Love and Literary Criticism

I was thinking today about the pervasiveness of what I would call Tubaforms in the “interpretation” of literature.  You have Freudian psychosexual analyses: Henry David Thoreau had an unresolved Oedipal Complex.  You have class analysis: the construction of sexual and class identity in the works of Dead White Male (or female exhibiting False Consciousness–since we know what true consciousness is).

In my view, what every human being on the planet needs is love.  They need to be able to receive it without guilt or holding back, and they need to be able to give it in the same way.  This is a very, very simple tubaform, but one which concords better than ANY other of which I am aware with the plainly observable needs we all have.

In breaking down “class” for example, what is the end game?  Is it human felicity?  Given that such narratives invariably depend upon hate and destruction, how could any sane person expect anything good?  Mack the Knife is a left wing hero. I mean that literally.  Look it up.

I look at these simplistic analyses, and it occurs to me they are mechanistic.  Thoreau was not someone whose mother failed to give him authentic permission to individuate as a man.  No: both were embroiled in an occulted biochemical mechanical process which occasionally creates incomplete reactions.

I get why people would want to dream of utopias; but as I said the other day, you do not create a utopia based solely on what you do not want.  In point of fact, that process is utterly lacking in intelligence and purpose, and no one who fails to purpose anything can claim to be working FOR anything.  They are lost in a house of mirrors.  That many are lost with them changes the basic situation not one iota.