Word: couchs
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...Mishima, who committed ritual suicide in 1970, was amazed when he first learned how many American intellectuals and artists go to psychoanalysts. "Would it not be more proper," he wrote, "for the psychoanalysts to consult the artists instead?" In Japan it is not just creative people who avoid the couch. Everybody does. Tokyo, with a population of 11 million, has only three psychoanalysts in private practice. New York City (pop. 9 million) has nearly...
...issues on which the views of the two wings are mainly the same. When CHUL votes on something that's politically controversial--it doesn't happen too often, but largely because of the touchiness of the Harvard-Radcliffe merger, it's not unheard of--CHUL's student members often couch their arguments in ideological terms...
Which suggests that for Philip Roth, a novel has something to do both with telling the jokes that we live and that are all around us and with telling them on the analyst's couch, while trying at once to discover and to hide some essential self. Now Roth has brought Dr. Spielvogel back, and for nothing so much as to minister to writing and writers themselves. If Portnoy's Complaint taught us about a whole new malady through a novel, then My Life as a Man tries to teach us about the malady of the novel itself...
...direct confrontation between life and fiction, drawn around the question of what fiction can say and do about life. The novel as joke has here turned to novel as formal trick, parentheses within parentheses, document inside document. And throughout runs a sense that Roth has put himself on the couch, decided to give up fictions and smokescreens, but then gone back on himself: he can't help lying, he can't help making fiction even--or maybe especially--of his own life...
...just another "useful fiction." What he proves in fact is only the complexity of the relation between fiction and life, how they can mutually invade each other's territory and both lose a locked combat. To show that is for Roth to put himself as a novelist on the couch of literary analysis, hoping to show that the novel is not dead or sick, only disturbed in mind. But just to talk about the problems is not enough: Roth should take Spielvogel's advice and "perhaps to begin" again...