> I agree, except for your statement that the motive must
> be a motif over the entire catalog as that does not allow
> for growth and change in the author over possibly
> decades. You can’t apply Dick’s spiritual themes from,
> say Valis to the earlier short-stories. As events happen
> in the authors lives, their ideas and reactions change.
I’ll accept that. Still, you must have a unified theory of the unconscious motives of an author over his entire life, including how and why they changed at particular points. You can’t just arbitrarily invoke those motives at one point and forget about them at another.
Dick was no more a “complete nutcase” or a “lunatic” than, say, Hemingway. He used amphetamines too much for a while, but he quit and later regretted having done it. Hemingway, on the other hand, never got any perspective on his alcoholism at all. Dick was married and divorced five times. Hemingway was married four times, and probably the last one endured only because that wife decided that she would stick to him through anything. Dick had a mystical vision in 1974 that quite possibly had something to do with his previous drug use. He used that experience to produce some of his best writing. With only a couple small gaps, Dick continued to write all his life, and his writing didn’t decline with age. In contrast, Hemingway didn’t write very well in his entire second half of his life. Dick had many friends who thought him a fascinating conversationalist. He was never a nutcase who bothered his neighbors. If your idea of a precise psychoanalytic evaluation is “complete nutcase” and “lunatic”, I shudder to think what sorts of criticism you have been doing.
Incidentally, I think that calling a writer who you never met “Ernie” or “Papa” is the height of pretentiousness.
I was approaching my responses on this board from a more colloquial aspect than I would use in a formal academic environment. I would never call Hemingway “Papa” around the seminar table or to my classes. Nor would I call Virginia Woolf a nutcase in class, though in normal conversational usage the term fits, as it does with Hemingway, Faulkner, and many other great writers. However, that is acceptable conversational usage once the subject has been identified–not pretentiousness, but a fun familiarity. And I wasn’t championing Hemingway over Dick, or actually championing either one. I was merely using the examples that came to mind.
I agree that we have to look at an overarching psychological profile, and that we have to use biographical data to create such. But when Salinger dies and the details that haven’t already been published get put against the details that have, we can come up with a reasonable psychological profile of a once-prolific author who dropped out of sight, and perhaps we can deduce what happened and when to make this happen. But there was a shift somewhere/sometime that would change the interpretation of Franny and Zooey as opposed to the novel he’s reportedly working on currently (if it exists and if it’s published).
I guess I should restate my original opinion on this in one sentence: Though we cannot discount the biography of the author and the overt opinions given in a novel, there is in good literature an un- or subconscious aspect that the author him- or herself may or may not realize; it is the job of the good critic to find these aspects, to bring them to light, and to do so responsibly in the context of biography, history, and textual evidence (not necessarily in that order) but to discount any of these factors is to be irresponsible.
