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Unity Identity Text Self

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Norman N. Holland
Norman N. Holland*
Affiliation:
Center for the Psychological Study of the Arts, State University of New York, Buffalo
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Abstract

Understanding the receptivity of literature, how one work admits many readers, begins with an analogy: unity is to text as identity is to self. Unity here means the way all a text’s features can be related through one central theme. Identity describes a person’s sameness within different behaviors as variations on one identity theme (Lichtenstein). To find unity or identity, however, the interpreter himself plays a behavioral variation on his identity theme. In interpreting, his identity re-creates itself as he shapes the text to match his characteristic defenses, fantasies, and coherences. Thus, what a poet says about fictional, political, or scientific texts expresses the same identity theme as the poems he writes. To understand reading, criticism, and any knowing or making in symbols, then, we need to let go the Cartesian craving for objectivity and accept the themes in ourselves with which we construe the world—including literary works.

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Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 90 , Issue 5 , October 1975 , pp. 813 - 822
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1975

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References

Notes

1 Phaedms, 264C. Poetics, Sec. viii and 1459a20.

2 “The Art of Fiction” (1884), in The Great Critics, ed. James H. Smith and Edd Winfield Parks, 3rd ed. (New York: Norton, 1951), p. 661.

3 “Literary Criticism,” in The Aims and Methods of Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literature, ed. James Thorpe (New York: MLA, 1963), p. 65.

4 A Glossary of Psychoanalytic Terms and Concepts, ed. Burness E. Moore and Bernard D. Fine (New York: American Psychoanalytic Association, 1967), s.v. “Self.”

5 Erikson, Identity: Youth and Crisis (New York: Norton, 1968), p. 50. Leites, The New Ego: Pitfalls in Current Thinking about Patients in Psychoanalysis (New York: Science House, 1971), Chs. viii-xiv.

6 Lichtenstein, “Identity and Sexuality: A Study of Their Interrelationship in Man,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 9 (1961), 179–260; “The Dilemma of Human Identity: Notes on Self-Transformation, Self-Objectivation and Metamorphosis,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 11 (1963), 173–223; “The Role of Narcissism in the Emergence and Maintenance of a Primary Identity,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 45 (1964), 49–56; “Towards a Metapsychological Definition of the Concept of Self,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 46(1965), 117–28.

7 De Anima, ii.l.412bll, trans. J. A. Smith, in Introduction to Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random, 1947), p. 172.

8 The responses of readers to this story are reported and analyzed in detail in my 5 Readers Reading (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1975). In “A Letter to Leonard,” Hartford Studies in Literature, 5 (1973), 9–30, I have described how these larger-than-expected differences make the usual explanation of the variability of literary response inadequate. It is usually said that the literary text embodies norms for an infinite number of experiences which its several readers each partially achieve. One can explain the very many and very different readings of a text mere economically (or more Occamically), however, by saying the differences come from the very many and very different readers rather than the text which, after all, remains the same and is demonstrably not infinite.

Incidentally, it is the close analysis of what readers actually say about what they read that differentiates, on the one hand, the work of what has been called the “Buffalo school of psychoanalytic critics” or the literary use of communication theory by Elemér Hankiss in Budapest from, on the other, the “affective stylistics” of Stanley E. Fish or more philosophical statements on response by Wolfgang Iser and Hans Robert Jauss of the Universitat Konstanz. Compare, e.g., this essay or Hankiss, “Shakespeare's Hamlet: The Tragedy in the Light of Communication Theory,” Acta Litteraria Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, 12 (1970), 297–312, with Fish, “Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics,” New Literary History, 2 (1970), 123–62, Iser, “Indeterminacy and the Reader's Response in Prose Fiction,” Aspects of Narrative, ed. J. Hillis Miller, English Institute Essays (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 1–45, or Jauss, “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory,” New Literary History, 2 (1970), 7–37.

9 These principles are evidenced and more fully stated in my Poems in Persons (New York: Norton, 1973) and 5 Readers Reading.

10 1 have described at length this transformational process and the way the reader uses materials from the literary work to achieve it in The Dynamics of Literary Response (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1968), Chs. i-vi.

11 Amy Lowell, A Critical Fable (Boston: Houghton, 1922), p. 22.

12 “At Stratford-on-Avon,” Ideas of Good and Evil (London: A. H. Bullen, 1903), p. 162.

13 My first quotation is from a letter to Lesley Frost Francis, 1 March 1939, Family Letters of Robert and Elinor Frost, ed. Arnold Grade (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1972), p. 210. Most of the rest come from the first 2 vols, of the Lawrance Thompson biography: Robert Frost: The Early Years, 1874–1915,i (New York: Holt, 1966) and Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph, 1915–1938, ii (New York: Holt, 1970). “Thestyle is the man” (ii, 421). Reading tastes (i, 549). “Greatest of all attempts” (ii, 694 and 364). Two remarks on science (ii, 649–50). Emerson (i, 70–71). Synecdoche (ii, 693). “I am a mjstic” (i, 550). “Every poem is an epitome” (i, xxii). “When in doubt there is always form” (i, xxiii). Quotations that use the phrase, “The Figure a Poem Makes,” are from that essay, preface to the 1939 and succeeding editions of his collected poems. “I never dared be radical” is from the poem “Precaution” (1936).

While this essay was in MS, C. Barry Chabot published a searching and convincing—and confirmatory—formulation of Frost's central theme: the created as a wall against a giant invader (“The ‘Melancholy Dualism’ of Robert Frost,” Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry, 13,1974,42–56).

14 “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming” (1908), Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1959), ix, 153.

15 In this paragraph, I am drawing on ideas developed in an essay by Murray Schwartz, “The Space of Psychological Criticism,” Hartford Studies in Literature, 5 (1973), x-xxi.

16 The Seventeenth Century Background: Studies in the Thought of the Age in Relation to Poetry and Religion (1934; rpt. Garden City: Doubleday, 1953), pp. 12–14.