Narcissism and the Literary Libido. Marshall W. Alcorn Jr.
sports car may be “sexy” in the literal sense of the word, but her presence bestows the car with a “sexiness” of another order. The car becomes the center of an acquisitive gaze that makes all its details seem glamorous and noteworthy. Clearly, an understanding of libidinal “flow” can contribute to our understanding of rhetoric. The car ad example makes it clear that the cold metallic and mechanical structures of a vehicle can become rhetorically enhanced by means of libidinal manipulations. Advertisers know they can manipulate us into feeling an attachment for the car if they can first elicit an attachment we already have for the blonde.
Although narcissism is usually associated with self-love, it is rather easy to see how the admiration of cars and many other fashionably produced objects can be as narcissistic as gazing in a mirror. When we are libidinally invested in cars, it is often not the cars that we actually care about; we care about ourselves. In looking at the car, we are concerned about our own self-image.8 The car takes on value because we project something narcissistic about ourselves into it. The blonde does not give the car her sex appeal simply by appearing with it. We create the glamour of both the woman and the car because we project glamour onto the object. We are creatures of history and culture, and this makes us active and not passive in the creation of our own feelings. We project libidinal qualities onto objects—cars and blondes—according to complicated rules of status, gender, memory, and mood.
In the Analysis of the Self, a ground-breaking book on the concept of narcissism, Kohut observes that whereas narcissism is usually associated with self-love (or the libidinal investment of the self), narcissism actually supports a wide array of libidinal investments. People, material objects, human activities, and even thoughts can be invested with “narcissistic libido.” Narcissistic libido, not only for Kohut (unlike Freud), contributes to “mature object relationships” (to healthy human relationships). It also forms “the main source of libidinal fuel for some of the socioculturally important activities which are subsumed under the term creativity.”9 Artists, Kohut argues, direct and invest “narcissistic libido” when they spend enormous time and effort in shaping a work—an apparently inconsequential flow of words or a squat block of wood—that becomes singularly important because it seems to “contain” or “express” a deeply human feeling.
Narcissistic libido helps to produce a work of art, and, in a different way, makes a work of art interesting. Narcissistic libido accounts for the laborious attention that critics give to such seemingly inconsequential products. The uninitiated often find art criticism tiresome, but the art critic usually takes great pleasure in the inspection, analysis, and discussion of art. Minute details that would seem accidental or irrelevant to many people appear full of meaning and consequence. Artworks repay such attention because they, in some manner, initiate complex imaginative experience and “gratify” the narcissistic libido of those who invest time in them.
People who appreciate art claim that it prompts them to see things differently, that is, to experience events differently. We sometimes imagine that these events are caused by the external object, but in reality these experiences are caused by the interaction between the observer and the object observed. These experiences occur when observers “invest” something of themselves in the object.
This notion of “investment” is an important idea; we might understand it best by considering our relationship to people. When narcissistic libido is invested in people, narcissistic needs can give people a special aura of “grandeur” or desirability. Kohut argues that this grandeur is the result of narcissistic libidinal investments. This grandeur is produced by an investment of “narcissistic libido” because an unconscious aspect of the observer’s self-structure makes the person observed seem attractive. Part of the psychic structure missing in the observer is perceived as existing in the object observed. Kohut points out:
The intensity of the search for and of the dependency on these objects [people] is due to the fact that they are striven for as a substitute for the missing segments of the psychic structure. They are not objects (in the psychological sense of the term) since they are not loved or admired for their attributes, and the actual features of their personalities, and their actions, are only dimly recognized.10
In Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Linda Loman’s attachment to Willy illustrates the commonplace truth of Kohut’s ideas. Linda “more than loves” Willy, Miller writes, “she admires him as though his mercurial nature, his temper, his massive dreams and little cruelties served her only as sharp reminders of the turbulent longings within him, longings which she shares but lacks the temperament to utter and follow to their end.”11 Because Willy serves Linda as a substitute for a missing part of her own nature, Linda does not see him fully. She is repeatedly hurt by his failings and his “little cruelties.” But, as Miller observes, she has developed an “iron repression of her exceptions to Willy’s behavior.”
In this example, as in many others, the investment of narcissistic libido in objects operates to make objects seem grand or valuable. At the same time, however, this investment can disguise the real nature of the thing admired. Certain people or objects are needed because of narcissistic need, but this same need dictates that these people or objects cannot be seen realistically.
This over inflation of the object or person should be an interesting theme for rhetoricians. I suggested earlier that narcissistic libido makes objects seem valuable primarily by disguising their true qualities; but I should draw more careful attention to this behavior. Narcissistic libido seems to disguise an object because it encourages us to pay only selective attention to it. Narcissistic libido can be considered a sort of light that, when shone on an object, can partly hide it by revealing it according to a particular and limited effect of shade and shadow; some facets are accentuated, other facets are hidden. Rhetoric constantly makes use of this lighting effect as it presents objects in particularly crafted ways in order to make them appear useful or valuable.
Rhetoric, I argue at some length, is facilitated through the libidinal manipulations of an object. Other psychoanalytic accounts of rhetoric emphasize the importance of fantasy, transference, and identification.12 These phenomena are indeed important, but consideration of libidinal manipulation offers an added tool to investigate rhetorical transactions. It allows us to examine texts more closely, to see interactions between signifiers and experience, to see links between particular words and wider patterns of signification found in plots, characters, and even readers. For example, when Conrad’s Marlow first describes his impressions of Kurtz he says:
I had heard Mr. Kurtz was in there. I had heard enough about it, too—God knows! Yet somehow it didn’t bring any image with it—no more than if I had been told an angel or a fiend was in there. I believed it the same way one of you might believe there are inhabitants in the planet Mars.13
A few pages later, however, when Marlow hears the manager and his nephew talk about Kurtz, Marlow suddenly gets a vivid image:
I seemed to see Kurtz for the first time. It was a distinct glimpse: the dugout, the four paddling savages, and the lone white man turning his back suddenly on the headquarters, on relief, on thoughts of home—perhaps; setting his face towards the depths of the wilderness.14
The image appears when Marlow makes a narcissistic and a libidinal investment in Kurtz. The image makes Kurtz “real.” It is produced when Marlow, who wants to be a great explorer, identifies with Kurtz’s apparently brave decision to set “his face towards the depths of the wilderness.” Marlow has had some firsthand experience of the “depths of the wilderness,” and he begins to understand and take a real interest in Kurtz when he sees him turning to this exotic,