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UNIVERSITY of DUBLIN, TRINITY COLLEGE DUBLIN Modernism UNIVERSITY OF DUBLIN, TRINITY COLLEGE DUBLIN Modernism Processing Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lawrence, Nin, Joyce Genevieve Sartor Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for Doctorate of Philosophy School of English Trinity College Dublin 2020 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements v Summary vi Introduction Psychoanalysis, Process, and the Territory of the Literary 1 Chapter One Sigmund Freud: Between Science and the Literary 19 1.1 Positivism, Charcot, and Freud’s Early Work 24 1.2 Studies on Hysteria: Language, Talking, Sexuality 35 1.3 “Project for a Scientific Psychology” as Paratextual Workbook 46 1.4 Self-Analysis Through Dreamdrafts: The Interpretation of Dreams 56 Conclusion 74 Chapter Two D.H. Lawrence: The Pristine Unconscious, Blood Wisdom, and 76 Aesthetic Purpose 2.1 Lawrence’s Psychoanalytic Beginnings: “The Religion of the Blood” 80 2.2 The Psychoanalytic Works: in Defence of the Literary 92 2.3 The Psychoanalytic Works as Paratextual Trial Pieces 110 2.4 A Paratextual Reading of Lady Chatterley’s Lover 120 Conclusion 136 Chapter Three Anaïs Nin: Editorial Diarist of the Female Unconscious 139 3.1 Early Edits: Nin’s Green and Red Notebooks, Henry and June 143 3.2 Psychoanalysis, and the Unexpurgated Incest 157 3.3 Otto Rank, Creative Will, Diary as Intertextual Resource 167 3.4 Revising Drafts of the Self in House of Incest 182 Conclusion 193 Chapter Four James and Lucia Joyce: Literary Genetics and the Mind of the Text 196 4.1 A Literary Biography of Lucia Joyce 199 4.2 Lucia’s Dance Career, First Breakdown, Illuminated Letters 205 4.3 Psychoanalysis, Genetic Criticism, and The Mime 216 4.4 Lucia’s Treatments 1934–1936, transition 23, and Storiella 226 4.5 “Lisp!”: Genetic Connections between II.2 and IV of Finnegans Wake 238 Conclusion 251 Conclusion Redefining the Territory of the Literary 253 Bibliography 260 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to express thanks to my supervisor Christopher Morash, who contributed to the vision and the development of this thesis. His expertise on modernist texts, the intellectual climate of the early 20th century, and contemporary scholarship on these topics was essential for cultivating its objectives. I am grateful to Trinity College Dublin for supporting my work with the internally allocated Ussher Award from 2015 to 2018. Receiving this award was an honour and allowed me unhindered concentration on the early development of my material, which could not have been accomplished otherwise. I am also appreciative of the ongoing support given by the James Joyce Foundation, Zürich, and director Fritz Senn. A two-month fellowship at the Zürich Foundation contributed to some of the archival research presented in this thesis. Resounding thanks are also owed to Finn Fordham, Julia Brünhe, Creston Davis, Robert Brazeau, and Tim Conley who read various chapter drafts, invited me to present talks on my research at their home institutions, and addressed questions and concerns that I had during the writing of this dissertation. SUMMARY This dissertation’s focus is grounded in literary modernism’s engagement with psychoanalytic theory and its therapeutic applications in the early 20th century. It examines how the ubiquity of Freud’s theories at that time contributed to the compositional development of modernist texts by D.H. Lawrence, Anaïs Nin, and James Joyce. The comparative approach in this thesis deviates from scholarship on modernism and psychoanalysis that applies psychoanalytic concepts to reading literature and literary authors symptomatically, or to psychoanalyse authors to form a psychobiography. Instead, this dissertation contributes to existing scholarship through an original process-based and paratextual approach. It analyses the exchange between modernist literary texts and psychoanalytic theory at the level of textual process prior to publication. It argues that expanding the possibilities of paratextual analysis as a method can enhance our ability to analyse how literary texts challenge the foundations of psychoanalytic interpretation; namely, its focus on the instability of language, memory, and symbolic or aesthetic representation. Modernist writing was composed in Freud’s wake, and in studying the modernist text compositionally, we can navigate how authors Lawrence, Nin, and Joyce intervened, responded to, and challenged psychoanalytic concepts in writing and over time. A distinguishing feature of this study is that, rather than concentrating on final published texts to form an analysis between theory and narrative, it focuses on how material peripheral to complete texts can foster a durational understanding of how textual process runs parallel to modernism’s engagement with psychoanalysis. It examines different forms of literary media, such as notebooks, letters, journals, essays, drafts, and illustrations. A text-based approach homes in on authors who spurned psychoanalytic interpretations of their work during their lifetime or who engaged in psychoanalytic therapy at the time of writing. There is an intellectual reciprocity between modernist literary authors and psychoanalysts, who brushed shoulders during the early 20th century, that can be developed through a grounded focus on the text. Chapter one begins by setting out an initial problem we will first consider; the dilemma between scientific and aesthetic theories of the self. Freud’s early developments leading up to The Interpretation of Dreams started with mentorship under Jean-Martin Charcot from 1885 to 1886. The positivist approach Freud learnt when studying under Charcot at the Salpêtrière was based on the outward observation of patients. Freud would reject Charcot’s theses, particularly his endorsement of hereditary degeneracy, while working with Josef Breuer on Studies on Hysteria. This pivotal text indicates Freud’s early focus on the significance of language, trauma, and memory in action, and the possible alleviation of neurotic symptoms by way of “talking out.” Freud’s abandoned “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” viewed in this thesis as a paratextual workbook, shows how he struggled to form a conciliation between scientific psychology and the aesthetic methods of psychoanalytic interpretation. He abandoned these efforts shortly before his father died in 1886. This event provoked Freud’s self- analysis, which, as argued, was a “writing cure.” He analysed his dreams like drafts of a text, and in doing so was his most successful patient. The insights Freud gleaned in his self-analysis form the conceptual basis of The Interpretation of Dreams. Literary process is engrained in psychoanalytic theory, though Freud sought to establish psychoanalysis as a scientific discipline despite frequently using literary texts, rather than epistemological data, to evince many of his claims. Chapter two begins with how D.H. Lawrence railed against interpreting literary works for evidence that might establish the validity of psychoanalytic concepts. Reviews of Sons and Lovers deemed it to be an Oedipal text indistinguishable from Lawrence’s own biography. Lawrence not only strongly disagreed with such readings, he also wrote two now largely forgotten essays that reject psychoanalytic theory and its interpretive methods in general. In Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious Lawrence put forth original concepts meant to replace Freudian theory. In considering these texts from an aesthetic perspective, it is argued that they are draft-like resources that can enhance our conceptual understanding of his fictional works. Lawrence’s late literature, when read in conjunction with his attempts to construct a new psychology, illustrate his belief in aesthetic representation attuned to the experiencing body, which he believed could revise or even replace psychoanalytic concepts. Chapter three focuses on Anaïs Nin and her diaries, specifically the intertextual process at work between editions of her various edited journals and the unexpurgated versions of her diaries. The fairly recent publication of Incest, the second unexpurgated diary, reveals how Nin cultivated her own self-representation as a fastidious editor. Incest includes how Nin breached the incest taboo with her father in 1933, which allows a new way to approach how Nin sought therapy with Otto Rank shortly thereafter. We will see that their analytic sessions established her methods as a writer imbricated in Rank’s theories of creative will. She sublimated her affair with her father into writing her first work of fiction: House of Incest. This text, which she considered to be the “seed of all my work,” is derived from an intertextual use of her diaries as material for revising her experience and self-understanding. This process came to define one of her principal ambitions: to portray the unconscious of women. Chapter four shifts from Nin’s focus on her father to a father’s focus on his daughter: Joyce was preoccupied with his daughter Lucia’s mental instability that began with her first breakdown in 1932. In an effort to cure what was commonly diagnosed as schizophrenia, Joyce had Lucia work on a series of illustrations to accompany his work: a deluxe edition of Pomes Penyeach, and two pre-publication fragments of Finnegans Wake—The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies and Storiella as She is Syung. In focusing on these works, this chapter applies genetic criticism to show how Joyce’s efforts to understand Lucia is not only visible in his attempt to collaborate with his daughter to enact a “writing cure,” but that her mental condition features in the
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