Holland Transactive

Transactive Criticism: Re-Creation Through Identity
Author(s): NORMAN N. HOLLAND

Source: Criticism, Vol. 18, No. 4 (Fall 1976), pp. 334-352
Published by: Wayne State University Press
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NORMAN N. HOLLAND*
Transactive Criticism:
Re-Creation Through Identity**
I had best begin by saying what I mean by transacti

I intend a criticism which takes as its subject-matt
in supposed isolation, as the New Criticism claimed
self in rhapsody, as the old impressionistic critici
transaction between a reader and a text. In other words, I would
like to see a criticism which frankly acknowledges, accepts, and uses
the critic's role in his own experience.
I want this kind of criticism because I think it is high time we

closed the gap that has dominated systematic thought since the
seventeenth century: the belief that the reality and meaning of
the external world exist alone, independent of the perceiving self,
and that therefore true knowledge requires the splitting of the knower
from the known. Over the centuries, two characteristic ways of

dealing with this assumed chasm between external and internal reality
have developedwe could call them fission and fusion.
Those who adopt the fission tactic assume that whatever is sub
jective or personal subtracts something from objective reality and
therefore the subject has to be taken out. This was the method of
the natural scientist in earlier centuries (but not today). It was
carried over quite uncritically to the social sciences and finally to the
verbal arts in the shape of " new " or formalist criticism. Indeed, we
have even reached a point where, at an Institute in North Carolina,
computers are being trained to read and analyze Paradise Lost, thereby
fulfilling not only the New Critic's dream of rigor, but Dr. Johnson's
dictum about that moral epic: "Its perusal is a duty rather than a
pleasure."
The fusion tactic for dealing with the supposed gap between
nature and mind has appeared in mystical movements ever since
* Norman N. Holland is Professor of English and Director of the Center for
the Psychological Study of the Arts at SUNY (Buffalo). Among his books are
Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare (1966), The Dynamics of Literary Response
(1968), Poems in Persons (1973), and 5 Readers Reading (1975).
** This essay was presented as a lecture for the Department of English, Wayne
State University, November 5, 1974. It is a companion piece to the author's

" Unity Identity Text Self," PMLA, 90 (October 1975), 813-22.
334
Transactive Criticism: Re-Creation Through Identity 335
Pascal, most recently in the late sixties in the excited cries of people
like Timothy Leary that one had to get mixed into the landscape, in
Tompkins' and Bird's The Secret Life of Plants, and in the practices
of the various yogas and gurus abroad in the land today. Yet
something of the same wish for total fusion and merger appears in
the writing even of sophisticates like Gregory Bateson, Norman O.
Brown, or R. D. Laing. All want to deal with a gap between nature

and mind by an ethical or mystical cry that we have to fuse mind
with nature. All proceed by tacitly assuming that there is such a
gap between mind and nature to close.
That, however, is precisely the question I want to raise: Is there a
gap? I think not. I think rather that whenever we experience
something ostensibly outside ourselves we do so by re-creating our

selves through that something. Or to state it more abstractly: a mind
re-creates identity through experience. I shall explain what I mean
by that very abstract statement of fact, but for the time being, notice
that it implies that whenever someone says there is a gap between

nature and mind or mind and body he has himself created that gap.
From my point of view, the seventeenth century cleaving of res extensa
from res cogitans is itself a historical and personal strategy which is
governed by psychological principles and can be described in philo

sophical terms by phrases like Alfred North Whitehead's "in-mixing
of self and other," John Dewey's "having an experience," Ernst
Cassirer's " myths," or Husserl's " intentionality." Similarly, psycho

logists of perception and cognition have been showing experimentally
for many years that perception is a constructive act. That is, reality
does not simply impinge on our sensesrather, we actively construe
even the simplest of events through complex information-processing
systems.
Now, however, the psychoanalytic psychologist can give his

particular precision to what the philosophers and the experimental
psychologists have adumbrated. We can turn these epistemological
and physio-cognitive abstractions into psychoanalytic statements
about particular people interpreting particular events, for that is the
forte of the psychoanalystthe study of the individual. Psycho
analytic psychology enables us, as it were, to go by means of science
through scienceto cross the gap between mind and nature by means
of a psychological principle that itself explains why men created that
gap. Namely: any way of interpreting the world, even Cartesian
dualism, meets some individual's needs, for interpretation is an in
336
Norman N. Holland
dividual act. Again, interpretation re-creates identity throug
perience.
Now that is a very large principleit could apply to any kind of

experience. I'd like to approach it by considering literary criticism
in particular and describing to you some things some of us have
discovered at the Center where I work, particularly four principles
that describe what happens when people read literary works. These
principles are based on the concept of identity, a word which, as if
you hadn't noticed, all kinds of people have been using for all kinds
of purposes. To explain what it is we mean by identity, I'd like to
detour through another word, presumably more familiar to literary
people: unity. Then, once you have the concept of identity as a
special kind of unity, I think you will see what we are seeing in
reading; why we think attention has to be concentrated on the literary
transaction, rather than on the text as such; and why our discoveries
about reading finally permit us to leap the Cartesian gap.
We typically encounter the idea of literary unity in twentieth
century demands that criticism be rigorous and objective. Leo

Spitzer set out some thirty years ago what I believe has become the
canonical method of interpretation for modern literary critics: "to
work from the surface to the ' inward life-center' of the work of art:
first observing details about the superficial appearance of the particular
work...then, grouping these details and seeking to integrate them

into a creative principle... and, finally, making the return trip to all
the other groups of observations in order to find whether the ' inward
form ' one has tentatively constructed gives an account of the whole." 1
When I interpret, for example, Macbeth, I find that I arrive at such
a center or unity by grouping the particular details of the work
together until I arrive at a few basic terms which constitute a central

theme. For example, I might sayin fact, I did say in The Shakespearean
Imagination in 1964Macbeth is " a play about nature's way of growth
and decay, an order in which supernatural and natural things mix and
germinate in a man's mind and from there grow out into his acts, his
family, and his commonwealth until finally their influence wanes and
dies." Such a theme is not necessarily uniquethat is, someone else
might arrive at a different theme from mine or, alternatively, I might
find that this theme would help me grasp the unity of some other
play besides Macbeth. A central theme simply helps one particular

person unify one particular literary work.
1Leo Spitzer, Linguistics and Literary History: Essays in Stylistics (Princeton:
Princeton Univ. Press, 1948), p. 19.
Such a central theme is highly abstract, yet one can quickly move
from key words of the theme to particular details of the play. For
example, the idea that " supernatural and natural things mix... in a
man's mind" could embrace all the various hallucinations and pro
phecies which are so uniquely a feature of Macbeth. It could include
even the schoolbook reading of the play as a tragedy of political

ambition ("commonwealth"). An order mixing supernatural and
natural implies the Elizabethan world-picture but also such details as
the recurring images of birds, as beings between heaven and earth,
as things that rise ("grow out"), or as domestic, nest-building
animals (" family"). Similarly, the idea that things " grow out" from
a man at their center would encompass the recurring images of titles,
theatre, and clothing. A word like " germinate " unifies for me not
only the large theme of parents, children, lineage, and inheritance but
also a tiny detail like the sequence of a half dozen or so images that
compare Macbeth's rise and fall to the life cycle of a plant (brought to
a sudden, supernatural end as Birnam Wood marches to Dunsinane,
escorting Macduff who is not of woman born). One arrives at such a
theme by a process of successive abstraction: grouping the details

of the work into themes, then grouping those several themes into one
large center. Therefore, one can reverse the process and go from the
center back to the periphery of detail.
Although such an interpretation uses logic, it is as intuitive and

imaginative as it is rational. And it is highly individual. Each reader
will choose the details he thinks important and group them into
themes that matter to him. At this point, someone is likely to object,
" But this makes all interpretation subjective!" Actually, I am
saying that all literary interpretations interrelate " objective " features
of the text in a "subjective" way. Further, the interpretation and

the style of the interpreter are so intertwined that one cannot isolate
" objective " features from the subjectivity of the person doing the
isolating. (Merely pointing to a detail expressses a choice of that

detail in preference to some other.) The question is not whether
interpretation is objective or subjective but how it is both.
To answer it, I wish to introduce that complex psychological term
"identity." The person who has written most precisely about it is
Heinz Lichtenstein. From his work as a psychoanalyst (and his
earlier philosophical studies), he has suggested the following way of
accounting for the sameness in a person. A newborn child is born

with a great (but not unlimited) range of potentialities. In all the
338
Norman N. Holland
various transactions of maternal care, particularly feeding, but also

gazing, touching, bathing, changing, and the rest, its mother-person
actuates a specific way of being. The baby becomes a child that

fits this particular mother. She imprints on the infant a "primar
identity," and because she does so both before and after the tim
(around the eighth month after birth) when the child first begins t
sense himself as a separate being, this " primary identity" becomes
part of the child's being. Irreversible, but capable of infinit
variation, it stands as an unchanging inner core of continuity which

the individual brings to all later transactions and all the later change
in himself. From this point of view, each of us lives out variation
on a " primary identity " the way a musician can play out an infinity
of variations on a single melody.2
Primary identity is a melody in another sense, however. It is pre
verbal. Therefore, neither the individual himself nor an outsid

observer can ever articulate it clearly. We cannot really know it
Fortunately, we do not need to. In fact, we do not even need t
assume that there is such a primary identity in an individual. For our

purposes, it is enough to assume that one can look at an individual as
though there were.
We do assume that all the time, as, for example, when we speak of a
person's " character " or " personality " or " style." Or when we say
such things as " That's so like Joan " or "That's just what I would ex
pect from Bob." In effect, I am positing an invariant something tha
runs through all that I have seen Joan or Bob doat least all tha
they chose. They are always choosing new and different things, yet
they are always the same people and hence there is a continuity in a
these actions no matter how novel or strange. In Lichtenstein's more
technical phrasing, what we describe as the " character" of another
person is an invariant which we abstract from " the infinite sequenc
of bodily and behavioral transformations during the whole life of the
individual." His term for that invariant is an "identity theme" an
"identity" thus becomes that combination of theme and variation

which is a person's life.
I know about myself, for example, that my feelings about books and
people, the things that turn me on sexually, the way I walk an
2 Heinz Liechtenstein, " Identity and Sexuality: A Study of their Interrelatio

ship in Man," Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 9 (1961)
179-260; "Towards a Metapsychological Definition of the Concept of Self,"
International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 46 (1965), 117-28.
talk and write essaysall these express certain central themes in my
character. One can learn to look at oneself this way through
psychoanalysis; one can also learn it simply through living. As

Proust sagely puts it: " What we call experience is merely the
revelation to our own eyes of a trait in our character..." The

human plagiarism which it is most difficult to avoid... is the plagiarism
of ourselves." 3
One can look at those themes within a personality quite systemati
cally. From the millions of ego choices which constitute a human

being, facts as visible as words on a page, I can abstract subordinate
patterns and themes and combine them until I arrive at a single unifying
theme for that life, a way of stating the sameness or "identity" of
the person living it. Operationally, I can arrive at a centering
identity for the series of ego choices which manifest a particular

person by the same method of interpretation which led me to a
theme for the series of ego choices which is Macbeth. Identity is the
unity I find in a person if I look at him as if he were a text.
Identity describes a person; it does not pre scribe one. No one has
succeeded in using identity to predict what a person will do, only to
show how what he is doing now fits in with what he has done before.
To be sure, identity defines a personal style which sets constraints

as well as possibilities. Yet the individual is free to act in any way
that will fit into the style. We are all in some sense free to choose,
to change, and to do the very opposite of what others predict of us
(particularly if we know what it is). Identity is a way to be you or
me, and only in that sense is it limiting.

Identity, moreover, is not unique. Just as the theme I derived for
Macbeth might describe many other literary works, so the same

identity theme might describe several different persons. Further, it
may not even be there. Identity in this operational sense is a way

of looking at a person, not necessarily something m them.
Although there may be a "primary identity" in Lichtenstein's
sense, we cannot know it. Instead, we abstract from surface data to
arrive at the essence of a given text or a person. When I do so, I

engage in an act which becomes part of my own identity. And so
do you. Each of us will bring different kinds of background infor
mation to bear. Each will seek out the particular issues that concern
him. Each will have different ways of giving the person (or text) a
satisfying coherence and significance. Again Proust, with his wise

8 Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff
and Frederick A. Blossom, 2 vols. (New York: Random House, 1934), II, 687.
Norman N. Holland
340
eloquence, remarks the way we ourselves enter into "the simple

which we describe as ' seeing someone we know '" :
We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all
the ideas we have already formed about him, and in the

complete picture of him which we compose in our minds
those ideas have certainly the principal place. In the end
they come to fill out so completely the curve of his cheeks,

to follow so exactly the line of his nose, they blend so har
moniously in the sound of his voice that these seem to be no
more than a transparent envelope, so that each time we
see the face or hear the voice it is our own ideas of him
which we recognize and to which we listen.4

And the psychologists of perception would confirm his insight.
The unity we find in texts or persons is impregnated with the

personality that finds that unity. Interpretation is a function of
identity, identity being defined operationally as what is found in a
person by looking for a unity in him, in other words, by interpretation.
We seem to be caught in a circular argument, but it is not the

argument which is circularit is the human condition in which we
cannot extricate an " objective" reality from our " subjective"
perception of it. What is not circular, of course, is the method of

interpretation toward a unity. That remains fixed, although the
interpretations resulting will vary according to the interpreter.
The idea that an interpretation expresses the character of the

person doing the interpreting does not, of course, imply that all
interpretations are equally good. True, they all may equally well
fulfill the needs of the interpreters, but that does not imply that they
will work equally well for other people besides the interpreter.
Others might find, for example, that my interpretation of Macbeth

leaves out certain features of the play or that they cannot follow the
connections I made between details or themesthey may seem far

fetched to those with other critical styles, backgrounds, or identities.
Again, the position may seem solipsistic, but it is not. Unlike
Berkeley, the transactive critic recognizes a real difference between

saying, " It's terribly hot today," and " I find it terribly hot today."
Or between saying, " Macbeth is a play about supernatural and
natural things mixing in a man's mind," and saying, " As I interpret it,
Macbeth is a play about supernatural and natural things mixing in a
'Ibid., I. IS.
man's mind." The difference, however, is not in what they say

about the weather or the play, but in the claims made by the critic.
Saying " It's terribly hot today" implies not only that the speaker
finds it hot, but that anyone else taking the air that day will also find
it hot. Similarly, the critic who simply says "Macbeth is a play

about..implies that anyone else interpreting the play will come to
the same conclusion about its theme that he has. But, of course, that
is not true, as the never-ending stream of Shakespearean criticism

proves. Such a claim cannot stand up against either the evidencethe
great variation in interpretations even by equally skilled readersor
the general psychological principles: perception is a constructive act;
interpretation is a function of identity.
Our next question is clear enough: If interpretation is a function of
identity, what is that function? In the course of an "experiment"

relating readers' comments on short stories to their identity themes
(discovered through interviews and testing), I have arrived at four
principles which I think govern the relationship between the reader's
personality and the creation and re-creation of literary and other

experiences. You can remember the four by an acronymreaders are
DEFT in shaping literary works by means of defense, expectation,

fantasy, and transformation. Although I must describe them se
quentially, obviously all four go on together.
Expectation: each of us brings to a new experience a cluster of

needs, hopes, fears, wishes, and so on, directed toward that yet-to
happen event. While these will at any given moment be quite
specific (think, for example, of your expectations at the end of a
scene of Macbeth), in a general way, we hope to gain as much pleasure

as we can with as little pain or psychological effort. Our means for
doing so are defenses, the mechanisms by which we ward off anxiety.
The word is useful because it brings in a well-established clinical

tradition and vocabulary, but I intend to include here all of an in
dividual's characteristic ego strategies for making the world gratify
his expectations. Reading literature, we construct our defenses from
the verbal structures the literary work gives usat least we do if we
feel satisfied by it. If we do not have that feeling, its absence is a

signal that we are not matching our defensive and adaptive strategies
from the work, and we begin to defend against it, pushing the work
away totally. If we do feel satisfaction, however, it is a signal that
we are matching our characteristic defenses by means of the work,
and taking it in. As we take it in, we invest it with fantasy, our
Norman N. Holland
342
characteristic clusters of wish and desire. (These are the oedipal an
other wishes that psychoanalytic critics customarily talk abou

Finallyalthough, of course, all these four transactions take p
as onewe transform those unconscious fantasies by means of
defensive strategies we have built up from the work toward an in

lectual, social, ethical, or aesthetic meaning.
I would like to go into these four modalities more fully. Elsewhe
in Poems in Persons (1973) 5 and 5 Readers Reading (1975),6 I h

described the total transaction at length, and, in an earlier wo
The Dynamics of Literary Response (1968),7 which has more litera

analysis and less psychology, I have described the fantasy and tran
formation parts of the transaction in great detail. Here in a limit
space, we can compress all four principles into one over-arching o
Identity re-creates itself or, it is perhaps clearer to say, personal st
creates itself. One can think of these four separate principle
emphases on one aspect or another of a single transaction: shaping

experience to fit one's identity and in doing so, (D) avoiding anxie
(F) gratifying unconscious wishes, (E) absorbing the event as part
a sequence of events, and (T) shaping it with that sequence int

meaningful totality. Through each and all of these, we use th
literary work to symbolize and finally to replicate ourselves. We
the work into ourselves and make it part of our own psyc
economyidentity re-creates itself.
Imagine, for example, several individuals all of whom share a

central wish and fear, the inhibition of sexuality. All, then, w
presumably seek out sexual inhibition in Macbeth. Yet each wo
bring to bear his characteristic way of dealing with the world so as
satisfy that wish with a minimum of anxiety. Someone who c
acteristically found security in separating the sexes might then t

most interest and pleasure in those contrasts in Macbeth between
man-woman pairing of the Macbeths themselves and the all-m

revengers at the end, or between the monarch as parent and t
monarch as power. He might find a scarcely acknowledgeable pleas

in the murder of Lady Macduff. Another person might character
5 Norman N. Holland, Poems in Persons: An Introduction to the Psy
analysis of Literature (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1973).
"Norman N. Holland, 5 Readers Reading (New Haven and London: Ya
Univ. Press, 1975).
* Norman N. Holland, The Dynamics of Literary Response (New York: O

ford Univ. Press, 1968).
ideally achieve sexual inhibition by distancing in time: a prohibition
at first licensing a later satisfaction (like Freud's Rat Man). Such a

person might find himself most attracted to the two-wave, crime
and-punishment structure of the play, or the whole theme of time and
prophecy. Still another person with the same wish and fear about
sexual inhibition might deal with it by finding authorities to do the
inhibiting. He might then take a particular pleasure in Macbeth

because of the extra-textual fact that it is the Shakespearean play
customarily assigned in the schoolsbecause it has no sex. And so
on. The point is that people seek out in the literary work what
they characteristically wish and fear, and they deal with it by
whatever in the literary work they can adapt to make their characteris
tic ego strategies.
To illustrate how this process works in more detail, I'd like to talk
about one particular reader. To make best use of this limited space,
I have chosen a reader who is, presumably, well known to you as a

writer, but for the next few pages, I would like to leave him name
less. I will identify him only by what I take his identity theme to
be. Then you can see for yourself how he re-creates his identity theme
through literary and other experiences. Listen to these informal

remarks; they reveal the way he constructs his experience of the
world, of poetry and fiction and people and money and politics and
himself. Compare that to his identity theme and, when you come to
recognize him, to those of his literary works you know.
When I try to phrase this man's identity theme, I find it very hard
to be brief. Let me first set out the basic polarities within which I
think he interpreted his world. He saw situations in terms of bigger
powers and lesser powers, in particular, his own self and the much
bigger world he resolved to conquer. He tended to divide things into
those which were magical and infinite as against those which were
separate and broken; and, again, the most important such dualism
involved himself and the world: either he magically participated in
the world, or he was his stoically resolute, separate self at the risk
of being emptied and broken by it. Actions for him took the shape
of giving and being given unto as against not giving, not being given
unto, and therefore beingin a word which he came back to over
and over again" broken." And part of the man's great charm was
that he could project all these inner ups and downs onto an infinite
plane outside as a child might.
If I try to put into a single sentence these three complex polarities
344
Norman N. Holland
giving and being given to, bigger and less powers, being part of
magical world and having a separate, broken selfI come out with an
identity theme like this: By giving myself, I show I am part of
world that magically gives me infinite supplies of talent and grace;

but by not giving I show I can stand alone, even at the risk of being
broken. Thus, this writer always headed in two directions at once
to give infinitely and so prove he himself had been infinitely given t
to withhold and so show that he had not been given to, that therefor
he had a right to be angry and to break into that magical source

or to be broken himself. In his own words, "I have no patience
and when I want something I want it. I break people. I am part o
the break-up of the times."
Thus, he was always involved in one of two cycles, giving or

withholding. He was driven from one to the other as it became
apparent that he was not going to receive infinitely (after all nobod
does), or as he needed to assert his own separate identity apart from
the era in which he lived. He always created expectations but onl

sometimes did he live up to them. If any one word could sum hi
up or the way he saw his world, it would be promising.
Given that he existed between these two cycles of giving to be
given unto and withholding to be withheld from, he saw his talent

as a writer, and indeed everything else he had, as a fluctuating stor
of supplies. "We feel so damned secure," he wrote of himself an
others like him, "as long as there is enough in the bank to buy the
next meal, and enough moral stuff in reserve to take us through th
next ordeal." Curiouslynot so curiously, reallyat his death, he lef
in his typewriter a final bit of doggerel:
There was a flutter from the wings of God and you lay dead.
Your books were in your desk
I guess and some unfinished chaos in your head
Was dumped to nothing by the great janitress of destinies.
When, however, he felt that he had the necessary supplies, he fe

confident, even omnipotent. "You know," he wrote to another
writer, " I used to have a beautiful talent once... It used to be a
wonderful feeling to know it was there, and it isn't all gone yet
think I have enough left to stretch out over two more novels. I may
have to stretch it a little thin, so maybe they won't be as good as th
best things I've ever done. But they won't be completely bad either,
because nothing I ever write can be completely bad."
That self-confidence a sense of inner supplies gave him could all

too easily shade off into arrogance or, if the supply failed, into
depression: " Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself
leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager." And so it

was that when he felt rejected and unknown at the end of his career,
his words for it were, "to die so completely and unjustly after
having given so much." (Italics mine)
I would be less than a true psychoanalytic critic if I failed to point
out how the imagery this man usesbuying the next meal, giving of
his body substance, or being destroyed by "the great janitress of
destinies "how these images re-create the early relation between
feeding mother and dependent child: the giving and withholding of
inner supplies to a little power by an infinitely greater force. The
same way of polarizing experience, I think, lay behind what he
called his "wise and tragic sense," "that life is too strong and
remorseless for the sons of men," " the sense that life is essentially a
cheat and its conditions are those of defeat."
" There was a book," he remembered from his childhood, " that was
I think one of the great sensations of my life.... it filled me with the
saddest and most yearning emotion." " It was about a fight the
large animals, like the elephant, had with the small animals, like the
fox. The small animals won the first battle; but the elephants and
lions and tigers finally overcame them my sentiment was all
with the small ones. I wonder if even then I had a sense of the wearing
down power of big, respectable people. I can almost weep now
when I think of that poor fox, the leaderthe fox has somehow
typified innocence to me ever since." Years later, he chose his college

because they always just lost the football championship, nosed "out
in the last quarter by superior ' stamina' as the newspapers called it.
It was to me a repetition of the story of the foxes and the big animals
in the child's book."
In the same vein, he interpreted the advent of the movies as a

confrontation of greater and lesser forces. "There was a rankling
indignity, that to me had become almost an obsession, in seeing the
power of the written word subordinated to another power, a more
glittering, a grosser power." " I saw that the novel, which at my

maturity was the strongest and supplest medium for conveying
thought and emotion from one human being to another, was becoming
subordinated to a mechanical and communal art that... was capable

of reflecting only the tritest thought, the most obvious emotion. It
was an art in which words were subordinate to images, where
346
Norman N. Holland
personality was worn down to the inevitable low gear of collaboration.

Yet it was typical of the man that he found it necessary to identify
himself with that grosser power and, in fact, to go to work for

Hollywood.
All his life he imitated the greater powers by moulding, mani
pulating, and cajoling the human material around him, getting it to
perform in one way or another. When, for example, there was a
fire in his house, he took command of the firemen. His chauffeur had
a speech defect in which he substituted s for thour writer composed
a sentence full of tWs which he then made the poor man repeat over
and over. He set himself up as a tutor to his mistress as, much earlier,
in his college years, he had written his sister long instructions on how
to be a coquette, how to get boys to talk about themselves to her, how
to flirt and tease, how to have a good laugh and a charming smile.
In trying to make himself into one of the greater powers, he saw
situations and especially his own creativity in terms of the cycles of
completion and incompletion we have seen: being given to by the

superior power and himself becoming a giver; being withheld from
by the superior power and himself withholding. As he said about

democracy, " The strong are too strong for us and the weak too weak."
These extremes came out strikingly in the image with which he

described himself during a depression much later in life: "his reali
zation that what he had before him was not the dish he had ordered for
his forties. In factsince he and the dish were one, he described

himself as a cracked plate, the kind that one wonders whether it is
worth preserving." Again a duality of completeness and incom
pleteness, this time based on the double meaning of the word " dish " :
" dish " as the food he hungered for; " dish " as the cracked container;
and, as he said, " he and the dish were one," the eater, the eaten, and
the empty worthlessness. He saw his marriage as creating the same

duality of his being filled or his being depleted. As a young bachelor,
he said, " I lived with a great dream. The dream grew and I learned
how to speak of it and make people listen. Then the dream divided
one day when I decided to marry I was a man dividedshe wanted

me to work too much for her and not enough for my dream." Before
he got out of it, he said, " I had spent m,ost of my resources, spiritual
and material, on her."
The same sense of spending himself, giving himself out, using

himself up applied to fiction. "I would rather impress my image
(even though an image the size of a nickel) upon the soul of a people
than be known "that is, than receive personal recognition. " The
purpose of a work of fiction," he wrote, " is to appeal to the lingering
after-effects in the reader's mind." Even as a boy, he would attend the
old Teck Theatre in Buffalo, take in long sections of dialogue, and

then with his prodigious memory repeat the performance for the
other children in the neighborhood.
One could only give something to the reader, though, if one had
taken it into oneself. Our writer thought the artist's purpose should
be to express in some palatable disguise emotions he had himself lived
through. In this sense, he saw the purpose of fiction as "to re
capture the exact feel of a m,oment in time and space, exemplified by
people rather than by things... an attempt at a mature memory of a
deep experience." "It was necessary for Dickens," he said, "to put
into Oliver Twist the child's passionate resentment at being abused and
starved that had haunted his whole childhood." And the idea
turned up in one of his own early stories, set in Elizabethan times. A

fugitive rushes in to hide in his friend's quarters. The guards come
looking for him and tell the friend that a lady has been raped, but
they do not find the fugitive. His friend reproaches him, but the
fugitive insists that he is responsible only to himself for what he
does. Then, after his friend has gone to sleep, he sits down and
writes The Rape of Lucrece.

The same thing, this writer felt, applied to character as to content:
" It takes half a dozen people," he maintained, " to make a syn

thesis strong enough to create a fiction character." And also to style.
" A good style simply doesn't form unless you absorb half a dozen
top-flight authors every year." Your style should be "a subconscious

amalgam of all that you have admired."
His creativity functioned well in this mode of being given to by
the world and giving in turn to his readers. Yet there was a failure
built in simply because of the magnitude of the demands he made.
At the beginning of his career he saw himself entering a world of
" ineffable toploftiness and promise," and he himself having " a sense
of infinite possibilities that was always with me whether vanity or
shame was my mood." Not to have that relation to infinity was to be
fatally flawedas he described a woman who he felt had failed, " She
didn't have the strength for the big stage." As for himself, however,
being inspired gave him an infinite power: " I can be so tender and
kind to people in even little things, but once I get a pen in my hand
I can do anything."
348
Norman N. Holland
For him, writing could balance discrepencies between the real and
the fantastic, the finite and the infinite, the loving and the aggressive
For example, he advised a fellow writer, "Try and find more
' bright' characters; if the women are plain make them millionairesses
or nymphomaniacs, if they're scrubwomen, give them hot sex attractio
and charm. This is such a good trick I don't see why it's not mor
usedI always use it just as I like to balance a beautiful word with a
barbed one." "Reporting the extreme things as if they were th
average things," he once noted, " will start you on the art of fiction."
Thus, his writings are full of marvelous aphorisms achieved by movin
from human details to the grand scale, for example, " The faces o
most American women over thirty are relief maps of petulant an
bewildered unhappiness." Or moving from the planetary force to
the helpless human, as in this closing of a letter: "Pray gravity t
move your bowels. It's little we get done for us in this world."
Yet these attempts to get from the finite to the infinite were
inevitably, doomed from the start; and the deepest strain in this man's
life and works is the sense of inevitable loss and failure. "The utter
synthesis between what we want and what we can have," he wrote,

" is so rare that I look back with a sort of wonder on those days of my
youth when I had it, or thought I did." " Again and again in m
books I have tried to imagize my regret that I have never been as good
as I intended to be." It was this sense of inevitable loss that gave rise
to his " tragic" sense of life and a feeling for the chanciness and
precariousness of existence: "You have got to make all the right
changes at the main cornersthe price for losing your way once is
years of unhappiness."
The way out of this doomed effort to climb into the infinite was
to separate himself from it. Thus, breaking up an affair with a marrie
woman, he wrote her: " The harshness of this letter will have served
its purpose if on reading it over you see that I have an existence
outside youand in doing so remind you that you have an existence

outside me." It is in this sense of a stoic separateness, I think, that we
have to understand his strong artistic conscience. "Work wa
dignity and the only dignity." "To me," he wrote, "the condition
of an artistically creative life are so arduous that I can only compare

to them the duties of a soldier in war-time."
The image of the soldier suggests some of the violence he felt in

being separate from that infinitely giving source. A word he use
even more for such catastrophes was "broken." Thus, of a woman
who could not work, he said, " She broke and is broken forever. He
advised a would-be writer, "If you want to be a top-notcher, you

have to break with everyone. You have to show up your own father."
And indeed, his father's being fired seems to have laid down for this
man the prototype of the loss of inner resources as a breaking: " That
morning he had gone out a comparatively young man, a man full of
strength, full of confidence. He came home that evening an old man,
a completely broken man." And somehow the son, even at the age
of twelve, had known for a long time that that was what happened to
you when you were cut off from a source of moneyyou were emptied
and broken, like the " dish " he himself became when he hit bottom.
How can I sum him up? His identity theme, as I re-create him,
consists of two cycles set in a world he perceived as consisting of a

large, even infinite, force and a self at its mercy. You could state the
cycles as variations on the Golden Rule: Give out from yourself as

you would be given to and so unite with the giver. Withold in
yourself as you are being withheld from and so become separate.
In his life, he workedand playedvery hard at making himself into
a legend, the very embodiment of his age, and other ages too: he
insisted on an exalted genealogy for himself as one way of uniting
himself with a larger past. In another mode he carried on fabulous
parties and debauches, many of them marked by recklessness and
violence. Sober, our man was the picture of grace, gentility, and
generosity, but when he was drunk, out came a mean streak of
rudeness and cruelty that appeared in his sober self mostly as a liking
for boxing and other contact sports and a persistent hobby of
military history. But perhaps this violence was implicit in his sense
of the conflict between the giver and the receiveras in his imagery of
breaking and cracking. He could say, for example, of his wife's
career, that she was working " under a greenhouse which is my money
and my name and my love She is willing to use the greenhouse

to protect her in every way.. .and at the same time she feels no
responsibility about the greenhouse and feels that she can reach up
and knock a piece of glass out of the roof at any moment."
Finally, however, what interests me about this man is not his life but
his literary legacy, an achievement which must necessarily spring from
the same identity theme as his life. If my hypothesis about inter

pretation re-creating identity is correct, then we should be able to
see in the ego choices embodied in his work the same identity theme as
in the ego choices with which he interpreted his life. Let me reprint
Norman N. Holland
350
here three of the passages I like best from my favorite among

novels. As you read them, be attuned to these themes of infinitel
giving and being given unto and of infinitely withholding and losin
particularly as they are expressed in global takings in through
mouth, imagery from the earliest giving of infancy. This, for exam
is just one sentence describing college people coming home f

Christmas vacation on the great trains of other daysI love
sentence simply because it describes something I have felt mys
"We drew in deep breaths of [air] as we walked back from din
through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity wi

this country for one strange hour, before we melted indistinguisha
into it again."
In those words, " indistinguishably" and " unutterably," you can

hear the distinctive note of withholdingyou could almost call our
man the Master of the Negative Prefix, particularly when he refuses
to tell you something, that is, to give from his mouth. Listen to
this astonishing statement of withholding from a narrator who is, after
all, supposed to be telling us the novel:
Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimen
tality, I was reminded of somethingan elusive rhythm, a

fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long
time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my
mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man's as though there
was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air.
But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered
was uncommunicable forever.
And for the same majestic theme of " uncommunicable " wonder and
loss, read this, to me, one of the finest bravura passages in all American
literature:
Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were
hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a

ferry boat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher
the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I
became aware of the old island here that flowered once for
Dutch sailors' eyesa fresh, green breast of the new world.

Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's
house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest
of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment
man must have held his breath in the presence of this con
tinent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither
understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in

history with something commensurate to his capacity for
wonder.8
I should not sully that exquisite passage with comment, but I

cannot help asking you to notice how Scott Fitzgerald the writer
continues the concerns of Scott Fitzgerald the man; how the great
themes of his writingexpectation and promise, loss and movements
to control lossre-create his identity theme just as do his attitudes
toward Zelda or Princeton or Hollywood. His alchoholism, his hobby
of military history, his use of negative prefixes or even his famous
statement, " The very rich are different from you and me "all
express this identity theme of giving and receiving and withholding
and being withheld from by an infinitude magically conceived in the
global, oral terms of the first giving.
And I ask you to accept the idea that you and I are continuous
just as he was. Just as Fitzgerald created his breathless novels and
his ever-promising life out of a single identity theme, so you and I
create him through our identity themes. I used to find Fitzgerald's
preoccupation with money and glamor and his various misbehaviors
cheap and showy, but when I experience himreally experience him
this way, acknowledging my own role in my interpretationI see him
responding as much to a sense of precariousness, deprivation, and loss
as to a shoddy materialism. And I like him the better for it.
Why? What difference does it make to me to find a depressive

underside to Fitzgerald's romantic exaggerations in language and in
life? Here are some things I wrote about myself long before be
coming involved with this paper: " My identity theme [has] to do
with preserving a sense of self and securing self-esteem by
gaining power over relations between things, in particular, mastering
them by knowing or seeing them from outside rather than being

" The quotations from the novel occur near the ends of Chs. vi and ix, The
Great Gatsby, The Portable F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York: The Viking Press,
1945), pp. 163, 103, and 167. All but a few of the biographical quotations come
from Andrew Turnbull, Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography (New York: Scribner's,
1962). The remainder appear in The Crack-Up, ed. Edmund Wilson (New
York: New Directions Books, 1945), The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed.
Andrew Turnbull (New York: Scribner's, 1963), or Scott Fitzgerald-. Letters to
His Daughter, ed. Andrew Turnbull (New York: Scribner's, 1965). These
also contain, of course, many of the passages quoted from the biography. In a
way, this paper beganand standsas a memorial to my late friend. One could
not write about Fitzgerald, in this depth, without the work of Andrew Turnbull.
352
Norman N. Holland
actually in the relationships." Not a bad hang-up, if you want to
be a literary critic. " I like examining the verbal structure of a text
looking particularly for an 'organic unity' in the way the parts a
come together." Certainly I have been able to scan the verbal surface
of Fitzgerald and make him into an organic unity. I did more, ho
ever. I had chosen a writer whose talent is far greater than min
Part of me deplores his Dionysiac lifestyle, but there is a more secre

part of me that envies it a little and wonders if I could stand such a
pace. Against an author whom I see outdoing me, I have managed to
shore up my self-esteem by establishing my knowledge of his relatio
to his texts, his money, his wife, his mistress, and so on. My organ
unity has overridden his control of those relations. This, in and
itself, does not make my interpretation invalid (that would be th

genetic fallacy). It does mean that, in interpreting Fitzgerald th
man, I have engaged in an act which expresses not only Fitzgerald's
but my own identity theme.
This is what I mean when I speak of " transactive criticism" :

frankly acknowledging that, by the very act of experiencing Fit
gerald's life and works, I mingle his characteristic style with my own
Indeed, the only way anyone can ever discover unity in texts o
identity in selves is by creating them from one's own inner style, fo

we are all caught up in the general principle that identity creates an
re-creates itself as each of us discovers and achieves the world in his
own mind. There is, in short, not a Cartesian gap but a psychoanalytic
bridge between you and what you experience. Not a communication
(in the usual sense) but an interlocking, mutual creation. Interpre

tation re-creates identity. The only sensible thing for critics to do
is to accept that fact and write and talk accordingly. Let's face up
to the emancipating truth. The seventeenth century is over.

Holland Transactive

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Transactive Criticism: Re-Creation Through Identity

Author(s): NORMAN N. HOLLAND

Re-Creation Through Identity**

I had best begin by saying what I mean by transacti

I want this kind of criticism because I think it is high time we

from the known. Over the centuries, two characteristic ways of

State University, November 5, 1974. It is a companion piece to the author's

Transactive Criticism: Re-Creation Through Identity 335

Brown, or R. D. Laing. All want to deal with a gap between nature

gap? I think not. I think rather that whenever we experience

something ostensibly outside ourselves we do so by re-creating our

that it implies that whenever someone says there is a gap between

governed by psychological principles and can be described in philo

of self and other," John Dewey's "having an experience," Ernst

Cassirer's " myths," or Husserl's " intentionality." Similarly, psycho

Now, however, the psychoanalytic psychologist can give his

dividual act. Again, interpretation re-creates identity throug

Now that is a very large principleit could apply to any kind of

We typically encounter the idea of literary unity in twentieth

century demands that criticism be rigorous and objective. Leo

work...then, grouping these details and seeking to integrate them

a center or unity by grouping the particular details of the work

together until I arrive at a few basic terms which constitute a central

play besides Macbeth. A central theme simply helps one particular

Transactive Criticism: Re-Creation Through Identity 337

even the schoolbook reading of the play as a tragedy of political

as things that rise ("grow out"), or as domestic, nest-building

theme by a process of successive abstraction: grouping the details

Although such an interpretation uses logic, it is as intuitive and

" But this makes all interpretation subjective!" Actually, I am

of the text in a "subjective" way. Further, the interpretation and

isolating. (Merely pointing to a detail expressses a choice of that

"identity." The person who has written most precisely about it is

Heinz Lichtenstein. From his work as a psychoanalyst (and his

earlier philosophical studies), he has suggested the following way of

accounting for the sameness in a person. A newborn child is born

various transactions of maternal care, particularly feeding, but also

actuates a specific way of being. The baby becomes a child that

part of the child's being. Irreversible, but capable of infinit

variation, it stands as an unchanging inner core of continuity which

verbal. Therefore, neither the individual himself nor an outsid

assume that there is such a primary identity in an individual. For our

"identity" thus becomes that combination of theme and variation

people, the things that turn me on sexually, the way I walk an

2 Heinz Liechtenstein, " Identity and Sexuality: A Study of their Interrelatio

Transactive Criticism: Re-Creation Through Identity 339

talk and write essaysall these express certain central themes in my

character. One can learn to look at oneself this way through

psychoanalysis; one can also learn it simply through living. As

revelation to our own eyes of a trait in our character..." The

One can look at those themes within a personality quite systemati

cally. From the millions of ego choices which constitute a human

theme for that life, a way of stating the sameness or "identity" of

the person living it. Operationally, I can arrive at a centering

identity for the series of ego choices which manifest a particular

To be sure, identity defines a personal style which sets constraints

me, and only in that sense is it limiting.

Macbeth might describe many other literary works, so the same

may not even be there. Identity in this operational sense is a way

Although there may be a "primary identity" in Lichtenstein's

sense, we cannot know it. Instead, we abstract from surface data to

arrive at the essence of a given text or a person. When I do so, I

satisfying coherence and significance. Again Proust, with his wise

eloquence, remarks the way we ourselves enter into "the simple