Abstract
The man bent over his guitar . . . They said, “You have a blue guitar, You do not play things as they are.” The man replied, “Things as they are Are changed upon the blue guitar.” And they said then, “But play, you must, A tune beyond us, yet ourselves, A tune upon the blue guitar Of things exactly as they are. —Wallace Stevens, 1937
In her searching 1998 study The Repeal of Reticence, Rochelle Gurstein asks what happened to the sacred value of privacy. The present essay, inspired by Jeffrey Berman’s recent book on Norman Holland (Norman N. Holland: The Dean of American Psychoanalytic Literary Critics, 2021), grapples implicitly with Gurstein’s question. I read Berman to ponder, implicitly, time-honored themes of subjectivity and objectivity in the context of a 21st-century American culture that places ever increasing emphasis on self-revelation and, pari passu, on relational, transactional versions of psychoanalysis that have all but replaced a former ideal of the psychoanalyst as remote, silent, and reserved.
As a nearly lifelong devotee of psychoanalytic approaches to the arts, I am grateful for the opportunity to ruminate on Jeffrey Berman’s complex tribute to his erstwhile mentor and late friend, Norman Holland (1927–2017). Holland will be remembered as a preeminent American contributor to the complex, fruitful, but occasionally disputatious dialogue between psychoanalysis and literary criticism and, indeed, as one of its progenitors in the United States, most especially as a promoter of reader-response criticism (about which more later). It is fitting that he and his work be reconsidered by a devotee, a professor of English literature, and, like Holland, a significant sojourner in these interdisciplinary fields. At the outset, it may be of interest to identify both Holland and Berman as academics who use psychoanalytic ideas in their scholarship rather than as clinical practitioners. The same is true for the author of this essay.
In our day, when an unfamiliar citation appears, usual practice entails whipping out a portable phone and looking it up on Wikipedia, thus obtaining instant information. Because of this ubiquitous practice, I have not taken space to recount readily obtainable facts about Holland. (Wikipedia will surface again later on.) Instead, this essay concerns Berman’s project of writing his intellectual (auto)biography, explores the value of disclosure versus reticence in its relation to truth, and gives voice to this reader’s idiosyncratic reactions to Berman’s book, an endeavor that neatly matches a core tenet of the book itself. For Berman advocates repeatedly for openness and self-disclosure—features without which, some would claim, there cannot be true psychoanalytic work of any kind. Yet we might pause to reflect that, however necessary these strongly advocated features of openness and self-disclosure may be to psychoanalytic inquiry per se, they are not essential features of literary criticism. Indeed, to read this book might be to come away pondering whether these features constitute criteria for (good) psychoanalytic criticism as opposed to nonpsychoanalytic criticism, at least as implied by Berman. “Good” in parentheses suggests merely that theories and their practice can be judged fairly only by examining superior rather than lesser examples of them.
As case in point, when the late art historian Leo Steinberg (1984) once railed in the pages of the New York Review of Books against the practice of psychoanalytic art criticism by attacking a particular example, a book—as it happened—on Michelangelo by a practicing psychoanalyst, a book Steinberg judged weak and ill-conceived (not at all, by the way, for reasons of failure to disclose aspects of the critic’s own biography), I rebutted his diatribe by claiming that to damn a whole practice on the basis of one example, one should at the very least choose the best example one can find of that practice and then show how and why it falls short. To attack a lesser example could scarcely be deemed a sufficient basis for condemning an entire practice. After tasting and recoiling from one sour grape, one would be reckless to proclaim all grapes unpalatable!
Berman, having braved the risks of self-revelation, enters his own book freely and frequently, and every now and then, he chides Holland for not doing the same, that is, for withholding aspects of himself from his written oeuvre. But does good psychoanalytic criticism require self-disclosure, and, if so, how much and in what forms? Could some measure of it be kept private, unshared with readers, and yet serve just as cogently, sub rosa, to illuminate? That latter model, presumably, would match the time-honored tradition of analysts’ maintaining anonymity vis-à-vis their ongoing work with patients, a tradition that has been widely replaced in our day by transactional, relational forms of psychanalysis in which analysts are not expected to be blank slates. More fundamentally, whichever technique is preferred, it seems patent that unconscious mental function, taken seriously, entails the humbling recognition that self-revelation is forever doomed to be partial and distorted. In theory, such disclosures could provide a useful context to evaluate the veracity of the reviewer’s direct commentary on the work, but even armed with that knowledge, how might readers be expected to parse the inevitable gaps and falsifications inherent in the self-revelations of a critic? Beyond such considerations, the very crafting of a written text entails performative elements, stagings, governed by factors both deliberate and not. Conundrums such as the foregoing may bubble up in readers’ minds in the course of Berman’s questing book on Holland, and their implicit presence in the text offers a gift.
Aspirational openness and self-disclosure are hallmarks of Berman’s writing. Attentively turning his pages, we learn about the author himself as well as about Holland, and indeed boundaries between subject and object tend to blur, intentionally, and perhaps otherwise. Berman affords ready access to his feelings about the person who is the subject of his book. He writes that two voices can be heard in his book. “Both voices, the personal and the scholarly,” he says, “reflect my complicated feelings toward the man and his work. These two voices conjure up my many different feelings toward him, fear, and anger when I was an undergraduate, affection, admiration, and trust years later” (p. 7). Betokening a strong personal identification between himself and Holland, he writes, “I have always appreciated Norm’s heartfelt dedication of each book to his beloved Jane; I dedicate my books to my beloved Barbara, who was my muse in life” (p. 4) Later on, as this ambivalent twinning persists, we learn that both men, after losing their cherished wives, move on eventually to begin successful new relationships with other women later in life and share this consolation with one another (pp. 233–235).
Berman quotes relevant passages from his own previous writing, professional and personal, including letters he sent to Holland, and he gives his readers arresting background information concerning his own life and its intersections with that of Holland in the name of “full disclosure” (p. 1), as he writes, using, perhaps ironically, the currently fashionable term to explain his private, extraprofessional interest in Holland. His revelations stimulate readers to ponder whether such a practice enhances an intellectual biography like this or slants it: that is, in what relation do the authorial revelations stand to truth? We begin as early as pages 1 and 2, where Berman tells us that, as a senior in college, he prevailed upon Holland to save the career of a junior faculty member with whom Berman had happily studied and whose reappointment was in danger. Although the instructor in question was temporarily spared, owing possibly in part to Berman’s supplication and to Holland’s intervention, this teacher was subsequently dismissed and eventually committed suicide (after first phoning Berman to tell him so). Naturally, this suicide was catastrophic for Berman, who writes, “I needed a scapegoat, and Holland was an easy target” (p. 2). Fast-forward to Berman’s own academic career, when the scene replays. This time minus a tragic ending. Berman, now at risk for the success of his own review process (the committee had recommended against tenure and promotion), is rescued by an outside letter from Holland, a letter that Holland photocopies and sends to Berman. Berman summarizes: “Bad father had become good father!” (p. 2).
As readers progress through the book, these early anecdotes cannot but resonate as they are meant to. And they subtly affect the way readers experience the text and our relation to the Norman Holland of this book. Just as in the case of “reader-response criticism” (about which more shortly), I suspect that each reader will assimilate the author’s autobiographical material differently. For some, it may prove a deep way in; for others, a muddying of the waters; for still others, a prod to rethink how to write an intellectual biography of this sort; for yet others, a challenge to try and repress the authorial self-revelations so as to concentrate on the more “objective” elements (specifically on Holland per se and his fiction and nonfiction work, both of which Berman reviews in detail), but this may prove hard. To dismiss authorial intervention here would be to row strenuously against the tide, for Berman insists on the priority of his subjectivity and entwines his own psyche with that of Holland. He plays Holland upon his blue guitar.
Berman’s self-referential impulses recall to mind, and may have been influenced by, a landmark critical text of 1994 (reissued in 2013), written by Susan Suleiman. A showstopper when it appeared, Risking Who One Is brought feminist preoccupations into literary criticism by contending, similar to Berman, that one’s critical work cannot be disentangled from the trajectory of one’s ordinary life, intellectual and otherwise. Suleiman, resisting the notion that criticism can be objective, claims it as personal and political, as well as psychological and professional. At first, she was a lone voice and suffered ridicule, but as time passed, ideas like hers gradually became absorbed into the scholarly repertoire; by now, they have seeped wholesale into academic life and become a normal part of classroom pedagogy in the humanities. Suleiman forcefully maintains, furthermore, that personal criticism of the sort she advocates entails taking risks. Risk-taking is what truth requires (my formulation, not hers). Taking a chance requires courage—courage, which, as we know, is prerequisite for sustaining the rigors of a successful psychoanalytic treatment, clinical or cultural.
Berman’s work dovetails with Suleiman’s not only when he reveals aspects of his own life but especially when he describes his project initially by saying, “I realize, in retrospect, that the tone of my remarks is not only celebratory but also perhaps panegyrical” (p. 5), but then goes on stunningly for 250 pages to criticize Holland on many counts, as well as to praise him. Berman takes Holland to task, for example, when he says, “Neither the real nor the fictional Holland discloses anything about his life that might have been painful or shameful: no major regrets, failures, or traumas” (p. 181). He also chides Holland for writing at times “with evangelical fervor” and for failing to acknowledge “the limitations of Freudian theory, particularly with respect to female psychology” (p. 61). He takes Holland to task for his excessive (inappropriate) cheerfulness. And despite his claims to extol, Berman dutifully reports negative criticisms of Holland by reviewers (p. 111). Berman chooses the word paradox in several places to refer to Holland, but it is noteworthy that Berman himself also instantiates paradox on several registers as he bravely proceeds to play his tune and to give us his multivalent, intermingled composition.
Holland has been particularly associated with a genre of literary criticism known as “reader response.” This approach, developed initially by Wolfgang Iser (1926–2007), postulates, in brief, that readers play an active part in cocreating texts as they read. Iser had the notion of an “implied reader” within the text, but his work was elaborated and developed by others, such as Holland, who claimed that, beyond inferred meaning within the text, readers experience a given literary text according to what they bring to it as individuals. In effect, every reader of the same book experiences a different book while simultaneously reading the identical words on the page. As Berman sympathizes with Holland’s use of this approach and considers it valuable, I wonder whether and how that notion might have influenced the way he, Berman, has organized his present book in formal terms. While certainly not literature per se, Berman’s book can be subjected (as I have been doing in this essay) to the same “reader response” analysis as that for which he and Holland advocate vis-à-vis literature, and indeed for which his book pleads.
In addition to Berman’s “reader response” to Holland, which, as I aver, animates his pages, let’s consider his chosen form. We have reason to do so because that form may actually strike some readers as unusual and because a good case can be made that we distinguish literature from other categories of writing principally by its concern with form. Literary critics are, consequently, extra sensitive to form and likely to take form into consideration with respect to their own writing. Here, Berman organizes his book into astonishingly small units of text. He subdivides each of his 10 chapters into sound bite–like morsels, some less than half a page in length, others a page or two or three, rarely four. Each chapter fragment boasts a boldface title, sometimes with literary aspirations: “Fathers and Sons,” “Absence and Presence,” “Seeing a Merlin,” “Dangerous Empathy.” It will be interesting to see the effect of this formal choice on his readers’ response.
As my essay is admittedly idiosyncratic, I’ll confess to my own initial reaction of surprise. The titled tidbits plummeted me out of my tactile, printed, paginated paper-book world into a Wikipedia-like virtual realm, where short entries often appear disjoint and underdeveloped: conceptual nibbles that leave me intellectually hungry. If links between them go missing, follow-through and sustained reflection go as well and, if the construction of a meaningful linear argument is seen as a lofty goal in expository writing, this mode of organization evades it. Yet when a text lacks sustained argument, resultant gaps may entice readers to fill them in, in which case this form works as a stimulant. My reaction, therefore, may not match that of other readers who, to the contrary, welcome its concision. Others may feel invited in by its mosaic structure, the tesserae of which match screened fragments in the virtual arenas by which today’s readers are increasingly held in thrall. Perhaps these two forms, the traditional long form (more finished) and this fractional style (more open), could be juxtaposed as a crude analog to the two forms of psychoanalysis mentioned above.
Berman’s book, organized in this fashion, offers a cornucopia of delectable aperçus worth sampling and savoring. One noteworthy example appears in his engagement with Holland’s writing on F. Scott Fitzgerald. Berman quotes Fitzgerald: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function” (p. 134). This maxim seems perfectly equilibrated for inclusion here, as Berman’s own book is riddled with ambivalence, marching steadfastly toward its conclusion, in which he attests that, by writing it, he has transformed Holland “from a ghost into an ancestor” (p. 258).
Wallace Stevens’s poem “The Man With the Blue Guitar,” quoted at the beginning of this essay, poses the question of truth: how do we “play things as they are”? Equipped with his own version of the blue guitar and its polyphonies, Berman gamely engages this theme. He does so in part by overlapping with Gurstein’s and Suleiman’s questions, by daring to put himself into his narrative—so that he can gently prod his readers to put themselves in as well and to think for themselves as they work their way slowly through his text. Unlike science, music, art, and philosophy do not progress. “What is truth?” “Where are the boundaries between myself and another?” “Is all knowledge good?” The questions perdure. They are as viable today as ever before. Here, in Berman’s book on Norman Holland, they resonate anew, quickened by “a tune beyond us, yet ourselves.”