Literature
as Early Warning
James Whitlark
Professor and Associate Chairperson of English
Texas Tech University
Abstract
One of the psychological-sociological functions of
literature is to provide its writers and their societies with early warnings of
individual and collective problems. This may occur as a deliberate, conscious
intention on the part of the author, but is more profound when it is
unconscious, and thus requires the kind of analysis this essay models.
Occasionally, poems, prose fictions, and dramas may even provide therapy for
the problems they uncover.
________________________________________________________________________
“…there were Court Anthologists in the early days
of the Chou Dynasty (1134-247) whose function was to collect songs through the
length and breadth of the land for the sake of supplying the king with data for
gauging the mores (feng) of his realm….”
(Achilles Fang, “Introduction” to Ezra Pound, The Confucian Odes, vi)
“…artists are useful to society because they are so
sensitive…. They keel over like canaries in coal mines filled with poison gas,
long before the more robust types realize that any danger is there.” (Kurt
Vonnegut, “Address to the American Physical Society,” Wampeters
Foma & Granfalloons
92)
According to one ancient tradition, the oldest
extant collection of poems, the Chinese shijing
came together because the government presumed that poetic art, in addition to
expressing personal emotions, also mirrored the changing social and political
climate of the empire. This was an early version of Vonnegut’s assumption about
sensitive artists, their private pains a response to public woes. Disturbingly,
the best-known English translation of the shijing
was made in a psychiatric ward by Ezra Pound, who, like its fabled kings,
tried to find his own politics in it. Considering Pound’s ambiguous situation (Bollingen Prize Winner but also alleged lunatic and
traitor), one may, of course, worry about any attempt to find predictive
significance in art. With the coalminers in mind, however, one may better worry
about withdrawing attention from the canaries-writers responding to dangerous
environments.
Such responsiveness is often very deliberate and
clear as in Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five (1968). Its prefatory section
and authorial interpolations thereafter show Vonnegut himself during the
Vietnam War painfully ruminating on the World War II bombing of Dresden and
relating both wars to other long-running American problems. Alongside this
appears the narrative of Billy Pilgrim, also moving back and forth through
time. Somewhat explicitly in Slaughterhouse Five and more so in a series
of lectures that he gave at university campuses, Vonnegut drew the conclusion
that Western culture inclines people to give a Cinderella-like shape to their
lives, their happy endings accompanied by the punishment of the demonized ugly
stepsisters (e.g., Dresden’s citizens, the Vietnamese, or non-WASP Americans).
Artistic responsiveness is less clear when, either
as a deliberate stylistic choice or from lack of self-knowledge, the authors
hide the connections. Ernest Hemingway, for example, wrote “The Doctor and the
Doctor’s Wife” (1926) when he was an expatriate in Paris during the breakup of
his first marriage. Instead of depicting that directly, however, it portrays
the strains in his parents’ marriage as well as his father’s shooting himself.
The story was written two years before his father shot himself in 1928—and
thirty-three years before Ernest shot himself (Berman 105).
Vonnegut had to keep delivering the same message because the larger culture was disinclined to heed it; Hemingway continued to write machismo-permeated tales of suicide, self-destruction, and reckless risk taking, perhaps because of some gender-related contradiction within both him and the culture, which neither was willing to heed. Usually, a fiction manages to deliver no more than part of its message, as when Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle (1906) brought reforms in meatpacking hygiene, but not the social revolution he advocated. Because the whole message so seldom takes effect, like repeating nightmares, writers consciously or unconsciously tend to echo warnings work after work, or, fortunately, more rarely, in suicides, e.g., Virginia Woolf, Georg Trakl, John Kennedy Toole, Sara Teasdale, Anne Sexton Cesare Pavese, Yukio Mishima, Jack London, Vachel Lindsay, Primo Levi, Jerzy Kosinski, Arthur Koestler, Yasunari Kawabata, Randall Jarrell, William Inge, Hart Crane, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Thomas Chatterton, Paul Celan, John Berryman, and Ryuosuke Akutagawa.
Why
and how are writers sensitive to what kinds of dangers?
Somewhat Depressing Facts:
“You cannot be a good writer of serious fiction if
you are not depressed” (Vonnegut, 1991, 29).
Perhaps one of the reasons turbulence
has fascinated artists is that its subtleties mirror the ... shifts in our own
psychologies and moods.—Briggs, Fractals (1992)
Studies documenting a statistical link between
affective turbulence and creative production include Andreasen
(1987); Andreasen and Glick (1988); Hershman and Lieb, 1988; Jamison
(1989, 1993, and 1995); Wittkower and Wittkower (1963). According to one British study, 38% of
creative writers tested suffered from affective illnesses, as opposed to
between 1 and 5 percent in the population at large (Jamison 1993: 80). Vonnegut
wrote to Lawrence Broer: “The medical school at the
University of Iowa did a study of established writers at the Writer's Workshop, myself included, and learned that we were all
depressives” (Broer 13). Vonnegut underwent therapy
for that condition, which is to say that even if it may have increased his
sensitivity, he thought it amounted to too much of a good thing, especially
since it probably underlay his attempted suicide in 1984 (Vonnegut 1988, 87).
Although affective illnesses seem to be the most common disorders among
writers, they are obviously not the only ones that increase various
sensitivities. Perhaps, we are all one another’s canaries, albeit responding to
different stressors and with widely varying powers of expression. Human variety
thus may provide community with a greater range of warnings and cautionary
tales—one possible reason why psychological diversity evolved. Furthermore, the
University of Texas psychologist James W. Pennebaker
has spent years publishing evidence that writing about one’s problems increases
the body’s immune system as if the energy of repressing awareness had become
available to the writer once the problems were faced. He studies college
students confronting issues very close to consciousness. From literature, one
expects a deeper probing, that thereby insures greater potential for healing, e.g., John Stuart Mill’s ameliorating his debilitating
adolescent depression by reading Wordsworth (Mill 88). As contrasted with
literal autobiography studied by Pennebaker, fiction,
drama, and poetry, however, provide material harder to understand and also, perhaps,
more frightening, by confronting the deeply repressed.
Nightmares
“The child
to begin with commonly likes horrors and he continues to indulge in them even
when he does not like them….The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since
he had first an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for is St. George to
kill the dragon….Exactly what the fairy tale does is this: it accustoms him for
a series of clear pictures to the idea that these limitless terrors had a
limit….Sometimes the sea at night seems as dreadful as any dragon.—G. K.
Chesterton Tremendous Trifles (1909), “The Red Angel,” XVII
“The gallows in my garden, people
say,/ Is new and neat and adequately tall;/I tie the noose on in a knowing
way/As one that knots his necktie for a ball;/But just as all the neighbours--on the wall--Are drawing a long breath to shout
‘Hurray!’/The strangest whim has seized me. . . . /After all I think I will not
hang myself to-day.’ –G. K. Chesterton, “A Ballade of Suicide”
A predecessor of Vonnegut as
philosophical humorist, G. K. Chesterton, in both his above verses and
fairy-tale theory, expresses wittily his defying the “limitless terrors”--night
sea and dragon, images not of the finite dangers perceived by consciousness
(aware of only five to nine themes at a time), but of the much more numerous
threats sensed unconsciously—a vastness inspiring anxiety, panic attacks,
depression, and suicidal musings. Chesterton recognizes that the child at first
finds this unconscious alarm system congenial, and even when “he no longer
likes” it, his developing consciousness maintains a fascinated contact with the
depths. To the sensitive, though, this fascination risks
turning one into an almost literal canary, plunging to death. Indeed,
falls (if one includes hanging and diving into water) number among the most
common suicides—perhaps literalized metaphors for reversing the painful
development of the conscious mind rising from the unconscious. Since artist
canaries should instead live to articulate the warning, one might wish Chesterton
had said more about how the “whim” prevented suicide or how St. George limited
the “limitless”. In contrast to Chesterton’s amusing brevity, according to the
Golden Legend (ca. 1260), St. George (a patron of healing) tamed the dragon and
led it through the town, a miracle inspiring citizens to choose the symbolic
death and rebirth of baptism. In the period of Chesterton’s “Red Angel” (1909),
alas, that would have sounded preachy to a modern audience that, like the
child, wanted to shift from the limitlessness of the psyche to the definiteness
of materialism. Despite being personally a conservative Roman Catholic,
Chesterton gives an abbreviated St. George (no more than the British, patriotic
symbol) and that knight limits the “limitless terrors” simply by slaying (i.e.,
repressing) the “dragon” unconscious—hardly a permanent solution.
Is a temporary fix sufficient? It
seems to be for the speaker of “Ballade of Suicide” but not for the speaker of
Silvia Plath’s 1962 confessional poem “Lady Lazarus.”
Powerfully, she merges her unnamed present plight with holocaust imagery, with
her own childhood traumas, and with feminist anger, which together constitute a
sufficiently large difficulty to justify the apparently limitless pain of her
depression. The poem expects rebirth via parasuicide,
i.e., an unsuccessful attempt at suicide. The verses prophesy a coming
attempt—the speaker’s third—one each decade, and she expects a total of nine
before she dies in old age. After writing “Lady Lazarus,” Plath
herself survived into 1963, leaving a trail of warning poetry as she went,
until her husband left her, and she died by failing to fail at suicide (Berman
156). Both Chesterton and Plath, thus represent a
very common problem of modern literary canaries: doubting, blaming, or even
trying to “kill” the messenger (the unconscious), e.g., by repressing it or attempting
to silence oneself through self-directed violence.
In the documentary film The Trials
of Franz Kafka (narrated by Vonnegut) and in various essays, Vonnegut makes
Kafka a prime example of a canary warning through death songs. For Vonnegut,
Kafka’s nightmarish fantasies and relatively early death come from
presentiments of World War II horrors. This appraisal differs from most
academic studies of Kafka, which come to the tamer conclusion that he was
writing not about his era but his father and that he died of tuberculosis.
There is, of course, the third possibility that both interpretations are parts
of a larger truth.
Franz Kafka: Cockroach and/or Canary?
“No one pushes his way through here,
certainly not someone with a message from a dead man. But you sit at your
window and dream of that message when evening comes.”—(Franz
Kafka, “The Imperial Message,” The Complete Stories, 243.)
The story is about a message that comes in day dream, the kind of message that writers gain through introspection and that leaves them wondering if it is some mere fiction they have themselves fabricated. This is the essence of all Kafka’s tales: he is at the brink of a communication with something beyond the ordinary, but stops to ponder if the suspect message is real.
Do these halted messages arise merely
from his personal concerns. Although Kafka’s
best-known story, Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung)
has his protagonist turn into an insect and be murdered by his father, Kafka
wrote to his non-Jewish friend Milena Jesenska that anti-Semitism made him feel like a cockroach
being exterminated in a bathroom, so that one of the tale’s roots may have been
that public issue (Kafka, Briefe an Milena 249). As is usually the case in the arts,
personal and private stressors probably had a way of intertwining (e.g., the
way Plath’s domestic traumas were holographs of
general misogyny in Anglo-American culture). As for Kafka’s death, in his mind at
least, it was not just a physical event: he believed that his contracting and
surrendering to tuberculosis followed a long psychosomatic preparation, much of
it during the strained ambience of World War I.
In August 1917, the month when he
was making final revisions to his short-story collection A Country Doctor,
he himself had to consult a physician when he began coughing blood. He
commented, “Sometimes it seems to me as though brain and lungs had communicated
without my knowledge. ‘Things just can’t go on this way, said the brain; and
after five years, the lungs offered to help” (Quoted in Pawel
364). He thus thought he was willing himself to death during the period when he
wrote Metamorphosis (protagonist murdered by father), “The Judgment” (“Das Urteil,” protagonist ordered
to drown by father), The Trial (Der Prozess, protagonist executed by the mysterious court), and
the tales of A Country Doctor, many of which also seem like warnings of
an unconscious, self-destructive process directed by an internalized authority
figure. On submitting A Country Doctor for publication, he wrote in the
letter accompanying the manuscript: “The disease which for years now has been
brought on by headaches and sleeplessness has suddenly broken out. It is almost
a relief” (Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors 9/4/17).
Frustrated that Kafka accepted his disease as
inevitable and was not seeking further treatment for it, Brod
noted in a diary, “Kafka sees it as psychogenic, his salvation from marriage,
so to speak. He calls it his final defeat. But has been
sleeping well ever since. Liberated?” (Brod 144). Breaking off his engagement with Felice Bauer, he wrote her how his psyche reflected the
surrounding wartime world, “As you know, there are two of me at war with each
other. … It wasn’t my lung that the blood came pouring out of, but a decisive
stab wound inflicted by one of the two opponents” (F 9/30/17). This ambivalence
(desiring both health and disease) took many forms, such as his drinking
un-pasteurized, probably tuberculosis-contaminated milk, but ostensibly as part
of a natural, healing diet (Pawel 361).
To what extent do the stories in it evidence any
awareness of what was about to happen? “In the Gallery” (“Auf der Galerie”} describes “some
frail, consumptive equestrienne in the circus … urged around and around on an
undulating horse for months” by a typical authority figure (Complete Stories
401). Kafka’s narrator imagines this slowly tortured victim of tuberculosis but
complains that he does not know why these images come into his mind in the
midst of a seemingly healthy circus. In “The Problem of Reality in Kafka’s ‘Auf
der Galerie,” Claus Reschke guesses that this imagined situation is the real
one, perceived unconsciously, while the narrator’s consciousness accepts the
theatrical illusion, yet (because of the unconscious awareness) bursts into
tears without knowing why (Reschke 50).
The volume’s title story, “A Country Doctor,”
features an ineffective doctor abandoned naked in a snowstorm and a child dying
of an enormous wound. As in a dream, the doctor’s thoughts guide what
transpires: he thinks of horses; they miraculously appear and sweep him to his
destruction; he thinks of what the groom may be doing to his maid Rosa and a
large “rosa” (rose-colored) wound appears on the
child with a worm going in and out, even though he completely missed it in his
first examination. In “A Dream of Jewishness Denied:
Kafka’s Tumor and ‘Ein Landarzt’,”
Sander Gilman argues that the boy’s symptoms may derive from “classical
turn-of-the-century anti-Semitic views embedded in the popular (and clinical)
medical discourse of the day,” including an alleged predisposition of Jews to
tuberculosis (in Rolleston 275). Gilman does not go
so far as to suggest that this association had a psychosomatic effect, but, as
I have shown elsewhere, a close parallel to the worm-infested-rose wound is
Andersen’s fairy tale “The Snow Queen,” where the character Kay is afflicted
with a demonic vision that causes him to see worms crawling in and out of a
rose that seems beautiful to everyone else (Whitlark
71). Kafka was thus alluding to a connection between mind and body, which, of
course, is complicated in the story, since child and doctor are both versions
of Kafka, to the extent that all characters in a dream are parts of the
dreamer’s mind, though parts that may be in conflict with one another. A long
critical tradition reads the dreamlike story in Freudian fashion with the child
either a version of the doctor or some aspect of him (see Triffit,
209, n.1). The results of the doctor’s thoughts are nightmarish (including the
appearance of the wound), but they need not be. That the power of his mind
begins by worsening his situation does not preclude his reversing that effect
by controlling that mind.
The pioneer of using narratives in hypnotherapy,
Milton Erickson, for instance, sometimes would first suggest that his patients’
symptoms grow worse. He did this because the patients came with the
preconception that they could not have their very real pain simply wished away.
Once, however, they accepted that they could control a symptom enough to
exacerbate it, they believed in their power to suggest the discomfort away.
Unaware of that therapeutic possibility,
Kafka’s Doctor just proclaims that he is sick and wishes to die. His young
patient also expressed that wish. At the conclusion of “Ein
Landarzt,” its title character, condemned by
the child’s relatives and friends, freezes to death in “the frost of this most
unhappy of ages” while (according to the Doctor) the minister unravels his
robes because his congregation have lost their faith. According to the Hasidic Rebbe Israel of Rizhin, “In the
latter days” that is, before the coming of the Messiah there will be great
coldness in regard to faith. And the remedy for this will be to ‘gather’ and
speak about faith in God and in the tzaddikim [the
righteous]” (Buxbaum 204). As has long been
recognized, Kafka’s story parodies various Hasidic narratives, including those
where the Baal Shem Tov (the faith healer founder of
Hasidism) communicates with his miraculously swift horses, whereas Kafka’s
Doctor is taken by his equally gifted steeds to destruction.
What Kafka is parodying is a tradition of
narratives that not merely identified the distresses of individuals and society
but also offered themselves as therapy for them. During World War I, Eastern
Jews displaced from their Hasidic communities brought with them the belief that
telling tales of the tzaddikim (righteous) could
bring personal healings and contribute to the redemption of the world. The oral
narratives are themselves often stories within stories about cures. According
to one tale, while relating how his grandfather’s teacher, the Baal Shem Tov, danced in religious ecstasy, the lame Rebbe of Helish began to caper
and suddenly found his legs well (Buxbaum 177). In
another legend, a Belzer Rebbe,
by telling about a remedy, staunched a baby’s bleeding (Buxbaum
185).
Through Georg Langer, a disciple of a later Beltzer Rebbe, Franz Kafka learned of exiled Hasids in Prague (Karl 404; Robertson 195-96). Max Brod recalls that actual contact with the m (beginning in 1914) left Kafka internally divided, attracted by the “primordial strains” but alienated as if in “a visit to a tribe of African savages” (Brod 137). Based on Kafka’s interest at this period, Dagmar Lorenz’s article “Kafka and Gender” largely interprets “The Judgement” as a reaction to Baal Shem Tov legends (in Preece 184). At some time, Kafka bought various tomes of Jewish lore including M. J. bin Gorion’s Sagen der Juden, Von der Urzeit: Jüdische Sagen und Mythen (1913) and Max Buber’s Die Legende des Baalschem (1908). A diary entry for October 6, 1915, for instance, summarizes tales of the Baal Shem Tov. In 1917, he wrote Brod, “The Hasidic tales in The Jewish Echo may not be the best. But all these stories—I don’t know why—are the only thing Jewish in which, regardless of my condition, I always and immediately feel at home” (Letters 9/17). Strange images from a religious past, Hasidism came to him like a visitation from the unconscious and thus attracted him only to the point of his not quite embracing it. In a 1922 diary entry, Kafka recalls “A Country Doctor” in connection to his tuberculosis and interprets the story as meaning that miraculous help may come when people exceed their personal resources (T 892). Since, however, the “help” (receiving magical horses) destroys the Doctor, this late comment shows no more than his usual, irony-tinged, incomplete faith and a! lso the continuing importance to him of this tale, whose title he gave to the entire collection.
In “Before the Law” (“Vor dem Gesetz”) another tale from that collection, a Man from the Country comes to the gateway of the mysterious Law, is intimidated by the Gatekeeper (who says that many guarded gates lie beyond), withers with age, while the gatekeeper remains strong, and dies without ever entering. The repression, the barrier, is the narrative’s pervasive image, but through it, the Man from the Country, now almost blind, glimpses a light streaming immortally from the “Law.” The Law may signify (among other things), the Torah from which Hasids expected healing light. “Rabbi Nahman [a successor of the Baal Shem Tov] said that a person has to know how to tell a story because every story has something that is concealed. What is concealed is the Hidden Light.…Where was it hidden? In the Torah—or in holy stories” (Buxbaum 111).
Hartmut Binder notes
another Hasidic analogue of “Vor dem
Gesetz: The Baal Shem Tov
told a story of a king (i.e., God) who amazed his courtiers with a palace that
seemed to extend unreachably far (as Kafka’s way to the Law does according to
the gatekeeper). The prince, however, sees that this effect is an illusion
created by mirrors (as the insuperable boundary in Kafka’s story depends on
mere report). Being a fairly simple healing story, the Baal Shem Tov’s parable shows how an obvious change of perspective
can solve the problem. With the protagonist’s perceiving the Light of the Law,
Kafka also focuses on how an altered perception can transform a situation. He
raises, though, the modern question, how can one reconcile the man’s subjective
experience of luminous vision and his objective one of declining in size,
eyesight, and vitality?
A first clue to a possible solution is that the gatekeeper remains powerful and seemingly unchanged while the Man from the Country, as if from the frustration of waiting, ages and grows childish. His deterioration, thence, is at least as much a result of his state of mind as of the passing time. Supporting a psychological reading of the entire narrative is its oneric vagueness, devoid of any explanation how the protagonist could be fed and maintained over years of waiting in an anteroom of the Law. If the story is indeed like a dream, then the conflict between protagonist and gatekeeper resembles that between the two opponents in Kafka divided psyche. Throughout many of his fictions, a childlike, literally or figuratively little person opposes a large, parent-like authority. Commenting on the presence of this pattern in his earlier story The Judgment (“Das Urteil”}, he noted that his persona’s father was psychologically within the son (Diaries of Franz Kafka 1910-1913, 278; Whitlark 42).
Instead of paying enough attention to
his unconscious to reconcile the conflicts, Kafka prefers the Modernist alienation
of leaving his character blocked. Before composing “Before the Law,” he wrote
in a November 30, 1914 diary, “I am at the final boundary, before which I
should perhaps sit for years, in order again perhaps to begin a new,
again-unfinished story.” Admittedly, he managed to amplify this metaphor into
“Before the Law,” but (except for one, ambiguous glimpse of the light) the tale
is permeated with the idea of failure to reach the goal—a goal that the diary
entry designated as creative writing, which for him seems to have meant
accessing the unconscious only to break off contact in disbelief. Given this
trajectory, Kafka understandably often suffered from writers’ block, and his
doing the short stories of A Country Doctor was partly because of
difficulties tackling a novel-length work. The major characters of those short
stories perhaps reflect that discontent—the despondent, wounded ape of “A Report
to an Academy” (“Ein Bericht
für eine Akademie” ) the Shopkeeper of “An Old Page” (“Ein altes Blatt)
afflicted by filthy, subhuman invaders, the unreconcileable
enemies of “Jackals and Arabs” (“Schakale und Araber”), and the murder victim of “A Fratricide” (“Ein Brudermord).
Probably this emphasis on life as
blocked is precisely what appealed to Vonnegut. In Slaughterhouse Five,
for instance, Vonnegut describes himself as spending many years unable to write
about his Dresden experience. Even when he does, the vehicle is Billy Pilgrim’s
suffering by being “unstuck” in time, as if the preferable condition was to be
stuck. The volume ends with Vonnegut declaring that he has been turned to a
pillar of salt by the events, an image of radical immobilization comparable to
the depression he associates with serious literature. This is a peril in his
otherwise intriguing canary metaphor: the implication that artists should stick
to the cage and keel over.
Kafka’s short story with the closest
tone to Vonnegut’s dark comedy is his satire of contemporary colonialism, “in
the Penal Colony.” Kafka was revising
the story when he first noticed the tuberculosis. The story is notable for its
graphic description of a writing machine whose acid-spraying needles penetrate
into the victims’ internal organs, as colonialism itself was the invasive
imposition of European writing (scriptures, science, literacy)
on non-European cultures. For his coughing blood during the first week of
August 1917, see Pawel 358. For his work on “In the
Penal Colony” from August 8-9 (the latter date being when he had the most
massive pulmonary hemorrhage—the one that he could not ignore), see The
Diaries of Franz Kafka 1913-23, 178-180. His revisions contained in that
diary focus on the gruesome suicide of the officer, very literally stuck on a
spike, which protrudes “as if it bore witness to some truth” (D2 178). As usual
for Kafka, that truth remains a mystery.
Narcissus and Goldmund
“In Beneath the Wheel (1906),
the only Hesse book I’ve read that has a hopelessly
unhappy ending, he shows himself as an abused schoolboy who gets drunk and
drowns.” (Kurt Vonnegut, “Why They Read Kafka, Wampeters
Foma & Granfalloons,
114.)
In “Why They Read Hesse,”
Vonnegut generally portrays Hesse as a non-canary,
because of his reassuring fairy tales. Despite also being belittling, the above
sentence from that essay, recognizes a darker work, Beneath
the Wheel, Hesse’s semi-autobiographical novel
about his own bipolar condition and about the grievances of fin-de-siécle adolescents. Hesse, thus,
qualifies as a canary, albeit a very different one from Kafka, in that, after Jungian
psychoanalysis, Hesse portrayed his protagonists as abandoning
self-destruction for self-improvement.
Like most people, he experienced the present
flavored by a remembered past and an imagined future, but his fictions usually
reconciled readers to these in a psychological manner. This is most obviously
true in Narcissus and Goldmund, whose title
characters are associated with future and past problems respectively, but with
those set reassuringly in a fairy-tale Middle Ages.
Hesse needed to make it
this gentle. His readers expected from him some Taoist-tinged tale of the
far-away and long ago, such as Siddhartha. Instead, he had just been
writing simultaneously the jarring, semi-autobiographical novel Steppenwolf
and the autobiographical collection of poems Krisis:
A Piece of Diary in Verse (both composed 1926-1927). Together they describe
insomniac nights spent in joyless drinking and partying to forget his broken
second marriage. At this point his bipolar condition was exacerbated both by
personal and public worries at the end of the Roaring Twenties (as T. S. Eliot
had written his Waste Land concerned about a breaking marriage and
world, but at the Twenties beginning). Given Hesse’s
previous fans’ dissatisfaction with the two volumes’ relatively direct
presentation of his crisis, he was wise to withdraw from the Zurich dancehalls
to his castlelike Swiss retreat and make Narcissus
and Goldmund into a more charming version of
society on the point of collapse than either Steppenwolf or The Waste
Land.
In other words, from 1926-1927, he was a fairly
primitive canary, screaming, more than singing his agony. Throughout his life,
what his biographer Ralph Freedman calls “ghosts of the past” pursued him,
causing him to threaten suicide, repeatedly (43-49, 51-52, 190, 261-66,
280-290). He might have joined the long catalog of famous authors who killed
themselves—the simplest canaries. Based on the previous work of C. Neuringer and E. S. Schneidman, Denys deCatanzaro’s Suicide
and Self-Damaging Behavior: A Sociobiological
Perspective notes that suicidal thinking commonly is of an unliterary,
simple sort, using “terms such as all, none, always, or never”
(75). Although in rare cases, such as Silvia Plath’s
last poems, a suicidal mood may yield enduring art, that
is not often the case. Consequently, artist-canaries who do more than signal a
problem through their demise, must find a more nuanced way of depicting the
issues through transmuting these into literature.
Narcissus and Goldmund
does this first by showing how to deal with the past memories affecting the
present. Goldmund begins tormented with guilt,
because of “some secret flaw [Sühne, more
literally, expiation,] attached to [his] birth” (Hesse
17/21). He has “forgotten [his] childhood” (44), but in response to Narcissus’s
therapeutic probing, he, under carvings of dogs and wolves, howls, ”I’ll lose my mind and those animal snouts will devour me”
(47) He is having the basic insight of Steppenwolf, that each person
contains an inner wolf from the steppes; to be bitten by him is to become him,
pulled back into savage nature. Terror about this (coupled to
his awakening sexuality) leads him to fears of damnation. A step beyond Steppenwolf,
when this nature/past/unconscious threatens to devour his conscious self, Goldmund finds it taking on the kindly anima form of
his mother. Obviously, Hesse had been reading the
tomes of his therapist, C. G. Jung, who had helped him extricate himself from
the sense of sin his missionary parents had instilled in him. So, like Hesse, Goldmund (despite a scene
where he longs to drown) does not actually kill himself but becomes an artist. Hesse provides a few descriptions of Goldmund’s
sculptures to convince the readers of this, but ultimately Goldmund’s
greatest project remains unfinished. The (Romantic) convention is of the
professionally failed artist, whose true art is his life—in this case, a life
as witness to the manic glut of bourgeois culture. It sickens Goldmund and he keeps fleeing from it, thereby sabotaging
his career. He also sees the literal sickness that descends on the urban
affluence: the Black Plague. In this detail, Hesse
was a somewhat obtuse canary, aware that the Roaring Twenties were heading for
disaster, but presenting a wrath-of-God-like plague, rather than the economic
depression (that, ironically, was a closer metaphor for the psychological depression
that was Hesse’s own recoil from the glut). More
perceptively, Hesse has Narcissus witness a massive
pogrom, for the medieval citizens’ deal with disaster by killing Jews—what
actually reoccurred in Hesse’s own age, Great
Depression preparing the way for Hitler.
Is there any way for artist-canaries to escape a
past-poisoned present? Hesse’s portrait of Narcissus
presaged what would become his characteristic manner of avoiding depression:
play with ideas, first in Journey to the East and more intensely in The
Glassbeadgame. Their precursor, the speculative
theologian Narcissus, lives much of his mental life contemplating the future,
which he extrapolates through his deep understanding of people’s characters.
Reluctantly, he recognizes that his fate is to become abbot and he is first
drawn to Goldmund because Narcissus had been quick to
recognize” the latter’s “character and destiny” (17).
Thus oriented, Narcissus is free from painful
memories and absorbed confidently in working toward the ideal: “despair was
unknown to him” (173). When he is still a simple character type (before the
deep influence of Goldmund), Narcissus believes,
“since man is a dubious mixture of mind and matter, since the mind unlocks
recognition of the eternal to him, while matter pulls him down and binds him to
the transitory, he should strive away from the senses ….in an attempt to construct
a purely spiritual world” (293). Thereby, he is constantly refining his own personality,
through prayer and meditation.
Hesse’s Narcissus sounds
nothing like the version of his namesake in Greek mythology or in Freudian
theory, but corresponds closely with the version of Narcissism encountered by
Heinz Kohut, the founder of American self-psychology.
According to him, his Narcissistic patients were sensitive introverts, who
turned inward because, not having developed a mature sense of self, they retained in the depths of the psyche a childish,
grandiose self (which provided only temporary comfort). The primary activity of
Kohut’s Narcissists is attempting to perfect this
radically incomplete, childish self (the childishness Vonnegut suspects in Hesse and his fans). A typical means of self-completion is
through intense friendships, where they seek to find in the friend what they
lack. Narcissus’s attitude toward Goldmund
exemplifies this, in that their friendship was so intimate as to be criticized
in the monastery, but Narcissus, otherwise scrupulous, persists in it because
it helps him to perfect himself.
In this characterization, Hesse
draws on many sources, including his own life and the concept of “introversion”
a concept popularized by his therapist C. G. Jung. That idea anticipated Kohut’s
understanding of Narcissism. Note that just as Kohutian
“Narcissism” is not identical to “Narcissistic Personality Disorder,”
supposedly derived from it, Jung’s “introversion” is not the permanent
orientation it more recently has been considered (e.g., in Myers-Briggs
personality typing). Indeed, according to his autobiography Erinnerungen,
Traume, Gedanken)
despite being an “introvert” as a child, Jung eventually managed to build a
satisfactory self and become an extravert.”
Kohut’s prime example of
Narcissism is Kafka and the personality characteristics Kohut
cites seem tailored to writers in general. What then do Narcissus and
Narcissism have to do with canaries? In many regards, Narcissism (withdrawing
into the self) functions as a natural paliative for
their over-sensitivity to external stressors, but like many remedies it has
side effects. Even Hesse’s Narcissus regrets being
emotionally dissociated, his monastery a confining
place where one is not fully alive. Since the late 1920s when Narcissus and Goldmund was written, however, Narcissistic preparation
for the future has become a more alarming activity—as, for instance, in
Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle (1963), where a thoroughly dissociated scientist
destroys the world.
Fear and Individuation
“That cumbersome computer [the human brain] could
hold so many contradictory opinions on so many different subjects all at once,
and switch from one opinion or subject to another one so quickly, that a
discussion between a husband and wife under stress could end up like a fight
between blindfolded people wearing roller skates”. (Kurt Vonnegut, Galapagos
253.)
Like Kafka’s “A Report to the Academy” about an
ape’s sorrow at attaining human intelligence, Vonnegut’s novel Galapagos
derides the idea that evolution has brought progress. He argues that mental
contradictions make the present human condition untenable. Although the arts
give many specific warnings, their largest function is as commentary on the
problems of human development.
As previously theorized (in Whitlark, “The Sequence of Individuation,” field HYPERLINK http://www.goertzel.org/dynapsyc/2005/Whitlark.htm),
Clare Graves’ development of conscious states coordinate with the sequence of
unconscious states C. G. Jung mentioned in Archetypes of the Collective
Unconscious, CW 9, par. 44-66. The conscious/unconscious pairs are
categorized: (1) Survivor/Transitional Object (often a Beast image); (2) Truster/Trickster; (3) Unscrupulous Competitor/Hero; (4)
Virtuous/Shadow; (5) Materialistic Analyst of Things/Anim(a/us); (6) Empathizer
with Every Person; Wise One; (7) Distancer/Self. Each
unconscious state is complementary and compensatory to its conscious state, but
naturally, contains memories of earlier states, thereby contributing to that
mental self-contradiction of which Vonnegut, Kafka, etc. complained. Each
unconscious state has a complex, almost amorphous configuration, but in
reaction against that seeming limitlessness, when consciousness perceives these
depths, it usually does so in terms of images, limiting and defining them. With
Kafka’s persona (Gregor Samsa)
turning into a bug in Metamorphosis, for instance, the character is
regressing all the way to a particularly early phase of stage one, imaged as a
very primitive form of the Beast. Gregor, however,
had previously developed to a virtuous, hard-worker (stage 4). Consequently,
the regression is resisted by an Oedipal father—a
Shadow figure—punishing him for moving backwards toward a stage when
consciousness was a tiny flicker in a vast unconscious night. Similarly, Chesterton’s
St. George is an abbreviated version of the Hero (an image limiting the
unconscious at stage 3). In other words, although the “archetypal” images
represent the unconscious, they are a form imposed by consciousness upon the
depths and their stories are thus often about the defense of consciousness.
What I have been complaining about is the materialistic simplification of this
defense (during the Modernist period, dominated by stage 5). Indeed, Kafka’s
stage-six point is that the reader should empathize with the suffering human! -insect, who should not simply be exterminated by his Shadow
Father. Psychologically more detailed, Steppenwolf teaches that
despite the original misgivings of Herman Hesse’s
protagonist, Harry Haller, his inner wolf need not be killed, but can be
integrated into consciousness.
What does this have to do with
artist-canaries? Being only able to handle between five and nine themes at a
time, consciousness tends to lump the countless, unconscious alarms into
archetypal images. The devouring Beast (e.g., wolf or dragon) is a particularly
common metaphor for the worry that all the alarms will pull the mind back into
the unconscious darkness, from which stages two to four have risen, with
progressively larger, more-differentiated consciousness. What, though, happens
from stages five to seven? Although the worry about going backwards may
persist, stages five to seven bring a new concern: they gradually integrate
conscious and unconscious—a potentially threatening situation for consciousness.
The issue, then, is distinguishing
fears of the developmental past (e.g., the archaic Beast) from fears of a
technologically developed future (a relatively new entry into the unconscious).
The most common image for the latter is now the cyborg,
the body turning not into a Beast, but, piece by piece, into unliving/unloving artifice. In the Star Trek series, for
instance, the original Borg were part-machine aliens,
who threatened to “assimilate” humans into a collective mind, which eliminated
individual consciousness. Throughout a number of his books, Vonnegut has the
universe destroyed by Trafalmadorians, aliens that
look as if they are part plumber’s helper and that are unemotional in their
absolute fatalism. Vonnegut’s novel Timequake
describes them as anthropomorphic versions of chemical elements, an expression
of his thoughts about chemical determinism after being diagnosed as bipolar.
During the lower-numbered Graves/Jung
stages, warnings about the future tend to be really warnings about the past
coming again—anxieties about the return of the Beast. These, of course,
continue but from the Modernist period of Freud’s Civilization and its
Discontents (1930) and thereafter, there has been the concern that
extending consciousness might drain life of nourishing emotions (as with Hesse’s Narcissus). Unlike the novel on which it is based
(in which the monster is an android, the Boris Karloff
movie Frankenstein (1931) is a step toward the cyborg—the
bolts on the monster’s neck and the stitching giving him a fragmented,
frightening appearance. After World War II, the holocaust, atom bomb, and
(eventually) awareness of ecological crisis have generally associated cyborgs with super-villains. Before World War II, there
were a few prosthetically enhanced superheroes, and
similar figures (e.g., the Bionic Man and Woman) continue to appear, but in the
minority. The norm is now that moment in Return of the Jedi, when Luke
Skywalker notices his own mechanical hand and worries that he may follow his cyborg father into evil. His solution, however, is not to
reject that father but redeem him through love. The arts can do more than warn;
they can provide some means of avoiding being immobilized through resultant
fear or despair.
Consider, for
instance, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (book 2001, film
2003). The Defense-Against-the-Dark-Arts instructor has the pupils confront
their fears by laughing at a boggart, who changes
itself into an image of each terror. Although less explicitly, much literature
employs this device, teaching that fears themselves are re-fashionable images
(even when the problems underlying the fears are real). Being thus flexible is
not an answer to all the world’s problems but it is a necessary beginning.
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