Plus, I love a good villainess in literature, and Hallgerd is one of the very best! "She is indeed beautiful, and many men will suffer for her beauty; but I cannot imagine how thief's eyes have come into our lineage." Can't beat that!
Good essay. I tend to think the various thinkers who insist we didn’t have a self in premodernity are noticing that there’s a steady shift over the modern period from a social mode primarily concerned with conforming oneself to community and an idealized higher form of the human to a mode primarily concerned with personal fulfillment (ie the therapeutic and its synonyms) and over-extrapolating from there. I buy that there’s something to the idea that people’s self conceptions were different in those long monotheist centuries, but by the same token i think it’s ridiculous to think we were basically a kind of happy social insect before the protestant reformation the way so many –seemingly the majority amongst the dissidents-of our right wingers do today. (which is ironic anyway because one of the accounts I've absorbed over the years postulates Saint Augustine as the first modern individual!)
Yes I think Trilling put it quite well in his essay Sincerity and Authenticity, which is that in modern life it's impossible to make your inner life and outer circumstances conform (no honorable person can work for a wage, and yet it's impossibler to live without working for a wage), so modern literature is concerned with maintaining your inner purity (your authenticity) where pre-modern literature was concerned with action within the world (sincerity). But the throughline there is precisely the opposite of what "premodern people didn't have a self" implies--the throughline is that premodern and modern people DID have the same psychology, we just now need to adapt it to different circumstances.
I was always skeptical about the "pre-moderns didn't have selves" thing, too, but thinkers who are opposed to one another about everything else seem to share this view in common, so I've tried to understand it sympathetically. Harold Bloom hates Foucault, but when he says Shakespeare invented the human, that's not too different from Foucault's (or his followers') saying textuality constructed the modern self. Mystical reactionary Jung said the modern self came into being when we withdrew "projections" of our own power onto the gods and took them back into the self—not that different from what materialist progressive Marx argued when he said we had to recognize our own power to change the world.
The way I've come to understand it is not that pre-moderns didn't have personalities, ambitions, or private lives, but that they didn't have the sense of a deep psyche, an unconscious stirring with hidden motives and repressed traumas (or, moving from Freud to Marx, capable of being manipulated by ideology), and the state of which, or our knowledge of which, fundamentally alters our experience of the world. There's the shift, for example, in interpreting dreams as signs from the gods or God or the ancestors or whatever and seeing them as promptings from this unconscious. Or the difference between Oedipus, who unwittingly sleeps with his mother, and Hamlet, who has constant intrusive thoughts about his mother's sexuality. Shakespeare often strips explicit and extrinsic character motives from his sources and replaces them with cryptic hints of psychosexual impulse: in Holinshed, Macbeth is upset the king has changed the succession law to pass him over, while in Shakespeare he seems to be convinced to commit murder because his wife implies he's impotent.
And giving credit to Foucault's thing about textuality, I suspect the reason things like the Odyssey, Samuel, and the Sagas sometimes feel modern, "selved" and novelistic, is that whoever put the narratives into order and into writing basically found themselves writing something like a novel whether they knew it or not. Anyway, thanks for this summary and sorry to go on, but I've also thought a lot about this question. I've read some Icelandic material, mainly Egil's Saga, but don't remember much and definitely should revisit!
To say that pre-modern people didn't believe in the Freudian unconscious seems fairly trivial though. That's like saying that pre-modern people didn't believe the earth revolved around the sun. To say they didn't have a self is like saying they didn't believe the sun existed. It's certainly true that _literature_ is influenced by their lack of belief in the unconscious, what's at issue is whether their experience of life was affected by that understanding. I don't think that is particularly true, precisely because they did seem to have an understanding that people have an essential self, a character--they just didn't think of it in the terms of an unconscious self (a being inside a being). Take for instance this quote from the Saga of the Sworn Brothers:
"Everyone who heard these tidings thought it remarkable that one young man on his own should have slain such an experienced fighter and chieftain as Jod. And yet it was no great wonder since the Almighty Creator had forged in Thorgeir’s breast such a strong and sturdy heart that he was as fearless and brave as a lion in whatever trials or tribulations befell him. And as all good things come from God, so too does steadfastness, and it is given unto all bold men together with a free will that they may themselves choose whether they do good or evil. Thus Jesus Christ has made Christians his sons and not his slaves, so that he might reward all according to their deeds"
It both indicates that people have an essential character (he is brave and strong) and that people are able to act in accord or not with this character. How is that different, in practical terms, from an unconscious?
Freud and his colleague Ernest Jones were convinced that Hamlet was an Oedipal play. Freud connected it to the recent death of Shakespeare’s father. This presented a problem later when he became a Shakespeare birther: now what’s the source of trauma? But Eliot thought the Hamlet-Gertrude weirdness represented an artistic problem that Shakespeare was unable to solve.
In Macbeth, Shakespeare may have changed Macbeth’s motivation for a variety of reasons, including a consideration for his audience, who likely understood little of the pre-primogeniture method of succession that operated in Macbeth’s day.
Macbeth’s asides, like a lot of asides in Shakespeare, give us a good view of self and suggest that Macbeth is just an opportunist: “If Chance will have me King, why, Chance may crown me / Without my stir.”
Right, I wasn't giving a Freudian reading of Shakespeare, I was suggesting Freud got the idea from the hints in Shakespeare that co-exist with other elements.
For sure. I was just reminded of Freud’s remark (via Jones): “Sometimes a cigar is only a cigar.”
Freud’s long footnote in Interpretation of Dreams (marked “CD.” in this edition) where he first discussed Oedipus and Hamlet is fascinating. He had read his Shakespeare (along with just about everything else it seems):
It’s hard to talk about the self without talking about Freud since it’s his language that we still use. For example, in ordinary conversation and casual writing, people use terms like id, superego and unconscious as though these exist like air and water, rather than like the ether we used to think filled the heavens.
With a few exceptions of people at the outer bounds of certain bodies of theory, I don't think anybody thinks premodern people didn't have a sense of selfhood, a kind of baseline human interiority, and a sense of goals/aspirations/personal distinctiveness to go along with that.
I think really the major issues that are harder to talk about and think through are:
a) The ways in which we communicate selfhood change over time, and it can be dangerous to read *literary works* as if they are modern/contemporaneous in how they imagine and represent selfhood. In terms of Icelandic sagas, for example, you pick up in this essay on the extent to which there are profound questions about social structure and the inability to make choices within those structures that many of the sagas are thinking about--about feuds and reciprocal violence--and they don't necessarily have a sense that there is a private self that is distinguishable from and at odds with a kind of corporate/kinship self. E.g., modern novels would often set interiority against sociality, imagine a self that is seeking freedom *from* obligation or social identity or law etc., and I'm not sure that's what's going on in Njal's Saga as a novel-like work of literature. This might be even more potently applicable to aspects of the Icelandic sagas that take quite seriously concepts of fate or the material tangibility of monsters and spirits--we have to somehow imagine selves that contemporary readers of the sagas and the writers really felt inside their own heads where those selves were foredoomed to particular ends. Grettir's Saga is really good on this--Grettir has aspirations to be a monster-slayer but it all goes to shit and it's really not his fault, it's not as if he makes a bad decision or has what we would consider individual agency. His aspiration is just misaligned with the world and with fate. We have to think about that as not just literature, but a felt structure inside of selfhood, as psychologically real.
b) In more general historical terms, I tend to think of this problem as parallel to thinking about what to call political forms that were not states but that had considerable structure and coherence. Just because they're not states in the modern sense doesn't mean that they didn't exist, and it doesn't mean that I should refer to them as "pre-states"--as reduced to being not-quite-something-else. Our problem now is that we live in a world of nation-states, with no other sovereign forms, and it takes a lot of intellectual effort to not universalize from that position across all time and space. Modern individuality is a very particular form of selfhood, similarly, and we inhabit it so strongly that whenever we try to imagine selves before modernity, we tend to translate them into being individuals in our fashion, or occasionally into being "almost individuals" (say, in some critical traditions of reading Hamlet as an anachronistically 'individual' sort of self--'almost us'). We live so strongly in modernity that we don't have a vocabulary for talking about the universals that are not equivalent to modernity.
I think the question is, precisely, how did pre-modern people understand their own stirrings? Did they truly believe they were utterly at the mercy of fate? Or was this merely a literary convention? If they believed only in fate, then all stories would be like Job, about trauma befalling on the undeserving, but in fact most ancient stories seem to place the fault squarely upon the hero himself. Take, for instance, the saga you mention: Grettir the Strong. Yes he is constantly warned againts behaving impetuously, and yes he constantly says whatever is my fate will be my fate, but the clear corollary here is that he has a particular character that is unsuited to the times. How is that different from the modern self of having a character that is unsuited to the times (i.e. being like, say, Cool Hand Luke and simply being unable to acclimate to prison life). Is there anything in Grettir that we couldn't read in a modern crime novel? This for instance is the curse that finally causes Grettir's death:
"These men are brave, but Fortune does not go with them. There is a great difference between you. You have made them many fine offers, but they turn them all down and there are few more certain ways to court trouble than to refuse what is good. Now I curse you, Grettir, to be deprived of all favour, all endowments and fortune, all defence and wisdom, the more so the longer you live! I trust that you will have fewer days of happiness in the future than you have had until now"
It happens precisely because he turns down a number of fine offers to vacate the island he is squatting upon. It happens not due to fate, but because of his own actions.
This is in stark contrast to Grettir's ancestor, Thorstein, as describing in Vatsnal Saga. Thorstein is not particularly war-like--he is criticized by his father for being a coward. So he goes off to kill a local rogue. But when he has the rogue in his power, he thinks the following:
"He recalled his father’s incitement – that strength and daring would be needed to accomplish this or any other bold deeds, but that glory and glittering coins would be the reward, and he would then be deemed to have done better than by sitting at his mother’s hearth. He then also recalled that his father had said that he was no better at wielding a weapon than a daughter or any other woman, and that it would better serve his kinsmen’s honour if there were a gap in the family line rather than having him. This drove Thorstein on, and he looked for an opportunity to avenge single-handedly the wrongs done to many people; yet, on the other hand, it seemed to him that the man would be a great loss."
And he decides not to kill the man, Jokul, and Jokul in return blesses him and basically offers him his sister and Thorstein becomes a great lord! Precisely because he disregarded his father's advice and acted in keeping with his own character, to be quite cautious.
It seems to me there is an explicit contrast being made here between the line of Thorstein and the tale of Grettir--a contrast all Icelanders would've known. And that what's at stake here is precisely this issue of character and free choice--the things we associate with a self.
My contention is that much too much is made of the concept of a freudian unconscious self. If you total up everything pre-modern people say about "character" then it seems basically equivalent to the unconscious self. In one case character might be given by fate or god, but the unconscious self also has a mysterious origin, which we call science or whatever--in both cases there is a mysterious substrate which produces our impulses, and it's our job to war with and manage those impulses.
I still think it's important not to read past the different functions, uses and/or expectations that different societies have of their literature, though--what the 15th-16th Century Icelandic readers made of the sagas and what 19th-21st C. readers make of novels in terms of how much they are meant to describe the interior sensation of being a human being really does seem different.
Good point about the shift in point of view from ancient texts to modern ones. For example, even in the considerable body of works devoted to retelling the ancient stories, everything from Christa Wolf’s Cassandra to William Carlos Williams’ Red Eric, these stories are often retold first-person like modern novels, whereas in the old stories the narrator is completely submerged.
In the latter work, almost a prose poem, I see your observation that “modern novels would often set interiority against sociality.” In the very first paragraph, meditating on his outcast status on Greenland, Eric says, “Because I am not like them, I am evil.”
In the old stories, we have little sense even of who’s telling us the story. Who’s the narrator of the Iliad, or Beowulf? Whereas in the retellings we have an individual that we’re meant to understand in social or psychological terms, if not identify or sympathize with.
Wonderful post, and I’ve also enjoyed reading the long, thoughtful responses. I’ll point you to a post of my own in which I touch on some of these same ideas, and end with a look at Denis Johnson’s poem “A Proposal,” which asserts that they (the early inhabitants) “were us.”
In the hands of the right filmmaker Njal’s Saga could be as great as the Godfather.
I know right! I've now read many of the Sagas, and it's made me wish Iceland was a world power so we could have a Saga Cinemastic Universe.
Plus, I love a good villainess in literature, and Hallgerd is one of the very best! "She is indeed beautiful, and many men will suffer for her beauty; but I cannot imagine how thief's eyes have come into our lineage." Can't beat that!
Good essay. I tend to think the various thinkers who insist we didn’t have a self in premodernity are noticing that there’s a steady shift over the modern period from a social mode primarily concerned with conforming oneself to community and an idealized higher form of the human to a mode primarily concerned with personal fulfillment (ie the therapeutic and its synonyms) and over-extrapolating from there. I buy that there’s something to the idea that people’s self conceptions were different in those long monotheist centuries, but by the same token i think it’s ridiculous to think we were basically a kind of happy social insect before the protestant reformation the way so many –seemingly the majority amongst the dissidents-of our right wingers do today. (which is ironic anyway because one of the accounts I've absorbed over the years postulates Saint Augustine as the first modern individual!)
Yes I think Trilling put it quite well in his essay Sincerity and Authenticity, which is that in modern life it's impossible to make your inner life and outer circumstances conform (no honorable person can work for a wage, and yet it's impossibler to live without working for a wage), so modern literature is concerned with maintaining your inner purity (your authenticity) where pre-modern literature was concerned with action within the world (sincerity). But the throughline there is precisely the opposite of what "premodern people didn't have a self" implies--the throughline is that premodern and modern people DID have the same psychology, we just now need to adapt it to different circumstances.
I was always skeptical about the "pre-moderns didn't have selves" thing, too, but thinkers who are opposed to one another about everything else seem to share this view in common, so I've tried to understand it sympathetically. Harold Bloom hates Foucault, but when he says Shakespeare invented the human, that's not too different from Foucault's (or his followers') saying textuality constructed the modern self. Mystical reactionary Jung said the modern self came into being when we withdrew "projections" of our own power onto the gods and took them back into the self—not that different from what materialist progressive Marx argued when he said we had to recognize our own power to change the world.
The way I've come to understand it is not that pre-moderns didn't have personalities, ambitions, or private lives, but that they didn't have the sense of a deep psyche, an unconscious stirring with hidden motives and repressed traumas (or, moving from Freud to Marx, capable of being manipulated by ideology), and the state of which, or our knowledge of which, fundamentally alters our experience of the world. There's the shift, for example, in interpreting dreams as signs from the gods or God or the ancestors or whatever and seeing them as promptings from this unconscious. Or the difference between Oedipus, who unwittingly sleeps with his mother, and Hamlet, who has constant intrusive thoughts about his mother's sexuality. Shakespeare often strips explicit and extrinsic character motives from his sources and replaces them with cryptic hints of psychosexual impulse: in Holinshed, Macbeth is upset the king has changed the succession law to pass him over, while in Shakespeare he seems to be convinced to commit murder because his wife implies he's impotent.
And giving credit to Foucault's thing about textuality, I suspect the reason things like the Odyssey, Samuel, and the Sagas sometimes feel modern, "selved" and novelistic, is that whoever put the narratives into order and into writing basically found themselves writing something like a novel whether they knew it or not. Anyway, thanks for this summary and sorry to go on, but I've also thought a lot about this question. I've read some Icelandic material, mainly Egil's Saga, but don't remember much and definitely should revisit!
To say that pre-modern people didn't believe in the Freudian unconscious seems fairly trivial though. That's like saying that pre-modern people didn't believe the earth revolved around the sun. To say they didn't have a self is like saying they didn't believe the sun existed. It's certainly true that _literature_ is influenced by their lack of belief in the unconscious, what's at issue is whether their experience of life was affected by that understanding. I don't think that is particularly true, precisely because they did seem to have an understanding that people have an essential self, a character--they just didn't think of it in the terms of an unconscious self (a being inside a being). Take for instance this quote from the Saga of the Sworn Brothers:
"Everyone who heard these tidings thought it remarkable that one young man on his own should have slain such an experienced fighter and chieftain as Jod. And yet it was no great wonder since the Almighty Creator had forged in Thorgeir’s breast such a strong and sturdy heart that he was as fearless and brave as a lion in whatever trials or tribulations befell him. And as all good things come from God, so too does steadfastness, and it is given unto all bold men together with a free will that they may themselves choose whether they do good or evil. Thus Jesus Christ has made Christians his sons and not his slaves, so that he might reward all according to their deeds"
It both indicates that people have an essential character (he is brave and strong) and that people are able to act in accord or not with this character. How is that different, in practical terms, from an unconscious?
Freud and his colleague Ernest Jones were convinced that Hamlet was an Oedipal play. Freud connected it to the recent death of Shakespeare’s father. This presented a problem later when he became a Shakespeare birther: now what’s the source of trauma? But Eliot thought the Hamlet-Gertrude weirdness represented an artistic problem that Shakespeare was unable to solve.
In Macbeth, Shakespeare may have changed Macbeth’s motivation for a variety of reasons, including a consideration for his audience, who likely understood little of the pre-primogeniture method of succession that operated in Macbeth’s day.
Macbeth’s asides, like a lot of asides in Shakespeare, give us a good view of self and suggest that Macbeth is just an opportunist: “If Chance will have me King, why, Chance may crown me / Without my stir.”
Right, I wasn't giving a Freudian reading of Shakespeare, I was suggesting Freud got the idea from the hints in Shakespeare that co-exist with other elements.
For sure. I was just reminded of Freud’s remark (via Jones): “Sometimes a cigar is only a cigar.”
Freud’s long footnote in Interpretation of Dreams (marked “CD.” in this edition) where he first discussed Oedipus and Hamlet is fascinating. He had read his Shakespeare (along with just about everything else it seems):
https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/66048/pg66048-images.html
It’s hard to talk about the self without talking about Freud since it’s his language that we still use. For example, in ordinary conversation and casual writing, people use terms like id, superego and unconscious as though these exist like air and water, rather than like the ether we used to think filled the heavens.
With a few exceptions of people at the outer bounds of certain bodies of theory, I don't think anybody thinks premodern people didn't have a sense of selfhood, a kind of baseline human interiority, and a sense of goals/aspirations/personal distinctiveness to go along with that.
I think really the major issues that are harder to talk about and think through are:
a) The ways in which we communicate selfhood change over time, and it can be dangerous to read *literary works* as if they are modern/contemporaneous in how they imagine and represent selfhood. In terms of Icelandic sagas, for example, you pick up in this essay on the extent to which there are profound questions about social structure and the inability to make choices within those structures that many of the sagas are thinking about--about feuds and reciprocal violence--and they don't necessarily have a sense that there is a private self that is distinguishable from and at odds with a kind of corporate/kinship self. E.g., modern novels would often set interiority against sociality, imagine a self that is seeking freedom *from* obligation or social identity or law etc., and I'm not sure that's what's going on in Njal's Saga as a novel-like work of literature. This might be even more potently applicable to aspects of the Icelandic sagas that take quite seriously concepts of fate or the material tangibility of monsters and spirits--we have to somehow imagine selves that contemporary readers of the sagas and the writers really felt inside their own heads where those selves were foredoomed to particular ends. Grettir's Saga is really good on this--Grettir has aspirations to be a monster-slayer but it all goes to shit and it's really not his fault, it's not as if he makes a bad decision or has what we would consider individual agency. His aspiration is just misaligned with the world and with fate. We have to think about that as not just literature, but a felt structure inside of selfhood, as psychologically real.
b) In more general historical terms, I tend to think of this problem as parallel to thinking about what to call political forms that were not states but that had considerable structure and coherence. Just because they're not states in the modern sense doesn't mean that they didn't exist, and it doesn't mean that I should refer to them as "pre-states"--as reduced to being not-quite-something-else. Our problem now is that we live in a world of nation-states, with no other sovereign forms, and it takes a lot of intellectual effort to not universalize from that position across all time and space. Modern individuality is a very particular form of selfhood, similarly, and we inhabit it so strongly that whenever we try to imagine selves before modernity, we tend to translate them into being individuals in our fashion, or occasionally into being "almost individuals" (say, in some critical traditions of reading Hamlet as an anachronistically 'individual' sort of self--'almost us'). We live so strongly in modernity that we don't have a vocabulary for talking about the universals that are not equivalent to modernity.
I think the question is, precisely, how did pre-modern people understand their own stirrings? Did they truly believe they were utterly at the mercy of fate? Or was this merely a literary convention? If they believed only in fate, then all stories would be like Job, about trauma befalling on the undeserving, but in fact most ancient stories seem to place the fault squarely upon the hero himself. Take, for instance, the saga you mention: Grettir the Strong. Yes he is constantly warned againts behaving impetuously, and yes he constantly says whatever is my fate will be my fate, but the clear corollary here is that he has a particular character that is unsuited to the times. How is that different from the modern self of having a character that is unsuited to the times (i.e. being like, say, Cool Hand Luke and simply being unable to acclimate to prison life). Is there anything in Grettir that we couldn't read in a modern crime novel? This for instance is the curse that finally causes Grettir's death:
"These men are brave, but Fortune does not go with them. There is a great difference between you. You have made them many fine offers, but they turn them all down and there are few more certain ways to court trouble than to refuse what is good. Now I curse you, Grettir, to be deprived of all favour, all endowments and fortune, all defence and wisdom, the more so the longer you live! I trust that you will have fewer days of happiness in the future than you have had until now"
It happens precisely because he turns down a number of fine offers to vacate the island he is squatting upon. It happens not due to fate, but because of his own actions.
This is in stark contrast to Grettir's ancestor, Thorstein, as describing in Vatsnal Saga. Thorstein is not particularly war-like--he is criticized by his father for being a coward. So he goes off to kill a local rogue. But when he has the rogue in his power, he thinks the following:
"He recalled his father’s incitement – that strength and daring would be needed to accomplish this or any other bold deeds, but that glory and glittering coins would be the reward, and he would then be deemed to have done better than by sitting at his mother’s hearth. He then also recalled that his father had said that he was no better at wielding a weapon than a daughter or any other woman, and that it would better serve his kinsmen’s honour if there were a gap in the family line rather than having him. This drove Thorstein on, and he looked for an opportunity to avenge single-handedly the wrongs done to many people; yet, on the other hand, it seemed to him that the man would be a great loss."
And he decides not to kill the man, Jokul, and Jokul in return blesses him and basically offers him his sister and Thorstein becomes a great lord! Precisely because he disregarded his father's advice and acted in keeping with his own character, to be quite cautious.
It seems to me there is an explicit contrast being made here between the line of Thorstein and the tale of Grettir--a contrast all Icelanders would've known. And that what's at stake here is precisely this issue of character and free choice--the things we associate with a self.
My contention is that much too much is made of the concept of a freudian unconscious self. If you total up everything pre-modern people say about "character" then it seems basically equivalent to the unconscious self. In one case character might be given by fate or god, but the unconscious self also has a mysterious origin, which we call science or whatever--in both cases there is a mysterious substrate which produces our impulses, and it's our job to war with and manage those impulses.
I still think it's important not to read past the different functions, uses and/or expectations that different societies have of their literature, though--what the 15th-16th Century Icelandic readers made of the sagas and what 19th-21st C. readers make of novels in terms of how much they are meant to describe the interior sensation of being a human being really does seem different.
Good point about the shift in point of view from ancient texts to modern ones. For example, even in the considerable body of works devoted to retelling the ancient stories, everything from Christa Wolf’s Cassandra to William Carlos Williams’ Red Eric, these stories are often retold first-person like modern novels, whereas in the old stories the narrator is completely submerged.
In the latter work, almost a prose poem, I see your observation that “modern novels would often set interiority against sociality.” In the very first paragraph, meditating on his outcast status on Greenland, Eric says, “Because I am not like them, I am evil.”
In the old stories, we have little sense even of who’s telling us the story. Who’s the narrator of the Iliad, or Beowulf? Whereas in the retellings we have an individual that we’re meant to understand in social or psychological terms, if not identify or sympathize with.
Wonderful post, and I’ve also enjoyed reading the long, thoughtful responses. I’ll point you to a post of my own in which I touch on some of these same ideas, and end with a look at Denis Johnson’s poem “A Proposal,” which asserts that they (the early inhabitants) “were us.”
https://open.substack.com/pub/arniesabatelli/p/looking-back?r=1nwa2p&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post