Dream Songs and Freud
by Matt Stoltz, 2004
Could there be an art form along the factions of the pleasure principle that, if enough psychic energy was poured into it, could create fissures too deep for the application of the dream-work? Up to now, we have taken literary walks only through highly structured texts with our psychoanalytic pedagogue Freud, who has shown us how to reduce these texts to wish fulfillments; but we have not explored the less structured, more chaotic avenue of poetry1. John Berryman's long poem The Dream Songs fundamentally expresses Freudian concepts, yet arguably remains out of reach from the dream-work. For the purpose of this essay, and, moreover, to demonstrate knowledge we must first bring to light the aforementioned Freudian concepts expressed in the text before we storm into our disparaging claim. However, before we embark upon on our inquiry a biographical account of the poet and an introduction of his protagonist would add useful context.
John Berryman and Henry
Beginning his life in tragedy, Berryman was twelve when his father shot himself because of the 1929 stock market crash. Though Berryman never got over the loss of his father, he eventually found a paternal source within his books. He fell in love with poetry at an early age and studied English at Cambridge. After college, he taught at various Universities including: Harvard, Cambridge, Princeton, University of Minnesota, and here at the University of Washington (Modern Poetry 1950, Spring quarter). Ending his life in tragedy, Berryman shadowed his father and committed suicide in 1973 by jumping over the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minnesota2.
Henry, Berryman's most successful poetic creation, closely resembles a modern Hamlet in the sense that he often seems frozen in place, powerless to make any decisive action. In The Dream Songs, Henry, and his manifold ego, is the protagonist bearing marks of Freudian concepts. He comes to the stage speaking of himself "sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third, sometimes even in the second; he has a friend, never named, who addresses him as Mr. Bones and variants thereof."3 At some point in Henry's fictitious life, he suffered an "irreversible loss"4 , which would undoubtedly give psychoanalytic archeologists a tempting spot to burry their shovels in his mind. However, it will later be argued that such an excavation would prove futile and illegitimate. With that said, here is Henry's inauguration song:
Huffy Henry hid the day,
unappeasable Henry sulked.
I see his point,-a trying to put things over.
It was the thought that they thought
they could do it made Henry wicked and away.
But he should have come out and talked.
All the world like a woolen lover
once did seem on Henry's side.
Then came a departure.
Thereafter nothing fell out as it might or ought.
I don't see how Henry, pried
open for all the world to see, survived.
What he has now to say is a long
wonder the world can bear & be.
Once in a sycamore I was glad
all at the top, and I sang.
Hard on the land wears the strong sea
and empty grows every bed.
Henry and Freud
In the above Dream Song, and many others, we can see how Freudian concepts play out in the theatre of Henry's mind. In Civilization and its Discontents Freud argues that "...the two urges, the one towards personal happiness and the other towards union with other human beings must struggle with each other in every individual; and so, also, the two processes of individual and of cultural development must stand in hostile opposition to each other and mutually dispute the ground" (106). In other words, there is a binary conflict between the internal and external worlds of Being. This concept unveils itself in Henry's mind as he thinks, "All the world like a woolen lover/Once did seem on Henry's side/Then came a departure." Freud would most likely assert that such a departure, or mutual dispute, is the result of the splitting off of fantasy which occurs early in childhood.
Yet, Freud cannot fully explain the 'Unappeasable Henry' who, conscious of the fantasy split, is discontented to the point where he removes himself from society, or as he puts it 'Hides the day'. Instead, 'Unappeasable Henry' retreats into his own mind to seek those sources of pleasure he received before the split. Freud, fundamentally siding with one side of his own binary conflict, namely, the societal half, says that "The hermit [who] turns his back on the world…and sets out upon this path to happiness as a rule will attain nothing"5 Borrowing a Nietzschean notion, 'the distance of pathos', to account for the other half of Freud's conflict would explain Henry's words as that of 'the superior man who instinctually aspires after a secret citadel where he is set free from the crowd and may forget the law of man.6'
In Henry and the poems, we can distinctly identify Freud's conception of the psychic relationship between the ego, id, and superego. It can best be illuminated through another Dream Song:
Filling her compact & delicious body
with chicken paprika, she glanced at me
twice.
Fainting with interest, I hungered back
and only the fact of her husband & four other people
kept me from springing on her
or falling at her little feet and crying
'You are the hottest one for years of night
Henry's dazed eyes
have enjoyed, Brilliance.' I advanced upon
(despairing) my spumoni.-Sir Bones: is stuffed,
de world, with feeding girls.
-Black hair, complexion Latin, jeweled eyes
downcast…The slob beside her feasts…What wonders is
she sitting on, over there?
The restaurant buzzes. She might as well be on Mars.
Where did it all go wrong? There ought to be a law against Henry.
-Mr. Bones: there is.
As you can see, the song strongly points to all the divisions and interactions of the psychic faculties. In this situation, Henry's thoughts reveal the conflict between the Id and ego, as well as the role of the external world (the Husband, the four other people, and the unnamed friend) which galvanizes Henry's superego. Furthermore, we can consider what Freud calls the 'primordial conflict' if we dichotomize the song by transposing both the positive and negative parts7 of the pleasure principle on Henry's situation. First, the woman's beauty spurs Henry's inclination to 'spring on her' and fulfill his appetite for sexual pleasure, but shortly thereafter he opts to avoid any displeasure that may come about through the husband and four others. Ultimately, Henry's situation results in the renunciation of sexual pleasure which produces the two-fold resentment directed at both society and Henry himself. Henry, resentful of these aim-inhibiting social conventions, asks "Where did it all go wrong," and, resentful of his own intentions, comments that there 'should be a law against me.' So what is Henry left with? According to Freud, Henry must depend on deflection, surrogate satisfactions, and intoxication to attain pleasure. Throughout the Dream Songs Henry mostly depends on intoxication for pleasure, because, as he indicated in the first dream song, he cannot be appeased by artificial sources of pleasure. As a result, Henry has bouts of anxiety, depression, euphoria, and is essentially a neurotic.
Freud, Berryman, and Dionysus
John Berryman's command and use of the language in the poetic form of these Songs is too chaotic to furnish a legitimate dream-work. A successful dream work depends upon the associative links between the manifest content and latent content as it passes through distortions. In the above explications, we could only point to instances in the songs where various Freudian concepts existed, but to claim associations of a common element among these thickly distorted songs would be an unforgivable metaphysical inference.8 Metaphysical inferences of this kind should be avoided at all costs so to preserve scholarly integrity, especially under the guise of positivism; unless one hoped to baptize another stillborn thought like the Oedipal Complex upon posterity. Unlike The Three Caskets, there are far too many motifs coursing through the pages to justify employing such a method and it would result in a butchering. In a similar vein, the language in these songs is highly lyrical, flooded with idiomatic expressions, and pulsates with a unique cadence that vacillates between the first, second, and third person, which would make it extremely difficult to organize. Furthermore, Berryman's innovative use of a dislocated syntax accomplishes incredible leaps in the language, expressing complicated ideas in no time at all; this would leave it up to the dream interpreter to fill in those gaps, necessitating speculation of the most difficult kind, namely, characterizing the author's intentions. In the end, a dream-work on these songs would be a futile.
This is not to say that one could not force a dream-work into a reality, certainly this is not the case. Quite the opposite is true, but our argument is that it would simply be unjust. In fact, as we mentioned earlier, an advocate of employing the dream-work method on this text might easily be tempted to admit Berryman's loss of his own father into the dream-work and find a common element of associating there. Such a person would have little difficulty finding evidence in the text to carve out this claim, especially in the later songs, like song 384 which reads:
The marker slants, flowerless, day's almost done,
I stand above my father's grave with rage,
often, often before
I've made this awful pilgrimage to one
who cannot visit me, who tore his page
out: I come back for more,
However, making the suicide of Berryman's father the common element of distortion would be an abandonment of the project altogether, because they would no longer be analyzing the text, rather its author. In other words, it would cease to be a literary dream-work and become a personal one. Nietzsche has called such speculation a 'display of insufficient honesty where a prejudice, sifted and made abstract, is defended by them with reasons sought after the event.'9
So with all of that aside, what is it about these poems that makes them outside the scope of the dream work? In order to answer this question we must consider the dichotomy spurred by Nietzsche between Apollo and Dionysus. For our purposes we will simply say that Apollo represents Form and Dionysus represents Instinct. From here, let us consider Freud's work as a whole and position it on the appropriate side of the dichotomy, and do the same with Berryman's work. It does not take much thought before we put the coldly calculating corpus of Freud butted up next to Apollo, and Berryman's intoxicated, madly driven poetry next to Apollo's counter part Dionysus. Now that we have a visual representation of our authors in relation to the dichotomy we can attempt to answer the question. When slicing into artwork Freud is committed to an Apollonian process, after all he is coming from that side of the dichotomy, and for us the dream-work allows him to reach across that line, grab a hold of the unintelligible, and form the intelligible. This is accomplished because the dream-work grabs a hold of, or discriminates, broken off pieces of that art which contain enough apollonian forms to allow him to piece an intelligible whole. However, Berryman's dream songs are so fortified by the instinctual language of Dionysus10 that any attempt to piece together these poems into a coherent intelligible whole demands a metaphysical inference.
This leap of faith would be required if Freud were to make the dream songs intelligible, it would cost him his credibility,11 and he would no longer be approaching the text from the side of Apollo, but rather Dionysus. Therefore, this is precisely how Berryman has stepped over the Freudian intellectual framework, namely, through its overbearing Dionysian characteristics.
Concluding Remarks
The purpose of my inquiry was to show a piece of art which I felt was an exception to the rule. Even though The Dream Songs run parallel to many Freudian concepts, Berryman's innovative use of poetry is a far too chaotic form of poetry to allow a legitimate dream-work to assert itself. Instead, the songs necessitate a metaphysical inference, or leap of faith that renders the dream-work unforgivably suppositious. I feel obliged to include a final excerpt from a song which speaks directly to Freud, and describes the shortcomings of the dream-work:
I tell you, Sir, you have enlightened but
you have misled us: a dream is a panorama
of the whole mental life,
I took one once to forty-three structures, that
accounted in each for each word: I did not yell 'mamma'
nor did I take it out on my wife.
Afterword
This assignment provided the kind of intellectual freedom that a student can only appreciate. For that, thank you. As you review the fourth section of this paper, please consider the thought, though it is a very inchoate and sloppy one, rather than its expression. Consequently, that section of the inquiry may simply be the author's bias and an attempt to blockade his aesthetic tastes from foreign theory.
Footnotes
1. I speak of structure not in terms of form, but rather content. A good illumination of my point would be like a chronicle vs. a narrative.
2. All biographical information collected from Dream Song The Life of John Berryman, Paul Mariani.
3. John Berryman.
4. John Berryman
5. Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and It's Discontents. Chapter two, Page 31
6. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, "The Free Spirit" section 26
7. The positive is that major instinctual drive which seeks the attainment of sexual pleasure, and the negative is simply the avoidance of displeasure. Lecture Notes: Richard Gray, CD. Mon, Nov 1, 2004.
8. I am simply using this term to attack inferences made by erroneous assumptions.
9. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, "The Prejudices of philosophers", section 5. Italics mine.
10. For Nietzsche, language itself is by definition Apollonian but Dionysus could be expressed, according to him, through music. With the inherent musicality of poetry in mind, I push forward this claim forward.
11. For instance, the theory of the Oedipal Complex easily expresses this thought.