Full Chapter A Psychological Approach To Fiction Studies in Thackeray Stendhal George Eliot Dostoevsky and Conrad 1St Edition Bernard J Paris PDF
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APSYCHOLOGICAL
APPROACH to FICTION
With a new preface by the author
Originally published in 1974 by Indiana University Press
Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,
and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to
infringe.
Paris, Bernard J.
A psychological approach to fiction : studies in Thackeray, Stendhal, George
Eliot, Dostoevsky, and Conrad / Bernard J. Paris ; with a new preface by the
author.
p. cm.
Originally published: Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1974.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4128-1317-4
1. Fiction--19th century--History and criticism. 2. Psychology and literature.
I. Title.
PN3499.P3 2010
809’.3’83--dc22
2009046333
Preface ix
Preface to the Transaction Edition xiii
I The Uses of Psychology: Characters
and Implied Authors 1
II The Psychology Used: Horney,
Maslow and the Third Force 28
III The Psychic Structure of Vanity Fair 71
IV The Transformation of Julien Sorel 133
V The Inner Conflicts of Maggie Tulliver 165
VI The Withdrawn Man: Notes from
Underground 190
VII The Dramatization of Interpretation:
Lord Jim 215
VIII Powers and Limitations of the Approach 275
Notes 291
Index 301
Preface
interpersonal behavior that form the matter {and often the struc-
ture) of a good many novels and plays. In addition to applying
her theories to the characters and implied authors of five realistic
novels, in Chapters III through VII, I suggest in my concluding
remarks a variety of other possible uses.
The five novels to be discussed here were chosen not only
because they are all helpfully illuminated by Horneyan psychol-
ogy, but also because they offer an interesting variety of personal-
ity types, of modes of characterization, and of narrative tech-
niques. Comparing the novels with each other will help us to
determine the virtues and defects of various modes of narration
and the kinds of insight for which realistic fiction is most properly
a vehicle.
In the course of writing this book I have been fortunate enough
to incur many debts. Theodore Millon first made me aware of
Karen Horney; Max Bruck has helped me to become aware of
myself. I have had the opportunity to discuss Horney's thought
with Doctors Harold Kelman, Helen Boigon, Norman J. Levy,
Isidore Portnoy, Ralph Slater, Bella S. Van Bark, and Joseph
Vollmerhausen, all of whom are practitioners and teachers ofher
theory. Doctors Kelman, Boigon, and Portnoy have read Chapter
II and have given me the benefit of their advice. Abraham Maslow
was kind enough to read this chapter also, and to assure me that
it is accurate.
Herbert Josephs has discussed Stendhal with me many times;
he and Laurence Porter have read my chapter on The Red and the
Black and have shared with me their expert knowledge of the
French text. Denis Mickiewicz has checked my quotations and my
reading of Notes from Underground against the Russian original.
Portions of this work have been read by Michael Steig, Richard
Berchan, Richard Benvenuto, Joseph Waldmeir, Sam Baskett,
Lore Metzger, Barry Gross, E. Fred Carlisle, Avrom Fleishman,
J. Hillis Miller, and Frederick Crews; I am grateful to all of them
for their comments. Michael Wolf, George Levine, Mark Spilka,
xii Preface
time and kept changing too constantly to write anything new. I moved
to Michigan State University in 1960 and knew that I had to publish, but
writing my dissertation had been such an ordeal that I did not want to go
through that again. I had come out of graduate school with enough mate-
rial to give me some breathing space, but I was afraid that I would not be
able to write anything new unless I again had my back to the wall.
I went into therapy to get help with my difficulty writing but discov-
ered, of course, that I had many more problems that needed to be resolved.
Although my therapist was not a Horneyan, I kept reading Horney, who
seemed to be writing about me; but I made no connection between what
I was learning about human behavior and my professional activity as a
teacher and critic of literature.
Then in 1964 I had an “aha” experience that led to the writing of this
book and to all of my subsequent work. While teaching Vanity Fair from
a thematic perspective, I found it to be full of inconsistencies of which
I was unable to make any sense. In the process of preparing my notes,
I suddenly remembered Horney’s statement that inconsistencies are as
sure a sign of inner divisions as a rise in body temperature is of a physi-
ological disorder; and in the next instant I began to see that the novel’s
thematic contradictions do make sense as part of a system of psychologi-
cal conflicts. As I continued to ponder the novel, I realized that Becky,
Dobbin, and Amelia are brilliantly drawn characters whose motivations
and personalities are also illuminated by Horney’s theories.
While I was revising my dissertation for publication, I did not reread
George Eliot’s fiction because I did not want to take the chance of find-
ing that I no longer agreed with what I had written; but by1964 the book
was in press; and while teaching The Mill on the Floss, I read the novel
again. I found myself arguing with George Eliot’s rhetoric, which I had
embraced before, but being awe-struck by her mimetic portrait of Maggie,
which I had entirely missed in my earlier readings. At that time I was
teaching not only Victorian literature but also courses in comparative
fiction, involving novels from a variety of national literatures; and as I
saw the books I was teaching from my new psychological perspective,
the idea for this study began to form.
xviii Preface to the Transaction Edition
This book was a long time in the making—it was published nine
years after my first because I had to continue my education in order to
qualify myself to write it. I did a great deal of reading in psychological
theory and sat in on courses in the Psychology Department at Michigan
State. I consulted with Horneyan analysts and submitted drafts of my
chapters to them for comment. In the course of my reading, I discovered
a number of other theorists who are highly compatible with Horney and
who, together with her, belong to Third Force or Humanistic Psychol-
ogy. These include Erich Fromm, Carl Rogers, Ernest Schachtel, and
especially Abraham Maslow. I sent a draft of Chapter 2 of this book
to Maslow, who enthusiastically wrote back that it was “excellent and
accurate.” Given my lack of formal training in psychology, I needed
assurance that I knew what I was talking about. I deepened my study
of literary theory as well so that I could explore the implications of my
approach and place it in relation to others.
Once I began to look at literature from a Third Force perspective, I
felt that I should try out other modes of psychological criticism. I offered
courses in which I employed a variety of theories, as did colleagues with
whom I sometimes team-taught. I came to realize that while Third Force
psychology works really well with numerous literary texts, there are also
many with which other theories are a better fit; and I utilized whatever
theory seemed most appropriate for what I was teaching. Although I have
used a wide range of theories in the classroom, in writing I have confined
myself to the ones I feel that I understand best, both intellectually and in
terms of my own experience.
I have also confined myself to texts with which the theories I use seem
highly congruent. Many authors have intuitively grasped and mimeti-
cally portrayed the same patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior that
Third Force psychology helps us to comprehend conceptually. No theory
accounts for everything—the human psyche is too complex and multi-
faceted for that; but Horney and Maslow deal with major components of
human psychology and illuminate works from a wide variety of periods
and national literatures. Maslow’s hierarchy of basic needs manifests
itself differently in different times and societies, but it seems to be an
Preface to the Transaction Edition xix
BJP
Gainesville, Florida
August 2009
Chapter I
expect is in fact the case; the new critic, when dealing with fiction,
is thrown back upon an interest in imagery, symbolism or struc-
tural features which have little to do with characterization. (p. 200)
The danger that the critic of novels must now be warned against
is not the neglect of harmonia, but the neglect of mimesis; for
harmonia has had its due of late, and "a mimetic intention" was,
after all, "the central concern of the novel until the end of the
nineteenth century" (p. 205).
No study of character should ignore the fact that characters in
fiction participate in the dramatic and thematic structures of the
works in which they appear and that the meaning of their behav-
ior is often to be understood in terms of its function within these
structures. The less mimetic the fiction, the more completely will
the characters be intelligible in terms of their dramatic and the-
matic functions; and even in highly realistic fiction, the minor
characters are to be understood more functionally than psycho-
logically. But, as Harvey points out, the authors of the great
realistic novels "display an appetite and passion for life which
threatens to overwhelm the formal nature of their art" (pp. 187-
188). There is in such novels "a surplus margin of gratuitous life,
a sheer excess of material, a fecundity of detail and invention, a
delighted submergence in experience for its own sake" (p. 188).
The result is "that characterization often overflows the strict
necessities ofform" (p. 188). This is especially true in the charac-
terization of the protagonists, of"those characters whose motiva-
tion and history are most fully established, who conflict and
change as the story progresses ... " (p. 56). What we attend to
in the protagonist's story "is the individual, the unique and
particular case . . . . We quickly feel uneasy if the protagonist
is made to stand for something general and diffused; the more
he stands for the less he is" (p. 67). Though such characters
have their dramatic and thematic functions, they are "in
a sense ... end-products"; we often feel that "they are what
4 A Psychological Approach to Fiction
the distinctive role which the novel has added to literature's more
ancient preoccupation with portraying 'life by values' " (p. 22).
The domain of the novel is the individual and his social relation-
ships, and it tends to present its subject less in terms of ethical
categories than in terms of chronological and causal sequences.
The distinctive characteristics of the novel are, for Watt, its em-
phasis upon the particular, its circumstantial view of life, and its
full and authentic reporting of experience (pp. 31-32).
To our statement that the novel's primary impulse is a mimetic
one, we must add the qualification that the reality imitated is not
general nature or the world ofldeas, but the concrete and tempo-
ral reality of modern empirical thought. The novel came into
being in a world dominated by secularism and individualism, a
world in which men were losing their belief in the supernatural
and institutional bases of life. "Both the philosophical and the
literary innovations," says Watt, "must be seen as parallel mani-
festations of a larger change-that vast transformation of West-
ern civilization since the Renaissance which has replaced the
unified world picture of the Middle Ages with another very differ-
ent one-one which presents us, essentially, with a developing
but unplanned aggregate of particular individuals having particu-
lar experiences at particular times and at particular places" (p.
31).
For Erich Auerbach the foundations of modern realism are,
first, "the serious treatment of everyday reality, the rise of more
extensive and socially inferior human groups to the position of
subject matter for problematic-existential representation"; and,
second, "the embedding of random persons and events in the
general course of contemporary history, the fluid historical back-
ground. "9 Throughout A1irnesis Auerbach is concerned with the
contrast between the classical moralistic and the problematic
existential ways of presenting reality. The distinction is basically
between the representation of life in terms of fixed canons of
style and of ethical categories which are a priori and static, and
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