Prof: Well,
now today is obviously a kind of watershed or transition in
our syllabus. You remember we began with an
emphasis on language. We then promised to move to an
emphasis on psychological matters, and finally social and
cultural determinants of literature.
So far we have immersed
ourselves in notions to the effect that thought and speech
are constituted by language or, to put it another way,
brought into being by language and that thought and speech have
to be understood as inseparable from their linguistic milieu--
language here being understood sometimes broadly as a structure
or a semiotic system. Now obviously our transition
from language-determined ideas about speech,
discourse, and literature to psychologically determined ways
of thinking about discourse and literature has a rather smooth
road to follow because the first two authors who borrow from
Freud and understand their project to a degree in
psychoanalytic terms are nevertheless using what is now
for us an extremely familiar vocabulary.
That is to say,
they really do suppose that the medium of consciousness to which
we now turn-- the psyche, the relationship
between consciousness and the unconscious--
they really do suppose that this entity,
whatever it may be, can be understood in terms that
we take usefully from verbal thought and from linguistics.
Lacan famously said,
as you'll find next week, "The unconscious is
structured like a language,"
and Brooks plainly does agree. You open Brooks and you find
yourself really apart perhaps--I don't know how well all of you
are acquainted with the texts of Freud.
We'll say a little bit about
Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which is the
crucial text for our purposes; but plainly apart from the
influence of and the ideas borrowed from Freud,
you'll find Brooks writing on what for you is pretty familiar
turf. For example,
he begins by borrowing the Russian formalist distinction in
trying to explain what fiction is between plot and story.
I feel that I do ultimately
have to cave in and admit to you that the Russian words for these
concepts, plot and story,
are syuzhet and fabula respectively,
because Brooks keeps using these terms again and again.
I've explained my embarrassment
about using terms that I really have no absolutely no idea
> of the meaning of except that
I'm told what the meaning of them is in the books that I am
reading, which are the same books that you're reading.
In >
any case, since Brooks does
constantly use these terms, I have to overcome
embarrassment and at least at times use them myself.
They're a little
counterintuitive, by the way, if you try to find
cognates for them in English because you'd think that
syuzhet would be "subject matter,"
in other words something much closer to what the formalists
mean in English by "story."
On the other hand,
you'd think that fabula might well be something like
"plot" or "fiction,"
but it is not. It's just the opposite.
Syuzhet is the plot,
the way in which a story is constructed,
and the fabula is the subject matter or material out
of which the syuzhet is made.
All right.
In addition to the use of the
relationship between plot and story,
we also find Brooks using terms that are now,
having read Jakobson and de Man, very familiar to us:
the terms "metaphor" and "metonymy."
There's plainly a tendency in
modern literary theory to reduce all the tropes of rhetoric to
just these two terms. When needed,
they back up a little bit and invoke other terms,
but the basic distinction in rhetoric,
as literary theory tends to understand it,
is the distinction between metaphor--
which unifies, synthesizes,
and brings together-- and metonymy,
which puts one thing next to another by a recognizable
gesture toward contiguity but which nevertheless does not make
any claim or pretension to unify or establish identity--
to insist, in short, that A is B.
These two terms,
as I say, are understood reductively but usefully to be
the essential topics of rhetoric and appropriated by modern
theory in that way. Now Brooks then uses these
terms in ways that should be familiar to us,
as I say. We have now been amply exposed
to them in reading Jakobson and de Man.
So there is a language of
language in Brooks' essay, "Freud's Masterplot,"
despite the fact that the framework for his argument is
psychoanalytic and that he is drawing primarily on the text of
Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
So what does he take from Freud? What interests Brooks about
Freud? He is, by the way,
a distinguished Freudian scholar who knows everything
about Freud and is interested, in fact, by every aspect of
Freud, but for the purpose of constructing the argument here
and in the book to which this essay belongs,
the book called Reading for the Plot--
for the purposes of constructing that argument,
what he takes in particular from Freud is the idea of
structure: the idea that, insofar as we can imagine Freud
anticipating Lacan-- Lacan himself certainly
believed that Freud anticipated him--
the idea that the unconscious is structured like a language.
In terms of creating fictional
plots, in terms of the nature of fiction, which is what interests
Brooks--well, what does this mean?
Aristotle tells us that a plot
has a beginning, a middle and an end.
"Duh!"
of course, is our response,
and yet at the same time we can't understand a degree of
mystery in even so seemingly simple a pronouncement.
A beginning,
of course--well, it has to have a beginning.
We assume that unless we're
dealing with Scheherazade, it has to have an end,
but at the same time we might well ask ourselves,
why does it have a middle? What is the function of the
middle with respect to a beginning and an end?
Why does Aristotle say,
as Brooks quotes him, that a plot should have a
certain magnitude? Why shouldn't it be shorter?
Why shouldn't it be longer?
In other words,
what is the relation of these parts,
and what in particular does the middle have to do with revealing
to us the necessary connectedness of the beginning
and the end: not just any beginning or any end but a
beginning which precipitates a kind of logic,
and an end which in some way, whether tragically or
comically, satisfactorily resolves that
logic? How does all this work?
Brooks believes that he can
understand it, as we'll try to explain,
in psychoanalytic terms. So this he gets from Freud,
and he also gets, as I've already suggested,
the methodological idea that one can think of the
machinations of a text in terms of the distinction that Freud
makes-- not in Beyond the Pleasure
Principle, but in The Interpretation of
Dreams in the passages that you read for today's assignment
taken from that book, The Interpretation of
Dreams, about the dream work.
It's there that Freud argues
that really the central two mechanisms of the dream work are
condensation and displacement. Condensation takes the
essential symbols of the dream and distills them into a kind of
over-determined unity so that if one studies the dream work one
can see the underlying wish or desire expressed in the dream
manifest in a particular symbolic unity.
That's the way in which the
dream condenses, but at the same time the dream
is doing something very, very different,
and it's called displacement. There the essential symbols of
the dream-- that is to say,
the way in which the dream is attempting to manifest that
which it desires, are not expressed in
themselves, but are rather displaced on to sometimes
obscurely related ideas or symbols,
images, or activities that the interpreter,
that the person trying to decode the dream,
needs to arrive at and to understand.
So displacement is a kind of
delay or detour of understanding,
and condensation, on the other hand,
is a kind of distillation of understanding.
The extraordinary thing that
Freud remarks on as he studies dreams in this book--
published in 1905, by the way--the extraordinary
thing about the way in which dreams work is that there seems
to be a kind of coexistence or simultaneity of these effects.
The dream work simultaneously
condenses and displaces that which it is somehow or another
struggling to make manifest as its object of desire.
Now the first person to notice
that there might be-- there are a variety of people
who noticed that there might be a connection between
condensation and displacement and metaphor and metonymy,
most notably Jacques Lacan whom Brooks quotes to this effect:
that the work in everyday discourse,
in what we say but also in our dreams and in what we tell our
analyst, can be understood as operating
through the medium of these two tropes.
Condensation,
in other words, is metaphorical in its nature,
and displacement is metonymic in its nature.
Metonymy is the delay or
perpetual, as we gathered also from Derrida,
différance of signification.
Metaphor is the bringing
together in a statement of identity of the discourse that's
attempting to articulate itself. Again we see in fiction,
as Brooks argues in his essay, that these two rhetorical
tendencies, the metaphorical and metonymic,
coexist-- and of course you can hear the
implicit critique of de Man in the background--
and may or may not work in harmony,
may or may not conduce to an ultimate unity,
but nevertheless do coexist in such a way that we can
understand the unraveling of a fictional narrative as being
like the processes we see at work in the unraveling of
dreams. So it's these two elements that
Brooks is interested in in Freud and that he primarily does take
from Freud. Now this means,
among other things, that Brooks is not anything
like what we may spontaneously caricature perhaps as a
traditional psychoanalytic critic.
Brooks is not going around
looking for Oedipus complexes and phallic symbols.
Brooks is, as I hope you can
see, interested in very different aspects of the
Freudian text, and he says as much at the end
of essay on page 1171 in the right-hand column where he says:
… [T]here can be psychoanalytic criticism of the
text itself that does not become ["This is what I'm
doing," he says]-- as has usually been the case--a
study of the psychogenesis of the text (the author's
unconscious), the dynamics of literary
response (the reader's unconscious),
or the occult motivations of the characters (postulating an
"unconscious" for them).
In other words,
Brooks is not interested in developing a theory of the
author or a theory of character. Now I don't think he really
means to be dismissive of Freudian criticism.
I think he's really just
telling us that he's doing something different from that.
I would remind you in passing
that although we don't pause over traditional Freudian
criticism in this course, it can indeed be extremely
interesting: just for example, Freud's disciple,
Ernest Jones, wrote an influential study of
Shakespeare's Hamlet in which he showed famously that
Hamlet has an Oedipus complex. Think about the play.
You'll see that there's a good
deal in what Jones is saying; and in fact,
famously in the history of the staging and filming of
Shakespeare-- as you probably know,
Sir Laurence Olivier took the role of Hamlet under the
influence of Ernest Jones. In the Olivier production of
Hamlet, let's just say made it
painfully clear in his relations with Gertrude that he had an
Oedipus complex. Again, there were actual sort
of literary texts written directly under the influence of
Freud. One thinks of D.H. Lawrence's
Sons and Lovers, for example,
in which the central character, Paul Morel,
is crippled by an Oedipus complex that he can't master and
the difficulties and complications of the plot are of
this kind. Moving closer to the present,
an important figure in literary theory whom we'll be studying in
this course, Harold Bloom,
can be understood to be developing in his theories of
theoretical text, beginning with The Anxiety
of Influence, a theory of the author--
that is to say, a theory that is based on the
relationship between belated poets and their precursors,
which is to say a relationship between sons and fathers.
So there is a certain pattern
in--and of course, I invoke this pattern in
arguing that Levi-Strauss' version of the Oedipus myth
betrays his Oedipus complex in relation to Freud.
Plainly, Freudian criticism
with these sorts of preoccupations is widespread,
continues sometimes to appear, and cannot simply be discounted
or ignored as an influence in the development of thinking
about literature or of the possibilities of thinking about
literature. But the odd thing,
or maybe not so odd-- the interesting thing,
that is, in Brooks' work is that although the text is not
there to tell us something about its author or to tell us
something about its characters, even though character is
important in fiction and that's what Brooks is primarily talking
about-- although it's not there to do
those things it is nevertheless, like an author or a character,
in many ways alive. That is to say,
the text is there to express desire, to put in motion,
and to make manifest desire or a desire.
That is a rather odd thing to
think about, especially when Brooks goes so far as to say
that he has a particular desire in mind.
The text, in other words,
the structure of the text, or the way in which the text
functions is to fulfill in some way or another a desire for
reduced excitation: that is to say,
the desire which can be associated with the pleasure
principle in sexual terms and can be associated with the idea
of the death wish that Freud develops in Beyond the
Pleasure Principle that I'll be coming back to as the
reduction of excitation that would consist in being dead.
In these ways--and it remains
to see whether, or to what extent,
these ways are cooperative-- Brooks understands the
structure, the delay, the arabesque,
or postponement of the end one finds in the text to involve a
kind of coexistence of the sort that I have been talking about
between relations to the possibility through desire of
reducing excitation, being excited,
and reducing excitation. Now obviously both dreams and
stories don't just express this desire;
they also delay it. I'm sure we have all had the
experience of waking up--it's an experience, by the way,
which is an illusion; it hasn't really been the
case--and thinking that we have been dreaming the same damn
thing all night long: in other words,
that we have just been interminably stuck in a dream
predicament which repeats itself again and again and again to the
point of absolute total tedium. Many of the dreams we have are
neither exciting nor the reverse but simply tedious.
Whatever excitement they may
have entailed in the long run, we feel as we wake up that they
go on too long. Perhaps fiction does have this
superiority over the dream work: that its art,
that its structure, is precisely the protraction of
delay to a desired degree but not unduly beyond that degree.
But it's not just that the
middles of fiction involve these processes of delay.
It's that they seem also--and
this is one of the reasons Brooks does have recourse to
this particular text of Freud-- they also have the curious
tendency to revisit unpleasurable things.
That is to say,
it's not that--the middles of fiction are exciting.
We love to read and everything
we read is a page turner, all to the good;
but the fact is our fascination with reading isn't simply a
fascination that takes the form of having fun.
In fact, so much of what we
read in fiction is distinctly unpleasurable.
We wince away from it even as
we turn the page. One way to put it,
especially in nineteenth-century realism which
particularly interests Brooks, is all these characters are
just madly making bad object choices.
They're falling in love with
the wrong person. They're getting stuck in sticky
situations that they can't extract themselves from because
they're not mature enough, because they haven't thought
things through, and because fate looms over the
possibility of making a better choice--
however the case may be, the experiences that constitute
the middles even of the greatest and the most exciting fiction do
have a tendency, if one thinks about them from a
certain remove, to be unpleasurable.
Why, in other words,
return to what isn't fun, to where it isn't pleasure,
and what can this possibly have to do with the pleasure
principle? Now that's precisely the
question that Freud asked himself in Beyond the
Pleasure Principle, a text which begins with a
consideration of trauma victims. It's written at the end of the
First World War, and you should understand this
text as not isolated in the preoccupation of writers in
Europe. Almost contemporary with
Beyond the Pleasure Principle are novels written in
England partly as a result of the making public of findings of
psychologists about traumatic war victims as the war came to
its conclusion. Most of you have read
Virginia's Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, and you
should recognize that her treatment of Septimus Smith in
Mrs. Dalloway is a treatment of a traumatized war
victim. Rebecca West,
a contemporary and an acquaintance of hers who wrote a
good many novels, wrote one in particular called
The Return of the Soldier, the protagonist of which is
also a traumatized war victim. So it was a theme of the period
and Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle
contributes to this theme. Brooks himself likes to refer
to the text of Beyond the Pleasure Principle as itself
a master plot-- in other words as having a
certain fictive character. It would be,
I think, extremely instructive to read it alongside The
Return of the Soldier or Mrs.
Dalloway for the reasons
I've mentioned. Okay.
So anyway, Freud begins by
saying, "The weird thing about these trauma victims whom
I have had in my office is that in describing their dreams and
even in their various forms of neurotic repetitive behavior,
they seem compulsively to repeat the traumatic experience
that has put them in the very predicament that brought them to
me. In other words,
they don't shy away from it. They don't in any strict sense
repress it. They keep compulsively going
back to it. Why is that?
How can that possibly be a
manifestation of the only kind of drives I had ever thought
existed up until the year 1919, namely drives that we can
associate in one way or another with pleasure--
with the pleasure principle, obviously;
with a sort of implicit sociobiological understanding
that the protraction of life is all about sexual reproduction
and that the displacement or inhibition of the direct drives
associated with that take the form of the desire to succeed,
the desire to improve oneself, and the desire to become more
complex emotionally and all the rest of it?
All of this we can associate
with the pleasure principle. How does this compulsion to
return to the traumatic event in any way correspond to or submit
itself to explanation in terms of the pleasure principle?"
So then he turns to an example
in his own home life, his little grandson,
little Hans, standing in his crib throwing a
spool tied to a string out of the crib saying,
"Fort!" meaning "away,
not there," and then reeling it back in and
saying, "Da!"
meaning "there it is again": "Fort!
Da!"
Why on earth is little Hans doing this?
Well, Freud pretty quickly
figures out that what little Hans is doing is finding a way
of expressing his frustration about the way in which his
mother leaves the room; in other words,
his mother is not always there for him.
So what is this play
accomplishing? He's got her on a string, right?
Sure, she goes away--we have to
understand this: we know our mother goes away,
but guess what? I can haul her back in,
and there she is again. This is the achievement of
mastery, as Freud puts it and as Brooks follows him,
that we can acquire through the repetition of a traumatic event.
So maybe that's the way to
think about it, but it can't just be the
achievement of mastery alone, because nothing can do away
with or undermine the fact that part of the drive involved seems
to be to return to the trauma-- that is to say,
to keep putting before us the unhappy and traumatic nature of
what's involved. So the compulsion to repeat,
which of course manifests itself in adults in various
forms of neurotic behavior-- by the way, we're all neurotic
and all of us have our little compulsions,
but it can get serious in some cases--
the compulsion to repeat takes the form,
Freud argues, especially if we think of it in
terms of an effort at mastery, of mastering in advance through
rehearsal, as it were, the inevitability
of death, the trauma of death which
awaits and which has been heralded by traumatic events in
one's life, a near escape:
for example, in a train accident or whatever
the case may be. So Freud in developing his
argument eventually comes to think that the compulsion to
repeat has something to do with a kind of repeating forward of
an event which is in itself unnarratable:
the event of death, which is of course that which
ultimately looms. Now it's in this context that
Freud begins to think about how it could be that the organism
engages itself with thoughts of this kind.
What is this almost eager
anticipation of death? He notices that in certain
biological organisms, it can be observed--this by the
way has been wildly disputed by people actually engaged in
biology, but it was a useful metaphor
for the development of Freud's argument: he noticed that there
is in certain organisms a wish to return to a simpler and
earlier state of organic existence,
which is to say to return to that which isn't just what we
all look forward to but was, after all, that which existed
prior to our emergence into life.
The relationship between the
beginning and the end that I have been intimating,
in other words, is a relation of death.
I begin inanimate and I end
inanimate, and Freud's argument is that
there is somehow in us a compulsion or a desire,
a drive, to return--like going home again or going back to the
womb to return to that inanimate state.
"The aim of all
life," he then says, "is death."
Well, now maybe the important
thing is to allow Brooks to comment on that so that you can
see how he makes use of Freud's idea and move us a little bit
closer to the application of these ideas to the structure of
a literary plot or of a fictional plot.
So on page 1166 in the
right-hand margin, the beginning of the second
paragraph, Brooks says: We need at present to follow
Freud into his closer inquiry concerning the relation between
the compulsion to repeat and the instinctual.
The answer lies in "a
universal attribute of instinct and perhaps of organic life in
general," that "an instinct is an
urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of
things." Building on this idea,
page 1169, the left-hand column, about halfway down:
This function [of the drives] is concerned "with the
most universal endeavor of all living substance--
namely to return to the quiescence of the inorganic
world." Kind of pleasant,
I guess, right? "The desire to return to
the quiescence of the organic world."
The aim in this context,
in this sense--the aim of all life is death.
But there's more,
and this is why novels are long: not too long,
not too short, but of a certain length--
of a certain magnitude, as Aristotle puts it.
There is more because the
organism doesn't just want to die.
The organism is not suicidal.
That's a crucial mistake that
we make when we first try to come to terms with what Freud
means by "the death wish."
The organism wants to die on
its own terms, which is why it has an
elaborate mechanism of defenses--
"the outer cortex," as Freud is always calling it--
attempting to withstand, to process,
and to keep at arm's length the possibility of trauma.
You blame yourself as a victim
of trauma for not having the sufficient vigilance in your
outer cortex to ward it off. Part of the compulsion to
repeat is, in a certain sense--part of the
hope of mastery in the compulsion to repeat is to keep
up the kind of vigilance which you failed to have in the past
and therefore fail to ward it off.
So the organism only wishes to
die on its own terms. If you are reminded here by the
passage of Tynjanov that I gave you where he makes the
distinction between literary history as evolving and literary
history as modified by outside circumstances,
I think it would be a legitimate parallel.
What the organism,
according to Freud, wants to do is evolve toward
its dissolution, not to be modified--not,
in other words, to be interfered with by
everything from external trauma to internal disease.
It doesn't want that.
It wants to live a rich and
full life. It wants to live a life of a
certain magnitude, but with a view to achieving
the ultimate desired end, which is to return to an
inorganic state on its own terms.
So there is this tension in the
organism between evolving to its end and being modified
prematurely toward an end, a modification which in terms
of fiction would mean you wouldn't have a plot,
right? You might have a beginning,
but you would have a sudden cutting off that prevented the
arabesque of the plot from developing and arising.
Now what Brooks argues
following Freud is that to this end,
the creating of an atmosphere in which with dignity and
integrity, as it were,
> the organism can progress
toward its own end without interference,
as it were--what Brooks following Freud argues is that
in this process, the pleasure principle and the
death wish cooperate. This is on page 1166,
bottom of the right-hand column, and then over to 1167,
a relatively long passage: Hence Freud is able to proffer,
with a certain bravado, the formulation:
"the aim of all life is death."
We are given an evolutionary image of the organism in which
the tension created by external influences has forced living
substance to "diverge ever more widely from its original
course of life and to make ever more complicated
détours before reaching its aim of death."
In this view,
the self-preservative instincts function to assure that the
organism shall follow its own path to death,
to ward off any ways of returning to the inorganic which
are not imminent to the organism itself.
In other words,
"the organism wishes to die only in its own
fashion." It must struggle against events
(dangers) which would help to achieve its goal too rapidly--by
a kind of short-circuit. Again on page 1169,
left-hand column, a little bit farther down from
the passage we quoted before, Brooks says:
… [W]e could say that the repetition compulsion and
the death instinct serve the pleasure principle;
in a larger sense [though], the pleasure principle,
keeping watch on the invasion of stimuli from without and
especially from within, seeking their discharge,
serves the death instinct, making sure that the organism
is permitted to return to quiescence.
It's in this way that these two
differing drives coexist and in some measure cooperate in the
developing and enriching of the good life,
and in the developing and enriching of the good plot.
An obvious problem with this
theory, and Freud acknowledges this
problem in Beyond the Pleasure Principle,
is that it's awfully hard to keep death and sex separate.
In other words,
the reduction of excitation is obviously something that the
pleasure principle is all about. The purpose of sex is to reduce
excitation, to annul desire. The purpose of death,
Freud argues, is to do the same thing.
Well, how can you tell the one
from the other? There's a rich vein of literary
history which insists on their interchangeability.
We all know what "to
die" means in early modern poems.
We all know about
"Liebestod" in "Tristan and
Isolde," the moments of death in
literature which obviously are sexually charged.
There is a kind of manifest and
knowing confusion of the two in literature--
and Freud always says that the poets preceded him in everything
that he thought-- which suggests that it is
rather hard to keep these things separate.
For example,
by the way, the compulsion to repeat nasty episodes,
to revisit trauma, and to repeat the
unpleasurable-- well, that could just be called
masochism, couldn't it? It could be called something
which is a kind of pleasure and which therefore could be
subsumed under the pleasure principle and would obviate the
need for a theory of the death drive as Freud develops it in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Now Freud
acknowledges this. He says that it is difficult to
make the distinction. He feels that a variety of
sorts of clinical evidence at his disposal warrant the
distinction, but it is not an easy one.
It's one that I suppose we
could continue to entertain as a kind of skepticism about this
way of understanding the compulsion to repeat as somehow
necessarily entailing a theory of the death wish.
All right.
Now quickly,
as to the plot: desire emerges or begins as the
narratable. What is the unnarratable?
The unnarratable is that
immersion in our lives such that there is no sense of form or
order or structure. Anything is unnarratable if we
don't have a sense of a beginning, a middle,
and an end to bring to bear on it.
The narratable,
in other words, must enter into a structure.
So the beginning,
which is meditated on by Sartre's Roquentin in La
Nausee and quoted to that effect by Brooks on the
left-hand column of page 1163-- the narratable begins in this
moment of entry into that pattern of desire that launches
a fiction. We have speculated on what that
desire consists in, and so the narratable becomes a
plot and the plot operates through metaphor,
which unifies the plot, which shows the remarkable
coherence of all of its parts. A narrative theory is always
talking with some satisfaction about how there's no such thing
in fiction as irrelevant detail. In other words,
nothing is there by accident. That is the metaphoric pressure
brought to bear on plotting, sort of, in the course of
composition. Everything is there for a
reason, and the reason is arguably the nature of the
underlying desire that's driving the plot forward;
but on the other hand, metonymy functions as the
principle of delay, the detour, the arabesque,
the refusal of closure; the settling upon bad object
choice and other unfortunate outcomes,
the return of the unpleasurable--all the things
that happen in the structure of "middles"
in literary plots. The plot finally binds material
together, and both metaphor and metonymy are arguably forms of
binding. Look at page 1166,
the right-hand column, bottom of the first paragraph.
Brooks says:
To speak of "binding" in a literary text is thus to
speak of any of the formalizations (which,
like binding, may be painful,
retarding) that force us to recognize sameness within
difference, or the very emergence of a
sjužet from the material of fabula.
Okay.
Now I want to turn to Tony
as an instance of the way in which reading for the plot can
take place. I also want to mention that the
choice of these materials for today's assignment is not just a
way into questions of psychoanalysis as they bear on
literature and literary theory, but also a gesture toward
something that those of you whose favorite form of reading
is novels may wish we had a little more of in a course of
this kind-- namely narrative theory:
narratology. I commend to you the opening
pages of Brooks' essay where he passes in review some of the
most important work in narrative theory,
work that I mentioned in passing when I talked about
structuralism a couple of weeks back and work which,
for those of you who are interested in narrative and
narrative theory, you may well wish to revisit.
Roland Barthes,
Tzvetan Todorov, and Gerard Genette are the
figures to whom Brooks is primarily expressing
indebtedness within that tradition.
Anyway: Tony the Tow Truck.
I would suggest that in the
context of Beyond the Pleasure Principle we could
re-title Tony the Tow Truck as The Bumpy Road to
Maturity. It certainly has the
qualities of a picaresque fiction.
It's on the road,
as it were, and the linearity of its plot--
the way in which the plot is like beads on a string,
which tends to be the case with picaresque fiction,
and which by the way is also a metonymic aspect of the
fiction-- lends the feeling of
picturesque to the narrative. Quickly to reread it--I know
that you all have it glued to your wrists, but in case you
don't, I'll reread it: I am Tony the Tow Truck.
I live in a little yellow
garage. I help cars that are stuck.
I tow them to my garage.
I like my job.
One day I am stuck.
Who will help Tony the Tow
Truck? "I cannot help you,"
says Neato the Car. "I don't want to get
dirty." "I cannot help you [see,
these are bad object choices, right?],"
says Speedy the Car. "I am too busy."
I am very sad.
Then a little car pulls up.
It is my friend, Bumpy.
Bumpy gives me a push.
He pushes and pushes [by the
way, this text, I think, is very close to its
surface a kind of anal-phase parable.
In that parable,
the hero is not Tony in fact but a character with whom you
are familiar if you're familiar with South Park,
and that character is of course the one who says,
"He pushes and pushes…"]
and I am on my way." [In any case that is part of
the narrative, and then:]
"Thank you, Bumpy,"
I call back. "You're welcome,"
says Bumpy. Now that's what I call a friend.
So that's the text of Tony
the Tow Truck. Now we've said that it's
picaresque. We can think in terms of
repetition, obviously, as the delay that sets in
between an origin and an end. We've spoken of this in this
case as--well, it's the triadic form of the
folk tale that Brooks actually mentions in his essay;
but it is, in its dilation of the relationship of beginning
and end, a way of reminding us precisely of that relation.
He comes from a little yellow
garage. The question is,
and a question which is perhaps part of the unnarratable,
is he going back there? We know he's on his way,
but we don't know, if we read it in terms of
Beyond the Pleasure Principle,
whether he's on his way back to the little yellow garage or
whether-- and there's a premonition of
this in being stuck, in other words in having broken
down-- whether he's on his way to the
junkyard. In either case,
the only point is that he will go to either place because the
little yellow garage is that from which he came;
in either case--little yellow garage or junkyard--
he's going to get there on his own terms,
but not as a narcissist and not as the person who begins every
sentence in the first part of the story with the word
"I," because you can't just be an
autonomous hero. On your journey,
and this is also true of the study of folklore,
you need a helper. That's part of fiction.
You need another hero.
You need a hero to help you,
and having that hero, encountering the other mind as
helper, is what obviates the tendency,
even in a nice guy like Tony, toward narcissism which is
manifest in the "I," "I,"
"I" at the beginning of the story.
Notice that then the
"I" disappears, not completely but
wherever it reappears it's embedded rather than initial.
It is no longer,
in other words, that which drives the line in
the story. So the arabesque of the plot,
as I say, is a matter of encountering bad
object choices and overcoming them: neatness,
busyness--choices which, by the way,
are on the surface temptations. We all want to be neat and
busy, don't we? But somehow or another it's not
enough because the otherness, the mutuality of regard that
this story wants to enforce as life--
as life properly lived--is not entailed in and of itself in
neatness and busyness. Resolution and closure,
then, is mature object choice and in a certain sense there,
too, it's a push forward, but we don't quite know toward
what. We have to assume,
though, in the context of a reading of this kind that it's a
push toward a state in which the little yellow garage and the
unnarratable junkyard are manifest as one and the same
thing. Now as metonymy,
the delays we have been talking about,
the paratactic structure of the way in which the story is told--
all of those, and the elements of repetition,
are forms that we recognize as metonymic,
but there's something beyond that at the level of theme.
This is a story about cars.
This is a story about
mechanical objects, some of which move--remember
those smiling houses in the background--
and some of which are stationary, but they're all
mechanical objects. They're all structures.
In other words,
they're not organic. This is a world understood from
a metonymic point of view as that which lacks organicity,
and yet at the same time the whole point of the story is
thematically metaphoric. It is to assert the common
humanity of us all: "That's what I call a
friend." The whole point of so many
children's stories, animal stories,
other stories like this, The Little Engine that
Could, and so on is to
humanize the world: to render friendly and warm and
inviting to the child the entire world,
so that Tony is not a tow truck--Tony's a human being,
and he realizes humanity in recognizing the existence of a
friend. The unity of the story,
in other words, as opposed to its metonymic
displacements through the mechanistic,
is the triumphant humanization of the mechanistic and the fact
that as we read the story, we feel that we are,
after all, not in mechanical company but in human company.
That's the effect of the story
and the way it works. In terms of the pleasure
principle then, life is best in a human
universe and in terms of-- well, in terms of Beyond the
Pleasure Principle, the whole point of returning
to an earlier state, the little yellow garage or
junkyard, is to avert the threat that one
being stuck will return to that junkyard prematurely or along
the wrong path. Okay.
So next time we will turn to
the somewhat formidable task of understanding Lacan.
