A Book Re-examines the Age of the Enlightenment
Nathan Gorelick traces literary criticism and psychoanalysis to their shared origins during the 17th and 18th centuries.
Barnard English Professor Nathan Gorelick’s The Unwritten Enlightenment traces the relations between literary criticism and psychoanalysis to their shared origins in the Enlightenment era’s novels and novelistic discourse. During this period in the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe, there were efforts to invent new notions of subjectivity and individualism. Gorelick shows how modern concepts of literature and the unconscious were generated in response to these efforts, and by an ethical concern for what the language of the Enlightenment excludes, represses, or struggles to erase.
Gorelick talks about the book with Columbia News, along with books he’s currently thinking about, classes he’s teaching this year, and who his ideal party guests would be.
How did this book come about?
The Unwritten Enlightenment grew out of my ambition to bring a psychoanalytic sensibility into conversation with the 18th century, and the ways that time period continues to inform, and frustrate, some of the most pressing social and political problems of our own time. This may at first seem like an odd pairing. The Enlightenment typically names the era during which a lot of our current notions of consciousness were developed, but through my research, I found that the period also influenced the discovery of the unconscious in some surprising ways, especially in the literary domain.
At the same time, and for many of the same reasons, I learned that reading psychoanalysis backward into this history of its literary origins reveals some key faults, dangers, and critical opportunities in our assumptions about the Enlightenment’s legacy today. By showing the literary qualities of psychoanalysis alongside the psychoanalytic dimensions of modern literature, the book also encourages these two camps—the critical and the clinical—to come together and invent new possibilities for collaboration.
Can you provide some examples from the book of how literary trends and practices of the Enlightenment led to the creation of modern literature?
The Enlightenment is usually thought of as a philosophical, scientific, and political movement. But it was literature, particularly the 18th-century novel, that provided this movement with the language it needed to take hold with a popular audience. The modern idea of a rational, inherently free individual was literally a novel invention. More fundamentally, the novel provided the imaginative framework in which our individuality, our identities, became inseparable from the stories we tell. The question then becomes: What do these stories both reveal and conceal? What are these stories not saying, or saying without realizing it? What are they silencing or keeping quiet? Beyond all the romance about individual liberty, how are modern narratives of the self also forms of repression? And how can we read these repressions in ways that open these narratives to new, even subversive, possibilities? Different histories? Different futures?
Take one of the most successful novels ever written—Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, first published in 1719. Here is the story of a solitary man marooned at the edge of the earth, with nothing but his middling intelligence and his will to survive, sifting through the remnants of the civilization he has left behind, somehow constructing from these ruins a new and better world. It’s the story of the modern, self-made man, the rational individual crafting his reality to fit his own desires. It is also a colonial fantasy structured by white supremacy and anti-Blackness, and a celebration of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
What unites these two halves of the narrative is that it is a portrait in paranoia. Crusoe dominates the world because he fears it, and he fears it because the world finally refuses to be dominated. So the novel is at once an emblem of reason, an appeal to the worst sort of violence, and the story of a psychosis. What if, reading the novel this way, we discover that the Enlightenment for which it stands is actually a psychotic project? What would that mean for our world today? What if our reality is somebody else’s delusion? And how should we deal with this troubled and troubling inheritance? These questions are anything but abstract.
What books have you read lately that you would recommend, and why?
I loved Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel, McGlue. Nobody writes more brilliantly today about the hideous side of life. I’m compelled by the beauty she finds in the grotesque. For non-fiction, I enjoyed Benjamin Fong’s Quick Fixes, all about the history of drug use in the U.S. as a temporary and, ultimately, failed escape from the psychological horrors of late capitalism.
What's next on your reading list?
Isabella Hammad’s Enter Ghost. It’s the featured novel for the inaugural semester of the Barnard English Department Book Club. The club is run entirely by students, and I want to know what they’re reading and what they think. It’s from our students that I learn the most about the future.
What are you teaching this semester?
A writing course on the topic of: Attention! Next semester, I’ll be teaching a seminar on the end of the world and the language of ruins, as well as a course that has more to do with The Unwritten Enlightenment, called Literature and Psychoanalysis.
Which three writers/academics, dead or alive, would you invite to a dinner party, and why?
James Baldwin, because I’m humbled, floored, and formed by his insight and the grace in his critique. Margaret Mead, because she went to Barnard and Columbia, and also had a front-row seat to many of the major upheavals of the last century. Maybe she was conducting the whole orchestra.
And William Blake, because he probably knew how to party—and I might get him to draw my next tattoo for me. The three of them together, because they had their own ways of not so much seeing the future, as seeing beyond the wreckage of the now.