Michel de M'uzan, Glimpses of the Process of Literary Creation (1964)
I tried to make this translation as a gift to Zach Phillips, who first put me on to de M'uzan, by way of his late article, "the hell of creativity." To be honest I prefer the hell of creativity to the hell of translation. I found more or less that it exceeded me, I found Green's prose considerably easier, but also there may be an effect of improving my French through that translation enough to feel my ignorance more intensely. Rather than abandon this project, I am going to attach a few fragmentary sections in my translation and offer that I am happy to send the original to anyone who has trouble finding it.
You'll see clearly what I find interesting about M toward the end. The struggle of the artist not to be your creature, yet to be your creature is precisely what art is. One thing I appreciate is that he doesn't take reconcilability or complementarity for granted. For de M'uzan, art may have little to do with health, with the creativity of children, with the spontaneity of birdsong, but rather to issue from and continuously inhabit a point of crisis. In a phrase he borrows from Bataille early in the essay, AT LAST, THE IMPASSE!
Apologies, again, for the incompleteness, and for any inaccuracies. I had to get out from under it. Bold formatting is mine.
¶ 3
I have spoken of velleities, of failure, of inhibitions, thus, of the accidents that we are bound to encounter. This is obviously an aspect which has not escaped psychoanalytic work. But overall, the principal literature devoted to this subject has seemed to me to present the creative practice in a somewhat idyllic light. Well, there is no idyll here, rather an enterprise which is random, always menacing, to the point where for some, it draws a part of its dignity from its very riskiness. This is the case in an actual literary trend — I’m thinking, for example, of the work of Maurice Blanchot, of Bataille, etc. — who go so far as to see in this difficulty, this blockage, this inhibition, the very soul of authentic work. In this regard I was told a story of George Bataille, who said to Robbe-Grillet one day when the latter was complaining of being hampered [entravé] in his work: “At last, the impasse!” In a way, one could say that the mark of a true writer is the impossibility of writing.
¶ 7
This doesn’t mean that we should confound all forms of creative activity in a single description. The sacred game is not the game tout court, and witticisms are not a poem. On the contrary, some of these forms of expression are of particular interest to us because they carry more clearly the trace of a remarkable psychic state which seems to have presided over their birth, a state commonly designated by the term: inspiration. To this established term, I would prefer that of seizure [saisissement] proposed by Frobenius, and which, it seems to me, has the merit of rendering its character as a sudden and essential accident. For Frobenius, this state of seizure results in an act which is not only descriptive, but organizational, the generation of a new order which constitutes an acquisition. This is, in other words, a mythic experience of the real, which doubles, so to speak, our immediate and silent communication with the objective reality of things.
¶ 8
The seizure of Frobenius, as I understand it, corresponds for us to states defined by Modification of the natural alterity of the external world Alteration of the intimate silence of the psychosomatic self The feeling of a wavering [flottement] of the limits separating these two orders, with a connotation of strangeness. This transformation of the relationship between object and narcissistic investments, responds to the feeling experienced by the subject of a change in his position in regard to the world, and even of his own identity. The state of seizure which is linked to it arouses the consciousness of entering into contact with something essential, yet ineffable. In my intervention on the report of Maurice Bouvet in Rome, I admitted that, in certain cases, this state, experienced in anxiety, can be classified among the phenomena of depersonalization; and that elsewhere, accompanied by euphoria, it is felt as an exalted experience of almighty expansion, connected to the initial moment of artistic or mystical inspiration, or even of the elation experiences described by Grunberger. Whatever may be, in both cases, the instant of seizure seems to me to raise a traumatic experience.
¶ 11
Creative representation is therefore exercised continuously, for the most part silently and automatically, and in a particular relationship with the movements of the drives. It searches unceasingly to grasp a present, the emergence of which is produced in every moment, and thereby to constitute a traumatic micro-experience. This description of the actual present, which is achieved by an active recuperation of the past, and accomplishes the transition from the discontinuous to the continuous, literally creates a reality whose opacity, otherwise would be total, since it would be reduced to an incoherent collection of abstract forms. The “nouveau roman” which, at least in one of its directions, affirms the existence of an entirely penetrating look at immediate reality, in fact cuts out from an experience which is normally experienced as global, this abstract sector which alone can revivify the past.
¶ 13
The irruption of the real, the brutal apparition of the object, as I have said, break up the economic peace and menace the status of primary narcissism, as well as the psychosomatic functional silence. A new situation follows in which the most destructive aspect of the drives is revealed, along with an anxiety linked to them. It is then that the necessity of development takes on a truly pressing character. Confronted by the internal danger of being radically submerged in the sum of the excitations involved; experiencing the rise of destructive drives; then renouncing the need to destroy the object, this program can only be realized economically by a staging of the situation which, in projecting images and forms linked together in a significative order, absorbs, binds, and integrates tensions, such that the fantasy is not only an experience one passively submits to, but takes on, up to a certain point, the efficacy of an act. Staging [mise en scène] and ordering [mise en ordre] which could be linked to the attempt to master the anxieties connected to the more primitive drives, in which Fain and David see one of the two functions of the primary process.
¶ 14
Thus, the external world, which in its demand for sole affirmation, collaborates in some way with the world of the drives to tear the individual away from his narcissistic organization, and contributes to the release of the destructive drives, sees itself in turn menaced by the being who, in its attempt to escape self-destruction, begins by turning its aggressive forces outward. We should not be surprised to find that the description of this this state of affairs in advanced literary works or in our psychoanalytic work immediately takes an extreme turn for the dramatic. The content of the drama, in fact, is chaos, but [from the moment] it translates through representations, phantasms, even if they are the most terrifying and primitive, it takes on an orientation, a value which already constitutes the beginning of an organization [d’aménagement], of the sort that, in spite of its discordant themes, immediately becomes creation. We know that at a later stage of development, the individual is aided in his tentative organization of the life drives by the edification of the Superego which, insofar as it participates in the introjection of aggression, also relates to the creative process of imagination. However, whatever might be the value of this superegoic personification, it is in its nature only to play its role in a closed field, and too easily, in a paralyzing or castrating way; while the path to sublimatory realizations constantly opens on the world, so that the individual, who in reality only works for himself, offers to the external world a product, not only to please himself, but also to protect himself. In its last manifestation, the most egoistic movement results in a gift, and in love, consequently, we find a staging of hatred. This hatred, always indecisive in its orientation, ready to to turn toward to the outside or back against the subject himself, is often close to crime, true work always bears its mark, even in its most voluntarily reconciled aspects. In this regard, literary history could truly recover the sense of Freud’s words in a letter to Pfister [cite], “we cannot do anything true without being a bit criminal.” Here, in effect, contrary to the reservations which I have expressed just now myself, psychoanalysis can perhaps make some contribution to aesthetics. Beauty, isn’t it, in the end, the true, a true which has undergone a radical metamorphosis which still betrays the chaos and all of the savage conflicts from which order was won? If this were so, one could comprehend how the horror of these archaic struggles could engender the fascinating beauty of Medusa’s head. [cite]
¶ 15
You can’t do anything real without being a bit criminal — in other words, without feeling guilty. Here we touch on the rift which so frequently divides artists between the law of the Superego and the demands of artistic truth, without which the work is nothing more than a bland production of conformism. Literary history abounds in examples of this conflict which, in serious cases, necessarily for us the most significant, can compromise in a more or less lasting way the success of the work, or even the life of the writer. I will cite only the case of Gogol, who under the daily pressure of a fanatical conscience, sought in vain to redeem with an edifying work the diabolism of the first part of Dead Souls. In this truly extreme case, the religious Superego did not succeed in overpowering the true nature of the work: Gogol, perfectly aware of the literary nullity of his work, but incapable of triumphing over his scruples, could only throw his manuscript into the fire and sink into despair.
¶ 16
We know that very often in history, the struggle of an artist for his work was no less a struggle for his life. This is understandable, born of complex conditions, where nostalgia for the lost narcissistic paradise with the discordant demands of the drives, the work, product of a synthetic elaboration, finished object, complete, endowed with efficacy, and therefore powerful, is represented in the unconscious by the phallus, which according to Grunberger is the emblematic image of narcissistic integrity. The proof is given to us that this is indeed the case in all cases of incompleteness, fragmentation, or interruption, which reveal a failure or insufficiency of the functional role of the work. There is perhaps a link between these more or less bastardized forms of literary failure, which can, moreover, give rise to great works, and the morbid organic developments that we so often find in biographies.
¶ 23
Throughout the first part of my presentation, I have spoken of representations, of dramatization, of fantasy activity, in other words, of creativity in general, but I did not address myself to literary creation itself, which only exists by the passage to a particular act: the act of writing. What renders this act necessary? Why and how does it become, for some, a need, even a vital requirement, while so many others are content with their daydreams, without seeking to offer its product to others? It is to these questions that I will attempt to respond — and, I apologize in advance, I will make some recourse to hypothetical views in the course of doing so, in representing the functional point of view taken here.
¶ 24
As I posed it, my first question itself suggests an answer: it is that, if some people have to resort to a supplementary operation to resolve one of the traumatic situations I’ve mentioned, we must believe that they were led there by a defect in their system of development, that is to say, paradoxically, by a relative failure of their imaginary life. Everything happens as if the potential artist, who, precisely, is capable of a particularly well developed and in principle always available fantasy activity, was nevertheless not in a position to use it effectively to ensure the integration of his tensions and conflicts. Or rather, his effort fails in part because, in the critical situation in which he finds himself, he reacts with a proliferation of images which invade and overwhelm him. Instead of reestablishing, as he sought to do, his narcissistic integrity, this abundance of fantasies plunges him into a new traumatic situation, a situation of powerlessness which he of course experiences as castration. Hence the need for a new operation, which can mobilize the forces of the imagination in a completely different manner.
¶ 25
The artist, therefore, sees himself menaced by the system which, precisely, was supposed to protect him. This is not surprising if we admit with Freud that he is probably endowed with an abnormally strong instinctive constitution, and that, in consequence, his systems of adaptation are constantly at risk of being pushed to failure, in such a way that he is exposed more than anyone to conflictual situations. We therefore understand that the abundance of interior imagery cannot be dominated solely by the play of autarkic elaboration, which would amount to a form of alienation. The artist, on the contrary, is led to turn towards others, before whom he describes his interior situation and finds confirmation of his existence. The paradox of creation, and particularly of literary creation which, based on the exploitation of common language, necessarily includes dialogue, is that the negative, here, must become the means of a positive affirmation. Castrated, solitary, aggressive — the writer is at the same time all-powerful to the extent that he manages to impose and even make people like his description.
¶ 26
Here we touch an essential difficulty which every literary vocation must resolve in some way: the writer, in effect, writes to express himself, but he can do so effectively only if his expression is received as proof of his existence, otherwise said, if he is capable of pleasing. This is a seriously conflicted situation from the start, because to express yourself, is to forcefully modify the relationships between the world and the subject, it is to attack, and up to a certain point to nullify the others, but how under these conditions can one obtain recognition and love? We know that the child already encounters this obstacle: to please his parents, to seduce them and not to lose their love, he is naturally led to falsify his expression of himself, as soon as it is offered as a gift. I could cite the case of a child I know very well, a young girl of eight, extremely gifted and with an intelligence far beyond her age, who for a long time has been producing all kinds of little poems and stories. This little girl, whose phobic organization is obvious, must constantly confront a terrifying fantasy production. Around the age of 4 or 5, she invented an imaginary person, M. Falbert, whose adventures she recounts to her older sister and her parents. These adventures bore the traces of childhood fantasy experiences, but always drew on the comic and the burlesque. The child already wanted to please people and make them laugh. Later, as she began to write, always for the benefit of this immediate entourage, the content of her stories changed notably, as if the simple fact of putting things on paper led to a tendentious choice among the themes of lived experience.What was most often eliminated was that which might shock or bring displeasure, leaning towards poetic or humorous themes likelier to earn admiration and esteem. Through this capacity of choice, the child was already engaging in an aesthetic point of view, and it is not impossible that this was even the indication of true vocation. But having already focused on seduction rather than being loyal to herself, it was not always in her little poems that she expressed herself most faithfully. One of my patients, a writer suffering from serious inhibition, has understood perfectly to what extent his fixation on this infantile situation has had on his his literary activity, a sterilizing effect. He said to me, “what prevents me from expressing myself and ultimately from acting? I observe that, from the beginning, I was taught not to express myself, but to please, to please those who surrounded and commanded me. Taking this particular activity of writing, which was encouraged from the beginning by my mother, I wrote not for my pleasure, but to please her. The concern for writing, considered as an expression of myself, that appeared later, along with opportunities to please others by writing. It was at that moment that the difficulties began.” If the patient had not become conscious of this dilemma, he probably would have continued to write pleasant and insignificant things, like so many others who supply average production on a daily basis. For the moment, he is obviously paralyzed, but at the same time, he sees a possibility of liberating his gifts.
¶ 27
It seems to me that my patient saw clearly a fundamental conflict which one can broadly define as that between narcissism and the demands of the drives [exigences pulsionnelles]. But naturally, things are more complicated, due to the fact that “pleasing” [plaire] and “making pleasure” [faire plaisir] belong to two different worlds, one relating to a search for narcissistic satisfaction, the other to an objective drive, while “expressing oneself” [s’exprimer] puts in play at the same time the aggressive drives and the narcissistic status of the subject. We understand that this situation can become painful and even seem insoluble as we render the dilemma: to express himself without pleasing exposes the writer to being rejected in his solitude and his impotence, that is to say, refers him to his castration. But on the other hand, to please without expressing himself, this is to renounce one’s truth in the name of an immediate narcissistic satisfaction, which is to inflict upon oneself a much deeper narcissistic wound, since it touches the very roots of one’s being.
¶ 28
Every writer is thus placed before an impossible choice. It remains to be seen how, in the best case scenario, he can escape from this alternative.
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In other news, I'm reading at a trans conference at Columbia on Friday afternoon, something new for me, a straight theory talk. I will probably post some digest here but if you happen to be in New York on a Friday afternoon and that sounds good to you, by all means come through. https://issg.columbia.edu/content/trans-disruptions-future-change-conference-2024
I also had a really fun reading at Topos Too the other day, with Lena Afridi, Kay Gabriel, and Maxi Wollenhorst. Felt kind of in my element, was reading from the half-finished manuscript which a few of you have read. Actually NOT the book I rewrote 90% of this Winter. I can't be a casual translator, I have to finish things. I will.