The Interpretation of Dreams The Psychopathology of Every day Life Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality A History of the Psycho-Analytical Movement New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis Beyond the Pleasure Principie The Ego and the Id Civilization and Its Discontents
I would suggest starting with these three titles: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, The Interpretation of Dreams, and Civilization and Its Discontents.
C.F.
99
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
1856-1950
Selected Plays and Prefaces
For the better part of a century GBS explained and advertised himself and his intellectual wares with dazzling wit, energy, clar- ity, and persistence. A man who lived to be ninety-four; who probably began thinking in his cradle if not in the womb; who left behind him, in addition to a vast library of correspondence, thirty- three massive volumes of plays, prefaces, novйis, economic trea- tises, pamphlets, literary criticism, dramatic criticism, musical criticism, and miscellaneous journalism dealing with every major preoccupation of his time and many trivial ones; and who, like ali his favorite supermen, lived forward, as it were, toward an unguessable future—such a man reduces to no formula.
Except perhaps one, and it is his own: "The intellectfis also a passion." Whether or not one agrees with Shaw at any point in his long mental wayfaring is less important than the solid fact that he made intellectual passion exciting, or at least mod- ish, for hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of human beings. He was a ferment, a catalyst, an enzyme. He left nei- ther system nor school. But one cannot come fresh to any half- dozen of his best plays and prefaces without having one's mind shaken, aerated, and often changed.
At the moment, the more rarefied critics tend to pass him by, or to stress his lacks: lack of any other than intellectual passion; lack of the tragic sense we find in the Greeks or in Shakespeare [39]; lack of what we call poetry. My own opinion is that he will be recognized as a master prose writer in the plain or unadorned style; and that, merely as a nonstop influential personality, he will rank with Voltaire[53], Tolstoy [88], and Doctor Johnson [59].
It will help us, as we read Shaw, to remember a few simple facts.
First, he was Irish—or, as he put it, "I am a typical Irishman; my family came from Yorkshire." Hence he viewed English life, his immediate world, with a detachment and an irony difficult for an Englishman.
Second, he was a Fabian (antiviolent, gradualistic) Socialist who never recovered from Karl Marx [82]. Hence, in his work economic knowledge, as he says, "played as important a part as the knowledge of anatomy does in the work of Michael Вngelo."
Third, he had a deep faith in the capacity of human beings to rise by effort in the scale of mental evolution. His mouth- piece Don Juan in Man and Superman speaks for him: "I tell you that as long as I can conceive something better than myself, I cannot be easy until I am striving to bring it into exis- tence or clearing the way for it."
Fourth, he is probably the greatest showman of ideas who ever lived. He is continually using ali his resources of wit, paradox, clowning, humor, surprise, invective, and satire, plus a thousand stage tricks, in order to fix firmly in the readers or playgoers mind ideas ordinarily found in volumes of sociology, economics, politics, and philosophy that would be inaccessible to the average intelligence. He is always preaching—but from the middle of the center ring of the circus.
You will see below the titles of eleven of Shaw's forty-seven plays. (He wrote ten more than Shakespeare, a man he considered rather inferior to himself as a dramatist—but then he lived almost twice as long.) Always read the prefaces that usually accompany the plays. As prose they are masterly. As argument they are often more comprehensive and persuasive than the plays—see, for example, the astounding Preface to Androcles and the Lion on the prospects of Christianity. Arranged in order of publication or pro- duction, this list suggests a little of the evolution of Shaw's mind over his most fertile quarter century, from 1894 to 1923: Amms and the Man; Candida; The DeviVs Disciple; Caesar and Cleopatra; Man and Superman; Major Barbara; Androcles and the Lion; Pygmalion; Heartbreak House; Back to Methusela; and Saint Joan.
C.F.
100
JOSEPH CONRAD
1857-1924
Nostromo
The same year, 1895, in which Thomas Hardy [94] gave up novel writing saw the publication of Joseph Conrad's first book,
Almayers Folly. The traditional English novel—a large, loose, free-flowing narrative, depending largely on externai action and easily grasped characters—has begun to die. A new kind of fiction—original in form, full of technical devices, its tensions flowing from the exploration of mental life—is being born. Sterne [58], Austen [66], George Eliot [84], and Hardy had ali helped to clear its path. But it is really Conrad who announces its themes and methods. At this point in our reading we will feel a greater richness if we see Conrad as helping to make possible our understanding of Henry James [96], D.H. Lawrence [113], Joyce [110], Mann [107], Proust [105], Faulkner [118], and others, such as Andrй Gide, not included in the Plan.
Strangeness, somberness, nobility: these mark Conrad's career. He repels affection, he compels admiration. Born a Pole, of a family tragically dedicated to the desperate cause of Polish freedom, he was left an orphan at twelve. At seventeen he turned westward "as a man might get into a dream." Without ever forgetting his aristocratic Polish heritage, he committed himself to a new world. Some years of curious, almost cloak-and-dagger adventure followed, during which, for instance, he smuggled arms for the Carlist cause in Spain. Then, adopting the life of a seaman and an Englishman, he spent twenty years in the British Merchant Service, rising to the rank of master. He pursued his vocation on most of the seas of the world and particularly in the fabled East Indies, the setting of many of his stories. At last came the fateful decision which had doubtless been incubating in his mind for years. With a certain reluctance he abandoned the sea and, now a mature man, using a language not his own, and interpreting the world as a Continental writer would, this Polish sailor in the end became (this is my own opinion, though shared by many others) one of the half-dozen greatest novelists to use our magnificent tongue.
For years, stoically suffering neglect and, what is worse, misunderstanding, Conrad toiled at his desk. He tested his
craft by a set of standards unfamiliar to the Victorians. He sought the perfect form for each of his stories. He searched human character in depth, fearless of what he might find there. He sought out wonderfully suggestive symbols (such as the silver mine in Nostromo) to mirror large areas of emotion. Just as Flaubert [86] did, he consciously forged a style suited to his special view of human nature under special conditions of moral stress. He thought of himself as an artist fiercely dedi- cated to his calling. He had no friendly relation to his public as Dickens [77] and Thackeray [76] had. His relation was to the vision within himself.
Nostromo is not an easy novel to read, and it is best to take it slowly. It does not tell itself, as Tom Jones [55] seems to. It uncoils, retraces its steps, changes its angle of attack. Into it Conrad put his most anxious effort, and if he has a masterpiece this is probably it.