise avoid commitment.

The description of Thackeray's ambivalence, which extends to Dobbin and other

characters, is a good one; it helps especially to explain the attractive portrait of Becky Sharp which has long puzzled Thackeray's critics-and here suppressed aggression seems to me a better key to Thackeray's secret admiration than that suppressed sexuality which Freudian critics (myself included) have postulated. I think also that the worm-turning pattern which the compliance-aggression dilemma allows Paris to

develop is a brilliant explanation of an obverse attraction-i.e., those scenes in which, to our immense satisfaction, Amelia or Dobbin turn against some aggressive or manip- ulative character who has long oppressed them. But these valuable insights aside, there is little that is new or exciting in this prolix, repetitive, 61-page chapter, with its overly familiar, almost compulsively thorough rehearsal of the novel's problems and their

Horneyan resolution. There is, moreover, something specious about Paris's efforts to deal with and describe that slippery customer, the implied author, in whose behalf he

may create more problems than Homey resolves. The idea seems to be that the implied author in the novel has structured his troubled

psyche not simply coherently, but in some naturally artistic way, and that the novel's mimetic dimension (if closely scrutinized) will reveal that structuring as its hidden

strength. The novel's psychological form is thus a key to its phenomenological power. If the novel's thematic and formal aspects will, more often than not, conflict with that

power, we need not take such conflicts seriously. They are only aspects of the implied author's fractured psyche through whose several beauties the novel's Horneyan unity may be perceived.

One obvious difficulty with these assumptions is that, having borrowed the implied author with due respect from Wayne Booth, Paris proceeds to cut him off from the

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rhetorical and thematic strategies which Booth prizes. Paris asks us to take him, in effect, as one of the novel's characters-a privileged character, of course, but not because of his superior wisdom or emotional health or conscious artistry, which we are wrong even to expect of him; his privilege rather is his psychic structure, which is our only sure key to the novel's unity.

May it not also be a key to the novel's weaknesses, its occasional disunities, as well as to its phenomenological strengths? An elastic all-encompassing fellow, the implied author is where you find him-in Thackeray's erring commentary on Amelia's character, for example, as well as in her supposedly accurate portrait which belies the commentary, by which magical juxtaposition an aesthetic flaw becomes a psychic unification. The implied author affirms her compliance, that is, in his commentary but undercuts it in his portrait, thereby revealing his own gorgeously phenomenological (albeit slightly rhetorical) ambivalence. But, alas, even the phenomenological portrait of Amelia is seriously flawed: her capacity to love, to feel deeply, is affirmed in several dramatic scenes by reliable witnesses like Dobbin and Becky Sharp, only to be denied when the worm Dobbin finally turns and pronounces her an emotionally superficial person-as I have long ago argued elsewhere ("A Note on Thackeray's Amelia," Nineteenth-Century Fiction, December 1955). And Paris himself points to minor flaws in the portrait of Becky Sharp, violations of the comic nature of her relation with Jos which "shock" and "surprise us" toward the novel's end. Such observations lead me to believe that the psychic unification theory, as Paris employs it, needs further structuring and more thought.

The too-obvious or redundant nature of his Horneyan categories is most evident in his chapter on The Mill on the Floss. George Eliot is so consciously dealing with

problems of compliance, withdrawal, and aggression in her heroine, Maggie Tulliver, that the superimposition of these frames seems at times irritatingly unnecessary: we

already know what is going on without their help. But Paris's analysis is more subtle and intelligent than I have so far indicated: he has the advantage of an efficient system and he applies it with flexibility and tact, pushing always a little farther than Eliot takes us through her astute commentary. He has the advantage also of hindsight and can give us the Horneyan version of Eliot's "immaturity," which F. R. Leavis and a number of Freudian critics have charged her with in accounting for the novel's prob- lematic ending, and which Leavis also sees as a failure in moral wisdom.

As with the implied author of Vanity Fair, Paris's reading of Maggie's psychic structure is a good one, and his account of the novel's weak ending complements all

previous accounts. As usual he explains the weakness away by denying its moral nature and settling for what it means "to a consciousness like that of the implied author." But perhaps we can explain that away too, as the reaction of a reformed moralist to his own previous reading of the novel, when, in Experiments in Life: George Eliot's Quest for Values (1965), he wanted to side with Eliot against Leavis's charges. His new-found antimoralism is, I think, one of the more curious indications of the

phenomenological convert's zeal, directed more obviously against his former moral self than his present moral opponent.

A more serious shortcoming of the Eliot chapter is its downplaying of Maggie's childhood and the aggressiveness of her behavior at that early stage. Paris is so intent

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on working out the falseness of Eliot's self-effacing solution for Maggie, which leads to the damaged ending, that he neglects the importance of these early years. Feminist critics today speak eloquently of the suppressed rage in many nineteenth-century heroines, a condition which applies nowhere more pointedly than with young Maggie Tulliver. Her childhood rebelliousness, which takes the form of defiant misbehavior,

untidy sensuality, and accident-prone impulsiveness, seems so obviously the reaction of a precociously bright assertive girl to a culture which prizes tidy placid domestic dolls that only a myopic male Horneyan could miss it. Paris dutifully notes the

repressive harshness of Maggie's cultural circumstances: but he persistently attributes her troubles to her own neurotic behavior, which in childhood at least seems like the most striking sign we have of her potential health and, one might well add, of her creator's ultimate greatness. It seems ironic that Horney's socially-oriented psychology, with its special concern for women's problems, should be used to downplay a cultural condition she herself would have emphasized; it is a condition, moreover, which might have excited a more insightful psychological critic of the old persuasion like Fiedler, whose alertness to the archetypal functions of blond dolls and black devils in machismo cultures is well-known.

One drawback Paris shares with the old persuasion is the contempt he exhibits, in his apologetic way, for the novel's ideological and thematic dimensions. Thematic conflicts with mimetic matter do of course exist, and the psychological approach is one

way to explain them. But thematic issues are not always grist for the psychological critic's mill. Paris's tendency to grind them up may be seen in his treatment of the romantic imagination as nothing more than a neurotic symptom. In his readings of The Red and the Black, Notes from Underground, and Lord Jim, he persistently treats ambivalent attitudes toward romanticism as signs of personality disturbance-as well

they may be. But the limits and possibilities of romanticism have been legitimate subjects for literary speculation for the last two centuries. It is part of the contemporary sense of the complexity and indeterminateness of experience, moreover, that we may deplore romantic illusion and satirize romantic egoism while yet honoring romantic

reachings toward heroic and glorious realms. Stendhal's introduction of this romantic

paradox into literature is after all a milestone in the history of modern sensibility. If his novels end sometimes with neurotic solutions, they also develop real cultural dilemmas within plausible social contexts. Similarly Conrad's Marlovian enthusiasm for the greatness of seventeenth-century Dutch and English traders is a legitimate historical qualification of Lord Jim's dilemma; it is a cultural expiation for his entrap- ment in Patusan through his own dependent egoism. (Consider in this light Fitzgerald's softening of the great Gatsby's demise through his lyric image of the "fresh, green breast of the new world" flowering before Dutch sailors' eyes.) As Joseph Frank has

shown, even the underground man's romantic egoism of the 1840's contributes to the

perverse assertion of individuality which is his saving moral grace in the 1860's. Again one suspects an attack on Paris's old romantic idealism in his persistent reduction of romantic dilemmas, first to structural defects (real and dubious), then to mere "case histories."

I don't know how else to characterize, short of smugness or complacency, the treatment Paris gives to the underground man's neurotic ravings in Part I of that great

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flawed document of the birth of modern sensibility. He believes that the philosophic arguments at the heart of that sequence "are both better understood and more perma- nently interesting as expressions of [the underground man's] neurosis than as thematic affirmations of the implied author"; that "they are first and foremost an integral part of Dostoevsky's incredibly complex and subtle portrait of his character" and as such have "an enduring aesthetic and mimetic truth which will make them fascinating even when their ideological content seems antiquated." He believes further that Dostoevsky's character is in fact controlled by "laws of nature" which Horney's categories best reveal, and he describes him accordingly (and again very finely) as a detached or withdrawn person with strong complaint and aggressive tendencies between which he vacillates compulsively.

I have several objections to this position. One is that, by reducing the underground man's arguments to aspects of his neurosis, Paris dissolves the historic context of ideological conflict which that unreliable narrator creates through one-sided dialogue with imagined listeners and through self-exposing immersion in the ideas he attacks- through adeptness in the "laws of consciousness" which threaten to engulf him. A similar objection is that Paris dissolves the hierarchy of positions Dostoevsky is trying to establish: the organ-stop life which the "normal man" of the century may enjoy through utilitarian rationalism; the underground man's superiority to that state through perverse assertions of individuality; and the "something different" he thirsts for but cannot find. I have already suggested how the first level of this hierarchy is established. The problem of posing the underground man's superiority to it seems to me brilliantly solved in Part I by the very antics Paris attributes solely to compulsion: it is the underground man's manipulation of the terms of his own compulsions which so in- trigues us, and which indicates a perverse vitality not adequately described even by Horney's categories. Dostoevsky was not able to create the third level, the "something different," in this novella: that would have to wait till as late as The Brothers Kara- mazov. But Paris seems to have created it for him through Horney's psychology: he really believes that if the underground man came to terms with the "laws of nature" as Homey (in his view) defines them, all his troubles would be solved.

Even Maslow holds that cultures as well as persons may work against the kind of self-actualization here commended (our own culture, for instance, allows only one per cent or less of the population to reach it, as Paris admits in Chapter Two). But Maslow too is ultimately utopian: he believes that "Many men have had no opportunity to choose higher over lower, healthy over sick pleasures. If both their natures and their cultures were highly enough evolved to give them the opportunity for choice, they would choose the pleasures of self-actualization over all else." This is, of course, precisely what the underground man denies so vehemently in asserting his right to choose perversely. The psychological hedonism Paris prescribes for him is exactly what Dostoevsky wanted to deny, and what, through all that delightfully perverse vitality in his zany narrator, he did deny as sufficient for defining human worth.

Homey herself resisted this conversion of her therapeutic tools into laws defining human nature. She was not a system-builder, nor was she personally inclined toward rational behavior. In a recent issue of Ms. magazine (June 1975) she is reported to have dumped onto the rug an overfull glass of wine and soda while casually talking

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with a visitor. Dostoevsky would have liked that, as would Paris, I'm sure, in his own

perverse moments. Nor would I, even perversely, want to question his humane inten- tions. He deserves much credit for his advocacy of "third force" psychologies which, by centering on the ego and its choices rather than the id's determinations, allow us to talk about characters as persons with problems rather than faceless victims of unconscious forces. If Paris condescends to romantic heroes in their ideological struggles, he also treats them in most other respects with sympathetic perception, and his work with supporting characters-like Conrad's Marlow-is often empathetic as well as

illuminating. He is even commendably worried about the problem of reductive treatment of characters, something which Fiedler and Lesser seem untroubled by; and he is

everywhere superior to them, and to most of his psychological predecessors, in his awareness of those critical problems peculiar to fiction which have surfaced in recent

years. Finally, I would commend also his attempt to convey phenomenological density at a time when other schools of criticism deny the mimetic function altogether-though Lesser may have conveyed that dimension more effectively in his chapters on the

psychic functions of language, form, and expressive content. It seems probable, then, that Paris's readings will serve in the future as introductory

models of responsible, self-critical analysis in the psychological mode. Whether old Freudians and Jungians will want to emulate them is hard to say: the new system complements rather than displaces the old ones, but it does not readily accommodate Fiedler's dazzling reaches or Lesser's somber depths. Still, it constitutes the fullest introduction we now have to the possibilities of applying the new ego-psychologies to

fiction, and may well have exemplary value for critics who have already gone to Erik

Erikson, R.D. Laing, Ian Suttie, Rollo May and others for more humanly inclusive

categories.

MARK SPILKA, Brown University

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Unleashing the Third Force