I am reading an excellent book called Possession: A Romance, by A.S. Byatt. I am sorely tempted to review it, but I must curtail this tendency of mine to indulge in reviewing before I have finished reading the volume in question.

It’s partially about literary criticism and literary historians - what they do, whether it matters, what’s wrong with what they’re doing. That’s all encoded in the story, not said outright - I should note that before you think it’s a dreadfully boring book. The primary main character is Roland Mitchell, a quiet British academic—oh dear, I am making it sound boring. Wait for the review! It isn’t!

At any rate, at some point in the book, Roland is reading an essay by a Scary-American Feminist Academic, in which she discusses constructing a feminine landscape. Towers, fountains, et cetera, are all “phallic”, she says, but the female poetic vision yields an “alternative landscape,” of springs that seep rather than shoot, of holes half-covered by fronds of foliage, blah blah blah. And Roland, bless his British little heart, thinks, “Oh dear.” Leonetta Stern (the S.A.F.A.) may have a very useful and interesting metaphor there, says Roland, but how horrifying to transform the world into sex, to believe that the land he walks on is a mass of genitals and pubic hair. I laughed in rueful recognition.

I have, as many of you know, an English degree. I have taken Literary Theory (history and theory of literary criticism, as well as philosophy of why it matters and isn’t just a bunch of frustrated writers ripping at successful writers for nourishment—oop, my bias is showing!). Oftentimes, sex is in fact an underlying theme, or a barely-hidden meaning (how could we get through Julius Caesar without all those naughty puns?) But the sex card is, in my humble opinion, not enough to fill an analytical deck.

Do you realize that pure Freud has been totally deprecated in the psychological disciplines? (Or so I am told, and thank Heaven!) Well, pure Freud continues not only to be employed as a basis for literary analysis, but as a foundation from which other popular schools of literary analysis grow. (Did you know that women aren’t as good with language as men, because all language stems from the realization as a baby that the Mother is Other? Yeah!)

The fact is that we are very good at reading sexual metaphors into things. Examine a jocular conversation between teens or adults, and you will see that almost anything can be a sexual metaphor. (“Beavis & Butthead,” anyone?) They can sometimes be a fruitful way to read things—but not always. I still am astonished by the ability of intelligent students to say, “Hamlet and Gertrude sitting in a tree,” and go no further. Yes, dear, you’ve come up with a sexual reading! Jolly good! Now what does it add to the meaning of the play? Could you, in fact, write an interesting essay on that? Or would it simply be, “Heh. Chick digs her son. Twisted.”

In fact, chalk it up to my years as a proto-paleontologist if you will, but I have always thought Freud was ridiculous, even without the horrible gender biases. You’re going to simplify the world down to one overarching concern, and you chose SEX? Sorry, Sigmund. Even sex is about death. Cheating it through reproduction, ignoring it through the life-affirmation of the sexual act, suppressing your urges because God says you’re naughty—it’s all about death and our fear of it. So I hereby declare all Freudian and Lacanian critics terrified of facing their own deep-seated fear of death, and therefore get to be just as smug as ever Freudian readers were about the repressed masses who thought Turn of the Screw was a ghost story.

And I will walk happily through a rich world with many different meanings and layers, perhaps muse on death, and the bodies of many years of life which form the rich loam under my feet—but I encourage the Freudians to watch where they step in their “alternative landscape.” You don’t know where it’s been!