This is another collection of Phillips’ essays, subdivided into three categories: Equals, Under Psychoanalysis, and Characters. Each essay is a self-contained piece, with the theme of the collection, on the nature of equality in relationships between people (or lack there of), ever-floating loosely in the background. Phillips first essay, “Superiority,” makes the point that “equality…. is the legitimation, if not the celebration, of conflict.” In order for there to be a real dispute there must be some kind of rough balance of standing between the parties. On the other hand, “the authoritarian order pre-empts conflict, which is in and of itself a primary value. And to value conflict—to prefer the openness of conflict to the closure of intimidation—necessitates some notion of equality.” Phillips continues by bringing it back to his field of expertise, “The aim of psychoanalysis, one could say, might be the precondition for democracy; that a person be able to more than bear conflict, and be able to see and enjoy the value of differing voices and alternative positions.”
In his next essay, “On Being Laughed At,” Phillips expands on his idea of how relationships between people often involve tensions. Indeed, he asserts that there often can even be tension between two parts of the Self. “In circulation with others—and in the circulation with ourselves that is called psychoanalysis—it becomes extremely difficult to sustain, to hold in place, our preferred images of ourselves, of who we would rather be…. We are always other than what we want to be…. We don’t look the same as we look to ourselves.” That is what is so piercing about getting laughed at. The self-constructed veil of illusion is lifted for all the public to see. Phillips suggests, “To grow up is to discover what it is one is unequal to.” Some people bear this revelation better than others. Phillips assumes that the ridiculer reveals more about himself than the one exposed to the ridicule. “To laugh at someone one must enjoy their hatred of being laughed at…. It is one thing to acknowledge—if one is psychologically minded to—that we are likely to project whatever it is we find unbearable about ourselves into others. It is quite another to ridicule or mock this unbearable something once it has been so projected.”
Phillips begins his second section, “Under Psychoanalysis”, with the essay, “Around and About Madness.” He quotes psychoanalyst John Rickman that “madness is when you can’t find anyone who can stand you.” Madness is inherently social. It is about what it says about the sane just as much as it is about the insane. “In so far as they don’t break the law…. they are more like people with disturbingly bad manners. People who, by not playing the game, make us wonder what the game is. And indeed why the rest of us have consented to play it…. Those people referred to (however loosely) as mad are always people who seem to be unable or unwilling to follow rules. Their language, their beliefs, their bodily gestures, their hygiene, their hopes and expectations can be wildly at odds with some putative norm. They remind us of what it is to be normal.”
In the essay “Making It Old,” Phillips discusses the baggage that we all carry from our past. He suggests, “Our preoccupations are the way our pasts go on in our future…. Memory is of desire; we are formulating, we are picturing, in what we call our memories disguised descriptions of previous and longed-for satisfactions and terrors…. One is always bringing ones own past to the past…. There is the past that can seem to be searching us out, while we go in search of other pasts.” He prolongs the theme of our past continually playing a role in our present and future selves in his next essay, “Childhood Again.” He explains, “The details of a life, of course, can never be predicted; nor can the content or the exact working of the repetitions…. But what can be assumed is that there will be repetitions, and that these repetitions found their initial (and initiating) forms in childhood…. The experiences of childhood—if that is what they are—are at once our most privileged and elusive referents. Memory becomes the hope, in however disguised a form, of the possibility of satisfaction.”
The last section of Phillips’ book is a series of character sketches taken from his book reviews of biographies, as well as novels. Phillips continues to pile on the insights while attempting to analyze from afar. In “Svengali,” he asserts, “That people want things that apparently do them harm—that they can desire the unimproving thing—might make us wonder less about human depravity and rather more about the points that pleasure makes.” Returning to how people view their pasts in “Isherwood,” Phillips states, “It is only in retrospect that we can avoid being so narrow-minded about ourselves…. Recollection, Isherwood intimates, may be the best cure for egotism.” In a review of the novel, “Mr. Phillips,” Phillips describes how the eponymous hero views his life course as charted. He is a man full of superstition. “The feeling that there are other powers, whether malign or in some way on our side, makes life seem more like something going on inside a novel than the random, intractable thing that we have to go through unassisted.” Of course, the person Phillips is ostensibly analyzing to make this point, is, in point of fact, a character within Lanchester’s novel. In “Russell” Phillips gets back to his theme of how perilous relationships are between people, but sometimes even more so between one’s own Self. “Disappointment with other people is easier to deal with, and rather more exhilarating, than disappointment with oneself. If one can bear it, though, disappointment with oneself may lead somewhere: once you realise you’ve got your ideal self wrong you can come up with a new one.” Finally, in his penultimate essay, “Ravelstein,” Phillips makes one last point about how amorphous the play between humans can be when we try to relate to one another. “That we might be full of other people—engaged in endless mutual biography—makes a more private sense of self difficult to account for.”
No comments:
Post a Comment