Fiction That Lies About Its Dreams
By Anatole Broyard
"Once I began practicing, I had to give them up. I was seeing eight patients a day and reading psychology. But now that I'm retired, I miss the close contact, the emotional splurging, all the details of being and doing, and I thought I might find this again in fiction. Of course I knew fiction had changed, that it no longer dealt in the heroic or the larger than life, as James, Tolstoy, Proust or Ford did. But that was all right. If characters in contemporary novels bore some resemblance to my patients, I'd feel right at home."
"Do they?" I asked.
"Before I answer that," he said, "I'll ask you not to use my name if you quote me. Now that I'm not working, I never know what what I might say. I feel giddy with freedom, but I mustn't forget my Hippocratic oath. As for your question about whether people in fiction are different from my former patients: Yes, they are, and in a way that took me by surprise. When I look back on them, it almost seems that my patients were more original -- I'm tempted to say more talented -- than the people in many current novels. I'm aware of the old saw that truth is stranger than fiction, but I don't see why this should be so. After all, truth is in the public domain -- a novelist can borrow anyone's truth. Since he has an infinite selection to choose from, I can only suppose it's some failure in his taste or technique that makes his fictive truths less vivid or convincing than ordinary ones."
"How do you explain this failure?"
"I think part of the difficulty lies in the relation of the writer to his characters and to his audience, which is not at all the same as a patient's relation to himself as a character and to his analyst. When someone tells me his story, he's fighting for his life, his happiness, his truth, if you like. He puts everything he has into his narrative. (This is not the case with all patients, but I try to avoid the other kinds.) Such pure need poured out of the people I saw, such beautiful sadness, such a reaching for the past or future, that I couldn't help loving them. Naturally there were patches of ugliness too, but these are the inevitable disadvantages of being born into a family and the world.
"I felt that these people loved me in return, if only because they depended on me, or because I was seriously interested in them. They may have felt that I alone understood them; I was the repository of their hopes and fears, their secrets. In a sense I was the mirror on the wall that enabled them to imagine for a moment that they were the fairest of them all, for there are times in analysis when nearly every patient takes on a great beauty, the beauty, you might say, of being the only creature who has to struggle with consciousness. Yet I don't always feel this pressing toward clarification in novels. The characters don't talk with the same urgency. It's as if they haven't much faith in whomever they're performing for. And this lack of faith may begin with the novelist, because he and his characters often strike me as resisting each other, as well as the reader. Authors who aren't faithful to their characters remind me of people who lie about their dreams.
"One lets the men and women in a novel speak or act for themselves, and the situation in analysis is similar. Much of what I do is simply sit and wait while the patient shows himself to himself. Eventually, if we're lucky, something happens -- something that he wants and needs and has been desperately waiting for. But in quite a few novels I read, I don't feel much wanting or needing, which baffles and frustrates me. And so many of the characters are depressed. At least some of my patients were manic and less depressive. When you get the right balance between them, the manic supplies a wild energy that enables the patient -- or the character -- to revenge himself on his depression, to toy with it or dance around it.
"Sex almost always disappoints me in novels. Everything can be said or done now, and that's what I often find: everything, a feeling of generality or dispersal. But in my experience, true sex is so particular, so peculiar to the person who yearns for it. Only he or she, and no one else, would desire so very much that very person under those very circumstances. In fiction, I miss that sense of terrific specificity. I miss those kinds of gratification that could arise only as an unconscious answer to a bizarre appeal.
"One of the things that has always moved me in analysis was the patient's voice. No singer or composer could express all the changes of voice that an excited, grieving or raging human being produces. But current fiction tends to be curiously dispassionate in its voice. I don't hear the break and tide of rhythm, the pulling for breath, the squawk or shriek of certain words, like bird or animal cries. And the images -- those creatures from the black lagoon that used to haunt my consultation room -- where are they?
"Then there were patients who would try to impress me with their brilliance or wit, as if to show that they didn't need me, didn't need anything. Certain authors are like that, and I want to ask them, Are you satisfied just to be amusing? What are you concealing?"
"Tell me," I said, "what do you miss most? What did your patients give you that fiction doesn't?
He thought a while, "Incongruity," he said. "Most of all I miss incongruity. A psychoanalyst, or at least this one, is constantly refreshed -- even sustained -- by the gorgeous incongruities that people produce under stress. Such a wrench of perspective is a measure of our range, our suppleness. Occasionally a patient will go through the kind of abrupt self-transcendence that's one of the glories of our species. Without transition, he'll leap from the disgusting to the sublime, from the petty or mundane to the wildest shores of human sensibility. These flashes of incongruity are like dying and going to heaven. If I wrote a novel, I would fill it with incongruities, like kisses."
"You've been pretty tough on fiction. Have you found any writers you envy because they came closer to the human soul that you did?"
"Oh, yes. Indeed yes. There are certainly exceptions, marvelous exceptions. Once in a while a novelist will raise a question and carry it to a height too exquisite to be described in any but ontological or theological terms. He'll develop his character's difficulty to a point where it dissolves into a radiance, a beatitude. It will have all the pathos of human fallibility, or original sin. It will identify our limits, and there's a consolation in this that only a few of us have the courage to appreciate. If a patient came to me with a complaint of such grandeur, I'd send him away. I'd tell him his difficulty is worth living for, suffering for, even dying for. I know this is romantic, but that's what psychoanalysis should be: a romance, or roman, an art form."