![]() “People can let it all hang out in writing classes,” Gaitskill writes, “and sometimes ‘it’ is very unpleasant.” While what Gaitskill calls a “quivering apparatus” of therapeutic concern now has its tentacles in every area of campus life, the workshop comes by its therapeutic orientation organically. The workshop, as Freud would have known if it had existed in his time, is not just any classroom: It is a laboratory where students are trained to operate upon their own neuroses, turning them into story. ![]() The truth of Freud’s model of authorship, in which narrative art involves the aesthetic laundering - the sublimation - of otherwise repellent fantasy material, is well attested by the novelist Mary Gaitskill’s bruising new essay in our pages, which draws on her three decades of teaching creative writing to paint a bleak picture of the unsettled minds of students now. ![]() But when the successful author “presents his plays to us or tells us what we are inclined to take to be his personal day-dreams, we experience a great pleasure.” Regular people cannot disclose their fantasy life without arousing “repulsion” in the listener or reader. “The author,” Freud writes, “softens the character of his egoistic day-dreams by altering and disguising it, and he bribes us by the purely formal - that is, aesthetic - yield of pleasure which he offers us in the presentation of his fantasies.” There’s a mystery here, Freud says. In a 1908 essay called “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming,” Freud explores the alchemy whereby personal fantasies - erotic reveries, self-aggrandizing ego trips, and so on - are transmuted, by creative writers, into fiction.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |