Hanif Kureishi - Collected Essays

If we wanted to create an authoritarian system which was complete, in which there were no loose tongues — or, within an individual, no significant inner life — it would have to be one in which dreams were controlled. Even in prison, under the strictest supervision and observation, a human being can at least dream. Here he might, at least, represent, or symbolise that which cannot, or must not, be said. But how would these dreams be understood? Who would be there to receive the scrambled communications which might be his only hope?

In 1906 an English surgeon, talking to Ernest Jones, mentioned, with some astonishment, a strange doctor in Vienna ‘who actually listened with attention to every word his patients said to him’.

What Freud realised was that because there are forms of speaking which are radically dangerous and unsettling, which change lives and societies, people don’t want to know what those words are. But, he adds, in another sense they do really want to know, because they are made to be aware, by suffering, of a lack; they at least know that they will not be complete without certain forms of self-knowledge, and that this will be liberating, even though the consequences of any liberation could also be catastrophic.

Human beings leak the truth of their desire whether they like it or not: in their dreams, fantasies and drunkenness, in their jokes and mistakes, as well as in delirium, religious ecstasy, in babble and in saying the opposite of what they mean. It takes a rationalist then, to see that rationalism can only fail, that what we need is more, not less, madness in our speaking. Otherwise our bodies take up the cause on our behalf, and bodies can speak in weird ways, through hysteria, for instance in Freud’s day, the modern equivalent of which might be addiction, anorexia, racism or various phobias.

Freud invented a new method of speaking, which involved two people going into a room together. One person would speak and the other would listen, trying to see, in the gaps, resistances and repetitions, what else, in the guise of the obvious, was being said. He would then give these words, translated into other words, back to the speaker.

Great individualists though they might be, both Wilde and Socrates, like Freud, used dialogue as their preferred form. Indeed, in another essay, Wilde replaces the Socratic imperative ‘know yourself ’ with ‘be yourself ’, which might become, in this version of ‘being’ — that of the language community — ‘speak yourself ’. The therapeutic couple is one method of seeing who you are by speaking, and it is an original and great invention. But there would be something odd, to say the least, about a society in which everyone was in therapy. Not that there isn’t something already odd in the idea that only the wealthy can buy mental health.

Fortunately there has always been another place where the speaking of the darkest and most dangerous things has always gone on, which we might call a form of lay therapy. We know that this mode of speaking is useful because of the amount of prohibition it has incurred. It is sometimes called conversation, or the theatre, or poetry, or dance, the novel, or pop.

What is called creativity or culture might remind us of Freud’s method because many artists have talked about the way in which words have the knack of speaking themselves. The writer is only there to catch them, organise them, write them down. Even the prophet Mohammed, around whose name silence is often required, was visited by an angel who gave him the law. Mohammed didn’t make up these rules himself; they were spoken through him but came from elsewhere. Another instance of the death of the author, or the author at one side to himself, as secretary or midwife to himself, you might say, making a divine Law that no human can modify or speak back to.

A culture is a midwife to images and symbolisations, a place where people speak to one another, where words matter and, because they are in the public domain, can be understood or used in a number of ways. It is also where one is forbidden to speak about certain things. It has, therefore, to be a place where the question of speaking and punishment is spoken about. The collective can have a conversation because artists like to loiter near the heat of the law, where the action is. If artists are considered to be on the edge, they are on the edge of the rules, close to punishment, and, like Beckett, not far from silence, where speaking has to be almost impossible if it is to be of value.

What Freud added, and the surrealists knew, along with the other artists who have formed our consciousness, Buñuel, Bergman, Joyce, Picasso, Woolf, Stravinsky, Pinter, was that if the unconscious was to be represented, there had to be new forms for it.

These artists knew that conventional talk and the conventional art which accompanied it, had been turned into chatter. They knew that this worked as a block or filter to forms of knowledge which were essential if we were not to be silent, or if we were not to racially persecute, and kill one another, for reasons we couldn’t understand. Therefore, if modern art and much of what has followed it, has been the attempt to say the unsayable, some of these forms can only be ugly and disturbing. These forms have to be banned, dismissed and discouraged, partly because, like most forms of fantasy, they are subject to shame, itself a form of censorship.

To speak at all is to be aware of censorship. The first thing tyro writers come up against, when they uncap their pen, is a block — in the form of a prohibition. They may well find their mother’s face floating into view, along with several good reasons why not continuing is a good idea. Freud, a prodigious writer himself, put it like this, ‘As soon as writing, which entails making a liquid flow out of a tube onto a piece of white paper, assumes the significance of copulation, it will be stopped.’

This, you might say, is the imprimatur of good speaking — that there is a resistance which guarantees the quality of the utterance. There are, then, at least, two voices called up here, the voice which needs to speak and the voice, or several voices, which refuse, which say these words are so exciting and forbidden that they are worthless. This is what makes any attempt at creativity a useful struggle. What makes it worthwhile is the difficulty, the possibility of a block.

Twentieth-century art has been fascinated by dreams and nightmares, by violence and sexuality, so much so that it might be termed an art of terrible fantasy. One begins to see splits, deep conflicts, terrors, hatreds and a lot of death in these art nightmares. These elements can be put together — somehow fused in a work of art — but they are not always reconcilable. However, irreconcilable parts may find a voice in some form of personal expression, which, partly, is why modern art has been so painful and difficult to look at, even now, and why any new art, to be of value, has to shock us. This is because it breaks a silence we didn’t even know we were observing.

At least art brings us beauty as compensation for its message. But it is not, in the end, the favour it might be, because it can be an awful beauty, just as to tell the truth about sexuality might not be to talk about how good or hygienic it is for us, but to speak about how bad or painful it is for us.

Speaking, listening, being known and knowing others. We might say that at least, if everyone doesn’t get much of a turn, we live in a representative democracy. This, at least, separates us from various fundamentalisms. We can vote; we believe we have politicians who can speak for us. Yet one of the reasons we despise politicians is that we suspect they are speaking on their own behalf while purporting to speak on ours. Our words, being handed on by our representatives, are not getting through and they never will. Our speaking makes not a jot of difference. One way of looking at globalisation, for instance, is to say that it is a version of certain Orwellian authorities saying the same thing, over and over, the attempt being to keep new words, or any human doubt, need or creativity, out of the system.