Narcissism and the Literary Libido. Marshall W. Alcorn Jr.
narcissistic libidinal investment in his representation.
Many things in daily experience are made more real, alive, and important because of narcissistic investments. As teachers, we know the importance of this moment of special “recognition,” a moment when students feel that they can “relate” to the text. This is a crucial event for classroom discussions—in its own terms and in terms of the critical resources we can bring to bear on it. Yet this event is infrequently discussed, and too often negotiated in intuitive terms only.
Most often our libidinal investments are relatively fixed by the structures of our character. We might consider character as something very much like an organization of libidinal investments. These investments are relatively stable, so we see the world according to customary patterns of perception and value. In reading, as I argue in some detail in the following chapters, rhetorical strategies make libidinal investments fluid so that libido can shift to new objects, allowing us to consider as “interesting” objects we might in other situations dismiss or recognize only according to established patterns of habit. Through rhetorical manipulation, things not otherwise invested with narcissistic libido become invested with narcissistic libido.
Just as the blonde can make the car seem interesting, a Romantic lyric about the wind can suddenly seem important when it engages rhetorical structures that promote identification and shifts in libidinal investment. Students who may initially care little about Shelley’s meditations on the west wind in Italy can often identify with the mood changes described in the poem and soon come to feel that the experiences described are very much like their own. In “light” of this perception, metaphors such as the “breath of Autumn’s being” and images such as “dead leaves,” “winged seeds,” and “sweet buds” become the focus of a caring attention that frequently deepens and intensifies the reader’s own appreciation of both nature (the objects of nature are visualized more acutely) and inner experience. Students sometimes comment that after reading the poem they experience a kind of rejuvenation, a feeling that can accompany a mood change when it is no longer something passively endured, but something actively anticipated and cultivated.
My discussion of Conrad and Shelley indicates that shifts in libidinal investment help students (and people in general) to take a more particular interest in the subjects of discourse. In the following chapters I describe rhetorical structures as devices that allow libido to be more “fluid,” more able to move from one location to another. We often think of a text’s rhetoric as equivalent to the value it endorses: A text’s rhetoric is its message or its meaning. But we might more usefully think of a text’s rhetoric as broader and more encompassing, something quite different from message or meaning. Rhetoric, considered from this perspective, is not the message of a text, but the specific ways—often present in the form of textual scenes, structures, or vocabulary—by means of which texts prompt readers to entertain, in the literal sense of the word, a new argument about value.
If we think of rhetoric as a force that pulls a reader or listener from one value to another, then the rhetorical power of a text would reflect its ability first to divide readers from their own customary self with its rigidly invested values, and second, make them feel that such a customary self is not desirable. Rhetoric works by convincing us that, although we have not considered it seriously before, we are really happier with a new perspective. This new perspective is something we have hitherto disregarded or seen as undesirable, but by means of the text’s modification of our perceptions, we now see it as more compatible with our larger system of value. In the case of Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” a student participating in the strategies and libidinal shiftings of the poem may come to see that poetry is not dead and unimaginative, but relevant and engaging.
Textual rhetoric is aided by the mechanisms with which literary texts promote a “fluidity” of libidinal investments.15 When the rhetoric of a text is successful, the libidinal structures of the reader are modified by the libidinally charged linguistic structures of the text. Texts that promote a fluidity of libidinal investments have more rhetorical power than texts that simply and rigidly assert a value position. Many literary works, such as Melville’s Billy Budd, for example, labor to promote fluidity by encouraging multilayered conflictual and complex judgments on values, each position inviting identification. When texts simultaneously both invite a play of identification and structure a perception of conflict, they put pressure on fixed patterns of libidinal attachments. Barbara Johnson comments on Billy Budd: “The effect of . . . explicit oscillations of judgment within the text is to underline the importance of the act of judging while rendering its outcome undecidable.”16 Often texts seem to need critics to encourage readers to appreciate such “fluid” modes of judgment that Johnson describes. But often enough, writers consciously discuss the importance of encouraging contradictory perceptions. For example, in The Crack Up, Fitzgerald argues that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”17
Literature is a verbal genre that is conspicuous in its ability both to induce identification and promote a conflictual vision of value. Literature is also a verbal genre that encourages us to appreciate and take aesthetic pleasure in an ambiguity or conflict that, in other contexts, we might find too stressful and disorienting. Thus, at the same time that it structures a perception of conflict, literature typically reduces our anxiety about it. As Aristotle observed long ago, we can take pleasure in literary representations of the tragic. Simon Lesser argues that
when we read fiction we are ordinarily relaxed and secure, so that we can see things that might elude us at other times. In imagination we can experiment, try out various approaches to our problems, alter this or that circumstance to see what results ensue.18
When the rhetoric of a text is successful, it weakens the rigidity of value commitment as it encourages satisfying narcissistic alliances and provides a secure space for entertaining new concerns, interests, and values.
The reading of literature offers a protected space for what Stephen Mitchell calls “self-regulation”: “Human beings are simultaneously self-regulating and field regulating.”19 Humans attempt, at the same time, to maintain a coherent sense of self and a coherent sense of their relations with others. “We are concerned,” Mitchell says:
with both the creation and maintenance of a relatively stable, coherent sense of self out of the continual ebb and flow of perception and affect, and the creation and maintenance of dependable, sustaining connections with others, both in actuality and as internal presences. The dialectic between self-definition and connection with others is complex and intricate, with one or the other sometimes being more prominent. Self-regulatory and field regulatory processes sometimes enhance each other and sometimes are at odds with other, forming the basis for powerful conflicts.20
This dialectic between internal and external world is central and inescapable for human thought. Too often in daily life, however, the human ego is too rigid and inflexible to be fully responsive to needed adjustments. Given this usual context of ego rigidity, the reading of literature can offer narcissistic support to insulate the ego from anxiety and reduce ego rigidity. In reading, the threatening world outside can seem held at a distance from vulnerable self-systems. The self does not face the world but only its representations of it. Chapter 4 discusses this protected space of reading in relation to Victor Nell’s description of the “state of absorption” common to readers. In this narcissistically protected space, our perceptions of the world can be more playful; libido is made more fluid to experiment with internal representations, thereby formulating new adjustments in both the self-system and the field system.
Reading is narcissistic in three senses. First it is narcissistic in so far as