The Hunchback and the Mirror: Auden, Shakespeare and the Politics of Narcissus

Abstract

In various essays from the 1950s collected in The Dyer's Hand (1963) as "The Well of Narcissus" and "The Shakespearian City," W. H. Auden attempts to establish a connection  etween the timeless world of primary narcissism and the order of politics. He argues in "Hic et Ille" that the political demagogue succeeds by converting the frustrations and anxieties of individual narcissism into a political project which creates a "public minor" where the collectivity can find an identity and outlet for its self-regard.

Shakespeare's History Plays, he argues in "The Prince's Dog," depict a world in which the primary realm of wish represented by Falstaff, an infantilised Lord of Misrule and improbable Narcissus, confronts the historical consciousness concerned with governance and political order, the institution of monarchy embodied in the "Prince of this World," Prince Hal.

This antithesis can be used to elucidate a series of famous poems written in the 1930s in which Auden attempts to understand the popularity and appeal of totalitarian politics to an exploited underclass. Auden, following the model adumbrated by Reich, Fromm and other "Left" Preudians, sees fascism, in its capacity to appeal to the infantile wish-fulfilment fantasies of the average "sensual man-in-the-street," as articulating the unconscious of the masses in the interests of its own corporatist fantasies, which ultimately lead to world war. The poems considered here include, from Look Stranger! (1936), "The earth turns over," "Now the leaves are falling fast," "Easily, my dear, you move" (later called "A Bride in the 30s"), "Epilogue" and, from Another Time (1940), "In Memory of Ernest Toller" and "September 1, 1939." In the latter, "Imperialism's Face" is briefly perceived as our own, making us accomplices of its misrepresentations and atrocities. Auden's idea of how ideology conscripts the unconscious has many points of convergence with that of Louis Althusser. Another Time, on the verge of global war, tries to envisage a Freudian therapy that redeems primary narcissism from its fascist usages. It remains a desperate dream, in this watershed volume.