The Erotic Motive in Literature

by Albert Mordell

There is always a large element in the population that hearkens back to its childhood days. Even our most intellectual people like to divert themselves with stories of piracy, battles, sunken treasures, tales of the sea, of adventure and mystery. The people who love romance go back in their reading to their boyhood days; they have in their unconscious, primitive emotions that, unable to find an outlet to-day very well, refuse to remain altogether repressed; they get satisfaction by seeing pictures of life in which the unconscious thus participates. The perennial interest of Robinson Crusoe and Treasure Island, of Scott and Dumas, of the sea stories of Cooper and Captain Marryat, of the detective stories of Gaboriau and Doyle, is due to the fact that they make us young again. It is true we often outgrow some of these books and find them dull in later life, but they enchant many of us at all ages because our inherent instincts from savage and less cultivated people can only be kept repressed by being given a feigned instead of a real satisfaction.

Old legends like those about Achilles, the Wandering Jew, the Flying Dutchman, Charlemagne, and King Arthur and his knights, never weary us; they continue to furnish artists and writers with artistic material. Psychoanalysis explains the love we feel for these romances. We have never quite grown out of either the barbarous or boyish state. We like the strange, the marvellous, the mysterious, for this was specially characteristic of man in an early stage and of the boy. We also find an affinity for the kind of life our ancestors led. We are interested in tales where men are hunting and fighting. Man's unconscious loves a fight, for he has always fought in the history of the race. He is fascinated by danger and the idea of overcoming obstacles. And he wants such scenes introduced in literature.

Psychoanalysis also explains the affinity that we have for the supernatural in literature. Freud's disciples, like Rank and Abraham and Ricklin, have shown in The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, in Dreams and Myths, and in Wishfulment and Fairy Tales, respectively, that fairy tales are to be interpreted like dreams and represent the fulfilled wishes of early humanity. The child who likes fairy tales finds his own wishes satisfied in these tales dealing with the supernatural and improbable. Even when great poets make use of the supernatural in their work, the same principles of wish fulfilment are there. Faust is saved in Goethe's poem, Prometheus is released in Shelley's lyric drama and the Knight of the Cross is victorious over the dragon in Spenser's allegory. The poems give us the fulfilled wishes of the modern poets. True the modern poet introduces advanced ideas of his time and gives different interpretations to the old tales. But we still love the supernatural because we have our limitations with reality.

In an essay on Hans Christian Andersen published in 1867 George Brandes showed the connection between the unconscious and the nursery tale. Thus he anticipated the discoveries of Abraham, Ricklin and Rank, who noted that folk-lore and fairy tales are, like dreams, realised wishes of the unconscious of early humanity, formulated into endurable form. Brandes objected to the occasional moral tag in Andersen's stories "because the nursery story is the realm of the unconscious. Not only are unconscious beings and objects the leaders of speech in it, but what triumphs and is glorified in the nursery story is this very element of unconsciousness. And the nursery story is right, for the unconscious element is our capital and the source of our strength." Brandes shows how child psychology interests us all because of its unconscious. He distinguished the changes brought in by the nineteenth century where the unconscious is worshipped, while in the critical eighteenth century consciousness alone had been valued.

Nietzsche understood that the romantic life of our ancestors and their ways of thinking were repeated by us in our dreams. He wrote in his Human All Too Human, Vol. 1, pp. 23-26: "The perfect distinctions of all dreams—representations, which pre-suppose absolute faith in their reality, recall the conditions that appertain to primitive man, in whom hallucination was extraordinarily frequent, and sometime simultaneously seized entire communities, entire nations. Therefore, in sleep and in dreams we once more carry out the task of early humanity.... I hold, that as man now still reasons in dreams, so men reasoned also when awake through thousands of years; the first cause which occurred to the mind to explain anything that required an explanation, was sufficient and stood for truth ... this ancient element in human nature still manifests itself in our dreams, for it is the foundation upon which the higher reason has developed and still develops in every individual; the dream carries us back into the remote conditions of human culture, and provides a ready means of understanding them better. Dream-thinking is now so easy to us because during immense periods of human development we have been so well drilled in this form of fantastic and cheap explanation, by means of the first agreeable notions. In so far, dreaming is a recreation of the brain, which by day has to satisfy the stern demands of thought, as they are laid down by the higher culture."

Supernatural phenomena, however, in our contemporary literature savour of imitation and the artificial. Writers do not as a rule believe in the supernatural while the creators of the old fairy tales did. From so fine a poet as Yeats, who is said to believe in fairies, we get literature that is both sincere and artistic. We have a beautiful ideal reconstruction of the world in such a play as The Land of Heart's Desire. Here the dream principle is still at work.

Among the fairy tales of our day are those centring around psychic phenomena and reporting the conversations of the dead. They are written because they represent the writer's wishes to communicate with the dead and to prove that we do not die. They are needed by some in an era of exact science and a great war as old folk lore was needed in its time. Needless to say this does not speak well for the intellects of the writers of these spiritualistic works. We make something occur because we want it to transpire. Lodge's Raymond is one of the fairy tales of recent times and it has a genuineness because the author, to the amazement of many of us, believes those talks with his son actually took place. The book is really a commentary on his pathetic state of mind after the death of his son, and is his dream of hope.

But realistic literature is after all in the ascendant, for it tells us of what we experience in our own life. Don Quixote showed us that love for books dealing with dreams and impossibilities may help to make one mad. Men are interested in their inner struggles and in the problems of the day. Books treating of these have replaced considerably the old romances as serious literature.

Romantic and idealistic works are like dreams, fragments of the psychic life of the race when it was young.