II
Authors also draw on the unconscious for their immoral characters. In Pere Goriot Balzac drew himself in Eugene Rastignac, but the author is also present in the villain of the novel, Vautrin or Jacques Collins, who appears likewise in Lost Illusions and The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans. Vautrin, it will be recalled, tries to persuade Eugene to marry a girl whose father will leave her a million francs, if Eugene consents to have her brother, the more likely heir, despatched by a crony of Vautrin's. Thus Eugene would be enabled to become rich immediately instead of being compelled to struggle for years. Vautrin wants a reward for his services. Vautrin's words are really the voice of Balzac's unconscious; Eugene's inner struggles are Balzac's own; and though the young student rejects the proposition he takes up Vautrin's line of reasoning unconsciously, even though to drop it. Vautrin's Machiavellian viewpoint was at times unconsciously entertained by Balzac himself, though never practised. We know Balzac always sought for schemes of getting rich to pay his debts, and was always occupied with thoughts of his aggrandisement and ambition. He no doubt unconsciously entertained notions that riches, love, fame might be attained by violating the moral edicts of society; these ideas may have obtruded but a few seconds to be immediately dismissed. But once they made their appearance they were repressed in Balzac's unconscious, and emerged in the characters of Vautrin and other villains who are the author's unconscious.
Balzac understood that vice often triumphed and that the way of virtue was often hard. "Do you believe that there is any absolute standard in this world? Despise mankind and find out the meshes that you can slip through in the net of the code." Vautrin here gives Balzac's inner unconscious secret away. The author was not aware that he drew upon himself unconsciously in depicting Vautrin. This, of course, does not mean that Balzac agreed with Vautrin. We remember Eugene shouted out to Vautrin, "Silence, sir! I will not hear any more; you make me doubt myself." The author merely got his unconscious into one of his leading villains, just as Milton did in Satan, as Goethe did in Mephistopheles.
Vautrin is Lucien de Rubempré's evil influence also, and Balzac saw how disastrously he himself might have ended his life had he heeded his unconscious, his Jacques Collin.
Since literature is often depicting struggles and conflicts with our evil instincts, it deals directly with the material of the unconscious; for the unconscious that psychoanalysis is concerned with is that which springs from repressions forced upon us by society as well as by fate. In literature the unconscious appears under various symbols and disguises, just as it does in dreams. The devil, for example, is but our unconscious, symbolised. He represents our hidden primitive desires struggling to emerge; he is the eruption of our forbidden desires. His deeds are the accomplished wishes of our own unconscious. We are interested in the devil because he is ourselves in our dreams and unguarded moments.
The fascination that the villain has for us is because our unconscious recognises in him a long-forgotten brother. True, our moral sense soon prevails, and we rejoice when the rascal is worsted, but he represents the author's unconscious as well as our own. Any one who has read of the thoughts and conduct of Raskolnikoff in Crime and Punishment, or of Julian Sorel in Red and Black, or of George Aurispa in The Triumph of Death, will see that much of the authors themselves, or rather their unconscious selves, is drawn in these criminals. Dostoievsky, Stendhal and D'Annunzio all said to themselves in writing: "I too might have ended like these characters. I did think their thoughts and a slight circumstance could have led me to the crimes they committed."
The man who hates a vice most intensely is often just the man who has something of it in his own nature, against which he is fighting. The author sometimes punishes himself in his novel by making the character suffer for engaging in the course of life that the author himself followed. There is always a suspicion, when a writer raves most furiously against a crime or act, that he has committed that deed in his unconscious.