Narcissism and the Literary Libido. Marshall W. Alcorn Jr.
mechanisms that produce the “experience” of such textual supplementation.
A good theory of rhetoric must avoid positivistic assumptions that would cut off certain lines of inquiry at the outset. I suggest that literary texts offer a supplementation for depleted being. From a positivist perspective this claim must sound ridiculous. The self cannot in any real sense get more “being” than it already has. In a certain sense the biological body is all the “being” that the self will ever achieve. But these complaints miss the point by failing to understand the point of narcissistic concerns. The question that needs to be answered here is not whether or not the experience of compensation or self-supplementation has some final ontological ground, but how the imagined experience (false though it may be) becomes produced. Even if the need for being more fully “alive” is purely an imaginary need or experience, we must take it seriously and investigate its dialogical implications for signification.
We must examine the various complexities of the experience of being more fully alive. There are numerous paradoxes to consider. Not every imaginary image of the fulfillment of being more fully alive, for example, can satisfy the imaginary need for being alive. Some images for the fullness of being can be shared between people, some images cannot. Some imaginary presences seem full, others seem empty. This is one of many paradoxes that surround this curious linguistic production. Many signified presences change their appearances as readers change. And many readers change in response to the ideological structures produced and marketed by cultures. Interpretation theory should explore these paradoxes. Interpretation theory should patiently and methodically explore the variety of psychological mechanisms that are the ground of textual rhetoric. Interpretation theory should seek to explain the psychological mechanisms that produce the effect of an experienced self-supplementation. A theory of textual rhetoric would thus appropriate another discourse explaining how rhetoric is an effect compensating for a depletion of being.
From a strictly economical point of view, writers write because they gain more reward than loss from the process. The same is true for readers: They read because they gain more than they lose.
How do we examine the complex psychological issues behind this simple gain? This question brings us back to the concept of narcissism. Narcissism is a name for a dialectical function presiding over an event we might call the transference of being. A species of narcissism occurs whenever being is transferred from one entity that has it (or seems to have it) to another entity that does not. This “thing” that is transferred from one self to another self is apparently imaginary. It does not exist in any “real” sense. Yet this “thing” that does not exist is central to human life and action, and is essential to the rhetorical functions of language.
How does one transfer something imaginary from one person to another? How does the receiver of the imaginary something acknowledge the receipt of a nonexistent entity? How does the receiver of an imaginary something sense, initially, the nonpresence of the nonexistent entity? These may or may not be valid metaphysical questions, but they are valid psychological questions. They characterize transactions we experience everyday. They describe experiences we take for granted, things that, as Fish says, “go without saying.” They also, I think, characterize many of the implicit, unspoken assumptions about existence and signification shared by writers and readers. If writers can rhetorically manipulate the hidden agenda of readers’ ontological or narcissistic concerns, they can find mechanisms for binding readers to texts, and readers to particular visions of life and community. If writers can induce us to narcissistically invest in imaginary things, these imaginary things can become real things.
The protected “narcissistic” space of literary enjoyment can insulate literary experience from real-world experience. But it need not. Many nineteenth-century readers saw Conrad’s skeletal image of Kurtz intensely, and saw this image as a clear political message, a fit representation of the Belgian rape of the Congo.33 When experiences such as these are noted and discussed in newspapers, as they often are, they are a clear force for propaganda. They influence a culture’s image of itself and influence political action. We should not underestimate the degree to which literary response can be “absorbing” and transformative. We should not underestimate how literary experience, unlike the usual experience of reading a newspaper, can manipulate libidinal shifts and cultivate new value perceptions in a manner not commonly managed by nonliterary modes of representation.
An enduring theme of religious art shows Mary, the mother of Jesus, looking down with care into her son’s eyes. The gaze from child to mother is transparent. The babe does not look at his mother. More properly, he participates in her being. He is surrounded and supported by her presence. He bathes in the resonance of her joy. Psychologists have argued that this unspoken and largely unspeakable experience is the ground of the emergence of the self. Children take on being as they take in the being of the mother. The mother offers her being to her children’s need for being. Children are at one with the mother’s inner life, and in this inwardness they develop their own inwardness. The mother-infant bond is, as they say, a narcissistic bond. Narcissism, in this case, characterizes the exchange of being from mother to child and from child to mother. Both participants are unusually “safe” but also vulnerable and receptive, unusually empathic. They give what they do not “really” have and receive that which could not exist except in the relationship between the two.
All bonds are narcissistic. All development and transformation are grounded initially in the receipt of nonexistent supplies. At the turning points of our self-development, we often have little more than a sense of inner emptiness and the faint glimpse of an idea. Our response to emptiness and our “regulation” of these ideas and images is both delicate and subtle. But this response and our regulation of it is enormously important. If we fail to organize and regulate our ideas and images, others will do this for us. Advertising and politics thrive on the marketing and manipulation of libidinal attachments and imaginary “images.”
The narcissistic transference of being does not usually designate the portage of some homogenous substance “being” from one subject to another. Rather, being always has texture, style, and particularity. In this sense, there are countless varieties of narcissistic themes, countless forms of rhetorical structures. The mother has love, or anger, and usually both together, and these things come into her children as the substance of their being. The mother also has ideas, work, and values, which also “position” her children’s identity. It is crucial to note that the child, or adult, may be surrounded by various and numerous experiences, that is, surrounded by many people who can become objects of identification. But the self cannot by a simple process identify with all or take in all (or even the best) that is without.
Neither parents, nor politicians, nor advertisers fully control the self-system of the subject. Only certain things can be ferried across the gulf that separates one person from another. Only certain things will come to count as being. The study of narcissism requires a study of what things can count, how they come to count, and what the consequences are.
Notes
1. Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), 55.
2. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), in The Standard Edition of Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1963), 7: 145. Henceforth all references to Freud come from the twenty-four-volume Standard Edition (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74).
3. Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction” (1914), The Standard Edition 14: 83-84.
4. In this book I have chosen to generally ignore the distinction between “narcissistic libido and sexual libido.” Freud