in Freud und Leid

That the Wolfman's very self-conception is bound up with the fictions he was told and read and dreamed as a child suggests a classic trope of the modern novel, from Cervantes on, where the hero must be disillusioned of a bookish, mystified conception of reality. What is radically Modernist in Freud's narrative is that there is not and cannot be any disillusion: the self is bound in illusory relations, and the most one can do is to situate himself knowingly within the symbolic order which allows him to master relation itself. Freud's suggestion that the individual life history may open backwards onto a phylogenetic masterplot is a further Modernist gesture, an example of how we try to account for the insertion of the individual subject within political, biological, and cosmic history. One thinks of the manner in which Thomas Mann uses the story of Joseph and his Brethren, or Faulkner the widening historical patterns of a man's life, a family's genealogy, the South's history, or Joyce the patterns of Homeric epic as the backdrop to a day in modern Dublin, to suggest the problematic relation of the seemingly undirected individual existence to large trans-individual orders-orders which might explain, organize, justify if only one were certain of their status, if only one could reinvest them with the explanatory power of sacred myth. The Modernist thirst for myth, for explanatory and justificatory mas- terplots, which we find not only in Joyce, Mann, Faulkner, but as well in Yeats, Eliot, Gide, Kafka, Giraudoux, and so many others, is suggested in Freud's comment that a person "catches hold of this phylogenetic experience where his own experience fails him. He fills in the gaps in individual truth with prehistoric truth". The individual, we might say, makes raids on a putative masterplot in order to remedy the insufficiencies of of his own unsatisfactory plot-unsatisfactory because unclosed, hence incompletely illuminated by significance. It is as if the individual, in order to be able to narrate his life-story to himself in such a way as to make it coherent and significant, had to reach back toward the idea of a providential plot which, for better or for worse, would subsume his experience to that of mankind, to show the individual as a significant repetition of a story already endowed with meaning, were it to be only the painful and inevitable story of Oedipus of Thebes. Filling in the gaps of individual truth with prehistoric truth may be one way of escaping from Sherlock Holmes' question about the meaning of secular plots.