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Unit 1: Jungian Psychology and the literary archetype

Levels of consciousness:
A. Individual (includes ego, persona, personality types (introversion or
extraversion, terms lung coined) and functions of consciousness (Thinking,
feeling, intuition, sensation)
B. Family
C. Clan
D. Nation
E. Large group. The archetypes from this level are much the same in any individual
who comes.
F. Primeval ancestors. This level applies to all higher forms of life.
G. Animal ancestors. This level applies to all higher forms of life.
H. Central fire (like itself)

Carl Jung accepted the concept of the personal unconscious and the concept of the
collective unconscious. In it, there are archetypes, tendencies to form universal images
(archetypal images); which can be images of animals, people, anthropomorphic beings
(vampire, gods, goddesses...), objects (a tree, a house, a cross1, a mandala...), abstract
ideas made concrete by the images, and patterns.

Jung’s central therapeutic concept is the concept of the need for balance to gain physical
health: when an individual is troubled, they will dream archetypal dreams instead of
personal ones with the aim to right an imbalance in the psyche. Just as dreams can be
personal (psychological) or archetypal (visionary), so can literature. Visionary literature
compensates for collective psychic imbalance.

The collective unconscious is common to the human race all over the world. To achieve
wholeness, the aim is individuation, become a whole individual person. The process is
different for each person, but Jung believed it especially involved coming to
terms with the following archetypes: the shadow, the anima/animus and the Self.
Archetypes come from the collective unconscious and by definition can be positive and
negative. In theory, their numbers are limitless.

1. Archetypal characters
The Hero: the Feminine Hero is not as prominent in Western culture, but examples of
both male and female heroes exist throughout the world, examples such as Gilgamesh,
Ishtar, Osiris, Shiva, Krishna, Kali, Oedipus, Theseus, Perseus, Jason, Dionysus,
Orpheus, Diana, Moses, Joseph, Elijah, Jesus, The Virgin Mary, Arthur, Merlin, Robin

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Hood, Joan of Arc, Quetzalcoatl, and many, many others. (Opposite: Tiresias appears to
Oedipus).
A modern variation of this archetype is the Antihero.

2. Jung and the Collective Consciousness

Archetypes come from the collective unconscious and by definition can be positive and
negative.
Within the collective unconscious are the archetypes; tendencies to form universal
images known as archetypal images.
Example:
 Images of animals
 People
 Anthropomorphic beings
 Objects
 Abstract ideas

2.1. The Scapegoat

An outcast or outsider, and a wanderer (e.g., Cain, Oedipus, the Wandering Jew, and
Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner)
The scapegoating can also be intensely personal in the for of persecution by one
individual against other. To use another as a scapegoat is to project’s one’s shadow (or
the collective shadow) onto him or her or onto a group. The “inside a nation, the aliens
who provide the objects for this projection [of evil] are the minorities” Erich Neumann
(1990).

2.2. The Devil Figure

Form of the shadow, evil incarnate, a figure who frequently offers the hero (or the
individual protagonist in a myth, poem, or story) worldly goods, fame, or knowledge for
possession of his soul.
The Faust legend is an obvious example, as is Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, in
which the protagonist is offered eternal youth and beauty, however obliquely.

2.3. The Fool

Typically a shadow figure distressed by some unconscious lack of power, often driven
by greed or an inordinate desire for fame (all archetypes), who projects his or her
inadequacies against scapegoats as described above.
These fools or tricksters generally suffer from psychic “inflation”; they are
unconsciously possessed by archetypal forces or figures that drive them to compensate
for their psychic split by persecuting others.

2.4. The Anima/Animus

Jung postulates that each individual has both masculine and feminine components of the
psyche. For male the feminine component is the anima, and for a female it is the
animus. Part and parcel of human biological and psychological development is the
mixture of masculine and feminine energies.
These energies are theoretical constructs, but are not identical with gender.
The Tao symbol of Yin and Yang is more useful to explain the characteristics of the
anima and the animus.

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In Eastern cultures the Tao symbol, consisting of a circle divided in two equal portions
each containing an element of the other, indicates that all of creation is composed of two
energies held in harmony and interaction.
- The Anima: feminine side of a man’s psyche. Can take many
forms:
o Merely physical to the highest spirituality and wisdom. Examples: the
Kore figure (mother/maiden/hag); the Earth Mother (symbol of fruition,
abundance, fertility; but also of destruction on a grand scale); the
temptress (or female fatale), the unfaithful wife or mate, the star-crossed
lover, the jilted lover.
o The Mother and Child together and separately are powerful archetypes,
as are the Father and Child. The Mother in her positive aspect is
nurturing, protecting, and loving; in her negative aspect she is
withholding of nurture, protection, and love. The Father, too, is
protective, instructive, and loving in his positive aspect but destructive
and hurtful in his negative aspect.
- The Animus: masculine side of a woman’s psyche. The animus
can also be the temper (the rapist is an extreme example), an
homme fatale, an unfaithful husband or mate, the star-crossed
lover, the jilted lover.
A woman with a positive animus shows assertiveness, control, thoughtful
rationality, and compassionate strength. The negative animus reveals in strong
opinions ruthlessness, destructive forces, and “always the last word”.
If a man is under the influence of the positive anima he will show tenderness,
patience, consideration, and compassion. The negative anima manifests as
vanity, moodiness, bitchiness, and sensitivity to hurt feelings.

2.5. Ying/Yang
The Yang energy is masculine in nature and is described as light, dry, directed, focused,
logical and action oriented, Yin energy is feminine and described as dark, moist,
diffuse, vague, intuitive and receptive.
Women, while predominately yin, contain an element of yang. Thus, human beings are
psychologically androgynous with latent inner masculine and feminine energies
awaiting development.
In the first half of life a differentiation of the primary sexual identity and corresponding
energy takes place but in later life a call to integrate the opposite energy, the anima, or
the animus, arises. This is a move towards wholeness. In literature, we see many
examples of this in character development.

2.6. The Double

The puer aeternus (the eternal youth) and the senex (the old man, often the Wise Old
Man) and their feminine counterparts, the puella aeternus and the Wise Old Woman
form a double archetype. These can form a constellation of the Self, the archetype of
Wholeness, just as the anima and the animus can lead to such psychic wholeness.
An example of the negative double is the hostile brothers (e.g., Cain and Abel); sibling
rivalry is another, often milder, form of this aspect of the archetype.
The hero often has a gelper of some sort, perhaps a Wise Old Man or Wise Old
Woman who guides him or her (or, conversely, leads him or her astray) and/or a
companion, who may be a double.

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Literary examples of Wise Old Man/Woman include Tiresias (for Oedipus), and Merlin
(for Arthur). Sam and Frodo in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Like all archetypes,
the double can be both positive and negative.

2.7. The Foil

A form of the double used in formal literature is the foil, who provides a contrast with
the hero.
The foil is a character who contrasts with another character (usually the protagonist) in
order to highlight various features of that other character’s personality, putting these
characteristics into sharper focus.
Examples: Laertes from Hamlet. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.

2.8. The Trickster

the trickster deceives, is often playfully, sometimes painfully. It is a very sexual
archetype, it has the ability to change genders and play havoc with the hyper-rational
personality and community. Examples of the trickster are Satan, Loki, and, in Native
American mythology, the coyote, the raven, and the Winnebago trickster. The vampire
is, in fact, a kind of trickster, “able to change into many shapes, among them bats,
wolves, spiders.
Jung says, is an aspect of the shadow archetype, at least in its negative traits. The
shadow is a part of the unconscious mind consisting of repressed weakness,
shortcomings, and instincts. “Everyone carries a shadow”, Jung wrote, “and the less it is
embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.”

3. Archetypal Concepts and Themes

- The Quest: can be a search for virtually anything, noble or
ignoble, spiritual or physical; in any case, the goal (also called the
treasure hard to obtain) has great value for the quester.
- The Task: is something that must be done to achieve something
valuable: the hero must perform this task to save the kingdom, win
the fair lady, etc.
- Initiation: involves going form one stage of the life to another.
Typically performed or experienced by a young person, it can also
occur during any stage life, as in the James Dickey novel,
Deliverance. The proverbial mid-life crisis, if successful, is a kind
of initiation.
- The Journey: can combine all or some of the above. Indeed, the
individuation process (see above) is a kind of journey.
- The Fall: involves going from a higher to a lower state being, as
in Paradise Lost, Sister Carrie, or the Great Gatsby.
- The hieros gamos: (“sacred wedding”) or conjuctio can
symbolize the union of opposites that is achieved in the Self.
- Death and Rebirth: the most common of all situational
archetypes, death and rebirth grows out of the parallel between the
cycle of nature and the cycle of life. Life and Death are themselves
archetypes everyone experiences.
- Light/Darkness: (the conscious and the unconscious), Water or
wetness/Dryness or the desert, Heaven/Hell, trees, rocks, dirt,
flowers, animals of all kinds.

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Unit 2: Psychoanalysis and Literary Theory

1. The 1960s unleashed the so-called sexual revolution.

Sexuality throughout the 20th century has moved closer to the center of public debate
than ever before, and the 1960s was crucial in bringing sexuality into the public fore.
Late 1960s and early 1970s, decisive break with the preceding.
Values of sexuality. Previously society prescribed women’s sexual pleasure within
heterosexual marriage and the regulation of man’s sexuality in the public.
After the 1970s, women’s sexuality outside marriage became widely accepted within
the west.

Important issues:
1. Student protests
2. Counter culture movements
3. Medically prescribed contraceptives.

2. The politics of sex

The predominantly young who became involved with the peace movement and co-
operative counter cultures which flourished particularly between 1967-72 took sexual
liberation and sexual freedom as central to its politics.
Herbert Marcuse (Eros and Civilization, 1955) William Riech (The Sexual Revolution,
1936) both fuse Marxism and Psychoanalysis to develop a radical theory on sexuality
within society.
Capitalism sexually repressed the masses in the interests of its life negating and
exploitative goals.

3. Sex and Society: The Radical 60s View

Capitalism demanded self-restraint and compulsive work, both it was argued were
contrary to any liberated and spontaneous sexual expression.
Sexual libido had been colonized and brought into the service of capitalism’s nexus of
production and consumption.
The bourgeoisie a century earlier had forged an identity around the confinement of
sexuality within the private domain of the heterosexual family. Sexual freedom was tied
to revolutionary outcomes.
The anti-authoritarian and revolutionary movements of the 1960s saw the reproductive
suburban family along with its morality of self-restraint, hard work and moral
Puritanism as an expression of class domination.

4. Sexual Revolution and its Consequences

Sexuality became political, emerging as an axis around which new social movements
organized.
Shifts in the relations between women and men, particularly those inspired by the
emergent women’s liberation movements. This parallels women’s increased presence in
the public realm and personal autonomy concerning reproductive choices and sexual
expression.
The political mobilization of the gay & lesbian movements.
A destabilizing of the rigid boundary between the private family and the individualistic
orientated public realm.
Reforms in the legal and medical regulation of sexuality.
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The increased commercialization and commodification of sexuality through

pornography and mass media. The concomitant relaxation of censorship laws.

5. Negative Effects (A Conservative View)

For conservatives it has become a scapegoat to blame many contemporary problems.
Many modern ‘social ills’ are seen as having their origins in the “permissiveness” of the
sixties. Issues such as:
 Pornography.
 Marriage breakdowns, single parent families.
 Welfare state dependency.
 Drugs and youth crime.
For the generation after the sixties, the love children of the baby boomers, it is often
seen as a failed project which sustains their parents romanticization of their youth prior
to selling out.

6. A Historical perspective (Foucault)

Victorian morality remains the beacon of asexuality and prudishness in much of the
popular imagination.
"For a long time, the story goes, we supported a Victorian regime, and we continue to
be dominated by it even today. Thus the image of the imperial prude is emblazoned on
our restrained, mute, and hypocritical sexuality" (Foucault 3). Foucault thus refutes
«The Repressive Hypothesis»
In the nineteenth century there was the multiplication of discourse concerning sex in the
field of exercise of power itself.
Foucault states there was a “veritable discursive explosion" in the discussion of sex.
Although this "explosion" was often produced as a means to contain and control
sexuality, Foucault asserts that the idea that Victorian sexuality was repressed or silent
is a modern invention (Foucault 36-49).

6.1. The History of Sexuality (Vol I) Foucault

Use of “authorized vocabulary“ which codifies where, when and with whom one could
talk about sexuality.
Educational and political campaigns tried to encourage chastity, to eliminate
prostitution, and to discourage masturbation.
The consolidation of Victorian morality, and its apparatus of social, medical, and legal
enforcement, was the outcome of a long period of struggle whose results have been
bitterly contested ever since.
There existed an apparatus of social, medical, and legal enforcement that functioned to
create a set of morals rather than morality being produced out of a repressed silence
about sexual matters.
Foucault argues that, prior to the 18th century, discourse on sexuality focuses on the
productive role of the married couple monitored by both canonical and civil law.

This desire to talk so enthusiastically about sex in the western world stems from
the Counter-Reformation: Roman Catholic Church called for its followers to confess
their sinful desires as well as their actions.
Towards the beginning of the c18th, other mechanisms took over from Christianity in
producing an increasing discourse on sex.
Offers example of My Secret Life, anonymous late 19th century book detailing the sex
life of a Victorian gentleman.
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New power mechanisms made discourse on sex essential.

Viewed as in the public interest: ‘” here emerged a political, economic, and technical
incitement to talk about sex” (23)
Sexuality was ‘taken as both an object of analysis and as a target of intervention’ (p.26)
The multiplication of discourses on sex since the c18th are a means of
exercising power (p.32)

7. Formal Structure of On Chesil Beach

The Good Soldier (1915) .Ford’s story constructs the plot around a series of
complicated flashbacks and is inspiration for Chesil Beach (Protagonists share same
name)
Composition of The Good Soldier & On Chesil Beach are composed imitating a musical
duet. Also can be seen as a minuet, a slow, stately ballroom dance for two
Chesil Beach: Narrator plays with time, speeding it or slowing it down (third chapter a
distended moment) in order to create effects on the reader and also allowing an in-depth
exploration of the character’s consciousness.
Split narrative: Novella written from a position of retrospect = historical irony. History
is seen through modern eyes, sharp contrasts between the way historical figures see their
world's future and what actually transpires.
Modern pespective: the construction of both masculinity and femininity create
unattainable gendered standards that take over healthy communication between lovers.

8. Nachträglichkeit (afterward) Freud

Concept: In present time a former traumatic event compels a character’s obsessional
return to this past enigmatic moment.
The regression itself becomes traumatic through this linkage, forming a kind of perverse
temporal knot of reciprocal relations that shapes the character’s future.
Activation of psychic mechanisms in On Chesil Beach (Edward and Florence)
(1) repression =inability to know that one knows)
(2) suppression = (inability to show what one knows)
Florence: a. scene on the boat with her father when she was 12 = a disgust for sex,
Florence is a hysteric (somatization disorder where the body attempt to cope with
emotional and psychological stress. )
Freudian psychoanalysis: hysteria derives from a traumatic seduction by a paternal
figure).
Edward: discovers that his mother is brain-damaged. Related to
pleasure in physical aggression & apprehension about his sexual performance
(sense of inferiority)

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Unit 3: Freud and “The Uncanny”

The uncanny is something fearful and frightening, and has to do with a certain kind of
feeling or sensation, with emotional impulses.
Modernism marks a turn in aesthetics in general toward a fascination with the ugly, the
grotesque: a kind of “negative” aesthetics, of the “fearful”, and of anxiety.
Freud’s definition  uncanny as the class of frightening things that leads us back to
what is known and familiar. Freud Reader (195).

1. Heimlich and Unheimlich (Canny/Homey; Uncanny/ Unhomey)

Heimlich is associated with the “private parts”, the parts of the body that are the
most “intimate” and that are simultaneously those parts subject to the most
concealment.
The “Heimlich” is also that is concealed from the self. It embodies the dialectic
of “privacy” and “intimacy” inherent in bourgeois ideology.
Unheimlich = Unhomey, unfamiliar, untame, uncomfortable = eerie, weird, etc.
What is made known; what is supposed to be kept secret but inadvertently
revealed.
It is the name for everything that ought to have remained secret and hidden but
has come to light.
Unheimlich thus becomes a kind of unwilling, mistaken self-exposure.
This uncanny thus marks the return of the familiar in the sense of our psychic
economy (in which nothing is ever lost or wholly forgotten)

2. The Return of the Repressed

3. The Double

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The double (doppelganger); its source is the primary narcissism of the child, its
self-love. In early childhood this produces projections of multiple selves. By
doing this the child insures his/her immortality. But when it is encountered later
in life, after childhood narcissism has been overcome, the double invokes a
sensation of the uncanny = a return to primitive state.
The double represents a psychic “nodal point” with multiple implications,
meanings, sources, etc.
The super-ego treats the rest of the ego like an object. Furthermore, as man is
capable of self-observation this renders the old idea of a ‘double’ with a new
meaning and to ascribe many things to it:
All the unfulfilled but possible futures to which we still like to cling in fantasy,
all the strivings of the ego which adverse circumstances have crushed.

4. The Super-Ego
Freud also relates the double to the formation of the super-ego. The super-ego
projects all the things it represses onto this primitive image of the double. Hence
the double in later life is experienced as something uncanny because it calls
forth all this repressed content:
Freud stresses the uncertainty of whether the events a narrator relates to us are
real or imaginary; for uncanny fiction, this ambivalence will become decisive.

5. The Uncanny in Fiction

Focus is one central character = the anchor character, events, people, etc. in the
fictional world only have significance in relation to this character.
External events seen through the perspective of the anchor character and colored
by his or her psyche; they are projections of the psyche of this fictional
character.
Text thus takes on the quality of a dream text, with manifest and latent content.
The real and the fantastic (Freud’s required ambivalence) form a unity in the
consciousness of the anchor character.
Stylistically, uncanny fiction requires a fusion of objective and subjective
narrative styles. We commonly find a realistic frame, which reads like a report
or a newspaper article, which is suddenly ruptured by fantastic events. But this
rupture is also related with the accuracy and detail of objective narration.
The reader’s perspective must be that of the anchor character; events must
be perceived through his/her eyes, filtered through the psyche of this character.
When all of these conditions are met is the experience of the uncanny
transferred from the domain of the fictional world to the receptive
experience of the reader.

6. Waiting For The Barbarians: intertextuality of the title

Taken from Constantine P. Cavafy poem “Waiting for the Barbarians” (1904).
Through the voice of a disingenuous Byzantine narrator, it explores the view
that the cultivating of fear by creating an invisible external enemy usually serves
internal purposes.

Coetzee explores Cavafy’s premise in his novella by never showing the reader
the ‘Barbarians’. They are just a rumor, and ultimately an excuse to exert and
maintain its power.

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6.1. Philosophical parallels

Fredrick Nietzsche.
Only in limited situations the drive for conservation is precedent over the
will to power. The natural condition of life, according to Nietzshe is one of
profusion (the property of being extremely abundant).
Parallels with colonialism: the need for man to secure more land, material
goods, and to sustain power over these resources.
Nietzsche's concept of the will to power (der Wille zur Macht) developed in
Thus Spoke Zarathustra. He applies this premise to all living things, and he
suggests that the struggle to survive is a secondary drive in the evolution of
animals, less important than the desire to expand one’s power.
Nietzsche describes instances where people and animals willingly risk their
lives to gain power, most notably in instances like competitive fighting and
warfare.
In Coetzee’s allegory we see how the Third Bureau is only interested in
maintaining its privileges at any cost. This applies to all empires and the
decline of any empire is seen as an excess of a ‘will to power’, the need to
expand at all costs.
This excess ultimately becomes decadent, there is a decline and power is
transferred onto a new imperial power.

6.2. The ambiguity

Will to power neither good nor bad. It is a basic drive found in everyone,
expressed in different ways.
The philosopher and scientist direct their will to power into a will to truth.
Artists channel it into a will to create. Businessmen satisfy it through
becoming rich.
We exercise power over other people both by benefiting them and by hurting
them (aphorism 13 of The Gay Science).
Causing pain is a sign that one lacks power since it is the inferior option.
Creating tables of values, imposing them people, and judging the world
according to them, is an expression of will to power.
The strong, healthy, masterly type confidently impose their values on the
world directly.
The weak seek to impose their values in a more cunning, roundabout way,
by making the strong individuals feel guilty about their health, strength,
egotism, and pride in themselves.

6.3. The Other as a construct

Michel Foucault argues that the process of ‘othering’ has to do with
knowledge; power acting through knowledge to achieve a particular political
agenda in its goal of domination.
Edward Said, in his book Orientalism looks at this Othering via ideas of
ethnocentricity—the belief that one's own ethnic group is superior to all
others and the tendency to evaluate and assign meaning to other ethnicities
using yours as a standard.
Edward Said bases his ideas on the process of othering through Michel
Foucault’s concept of discourse. Quoting Nietzsche, Said says that language
(discourse) is nothing but

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...a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in

short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed,
and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use
seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions
about which one has forgotten that this is what they are.
Said’s theory gives new perspectives on historiographers of other cultures
created by the dominant culture, the discourses, academic or otherwise, that
surround these written and oral histories.
The cultures that a supposed superior ethnic group deems important to study,
and the different aspects of that culture that are either ignored or considered
valuable knowledge, relies on the judgment of the ethnic group in power.

6.4. Themes and symbols

Supposed historical background: South Africa and the Apartheid Regime
Novel can be seen as a political fable on South Africa
Imaginary Empire, set in an unspecified place and time, yet recognizable as a
''universalized'' version of South Africa.
Allegory of the war between oppressor and oppressed. The Barbarians are
accused of plotting against the empire. There is no evidence against them,
just rumours.
The ‘Third Bureau’ symbol of the cruelty and pragmatism of imperialism. It
becomes representative of a ‘Universalised Imperialism’.
Empathy with the ‘Other’. (The Fall).

6.5. Literary parallels

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
In Conrad’s novella, the narrator makes an illusion to the atrocities
committed by the Belgian colonial administrators during its administration
of the Belgian Congo under the auspicies of King Leopold II. Whilst serving
as a merchant seaman in the Conrad during the reign of Leopold, Conrad
was first alerted to the barbarism of European practices by Rodger
Casement, who published a report on human rights abuses in Peru and the
Belgian Congo. The Casement Report, which detailed the attrocities of the
colonial rule in the Congo, was delivered in 1904 The life of Roger
Casement has been fictionalised by Mario Vargas Llosa in his book El
Sueño del Celta.

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Unit 4: Colonial Desire

Term coined by Robert Young in his study Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory,
Culture and Race (1995).
Young looks at hybridity both from a botanical point of view from where the term
originally emerges from, and to the process of creolization which is the organic
formation of two or more cultures merging into a distinct third culture.
The etymology of the word ‘commerce’ in colonial times includes the exchange both of
merchandise and of bodies in sexual intercourse.
Colonialist discourse was pervaded by sexuality.
The idea of colonization itself is grounded in a sexualized discourse of rape, penetration
and impregnation.
The subsequent relationship of the colonizer and colonized is often presented in a
discourse that is redolent of a sexualized exoticism.

1. Promiscuous Nature of Colonialism

The violent antagonistic power relations that sexual and cultural diffusion
contain.
Sexual exchange and its miscegenated product becomes the dominant paradigm
through which the passionate economic and political trafficking of colonialism
was conceived.
Culture is the product of an emergent capitalist European society. Class, gender
and ‘race’ are circulated promiscuously by this cultural power which is
patriarchal in nature.
The “positive” features of colonial attitudes in discourses such as The Civilising
Mission reflect and eroticized vision that is fundamentally reductive.

2. Fear of the Other; Fear of One’s Self

The seductive but enervating world of the ‘native’ to which the colonizer yields
at his (or even more her) peril.
Lead to formulations such “going native” as which embody the simultaneous
lure and threat of the other.
The discourse of colonialism is pervaded by images of transgressive sexuality,
of an obsession with the idea of the hybrid and miscegenated, and with
persistent fantasies of inter-racial sex (Young, 1995).
Sexuality is the direct and congruent legacy of the commercial discourse of early
colonial encounters.
The traffic of commerce and the traffic of sexuality being complementary and
intertwined.

3. The Racial Stereotype

The regime of the stereotype.
Constructed not within the stability of the 'disciplinary' gaze of the colonizer, or
security in his own conception of himself.
Manifests the degree to which the colonizer's identity (and authority) is in fact
fractured and destabilized by contradictory psychic responses to the colonized
Other.
Colonial discourse depends on concepts of 'fixity' in its representation of the
unchanging identity of subject peoples.

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4. The Colonial Stereotype and the Fetish

The stereotype shares the fetish's metonymic structure of substitution for the
'real' object.
Like the fetish, the stereotype is a means of expressing and containing severely
conflictual feelings and attitudes.
Homi Bhabha in the Location of Culture (1994) assures that 'fetishism is always
a "play" or vacillation between the archaic affirmation of wholeness/similarity...
and the anxiety associated with lack and difference'.
This ambivalence is partly manifested in a consistent pattern of conflict in
colonial discourse.
The stereotype is given both its fixed and phantasmatic quality through what
Bhabha describes as a “metaphoric masking”, inscribed on a lack which must
then be concealed.

5. Hybridity
Bhabha employs the metaphor of the colonial subject returning the colonial gaze
to undermine the mimetic demands of colonial power.
The notion of hybridity locates the colonised subjectivity within a separate space
that transcends both self and other.
Hybridity, for Bhabha, intervenes in the exercise of authority, its identity
containing a certain unfixedness which resists being assigned the sign of “after
the intervention of difference” which has the effect of deconstructing the
originary myth of colonialist power.

6. Alternative View
Although for some hybridity is lived as just another metaphor within Derridean
free play, for others it is lived as pain and visceral memory. Indeed, as a
descriptive catchall term, hybridity fails to discriminate between the diverse
modalities of hybridity, such as colonial imposition…, or other interactions such
as obligatory assimilation, political co-optation, cultural mimicry, commercial
exploitation, top-down appropriation, bottom-up subversion. Hybridity, in other
words, is power-laden and assymetrical. (Stam, 1999: 60-61).

7. Deconstruction: A Poststructuralist View of Texts

The term canon refers to a traditional core of literature (the great, valuable,
universal and timeless works), which has been the main goal for poststructuralist
and feminist criticism.
Through analysis of the internal structure of a text, particularly its
contradictions, deconstructionists demonstrate the existence of subtext meanings
– often not those that the author intended – and hence illustrate the impossibility
of attributing fixed meaning to a work.
It produces a method of ideological critique, since ideology always privileges
certain features of social life while discriminating others.

8. What To Do With A Text In Such A Feminist Critique?

How the text presents women and men in their narratological relationship?
What type of society is this representation of gender framed?
What implied meanings are derived from this relational presentation?
What type of reader does the story create?

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Exploration of a divided self: to be one thing and to pretend to be something

other.
Proyection of anxieties and incommunication with the world.

9. Intertextual Games
One of the ways of practising deconstruction is to write back to some prexisting
texts
Objective: to lay bare the ideological construction which functions as a subtext.
Gender and sexuality are the main categories that feminist deconstruction is
interested in.

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Unit 5: Post-War Subjectivity and Alienation

1. The Catcher In The Rye

America in the 1950s. Moment characterized by a culture of consensus.
The postwar economy prospering, millions of Americans bought homes in
the newly developed suburbs.
GI Bill = veterans attended college in record numbers, expanding the ranks
of the professional-managerial class.
Political unrest fostered by the Great Depression subsided. With the vision of
Stalin’s nightmarish totalitarian regime, radical dissent lost its appeal.
Many American writers and intellectuals saw the need to defend the United
States and the freedoms that it purportedly protected against the communist
threat.
1.1. Commodification
Critics concerned by patterns of widespread conformity. Mass market
commodities, bewildering corporate bureaucracies, uniformly designed
suburbs were all serving to homogenize the population.
Sociologist David Riesman in 1950 describes as “the other-directed”
person; William Whyte termed the “organization man”—individuals
focused on getting along, desperate for the approval of others, and
incapable of independent thought or action.
Commodification is the transformation of goods and services as well
as ideas or other entities that normally may not be considered goods, into
a commodity.
Commodification creates isolation.
In The Cather in The Rye, Holden Caulfield uses the term “phony” which
references this culture of commodification and conformity.

1.2. Alienation and The Catcher in the Rye

In existentialism and phenomenology (An approach that concentrates on
the study of consciousness and the objects of direct experience),
alienation describes the inadequacy of the human being (or the mind) in
relation to the world. The human mind (as the subject who perceives)
sees the world as an object of perception, and is distanced from the
world, rather than living within it.
In the 19th century Soren Kierkegaard, from a Christian viewpoint, saw
alienation as separation from God, and examined the emotions and
feelings of individuals when faced with life choices.
In The Catcher in the Rye Alienation becomes a Form of Self-Protection
 Holden’s alienation is his way of protecting himself
 Uses his isolation as proof that he is better than everyone else
around him and therefore above interacting with them
 Alienation is both the source of Holden’s strength and the source
of his problems
J. D. Salinger was drawn to Sufi mysticism in the 1960s. He also read the
Taoist philosopher Lao Tse and the Hindu Swami Vivekananda who
introduced the Indian philosophies of Vedanta and Yoga to the Western
world. He retreated from the public eye and author had left specific

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instructions authorizing a timetable, to start between 2015 and 2020, for

the release of several unpublished works.

1.2.1. Alienation is a systematic result of capitalism (Marxist

Theory)
Marx defines four types: Economic and Social Alienation,
Political Alienation, Human Alienation, and Ideological
Alienation. George Simmel's The Philosophy of Money describes
how relationships become more and more mediated by
money. Ferdinand Tönnies and the loss of primary relationships
such as famial bonds in favour of goal-oriented,
secondary relationships. impersonal monetary connections
between people. Social ties often become instrumental and
superficial, with self-interest and exploitation increasingly the
norm.

1.3. Social Isolation and The Catcher in the Rye

Holden’s red hunting cap = symbol of his isolation. Isolation protects
him by ensuring that he will not ever have to form connections with other
people that might cause awkwardness, rejection, intense emotional pain
(Allie’s death). Fear of human contact =alienation= loneliness reach out
to another person excites his fear of human contact terrible experience
convinces him that people are no good, alienation…vicious circle
- Alienation, Marxist Theory and Postmodernist Theory
Critical theory, particular with the Frankfurt School (Theodor
Adorno and Erich Fromm) developed theories of alienation,
drawing on neo-Marxist ideas. They apply Marxist theories of
commodification to the cultural, educational and party political
spheres. Links are drawn between socioeconomic structures,
psychological states of alienation, and personal human
relationships.
- Meaningless: "The accelerating throughput of information [...]
meaningless is not a matter anymore of whether one can assign
meaning to incoming information, but of whether one can develop
adequate new scanning mechanisms to gather the goal-relevant
information one needs, as well as more efficient selection
procedures to prevent being overburdened by the information one
does not need, but is bombarded with on a regular basis."
Alienation, ethnicity, and postmodernism Felix Geyer (1996:
xxiii).
- Powerlessness: Geyer remarks that “a new type of powerlessness
has emerged where the core problem is no longer being unfree but
rather being unable to select from among an overchoice of
alternatives for action, whose consequences one often cannot even
fathom”.

1.3.1. Isolation and its psychological triggers in The Catcher in the Rye
 Denial. Primitive defense that blocks external events from
awareness. Person refuses to experience a traumatic
situation.

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 Regression. This is a movement back in psychological time

when one is faced with stress. When we are troubled or
frightened, our behaviors often become more childish or
primitive.
 Displacement. Redirection of an impulse onto a powerless
substitute target. (Someone who feels uncomfortable with
their sexual desire for a real person may substitute a fetish.)
 Rationalization. Cognitive distortion of "the facts" to make
an event or an impulse less threatening. People with
sensitive egos = making excuses and unawareness of this
mechanism. Expect others to believe their lies.

1.4. “Phoniness” and innocence

“Phoniness” in The Catcher in the Rye, describes the superficiality,
hypocrisy, pretension, and shallowness that he encounters in the world
around him.
Holden Caulfield, however, is an integral part of the system he criticises
and therefore escape from its strictures is problematized. This, in part,
defines his struggles with mental illness.
The world is not as simple as he’d like—and needs—it to be; even he
cannot adhere to the same black and-white standards with which he
judges other people.

2. The Lonely Crowd

Riesman defines shift from a society based on production to one shaped by
the market orientation of a consumer culture.
Increasing ability to consume goods and afford material abundance.
Explores how people use consumer goods to communicate with one another.
Shift from "inner-directed" personalities to "other-directed" ones.
Modern suburbia: individuals seek neighbours' approval. Fear of being
outcast from their community.
This lifestyle has a coercive effect, it compels people to abandon "inner-
direction" of their lives, and induces them to take on the goals, ideology, of
their community.
One defines one's self through the way others lived.

3. Modern Culture and Alienation

Antonio Gramsci purports that advanced capitalism had adapted to avoid the
revolutionary overthrow that had seemed inevitable in the 19th century.
Decline of raw coercion as a tool of class power, replaced by use of civil
society institutions to manipulate public ideology in the capitalists' favour.
American sociologist C. Wright Mills conducted a major study of alienation
in modern society with in 1951, describing how modern consumption-
capitalism has shaped a society where you have to sell your personality in
addition to your work.

4. White Collar: The American Middle Classes

C. Wright Mills states that bureaucracies have robbed all middle-class
workers of independent thought.
Turned into near-automatons, oppressed but cheerful.
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Three types of power within the workplace: coercion or physical force;

authority; and manipulation.
Western Society is trapped within the iron cage of bureaucratic rationality.
Focus more on rationality and less on reason.
Middle-class was becoming "politically emasculated and culturally
stultified" which would allow a shift in power from the middle-class to the
strong social elite.
Middle-class workers receive an adequate salary but have become alienated
from the world because of their inability to affect or change it.

5. Roots of Counter-Culture Movement

Scholars challenge the characterization of the 1950s as a period of
uniformity, optimism, and harmony: unspoken divisions, festering conflicts,
and subterranean forms of dissatisfaction and revolt.
Racial tensions escalated, leading to the growth of the Civil Rights
Movement as well as the emergence of the Nation of Islam as an outlet for
black frustrations.
Within a Cold War scenario, the threat of worldwide annihilation fostered
diffuse anxiety, and the immediate postwar period witnessed the formation
of pacifist groups committed to civil disobedience.
Reading The Catcher in the Rye functioned in the 1950s as a badge of self-
declared authenticity, and some critics hold that it helped to foster forms of
disaffection central to the counter-cultural movement of the 1960s.

6. American Individualism and Huckleberry Finn

Salinger belongs to tradition of quixotic individualism among American
authors. Society is inherently corrupt and corrupting.
Comparisons with Huck Finn.
Both are precocious and naïve, worldly tricksters quick to lie to protect
himself, but preternaturally sensitive and thus horrified by the cruelty and
decadence that he witnesses.
Both pursue an enclave of freedom and innocence and both resist the efforts
of adults to educate and mould them in accordance with prevailing standards
of conduct.
They assert their own relatively untarnished status through a vernacular style
that does not conform to standard English.
Subversive Individualism. Holden’s stubbornly childlike perspective
demonstrates greater wisdom and maturity than the ostensibly more realistic
outlook of those who gladly accept the conventional roles offered to them.

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