Volume 12, Number 7 · April 10, 1969
Interfering with Literature
By Robert M. Adams
The Dynamics of Literary Response
by Norman N. Holland
Oxford, 378 pp., $8.00
The Return of the Vanishing American
by Leslie A. Fiedler
Stein & Day, 192 pp., $5.95
The Ordinary Universe
by Denis Donoghue
Macmillan, 320 pp., $6.95
Seeing into literature without losing sight of it altogether is a problem of critical focus; it involves us with literary energies and façades. Any man who offers to reduce these slippery variables to a single formula merits at least a prize for bravery. The Dynamics of Literary Response by Norman N. Holland, is a vigorously reductive Freudian argument, of the kind more frequently encountered twenty or thirty years ago. The book begins with a joke of sorts, modified to suit the author's special interests, from the pages of a 1964 Playboy; when ground exceedingly small, this joke proves analogous, in the mechanism of its fantasies, to the Wife of Bath's Tale in Chaucer. The successful promotion of this parallel (designed to show the importance of fantasy to all literature) is not without its perils, since one could readily give it this twist: fantasies which underlie both a piece of literary garbage and a literary masterpiece can have little to do with specifically literary responses. Mr. Holland, however, keeps well away from this argument; having established that fantasies underlie the 'willing suspension of disbelief,' which he finds characteristic of both the joke and the Tale, he proposes that the psychoanalytic reading of a work of art has 'special status,' that it involves 'the deepest roots of our cumulating lives,' and is indeed 'the ultimate form of the fantasy that generates our response.' 'Special,' 'deepest,' and 'ultimate' are the key terms here; and, alas for the argument, most literary readers won't be disposed to grant Mr. Holland these large claims quite as blithely as he makes them.
Review, 2899 words
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