Formalism and the Freudian aesthetic

Formalism and
the Freudian aesthetic
The example of Charles Mauron

LINDA HUTCHEON

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Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

Hutcheon, Linda, 1947-
Formalism and the Freudian aesthetic.
Includes bibliographies and index.
1. Mauron, Charles - Biography - Careers. 2. Formal-
ism (Literary analysis). 3. Psychoanalysis and litera-
ture. 4. Criticism. 5. Aesthetics. 6. Critics
France - Biography. 7. Authors, French - 20th century -
Biography. I. Title.
PN75.M33H87 1984 840'.9 [B] 83-23211

ISBN-13 978-0-521-26302-3 hardback

ISBN-10 0-521-26302-6 hardback

ISBN-13 978-0-521-02795-3 paperback

ISBN-10 0-521-02795-0 paperback
 Contents

Preface page vii

Acknowledgments xiv
Introduction i
Part I The critical formation: science, formalism,
and aesthetic contemplation
1 Early roots: science, Bloomsbury, and Roger Fry 17
2 The attraction of formalism 35
3 Art and science 52
4 Toward psycho critique: from "spiritual" to
"psychological" 62
Part II Psychoanalysis and literary criticism
5 Scientific psychology and art 97
6 Psychoanalysis and psycho critique 115
7 Psycho critique: formalism, science, and the value
of problems 134
8 Psycho critique and the modern French critical context 163

Conclusion 185
 Contents

Appendixes
A Critical works of Charles Mauron referred to in
this study 201
B Translations by Charles Mauron 207
Translations of E. M. Forster 209
Translations of Virginia Woolf 209
Translation of Roger Fry 209
Translations of T. E. Lawrence 210
Translation of Laurence Sterne 210
Translation of D. H. Lawrence 210
Translation of Katherine Mansfield 210
Translation of T. F. Powys 210
Translation of I. Zangwill 210
C Published poetry and prose of Charles Mauron 211
D Works of Sigmund Freud referred to in this study 214
Notes 216
Index 241

vi
 Preface

T HIS IS A study with a double focus: In the first place it

seeks to chart the parallel revaluation of both formalism
and psychology in twentieth-century literary criticism by
using the work and career of the French critic Charles Mauron
(1899-1966) as both a diachronic and a synchronic scaffolding. Us-
ing a structure of biography and literary history, it investigates
Mauron's rather odd position both inside and outside two different
critical contexts, the French and the English - a position that makes
his work a particularly revealing kind of reflection of the diverse
critical trends and tensions of our age. As a product of modernism,
Mauron was aware of and open to the seeming contradictions of
both formalist and psychoanalytic aesthetic theories, although for
ultimately different reasons: He was both a literary critic, intent
upon investigating the forms and structures, as well as the meaning,
of literary objects, and an aesthetician, concerned with the nature
of the aesthetic experience, of the conditions of mind related to the
production and comprehension of those objects. Mauron is best
known as the formulator of a psychoanalytic approach to literature
for which is reserved, in the French language and in this book, the
name psycho critique. The full account of the genesis and development
of this approach that will be provided in the Introduction has been
deemed necessary, for it is only in the light of this final product
that the stages in Mauron's development take on their particular

Vll
 Preface
significance: They reveal his attempts to solve a personal dual al-
legiance, to "objective" science and to "subjective" art, and they
also serve as one characteristic manifestation of what some would
call a "paradigm," in an extension of Kuhn's sense, of a generally
shared dichotomy that governs our literary critical thinking even
today.
That paradigm forms the second focus of this study. With Mau-
ron's work still firmly in the center, the broader general context is
that of the very contemporary - and yet enduring - theoretical issue
of the designation of literary criticism as an objective or as a sub-
jective activity. The English liberal humanist tradition has felt
threatened recently by the attempts of continental semiotics and
structuralism to put criticism on a more objective basis. Why the
paranoia? Or, perhaps the question should be: Why the threat?
There is a feeling today that criticism, in order to have validity as
an institutionalized professional activity, must involve more than
an innate appreciation of ineffable beauty or exquisitely fine moral
vision on the part of the critic. But surely all so-called traditional
criticism is not just an elitist, impressionistic exercise? And surely,
too, structuralist and semiotic approaches go beyond sterile, pseu-
doscientific descriptions of form at the expense of all human content
or meaning?
This battle - often fought, on both sides, with the double-edged
weapons of rhetoric and reduction - represents more than just a
modern clash of the cultural temperaments and tastes of England
and France. The persistent resistance to some kinds of formalism
in literary studies should be looked at in the context of the post-
romantic aesthetic heritage. And the French infatuation with what
the English reject must be seen as what it is: a very recent phe-
nomenon, perhaps a reassertion of a version of Cartesian faith, but
certainly a reaction against both a dominant metaphysical aesthetic
and a predominantly historical and philological critical orientation.
Charles Mauron's work over a period of forty years belongs to
neither the French nor the English tradition, but can cast interesting
lights on both precisely because of this. The relative lack of success
of his psychocritical method in France, a country that has since
embraced the theories of Jacques Lacan with such fervor, points to
the very foreign nature of Mauron's Freudian formalism. Trained
in France, but as a scientist, Mauron first began to think about art
under the influence of the British formalist art critic Roger Fry.

Vlll
 Preface
Like his mentor, Mauron sought a way to unite the two interests
of his life: art and science. Both men thought that science would
offer some objective means of approach to aesthetic objects. Just
as the logical positivists were trying to move philosophy away from
metaphysical speculation and toward analytical activity, so Mauron
fought the metaphysical domination of one branch of philosophic
inquiry, aesthetics. He wanted to introduce into aesthetics what the
positivists were introducing into logic: the methodology and pre-
cision of science, the determination of meaning by tests of empirical
observation. Such was the theory. In practice, Mauron's criticism,
like Fry's, was scientific only in a very loose and metaphorical sense.
There were no real experiments, despite the liberal use of the lan-
guage of the experimental method. And so there was no quantitative
measuring of results, and finally no universal scientific laws. What
there was, at least in theory, was a scientific attitude of rational
impartiality. After his first work, beauty was not Mauron's main
aesthetic focus. For him, aesthetics was redefined as a science that
treated of the conditions of sensuous perception; aesthetics became
a form of psychology that examined empirically the nature of ar-
tistic creation and judgment. He sought to separate what in England
had been united as the "mental and moral sciences." From there,
with the help of the theories of Sigmund Freud, Mauron could
finally formulate psycho critique. Psychoanalysis, or "scientific psy-
chology," was for Mauron the validating authority needed to give
meaning and significance to both his formalistic method and his
theory of creation and response. The result, he argued, was objec-
tive literary criticism and an "empirical aesthetic."
Mauron's concept of the empirical was not really that of the
English philosophical tradition. If anything, it was closer to that
of American pragmatism: Mauron believed that the value of his
analyses could be measured by their correspondence with so-called
experimental results. His hypotheses, he felt, could be verified by
empirical means. In this, he was perhaps most like the semiotician
Peirce in his basic underlying assumptions. But the resemblance
stops there. The method of literary analysis Mauron came to pro-
pose was in no way semiotic; nor, despite the claims of recent
commentators, was it structuralist. It was also not Lacanian or
deconstructivist, though related to both. It was, however, for-
malist, and from this and from the belief that psychoanalysis was
an experimentally valid science came the sources of Mauron's claim
IX
 Preface
that psycho critique was an objective methodology. But what exactly
does this word "objective" mean in this context?
Today's theoretical debates have made it almost impossible not
to be self-conscious about using the terms objective and subjective
as applied to literary criticism. The mind's eye should see these
words in quotation marks throughout this book, for the reader
must continually remind himself or herself of the modern distrust
of a distinction that Nietzsche (in The Birth of Tragedy) claimed to
be of "no value whatever" in aesthetics. Yet, in The Language of
Criticism (1966), John Casey has convincingly argued that the "ob-
jective-subjective dichotomy" has been the central dilemma of Eng-
lish criticism since Wordsworth. The last one hundred and fifty
years, he believes, have produced only a series of failures to solve
this dichotomy, mainly because of what he sees as an inadequate
and even mistaken philosophy of the emotions that has demanded
a choice be made between accepting literary response as subjective
and seeking a scientific account of it. The habit of some literary
critics - including Mauron - of using scientific language to describe
aesthetic production and response is no guarantee of their theories'
objectivity: Eliot's famous use of "catalyst," "medium," and "fu-
sion" in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" does not really mask
the subjective or romantic implications of his image.
Without disputing at all Casey's argument about English criti-
cism, I still find myself uneasy about those terms that even he
initially placed in quotation marks. We can no longer assume, even
in science, the objectivity of the observing mind. And since Hegel,
the terms "object" and "subject" have themselves become prob-
lematic. In literary criticism too, who is going to decide, for in-
stance, which is more objective: the application of an external
"scientific" frame of reference (linguistics, psychoanalysis) or the
rigorous, internal, formal analysis of structures within a work of
art? Both methods lay claim to objectivity. Usually, today, a critical
method that pretends to this status will argue that it is scientific
and descriptive. What is meant by science is, however, rarely de-
fined. Certainly science does not merely describe; it interprets its
findings. The problem becomes how to go from textual description
to interpretation. Usually some grid is applied to the descriptive
findings, often one with scientific pretensions itself- anthropology
or linguistics or psychoanalysis. These social or, as the French say,
"human" sciences are often called upon to lend what is sometimes,
 Preface
in effect, only a spurious air of scientificity and objectivity to the
interpretation, as if to suggest that the text itself demanded that
particular orientation of reading.
Today the subjective and objective extremes are often discussed
in terms of impressionism and formalism. As modern critical con-
cepts, both of these could be said to have their roots in the theories
of''art for art's sake" and Kant's "purposiveness without purpose."
As its name suggests, formalism presumes the precedence of form
over content, at least in critical discussion. It does not deny that
content exists, but chooses to limit its focus to the ordering of the
content. In other words, form is the system of relations of parts
within the work of art itself. In literary criticism, this may suggest
an argument for the autonomy of art, in the sense of its liberation
from the need to represent "reality," be it moral or phenomeno-
logical. But to place the locus of aesthetic value on form is not to
deny content, or its significance, as the detractors of formalism
insist. It is true, however, that the intent of the artist regarding the
meaning or function of his work is considered irrelevant to most
formalist critics.
Modern critical impressionism also flourished in the last century
among the same art for art's sake purists. Their interest in the
"sensibility" of the critic, in his openness to beauty, could be seen
as the precursor of Eliot's special trust in the poet as critic and even
of F. R. Leavis's faith in the critic's intuitive response to art, free
from formulated criteria of judgment. However, psychologists,
scientists, mathematicians, and others have all argued that intuition
is in fact the basic intellectual act at the origin of all more complex
and objective rational structures. Even if this is so, the trusting of
intuition alone remains the source of that definition of critical
impressionism as interpretation that lacks public reference. Criteria
of judgment and selection do exist, but in the form of personal,
intuitively perceived norms. This is what critics like Leavis are often
accused of today, usually by formalists who fail to see that the
exercise of value judgments is perhaps an implicit part of the entire
critical enterprise - even if only in the selection of the text to be
examined or described.
The terms formalist and impressionist are often used as pejorative
labels for critics who "limit" themselves to form or to personal
response. In this study, they are intended to be merely descriptive
of two general critical approaches. Formalism calls for, first of all,
XI
 Preface
the ordered description of the internal relations of a work of art.
Unlike structuralism, it does not depend on a linguistic orthodoxy;
in this sense, it is intrinsic, not extrinsic. Insofar as it describes the
patterns of a work of art, formalism could be called an empirical
approach. If we can speak of criteria of judgment here, they would
be the coherence and unity of the work itself. Although critical
impressionism often pretends to be purely inductive, there are ac-
tually unspoken (perhaps because intuitive) norms, which are in
this way extrinsic to the work of art. The result is less descriptive
than evaluative. In both cases, however, the hermeneutic activity
is similar. Interpretation is carried out according to some chosen
orthodoxy, some set of rules that provides an authority, tacit or
acknowledged. In this sense, all criticism is deductive, or "judicial,"
to use Wellek's and Warren's terminology.
If the chosen orthodoxy is an organized body of knowledge, a
science, or a philosophical system, we are more likely to accuse the
criticism of being deterministic or a priori, especially if its her-
meneutic grid feels as if it has been "imposed upon" the text. The
choice of orthodoxy and its appropriateness to the text examined
would seem important considerations. Charles Mauron came to
adopt and adapt what he accepted as a scientifically validated or-
thodoxy - psychoanalysis. The reasons for this choice are to be
found in a conflict in his early work between, on the one hand, his
formalism and his trust in the scientific method, and on the other
hand, an impressionistic, almost mystic trust in his intuitions as a
reader of literature. The particular appropriateness of his choice lies
in the fact that psychoanalysis itself can be seen as that most par-
adoxical of sciences, one that claims to offer an objective account,
by means of inductive, empirical investigation, of the most sub-
jective of human faculties, the unconscious. It is not surprising that
Mauron should, therefore, be drawn to Freud as an authority to
validate both his formalistic method of psychocritique (the empirical
description of textual structures or networks of associated images)
and his interpretation of those formal relations in terms of their
unconscious origins in the psyche of the artist.
In addition to this, his early formalist concern for discovering
scientifically the "Unity and Diversity in Art" (the title of his first
published work in aesthetics) came to be tempered by an increasing
respect for that which could be perceived only by what he called
the critic's "antennae" - in other words, for details that often defy

xn
 Preface
historical or textual ''proof." As he wrote in "Mallarme et le Tao":
"Mais l'experience humaine depasse largement et sans cesse le do-
maine etroit des certitudes ou memes des hypotheses scientifiques.
Le simple et deja si mysterieux sens esthetique tressaille en nous a
des messages sans justification historique." With the discovery of
Freud, Mauron could then argue that these messages were definitely
not to be ignored, for their formal patterns worked upon the critic's
unconscious and, in fact, derived from, and therefore revealed, the
artist's unconscious. Psycho critique's concern for this level of mes-
sage was what psychoanalysis served to validate but what actually
existed, from the start, in all of Mauron's inquiries into the formal
structures of art intuitively perceived by the critic's antennae. And
this was to be the basis of what Mauron called his empirical aes-
thetic, his Freudian formalism.

xin
 Acknowledgments

A STUDY of a modern writer cannot be undertaken with-

out the cooperation and assistance of the people who knew
him and who are, in effect, the executors of his intellectual
legacy. I must express my gratitude on this count above all to Alice
Mauron for her hospitality and help with Mauron's papers, and
also to her son, Claude Mauron, to Quentin Bell, Pamela (Fry)
Diamand, Marie Mauron, and P. N. Furbank. In addition sincere
thanks are due to the Bloomsbury scholar whose expertise has
proved invaluable and whose patience has seemed unlimited: S. P.
Rosenbaum. It was he who inspired this project. A special debt is
owed to the Toronto Freud Group (Gabriel Moyal, Mary O'Con-
nor, Paul St-Pierre, Anne Boyman). Reading Freud with these
friends was an exciting and stimulating experience that was in some
ways also responsible for this study. I am also greatly indebted to
those friends and colleagues who read the manuscript in its various
stages: Sharon Adams-Butler, Michael Ross, Alwyn Berland, Janet
M. Paterson, Robert A. Greene. My gratitude also goes to Liz
Maguire of Cambridge University Press for her faith and encour-
agement, and to Michael Black, Tom Conley, and the other (anon-
ymous) reviewer, whose constructive comments and acute insights
helped make this a better book. Its errors and inadequacies, of
course, are mine only. For her care and skill in copyediting the
manuscript, I would like to express my debt to Anne Richards.

xiv
 Acknowledgments
Particular and final thanks must go, as always, to my husband,
Michael, for his patience as well as for his provocative, informed
responses to all stages of this work.
I should also like to acknowledge the assistance of the Killam
Foundation for its support during the researching and writing of
this study. The financial generosity of its Post-Doctoral Research
Fellowship allowed me to travel to St. Remy-de-Provence, Paris,
London, and Cambridge. But it is the moral support that such
fellowships as this provide during these times of increasing profes-
sional underemployment of recent graduates that has been appre-
ciated above all.
Part of Chapter 4 was presented to the E. M. Forster Centenary
Conference (Montreal, May 1979) and a considerably more ex-
tended version was published both in a special issue of Modernist
Studies: Literature and Culture: 1920-1940, 3, No. 3 (1979), pp. 141-
50, and in E. M. Forster: Centenary Revaluations, ed. J. S. Herz and
R. K. Martin (London: Macmillan, 1982), pp. 84-98, as " 'Sublime
Noise' for Three Friends: The Role of Music in the Critical Writings
of E. M. Forster, Roger Fry, and Charles Mauron." Versions of
the Introduction were delivered to the English Society, McMaster
University (October 1982), and to a meeting of the Association of
Canadian University Teachers of English (Montreal, May 1980) as
"Roger Fry, Sigmund Freud, Charles Mauron: Aesthetics and
Psychology."

Toronto, 1984

xv
 INTRODUCTION

A S A LITERARY CRITIC, Charles Mauron is a figure

whose value as an index to the major literary theoretical
issues debated in our century equals, and indeed exceeds,
his value as the inventor of psychocritique. His literary critical career
began in the 1920s in England under the auspices of E. M. Forster,
Roger Fry, and the Hogarth Press of Virginia and Leonard Woolf
- a fact that the French have generally ignored, concentrating instead
on his post-1950 formalization of the psychocritical method. How-
ever, in the mid-1960s, Mauron became embroiled in the now-
famous Picard-Doubrovsky battle over the "nouvelle critique,"
that is, over the importation of the frameworks from the social
sciences into French literary criticism. For a brief time Mauron was
alternately admired and condemned for the so-called rigor of his
particular literary methodology derived from psychoanalysis. To-
day his work tends to be either ignored as out of fashion in France
or rewritten - not without considerable distortion - in Lacanian
terms.
Yet, before his rather late conversion (at the age of fifty or so)
to Freudian psychology, Mauron was an aesthetician and one of a
particularly British sort. His two English books, both translated
by his friend Roger Fry, and the series of articles that appeared in
The Burlington Magazine (1925a - see Appendix A) and The Criterion
(1927c, 1930, 1933a, 1935), translated by T. S. Eliot, bear the im-
 Introduction

print of English as much as French aesthetic issues, as do the lectures

that Mauron gave during his English university tours in the twen-
ties, thirties, and forties. But even the relatively recent rediscovery
of Mauron's work in North America has not resulted in any re-
valuation of his method or its results. Nor has it brought about a
reconsideration of the broader perspective that would place Mauron
where he belongs: in the midst of that larger historical context of
more than fifty years of diversity and tension in critical experi-
mentation. What must be taken into account is the critical heritage
of Mauron's British coevals, a heritage he absorbed almost by de-
fault, as his French formation was scientific and not philosophical.
Those Kantian remains of art for art's sake led not only to Roger
Fry's (and Mauron's) formalism, but also to that previously men-
tioned concern for the "sensibility" of the critic that T. S. Eliot as
well as Mauron would manifest. The French symbolist inheritance
of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound is also Mauron's. Those interests in
aesthetic purity, in the unity of the arts, in music, in that bizarre
union of intellectualism and an almost mystic suggestiveness are
actually the materials for the experimental hypotheses of Mauron's
first work, The Nature of Beauty in Art and Literature.
Together Fry and Mauron translated and published Mallarme's
poems, and in fact, Mallarme was in some ways the unwitting spur
to Mauron's moving beyond his early formalist and symbolist aes-
thetic formulations. Mallarme's stress on craft and intellectual con-
trol acted as a challenge to Mauron, who had just been reading
Freud and suspected the omnipotent control of the unconscious.
Unlike Fry, his mentor, Mauron was seduced by Freud, as his
Aesthetics and Psychology (1970a [1935]) bears witness. The attempt
in this work, as its title suggests, is to separate and then reconcile
the contemplative and the active impulses, or what Mauron saw
alternatively as art and science, or aesthetics and psychology.
From 1935 on, Mauron clearly reflects the consequences of the
modernist-inspired resurgence of both aesthetic formalism (in the
visual and literary arts especially) and critical psychologism - both
affectivist and expressive. The inherited (Kantian) nineteenth-cen-
tury tension between criticism as description and as evaluation is
transmitted here, in critical terms, in Mauron's constantly split
allegiance: an allegiance, on the one hand, to the describing of the
structures of the work of art itself and, on the other, to their elu-
cidation in terms of the psyches of both the creator and the reader.
 Introduction
The first half of this study investigates Mauron's formation, both
in its particulars and in the general implications of each stage of his
intellectual development, as he cast about for satisfactory answers
to the various aesthetic questions posed by his contemporaries. His
early training in science and his immense respect for the experi-
mental method of Claude Bernard left their mark on all of his
methodological structures. His increasing blindness sharpened his
already remarkable memory to such an extent that the first step of
his later psychocritical method (a mental superimposition of mem-
orized texts) became almost easier for a blind man than for a sighted
one. And it was his 1919 meeting with Roger Fry that inaugurated
an early period of quite strict formalism, soon tempered by the
discovery of Freud.
At first, however, Freud was problematic for Mauron, who
wanted to posit a higher reality, a spiritual sensibility, to explain
the existence of art and also to act as a counter to both the instinctive,
libidinal unconscious and the "social" self of the artist. Despite his
anti-Bergsonianism, Mauron was in effect willing to posit a su-
perrational as well as a subrational force in the human psyche. For
support in this endeavor, he turned to Jung and to the Eastern
mystics. In his two series of essays, Sagesse de Veau (1945) and
L'Homme triple (1947), the attempt to reconcile the animal and the
spiritual became a reworking of the old struggle to unite psychology
and aesthetics, for by the early 1950s Mauron had begun to perceive
the true value that Freud was to have for him.
The second part of this study begins by investigating psycho-
analysis as the objective science that studies the most subjective of
realities - the human psyche. Or so it appeared to Mauron. Aban-
doning his (in some ways) quite traditionally philosophical, tri-
partite (spiritual, social, animal) concept of the mind, Mauron turned
to Freud, and then to Ernst Kris, Leopold Bellak, and finally Me-
lanie Klein and the Anglo-Saxon school of object-relation theorists,
in his attempt to reconcile those haunting polar opposites that he
could no longer ignore, whether he formulated them in terms of
aesthetics and psychology, or of the work and the man, or of the
contemplative impulse of art and the active impulse of science. His
eclectic borrowings from various psychoanalytic theories were
melded into what he named psycho critique, a four-step objective
method for studying the unconscious structures of a work of art
and, thereby, of the author's psyche. Even Mauron's early work,

3
 Introduction

however, reveals a search for objectivity in the judgment and elu-

cidation of literature. The working assumption behind such a search
seems to be a confidence in an ordered mode of knowing, ultimately
one that can lead to a codification or systematization of method
and results. This impulse, added to his scientific training and his
early association with Roger Fry's formalism, prepared Mauron for
the acceptance of one particular system, one particular ordered and
structuring body of knowledge - psychoanalysis. Yet in this very
choice lie the seeds of the renewal of the tension of Mauron's earliest
work, the tension between aesthetics and psychology.
Freud's system, as its more negative critics have delighted in
pointing out, can be seen as an amalgam of eighteenth-century
deterministic rationalism, romantic irrationalism, and nineteenth-
century biologism. When adapted to literary criticism, no matter
how carefully, it can open the door to expressive and affective
theories of criticism that both tend to value subjectivity and intu-
ition as keys to knowledge. Mauron was, however, personally
predisposed as well to these latter possibilities. His fascination with
the Eastern mystics grew directly out of his early distrust of pure
rationalism and his appreciation of Bernard's and Poincare's ac-
counts of the role of intuitive insight, even in such codified systems
of knowledge as experimental medicine and mathematics. But by
1950, with the publication of his Introduction a la psychanalyse de
Mallarme (1968a [1950]), the only psychocritical work that has been
translated into English, Mauron had formalized psycho critique, one
of the first methodical applications of psychoanalysis to literature.
Mauron's avowed aim for psycho critique was to increase our
knowledge of literary works by isolating and then studying textual
structures the origin of which was attributed to the ''unconscious
personality" of the author. It never denied the existence or signif-
icance of consciously intended or constructed textual structures or
meanings; nor did it underestimate the force of influences, be they
viewed historically or in terms of language. In fact, as Mauron
constantly repeated, psycho critique was meant to be only a partial,
supplementary critical mode, complementary to the analysis of the
consciously elaborated artistic structures and of the conscious per-
sonality of the author that is undertaken by traditional or, in France,
"classical" literary criticism. Although Mauron postulated the cre-
ative liberty of the poet, he preferred to limit the impressionistic
freedom of the critic. Placing himself always in the position of what
 Introduction
he called the "man of science," he revealed his early roots as a
chemist in his insistence that the point of view of empiricism, that
is, of the experimental method, demands that the critic acknowl-
edge three variables within the poet's free act of creation: milieu,
language, and the artist's personality. To each of these variables
corresponds a systematic study that offers a scientific method of
approach: history, linguistics, and psychology. Although the links
between art and the social sciences of language and history had been
generally accepted, the traditional resistance to the aesthetic-psy-
chological connection was seen as a critical failing by Mauron, for
to him psychology was as objectively valid, in experimental and
clinical terms, as the other two sciences. Therefore he situated his
invention of the psychocritical method within that same context of
a need to synthesize art and science, aesthetics and psychology.
In order to complement the traditional critic's investigations into
the conscious thoughts and structures of the artist and his work,
Mauron turned to theories of psychoanalysis to support his view
of the unconscious, internal, or latent source of the external or
manifest form and content of the work of art. This theoretical choice
meant that he had to postulate two things: first, that there is an
unconscious that all men possess and constantly express, and sec-
ond, that this psychic structure is reflected in the work of art and
is therefore analyzable by an adaptation of psychoanalytic methods
to literary criticism. Although he claimed for psychoanalysis the
same objectivity of observation, the same clarity of methodology
and validity of hypothesis as any of the other human sciences -
including philology and history - Mauron did not fall into the
reductionist trap of confusing the art work with either a dream or
a symptom. Scientific psychology offered, he felt, insights into
imaginative fantasies, into the creative process, and into ego-object
relations that the literary critic ignored at his peril. For Mauron,
the unconscious of the artist was indeed accessible through his text,
for it was the unconscious that sought to establish connections
within the essential discontinuity of the personality. Freud's studies
of the manifest-latent structures of dreams, therefore, provided
only one analogue of the possible analyzable bridges between the
conscious and the unconscious.
Mauron was aware, however, that the methods of psychoanalysis,
unlike its insights into the psyche's structures, must be adapted for
use by the practicing literary critic whose interest is more in the
5
 Introduction

form and meaning of the work than in the diagnosis of the author.
With no patient on a couch to analyze, with no free associations to
work with, the critic must instead substitute a textually based
method, one that Mauron felt should seek to unite the advantages
of the analysand's free associations (the voluntary suspension of
conscious control) and of the vigilance of the analyst (ready to seize
upon repetitive structures). The method Mauron invented is one
of a mental superimposition of texts, which he compared (as did
Freud for his own dream-condensation process in The Interpretation
of Dreams) to Francis Galton's superimposing of photographs to
reveal common morphological traits within a family. Here, how-
ever, the texts must be more or less known by heart and, to use
Mauron's image, "ecoutis ensemble." The importance of this im-
age lies in its first signaling of the relationship between Mauron's
blindness and the methodology that he developed.
It was not fortuitous that his first extended psychocritical trials
were on the work of Mallarme - on poems he in fact did know by
heart, as he had worked on their translation with Roger Fry before
blindness set in. He even provided the individual commentaries to
the poems in the Fry volume (1938a [1936]). If the texts were
memorized, the critic could indeed let his conscious attention "float";
he could permit the works to lose their distinctive individuality,
and he could then allow coincidences to suggest themselves as he
called the texts to mind, though in no particular order. This text-
critic relation was the adaptation of the patient's free associating in
analysis. The parallel to the role of the vigilant listening analyst
was that of the same critic who then took hold of these enigmatic,
intuitively discovered coincidences and, while still eschewing inter-
pretation, objectively noted their textual existence and then decided
whether the source was likely to be conscious or unconscious (for
only the latter would concern him further). An example will best
illustrate how this important decision was reached. In Des metaphores
obsedantes au my the personnel (1962; I29n), Mauron offered the results
of his superimposing of Mallarme's "Le vierge, le vivace . . . " (a)
and "Toast funebre" (b)

(a) (b)
(1) Vierge Vierge heros
(2) Hante, fantome Spectres
 Introduction

(3) les vols qui n'ont pas fui les mots qu'il n'a pas dits
(4) le cygne d'autrefois cet homme aboli de jadis
(5) se souvient souvenir
(6) magnifique magnifique
(7) n'avoir su chanter muet
(8) blanche agonie attente posthume
(9) par l'espace infligee l'espace a pour jouet
(10) horreur horreur
(11) fan to me hote de son linceul vague
(12) songe songe
(13) mepris meprise
(14) vet linceul

Some of these items are more or less direct lexical echoes (1, 5, 6, 9,
10, 12, 13); others are semantically connected (2, 4, 7, 11, 14); some
are syntactically parallel (3, 4); yet another operates by what might
be called similar figurative mechanisms (8). In other words, the links
are not merely of one sort, though Mauron himself never analyzed
the types or levels at which they exist. What was important for him
was that the context of these two poems precludes any voluntary
conscious source of these connections: The poems are about different
and not at all similar views of the poet. Thus, Mauron felt he could
posit a latent unconscious (or common repressed) source of the iden-
tities perceived at these different textual levels.
The next task of the psychocritical method was to note the rep-
etitions of these orderings or groupings of what he called "obsessive
metaphors" (though, as noted, they are by no means all, technically,
metaphors). These "networks of associations" "resonate," another
common auditory image in the blind Mauron's criticism. For ex-
ample, in Mallarme's poems he noted that the associations group
themselves in five verbal constellations: death, combat, triumph,
grandeur, and laughter. For Mauron these networks came to rep-
resent unconscious groupings, within the psyche, of relations to in-
ternal and external objects; that is, they are attempts at creating a
unified vision of the inner fragmented world, as described by Me-
lanie Klein. But in Mauron's work as a whole, the important role
of the perception of systems of relations in art took root well before
his discovery of the Anglo-Saxon school of object-relation theorists
in the 1950s. Its source was in the formalism that Mauron espoused
in the 1920s as a result of that contact with Roger Fry,
 Introduction
for whom the aesthetically significant feature of all art lay in its
formal relations, in what he called its "harmonic principle," its
rhythm, its architecture, and not in its manifest content or its rep-
resentational subject matter. In fact, when translating Mallarme
with Mauron, Fry wrote to Kenneth Clark that even Mallarme's
most private associations "are so constant that you can gather their
meaning by comparing different examples." Although this prefi-
guring of the psychocritical method makes evident the formative
influence of Fry's structural orientation, Mauron's formalism did
take its final form only after the discovery of Melanie Klein, for it
was by means of her theories of projection, of the internalization
of desired objects, and more generally, of the dynamic nature of
psychic interrelations, that Mauron was able to make dynamic those
more static Freudian associative networks or systems of relations
singled out by the process of textual superimposition.
Mauron's studies of Racine (1949b, 1950, 1955b, 1968b [1964-
5], 1969 [1954]) and then of Baudelaire (1957c, 1961b, 1966a, 1967c
[1966], 1968c [1966]) gradually led him to this realization of the
nonstatic interrelations between what he saw as a constant (the
unconscious personality of the author) and inevitable temporal
change. He perceived not only a latent textual unity at an uncon-
scious level, but also now saw the succession, the order of works
as created by a writer, as having a significance that thematic crit-
icism (especially of the Geneva school) ignored. He felt that a psychic
"force field" was created by the associative networks, one of con-
flicts, anguish, and defenses that become affectively polarized into
mythic figures, which then act out dramatic roles within dynamic,
rather than static, structures. These figures he saw as representing
Kleinian internalized objects and identifications, as presenting both
desires and objects of desire. In other words, there is an obsessive
fantasy underlying the networks of obsessive images, and this fan-
tasy is a dramatic representation of the dynamic structures of the
psyche and their interrelations. To this fantasy, Mauron gave the
name of "personal myth"; this acts as a kind of filter through which
psychic energy must necessarily pass and which, therefore, is shared
by both the conscious and the unconscious. In order to buttress
this new entity with scientific theory, Mauron turned to the psy-
choanalytic works of Ernst Kris, where he discovered the concept
of the creative process operating as an oscillation between the dif-
ferent psychic levels. Translating a somewhat abridged version of
 Introduction
the Orphic myth into psychoanalytic language, Mauron reworked
Kris's theory of art as a regression in the service of the ego into
terms of the artist's controlled and reversible descent into the hell
from which the madman, on the other hand, does not return.
The artist's personal or fundamental myth does endure, but evolves
constantly from the moment of its formation (at the time of artistic
vocation, usually in adolescence). By means of this dynamic but
constant structure, Mauron could account, he argued, for such
things as influences: At a certain point in an artist's life, a mode of
expression or thought corresponds to a partial project of psychic
integration of his personal myth with his conscious vision of the
world. For the poet, Mauron postulated, art becomes a kind of
Kleinian autoanalysis, an attempt to link the dissociated fragments
of the personality. This probable interaction of the "personally"
mythic and the lived provides the basis of his theory of the creative
ego in its battle with the social ego. The undue interference of the
one upon the other in the poet's life could spell disaster - in either
existential or aesthetic terms.
Mauron's early interest was in lyric poets (such as Mallarme,
Nerval, Valery, and Baudelaire), whose works lend themselves
quite easily to superimpositions revealing networks of associated
obsessive metaphors. However, the discovery of the dramatic na-
ture of the personal myth made natural and inevitable the subse-
quent extension of his method to the study of dramatic and epic
works. The four epics of Mistral, for example, are shown to reveal
a progressive dramatic myth whose original configuration Mauron
first studied quantitatively in 1955. (He actually calculated per-
centages of "affective words" associated with characters and with
natural phenomena.) But it was with his first full study of drama,
L'Inconscient dans Voeuvre et la vie de Racine (1969 [1954]), that the
full critical possibilities of the personal myth as a dynamic, evolving,
but lasting structure became apparent to Mauron. As in the dis-
cussion of the influences on Mallarme, Mauron was here able to
account for Racine's choice of the subjects for his plays, again by
means of a theory of the interaction of conscious and unconscious
psychic forces, funneled through the personal myth. He was also
able to propose a psychic reason for Mithridate's (materially) central
place in Racine's oeuvre and for the dramatist's final renunciation
of the theater.
Here, the progression from text to author that is implied in the
 Introduction
psychocritical steps from superimposition to discerning associa-
tive networks and then to the underlying mythic figures and their
dramas within the author's psyche - becomes overt, though it had
in fact been so earlier in his Introduction a la psychanalyse de Mallarme
(1968a [1950]), as the title itself suggests. Although Mauron orig-
inally intended biographical materials to act as only a final check
or control on his interpretations of the obsessive metaphors and
their configurations, his postulation, first of the personal myth, of
the conscious-unconscious oscillation within the creative process,
and then of the creative and social egos, made the biographical
element of obvious importance in his criticism. Though he always
argued that elucidation of the text was the aim of psychocritique, the
"unconscious personality" or the personal myth, which provided
the source of the latent unities and structures perceived, obviously
also interested Mauron. Although he never confused this personal
myth with the externally observable character of the author, Mau-
ron rarely hesitated to hypothesize about the psychic results of
traumatic events on an author (for instance, of the death of Mal-
larme's mother and sister) or about the dynamic interrelations of
desire and desired objects, of the splitting of good and bad objects,
in a Kleinian sense (for example, the prince-buffoon antagonism
in Baudelaire's verse).
It was only with his attempts to carry out a psycho critique of
Moliere's work (1964a) that Mauron was forced into a broader
perspective, compelled to acknowledge both manifest generic struc-
tures in a work of art and the possible aesthetic function of the
unconscious of the reader or audience. When he discovered that
Moliere's theoretically unconscious personal myth's patterns co-
incided with the general character and plot structures of comedy
in general, Mauron undertook a psychocritical study of the comic
genre as a whole - seemingly unconvinced, by the way, of the
psychic or literary relevance of tragedy's basic plot forms to his
earlier study of Racine. Mauron's formalism was never one that
dealt with generic or linguistic structures. Using Freud's work on
the Witz and on play, as well as Jung's concept of a collective
unconscious manifest in archetypal situations, Mauron attempted
to account for the public s constant psychological response-laughter
- to type plots, as this was obviously the response the author of
comedy sought to provoke. His hypothesis was that the answer
lay in the work of Melanie Klein and Anna Freud on the defense
10
 Introduction
mechanisms of the ego against depression and anguish: The trium-
phant fantasy of reversal of the anguished dream (the one that,
instead, is endured in tragedy) could account for this ultimately
defensive laughter. Because drama is a public form of art, Mauron
could argue that the personal myth of the author became incarnated
- almost like an hallucination - in the actors and so set up an
mterpsychic as well as an intrapsychic situation. It was within this
general framework, then, that Moliere's particular personal myth
was then situated and singled out through its own dramatic stages
(jealousy, seduction, narcissism).
Mauron's psychocritical work taken as a whole, though, reveals
a constant tension: specifically, a tension between, on the one hand,
his interest in the man as creator, and on the other, his desire to
elucidate the created object itself. Just as Freud sought to objectify
the subjective by first making scientific and then institutionalizing
the study of the human psyche, so Mauron tried to unite the sci-
entific objectivity he admired both in the experimental method and
in the descriptions of psychic functioning of the various schools of
psychoanalysis with the subjective individuality of art, of the artist,
and of aesthetic response and judgment. In the psychocritical method
itself, this tension can be seen in the relationship between the initial
intuitive perception of networks of associations (the critic as ana-
lysand; the adaptation of free association) and the next stage, the
objective or noninterpretive ordering of the networks into the per-
sonal myth (the critic as vigilant, listening analyst). The same ten-
sion continues, as we shall see, throughout both the steps of the
method and the results of psychocritique, in the opposition between
the objective formalist description of structures within an author's
body of work and the subjective interpretation of the personal
myth, an interpretation ultimately no less subjective for being but-
tressed by an eclectic sampling of psychoanalytic theories and a
relative abundance of biographical information about the author.
Mauron's underlying interest in the creative process in general
(as much as in its individual textual manifestations or even in its
unconscious sources within the individual author) was perhaps one
of his ways of coming to terms with this subjective-objective critical
tension. However, on a first level, psycho critique, Mauron always
claimed, aimed at increasing our knowledge of the texts of an author
through the revelation of the added underlying unity of the works
that traditional critics missed in their concern for conscious intent
II
 Introduction
and deliberate elaboration. On a second level and as a corollary of
this first aim, Mauron hoped, through psycho critique, to establish
closer ties between what he persisted in calling "scientific psy-
chology" (psychoanalysis) and literary criticism. This desire to ef-
fect a liaison between what he saw as science and aesthetics is central
to Mauron's oeuvre as a whole, as it was to the life of the chemist-
poet turned literary critic. His very first publication, a three-part
article in The Burlington Magazine (1925a), set up the hypothesis of
what he called an empirical aesthetic; psycho critique is nothing if not
an elaboration of that same hypothesis.
One could also argue that the description of empirical aesthetics
fits many of the literary critical trends in England, in particular, in
this last century. Mauron's interest in the psychology of creation
is traditionally a very British concern - it began with early empirical
philosophers and extends through Coleridge to, more recently,
Richards and the early translation of and interest in Freud. The
comparatively late French interest in Freud, on the other hand, was
attributed by Mauron to a philosophic and literary culture that felt
threatened by the intrusion of science into its domain. As a scientist
by training, Mauron felt exempt from this limitation; but as a
literary critic, he also felt more qualified than the purely medical
sorts (like Marie Bonaparte and Rene Laforgue) whose earlier psy-
choanalytic interpretations of literary works had focused primarily
on the pathology of the artist. The concluding part of this study
will attempt, then, to place Mauron within the broader context of
some of the critical issues still being debated today. Is literary crit-
icism descriptive analysis? Is it the elucidation of texts, or of those
texts' "literariness"? The formalists in Russia and Czechoslovakia,
the New Critics in America, and the structuralists in France and
elsewhere would have us believe so. Or does literary criticism have
to involve, as Eliot and Leavis argued, evaluation - aesthetic, moral,
or both? Another major modern critical problem is raised by the
fact that psychological criticism, if admitted into the canon of crit-
ical creeds, can be focused either on the author (expressive) or on
the reader (affective). Yet today, in France, in particular, the entire
notion of the "subject" is being called into question. Nevertheless,
Mauron, like Freud, considered both the author and the reader, often
slipping into psychobiography, on the one hand, and into a Rich-
ards-like pseudoscientific affectivism, on the other. But, paradox-
ically, he always claimed that psycho critique was both partial

12
 Introduction
(complementary to traditional critical methods) and concerned pri-
marily with texts, and not people. This consistent paradox perhaps
bears witness to the fact that Mauron too was caught in what
Stephen Spender called the "struggle of the modern," that perhaps
futile but modernist fight to reconcile interest in the subjective
processes of the mind with critical consciousness of form and of
objective values in art.
It is in this focus on the broader critical context that this study
of Mauron differs from earlier ones. There have been numerous
investigations of psychocritique's insights into particular authors and
their works. The focus here will not be on the results of Mauron's
method, but rather on the unresolved tensions revealed by the working
assumptions at each stage of his development as a critic. This literary-
historical context is important, for it offers a window onto present
problems and conflicts that are seemingly inherent in the critical
enterprise itself as we define it today.
 PARTI

THE CRITICAL FORMATION:

SCIENCE, FORMALISM, AND
AESTHETIC CONTEMPLATION

To have science one has both to accept mystery and

to dislike it enough to try to clear it up which is so
complicated a balance that there is no wonder it's
rare.
ROGER FRY
 1

EARLY ROOTS: SCIENCE, BLOOMSBURY,

AND ROGER FRY

[Mauron's] passion for literature and the plastic arts

was at least as strong as his love of science. He brought
to his renewed contemplation of the nature of literary
and plastic beauty that unhesitating confidence in
experimental methods and that precision of thought
with which his scientific work had endowed him.
ROGER FRY

B ORN JUNE 27, 1899, at St. Remy-de-Provence, Charles

Mauron did not plan a career as a psychoanalytic critic of
literature. In fact, he did not receive his first literary degree
until 1954, and was sixty-four years old when he received his Doc-
torat es Lettres from the Sorbonne and took up his first and last
brief teaching post at the Universite d'Aix in his native Provence.
Mauron's early intellectual leanings had been toward the physical
sciences. After receiving his Diplome d'Ingenieur Chimiste at Mar-
seilles in the spring of 1921, he went on to become an assistant in
Industrial Chemistry. In 1924, he received his Diplome d'Etudes
Superieures de Sciences Physiques. His thesis on the crystalline
structure of soaps was awarded the prize of the Due de Villars at
the Academie de Marseille. A gifted, or certainly a competent sci-
entist, Mauron was ready to take up his first laboratory position
in the government service when a worsening eye condition (de-
tached retinas) forced a radical change in plans. Abandoning science
and its precision, which depended upon vision, he turned to the
arts. Yet, one immediately thinks, surely the study of painting and
literature was an equally inappropriate endeavor for a man who
was losing his sight. Perhaps. But, as we shall see, a chance meeting
with Roger Fry in 1919 had been the trigger, and under the influence
of Fry's famous enthusiasm, nothing was impossible. The young
man, sitting in a dark room to save his.eyes from strain, was a

17
 The critical formation
challenge to Fry and the first result of that challenge was the French
translation of E. M. Forster's A Passage to India, work undertaken
at Fry's instigation with the aid of Mauron's first wife, Marie. The
long-term results of Fry's support and encouragement at this stage
of the young man's life are visible not only in his long list of
translations (see Appendix B) and poetry (see Appendix C) but
also, of course, in his writings on aesthetics and eventually in his
founding of the psychocritical method of literary analysis.
Before we examine the impact of Mauron's early scientific train-
ing, the reason for his renunciation of a career in chemistry should
be given more attention: Mauron was totally blind by 1940. He
prepared for the dark life ahead by reading and by studying paint-
ing, storing up visual aesthetic experience that he soon knew only
in memory or secondhand. Again, Roger Fry, both as painter and
art critic, was instrumental in insuring that Mauron see as many of
the great paintings of the world as possible before it was too late.
In this cause and with the financial aid of E. M. Forster, Fry first
sent Mauron to Italy. Then, in June of 1939, Forster himself ac-
companied Mauron, first to Geneva for a visit to Ferney, to Vol-
taire's home (a trip that Forster was to describe so amusingly in
Two Cheers for Democracy), and then to the Prado exhibit. This was
a trip intended, in Forster's biographer's words, to "provision one's
soul against the coming war" and, for Mauron, against his coming
blindness.1 An unsuccessful operation in Zurich in August of that
year and a series of final hemorrhages made the darkness total and
final. Commentators on Mauron's later work have used his blind-
ness to account for almost every characteristic of psychocritique, from
the repetitiveness of Mauron's style and method to the subtle per-
spicacity of his intuitions. The latter variety of critic cannot seem
to avoid sentimentality in dealing with the blindness that Mauron
himself dealt with extremely calmly.2 Writing to Roger Fry's sister,
Margery, just after the finality of his loss became evident, Mauron
claimed that although a large part of our sense of reality did come
from sight and was therefore lost with it, one could live inside one's
mind, in a world ruled by different laws, observing existence from
an intellectual and disinterested point of view.3 Although Mauron's
blindness did have its effect on the method of psychocritique, there
are very few references to it or acknowledgments of it in his pub-
lished works. Characteristically, one of the few is the simple remark

18
 Early roots
made in passing in a 1959 article in the newspaper Le Provencal
announcing the exhibition of Van Gogh paintings coming to Aix-
en-Provence: "Heureux ceux qui ont des yeux pour voir, car ils
verront" (1976 [1951-9]: 148).
Nevertheless, the loss of sight was the cause of Mauron's giving
up a scientific career, and though it seems strange, it was also the
cause of the start of his literary endeavors. Happily for criticism,
perhaps, Mauron lacked the traditional French philosophical train-
ing that has seemed to give some French literary critics the con-
viction that they can, if necessary, speak with sureness on any given
subject. The only sureness Mauron had been trained to trust was
one arrived at empirically through investigation directed by the
means and ways of science. His first published words are: "In
aesthetics, as indeed elsewhere, there is only one honest method -
the experimental. All the a priori affirmations of dubious meta-
physics and inopportune ethics are puerile impertinences" (1925a:
121). Clearly, the forceful insistence of these sentences puts Mau-
ron's interest in science and art in a different category from Sainte-
Beuve's desire to write 'Thistoire naturelle des esprits."
Rejecting from the start (1925b, 1929a [1925]) the dominant French
philosophical tradition that made aesthetics into a branch of me-
taphysics, Mauron argued that the thinking of metaphysicians suf-
fered an intellectual sterilization because it was beyond the scientific
control of experiment. This lack of external control was the ar-
gument he used against Bergson (1925c: 16), Ramon Fernandez
(1927b: 326-7, 335), and even Middleton Murry (1927c: 230), all
of whom, when writing of science, put the emphasis on the process
of rationalization without realizing (or at least admitting) that the
"abstractions" of systematic science are always compared to con-
crete experience and are adjusted accordingly. Nowhere did he feel
this was more true than in aesthetics. Mauron shared his genera-
tion's distrust of the sufficiency of reason, but this distrust did not
taint the method of science, which, for him, both was faithful to
the concrete and allowed room for imaginative intuition. This was
the method of Montaigne (1929a [1925]: 702) and was to guide that
of Mauron. Aesthetics, unlike metaphysics, he felt, was the meeting
ground of art and science (especially psychology), and as such be-
came the potential model of the ideal exercise of the human spirit.
Even in his earliest works, Mauron argued against the separation
 The critical formation
of "sensibility" and "intellect" as the faculties of art and science
respectively: The aesthetician and literary critic, he believed, should
unite both reason and sensibility in their work.
It is not an accident that Mauron's ideas here echo precisely
Virginia Woolf s description of Roger Fry: "He always used his
brain to correct his sensibility. And what was of equal importance,
he always allowed his sensibility to correct his brain."4 Mauron
and Fry were close friends and their correspondence bears witness
to the mutual influencing that went on in the last fifteen years of
Fry's life. In 1925, Mauron had written that in aesthetics, "il y a
un grand danger a vouloir separer la sensibilite de l'intelligence."
These words are from an unpublished manuscript sent to Fry, who,
nine years later in 1934, would announce to Helen Anrep: "I think
in the end all questions of aesthetics will come down to some
question of equilibrium between intellect and instinct."5 A slightly
earlier letter to Mauron himself announced that Fry was developing
his young friend's ideas on the intellectual pleasure of art in his new
lecture on sensibility.6
Fry's first training, like Mauron's, was in science, though his
reasons for making the transition to art were guided more by tem-
perament than by the vicissitudes of life. Both men are, however,
examples of the impact of the methodology of the natural sciences
on the intellectual thought of a generation - from Westermarck's
"scientific ethics" and Durkheim's "scientific" sociological obser-
vations to the use of the verification principle in logical positivism.
Roger Fry's Cambridge was that of Bertrand Russell and G. E.
Moore, of the attack on idealism and its implied downplaying of
the observational study of phenomena. Mauron, of course, was
heir to the Cartesian faith that science and mathematics could pro-
vide clear and certain knowledge. Yet, as we have just seen, both
Fry and Mauron wanted to unite the rational with the intuitive in
the name of aesthetics. Even the purest, most abstract of sciences,
argued Mauron, partook of some kind of "mystical knowledge and
the sense of absolute reality that goes with it" (1930a: 26). This
was not as much of a heresy to the positivist dogma of science as
it first appears, nor was it pure Bergsonianism. It was, rather, part
of the experimental method itself as outlined by Claude Bernard,
and as practiced daily, even in choosing a garment or a lamp to
purchase (1929a [1925]: 701), for it was based simply on comparison
of observed facts as directed first by intuition, then by logic. The
20
 Early roots

basic determinism of science was tempered for Mauron by the

intuitive initial step that set the process in motion. And comparison
was the basis of the principle of identity that was central to human
intelligence. Hence, the determinism of a statement such as: "II
n'est de science, en verite, que du comparable. Aussitot qu'il y a
ressemblance, une classification, et par suite des predictions, de-
viennent possibles" (1929b: 843). But the decision of what to observe
and compare was an intuitive one. The formulator of this particular
paradox was not Mauron, but Claude Bernard in his Introduction a
Vetude de la medecine experimental.
To accept Bernard's "absolute" principle in the experimental
sciences is to believe in the necessary relations of things. In other
words, truths in science are always provisional and partial; they
stand in an order in which each depends on others. The order of
relations constitutes the basis of the determinism of science, as,
within it, all can be foreseen and predicted, produced or stopped
at will, if conditions are properly manipulated. The wrong kind of
method is the one that starts from a notion, founded more or less
on observation, which is then taken as an absolute truth from which
to reason logically, but with no experimentation. The result is the
construction of a system that is logical but that has no "realite
scientifique" whatsoever. The only true way to apply the scientific
method is by experiment, for only in this way can one be assured
of "comparable" facts exempt from error. In the first part of his
book, entitled "Du raisonnement experimental," Bernard offers a
theory of human intellectual development: "L'esprit humain, aux
diverses periodes de son evolution, a passe successivement par le
sentiment, la raison et Y experience. " 7 The first period yielded theology;
the second, philosophy. The third - experience or experiment -
directed man to the realities of the exterior world which, according
to Bernard, are our indispensable guides. In fact, Bernard resound-
ingly declares: "La methode experimentale est la methode scienti-
fique qui proclame la liberte de l'esprit et de la pensee."
This spiritual and intellectual freedom of the scientist is achieved
by clearing the mind of all personal or public opinion before ex-
perimenting. Even during the experimental process, the scientist
must be willing and prepared to abandon or modify the anything
but immutable truths of science when they no longer conform to
reality as observed by him. The reason for this openness lies in the
first step of the experimental method: As one never begins with an
21
 The critical formation
absolute truth, doubt must accompany the initial a priori hypothesis
that is about to be submitted to the control of experimental criteria.
Facts alone are useless in science; the scientist needs, first, an hy-
pothesis to give meaning to the facts, and then, the proof that lies
in the "rapport rationnel" that he establishes between the phenom-
enon and its cause. That initial hypothesis is not the product of
cold reason; in fact, it appears only when the scientist lets his imag-
ination run free. It is an anticipated - imagined - interpretation of
natural phenomena. Without it, reason would have nothing from
which to deduce consequences, for it is the hypothesis that provokes
the experiment. It is born of a fact observed by chance that acts as
an "excitant exterieur"; neither arbitrary nor purely imaginary,
then, it is always based on previous observation of reality. The
hypothesis, to use Bernard's image, is the seed. The method is the
ground that provides it with the conditions to flourish and prosper.
It was this welcome emphasis on the significance of the intuitive
that attracted Mauron when he began to ponder aesthetic issues.
The constant reference in all his critical writings to his "hypotheses"
shows his faith in Bernard's claim that the experimental hypothesis
was, in fact, "le principe de tout raisonnement et de toute invention,
c'est a elle que revient toute espece d'initiative." Mauron's later
psychocritical stages of superimposing passages and of finding net-
works of obsessive metaphors were essentially intuitive processes
that then provided a working hypothesis for his interpretation of
an artist's personal myth through the orthodoxy of psychoanalysis.
The three-stage process of the experimental method - observa-
tion, comparison, interpretation - certainly influenced the meth-
odology of psychocritique. In theory, the scientific and the literary
are both inductive; in practice, however, the deductive features
appear once the hypothesis is established. Of course, this is always
a provisional deduction, as the hypothesis is not an absolute, but
rather is always open to modification. Mauron's earliest writings
contain the first statements of his constant faith that this experi-
mental method was the only way to true knowledge: He sincerely
believed he could obtain exact facts about art through rigorous
investigation, facts that would then reveal the underlying laws of
aesthetic phenomena. But literature is man-made; it is not part of
nature, and so one could easily argue that Mauron could never
attain the "objectivity" of Bernard because the two men dealt with

22
 Early roots

different kinds of objects. Material reality and aesthetic, or even

psychic, reality are indeed different entities, and it would not be
hard to show that Mauron was being rather naive. What is of
interest, however, is the way in which Mauron's early scientific
training left its mark on both his interests and the method by which
he studied them. Mauron at least did not make the mistake of merely
substituting for Bernard's "physiologist" the word "psychocri-
tique."8 From the start he adapted scientific concepts; he never merely
applied them. That early desire to establish an "experimental aes-
thetics" (1925a: 251) guided the language of all of Mauron's state-
ments about critical method, and Claude Bernard's name and ideas
were constantly evoked: Hypotheses were always being instinc-
tively discovered and then rationally studied by means of experi-
mentation. The lingering traces of this influence are to be seen in
a much later statement, made in passing, about the latent network
of obsessive metaphors: "Mais je n'accorde a cette intuition que la
valeur d'une hypothese prealable ('idee preconque' de Claude Ber-
nard)" (1962: 39n). Psychocritique was based on the experimental
method as a dialogue between an interrogating mind and the facts
presented to it, or as a combination of intuition and reason.
Mauron began his 1954 thesis on Racine by thanking Louis Mar-
gaillan, director of the Institut Technique in Marseilles, for having
taught him, thirty years earlier, that the rigor of mathematics and
the suppleness of biology could be reconciled by the experimental
method (1969 [1954]: 5). But reason alone did not have the answers
- in science or in aesthetics - and, Mauron believed, the literary
critic must begin with his intuitive faculty and only then apply
logic. The discipline of mathematics provided a useful comparison
for Mauron, of course, as that study too had its Bernard-like theo-
retician who believed in the value of intuition as well as of reason:
Henri Poincare.9 According to Poincare, intuition might not be
able to provide the rigor or certainty of logic, but it came first in
human evolution and has never been overcome, nor should it be.
The significance of intuition was made clear to Poincare from his
personal experiences of seemingly insoluble problems in mathe-
matics that were resolved by sudden illuminations following his
abandonment of conscious application. These intuitions Poincare
ascribed to long unconscious work that had been proceeding outside
the conscious control of the mathematician. In other words, as with
 The critical formation
scientific observation for Bernard, conscious logical work had to
precede and follow the inspiration, to prepare for it and to verify
and deduce consequences from it.
Poincare added two important elements to Bernard's intuition-
logic conjunction for Mauron: the unconscious or subliminal source
of the inspiration and the equal status of that source. The uncon-
scious gives rise to sensibility, to those combinations that give us
"le sentiment de la beaute mathematique, de Fharmonie des nombres
et des formes, de l'elegance geometrique." This aesthetic feeling
for mathematics reinforced Mauron's early agreement with Roger
Fry's sense of the formal rhythm and harmonies of art. Its uncon-
scious origins appealed to the psychologist-in-the-making who later
disagreed with Fry over Freud.10 Both unconscious intuition and
conscious reason were to be the instruments of the critic, according
to Mauron, because of the very nature of the object of investigation.
The work of art was the product of imagination, but its structures
could be studied analytically once they were intuitively perceived
by the critic. As the experimental method was initially to be applied
to the responses of the critic to the work of art, the adaptation of
the insights of the new science of psychology seemed to be one
possible answer to Mauron's personal problem of the need to rec-
oncile science and art. All of his later psycho critique, one could argue,
is merely a further, more elaborate attempt to unite these opposites
of his own training and temperament. As he himself later saw, in
those early years: "Mon seul souci etait deja de voyager, comme
le 'pale vasco' mallarmeen, vers cette 'Inde splendide et trouble' ou
la science et l'art se rejoignent en une psychologie de l'experience
esthetique. A tort ou a raison, je voyageais la un des points les plus
singuliers, peut-etre le plus singulier de la connaissance humaine.
Je n'ai fait, depuis, qu'approfondir cette recherche" (1959a [1954]:
1-2).
The loss of his eyesight alone, however, might not have provoked
Mauron's change from scientific to aesthetic endeavors in particular,
thereby initiating the dichotomy that would structure all of his
work. It took the mercurial personality of Roger Fry to direct and
inspire the young Mauron's thinking about his future. That 1919
meeting was a chance one, effected through the young Marie Mau-
ron, then teaching at Les Baux. Fry, like Clive Bell, had come to
see Paris as the capital of the visual art world, but his subsequent
love for Provence grew out of temperamental, as well as aesthetic,
24
 Early roots

affinities. His artist's appreciation of the land and the light that had
inspired the postimpressionists was matched by his delight in the
hospitality of what he saw as a peasant culture that was free of
"bourgeois snobbery" and therefore "Pagan" to its core.11 A visit
with Marie to the Provenqal poet Rieu introduced Fry to the literary
regionalism of the south and, as usual, Fry's enthusiasm brought
concrete results: the writing and publishing of Marie Mauron's first
book, Mont-Paon, which appeared (as Mount-Peacock) at the Cam-
bridge University Press, translated by Fry's friend, F. L. Lucas.
Hearing of the failing sight of Marie's husband, Charles, Fry
responded with equal energy. Immediately after their meeting, Fry
sent to Marie names of books for Charles to read and offered to
order booksellers' lists. At the age of fifty-three, Fry began a friend-
ship that Virginia Woolf, in her biography, would call one of the
most valued relationships of Fry's life - with a twenty-year-old
man. In the summer of 1924, Fry shared the family mas with the
Maurons, painting Charles's portrait as they sat in the prescribed
darkened room, discussing aesthetics, playing chess, and translating
A Passage to India together. Not content to keep his friend company,
Fry set out reorganizing, indeed revitalizing, Mauron's existence.
His promotional ideas were wide-ranging and, as always, he thought
nothing of involving the other members of Bloomsbury in his
enthusiasms. Writing to Virginia Woolf (2 July 1924), Fry reminds
her that Mauron is "the man I told Leonard of that I wanted to get
jobs for as he's threatened with blindness. We discussed a number
of articles some of which I think would do very well for the Nation.
I also started him on translating Morgan's book."12 By the next
summer, he was planning the trip to Italy so that Mauron could
be provided with "the necessary requirements for the long task of
reflection and gestation which he must undertake if he wants to
give the world all that his spirit bears."13
When E. M. Forster noted in Fry's obituary that Fry was always
helping others, especially the young and the obscure, he no doubt
had in mind their mutual friend, Mauron, as well as many others.
Virginia Woolf acknowledged this talent of Fry's in these simple
words: "He would start people living again just as he would start
them painting again."14 Fry was drawn to Mauron by the young
man's need to start "living again" as much as by their shared beliefs,
both humane and aesthetic. Their long conversations and frequent
letters bear witness to Fry's pleasure in discussing artistic issues

25
 The critical formation
with his new friend; they point also to his faith in his young friend's
intelligence and therefore to the importance of Mauron's approval
of his own ideas.
Given his respect for Mauron's intellectual rigor, as well as for
his aesthetic sensibility, it is not surprising that Fry should have
sought to promote his work whenever and however possible. Be-
sides starting Mauron on his translating career (see Appendix B),
Fry himself began translating the poems and articles of his friend
and trying to get them published in England. Although he en-
couraged Mauron to philosophize about aesthetics, Fry was finally
hesitant to advise him to continue writing poetry. Obviously unsure
of the value of Mauron's creative writing, Fry sought to direct his
young friend toward his stronger areas.15 Nevertheless, he did man-
age to persuade the Princess Bassiano to print some of Mauron's
poems in Commerce and he wrote to Gide, Maurois, Vildrac, and
others to interest them in Mauron's work. Their failure to respond
he wrote off as Parisian snobbery and fashion, assuring Marie that
"Charles is worth too much to make his way rapidly. He will arrive
very slowly."16 These prophetic words probably rang in Mauron's
ears for many years. Fry had hoped that Mauron's intellectual pow-
ers would be recognized and his entry to publishing in any journal
guaranteed by his participation in the conference known as the
Decades de Pontigny in 1925. Although Fry felt that Mauron's
paper, later published as part of The Nature of Beauty in Art and
Literature (1927a [1925]), was a triumph of the scientific method
over the metaphysicians' abstractions, Mauron's career was not yet
destined to be launched in France. In England, however, he had
more luck, thanks to Fry's help, and also to the international scope
of Eliot's Criterion. Its European orientation and its openness to
new ideas made it a good vehicle for the expression of Mauron's
early aesthetic notions. In the early 1930s Mauron's contributions
appear alongside and often in response to those of Middleton Murry,
I. A. Richards, and Herbert Read, among others.
Fry also sought to introduce Mauron himself to English intel-
lectual circles, organizing - after a fashion - lecture tours for his
friend. Never one to flatter, Virginia Woolf was to describe Mauron
as "that rather obese and almost blind Frenchman" who was
"dumped without the least affectation of interest on the backs of
Bloomsbury" by Fry, but there is little evidence that Mauron's first
lecture tour in May of 1929 was as much of a failure as her letters
26
 Early roots
suggest.I7 In fact, she herself took the chair for one of the lectures
in his second series. The range of lectures offered by Mauron for
his 1930 tour was impressively wide. There were three general areas:
aesthetics, philosophy, and French literature. From the lectures ac-
tually given, however, it would appear that audiences from Rugby
to Cardiff were most interested in hearing not about the unknown
Mauron's aesthetic theories but rather about "Trois romanciers
modernes: Giraudoux, Mauriac, Martin du Gard."18
After Fry's death it was Forster who, in 1949, undertook - rather
more competently - the organization of Mauron's lectures. Sensing
his audience's distance from Mauron's interests, Forster sought to
prepare the listeners at the Institut Franqais de Londres for Mauron's
philosophical talk, "L'Homme et la liberte creatrice." In his intro-
ductory remarks, Forster characteristically pointed to his own in-
adequacies, humbly stating that his literary background had not
equipped him to deal with a discourse like Mauron's. Yet, he went
on to say, his experience of his friend was that his philosophy had
a way of going right to even the most unphilosophic heart.I9 Out-
lining the basic theory of L'Homme triple (1947) for his audience,
Forster added that even if they did not always follow Mauron, they
would still know that their values and their world were his and
that he was helping to master the best of that world. Forster was
sensitive to the increasingly "foreign" quality of Mauron's thought,
perhaps because he too had had to struggle with it.
Though Mauron's lectures fell short of being grand successes,
his role in Bloomsbury thought cannot be denied. Through Fry
many of Mauron's ideas became current coin in Bloomsbury aes-
thetic discussions. Far from merely being what one critic calls a
"sort of Boswell to Fry,"20 Mauron offered Fry a sounding board
- an extremely critical one at that - and also provided him with a
source of new ideas. In his letters, Fry willingly admits his debt to
Mauron.21 The day after his Inaugural Lecture at Cambridge, Fry
wrote to thank Mauron for his discussions and explanations, with-
out which his own ideas would not have been as rigorously exact
as he thought they had been. In fact, Fry warned, when Mauron
read this lecture he would see how much he had adopted his friend's
skeptical ideas on aesthetic values, adding: "It was only on later
reflection that I saw the whole bearing of your reasoning."22 Fore-
stalling any notion of illegitimate borrowing of ideas, Fry always
sought to show their parallel thinking in statements such as: "You

27
 The critical formation
were already on this track and I wonder if we have arrived at the
same position."23 And, despite the (sometimes suspect) defensive
insistence on his having developed Mauron's ideas further, Fry's
parallel track image was probably accurate: The frequent letters and
conversations probably made it impossible to decide who was the
source of what idea. The intensity of their intellectual, as well as
personal, friendship caused their separate theories at times to be
welded together.
But Roger Fry was certainly not the only Bloomsbury member
Mauron knew well. His meeting with Fry created other ties with
the cultural life of London. In Quentin Bell's words, it also "brought
several generations of British intellectuals to his house in St. Remy
there to enjoy the pleasures of highly athletic conversation and
memorable hospitality."24 The first to be sent by Fry to Provence,
in 1925, was E. M. Forster, because of the translating of A Passage
to India. Forster and Fry had known each other for many years,
but their mutual friendship with Mauron acted to strengthen the
rather tentative relationship between these two very different kinds
of men. The younger Forster recalled attending Fry's 1898 lectures
at Cambridge and finding them "magnificent," but it was not until
later that they would become anything like friends. Their shared
experiences of King's, of the Apostles, of Goldsworthy Lowes
Dickinson's friendship, of Bloomsbury and the "Friday Club" -
did not necessarily ensure their compatibility. Forster's admiration
and affection made him accept with delight Fry's request to paint
his portrait in 1911; less successful were the resulting sessions' con-
versations. (The final product, a rather postimpressionist portrait,
was finally rejected by Forster's family.) During these sittings, the
two men's fundamental differences, both personal and professional,
became clear. These differences are important to our discussion
here because they represent two opposite poles of attraction in
Mauron's own dual allegiance to intuition and reason, to art and
science.
Forster's biographer vividly sums up the outcome of the discus-
sions during the 1911 portrait sittings:

As for Fry's art-theories, Forster, brought up on Ruskin, found

them baffling, while Fry thought his frankly impossible. He
would make Forster come to exhibitions with him, forcing
him to give him his opinion on paintings, and then, when
28
 Early roots

Forster nervously did so, throwing up his hands in the wildest

astonishment, crying, "But Morgan, can you really think that?"
However, Forster now began to feel, as they talked, that he
was grasping Fry's idea. It was "to clear art of reminiscence:
Romanticism the enemy. To paint the position of things in
space." Not that Fry was at his best, so he felt, when he
succeeded in his aim: the canvas of Fry's he would have liked
most to possess was one full of "subject," a painting of green
snakes. None the less, Fry's confidence was wonderfully
invigorating.25

Forster's various subtle cuts over the years at notions of significant

form suggest that he was not at all converted to Fry's formalism;26
nor was Fry very attracted, ultimately, to what he called Forster's
"mysticism" or impressionism.27 As David Garnett noted, their
friendship was enhanced most by their interest in Mauron.28
Although Mauron frequently admitted in print to his indebted-
ness to Fry, the few mentions of Forster were only to the distinction
made in Anonymity (a pamphlet later reprinted in Two Cheers for
Democracy) between the two uses of language: for information and
for creation (1938a [1936]: 31, 1967a [1941]: 46). This absence of
published acknowledgment of debt should not mislead us, for what
is clear in Mauron's writings (especially in the 1940s when Fry's
death had made him a less dominating influence) is that Forster had
become an important figure in Mauron's rethinking of the art and
science dichotomy. How Forster came to have this privileged po-
sition is again the work, however, of Roger Fry, who induced
Forster in the spring of 1925 to take the first of many trips to St.
Remy. Forster's financial assistance was to see the two successive
Mauron households through many monetary crises, from the war
to Mauron's cancer surgery to his three sons' educations. Forster
felt very strongly about his blind friend's intellectual and moral
integrity, which allowed him to work, in relative critical obscurity,
with no teaching post and with no income other than the limited
one generated by his later position as Mayor of St. Remy. This
personal caring was typical of Forster's friendships, but rarely did
it prove so necessary and so appreciated. Forster derived great per-
sonal satisfaction from helping his friend, but there was yet another
attraction to visiting St. Remy. In his mother's words: "It was
Egypt, it was India, now it's France," though Provence would have

29
 The critical formation

been more accurate yet. The local festivals and the bullfights seemed
to Forster, as they had to Fry, to be signs of the wonderfully pagan
nature of Provence. But most of all, it was Mauron's company that
drew Forster to St. Remy; it was affection and concern for his
friend's welfare.
This concern grew in the 1930s when Mauron became politically
active.29 In 1935 he spoke at the Oxford Conference on Academic
Freedom as the representative of the Vigilance Franchise. Forster
sympathized with Mauron's attempts in 1936 to found a popular
front and to crystallize resistance in Spain, but was more concerned
with the danger Mauron was in than with the political issues in-
volved.30 Such was not the case with a younger friend who turned
to Mauron for help and advice on political matters: Julian Bell,
elder son of Clive and Vanessa Bell. After a stint teaching in China,
Bell decided to go to Spain in 1937 to fight so that he would not
feel a coward and shirk responsibility for a cause in which he be-
lieved. Mauron's acquaintance with "young Cambridge" came
through Bell. His 1933 Criterion article entitled "The Cow" is an
imagined dialogue with a "Cambridge poet," likely Julian Bell, on
Forster's "The cow is there" discussion in The Longest Journey.
Although G. E. Moore is never mentioned, the context of this
article is the debate, more of the previous Cambridge generation,
on the existence and meaning of empirical reality, an important
debate in Mauron's eyes because "the values which a thinking man
assigns to science, to art and to morality, are all, more or less,
dependent upon the attitude he adopts in this case" (1933a: 455).
Bell agreed with Mauron's refutation of both the idealist and realist
stands on this issue, and also with his scientist's empirical defense
of "stupid and magnificent fact" (467). That Bell did agree and that
he, in fact, was influenced by Mauron in his thinking is clear from
his King's dissertation, an inscribed copy of which he sent to Mau-
ron. Not only does "Good and All That: An Essay on a Provisional
Theory of Ethics" begin with the omnipresent Forsterian cow, but
from the start Bell announces that he believes in experiment, in
inductive and empirical methods of investigation. The central eth-
ical argument of the thesis he owes to G. E. Moore, his spiritual
grandparent via "Old Bloomsbury," but both the approach and
the making of aesthetics into a branch of psychology he owes to
Mauron, or rather, as we shall see, to Roger Fry and Mauron
together.

30
 Early roots

When Julian Bell was killed in Spain, his brother Quentin put
together a collection of his essays, poems, and letters. To this,
Mauron contributed a preface, placing the dead youth in his
Bloomsbury context of values and beliefs, while stressing that Julian
Bell, unlike the others, was a man of action. Mauron, the political
activist, felt a certain ambivalence toward Bloomsbury painters,
writers, and philosophers: "In their work and in their lives all have
given the greatest importance to liberty of thought, expression and
choice. They think, amuse themselves and suffer in the peaceful
qualitative land of tastes and colours" (1938b: 248). Mauron, how-
ever, added that he thought Bell erred in demanding, in his 1937
"Open Letter" to Forster, that the gentle novelist practice the "mil-
itary virtues"; instead Mauron praised the "wisdom at once ex-
quisite and profound" of his friends, stating his own desire to save
that wisdom without asking them to risk it. The conflict between
action and contemplation, as between science and art, was a real
and very personal one for Mauron. The contemplative solution of
Bloomsbury, however, was not one he could fully accept for himself.
For this and other reasons, in Quentin Bell's view today, Mauron
was not a member of the Bloomsbury Group. He knew certain of
the members well and he shared their values when it came to human
relationships and the pursuit of truth. Quentin Bell dedicated his
1968 book Bloomsbury to Mauron, as Forster had dedicated Aspects
of the Novel to him in 1927, as a token of his gratitude for the long
and stimulating conversations that contributed to the formation of
the ideas therein. That Mauron influenced his friends is clear; that
he was influenced by them is perhaps even clearer. This is especially
the case with the first Bloomsbury member he met - Roger Fry.
The concept of influence presents many problems. As John Paul
Russo has argued, the usual "emanational" model, in which one
person's influence is seen as a stage (overcome) in another's devel-
opment, falsifies the interaction of the two parties involved, as it
does the continuing, often buried history of an influence throughout
an entire life.31 Both of these warnings are to be heeded when
considering the Fry-Mauron relationship. As suggested earlier, the
influencing was both mutual and, in Mauron's case, long-lasting.
There were certainly temperamental similarities that drew these
two men together: Their ever-curious experimental minds shared
a solid grounding in similar consistent beliefs. In the preface to his
1954 thesis on Racine, Mauron paid tribute to his early mentor's
 The critical formation

scientific spirit, grafted as it was onto a vast cultural knowledge.

However, he admitted an even more important debt: "Je dois a
Roger Fry, entre autres choses. le sentiment que le probleme humain
crucial - celui des rapports entre la verite scientifique et les valeurs
spirituelles - peut etre etudie experimentalement a cette croisee de
nos connaissances: la psychologie de la creation. Mon faible travail
n'a de sens que dans cette perspective" (1969 [1954]: 7). In other
words, the later psychocritical works, not just the early aesthetic
theories, are to be linked directly to the influence of Roger Fry.
Although Fry is best remembered as the art critic of postimpres-
sionism, he was also a painter, but one who began his career dis-
secting as well as drawing the forms of nature. Fry's early training,
like Mauron's, was in science, but he progressed less far before
changing careers. Nevertheless, in his writings after 1919 - that is,
after his meeting with Mauron - one of Fry's favorite aesthetic
images is that of chemical reactions, of chemically pure substances,
of chemical compounds.32 One could argue that there is an entire
romantic and even modernist tradition of such images for the poetic
mind, from Keats's "etherial Chemicals" to Eliot's "catalyst" or
shred of platinum, that Fry might have been drawing upon. Al-
though this is true, it would be foolish to ignore his contact with
the young ex-chemist who constantly used such images from his
earlier discipline in his own aesthetic writings (1927a [1925]: 31 and
1933 a: 457). The roots of Mauron's usage are, of course, more
personal than romantic. In Aesthetics and Psychology, he uses the
terminology of science for the sake of precision: "Remembering
that I was once a chemist, I shall give to this [Roger Fry's] oppo-
sition between chance and aesthetic order a convenient form" (1970a
[!935]: 78), that is, as an opposition between a mixture and a com-
bination. Recalling, no doubt, that Mauron's thesis had been on
the crystalline structure of soaps, Fry wrote of another Provencal,
Cezanne, that the synthesis the painter sought was like "the phe-
nomenon of crystallization in a saturated solution."33
Fry's attraction to science was not merely on the superficial level
of convenient suggestive images, however. Soon after meeting Marie
Mauron, Fry wrote to her of his fear of what he called mysticism
and of man's impatience: "The only path that has never led him
astray is science; and science demands the greatest virtues of man,
a humility beyond reproach and complete disinterestedness."34 This
 Early roots
faith in the ability of science to save society by redirecting its con-
cerns from metaphysics to an empirical coming to terms with real
phenomena was one shared by Mauron who, as we have seen, had
arrived at this realization through the writings of Claude Bernard.
The *'father of experimental medicine" also begat, we recall, a firm
belief in the potential liberation of the human spirit through science,
the highest stage of man's intellectual evolution. This positivist faith
in science was translated into Mauron's belief that science had enor-
mous potential to contribute "a l'avancement d'une societe sans
classes, plus juste et plus humaine" (1947: 172). Coming at the
problem of the social value of science from another angle, Roger
Fry had already reached the same conclusions. He saw science as
the only antidote to the "unendurable obsession of the ego as the
centre of things," the only hope to change man, by changing his
conditions.35 The disinterestedness of the scientific method appealed
to Fry, then, for social as well as aesthetic reasons.
At the Decades de Pontigny in 1925, Fry understandably felt "the
pride of a trainer whose horse had won the Derby," when Mauron's
paper on beauty in art "triumphed" over the abstractionists and
metaphysicians by its use of the experimental method and concrete
empiricism.36 But Mauron came by his method via Bernard, not
Fry. In fact, it was Fry who then wrote to the Maurons that he was
becoming "more and more aware of the immense value that the
experimental method possesses in everything."37 This does not mean
that Fry came to his views on scientific method only through Mau-
ron, of course, but it does suggest that the shared faith in its value
and efficacy formed an important bond between the two men, one
that, as we shall see, was reflected in both of their works.
For Mauron, the experimental method was, from the start, the
only truthful or "sincere" method of aesthetic, as well as scientific,
inquiry. It alone could free aesthetics from grand metaphysical ab-
stractions and preconceptions and bring it back down to facts -
facts that could then be analyzed and compared. Far from being a
sophisticated mechanism for fabricating a truth, this method was
intended rather as "une demarche toute naturelle et terre a terre de
l'esprit, quelque chose comme un outil tres simple dont l'usage
demande pourtant des mains delicates et du discernement" (1925c:
14). So, when Middleton Murry called for a new classicism that
would effect a synthesis between intuition and intelligence, Mauron

33
 The critical formation
could easily counter that Bernard's experimental method had al-
ready realized this goal in science (1927c: 230-31) and that all that
remained was for aesthetics to adapt its insights.
But what exactly would be the meaning of an experimental method
applied to aesthetics? Who or what would be the object of exper-
imentation? Mauron attempted to answer these questions in his
description of his "guide in aesthetics," Roger Fry, as "le seul
homme, a mon sens, qui sut adapter a l'examen des emotions esthe-
tiques une methode experimentale correcte, entierement libre de
prejuges. Sans pedantisme, mais avec le souci de ne jamais se mentir
a soi-meme, Roger Fry poursuivait, sur les donnees de sa sensibilite
informee, un travail comparable a celui que William James et Flour-
noy appliquaient a l'experience religieuse" (1953d: 190). The object
to be studied experimentally was the informed sensibility of the
critic himself in his response to that work. But was not the detached
observer of the experiment the very same person? As we shall see
in the discussion of Aesthetics and Psychology, Mauron never really
came to terms with this rather obvious problem of the impossibility
of scientific disinterestedness on the part of the critic: He continued
to write about his experimental "hypotheses" as being the opposite
of "l'equivoque impressioniste" (1931a: 21) and even sought aes-
thetic "formulae" that would correspond to "any reality which can
be established by experiment in the minds of those interested in
art" (1935: 384).
As all of psychocritique was to come up against a similar logical
block, Mauron was at least accurate in pointing out his constant
debt to Fry, for the mentor too failed to see the contradiction in
the critic's analyzing and describing psychological phenomena ex-
perienced by himself.38 Even under so-called experimental condi-
tions, any attempt by one person to correlate the observable formal
properties of a work of art with the emotions they provoke in him
is open to nonscientific impressionism, no matter how open the
mind or how deliberate the intellectual honesty. Bernard's science
may allow for both intuition and reason in its method, but does
this in itself prevent the method of both Mauron and Fry from
being "experimental" in only a vague and metaphorical sense of
the word? These strange, but typically modernist, aesthetic bed-
fellows of formalism and psychology will be the subject of the next
two chapters, as we investigate how or if aesthetics could be said
to be a scientifically objective discipline.

34
 THE ATTRACTION OF FORMALISM

. . . the design itself, the scaffolding of the architec-

tonic structure, is really what counts.
ROGER FRY

C HARLES MAURON was himself like the disinterested

scientist he described as believing that the human mind
could conceive clearly nothing but relations and systems
of relations (1930a: 24). And it was as a man of science that Mauron
was attracted to formalism. For Roger Fry, both aesthetic contem-
plation and scientific reasoning involved the disinterested contem-
plation of what he too called "inevitable relations."1 Although
Mauron later disagreed with Fry's contemplative conception of
science, all of his writings manifest the same belief in the importance
of what Fry variously called form, design, unity of texture, rhythm,
and structural harmony. Fry came to see art primarily as a system
and, where the system was found wanting in coherence or control,
the art was found wanting in quality. The sense of ordered design,
of deliberate coordination of elements was what he appreciated in
the postimpressionists, who, he argued, had succeeded in redis-
covering the principles of structural design lost by the impression-
ists. The true artist, Fry believed, was ultimately and, in the long
run, exclusively concerned with form.
Fry's meeting with Mauron coincided with what Quentin Bell
has called the period of Fry's life in which he was most deeply
concerned with "plastic values."2 Concomitant with this concern
was his attraction to the idea of aesthetic "purity." As oddly naive
as this term sounds today, the concept of purity in art was then

35
 The critical formation
very much in the air, from Abbe Bremond's idea of "poesie pure"
to I. A. Richards's refutation of its existence. For Fry, the term was
intended to combat several inherited aesthetic presuppositions. As
early as 1886, he felt that a "pure aesthetics" should exist "apart
from the emotional end" of art.3 The intrinsic beauty of art, not
its goodness, was at issue. "An Essay on Aesthetics" (1909) further
clarified the distinction, upon which Fry insisted, between art and
morality. Taken for granted, perhaps, today, such a distinction was
at that time necessary. Though probably not directly influenced by
G. E. Moore, Fry revealed the general impact of the climate of
Cambridge expressed in Principia Ethica when he asserted that "eth-
ics are not an end in themselves, whereas the emotions of religion
and aesthetics are ends in themselves. " 4 As his biographer has noted,
Fry began his career "when Ruskin's belief that art had a moral
directive was being challenged by the notion of'art for art's sake.'
Fry could agree with neither faction: the former led to the distortion
of art as a means to an ulterior, non-aesthetic end; the latter was
in danger of divorcing art completely from life and it left no stan-
dard of judgement other than personal, subjective taste."5
Mauron always felt that Fry used the word purity in an almost
chemical sense, that is, to refer to an absence of nonaesthetic ele-
ments in the work of art. Under this category of nonrelevant items
would come not just moral considerations but utilitarian ones that
distract the spectator or reader from the essential aesthetic purpose
of art: hence, Fry's rejection of Buddhist religious art and "por-
nographic" Indian art. But knowing what purity excluded does not
necessarily get us much closer to Fry's actual meaning of the term.
It is clear that design or "ideal construction" has something to do
with it, but the concept is immediately complicated by the fact that
Fry always spoke of a reaction to relations of forms. In 1902 Fry first
analyzed his experience before a Chardin still life as an emotion
derived from form.6 This first linking of form and feeling (or for-
malism and psychology) became a constant in Fry's theories, though
he never fully explained the nature of the connection.
In the 1909 "Essay in Aesthetics," Fry conceded that the "emo-
tional elements of design" had even greater power if combined
with some representational content; but in the next few years his
statements on art became increasingly formalistic, at times almost
antirepresentational. The outraged reaction of the conservative Brit-
ish public to his two postimpressionist exhibitions (1910 and 1912)
36
 The attraction of formalism
might have forced him into this more radical position to combat
the obviously dominant taste for storytelling and recognizable sub-
ject matter in art. Certainly, by 1913, he was playing with the idea
that the aesthetic function of content in art might be only as directive
of form.7 In 1914, however, Clive Bell published his book Art.
Although much of the theory in it was reminiscent of Fry's, there
was an important difference. Fry was interested in significant form
as well, but also in that something that fused with form to give it
aesthetic significance, though again he never precisely defined this
relationship. When he came to write "Retrospect" for the 1920
collection of essays, Vision and Design, Fry traced the growth of his
belief in the aesthetic significance of formal design to the point that
he questioned his 1909 integration of representation in the power
of art. But the title of the book still suggests a duality: of vision,
or emotional impression, and design, the formal ordering of it.
Because Fry found the latter considerably easier to discuss, there is
a danger of reading his writings as more antirepresentative than
they, in fact, are. If it were all the same to Fry if a painting rep-
resented Christ or a saucepan, this is only because it was the form,
rather than the object itself, that was preeminent in aesthetic terms.
Fry was careful to point out that never had he denied the existence
of representation in art. He had come to argue only that the "purer"
the artist, the more his representation would be of universals and
the less of particulars. And the most significant universals were,
for Fry, formal ones. In a later paper, delivered in Brussels in the
fall of 1933,8 Fry again rethought and refined this notion of purity
by allowing that there were, indeed, two kinds of art: one that was
representational of everyday life (and this included poetry and most
painting) and another (such as music and architecture) that rejected
or at least downplayed this representation in favor of form in and
for itself. However, he then went on to distinguish between two
types of painting, one that, like architecture, produced "volumes
developing in an ideated space," and another that, like poetry,
derived its interest from the associations of the objects represented.
Great art, such as Giorgione's The Three Philosophers, he argued (as
he had in 1909), would ideally combine "great plastic construction"
and "extreme poetic exaltation." Together they created the strong-
est aesthetic emotion.
Although this statement of synthesis appears to be Fry's last and
most inclusive one on the question of representation, there is no
37
 The critical formation
doubt that his main interest, at least after 1902, was primarily in
the formal, that is, in the nonrepresentational qualities of a work
of art. Cezanne was, to him, the great classic master who avoided
appealing to romantic (that is, what he called "poetical") associa-
tions of ideas. For Mauron, as for Forster, this implied denigration
of poetry qualified any wholehearted desire to adopt this kind of
formalism for literature. Perhaps, in painting, content associations
do interfere with the contemplation of visual forms and patterns,
and so defile the purity of the aesthetic response. However, the
linguistic nature of literature, and in addition the narrative form of
fiction, complicate considerably the literary application of formalism.
Fry too found himself deciding that literature probably had little
to do with art, that is, art conceived of as form: "Even in the novel,
which as a rule has pretensions to being a work of art, the structure
may be so loose, the esthetic effects may be produced by so vast
an accumulation of items that the temptation for the artist to turn
aside from his purpose and interpolate criticisms of life, of manners
or morals, is very strong. Comparatively few novelists have ever
conceived of the novel as a single perfectly organic whole."9 But
Fry was always more willing to trust his direct response to a work
of art than to adhere at all costs to any theory, and much poetry,
and even some prose, escaped his disapprobation.
Mauron was profoundly influenced by the aspect of Fry's for-
malism that singled out formal relations as most worthy of study.
However, his field was literature and there the entire problem of
representation and signification was considerably more complex
than it was in the visual arts. The following statement represents
Mauron's earliest important literary adaptation and modification of
Fry's theories. In his commentary to Fry's translation of Mallarme's
"Ses purs ongles," Mauron remarked:

But the spirit demands a sense in what it reads; and not, as

certain modern poets would have us believe, merely from a
prosaic and vulgar preoccupation, but because the spirit lives
by finding relations and finds its delight therein, so that to
deprive one's phrases of sense is to renounce the richest system
of relations that language has created. Mallarme never ne-
glected such opportunities. He refuses no means of interre-
lating the words of his poem, on the contrary he combines
them all and complicates them, adding to the ties of primary
38
 The attraction of formalism
significance a whole network of harmonic suggestions and
interweaving the analogies of sound with the analogies of
sense. (1983b: 190-91)

In this passage lie all of the keys to psycho critique to its method
(interrelations; network of suggestions) and even to its fundamental
tenet of latent and manifest meanings in literature ("adding to the
ties of primary significance"). All that remained to be added was
the unconscious source both of those latent relations and also of
the "sense" itself. Even at his most formalistic, Mauron as literary
critic could not underestimate the role of meaning or representation
in literature; what he would do was displace the locus of both form
and signification from the conscious to the unconscious.
For a time Roger Fry's aesthetic formalism did involve a deni-
gration, though never a denial, of the aesthetic importance not only
of subject matter drawn from real life but also of the emotional
responses of everyday living. In all of Fry's writings the term "ro-
mantic" was used to describe art that deliberately called up the
emotions and memories of life. "Classical" art, on the other hand,
although it could not prevent the entry of these sorts of associations,
at least did not rely on them or try to provoke them. However,
acknowledging that great classic works of art evoked intense emo-
tion in the perceiver, Fry adopted as a solution the idea that this
was an emotion primarily aroused by form; it was an "aesthetic
emotion." Purely formal relations, or rather their recognition, cre-
ated profound feelings: The spectator, in contemplating the form,
moved along the same path, though in the opposite direction, that
the artist had taken. Thus, for both, the form and the emotion it
conveyed were bound together in an aesthetic whole.
Like the question of representation, this postulation of a uniquely
aesthetic emotion opens up a Pandora's box of logical problems.
Aesthetic value defined in any terms of emotional pleasure can easily
lead to tautologies: The aesthetic emotion is that which one feels
when contemplating the "necessary" formal relations in a work,
and if one's enjoyment of this work is attributed to its formal
beauty, its form then can be defined as having the property of
provoking aesthetic pleasure. This is exactly the kind of circular
reasoning that Clive Bell fell into in his discussion of this issue in
Art. Despite his professed debt to Fry in the preface, Bell was careful
- as was Fry - to insist on their theoretical disagreements.10

39
 The critical formation
In Art, Bell, unlike Fry, stated that representation was always
irrelevant and that one needed only a sense of form and color and
a knowledge of three-dimensional space to appreciate art.11 Ap-
preciation meant aesthetic emotion, an emotion peculiar to the ex-
perience of true works of art. True works of art were (circularly)
defined as those objects that provoked the aesthetic emotion, that
is, that therefore possessed significant form. Like Fry, however,
Bell felt that the spectator responded to this form insofar as it
represented the artist's emotion in perceiving pure forms in relation
to each other. Although we have seen that Fry's position on the
role of representation was more ambivalent and less fixed than Bell's
more extreme formulation, Fry did welcome the liberation of the
artist from the implied rules that prevented him from being able
to choose the degree of representation needed to express his "formal"
or aesthetic emotion. He also welcomed Bell's attempt to isolate
"purely" aesthetic feeling from the entire complex of feelings that
invariably accompany it when one contemplates a work of art.
Fry's definition of significant form is rather less strictly formalist
in its wording than the spokesman of purity might be expected to
produce.12 It is only vaguely defined as the outcome of an endeavor
to express an idea; it implies, according to Fry, an effort on the
part of the artist to "bend our emotional understanding" by means
of his "passionate conviction" to some intractable material that is
alien to our spirit.
Perhaps the reason here for the unformalistic, indeed expressive,
terminology lies in Fry's belief that the least representational, most
formal art form (such as music or, in painting, the still life) was
especially valuable as a gauge to the artist's personality: "If one
would understand an artist, one must sooner or later come to grips
with the actual material [not content] of his paintings, since it is
there, and nowhere else, that he leaves the precise imprint of his
spirit."13 Mauron's later development, in psycho critique, of the no-
tion that the formal networks of related images structuring an au-
thor's oeuvre had their roots deep in the creating psyche could be
seen as the same, initially bizarre-sounding, mixture of formalism
and expressivism, as a Fry-like belief both in patterns of relations
and in the emotional responses provoked by them - in artist and
perceiver both. Mauron felt that the aesthetic emotion was almost
always a mixture of the results of direct perception and a touching
of all the zones of the personality of the perceiver, as an echo of
40
 The attraction of formalism
those of the artist (1931a: 3-5). By the end of his life, however,
thirty years removed from Fry's influential presence, he would
finally only say: "Je crois que l'oeuvre d'art donne une emotion
specifique, que le probleme reste d'analyser" (1966a: 185).
The French discovery of the Russian and Czech formalists in the
1960s should serve to remind us that Roger Fry was by no means
the only theoretician of formalism in the early decades of the cen-
tury. Nevertheless, his immediate influence among his contem-
poraries (including Mauron) was considerable. The public scorn
and ridicule that greeted the first and second postimpressionist ex-
hibitions in London would not have led one to suspect that Fry
could claim, though perhaps still overconfidently, that by 1927
Cezanne's style was so universally accepted that any painting that
recalled it was usually overrated.14 Yet a major shift in British taste,
at least in the visual arts, was underway and Fry had certainly been
instrumental in its inauguration.
The general European climate in the twenties and thirties was
not necessarily open to formalist values in art, however. In Italy,
Croce's idealist influence had led to the devaluation of structure and
form as mere externalizations of the "intuition" that was the true
spiritual essence of art. In Mauron's France, the very home of
postimpressionism, one aesthetician actually called the 1920s a pe-
riod poor in painting and lacking in the recognized value that precise
landscape representation, for instance, once offered. Instead France
was plagued with uninteresting artists who painted badly, "prob-
ablement par manque de culture generale et culte de l'instinctif qui
l'un et l'autre dominent notre epoque."15 In England too - even in
Bloomsbury - formalism had certainly not yet won the day, es-
pecially in literary aesthetics. That text-psyche ambivalence at the
very heart of psychocritique betrays a double influence on Mauron:
Fry may have been delighted by the fiction of Henry James because
he felt he could almost draw the psychological pattern, but his
friend Forster felt this same pattern to be a liability, for it "shut
the doors on life."16 Significantly, the "People" chapter of his As-
pects of the Novel (1927) is about characters in relation to real people.
In his introductory remarks, Forster made clear his stand on the
question of the value and position of representation in fiction: "The
intensely, stiflingly human quality of the novel is not to be avoided;
the novel is sogged with humanity; there is no escaping the uplift
or the downpour, nor can they be kept out of criticism. We may
 The critical formation
hate humanity, but if it is exorcised or even purified the novel wilts,
little is left but a bunch of words."17
It was this very valorization of the "humane as opposed to the
aesthetic," as well as the attack on James, that drove Virginia Woolf
into the formalist camp, at least in her review of Forster's book in
the Nation and Athenaeum.1* Why, she demanded, was "life" con-
sidered to be "absent in a pattern but present in a tea party"? But
Forster had never ignored aesthetic form completely. His earlier
(1925) pamphlet, Anonymity: An Enquiry, had made this clear in its
stress on the unity and arrangement of words in verse. Its formalist
statement of faith - "A poem points to nothing but itself - antic-
ipated his 1949 assertion that the work of art was "a self-contained
entity, with a life of its own imposed on it by its creator. It has
internal order. It may have external form."19 But neither E. M.
Forster nor Virginia Woolf is remembered as a formalist theore-
tician; Roger Fry, on the other hand, is (despite his own insistence
that he was first and foremost a painter). Fry's impact on aesthetic
theory was significant, perhaps as much because of what he was
not, as because of what he actually was. As has probably become
apparent by now, Fry was not original, abstract, precise, or sys-
tematic as a theoretician, yet he was influential, and not just for
Charles Mauron.
It has recently been pointed out that the formalist theories of
Maurice Denis were responsible, as early as 1890, for making the
connections explicit between Cezanne and Poussin (and the classical
tradition in painting).20 To the reader of Roger Fry, such a link is
disturbing. Knowing that Fry was responsible for translating Denis
for the Burlington Magazine, one cannot help but feel that one has
stumbled upon one of the major unacknowledged sources of Fry's
own "classical" formalism, with his reactions to and arguments
with Clive Bell's pronouncements acting as a second inspiration.
Nevertheless, thanks to his numerous and somehow powerful
syntheses and to the force of his personality, it was Fry, even more
than Bell or Denis, who was most influential at the time.
Fry's formalism, with its directly related stress on the aesthetic
emotion of creator and perceiver both, preserved his theories from
any Bauhaus-like tendency toward the systematic and the abstract,
and also from the restricted formal idiom of the De Stijl idea of
geometric mechanical perfection. Fry's often unsystematic and even
shifting definitions obviously lacked the Germanic precision of dis-
42
 The attraction of formalism
tinction of a formalist like Worringer. Nor did Fry grapple in detail
with individual issues such as representation, as would a philoso-
pher of art like Bernheimer or an erudite art historian like Gom-
brich. In other words, perhaps it was the very lack of specialized
systematization in his formalism that made it suggestive - and
seductive. His power as a teacher and theoretician may well have
come, paradoxically, from what we see today as his very weak-
nesses - his vacillation, his derivativeness, his lack of technical
precision and rigorous organization.
Roger Fry was actually, then, anything but what John Rothen-
stein wanted to make of him: "a victim of a mystique of pure
form."21 Fry's formalism, as we have seen, was focused not just
on the form of the work of art but on the emotion intendent upon
its creation and its perception; this was to be a crucial part of Fry's
legacy to Mauron. This emotion was never, however, considered
totally dependent upon the overt content of the work. Photography
had liberated the artist from the constraints of direct representation;
it was now possible for Whistler to entitle his portrait of his mother
Arrangement in Gray and Black. The new emphasis was away from
Ruskinian moralism toward an appreciation of craftsmanship and
an assertion of the autonomy of art. This part of Fry's theory should
also be considered in the light of a long aesthetic tradition, a tra-
dition not only in the visual arts. In 1901, for instance, A. C.
Bradley, in "Poetry for Poetry's Sake," had rejected moral or re-
ligious apologia for verse. Bradley had argued for its independent
existence and intrinsic value. Like Mauron and Fry, however, he
felt that the subject of poetry was not indifferent or unimportant,
but that it constituted the content that the form then molded into
a unified whole. This was "purely poetic poetry." Although ad-
mitting that, in music and painting, form and content could be
separated, Bradley denied the possibility of such a split in poetry,
placing the locus of value on the integration of both components.
Fry's own ambivalence about the artistic status of literature as form
stems from the absence in his work of a consideration of the special
problems caused by the medium of language when representation
is at issue. This task he bequeathed to Charles Mauron.
The differences among the arts can probably not be ignored when
discussing any aspect of aesthetic formalism; however, perhaps these
differences are less significant than Fry's work suggests. The pos-
tulation of an aesthetic emotion is one aspect of formalism that begs
43
 The critical formation
the question. From Aristotelian catharsis to Longinian transport,
the idea of an emotional response to art has long been with us. But
the idea of an emotion peculiar to art, an emotional response to
form and not content, was a consequence of a formalistic theory
of art, and one that I. A. Richards, among others, disputed. In his
Principles ofLiterary Criticism, Richards traced this idea of an aesthetic
emotion to the influence of Whistler and Pater (via German aes-
thetics) and then to Clive Bell and A. C. Bradley. He did this in
order to argue against any such privileged emotion. Like many
other psychologically oriented critics (including finally Mauron),
he claimed that we cannot judge poetry "from within" only, be-
cause other concerns (cultural, religious, and so on) interfere with
- that is, enter - our poetic judgments. No formalist, Richards
would not admit a unique response to mere form that would be
different from the response to content in kind, rather than degree.
He was reacting less to Fry here than to Clive Bell's rather strong
statement in Art that "to appreciate a work of art we need bring
with us nothing from life, no knowledge of its ideas and affairs,
no familiarity with its emotions. Art transports us from the world
of man's activity to a world of aesthetic exaltation. For a moment
we are shut off from human interests; our anticipations and mem-
ories are arrested; we are lifted above the stream of life."22 Even
Fry found this view a little extreme, as we have seen, and argued
instead that although art (especially representational art) did arouse
other emotions, there still existed a "purely aesthetic" one. In this,
Fry may have been influenced by Santayana's The Sense of Beauty,
which he probably read during his 1904 trip to America.23 In it,
Santayana had argued that beauty in art was in the material and
form of the work - that is, in the objectification of the pleasures
of perception. But beauty also involved the associated feelings in-
herent in the object as material or form. In literature, form resided
in the music or syntax of the language of verse, but also in the plot
and characters of the work of fiction. Content and representation
cannot, therefore, be excluded, even if it is their ordering, not their
identity, that is aesthetically significant.
In the theory of the representational arts, Walter Abell tried to
effect this same synthesis of form and content that literary critics
were compelled to create because of their linguistic medium. As
the title of his 1936 book, Representation and Form: A Study of Aes-
thetic Values in Representational Art, suggests, it was the content, not

44
 The attraction of formalism
only its form or its medium, that instigated Abell's investigations.
Influenced, he claimed, by Santayana, Roger Fry, and Charles Mau-
ron, Abell's method is one of proceeding "in a scientific temper,"
examining data and then experimenting with reducing visual ex-
perience to its simplest elements by using as subject his own "per-
ceptive mechanism" as grasped "through introspection."24 Abell's
chosen field of study was obviously one of the most controversial
issues in art criticism at the time: the relation of subject matter to
aesthetic effect. The formalist rejection of the traditional valorizing
of content was creating a rethinking of the issue, resulting in various
attempts to reconcile the extremes. Abell's attempt began with
Santayana's distinction between material (color, tone, and so forth),
form (the significant relations of material), and "expression" (as-
sociation of contemplation and sensation). Fry wanted to deny the
aesthetic value, though not the existence, of expression. But Abell's
subsequent broadening of Fry's notion of form was important: Here
form still involved organized relations, but now these were relations
between any given elements. Therefore, to ignore subject matter
would now be to ignore form. Mauron had had to make much the
same change because his linguistic medium had demanded it, and
Abell likely reasoned from Mauron and literature back to the visual
arts,
Abell's reason for including content as form was that he saw the
mind as a "representational instrument" that tended to create rep-
resentational forms from any colors, shapes, masses, and volumes.
In other words, representation was actually needed in order for the
interest in form to be pursued. Fry's own lack of interest in abstract
art and his own paintings - landscapes, still lifes, and portraits -
suggest that Abell understood, as few others did, Fry's implied
validation of at least the formal use of representational objects in
art.25 However, Fry would not have approved of Abell's theory of
an "associative form" that would unite with a "plastic form" to
create a "representational form." The associations, inevitable in
romantic art or literature, were always things better exorcized, not
integrated, according to Fry's notion of aesthetic purity. Abell was
aware that he had gone beyond Fry's formalist frame of reference;
in fact, it was Mauron, he claimed, who had shown him the way.
There were other critics who, like Mauron and Abell, wanted
to include content and the emotional response to it as at least a part
of the aesthetic emotion. In Art as Experience (1934), John Dewey,
45
 The critical formation
for instance, defined form as "the operation of forces that carry the
experience of an event, object, scene, and situation to its own integral
fulfillment."*6 Although explicitly in response to formalism, Dew-
ey's book misrepresented Roger Fry's views considerably. Dewey
claimed, for example, that Fry denied that the artist even attempted
representation. But surely the admirer of Cezanne's still lifes, land-
scapes, and portraits acknowledged their representational nature.
All Fry argued was that the particular objects represented were not
what were significant to aesthetic perception. Once more, Fry never
denied the presence, only the aesthetic significance, of representa-
tion in art. He knew only too well that the plastic arts aroused
emotion through what they expressed, apart from the emotional
reaction to formal relations. However, he was primarily interested
in the form and the response to it.
The early work of Herbert Read shows him to be another ba-
sically formalist critic who was also grappling with this issue in the
early 1930s. And, like many of the others, he wanted to broaden
the idea of form to include not just architectonic rhythm but also
a symbolic or generalized response. He specifically argued against
Fry in The Meaning of Art (1931) for the consideration in art of
philosophical and psychological (even unconscious) values that might
arise from "our common human sympathies and interests. "27 How-
ever, like Fry, he called "impure" any strictly moral concern that
intruded upon the work, while still accepting that art was "pattern
informed by sensibility" or "the direct measure of man's spiritual
vision." Read's work is interesting, for in many ways it represents
a kind of unwitting synthesis of the concerns of Mauron, the literary
critic, and Fry, the art theoretician. Obviously I do not mean to
suggest that this was a deliberate endeavor, but rather only that
Read manifested clearly an intense interest in (and attempted res-
olution of) many of the same issues - especially formalism and
psychoanalysis - that Mauron and Fry struggled with over the
course of their lives. Most important here, though, is the same
extended formalist concern for the effects of the rhythms of art that
can be seen in Read's definition of aesthetics as "the study of the
conditions under which the materials of art are persuaded to ac-
commodate an informing spirit."28 Aesthetics, as the science of
perception, was to be concerned with the perception and arrange-
ment of material qualities into pleasing shapes and patterns. The
similarities with Mauron's thinking are striking, perhaps because

46
 The attraction of formalism
both men were responding to Fry, or perhaps because they both
participated in the speculative rethinking of philosophic and sci-
entific boundaries that both Fry and Bell represent.
The somewhat tautological and extreme theories of Clive Bell
have been attacked as often and as vehemently as have Fry's, but
for Mauron, it was definitely his friend, Fry, who was the important
formalist voice - not only because of their friendship, but also
because Mauron saw in Fry the same personal split between art and
science, between artistic imagination (and receptivity) and the an-
alytic, scientific mind. As we have seen, he was by no means alone
in his attraction to Fry and his work. In fact, few aestheticians since
have felt happy ignoring Fry; most have felt obliged to acknowledge
him, in passing at least, if only to disagree. One of these more
recent theoreticians is Susanne Langer. Although she agrees with
Fry on the primacy of formal organization, even in representational
art, she disagrees on grounds of common sense with his exclusion
of the ordinary concerns of the perceiver, as most people cannot
or will not bother to separate their aesthetic contemplation from
their everyday emotions and concerns.29 Fry's firm and constant
commitment to the notion of aesthetic emotion was, however, a
direct development from his formalism and in no way contradicts
it. And it was perhaps precisely his willingness to consider not just
the work of art as a formal entity, but also the responses engendered
in both creator and perceiver, that made him someone to deal with,
a voice impossible to ignore. The very wide-ranging implications
of Fry's particular aesthetic formalism probably made him inevit-
ably influential, even without the force of his personality. Among
those most attracted to both the person and the broad theoretical
perspective, as his first book, The Nature of Beauty in Art and Lit-
erature, reveals, was Charles Mauron.
This work by Mauron was published in 1927 by Leonard and
Virginia Woolf in the Hogarth Essay series, a series that had in-
cluded Fry's The Artist and Psycho-Analysis and Art and Commerce,
Read's In Retreat, Forster's Anonymity, Eliot's Homage to John Dry-
den, and Virginia Woolf's Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown. It consisted
of two parts, the first being the series of Burlington Magazine articles
of 1925, and the second, a version of Mauron's paper given at the
Pontigny Conference in the same year. Fry's influence is clearly
visible in the entire book, though Mauron did adapt rather than
adopt his theories, and his modifications are significant ones. This

47
 The critical formation
established a pattern that Mauron would later repeat with the the-
ories of his second mentor, Sigmund Freud.
Mauron began from a very formalist starting point: "If an object
counts only by its shape and colour, it is of little importance if it
be an object or not; it is purely shape and colour, and one can place
it beside other shapes and other colours without any signification;
they are chosen by the painter only to satisfy his sense of harmony"
(1927a, [1925]: 14). However, he used this formalistic idea of the
choice and arrangement of elements to bring out a certain order of
relations as the basis of his discussion of the relationship between
art and science. As we saw earlier, Claude Bernard had argued that
all science involved the study of relations; so the ex-scientist, Mau-
ron, perceived a similarity on these grounds between the scientific
and artistic domains. However, the differences between them were
even more apparent to him. Whereas science aimed at universal
laws or at mathematical formulas, such schematic and simple re-
ductions would not be satisfying in art (18). Mauron subscribed
instead to the time-honored traditional view of beauty in art: unity
in diversity, order in variety. However, this view was also a con-
sequence of Mauron's formalism, as it was of the formalism of
others we have considered.30 The originality and complexity of art,
for Mauron, made it like a natural object (a leaf or a tree): simple,
lucid, yet complicated (36). Perhaps by implication, then, the critic
of art could be said to be like the biologist. Art was more than an
intellectual construct to Mauron - it was something both as real
and as complex as an external, natural object, though he never
denied its existence as an inimitable creation of the human spirit.
Poincare had suggested that aesthetic order gave a presentiment
of mathematical law in the sense that the latter also involved beau-
tiful and harmonious relations. Roger Fry too saw both science and
art as ruled by a "unity emotion" that accompanied recognition of
"unity in a complex."31 Aesthetic emotion corresponded in a sense
to scientific logic. In fact, Fry wrote to the Maurons in 1920 that
the artist was like the scientist in working toward unity: "This
perception of unity and necessity is very like the perception and
comprehension of a natural law when one recognizes that many
different phenomena are governed by a single principle."32 It was
probably just such a statement that provoked Mauron, on the basis
of his experience as a scientist, to disagree with Fry, while still
basically accepting Bernard's view of science as the establishing of
48
 The attraction of formalism
relations. The laws of science were too simple to be satisfying
equivalents of the heterogeneous, complex structures of art. How-
ever, Mauron agreed with Fry that the unity in multiplicity of art
operated on the level of form, not matter, that is, on the level of
intent, not accident: It is the form of the statue, not the stone, that
interests us. This is what Fry called the "purposeful order and
variety" of art. Like Mauron, Fry felt that the more complex the
relations recognized in the form, the greater the aesthetic pleasure.
Just as it was Mauron's real experience as a scientist that led him
to differ with Fry on the kind of order found in science as opposed
to that found in art, so it was his interest in literature in addition
to painting that led him to contest Fry's formalist denigration of
the aesthetic significance of subject matter. Mauron's argument
grew out of their initial art-science disagreement, however: He
opposed the exact and rigorous precision of a scientific formula to
the "a peu pres," the suggestive quality of art. In art, therefore,
there is both that natural complexity discussed earlier and a "spir-
itual complexity" that appeals to the sensitive perceiver. Language
provided Mauron with his most cogent example, for words have
both an intellectual (denotative) reality and a poetic (connotative)
one that he defined as "the ensemble of the reactions of our sen-
sibility before the objective reality which the words represent" (44).
Mauron was now straying from Roger Fry's kind of formalism,
for he now actually allowed associations from content into his literary
aesthetics, and he did so because he felt that the analytic form-
content separation did not correspond to the experience of either
the creator or the perceiver of a work of literature. He still held,
with Fry, that form alone could be beautiful, but felt these emotive
associative elements should not, and could not, be ignored.
In the second essay in The Nature of Beauty in Art and Literature,
Mauron again took up this point of debate with Fry and it became
clear that it was in the comparison between painting and literature
that the disagreement lay. Mauron began by claiming that he wanted
to isolate, from the many and complex reactions to art, the spe-
cifically aesthetic emotion. In painting, he agreed that this would
be a response to spatial volume. The equivalent response in liter-
ature, however, would be to spiritual or psychological realities, "all
the forms of our inner life" (66). In other words, volume in the
plastic arts provokes reaction in the same way that content - that
is, the sense of words and the psychological reality they define -

49
 The critical formation
does in literature. Mauron went on to suggest a classification of
these "beings," ranging in complexity from "states of mind" to
character types to related facts or situations (74-8). Roger Fry paid
a formalist's tribute to this idea of psychological volumes as "an
ingenious analogy of literature with the plastic arts" that enabled
us "for the first time dimly to grasp what it is of which the relations
are felt by us when we apprehend esthetically a work of literature."33
Fry undercut his praise, however, by warning the reader that it
would be perhaps premature to lay too much stress on Mauron's
"brilliant suggestion." And indeed, neither Mauron nor Fry pur-
sued the idea further. Perhaps, however, another friend did. That
E. M. Forster dedicated Aspects of the Novel to Mauron was not
likely just a sign of friendliness toward his translator. The influence
of Mauron's "psychological volumes" can be seen in Forster's de-
scription of characters in novels as "word-masses," and in his fa-
mous idea of a typology of "flat" and "round" characters.
The term "psychological volume" suggests a paradox, or at the
very least a mixture, of content (psychological) and form. This
combination was forced upon Mauron, as it was upon other literary
formalists, by the nature of both language and narrative. Mauron
was obliged to admit that in general "it is the sense of the phrases
that gives us pleasure and not their rhythm, it is our spirit and not
our ear that savours them" (72). Form cannot be separated from
content; it is the "spiritual shape" of the poem, as dictated by
content, "an unforeseen mixture of sensations, ideas, memories,
and emotions which find themselves miraculously in unison, and
compose, one knows not how, a single whole" (75). This is a bizarre
combination of mysticism, impressionism, and associationalism to
find in a book that began with a strong statement of faith in the
experimental method in aesthetics. Bizarre, perhaps, but typical of
all of Mauron's work, despite his aiming for scientific "objectivity."
Like Mauron, Fry protested that he was never an impressionistic
critic. The terms in which he perceived his own endeavors apply
equally well - as a statement of intent, at least - to the early empirical
aesthetics of his French friend:

A certain scientific curiosity and a desire for comprehension

have impelled me at every stage to make generalizations, to
attempt some kind of logical coordination of my impressions.
But on the other hand, I have never worked out for myself
50
 The attraction of formalism
a complete system such as the metaphysicians deduce from a
priori principles. I have never believed that I knew what was
the ultimate nature of art. My aesthetic has been a purely
practical one, a tentative expedient, an attempt to reduce to
some kind of order my aesthetic impressions up to date. It
has been held merely until such time as fresh experiences
might confirm or modify it. Moreover, I have always looked
upon my system with a certain suspicion.34

This is, in effect, a confession of faith in the scientific method of

Bernard, complete with a belief in a working hypothesis, in concrete
experiment, in inductive logic, in an openness to modification or
correction, and in a necessary scientific doubt. Later Fry would
reinforce his faith in the modest words describing ''Art-History as
an Academic Study": "It is indeed only by acquiring a certain
humility and diffidence in our own judgments that we can hope
constantly to improve our sensibility and lay ourselves open to
fresh experiences."35 Mauron, in the same spirit, had opened his
first work with certain conditions of "making, before one starts,
good provision of intellectual honesty, of abandoning all pride and
all hope of absolute success, of being happy if one finds, not the
formula, but a few honest phrases which are not too absurd" (n).
This becoming modesty of intention is a product of both men's
belief in the value of the experimental method in aesthetics. It
contrasts sharply and significantly with Mauron's later defensive
insistence on the value and importance of both psycho critique and
its chosen orthodoxy, psychoanalysis. Bernard had taught that in-
creased complexity in science demanded an even better experi-
mental critique. Surely, then, the even greater complexity of modern
art could also benefit from a rigorous experimental criticism. And
so, in his first work, Mauron began: "Let us question our sensa-
tions. Let us consider simply, without any theories in mind, the
two results that we wish to identify" (16). What two results? What
was the case submitted to experiment here? It was again Mauron's
personal bete noire, the relationship between art and science. How-
ever, this personal issue coincided with a very public debate in
aesthetics at this time, making Mauron a revealing figure of his
period - and not for the last time.
 ART AND SCIENCE

Le devoir, pour chacun de nous, est de rechercher

les points de liaison [entre la science et l'art] et de les
rechercher experimentalement, car c'est le seul moyen
de reussir.
CHARLES MAURON

T HAT THERE COULD EXIST any grounds at all for a

debate on art and science is a modern phenomenon. In the
days of Leonardo, the bifurcation did not really exist. Both
Mauron and Fry felt the need in their respective fields for what the
latter called "systematic study in which scientific methods will be
followed wherever possible, where at all events the scientific atti-
tude may be fostered and the sentimental attitude discouraged."1
Both Julian Bell and Mauron described Fry as a man who made a
synthesis of the attitudes of the artist and the scientist,2 the very
terms of praise Freud used to describe Goethe (1930c; 21: 208 - see
Appendix D). Whereas Mauron believed that it was the critic, armed
with the experimental method, who was like the scientist, Fry
compared the artist to the man of science: Both dealt with relations
that were ends in themselves and did not stand for something else.
They both constructed self-contained, self-consistent structures that
were real in and of themselves.3 Another link between the modern
artist and the scientist for Fry lay in the direction of their orientation:
"Science has turned its instruments in on human nature and begun
to investigate its fundamental needs, and art has also turned its
vision inwards, has begun to work upon the fundamental necessities
of man's aesthetic functions."4
The similarities Fry saw between art and science made him enter
the debate on the topic in the pages of the Athenaeum in 1919, in
52
 Art and science

response to the articles of "S" on the aesthetic value of scientific

theories. Fry argued that, though the processes of science might be
intellectual, the motives were fundamentally emotional in the sense
that science, like art, provided pleasure through the recognition of
inevitable relations. In science the relations existed even without
this emotional response, however. Such was not the case in art,
given Fry's definition of the aesthetic emotion. Nevertheless, despite
this difference, Fry posited a higher psychological "unity-emotion"
that the two activities shared, as the recognition of unity in com-
plexity brought pleasure in science much as in art.5
When the formalist Fry went one step further and claimed that
the aesthetic consideration of both art and science had nothing to
do with truth to fact, reference, or subject matter, he provoked a
response from I. A. Richards, whose reply suggests his debt to
G. E. Moore: The fact that art and science did treat truth differently
meant that science consisted of a "systematic connection of prop-
ositions," whereas art consisted of propositions "for their own
sakes."6 This view would be translated (by 1925) into the semantic
distinction between referential and emotive uses of language, and
(by 1926) into the statement versus pseudostatement theory. Rich-
ards's insistence on the difference in truth value of art and science
is one that would not, of course, worry a strict aesthetic formalist.
But Richards's own roots were clearly in that part of the romantic
tradition that saw a dichotomy between beauty and truth, imagi-
nation and scientific observation.
Beginning with the renewed importance of scientific positivism
in the nineteenth century and continuing on through the modern
preoccupation with science and technology, there has been a gen-
erally increased desire to bring various aesthetic and scientific the-
ories into line with one another. Charles Mauron was not the only
one who wanted to use the methods of science to study art. For
example, even in the 1870s Fechner was trying to locate, by sci-
entific experiment, the pleasurable elements in art.7 Indeed, there
is an entire tradition of this search for what Mauron called an
empirical aesthetic in nineteenth-century Germany and Austria, not
to mention the British tradition going back to Hume. In the back-
ground of these discussions, of course, looms the figure of Kant.
The psychoanalysts, too, later entered the art-science debate. Ella
Freeman Sharpe, for instance, worked from a formalist starting
point not unlike that of Roger Fry: Both art and science were

53
 The critical formation
concerned with ordering complexities into unities, although in the
first case the complexities were emotional, and in the second, fac-
tual.8 The "pure scientist" believed in knowledge for knowledge's
sake, just as the "pure artist" believed in art for art's sake. With
no utilitarian or moral end in view, both were seen as detached
from the practical life. However, both were seen as sublimations,
and here Fry, if not Mauron, would have disagreed. Sharpe saw
the artist's introjection that led to the impersonality and universality
of art as a direct equivalent of the scientist's projection that was the
source of his dispassionate objective observation. Despite this dif-
ference between introjection and projection, she saw art and science
as complementary on a psychological level. In this she anticipated
Mauron's comparable turning to psychoanalysis as a way of com-
bining art and science.
This general debate between the two disciplines, then, was very
much in the air in the first decades of the century. Even resolutely
unscientific commentators such as E. M. Forster were made self-
conscious. One of his notes for Aspects of the Novel reads: "The
scientist aims at truth, and succeeds if he finds it. The artist aims
at truth and succeeds if he raises the emotions."9 Forster's profound
distrust of science was in part based on his experience as a novelist,
for he was always more interested in "bouncing" his reader than
in following any rigid theory. As a critic, therefore, he chose the
"unscientific and vague" term "aspects" for the title of his Clark
lectures, with the idea of allowing himself a maximum of freedom.
The Second World War then added a further dimension to Forster's
fear of science: "If Science would discover rather than apply - if,
in other words, men were more interested in knowledge than in
power - mankind would be in a far safer position."10
There is none of Roger Fry's confidence in the social value of
the disinterestedness and truth of science here, but Fry did not live
to witness Hiroshima. And of course, true to form, Fry changed
his mind about the similarities between art and science by the end
of his life. Like Mauron, and perhaps even because of him, Fry
began to take the view of the critic, not the artist. From that point
of view he could see that, although both critic and scientist turned
to experience to verify their statements, the individual responses
to the complexity of art prevented aestheticians from arriving at
any agreement regarding universals. Almost agreeing with the young
Richards, Fry then claimed that science was concerned with the

54
 Art and science

relation of man to his environment, whereas art was "purely a

family matter among human beings," a way of sharing, of com-
municating experience. Art presented the "quality and quiddity"
of experience; science reduced it to a mere statement of fact.11 One
wonders how deeply Fry's conversations with Mauron influenced
his change of theory: The young chemist began disagreeing with
Fry's view of science in print in 1925, but his fullest rebuttal came
in his second book, Aesthetics and Psychology, translated by Fry.
During his 1931 lecture tour, Mauron had offered his first con-
tribution to the art-science debate. Although each, he claimed,
made order out of chaos, established resemblances, and denied chance
in favor of intentional control, there were significant differences
between the two activities (1931a: 30). Unlike art, science sought
to reduce its observations of relations to formulas, which were then
capable of validation through experiment. The resemblances noted
by science must therefore be obvious and reproducible. None of
these conditions held true for art. Likewise, the end of art was not
a practical one, like that of science. The contemplation of the past
and especially the present was important to individual creative art;
collective experimental science, on the other hand, oriented itself
toward action in the future. In making this claim Mauron was
following Claude Bernard, his first master, and not Roger Fry, his
second.
Fry had always argued, of course, that art belonged to the realm
of imaginative, not actual, life. The imagination was, by definition
for Fry, intense yet disinterested and contemplative, impassioned
yet detached.I2 It was a higher state of being, freed from the de-
mands and influence of the actual world. In 1919, in that Athenaeum
debate, Fry extended this quality of art to science and mathematics:
"The mind is held in delighted equilibrium by the contemplation
of the inevitable relations of all the parts in the whole."13 And by
1924, Fry was prepared to formulate this idea in even stronger
terms: In The Artist and Psycho-Analysis, originally a paper presented
to the British Psychological Society, Fry said: "To understand the
scientific activity you must note that its essence is precisely this
complete detachment from the instinctive life, its complete use-
lessness, its abiological nature, since it exists not to serve life, but
truth."14 He could then claim that therefore science was like art,
disinterested and contemplative. Fry seemed unaware of the im-
plications of this view of science. Was science, like art, a "non-
55
 The critical formation
essential activity" in practical terms?15 Did it too imply an ''attentive
passivity to the effects of sensations apprehended in their relations"?16
It was precisely these implications that Mauron picked up on in
Aesthetics and Psychology. In 1925, he had still been trying to sit on
Fry's fence, calling science an active contemplation of facts (1929a
[1925]: 707), but by 1935 he was willing to say that he disagreed
with Fry's idea of science as a manifestation of the contemplative
attitude of the mind. As a former chemical engineer, Mauron felt
that science was not absorbed in the present, but rather was con-
cerned with the future, and as such was active, not contemplative
(1970a [1935]: 29). The scientist sought to label sensations, to find
their functions, rather than to enjoy them in the present. The con-
templative "aesthetic attitude" forced us to focus attention on the
present. One of the immediate consequences of this focusing was
the dissolution of the "practical" or material organization of our
world. Here Mauron was being Fry's disciple. However, Mauron
was not willing to extend this to science, as his mentor was. In
fact, Mauron stressed the fact that art actually had to create new
orders to replace the natural utilitarian ones, because action was
forbidden in the contemplative state of either creation or recognition
of new relations in art. Science operated differently, aiming actively
to understand natural organization, with an eye to its future control
and change.
Another distinction between art and science arose from Mauron's
discussion of a second consequence of the aesthetic attitude - an
increased sensitivity to differences, which he called "sensibility"
(40). As opposed to intellectual, scientific attempts to reduce dif-
ferences to general laws, to assimilate distinctions, the aesthetic
sensibility delighted in the individual otherness of differences, in
diversity, despite unity. The search for resemblances was seen as
an essential characteristic of the human mind, and, as Mauron had
learned from Claude Bernard, it was the basis of all scientific logic.
Yet for Mauron, "intelligence" meant the balancing of logical rea-
son with a sensibility that could perceive and value differences in
relation to analogies. In viewing or creating art, there was none of
the scientist's need to use resemblances to predict; individual oth-
erness was central to art.
The third consequence of the aesthetic attitude, according to
Mauron, was the one most calculated to set him apart from Fry,
whose concept of "pure" art eliminated, in his own words, "all
56
 Art and science

the romantic overtones of life which are the usual bait by which
men are induced to accept a work of art."17 A Criterion essay,
published in the same year as his second book, first expressed Mau-
ron's contrary view that the aesthetic emotion was not just a re-
action to form, but was instead a "ferment of instincts, memories
and ideas of every sort" (1935: 383). In Aesthetics and Psychology he
was more precise: An important consequence of the aesthetic at-
titude was its "multiplication of echoes" (41). The term "association
of ideas" was discarded as too narrow, because the feelings and
desires awakened were from daily life, but also from physiological
or sexual responses, and perhaps from deeper psychological impres-
sions. (This was the main idea of Mauron's that Walter Abell de-
veloped into his theory of "associative form.") Once again, Mauron's
source was likely Poincare. In his work on the value of science, the
mathematician had also argued that an aesthetic emotion was aroused
by harmonious combinations of the relations of sensations brought
about by a work of art. A sensation was beautiful because it oc-
cupied a central place in the "woof of our associations of ideas."18
What is of particular interest for us here, however, is that, in
disagreeing with Fry's definition of the aesthetic emotion, Mauron
had sided with Freud. Fry opposed what was really his own re-
ductive interpretation of the Freudian notion of art as sublimation
and of the artist as a person with unusually powerful instinctual
demands but with an introverted personality that drove him to live
in a fantasy world (cf. Freud, I9o8e; 9: 143-53, and 1916-17; 15:
99). Although he admired Freud's scientific and intellectual integ-
rity, Fry could not accept that art was wish-fulfilment. In The Artist
and Psycho-Analysis he argued against "honour, power, and the love
of women" as motivating forces in "pure" artists (who were con-
cerned with the contemplation of formal relations), although he
admitted that other "impure" artists might well succumb to such
lures.19 He wrote to Robert Bridges at this time: "As to sex, it,
like the endocrine glands, may be a predisposing cause, a stimulus
. . ., but surely is no part of the aesthetic apprehension."20 In other
words, other impulses existed in art but they did not contribute to
its specifically aesthetic quality.
Mauron felt that common sense showed that human beings could
not or would not separate their responses to art quite that precisely.
But a formalist purist like Clive Bell would argue the contrary, at
least for the creator of art, if not for the perceiver. In 1925, in
57
 The critical formation
agreement with Fry, Bell wrote: "The artist is not concerned with
even the 'sublimations' of his normal lusts, because he is concerned
with a problem which is quite outside normal experience. His object
is to create a form which shall match an aesthetic conception, not
to create a form which shall satisfy Dr. Freud's unappeased long-
ings."21 Yet it was not Bell but Fry to whom Ernest Jones felt he
had to reply in his chapter devoted to art in Freud's biography.
Jones bowed to Hanns Sachs's agreement with Fry that recognition
("honour, power, and the love of women") was not the motivating
force for "pure" or mature artists, for whom the audience was only
an internalized concept.22 However, Jones defended Freud's stress
on fantasy and his relative neglect of form, as he shared Freud's
belief that form was a lure of "forepleasure" that only disguised
gratification of wishes. Fry, of course, eliminated from the aesthetic
emotion all but responses to form: that is, sexual emotions and the
pleasures of vanity and of love of power, not to mention religious
and moral convictions. These more instinctive satisfactions had
nothing to do with the "pure" response to art.
Very early on, Mauron had suspected that the aesthetic emotion
was really a complex of emotions (1925c: 18). At no point did he
reject psychological insights, as some of the critics of his early work
have suggested.23 In fact, although he admitted his debt to Fry, he
was quick to show his doubts as well: The stimulation of strong
sensations by popular or "impure" art was surely a crude but par-
allel version of the pleasure of all art. The strongest instincts of
man were seen by Mauron as the wills to power and sex. Nietzsche
and Freud united to fight Fry. Mauron also left room in aesthetic
response for the "gentler emotions" (73) - feelings and convictions
- as long as they did not break the contemplative attitude and
become propaganda, orienting the viewer toward future action.
Finally, the associations of art did not exclude personal memories,
for the past too was part of the contemplative state. All of these
associations, of course, would have been rejected outright by Fry
as "impure" and unrelated to aesthetic response.
But Mauron was attempting something new: He was trying to
make aesthetics into a branch of psychology, to move it away from
the judgments of ethics and the generalized abstractions of meta-
physics. This prefigured psycho critique's acceptance of the orthodoxy
of psychoanalysis. Mauron always sought an experimental method
of inquiry into aesthetic response and, from the start, he saw psy-
58
 Art and science

chology as the scientific study that took the emotions as its raw
material. This meant that Mauron had shifted the entire focus of
the art-science debate. It was no longer the artist who shared the
scientist's detached contemplation, as Fry had argued, but instead
it was the aesthetician, the critic, who shared the active role of the
scientist, seeking analogies amid the differences. Like Bernard's
scientist, he would be observer, data collector, experimenter. The
significant and problematic variant on the classic experimental
method, however, was that his own reactions to the work of art
were to constitute the data observed and collected. Mauron seemed
to see this experiment on himself not as a problem or as a contra-
diction of the principle of scientific objectivity, but rather as a
necessary adaptation for aesthetic usage: "Can I introduce some
order into my aesthetic impressions, and in a measure explain them,
by taking the contemplative attitude as a starting point? The study
which follows is simply a personal experiment with this hypoth-
esis" (2930). In choosing this method Mauron was trying, perhaps,
to achieve a reconciliation with Fry's general procedures, if not
with his specific argument. He always admired Fry's ability to be
faithful to his concrete experience rather than to his theories, but
would later also compliment the scientific spirit in Fry: "II aimait
la verite et, dans l'esprit, on peut dire, d'un naturaliste examinant
des plantes . . ., avait etudie ses propres reactions devant les oeuvres
d'art" (1952 [1949]: 24). Mauron's self-observation in Aesthetics and
Psychology was, he claimed, that of an amateur, not a professional,
and he invited the reader to try the test himself. In this too, Mauron
echoed Fry's views that the "experiments have to be made by the
inquirer and mainly on himself, by watching, with such honesty
and detachment as he can command, his own reactions . . . The
only guarantee that the inquirer can give under such circumstances
is to lay his cards on the table and invite the reader to see whether
his own reactions in any given case coincide."24
However, it was not just Mauron's method that was psycholog-
ical. His "experiences" - in English, both his experiences and his
experiments - revealed that the pleasure of art set into action what
he described as a three-part psychological mechanism: sensibility,
mental echoes, and organizing reason. In other words, there is the
nonscientific perceiving and valuing of difference, along with the
many "impure" associations called up by the work, and the, again
unscientific, elimination of the active and practical organization in

59
 The critical formation
life in favor of the contemplation of the new structures of art. On
all three of these points, Mauron was expressing disagreement with
Roger Fry's theories. This, however, did not prevent Fry from
translating the book, although he died before completing it. And
there was no doubt in Mauron's mind that Fry's spirit of scientific
inquiry, combined with that sensitivity and openness to art that
often overrode his theories, remained the model and point of de-
parture for his own efforts all his life to unite science and art (1952
[1949]: 27).
Aesthetics and Psychology was widely and favorably reviewed. Al-
though the review (1 August 1935) in the Times Literary Supplement,
praising both Mauron and Fry, might be suspect, given the number
of Bloomsbury associates who wrote anonymously for the paper,
the laudatory reviews from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South
Africa, America, and even Oxford cannot be dismissed so easily.25
And we have already seen that Walter Abell, for one, was directly
influenced by Mauron, almost more than by Fry. The Criterion
review pointed out that Mauron attempted to account for all of the
elements of aesthetic experience: that is, the roles played by reason,
emotions, and sensibility.26 It also contrasted Mauron both with
those psychoanalysts who saw art only in terms of symbolic ref-
erence and with the "exponents of Significant Form" who were
interested only in the formal organization of art.
Although this distinction is accurate, in reality it masks the fact
that Mauron actually unites a formalistic concern about the unity
and uniqueness of the work of art itself with a psychological in-
vestigation into the responses to the work of art, on the level of
content as well as form. This synthesis was an extension of that
alteration of Fry's formalism for literary purposes that he had al-
ready argued in his first book: Form in literature had to include
sense. When Mauron sought a scientific basis for his formalism, he
turned to Bernard's experimentalism for the general method, but
for the material and techniques he turned to the new sciences of
psychology and psychoanalysis. Mauron later claimed that it was
Mallarme who taught him that purity in art and psychoanalytic
notions were far from incompatible (1952 [1949]: 28), but his earlier
response to Fry's challenge to Freud was just as instructive in help-
ing Mauron reconcile art and science. And when the aesthetician
turned literary critic, the resulting psychocritical method openly

60
 Art and science

tried to combine the concreteness of science with the openness and

intuitiveness that characterized imaginative art (1968b [1964-5]: 35).
All of Mauron's later criticism was to reflect these constant ten-
sions which, as we have been seeing, had their roots in the very
life of the chemistpoetcritic: the active versus the contemplative,
the psychological versus the formal, reason versus intuition. The
focus of Mauron's psychocritical works also vacillates between the
man and the work, the "moi social" and the "moi createur," be-
tween the obsessions and the metaphors that revealed them. This
vacillation stemmed from the fact that Mauron wanted to remain
the detached man of science, but his scientific interest was increas-
ingly in the aesthetic, that is, psychological, process of creation.
Psychoanalysis was in a way an obvious choice of orthodoxy for
Mauron, for it purported to be the science of the human mind, the
union of the objective and the subjective. Mauron's later adoption
of its insights and adaptation of its methods to literary criticism
were intended to realize his dream of a meeting of science and art.
However, despite his seduction into the Freudian camp in Aes-
thetics and Psychology, Mauron was not yet totally comfortable with
the implications of certain psychoanalytic concepts, and it would
take another fifteen years to convince him fully enough to permit
the formulation of psychocritique. In those years - the years following
Fry's death, in fact - Mauron appears to have been distracted from
both science and art: The Spanish Civil War and the Second World
War turned his attention to social and political realities. He sought
answers to troubling psychological and philosophical questions in
the Eastern mystics and in Jung, as well as in Freud. That he should
have moved through seeming extremes, from science to mysticism,
was not as radical a change in direction as it first might appear. In
the theories of Aesthetics and Psychology, the methodology of science
applied to art had already often been sitting rather strangely next
to a kind of impressionistic intuitionism: "Aesthetic order is meant
to be felt rather than analysed; the existence of a combination [of
chances and necessities] produces a vague and delightful impression
of continuity and order; we feel ourselves in a harmonious atmos-
phere" (1970a [1935]: 87). The actual conflict between subjective
impressionism and objective formalism was just beginning in Mau-
ron's work, and the orthodoxy to guide further literary interpre-
tation had to wait in the wings a little longer.

61
 TOWARD PSYCHOCRITIQUE: FROM
"SPIRITUAL" TO "PSYCHOLOGICAL"

A literary judgment, though based on the closest

scientific assessment of the objective facts, is not gen-
uine unless coloured by the subjective intention of
the originator. A view, not merely of literature, but
of life is involved; not merely the science of writing,
but also the philosophy of being.
HERBERT READ

M ANY YEARS AGO NOW, Edmund Wilson con-

vinced us that the French symbolists greatly influenced
the entire generation we have been considering here.
AxeVs Castle outlined the literary debt that Yeats, Joyce, and others
owed to those hermetic poets and their theories of verse. In criticism
too, the symbolists could not be ignored. Benedetto Croce attacked
their idea of purity in art as a false one, mistrusting their valuing
of suggestiveness. T. S. Eliot, on the other hand, saw them as prime
examples of aesthetic classicism, with their "excellence of form,
their perfection of phrasing," and their transmutation of ideas into
sensations. Roger Fry's attraction to Mallarme, in particular, was
one of his first points of artistic contact with Mauron. Fry had
begun translating Mallarme early, attracted by his "sincerity" and
purity as a poet. The valise carrying his translations was stolen at
the Gare St. Lazare in 1920, but Fry, undaunted, began reworking,
reconstructing the English version, this time with Mauron's help.
In 1930, Fry asked his friend to write accompanying commentaries
for the poems. Mauron worked on these on his own, though he
admitted that the two men freely compared "impressions" (1938a
[1936]: 4).
Why was Fry, for whom literature was an impure art form, so
impressed with Mallarme? It may have been in part because of the
poet's intense interest in painting, as revealed in both his verse and
62
 Toward psycho critique
his prose.1 Perhaps it was that Fry sensed, in both Mallarme's
abstraction and his craft, analogues to his own concepts.2 There
were certainly similarities to be found in the theories of pure art of
Fry and the symbolists, though Mauron always insisted that this
reflected parallel, independent thinking and not influence (1962: 21).
The lack of aesthetic significance attributed to subject matter and
the resultant stress on form and craft were bound to appeal to the
formalist in Fry. He even argued that Mallarme's breaking up and
reconstructing of themes in poems anticipated the cubist technique.3
However, his more common idea was that Mallarme's verse was
postimpressionist. And, in fact, Cezanne and others have often been
identified with a symbolist aesthetic in their interest in finding an
ideally expressive form.4
If, however, form is the locus of value in art, the obvious question
is: How does one justify a translation of content, especially a literal
translation? Fry admitted that the rhythm, the "aural complex,"
the "melodic effect" of verse obviously were significant, but that
they were "incomparably feebler" than they were in music. There-
fore he opted for literalness in translation "with so much of a
rhythmic order in the sound as would not hamper that too much."5
Had Mauron made such a statement, it would have been quite in
keeping with his literary qualification of Fry's formalism: As we
have seen, in literary discussion, form had to include content. As
Mauron would later write, Mallarme was a "figurative" artist: "Ses
phrases gardent un sens exterieur, garanti par une structure syn-
taxique qui demeure celle de la langue commune" (1964b: 64). If
we leave aside for the moment the question of the quality of Fry's
translating work, the logic behind his choice of a literal translation
of content or meaning remains somewhat of a mystery. And, in-
deed, his contemporaries were quick to attack the formalist on
exactly this point, calling his attempt everything from treachery to
a total inanity that invalidated Fry's right to be considered as a
serious aesthetician. The translations themselves were called, among
other things, "absurd," and even more condescendingly, admirable
"cribs."6 The less vitriolic but still cautious Times Literary Supple-
ment review (14 November 1936) reads, however, as if a member
of Bloomsbury had written it: "No one who has made a study of
Roger Fry's investigations into the nature of pure form and aesthetic
emotion in pictorial art will be surprised that he devoted as much
time as he could spare from painting and criticism over a period

63
 The critical formation
of more than twenty years to the almost impossible task of trans-
lating Mallarme's poems into English." But one would not have
been surprised, perhaps, only if the translation had not been so
resolutely, so unformalistically literal. The form, not the sense, of
"Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd'hui" is certainly what got
lost in Fry's "This virgin, beautiful and lively day."
In contrast to the negative response to both the idea and the fact
of Fry's translation, Mauron's commentaries were generally praised
by the French, English, and Americans for their subtlety, their
clarity, and, at times, their ingenuity.7 Mauron had been attracted
to Mallarme's work even before he met Roger Fry. In a 1963 in-
terview, he suggested that Mallarme's complexity would have inev-
itably acted as a challenge to a young scientist who had written a
thesis on "des formes intermediaries entre l'ordre (cristaux) et le
desordre (colloides)."8 Fry's formalism reinforced this desire to
seek, in Mallarme's verse, order or unity amid diversity. Fry's
aesthetic emphasis on pattern and structure rather than on imitation
of reality was an obvious influence on Mauron's own first book on
the symbolist poet, Mallarme I'obscur, which was begun in 1938 and
which contained his commentaries on the Fry translations. Here he
expanded on Fry's formalistic notion of purity, supplementing it
with Mallarme's notions of the "vide" and the "blanc" of the page.
Reality, he argued, was imperialistic and had to be excluded from
art (1967a [1941]: 29). But reality could be excluded from poetry
in two different and opposite ways: by concentrating only on form,
as a formalist like Fry would argue, or by going beyond reality, by
suggestions, by connotation, as the symbolists had urged. If Mau-
ron seemed to vacillate between these extremes in his interpretation
of Mallarme's means of exclusion of reality, it was largely because
he was both Fry's protege, and, as the mentor himself said, "the
disciple of our dear Mallarme."
It is tempting to argue that it was because Mauron was dealing
with poetry - and specifically with the poetry of Mallarme - that
the formal crossed over into the almost mystically suggestive. Yet,
even in his more general aesthetic inquiries in his first two books,
the same mixture of formalism and what becomes a kind of critical
impressionism could be found: for example, in his idea that a paint-
er's sense of harmony "passes beyond the limits of painting. It
explains music, it may be adapted to poetry" (1927a [1925]: 14). It
appeared as if all art forms were to be treated as one. Mauron was,
64
 Toward psycho critique
of course, not alone in this implied belief in the essential unity of
the arts. Early in this century, there were many obvious manifes-
tations of efforts to integrate various forms - from Apollinaire's
verse and cubism to the Ballets Russes' unifying of the visual arts
(sets by Picasso, Larionov, Gontcharova), music (Stravinsky, Sa-
tie), and dance. Once again, however, it was the example of Roger
Fry, as much as of Mallarme, that inspired Mauron's thinking on
this topic. In writing of painters, Fry would draw comparisons
with poets, dramatists, musicians: Giotto and Dante, Bonnard and
Proust, Cezanne and Flaubert.9 His descriptions of paintings were
in terms of the other arts: Botticelli, in his Primavera, was said to
distort and deform nature in order to create 'Visible melodies."10
However, such comparisons among the arts are perhaps natural
consequences (or even necessities) of a formalist theory of art. They
are certainly convenient, as Fry, for instance, could then argue that
the "theory that art appeals solely by the associated ideas of the
natural objects it imitates is easily refuted when we consider music
and architecture; in those at least the appeal to the spirit is made
directly in a language which has no other use than that of conveying
its own proper ideas and feelings."11
Mauron used the same argument, in Aesthetics and Psychology,
against utilitarian views of art and in favor of Fry's "system of
relations" theory of form (1970a [1935]: 72). In the course of his
"personal experiment," Mauron had cause to mention many com-
posers - Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, Haydn, Schubert, Couperin,
Debussy - as well as artists - Velazquez, Chardin, Watteau, Renoir,
Correggio, Michelangelo, Giotto, Titian, Rubens, Breughel, Pous-
sin, Raphael, Seurat. The list of writers is equally long: Proust,
Mallarme, Racine, Flaubert, Gautier, Baudelaire, Gorky, Pascal,
Rabelais, Shakespeare, Rousseau, Malherbe, and others. Mauron
was more than just a cultured name dropper. He was trying to
make his point by using as wide a range of artistic experience as
possible. As an aesthetician, he needed such a "data base." How-
ever, when he was being a literary critic, he did not change his
technique. Mallarme's poems are praised for their "tonal unity"
and then compared to a still life or to an Italian diptych (1938a
[1936]: 130, 248). Mallarme's spirit is said to be like that of the
great baroque painters (1967a [1941]: 41). Perhaps it was also Mal-
larme who, in part, inspired such a fusion of the arts, for, besides
those poems and essays on painters already noted earlier, he wrote

65
 The critical formation

many pieces on musicians.12 Yet Fry would still appear to be the

more important (or at least the more direct) influence on Mauron,
and not only because of his formalism. Fry was also interested in
the aesthetic state of mind in general, in the "modes of imaginative
life" that applied to all the arts. This psychological interest in the
creative process was one Mauron shared. The pleasures of discovery
of unities - in all forms of creation - had always been one of
Mauron's objects of study (see, for example, 1935: 388). By 1950,
he was explicitly arguing that the creative act was comparable
throughout the arts and that the analogies ought to be studied more
in order to clarify aesthetic problems (1968a [1950]: 209, 2O9n). A
psychological critical orientation, like a formalist one, can treat all
the arts as one. The implications of Mallarme's verse and theories
had intrigued Mauron (and Fry) from both these perspectives, and
they saw form and the creative process as obvious common de-
nominators of all the arts.
However, there was a third way Mauron used the idea of the
unity of the arts in his discussions of Mallarme: There was some-
thing in his verse, as in music or in painting, that could not be
explained by form, and that did not derive its interest from the
creative act that engendered it. This he called the "third dimension,"
and claimed it was made up of "allusions increasingly uncertain"
(1938a [1936]: 8, 1967a [1941]: 19). This was, in part, just Mauron's
rewording of the symbolist desire for suggestiveness and mystery;
but it was also a signal that something opposite to form was at-
tracting Mauron, something that was, in fact, mysterious, even
mystic, in its implications. These two adjectives were never clearly
separable in any of Mauron's work.
It is easy to argue that what Mallarme thought of supreme value
- his state of mind in writing - bordered on a mystic notion. But
formalists no more rigid than Roger Fry would obviously object
to any suggestion of mysticism in their theories. Fry did share,
however, the Bloomsbury notion of a world of aesthetic contem-
plation, separate from daily existence, with, in Clive Bell's terms,
"an intense and peculiar significance of its own." 13 Although this
is not in itself a mystical idea, it led the way to mysticism for
Mauron. Bloomsbury's openly acknowledged source of this con-
cept of contemplation was G. E. Moore's Principia Ethica (1903).
In his famous chapter "The Ideal," Moore had written that the
most valuable things we know or can imagine are certain "states

66
 Toward psycho critique
of consciousness," one of which is "the enjoyment of beautiful
objects."14 Bloomsbury was by no means alone at this time in
holding this potentially mystic, if traditional, view of the pleasure
of art as a contemplative one, set apart from that of other experience:
"The difference between art and the event is always absolute,"
wrote T. S. Eliot in 1919.15 Two years later, Victor Basch, in an
article Mauron likely read entitled "Le Maitre-Probleme de l'esthe-
tique," prefigured all of Mauron's later arguments in Aesthetics and
Psychology in favor of the contemplative attitude of art versus the
active (practical and intellectual) attitude of science.l6 For the sym-
bolists, of course, the idea of mystery, even mysticism, had co-
incided with the concept of a contemplative attitude. In other words,
the notion of pure art entailed the suggestion at least of the existence
of some dimension beyond phenomenal reality and, to some extent,
beyond form.
In his early work, however, the scientist in Mauron openly re-
jected any mysticism, although he accepted that literature could
produce "spiritual entities" (1927a [1925]: 86). By 1931, though,
he was willing to admit that there was something mysterious in
art, some associations whose law was not that of logic (1939 [1931]:
334). Logic - or science - appeared to Mauron as the antithesis of
both mystic (1929b: 830, 842) and aesthetic (1927b: 331) thought.
The detached contemplation of art had nothing to do with the
active, future orientation of science (1970a [1935]: 50, 61).I7 But
contemplation was not yet a mystic notion in Mauron's mind.
Perhaps his trust in science kept him from systematically following
up the possible parallels between aesthetic and mystic contempla-
tion that his reading of Mallarme had also already suggested. How
(and when) Mauron's rethinking of science and logic, and of their
functions in man's spiritual and psychological being, took place can
easily be traced. By 1947, it is clear that something had happened.
Mauron wrote to a friend about the foolish limitations of science
and the exciting openness of mysticism:

Je considerais comme un mensonge scientifique cette habitude

aujourd'hui courante de nier ou d'ignorer une large part de
l'experience humaine . . . Et un peu de reflexion . . . du cote
de Meyerson aussi bien que de Lao-Tseu m'avait convaincu
que nous nous donnions, betement, des bornes. Ce qu'on
appelle la pensee objective, si admirables qu'en soient les de-
67
 The critical formation

veloppements, a probablement les siennes inscrites dans ses

premisses . . . [La science] s'elargit indefiniment mais a la
faqon d'un plan qui ignorerait par convention prealable, l'autre
ou les autres dimensions de l'espace spirituel humain.18

Like Hesse, Mauron would travel through Freud and Jung to the
Oriental mystics. In 1940 he was absorbing the Chinese philoso-
phers, perhaps recalling Fry's interest in them, and was referring
to Chuang Tzu as "un des hommes les plus hauts et les plus spirituel
[sic] que je connaisse."19 By the next year, Mallarme had become
to him "un mystique, et peut-etre le seul grand mystique athee, ou
se disant tel, que nous ayions jusqu'ici connu en Occident" (1967a
[1941]: xiv). In this preface to Mallarme Vobscur, Mauron linked the
poet to St. John of the Cross, taoism, and brahmanism (xv). In
1942 he dedicated an entire article to "Mallarme et le Tao," con-
centrating on both biographical and philosophical parallels between
Mallarme and "Lao Tseu" that he felt were not accidental but were
signs of deep, unconscious resemblances: They shared notions of
nonaction ("non-agir"), negation, silence, wisdom, and irony (1942a:
352-64 in particular). Although he admitted that these were char-
acteristics common to an entire mystic tradition (and, he might
have added, an entire symbolist aesthetics), Mauron still claimed
that Mallarme's "literary mysticism" was the most perfect example
of the aesthetic application of taoist doctrine.
In his next book, La Sagesse de I'eau, Mauron generalized this
interpretation of Mallarme in the light of his earlier formalism: For
Western man, the most direct route to the spiritual or contemplative
life was by means of the aesthetic emotion (1945: 234). The West
had ceased to contemplate nature and had instead developed the
natural sciences to exploit and produce: This was Mauron's next
generalizing step in L'Homme triple (1947: 25). But by 1949, his
interest and faith in science had been restored and he longed to
establish a bridge between "la pensee objective, scientifique, et
l'exploration de realites spirituelles" (1949c: 22-3). Psychoanalysis
was one way; a method of analyzing art that was experimental yet
sensitive to the subtleties of the spirit was another. In his 1950
Introduction a la psychanalyse de Mallarme, Mauron actually compared
the work of Descartes, Poincare, and Bernard on the scientific
method to that of St. John of the Cross on mysticism, and to that
of Mallarme on poetic method (1968a [1950]: 46). In a revealing
68
 Toward psycho critique
footnote, he added: "II m'a fallu des annees pour decouvrir . . .
qu'en general les verites de Fart s'expriment sans effort dans la
langue mystique" (2O5n). The restoration of his faith in science had,
however, been a result of the serious reading of Freud and other
psychoanalysts. So, when Mauron began to construct his aesthetic
theory to bridge science and mysticism, the Freudian unconscious
provided an important foundation. At first, for example, Mauron
toyed with the traditional notion of the inspired artist, but this time
in psychoanalytic terms, in which madness broke fixed patterns of
mind and perception. Then he gave this function of irrationality a
mystic twist: "La pensee mystique use, d'ailleurs, des memes
procedes de rajeunissement comme le prouve la technique de l'ab-
surde utilisee par l'enseignement Zen et, en general, toute initiation
mystique traditionnelle" (1953b: 98-9).
The artist, the madman, the mystic, and the saint - all shared a
rejection of reality in favor of the contemplative life and did so at
great risk, both psychological and social. This was Mauron's inter-
pretation of van Gogh (1953b: 95-7; 1976 [1951-9]: 141), Rene
Seyssaud (1959a [1954]: 4), and ultimately, of Mallarme (1964b: 7
9, 49) and Baudelaire (1966a: 89-90). In the earliest of these works,
it was definitely Jung's influence that reinforced that of the Eastern
mystics, as Mauron himself pointed out (1953d: 194). Jung was
attractive, for he allowed room for individual metamorphosis in
his treatment and theory both, whereas Freud's therapeutic norm
was an adaptation to social reality, a healthy ego. If art was sub-
limation, Mauron then preferred Jung's notion of sublimation (as
a personal, individual transcendence of the social norm) to Freud's,
in which desire was satisfied in a socially acceptable manner (1953d:
194). Here, no doubt, were the origins of that apparent paradox of
psycho critique, the personal myth of the artist.
Scientific psychology, or psychoanalysis, provided an important
link between Mauron's personal scientific tendencies and his mystic
ones. It also, through its adaptation in the formulation of psycho-
critique, offered a way of reconciling what had become, between
1935 and 1950, a constant tension in Mauron's criticism between
his formalism and his impressionism. Science had reinforced the
former; mysticism, the latter. In order to understand the critical
synthesis that psychoanalysis was to bring about, we should first
study this tension in more detail. And nowhere is it more evident
than in Mauron's references to music, that art form that is at once
69
 The critical formation
the most formalistic and the most suggestive, the most open to
critical impressionism. In The Mirror and the Lamp, M. H. Abrams
argues that the analogy used for art and criticism in a given period
plays an important role in shaping the structure of critical theory.
If this is so, we might profitably examine both the use of an analogy
and the perspective taken on the art form from which it is drawn
for help in discerning a critic's underlying theoretical presupposi-
tions. Mauron, like his friends Fry and Forster, was much attracted
to images and analogies from music. This art form was a biograph-
ical link among the three friends: All were appreciators of music
in concert or on record, and each attempted to play keyboard music
for himself in order to understand and enjoy more fully. It was
Forster, on his first visit to Mauron, who arranged for Fry to
purchase a gramophone for Mauron, and who also later bought
him a piano.
Forster's view of music was, in some senses, a paradoxical one.
He felt that music was "the deepest of the arts and deep beneath
the arts";20 yet, in his critical writings he wavered between two
different reasons for giving this exalted status to music. Sometimes
he held the view that it was because of the form or the order of
the art, as indeed Roger Fry believed. At other times he seemed to
want to attribute music's power to something that reminded him
of something else, or even to something ineffable, almost mystical
about it. If the formalist and the impressionist were at war in For-
ster's references to music, they were even more so in Mauron's:
Music to him was both the purest of the arts, and the one that
could transmit something other, beyond sensations (1970a [1935]:
54). And Forster likely contributed to Mauron's musical muddle.
Aside from his writing of the libretto to Billy Budd, Forster's ap-
preciation of music was largely that of a serious amateur. In his
critical writings on other authors, the language of and analogies to
music appeared frequently, often in the context of praise for some
formal accomplishment: "With Ibsen as with Beethoven, the beauty
comes not from the tunes, but from the way they are used and
worked into the joints of the action."21 And Forster himself wanted
to learn to play Beethoven's piano sonatas in order to capture their
formal "architecture," even at the expense of the sensuousness of
a concert. In Aspects of the Novel, Forster wrote that, in formal
terms, music,

70
 Toward psychocritique
though it does not employ human beings, though it is gov-
erned by intricate laws, nevertheless does offer in its final
expression a type of beauty which fiction might achieve in its
own way. Expansion. That is the idea the novelist must cling
to. Not completion. Not rounding off but opening out. When
the symphony is over we feel that the notes and tunes com-
posing it have been liberated, they have found in the rhythm
of the whole their individual freedom.22

Forster's concept of the "intricate laws" of music, of the "rhythm

of the whole" that gives the parts their freedom and their meaning
was one that he shared with Roger Fry. But the postimpressionist
aesthetician had a different notion of what the "expansion," to
use Forster's term, consisted of. Art did indeed have effects on
its perceiver, but the most important of these was, as we have
seen, the response to form. And music provided the best proof.
For Fry, the emotions induced by music were abstract and uni-
versal because they were created by the contemplation of formal,
harmonious relations of notes, one to the other. The value of the
musical aesthetic emotion for Fry, as for the symbolists, was
unquestionable. It was more important, more profound than those
"accessory" feelings aroused by less pure art forms: "A harmony
in music cannot be perceived by a person who merely hears
accurately the notes which compose it - it can only be recognized
when the relations of those notes to one another are accompanied
by emotion."23 Music was the model art, in Fry's mind: It was
not a useful medium of communication and the pleasure in lis-
tening to it was a formal one, coming from the perception of
relations. These same characteristics attracted Mauron: "Musical
notes constitute one of those rare sensations which play no part
in our active life. They are of no use, they mean nothing, and
consequently they find no place in a utilitarian organization of
the world" (1970a [1935]: 79).
If music were the purest art form, the one least reliant on rep-
resentation, literature (and the novel in particular) was quite another
matter. Nevertheless, Fry always argued that at least "first-rate
novels" owed their delight for the reader to something akin to the
pleasure of music - to "the recognition of inevitable sequences', a
pleasure which . . . corresponds to the pleasure . . . found in mark-
 The critical formation
ing the inevitable sequence of the notes in a tune."24 Forster used
a musical image too in his discussion of fiction in Aspects of the
Novel. His idea of "rhythm" concentrated less on "sequences" for
the musical parallel than on those very formal relations that Fry so
prized. Proust's novel "hangs together because it is stitched inter-
nally, because it contains rhythms."25 Rhythm was not, however,
a fixed "pattern"; rather, it was "repetition plus variation" and
operated structurally to create beauty in the text. It was this formal
idea of rhythm, the use of the musical structure of relations among
parts, that led Forster to suggest, as we have seen, that "in music
fiction is likely to find its nearest parallel."
Fry certainly found in music the nearest parallel to what he valued
in painting: Picasso was praised for trying to create "a purely abstract
language of form - a visual music."26 Fry basically remained a
formalist, though he modified his views over the years, but Forster's
concept of rhythm seemed subtly to alter in the thirteen years that
separate the Clark lectures that became Aspects of the Novel and the
piece called "Not Listening to Music," in which the term rhythm
took on a somewhat less rigorously formalist meaning, in music,
at least: "There's an insistence in music - expressed largely through
rhythm; there's a sense that it is trying to push across at us some-
thing which is neither an aesthetic pattern nor a sermon."27 He
never did specify what that "something" was, and this lack of
explanation, this opting for the suggestively unexplained, was also
a feature of Forster's use of musical analogies in his more literary
writings. The "mysticism" that Roger Fry lamented in Forster's
fiction might be seen to play a role in Forster's general critical frame
of reference as well. He wrote in his Commonplace Book around
the time of Aspects of the Novel that music and poetry ("words under
their musical aspect") could be timeless in a way that the novel,
written in linear prose, could never be. Because of this, perhaps,
music (and some forms of literature) could provide an escape from
the present; listening to Beethoven's Seventh Symphony later, dur-
ing the Second World War, he wrote that music like that could
never be stopped. It moved right through tanks and guns.28 These
ideas were written for Charles Mauron, who was himself in the
process of developing a theory connecting what he perceived as a
contemporary desire for mysticism and mystery with the immense
power of music (1947: 65).
Music also offered to Forster, however, the possibility of another
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kind of transcendental moment, a moment actually endangered by
rhythm, by the recognition of formal relations. Upon finding a
parallel between Beethoven's Sonata op. 31, no. 3, Scherzo move-
ment, and his Appassionata, Forster noted the danger of making
such a discovery, in that it removed him from Beethoven's state
when he was composing. But most often it was less some spiritual
identification with the composer that Forster achieved than a more
simple sort of "wool-gathering" by the listening but "wandering"
mind as it made associations, as did Helen Schlegel in Howard's
End, who thought of goblins and elephants, "panic and emptiness,"
as she listened to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. The listener, if not
the composer, then, could transform even music into a representa-
tional art form. In this transformation Forster departs from the
strictly formalistic concerns of a critic like Fry. Today Fry would
be classed more as an absolutist than as a referentialist by musical
theorists, as to him music operated as a closed system, with no
signs related to a nonmusical world. Although Forster at his piano,
trying to learn a little about musical construction, might have agreed
in part, it was the "wool-gatherer" who usually won out, and
Forster would have to be labeled as a referentialist, or at least as an
impressionist.
That this difference between the two men should be revealed
clearly in the discussions on music was perhaps inevitable, given
that the process of verbalization of responses to music is tradition-
ally accepted as being a difficult one, one prone to garbling and to
perverting experiences that are thought too subtle or at least too
varied for language. Forster seemed to sense this linguistic limi-
tation, but the artist in him found a partial solution: He translated
his wordless feelings into images, thereby making music a form of
representational art in yet another sense of the word. The manu-
script of Forster's so-called analysis of Beethoven's piano sonatas
(at King's College Library, Cambridge) is full of such literary or
metaphorical translations. The last bars of one piece are called a
little smile that irradiates backward over the rest. In another, the
arpeggios, we are told, rush up and down like brooms until any
sense of continuity is swept away. Then the brooms are put away
and their swing is lost. In other words, where we expect formal
analysis of the sonatas (as this was what Forster, inspired by Mau-
ron, set out to do), we find instead impressionistic description and
suggestive images. Often even the narrative impulse of Forster the

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 The critical formation
novelist was called into play by the music, and this referentialm
was far from a formalist response to the contemplation of structural
relations in art.
However, in his formalist "manifesto," Art, Clive Bell had also
noted that he personally had difficulty listening to music properly.
At times he felt the same pure aesthetic emotion he got from visual
art; he experienced pure musical form which he defined as "sounds
combined according to laws of a mysterious necessity."29 But his
more usual reaction to music was to let slip his sense of form, to
allow his mind to wander and the emotions of life to enter: a
Forsterian woolgatherer in formalist's clothing. For most people,
however, the pleasure of music ideally comes both from the expres-
sions of emotions suggested and perceived in the sensuous contact
with sound, and from awareness of the design or of the logic that
shaped the piece. This experience at times feels like a paradox, and
this may well be the reason that music has been classed as both the
lowest and the highest of the arts.
The formalistic Fry and the increasingly impressionistic Forster
were often in complete disagreement over why music was for each
of them the greatest art form. They argued, for example, over the
music that they were going to send to Mauron. Forster forbade
Fry to choose the records; Fry responded by criticizing Forster's
subsequent choice (Hoist) as a "picturesque kind of music" that
bored him because it relied on impure associations of ideas, and
not on the contemplation of form.30 Perhaps, however, Fry's the-
ories did not work as perfectly as he thought they did for all kinds
of music: Certainly opera and song presented difficulties, difficulties
that Fry chose to ignore, because to him these arts were obviously
"mixed" (that is, partially representational) forms. Unlike Mauron,
who had had to adapt formalist theories to literature by making
form include "sense," Fry wanted to keep art pure and separate
from life and its emotions - at least in theory.
Forster, on the other hand, was more like Mauron. As a novelist,
he was willing to admit that "intensely, stirringly human quality
of the novel." As we saw, he wrote in Aspects of the Novel that this
was a quality not to be ignored. Mauron, too, realized this even if
he lamented the resultant referential imperialism: "Music has been
for long the purest art, the art of which the effects are apprehended
by the purest feeling; painting and sculpture are today almost ap-
proaching this. But literature remains encumbered with accessories,

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 Toward psycho critique
philosophical, psychological, social demonstration, with sentimen-
talities and opinions. A great step would be made if we could
savour, appreciate, and discuss pure literary qualities" (1927a [1925];
87). This last wish reveals Fry's strong formalist influence at the
time; nevertheless, there was a side to Mauron, as we have seen,
that was prepared to respond to Forster's impressionistic vagueness
as well.
This vagueness was perhaps most obvious in the use of another
musical analogy throughout Aspects of the Novel. This time it was
not the formal concept of rhythm that was in question, but the
more indeterminate, if suggestive, notions of "voice" and, espe-
cially, "song." Story was called "the repository of a voice," of
"something" that appealed to the ear, "something we should lose
if the novel were not read aloud," yet it was not melody or cadence.
This something evidently lay in the story, but what it was is unclear.
This same vagueness characterized the discussion of "prophecy,"
which was also called a "tone of voice." The difference between
George Eliot and Dostoevsky was clear, wrote Forster, to "anyone
who has an ear for song." But what did this mean? And how helpful
was it, in literary terms, to say that prophetic literature such as
Dostoevsky's gave us "the sensation of a song or of a sound," or
that the "essential" of Moby Dick was its "prophetic song," even
though "we cannot catch the words of the song"? The almost
mystic quality of Forster's vague defining characteristic of song
came to light as he went on to write: "Nothing can be stated about
Moby Dick except that it is a contest. The rest is song."
This same impressionistic use of music characterizes even Mau-
ron's early formalist writing, especially the works on Mallarme.
For instance, "Petit Air II" was said to be marked by a "passage
rapide de la realite a rien, du son au silence, d'un seul trait en rubato,
fusee et retombee en eparpillement qui font penser a Chopin" (1967a
[1941]: i n ) . Yet, when commenting on the formalistic Fry's trans-
lations of this pure poet, Mauron chose to discuss Mallarme's es-
tablishment of a keyboard, or a "system of transitions" (1938a
[!936]: 37)- In other words, Mauron's use of musical analogies and
associations vacillated between vague impressionism and fairly rigid
formalism. It was the latter that would triumph, as we shall see,
in his definition of psychocritique as a musical analysis of systems of
obsessive themes and their variations in literature (1969 [1954]: 20;
1962: 33). But the former, the impressionism bordering on mys-

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 The critical formation
ticism, he probably learned from Mallarme himself, as he later
quoted the French symbolist's own admonition that all art should
resemble music; that is, it should play with revelation and strive
to amass mystery (1963b [1959]: 241).
When Mauron and Forster both wrote about the aesthetic structure
of works of art, they did tend to share Fry's focus on form. How-
ever, when psychological questions of artistic response and creation
arose, both writers turned away from formalism. This distinction
is what is at the base of the formalist-impressionist vacillation,
which we have seen in their criticism, and which is illustrated clearly
by their particular references to music. The mystic "ascension" that
Mauron compared to aesthetic contemplation in music and poetry
(1945: 42) was to get a new psychological reinterpretation as Mau-
ron's interest in the process of creation increased and his reading
of Freud widened. For the two literary men, those practical aspects
(both social and personal) of the response to art that Fry felt were
impure and not aesthetic were actually implicit in their critical
impressionism. Formal principles were espoused when both wrote
of structures within a work; but when Mauron, especially, ad-
dressed himself to the process of creation, his mysticism (and, later,
his psychologism) was evident. Both men seemed decidedly un-
willing to surrender to formalism the actual psychological or spir-
itual mechanisms they felt to be involved in the creating and
perceiving of art. And both, unlike Fry, wanted to be able to claim
for art a pragmatic value outside itself, as their use of music once
again revealed.
The concluding pages of Mauron's L'Homme triple of 1947 offered
an image of music as an ideal model of all art, exercising a social
function outside itself. At a concert, wrote Mauron, "chacun y
ecoute seul, et pourtant la societe ne nous offre rien d'aussi unanime.
Et n'oublions pas que pour realiser le miracle, pour trouver en lui
la musique, le compositeur a du fuir le bruit pour lui infernal, de
la societe" (1947: 206). Seen here are the functions of contemplation
that Fry did not want to claim: a potentially pragmatic one for the
listener and a spiritual, almost mystical, one for the creator. Music
as a model for social order through some sort of mystic communion
was an idea that Forster too had entertained at this time. In 1946
he wrote that the value of art lay in its order, its internal "harmony,"
which at least offered some symbol of hope "in the bosom of this
disordered planet."31 This, of course, sounds like a formal principle,
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 Toward psychocritique
though it was to be used to a practical end that Fry would likely
have scorned.
Music, being perhaps the least representational of art forms, may
be the most immediately expressive of feeling, and therefore also
the most open to subjective responses, social and personal. Witness,
for instance, Forster's account of listening to some previously un-
known music late in the dusk: "When the music stopped I felt
something had arrived in the room; the sense of a world that asks
to be noticed rather than explained was again upon me."32 This
same, almost mystic, suggestive vagueness was characteristic too
of the musical analogies used in Aspects of the Novel in the discussion
of "prophecy," as it is defined in terms of aesthetic response: The reader
will recognize it by its "song." But in that same book there was
also that formalistic use of the other image from music, the rhythm
or order of the novel's structure, which gave meaning to the parts
and beauty to the whole. This mixture of the impressionistic and
the structural was even more striking in some of Mauron's writing,
again especially when music was in any way involved. For example,
in the course of a few paragraphs, he once defined melody with a
Forster-like image of a "journey in the land of music" (and extended
the image at length) and then redefined it, as might Fry, as "the
sequence of . . . modifications, perceived in relation to the constants"
(1970a [1935]: 82, italics his).
Mauron spent the years following his writing of the commen-
taries to Fry's Mallarme translations (1936) and of Mallarme Vobscur
(1941) rethinking this double pull toward mysticism and formalism.
His total blindness now made music an especially important art
form in his life, but again both as an intellectual, formal pleasure
and as a suggestive, almost mystic ascension out of the reality of
the moment. It was during this mystic phase that Mauron's center
of interest began to change from the structures of the work of art,
its unity and diversity, to the psychological, or rather to the spir-
itual, process of creation itself. Fry's notions of the aesthetic emo-
tion and the contemplative state helped bridge the gap between
formalism and mysticism for Mauron. The horrors of the Second
World War were making many turn inward for replies to the ques-
tions about man that the outer world posed but could not - or
would not - answer. Science, in which the late Roger Fry had
placed such trust, was not proving to be man's savior. Madness,
not reason, seemed to prevail. Mauron felt caught between the

77
 The critical formation
remains of his faith in the scientific method as a means of explaining
the world and his new belief in the mystic and aesthetic hope in
the possibility of creation ex nihilo (1942a: 361). By 1945, when he
came to write Sagesse de Veau, he had decided that science too could
allow for the possibility of such a theory of creation, and so he set
out to write "une reverie personnelle entre les confins de la science
et ceux de la poesie" (1945: I39n), a more mystical version of the
"personal experiment" of Aesthetics and Psychology.
Like that 1935 book, Sagesse de Veau addressed itself to the science
and art division that we have seen to be a personal as well as
intellectual issue for Mauron. The added element here was mystic
meditation, which he saw as the opposite of reason (1945: 237-8).
Yet, aesthetic contemplation could unite these opposites, he felt.
His authorities: Poincare and Coleridge. His method: the experi-
mental one, or rather, once again, the trappings of it. "Experi-
ments," "hypotheses," "facts" - the words are scattered throughout
the first part of the book, but the modesty of the conclusion reached
did cast some doubt on the scope of his experimental findings:
"Ainsi, dans ce qui demeure, malgre tout, le mystere de notre
existence propre, nous avons apparemment avance de quelques pas,
sans appareil dogmatique, sans prevention a l'absolu, en ne prenant
pour guide qu'une experience sensible un peu affinee" (no). This
avowal of the existence of mystery beyond the reach of science
permitted him, from this point on in the book, to speculate, to
write poems, to meditate, rather than to experiment. However,
even Mauron's idea of what constituted an experiment had loosened
considerably over the years and by the time he wrote his next book,
L'Homme triple, he would use as his experimental base not his own
observed responses to art, but "la convergence plus ou moins pres-
sentie ou constatee de mille jugements dont les objets lui furent
presentes par la vie, la societe ou les livres" (1947: 142). Mauron
managed to feel at ease, in both of these books, using aesthetics as
a way to unite his versions of science and mysticism, mostly because
formalists such as Fry and Bell had actually prepared the way. Fry,
we recall, had felt that art and science were both contemplative,
detached from the ordinary concerns of life. Both Bell and Fry
attributed the power of forms in art to their arrangement according
to certain unknown and mysterious laws.
The war had been the other major impetus to Mauron's desire
to unite the facts of science and the indefinite promise of mysticism.
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 Toward psycho critique
In L'Hornme triple he argued that the flourishing of mystic interests
during that grim period was a result of the need for a remedy or
a source of inspiration, a spiritual guide, to get man beyond his
physical and social difficulties (1947: 127). In Sagesse de Veau as well,
he had wanted to show Europe that a more stable wisdom could
exist. The increased "internalization" of Western culture - that is,
the turning inward caused by the war - meant to Mauron that, in
aesthetics, mysticism had become the focus of attention, and that,
in science, psychology displaced the physical sciences (1947: 64-5).
At least, this was his personal assessment of the situation at the
time. Uniting these two new areas of interest, Mauron set out to
study what people called the "reverie" of the artist, but which he
saw as "la vie creatrice de formes" (1945: 213). The formalist and
the mystic impressionist came together to study once again the
ways of uniting art and science, aesthetics and psychology.
Mauron began with the observation that science was founded on
the notion of an accord between inner intelligence and outer phe-
nomena. Why, he asked, should the intellect be privileged here
over instincts, feelings, or moral values? Finding no good reason,
he argued that all the correspondences or symmetries between in-
terior and exterior ought to be examined. From observation, he
posited the existence of a superior unconscious, symmetrical to the
inferior or Freudian unconscious. Using this as his hypothesis, he
then experimented; that is, he sought confirmation from his ex-
perience of analogies between the animal and the spiritual life. And
he found in both such patterns as "silence-parole-silence" (1945:
42-4), "solitude-commerce-solitude" (44-7), "somnolence-activ-
ite-non-agir" (47-54), and so on. On this basis, Mauron drew the
conclusion that the psyche must have three parts: an inferior sen-
sibility that perceived differences (an idea he had developed in his
earliest work on aesthetic unity and diversity) and that included
instinctual or animal drives as well; a middle ground of reason that
could perceive resemblance and unity; and finally a superior sen-
sibility, symmetrical to the lower one, which perceived new kinds
of distinctions. His visual and symbolic image for this, perhaps not
a very original one, was reflecting water.33 Arguing against the
symbol fixing of psychiatric dream theories, he offered instead three
levels, not just one, of interpretation of the symbol of water (parallel
to his three-part psyche). The lowest level was that of the animal
unconscious, to which water was symbolic of the mother, the lover,

79
 The critical formation
and death; on the middle level of consciousness, water stood for
chance, both creative and destructive, and for ambivalent responses
(to open seas); for the superior unconscious, water symbolized wis-
dom. Here the Eastern mystical tradition was brought in to support
Mauron's thesis.
This pseudosymmetry between inner psyche and outer phenom-
enon (water) was seemingly proof enough even for the scientist in
Mauron that his theory was superior to that derived from the purely
external observations of psychoanalysts. And from his position as
the "honnete homme" (his new way of referring to the "homme
de science" of the earlier works), he launched his attack on Freud.
He was willing to accept that there was such a thing as the uncon-
scious but he could not see how the "higher" elements of human
consciousness - spiritual and intellectual both - were to be attributed
to sexuality. Common sense and experience contradicted this, he
later claimed (1947: 191). The postulation, therefore, of a superior
unconscious seemed both necessary and advantageous, for it al-
lowed, in Mauron's own strong and revealing words, "de ne pas
fourrer dans le meme sac le grouillement de desirs incestueux, d'a-
berrances infantiles, de masochismes et de sadismes plus ou moins
anaux . . . et, d'autre part, l'invention du mathematicien ou de
l'artiste, pour ne rien dire de la grace du mystique" (1945: 33). This
rhetoric betrays Mauron's fastidiousness: He did not feel comfort-
able with the Freudian unconscious, even if he did acknowledge
the likelihood of its existence. Fry had suggested an unconscious
source for the impulse of aesthetic creation in The Artist and Psycho-
Analysis; Mauron had come to agree, but wanted that source to be
a "superior" one. Charles Baudouin had already expressed, in Psy-
chanalyse de Vart (1929), the same need to reach to superior regions
of the spirit. But his path - through symbol - was not Mauron's.
Mauron was not, of course, alone at the time in his fears and
misgivings about Freud,34 and like many others, he was guilty too
of a certain reductive view of the psychoanalytic concepts of wish-
fulfilment and sublimation. Freud had claimed that sublimation was
a displacement of libido, which allowed the greater yield of pleasure
that accounted for the creation of what we call civilization. He
wrote: "A satisfaction of this kind, such as an artist's joy in creating,
in giving his phantasies body, or a scientist's in solving problems
or discovering truths, has a special quality which we shall certainly
one day be able to characterize in metapsychological terms. At
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 Toward psycho critique
present we can only say figuratively that such satisfactions seem
'finer and higher' " (1930a: 21: 79). We must not ignore Freud's
hesitation: He had not yet fully explained these "higher" states even
to his own satisfaction. The libido included more than merely a
sexual drive, an animal instinct. Sublimation was a complicated
transformation of unconscious tendencies in the individual psyche
into something accepted, and indeed praised, by society. What
Mauron was reacting against was his own simplified version of the
Freudian unconscious and the cultural function of sublimation.
However, it is also true that, within psychoanalysis itself, there
is a certain ambiguity in the theories of the role of rationality in
the psyche. Two directions are possible, for example, for theorists
who want to establish the prdogical: one toward the biological,
toward the animal in man, and one toward the spiritual, toward
intuition and feeling. Freud tended toward the first; Jung, toward
the second, as Mauron discovered. The return to the biological was
not appealing to Mauron: Its implications were too negative. Dur-
ing the war he had denounced Nietzsche's nihilism for the same
reason (1942b: 7). Increasingly he saw the need for a hierarchy of
values to combat skepticism and despair. His answer was this third
psychic dimension, the superior unconscious, which would open
"la porte salvatrice par ou 1'homme passera necessairement s'il veut
eviter la mort de l'espece par la guerre ou par la folie" (1947: 73).
Both the mystic and the scientific sides of Mauron saw the need
for frequent retreats into the self, away from society, but he never
denied his responsibility to return to that society, corrupt and cor-
rupting though it may be, in order to attempt to better it. The man
who read the mystics carried his "carte du combattant" in the
Resistance; the believer in the supreme value of aesthetic contem-
plation was also the mayor of St. Remy for fourteen years.
Mauron's postwar social theories were a complex mixture of
Rousseauistic denigration of law and custom in the name of a faith
in man's natural goodness, and a gradual, if regretful, acceptance
of what he called the Freudian "animal nature" of man. His rather
Platonic concept of the triple psyche formed the basis of his recipe
for coping with reality, offered after the war in L'Homme triple.
First, as the animal in man existed, it should be kept in its place:
that is, in nature and out of the social and spiritual realms. Second,
human commerce was antinature; its interest was in the general,
not in the individual. He concluded, therefore, that the intellect
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 The critical formation

(not the natural animal instincts) should be the only criterion for
social distinction. Third, both of the above were only preconditions
for a free, personal, spiritual life, the only hope left after war had
played into and corrupted the animal and the social.
After the First World War, Roger Fry had responded in a similar
way, hoping that a discovery in psychology would succeed where
moral effort had failed to save the "leaky vessel of society": "Above
all we need a valid psychology. We must understand this obstinate,
violent, idealistic animal who lets himself be led by hollow words.
The immense suggestibility of the crowd is terrifying."35 To un-
derstand the individual as a way to understanding the society - such
was Mauron's interest as well. The Second World War had taught
Mauron what happened to personal values when they were sacri-
ficed to the collective, and so he had turned to the individual and
to the individual's superior unconscious, which was the source of
his "creative freedom" (1949c: 12, 17; 1952 [1949]: 30). In particular,
then, it was man as creator who came to symbolize the last hope
- the hope of synthesis between mystic contemplation and scientific
action, between the individual and the social: "Seule une oeuvre de
l'esprit realise cette synthese: car, par une fusion singuliere de ce
qui s'opposait jadis, plus elle est originale, plus elle semble offerte
a la communion de tous" (1947: 206).
Virginia Woolf believed that whereas ordinary people lived, art-
ists contemplated them, watched them living, and then told them
how they lived. Mauron's reply was this: "L'homme, lorsqu'il ecrit
ou peint, exerce certainement une fonction vitale. Je crois, pour ma
part, qu'elle 1'empeche de se couper du vaste monde, de s'enkyster
et de se scleroser dans une coque trop humaine, trop sociale."36 The
artist, like the scientist, was now seen to have a social function.
Like the man of science, the artist derived his originality and power
from the superior unconscious. The early active-contemplative dis-
tinction could now be abandoned in the light of the newly posited
common source of science and art. The Freudian ego-id-superego
structure of the psyche did not permit, in Mauron's view, any such
satisfying synthesis (1945: 21). Nor did it allow any hierarchy of
values. And Mauron wanted to be able both to place relative values
upon human activities and to locate their psychological origins. His
own intuition was that there was a symmetry, not a Freudian battle,
among the parts of the psyche. The "materialism" of psychoanalysis
was therefore at this point rejected, though Mauron did admit that

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his idea of mirroring psychic symmetries sounded close to the
Freudian notion of projection: Mauron's theory was that the mid-
dle, social level of the psyche, called "la cite," was able to reflect
both the superior and the inferior unconscious because it was the
realm of reason and of language. In literature, for instance, what
would be reflected (or "projected") in language would not be an
inferior or lower drive, but a superior impulse. Creativity was the
opposite of conflict - and of war. Mauron desperately wanted to
reject the binary psychoanalytic thinking in terms of oppositions
in order to account for the higher level, "la sensibilite de l'esprit a
des valeurs universelles, la foi en ces valeurs, la tendance a les
realiser" (1947: 175).
This succinct description from L'Homme triple of his aims in that
work and in Sagesse de Veau (see 1945: 122) does not sound very
psychological or scientific. The philosophical language in which he
wrote of "esprit," man's highest and "synthetic" faculty (1947:
112), was new to his work, as was his stress on the need for stan-
dards of value, both moral and aesthetic. The attack on psycho-
analysis was also made in the name of aesthetics: Freud could not
explain the beauty or the individuality of art. Mauron saw that no
science allowed for hierarchies of value, however. This, as much
as the aesthetic disagreement, was the reason Mauron could not
yet fully accept psychoanalysis or "scientific psychology." The eth-
ical implications were still disturbing. Both Sagesse de Veau and
L'Homrne triple are therefore more social and moral than aesthetic
in their focus, as the reviewers duly noted.37 Over the next few
years, Mauron's emphasis returned to art, but never in the same
way as before the war. His formalist interest in unity and diversity
was reformulated in terms of the workings of the creative mind as
a spiritual and then psychological process both worthy and capable
of study in and for itself. The form Mauron then focused on was
unconscious; the structures of the creating psyche were ultimately
more significant than those of the works.
The development from social and moral back to aesthetic was a
gradual one, and psychology proved to be the vehicle. We have
noted that, in 1949, Mauron gave a lecture at the Institut Franqais
in London, presided over by E. M. Forster, and entitled "L'Homme
et la liberte creatrice." He began by discussing the historical fact
that reason and science had recently served the interests of war, but
his social emphasis soon gave way to a psychological one - the

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creative freedom of man and the obstacles to it. His triple psychic
structure, in which the social self reflected and coordinated the
spiritual and animal selves, was used to explain war and justice,
which were brought about by a "Creon complex," that is, by "un
moi social sclerose, paranoi'de, tres conscient et nourri d'agressi-
vite." The self would then be cut off from the living and the ir-
rational, or to continue his analogy, from Antigone. The interest
of this particular Creon-Antigone idea is twofold. First of all it
marked, quite simply, a return to literary ways of thinking for
Mauron. Second, it was a direct and unacknowledged borrowing
from a most unlikely source: Maurice Barres's Scenes et doctrines du
nationalisme. Mauron had converted into psychological terms Barres's
image of the limits of rationalism as perceived in social and political
terms. Creon, wrote Barres, ' juge avec son intelligence. L'intel-
ligence, quelle petite chose a la surface de nous-memes! Antigone,
au contraire, dans le meme cas, interesse son heredite profonde,
elle s'inspire de ces parties subconscientes ou le respect, l'amour,
la crainte non encore differences forment une magnifique puissance
de veneration."38 Mauron had likely read Barres; that is, his contact
probably dated from before his total blindness. When he later came
to write, his fine memory no doubt drew heavily on early works
he had actually read himself. Therefore, we have a case of super-
imposition of contexts, rather than of plagiarism. Writing about
social and aesthetic matters in this lecture, Mauron wanted an anal-
ogy that would be both political and literary. Creon and Antigone
- with their echoes of both Barres and Sophocles - served his
purpose well.
A similar dual association characterized Mauron's contempora-
neous image of the poet's "moi orphique" (1952 [1949]: 32), with
its suggestions of Orpheus as mystic initiate as well as mythic and
literary figure. The orphic self or ego was the one that harmonized
the rational and the inferior unconscious by means of the superior
level. It was this self that could, therefore, feel values instead of
rationalizing them. This "realite superieure" was called, by 1953,
"une terre nouvelle, c'est-a-dire, du point de vue psychologique,
une faqon plus integree de considerer l'univers" (1953a: 99). The
social and aesthetic had merged in the psychological. Once this step
had been taken, the path was clear for Mauron to rethink Freud.
But he surrendered his cherished triple, symmetrical model of the
psyche very slowly. In his Introduction a la psychanalyse de Mallarme

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 Toward psycho critique
he still made the distinction between madmen and artists on the
basis of it: Obsessions came from a lower order of the mind, but
"[l]'irrationnel esthetique se situe au-dessus et non pas au-dessous
de la raison" (i968a[i95o]: 195). In 1950, then, Mauron still found
Freud too deterministic and argued for the liberty and superiority
of art. Even after his full conversion to psychoanalysis, he still
wrote: "Faut-il songer a un inconscient superieur? Le mot n'a de
sens que pour designer des etats de connaissance metaphysique, ou
au moins les activites de quelque fonction synthetique du moi:
invention, creation geniale" (1962: 28).
Although he had once rejected this vertical model of layers of
human consciousness (1970a [1935]: 27), which placed, as did Fry's
model, the emotional character of art at a deeper level, Mauron
had begun to change his mind. The need for a hierarchy of values
and the need to unite aesthetic and scientific pursuits in terms that
were not considered degrading to the dignity of the spirit - both
were very real and urgently felt by Mauron. Of course, other writ-
ers too had influenced him to see the mind in terms of a higher and
lower psychic order. That pamphlet by his friend, Forster, which
Mauron so often praised - Anonymity: An Enquiry - had included
a reference to man's surface and deep personalities, and had attrib-
uted art's impersonality and beauty to the latter. Mauron's objection
to the Freudian topography of the mind was based, however, on
a misinterpretation: Deeper and lower were meant as positives, not
negatives, in Freud. There were also other possible influences on
Mauron's desire to posit another, higher unconscious to match and
balance the animal one. In 1933 he had translated D. H. Lawrence's
Fantasia of the Unconscious. Like Mauron, Lawrence had both reacted
against Freud and been attracted to the mystics. The limits of human
reason were also clear to him, and the Freudian unconscious was
"an unpleasant menagerie."39 One difference between Lawrence's
solution and Mauron's was that, from the former's rather literalist
and certainly sexual perspective, the lower "center" of man was
the positive one. Like Mauron, however, Lawrence felt that the
psyche had symmetrical poles, but his image for this was, typically,
not reflecting water, but a cross.
In a passing note in his Introduction a la psychanalyse de Mallarme,
Mauron cited French psychiatrist Pierre Janet in support of his desire
to free art from Freudian determinism (1968a [1950]: 2i5n). Janet,
like Lawrence, was part of Mauron's cultural baggage, so to speak,
85
 The critical formation
at this time. Janet would have been attractive to Mauron not only
because he too had opposed Freud, but also because he had studied
religious mystics from an experimental perspective. In other words,
his work represented a kind of synthesis of science and mysticism.
But even more interestingly, in De Vangoisse a Vextase Janet had
described three tendencies in man: an inferior one, linked to the
animal life, a middle or average one, analogous to logic, and a
superior one, which was above "activite reflechie" and which was
the source of science as well as of art.40 It is not surprising that
Mauron should cite Janet for support; it is odd only that he should
do it merely once, and then in passing. Janet certainly provided an
alternative model to Freud's, and in the 1940s Mauron was still
searching for such an alternative. By the end of the decade, his
interest had shifted from the social and moral back to the aesthetic,
but the early formalism had given way to psychology. The process
of creation, rather than the work itself, had captured his interest,
and the mystics had had their part to play in this change. This was
not to be the final development of Mauron's aesthetics, by any
means: Psycho critique was as formalistic as it was Freudian, and as
impressionistic, if not really mystic, as it was either.
In the 1940s, then, Mauron was willing to accept certain Freudian
ideas, but he still found many of them too general, too universal,
to explain the uniqueness of the single work of art (1949a: 83). His
mystic phase had led him to value highly the individual; his interest
in the process of creation, however, had been drawing him more
and more toward the psychological and, therefore, the general.
With time, the influence of the war faded somewhat, and the social
motivation behind Mauron's mysticism faded with it. What emerged
was an interest in the psychology of the individual as creator. Even
before Mauron read the Eastern mystics, however, he had argued
that aesthetics should be inscribed as a chapter in the psychology
of man (1925c: 12), although he admitted that, in 1925 at least, the
day when psychology would become an exact science was still a
long way off. Nevertheless, he felt that the experimental method
could prove useful in interrogating man's responses to art. Though
denying any mystic associations with the terms, Mauron placed in
apposition "psychological unities" and "spiritual entities" (1927a
[1925]: 86). A work of art combined both a natural and a "spiritual"
complexity, he had argued (30). "Spiritual," then, was not intended
to suggest the mystical or religious, nor was it meant to imply such
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 Toward psycho critique
a thing as the soul (1927c: 232). The adjective had, if anything,
vague psychological associations, which became more precise by
1935 in Aesthetics and Psychology.
There Mauron likened aesthetics to psychology in terms of the
elusiveness of the subject of enquiry: In both cases, the subject was
"refractory to any scientific determination" (1970a [1935]: 8). Yet,
in this book his interest had been mostly in documenting his own
responses to works of art, assuming that his experience was anal-
ogous to the "state of mind" of the creative artist himself, as trans-
mitted through the medium of one of the senses. The limits of
psychology were clear to him at this time: Though it could help
characterize the psychological mechanisms (conscious and uncon-
scious both) set in motion by perception, and help describe the
pleasure involved, it could not account for the play of "individual
fancy" (108). This was the same criticism he later made of Freud,
as we have just seen.
Mauron claimed that Roger Fry was his point of departure for
the search for an empirical or psychological aesthetics. Fry always
hoped that the psychologists - behaviorist and psychoanalytic both
- would come to the aid of this kind of aesthetic inquiry.41 It is
clear that it was Fry's interest in form, which always included the
perception of and response to form, that had guided his psycho-
logical investigations into "sensibility." The role of unconscious
forces in both the creation and reception of works of art was another
area that intrigued Fry, as it did many people at that time. Freud
had been translated very early into English by James Strachey and
had been published by the Hogarth Press. Forster later wrote of
the sense of a real "psychological movement" that had been "not
so much in Freud as in the air." The ensuing attempts at under-
standing man and his contradictions were not new, he felt: Shake-
speare, Melville, and others had been "subconsciously aware of the
subconscious."42
Forster, however, distrusted psychology, especially psychoanal-
ysis, in a way that Fry never really did. Like the early Mauron, Fry
consistently referred to art as a spiritual exercise. In his early works,
"the spiritual life" was defined, however, as "the reflective and
fully conscious life. "43 Form was seen as deliberate and the emotions
it induced in the contemplating observer were "significant spirit-
ually."44 Just what "spiritual" meant to Fry was rather vague and
at times even bordered on the mystic too. But Fry's interest in

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 The critical formation
"states of mind" increasingly became a psychological rather than
a metaphysical one, probably more because of the influence of his
aesthetic debates with Mauron than, as Virginia Woolf claimed,
because of his medical treatment with the famous Dr. Coue.45 In
a later lecture, "Art-History as an Academic Discipline," Fry re-
peated his hope from The Artist and Psycho-Analysis (1924) that
psychology would someday provide answers to aesthetic questions.
He himself was not concerned with the infantile and primitive
psychic development that had been the major advance thus far, but-
rather "with another aspect, with those parts of the subconscious
being which have filtered down through our conscious life and
consist of the abiding residue of innumerable sensations, feelings,
predilections, aspirations, desires, judgments, in fact all those things
which constitute our spiritual life."46
This is not to say that Fry ever abandoned his belief in the aesthetic
role of conscious intent. An early letter of 1909 stressed the im-
portance, in the definition of what actually was art, of the artist's
deliberate intention to arouse aesthetic emotion, and the same idea
reappeared as late as 1933 in Fry's distinction between natural and
aesthetic beauty: In art, "it is its power of communicating to us
the artist's state of mind that gives it its importance."47 But by that
point Fry had acknowledged that subconscious associations and
feelings in the artist also had the power to stir up corresponding
subconscious responses in the spectator. Art, in other words, was
a "transmitting medium" between two subconscious natures. As
we have seen, after reading the mystics, Mauron too was willing
to accept the idea of unconscious motivation in aesthetic creation
and response, but only in terms of a superior unconscious. Jung's
protest against Freud's distrust of spirituality as repressed sexuality
was echoed in Mauron's positing of his triple psyche.
The gradual "psychologizing" of Mauron's theories can best be
seen in his remarks on Mallarme over the course of fifteen years
or so. In his introduction to Fry's translations in 1936, Mauron
noted certain obsessions, certain choices that Mallarme had made.
Then he added: "What determines this choice? The psychologists
may reply; I wish only to indicate the fact" (1938a [1936]: 14). In
Mallarme I'obscur, five years later, he was still writing of the relation
between Mallarme's art and his life in terms of a conflict - between
"spiritual" and temporal realities (1967a [1941]: xi) - and he noted
the probable artistic consequences of this relationship between the
 Toward psycho critique
poet's spiritual crisis and his peaceful daily life. By 1942, Mauron's
early and cautious hesitation about claiming a real causal connection
between psychological or spiritual conflicts and poetic production
had disappeared: "De l'angoisse obsedante causee par les conflits
de la vie et de l'art, les premiers poemes de Mallarme indiquent
. . . la solution de desespoir: le suicide" (1942a: 351). Mauron's
deeper reading of psychoanalysis had followed closely on his in-
vestigations into mysticism. His triple psyche model had been an
attempt to resolve the apparent opposition between the spiritual
and the psychological, while keeping reason and logic in their place.
The general pattern of a horizontal - discursive or rational - axis
(the reflecting water) and of a vertical - unconscious - one (superior
and inferior) would, in fact, later provide the model for psychocritique
(1968a [1950]: 151, 196, 212). Traditional criticism was concerned
with the horizontal - the conscious, planned, rational structures of
art. Therefore, Mauron's criticism would supplement this with the
vertical - the unconscious, irrational forces that motivated aesthetic
production (1962: 334).
In orienting his interest toward the nonrational, latent forms and
origins of art, Mauron was reflecting, of course, the influence of
the mystics and of Freud; but he was also revealing his roots in a
long aesthetic tradition that had grown from the notion of divine
poetic inspiration. There is also a long romantic heritage supporting
the psychological theory that art reveals the disguised innermost
conflicts and desires of the poet, a heritage that can be traced back
to Hazlitt, Rousseau, Goethe, and many others. But there is yet
another direction in which the romantic tradition leads, a direction
that is oriented more toward an affectivist interest in the response
of the reader. During Mauron's life, this direction was most force-
fully expounded in England by I. A. Richards. It is perhaps not
surprising, therefore, that Mauron should have wanted to spar with
that other "amateur," that other aesthetic empiricist who desired
a textual but also a psychological critical approach to literature.
Mauron's interest in the psychology of creation was matched by
Richards's interest in that of reception.
Both Mauron and Richards were important popularizers, among
literary critics, of the renewed modernist interest in psychology.
Mauron's orientation was increasingly expressive, despite his early
experiments on his own response to art in Aesthetics and Psychology.
Richards was not uninterested in the artist's creative process or the
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 The critical formation
quality of his mind, but much of his theorizing (like Eliot's) on
this topic sounds straight out of Wordsworth or Coleridge: His
view that the artist orders and reconciles what in most minds is
disordered and confused recalls Wordsworth's view of the poet's
"more than usual organic sensibility" expressed in his 1800 preface
to the Lyrical Ballads, and Coleridge's concept of the "more than
usual state of emotion with more than usual order" to be found in
the poet. This romantic theory of expression appeared to satisfy
Richards sufficiently that he could turn his attention to aesthetic
response rather than creation. Perhaps if Mauron's formation too
had been English and more literary, psycho critique might never have
come into being. Romantic theory, of course, had affectivist im-
plications as well, and it was from these that Richards began: As
readers we could be changed by art for the better because of "per-
manent alteration of our possibilities as responsive human beings."48
In their distrust of the intellect, Wordsworth and Coleridge had
often stepped into a kind of mysticism; Richards did so as well,
despite his scientific trappings. He easily linked his concept of syn-
aesthesis to "revelation" in much the same way that Mauron con-
nected art to a superior unconscious. When Richards wrote of
harmony, he did not have a formalist system of relations in mind,
but rather the Chung Yung, and when he spoke of the critic's sin-
cerity, it was Confucius who was behind his idea of this "myste-
rious but necessary virtue."49 The similarities with Mauron during
his mystic phase are obvious, but Richards did not share his French
coeval's formalism. His response to the work of Roger Fry reveals
the difference most strikingly.
In that 1919 debate in the Athenaeum entitled "Art and Science,"
Richards had replied to Fry's formalistic view of the aesthetic emo-
tion on two points. One, which we have already seen, was that he
believed that the contemplation of a work of art was a more com-
plicated experience than Fry had allowed, because it involved "vastly
complex systems, composed of sensations and images of all kinds
and of the feelings and emotions provoked by and provoking these
sensations and images."50 Mauron was of the same opinion up to
this point. Richards then attacked the imprecision of Clive Bell's
theorizing as a residue of aestheticism, and offered instead an outline
of six ways emotion could enter aesthetic experience. His conclu-
sion was that the aesthetic quality of a work of art lay not in its
arousing of an emotion of any kind, but rather in its "communi-
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 Toward psychocritique

cation of an import of a certain order."51 Given this orientation,

Richards also had to attack Fry's formalist idea that the theories of
both science and art were appreciated not by the truth or falsity of
what they stated but by their "unity emotion," "the clear recog-
nition of unity in a complex." For Richards the logical and semantic
distinctions between science's statements of fact and art's "pseu-
dostatements" were absolute. In art, propositions were made only
"for their own sake." The echo of G. E. Moore here is not acci-
dental: Richards's training in the mental and moral sciences at Cam-
bridge had brought him under the influence of Moore's analytic
philosophy,52 an influence clearly seen in Principles of Literary Crit-
icism (1925), in which Richards attacked the formalist practice of
"alluding to Form as though it were a simple unanalysable virtue
of objects." Formal elements, to him, were rather "the stimuli,
simple or complex, which can be most depended upon to produce
uniform responses."53
Richards had to admit problems with music, however, as the
issue of pure form did enter there. Rejecting "mystery-monger-
ing," Richards merely placed his faith in the eventual discoveries
of psychology and neurology, which would deal with the "im-
mense scope for the resolution, interanimation, conflict and equi-
librium of impulses opened up by this extraordinary complexity
of musical sounds and of their possible arrangement."54 When it
came to painting, Richards agreed with the formalists that form,
or rather the sensory response to form, was more important than
content, but denied that representation was totally irrelevant. Of
course, so did Fry and Mauron in their own ways; Clive Bell
remained the more radical butt of Richards's attack on the "fash-
ionable" notion of aesthetic purity which, in his eyes, was really
grounded on an inadequate psychology. Given Richards's belief in
art as communication, content or reference in literature was going
to be even more important than representation in painting. Like
Mauron, Richards felt that comparison of the arts was an important
means to understanding their methods and resources.
Principles of Literary Criticism shared the empiricism of Aesthetics
and Psychology as well as its range of aesthetic reference. Earlier too,
in The Foundations ofAesthetics and The Meaning ofMeaning, Richards
had tried to use psychology in an empirical and scientific way in
order to study beauty and symbolism respectively. Richards's em-
piricism, however, made Mauron's claims to scientific objectivity

91
 The critical formation
seem even more loosely metaphoric. Richards referred to emotions
as "diffused reactions in the organs of the body," and to the ex-
perience of reading a poem as a process consisting of the printed
words being impressed on the retina, and then moving to the "mind's
ear," to visualization, and finally to intellectual and moral re-
sponses. Yet when Richards actually defined his kind of psycho-
logical focus, he rejected psychoanalysis and behaviorism, though
he had used the language of both, opting instead for "the cautious,
traditional, academic, semi-philosophical psychologists," like Stout
and Ward, who combined "an interest and faith in psychological
inquiries with a due appreciation of the complexity of poetry."55
But this area of philosophical psychology - which goes back to
Brentano, James, and Moore - is very different from the kind of
psychology Mauron had in mind. Mauron's model seems to have
been either psychiatric (Janet) or just a generalization from his own
experience as a scientist. Mauron was much more positivistic than
philosophical, even when rejecting science during his mystic phase.
But, like Mauron - and like Coleridge - Richards wrote as an
"amateur," despite his training in the moral sciences. In 1919, he
had been invited to join the newly formed Cambridge School of
English, and his classroom soon became the laboratory in which
he conducted his experiments, which studied his students' responses
to literary stimuli. In Principles of Literary Criticism, Richards ex-
plained the need for a "systematic exposition of psychology" in a
book about literature: "Nearly all the topics of psychology are raised
at one point or another by criticism"56 when criticism is seen as the
discriminating and evaluating of experiences. Such, of course, was
the task of the aesthetician, according to Mauron's early books in
English.
Unlike Mauron, however, Richards used his students, and not
himself, in his experiments, thereby removing at least the subject-
object problem. Although he was willing to accept the existence
of an instinctive, unconscious impulse to order in the^o^, Richards
had no desire to delve psychoanalytically into the readers uncon-
scious. There were enough pitfalls for the critic without that, and
in Practical Criticism he treated each of these traps. Like Mauron,
however, Richards finally claimed to want to remove aesthetics and
criticism from metaphysics: A critical remark was merely a kind
of psychological remark. Both men, nevertheless, strayed fre-
quently from scientific psychology into mysticism. For Mauron,
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 Toward psycho critique
we have seen that this was the result of his personal and social
needs; for Richards, it may have been more the example of the
romantics before him that made him sensitive to the ready adapt-
ability of the spiritual to the psychological.
Mauron and Richards came into direct contact on the pages of
the Criterion in 1933. Richards's article "Fifteen Lines from Landor"57
had opened with a quotation from Chuang Tzu that would have
attracted Mauron later, but in 1933 Mauron was still the scientific
disciple of Roger Fry and Claude Bernard. Richards was interested
in investigating discrepancies in the reading of a poem, given Cole-
ridge's hypothesis that the lack of need to understand a poem was
actually pleasurable. Using both his students' interpretations and
those of published critics, Richards concluded that the conflicting
statements about a poem's meaning were not, in fact, statements
at all, in the sense of the statements of science. Instead they were
merely alternative formulations of a set of signs that was in the
words of the poem. In other words, the poem was about its reader.
In the next issue, Mauron replied. Professing his respect for Rich-
ards's use of the experimental method, Mauron went on to disagree
with the conclusions reached by the experiment performed. Placing
himself, as always, into the experimental group, Mauron found
Richards's attempt to make unity out of contradictions and ob-
scurities a bit forced. He argued, instead, for the acceptance of
dissonance as the key to both "the logical absurdity and the pow-
erful emotional unity" of the poem (1933b: 665). And he argued
this by using the Freudian notion of transference.
Even in 1933, then, the fundamental difference between these
two psychological critics appeared, and it was a permanent one.
Freud and Fry were never Richards's mentors; yet in Mauron's later
psycho critique we shall see some similarities to Richards's theories -
the same need for both orthodoxy and intuition as bases of inter-
pretation, and the desire to codify in a more or less scientific way
in order to find general principles, both aesthetic and psychological.
Richards's interest in the "contemporary state of culture" in post-
World War I England motivated his interest in improving educa-
tional methods, in order to help develop "discrimination and the
power to understand what we hear and read."58 He called Practical
Criticism a piece of fieldwork in "comparative ideology." Psy-
chology could be the indispensable instrument of social change,
although Richards's basic interest would always be in language and

93
 The critical formation
meaning. After the Second World War, Mauron had first turned
inward. His blindness and his attraction to mysticism made him
value the artist as contemplative, as removed from the degradations
of the war years; yet he had also worked, we recall, for the Re-
sistance. This is less of a paradox than it at first appears: We saw
that, for Mauron, the only way to save the collective was to save
the individual. But he needed faith in some force of change, in some
mode of understanding the destructive, yet creative, being called
man. Mysticism was a personal comfort; his leftist politics offered
a social framework. But neither provided explanations of why man
could both wage war and create beauty in art. His early training
urged him to find a scientific answer; his subsequent formalist and
psychological thinking about the processes of creation of and re-
sponse to works of art made the field of literature the most attractive
"data base" for an experimental psychology of man. His early
objective formalism and the opposite tendency toward a subjective
impressionism (fostered by his mysticism) had to be reconciled,
however, if his theorizing were to have any coherence and validity.
Mauron soon discovered that there already existed a science of man
(though he had already expressed many reservations about it) that
still probably offered the best authority upon which to build an
investigation of the literary - and therefore psychological - com-
plexities of man. The orthodoxy he chose was psychoanalysis.

94
 PART II

PSYCHOANALYSIS
AND LITERARY CRITICISM

The critic of the future may well have a dual training

- psychiatric and formal-esthetic. His psychiatric
training will teach him the ABCs of understanding
unconscious reactions; his training in problems of
aesthetic form . . . [will teach] the standards for the
formal-literary judgment of the presentation of the
contents of the unconscious.
EDMUND BERGLER
 SCIENTIFIC PSYCHOLOGY AND ART

For psychoanalysis is one of the culminations of the

Romanticist literature of the nineteenth century. If
there is perhaps a contradiction in the idea of a science
standing upon the shoulders of a literature which
avows itself inimical to science in so many ways, the
contradiction will be resolved if we remember that
this literature, despite its avowals, was itself scientific
in at least the sense of being passionately devoted to
a research into the self.
LIONEL TRILLING

T HE ATTEMPT to reconcile science and art is not unique

to Charles Mauron or to his time or place. Nor has it been
forgotten today. In literary criticism, as in the philosophy
of science, the debate on their interrelations continues. It is the
choice of a particular orthodoxy to be used both as a model and as
a theory that makes Mauron's efforts all the more problematic -
and intriguing. Freudian psychoanalysis might not seem an im-
mediately obvious choice for a Frenchman whose nation's neglect
and rejection of Freud before 1968 are matched in intensity only
by its perhaps modish idolization of him since then.1 Nor, as we
saw in the last chapter, was Mauron without strong reservations
about the Freudian deterministic view of the psyche and of art.
Yet, despite his earlier fastidiousness, Mauron gradually came to
terms with the thinker of whom Auden would write: "To us he is
no more a person/Now but a whole climate of opinion, /Under
whom we conduct our differing lives" ("In Memory of Sigmund
Freud, d. September 1939"). Mauron's turning to psychoanalysis
could be seen as a manifestation of a general change from the pre-
vailing objective paradigm, in Kuhn's sense, to the belief in the
primacy of subjectively generated knowledge that, David Bleich
has argued,2 characterizes the present. Freud, along with Einstein
and Bohr, is said to have dislodged Galileo and Descartes. But

97
 Psychoanalysis and literary criticism
Freud, the objective scientist, would not have agreed with Bleich's
theory.
However, it is certainly true that Freud had an impact on creative
artists and on critics, as well as on philosophers. And it was not
his scientific objectivity that attracted most of them to psycho-
analysis. It is true that Freud's emphasis on the methodical, sys-
tematic nature of his exploration of the unconscious and his optimistic
positivist faith in the progress of science were both attractive to
Charles Mauron. But of equal importance, both for him and for
many others, was what Freud explored: the irrational, the buried
desires, the dark side of the mind. Ludwig Binswanger and many
others have pointed out that, despite positivist appearances, Freud's
work was strongly influenced by the romantic and preromantic
philosophy of natural energy, and Jean Starobinski has gone even
a step further and called psychoanalysis one of the heights of ro-
mantic literature, although he admits that it is a romanticism strongly
colored by positivist rationalism.3 This paradoxical mixture of art
and science probably accounts for Freud's ultimate significance for
Mauron, who also saw himself as a rational scientist, but one who
studied the products of the human unconscious, works of art. The
mixture of the subjective and the objective also seems central to
Freud's own view of his work, for he was embarrassed by Breton's
(and the other surrealists') misunderstanding that made him into
an apologist for the irrational.
Mauron shared Freud's need to legitimize and shape into a co-
herent whole the study of the fragmented, of the uncontrolled, of
the illegitimate repressed. Although Freud himself was influenced
in his artistic theories by Fechner and Lipps, two of the most im-
portant figures in the romantic turning of aesthetics toward psy-
chology and subjective experience, in the end he always hoped that
science would provide the physical explanation for all his findings
(i92Og; 18: 60). Freud's desire to objectivize the subjective is also
clear in another, very different way in "The Claims of Psycho-
Analysis to Scientific Interest." Here he argued that the philosoph-
ical interest of psychoanalysis lay in its ability to reveal (presumably
by objective means) the subjective and individual motives that hid
behind philosophical theories which claimed to be objective, logical
constructs (1913j; 13: 179). In other words, psychoanalysis could
detect the nonrational, the flaws in logic.
Psychoanalytic literature today has turned the tables on Freud
98
 Scientific psychology and art
and has questioned the objectivity of his own texts, casting doubt
on their scientific status. This, of course, has been the fate of psy-
chology in general. As a science - that is, with all the apparatus of
laboratories, learned journals, and societies - psychology is a twen-
tieth-century phenomenon. But it grew out of the confluence of
two very different entities: mental philosophy or theories of the
mind, and the biological sciences. Both Freud and Mauron, given
their training, were attracted to the possibility of scientifically
studying the subjective consciousness. They both would have re-
jected the subsequent split into the different camps that Dilthey
called the scientific (naturwissenschaftliche) psychologists or behav-
iorists, whose experimental, objective work enlisted other sciences
such as biochemistry and physiology, and on the other side, the
humanistic (geisteswissenschaftliche) psychologists or phenomenolo-
gists whose philosophical or speculative interests were in the de-
scription of conscious experience and human intelligence.
The nature of psychoanalysis in general has also come under
scrutiny. Traditionally, epistemology is seen as the study of the
theory of the mind, that is, the theory of knowledge. But Susanne
Langer has argued that psychoanalysis is not an epistemology in
this sense, for it is a theory of wnknowledge.4 The French, on the
other hand, have perhaps been the most vocal in recently claiming
for psychoanalysis the status of a "savoir," a body of knowledge
with a coherent structure of operative concepts.5 There is no doubt
that it has, as such, been institutionalized into a set of a priori
principles, available for use and abuse by the humanistic disciplines.
In its medical manifestations, psychoanalysis has become an insti-
tution in another sense - an economic, ideological, and philosoph-
ical institution - which in some circles is felt to be as repressive as
it is therapeutic.
Whether Freudian psychoanalysis is indeed scientific is a vast and
still much-debated topic today. It is of interest to us here, however,
only because Mauron's choice of critical orthodoxy was made on
the basis of his belief that it indeed represented an objectivizing of
the subjective: "Je tiens la psychanalyse non pour une doctrine ou
une pluralite de doctrines dont la discussion n'exige pas de con-
naissances speciales, mais pour une science experimentale, com-
plexe, enseignee dans les Universites, appliquee par des praticiens,
et tenue pour valable dans ses contributions aux domaines les plus
divers" (1962: 25). He viewed as the major advance of the twentieth

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 Psychoanalysis and literary criticism
century the progressive discovery of the unconscious and its dy-
namics. And this was a scientific discovery in the eyes of Mauron,
as of Freud.
According to Freud, science has dealt three blows to man's nar-
cissism. The first, the cosmological, was delivered when Coper-
nicus suggested that man's earth was not the center of the universe.
The second, biological, blow came when Darwin showed that man
was not very different from animals, that he was not really master
of his own earth. Freud himself delivered the most wounding, the
psychological blow, by teaching man that the ego is not even master
in its own house (1917a; 17: 135-42). In this line of deflators of
narcissism, Freud saw himself as a scientist. Unlike other cultural
productions such as art and religion, which find their echoes in
neurosis, science was to Freud a lucid, objective discipline governed
by the reality principle.6 Clinical findings and neurophysiological
hypotheses always remained important for Freud, even up to his
1938 Outline of Psycho-Analysis. These central scientific tenets were
first stated systematically in 1895 m P a r t of his correspondence to
Wilhelm Fliess, which was later published under the translator's
title of "Project for a Scientific Psychology." It opens with Freud's
intention "to furnish a psychology that shall be a natural science"
(i95o[i895]; 1: 295). Seeking neurological bases for his clinical psy-
chological findings, Freud constructed an hypothesis (of two sys-
tems of neurones), which he then "moulded and corrected in
accordance with various factual experiences" (347). Although Freud
subsequently officially abandoned this neurological framework, the
continuities between the "Project" and the rest of his work are very
strong. In Freud, Biologist of the Mind, Frank Sulloway has con-
vincingly argued that the "Project," in fact, represents Freud's fun-
damental and continued assumptions within a psychobiological
system.7 What Sulloway calls the "politics of scientific indepen-
dence" (p. 419) are said to have made Freud hide the roots of these
assumptions in his attempt to reinforce the empiricist image of
psychoanalysis as a science of the mind, independent of biology.
This masking was, of course, successful enough that Jung, Adler,
and other of Freud's defectors would use biological findings to
contradict psychoanalysis (pp. 425-37). "Seen in proper historical
perspective," Sulloway concludes, "Freud's theory of mind is the
embodiment of a scientific age imbued with the rising tide of Dar-
winism" (p. 497). In other words, Freud's science was based on

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 Scientific psychology and art
the logic of nineteenth-century biological assumptions of a psy-
chophysicalist, Lamarckian, and biogenetic nature (pp. 497-8), which
have now been thoroughly contested.
Other objections have been raised regarding the more general
scientific nature of Freud's enterprise. In The Logic of Scientific Dis-
covery, Karl Popper argued that in the empirical sciences the cri-
terion for judging the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability,
not its justifiability or verifiability.8 In other words, a theory, in
order to count as objective knowledge, must be capable of being
tested by experience and of being proved false. A subjective feeling
of conviction will not do. Later, in Conjectures and Refutations: The
Growth of Scientific Knowledge, this refutability criterion was used
to argue that psychoanalysis is not a real science because it is not
testable. The Freudian "epic" of the ego, the superego, and the id,
according to Popper, "has no stronger claim to scientific status than
Homer."9 One of the reasons that psychoanalysis fails to qualify
as falsifiable lies in its increasing movement away from Freud's
earlier openness toward a kind of closure. Experimental science
does not consist of fixed rules. It is always developing and being
disproved and changed. Although Freud did keep altering his own
thinking and adapting it to new findings, his theories, as institu-
tionalized in the doctrines of psychoanalysis, did tend to harden
into a priori principles that rejected refutation. It has been argued
that Freud himself was more and more guilty of a lack of scientific
objectivity as his theories generalized and became as metaphysical
as they were metapsychological. Given the idea of unconscious
resistance, Freud, as the interpreter of dreams and parapraxes, could
manipulate evidence to prove his theories. Every contradictory fact
could be seen as not real, but only seeming so. This is not a question
of deliberate falsification or vulgar bad faith, but of an understand-
able, if obsessive and unscientific, attachment to theories to which
Freud had dedicated his entire life. Mauron would manifest the
same stubborn sense of conviction in defending psycho critique, which
some would say was an equally unscientific and closed system of
interpretation.
Unlike Mauron, most critics of Freud's theories today seem to
want to deny them the status of scientific psychology, that is, of
an empirical science of observation. This is true both within and
outside the psychoanalytic ranks: Epistemologists, logicians, se-
manticists, linguists, and philosophers of language have all attacked
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 Psychoanalysis and literary criticism
Freud's pretension to science.10 Emile Benveniste's objection is of
particular interest because it is directly related to the question of
the applicability of psychoanalysis to the study of literature.11 Anal-
ysis, he argues, operates on what patients say. In other words, it
is a question of discourse and of a relationship of motivation that
is not the causal one of the natural sciences. In psychoanalysis,
motivation functions as a cause in itself, and facts take on meaning
only through verbalized discourse. Therefore, language is both the
field of action and the privileged instrument of the technique. As-
language can express only what its categorizations allow, Benven-
iste claims that it is language that determines the logic of dreams
because the analyst can examine dreams only within a verbal frame-
work. What is interesting for our study of Mauron is that Ben-
veniste does admit that some forms of poetry "peuvent s'apparenter
au reve et suggerer le meme mode de structuration, introduire dans
les formes normales du langage ce suspens de sens que le reve
projette dans nos activites."12 For Mauron, the verse of Mallarme
served this very purpose and motivated his turning to psycho-
analysis as a critical orthodoxy. On Freud's model, however, he
would still see his psychocritique as scientific and objective, a claim
that many of his critics would dispute. And to deny the objective
validity of psychocritique is to call into question the applicability to
aesthetics of psychoanalysis itself.
The extent of Freud's contribution to the understanding of human
nature and of human cultural constructs has already been well doc-
umented. He showed us that we think and feel in what Lionel
Trilling called "figurative formations." To Trilling, psychoanaly-
sis, if it is a science of anything, is a science of tropes: of metaphor,
synecdoche, and metonymy.13 Others, working from the same
idea, have claimed that psychoanalysis is, therefore, like the arts in
its use of emotive language, symbolism, and imagination. This is
exactly what Freud feared most when he consciously but hesitantly
used figurative language to describe psychological processes (i92Og;
18: 60). It is as if Freud were foreseeing Starobinski's accusation
that these images were not tools, but rather that they betray the
principles of a system that was not scientific, but mythopoetic.14
This is a criticism that has also been brought to bear on the language
and assumptions of Mauron's criticism.15 But Mauron, unlike Freud,
was consciously trying to reconcile art to the findings of psychoan-
alytic science: "Au point ou la psychanalyse par autrui devient auto-
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 Scientific psychology and art
psychanalyse, la connaissance scientifique se mue en connaisance
poetique. La serait le point de jonction exact entre la science et l'art"
(1952 [1949]: 32).
Freud, for all his love of literature, was less at ease about such a
meeting of science and art. His early case histories, he feared, sounded
like short stories, and therefore seemed to lack the stamp of serious
science (i895d; 2: 160). Although he outwardly praised the detailed
descriptions of mental processes that imaginative writers presented,
descriptions that made artists the precursors of psychoanalysis, his
view of art as sublimation does suggest a somewhat reductive, not
to say condescending, attitude toward the artist. Jean Starobinski,
as an analyst himself, has offered an interesting theory of Freud's
view of art and the artist:

Freud, qui veut se maintenir dans la science rigoureuse, con-

nait la fragilite de sa propre position: la psychanalyse ne peut
proposer son modele anthropologique que dans un edifice de
mots, et Freud sait que tout l'expose a etre traite de litterateur
et de "poete." II lui faut marquer ses distances, et rien n'y
servira mieux que ce ton de condescendance a l'egard du poete.
Son apparent dedain pour l'art ne serait alors rien d'autre qu'un
mecanisme de defense destine a masquer et a refouler le "com-
plexe litteraire" lie aux origines memes de la psychanalyse.16

Freud's implied reduction of art does not mean that there is no

positive Freudian aesthetic discernible in his psychoanalytic writ-
ings. When he first looked to art for illustrations and confirmations
of his clinical hypotheses, it was in his interest to vaunt the pre-
science of creative writers in describing the processes of the mind.
It was when he began to look at the creative process itself that Freud
sensed the limits of psychoanalysis as applied to art (1913j; 13: 187).
The "artistic gift" was deemed "a thing that is still a psychological
mystery to us" (1910a [1909]; 11: 50). Although the question of
the limitations of the applicability of psychoanalysis will be dealt
with at greater length in the next chapter, a fuller view of the implied
aesthetics of Freud is warranted if we are to understand Mauron's
attraction to psychoanalysis.
Freud was not in any way an aesthetician, though he did look
to art to show that the range of psychoanalysis extended beyond
dreams and neurosis to even the highest cultural achievements.
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 Psychoanalysis and literary criticism

Ernest Jones has suggested that Freud's main emotion in the pres-
ence of art was curiosity.17 He was primarily interested in how art
moved him and what had led the artist to create it. In other words,
his main impulse was scientific rather than aesthetic or, in Mauron's
terms, active rather than contemplative. Freud's own "Contribu-
tion to a Questionnaire on Reading" would corroborate this view.
There he listed the works of Copernicus and Darwin under the
heading of "most significant books," whereas he ranked the poems
and plays of Homer, Sophocles, Goethe, and Shakespeare under
"most magnificent works" (190yd; 9: 245). These latter works, of
course, had been the ones that provided him with his best illustra-
tions of psychoanalytic theories.
In 1912, Freud founded Imago, a journal of applied psychoanal-
ysis, for he was interested in extending his insights from the in-
dividual to his interaction with the collective - in religion, aesthetics,
mythology, philology, law, and so on. Freud also invited nonmed-
ical people - Otto Rank, Hanns Sachs, Theodor Reik - to join the
Vienna Association. Today the consequences of Freud's fertile in-
terdisciplinary efforts for aesthetics can be seen in Norman Kiell's
two extensive bibliographies, Psychoanalysis, Psychology and Liter-
ature (2nd ed., 1982) and Psychiatry and Psychology in the Visual Arts
and Aesthetics (1965), as well as in the bibliographies printed in the
journal Literature and Psychology.
Freud was admittedly generous in attributing to the artist the
role of precursor of psychoanalysis in his insights into the uncon-
scious, be it in prefiguring the significance of dreams (1907a [1906];
9: 54ff.), of fetishism, repression, and childhood eroticism (46-9),
of parapraxes (1901b; 6: 79, 96-100, 133, I54n, 176-7, 212-13), of
object choice in love (1910I1; 11: 165), of the uncanny (1919I1; 17:
227-33), of the roles of Eros (1930c; 21: 210), of daydreams (1900a;
5: 491), or of almost anything else. Artists' sensitive perception of
the hidden means that, in their knowledge of the human mind,
"they are far in advance of us everyday people, for they draw upon
sources which we have not yet opened up for science" (1907a [1906];
9: 8). That "not yet" is both interesting and significant. Sarah
Kofman has shown how Freud's reading of Jensen's Gradiva de-
velops from admiration for the author's insights to astonishment
that he could have prefigured Freud's own findings. In other words,
Freud elevated Jensen's work to the status of a case study and yet
undercut his achievement by pointing out that Gradiva only de-
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 Scientific psychology and art
scribed and did not explain. And, in fact, Jensen could have had
no idea of how significant his descriptions would prove, claimed
Freud. As Kofman succinctly remarks: "L'artiste ne sait pas ce qu'il
dit et dit plus qu'il ne croit dire."18 This would be Mauron's po-
sition, in fact, when he would argue that the structure of a work
reveals more than the artist consciously intends it to, but there is
none of Freud's implied condescension here.
Without entering yet into particular arguments, however, one
can probably safely say that psychoanalysis and literary criticism
in general have several obvious concerns in common: meaning and
a hermeneutic method, symbolism and stylistic deviations, dis-
course and narrative. But Mauron was an aesthetician, concerned
with the nature of the artistic experience, as well as a literary critic,
interested in the text. Therefore, the aesthetic implications of Freud's
general metapsychology were as important to Mauron as the direct
remarks on art. There are at least five different aspects of Freud's
theories that directly influenced Mauron. The first and most central
is the significance of the primacy of the unconscious to theories of
creativity and culture. Next came the implications of this general
axiom for both aesthetic pleasure and interpretation. The fourth
aspect of importance to Mauron's method is the relationship be-
tween the artist and the work, the psyche and the productions of
its sublimation. And the final aspect is more a methodological one,
for Freud's comments both on art and on psychoanalysis in general
suggest a number of possible critical techniques and models that
might be used in applied psychoanalysis. As the discussion of these
points will serve as a touchstone for subsequent chapters, each will
be treated separately, although their interdependence is understood.

THE UNCONSCIOUS IN CREATIVITY AND CULTURE

Whether we believe that in writing on art Freud wanted only to
verify his interpretation of neurotic symptoms, dreams, jokes, and
parapraxes, or whether we feel that his ambition was actually to
create an entire theory of culture, in either case Freud savv in all
cultural and psychic phenomena the same source - the unconscious.
This meant that the same principles operated (such as repression
and economy of psychic expenditure) and the same mechanisms
were brought into play (condensation, displacement, symboliza-
tion, and so on). Freud did not, of course, discover the uncon-
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 Psychoanalysis and literary criticism
However, he could perhaps be said to have posited the
essential psychic structural principles and contents of the uncon-
scious mind.20 He could be said to have shown that, despite indi-
vidual variants, the unconsious has universal laws. Otto Rank and
Hanns Sachs described the Freudian unconscious as

that part of the mental life which, bent upon immediate gain
of pleasure, will not submit to adaptation to reality. So far,
then, as human mental activity had to deal exclusively with
reality and its domination, nothing could be started with the
unconscious. But in all those fields where a diversion from
reality was allowed the mind, where phantasy might stir its
wings, its field of application was assured.21

It is from this point of view that Mauron and other Freudian psy-
choanalytic literary critics have based their belief in the primacy of
the unconscious in aesthetic production.
As the unconscious is essentially and radically asocial, it can in-
stigate the creation of cultural phenomena only by sublimation,
that is, only when the sexual aim of the libido is turned into a
cultural one via the mediation of the ego (1923d; 19: 30). As we
saw in Chapter 4, this displaced libido is actually more than just
animal instinct, and its sublimation is a complex process of repres-
sion and of transformation of these unconscious drives into some-
thing more acceptable to society. Sublimation, in other words, has
the power to transform individual unconscious fantasy into uni-
versal art. However, if sublimation is not learned, but rather is
"organically determined and fixed by heredity" (i9O5d; 7: 178),
and if art is the product of sublimation, then what are we to make
of Freud's ever-so-modest claim that psychoanalysis cannot explain
creativity?22 Kofman, deconstructing Freud, shows that we are not
necessarily to take him at his word, for he implies that to say that
creative genius is inexplicable is to say it is an illusion. In her terms,
the sublime is merely the sublimated.23
In Freud's view, the artist sublimates but the art he creates rep-
resents a kind of legalized fantasy, halfway between a wish-frus-
trating reality and a wish-fulfilling world of imagination: "Art is
a conventionally accepted reality in which, thanks to artistic illu-
sion, symbols and substitutes are able to provoke real emotions"
(1913j; 13: 188). For Mauron, it was important that Freud saw art
106
 Scientific psychology and art
as a path linking fantasy and reality (1916-17; 16: 375-6, 1910a
[1909]; 11: 50). But this path concept made art into an alternative
to neurosis, not to unrepressed, unconscious sexual drives; the artist
"can transform his phantasies into artistic creations instead of into
symptoms" (1910a [1909]; 11: 50), and by this linking path of art
regain contact with reality. Art is social and public; neurosis is
asocial and private. For Freud, the artist was "in rudiments an
introvert, not far removed from neurosis" (191617; 16: 376). Mau-
ron agreed with this but added his own positive, romantic-mystic
tinge to the idea of the introvert in his concept of the "moi createur."
For Freud, however, the artist (always seen as male) was a man
who was oppressed by excessively powerful instinctual needs for
honor, power, wealth, fame, and the love of women, but who
lacked the means of achieving satisfaction. This was where subli-
mation came into play: Fantasy, the substitute satisfaction of all
people, became the reserve, the psychic realm free from the reality
principle.
This central Freudian tenet, as expressed in the 1916-17 Intro-
ductory Lectures in Psycho-Analysis, was first expounded in 1908 in
an important paper entitled "Creative Writers and Daydreaming."
The artist was the one who could work out the overly personal
(and therefore repellent) in his daydreams in order to let others
enjoy them too. The "origin from proscribed sources" of the day-
dreams was hidden, for the artist possessed "the mysterious power
of shaping some particular material until it has become a faithful
image of his phantasy." Therefore others could derive consolation
from their own unconscious depths which had been inaccessible
until this pleasure-yield lifted the repression. So, the artist managed
to achieve through fantasy what he had wished in fantasy: the fruits
of success (see also 1913j; 13: 187).
In suggesting nonrational origins for art, Freud was in a sense
only reworking a version of the old tradition of the divinely inspired
poet. Philosophers and art critics had often turned to some such
theory of imagination to explain overdetermined meaning, obses-
sive repetition, and any apparent disorder in art - gaps, contradic-
tions, and so on. Psychoanalysis had posited the theory of the
unconscious to explain those discontinuities in consciousness such
as dreams and parapraxes. So, in a way, it made sense to transfer
this theory of repressed infantile desires to the explanation of the
latent meaning of discontinuous art forms. Mauron certainly thought
107
 Psychoanalysis and literary criticism
so, for his psychocritical method sought from the start the common
denominators of both an author's oeuvre and his life; these he found
in "quelques noyaux affectifs inconscients, qui sont formes dans
l'enfance" (1949a: 78), but which he discerned from the latent struc-
tures of the works themselves. Even though he would later turn
to ego psychology, Mauron's early statement of faith in the Freud-
ian unconscious remains the origin and, in some senses, the mo-
tivating force of psychocritique: 'L'inconscient joue un role dans la
creation litteraire: quelle est au juste sa fatalite? Cela nous importe
et nous ne saurions resoudre la question qu'en etudiant et en com-
parant des cas precis en toute bonne foi" (77). This is precisely what
he did for the next seventeen years.
The artist, then, in Freud's view, was like a daydreamer who
could objectify the subjective into a public, socially acceptable form
- art - instead of turning it into private neurotic symptoms.24 This
analogy allowed Freud to suggest that the fantasies called art could
therefore be interpreted by means of the methods of dream analysis.
Freud had made an early and very strong commitment to the value
of such analysis. "The interpretation of dreams," he wrote, using
italics, "is the royal road to knowledge of the unconscious activities of the
mind" (1900a; 5: 608). Writers, Freud duly noted, have always given
dreams great significance. His study of the dreams in Jensen's Gra-
diva, for instance, had corroborated his own clinical findings about
the structures, mechanisms, and interpretations of dreams, and Freud
was not surprised: "The author no doubt proceeds differently [from
the psychoanalyst]. He directs his attention to the unconscious in
his own mind, he listens to its possible developments and lends
them artistic expression instead of suppressing them by conscious
criticism. Thus he experiences from himself what we learn from
others - the laws which the activities of the unconscious must obey"
(1907a [1906]; 9: 92). Works of art, therefore, support Freud's the-
ories; artists are "valuable allies and their evidence is to be prized
highly" (8). But the artist's fantasy involves more than daydreaming
or hallucinatory wish-fulfilment and its reworking into shareable
form. Here Freud turned to children's fantasies in play for a fuller
analogy, for play involves control and mastery as much as fantasy.
The hero of every story, then, the one who controls, is an em-
bodiment of the ego, the part of the psyche whose role it is to
master both reality and the unconscious. Daydreams, wrote Freud
in summary, "are the raw material of poetic production, for the

108
 Scientific psychology and art
creative writer uses his day-dreams, with certain remodellings, dis-
guises and omissions, to construct the situations which he intro-
duces into his short stories, his novels or his plays. The hero of the
day-dreams is always the subject himself, either directly or by an
obvious identification with someone else" (1916-17; 15: 99).
Many questions can be raised at this point regarding Freud's
choice of analogue for art and artistic creation. Dreams, for Freud,
had no aesthetic value per se. Where did this aesthetic value in art
lie? It was not in its form, which (as we shall see in Chapter 7) was
seen only as a disguise or as a bribe of forepleasure. Daydreams
and dreams are private and relatively formless on the surface; art
is social and formal. This does not mean, of course, that they cannot
fulfill the same function or analogous functions for the psyche; that
is, both can act as safety valves. Nor does this difference necessarily
negate the similarity in latent structures and mechanisms, as the
laws of the unconscious are universal ones. The main objection -
and the obvious one - to the use of dreams as a model for art is
that it reduces art to a psychological framework for something
else.25 The history of psychoanalytic criticism would, unfortu-
nately, seem to bear out the view that the dream model has led
only to facile, if attractive, formulations on creative process. The
ego psychologists were the ones to question most radically the
adequacy of the concept of sublimation. Even more recently, psy-
chologists working directly with artists have even questioned the
primacy of the unconscious in creativity. The nonlogical primary
processes of the unconscious, they argue, do not resemble the con-
scious elaboration that results in works of art. In other words, art
resembles, if anything, the patient's narration of his dream, not the
dream itself. The repressed elements of the unconscious may exert
influence, but they cannot account for novelty, for aesthetic form,
for artistic conventions, and - given their discontinuity - for the
organic unity of art.
The mechanisms of dreamwork (mediating between precon-
scious censorship and unconscious desire) - condensation, displace-
ment, symbolization - obviously resemble the processes of
metonymy, metaphor, and symbol in poetry, but the actual equa-
tion of the two does not necessarily logically follow. Like works
of art, those dreams, slips of the tongue and pen, jokes, and neurotic
symptoms are all overdetermined, that is, capable of being inter-
preted in more than one way. Freud attributed this overdetermi-
109
 Psychoanalysis and literary criticism
nation in dreams to an element of dreamwork that he called
''secondary revision" (1901a; 5: 652, 1900a; 5: 505). This is still not
conscious aesthetic elaboration. Meanings are hidden and not in-
tended for communication. This may be true of parapraxes and
neurotic symptoms, but surely jokes share with works of art the
desire to communicate their overdetermined ambiguities. But for
Freud jokework was like dreamwork (1905c; 8: 54), and both pro-
vided analogies for art. And, as Mauron too was interested in what
the artist did not intend to communicate, these models did not prove
at all problematic for him. He was not interested in the consciously
elaborated manifest structures of the work of art. In this he shared
Freud's view that the overt, conscious order of art arose logically
but from unconscious premises (i9i6d; 14: 329). The "much-abused
privilege of conscious activity" seemed to Freud to serve only to
conceal what was truly important, and he concluded: "We are prob-
ably inclined greatly to overestimate the conscious character of
intellectual and artistic production" (1900a; 5:613). What interested
Freud were the deep unconscious structures that art shares with
myth and religion as well as with dreams. The manifest individ-
uality of the work was less significant for him than its latent
universality.

THE THEORY OF AESTHETIC PLEASURE

Freud's theory of the unconscious as the root of artistic creativity
held certain implications for the theory of the reception of art as
well as its creation. Given the belief in psychic universality, the
pleasure that the viewer or reader derives from art must be directly
linked to that of its creator: "Kindly nature has given the artist the
ability to express his most secret mental impulses, which are hidden
even from him, by means of the works that he creates; and these
works have a powerful effect on others who are strangers to the
artist, and who are themselves unaware of the source of their emo-
tions" (1910c; 11: 107). As early as The Interpretation of Dreams,
Freud saw the universality of safely released repression as the key
to the continuing impact of works like Oedipus Rex and Hamlet.
The artist's disguised and objectified presentation of his unconscious
fantasy in the form of art caused a yield of pleasure so great that
repression was lifted and the audience could "derive consolation
and alleviation" (1916-17; 16: 376). In other words, there is a release
no
 Scientific psychology and art
and gratification by fantasy of unconscious desires common to both
writer and audience. Therefore to study creativity is to study
reception.

THE IMPLIED HERMENEUTIC OF PSYCHOANALYSIS

Nothing is arbitrary in art - or in any of the other manifestations
of unconscious psychic processes. Or so Freud claimed. Freud's
determinism is clear in his assigning of meaning to all verbal am-
biguities and seeming incongruities, be they in jokes, dreams, par-
apraxes, or works of art. There are obviously implications of this
determinism for the interpretation of art, as well as for the response
to it. If one accepts a manifest-latent structure for all the productions
of the unconscious, the task of the analyst - literary or psychological
- becomes one of divining secret and concealed meanings. For
Freud, as for Mauron, this task entailed paying attention to the
small, seemingly unimportant detail, which is then assumed to have
significance (1914b; 13: 222, 229). His interpretation of the Moses
of Michelangelo, for instance, centers on the attitude of the statue's
right hand and the position of the Tablets of the Law. Unlike most
traditional interpretations that see Moses' pose as that at the incep-
tion of action, Freud's presents the statue as a representation of the
remains of a completed action. Freud attributes this obvious de-
viation from the usual view of Moses (in other words, that he does
not break the tablets) to Michelangelo's inner motives in his rela-
tions with Julius II, whose tomb this statue was to adorn. But, as
several generations of commentators have asked since then: By what
criteria are we to judge the validity of Freud's interpretation?
The same question has been posed regarding Freud's dream inter-
pretations as well. Freud was a wily defender of his own views:
Contradictions were shown to be apparent, not real, and negatives
were claimed, in actual fact, to hide positives. In dream analysis
Freud used a mixture of free association and symbol decoding (1900a;
5: 360). It was not that dream symbols had a fixed, known meaning,
but rather that dreams used existent symbols to escape censorship
and allow "representability" of the repressed. And some symbols
did seem to have universal meanings. In addition, most dream
symbols seemed to represent "persons, parts of the body and ac-
tivities invested with erotic interest" (1901a; 4: 683). Given Freud's
theories of repressed infantile desire, they could hardly do other-
III
 Psychoanalysis and literary criticism

wise. The circularity of Freud's theory of interpretation has, need-

less to say, not gone unnoticed.

PSYCHOBIOGRAPHY AND LITERARY CRITICISM

As Freud believed in the universality of such symbols, he felt jus-
tified in applying the laws of the unconscious, which he learned
from the dreams of living patients, to the creative works of dead
artists. In his study Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory ofHis Childhood,26
he went beyond an interpretation of a particular work to investigate
and pronounce upon the psyche of the artist himself. In his writings
on Goethe (1917b) and Dostoevsky (1928b), Freud worked more
in the opposite direction, interpreting works in the light of psy-
chological details gleaned from the lives of the writers. It was Ernest
Jones who would push this psychobiographical impulse of Freud
to its logical conclusion. In Hamlet and Oedipus, Jones's main con-
cern was with what the works tell us of the authors' psyches. Here
the artist was in the role of the analysand and the critic was the
analyst. But sometimes, we have seen, the artist was credited with
the insights of the analyst himself. This question involves the final
part of Freud's aesthetic of interest to us here.

TECHNIQUES AND MODELS OF ANALYSIS

Aside from the dreamwork concept, there are at least three possible
investigative methods implied in Freud's writings that theoretically
could prove useful to literary criticism: the method of the analytic
situation (minus transference), the model of archaeology that Freud
loved, and the technique of superimposition of examples to yield
common factors.
In the first case, if the character is seen as manifesting the symp-
toms of a real neurotic person, the artist is credited, we have seen,
with prefiguring Freud's own clinical findings. He is an analyst;
the character is his patient. The problem for literary criticism here
is obviously that the only criterion of judgment is truth to psy-
choanalytic "fact." The orthodoxy must be accepted without ques-
tion. Freud himself, we have noticed, seems to have changed his
view of the value of art: It began as a theoretical model to validate
psychoanalysis to the public at large; but then art seems to have
become more of an illustration, rather than a confirmation, of Freud's
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 Scientific psychology and art
version of psychic truth. Lady Macbeth became only another ex-
ample of one of "those wrecked by success," a character type Freud
met constantly in his clinical practice (i9i6d; 14: 318-24). Rosmer-
sholm was reduced to "the greatest work of art of the class that
treats of this common phantasy in girls" (331).
Freud, however, also suggested another investigative model for
analysis. The psychoanalyst's task was like that of the archaeologist,
rather than the artist, though his object was more complex. Fur-
thermore, whereas the archaeologist aimed at reconstruction, the
analyst used this only as the first step in his real labor of interpre-
tation and therapy (1930a; 21: 68-9). In both cases, however, frag-
ments had to be discovered and pieced together. A seemingly
insignificant detail - like the position of Michelangelo's Moses' right
hand - might prove to be the key to reconstituting the whole form
of the work of art and its probable context. In dream analysis, this
reconstruction of latent meaning was the product of a series of
successive decodings and unravelings - a model used by many
psychoanalytic critics since. The problem is that, despite Freud's
theory of universality, any such reconstitution can be only hypo-
thetical, and the evidence for this would lie, for example, in the
many different psychoanalytic readings offered for a text such as
Hamlet.
The third technique Freud suggested was not a model so much
as a method, an intertextual one, in the sense that it involved su-
perimposing various manifest versions of a literary or mythic struc-
ture in order to reveal the latent common denominators. In a way,
Freud's method in "The Theme of the Three Caskets," then, is the
true direct forebear of Mauron's psycho critique, as Jeffrey Mehlman
has argued,27 and as we shall discuss in more detail in a later chapter.

Although it is no doubt true that no complete and coherent aesthetic

system could be derived from Freud's writings, these five aspects
of his theory and practice suggest that, from the point of view of
psycho critique, at least, Jack Spector's conclusion to his study of
Freud's aesthetic is rather reductive: "Psychoanalysis as a technique
has contributed little to the field of aesthetics, but as a technique it
has had a most significant - and often stimulating - impact on some
of the art and literature of this century."28 Even the most unsym-
pathetic observer would have to admit, I suspect, that at the very
least Freud gave to literary criticism a new vocabulary with which

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 Psychoanalysis and literary criticism

to discuss the functioning of the psyche and perhaps the imagina-

tion, and that this addition opened up potential new significances
for literary symbolism. If there was a deficiency in Freud's treatment
of art it was in his view of aesthetic form as merely a disguise for
authorial egotism or as a bribe of forepleasure for the reader (i9o8e;
9: 153). In jokes as well, form was related only to the economics
of instinct and pleasure, as pleasure here corresponds to "the psychical
expenditure that is saved" (1905c; 8: 118, italics his). That a proper
treatment of form in and for itself is missing in Freud is suggested
by Ernest Jones's need to address Roger Fry's concept of significant
form in his biography of Freud. Yet implied in Freud's notion of
the latent unconscious structures of art and dream is the one more
or less formal concept that Mauron would seize upon: The unex-
plainable repetitions and discontinuities of manifest content could
be analyzed to reveal internal latent constants. Freudian psycho-
analysis did not provide him with an a priori theoretical grid, though
it is true that Freud's views on creativity, aesthetic pleasure, and
interpretation were integrated into Mauron's wherever there was an
echoing of his own developing theories of literary production, response,
and criticism. In other words, psychoanalysis was the authority
that validated his own intuitions.

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 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND PSYCHOCRITIQUE

Entre la critique dont Sainte-Beuve usa pour Racine

et celle que Marie Bonaparte ou le Dr Laforgue ap-
pliquent a Poe ou a Baudelaire, il y a place pour de
nombreuses formules.
CHARLES MAURON

M AURON'S PARTICULAR ATTRACTION to

Freud's theories grew out of his personal need to find
a critical orthodoxy that would serve to unite science
and art, to objectivize the subjective. As an aesthetician, he saw in
Freud's work what he felt to be a scientific theory of the sources
of aesthetic experience; as a literary critic, he thought Freud offered
experimental techniques by which to approach the artwork in an
objective manner. He was not particularly interested in Freud as
an interpreter of culture. As Mauron moved away from the mystics,
or rather, as he "digested" his Eastern reading and formulated his
theory of the triple psyche, the word "spiritual" began, as we saw
in Chapter 4, to take on the meaning of "psychological." His ob-
jections to Freud at that time centered on Freud's binary thinking
(for instance, the pleasure and reality principles) and on his for-
mulation of the unconscious in what Mauron felt to be only de-
basing sexual terms. I suspect Mauron did not fully understand the
concept of the Freudian unconscious at this time; therefore he felt
the need to posit, in L'Homme triple, that higher superior form of
the unconscious to account for the things he valued most: art,
science, all the products of intellectual effort (1947: 71-3, 149-55,
197).
In "L'Art et la psychanalyse," written two years later, something
had changed. Mauron felt that the psychoanalysts (like Laforgue)
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 Psychoanalysis and literary criticism
had failed in linking art and life (1952 [1949]: 27), and so the literary
critic felt it was his turn to try. Real psychoanalysis cannot, in a
sense, be used on art, because artists are usually either dead or
unwilling to be analyzed. (Even if psychoanalysis could be applied,
it would likely be of little aesthetic use to the critic, for it probably
would be primarily concerned with what Roger Fry called the
impure parts of art.) Mauron proposed a new discipline: "La psy-
cho-critique devrait avoir un objet distinct, la creation esthetique,
le centre d'une oeuvre valable et non point les elements impurs . . .
Et pour l'etude de cet objet distinct, la psycho-critique devrait forger
son outil et ses methodes propres" (29). The insights of Freud, like
those of Fry, were to be adapted, not followed slavishly.
What had changed Mauron's mind? In this same article he sug-
gested that it was Mallarme who had taught him that the purity of
art was not incompatible with the concepts of psychoanalysis. But
what exactly does this mean? Critics have often pointed out that
symbolist verse and theories offer many similarities to Freud's own
views of unconscious psychic processes.1 But what and how Mau-
ron learned from Mallarme is considerably more subtle and com-
plex than this, though it is true that he had always seen Mallarme
as a psychological poet. In his early commentaries on Fry's trans-
lations of Mallarme, Mauron wrote that this was a poet "in com-
munication with some unconscious depths," whose poetry could
be better interpreted by a psychoanalyst than by a literary critic
(1938a [1936]: 92). When he reprinted these commentaries in the
French original in Mallarme Vobscur in 1941, he omitted this remark,
but left in a perhaps more significant, qualified Freudian one:

Almost all the familiar ideas of modern psychology find . . .

some example in the symbols of this poem [Herodias]. After
the regression of unconscious desires, after the return to child-
hood, how can we avoid thinking of narcissism in reading
the famous invocation to the mirror . . . I cannot attempt even
to sketch a study of this kind, for which I lack all knowledge.
But if esthetics one day becomes a branch of psychology -
and, after all, this is the only way in which we shall avoid
mere gossip [bavardage], since all that is not an art should
become a science - I cannot help believing that Herodias will
provide one of the clearest examples for the new criticism.
(92-3).
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 Psychoanalysis and psycho critique

And so it did.
Mallarme was not just Mauron's mentor. He had also deeply
influenced even his very formalistic translator, Roger Fry, who had
actually once written to Virginia Woolf: "I'm certain that the only
meanings that are worth anything in a work of art are those that
the artist himself knows nothing about."2 Mauron first modified
this theory of unconscious intent, equating the meaning of a Mal-
larme poem with "what it may have signified to Mallarme himself
(1938a [1936]: 175). Soon, however, Mauron would add "uncon-
sciously" to that "what it may have signified." We saw earlier that
Fry and Mauron had been influenced by Mallarme's quasi-mystic
ideas of music and the formal purity of poetry. However, there
was a significant change in Mauron's view of Mallarme after even
his qualified acceptance of Freudian ideas. Mallarme always stressed,
in writing about the creative process, the role of intellectual control,
of the refining of the object by sheer craft. Chance did not enter
either the construction of or the response to art. Mauron would
agree with this latter statement, but Freudian determinism would
prevent him from assigning the controlling role to the conscious
part of the poet's psyche. Nor could he accept only deliberate craft-
manship as the creative force, because elements did seem to slip
out (like Freudian parapraxes), elements that were both unintended
and extremely significant. In other words, Mallarme's poems, with
their implied insights into the unconscious, seemed to work con-
trary to his professed theories, which overvalued the conscious.
This contradiction, I think, acted as a challenge to Mauron, a chal-
lenge that Freud helped him to meet.
In order to discuss in as concise a manner as possible Mauron's
attraction to Freudian theories as he came to formulate what would
be the final form of psychocritique, we return to the structure of the
five aspects of Freud's aesthetic outlined in the last chapter.

THE UNCONSCIOUS IN CREATIVITY AND CULTURE

In The Nature of Beauty in Art and Literature, Mauron had written
that the "reality of a poem is in the spiritual shape that it offers us"
(1927a [1925]: 72). The vagueness and ambiguity of "spiritual shape"
and its mixture of the impressionistic or mystical and the formal
were both typical of Mauron's early thinking. As "spirit" came to
mean "psyche," however, Mauron's idea of some kind of intellec-
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 Psychoanalysis and literary criticism
tual or formal emotion shared by creators of both art and science
began to find its resonance in the writings of Poincare and Bernard,
as well as Freud.3 The unconscious began to play more of a role in
Mauron's theorizing about aesthetic creativity and reception. Freud's
theories in general became plausible for Mauron once he realized
that even in Mallarme's most "pure" art, "impure" Freudian no-
tions like the Oedipal complex could be found (1952 [1949]: 28).
In 1962, he could look back and see that the big break had come
with his almost accidental, though formalist, discovery of meta-
phoric chains in Mallarme's work, chains that he had seen, even at
the time, as obsessive: "J'appris ainsi que Roger Fry, apres tant
d'autres, s'etait trompe sur la realite de l'inconscient. L'impurete
qu'il denonqait se composait surtout de contenus tres conscients
. . . II fallait chercher le reve profond" (1962: 22-3).
Mauron had accepted the Freudian concept of creation as subli-
mation as early as 1941. "L'Apres-midi d'un faune" presented a
happy and content Mallarme, he claimed: "Qu'est-il done arrive?
A la fois un reve et la technique de son expression, ce que les
psychanalystes nomment 'sublimation,' une faqon de vivre poe-
tiquement, une maniere d'utiliser le reel au lieu de le repousser"
(1967a [1941]: 37). Art was what gave the poet what he lacked in
reality (1964b: 124); the significant process did not take place con-
sciously, however, but in the depths of the unconscious. Repression
and sublimation became givens in Mauron's account of aesthetic
creation, as did the analogy between the psychic and structural
dynamics of dreams and those of art. He appears to have adopted
at times the psychical mechanisms of dreamwork (condensation,
displacement, representability, and symbolization) in his analysis
of the structural and psychological significance of characters (1967b;
IV), but this would not be his main analytic technique. Like Freud,
Mauron did not deny that conscious elaboration by the poet took
place. But craft was linked to the rational, the intelligible, and the
unified. The presentation of these manifest structures and contents
of a work of art - as discussed by traditional literary critics - formed
a first step in any poem's analysis for Mauron. By choosing liter-
ature about which much had already been written (the works of
Mallarme, Racine, Baudelaire), Mauron probably felt he could ab-
solve himself from that preliminary step and move right on to the
unconscious form and content. He was always careful at least to
claim that psycho critique was only a partial, complementary mode

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of analysis, and that therefore he was not falling into the trap, he
implied, of the medical psychoanalyst-critics like Marie Bonaparte:
"Je ne reproche pas a la psychanalyse d'elucider un poeme a sa
faqon, c'est-a-dire par en dessous, de nous en donner ainsi comme
le sens inferieur et de feindre parfois qu'il est le seul ou le plus
important, celui dont tous les autres ne seront plus que des reflets"
(1968a [1950]: 37). It was precisely because of these problems with
psychoanalysis, as it had already been applied to literature, that
Mauron felt the need to invent the psychocritical method.

THE THEORY OF AESTHETIC PLEASURE

Despite his early interest in aesthetic contemplation and the aesthetic

emotion, Mauron did not turn to Freudian ideas on these topics
until he was forced to do so. In other words, he concentrated on
aesthetic production, on the unconscious structures of the art object,
and on what these revealed about the psyche of the author, until
his study of Moliere brought him up against two difficult problems:
the conventions of the genre of comedy, and the possible conscious
motivation behind provoking the consistent laughing response of
the audience. This latter issue did not really present a problem,
once the Freudian view was accepted; that is, the view that the
reader or viewer derived from art the same satisfactions as the
creator. The universality of unconscious desires and of the means
of gratification was precisely what lay at the root of Mauron's
affective theory of aesthetic pleasure in his Psycho critique du genre
comique, in which he studied the ridiculing of primitive infantile
fears, which was, he decided, at the base of all comic types: "Chez
un spectateur assis au theatre et resolu a se divertir en toute securite,
de telles angoisses ne peuvent pas reparaitre; mais l'inconscient du
spectateur peut encore jouir, a leur evocation grotesque, d'un
triomphe secret" (1964a: 85). In order to make this theory work,
however, Freud's idea of childhood laughter had to be broadened.
Mauron turned to Ernst Kris, as we shall see shortly, for the au-
thority to view all laughter as a dissipation of tension, as the sign
of a liberation from fear. He also, however, employed Freud's
concept from Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious of the ten-
dentious intent ofjokes in order to account for the power upon the
audience of certain kinds of comedy.

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 Psychoanalysis and literary criticism

THE IMPLIED HERMENEUTIC OF PSYCHOANALYSIS

Freud's theory of interpretation, as we have seen, was based on the

premises of a latent-manifest structure and of a kind of psychic
determinism in which nothing was arbitrary. Mauron accepted both
of these postulations as givens and would have agreed in full with
Freud's statement that the "images and turns of phrase to which a
person is particularly given are rarely without significance when
one is forming a judgment of him; and others often turn out to be
allusions to a theme which is being kept in the background at the
time, but which has powerfully affected the speaker" (1901b; 6:
216). If, in Sagesse de Veau and L'Homme triple, Mauron had tried
to deny the artist's subjection to the lower or animal instincts of
the unconscious, he did come to accept, albeit at first grudgingly,
Freud's determinism - mainly because he saw in it a way to validate
his own theory of the text's unconscious structure: "Meme si la
liberte creatrice echappait a des determinations inferieures, elle n'en
serait pas moins circonscrite par elles . . . La structure inconscient
revelee dans l'oeuvre pourrait fort bien etre la fatalite d'ou elle
cherche a s'evader" (1958: 105). Freud's theory once again turns
out to have been, above all, convenient.

PSYCHOBIOGRAPHY AND LITERARY CRITICISM

It is not just Freud and the psychoanalysts who have been tempted
to deduce an artist's personality from his work or to analyze lit-
erature in the light of biographical information. Mauron, however,
claimed he was doing neither: Psycho critique was the analysis of
works of literature; it only "passed by" the people who created
them (1969 [1954]: 18). Although it is true that Mauron was never
interested in the neuroses of a writer in and for themselves, he most
certainly was interested in the conflicts between what he labeled the
creative ego and the social ego of the artist. The slippage of focus
from the work to the person who created it is a real one in Mauron's
work, despite his denials. As the Introduction argued, although
biographical materials were, in theory, intended only as a check or
control on the critic's interpretations of the networks of obsessive
metaphors, in practice it was the personal myth of the artist, and
not the text's structures, that captured Mauron's attention more
and more. The formal, unconscious, textual patterns were only the
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 Psychoanalysis and psycho critique

first step to the real psychocritical work. After Mauron had accepted
psychoanalysis as his critical orthodoxy, these interpretations of
artists could be carried out in fairly traditional Freudian terms of
reference. For instance, Mauron knew that he risked banality and
oversimplification if he reduced all works of art to manifestations
of the universal Oedipal complex. Nevertheless, he did feel that
the complex played too significant a role to ignore and so he out-
lined its place in the works of Giraudoux (1971b [1964]: 153), Ra-
cine, Baudelaire, Goya, Hugo, and Mallarme (1949b: 440). The
man (and it always was a man) and the work were not easily sep-
arated in psychocritique.

TECHNIQUES AND MODELS OF ANALYSIS

The literary adaptation of the analytic situation model, in which
the character figures as analysand, was certainly one Mauron slipped
into more than occasionally. At the very beginning of his career,
Mauron had categorically stated that a psychological knowledge of
men - scientific and not intuitive - was essential to novelistic cre-
ation (1927b: 336). The writer was a kind of analyst before the fact.
The actual analogue to the psychoanalyst was, however, the critic.
Mauron's 1964-5 lectures, posthumously published as Phedre, pro-
vide the clearest examples of the use of this model, as Racine's
heroine is analyzed in terms of her anguish and her defenses (1968b
[1964-5]: 76). Mauron did go beyond this character investigation
as well to posit Racine's own intrapsychic drama, in which Hip-
polyte would represent the ego who must reject part of himself
(his Oedipal attraction to Phedre) in order to form a true relation-
ship with the Other (Aricie), but who is also haunted by guilt over
that rejected part which he has now internalized. The other use to
which Mauron put Freud's analytic situation model was, as ex-
plained earlier, a more technical one. The psychocritic was some-
how supposed to combine the vigilance of the analyst, who listens
for repeated structures, and the openness of the analysand, who
"free associates." This combination was the prerequisite for ef-
fecting the superimposition of texts, the first step of psychocritique.
The second potentially useful analogy for literary criticism was
the archaeologist-analyst one. Much has been made of Freud's re-
peated archaeological images, such as the return of the buried re-
pressed by tunneling into time or the concept of reconstruction

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from fragments of the past. Yet, Mauron's favorite image for psy-
chocritique was very different: It was that of musical analysis. In other
words, given the context of Mauron's musical images in general
(see Chapter 4), his analogue was meant to be overtly formalist,
although it secretly allowed room for impressionism. Nevertheless,
the Freudian idea of building a whole from past fragments did affect
Mauron's criticism. Just as in Freud's analysis of dreams or of
Michelangelo's Moses, the seemingly insignificant detail (in terms
of manifest form or content) often triggered Mauron's construction
of his hypotheses regarding latent meanings. On the other hand,
Mauron also tried to make Freud's own thinking into "musical
logic," the logic of variations, which he saw as the only way to
understand dreams (1953d: 202). He even claimed that this logic
was the real key to Freud's objectivity of method: "La grande audace
de Freud, et la raison de son progres, fut, par une extreme humilite
experimental, d'adopter la logique, fut-elle non scientifique en
apparence, que lui imposaient les faits observes" (203).
Mauron was never one of the psychoanalytic symbolmongers,
translating every flowerpot into a vagina and every fence post into
a phallus. Nor was he interested in symbolic structures in and for
themselves. The initial step of the psychocritical method involved
the superimposition of texts to find latent common denominators,
which otherwise escaped detection and which could not be ex-
plained by the traditional methods used in literary criticism. The
roots of this comparative intertextual method certainly lay within
Mauron's own work in the early use of analogy- and difference-
seeking as the first guide of analysis in the two English books. His
sources there we have seen to be Poincare and Bernard. But Freud's
"The Theme of the Three Caskets" applied this method of inter-
textual comparison to versions of the same tale to seek common-
alities. It was this upon which Mauron would seize. If Freud could
compare The Merchant of Venice to King Lear, compare both to
various myths, and end up with the "proof for a psychoanalytic
truth (wishful reversal) (1913f; 12: 299), how much more valid
would be Mauron's comparison of all the texts of one author? Who
knows what truths might emerge from this?

From these five aesthetically relevant aspects of psychoanalytic the-

ory, Mauron adopted the insights and adapted the methods of Freud.
The adaptations were necessitated by the difference in the position
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 Psychoanalysis and psycho critique
of the critic: Free association, transference, and verification by effect
on the analysand are all impossible in literary criticism. But, never-
theless, Mauron was not willing to surrender this objective study
of the subjective. Reversing Freud's fear that his case histories would
lack the stamp of science if they read like literature, Mauron sought
to give his analysis of art that stamp of serious science by using the
language and the theoretical underpinnings of scientific or depth
psychology. Although he finally accepted as given the basic relevant
Freudian theories of the unconscious - of the importance of day-
dreams and sublimation, of the existence of the pleasure and reality
principles, of the process of dreamwork (1969 [1954]: 311, 141, 45,
40, respectively) - Mauron was never a trained or practicing psy-
choanalyst.4 But, with the help of his second wife, Alice, he was
widely read in psychoanalysis and actually conducted an autoana-
lysis. According to Alice Mauron, he was invited to Paris, Lau-
sanne, and Geneva to speak with analysts, and his ideas on the
creative process were well received by them. In a way, this reception
guaranteed in his own mind the scientific seriousness of his venture.
The critic-analyst analogue presents not a few problems, how-
ever. In an early lecture, Mauron had given Freud credit for teaching
that word associations were not gratuitous. He added that, never-
theless, these associations and their interconnections were so par-
ticular and individual that only the subject could both discover and
understand them (1930b: 12). By 1950, in Introduction a la psychan-
alyse de Mallarme, he had altered this belief and begun to claim that
it was not necessary to be a professional analyst, or a patient, to
be able to discern latent meaning in a text (1968a [1950]: 24). In
this first extended psychocritical work, he was careful to state that
he was not an analyst: "J e voudrais done que le lecteur prete ce qui
va suivre non pour une veritable analyse, presomptueuse de la part
d'un non-praticien, mais pour un elargissement de la critique com-
mune" (39). Such a profession of his amateur status was not to be
repeated, and Mauron's subsequent silence on his formal qualifi-
cations reflected his increasing confidence and conviction. Applied
psychoanalysis, at first one possible interpretive hypothesis, grad-
ually became an unchallenged orthodoxy for Mauron.
Freud himself had not been willing to make such a great claim
for psychoanalytic insights into the creative process, at least not
overtly (1910a [1909]; 11: 50, 1913j; 13: 187), and his critics have
agreed.5 For all his general acceptance of Freud, Mauron did make
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 Psychoanalysis and literary criticism
several qualifications. Like the master himself, Mauron saw that
the universality of the structures of the unconscious and the belief
in psychic determinism worked against the possibility of psycho-
analysis being able to account for novelty, individuality, or genius
in art. We have seen Mauron voicing his criticism in both Sagesse
de Veau (1945: 95, 122) and L'Homme triple (1947: 152). On a the-
oretical level, universal, determined psychic structures suggest the
imposing of a kind of continuity on the essentially discontinuous.
Leo Bersani has argued that Freudian psychoanalysis is reductive
because of this commitment to the notion of an organized history
of desire, not because of its continuous reference to childhood sex-
uality.6 Mauron was not bothered by this sort of objection, because
he was quite willing to commit himself to the notion of a structured
psyche with various stages of development. What did bother him
- enough to send him to the works of Melanie Klein - was the
implied static quality of the Freudian symbol. Herbert Read had
already turned to Adler and Jung for a theory of symbol-making
and of creativity as a more vital activity.7 Neither critic wanted to
reduce the complex to the elementary at the expense of the dynamic
process that constituted aesthetic creation and perception. Mauron
would take other Mallarme critics to task for their desire to decipher
symbols as if they had fixed, static meanings, instead of interpreting
them in the light of the complex latent whole that constituted the
text and the hypotheses about the creating psyche (1963a: 6-20).
But Freud's theories alone would not allow Mauron (or anyone
else, perhaps) to get out of the potentially reductionist, symbol-
mongering critical impasse.
The second limitation of applied Freudian psychoanalysis from
Mauron's point of view was the obvious one: The text was not
like a patient. It did not free associate and then confirm the analyst's
interpretive constructions by memories (1952 [1949]: 26-7). The
text was a prestructured given. At best, then, the psychoanalytic
situation provided an analogy for criticism, never an identity. The
work of art, unlike the dream, had been subjected to a double
elaboration - by the critical intelligence and by the artistic sense of
the writer (1968a [1950]: 36). Dreams, unlike art, have no aesthetic
significance. Psychocritique was not therapeutic; nor was it diag-
nostic, despite Mauron's belief that Mallarme would have been a
wonderful case for an analyst (1967a [1941]: 26). As a literary tech-
nique based on psychoanalytic insights, however, the psychocritical
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 Psychoanalysis and psycho critique
method aimed at establishing "assez solidement des relations ina-
perques jusqu'ici et de donner ainsi a la vie et a l'oeuvre . . . une
grande unite qu'on ne lui connaissait pas" (1968a [1950]: 39). This
continuity was one that included both the work and the one who
created it.
We enter at this point the problematic area of psychobiography
as practiced by both Freud himself and many others since, starting
with Marie Bonaparte and her work on Poe. What is interesting
about psychocritique is that it reveals Mauron's awareness of the
limitations of Freudian psychobiography for aesthetics, as its main
value was psychological and even medical. Dominique Fernandez
called Mauron's solution to this problem an ingenious effort at
synthesizing Freudianism with structuralism,8 although formalism
would, perhaps, be a more accurate term, for structural anthro-
pology and linguistics were never contexts Mauron would employ.
Usually this kind of remark about Mauron's work separates the
psychoanalytic assumptions and interpretations from the method-
ology, especially the psychocritical step of textual superimposition.
Mauron himself, however, would have rejected such a separation,
claiming that the methodology itself was derived from Freudian
technique (1966a: 72). This is really only partially true: Textual
comparison had been Mauron's favored critical tool from the very
start. In a very real sense, Freud once again provided him only with
the way to buttress this personal preference for what he saw as an
objective method with an elaborate and scientific psychological
superstructure.
Mauron was to make many defensive-sounding affirmations about
the validity of his psychocritique. His evaluation of the worth of
Freud's specifically aesthetic theories was rather more qualified,
despite his adoption of them as orthodoxy: "L'apport de la psy-
chanalyse a la critique serait moins constitue par des analyses pre-
cises que par de nouvelles faqons de considerer l'ame humaine et
ses modes d'expression" (1968a [1950]: 23-4). In other words, Freud's
insights were of great general value, but it took Mauron's adap-
tations to render them useful to the actual critical analysis of texts.
Actually, Mauron had to turn to other psychoanalytic theorists to
break out of the potential aesthetic dead end to which Freudian
psychic universality and determinism seemed to lead. Mauron saw
the tensions of art as reflecting a dynamic process at work in the
creator's unconscious. The intrapsychic drama glimpsed in the la-
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 Psychoanalysis and literary criticism

tent structures of the work was what generated meaning, as well

as satisified desire. It is not that Mauron left depth psychology
behind at this point, but that he felt that whatever psychoanalysis,
as the psychology of the id alone, brought to the domain of aesthetic
knowledge needed completing by a psychology of the ego. Whereas
Freudian psychoanalysis concentrated on the id, on the relation
between the conscious and the unconscious, the work of Anna
Freud and Melanie Klein focused upon the ego and the nonego.
Post-Kleinians like Fairbairn broadened this to account for what
were called object relations.9 For psychoanalytic literary criticism
in general, this has meant a change from a decoding of static sym-
bols within an intrapsychic structure to an investigation of the ego
strategies in language. This marks a progression too from the Freud-
ian valorizing of the latent unconscious to a more equalizing con-
nection of the latent with the manifest. It was this dynamic linking
that Mauron, both as a formalist textual critic and as a psychoan-
alytic interpreter, sought in the works of Melanie Klein, above all.
In her dissertation on Mauron and Norman Holland, Wendy
Deutelbaum credits Mauron with restoring to psychoanalysis "the
positive image of woman behind the Jewish myth" through his
theory of the poet's regression to and reconstruction of the lost
love object, the mother.IO Unfortunately, Mauron is not responsible
for this restitution theory of art; Melanie Klein is.11 Both she and
Anna Freud came to Britain as emigres before the Second World
War and began to work with children, something Freud had not
really done.12 Although Anna Freud remained closer to the ortho-
dox position of her father, she did give more importance to the
ego and its defenses. The work of Melanie Klein, however, ques-
tioned Freud's hypotheses about pre-Oedipal stages of develop-
ment. Yet her work too can be seen to derive from such relatively
late Freudian texts as The Ego and the Id, "Mourning and Melan-
cholia," and Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. In The
Psycho-Analysis of the Child (1932), Klein both extended Freud's
hypotheses about early infantile experience and added new ideas
that provided Mauron with that more dynamic model he sought
for aesthetic creation. His early Freudian reading of Mallarme (1950)
was reworded in Kleinian terms in the 1963 introduction to the
American translation of The Psychoanalysis of Mallarme. But as early
as 1954, in his thesis, Mauron had turned to Klein's theories of
mourning and of the depressive situation: "L'art est essentiellement

126
 Psychoanalysis and psycho critique

une restauration du 'temps perdu,' une compensation a un deuil et

a une ruine psychique" (1969 [1954]: 11). The central concepts being
drawn upon here are best defined by Klein herself:

The baby experiences depressive feelings which reach a climax

just before, during, and after weaning. This is the state of
mind in the baby which I termed the "depressive position,"
and I suggested that it is a melancholia in statu nascendi. The
object which is being mourned is the mother's breast and all
that the breast and milk have come to stand for in the infant's
mind: namely love, goodness and security. All these are felt
by the baby to be lost, and lost as a result of his own uncon-
trollable, greedy, and destructive phantasies and impulses
against his mother's breasts.13

As he had with Freud earlier, Mauron now found in Klein many

echoes of his own intuitions. He had often used the image of the
artist as Orpheus descending to recover a lost female object, and
now he saw Klein's theories as confirming this metaphor in sci-
entific terms (1962: 234). He had also already come to see Mal-
larme's art as a compromise attempt to recapture the image of a
dead or mutilated mother. But the real importance of Klein for
Mauron was that her theory of internalized objects allowed psy-
chocritique to move from that formalist and Freudian perception of
networks of obsessive metaphors to the postulation of the fantasy
underlying them (1970b [1965]: 96). This he called the personal
myth. Because this involved both desire and the objects of desire,
internalized objects became both subject and object, and so formed
a world that existed between the ego and the nonego (1962: 108).
Even more important for Mauron was the fact that this kind of
fantasy was accepted as the dynamic representation of the structures
of the psyche and of their interrelations. Mauron had always seen
psychoanalysis as a drama, and had pointed to Freud's own reliance
on the examples of plays (1952 [1949]: 35), but it took the Kleinian
context of the projection of internal objects to allow him to posit
for psycho critique the importance of the dramatic intrapsychic situ-
ation. Now his method began to resemble the first stages of a
Kleinian analytic therapy situation: that is, the analysis of the ego's
relations to external and internal objects.
The other major influence on Mauron's thought at this point was
127
 Psychoanalysis and literary criticism

Anna Freud's The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936). To her
father's list of various psychic defenses (including sublimation),
Anna Freud added several others, including that of denial in fantasy.
Mauron would use this theory in his Psycho critique du genre comique
to account for unexpected reversals of fact, in a plot or character,
in terms of regression and displacement. Anna Freud felt that in
analysis the id impulse was never seen in itself, but rather only as
distorted by these silent, invisible defense mechanisms. That these
were, once again, dynamic adaptations by the ego (of the relations
among id, superego, and external forces) was what attracted Mau-
ron (1962: 80, 168, I72n, 199, 255-68, 292). He saw in the novels
of Victor Hugo, for instance, the workings of another defense
mechanism, that of altruistic surrender, a mechanism that Anna
Freud herself had once used Cyrano de Bergerac to illustrate.14 What
interested Mauron in particular was that the ego's defenses fought
the forces of desire and the demands of conscience in a dramatic
fashion that he felt to be reflected in the personal myth of the writer
(1967b [1966]: XL).
Melanie Klein posited a series of specific configurations of these
defenses (along with anxieties and object relations), which she called
positions. Of these, the most significant for Mauron, we have seen
was the depressive position, which was the result of the child's
recognition of the mother's otherness, with the accompanying re-
alization of helplessness and dependency. The jealous anxiety that
this created was linked to the child's feelings of having destroyed
the breast. However, during this period, integrative processes (of
ideal, good objects and persecutory, bad objects) were initiated that
lessened the anxiety, and then reparation, sublimation, and crea-
tivity could come to replace defense mechanisms.15 As symbol for-
mation and capacities for both abstraction and connection develop
out of this position as well, the formalist methodology of psycho-
critique also indirectly received some support from this new version
of the psychoanalytic orthodoxy. Mauron had also read the work
of Adrian Stokes, who used the theories of Hanna Segal and Melanie
Klein to study aesthetic form as derived from infantile introjections
and reparative attitudes. Art in general was seen by Stokes as a
substitute for psychic integration ("the sensation of oneness with
the satisfying breast"16), and the visual arts were seen as external-
izations of unconscious internal objects.17 Mauron saw van Gogh's
painting as a form of this good-object absorption (1976 [1951-9]:
128
 Psychoanalysis and psycho critique

49) on Stokes's model, and turned to the letters of the painter to

verify his hypothesis. The association chains he found there (heat-
Midi-painting versus cold-Holland-Christianity) were, he felt, re-
flected in the art as well, although, as Mauron was completely blind
by then, he had to rely on his memory.
In 1959, Mauron analyzed van Gogh's use of color in psychoan-
alytic terms: "II y a au coeur de l'art la realite de Fangoisse et du
salut, c'est-a-dire la realite de Tame, du moi profond, a projeter sur
la realite de 1'object, du non-moi, de faqon a creer un objet de
communion" (151)- The influence of Klein is clear, but what is also
evident is that slippage of focus from the art to the artist, and in
fact, from the part of the ego that creates to the part of the ego
that must deal with society. The creative ego would always interest
Mauron more than the social ego, but they were forever in conflict,
according to Mauron, and so could not be separated in discussion.
In Mallarme par lui-meme, Mauron reworked his earlier Freudian
analysis of Mallarme's unconscious personality in Kleinian terms
of the defense mechanisms of the ego against the early death of the
poet's mother. The basis of Mallarme's personal myth was now
restated in terms of object relations (1964b: 25, 57, 72-6, 125).
Mauron also found other uses for Klein's theories. In Psychocri-
tique du genre comique, he saw comedy's fantasies of triumph and its
hallucinatory (visualized) satisfaction of desire as defense mecha-
nisms of the ego against the depressive position (1964a: 131). As
the ego here was that of the members of the audience, as much as
that of the artist, Mauron had found another way of stating his
basically Freudian theory of aesthetic pleasure. He also subjected
literary characters, most notably Phedre, to extended Kleinian anal-
yses, studying Phedre as if she were the analysand whose ego-object
relations were to be examined (1968b [1964-5]: 24, 47, 51, 102-10,
120-7, 16970). Sometimes, however, he used Klein more as a
formal grid to set up structural parallels between dramatic relations
among characters and intrapsychic situations. In Hugo's work, the
pure hero-pure heroine relationship is likened to that of the good
ego and the externalized, projected good object; whereas the impure
herosociety relation is like that of the bad ego and bad objects
(1967b [1966]: XX).
Mauron's psychoanalytic eclecticism was rooted in his realization
that, although scientific psychology in general satisfied his need for
an objective experimental authority or critical orthodoxy, different
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 Psychoanalysis and literary criticism

theories offered different tools to the literary critic. In his own

words: "Les mecanismes freudiens ou kleiniens se montrent pre-
cieux, et a vrai dire irremplaqables pour l'analyse dynamique des
oeuvres, l'intelligence du jeu des forces. Les notions de conflit,
d'ambivalence, de compromis dans le symptome, de culpabilite,
les trois instances et leurs difficultes frontalieres, les divers stades
du developpement affectif- autant d'outils classiques et d'une valeur
experimental eprouvee'' (1953d: 193). These psychoanalytic tools,
to be adapted to the use of the literary critic, were helpful in two
separate fields: in the dynamic analysis of specific texts, and in what
Mauron called "l'intelligence du jeu des forces." Later he would
link this latter knowledge of the psyche to the concept of creation
implicit in each theory, be it the one centered on the id, as was
Freud's, or on the ego, as was Klein's (1958: 109). Gradually Mau-
ron's own theory came to resemble Klein's in his stress on creation
as an integration and as a dynamic process. But Mauron has not
been the only literary thinker to be attracted to Klein's theories.
Even Derrida once felt her views might prove more fruitful than
Freud's in his own work, and Jean Laplanche based his work on
Holderlin on the theories of Klein and Lacan.18 In psychoanalytic
circles (mostly outside Britain, however), Klein has often been
attacked for presenting as factual description what is really only a
hypothetical reconstruction of the pre-Oedipal stages from her anal-
ysis of older children. Freudians have not always seen where her
improvements on the master's work lie. For Mauron, however,
the major advantage ego psychology offered was its alternative to
the model of static structures. Although he never denied Freud,
Mauron would feel free to borrow and adapt insights and techniques
from Freud's successors.
Melanie Klein and Anna Freud were certainly the first important
psychoanalytic influences after Freud for Mauron. But they were
by no means the last. Mauron was prone to making great catalogs
of the important thinkers in the field, implying that he had read
and absorbed all of their works (1969 [1954]: 10; 1963a: 1-22):
Abraham, Silberer, Riklin, Rank, Jones, Sachs, Sarasin, Harnik,
Jekels, Sperber, Ossipow, Baudouin, Weiss, Pfister, Bergler, Spitz,
Fenichel. Jung had been mentioned frequently in Mauron's earlier,
more mystic work (1945: 90; 1947: 197; 1949a: 77; 1968a [1950]:
190, 203), and Mauron admitted that, although he preferred Freud's
theories, he found himself using Jung's vocabulary (1953d: 194).
130
 Psychoanalysis and psycho critique
This stage did not last, however, beyond Mauron's discovery of
Klein. There were a few psychologists that Mauron seemed to single
out for fuller treatment, suggesting that their theories might have
been more important for him than some of the others. Edmund
Bergler, a clinical psychiatrist who treated authors with writer's
block, provided Mauron with empirical evidence to support his
belief (derived from Anna Freud and Klein) that art was not the
direct expression of unconscious desire, but rather the result of
unconscious defenses against it. Similarly, the work of William
Stekel in "Poetry and Neurosis" offered Mauron an authority for
the development of his own early Freudian notion - of the artist
as being more in touch with his unconscious than most people -
into an idea of the artist as one capable of autoanalysis19 (1969 [1954]:
259). In fact, like Klein, Mauron came to see art as a form of
autopsychoanalysis that was the first healing step in the fight "contre
les maladies de notre civilisation" (334).
The two other ego psychologists, however, who appear to have
most influenced Mauron's aesthetic theories are Ernst Kris and Ron-
ald Fairbairn. In Kris's work, Mauron found another theory to
support his own image of the artist's orphic ego descending into
the unconscious and then returning (unlike the madman, who could
not reverse the descent). Art became a form of controlled madness,
an oscillation between the conscious and the unconscious, between
controlled functioning and regression (1966a: I9n, 71, 129; 1967b
[1966]: II). The theoretical authority for this idea came from Kris.20
In his Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art, Kris expanded Freud's idea
of the flexibility of repression possessed by artists (1928b; 21: 177
96) to define the difference between dreams (in which the ego is
overwhelmed by regression) and art, or even wit, which he defined
as a "regression in the service of the ego."21 Aesthetic creativity
represented a relaxation or regression of ego functions, like fantasy
and dream, but unlike these, it was seen as purposive and controlled.
Mauron appreciated Kris's account of art most because it was one
of the only ones to take into account both unconscious, latent
sources of inspiration and the conscious, manifest elaboration. Clas-
sical literary criticism had dealt with the latter; the former was to
be the domain of psycho critique. The other attractive aspect of Kris's
theory was that it gave a more positive view of art than the Freudian
theories of either sublimation of libidinal impulses, or alternative
reaction formation to neurotic symptoms. For the author of L'Homme

131
 Psychoanalysis and literary criticism

triple, the formulator of the idea of a superior unconscious, this

view could not but be attractive, and Kris helped Mauron justify
his intuitive rejection of the negative implications of Freudian the-
ory. Mauron was only too willing to see the artist, as he saw van
Gogh, as one who adopts "la logique irrationnelle, risque l'archa-
isme et la regression mentale, dans l'espoir d'atteindre, sur l'aile
des symboles, a quelque niveau superieur de realite et de liberte"
(1976 [1951-9]: 100).
The other theory that offered Mauron an aesthetic alternative to
the Freudian biological emphasis on the pleasure-seeking libido was
that of the Scottish psychoanalyst Ronald Fairbairn. Instead of con-
sidering art as symptomatic expression, Fairbairn, along with other
post-Kleinians like Winnicott, saw works of art as "transitional
objects," which restored an inner world, incorporating both good
and bad objects. Art was also not a Freudian wish-fulfilling escape
from reality, but rather an enactment of a new relatedness to the
external world, based on the differentiation of exteriorized objects,
accepted by and rejected from the self. Mauron would employ these
figurations, as outlined by Fairbairn in his Psychoanalytic Studies of
the Personality, in his studies of the work of Baudelaire (1957c: 214),
van Gogh (1976 [1951-9]: 21), and Giraudoux (1971b [1964]: 15-
18). In Des metaphores obsedantes au my the personnel, Mauron also
turned to Fairbairn to explain the literary functions of the personal
myth in psycho critique. He rejected the possible psychoanalytic inter-
pretations of the myth as a reaction of the personality to the present
in the light of either the individual past (Freud) or collective human
history (Jung) (1962: 221-5). Claiming Fairbairn and Rank as his
authorities, Mauron declared that the personal myth discerned by
the psychocritical method was an imaginative fantasy that reflected
the actual state of the psyche in the present that is, the dramatic
equilibrium of its acquired psychic structures (1963 a: 3; 1962: 220).
Fairbairn's model was even more dynamic than Klein's, and there-
fore even more appropriate to Mauron's increasing interest in drama.
In all of these cases of influence, it was that appropriateness, that
echoing of Mauron's own early ideas, that conditioned the degree
of acceptance of a given framework.22 The eclecticism of Mauron's
psychoanalytic references was a result of both his wide-ranging
knowledge and his searching for scientific, empirical, objective cor-
roboration for his own individual, subjective intuitions about crea-
tivity and the origins of art. Recently, Peter Fuller, in his Art and
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 Psychoanalysis and psycho critique
Psychoanalysis, has epitomized and characterized that modern re-
action against Freudian psychoanalysis as being too excessively ra-
tionalistic and patriarchal to be of use to aesthetics. Perhaps this is
so from an epistemological point of view. However, Mauron was
attracted precisely to the rationalistic side of Freud which, Fuller
argues, is linked to the objectivist tradition of nineteenth-century
aesthetics. Mauron, the former chemical engineer, was not inter-
ested in the philosophy of science or of psychoanalysis. He was trying
to formulate an empirical aesthetic with whatever tools seemed to
work to validate his intuitions best - patriarchal Freudianism or
matriarchal Kleinianism. He had begun as an aesthetic formalist in
theory, though an impressionist in practice; in many ways, he al-
ways remained so. Though finally committed to a Freudian ortho-
doxy, with important noddings to ego psychology, Mauron had
originally turned to Freud and the others to resolve the objective-
subjective critical dilemma that his early theory-practice dichotomy
had instigated. And psychocritique was to bear the marks of this past.

133
 7

PSYCHOCRITIQUE: FORMALISM, SCIENCE,

AND THE VALUE OF PROBLEMS

Car l'artiste est d'abord cet homme qui cree des etres
de langage.
CHARLES MAURON

F REUD CONFESSED, on many occasions, that the subject

matter of works of art interested him much more than those
formal or technical qualities in which artists themselves
seemed to place the value of art. He had little appreciation for music,
he claimed, precisely because he could not explain to himself the
effect of that art form. Freud attributed this failing to his "ration-
alistic, or perhaps analytic, turn of mind" (1914b; 13: 211). After
spending an evening with an artist, Freud wrote in exasperation to
Ernest Jones: "Meaning is but little to these men; all they care for
is line, shape, agreement of contours. They are given up to the
Lustprinzip."1 Critics of the application of psychoanalysis to art
have been quick to point out the aesthetic reductionism involved
in ignoring form. However, Freud's personal limitation of interest
to content was not, in fact, one shared by all his followers. Otto
Rank, for example, actually claimed that form determined content,
although his concept of form was hardly that of Roger Fry. "As
it appears to us," Rank wrote, "all form goes back to the primal
form of the maternal vessel."2 Ernest Jones, always more orthodox
in his Freudianism, argued that form or the ordering of chaos was
a sublimation of infantile enjoyments and represented a fixation on
a stage of primary pleasure or forepleasure.
More interesting from the point of view of Mauron's early for-
malism is Hanns Sachs's argument for the inseparability of form

134
 Formalism, science, and the value ofproblems
and content. Although he still saw aesthetic structure as a Freudian
bribe of forepleasure, Sachs linked form to the process of aesthetic
creation: The work of art was seen as a translation into form of the
inner experiences of the artist. These lines, colors, sounds, or words
were then retranslated into reactions in the viewer or reader, who
thereby indirectly acquired the same emotional experience as the
creator.3 Again, Mauron found in Sachs's work these and other
echoes of his own earlier theories, which had been inspired by Roger
Fry's linked concepts of significant form and the aesthetic emotion.
The connecting of these two concepts by Sachs too, however, was
possible only because of an implied connection in the writings of
Freud himself. Although Freud saw form primarily as a kind of
pleasure, which lulled the repression of the unconscious in order
to allow the enjoyment of art through the "release of still greater
pleasure arising from deeper psychical sources" (1908c; 9: 153),
form was also related to the economics of instinct and desire (1942a
[1905-6]; 7: 310). Freud had frequently written about the means of
aesthetic effect as related directly to the "laws of poetic economy,"
a concept that was central to his study of Witz. Artistic form was
therefore like the condensation of dreams and jokes; it arose from
the unconscious. Like dreamers, artists selected, isolated, and re-
constructed reality (1910I1; 11: 165). In doing so they also managed
to tone down and disguise the narcissism and individual peculiarities
of their personal fantasies (1928b; 21: 188).
This principle of economy in the distribution of affect through
form might be seen as not wholly alien to Fry's idea of the aesthetic
emotion created by significant form. However, the Freudian de-
valuation of form as only a bribe was not one that the formalist
Mauron could accept, although the related concept of the disguising
or attenuating of authorial egotism through form was suggestive
to him. So was the implication in Jokes and Their Relation to the
Unconscious that it must be the form, not the content, that in fact
makes jokes work, as economy of wordplay actually seemed to
prevent the paraphrasing of jokes (1905c; 8: 16-17). It was this
implication that Ernst Kris saw as Freud's major, if unwitting,
contribution to aesthetics,4 though he also felt that form and content
in art could be interrelated through psychoanalysis by using Freud's
model of translating the formal characteristics of dreams into latent
dream thoughts. It was Abraham who seized on this idea of the
manifest implying the latent as the basis for a formalist psycho-

135
 Psychoanalysis and literary criticism
analysis of art, arguing that the actual material form of a work was
indeed a mode of access to the unconscious.5
However, none of these psychoanalytic theories of form was
quite what Mauron was looking for, though he was aware of most
of them, and would eventually draw from all of them in some way.
Mauron's formal conceptions had been developing: Roger Fry's
idea of form as the harmonious interrelation of parts, as the rhythm
of the lines in a painting, had always been very suggestive for
Mauron, and it does seem that it was the suggestiveness and not
the actual structural nature of the definition that influenced him
most. Mauron was a formalist in his general theories of art, but
when it came to confronting the particular work, his impressionism
surfaced. He was never as interested in the intricacies of verbal form
as Fry was in the complex interaction of pictorial elements of visual
form. Mauron was later able to excuse this constant lack of interest
by saying that verbal form in individual works was purely manifest,
and therefore could be handled perfectly well by traditional literary
critics. He was interested, rather, in a deeper form, a latent con-
nection between works of art, a connection whose existence he in-
tuitively sensed. Bernard and Poincare had originally given him the
scientific authorization to trust this intuition. Now all he needed
was a scientific validation for the linking structure he felt running
through, first of all, the works of Mallarme.
Mauron knew Freud's work well enough to know that the eco-
nomic view of form (the dream- or joke-like condensation of mean-
ing) was based on the workings of the primary process, which were
not, in themselves, aesthetic. Mauron reasoned that external form
- surface artistic unity and harmony - must therefore be due to
conscious secondary elaboration and, as such, was again the concern
of traditional criticism, not psychocritique. If psychoanalysis were to
add any new insights to criticism, he felt it had to be used to explain
discontinuities in the manifest form that revealed latent unity or
structure, and thus would serve to increase our understanding of
the unconscious sources of the creative processes. Mauron then
returned to his instinctive belief in the underlying unity of all the
works of Mallarme (or any author) and posited what would be not
an hypothesis to be proved but rather an axiom of psychocritique:
"L'oeuvre totale d'un ecrivain ne nous apparait plus comme un
archipel d'oeuvres distinctes. Nous savons que ces iles sont reliees
entre elles par une structure de grands fonds. Cette formation est
136
 Formalism, science, and the value of problems
inconsciente: il faut la decouvrir pour voir se reveler l'unite de
l'oeuvre totale et la signification de chaque ilot" (1949b: 431). Mau-
ron had moved far from Fry's concentration on the formal inter-
relations of parts of an individual painting. His experimental base
was larger - the entire opus - and his focus inevitably became the
unconscious of the artist, the only common denominator that in
his view would link all the works together. Art was, therefore,
found to be bound to the primary processes after all, but it was the
positing of this unconscious structure (latent in all the works of an
artist and available to the sensitive reader of them) that reflected
Mauron's particular attempt to reconcile both his formalism and
his critical impressionism with psychoanalysis.
It seems to have been Kris's idea of the temporary regression of
the ego to primary processes that provided Mauron with the main
authority in support of this intuition of his about the sources of
aesthetic creativity. But the origins of that intuition can probably
be traced back to Fry, for whom the general design of a work,
although not fully divorced from consciousness, owed its synthesis,
in all probability, to the unconscious.6 Fry had once asked psy-
chologists to enter the field of aesthetic enquiry, for the discipline
could benefit, he felt, from "your precise technique and your me-
thodical control."7 There is little doubt that Mauron thought he
was doing exactly what Fry had asked. But is psycho critique really
the answer to Fry's desire for an explanation of the psychological
significance of art for human life? Mauron certainly thought so: He
saw psycho critique as a testament and tribute both to Fry's formalism
and to his faith in the scientific method.
We have seen that, when I. A. Richards separated the statements
of science from the pseudostatements of art, he was trying to ar-
ticulate more precisely the general assumption that poetic "knowl-
edge" is different from scientific knowledge. However, literary
criticism - as ordered, reasoned discourse - could at least be said
to approximate the discourse of science if it were hypothetical and
deductive, and if its elements could be subjected to confirmation,
or rather to falsification. Generalizations from data alone would
not make criticism into a science. We have seen that both formalist
and psychoanalytic critics claim to construct literary theories that
are objective in the sense that they are grounded in "fact." Mauron
too claimed to be antiimpressionistic in this sense, to be advancing
hypotheses as a dispassionate observer. His claimed analytic rigor

137
 Psychoanalysis and literary criticism

was intended to counter any attacks of subjectivity or of the un-

critical use of extraliterary information. Such at least was the theory.
In practice, the early impressionism was harder to eradicate. Mau-
ron had also made a leap of faith; he had accepted psychoanalysis
as a "true" science, and he had done so more because, as we have
seen, he found echoes of his own intuitions in the writings of Freud,
Klein, and the others, than because he had actually submitted this
new orthodoxy to a complete or completely scientific analysis.
Perhaps Mauron sensed, in his own trust of the science of psy-
choanalysis, a parallel with Freud's faith in biology. Freud felt that
any deficiencies in his description of the mind would probably
vanish if psychological terms could be replaced by physiological
ones (i92Og; 18: 60). Biology would someday answer all questions
that psychoanalysis could not. For Mauron, it was rather a case of
future psychoanalytic developments providing solutions to prob-
lems that psycho critique might not be able to solve - at that moment.
For both Freud and Mauron there were strong continuities between
their first fields of interest (neuroanatomy and chemistry, respec-
tively) and psychoanalysis, and each always saw himself as a sci-
entist. There are other interesting and suggestive parallels between
Mauron and Freud. Each claimed empiricism in his analysis; each
claimed to use a "highly hypothetico-deductive methodology."8 In
reality, Freud often saw in patients, as Mauron saw in poems, just
what his psychoanalytic theory led him to seek and then to interpret
the way he did. Nevertheless, in both cases, the development of
the method of analysis was also strongly influenced by the objects
under investigation: Mallarme taught Mauron much about the ac-
cessibility of the structures of the unconscious, just as Fraiilein
Elizabeth von R. and other intelligent patients did much to help
Freud formulate his therapeutic model. It is possible that a kind of
identification with Freud himself was as important to Mauron as
were his psychoanalytic theories. Certainly, as we shall see in the
last chapter, their defensive responses to criticism were similar: The
"truth" about the unconscious would always be met with resistance.
These similarities between the two men and their modes of thought
go beyond any question of direct influence. However, Freud's the-
ories, as well as his example, certainly reinforced Mauron's personal
need to be able to see his own work as a means of objectively
investigating the aesthetic subjective. This need had been manifest
from Mauron's first publications in England, which were full of
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 Formalism, science, and the value of problems
references to chemistry and hypotheses. And psycho critique can be
traced back to this same source. In Introduction a la psychanalyse de
Mallarme, Mauron wrote: "En tatonnant je n'ai cherche qu'a faire
oeuvre de chimiste, isolant autant que possible les elements d'une
combinaison" (1968a [1950]: 213). We should recall that early stress
on the experimental nature of his analyses (1938a [1936]: 224; 1967a
[1941]: 4, 56, and so on), which had been dictated by his desire to
conform to the teachings of Claude Bernard. The emphasis on
studying networks of relations (1967a [1941]: 10) had come from
an adaptation of Fry's formalism. But both of these concerns per-
sisted in all of Mauron's later psychocritical writings as well. This
continuity was possible largely because Mauron saw Freudian psy-
choanalysis as the successor to Bernard's experimental medicine,
"la vraie science": "Elle observe, pressent des relations fonction-
nelles, interroge encore, corrige ses pensees premieres - bref pro-
gresse par une dialectique constante entre la donnee la plus directe
et l'hypothese . . . Freud n'a pas fait progresser autrement l'analyse
de l'inconscient" (1966a: 184). And the psychocritic was in this
same line of descent: "Le physicien ecoute son objet [l'Autre]; Freud
fait de meme; je ne crois pas que le critique doive agir autrement
envers l'artiste" (186). So Mauron's interest was really in the artist
after all, despite psycho critique's claim to be textual analysis. The
starting point was indeed the text, but the final object was not
textual description in itself, but psychological insight. He claimed
he used psychoanalysis because the results of his own methodology
happened to coincide with the findings of Freud. We have seen that
this statement would be perfectly true if the word "methodology"
were replaced by "intuitions." In actual fact, however, psycho-
analysis probably did condition the discovery of Mauron's partic-
ular methodology more than he wanted to admit. In other words,
psychoanalysis did more than verify Mauron's intuitions of the
essential unconscious unity of the work and the life of the artist
(1968a [1950]: 38): If he had not known about the topography of
the Freudian unconscious or about the repetitive nature of obses-
sions, or even about free-association technique, it is unlikely that
the psychocritical method would have been developed in quite the
form it was. In fact, in his early commentaries on Fry's translations
of Mallarme, Mauron only compared texts, following the method
of seeking analogies, which he had argued as being objectively valid
in his 1935 Aesthetics and Psychology. The later idea of a method of

139
 Psychoanalysis and literary criticism
textual superimposition was possible only after his discovery of the
Freudian idea of latent unconscious structures, which, he felt, mere
comparison of manifest or surface formal elements would never
reveal.
It is possible, I suggested earlier, that Freud's own intertextual
method in 'The Theme of the Three Caskets" was the model for
psychocritiques first step. Superimposing the plays of Racine, Mau-
ron discovered certain common denominators in the plays before
Mithridate and others in those after (1969 [1954]: 169). This allowed
him to make two deductions: that this play represented a pivotal
point, first in Racine's work, and second, in his psychic evolution.
The second deduction was possible only because of what Mauron
claimed to be experimental probability: "Tout se passe comme si
une oeuvre etait greffee sur l'inconscient de l'auteur" (177). In the
very next sentence, though, that "comme si" disappears and Mau-
ron simply asserts: "A la base, leurs structures coincident." There
is no scientific proof offered between the sentences, but Mauron
seems not to have been aware that this kind of reasoning could not
constitute objective or scientific validation of the link between the
unconscious of the author and the schema of structures he some-
how, intuitively, perceived in the works through their superim-
position. Mauron's impressionism was barely hidden at such times,
despite his reiteration of the objectivity claim. Everything was said
to be objective - his method of analysis, the resulting data, and the
connections therein (1968b [1964-5]: 30, 35) - yet indirectly he
admitted that intuition was still needed to draw final conclusions:
"Si Ton admet la validite objective du schema, l'importance theo-
rique de ses significations saute aux yeux" (37, my italics). How this
takes place is never explained. Similarly, even in his statistical stud-
ies of Mistral's texts (1957a [1955]; 1961a [1958]), the actual objec-
tive counting of "affective words" occurred only once the critic
had decided which words were indeed deemed affective, and he
ultimately made this decision on the basis of intuition: "L'experi-
ence prouve qu'il y a correspondance entre le sentiment d'un passage
et son vocabulaire affectif' (1961a [1958]: 4i7n). This is hardly a
scientific, experimental, or empirical method.
Like his claim to formalism, Mauron's insistence on the scientific
status of psychocritique proves questionable. He certainly used the
trappings of the experimental method, constantly explaining his
hypotheses. But although he insisted that these were only hy-
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 Formalism, science, and the value of problems
potheses, he also believed that actual "truth," in both criticism and
science, lay in the one hypothesis that would link together and
explain best the greatest number of "facts" (1968a [1950]: 189).
Mauron claimed to formulate these hypotheses on the grounds of
both psychoanalytic insights and intrinsic textual material (1949a:
84). But herein lies the problem. Unfortunately, his a priori ac-
ceptance of psychoanalysis as a critical orthodoxy must qualify the
objectivity of his investigation of any given hypothesis: It is not
surprising that he would find his ideas confirmed by his analysis,
in other words. Mauron did perceive the fact of this circular con-
firmation, but he failed to see its implications (1966a: 183), prefer-
ring to interpret the coincidence of what he saw as textual and
psychic forms as proof of the universal validity of psychoanalytic
structures rather than as evidence of the unscientific circularity of
his own reasoning.
Other objections can be raised regarding the experimental status
of even the first superimposition step ofpsycho critique. Despite Mau-
ron's assertions, there was obviously some subjective choice at
work in both the choice of author and the selection of texts and
parts of texts to be superimposed. Why, for example, did Mauron
begin his superimposition of the works of Valery with the eighth
stanza of "Cimetiere marin" and then proceed to a few lines from
"Jeune Parque" (1962: 87-8)? And were the networks of associations
then discovered as undeniable as Mauron claimed? He admitted that
he selected for discussion only some of the obsessive metaphors he
found: "Elles ne sont pas d'un egal interet" (1967a [1941]: 58).
Undoubtedly this is true, but by what criteria was Mauron's par-
ticular selection made? Raymond Jean once tried to explain the
feeling that many readers of Mauron have had - that his findings
were not revolutionary - by claiming that what he really did was
put his finger on ideas they had all sensed intuitively.9 Probably
the truth of the matter is that it is Mauron who sensed these things
intuitively, and all of the language of science was ultimately just a
smoke screen for what was really critical impressionism of a sort.
The constant references to working hypotheses provided him with
both a scientific-sounding way of talking about his hunches and a
cautious, if deceptive, modesty.
If Mauron's critics have not raised this central objection to his
very method before, that is not to say that they have not raised
others. Aside from the general accusations of Freudian reduction-
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 Psychoanalysis and literary criticism
ism,10 there have been specific attacks on Mauron's imprecise use
of facts, both biographical and psychoanalytic. For example, in his
work on Hugo, Mauron had laid great emphasis on the absence of
the writer's mother when the child was eight months old. Michel
Grimaud, although he admired Mauron's insight, pointed out that
Hugo was actually nine months old at the time, and that this quibble
was significant given the enormous importance attributed to the
various stages of early childhood by the Kleinians Mauron cites.11
Other critics have objected to the monotony of Mauron's findings,I2
a criticism perhaps applicable to any Freudian who accepts the
universality of the psyche's structures. The description of Mauron's
style as monotonous, however accurate it may be, is another matter.
What all of these critics ignore is the fact that Mauron was, after
all, blind. Although he did type his own manuscripts, he obviously
could not reread and rewrite in the normal fashion. Aural memory
is probably not as accurate as visual memory. The repetition of
wording, as well as of concepts, from book to book might also
have been conditioned by Mauron's feeling that, judging from the
reviews of his work, his critics had missed the point, had not read
him closely enough.
These kinds of objections to the psychocritical method and its
application are more or less valid ones, but none of them alone
would totally invalidate the claim of scientific objectivity. Some
critics, however, have accused psycho critique of something more
serious, of being more metaphysical than scientifically psycholog-
ical.13 This accusation comes closer to our own findings here. Is
psycho critique in any sense what Mauron said it was: that is, an
experimental, empirical, objective science based on "facts" (1958:
104)? The operative word here is the overdetermined one, objective,
for we have seen that Mauron used it to describe the method of
Bernard, the theories and findings of psychoanalysis, the disinter-
ested stance of the critic before a text, and the method and, there-
fore, the discoveries of superimposition. Yet we have seen that in
each of these areas, it is in fact the element of intuition that most
attracted Mauron (in practice, not theory), especially if that intuition
was ultimately shown to be derived from or provable by empirical
observation of some kind. Because Bernard and then Freud had
authorized and legitimized intuition, Mauron claimed it as a part
of the experimental method of his science. I am not suggesting that
he deliberately cloaked his impressionism in the dress of science,
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 Formalism, science, and the value of problems

but rather that he hid it behind his mentors' authority, fooling even
himself. How else could we explain his attacks on Bachelard and
thematic critics for being vague and unscientific in their method-
ology (1962: 26-8), when shortly thereafter he agreed to the English
translation of the Introduction a la psychanalyse de Mallarme, years
following its original publication, on the grounds that it was still
"scientifically valid," that it presented not "mere impressions or
personal interpretations" but rather "objective results, uncontested
as to the essentials and - doubtless more important - as to the
method which led to these results" (1963a: 1)? Mauron finally ap-
pears to have come to believe his own rhetorical insistence and to
forget what really attracted him to the theories of his authorities in
the first place - their justification of the intuitive in general, and
their echoing validation of his own intuitions in particular.
As Gerard Genette so acutely noted, there is nothing less scientific
than Mauron's constant and dogmatic claim to objectivity.14 Mau-
ron's early modesty and tentative openness gave way to a growing
defensiveness and rigidity that often led him to overstate his case,
or indeed to misrepresent it. What is left to decide is whether this
is the cause or the effect of the reception of psychocritique in France.
What is clear is that Mauron's formulation of the psychocritical
method was rooted in a strong personal necessity to reconcile those
many related dualities: art and science, impressionism and formal-
ism, subjectivity and objectivity. And psycho critique represents the
coming together of all of the forces that we have been examining
up to this point. Perhaps this explains why Mauron always insisted
that his method was one of literary criticism, not psychobiography.
In practice, we have seen that psycho critique turned into something
quite different. It was indeed empirical, in a sense, in its starting
point - the text - but from that point on the focus of interpretation
strayed away from the work toward the unconscious of the artist.
Mauron forgot that to interpret the personal myth is not necessarily
to explain anything at all about the text, which does not in itself
have an unconscious; its so-called latent structures are only those
noted by the critic. As textual criticism, psycho critique was, to say the
least, partial and complementary, though not for the reasons Mau-
ron thought. Only its first step - superimposition - was at all
textual, and even then the obsessive metaphors and their networks
were given meaning only by the personal myth, that is, by an
hypothesis about the author's unconscious. Psycho critique may be

H3
 Psychoanalysis and literary criticism
complementary to literary criticism, but it would not be hard to
argue that it was not, in itself, very literary. What, then, was it? It
would appear to be what Herbert Read called a form of "ontoge-
netic" criticism,15 because its concern was the tracing of the origins
of the work in the psychology of the creator. It is not psychoanalysis
per se, but a kind of adaptation of its tools to suit a different object
- the sources of art (1952 [1949]: 29). Perhaps Mauron's insistence
on the partial nature of his method was his way of acknowledging
Freud's warning in The Interpretation of Dreams that, just as dreams
and neurotic symptoms could - and should - be interpreted in more
than one way in order to be understood fully, "so all genuinely
creative writings are the product of more than a single interpre-
tation" (1900a; 4: 266).
What seems clear is that Mauron felt he was doing something
new and revolutionary. He was not contributing to the knowledge
of the conscious level of the work; that was the task of the traditional
critic. The structures that interested him were not manifest and
syntagmatic, but latent and paradigmatic. This is why he always
insisted that his method began with superimposing, not just com-
paring, texts: "La comparaison est une operation rationnelle, alors
que nous operons ici dans le domaine irrationnel de rimagination
et du desir" (1968b [1964-5]: 27). We have seen this logical fallacy
before: Mauron has been caught in his own trap. He had always
claimed to study the unconscious and subjective by an objective
experimental method. However, here he admits that even the first
step of that method is an intuitive and irrational one. And his rather
feeble justification for this is that it is appropriately so, as he is
studying the intuitive and irrational as manifested in the latent struc-
tures of the text. The scientificity of psycho critique begins to look
increasingly spurious. Why did Mauron continue to insist upon it?
Probably for the same reason that he kept insisting that it was the
objectivity of the methods of Bernard and Freud that made them
valuable. In other words, Mauron was not just a muddled thinker.
His muddle was an indication both of his inability to reconcile those
paradoxes of art and science and impressionism and formalism, and
of his desperate need to keep trying - even if the logic of his
argument had to suffer in the attempt. His psychoanalytic eclec-
ticism was, as we saw, the result of the need to find authorities to
validate his personal intuitions, and he adopted only those theories
that echoed his own. He almost admitted this once: "La methode

144
 Formalism, science, and the value of problems
adoptee resulte surtout de reflexions et d'experiences personnelles"
(1968a [1950]: 14). But he thought he was admitting only to em-
piricism, not to impressionism.
Psycho critique was intended as a means of bridging the gap be-
tween classical literary criticism and psychoanalysis, and thereby
of enriching our reading of texts, "en nous permettant d'y discerner
en filigrane l'expression de la personnalite inconsciente."16 But is
this what it in fact did? Are not both the unconscious and its struc-
tures posited as givens from the start? Mauron's thinking is once
again circular. What does the psychocritical method achieve, then?
It could be said to offer what Mauron himself called a "psychologie
esthetique" (1968a [1950]: 203) that is not reductive, in the sense
that its complexity at least seeks to do justice to the complexity of
its object of study, the unconscious sources of creative imagination.
Recognizing that the unconscious of the artist was not only complex
but also constantly changing, Mauron studied the oeuvre of a writer
like Racine in order to trace the constants as well as their variants,
their "modulations musicales" (1949b: 431). By the superimposi-
tion of texts, Mauron felt he could demonstrate that, despite great
differences in external plot, character, and theme, Racine's plays
shared certain "principales relations dynamiques" (1968b [1964-5]:
22). Since his discovery of ego psychology, Mauron had been able
to account for these dynamic constants in terms of the intrapsychic
drama of the ego and its defenses. Psycho critique became an inves-
tigation into the nature of a particular author's creativity, an in-
vestigation that began in the work but that did not necessarily return
to it. Mauron himself gave many summaries of the steps of the
psychocritical method, and none of them really denied this pro-
gression from text to author (see 1957c: 203; 1958: 104; 1962: 32;
1969 [1954]: 19-24). He always began with that superimposition
of texts, which he felt was experimental and thus must be done
"sans idee preconque" (1957c: 203). Yet, given Mauron's Freudian
orthodoxy, this was not in fact the case. The "force-field" sensed
beneath the texts' surfaces could be organized into obsessive met-
aphors only if one accepted and recognized the traits of unconscious
production - obsessive repetitions, overdetermined meaning, and
so on. Mauron actually admitted that the critic here used a mixture
of intuition and science (1969 [1954]: 20).
Once discovered, the obsessive metaphors had to be orga-
nized. Or rather, they somehow organized themselves, and the
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 Psychoanalysis and literary criticism

seemingly passive critic needed only to heed their groupings - the

"charpente obligee" or "fatalite interieure" of the work (19). Some-
times Mauron seemed unwilling to admit that the critic actually
intervened at all in this step, even in the sense of conducting a
"musical" analysis of the themes, their groupings, and variations
(1958: 104; 1962: 32). It was not until the next step that the in-
terpretive skills of the critic were supposed to come into play. Out
of those networks of obsessive images the psychocritic posited the
personal myth, an hypothesis that could then be tested in the works
themselves. As the texts were indeed the starting point, it would
be surprising if the hypothesis were not in fact verified by a circular
return to them. The image of the unconscious personality of the
author that had been postulated - proved, Mauron would say -
was then tested against the biography of the author. But Mauron
always knew the biographical details from the start, and even drew
on them throughout the third, interpretive step. Recourse to bi-
ography at the end, instead of being a final verification, was in fact
only a redundancy. Mauron always found what he already knew
he would find.
This eternal circularity of psycho critique must certainly condition
our acceptance of any of Mauron's claims to objectivity or scientific
experimentation. It is simply not enough to use the language of
science. But Mauron was not, I repeat, trying to be duplicitous.
His confusion signals deep conflicting needs more than a lack of
logical ability. It is in a sense the problems that Mauron did not
see, the issues he did not realize he had raised, that make the as-
sumptions, if not the results, of psychocritique worth studying. The
formalist claims of the method and the psychoanalytic interpreta-
tions of the hypothetical personal myth are the two most proble-
matic areas of investigation.
In the Introduction, a summary of the chronological development
of psychocritique was presented along with examples of the results
of the method as applied to Mallarme, Moliere, Racine, and Bau-
delaire. So far, however, no further, more extended examples have
been provided, and there are several reasons for this deliberate
omission. The first is the impossibility of condensing the argument
of an entire book like Ulnconscient dans Voeuvre et la vie de Racine
without being reductive and thus unfair to Mauron. The second
reason is that many other commentators on Mauron's work have
already attempted this kind of condensation in order to evaluate
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 Formalism, science, and the value of problems
the insights that psycho critique brings to the study of a particular
author and his work.17 This book has attempted a rather different
aesthetic focus. It is the underlying, unresolved conflicts revealed
by the methodology and hermeneutic frame of reference that have
been examined, and the primary reason for this is that these prob-
lems are not just Mauron's. They appear to be inherent to the
literary critical enterprise today, as it has developed over the cen-
tury. The very obviousness of Mauron's problems and the very
transparency of his unsuccessful attempts to solve them make psy-
chocritique emblematic of the tensions between the concepts of crit-
icism as objective, analytic description and as subjective, evaluative
interpretation. And nowhere are these tensions more visible than
in Mauron's methodological presuppositions.
When Mauron defined superimposition, he noted the locus of its
activation as "evidemment dans l'esprit du critique," and then ex-
plained: "Cela consiste en fait a connaitre plusieurs textes apeupres
par coeur et a ecouter constamment l'un d'eux en ayant l'interet porte
sur les autres" (1970b [1965]: 99, my italics). The emphasized phrases
are not innocent, but act as indexes of the significance of Mauron's
blindness to the method of analysis he developed.18 The method-
ological implications of what is in effect a dual emphasis - on the
role of the critic's memory and intuitions, and on the textual nature
of the subsequent analysis - demand further investigation. Mauron
always insisted, we have seen, that his primary empirical concern
was fidelity to the texts themselves, "dont les images obsedantes
maisfluidesforment notre materiel experimental" (1957c: 217). The
continuing influence of the experimental method is clear both here
and in the general outline of the four steps of the psychocritical
method: Bernard's particular combination of empirical observation,
intuition, construction and investigation of an hypothesis, formal
analysis, and interpretation is precisely what Mauron intended psy-
chocritique to be. Mauron's formalism, inspired by Fry, had always
been closely tied to his chemist's belief in the validity of the ex-
perimental method as the only means of attesting to the significance
of form.
Although, as Jeffrey Mehlman has shown,I9 it is clear that Mau-
ron's textual superimposition is related to Freud's own intertextual
technique in "The Theme of the Three Caskets," there is an even
more relevant Freudian model operative here as well. In "Delusions
and Dreams in Jensen's Gradiva," Freud compared several of Jen-
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 Psychoanalysis and literary criticism

sen's works to find recurrent images and situations amid the man-
ifest contents (1907a [1906]; 9: 95). He selected one of these images
as the nodal point of a network of latent thoughts, and related it
to memory traces from the author's own childhood. Like Mauron,
Freud here worked from latent structures beneath textual manifest
content to an hypothesis about the meaning of the image network
in the psyche of the artist. It is as if the work of art were a dream.
This assumption of the relatedness of the different productions of
the psyche is at the heart of psychocritique as well. Mauron never
felt he was applying to art a theory that was external to it. The
authorial psyche was, in his view, directly accessible to the critic
once he had discovered the networks of obsessive metaphors, for
these were the traces of the artist's unconscious mental operations
(1966a: 84). And this important discovery process was to be insti-
gated by the superimposition of texts. The source of this super-
imposition concept, according to Mauron, was Francis Galton. In
1878 Galton had presented a memoir to the Anthropological Society
in London arguing that the composite result of superimposed pho-
tographs of the faces of members of a family was more beautiful
than any individual face. A facial feature on the composite would
be clear or blurred, depending on the frequency of its recurrence.
Freud too had used the Galton analogy to describe the composite
form of dreams as created by condensation (1900a; 4: 293, 1901a;
5: 649). But Mauron's use of it centered not on the composite
product of superimposition as much as on the process itself, a
process that allowed the perception of common denominators, not
otherwise visible. But Mauron could not have interpreted these
constants without Freud's theory of dreams. The clearest summary
of this theory and the formulation that best reveals Mauron's debt
to Freud's methodology, as well as his theory, is Freud's own
synthesis of his work on dreams in Jokes and Their Relation to the
Unconscious'.

This strange *'manifest" content of the dream [the part the

dreamer remembers] can regularly be made intelligible as a
mutilated and altered transcript of certain rational psychical
structures which deserve the name of "latent dream-thoughts."
We arrive at a knowledge of these by dividing the dream's
manifest content into its component parts, without consid-
ering any apparent meaning it may have, and by then follow-
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 Formalism, science, and the value of problems
ing the associative threads which start from each of what are
now isolated elements. These interweave with one another
and finally lead to a tissue of thoughts which are not only
perfectly rational but can also be easily fitted into the known
context of our mental processes. (1950c; 8: 160)

Freud's idea here of the latent associative threads in dreams and,

by extension, in works of art, echoed Mauron's own early theory
in Aesthetics and Psychology of the "multiplication of echoes" in art
whose complex associations "only a psychoanalyst could hope, by
long and painful effort, to unravel" (1970a [1935]: 40-1). Mauron
might also have thought of Freud's work on the multiple signifi-
cation of jokes as a validating authority for his own theories, as
words for Freud were "predestined to ambiguity" (1900a; 5: 340),
a concept Mauron needed to qualify Fry's tendency toward anti-
representationalism in the application of formalism to literature.
Ambiguity had been explained by Freud in terms of displacement
and condensation: "Switch words" (1901b; 6: 274n) were nodal
points where one meaning emanated from the latent dream thoughts,
but another related one was actually introduced into the manifest
dream content (1900a; 5: 428-9, 411-13). Freud felt that jokes too
involved these techniques of play on verbal, as well as conceptual,
similarities and differences, and analyzed them all at length (1905c;
8: 23-81). Mauron's networks of obsessive metaphors were also,
as we saw in the Introduction, not always strictly metaphorical
associations at all. However, they were always, like Freud's verbal
bridges, claimed to be unconscious in origin. Logical and syntactic
connections, manifest figures of style, and phonic and rhythmic
patterns were identified as conscious or voluntary textual relations
(1962: 30). Psychocritique aimed at discovering something quite dif-
ferent: latent structures.
Of course, these latent structures exist in the manifest content,
which is, therefore (by implication), overdetermined. To reason,
as does Mauron, that these structures are attributable only to the
unconscious of the artist,20 is to be both Freudian and naive: Could
not the unconscious projections of the superimposing critic come
into play? What about the Freudian theories of resistance and trans-
ference? Mauron himself likened the critic to the psychoanalyst, as
he examined the results of superimposition with free-floating at-
tention (1970b [1965]: 92). Yet he knew that the critic could not
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 Psychoanalysis and literary criticism
be totally self-denying and objective, for without his intuition of
links the scientific hypothesis, upon which the analysis would be
based, could not even be formulated. Mauron's typically paradox-
ical, subjective-objective solution was to posit a dual activity on
the part of the critic. He was like the analysand in that superim-
position was a kind of free association, a temporary suspension of
the control of reason. However, he was also like the analyst, lis-
tening with free-floating attention, but nevertheless, ready at all
times to note any repeated structures. This latter step was seen as
purely objective: "La regie fondamentale est la suivante: ceder la
parole aux faits, ne rien discuter, ni interpreter, constater simple-
ment les coincidences, s'il en existe" (1971b [1964]: 38). However,
perhaps the "facts" here examined are only the free associations of
the critic himself.
In the Freudian deterministic context, "free" association, the main
rule of the therapeutic session, is an overcoming of resistance to
the analysand's conscious effort to bring something repressed to
consciousness. The associations are considered free in the sense of
being free of the intrusion of preconscious ideas on conscious think-
ing (1910a [1909]; 11: 29). This seems to be rather different from
what Mauron was proposing. Although he referred to Freud, Mau-
ron's real basis for calling his method "free association" was not
Freud, but rather an article by Leopold Bellak, cited by Mauron as
the key to the linking of Kris's theory of creative function and the
association of ideas - "done entre une psychologie de l'art et le
reseau concret des metaphores obsedantes" (1962: 235). Bellak,
however, did not, as Mauron here implies, make this connection
through the person of the analyst who perceived these networks.
In "Free Association: Conceptual and Clinical Aspects,"21 Bellak
did begin from Kris's idea of the oscillating function of the ego:
The artist progressed from "regression in the service of the ego"
to the "vigilance of cognitive, adaptive and synthetic functions."
But in free association this second stage was bracketed and the
synthetic task fell to the analyst. Mauron, however, gave both the
analysand's free-associating regression and the analyst's vigilant role
to the critic.
Freud argued that the analyst must be objective in not bringing
his own feelings into play, but also that he must not be emotionally
cold. Without tolerating his own resistances, he must "turn his
own unconscious like a receptive organ towards the transmitting
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 Formalism, science, and the value of problems
unconscious of the patient" (i9i2e; 12: 115). Giving equal attention
to all details, the analyst must allow his attention to float, "evenly-
suspended. " Jean Starobinski has claimed that literary criticism could
benefit considerably from this concept of free-floating attention,22
but others have been more critical. As Freud's archaeologist analogy
suggested, the analyst also engages in the act of construction, or
reconstruction (193yd; 23: 259). For Serge Leclaire, these listening,
interpreting, and constructing activities qualify and condition the
concept of ^ree-floating attention: "Qui pourrait en effet serieuse-
ment pretendre reussir a faire table rase de tous ses prejuges?"23
Any critical orthodoxy or frame of reference automatically priv-
ileges certain elements and directs the focus of attention. Andre
Green has even argued that the critic who allows a free-floating
reading, which pays attention to elements ignored by even the most
rigorous linear reading, is actually in danger of becoming himself
the analyzed. In other words, the analysis of the text becomes in
reality the analysis of the effects of the text on the critic's own
unconscious.24 The associations belong to the critic, not the text.
Mauron would never have admitted to such a connection, although
his critics have frequently suggested it. He believed he had solved
the transference and resistance problems by the concrete empirical
textuality of his method. Yet, Mauron's methodology is rife with
the same contradictions that developed in even his earliest theories.
Impressionism there was often disguised, couched in formalist or
scientific terminology. The later adoption of Freudian vocabulary
often served the same function. The subjective-objective critical
paradox cannot be solved by semantic juggling, yet Mauron kept
trying.
Psycho critique's associative networks were, Mauron kept insisting,
objective (1971b [1964]: 186) because they were both inscribed in
the text and detected by an experimental method. If the objectivity
of this methodology can be called into question, as I have been
suggesting, are not the results also suspect? Mauron interpreted
these networks in the light of psychoanalysis and formulated a
working hypothesis that he called the personal myth.25 As this entity
was supposed to be in the text but o/the artist, the postulation of
the personal myth was clearly another of Mauron's attempts to
unite those constant opposites. Although superimposition was based
on Freud's theories and practice, the formulation of the personal
myth owed more to the work of Melanie Klein and Anna Freud.
 Psychoanalysis and literary criticism

We have seen that Mauron felt that Freudian topography did not
sufficiently take into account the intersubjective nature of the psy-
che's main dramas, both parental and analytic. Klein's theories of
object relations allowed Mauron, or so he felt, to go beyond the
static formalism of systems of relations or networks of associations
to their interpretation in terms of a dramatic internal situation of
the author that evolved, yet retained a consistent core structure
(1966a: 50).26 This psychic situation was deemed responsible for
the latent unity Mauron sensed in an author's work as a whole.
Characters in Giraudoux's plays, for example, were different only
on the surface, as they all functioned as parts of the ego (identifi-
cations, defenses, and so on). Their dynamic interplay was therefore
determined by the author's interior conflicts, which were dramatic
by definition (1971b [1964]: 111-12). Mauron had many synonyms
for the personal myth - rive, phantasme,fiction,fable - but they all
meant the same thing: a dominant, dynamic, unconscious fantasy
that, in both its evolution and its constants, represented the structure
of the artist's unconscious personality, and that could be discerned
only through the latent networks that superimposition alone was
said to reveal (1968b [1964-5]: 27). Obviously, it followed that the
artist's life as well as his art should reveal this same fantasy, and
Mauron indeed claimed exactly this, and in characteristic terms:
"L'ecrivain, nous le savons maintenant experimentalement par toutes
les analyses psychocritiques anterieures, raconte moins sa vie que
son my the; cependant vie vecue et oeuvre revee s'organisent autour
des memes noeuds affectifs profonds, du meme phantasme domi-
nant, qui se modifie lentement au cours de l'existence" (1971b [1964]:
264). The personal myth was not really in the work at all, then. It
was more the filtering agent through which all psychic energy had
to pass (1963a: 4), though it was considered accessible only through
the psychocritical reconstitution or interpretation of the associative
networks of the text (1963a: 25m; 1958: 113). It was, in one critic's
terms, "ce lieu d'echanges permanents ou l'objet exterieur est in-
teriorise et ou les groupes d'images internes se projettent a leur tour
surlereel." 27
The personal myth was, then, a kind of psychic force field (1970b
[1965]: 92) that was shared by what Mauron called the social ego
and the creative ego. Although he did not want to limit the social
ego to mere biographical events, Mauron did include in it "tout ce
qui n'est pas son activite creatrice" (1966a: I9n). Although 'Thomme
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 Formalism, science, and the value of problems
social et l'artiste ne parlent pas la meme langue" (1959a [1954]: 12),
they did share the same psychic phantasme or personal myth, and
in fact they communicated through it (1966a: 2on). Mauron did
not imply that social integration was the key to creative excellence.
In fact, in his discussion of Racine, Mauron actually did the reverse,
suggesting that the dramatist's successful socialization was, in fact,
an example of psychological regression. Mauron had always pro-
foundly distrusted the psychic power that conforming society
wielded over artists. As early as 1931 he had asserted that Fontenelle
was a poor poet because he was a man of society, the opposite of
a private artist like Mallarme (1939 [1931]: 331). This later devel-
oped into the theory that the social being and the spiritual artist
fought for the power of decision over the ego (1958: 109). Le Dernier
Baudelaire, the last book Mauron wrote, represents the culmination
of this theory of the interconnections of the social and creative egos.
Baudelaire's financial failures here were seen as leading to depres-
sions which, in turn, inhibited his creativity (1966a: 18-20), al-
though his literary successes built up his self-esteem: "Le moi createur
exige du moi social qu'il vive et s'accommode de la realite" (33).
The major defenses of the social ego - isolation, drunkenness, ag-
gressive fantasies, verbal attacks - were all seen as reflected in Bau-
delaire's texts, in the work, that is, of the creative ego.
There is obviously an implicit axiom operating here and through-
out Mauron's work, an axiom that states that there is a direct and
continuous relationship between the person and the work. Usually
this is phrased in terms of the latent structures of the text as the
direct means of access to the unconscious structures of the artist.
Occasionally, however, a more blatant formulation slips out: "Les
echanges entre la vie et l'oeuvre me paraissent evidents. Une critique
honnete doit s'y referer de faqon constante" (1964b: 127). Mauron
rejected Fretet's interpretation of Mallarme as a neurotic (1968a
[1950]: 50), yet did not see any potential contradiction between this
denial and his view that 'Thomme normal n'est pas admirable. Et
pour qu'une personnalite exceptionnelle se manifeste par une oeuvre
creatrice, il semble bien qu'une grande angoisse soit interieurement
necessaire" (1959a [1954]: 9). Introduction a la psychanalyse de Mal-
larme is not, after all, called Introduction a la psycho critique de V oeuvre
de Mallarme.
The theory of a personal myth as the connecting link between
the social and creative egos is what separates Mauron's theory of
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 Psychoanalysis and literary criticism
the two egos from Benedetto Croce's distinction between the prac-
tical and poetic personalities of the artist, or even from T. S. Eliot's
Proustian (or Contre Sainte-Beuv e-izn) insistence that "the more
perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the
man who suffers and the mind which creates."28 But the manifes-
tations of the axiom of the continuity between the man and the
work in psychocritique are different from those in, for example, Marie
Bonaparte's Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe, in which the psychic
complexes of the author form the primary focus for the analysis of
the text. This continuity axiom is, of course, a Freudian one. Freud's
first application of psychoanalysis to literature appears to be his
1898 letter to Fliess on Die Richterin as "a defence against the writer's
memory of an affair with his sister" (1954c [1887-1902]; 256). He
later asserted more generally that psychoanalysis "can conjecture
with more or less certainty from an artist's work the intimate per-
sonality that lies behind it" (1913j; 13: 179). By "intimate person-
ality" Freud did not mean biographically verifiable facts, but more
what Hanns Sachs called the "life-giving force" of the unconscious
behind the facts.29 Nor did Freud rely on the conscious intent of
the artist for information or for validation of the unconscious per-
sonality (1907a [1906]; 9: 43).
In these ways, Mauron's implied continuity axiom is strictly
Freudian. There is also, of course, a long critical tradition at work
here, and one could argue that the basis of the personal myth is
not all that different from that of Sainte-Beuve's "faculte premiere,"
although it would be true that Mauron claimed at least to begin
with the work and move toward an understanding of the author,
rather than vice versa. To attempt, as Mehlman has done, to re-
cuperate Mauron's mixing of life and art in psychocritique by negating
the particularly positivistic and Freudian basis of the axiom,30 is to
distort the critical paradox at the heart of all of Mauron's theory
and practice. Psychocritique was intended as an objective description
of networks of associations discovered by textual superimposition.
But the interpretation of these experimental or formalist findings
was potentially doubly subjective, not to say impressionistic, for it
depended both upon the intuitive connections made by the critic
and upon the hypothesis thus formed of the unconscious personality
of the artist, which is presumed to be accessible. Although Mauron
always cited Freud and other psychoanalysts as the objective au-
thorities of the expressive theories upon which he based his inter-

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 Formalism, science, and the value of problems
pretations, I have argued that the acceptance of a critical orthodoxy
does not in itself constitute either scientific validation or a defense
against allegations of impressionism.
Yet, obviously secure in his belief in the objectivity of his so-
called scientific method of analysis, Mauron always denied that
psycho critique was in any way impressionistic. Even Freud, however,
was accused of interpreting art in terms of his own psychic situation.
David Bleich has recently claimed, as has Norman Holland from
a different perspective, that there is no such thing as an objective
reading or a critical judgment based on "evidence."31 Critics, Bleich
argues, make - rather than find - meaning; criticism is based on
personal predilection. Mauron's personal need to reconcile his sci-
entific and artistic interests had been reinforced by the seeming
contradiction of the simultaneous modernist reawakening of critical
interest in both formalist and psychological theories of art. And
psycho critique, in its methods and its achievements, reveals both the
personal and the public dimensions of Mauron's need to unite the
objective and the subjective. Psychoanalysis allowed Mauron at
least the illusion of reconciling opposites by focusing not on the
critic but on the artist and his unconscious. As the study of these,
psycho critique is essentially based upon an expressive aesthetic theory
of the psychology of creation. Mauron worked happily within this
perspective until he attempted to analyze the works of Moliere, and
noticed that the hypothesized personal myth of the dramatist had
the same structure as comedy as a genre. Suddenly Mauron had to
account for the aesthetic and psychological function of both generic
form and the one consistent response of the reader or viewer of
comedy: laughter.
However, Mauron discovered that Freudian psychoanalysis, when
applied to literature, has possible aesthetic implications that are both
expressive and affective - that is, implications for theories of both
creation and response. For Mauron, it had been, almost paradox-
ically, the formalist teachings of Roger Fry that had made him first
consider affectivist psychological theories (in terms of the aesthetic
emotion). Once psycho critique was formulated, however, expressive
theories tended to dominate - until Moliere disturbed his precon-
ceptions. Expressive criticism assumes that a work of art is some
index to the artist's personality. Mauron merely added "uncon-
scious" to personality. His reading of Freud had reinforced a basic
romantic view of art as the internal made external, and had provided

155
 Psychoanalysis and literary criticism

him with a new vocabulary of latent and manifest with which to

discuss the structures of the internal and external. Although Mau-
ron's metaphors were more chemical than biological, his concept
of the creative imagination, as that which reconciled opposites and
unified diversity, could be seen as rather Coleridgean. One of the
dangers of expressive criticism, whether it be biographical or psy-
chological, is that of simplistic reduction, and Mauron seemed to
be aware of this potential problem: "Nous nous acheminons vers
l'idee que la creation litteraire resulte d'une multidetermination as-
sez complexe et assez souple, mais ou la Constance relative des
suggestions inconscientes joue un role decisif' (1968b [1964-5]:
154).
Freud himself had argued the same point in his discussion of the
limitations of even the fullest biography of a man like Goethe: "It
would not throw any light on the riddle of the miraculous gift that
makes an artist, and it could not help us to comprehend any better
the value and the effect of his works" (1930c; 21: 211). Yet, for
example, despite Freud's aim "to explain the inhibitions in Leon-
ardo's sexual life and in his artistic activity" (1910c; 11: 131), it was
the biography - or fiction - that dominated in his study of da Vinci,
as we have seen. His analysis of Dostoevsky focused as well on the
writer as neurotic rather than as creator: "Before the problem of
the creative artist analysis must, alas, lay down its arms" (1928b;
21: 177). In neither case, however, was the artistic achievement
either seriously belittled or understood. Both artists were, first and
foremost, human, and therefore they shared the same mental struc-
tures with all men. (I retain, in conformity with Freud's practice,
the male sexual identification here.) It is at this level that Freud felt
he could learn from them (1910c; 11: 131). The artist, unlike the
purely neurotic, knew his way back from withdrawal into the un-
conscious; the imagination was the place of substitution of grati-
fication of instincts. Mauron too saw the artist as an Orphic figure,
descending and returning, oscillating between the unconscious and
the conscious realms. The work of art was, as Freud, Klein, and
Fairbairn had all suggested, like an autoanalysis resulting in a lib-
eration of affective energy (1962: 237-8).
This theory of the complementary action of the conscious and
unconscious in creation has a long and revered tradition, dating
back to Plato. Though the terminology has changed, the concepts

156
 Formalism, science, and the value of problems
have remained more or less the same: Creation is the result of the
interaction of both intellect and intuition, deliberate craft and spon-
taneous inspiration, Apollonian and Dionysian impulses, conscious
elaboration and unconscious source. Mauron's superimposition of
texts had led him to postulate that presence of unconscious forms
in addition to the conscious structures (1962: 56, 57, 92) that were
the product of deliberate craft and rational thought. The two modes
interacted in counterpoint, demanding of the artist considerable
mental agility (1966a: 85). The insights of both formalist and psy-
choanalytic theory are here combined in Mauron's reworking of a
time-tested view of aesthetic creation. However, Mauron also
claimed that his only interest in the unconscious personality of an
individual author was in its role as the source of the texts that the
first empirical operation of psychocritique had studied (1964a: 7). It
is important to note that this statement came in the work that
marked the shift in Mauron's theorizing from the purely expressive
to the affective. Although Mauron was never as thoroughly affec-
tivist in his views as was I. A. Richards, his work from Psycho critique
du genre comique on reveals an increased interest in the psychology
of response. Although the general modern stress on affectivity has
been related to the preoccupation with science, Mauron's interest
was both scientific and formalist, thanks to Roger Fry. In "Art-
History as an Academic Study," Fry had used the analogy of the
wireless: "The artist is like the transmitter, the work of art the
medium and the spectator the receiver."32 Despite the "immense
variety of receiving instruments that men possess," the receiver has
to be more or less in tune with the transmitter for the message to
come through. It was the significant form of the work of art that
instigated the specifically aesthetic emotion in the receiver, as it had
in the transmitter. I. A. Richards was the one who pointed out the
circularity of Fry's definition of the aesthetic emotion as it was
described in terms of significant form, which itself could be defined
only in terms of provoking the aesthetic emotion. Richards rejected
as inept both Freudian expressionism and Bloomsbury formalism,
taking instead as his aesthetic norm the standard experience of the
reader.33 The "scientific" basis of investigation was the stimulus-
response model, by which he sought to explain the reception of
aesthetic stimuli in terms of the "organism's" need for "equipoise"
or the conscious "equilibrium of its multifarious activities." Critics

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 Psychoanalysis and literary criticism
were quick to attack both his psychological basis and the impli-
cations for criticism of a view that placed the structure of equipoise
in the reader's response rather than in the text.34
This was not the kind of affective criticism likely to appeal to
Mauron, as even his early response to Richards (1933b) had re-
vealed. His formalism and later his Freudianism suggested a dif-
ferent route, though it would never be at the expense of his belief
in both the expressive and structural insights of psychoanalysis as
applied to literature in psycho critique. As Freud believed that the
value of artistic or intellectual beauty was determined only by its
significance for our own emotional lives (1916a [1915]; 14: 306), it
could be said that, for Freud, response was the actual basis of
psychoanalytic aesthetics, "when aesthetics is understood to mean
not merely the theory of beauty but the theory of the qualities of
feelings" (1919b; 17: 219). Reworking Aristotle's theory of catharsis
and using the model of tragedy, Freud argued for the safe discharge
of emotion as central to aesthetic response - just as in childhood
play - for we are always aware that, despite our identification with
a hero, he is really only an actor who is playing at suffering (1942a
[1905-6]; 7: 305-6). For Freud it was drama in general and tragedy
in particular that proved most instructive in terms of response. The
universal psychological conflict structures were reworked, dis-
guised by the dramatist to avoid resistances, and thereby gave pleas-
ure by overcoming repression (310). For Mauron, who accepted
this view of tragedy, it was the genre of comedy, rather, that
presented new problems, which Freud had not solved or perhaps
not even considered.
Much of the psychoanalytic investigation into aesthetic response
was derived directly from the work on creation. Just as the artist
is probably unconscious of the deepest sources of creativity, so the
reader does not consciously understand the source of the pleasure
that comes from the liberation of tension in the response to works
of art (Freud 1908c; 9: 153). To Freud, creation was sublimation,
intended to allay ungratified wishes in the artist. But by commu-
nicating the product of this process, the artist also managed to
satisfy the reader through fantasy. "Psycho-analysis has no diffi-
culty," claimed Freud, "in pointing out, alongside the manifest part
of artistic enjoyment, another that is latent though far more potent,
derived from the hidden sources of instinctual liberation" (1913J;
13: 187). Although Freud later downplayed aesthetic response as a
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 Formalism, science, and the value of problems

"mild narcosis" and a "transient withdrawal from the pressure of

vital needs" (1930a; 21: 81), he himself always began his analyses
of works of art, like jokes, from his own responses to them. Freud's
aesthetic theory of sublimation and release of desire has been chal-
lenged, but the idea of some common psychic bases to the two
aesthetic processes of creation and response has been more generally
accepted even by Freud's opponents.
Both Fry and Mauron had argued, in the 1930s, that the shared
element was form, but by form neither meant the structure of
genres. Mauron, in fact, went out of his way to argue that psycho-
critique was independent of genre (as well as of period). The material
in Des metaphores obsedantes au my the personnel ranges over the work
of four nineteenth-century lyric poets, three seventeenth-century
dramatists, and even a modern epic poet. Genre change was im-
portant only as a reflection of change in the personal myth. Or such
was the case until Moliere's personal myth presented complications.
Comedy had already attracted considerable affective theorizing,
including the nineteenth-century physiological studies of laughter
and Freud's work on Witz. However, psychoanalytic critics have,
since Freud himself, tended to privilege tragedy. Shakespeare and
Sophocles wrote tragedies because their own unconscious minds
understood the dramas of Hamlet and Oedipus, claimed Freud
(i954e [1887-1902]; 223-4). Mauron's studies of the tragedies of
Racine reflected a similar belief. Gerard Genette has suggested that
L'Inconscient dans Voeuvre et la vie de Racine owes its particularly
convincing quality to the fact that these tragedies lend themselves
best to the language of analysis. Genette's compliment is rather a
backhanded one, as he is really pointing out the circularity of Mau-
ron's Freudian reasoning as applied to the genre of tragedy: "Apres
tout, l'Oedipe fut un mythe tragique avant d'etre un 'complexe,'
et Freud lui-meme ne designait-il pas les tragiques grecs comme
ses veritables maitres? Quand Mauron 'freudianise' Racine, il ne
fait peut-etre que restituer la psychanalyse a ses propres sources."35
Certainly the universality of tragic structures was seen by Freud as
the key to aesthetic response as well as creation. We recognize, in
Hamlet's and in Oedipus's destinies, one that might have been our
own (1900a; 4: 261-6); Shakespeare's Richard III is "an enormous
magnification of something we find in ourselves as well" (i9i6d;
14: 315). In "Psychopathic Characters on the Stage," Freud even
classified dramas by the kind of universal psychological conflict that

159
 Psychoanalysis and literary criticism
precipitated the hero's mental suffering (1942a [1905-6]; 7: 305-
10).
Mauron, however, had not begun with tragedy. His early interest
had been in lyric poetry, which he saw as more psychologically
transparent (1950: 256). When he was formulating the psychocritical
method, his interest was in articulating its steps and findings - the
networks of obsessive metaphors discovered by textual superim-
position. His blindness made the logical subject material the short
poems of Mallarme that he knew so well from his commentaries
on Fry's translations. However, the psychoanalytic interpretation
of these networks suggested mythic configurations in a dramatic
structure, and with the help of the ego psychologists, Mauron
postulated the existence (and critical availability) of the personal
myth. From then on, drama was his main interest and the static
networks of obsessive images were replaced by the larger and more
dynamic structures of dramatized intrapsychic situations (1962: 204).
It is worth noting that Mauron limited his narrative interest to
drama. His treatment of novelistic fiction remained cursory. This
is surprising, given his career as a translator of Forster, Woolf, and
Sterne. He first tried to explain his lack of interest in novels by the
fact that epic and drama symbolically retraced "une lutte contre la
folie," whereas the novel presented only "la lutte contre les obstacles
du monde" (1955a [1954]: 138). But his subsequent focus on the
interaction of the social and creative egos should, therefore, have
made the novel a rich source of study. Instead he chose Baudelaire's
lyric verse (1966a) and van Gogh's letters (1976 [1951-9]), resolutely
reducing the novel to a kind of unperformed stage play, either comic
or tragic (1965a [1963]: 113): Manon Lescaut was seen as a mixture
of the genres of comedy and tragedy. His analysis of Hugo's char-
acters was premised on the belief that "le roman se distingue mal
du theatre" (1967b [1966]: I), and he did not hesitate to superimpose
a novel and a play to decide that "Bella, sous forme romanesque,
est la premiere tragedie de Giraudoux" (1971b [1964]: 21). It is not
that the novel has not proved amenable to the attentions of other
psychoanalytic critics: Witness the work of Marthe Robert and
Simon O. Lesser, for example.36 Mauron's blindness probably played
some role in his relative neglect of the novel form and his privileging
of the classical French dramatists, which he would have read as a
young student. The practical problem of the length of novels would
make memory, and therefore superimposition, difficult. Although
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 Formalism, science, and the value of problems
it is true that plays too are obviously longer than lyric poems,
Mauron did alter his method for them, as we have seen. At no
point, however, were the manifest verbal textures of plays his con-
cern; he searched for less tangible, latent structures of the works
and of the unconscious personality of the author.
This expressive perspective, we have seen, was challenged by
Moliere, whose hypothetical personal myth coincided with the ge-
neric structures of comedy, and for this reason, Mauron had to
entitle his study of Moliere Psycho critique du genre comique. One of
the first consequences of this broader focus was that Mauron had
to account for the existence and the consistent nature of laughter
as the psychological response that authors obviously aim at evoking
in the audience. In an appendix to the study, Mauron traced the
history of the theory of laughter (1964a: 144-7), but he drew his
own theories from Freud's work on Witz and on the tendentious
quality of jokes, as well as from Klein's and Anna Freud's theories
of laughter as a mechanism of defense against depression - both
for the author and the audience. Comedy's power was seen as based
on an unconscious fantasy of triumph - in both expressive and
affective terms. In other words, Mauron extended the psychic con-
tinuity of creation and response that Freud had postulated for trag-
edy to include comedy.37 Only then did he return to Racine's work
to reformulate the importance of the audience in the psychocritical
discussion of tragedy as the representation of an intrapsychic sit-
uation (1968b [1964-5]: 19). Now the dynamic relations of a play's
characters were seen to draw their force and life from the psyche
of the spectator as well as the author.
However, Mauron maintained that the psychic situations beneath
comedy differed from those of tragedy, although a single personal
myth could contain both kinds: "Dans la tragedie, l'angoisse est
toleree et croit jusqu'au denouement funeste; dans la comedie, l'an-
goisse est niee, la souffrance anesthesiee, les fantaisies de triomphe
l'emportent sur les fantaisies de deuil ou de melancolie" (1971b
[1964]: 56). Although Freud had suggested as much (i927d; 21:
164), it was probably Hanna Segal's Kleinian aesthetic theories that
influenced Mauron on this difference in the affective and expressive
psychological bases of tragedy and comedy.38 Mauron never made
any value judgment on the basis of this difference: There was (in
both genres) simply a continuity between affective and expressive
psychological realities. He saw both the response to and the creation
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 Psychoanalysis and literary criticism
of art in terms of the latent rather than the manifest, and in this
way, perhaps, avoided the grosser manifestations of both the af-
fective and intentional fallacies.
The aim of psychocritique was empirical description and objective,
that is, psychoanalytic, interpretation of the latent unconscious
structures, both textual and authorial. The addition of the issue of
aesthetic response did little to change this in intent or practice, as
the reader or spectator, according to Freudian orthodoxy, only
reflected the psychic situation of the creator. What became increas-
ingly clear was that Mauron's elaborate juggling of the contradic-
tory impulses of impressionism, formalism, scientific empiricism,
and psychoanalysis turned out, in the end, to be precisely as re-
ductive as he argued it was not. Perhaps it was the critical reception
of psychocritique that forced Mauron into more and more dogmatic
assertions, but his later attempts to resolve the demands of science
and art, of the objective and the subjective, were less convincing,
because, I think, they were less tentative, less qualified, less ex-
perimental, in short. Yet this is an instructive failure, for the trans-
parency of both Mauron's contradictory needs and his means of
reconciling them makes him a useful subject through which to
investigate the forms and implications of the paradoxical modern
desire for criticism to be both description and interpretation.

162
 8

PSYCHOCRITIQUE AND THE MODERN

FRENCH CRITICAL CONTEXT

La critique de l'auteur est en somme une semiologie

qui n'ose pas dire son nom.
ROLAND BARTHES

M AURON'S LITERARY BACKGROUND, such as it

was, had been formed primarily outside the dominant
French aesthetic tradition of his time. Among the rea-
sons for his continued anomalous position, however, were his early
scientific training, the formalist influence of Roger Fry, and perhaps
even his own blindness. As Mauron and Fry discovered at the
Pontigny conference in 1925, the French perspective on aesthetics
at that time was largely metaphysical. It was against this view that
Mauron's early pronouncements were directed. Aesthetics should
become, he had argued, a branch of psychology (1970a [1935]: 17).
It should be empirical and objective, and not abstract, generalized,
or reduced to value judgments. Yet in the philosophical French
tradition, aesthetics definitely involved the question of values. It
was an inquiry into beauty and its ideals. Within this tradition,
Mauron at first stood out, isolated in his early positivist and for-
malist investigation into aesthetic creation and response. After that
middle period, characterized by a questioning of science in the face
of the brutalities of modern war and also by a turning to mysticism,1
Mauron found in psychoanalysis an orthodoxy that made sense of
his personal split allegiance to art and science, but again, his choice
of creed was not a very popular French one to make at that time.
The few French-speaking commentators who turned their attention
to Freud in the first part of this century did so in rather different

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 Psychoanalysis and literary criticism

ways than did Mauron. They tended either to reduce Freudian

notions to vague romantic dichotomies, privileging unconscious
inspiration over willed manufacturing of objects, or to make an
author's conflicts, as discovered by psychoanalysis, into the source
of both ethical and literary value. This latter use of Freud ended
up actually being just a new variation on the tradition of Sainte-
Beuve, both in its presupposition of a direct link between biography
and literature and in its implied equation of moral and aesthetic
values. And Mauron was self-consciously not in this tradition.
His training in chemistry and his confidence in the experimental
method had been important in confirming Roger Fry's own for-
malistic stand against metaphysical interpretations of art. Clive Bell,
though influenced in this case by G. E. Moore, had argued that
"once we have judged a thing a work of art, we have judged it
ethically of the first importance and put it beyond the reach of the
moralist."2 For Bell, there were no qualities of greater moral value
than artistic ones. Fry did not go quite this far, but he did feel that
the contemplative response to art was free of the moral responsi-
bility usually implied by responsive action in "actual life."3 Mau-
ron's early writings reveal his agreement with Fry. He first separated
moral from aesthetic "intuition" (1927c: 234), based upon his own
experience and common sense. Then, in 1935 in Aesthetics and Psy-
chology, he articulated more fully his objections to the confusing of
ethics and aesthetics that resulted in the illusion that there could be
an absolute standard of values by which to judge responses to art.
During and just after the war, as we have seen, Mauron had, how-
ever, felt the need to seek social and even ethical values in art.
Therefore, Jung's archetypes and Freud's materialism were both
rejected at first for their denial of the important "sensibilite aux
valeurs" (1947: 197): "Les differences de valeur, qui sont l'objet
meme de l'esthetique, demeurent done inexpliquees" (1953d: 191).
Psycho critique could be said to have grown out of this crisis in
values for Mauron, even if only in the sense that he decided to leave
the question of evaluation to aesthetics proper, which he then felt
he left behind in turning to an experimental investigation of texts.
He had argued that man's "sante spirituelle" depended upon a bal-
ance between "la sensibilite aux valeurs et l'intelligence objective"
(1952 [1949]: 35). Perhaps Mauron felt he had given evidence of
the first in his work before psycho critique and so could be free to
bring to aesthetic inquiry the second, the objective or rational in-
164
 The modern French critical context

tellect. In his thesis on Racine, Mauron recognized as one of the

limits of psychoanalysis as it was applied to literature the fact that
it refused to deal with values:4 "On ne peut pas. . .traiter de l'art
et ignorer la valeur" (1969 [1954]: 14). Yet psychocritique intended
to do exactly that, and therefore could use Freudian concepts as
objective authorities because of it. Mauron left to both traditional
criticism and philosophical aesthetics the entire realm of values. He
was aware that this limited his own scope, but felt that the restric-
tion would prove fruitful in redirecting attention to new and hith-
erto unrecognized aesthetic phenomena. However, in conceiving
of literature in terms of value and yet denying that psychoanalysis
and psycho critique could deal with value, Mauron in effect admitted
that his work was not really the empirical and literary study it so
loudly insisted it was, but rather was more speculative and psy-
chological in orientation.
In the context of French criticism today, this kind of psycholog-
ical speculation is decidedly out of fashion. The rise of the nouvelle
critique in general and structuralism in particular, along with La-
canian psychoanalysis, has worked against Mauron's reputation as
a critic in France. The proceedings of the 1962 Cerisy-la-Salle con-
ference on art and psychoanalysis contain no reference to Mauron's
work,5 although it should be pointed out that his thesis was not
defended at the Sorbonne until the following year. As he himself
often complained, he always worked very much in isolation. His
blindness and his provincial distance from Paris were no doubt
partly responsible for this, but the fact that his work became quite
well known outside France suggests that France itself was somehow
particularly resistant to something in Mauron's theory or practice.
In Italy, where literary criticism had long been in the clutches of
Crocean idealism, Mauron's seeming scientificity of method and
application of psychoanalytic insights were welcomed as stimulat-
ing new directions for criticism.6 The English translation of Intro-
duction a la psychanalyse de Mallarme was published in the United
States in 1963, and many of Mauron's more recent defenders -
Mehlman, Bersani, Deutelbaum - have come from the American
academic context as well. Why, though, the comparative neglect
in France?
Mauron's obituary in Le Monde provides one clue in its descrip-
tion of his "voix mesuree et sereine, qui se reclamait de la science
plus que de la philosophie. " 7 The philosophical French literary tra-
165
 Psychoanalysis and literary criticism
dition before, let us say, i960 was alien to Mauron's positivistic
formalism, and Mauron's acceptance of psychoanalysis as an ex-
perimental science further separated him from even the critics in
France who were willing to consider Freud in more general terms.
Mauron was acutely aware of his isolation and even exploited it in
order to validate the originality of his work, suggesting that he
alone in France had not rejected or repressed the notion of the
Freudian unconscious (1962: 19). At other times, though, his iso-
lation seems to have made him feel he ought to be prudent and at
least profess to a modesty of aim: Psycho critique was in theory a
limited and partial mode, with no totalizing pretensions. In practice,
this was by no means always the case. His modest self-censuring,
like Freud's own, is definitely suspect. The self-deprecation in both
cases was too strategic to be innocent. Both men readily admitted
the limits of their theories, but the contexts in which they did so
were almost always polemical. In other words, they did so as a
defense against the hostile reception of their ideas. And they both
knew they could always have recourse to that ultimate defense -
to see any opposition as resistance and incomprehension.8
The impression Mauron often gave of being a beleaguered, un-
recognized prophet in France warrants some comment. No doubt
Mauron's isolation during his own lifetime was real enough. It was
largely after his death that he was hailed both as a pioneer in his
serious attempt to apply psychoanalysis to literature and as an in-
novator in methodology. Even during his life, though, Mauron's
strategic modesty had not only managed to forestall many objec-
tions, but also led to direct compliments on his honesty by review-
ers.9 Some, very generously, called his increasing defensiveness part
of his missionary zeal. Later critics were equally willing to present
positive evaluations of psycho critique's intentions, even if they had
serious reservations about its actual achievements.10 However, even
before Mauron's death, some commentators felt he had managed
to throw new and valuable light on the great French classics, and
said so.11 Although some felt his method was as objective and
fruitful as he himself claimed it was, there were others who felt its
success was in spite of the institutionalized psychocritical meth-
odology. The relative lack of disciples, which always saddened
Mauron, might be accounted for by this latter point. A method
can theoretically be handed on to others, but if the insights are
dependent not upon the method but upon the man applying it, the
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 The modern French critical context
results may be disappointing.12 Psycho critique had developed as a
very personal solution to Mauron's somewhat idiosyncratic vari-
ation of modernism's nineteenth-century split heritage of positivism
and romanticism. The background to this included all those diverse
elements we have been examining - Mauron's chemistry training,
Fry's formalism, and Freud's attempts at the objectification of the
subjective. Given that Mauron himself (citing, as always, Bernard
and Poincare as authorities) laid a certain amount of emphasis on
the importance of intuition in the finding of the experimental hy-
pothesis that was to govern the objective superimposition of texts,
there is an obvious problem.13 Would every application oi psycho -
critique necessarily be done by someone with the same intuitive
skills as Mauron? As a corollary to this, would every psychocritical
analysis necessarily yield the same results?
Oddly enough, perhaps, these were not the kinds of objections
that were raised to Mauron's work. Alongside a positive general
reception, especially after his death in 1966, was a more critical
view that cannot be dismissed as resistance to new ideas because it
is based on precise problematic points, some of which we have
already discussed. For instance, critics often questioned both the
objectivity of Mauron's methodology and the wisdom of trying to
eliminate the subjective from the literary critical enterprise. Even
allowing for his particular ideological perspective and his own my-
opia about the empirical, it is Adorno's attack on Mauron that best
exemplifies this line of criticism:

Les remarques que Mauron a faites sur l'entreprise de l'ana-

lyste et du critique memes indiquent qu'il vise a eliminer leur
subjectivite; l'idee y apparait qu'on pourrait approcher une
objectivite et surmonter sa propre subjectivite. D'innombr-
ables passages de Freud infirment cette these; Freud y dit que
le psychanalyste ne peut comprendre l'inconscient et la pro-
blematique du malade, de celui qu'il etudie, qu'a partir de son
propre inconscient.I4

We have seen that Mauron felt confident that he had avoided the
problems of transference and personal resistance by the empirical
objectivity of superimposition, but Adorno was right to use Freud
himself against this illusory confidence. Adorno also hit upon an-
other problem and this time Freud was as guilty as Mauron. Even
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 Psychoanalysis and literary criticism
the positive reviews of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams had pointed
out, first of all, the questionable (and finally unverifiable) nature
of the particular analyses of certain dreams, and second, the tech-
nical problems in the objective application of Freud's method. These
same two hermeneutic and methodological issues have also arisen
in our discussion of psycho critique. Mauron was aware of these ob-
jections, but instead of mounting a reasoned argument to defend
his point of view, he usually had recourse to dogmatic statements
that asserted, rather than proved, his point. The most blatant ex-
ample of this comes from his 1964 work on Giraudoux and warrants
being cited at length to capture the tone of defensiveness mixed
with self-assurance:

Une fois rassure sur l'objectivite de notre entreprise, une fois

convaincu que nous ne poursuivons pas une chimere, c'est-
a-dire qu'il existe, en effet, entre les oeuvres des correspond-
ances sous-jacentes et qu'elles ne sont pas dues au hasard, nous
n'avons plus a queter anxieusement de nouvelles analogies et
a ressentir quelque soulagement si nous les decouvrons, quel-
que inquietude si nous constatons leur absence, comme si, a
chaque detail, toute la validite de notre recherche etait a nou-
veau mise en cause. La psychocritique a deja revele, sur les
auteurs les plus divers, assez de faits, independamment de
toute interpretation, pour qu'il soit raisonnable de lui faire
quelque credit. (1971b [1964]: 46)

That almost every statement here could be challenged should now

be clear, for Mauron's perspective on the achievements oi psycho-
critique, a method he had fathered and raised to maturity, could
perhaps scarcely be expected to be disinterested.
Mauron constantly insisted on not only the objectivity but also
the textuality of both his method and its results. Psychocritique, he
claimed, "ordonne les structures inscrites dans les textes, comme
font la logique, la grammaire ou la rhetorique" (1962: 341). But
we have seen that this process ceased after the first superimposition
step of the method. The psychoanalytic interpretation of its findings
and the hypothesizing of the personal myth tended to turn psycho-
critique more into psychological, even biographical, speculation, and
critics have frequently pointed out this discrepancy between inten-
tion and result.15
168
 The modern French critical context

They have also focused on the banality of Mauron's findings.

Obviously this is a serious objection. First of all, some have asked,
is it worth such great effort to seek latent structures of a text to
prove the existence of a basic trauma that may be quite overt and
visible even on the surface? Second, surely such concepts as those
of the social and creative egos, when stripped of Kleinian associ-
ations, end up being quite common notions - the man and the
artist? Gerard Genette paid Mauron a dubious compliment when
he tried to validate the benefits of the (denied) obviousness of Mau-
ron's findings: "La psychocritique pose a la litterature d'excellentes
questions, elle lui arrache d'excellentes reponses, qui enrichissent
d'autant notre commerce des oeuvres; elle ne gagne rien a cacher
(et a se cacher) que souvent le plus clair de la reponse est deja dans
la question."16 Mauron seems to have had no answer to such an
objection, probably because he would not admit its validity. Or
perhaps his increasingly dogmatic statements about the proved value
of psychocritique were his response. At other times, he did directly
answer specific criticisms. For instance, his series of lectures (pub-
lished posthumously) on one play, Phedre, was clearly an attempt
to reply to the objection that, in Inconscient dans Voeuvre et la vie de
Racine, his general schema precluded consideration of the specificity
of individual works. And all of his later works contain some ac-
knowledgment of his solving of this potential problem (for ex-
ample, 1971b [1964]: 180; or 1967b [1966]: XXVI). A third cause
of these accusations of banality is, of course, the universality of the
Freudian psychic structures and dynamics that Mauron had accepted
as orthodoxy. If everyone goes through an Oedipal stage, so will
each artist. But, it is legitimate to ask, what makes the artist's
version either of particular interest or of any value in literary crit-
icism? Mauron's questionable reply was that, as he had found the
personal myth latent in the text, the myth by definition increased
our knowledge and comprehension of it, as well as of the artist.
Whether the latter is even the concern of the literary critic is not a
question Mauron asked himself.
His acceptance of the Freudian psychoanalytic framework led to
still other problems, according to his critics. When Leo Spitzer
attacked Mauron's jargon,17 he, like many others, was really at-
tacking Freud, not Mauron. Once this orthodoxy had been ac-
cepted, however, the technical terminology was considered by
Mauron to be necessary for precision of analysis and description.
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 Psychoanalysis and literary criticism

The real question, then, concerns the validity of the choice of or-
thodoxy. Unfortunately, the only commentators on psycho critique
to have raised this point have betrayed their own limited under-
standing of both Mauron and Freud.18 Mauron's mechanisms for
dealing with this kind of disguised attack on his chosen orthodoxy
ranged from righteous anger to sarcasm against what he saw as
obvious resistance. For example, he claimed that the significance
of Mallarme's sister's death would never have been realized without
psycho critique, or as he put it, "si l'histoire de la critique litteraire et
de ses relations avec la psychanalyse ne lui donnait une valeur de
signe" (1964b: 12). Mauron added a characteristic footnote here:
'II y a des gens qui voient des fantomes partout,' ecrit encore
recemment un critique. II en est d'autres qui decouvriront peut-
etre un jour l'inconscient" (i2n).
It is true that critics often tended to misread Mauron, claiming
that psycho critique was intended to be pure psychoanalysis and that
it reduced art to an unconscious outpouring. Of course, Mauron
not only intended no such thing, but constantly, monotonously
even, asserted the opposite. It is no wonder that in his last works,
a rather exasperated tone crept in, as he repeated yet again: "Je n'ai
jamais songe a reduire le poeme a son pole inconscient; ceux qui
m'en accusent, en revanche, ne commettent-ils pas l'erreur de le
reduire sans cesse a son seul pole conscient?" (1966a: 71-2). Psy-
choanalytic critics have often felt the need to write apologia for
their method as a response to accusations of both reductionism and
jargon, but most have argued on humanistic grounds for the psy-
chological value and validity of their insights. Mauron, on the
contrary, always argued on scientific grounds; so once again, he
seems to have been an outsider - even in his own area.
His most concerted and characteristic counterattack on the ene-
mies of both psychoanalysis and psycho critique was his 1963 intro-
duction to the American edition of Introduction to the Psychoanalysis
ofMallarme. Over a decade had passed since the publication of the
French version and its conclusions had not been totally ignored.
Mauron chose to reply to three kinds of criticism. First he took on
Dr. Mondor, Mallarme's biographer, whose reservations about
Mauron's psychoanalytic interpretation of the artist were written
off by Mauron quite simply: "His attitude may be listed in the
general history of resistances to this science" (1963a: 3). Adile Ay-
da's Le Drame interieur de Mallarme was accused of being a plagiarism
170
 The modern French critical context
of Mauron's ideas, in the sense that she presented the ideas anon-
ymously as self-evident truisms. Another critic, Cellier, who based
his view on Ayda's, also came under attack. They were all guilty
of using "a vague, expurgated sort of psychoanalysis," which clung
to a conscious content for the unconscious. Ay da, in particular,
was guilty of reductiveness in accepting Freud's principles while
rejecting his methods (252n). What is interesting is that Mauron's
long and detailed attack began with a denial: "It is a question. . .of
clarification of methodology, and not of polemics" (7). Psychocri-
tique was then presented as more original, more empirical and hy-
pothetical (scientific), and more prudent and cautious than the
methods of its detractors or plagiarizers (7-21). As Mauron's com-
mentators have been quick to note, however, Mauron was often
guilty of what he accused others of doing. Frequently it was what
one has called his "rather alarmingly assertive and confident"19 tone
that provoked criticism. In reality, this tone was usually a mask
for the defensiveness Mauron obviously felt. After italicizing his
assertion - "une situation dramatique represente une situation intrapsy-
chique" Mauron added: "Bien entendu, elle represente aussi autre
chose" (1968b [1964-5]: 19). A few pages later: "Bien entendu, ce
schema est une hypothese de travail et non un article de foi" (32).
And on the next page we find: "Bien entendu, nous ne reduirons
pas l'oeuvre de Racine a un schema" (33). This repetitious stylistic
mannerism can probably not be totally accounted for by the blind
Mauron's necessary reliance on aural memory. It suggests instead
the betrayal of a certain frustration as well as defensiveness.
If Mauron worked in such isolation and died in 1966, how has
his work attracted even the attention that it has? In 1965, Pierre-
Henri Simon offered in Le Monde the following judgment: "La
'psychocritique' de M. Charles Mauron me semble bien etre, parmi
les methodes de la nouvelle critique, celle qui se propose avec la
meilleure coherence, s'applique avec le plus de souplesse et saisit
d'ailleurs ce qu'il y a de plus essentiel dans le projet d'explorer les
structures de l'oeuvre liees a des conditionnements inconscients."20
This placing of the solitary writer of St. Remy-de-Provence in the
context of the 1960s' Parisian debate over the new importing of
the methods and theories of the social or "human" sciences into
literary criticism was both accurate and misleading. Mauron's adop-
tion of the psychoanalytic orthodoxy certainly in a sense made
psychocritique part of the nouvelle critique, but Mauron had no feel-
171
 Psychoanalysis and literary criticism
ing of being part of a new movement. He felt he was alone in
advocating the revolutionary new methodology that would be em-
pirical and therefore scientifically valid. He staunchly defended his
originality against attackers, but in choosing to write on Racine,
he had, inadvertently perhaps, invited comparisons with the soci-
ological, phenomenological, and other psychological critics whose
work constituted the French nouvelle critique of the fifties and
sixties.
In his desire to establish the originality of his method, Mauron
repeatedly compared it to others, at first in order to reveal the
complementary nature of psycho critique, and finally to assert its
uniqueness. Because, for example, classical or traditional French
literary criticism ignored the unconscious in favor of the conscious,
Mauron felt his method could add a new dimension to the works
studied (1962: 13, 23). He eventually came to feel that psychocritique
could even correct traditional readings, especially those that ques-
tioned the validity of certain decisions made by an author; it would
do this by revealing the affective reality behind the decisions (1968b
[1964-5]: 144). Mauron was also careful to distinguish his work
from what he saw as the French "medical" psychoanalytic criticism
of Laforgue and Bonaparte.21 The pseudoclinical orientation and
the biographical, pathological focus of both were alien to Mauron's
work (1962: 13, 26), although he did admit to being helped by
certain of Bonaparte's ways of applying psychoanalysis to art (1968a
[1950]: 30-4, 130-1). This medical kind of analysis can be seen as
a remnant of a nineteenth-century positivistic biographism that had
resulted in all of those The Life and Works of. . . volumes, although
in the latter, the life was often a shortcut to the works and not vice
versa. The more modern French genre of psychobiography is also
not really the same as psycho critique, for the focus of the former is
broader - the manifestations of the unconscious as actually lived.22
Psychocritique was neither medical nor biographical, and Mauron
also claimed that it was not an adaptation of psychoanalysis like
Baudouin's, whose findings Mauron thought limited and of more
use to psychoanalysts than literary critics (1967b [1966]: XLI). Mau-
ron's positivistic faith in psychoanalysis as a science also set him
apart from the phenomenological use of psychoanalytic notions by
many of the "thematic" critics, from Bachelard on.23 However, as
Mauron's work was most often confused with this thematic ap-

172
 The modern French critical context
proach, and as he most resented this confusion, a comparison of
the two methods would seem warranted. And, this raises once again
the issue of the nouvelle critique and Mauron's place within it.
The label most frequently used in English, in discussing what in
French is called "la critique thematique," is Sarah Lawall's desig-
nation of its practitioners as "critics of consciousness," in her book
of this title.24 This is a useful start because it immediately suggests
what Mauron most objected to - the bastardization of what was
to him a science of the unconscious into a metaphysic of the con-
scious imagination (1964b: 129). The methods were different (1962:
269), therefore, and so were the materials. The themes found by
Bachelard, Weber, Poulet, Richard, and Starobinski were conscious
ones, and the methods used in each case risked "subjectivism,"
claimed Mauron, because of their refusal to accept the scientific
view of the unconscious (29-30). Mauron was directly attacked by
Jean-Paul Weber, who claimed that his own thematic analysis was
a scientific doctrine with a rigorous methodology. Yet he also said
that it was related to "des tendances qui, a l'exception de la psy-
chanalyse vieillotte de Charles Mauron, ne pretendent pas a la verite
objective."25 Though Weber's snide remarks were likely motivated
by revenge for Mauron's criticism of his thesis,26 what is even more
evident is that Weber's concepts of both psychoanalysis and literary
criticism were considerably more in the French metaphysical aes-
thetic tradition than Mauron's positivist empiricism and faith in
Freud as a scientific psychologist. Weber wrote: "Seule la psy-
chanalyse de Mauron s'efforce de se parer de prestiges scientifiques.
Mais la psychanalyse freudienne ne pourrait etre considered comme
science qu'au niveau des nevroses. . .; sur le plan des oeuvres d'art
sa faillite est retentissante." Weber, unfortunately, offered no more
proof of his argument than Mauron gave of its opposite. The lan-
guage in which Weber described his own methodology was also
often suspiciously like Mauron's: "Une discipline objective, rigo-
ureuse, capable de progres, apte a etre approfondie et amendee,
mais non niee en bloc, et sans formes; bref, une science: mais en
voie de se constituer." What is most suspect is that this is precisely
the positivist view of Claude Bernard, point by point. Yet Weber
claimed to reject as spurious such scientificity as Mauron repre-
sented. Weber replaced empirical superimposition with the critic's
personal belief and intuition, and then argued: "Ne craignons pas

173
 Psychoanalysis and literary criticism
d'affirmer que l'analyse thematique, moins infeodee aux a priori que
la psychanalyse de M. Mauron, est plus rigoureuse et plus scientifique
que celle-ci."
Although the battle lines were obviously drawn, there is at least
some basis for arguing that the two methods were not totally dis-
similar, in practice at least. Both neglected genre distinctions, for
example. Mauron did so because generic structures were deemed
conscious and manifest, and were therefore not his interest. For the
critics of consciousness, the neglect was an antiformalistic rejection,
as their interest was in the manifestations of human consciousness,
of the perceiving mind, as reflected in the words of the text. Both
methods saw art as analyzable in terms of an act, a drama taking
place in the mind, though Mauron located this in the unconscious,
not the conscious. For both, individual works of art were separate
but continuous manifestations of the same developing personality.
Again, however, it was the unconscious personality that interested
Mauron; a critic like Jean-Pierre Richard, for instance, was inter-
ested in the perceiving self, not the unconscious ego. Parallels in
basic methodology also exist. Both tended to take images out of
the manifest or surface context of the work in order to fit them
into another broader context - existential or psychic. And both also
tended to ignore language as language, seeking in it patterns of
images instead. Poulet saw art as a network of perceptions; Mauron,
as a network of obsessive images.
The critics of consciousness, despite being centered around Ge-
neva, were very much within the French philosophical aesthetic
tradition. Although, during his mystic phase, Mauron may in fact
have sounded like Albert Beguin at times, his later psychocritical
work clearly had a different focus and aim. "Mon probleme per-
sonnel," he revealingly wrote in 1965, "etait dejeter des ponts entre
une science psychanalytique vraie, fondee sur l'experience clinique,
et une critique classique qui comprenait les methodes statistiques
entre autres methodes d'appreciation et d'estimation" (1970b [1965]:
104). Today, however, both thematic and psychocritical approaches
are out of fashion and the main reason for this is that they share a
certain neglect of language. Neither treated the inherent, the im-
manent linguistic texture of the works they analyzed. And the new
French aesthetic tradition-in-the-making is one that privileges lan-
guage perhaps above all else.
Leo Bersani has tried to recuperate Mauron by claiming that his
174
 The modern French critical context

method of analyzing Racine's characters, for instance, is at least

analogous to the structural method the textual critic uses. In other
words, the logic Mauron finds in character relations is like that
which we accept in certain metaphors.27 But this is only an argu-
ment by analogy, and Mauron himself admitted that in his work
"les aspects linguistiques des textes seront brouilles" (1964a: 142)
in the interests of the collective psychological groupings of the
mythic figures and situations. Mauron never explained this, except
to try to argue that the verbal level was primarily conscious and
thus not of interest, or to admit that the author, not his style, was
his main concern - contradicting his frequent assertions to the con-
trary. Mauron's search for networks of obsessive metaphors was,
in one sense, a structural one. Even more precisely, it was a for-
malist search for relations. If anything, psycho critique is closer in
design to Northrop Frye's archetypal criticism, as Gerard Bessette
has noticed, than to any structuralist approach.28 Is the psycho-
critical method, then, really an example of the nouvelle critique,
as so many have claimed?
The background to this debate is to be found in the situation of
French literary criticism in the early 1960s. In the face both of a
dominant Lansonian, positivist university tradition of historical and
philological analysis and of a popular belletristic tradition charac-
terized by an impressionistic lack of method, critics such as Roland
Barthes suggested a methodical and textual, but less extrinsic, al-
ternative: an immanent yet deeper form of analysis.29 The university
critics, as they were dubbed, rose in protest, led by Raymond
Picard. In his 1965 pamphlet, Nouvelle Critique ou nouvelle impos-
ture?, Picard criticized Barthes for attacking biographical criticism
and yet doing nothing more himself. As Barthes had praised Mau-
ron's thesis on Racine, Picard included psycho critique in his attack
on the validity of psychoanalysis applied to literature, accusing it,
along with thematic criticism, of subjectivity, of totalitarianism,
and finally of unliterariness. Picard soon received a response; the
nouvelle critique had found a defender in Serge Doubrovsky. Just
as the Cartesian tradition of reason and lucidity had been ruptured
by modern writers, Doubrovsky began, so had there been a rupture
of equal scope and significance in literary criticism.30 The new,
objective sciences of linguistics and psychoanalysis had challenged
the philosophical aesthetic tradition of France. The criticism in-
spired by these human sciences tried to avoid the traditional literary

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 Psychoanalysis and literary criticism
critical mixture of external erudition and impressionistic intuition,
and aimed instead at a systematic search for coherence and totality
within the work itself (which was seen as an object open to a variety
of intrinsic investigations). Alongside its technical and precise lan-
guage, the nouvelle critique respected the ambiguity inherent in
literary texts. In other words, these new forms of analysis all aimed,
as had psycho critique, to reconcile the objective and the subjective.
Doubrovsky saw this as a dialectical, philosophical process, how-
ever, rejecting the positivistic ideal of science as being out of date,
as being part of the ideological baggage of the last century. Herein
lies the reason for his misreading of Mauron - who had never got
rid of that nineteenth-century scientific baggage. Doubrovsky de-
fended Mauron against Picard, complimenting him on what he saw
as his descriptive, phenomenological, structuralist method of tex-
tual analysis, and lamenting his impressionistic interpretations, his
victimization by the reifying Freud, the "scientiste attarde" (p. 113).
Mauron had been right to choose a human science, but he had
chosen the wrong one (p. 127).
Mauron himself, in his last work, replied to both Picard and
Doubrovsky, though he contented himself with merely attacking,
rather than responding to, Picard's refusal to see the crisis in literary
criticism brought about by the discovery of the Freudian uncon-
scious (1966a: 173-7). Doubrovsky was also accused of missing the
main issue, and of being reductive in ignoring Mauron's repeated
statements about the limits of his endeavors (177, 180, 182): "Dou-
brovsky m'a done simplement mal lu, et je le regrette" (182). Al-
though there was some truth to this accusation, Doubrovsky could
perhaps be forgiven, as Mauron's theoretical intent and his actual
practice were often quite disparate. Insofar as Mauron had written
on Racine from a psychoanalytic perspective, it was fair to include
him in the polemic over the nouvelle critique. However, Barthes
had offered language as the model and linguistics as the science that
would, he hoped, forge the new relationship between art and sci-
ence. By science, Barthes meant a systematic construct premised
on its internal coherence, self-reflexive in its acknowledgment of
its own and its object's relativity.31 Although it has been ironically
suggested that this kind of self-consistent systematization is actually
the heir to Taine and Comte,32 it is clear that Barthes intended it
as the very opposite. It was the Lansonian university critics who
were positivistic, not the new ideological critics - existentialist,
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 The modern French critical context
Marxist, phenomenological, or psychological. He was correct, then,
in associating Mauron with the former: "La Sorbonne vient d'in-
gerer si facilement la psychanalyse litteraire, sous les especes de la
these de Mauron."33 Psycho critique's psychoanalytic interpretations
did not constitute intrinsic criticism, even if they began structurally
in superimposing texts. Psycho critique was not ideological in the
sense that Goldmann's sociocriticism was, despite Mauron's at-
tempt to claim that, in seeing moral, social, and religious issues in
a Freudian light (as libidinal), his work both included and went
beyond Goldmann's work (1970b [1965]: 100-3).34 But Mauron
always accepted as scientific orthodoxy the statements of psycho-
analysis. He never engaged in an ideological reading of Freud, as
many later French critics would.
In another sense, though, Mauron, like Goldmann, was more
descriptive than normative, and because of this, many, including
Doubrovsky, have wanted to make psycho critique (at least the first
steps of it) into a form of structuralism. Genette defined the struc-
turalist method as being characterized by a concern for message
and code, as discerned by an analysis of immanent structures:
"L'analyse structurale doit permettre de degager la liaison qui existe
entre un systeme de formes et un systeme de sens."35 In this sense,
Mauron was a kind of structuralist, as some of his commentators
have noted.36 Genette himself was more prudent: The psychocritical
method was only "d'allure typiquement structuraliste," at first glance
not unlike Propp's formalism.37 Superimposition and the syn-
chronic metaphor networks it yielded can be seen as structuralist,
or at least formalist, but the psychoanalytic interpretations pre-
sented in the personal myth were made on the grounds of an ex-
trinsic orthodoxy. More significantly, to attempt to recuperate
Mauron and make him into a real structuralist, as some have done,
is to do so at the expense of what he himself held most dear - his
scientific positivism. Mauron's search for structures owed more to
Roger Fry, or even Aristotle, than to Saussure. He thought naturally
in triadic, not binary terms of opposition. More important still is
the fact that he made no distinction between langue and parole,
probably because he made none between the universal Freudian
structures of the psyche and those of the individual unconscious.
Mauron also did not ignore the issue of reference, an issue that is
outside the confines of a strictly structural linguistics. He did not
restrict himself to the unit of the sign as defined by differential

177
 Psychoanalysis and literary criticism
values within a system. Psycho critique dealt with discourse more
than with signs, and it was interpretation as well as description.
In his review of Le Dernier Baudelaire, Raymond Jean cited Mau-
ron: "La participation de l'inconscient a la creation est d'ordre on-
irique, done preverbal: quel fou reduirait Phedre a un element
preverbal?" Then he added in parentheses: "On imagine d'ailleurs
tout de suite le genre de contestation auquel pourrait etre soumise
une telle affirmation a la lumiere des travaux du Dr. Lacan."38 This
turned out to be a prophetic statement, and inevitably so. Mauron's
lack of interest in linguistic structuralism left him open to attacks
from practitioners of Lacan's new reading of Freud in terms of a
grammar of the unconscious, a reading now dubbed French Freud.
The Lacanian position on psycho critique is worth citing at some
length:

Sans doute, dans le cercle de la critique franchise, nul ne peut

contester le role de pionnier qui fut celui de Charles Mauron.
La psychocritique, en tant qu'effort pour reconnaitre des fan-
tasmes dans un certain corpus, fonctionne avec une rigueur
que TUniversite - avec quelles inquietudes! - accepte de cau-
tionner. Au moins propose-t-elle une lecture de l'oeuvre, qui,
par precaution, cherche ensuite une sorte de verification dans
les incidents de la biographie; mais on voit, sur les marges de
la critique traditionnelle, se generaliser une pratique du de-
chiffrement qui vise a raccorder, au prix de maints bricolages,
une "oeuvre" sur un "homme," en recourant aux instruments
sommairement fournis par une sorte de vulgate freudienne,
et sans que la legitimite de ce raccordement soit elle-meme
fondee. Une telle pratique, soucieuse d'articuler la verite du
texte sur l'authenticite d'un etre, et qui croit sortir de l'orniere
idealiste parce qu'elle substitue l'enfant a Fhomme, ne tient a
la fin nul compte de la rupture provoquee par la mise en cause
du sujet. En somme, on elargit le champ de la biographie, on
affine ses procedes heuristiques, et on traite l'inconscient
comme un canton de l'espace deja mesure et jalonne par la
psychologie humaniste: la resistance de l'esprit classique se
manifeste dans les entreprises, apparemment novatrices, dont
les presupposes demeurent occultes.39

Lacanian literary critics today see their work as a break both with
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 The modern French critical context
the dominant psychoanalytic tradition and with any psychocritical,
biographical institutionalization. Their theorizing is on the level of
the relations between discourse and the unconscious, of the work
of the unconscious in ecriture (the unconscious of the text, the text
as unconscious). Out of the linguistic resurgence of the nouvelle
critique has developed a particularly French brand of literary psy-
choanalysis - theoretical, abstract, ideological. Mauron's dream of
an empirical aesthetic could not be more foreign. He had been
interested in the application of psychoanalysis to literature long
before the Lacanian critics, but his was an English, not a French
Freud.
For any number of possible reasons, Freud's ideas had penetrated
England and America more quickly than France. And Mauron had,
it seems, probably been put onto Freud by Roger Fry. In France,
thanks to specific anti-German chauvinism and a general distrust
of anything but philosophic kinds of psychology,40 Freud's theories
were more attacked than discussed, and more ignored than either,
in the first decades of this century.41 The main interest in psycho-
analysis came either from French writers - Paul Morand, Paul Bour-
get, H-R Lenormand, and later Gide, Jouve, Breton, and the other
surrealists - or from clinicians like Marie Bonaparte and Rene La-
forgue. In 1931, Albert Thibaudet had published "Psychanalyse et
critique" in the Nouvelle Revue Frangaise. Thibaudet noted the French
neglect of Freud, but he explained it, on the one hand, by claiming
that Freud really just gave new names to familiar French notions
(and so was redundant), and on the other hand, by admitting that
the power of France's "vieille culture" repressed Freudian insights
"automatiquement."42 Although he acknowledged that psycho-
analysis had great potential in aesthetic inquiry, Thibaudet revealed
a typically French insularity in then claiming for Bergson priority
over Freud in any really fruitful notions. The positivistic, organicist
medical establishment and the metaphysical aestheticians of France
both rejected Freud, though their reasons for doing so were based
on diametrically opposite misinterpretations.
We saw that Freud had founded Imago in 1912 as a journal to
investigate the interrelations of psychoanalysis and the products of
culture, and outside of France, in the twenties and thirties, Rank,
Abraham, Ferenczi, Klein, Stokes, Bergler, and many others were
already studying myth and literature from the new perspective.
Aside from Thibaudet's article, however, the initiation of the more
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 Psychoanalysis and literary criticism
general French public in Freudian psychology and aesthetics came
only with the publication of the Swiss Baudouin's Psychanalyse de
Vart in 1929. In her survey Psychanalyse et critique Htteraire, Anne
Clancier has outlined the slow stages in the spread of Freudian ideas
in France. It was the existing (Sainte-Beuve) critical tradition that
made psychobiography both possible and the most likely first place
for psychoanalysis to influence literary studies. From 1950 on, many
French writers were the subject of analysis by critics such as Jean
Delay, Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, Gilberte Aigrisse, Didier An-
zieu, Jean Gillibert, and so on. There were other literary critics
whose insights were close to psychoanalytic ones, but who could
not be called Freudian: Albert Beguin, Marcel Raymond, R-M
Alberes, Georges Blin. In many ways, Mauron, though not part
of this literary establishment, was closer to these psychological and
mythic critics. But he was one of the first to try to apply purely
psychoanalytic insights in what he saw as a rigorous manner.
Sartrian "existential psychoanalysis," on the other hand, was not
really Freudian at all, because of its rejection of the unconscious
and its tenet that choice, as a psychic fact, was coextensive with
consciousness. In L'Etre et le neant, Sartre had argued that the un-
conscious was, in fact, only an abstract postulate. It was really only
with Lacan that France found a psychoanalytic perspective to its
taste. Lacan rejected Anglo-Saxon and American ego psychology
as a recuperation of Freud's "epistemological severance"43 - the
view of the subject as radically and fundamentally divided. The
function of analysis, therefore, could not be to "cure," that is, to
adapt the subject either to his self or to the social order. This distance
between Lacanian and Kleinian psychoanalysis is important to keep
in mind, for it explains why Mauron's work - based as it is on ego
psychology as much as on Freud - resists the attempts of critics to
rework it in Lacanian terms.
In addition to the cultural and historical reasons already given
for that French resistance to psychoanalysis that Mauron had so
lamented, there was also an ideological objection, as it was labeled
German-American, right-wing, and bourgeois. After May of 1968,
however, it suddenly became French and left-wing.44 Thanks to
Lacan, who has been called France's own "indigenous heretic,"45
psychoanalysis became multidisciplinary (including linguistics and
anthropology, in particular), but also philosophical and theoretical,
that is, acceptable to the French Cartesian tradition. The decade
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 The modern French critical context

and a half of the existence of the Ecole Freudienne brought major

changes to both the institution and the application of psychoanalysis
in France, and Lacan was the personal and intellectual center of all
of this. May of 1968 had been to all a signal that social changes had
undermined the once-comforting French traditions, and in the at-
tempt to find new points of reference that could speak to their new
insecurities, some of the intellectuals of France turned to psycho-
analysis, or rather to the particularly structural and ideological read-
ing of Freud that had always made Lacan a renegade in even the
French psychoanalytic establishment.
This version of Freud was obviously very much to French literary
taste in the years following the introduction of the nouvelle critique.
Had Mauron lived to see this abrupt switch from resistance to
infatuation, he might have felt less isolated and solitary. Yet, his
own eclectic adaptation of psychoanalytic insights was alien to the
Lacanian perspective. Mauron had shown no interest in the theories
developed in the mid-1950s, by linguists as well as psychoanalysts,
that linked first the functions, then the structures, of the uncon-
scious to those of language. Freud's theories of symbolism in all
unconscious ideation (dreams, jokes, myths, legends) had led to
new comparisons with linguistic symbolism; Benveniste argued
that the unconscious used a rhetoric with figures and tropes; Ja-
kobson and Halle linked metonymy to the Freudian dreamwork
process of displacement, and synecdoche to condensation.
It was not long before the Lacanian reading of the master became
itself the orthodoxy in France. French Freud was almost the only
Freud: In 1970, Sarah Kofman actually felt the need to explain that
she was citing Freud himself at length in her book, L'Enfance de
Vart: une interpretation de Vesthetique freudienne, because the French
public, "du fait du manque de traductions, ou de leurs insuffisances,
ignore la plupart des oeuvres de Freud."46 This testifies to her
realization that French critics primarily read Lacan, or at best Freud
through Lacan. Lacan's famous seminar on "The Purloined Letter"
of Poe47 created a new model for psychoanalytic literary criticism,
a model that was close to being the opposite of the psychocritical
one. Within Poe's story itself, Lacan found a rejection of the in-
terpreter who stands - objective - outside the text, equipped with
a fixed system by which to interpret the author's unconscious
through the illustration provided by the text. Positivism, such as
that which buttressed Mauron's method, appears to be one of the
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 Psychoanalysis and literary criticism

targets of Lacan's critique. In literary criticism, this new model and

Lacan's linguistic focus on the unconscious would obviously yield
different kinds of analysis and results from those of psycho critique.
Jean Laplanche's 1961 Holderlin et la question du pere combined phi-
losophy and psychobiography with Lacan's theories to argue that
the key to the poet's psychosis lay in the "manque d'un signifiant,"
that is, of Lacan's "Norn du Pere." O. Mannoni, in Clefs pour
Vimaginaire ou Vautre scene (1969), mixed Lacanian psychoanalysis
with ethnography and linguistics to focus on both the process of
creating and that of reading. The resulting theories are rather dif-
ferent from those produced by psychocritical analyses or even by
Mauron's more theoretical attempts at positing an empirical aes-
thetic. The difference made by the addition of a linguistic or struc-
tural perspective can be sensed in comparing Guy Rosolato's
psychoanalytic aesthetic with Mauron's. In Essais sur le symbolique
(1969), Rosolato posits a dual register of the "demarche esthetique,"
basing aesthetic value and dynamism on an oscillation between
metaphor and metonymy in both language and aesthetic process.
The abstract and theoretical nature of this kind of focus is rather
far from Mauron's textual superimposition and working hypothesis
of an individual writer's personal myth.
However, the more significant difference is in the underlying
view of the subject. In the first place, for Lacan, the subject, the
ego, is irreparably divided: There can be no integration, no resti-
tution through art, as Melanie Klein had claimed and Mauron had
accepted. Taking Freud's experiences of negative transference as
his guide, Lacan also insisted on the inter subjective and dialectic
nature of psychoanalysis48 - and thus of any application of it. This
rejection of positivist, scientific "objectification," in Freud's own
name, reveals the different "Freuds" Mauron and Lacan read. Mau-
ron's was this rejected English (or American), pragmatic, empirical
scientist, the "biologist of the mind." Even if Mauron did use
Freudian concepts to perceive unconscious gaps or discontinuities,
he always sought an underlying unity or totality. Although ele-
ments of Mauron's method (the analyst-critic listening without
preconceived notions or categories) and general area of interest (the
status of human discourse) could be seen, perhaps, as related to a
Lacanian framework, Mauron could never have accepted the idea
of an irreparably divided ego, and he would not have been interested
in the unconscious as related in structure to language in general.
182
 The modern French critical context
Attempts to rework Mauron's theories in Lacanian terms are
more than recuperation: They are serious misunderstandings of
Mauron's intellectual essence. Mauron may have been interested in
the latent but not in the lacking ("le manque"). He was no symbol
hunter; he searched for neither Freud's phallic symbols nor Lacan's
"l'objet a."49 Mauron was actually closer to what Barthes called
the "critique universitaire," with its positivist methodology of bio-
graphic transcendence, than to any of the ideological forms of the
nouvelle critique. Psychoanalysis, his choice of orthodoxy, was to
him scientific psychology, as valid and experimentally validated as
any other science. Mauron was aware that, in France, this was not
the view of Freud. This was so both before and after 1968. Mauron
saw the problem with the pre-Lacanian resistance to analysis in the
same terms as he saw the critical neglect of his objective psycho cri-
tique: "Un Franqais, ay ant requ une culture philosophique et litter-
aire se contracte le plus souvent a l'idee d'une psychologie scientifique
faisant intrusion dans son domaine. II n'a pas confiance et reagit
d'abord comme a une possession ou depossession violente: on lui
vole son ame!" (1966a: 174). Even Lacan, in a sense, had taken
psychoanalysis as a philosophy, not as an experimental science,
preferring abstract theorizing about the Imaginary, the Symbolic,
and the Real orders to what Mauron called "le contact avec le
veritable inconscient," which, he felt, was accessible through the
method of psychocritical superimposition. Mauron rejected Dou-
brovsky's backhanded compliments in Pourquoi la nouvelle critique;
he rejected this attempt at recuperation, because he saw that the
real target was "l'homme de science" and that the real conflict was
"entre la pensee experimentale (qui croit a une verite objective) et
une ideologie que (ne croyant a rien d'objectif) pretend imposer ses
valeurs subjectives en science comme en art ou en morale" (1966a:

Mauron's formation in the physical sciences and his respect for

the experimental method had been strengthened by Roger Fry's
formalist viewing of systems of relations in art. His attraction to
psychoanalysis had been rooted in the need to reconcile this objec-
tive view with his instinctive, at times almost mystic, faith in the
intuitive and the impressionistic. He thought Freud offered a way
to do this. Mauron's Freudian formalism, psycho critique, represents
his attempt to create a method of analysis and an underlying aes-
thetic that would be, above all, empirical. Perhaps the first step of
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 Psychoanalysis and literary criticism
his method qualifies; the Freudian and Kleinian bases of his theories
of aesthetic creation and response might qualify if we, like Mauron,
believe psychoanalysis to be an observational, clinical science. Un-
fortunately for the fate of psychocritique, the status of its orthodoxy
as a scientific model has been questioned today. Freud - and Mauron
- believed science to be the sole discipline of knowledge, and they
carried this belief on through their implied aesthetics. But Mauron
used psychoanalytic theory as a kind of hermeneutic, as a way of
interpreting the findings of his formalist superimpositions. It is Paul
Ricoeur who has most probingly questioned the status of such
interpretation in closed "scientific" systems like psychoanalysis and
structuralism. 5 His particular posing of this epistemological prob-
lem has serious implications for literary criticism today. Lacanian
analysts appear to understand the metaphysical nature of their work.
Structuralists, perhaps, do not - and for the same reasons that
Mauron did not. Both tried self-consciously to break with the dom-
inant French philosophical tradition of aesthetics, and for both, the
orthodoxy - linguistics and psychoanalysis - was a science. There-
fore the first function of criticism was description. This empiricism
is possible only with an act of faith, a belief that the orthodoxy
that guides that description can yield facts, "truth." Interpretation,
for Mauron, was to be seen as another form of description. If the
facts take on meaning only within the closed system, the doxa, they
can be interpreted "correctly" or objectively only in terms of that
system. Mauron was - and is - not alone in ignoring the logical
fallacy involved here. His work and its limitations seem a little
more transparent, a little more open to scrutiny, both because he
worked in isolation, without the protective support of Parisian
intellectual fashion, and because, given his particular background,
he revealed so clearly and so intensely the tension between the
objective and the subjective views of criticism, a tension that is still
dominant (though often unacknowledged) in discussions of literary
criticism from semiotics to deconstruction, from hermeneutics to
Lacanian analysis, from German reception theory to the "New
Rhetoric."

184
 CONCLUSION

. . . an attempt to overcome the cleavage between

subject and object, between the vital, purposive,
value-full world of private experience and the dead
postulated world of extension, quality, and motion.
M. H. ABRAMS

L ITERARY, or more precisely, aesthetic history rather than

deconstruction has been the aim of this book, partly, it must
be admitted, because there would seem to be little need for
subtle investigations into how Mauron's psycho critique became en-
gaged and involved in the literary domain it sought to describe:
Mauron's theories tend to self-de(con)struct. But, although Mau-
ron's consistent attempts at the objectification of the subjective can
be seen as being premised on a series of assumptions that created
logical as well as practical problems, this in no way invalidates the
worth of these theories to the study of what I suggested in my
preface was the dichotomous reality of postromantic literary crit-
icism. Mauron's work certainly represents part of that modern and
modernist shift we have been witnessing in criticism from historical
and philological erudition to interpretation of individual texts,
though Mauron did use the authoritative metalanguage of psycho-
analysis to both guide and express his interpretations.
Recently Jonathan Culler has made a plea for a separation of
interpretive criticism and poetics. In The Pursuit of Signs (1981), he
outlines how, in the wake of the Anglo-American New Critical
commitment to the autonomy of the text, we have come to believe
that interpretation alone is the proper activity of literary studies.
And interpretation is guided by a very romantic belief in the organic
unity of the work of art: Everything must be made to fit a whole.
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 Conclusion
This is as true of the immanence model of the nouvelle critique as
it is of the practice of New Criticism. The most convincing proof
of Culler's position lies in the fact that we tend - as indeed did
Mauron's critics - to ask of an aesthetic theory (or of historical
scholarship or philological analysis) how it can help us understand
particular works of art. To counteract this, I have not entitled this
study Psycho critique, for there are other, less strictly hermeneutic,
literary concerns, as Culler argues - concerns that are different from
interpretation and yet not handmaidens to it. And these are no less
literary and no less important. The value of Mauron's work to
literary criticism may lie not in the success or failure of the psy-
chocritical method as a means of interpretation, but rather in its
exemplifying - in an instructively overt manner - the aesthetic
dilemma that is still puzzling us today. Mauron, as much as Frye,
Fish, Riffaterre, or the others Culler discusses, could not resist the
lure of interpretation. What makes him particularly interesting is
that it was the very objective-subjective critical tension that drove
him to formulate an interpretive method and yet to try to under-
stand the aesthetic operations of literature as a mode of discourse
and the processes of the creative imagination. Mauron wanted to
describe as well as interpret; he wanted his aesthetic to be empirical.
I have traced what I see as the personal, historical reasons for this
need for both an objective aesthetics and more subjective interpre-
tation; the interaction of the private with the public dimension of
this modern critical paradox is what remains to be explored in more
depth.
Just as Mauron began his career arguing that aesthetics should
become a branch of psychology, not philosophy, psycho critique was
conceived and carried out, from Mauron's point of view, as an
experimental and empirical activity, a dialogue between the ques-
tioning mind of the critic and the textual facts presented to it (1962:
9). Mauron's insistence on the objectivity of his method and its
results has been called into question here, as it had been elsewhere,
if from different perspectives. The disparity between intention and
achievement has been investigated in terms of dichotomies that can
be expressed as impressionistic interpretation versus formalistic de-
scription, artistic intuition versus scientific methodology, or sim-
ply, perhaps, the influence of E. M. Forster versus that of Roger
Fry. Just as Mauron rarely mentioned Forster in his psychocritical
theorizing, he also suppressed all acknowledgment of his own
186
 Conclusion
impressionism. Intuition was permitted and admitted, but even
then, only as the springboard for scientific hypothesis, as sanctioned
by Bernard. Mauron believed that psycho critique resolved these dual-
ities and that it was psychoanalysis that made the resolution pos-
sible. Mauron accepted its findings, as few besides Freud have, as
those of an empirical science. However, we have seen that, as with
Fry's theories, Mauron's adoption and adaptation of psychoanalytic
concepts were radically selective. Psycho critique was not formulated
after a dispassionate, disinterested investigation into the worth of
the various theories that were used to buttress it; the criterion of
selection was strictly that of approximation to Mauron's own ideas.
However, the authority he felt he thus gained offered him the
necessary proof of having discovered for himself empirical "facts"
about literature, when in reality all he had gained was a metalan-
guage and, through it, an illusion of scientific objectivity.
Mauron's recourse to psychoanalysis could not be more different
from that of either Lacanian or what are now called poststructuralist
critics. To Mauron, Freud's texts were the documents of a clinical,
observational science, not literary narratives or acts of transference
of Freud's own psychic quests and conflicts.1 In the last chapter we
saw too that the dominant French psychoanalytic reading of Freud
was not Mauron's. The abstract, philosophical, and linguistic point
of view of Lacan contrasts sharply with Mauron's optimistic, em-
pirical positivism: For Mauron, the psyche was not discontinuous,
but unified, as the text was - at a latent level. The work of art was
the product of a biographically and psychologically defined person;
it was not to be treated as the result of a process of ecriture. The
unified, continuous subject was still the source of meaning for
Mauron. He would not have agreed with Michel Foucault, who
saw in psychoanalysis a radical decentering of the subject in relation
to the laws of desire.2 If the subject were no longer the source or
the center of discourse, the purpose of the exercise of literary crit-
icism would obviously not be to trace the text to its source in the
psyche of its creator; its task would be, rather, to describe. In one
sense, structuralism and semiotics have sought to do just that: to
describe systems of signs. They have succeeded insofar as the tools
of modern linguistics have allowed them new distinctions by which
to describe relations and systems of relations. Mauron attempted
the same - without linguistics - but his formalist description was
only the first step to the real work of criticism: interpretation. This

187
 Conclusion
is the real reason why Mauron was the most easily acceptable of
the psychoanalytically inspired critics of the sixties in the eyes of
members of the French university critical establishment and of many
others outside France: His formalism was not so radical as to prevent
him from interpreting. Mauron, quite simply, was not a structuralist.
As he fully accepted the Kleinian ideal of an integrated psyche,
Mauron was not, as we have seen, part of the move toward the
dissolution of the subject, and therefore did not constitute a threat
to the classical or liberal humanist tradition of literary criticism.
Despite his own leftist political leanings, he would not, I think,
have understood the ideological and psychoanalytic contestation of,
for example, Deleuze and Guattari's Capitalisme et schizophrenic:
L'Anti-Oedipe (1972). His positivist faith in science bears little re-
semblance to even the philosophico-scientific perspective of some-
one like Michel Serres today; yet Serres too has tried to unite science
and art. To find a context for Mauron, we have had to look to the
nineteenth-century split heritage of romanticism and positivistic
science, and also to Anglo-American criticism, the criticism that
has been marked most deeply, perhaps, by this split. Under the
influence of Fry's mixture of affective psychology and formalism,
Mauron had consciously reinforced the mode of thinking instilled
in him by his own training in the physical sciences. He sought to
describe the relations of systems in works, and he would do so, he
claimed, by investigating his own subjective reactions to art in an
objective, experimental fashion. Though he rarely spoke specifically
in terms of significant form and the aesthetic emotion, it is clear
that his early work was premised on Fry's theory of their interaction.
The so-called experimental nature of his studies - from the be-
ginning through to psycho critique - requires further investigation,
however. When Mauron wrote, as he so often did, that '^'expe-
rience prouve que. . .," we must inquire exactly what he was claim-
ing. In the French language the word experience can mean either
experience or experiment. To claim that "experience proves" is
clearly not the same as saying that "experiment proves," especially
when the writer is arguing for the scientific objectivity of both his
method and observations. When Mauron claimed, in his first pub-
lished works, that he was presenting the results of what Fry trans-
lated as "personal experiments," we can now see that it was just
as likely personal experiences - not to say impressions and intuitions
- that were at the core of this scientific-sounding methodology.
188
 Conclusion
The adjective experimental does exist in French and Mauron's use
of it is not ambiguous: It is meant to signify the observational or
empirical. But the noun presents greater difficulties, for Mauron
almost seems to have relied upon his language's own merging of
the objective (scientific experiment) and the subjective (personal
experience): "L'experience prouve que.
For all his attempts to unite art and science, Mauron was very
aware of their different orientations: "La science etudie les faits,
alors que Tart manifeste des valeurs" (1950: 258). However, Mauron
saw criticism at least, psychocritique as approximating science in
its investigations of the psychic "facts" of literature. But what about
that question of value to which, he had argued, aesthetics must
address itself? Psychocritique was a mode of interpretation; its focus
was the elucidation of the artistic product. Aesthetics, on the other
hand, focuses on the process. An empirical aesthetics should be the
result of an observational investigation into the operations of the
creation and reception of art. And, in the Western cultural tradition,
at least since Plato, discussion of these processes, as well as of their
products, has involved not just interpretation and description, but
evaluation as well. Things would have been different, perhaps, if
Plato had not suggested that artistic quality was a consequence of
moral quality, that art was a means of moral instruction, that a
work was an index to the ethical character of the artist. Much British
literary criticism, from at least the Renaissance to the present, has
been based on the belief that the essential task of the critic goes
beyond contemplation and analysis, beyond description and inter-
pretation, to the making ofjudgments that are as moral as they are
aesthetic, for the two are not easily separable in the humanist tra-
dition. In fact, John Cruickshank, in the British Journal of Aesthetics,
attacked psychocritique on precisely these grounds: Scientific psy-
choanalytic statements about the psyche of the author may be in-
teresting but, he argued, they offer "no direct help in the task of
judgment and evaluation which is the prime concern of the literary
critic."3
If Mauron limited psychocritique to a descriptive and interpretive
mode of criticism, it was partly because he felt he had left to general
aesthetics the question of value. He had bracketed it, not denied it.
And general aesthetics were no longer his primary concern. But
underlying all of Mauron's work, of course, are aesthetic assump-
tions; the language of his elucidations betrays the affirmation of
189
 Conclusion
certain values: "La force latente du my the, la richesse de ses de-
veloppements, la surprise de ses variations constituent des signes
de superiority creatrice" (1958; 115). In activating this unexamined,
implicit evaluative mechanism, Mauron was much more in tune
with contemporary Anglo-American criticism than with the French
equivalent where, in Doubrovsky's words, ' juger, de nos jours,
n'a pas bonne presse; c'est meme un acte coupable: expliquer ou
expliciter, structurer ou decrire, voila la vocation de la critique."4
The establishing of a hierarchy of aesthetic values is not the concern
of semiotics or structuralism today, probably because such a scale
is not considered an objectively verifiable entity.5
M. H. Abrams once described the physician-poet Keats as the
"first great poet to exhibit that peculiarly modern malady - a con-
scious and persistent conflict between the requirements of social
responsibility and of aesthetic detachment."6 This echoes Mauron's
theory of the interrelations of the social and creative egos, and with
very little rephrasing could apply to the chemist-critic Mauron,
torn between the active and the contemplative, between science and
art. In the Anglo-American critical context, the legacy of roman-
ticism had coincided with the rise of science in the last century.
The results of this conflation were various. Francis Mulhern, in
The Moment of 'Scrutiny' (1979), has suggested that in order to
understand modern British critical thought we have to look back
to the late Victorian attempts at reconciling the loss of faith and
the new science. He discusses Matthew Arnold, of course, but also
T. H. Greene, who rejected Arnold's call for poetry to be the new
source of moral value. Greene's solution was a combination of a
belief in inevitable progress and an exacting sense of moral obli-
gation. It was this metaphysical idealism that G. E. Moore and
Bertrand Russell attacked. Mulhern argues that this is the real back-
ground of the modern humanist's feeling that his culture is in peril,
threatened by science and the resultant decline of religion, which
had once offered an authoritative value system. Mulhern also claims
this is the source of the subjective or impressionistic criticism that
T. S. Eliot lamented and, we might add, that Santayana tried to
subvert in defining aesthetic beauty as "value positive, intrinsic,
and objectified."7
The Bloomsbury aesthetics to which Mauron was first exposed,
via Roger Fry, was very different from Arnold's or Greene's. It
recalled, rather, in some ways, the long British empirical tradition
190
 Conclusion
dating back at least to Shaftesbury, the tradition of "taste" or innate
feeling as the basis of art and morality, in that it was by definition
directed toward the good - and therefore toward the beautiful and
the true. But G. E. Moore's definition of aesthetics made "taste"
into "contemplation," and although the beautiful was not identical
with the good, it defined itself in reference to it: Beauty was "that
of which the admiring contemplation is good in itself."8 We have
seen that Moore was the authority upon which Clive Bell had based
his theories in Art, but Bell's formalism, like Fry's, was one "tainted"
by psychology: significant form was recognized by its provoking
of a specifically aesthetic emotion.
An early (1925) unpublished paper by Mauron, entitled "La
Methode experimental en esthetique," reveals the influence of not
only Fry's formalism and psychologism, but also his impression-
ism. Mauron lists the factors upon which beauty in art depends:
"L'ordre, la mesure, la sobriete, l'harmonie, l'invention, l'imagi-
nation, le feu, la passion, la vie, que sais-je encore? Ou, si Ton veut
descendre aux techniques, l'equilibre des valeurs, l'atmosphere, la
plasticite, le rhythme, la surete de developpement, la richesse in-
strumentale, la syntaxe parfaite, la beaute des images" (1925c: 13).
This grab bag of qualities reveals all of the same, often conflicting,
forces to whose power psycho critique would later testify. Although,
in his work on Giraudoux, Mauron claimed to bracket the issue of
moral evaluation ("Pour notre part, nous n'avons pas a porter de
jugement moral."), he did not hesitate to make what are in fact
overt value judgments - both aesthetic and psychological: "Le mythe
personnel, projete sur l'ecran du monde reel afin de creer l'oeuvre,
s'y adapte d'autant moins que l'angoisse est plus forte. Giraudoux
n'etait pas assez grand poete pour forcer cette adaptation" (1971b
[1964]: 271).
How could Mauron make such a judgment if he believed psy-
chocritique to be scientific, because, as Mauron himself asserted, the
concepts of value and a hierarchy of values were foreign to science?
There is obviously a problem, although it is true that he was not
denying that value existed; he had only declared the issue "etrangere
au domaine de la science" (1968a [1950]: 194). Mauron knew that
his positivistic trust in science was perceived as threatening by some
metaphysical aestheticians who probably, as had others in the pre-
vious century, connected science to the loss of faith and, conse-
quently, to the loss of standards of value. But in choosing
191
 Conclusion
psychoanalysis as the science in which to ground psycho critique, and
in developing a primarily expressive psychological theory of both
the structures and origins of art, Mauron had revealed himself to
be the heir not only of nineteenth-century scientific positivism,
French or English (Comte or Darwin), but also of romanticism.
Mauron became, I have argued, a kind of emblematic modern
figure, torn between the two poles of an attractive but unmanage-
able distinction - that is, between subjectivity and objectivity, or
between romanticism and classicism, in Friedrich Schlegel's ter-
minology.9 During the twenties and thirties, when Mauron was
most deeply engaged in British aesthetic debates, the terms of this
distinction in the Anglo-American context were often the latter
ones. In 1923, Herbert Grierson gave the Leslie Stephen Lecture at
Cambridge and entitled it "Classical and Romantic." In this talk
he summarized perhaps most concisely the roots of the dichoto-
mous identity of criticism that I feel to be still operative today:

Classic and romantic - these are the systole and diastole of

the human heart in history. They represent on the one hand
our need of order, of synthesis, of a comprehensive yet def-
inite, therefore exclusive as well as inclusive, ordering of thought
and feeling and action; and on the other hand the inevitable
finiteness of every human synthesis, the inevitable discovery
that. . .the classical has become the conventional.10

A few years later, Herbert Read argued that the central problem
of literary criticism was that of the romantic and classical tendencies
of the artistic mind: that is, the tendency to fantasy, to diving into
the primitive, elemental unconscious, and the tendency toward
"ideals of moral beauty, of plastic form, of order and architecture."
He argued that the critic had to see this division as "the natural
expression of a biological opposition in human nature."11 The basis
for this assertion was Jung, and Read later felt that the scientificity
of psychoanalysis had authorized the revaluation and redefinition
of romanticism in terms of the Freudian id. Like Mauron, Read
argued that the mystic and the artist were the ones who could best
tap the deepest intuitions of the mind.
Although the terms of reference here sound very different from
those of the present humanist-poststructuralist debate, I would like
to suggest that they are in fact very similar. Whether we believe
192
 Conclusion
art to be the expression of the moral and aesthetic imagination of
a writer or else the formal product of ecriture, this contemporary
difference reflects the same underlying subjective-objective di-
chotomy (of art as well as criticism) that we have been examining
in Mauron's work. In John Dewey's early terms: "What is called
'classic' stands for objective order and relations embodied in a work;
what is called 'romantic' stands for the freshness and spontaneity
that comes from individuality."12 But the situation today is even
more complex, for in these terms the modern, liberal humanist
tradition is itself dichotomous, a product of both romantic and
classical impulses. This is what Wimsatt too suggested when he
claimed that modern aesthetics lay somewhere between two radi-
cally opposed axes of aesthetic theory: sensation and cognition, or
the romantic affective and expressive theories of aesthetic emotion
in creation and response, and the classical formal theories of unity
in multiplicity.13 T. E. Hulme had been surprised to find Maurice
Denis (and Roger Fry) referring to the postimpressionists as clas-
sical, though he saw that this was a classicism that had passed
through romanticism and was a kind of synthesis.14 In his famous
essay, "Romanticism and Classicism," Hulme had argued for the
need for a classic revival. In criticism, this would have meant a
move away from impressionism or the infinitely receptive attitude
of the critic to what he called "accurate, precise and definite de-
scription." Is contemporary semiotics, for example, then, classical?
It is, by this definition, but I doubt that most humanists would
agree: For them, the concept of criticism as interpretation and eval-
uation, and not just description, has never been something to be
ignored, even if romanticism itself was to be left behind. Witness
Ivor Winters' statement: "The poem is good in so far as it makes
a defensible rational statement about a given human experi-
ence. . .and at the same time communicates the emotion which
ought to be motivated by that rational understanding of the
experience."15
It is no accident that Winter's and Hulme's writings were con-
temporary with those of Fry: Their classicism and his formalism
were not different in some of their basic presuppositions. Yet, just
as form had come to be defined by Fry in terms of romantic affective
psychology (the aesthetic emotion), so the classicism of a modernist
critic like T. S. Eliot would not go untouched by romanticism,
even by impressionism. In citing, as the ideal definition of criticism,

193
 Conclusion
Remy de Gourmont's "eriger en lois ses impressions personnelles,"
Eliot revealed not only his formalist love of order and classical
desire for orthodoxy and authority, but also his reliance on personal
intuition. His criticism also manifests this same dichotomy. For all
his urging of the impersonal in criticism, Eliot would often resort
to statements such as: "I feel, rather than observe, an inner uncer-
tainty and lack of confidence and conviction in Matthew Arnold."16
Impersonal meant nonexpressive, but not, obviously, nonimpres-
sionistic. Eliot tried to evade this secret romanticism by claiming
to base his impressions on literary tradition and on the spiritual
sanctions of Christian orthodoxy. We have seen a similar kind of
evasive behavior in Mauron as well, but the orthodoxy there was
psychoanalysis. (He once confidently asserted: "Trente annees de
travaux ont prouve sans conteste que Tart et la morale sont, dans
une certaine mesure, expliques par la psychanalyse" [1968a (1950):
161].) Mauron's criticism was like Eliot's in the sense that, for all
their recourse to authority, both of their interpretive procedures
were, in theory, based not only upon the specificity and comparison
of texts, but also upon the availability of extratextual information
necessary to interpretation. "Qua work of art," wrote Eliot, "the
work of art cannot be interpreted; there is nothing to interpret; we
can only criticize it according to standards, in comparison to other
works of art; and for 'interpretation' the chief task is the presentation
of relevant historical facts which the reader is not assumed to
know."17 If we replace "historical" with "psychological," and add
that psycho critique itself was not interested, as was traditional crit-
icism, in art qua art, this statement could apply to Mauron's own
intentions.
There were many other critics too who were aware of the tension
between romantic expression and the classical respect for form and
craft, as well as for authority. F. R. Leavis comes to mind, but it
was his rejection of empirical presuppositions about psychology
that made it possible for him to synthesize expressive and moral
perspectives. For Leavis, as John Casey has explained, "inner states
are essentially expressed and judged in terms of objective qualities;
there is no room for essentially private emotions, subjective re-
sponses."18 Mauron would have basically agreed with this, but his
ideas of "objective qualities" would have involved the universal
psychoanalytic "facts" he had learned from Freud and the ego psy-
chologists. Although Mauron and Leavis were very different critics,
194
 Conclusion
the subjective-objective dichotomy could be seen to underlie the
critical assumptions and practices of each.
New Critics have often been accused of using a false objectivity
to cover the advocacy of their own subjective ways of reading.19
The New Criticism, it has been suggested, was perhaps as pre-
scriptive and as judgmental as the criticism it contested. The same
was true of psychocritique, for in both cases, even the act of selecting
a work for study was implicitly an act of evaluation. But this would
be true of any critical practice based on interpretation of particular
works. On the contrary, in the noninterpretive poetics of a formalist
like Propp, for instance, the claim for objectivity would come from
the search for larger patterns among many works. As in psychocri-
tique, the surface particularity of texts would be sacrificed to latent
patterns. All works, from these formalist angles of vision, would
look alike, disturbingly alike to the romantic humanist who prizes
individuality.
Is not the notion of an empirical aesthetics, however, one that
endeavors to draw the individual back into the process, at least in
the person of the critic? When Mauron defined the beauty of Mal-
larme's "Toast funebre" as residing in "une attitude psychique in-
consdente" (1968a [1950]: 151), he was offering an aesthetic
justification for his psychocritical orientation: "Fouiller l'incon-
scient de Mallarme, apres tout, ne serait qu'une indiscretion et un
manque de piete si le but poursuivi n'etait cette beaute de Foeuvre
qu'a notre sens toute connaissance vraie enrichit" (38). Psycho-
analysis and aesthetics were to come together in the interpretation
of the empirical observations of the critic. There have been, of
course, other more systematic critical attempts to bring about this
same conjunction of science and art, both in the nineteenth and in
the twentieth centuries, many of them harkening back to Aristotle,
the model of the scientist-critic. To list only a few: R. G. Moulton's
preface to his Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist (1885), Herbert Din-
gle's Science and Literary Criticism (1949), F. L. Lucas's Literature and
Psychology (1951), and important articles by John Rickman, Hanna
Segal, and Michael Wallach.20 Mauron, however, actually only did
what many an empirical philosopher and romantic theorist before
him had done: He translated his version of existing, often tradi-
tional, theories of creative production and its products into a new
vocabulary; but this time the model was not the mental elements
and faculties of Newtonian mechanics or of organic biology, but

195
 Conclusion
rather of Freudian psychoanalysis. But in using Freud as orthodoxy,
Mauron was, as we have seen, much less like the practitioners of
the nouvelle critique than those university critics they fought. In-
stead of being based on philology or history, Mauron's erudition
was psychoanalytic, and he used Freud's authority as an absolute
criterion in interpretive analysis. The scientific attitude of the critic
in psycho critique was also not like that of the New Critic, although
both had looked to science for the analogy to objective literary
criticism that attempted - in vain - to transcend subjective impres-
sionism. And it was the positivist as well as (and together with)
the romantic inheritance that was probably responsible, in historical
terms, for that critical dichotomy that, I have argued, governs us
still.
Literary studies today are being pulled, perhaps by fashion as
much as by conviction, in two opposite directions, and the tension
in which we teach and read literature is a tension between defining
the critical enterprise as a "humanistic discipline" and defining it
as a "pursuit of signs." This tension is not particularly new to the
immediate present. We are witnessing only its most recent mani-
festations. I agree with David Bleich's exposing of the subjective
bases of much modern criticism that pretends to objectivity, but I
do not see that this justifies labeling the modern "paradigm" purely
"subjective."21 The extremes of critical practice today would not
exist if this were really the case. If there is a modern critical par-
adigm, it is a dichotomous one that allows each pole of critical
strategy to define itself against its opposite.22 In this sense, the
assumptions, the methodology, and the observations of Charles
Mauron are typical, despite their idiosyncrasy; typical, because of
those very contradictory elements that have limited his success in
France today: his positivism, his nonlinguistic formalism, and his
impressionism.
The current debate in literary studies is not simply one between
two national cultures, a matter of mutual chauvinism and insularity,
though no doubt this plays some role. As Mauron's work so acutely
reveals, the subjectiveobjective dichotomy crosses national bound-
aries, uniting modern thinkers as diverse as Roger Fry and Sigmund
Freud, or - more recently - A. J. Greimas and Fredric Jameson,
David Lodge and Jacques Lacan. The critical community today is
- as never before - an international one, and the potential for in-
tellectual cross-fertilization is great. To seek to deny this potential
196
 Conclusion
is self-defeating. The increasing professionalism of literary studies
has perhaps been responsible for the debilitating division into war-
ring critical camps: the liberal humanists, the semioticians, the
poststructuralists, the Lacanians, and so on. Whether it be a case
of British resistance to continental theories or of North American
enthusiasm for critical fashion, in both of these (admittedly over-
simplified) instances, some perspective would seem to be needed,
and the recognition of the historical paradigm in which both operate
might provide that perspective. Charles Mauron struggled with
both poles of the subjectiveobjective dichotomy, unable to opt for
either. He wanted to be a scientist who studied art, and he wanted
thereby to bestow upon art equal value to that of any other object
worthy of serious investigation. He felt that in the twentieth century
we had come to respect the workings of science in all fields except
that of literary studies, where we seemed to have tried to turn back
the clock to the last century. To ignore the presuppositions and
methods of modern science was not the way Mauron chose to deal
with the threat to the humanist or aesthetic tradition. He decided,
instead, to defend art with science (or with what he perceived to
be science). That he may not have been wise in his choice of or-
thodoxy or convincing in his results does not detract from the value
of his attempt, for Mauron faced squarely, as few have, the im-
plications of science for aesthetics, and in doing so clearly mani-
fested the tension between the two extremes of the dichotomous
paradigm that still governs criticism today. Mauron opened Des
metaphores obsedantes au my the personnel with a statement of scientific
methodological intent: "J'aborderai done mon etude dans un esprit
volontiers empirique experimental meme" (1962: 9). But within
three pages he had added: "La connaissance essentielle de l'oeuvre
d'art echappe a l'enquete scientifique. Elle est une revelation qui se
prolonge en relations personnelles."

197
 APPENDIX A

CRITICAL WORKS OF CHARLES MAURON

REFERRED TO IN THIS STUDY

A PARENTHETICAL SYSTEM of notation will be used

throughout the text for reference to Charles Mauron's
critical writings. The purpose of this device is to reduce
the number of endnotes required, and to give the reader the nec-
essary historical sense of the date of composition.
Immediately following the quotation or mention in the text, this
information will appear in parentheses: date of publication of edition
used, (in brackets) original date of publication or of composition
(in the case of available manuscripts), and page number. In the case
of unpublished typescripts, the date of composition is provided,
and the page number. All of the typescripts cited herein are in the
possession of Mme Alice Mauron.
Mauron's many works on the literary and linguistic issues of his
native Provence do not appear in this listing, unless directly con-
cerned with the problems studied.

1925a "Unity and Diversity in Art." The Burlington Magazine, 47, No.
1 (September 1925), 121-4; No. 2 (October 1925), 176, 181-2; No. 3
(November 1925), 246-8, 251. (Reprinted in 1927a: 9-60; TS, "La Com-
plexite necessaire.")
1925b "Le Couleur et le son." Unpublished TS.
1925c "La Methode experimentale en esthetique." Unpublished TS, part
of which is 1929a (1925).
201
 Appendix A
1927a (1925) The Nature of Beauty in Art and Literature. Translated and
prefaced by Roger Fry. London: Hogarth Press, 1927.
(I, "Unity and Diversity in Art," is 1925a.)
(II, "Beauty in Literature," is address to Decades de Pontigny, Septem-
ber, 1925.)
1927b "Ramon Fernandez et l'intuition." Cahiers du Sud, No. 90 (mai
1927), pp. 325-45-
1927c "Concerning 'Intuition'." Monthly Criterion, 3 (September 1927),

1929a (1925) "La Methode experimentale et les philosophes." Cahiers de

VEtoile, No. n (septembre-octobre 1929), pp. 700-7. (Part I is 1925c.)
1929b "Science et mysticisme." Cahiers de I'Etoile, No. 12 (novembre-
decembre 1929), pp. 830-48.
1930a " O n Reading Einstein." Criterion, 10 (October 1930), 23-31.
1930b "Tentatives de la poesie moderne." Lecture TS.
1931a "L'Art et l'intelligence." Lecture TS.
1931b "Le Probleme du vers fixe." Lecture TS.
1933a "The Cow." Criterion, 12 (April 1933), 454-67.
1933b Letter to the editor. Criterion, 12 (May 1933), 661-5.
1935 "Short Essay on Perfection." Criterion, 15 (April 1935), 37990.
1938a [1936] Introduction and commentaries to Stephane Mallarme, Poems.
Translated by Roger Fry. London: Chatto & Windus, 1938.
1938b Preface to Part II. In Julian Bell: Essays, Poems and Letters, ed.
Quentin Bell. London: Hogarth Press, 1938, pp. 233-56.
J
939 ( I 93 I ) "Fontenelle." Tendances, 5 (15 mai 1939), 329-45. (Originally
written in preparation for 1931 lecture series in London and Cambridge.)
1942a "Mallarme et le Tao." Cahiers du Sud, No. 246 (mai 1942), pp.
351-67.
1942b "Sur la sincerite." Fusees, Nos. 4-5 (1942), pp. 6-15.
1943 "Montee du songe." Cahiers du Sud, No. 259 (juin 1943), pp. 415-
29. (Reprinted verbatim in 1947: 43-73.)
1944 "L'Epee, Tor et l'esprit." Cahiers du Sud, No. 266 (aout 1944), pp.
34269. (Reprinted verbatim in 1947: 77-137, plus long footnote on
Keynes, p. 121.)
1945 Sagesse de Veau. Marseille: Robert Laffont, 1945.
1947 L'Homme triple. Paris: Laffont, 1947. (Includes 1943, 1944.)
1948a "Une Nouvelle Explication de Mallarme." Figaro Litteraire, 10 avril
1948, p. 6. (Reprinted verbatim in 1968a [1950]: 13-19.)
1948b "Psychanalyse d'Herodiade." Cahiers du Sud, No. 291 (1948), pp.
288-97. (Reprinted verbatim in 1968a [1950]: 105-18.)
1948c "Le 'Coup de des.' " Les Lettres, special issue on Stephane Mal-
larme, 3 (1948), 155-77. (Pp- 156-77 reprinted verbatim in 1968a [1950]:
119-42.)

202
 Critical works ofMauron
1948c! "Introduction a la psychanalyse de Mallarme: L'alienation poe-
tique." Les Temps Modernes, No. 36 (septembre 1948), pp. 455-77.
(Reprinted with minor variations in 1968a [1950]: 41-62, 65-6, 68-9,
191-200, 211-13.)
1948c "Le Miroitement en-dessous." Les Cahiers du Nord (Stele pour Mal-
larme), No. 21 (1948), pp. 20816. (Reprinted verbatim in 1968a [1950]:
20-8.)
1949a "Nerval et la psycho-critique." Cahiers du Sud, No. 293 (1949),
pp. 76-97.
1949b "La Descente au labyrinthe." Cahiers du Sud, No. 298 (1949), pp.
431-2.
1949c "L'Homme et la liberte creatrice." TS of lecture delivered 29 N o -
vember 1949, Institut Franqais, London.
1950 "Profondeurs de la tragedie." Les Cahiers du Nord, No. 87-8 (1950),
pp. 255-62.
1952 (1949) "L'Art et la psychanalyse." Psyche, 7, No. 56 (1952), 24-36.
(Originally lecture given at Oxford and London, November 1949.)
1953a "Notes sur la structure de 1'inconscient chez Vincent van Gogh."
Psyche, 8, No. 75 (Janvier 1953), 24-31; No. 76 (fevrier 1953), I24~43
Nos. 77-8 (mars, avril 1953), 203-9. (Reprinted in 1976 [1951-9]: 30-
77.)
!953b Vincent et Theo van Gogh: une symbiose. Amsterdam: Instituut voor
Moderne Kunst d'Amsterdam, 1953. (Originally lecture at Municipal
Museum of Amsterdam, 31 March 1953; later reprinted verbatim in
1976 [I95I-9]: 94-H2.)
1953c "Presentation" to Jean de Beucken, Un Portrait de Vincent van Gogh.
1938; rpt. Paris: Gallimard, 1953.
!953d " J u n g e t l a psychocritique." Le Disque Vert (1953), pp. 190-204.
1954a Vincent et Gauguin. Catalogue of exhibit. "La Provence et les
peintres." Musee Reattu, Aries (juillet-aout 1954). (Reprinted verbatim
in 1976 [1951-9]: 121-4.)
1954b Estudi mistralen. Aix-en-Provence: Librairie de l'Universite, 1954.
(In Provencal.)
1955a (1954) "La Vierge qui fuit." In Melanges Mistraliens. Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1955, pp. 127-45. (Translated from the Prov-
enqal from 1954b.)
X
955b "Andromaque." Presence, 6 (hiver 1955-6), 44-62. (Reprinted ver-
batim in 1969 [1954]: 52-69.)
1957a (1955) "Le Vocabulaire affectif de 'Mireio.' " Actes et memoires du
1st Congres International de Langue et Litterature du Midi de la France (1955).
Avignon: Palais du Roure, 1957, pp. 373-80.
1957b "Vincent et Monticelli." Vincent van Gogh. Catalogue of exhibit.
Musee Cantini, Marseille (12 March-28 April 1957). (Reprinted ver-
batim in 1976 [1951-9]: 124-30.)

203
 Appendix A
!957c "La Personnalite affective de Baudelaire." Orbis Litterarum, 12 (1957),
203-21.
!957d "Pour une therapeutique du langage." In Melanges de linguistique
et de litterature romane a la memoire d'Istvdn Frank, n.p: Universitat des
Saarlandes, 1957, pp. 4218.
1958 "La Psychocritique et sa methode." In Theories et problemes: contri-
butions a la methodologie litteraire. Orbis Litterarum, Supplement 2. Copen-
hague: Munksgaard, 1958, pp. 104-16. (Translated into German as "Die
Psychokritik und ihre Methode" in Psychoanalytische Literaturkritik.
Munchen: Fink, 1975, pp. 276-88.)
1959a (1954) Rene Seyssaud, mon ami. St. Remy-de-Provence: l'Escolo dis
Aupiho, 1959. (Lecture of 13 February 1954 at Musee Cantini, Marseille.)
1959b "Vincent et Theo." L'Arc, 8 (automne 1959), pp. 3-12. (Reprinted
with variants in 1976 [1951-9]: 94-112.)
1959c Van Gogh au seuil de la Provence. Aries: Mairie d'Arles, 1959. (Lec-
ture at Aix-en-Provence, 10 October 1959; reprinted in 1976 [1951-9]:
15 5-77-)
1961a (1958) "Le Vocabulaire affectif de Mistral." In Proceedings of IF
Congres International de Langue et Litterature du Midi de la France. Aix-
en-Provence: Centre d'Etudes Provenqales de la Faculte des Lettres,
1961, pp. 417-27. (Paper to conference at Aix, 2-8 September 1958.)
1961b "Mistral et Baudelaire." In B. A. Taladoire, ed., Congres de Civ-
ilisation et Culture Provencales. Avignon: Palais du Roure, 1961, pp. loo-
s'
1962 Des metaphores obsedantes au my the personnel: introduction a la psycho-
critique. Paris: Jose Corti, 1962, 1964.
1963 a Introduction to American edition of his Introduction to the Psycho-
analysis of Mallarme. Translated by Archibald Henderson, Jr., and Will
L. McLendon. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1963, pp. 1-22. (New introduction to translation of 1968a [1950].)
1963b (1959) "Le Livre." In American edition (1963a), pp. 237-49. (Writ-
ten as addition to American edition in July 1959; published in French
original in 1968 in 1968a [1950]: 241-54.)
1964a Psychocritique du genre comique. Paris: Jose Corti, 1964.
1964b Mallarme par lui-meme. Paris: Seuil, 1964.
1964c "Des metaphores obsedantes au mythe personnel: introduction a
la psychocritique." Information litteraire, 16 (Janvier 1964), 1-8.
1965a (1963) "Manon Lescaut et le melange des genres." In L'Abbe Pre-
vost. Aix-en-Provence: Ophrys, 1965, pp. 113-18. (Paper to Colloque
d'Aix-en-Provence, 20-1 December 1963.)
1965b TS report on thesis (doctorat de troisieme cycle) of Mme Berna-
dette Dischamps, "Contribution a l'etude du 'Groupe de Bloomsbury':
constitution du groupe et rapports de la pensee et de l'esthetique de ses
membres." (TS dated 30 June 1965.)

204
 Critical works ofMauron
1966a Le Dernier Baudelaire. Paris: Jose Corti, 1966.
1966b TS transcription of interview with Pierre Sipriot. ORTF, 19 N o -
vember 1966.
1967a (1941) Mallarme I'obscur. Paris: Jose Corti, 1967. (Originally pub-
lished, Paris: Denoel, 1941; "gloses" mostly appear in 1938a in English
as commentaries to Fry's translations.)
1967b (1966) "Les Personnages de Victor Hugo: etude psychocritique."
In Victor Hugo, Oeuvres completes, II, ed. Jean Massin. Paris: Le Club
francais du livre, 1967, IXLII.
1967c (1966) "Le Rire Baudelairien" (1966). Europe, Nos. 456-7 (avril-
mai 1967), PP- 54-6i.
1968a (1950) Introduction a la psychanalyse de Mallarme. 1950; rpt. Paris,
Neuchatel: La Baconniere, 1968. (Translated into English by Archibald
Henderson, Jr., and Will L. McLendon as Introduction to the Psychoanalysis
of Mallarme. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1963. Additions to American edition included in this 1968 French edi-
tion: See 1963a and 1963b [1959].)
1968b (1964-5) Phedre. Paris: Jose Corti, 1968. (From lectures at Faculte
des Lettres et Sciences Humaines, Aix-en-Provence, winter 19645.)
1968c (1966) "Premieres Recherches sur la structure inconsciente des Fleurs
du mal." In Annales de la Faculte des Lettres et Sciences Humaines de
Nice (Baudelaire: Actes du Colloque de Nice [25-7 mai 1967]), 4-5 (1968),
pp. 131-7. (Originally a lecture at Aix-en-Provence, November 1966.)
1969 (1954) L'Inconscient dans Voeuvre et la vie de Racine. Paris: Jose Corti,
1969. (Thesis presented in June 1954 to Universite d'Aix-Marseille;
published first, Aix-en-Provence: Annales de la Faculte des Lettres,
1957.)
1970a (193 5) Aesthetics and Psychology. Translated by Roger Fry and Kath-
erinejohn. Port Washington, N.Y., and London: Kennikat Press, 1970.
(First published, London: Hogarth Press, 1935.)
1970b (1965) "Les Origines d'un mythe personnel chez l'ecrivain." In
Critique sociologique et critique psychanalytique. Bruxelles: Editions de l'ln-
stitut de Sociologie, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, 1970, pp. 91109.
(Colloquium paper, 1965.)
1970c (1966) "Poesie-Traduction." Points et contrepoints (Paris), 95 (juin-
juillet 1970), 61-2.
1971a (1962) "Lecture psychocritique." In Jean Bellemin-Noel, ed., Les
Critiques de notre temps et Valery. Paris: Gamier, 1971, pp. 133-48. (Taken
from 1962: 81-104.)
1971b (1964) Le Theatre de Giraudoux. Paris: Jose Corti, 1971. (Edited
from MSS by Alice Mauron.)
1976 (1951-9) Van Gogh: Etudes psychocritiques. Paris: Jose Corti, 1976.
(Includes all earlier articles on van G o g h - 1953a, 1953b, 1954a, 1957b,

205
 Appendix A
!959b, 1959c - and articles from Le Provencal column from 19519;
there are also three new papers [from MSS]: "Quatre Notes psycho-
critiques" [1951], pp. 79-91; "Note sur le role de l'argent dans les
relations Vincent-Theo" [1955], pp. 118-20; "Deux notes sur van Gogh
et la couleur" [1959 and 1953 respectively], pp. 151-4].)
1977a (1959) "Quelques traits de E. M. Forster." CERVE, Nos. 4-5
(1977), pp. 5-7. (Reprinted from Figaro Litteraire, 10 January 1959.)
1977b (1959) "Amitie." CERVE, Nos. 4-5 (1977), pp. n - 1 3 . (Reprinted
from Le Provencal, 17 February 1959.)
1977c (1962) "Le Manage, aout 1962." CERVE, Nos. 4-5 (1977), pp.
23-6.
I977d "Notepour EMF." CERVE, Nos. 4-5 (1977), pp. 8-10. (Undated
MS.)
I977e "Agnes." CERVE, Nos. 4-5 (1977), pp. 17-18. (Undated MS.)
I977f "L'Education." CERVE, Nos. 4-5 (1977), pp. 14-16. (Undated
MS.)
X
977g "A propos de The Longest Journey 'The cow is there': Le bien-et-
mal." CERVE, Nos. 4-5 (1977), pp. 21-2. (Undated MS.)
1977I1 "La Tendance orphique." CERVE, Nos. 4-5 (1977), pp. 19-20.
(Undated MS.)

206
 APPENDIX B

TRANSLATIONS BY CHARLES MAURON

I T WAS ROGER FRY who first started Mauron on his trans-

lating career. To rekindle the almost-blind young man's interest
in his life, Fry helped him begin translating Forster's A Passage
to India. With Marie Mauron's help, the work was completed and
sent off to Gabriel Marcel, then director of the "Feux croises"
collection at Plon in Paris. Marcel was not at all pleased with the
translation and demanded extensive changes. Many of these were
rejected by Forster and Mauron both: For example, Marcel cor-
rected deliberate errors introduced by author and translator in order
to capture Hindu English. Forster suspected that this was a case of
Parisian snobbery toward the provinces, and attacked Plon for
wanting to mutilate his text without his permission.1 Mauron, for
his part, replied point by point to Marcel's objections, only to learn
that Marcel had never read the English version at all, and therefore
could have had no idea that certain passages, accused of being ironic
in French, were indeed intended as such in the English. Marcel
continued, however, to complain of Mauron's stubbornness and
intransigence until Forster threatened to forbid publication of the
novel.
After this stormy start, Mauron's career settled down. He trans-
lated stories by Fry and Forster before tackling longer works, in-
cluding Virginia Woolf s Orlando and Flush. Earlier he had translated
the "Time Passes" section of To the Lighthouse, a difficult task,
207
 Appendix B
which Fry felt Mauron carried through very well.2 The Orlando
story, however, began to look like a repeat of the first Forster
novel. Virginia Woolf s friends tried to convince her that Mauron
was not a good translator,3 but she nevertheless asked him to con-
tinue. In the spring of the next year, she sent his version to her
friend Jane Bussy, sister of Lytton Strachey and wife of the French
painter Simon Bussy, asking her to see if Orlando by Mauron was
at all like Orlando by Woolf,4 as she had heard conflicting reports.
Jane Bussy replied that the translation was fine and, professing her
relief, Woolf promised to "bruit it about."5
Mauron then went on to translate Katherine Mansfield, D. H.
Lawrence, T. E. Lawrence, and Laurence Sterne before, in 1947,
attempting his second Forster novel, A Room with a View. In 1950,
his translation of Howard's End was about to appear when Forster
received word that the ever-vigilant Gabriel Marcel had once again
found the translation defective and had had it revised by Jean-
Aubry, a translator (of Conrad) whose value was, he claimed, un-
contested.6 Mauron, on the other hand, he wrote to Forster, was
being incomprehensibly obstinate in rejecting changes. Forster's
reply to Marcel's remarks about his friend's "unjustified preten-
sions" was predictable: He rejected all changes on principle, in full
support of Mauron. It is interesting, however, that he never did
study the French version in detail. When exactly the same scene
was played out three years later, over Where Angels Fear to Tread,
the question of Parisian snobbery toward unknown provincials again
suggested itself.
Yet, Jean-Aubry himself reviewed Mauron's translation of T. E.
Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom in very positive terms,7 and in
Mauron's Times obituary, Quentin Bell wrote that Mauron "always
used the French language with delicacy and affection, finding his
equivalents with scrupulous exactitude and keeping the pace and
the tone of the original."8 For a blind man, the task of translation
can never be an easy one. That Mauron continued and succeeded
as well as he did is a tribute to his perseverance and his ear for
language, and also to the untiring help of his two wives, Marie and
Alice, and of friends such as Quentin Bell. In one of his weekly
columns of Le Provencal, entitled "Plaisirs du langage" (25 sep-
tembre 1955), Mauron wrote that a translation was like a musical
transcription (for example, of a piano work into a work for
orchestra):
208
 Translations by Charles Mauron

Pour traduire a peu pres bien, par exemple, de l'anglais en

franqais, il faut d'abord . . . traduire de l'anglais en rien, puis
de rien en franqais . . . L'esprit du traducteur remonte done
vers l'impulsion, de la phrase vers l'etat d'esprit muet qui en
est l'origine. Ce faisant, il abandonne la langue originale; puis
ay ant tache de confondre son intention avec celle de l'auteur,
il repart sur une autre voie et tente de dire d'un trait, dans la
seconde langue, ce que l'auteur a dit dans la premiere.

TRANSLATIONS OF E. M. FORSTER

Route des Indes. Paris: Plon, 1927. (Reprinted in 1947.)

"L'Omnibus celeste." Revue de Geneve (juillet 1928), pp. 781-99.
" U n Aspect du roman: dessin et rythme." Revue de Geneve (fevrier 1929),
pp. 163-78.
"Pharos et Pharillon" (extraits). Echanges, 2 (mars 1930), pp. 5263.
"Aspects du roman." Mesures, No. 3 (15 juillet 1938), pp. 15-40.
Avec vue sur VArno. Paris: Laffont, 1947. (Reprinted in Livre de Poche,
1970.)
"La Sirene." Echo, No. 23 (juillet 1948), pp. 629-37.
"Au Fil de l'lnde." La Licorne, No. 3 (automne 1948), pp. 117-26.
Le Legs de Mrs. Wilcox. Paris: Plon, 1950.
"Recit d'une panique." Le Figaro Litteraire, 16 fevrier 1952.
Le Plus Long des Voyages. Paris: Plon, 1952.
"Ce queje crois." Mercure de France, 1 juillet 1953, pp. 385-95.
Monteriano. Paris: Plon, 1954.
"De Senectute." Figaro Litteraire, 10 Janvier 1959.
"Dans la rue Lepsius." Unpublished TS.
"A quoi rime cette histoire." Unpublished TS.

TRANSLATIONS OF VIRGINIA WOOLF

"Le Temps passe." Commerce, No. 10 (hiver 1926), pp. 89-133.

Orlando. Paris: Stock, 1931. (Reprinted in Oeuvre romanesque. Paris: Stock,
I974-)
"Vie de Flush." Revue des deux mondes (1934).
Flush. Paris: Stock, 1935.

TRANSLATION OF ROGER FRY

"Moustiques." Commerce, No. 6 (printemps 1926), pp. 147-54.

209
 Appendix B

TRANSLATIONS OF T. E. LAWRENCE
Les Sept Piliers de la sagesse. Paris: Payot, 1936.
he Desert de Sin. Paris: Payot, 1963.

TRANSLATION OF LAURENCE STERNE

Vie et opinions de Tristram Shandy Gentilhomme. Paris: Laffont, 1946. (Re-
printed, Paris: 10/18, U.G.E., 1975.)

TRANSLATION OF D. H. LAWRENCE

Fantaisie de Vinconscient. Paris: Stock, 1932.

TRANSLATION OF KATHERINE MANSFIELD

Pension allemande. Paris: Stock, 1930.

TRANSLATION OF T. F. POWYS

"John Pardy et les vagues." Commerce, No. 16 (ete 1928), pp. 101-18.

TRANSLATION OF I. ZANGWILL

Tragedies du ghetto. Paris: Hazan, 1928.

210
 APPENDIX C

PUBLISHED POETRY AND PROSE OF

CHARLES MAURON

M AURON'S PUBLISHED literary writings date mostly

from his early prcpsychocritique period. Like Mallarme
and others of the symbolists, and no doubt because of
them, Mauron was first drawn to the prose poem as a form. He
did try his hand at a kind of short-story format, but perhaps the
response of Roger Fry, his friend, translator, and promoter, had
something to do with his turning back to the accepted and more
personally congenial form of the prose poem. Fry wrote to Charles
and Marie Mauron:

Charles' story has great literary qualities and I must re-read

it several times to get all the flavour of it, but at the first glance
I am not very sure that the idea and the form are perfectly
matched. Basically it's a poem rather than a story, and I imag-
ine that perhaps the essentials would come out with greater
clarity in a more concentrated, more elliptical, form where
one would have to guess the events. In fact, there are no
happenings: it's a succession of states of mind and everything
related only serves to indicate these states of mind.I

Perhaps Fry had a similar response to the work of Virginia Woolf,

who felt it was precisely the duty of fiction to present such states
of mind,2 but, in any event, Mauron did take his advice and turn
211
 Appendix C
to more elliptical and concentrated forms, collecting them together
in a 1930 volume. Fry, however, had already managed to get the
Princess Bassiani to publish a good number of them in Commerce
before that. Mauron's only complete volume of poetry other than
this collection is dedicated to the memory of Roger Fry. In writing
Esquisses pour le tombeau d'un peintre to the memory of his dead artist
friend, Mauron again followed in the footsteps of Mallarme, who
wrote tributes to Gautier (''Toast funebre"), Verlaine ("Tom-
beau"), Poe ("Le Tombeau d'Edgar Poe"), and Baudelaire ("Le
Tombeau de Charles Baudelaire"). A few other lyrics were first
published in journals and later incorporated as part of Mauron's
mystic meditations on contemplation and nature in Sagesse de Veau
(1945). After the mid-i94os Mauron more or less stopped publish-
ing verse, though he continued to write it for his own pleasure.
His special interest was in poetry in the language of his native
Provence.

MAURON'S PROSE AND POETRY

"Poemes." Commerce, No. 6 (hiver 1925), pp. 125-37. (Prose poems re-
printed in 1930 collection.)
"Poemes." Commerce, No. 12 (ete 1927), pp. 55-74. (Prose poems reprinted
in the 1930 collection.)
"L'Incurable (Ombres chinoises)." Cahiers du Sud (mai 1928), pp. 374-7.
(Prose.)
Poemes en prose. Published by Charles Vildrac and Claude Aveline, 1930.
(Includes the Commerce poems and a few others.)
"Les Lampes dela ville." Europe, No. 92 (15 aout 1930), pp. 545-9. (Prose.)
Esquisses pour le tombeau d'un peintre. Paris: Denoel, 1938.
"Chansons d'ermite." Poesie 41 (mai-juin 1941), pp. 58-9. (II appears,
slightly modified, in 1945: 222; and III appears in 1945: 229.)
"Quatre Poemes." Poesie 43 (juillet-aout-septembre 1943), pp. 42-4. ("Le
Mendiant sculpte," "Romance de la pauvre buche," "Souvenir de
Lao-Tseu" [reprinted in 1945: 263], "La Rose d'eau" [reprinted in
1945: 208].)
Sagesse de Veau. Paris: Laffont, 1945. (Includes many other poems, especially
in the last section.)
"Vincent van Gogh a Sant-Roumie" (and the French translation by the
author). In 1976 (1951-9): 182-3. (The Provenqal original appeared

212
 Published poetry and prose ofMauron
in Armana prouvenqau per 1946, p. 85, and was reprinted in both
Marsyas. 252 [mars-avril 1947] and Lis Aupiho [1951]. Both versions
first appeared together in 1957 in Poueto prouvengao de vuei, pp.
42-3).

213
 APPENDIX D

WORKS OF SIGMUND FREUD REFERRED

TO IN THIS STUDY

T HE NOW-STANDARD form of date reference to the

works of Freud will be used. References will appear in
parentheses in the text, giving the accepted year of pub-
lication or writing, followed by the volume and page number from
- unless otherwise stated - The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 volumes, translated from
the German under the general editorship of James Strachey, in
collaboration with Anna Freud, and assisted by Alix Strachey and
Alan Tyson (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-
Analysis, 1953-74).
Below is a list of those works cited in the text. The number
following the title is the volume of the Standard Edition in which
the work is found. If the work is shorter than a volume, page
references follow volume number.
i895d With Breuer, Joseph. Studies on Hysteria. 2.
1900a The Interpretation of Dreams. 4-5.
1901a On Dreams. 5: 631-86.
1901b The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. 6.
1905 c Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. 8.
i9O5d Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. 7: 125-243.
1907a (1906) "Delusions and Dreams in Jensen's Gradiva." 9: 7-95.
i9O7d "Contribution to a Questionnaire on Reading." 9: 245-7.
I9o8e "Creative Writers and Daydreaming." 9: 143-53.
1909c (1908) "Family Romances." 9: 237-41.

214
 Works of Freud
1910a (1909) "Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis." 11: 9-55.
1910c Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood. 11: 63-137.
I9ioe "The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words." 11: 154-61.
I9ioh "A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men" (Contributions
to the Psychology of Love 1). 11: 163-76.
I9i2e "Recommendations to Physicians Practising Psycho-Analysis"
(Papers on Technique). 12: 111-20.
1912-13 Totem and Taboo. 13: 1-161.
1913f "The Theme of the Three Caskets." 12: 289-301.
1913J "The Claims of Psycho-Analysis to Scientific Interest." 13: 164-
90.
1914b "The Moses of Michelangelo." 13: 211-36.
1914c " O n Narcissism: An Introduction." 14: 69-102.
I9i4d " O n the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement." 14: 3-66.
1916a (1915) " O n Transience." 14: 305-7.
I9i6d "Some Character-types Met with in Psycho-Analytic Work." 14:
311-33.
191617 Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. 15-16.
1917a "A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis." 17: 135-42.
1917b A Childhood Recollection from Dichtung und Wahrheit." 17: 147-
56.
1919I1 "The 'Uncanny.' " 17: 21956.
i920g Beyond the Pleasure Principle. 18: 3-64,
1923d The Ego and the Id. 19: 3-59.
igijd "Humour." 21: 161-6.
1928b "Dostoevsky and Parricide." 21: 177-96.
1930a Civilization and Its Discontents. 21: 64-145.
1930c "The Goethe Prize." 21: 207-12.
I937d Constructions in Analysis, 23: 255-70.
1942a (1905-6) "Psychopathic Characters on the Stage." 7: 305-10.
1950 (1895) "Project for a Scientific Psychology." 1: 281-397.
I954e (1887-1902) The Origins of Psycho-Analysis: Letters to Wilhelm Fliess,
Drafts and Notes: 1887-1 go2, ed. Marie Bonaparte, Anna Freud, Ernst
Kris. Translated by Eric Mosbacher and James Strachey. London: Im-
ago, 1954.

215
 NOTES

i. EARLY ROOTS: SCIENCE, BLOOMSBURY, AND ROGER FRY

P. N . Furbank, E. M. Forster: A Life, volume II, Polycrates' Ring (1914-

1970) (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1978), p. 233.
For example, Bruno Romani, in "Alcuni aspetti attuali della critica
letteraria francese," Letteratura, 14 (luglio-ottobre, 1966), 75.
Manuscript letter, dated March 1940, collection Alice Mauron.
Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry: A Biography (1940; rpt. New York & Lon-
don: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1968), p. 90.
In Denys Sutton, ed., Letters of Roger Fry (London: Chatto & Windus,
1972), II, 687.
Unpublished letter, 12 November 1933, collection Alice Mauron.
Claude Bernard, Introduction a Vetude de la medecine experimentale (1865;
rpt. Geneve: Editions du cheval aile, 1945), p. 87. The subsequent
discussion is taken from pp. 80-133 in particular.
As Zola has been accused of substituting, in error, "experimental nov-
elist." See Reino Virtanen, "Claude Bernard and the History of Ideas,"
in Francisco Grande and Maurice B. Visscher, eds., Claude Bernard and
Experimental Medicine (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman, 1967), p. 17.
The subsequent discussion is based on Poincare's The Value of Science
(1905), printed in The Foundations of Science, trans. George Bruce Halsted
(1913; rpt. Lancaster, PA: The Science Press, 1946), and his Science et
methode (1908; Paris: Flammarion, 1914).
216
 Notes to pp. 24-27
It is worth noting that when F. L. Lucas, in Literature and Psychology
(London: Cassel, 1951), pp. 1657, mentions Poincare and Freud in
the context of the conscious-unconscious-conscious alternating process
of reasoning, he is very likely indebted to his friend, Mauron, at whose
home he spent many a summer. As with Fry, the line of influence was
not always from the English academic to the almost self-taught, un-
recognized French writer, nor was it always acknowledged.
See his letters to Marie Mauron in Sutton, Letters of Roger Fry, 8 No-
vember 1919, II, 467; 26 November 1919, II, 473; 3 July 1924, II, 557.
Sutton, Letters of Roger Fry, II, 554-5.
Sutton, Letters of Roger Fry, 10 June 1925 to Marie Mauron, II, 573.
"Roger Fry," address at the Roger Fry Memorial Exhibition at the
Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, 12 July 1935; printed in Virginia
Woolf, Collected Essays, IV (London: Hogarth Press, 1967), p. 90. Her
sister, Vanessa Bell, expressed a similar feeling that Fry had created
more by making others create as well as by his own work than anyone
else could ever have done. This is expressed in an unpublished letter
to Mauron following the publication of the latter's poems on the late
Fry, Esquisses pour le tombeau d'un peintre, collection Alice Mauron.
Compare, in Sutton, Letters of Roger Fry, the letter of 9 July 1925, II,
575, and that of 20 January 1926 to Charles and Marie Mauron, which
reveal Fry's hedging on the interest of a poetic "story" Charles had
sent him (p. 591). By 8 December 1929, Fry admits to Gerald Brenan
that Mauron "hasn't the specific gift of the writer" (p. 644).
Sutton, Letters of Roger Fry, 24 April 1927, II, 602.
See Virginia Woolf, A Reflection of the Other Person: The Letters of
Virginia Woolf, IV (1929-31), ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann
(London: Hogarth Press, 1978), 2 May 1929 to Clive Bell, p. 49. See
also 5 May 1929, p. 53, and 18 May 1929, p. 59. In an earlier letter of
28 April 1929 to her sister, Virginia Woolf explains that Fry had invited
Mauron, but then had taken off, leaving Bloomsbury and the lecturer
in chaos: "Mauron is entirely unprovided for - Morgan [Forster] and
Mary are getting up a lecture at 37 [Gordon Square] on Wednesday;
no preparations have been made at Oxford; Margery Fry has disap-
peared the poor man is thinking of returning to France in despair.
So we have to ask him in" (p. 47).
A copy of Margery Fry's letter announcing Mauron's topics is to be
found among Mauron's papers, as is Mauron's agenda from 21 No-
vember to 10 December 1930, marking the eleven places and lectures
to be given.
Forster's copy of his introductory notes is attached to Mauron's own
manuscript of this lecture, collection Alice Mauron.
Laurent Lesage, "Charles Mauron in Retrospect," L'Esprit createur, 14
(Fall 1974), 266.
217
 Notes to pp. 2733

Sutton, Letters of Roger Fry, 26 June 1933 to Helen Anrep: "Charles is

so terribly good at analysis that it sometimes seems impossible to make
any positive construction that will resist his acids . . . [and] as I never
feel clear in my mind without having analysed as far as possible I have
to applaud his destruction even of my cherished ideas" (II, 681-2).
This latter part of the letter (12 November 1933) has been translated
and appears in Sutton, Letters of Roger Fry, II, 685. The earlier part
remains unpublished, collection Alice Mauron.
Sutton, Letters of Roger Fry, II, 485.
Times (London) obituary, 20 December 1966, p. 10. Bell himself was
one of these intellectuals, becoming a professional collaborator on trans-
lations as well as a personal friend, and later godfather to Mauron's
first son, Claude.
P. N . Furbank, E. M. Forster: A Life, I, The Growth of the Novelist
(i87g-igi4) (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1977), p. 206.
See Furbank, E. M. Forster: A Life, I, p. 207 on "Arctic Summer," and
also "Happiness" (review of Legrand's Macao et Cosmage) in Forster's
Abinger Harvest (London: Edward Arnold, 1936), p. 36.
Fry's reservations on this count about Forster's fiction can be seen in
Sutton, Letters of Roger Fry, 22 May 1907 to William Rothenstein, I,
284, and then to R. C. Trevelyan, I, 285; and 26 October 1922, II, 529
and 2 July 1924, II, 555 to Virginia Woolf.
David Garnett, "Forster and Bloomsbury" in Oliver Stalleybrass, ed.,
Aspects ofE. M. Forster (London: Edward Arnold, 1969), p. 34.
Forster's concern during the Second World War was equally strong
and equally warranted. Mauron was active in the Resistance and with
the Germans camped under his very olive trees, his position as Mayor
of St. Remy was not an enviable one. See Furbank, E. M. Forster: A
Life, I, p. 252.
Letter of 22 February 1936 to R. C. Trevelyan, now at the library,
Trinity College, Cambridge. My thanks to S. P. Rosenbaum for this
information.
See John Paul Russo, "A Study in Influence: The Moore-Richards
Paradigm," Critical Inquiry, 5 (1979), 683-712.
See, for instance, Roger Fry, "Retrospect," Vision and Design (London:
Chatto & Windus, 1920), p. 198; "Art and the State," Transformations
(London: Chatto & Windus, 1926), p. 48; The Artist and Psycho-Analysis
in Hogarth Essays (London: Hogarth Press, 1928), p. 283; and "The
Double Nature of Painting," translation (abridged) of 1933 address in
Brussels, in Apollo, 89 (May 1969), p. 371.
Roger Fry, Cezanne: A Study of His Development (London: Hogarth
Press, 1927), p. 64. Fry actually drafted this study while visiting Mauron.
Sutton, Letters of Roger Fry, 12 December 1919, II, 475.
Sutton, Letters of Roger Fry, letter to Wyndham Lewis, 5 April 1913,

218
 No to to pp. 3342

I 367, and to Charles Vildrac, 10 October 1918, II, 434. See also Fry's
dialogue with Prince Mirsky in 1925, cited by Sutton in his introduc-
tion, p. 80.
Sutton, Letters of Roger Fry, letter to Marie Mauron, 26 September
1925, II, 583.
Sutton, Letters of Roger Fry, letter of 20 September 1926, II, 596.
See Sutton, Letters of Roger Fry, letter to the editor of the Burlington
Magazine, August 1919, II, 453, and to Robert Bridges, 23 January
1924, II, 548. Julian Bell's description of Fry's method in "On Roger
Fry" also failed to note the contradiction. See Julian Bell: Essays, Poems
and Letters, ed. Quentin Bell (London: Hogarth Press, 1938), pp. 280-
1.

2. THE ATTRACTION OF FORMALISM

In Roger Fry, "Art and Science," Athenaeum (6 June 1919), p. 434.
Quentin Bell, Roger Fry: An Inaugural Lecture (Leeds: Leeds University
Press, 1964), p. 7.
Sutton, Letters of Roger Fry, letter to C. R. Ashbee, 22 October 1886,
I, n o .
Sutton, Letters of Roger Fry, letter to Herbert Waley, 26 August 1915,
II, 389. See also letters to Charles Vildrac, 10 October 1918, II, 435,
and to Robert Bridges, 23 January 1924, II, 548.
Frances Spalding, Roger Fry: Art and Life (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1980), p. 72.
Spalding, Roger Fry, p. 109.
Sutton, Letters of Roger Fry, I, 362.
Translated, abridged, and published as Roger Fry, "The Double Nature
of Painting," Apollo, 89 (May 1969), pp. 362-71.
Roger Fry, "Some Questions in Esthetics," Transformations, p. 7. See
also Sutton, Letters of Roger Fry, letters to R. C. Trevelyan about Moll
Flanders of 23 February 1902, I, 189, and to Goldsworthy Lowes Dick-
inson, 31 May 1913, II, 369.
See Bell's Art (1914; rpt. London: Chatto & Windus, 1928), pp. viii-
x, and Spalding, Roger Fry, pp. 164-5.
Bell, Art, p. 27. The discussion following is drawn from pp. 6-23.
See Fry, "Retrospect," pp. 195-9, f r Fry's argument here.
Fry, Cezanne, p. 51.
Fry, Cezanne, p. 47.
Pierre Guastalla, L'Esthetique et Vart (Paris: J. Vrin, 1928), p. 131.
E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel and Related Writings, ed. Oliver
Stalleybrass (1927; rpt. London: Edward Arnold, 1974), P- X45-
Forster, Aspects, pp. 15-16.
Virginia Woolf, Literary Supplement, 12 November 1927, pp. 247-8.

219
 Notes to pp. 42-51
Both are reprinted in E. M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy (1951;
rpt. London: Edward Arnold, 1972), pp. 80-1 and 88, respectively.
See Richard Shiff, "Seeing Cezanne," Critical Inquiry, 4 (1978), 769-
808.
John Rothenstein, Modern English Painters, II (1956; revised ed., London:
Macdonald and Jane's, 1976), p. 55. The motive for this remark and
for the general attack on Fry (pp. 14-15, 17, 26, 45, 52) is overtly
revenge for what he calls a "Bloomsbury vendetta" against his father.
Bell, Art, p. 25.
See Spalding, Roger Fry, on the influence of Berenson (pp. 62-3) and
Denman Ross (p. 85), as well as Santayana (p. 86). The following
discussion is from Santayana's The Sense of Beauty (1896; rpt. New
York: Dover, 1955), pp. 104-22.
Walter Abell, Representation and Form (New York: Scribner's, 1936),
pp. 18-96 especially. Gwilym Price-Jones, reviewing Abell's book in
the Criterion (April 1937), pp. 555-8, attributes a strong influence on
Abell to Mauron or rather to "the late phases of Roger Fry's specu-
lations under the influence of M. Charles Mauron' (my italics).
A good example of this validation is to be seen in a revealing letter to
Marie Mauron, 23 November 1920, Sutton, Letters of Roger Fry, II,
497: "So though the subject is rather romantic in my picture, I think
I've done nothing to accentuate these feelings. I've looked for a certain
logic in the architecture of the groups of trees. In the spacing of the
shapes and the tone and colour intervals, I have sought those that
express my sensations about this bit of Nature - not, of course, my
everyday sensations but those of the moment when I saw it as a whole,
a unity where all the parts were bound to each other inevitably."
(New York: Minton, Balch, 1934), p. 137, italics his. The rest of this
discussion is based primarily on pp. 87-90.
(1931; rpt. n.p.: Penguin, 1949), p. 36.
Read, The Meaning of Art, p. 99.
Susanne Langer, Feeling and Form (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1953), P- 38.
See Santayana, The Sense ofBeauty, pp. 61, 70; Dewey, Art as Experience,
p. 161; Abell, Representation and Form, pp. 94-5, 168.
Fry, "Art and Science," p. 434.
Sutton, Letters of Roger Fry, 23 November 1920, II, 497.
Fry, "Some Questions in Esthetics," pp. 8-9, italics mine. An amusing
note: The Listener's anonymous review of Abell's Representation and
Form (25 November 1936) refers incorrectly to "what Roger Fry used
to call 'psychological volumes,' which were more fully developed into
a coherent aesthetic theory by his friend Charles Mauron."
Fry, "Retrospect," p. 188.
Roger Fry, "Art-History as an Academic Study," in Last Lectures (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939), p. 17.

220
 Notes to pp. 52-58

3. ART AND SCIENCE

Fry, "Art-History" in Last Lectures, p. 3.
See Julian Bell, " O n Roger Fry - A Letter to A. ,"in Julian Bell, ed.
Quentin Bell, p. 258. Bell wrote that Fry's attitude to life combined
"the sensuousness and sensitiveness of the arts with the clearness and
hardness of mind, the resolute intellectualism, of an admirable scien-
tist." Mauron referred later to Fry's "rare combinaison d'esprit scien-
tifique et de sensibilite esthetique" (1952 [1949]: 24).
See Roger Fry, "Art and Socialism" (1912) in Vision and Design, p. 47,
and Fry, The Artist and Psycho-Analysis (1924) in Hogarth Essays, p. 296.
Roger Fry, "Art and Life" (1917) in Vision and Design, p. 9.
Fry, "Art and Science," 434-5.
I. A. Richards, "Art and Science," Athenaeum (27 June 1919), p. 534.
Gustav Theodor Fechner, Vorschule der Aesthetik (Leipzig: Breitkopf
und Hartel, 1876).
Ella Freeman Sharpe, "Similar and Divergent Unconscious Determi-
nants Underlying the Sublimations of Pure Art and Pure Science,"
International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 16 (1935), 186-202.
Appendix A to Forster, Aspects, p. 136.
E. M. Forster, "Art for Art's Sake" (1949), in Two Cheers, p. 89.
Fry, "Art-History," p. 11.
See, for example, in Fry's Vision and Design alone, "An Essay in Aes-
thetics" (1909), p. 19; "The French Post-Impressionists" (1912), p. 157;
"Art and Life" (1917), p. 7, and "The Artist's Vision" (1919), p. 33.
Fry, "Art and Science," p. 434.
Fry, The Artist and Psycho-Analysis, p. 282.
Roger Fry, Art and Commerce (London: Hogarth Press, 1926), p. 5.
Fry, "Some Questions in Esthetics," p. 5.
Fry, "Art and Life," p. 10.
Henri Poincare, The Value of Science (1905), printed in The Foundations
of Science, trans. George Bruce Halsted (1913; Lancaster, PA: The Sci-
ence Press, 1946), p. 349.
Fry's distrust of Freud is clear from other articles and letters as well.
See his reference to Freud's attempt to explain "the whole nature of
the artist" in a "small pamphlet" as an "unwarranted intrusion," in
"Art-History," p. 3. See also Sutton, Letters of Roger Fry, letter to
Helen Anrep, 24 June 1930, II, 680; to Margery Fry, 2 August 1933,
II, 683; to "Reginald," undated fragment, II, 697.
Sutton, Letters of Roger Fry, 23 January 1924, II, 548.
Clive Bell, "Dr. Freud on Art," The Dial (April 1925), p. 281.
Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (New York: Basic
Books, 1957), III, 41 off. See Sachs, The Creative Unconscious (Cam-
bridge: Sci-Art, 1950), pp. 57ff.

221
 Notes to pp. 586)

Barbara Lowe, in her review of Aesthetics and Psychology in Life and

Letters (December 1935), attacked Mauron for relying on Fry's "half-
digested" and "often completely misconceived" ideas of Freud (p. 212).
That Mauron did nothing of the sort should be clear. Jeffrey Mehlman's
otherwise excellent study, "Entre psychanalyse et psychocritique" in
Poetique, 3 (1970), outlines Fry's views on form (which Mehlman mis-
takenly equates with those of New Criticism) and explains Fry's re-
jection of psychoanalysis, ending with: "Telles etaient a peu pres les
vues de Mauron quand il s'est mis au travail de dechiffrement des textes
les plus hermetiques de Mallarme" (p. 373). Much was to intervene
between Fry and Freud in Mauron's development.
Fry, "Some Questions in Esthetics," p. 1.
For example, the largely anonymous reviews in The Globe, 22 June
1935; Free Press Evening Bulletin (Winnipeg), 17 August 1935; Bulletin
(Sydney), 7 August 1935; Christchurch Star Sun, 2 November 1935;
Press (Christchurch, N.Z.), 17 August 1935; Cape Times, n July 1935.
In England, positive reviews appeared in Granta (Cambridge), 12 June
1935; Listener, 31 June 1935; The London Mercury, September 1935; Time
and Tide, 13 July 1935; Manchester Evening News, 15 June 1935; Studio,
October 1935; Nottingham Journal, 18 October 1935; Oxford Magazine,
7 November 1935.
Criterion, 15 (October 1935), 127.

4. TOWARD PSYCHOCRITIQUE: FROM "SPIRITUAL" TO

"PSYCHOLOGICAL"
For example, in the Pleiade edition of Mallarme's Oeuvres completes,
see the poems "Hommage" (a Puvis de Chavanne), p. 72, and "Les
Loisirs de la poste" and "Peintres," pp. 88-91. His prose works on
painters include "Whistler," pp. 531-2, and "Edouard Manet," pp.
532-3, both in Quelques Medaillons et portraits en pied. See also "Le 'Ten
O'Clock' de M. Whistler," pp. 56983, and "Le Jury de peinture pour
1874 et M. Manet," pp. 695-700.
Mauron suggests this in his introduction to the translations: "When
Roger Fry had satisfied himself that the 'subject' in art did not matter,
he looked for what did matter and reached in the end his 'system of
relations,' the most abstract of esthetic theories, whose typical work
of art is a still life. Mallarme's thought followed a parallel evolution"
(1938a [1936]: 30).
The cubist remark is in Fry's "Early Introduction," published by Mau-
ron after Fry's death, in 1938 (1936): 306. The postimpressionist des-
ignation appears in Sutton, Letters of Roger Fry, letter to Charles Vildrac,
26 October 1911, I, 352.
See Richard Shiff, "Seeing Cezanne," 769n, 788.

222
 Notes to pp. 63-68
Fry, "Early Introduction," p. 296; see also pp. 297, 3oon, 301, 307.
See, for example, Frank Rutter's "More about Mallarme: Roger Fry's
Mistake," Sunday Times, 7 March 1937; Desmond MacCarthy's earlier
review in the same paper, 28 February 1937; Harold Nicolson's review
of the 1952 reprint in The Observer, 24 February 1952.
See, for example, Gustave Rudler's review in L'Echo de Londres, 29
November 1936; Babette Deutsch's in the New York Herald Tribune,
9 May 1937; Humbert Wolfe's in The Observer, 13 June 1937; Cuthbert
Wright's in the New York Times Book Review, 12 September 1937;
Edwin Muir's in The Scotsman, 29 October 1936; P. M. J.'s in the
Cambridge Review, 27 November 1936; Goronwy Rees's in The Spec-
tator, 30 October 1936; Henry Johnstone's in the Dublin Magazine,
April 1937, pp. 70-1.
Guy LeClec'h, "Charles Mauron soutient une these en Sorbonne," Le
Figaro litteraire (8 juin 1963), p. 4.
Respectively, in Fry, "Giotto" (1901) in Vision and Design, pp. 116,
110-11; in his review in the Nation and Athenaeum, 18 February 1928,
of a Bonnard exhibit, cited by Sutton in his introduction to the Letters
of Roger Fry, I, 83; and in Fry, Cezanne, pp. 87-8.
Roger Fry, "The Meaning of Pictures: 1. Visible Melodies," Listener
(9 October 1929), pp. 467-9.
Roger Fry, "Three Pictures in Tempera by William Blake" (1904),
Vision and Design , p. 143.
In the Pleiade edition, see the poems "Hommage (a Richard Wagner),"
p. 71, and "Les Loisirs de la poste" and "Musiciens," p. 91. In prose,
there is "L'Art pour tous," pp. 257-60; "Richard Wagner: Reverie d'un
poete fran^ais," pp. 541-6; and his Oxford-Cambridge paper, "La
Musique et les lettres," pp. 643-54.
Bell, Art, p. 26.
G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (1903; rpt. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1922), p. 188.
T. S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent" in The Sacred Wood
(1920; rpt. London: Methuen, 1967), p. 56. See, in the same collection,
references to contemplation in "The Perfect Critic," p. 14 and in "Im-
perfect Critics," p. 40.
Victor Basch, Revue philosophique, 92 (juillet-aout 1921), 1-26.
Wallace Stevens claimed that this theory of contemplation in Aesthetics
and Psychology influenced him in his formulation of this problem. For
a full discussion of this point, see Barbara Farris Graves, "Stevens'
Reading in Contemporary French Aesthetics: Charles Mauron, Thierry
Maulnier, Roger Caillois," Ph.D. diss., University of Oklahoma, 1975.
Letter to Francois Walter, 12 Janvier 1947, collection Alice Mauron.
Letter to Margery Fry, dated "mars 1940," collection Alice Mauron.
In this same letter, he claimed Fry once declared himself a taoist.

223
 Notes to pp. 70-79
E. M. Forster, "The Raison d'etre of Criticism," in Two Cheers, p. 105.
E. M. Forster, "Ibsen the Romantic," Abinger Harvest, p. 84. Similarly,
Proust's use of Vinteuil's phrase was praised as a literary as well as a
musical structuring device in "Our Second Greatest Novel?" in Two
Cheers, p. 218. Virginia Woolf s biography of Fry is ordered like a
"musical composition" and To the Lighthouse is a "novel in sonata
form," in Forster's 1941 Rede Lecture on Virginia Woolf, in Two
Cheers, pp. 240 and 243 respectively.
Forster, Aspects, p. 116.
Fry, "Art and Science," p. 434.
Fry, The Artist and Psycho-Analysis (1924) in Hogarth Essays, p.292,
italics his. See also letter to Marie Mauron, 1 February 1921, in which
Fry compliments Gide's Symphoniepastorale for "the design, the rhythm
of the movement in the narration" (Sutton, Letters of Roger Fry, II,
502).
Forster, Aspects, p. 113.
Roger Fry, "The French Post-Impressionists" in Vision and Design, p.
157. Benedict Nicolson, as Denys Sutton reminds us (introduction to
Letters, I, 40), claimed that this idea of Fry's was a "streak of'Expres-
sionism' " influenced by Julius Meier-Graefe. (See Nicolson's "Post-
Impressionism and Roger Fry," Burlington Magazine, 93 [January 1951],
1 iff.) It would appear rather to be the perfect example of Fry's for-
malism, given his many remarks on the formal purity of music as an
art form.
In Forster, Two Cheers, p. 124.
This appears in a manuscript (at King's College Library, Cambridge)
of analyses of Beethoven piano sonatas, p. 23 verso, in a note about
Mauron's fate in war-torn France.
Bell, Art, p. 31, my italics.
Forster's letter, dated 5-5-25, is in King's College Library; Fry's to
Mauron, 9 July 1925, is in Sutton, Letters of Roger Fry, II, 575.
Forster, Two Cheers, p. 57.
Ibid., p. 357.
In fact, the question of unacknowledged borrowing comes up: As in
the case of the active-contemplative distinction in Aesthetics and Psy-
chology, this image may have come from Victor Basch's early article,
"Le Maitre-probleme de l'esthetique," Revue Philosophique, 92 (juillet-
aout 1921), 1-26. Basch argues for the intellectual and affective parallels
in human consciousness, using precisely this image: "Notre vie con-
sciente est comme un lac a deux nappes superposees. L'une, la super-
ieure, est transparente et tout ce qui s'y mire donne des images nettes
et arretees. Sous cette nappe, s'en etend une autre, plus opaque, plus
dense, chargee d'humus et de matieres organiques, qui est comme la
vie meme, trouble et obscure, des eaux profondes, qui en reproduit

224
 Notes to pp. 79-91
toutes les pulsations, et dans laquelle en mime temps se rejractent toutes les
images de la zone superieure" (p. 21, his italics).
See, for example, Roland Dalbiez, La Methode psychanalytique et la doc-
trine Jreudienne (Paris: Desclee de Brouwer, 1936), II, 513: "L'oeuvre
de Freud est l'analyse la plus profonde que l'histoire ait connue de ce
qui, dans Vhomme, n'estpas le plus humain" (my italics). See even Roger
Fry's remark to Vanessa Bell, 17 March 1919, on Jones's book on
psychoanalysis: "It's a fine corrective to nobility and edification to
realize that our spiritual nature is built upon dung" (Sutton, Letters of
Roger Fry, II, 449).
See Sutton, Letters of Roger Fry, to Margery Fry, 4 October 1919, II,
457, and to Marie Mauron, 17 May 1921, II, 508-9.
In a column in Le Provencal, 31 Janvier 1954, on the "Fonction de
l'artiste."
For a typical French review see Louis Martin-Chauffier, "L'Homme a
trois dimensions," Mercure de France (1 avril 1948), pp. 679-82. E. M.
Forster also reviewed L'Homme triple in Adam, 17 (1949), 17-18.
Maurice Barres, Scenes et doctrines du nationalisme (Paris: Juven, [1925]),
pp. IO-II.
D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious (1923; rpt. Harmonds-
worth: Penguin, 1971), pp. 11-12, 17.
Pierre Janet, De Vangoisse a Vextase I (Paris: Alcan, 1926), pp. 210-34.
See, for example, besides The Artist and Psycho-Analysis, Vision and
Design, especially "Art and Science," p. 54, and "Retrospect," p. 198.
E. M. Forster, "English Prose Between 1918 and 1939" (1944) in Two
Cheers, p. 268.
Fry, "Art and Socialism" (1912), in Vision and Design, p. 47.
Sutton, Letters of Roger Fry, to Robert Bridges, 23 January 1924, II,
547-8.
Woolf, Roger Fry: A Biography, p. 249.
Fry, Last Lectures, p. 14.
Respectively, Sutton, Letters of Roger Fry, to Henry Rutgers Marshall,
president of the American Psychological Association, 24 July 1909, I,
323; and "Sensibility," in Last Lectures, p. 32.
I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (New York: Harcourt
Brace, 1925), p- 43-
See L A . Richards, Practical Criticism (New York: Harcourt Brace and
World, 1929), pp. 266-8, 270-2, 304.
Richards, "Art and Science," p. 535.
Richards, "Emotion and Art," Athenaeum, 18 July 1919, p. 631.
For a full discussion of this influence, see Russo, "A Study in Influence,"
683-712.
Richards, Principles, p. 167 and p. 193 respectively.
Richards, Principles, "The Impasse of Music," p. 173.

225
 Notes to pp. g2-iO2
Richards, Practical Criticism, pp. 302-3.
Richards, Principles, p. 2.
Criterion, 12 (April 1933), 355-70.
Richards, Practical Criticism, p. 3. For a Marxist interpretation of the
social utility of Richards's theories, see Francis Mulhern, The Moment
of'Scrutiny' (London: NLB, 1979), pp. 21-31.

5. SCIENTIFIC PSYCHOLOGY AND ART

See, for example, on this topic, the three articles of Section I of Alan
Roland, ed., Psychoanalysis, Creativity, and Literature: A French-Amer-
ican Inquiry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978).
David Bleich, "The Subjective Paradigm in Science, Psychology and
Criticism," New Literary History, 7, 2 (1976), 313-34.
In L'Oeil vivant II: La Relation critique (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), Sta-
robinski works out the paradox suggested by Binswanger as that be-
tween an optimistic epistemology and a pessimistic metaphysic (pp.
260-4).
Susanne Langer, Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of
Reason, Rite, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1942),
p. 51.
See the long debate, led by Serge Doubrovsky, following Catherine
Backes's paper at Cerisy-la-Salle, 1969, in Serge Doubrovsky and
Tzvetan Todorov, eds., L'Enseignement de la litterature (Paris: Plon,
1971), pp. 323-39.
Recently Bruno Bettelheim has tried to stress the spiritual and humanist
Freud visible in the German texts, though not in the English trans-
lations. See his Freud and Man's Soul (New York: Knopf, 1983).
Frank Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind (New York: Basic Books,
!979)> P- I 2 3 - All further references to this study will appear in pa-
rentheses in the text. See too the very useful annotations to the "Proj-
ect" in the Standard Edition: the footnotes, the editor's introduction,
and Appendix C, pp. 392-7.
Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934; London: Hutch-
inson, 1959), pp. 40-6.
Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowl-
edge (New York: Basic Books, 1963, 1965), p. 38.
See Sidney Hook, ed., Psychoanalysis, Scientific Method and Philosophy
(New York: New York University Press, 1959), especially Heinz Hart-
mann, "Psychoanalysis as a Scientific Theory," pp. 3-37, and the reply
to this by Ernest Nagel, "Methodological Issues in Psychoanalytic
Theory," pp. 38-56.
Emile Benveniste, "Remarques sur la fonction du Iangage dans la de-

226
 Notes to pp. 102-108

decouverte freudienne," in his Problemes de linguistiquegenerate ([Paris]:

Gallimard, 1966), pp. 75-87.
Benveniste, "Remarques," p. 83.
Lionel Trilling, "Freud and Literature," in his The Liberal Imagination
(1950; New York: Viking, 1951), p. 53. These ideas Trilling first ex-
pressed as early as 1940, however, in "The Legacy of Sigmund Freud:
An Appraisal: II Literary and Aesthetic," Kenyon Review, 2, 2 (1940),
152-72.
Jean Starobinski, Sens de la critique (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), p. 275. See
also Stanley Edgar Hyman's The Tangled Bank: Darwin, Marx, Frazer
and Freud as Imaginative Writers (New York: Atheneum, 1962), and
Sarah Kofman, L'Enfance de Vart (Paris: Payot, 1970), especially pp.
25-37.
See Domna C. Stanton's "Commentaire" to Harriet Allentuch's article,
"Mauron, Corneille et l'inconscient," both in Papers on French Seven-
teenth-Century Literature (Seattle), 10, 2 (1978-9), p. 219.
Jean Starobinski, "Psychanalyse et litterature," in L'Oeil vivant II, pp.
274-5-
Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, III, 413.
Kofman, L'Enfance de Vart, p. 73.
See Lancelot Law Whyte, The Unconscious Before Freud (i960; New
York: Basic Books, 1962), pp. 1689: "The general conception of un-
conscious mental processes was conceivable . .. around 1700, topical
around 1800, and fashionable around 1870-1880."
See Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind, p. 468.
Otto Rank and Hanns Sachs, "The Significance of Psychoanalysis for
the Humanities" (1913), in Rank and Sachs, eds., Psychoanalysis as an
Art and a Science: A Symposium (Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
1968), p. 32.
See his foreword to Marie Bonaparte's The Life and Work of Edgar Allan
Poe: A Psycho-Analytic Interpretation, trans. John Rodker (1933; London:
Imago, 1949), p. xi: "Investigations such as this do not claim to explain
creative genius."
Kofman, L'Enfance de Vart, pp. 212 and 220. See also Sulloway's view
of repression as the "phylogenetic price" paid for the evolution of
higher civilization, in Freud, Biologist of the Mind, p. 374.
The active, conscious role of the artist in transforming his daydreams
into art, in elaborating his fantasies, was never denied by Freud, though
unsympathetic critics like Rene Wellek and Austin Warren were apt,
wrongly, to suggest that the daydreamer-poet analogy "presumably
disposes of the philosopher and the 'pure scientist' along with the artist,
and is, therefore, a kind of positivist 'reduction' of contemplative ac-
tivity to an observing and naming instead of acting" {Theory of Liter-
ature, 3rd ed. [New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1956], p. 82).

227
 Notes to pp. 109-126

See Alan Roland, "Imagery and Symbolic Expression in Dreams and

Art," International Journal ofPsycho-Analysis, 53 (1972), 531-9, and Alan
Roland, "Toward a Reorientation of Psychoanalytic Literary Criti-
cism," in Roland, Psychoanalysis, Creativity, and Literature, pp. 248-70.
Recently this study has come to be read more as fiction than biography.
See Tom Conley's study, "Les Abords d'une lettre," Litterature, 43
(octobre 1981), pp. 3-16.
Jeffrey Mehlman, "Entre psychanalyse et psychocritique," Poetique, 3
(1970), pp. 365-83.
Jack Spector, The Aesthetics ofFreud (New York and Washington: Prae-
ger, 1973), p. 164.

6. PSYCHOANALYSIS AND PSYCHOCRITIQUE

See Georges Emmanuel Clancier, "Psychanalyse et litterature," in Andre

Berge et al., Entretiens sur Vart et la psychanalyse (Paris, The Hague:
Mouton, 1968), p. 121; and Robert Greer Cohn, "Mauron on Mal-
larme," MLN, 78 (December 1963), 522.
Sutton, Letters of Roger Fry, II, 555.
Critics' attempts to locate Bachelard as the main influence on Mauron
here would have to deal with Mauron's later labeling of Bachelard as
a bastardizer of psychoanalysis (1966a: 172), a statement they seem not
to acknowledge. More importantly, such an attribution of influence
also ignores the implications of Mauron's profound disagreement with
Bachelard-inspired thematic criticism. See chapter 8. Cf. Bruno Ro-
mani, "Alcuni aspetti attuali della critica letteraria francese," Letteratura,
14 (luglio-ottobre 1966), 74, and Robert Emmet Jones, Panorama de la
nouvelle critique en France de Gaston Bachelard a Jean-Paul Weber (Paris:
SEDES, 1968), p. 157.
Despite Anne Clancier's constant labeling of him as such in Psychanalyse
et critique (Toulouse: PRIVAT, Nouvelle Recherche, 1973), pp. 191-
221.
See, for example, Paul Ricoeur, De Vinterpretation (Paris: Seuil, 1965),
p. 159, or Frederick Crews, "Reductionism and its Discontents," Crit-
ical Inquiry, 1, 3 (1975), 543-
Leo Bersani, A Future for Astyanax (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), pp.
31-43.
Herbert Read, Reason and Romanticism: Essays in Literary Criticism (Lon-
don: Faber and Gwyer, 1926), pp. 86, 89-90.
Dominique Fernandez, "Les Racines de l'ecriture," Nouvel Observateur
(26 avril-2 mai, 1971), pp. 48-9.
There has been a third development, a psychoanalysis of the self, rep-
resented by Erikson, Schafer, Winnicott, and perhaps, in his own way,

228
 Notes to pp. 126-132

Lacan. See Normand Holland, "Literary Interpretation and Psycho-

analysis," in Roland, Psychoanalysis, Creativity, and Literature, p. 242.
Wendy Deutelbaum, "Epistemology and Fantasmatics in the Psy-
choanalytic Criticism of Charles Mauron and Norman Holland," Ph.D.
diss., New York University, February 1978, p. 158.
See Melanie Klein, "Infantile Anxiety-Situations, Reflected in a Work
of Art and in the Creative Impulse," International Journal of Psycho-
analysis, 10 (1929), 436-43.
Freud's analysis of Little Hans was conducted through the child's fa-
ther's interpretation of his remarks. See "Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-
Year-Old Boy" (1909b; 10: 22-150).
Melanie Klein, Contributions to Psychoanalysis, 19211945 (London: Ho-
garth Press, 1950), p. 312.
Anna Freud, The Ego and the Mechanisms oj'Defence, trans. Cecil Baines
(1937; London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis,
1948), pp. H3ff
See the work Mauron cites frequently (e.g., 1968b [1964-5]: i69n),
Hanna Segal's Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein (New York:
Basic Books, 1964), p. 62: "The pain of mourning experienced in the
depressive position, and the reparative drives developed to restore the
loved internal and external objects, are the basis of creativity." See also
her own "A Psycho-analytic Approach to Aesthetics," International
Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 33 (1952), 196-207.
Adrian Stokes, "Form in Art: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation, "Journal
of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 18 (1959), 197. Not surprisingly, Herbert
Read also read Stokes; see his The Origins of Form in Art (London:
Thames and Hudson, 1965), p. 8.
Adrian Stokes, "La Peinture et le monde interieur" in Berge, Entretiens
sur Vart et la psychanalyse, p. 336.
See Derrida's "Freud et la scene de l'ecriture," in his L'Ecriture et la
difference (Paris: Seuil, 1965), p. 340, and Laplanche, Hb'lderlin et la
question du pere (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1961).
William Stekel, "Poetry and Neurosis," trans. James S. Van Teslaar,
Psychoanalytic Review, 10 (1923), 84.
And, Mauron claimed, from the Kris-inspired work of Leopold Bellak
(1964a; 22n). See Bellak's "Free Association: Conceptual and Clinical
Aspects," International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 42 (1961), 9-20. As
psycho critique used a variant of free association (superimposition), Bel-
lak's theory allowed Mauron to unite his method and his idea of creative
function. See 1962: 235.
Ernst Kris, Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art (1952; rpt. New York:
Schocken Books, 1964), p. 177. See also pp. 253 and 313.
A good example of this process would be Mauron's not using Fairbairn's
echo/es5 theories of creation as play or game and of aesthetic pleasure

229
 Notes to pp. 132-147

as "the fun of perceiving something that has been made for fun." See his
"Prolegomena to a Psychology of Art," British Journal of Psychology,
28 (January 1938), 291 (italics his).

7. PSYCHOCRITIQUE: FORMALISM, SCIENCE, AND THE VALUE OF

PROBLEMS
Cited by Jones in The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, III, 412. The
letter is dated 8 February 1914.
Otto Rank, The Trauma ofBirth (1929; rpt. New York: Robert Brunner,
1952), p. 160.
Sachs, The Creative Unconscious, p. 196.
Kris, Psychoanalytic Explorations, p. 22.
See the discussion in Berge, Entretiens sur Vart et la psychanalyse, pp.
40-1, and his own paper "Le Temps, le rythme et l'inconscient," pp.
51-67.
Roger Fry, "Sensibility" in Last Lectures, p. 28.
Fry, The Artist and Psycho-Analysis in Hogarth Essays, p. 302. This was
his 1924 lecture to the British Psychological Society.
Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind, p. 421.
Raymond Jean, "Mauron et la methode psychocritique," La Quinzaine
litteraire (1-15 Janvier 1967), p. 10.
See, for example, Michel Autrand's review of Psychocritique du genre
comique in Revue d'histoire litteraire, 4 (octobre-decembre 1965), p. 727.
Michel Grimaud, "A propos d'une hypothese de Charles Mauron sur
l'enfance de Victor Hugo," Revue d'histoire litteraire de la France, 79, 1
(1979), 90-5.
Nicolas Morovesco's long review article in Studi francesi, 46 (gennaio-
aprile 1972), pp. 119 and 122.
Pierre-Henri Simon, Diagnostique des lettres francaises contemporaines (n.p.:
La Renaissance du livre, 1966), p. 402, and L. J. Austin's review of the
American edition of Mauron's Introduction to the Psychoanalysis of Mal-
larme in Modern Language Review, 40 (1965), 454.
Gerard Genette, "Psycholectures," Figures /(Paris: Seuil, 1966), p. 137.
Herbert Read, In Defence of Shelley (London: Heinemann, 1936), p. 71.
Mauron's interview with Guy LeClec'h, "Charles Mauron soutient une
these en Sorbonne," Figaro Litteraire (8 juin 1963), p. 4.
A select list of these would include the following:
On Mallarme: Robert Greer Cohn, "Mauron on Mallarme," MLN, 78
(December 1963), 520-6; Dominique Fernandez, "Mallarme saisi par
les cheveux," UExpress, 21 novembre 1963, pp. 36-7.
On Baudelaire: Franchise Aubert, "Psychanalyse et critique litteraire: a
propos de la psychocritique de Baudelaire," Spicilegio moderno, 2 (1973),
15-31; Anne Clancier, "Charles Mauron" in her Psychanalyse et critique

230
 Notes to pp. 147-151
litteraire (Toulouse: PRIVAT, Nouvelle recherche, 1973), pp. 191-221.
On Hugo: Leon Cellier, "Victor Hugo 'lu' par Baudouin et Mauron,"
Circe, 1 (1969), 81-131; Michel Grimaud, "A propos d'une hypothese
de Charles Mauron sur l'enfance de Victor Hugo," Revue d'histoire
litteraire de la France, 79, 1 (1979), 90-5.
On Giraudoux: Solange Guberman, "La Psychocritique de Charles
Mauron et le theatre de Jean Giraudoux," Culture jrancaise (Bari), 22
(1975), 315-21.
On Moliere: Harold C. Knutson, "Moliere, Mauron and Myth," Esprit
createur, 16 (1976), 138-48.
On Racine: Roland Barthes, "Histoire et litterature: a propos de Ra-
cine," Annales, 15, 3 (i960), 524-37; Raymond Picard, "Racine et la
'nouvelle critique,' " Revue des sciences humaines (janvier-mars 1965),
pp. 2949 (reprinted as Nouvelle Critique ou nouvelle imposture [n.p.:
Pauvert, 1965]); A. Bonzon, La Nouvelle Critique et Racine (Paris: Nizet,
1970), pp. 139-59; Paul Delbouille, "Les Tragedies de Racine, reflets
de l'inconscient ou chronique du siecle?" French Studies, 15 (April 1961),
103-21; Hugo Laitenberger, "Charles Mauron, Roland Barthes und -
Racine," in his edition of Zeitschrijijur Franzb'sische Sprache undLiteratur:
Festgabe Jlir Julius Wilhelm zum 80. Geburtstag (Wiesbaden: Franz Sterner
Verlag GMBH, 1977), pp. 91-105; Andre Rousseaux, "Psychanalyse
de Racine," Figaro litteraire (5 octobre 1957), p. 2.
Mauron's blindness, rather than any desire to misrepresent or misdirect
analysis, may also account for the inaccuracies that have been noted in
some of his quotations. Cf. Arnaldo Pizzorusso, "Analisi di La Vie
Anterieure," Belfagor (guigno 1971), p. 621.
Mehlman's theory (in "Entre psychanalyse et psychocritique," p. 377)
may have been inspired by a paper on this essay by Freud which he
heard at the Cerisy-la-Salle conference in 1969. This paper, "La Science
psychanalytique," was by Catherine Backes, and was printed in Dou-
brovsky and Todorov, L'Enseignement de la litterature, pp. 297-304,
especially pp. 301-02.
Franchise Aubert has argued that many of Mauron's networks resulting
from the superimposition of Baudelaire's poems are indeed very overt
and not at all latent. Her most powerful example is Mauron's idea of
the unconscious linking of "cygne" and "Andromaque," which is ac-
tually blatant in the poem "Le Cygne": "Je pense a mon grand cygne
. . . et puis a vous/Andromaque." See "Psychanalyse et critique litter-
aire," 21-4, 30.
International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 42 (January-April 1961), 9-20,
especially 13-14.
Jean Starobinski, "Psychanalyse et litterature," L'Oeil vivant II, pp.
278-9.
Serge Leclaire, Psychanalyser (Paris: Seuil, 1968), p. 23.

231
 Notes to pp. 151-158
Andre Green, "The Unbinding Process," New Literary History, 12, 1
(1980), 17-18 (translated from "La Deliaison," Litterature, 3 (1971), pp.
33-52).
The apparent oxymoron of this term is treated by Jeffrey Mehlman in
"Autour du mythe personnel" in Doubrovsky and Todorov, L'En-
seignement de la litterature, p. 295, especially. What Mauron very cer-
tainly did not want to suggest is that the myth was universal in a
Jungian sense, or even archetypal in the sense given that term by North-
rop Frye or Maud Bodkin. Cf. Knutson, "Moliere, Mauron and Myth."
Mauron's reading of Freud here was rather reductive, for Freud's own
theories were actually the basis of these particular theories propagated
by both his daughter and Klein. "The psychological novel in general,"
wrote Freud in 1908, "no doubt owes its special nature to the inclination
of the modern writer to split up his ego, by self-observation, into many
part-egos, and, in consequence, to personify the conflicting currents
of his own mental life in several heroes" (1908c; 9:150). Similarly, Freud
always saw the unconscious desires as both indestructible and active,
both constant and dynamic. See 1900a; 5: 577-8.
Jean LeGaillot, "La Psychocritique," in Jean LeGaillot, ed., Psychanalyse
et langages litteraires: theorie et pratique (Paris: Nathan, 1977), p. 150.
Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," p. 54. See Edmund Ber-
gler's attack on this theory in The Writer and Psychoanalysis, 2nd ed.
(New York: Robert Brunner, 1954), p. 229: " The poet can express nothing
but inner defenses against his inner conflicts [his italics]. 'The man who
suffers' and 'the mind which creates' are one and the same, connected
by an inner defense mechanism."
Sachs, The Creative Unconscious, pp. 344-5.
In favor of a concept of the uncanny as the true core of similarity. See
Jeffrey Mehlman, "Baudelaire with Freud: Theory and Pain," Diacritics,
4, 1 (1974), 8.
See David Bleich's Readings and Feelings: An Introduction to Subjective
Criticism (Urbana, 111: National Council of Teachers of English, 1975)
and Norman Holland's Five Readers Reading (New Haven: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 1975).
Fry, Last Lectures, p. 15.
See the attack on Fry in I. A. Richards (with C. K. Ogden and James
Wood), The Foundations of Aesthetics, 2nd ed. (New York: Lear, 1925),
p. 61, and on expressive theories in Richards, Principles, pp. 30, 180-
5-
See Max Eastman, "A Note on I. A. Richards' Psychology of Poetry,"
in his The Literary Mind (1929; New York and London: Scribner's,
1931), p. 297; and John Crowe Ransom, "Criticism as Pure Specula-
tion," in Donald A. Stauffer, ed., The Intent of the Critic (1941; rpt.
New York: Bantam, 1966), p. 32. The debate continues among textual

232
 Notes to pp. 158-165
and reader-response critics today. See too O. Mannoni, Clefs pour Vim-
aginaire ou Vautre scene (Paris: Seuil, 1969). Here analysis is denied any
insight into textual or authorial issues; all it can do is elucidate the
experience of reading and interpreting.
Genette, "Psycholectures," p. 134. For a contrasting view of the im-
portance of psychoanalytic investigations of tragedy, see Andre Green,
"Oreste et Oedipe: Essai sur la structure comparee des mythes tragiques
d'Oreste et d'Oedipe et sur la fonction de la tragedie," in Berge, En-
tretiens sur Vart et la psychanalyse, pp. 174-5.
Marthe Robert, Sur le papier: essais (Paris: Grasset, 1967), and Simon
O. Lesser, Fiction and the Unconscious (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957).
Freud himself also developed a theory of humor as the triumph of the
ego. See "Humour": lgijd; 21: 161-6,
Hanna Segal, "A Psycho-Analytic Approach to Aesthetics," Interna-
tional Journal ofPsycho-Analysis, 33 (1952), 205: "The difference between
tragedy and comedy lies then in the comic writer's attempt to dissociate
himself from the tragedy of his hero, to feel superior to it in a kind of
successful manic defence."

8. PSYCHOCRITIQUE AND THE MODERN FRENCH CRITICAL CONTEXT

During this period, Mauron wrote his only essays - in Sagesse de I'eau
(1945) and L'Homme triple (1947) - and temporarily did participate in
the philosophical formation that has united writers as otherwise diverse
as Sartre, Levi-Strauss, Merleau-Ponty, and Foucault. The essay form
in France is a poorly defined genre, but as one commentator has noted,
it is the genre in which "l'ecrivain tend a se faire philosophe et le
philosophe ecrivain." See Maurice Brueziere, Histoire descriptive de la
litterature contemporaine (Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1976), p. 329.
Bell, Art, p. 20. See also p. 117.
Roger Fry, "An Essay in Aesthetics," Vision and Design, p. 14. The
moralism in Fry's concept of the nonaesthetic responses is likely the
result of his Quaker upbringing. See Spalding, Roger Fry, pp. 3-15
especially.
This is a common criticism of Freud. See Edmund Wilson, "The
Historical Interpretation of Literature," in D. A. Stauffer, ed., The
Intent of the Critic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941), and
Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1942), pp. 207-8. Lionel Trilling argued, on the
contrary, that Freudian doctrine contained the elements of a complex
moral system, yet no one had dealt seriously with its existence, much
less its implications. See "The Situation of the American Intellectual
at the Present Time" (1953), reprinted in his A Gathering of Fugitives
(London: Seeker & Warburg, 1957), p. 76.

233
 Notes to pp. 165-166
Anne Clancier does mention Mauron in her 1968 introduction to the
proceedings, but only in passing, as if belatedly to fill in the gap. See
Berge, Entretiens sur I'art et la psychanalyse.
For a full exposition of the cultural and critical response to psycho-
analysis in Italy, see Michel David, La psicanalisi nella cultura italiana
(Torino: Boringhieri, 1966), and also his Letteratura e psicanalisi (Mil-
ano: Mursia, 1967), pp. 11-12, 79-82. Mauron's Des metaphores obse-
dantes an my the personnel was translated in 1966 (Milano: il Saggiatore)
and was generally favorably reviewed, though never without quali-
fications. See Claudio Scarpati, "Critica e psicocritica," in Vita e pen-
siero, 50, 5 (1967), 548-50; Renato Barilli, "La parte inconscia e quella
malata," Corriere della sera (12 marzo 1967), p. 11; Andrea Frullini, "La
psicocritica di Mauron," Tempo presente, 12, 7 (1967), 51-3; Michel
David, "La critica psicanalitica," in Maria Corti and Cesare Segre,
eds., I metodi attuali della critica in Italia (Torino: RAL, 1970), pp. 115
32.
J[acqueline] P[iatier], "Mort de l'ecrivain et critique, Charles Mauron,"
Le Monde, 6 decembre 1966, p. 24.
The modesty, as well as the self-reinforcing defense system, involved
other considerations on Freud's part as well. Sulloway's description,
in Freud, Biologist of the Mind, p. 502, of the role of the investigator in
the myth involved in scientific discovery in general fits both Freud
and Mauron. The myth portrays the scientist "as a 'pure empiricist'
who happily comes upon the truth, often in some serendipitous man-
ner, through hard-nosed attention to 'the facts.' The mythology of
science goes to great lengths to mask both the theory-laden nature of
its achievements and the role that creative inspiration so often plays
in them."
See R. C. Knight's review of Phedre in French Studies, 24 (1970), 291;
Alison Fairlie's review of Le Dernier Baudelaire in French Studies, 22
(1968), 350; J. M. Cocking's of Dei metaphores in French Studies, 19
(1965), 8990; Michel Autrand's review of La Psycho critique du genre
comique in Revue d'histoire litteraire, 4 (octobre-decembre 1965), p. 727.
See also H. Lemaitre's later review of Le Dernier Baudelaire in Deux
Annies d'etudes baudelairiennes, supplement to Studi Jrancesi, 39 (set-
tembre-dicembre 1969), p. 25.
For instance, Franchise Aubert, "Psychanalyse et critique litteraire: a
propos de la psychocritique de Baudelaire," Spicilegio moderno, 2 (1973),
301, and Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, Pour une psychanalyse de Vart et
de la creativite (Paris: Payot, 1971), p. 46.
Andre Rousseaux, "Psychanalyse de Racine," Figaro litteraire (5 octobre
^Sl)^ P- 2 - See too the later work of Robert Georgin, "La Psycho-
critique et sa methode" in his La Structure et le style ([Lausanne]: L'Age
d'Homme, 1975), p. 16, and Bersani, A Future for Astyanax, p. 21.

234
 Notes to pp. 167-170
Commentators do not seem to agree on the importance of Mauron to
later critics. Jean LeGalliot feels psycho critique has always exercised a
profound influence of some kind on literary critical circles ("La Psy-
chocritique" in Jean LeGalliot, ed., Psychanalyse et langages litteraires:
theorie et pratique [Paris: Nathan, 1977], p. 153), and Wallace Fowlie
confidently claimed, in 1968, that Mauron's influence would "doubtless
be far-reaching in the present and the next generation of French critics"
(The French Critic i^4gig6y [Carbondale, Edwardsville: Southern Il-
linois University Press, 1968], p. 90). On the other hand, others have
claimed that he had no followers. See Nicolas Morovesco's review
article in Studifrancesi,46 (gennaio-aprile 1972), p. 122, and Manfred
Lentzen, "Charles Mauron," in Wolf-Dieter Lange, ed., Franzb'sische
Literaturkritik der Gegenwart (Stuttgart: Alfred Kroner Verlag, 1975), p.
100. There actually have been quite a few critics who have at least
attempted to apply psychocritical ideas. Among these are Mauron's
son, Claude, Albert Chesneau, Anne Clancier, Marcelle Marini, Gerard
Bessette, Patricia Smart, Andre Vanasse, Hans Verhoeff, Roger Lew-
inter, and Maurice John Blackman.
Only one critic, Robert Greer Cohn, seems to have seen the importance
of both Mauron's intuitive response and his scientific training, and he
limits this to Mauron's early prepsychocritical work on Mallarme: "What
counted most was his own latent creative gifts, his innate sympathy
for the poet . . . Added to this, an unusual analytic faculty (and perhaps
even, as he suggests, his training as a chemical engineer) afforded him
lucid, as well as sincerely felt, insights into the underlying psychic
structure of the works." See his "Mauron on Mallarme," MLN, 78
(December 1963), 520.
In Adorno's commentary to Mauron's 1965 paper (1970b [1965]) on
the personal myth, published in Critique sociologique et critique psychan-
alytique (Bruxelles: Editions de l'lnstitut de Sociologie, Universite Libre
de Bruxelles, 1970), p. 106. Adorno's own beliefs are clear: "Tout essai
de comprendre la vie sociale dans une perspective de psychologie ap-
pliquee mene a un echec total de la comprehension de la realite" (p.
107).
See John Cruickshank, "Psychocriticism and Literary Judgment," Brit-
ish Journal ofAesthetics, 4, 2 (1964), 157, and Domna C. Stanton, "Com-
mentaire," 220.
Genette, "Psycholectures," p. 138.
Review of Mauron's work on Racine in Erasmus, 13 (i960), pp. 617-
18 in particular.
Robert Emmet Jones, Panorama de la nouvelle critique en France de Gaston
Bachelard a Jean-Paul Weber (Paris: SEDES, 1968), especially pp. 162-
86; Paul Delbouille, "Les Tragedies de Racine, reflets de l'inconscient
ou chronique du siecle?" French Studies, 15 (April 1961), 103-21.

235
 Notes to pp. 171-175

Cruickshank, "Psychocriticism and Literary Judgment," 159.

Reprinted in his Diagnostique des lettres francaises contemporaines (n.p.: La
Renaissance du livre, 1966), p. 406.
Rene Laforgue's L'Echec de Baudelaire (Paris: Denoel et Steele, 1931)
aimed at teaching the public about neurosis by using the masochism
in the poet's life and the sadomasochism in his work to show Baudelaire
as a neurotic. Marie Bonaparte's two-volume Edgar Poe, etude psychan-
alytique (Paris: Denoel et Steele, 1933) worked more from the literature,
using dreamwork techniques to differentiate between the latent and the
manifest, the unconscious and the conscious, but again her focus was
on Poe's neurosis as revealed through his work.
The main vogue for psychobiography seems, since Jean Delay's 1956
La Jeunesse d'Andre Gide, to have been in France, where Dominique
Fernandez is perhaps its best-known practitioner. For a comparison of
Mauron's work and that of Fernandez, see Victor Smirnoff, "L'Oeuvre
lue," Incidences de lapsychanalyse, Nouvelle Revue depsychanalyse, 1 (prin-
temps 1970), 49-57; and Fernandez himself in "Mallarme saisi par les
cheveux," L'Express, 21 novembre 1963, pp. 36-7, and in "Introduction
a la psychobiographie," in Incidences de la psychanalyse, pp. 33-48, es-
pecially pp. 39-40-
In 1938 Bachelard began applying psychoanalytic ideas to objective,
prescientific knowledge in La Formation de Vesprit scientijique, and then
applied them to the creations of literature and myth in La Psychanalyse
du feu. Later he would argue against a too-mechanical application and
for a more phenomenological methodology. The result was that, though
(like Mauron) he was interested in metaphor, his various studies of the
images of the elements were far from Mauron's studies of networks
of obsessive metaphors.
Sarah Lawall, Critics of Consciousness: The Existential Structures of Lit-
erature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968).
Jean-Paul Weber, Neo-critique et paleo-critique ou Contre Picard ([Paris]:
Pauvert, 1966), p. 13. The subsequent discussion is from pp. 16-17
and n o n .
Mauron quite simply accused Weber of plagiarizing his work, and
wrote a long report to prove his accusations in i960. A copy of this
is in Mauron's papers at St. Remy.
Bersani, A Future for Astyanax, pp. 27-8.
Gerard Bessette, "La Psychocritique," Voix et images, 1, 1 (septembre
1975), 72-3.
See Barthes, "Les Deux Critiques," in Essais critiques (Paris: Seuil, 1964),
pp. 246-51.
Pourquoi la nouvelle critique: critique et objectivite ([Paris]: Mercure de
France, 1968), p. xiii. Further quotations will be followed by the page
number, in parentheses.

236
 Notes to pp. 176-180
Roland Barthes, "Litterature et signification," Essais critiques;, pp. 274
5.
This (typically British?) irony is from "Structure and Society," Times
Literary Supplement, 30 September 1965, p. 864.
Barthes, "Litterature et signification," p. 268.
Mauron has often been compared to Goldmann, as they were both
interested in structures and in Racine. Usually Mauron's psychological
perspective has been seen as inferior to the social one offered by Gold-
mann. See Jacques Leenhardt, "Psychocritique et sociologie de la lit-
terature," in Georges Poulet, ed., Les Chemins actuels de la critique (1967;
rpt. Paris: 10/18, 1968), pp. 25371; Pierre-Aime Touchard, he Theatre
et Vangoisse des hommes (Paris: Seuil, 1968), pp. 92^7; Pierre-Henri Si-
mon, Diagnostique des lettres Jrancaises contemporaines, p. 410.
Genette, "Structuralisme et critique litteraire," Figures I, p. 151.
Hugo Laitenberger is the most cautious in limiting his attribution of
the label to the fulfilling of two conditions - segmentation and the
positing of relationships between elements. See his "Charles Mauron,
Roland Barthes und - Racine," p. 98. Solange Guberman, on the other
hand, sees Mauron as nothing but a structuralist, and limited because
of this, in "La Psychocritique de Charles Mauron et le theatre de Jean
Giraudoux," Culturefrancaise(Bari), 22 (1975), 315.
Genette, "Psycholectures," p. 134; he here tempered an earlier evalu-
ation of Dei metaphores where he saw: "la coexistence singuliere du'une
extreme subtilite dans la methode et d'une rudesse surprenante dans ce
qu'il faut appeler la philosophie de son entreprise." This phrase from
the 1963 original in Critique, 19 (octobre 1963), p. 869, was deleted in
the version published in Figures I in 1966.
Raymond Jean, "Mauron et la methode psychocritique," La Quinzaine
litteraire, 19 (1-15 Janvier 1967), p. 10.
"Postface" by the editors of the special issue on "Litterature et psy-
chanalyse" of Litterature, 3 (octobre 1971), 121-2.
See Pierre Janet's protest against this in De Vangoisse a Vextase, p. 235.
Cf. Vinchon's 1924 L'Art et lafolie, based on Charcot, not Freud.
See David Steel, "Les Debuts de la psychanalyse dans les lettres fran-
chises: 1914-1922," in Revue d'histoire litteraire de la France, 79 (janvier-
fevrier 1979), 62-89.
(avril 1921), pp. 469, 472.
The phrase is that of Francois Peraldi, in "American Psychoanalysis"
in Roland, Psychoanalysis, Creativity, and Literature, p. 31.
See Sherry Turkle, "French Psychoanalysis: A Sociological Perspec-
tive," in Roland, Psychoanalysis, Creativity, and Literature, pp. 39-71,
and "Contemporary French Psychoanalysis," The Human Context, 7
(Summer 1975), 333-42, and 7 (Autumn 1975), 561-9.
By H. Stuart Hughes, The Obstructed Path: French Social Thought in the

237
 Notes to pp. 180-192
Years of Desperation, 1936-1960 (New York: Harper 8c Row, 1966), p.
290.
(Paris: Payot, 1970), p. 8n. Kofman's work has been important in
correcting the reductionism that some Lacanians have brought to the
reading of Freud. See too her discussion of Baudry's "Freud et la
creation litteraire," Tel Quel, 32 (hiver 1968), pp. 63-85.
Jacques Lacan, "Le Seminaire sur La Lettre volee" (26 avril 1955), ha
Psychanalyse, 2 (1956), 1-44.
Jacques Lacan, "Intervention sur le transfert," Ecrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966),
p. 216.
See Jeffrey Mehlman, "Autour du mythe personnel," in Doubrovsky
and Todorov, L'Enseignement de la litterature, p. 290.
See Ricoeur, De I'interpretation: essai sur Freud (Paris: Seuil, 1965) and
Le Confl.it des interpretations: essais hermeneutiques (Paris: Seuil, 1969).

CONCLUSION

See Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (Ith-

aca: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 225; Neil Hertz, "Freud and
the Sandman" in Josue V. Harari, ed., Textual Strategies: Perspectives
in Post-Structuralist Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979),
pp. 296-321; and Catherine Clement, Vies et legendes de Jacques Lacan
(Paris: Grasset, 1981).
Michel Foucault, VArcheologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), p. 22.
Cruickshank, "Psychocriticism and Literary Judgment," 159.
Doubrovsky, Pourquoi la nouvelle critique: critique et objectivite, p. 245.
See, for example, the remarks on judgment that the Groupe Mu felt
obliged to make in their Rhetorique generale (Paris: Larousse, 1970), p.
156: "L'acte consistant a exprimer, de faqon manifeste ou non, sa sat-
isfaction esthetique ou son mecontentement devant un texte determine,
suppose en effet la presence d'une echelle de valeurs dont la constitution
echappe jusqu'a present a toute mesure precise. Elle depend, en effet,
de bien des variables (psychologiques, culturelles, sociologiques, etc.)
et peut etre contaminee par les autres echelles de valeurs (ethiques,
politiques, etc.) existant chez l'individu. L'etude poussee de cette re-
ponse que constitue l'appreciation est done 'd'un autre ordre' et reclame
de methodes et des concepts radicalement differents de ceux dont nous
nous sommes servis jusqu'ici."
M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (1953; New York: Norton,
1958), p. 328.
Santayana, The Sense of Beauty, p. 31.
Moore, Principia Ethica, p. 201.
See Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, pp. 235-44.
Reprinted in The Background of English Literature, Classical and Romantic,

238
 Notes to pp. 192-20j

and Other Collected Essays and Addresses (1925; rpt. London: Chatto 8c
Windus, 1934), pp. 287-8.
Herbert Read, Reason and Romanticism (London: Faber and Gwyer,
1926), pp. 92 and 104. Later, in "Organic and Abstract Form" in his
Collected Essays in Literary Criticism (London: Faber and Faber, 1938),
he would feel that his experience as a poet-critic cut across the classical-
romantic division (p. 18).
John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Minton, Balch, 1934), p.
282.
See William K. Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short
History (1957; rpt. New York: Knopf, 1964), pp. 134-5.
T. E. Hulme, "Romanticism and Classicism," in Herbert Read, ed.,
Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art (London:
Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1936), p. 125.
Ivor Winter, In Defense of Reason (1937; rpt. Denver: University of
Denver Press, 1947), p. 11.
T. S. Eliot, The Use ofPoetry and the Use of Criticism (1933; rpt. London:
Faber and Faber, 1944), p. 119.
T. S. Eliot, "Hamlet and His Problems," The Sacred Wood, p. 96.
John Casey, The Language of Criticism (London: Methuen, 1966), p.
177.
Cf. Rene Wellek's defense of New Criticism as the enemy of science
and formalism in "The New Criticism: Pro and Contra," Critical In-
quiry, 4, 4 (1978), 611-24. See too Frank Lentricchia's study, After the
New Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
See Rickman, "The Nature of Ugliness and the Creative Impulse,"
International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 21 (1940), 294-313; Segal, "A
Psycho-Analytic Approach to Aesthetics," International Journal of Psy-
cho-Analysis, 33 (1952), 196-207; Wallach, "Art, Science, and Repre-
sentation, " Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 18 (1959), 159-73.
David Bleich, "The Subjective Paradigm in Science, Psychology and
Criticism," New Literary History, 7, 2 (1976), 313-34.
Therefore I prefer the more awkward subjective-objective label to the
"transactive" one that Norman Holland suggests for this inseparably
dual paradigm, for, though this latter term gains in elegance, it loses
the suggestion of dichotomous unmanageability that characterizes the
paradigm as it exists today. See Holland, "The New Paradigm: Sub-
jective or Transactive?," New Literary History, 7, 2 (1976), 335-46.

APPENDIX B
A complete set of the correspondence ofJuly 1927 between Marcel and
Forster, Forster and Mauron, Mauron and Marcel is to be found among
Mauron's papers, in the possession of Alice Mauron.

239
 Notes to pp. 208-211

Sutton, Letters of Roger Fry, II, 598. Fry here writes to Marie Mauron,
21 December 1926: "Good Lord, how difficult she is to translate, but
I think Charles has managed to keep the atmosphere marvellously."
Woolf, A Reflection of the Other Person: The Letters ofVirgina Woolf IV
(1929-31), p. 125. On the 3rd of January 1930, she wrote to Forster
about Stock's (the publisher) desire for a new translator to replace
Mauron. William Plomer agreed because "having been to a lecture of
Mauron's . . . he talked bad French, had a bad accent, and was not on
the strength of the lecture, intelligent. The other frogs were some of
Clive's friends in Paris who remarked how well Mrs. Dalloway was
translated [by S. David] compared with Passage, which they professed
to find very bad: but who they were I don't know. Raymond's [Mor-
timer] evidence was of the same kind. Why, I wonder, this hostility
to Mauron in Paris? Is it disinterested criticism, or is there some motive
behind?"
Woolf, A Reflection, 26 June 1931, p. 347.
Woolf, A Reflection, 28 June? 1931, pp. 349-50.
Letter from Marcel to Forster, 10 fevrier 1950, in the possession of
Alice Mauron.
In Lejour, 28 septembre 1936, he wrote that Mauron managed to render
into French "l'accent febrile, le mouvement tour a tour souleve et
defaillant, le style delicat et brutal, la precision reveuse."
Times (London), 20 December 1966, p. 10.

APPENDIX c
Sutton, Letters of Roger Fry, 20 January 1926, II, 591.
For an example of this, see her famous "Examine for a moment an
ordinary mind on an ordinary day" passage in "Modern Fiction" (1919)
in Woolf, The Common Reader, First Series (1925; New York: Harcourt
Brace and World, 1953), p. 154.

240

Abell, Walter, 44-5, 57, 60, 220
1124, 220 1133
Abraham, K., 130, 135-6, 179
Abrams, M. H., 70, 185
Adler, Alfred, 100, 124
Adorno, Theodore, 167, 235 1114
aesthetic emotion, 36, 37, 38-9,
43-5, 47-8, 57-8, 63, 71, 74,
77, 90-1, 135, 155, 157, 188,
191
aesthetic purity, 2, 35-6, 38, 44,
46, 54, 56-7, 58, 60, 63-4, 67,
69, 91, 116, 118, 224 1126
aesthetics
affective theories of response,
ix, 4, 10, 12, 76, 87, 89-90,
no11, 118, 119, 124,
155-9, 161, 193
expressive theories of creation,
ix, 4, 5, 12, 40, 61, 66, 76,
87, 89-90, n o , 119, 124, 130,
131, 135, 145, 154-7, 161,
194, 195
metaphysical, viii, 19, 26, 33,
58, 92, 142, 163-4, 173, 179,
184
psychological, ix, 2, 4, 46, 58-
9, 79, 116, 142
affectivism, see aesthetics: affective
theories of response
Aigrisse, Gilberte, 180
Index
Alberes, R-M, 180
Anglo-Saxon school, see object-re-
lations theory
Anzieu, Didier, 180
Apollinaire, G., 65
Aristotle, 44, 158, 177, 195
Arnold, Matthew, 190, 194
art for art's sake, xi, 2, 36
Athenaeum debate on art and sci-
ence, 52-8, 90
Aubert, Franchise, 231 n20
Auden, W. H., 97
authority, need for, xii, 93, 97,
114, 129, 143, 151, 155, 194
autoanalysis, see Klein, Melanie:
autoanalysis
135, Ay da, Adile, 170-1
Bach, Johann Sebastian, 65
Bachelard, Gaston, 143, 172, 173,
228 n3, 236 n23
Ballets russes, 65
Barres, Maurice, 84
Barthes, Roland, 163, 175-7, 183
Basch, Victor, 66, 224-5 n33
Baudelaire, Charles, 8, 10, 65, 69,
115, 118, 121, 132, 146, 153,
160, 212, 230-1 ni7, 231 n20,
236 n2i
Baudouin, Charles, 80, 130, 172,
180
241
 Index
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 65, 70,
72-3
Beguin, Albert, 174, 180
Bell, Clive, 24, 30, 37, 39, 42, 44,
47, 57-8, 66, 74, 78, 90, 91,
164, 191
Bell, Julian, 30-1, 52
Bell, Quentin, 28, 31, 36, 208, 218
n24
Bell, Vanessa, 30, 217 ni4, 225
n34
Bellak, Leopold, 3, 150, 229 n20
Benveniste, Emile, 102, 181
Bergler, Edmund, 95, 130, 131,
179
Bergson, Henri, 3, 19, 20, 179
Bernard, Claude, 3, 4, 20, 21-3,
33, 34, 48, 51, 56, 59, 60, 68,
93, 118, 122, 136, 139, 142,
144, 147, 167, 173, 187
Bersani, Leo, 124, 165, 174-5
Bessette, Gerard, 175, 235 ni2
Bettelheim, Bruno, 226 n6
Binswanger, Ludwig, 98
Bleich, David, 97, 155, 197
Blin, Georges, 180
Bloomsbury, 60, 63, 217 ni7, 220,
n2i
aesthetics, 27-8, 669, 190-1
Mauron's position in, 27-8, 30
values, 30-1
Bonaparte, Marie, 12, 115, 119,
125, 154, 172, 179, 236 n2i
Bonnard, Pierre, 65
Botticelli, Sandro, 65
Bourget, Paul, 179
Bradley, A. C , 43, 44
Bremond, Abbe, 36
Breton, Andre, 98, 179
Breughel family, 65
Burlington Magazine, 1, 12, 42, 47
Cambridge, 20, 27, 28, 30, 36, 73,
91, 92, 192
Casey, John, x, 194-5
Cellier, Leon, 171
Cezanne, 32, 38, 41, 42, 46, 63, 65
Chardin, Jean-Baptiste-Simeon,
36,65
Chasseguet-Smirgel, Janine, 180
Clancier, Anne, 180
242
classicism, 33, 38, 39, 62, 188,
192-4
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 12, 78,
90, 92, 93, 156
Commerce, 26, 212
Conley, Tom, 228 n26
contemplation vs. action, 2, 31,
35, 47, 56, 58, 61, 66-7, 69,
74, 77, 78, 82, 90, 94, 191
Correggio, 65
Couperin, Franqois, 65
creative process, see aesthetics: ex-
pressive theories of creation
Criterion, 1, 26, 30, 57, 60, 93
critical context
England, vii, 1-2, 12, 41-2,
188-9
France, vii, viii, 1, 19, 41, 97,
163-84, 190
Italy, 41, 165, 234 n6
Croce, Benedetto, 41, 62, 154
Cruickshank, John, 189
Culler, Jonathan, 185-6
Dalbiez, Roland, 225 n34
Dante, 65
David, Michel, 234 n6
Debussy, Claude, 65
Decades de Pontigny, 26, 33, 47,
163
deconstruction, ix, 184, 185, 187,
192, 197
deductive reasoning, xii, 22, 138
defense mechanisms, see Klein,
Melanie: defense mechanisms
Delay, Jean, 180
Deleuze, Gilles, 188
Denis, Maurice, 42, 193
depressive state, see Klein, Me-
lanie: depressive position
Derrida, Jacques (see also decon-
struction), 130
design, see formalism
determinism, xii, 21, 85, i n , 117,
120, 124, 150
Deutelbaum, Wendy, 126, 165
Dewey, John, 45-6, 193
Dickinson, Goldsworthy Lowes,
28
Dilthey, Wilhelm, 99
Dingle, Herbert, 195
Dostoevsky, Feodor, 75, 112, 156
 Index
Doubrovsky, Serge, i, 175-6,
183, 190
dreams and dreamwork, see psy-
choanalysis: dreams and
dreamwork
Durkheim, Emile, 20
ego psychology, see Klein, Me-
lanie; Freud, Anna
Eliot, T. S., x, xi, 2, 32, 47, 62,
67, 90, 154, 190, 193, 194
empiricism: ix, xii, xiii, 5, 12, 19, Freud, Sigmund (see also
30, 33, 50, 53, 87, 89, 91,
100, 131, 132, 138, 140, 142,
143, 145, 147, 151, 157, 162,
163, 165, 167, 171, 172, 183,
184, 186, 187, 189, 190, 195
experimental method, see science:
methodology
expressivism, see aesthetics: expre-
sive theories of creation
Fairbairn, Ronald, 126, 132, 156,
22930 n22
fantasy, 5, 8, 11, 57, 58, 106-8,
128, 131, 132, 135, 152, 158,
161
Fechner, Gustav Theodor, 53, 98
Ferenczi, Sandor, 130, 179
Fernandez, Dominique, 125, 236
n22
Fernandez, Ramon, 19
Fish, Stanley, 186
Flaubert, Gustave, 65
Fliess, Wilhelm, 100, 154
formalism (see also Fry, Roger;
Forster, E. M.; significant
form)
definition, xi-xii, 8, 44, 60
literary vs. visual, 389, 41-2,
43-7, 49-50, 149
musical, 70-7
roots of, 2, 62-3
Russian and Czech, 41, 177, 195
Forster, E. M.
Anonymity, 29, 42, 47, 85
Aspects of the Novel, 31, 41, 50,
54, 70-1, 72, 74, 75, 77
formalism of, 38, 41, 42
friendship with Fry, 26-9
friendship with Mauron, 1, 18,
26-31, 217 ni7
243
influence on Mauron, 29, 30,
70-7, 186
translated by Mauron, 18, 25
Two Cheers for Democracy, 18,
29
view of music, 70-77, 224 n2i
Foucault, Michel, 187, 233 ni
free association, see psychoanaly-
sis: free association
Freud, Anna, 10-11, 126, 128,
130, 151, 161
psychoanalysis)
attacks on, 4, 69, 80-1, 83, 98-
9, 100-2, 115-6, 124, 132-3,
151, 167-8, 225 n34
impact on aesthetics, 97-114,
179-84
interest in, 12, 97-8, 179-81
view of art, 52, 134-5, X54, X56,
232 n26
works mentioned by name: The
Interpretation of Dreams, 6,
n o , 144, 168; fokes and Their
Relation to the Unconscious
(Witz), 10, 119, 135, 148,
159, 161; Outline ofPyscho-
Analysis, 100
Freudian formalism, see
psycho critique
Fry, Margery, 18, 217 n i 7
Fry, Roger
formalism, viii-ix, 4, 8, 24, 37-
40, 42-3, 50-1, 136, 137, 163,
191
friendship with Mauron, 1, 7-8,
17-19, 24-7; importance of,
20, 42-3, 47, 58
influence on and influence of
Mauron, 25-7, 31-4, 38-9,
70-7, 163, 177, 186, 188-9,
211-12, 218 1121, 220 n24, 220
n33
relation to Forster, 28-9
theory of representation, 36-41,
44, 46, 71-2, 149
translator of Mallarme, 62, 77,
88, 116, 139, 160, 222 n2
view of music, 70-7
view of psychoanalysis, 55, 57,
80, 87, 88, 114, 137, 221 ni9,
222 n23, 225 n34
 Index
view of science, 33-4, 50-1, 52-
60, 77-8, 82, 137, 221 n2
Frye, Northrop, 175, 232 1125
Fuller, Peter, 132-3
Galton, Francis, 6, 148
Garnett, David, 29
Gautier, Theophile, 65, 212
Genette, Gerard, 143, 159, 169,
177, 237 n37
Geneva critics, see thematic
criticism
genre considerations, 9, 10, 11,
119, 158-61, 174, 233 n35,
233 n38
Gide, Andre, 26, 179, 224 n24
Gillibert, Jean, 180
Giorgione, 37
Giotto, 65
Giraudoux, Jean, 27, 121, 132,
152, 160, 168, 191, 231 ni7
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von,
52, 89, 104, 112, 156
Goldmann, Lucien, 177, 237 n34
Gombrich, Ernst H., 43
Gontcharova, Natalya, 65
Gorky, Maxim, 65
Goya, Francisco, 121
Gradiva, 104-5, 108, 147-8
Green, Andre, 151, 233 n35
Greene, T. H., 190
Greimas, A. J., 197
Grierson, Herbert, 192
Grimaud, Michel, 142
Groupe MM, 238 n5
Guattari, Felix, 188
Haydn, Franz Joseph, 65
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich,
x Kiell, Norman, 104
hierarchy of values, 82-3, 85, 191-
2 132-3, 142, 156, 169, 179,
Hogarth Press, 1, 47, 87
Holderlin, Friedrich, 130, 182
Holland, Norman, 126, 155
Homer, 101, 104
Hugo, Victor, 121, 128, 129, 142,
160, 231 ni7
Hulme, T. E., 193
Hume, David, 53
Hyman, Stanley Edgar, 227 ni4
244
hypothesis, see science:
methodology
idealism, 41; attack on, 20, 30
Imago, 104, 179
impressionism, viii, xi-xii, 4, 29,
34, 37, 50, 61, 62, 64, 69, 70-
7, 86, 94, 117, 133, 136, 137,
138, 140, 141, 145, 154, 155,
162, 175, 176, 186-7, 188,
191, 193
inductive reasoning, xii, 30, 51
intuition {see also impressionism)
role in Mauron's work, 22-4,
93, 121, 127, 132, 133, 136,
137, 138, 139-40, 142, 143,
144, 147, 164, 167, 173, 176,
187, 188, 192, 235 ni3
vs. reason, xi, 4, 6, 19, 20, 2 1 -
4, 28, 33-4, 61, 145, 157, 186
Jakobson, Roman, 181
James, Henry, 41, 42
James, William, 34, 92
Jameson, Fredric, 197
Janet, Pierre, 84-5, 92
Jean-Aubry, 208
Jean, Raymond, 141, 178
John of the Cross, St., 68
jokes and jokework, see psycho-
analysis: jokes and jokework
Jones, Ernest, 58, 104, 112, 114,
130, 134, 225 n34
Jouve, Pierre-Jean, 179
Jung, Carl, 3, 10, 61, 68, 69, 81,
88, 100, 124, 130, 132, 164,
192, 232 n25
Kant, Immanuel, xi, 2
Keats, John, 32, 190
Klein, Melanie, 3, 7, 124, 130,
180, 188
autoanalysis, 9, 131
defense mechanisms, 10, 128,
129, 131, 145, 153, 161, 229
ni5
depressive position, 127, 128,
129
object-relations, 10, 127, 128,
129
 Index
restitution theory of art, 126,
128, 182
role in Mauron's theories, 8,
126-33, 151- 2
Kofman, Sarah, 104-5, 106, 181,
238 n.46
Kris, Ernst, 3, 8-9, 119, 131-2,
135, 137, 150, 229 n20
Lacan, Jacques, viii, ix, 1, 130,
165, 178-84, 187, 196, 197,
238 n46
Laforgue, Rene, 12, 115, 172, 179,
238 n2i
Langer, Susanne, 47, 98
Lansonianism, see university crit-
ics; positivism
Lao-tse, 67, 68
Laplanche, Jean, 130, 182
Larionov, Mikhail, 65
Lawall, Sarah, 173
Lawrence, D. H., 85, 208
Leavis, F. R., xi, 194
Leclaire, Serge, 151
Lenormand, H-R, 179
Leonardo da Vinci, 112, 156
Lesser, Simon O., 160
liberal humanism (see also critical
context: England), viii, 188
97
linguistics, x, xii, 5, 175, 177, 184,
187
...
literary criticism
as analytic description, x, xii, 2,
11, 12, 147, 162, 169, 176,
178, 186, 189
as evaluation, x, xii, 2, 12, 112,
147, 163-5, J 89, 190-1, 195,
238 n5
as interpretation, x, xii, 11, 111,
146, 147, 162, 178, 186, 187,
189, 194, 195
intrinsic or extrinsic, xii, 175-84
in relation to social sciences (see
also nouvelle critique), x, 1, 5, as translator, 18, 26, 28, 160,
171, 175-84
(see also traditional literary
criticism)
Lodge, David, 197
logical positivism, ix, 20
Longinus, 44
Lucas, F. L., 25, 195, 217 nio
245
Malherbe, Frangois de, 65
Mallarme, Stephane: as mystic,
xiii, 68-9, 117
craft, 2, 63, 117
contribution to psychocritique,
60, 63, 102, 116-17, 118, 124,
138
poems analyzed, 6-7, 38-9, 75,
116, 118, 195
psychocritique of, 2, 10, 88-9,
121, 129, 136-7, 146, 153,
170-1, 230 ni7
translated by Fry, 6, 8, 62-4,
88, 116, 139, 160
Mannoni, O., 182
Marcel, Gabriel, 207-8
Martin du Gard, 27
Mauriac, Franqois, 27
Maurois, Andre, 26
Mauron, Alice, 123, 201, 208
Mauron, Charles (see also psychocri-
tique; Fry, Roger; Forster,
E. M.)
as aesthetician, vii, 1, 20, 60,
92, 115
blindness, 3, 6, 7, 17, 18, 19,
26, 77, 94, 142, 147, 160, 163,
165, 208, 231 ni8
defensiveness, 125, 143, 162,
166, 168, 170-1, 176
influence on others (see also Fry,
Roger: influence on and influ-
ence of Mauron), 45, 166-7,
217 nio, 235 ni2
as lecturer, 2, 26-7, 55
as literary critic, vii, 20, 60, 115
as poet, 26, 211-13
politics, 30-1, 81, 84, 94, 188,
218 n29
as scientist, 3, 4, 5, 17, 18, 20,
23, 64, 133, 139, 147, 163,
164, 167, 188-9, !97, 2 35 n I 3
similarities to Freud, 101, 138
9, 166, 234 n8
207-10, 240 n2, 240 n3
triple psyche theory, 79-82, 86,
88, 89, 115, 224-5 n33
works mentioned by name: The
Nature of Beauty in Art and
Literature, 2, 47-51, 117; Aes-
thetics and Psychology, 2, 32,
 Index
34, 55, 56-61, 65-6, 67, 78,
87, 89, 91, 139, 149, 164;
Mallarme Vobscur, 64, 68, 77,
88, 116; Sagesse de I'eau, 3, 68,
78, 79, 83, 120, 124, 212, 233
ni; L'Homme triple, 3, 27, 68,
76, 78, 79, 80, 83, 115, 120,
124, 131-2, 233 ni; L'lntro-
duction a la psychanalyse de
Mallarme, 4, 10, 68, 84-5,
123, 126, 139, 143, 153, 165,
170; Des metaphores obsedantes
au my the personnel, 6, 132,
J
59> J 97; L'Inconscient dans
Voeuvre et la vie de Racine, 9,
146, 159, 169; Psycho critique du
genre comique, 119, 128-9, 161;
Mallarme par lui-meme, 129; Le
Dernier Baudelaire, 153, 178;
Phedre, 121, 169, 178
Mauron, Claude, 218 n24
Mauron, Marie, 19, 24-5, 208,
211
Mehlman, Jeffrey, 113, 147, 154,
165, 222 n23, 231 ni9, 232
n25
Melville, Herman, 75, 87
Michelangelo, 65, i n , 113, 122
Mistral, Frederic, 9, 140
modernism (see also Eliot, T. S.;
Pound, Ezra), 2, 13, 34, 185
Moliere, Jean Baptiste Poquelin,
10, 11, 119, 146, 155, 159,
231 ni7
Mondor, Dr., 170
Montaigne, Michel de, 19
Moore, G. E., 20, 36, 53, 66, 91,
92, 164, 190-1
moral values and art, 36, 43, 58,
79, 233 113, 233 n4
Morand, Paul, 179
Moulton, R. G., 195
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 65
Mulhern, Francis, 190
Murry, Middleton, 19, 26, 33
music
and formalism, 37, 63, 65, 70-7,
122
and impressionism, 66, 70-7,
91, 208-9
mysticism
and mystery, impressionism,
246
xii, 2, 20, 29, 32, 50, 64, 66,
68, 69, 72, 74, 78, 79, 84, 90,
92, 107, 117, 212
Eastern, 4, 61, 66-9, 80, 84, 88-
9, 94, 115, 163, 192
Nation and Athenaeum, 25
Nerval, Gerard de, 9
networks, see psycho critique: net-
works of obsessive metaphors
New Criticism, 185-6, 195
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, x,
58, 81
nouvelle critique, 1, 165, 171,
172-84, 186, 196
objectivity, see subjective-objec-
tive dichotomy
object-relations theory (see also
Klein, Melanie; Freud, Anna;
Fairbairn, Ronald), 3, 7, 180
obsessive metaphors, see psychocri-
tique: networks of obsessive
metaphors
orthodoxy, see authority; psycho-
analysis: as orthodoxy
painting, see Fry, Roger: theory of
representation
parapraxes, see psychoanalysis:
parapraxes
Pascal, Blaise, 65
Pater, Walter, 44
Peirce, Charles Sanders, ix
personal myth, see psycho critique:
personal myth
Picard, Raymond, 1, 175-7
Picasso, Pablo, 65
Poe, Edgar Allan, 115, 125, 154,
181-2, 212, 236 n2i
Poincare, Henri, 4, 23-4, 48, 57,
68, 78, 118, 122, 136, 167,
217 nio
Popper, Karl, 100
positivism, 20, 33, 53, 98, 154,
163, 166, 167, 172, 173, 175,
176, 177, 179, 181, 183, 187,
188, 191, 192, 196
postimpressionism, 28, 32, 36, 41,
63, 7i, 193
poststructuralism, see
deconstruction
 Index
Poulet, Georges, 173, 174
Pound, Ezra, 2
Poussin, Gaspard, 42, 65
pragmatism, ix
Proust, Marcel, 65, 72
Provence, 25, 2930, 212
psychoanalysis (see also Freud,
Sigmund)
adapted tor psycho critique, vii, 5,
61, 116-33, H4
daydreams, 104, 105, 123
dreams and dreamwork (con-
densation, displacement, sym-
bolization, representation),
101, 104, 105, 107-9, n o ,
i n , 113, 118, 122, 123, 124,
135, 148-9, 168, 181, 236 n2i
free association, 6, n , 123, 124,
139, 150, 229 n20
jokes and joke work (Witz), 105,
109, n o , i n , 119, 135, 149,
159, 161, 181
models provided by, 112-14,
121-2, 140, 147-8
neglect of form, 58, 114, 134-6
as orthodoxy, xii, 4, 22, 51, 58,
61, 94, 99, 112, 115, 121, 123,
125, 128, 129, 138, 145, 162,
163, 169-70, 171, 177, 183,
184, 196, 197
parapraxes, 101, 104, 105, 109,
n o , i n , 117
prefigured by artists, 103, 108
as scientific psychology, ix, 3,
11, 69, 83, 97-114, 122-3,
127, 139, 141, 166, 173, 177,
183-4, 187
sublimination, 6, 54, 58, 69, 80,
81, 105, 106, 107, 109, 118,
123, 128, 131, 158, 159
transference, 93, 112, 123, 149
uncanny, 104
unconscious, xii, 3, 5, 79, 101,
105-10, 126
wish-fulfilment, 57, 80, 106,
108, 132
psychobiography, 12, 112, 120-1,
125, 143, 172, 180, 236 n22
psycho critique (see also Mauron,
Charles; psychoanalysis:
adapted for psycho critique;
genre considerations)
247
biography's role, 10, n , 120,
146
criticism of, 141-3, 151, 165-84,
173-4, 175, 178-9, 183, 231
n20, 237 n37
definition, 3, 4, 11-12
differences from psychoanalysis,
5-6, 117-33, 144
latent-manifest structures, 5, 7,
11-12, 39, 89, i n , 114, 120,
131, 136, 140, 143, 144, 153,
156, 161-2, 169, 187
as musical analysis, 75, 122, 146
networks of obsessive meta-
phors, xii, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 23,
39-40, 61, 120, 127, 143, 145-
6, 148, 149, 151, 154, 160,
174, 175
as partial, complementary, 4,
12-13, 118, 143, 166
personal myth, 8, 9, 10, 11, 69,
120, 127, 128, 129, 132, 143,
146, 151-6, 159, 160, 168,
169, 182, 191, 232 n25
psyche-work confusion, 7, 9,
11, 61, 129, 140, 145, 148,
151-6, 178
scientific, x, 12, 23, 123, 142,
143, 168, 170, 183-4
social vs. creative ego, 3, 9, 10,
61, 107, 120, 129, 152-4, 160,
190
textual superimposition, xii, 4,
6, 8, 10, 11, 112, 113, 120,
122, 125, 139, 140, 141, 142,
143, 144, 145, 147, 152, 154,
157, 160, 167, 168, 173, 177,
182, 184
unconscious personality, 6-7,
24, 39, 152
psychological volumes, 50, 220
n33
psychology (see also science; psy-
choanalysis; aesthetics: psy-
chological; spiritual, as
psychological)
as discipline, 98
roots in modernism, 3
Rabelais, Francois, 65
Racine, Jean, 8, 9, 10, 23, 31, 65,
115, 118, 121, 129, 140, 145,
 Index
146, 153, 159, 165, 171, 172,
175, 176, 178, 231 ni7
Rank, Otto, 104, 106, 130, 132,
134, 179
Raphael, 65
Raymond, Marcel, 180
Read, Herbert, 26, 467, 124, 144,
192
Reik, Theodor, 104
Renoir, Pierre Auguste, 65
representation, see Fry, Roger:
theory of representation
Richard, Jean-Pierre, 173, 174
Richards, I. A., 26, 36, 53, 54,
137
as mystic, 90, 92-3
as psychologist, 12, 89-93, J 57~
8 semiotics, viii, ix, 163, 184, 187,
vs. Fry, 44, 90-1
Rickman, John, 195
Ricoeur, Paul, 184
Riffaterre, Michael, 186
Robert, Marthe, 160
romanticism, 29, 39, 53, 57, 89,
90, 93, 97, 98, 107, 155, 164,
167, 185, 190, 192-4, 195,
196, 220
Rosolato, Guy, 182
Rothenstein, John, 43
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 65, 81, 89
Rubens, Peter Paul, 65
Ruskin, John, 28, 36, 43
Russell, Bertrand, 20, 190
Russo, John Paul, 31
Sachs, Hanns, 58, 104, 106, 130,
134-5, 154
Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin,
115, 154, 164, 181
St. Remy-de-Provence, 17, 28,
29-30, 81, 171, 218
Santayana, George, 44, 45, 190
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 180, 233 ni
Satie, Erik, 65
Saussure, Ferdinand de, see
linguistics
Schlegel, Friedrich, 192
science
and art, viii, ix, 5, 24, 28, 48,
51, 52-61, 78, 90, 97, 115,
123, 137-8, 143, 163, 189,
195, 197
248
appearances of, xi, 143
language of, x, 32, 141, 146,
151, 185, 187
and literary criticism, x, 45, 52-
3
methodology, ix, xii, 2, 5, 19,
20, 21-4, 33-4, 50-1, 52, 55,
59-60, 78, 93, 99, 100, 101,
115, 122, 124, 129, 137, 139,
140, 141, 142-3, 146, 147,
150, 151, 152, 155, 162, 168,
171, 173, 183, 186, 187, 188-9
social function of, 33, 54-5, 77-
8, 82, 93-4
Schubert, Franz, 65
Segal, Hanna, 128, 161, 195, 229
ni5, 233 n38
197
sensibility, xi, 2, 3, 24, 56, 87, 90,
164
and intellect, 20, 59
Serres, Michel, 188
Seurat, Georges, 65
Seyssaud, Rene, 69
Shakespeare, William, 65, 87, 104,
n o , 112, 113, 122, 159
Sharpe, Ella Freeman, 53-4
significant form, 29, 37, 40, 60,
114, 135, 157, 188, 191
Simon, Henri, 171
social sciences, see literary criti-
cism: in relation to social sci-
ences; nouvelle critique
Sophocles, 104, n o , 112, 159
Spanish Civil War, 30-1, 61
Spector, Jack, 113
Spender, Stephen, 13
spiritual, as psychological, 3, 49-
50, 67, 76, 77, 83, 86, 87-8,
89, 115, 117-18
Spitzer, Leo, 169
Starobinski, Jean, 98, 102, 103,
151, 173
Stekel, William, 131
Stevens, Wallace, 223 ni7
Stokes, Adrian, 128, 179
Strachey, James, 87
Stravinsky, Igor, 65
structuralism, viii, 12, 125, 165,
176, 177, 178, 187, 237 n36
subjective-objective dichotomy
 Index
(public and private), viii, ix,
x, 3, I I , 13, 24, 61, 77, 94,
97-8, 101, 115, 123, 132, 133,
138-9, 143, 144, 146, 147,
150, 151, 155, 167, 176, 183,
184, 185-97, 239 n22
subjectivity, see subjectiveobjec-
tive dichotomy
sublimation, see psychoanalysis:
sublimation
Sulloway, Frank, 100-1
superimposition, see psychocritique:
textual superimposition
symbolism (see also Mallarme), 2,
62-4, 66-8, 76, 211
systems of relations, see formal-
ism: definition
Taoism, 68
thematic criticism (Geneva
School), 8, 172-4
Thibaudet, Albert, 179
Titian, 65
traditional literary criticism, viii,
4, 5, 11, 89, 118, 122, 131,
136, 144-5, 165, 172, 174,
175-6, 178
transference, see psychoanalysis:
transference
Trilling, Lionel, 97, 102
unconscious, see psychoanalysis:
unconscious
unity of the arts, 43-4, 64-6, 72,
9i
university critics, 175-6, 178, 183,
188, 196
249
Valery, Paul, 9, 141
value judgments, see literary criti-
cism: as evaluation
values, see moral values in art; hi-
erarchy of values
van Gogh, 19, 69, 128-9, !32, 160
Verlaine, Paul, 212
Vildrac, Charles, 26
Watteau, Jean-Antoine, 65
Weber, Jean-Paul, 173-4
Wellek, Rene and Austen Warren,
xii, 227 n24
Westermarck, Edward Alexander,
20
Whistler, James, 43, 44
Whyte, Lancelot Law, 227 ni9
Wilson, Edmund, 62
Wimsatt, W. K., 193
Winters, Ivor, 193
wish-fulfilment, see psychoanaly-
sis: wish-fulfilment
Witz, see psychoanalysis: jokes and
jokework
Woolf, Leonard, 1, 47
Woolf, Virginia, 1, 20, 26-7, 42,
47, 82, 88, 90, 117, 207-8,
211, 217 ni4, 217 ni7, 240 n3
Wordsworth, William, x, 90
World War II, 18, 54, 61, 72, 77,
81, 82, 83, 94, 126, 164, 218
Yeats, William Butler, 2, 62
Zola, Emile, 216 n8
APPENDIXES