Encyclopedia of Literature and Criticism

Just as the productive apparatus of the book trade conforms to the larger social formation, so do(es) the reading public(s). In the sixteenth century, the class divisions of the reading public were clearly demarcated by the Act of 1543 which decreed that for the ‘advancement of true religion’ the reading of the Bible in English was forbidden to women, artificers, apprentices, yeomen and all lower orders. This strict hierarchical regimentation of readers was unmanageable with the growth of individualism, class mobility and the spread of literacy in the mid-sixteenth century. (It is estimated that four times as many titles were produced in 1550 than in 1500.)

Modern reviewing of creative literature has had to make an uneasy pact with mass-market advertising. A number of the main organs of review—for instance the London Review of Books and New York Review of Books—were started opportunistically during protracted newspaper strikes (of the New York Times and Times Newspaper London groups). It is quite common, in journals like the TLS or the Sunday Times literary supplement, to see a review of a book—for which the reviewer may receive around £150—in company with an advertisement for the same book that may have cost up to five times as much. Maintaining critical neutrality in such circumstances requires great editorial firmness.

All readings, in so far as they are an orderly expression of incoherency, are just another aberrant narrative. This is the unmasterable irony. All we have is an allegory of reading, an allegory that speaks of something other than the closed economy of its own exposition. ‘Allegory is sequential and narrative, yet the topic of its narration is not necessarily temporal at all’, says de Man in a late text, and this condenses the de Manian notion of the relationship between understanding and language (1986, p. 1). This process was thematized in de Man’s earlier work of the sixties as the necessary co-implication of critical blindness and insight (de Man, 1983).

Language is the place where the personal and the cultural intersect, where there is a constant displacement of meaning. One of the difficulties of psychoanalytic reader-theory has been the problem of assigning an unconscious to the text: for Lacan transference is a process that goes on in language, but, because the unconscious is that residue or excess that cannot be defined, there will always be gaps that neither author nor reader will finally be able to fill in. Both author and reader are controlled by the strategies of language.

The post-Freudian critics who stayed with Freud’s libido theory were critical of the approach based on Freud’s dynamic model of the psychic apparatus, showing the pleasure principle opposed to the reality principle. They developed an approach based on Freud’s structural model of the psyche as having three groups of functions (id, ego and superego), and concentrated on the ego as an adaptive agency. This shifted the emphasis in three respects: (1) the ego was seen as a creative force in its own right, the emphasis initially moving from the author to the text and its formal qualities (Empson, 1930; Kris, 1964); (2) aesthetic form was seen as giving pleasure and regulating anxiety (Lesser, 1957); (3) the focus of interest gradually shifted from text to reader, leading to a psychoanalytic reader-response theory.

In keeping with his belief in an innate force, Jung sees the act of creation as an ‘autonomous complex’, originating in the unconscious (Jung, 1972). Hence for him there can be no question of analysing the work on the basis of the artist’s or reader’s personal psychology. Nor does Jung avail himself of the method of ‘free association’, since it is not the personal unconscious of the writer or reader that is at stake. He decodes texts, be they patients or literature, by a method he calls ‘amplification’, whereby images of the personal unconscious are immediately extended to those of the collective.

Classical applied psychoanalysis has analysed the literary work as a symptom of a particular artist. This has led to certain well-known presuppositions, such as the work of literature as analogous to a fantasy, within which the literary character is treated as if he or she were a living being and all figures become symbols which are part of a given and rigid code. This approach rests on the assumption that the purpose of the work of art is what psychoanalysis has found to be the purpose of the dream: the secret gratification of an infantile and forbidden wish.