Students and faculty crowded into Haldeman 41 Monday afternoon to discuss the works of William Butler Yeats, Paul Cezanne and Sigmund Freud with Yale University comparative literature professor Peter Brooks. Brooks discussed the way in which the artists took a radical turn in their work as they neared the ends of their lives. His lecture was based off the last chapter of his most recent book, "The Enigmas of Identity."
"I have the impression that there have been over the ages artists with the capacity for what you might call self-reinvention late in their careers," Brooks said. "Their work seems to take off in an audacious leap that both comments on and radically transforms their earlier practice."
He said he has noted this phenomenon in the work of Yeats, Victor Hugo, Cezanne, Titian, Ludwig van Beethoven, Richard Wagner, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Marcel Proust and Freud. He briefly recited a section of poetry by Yeats before moving on to the late work of Cezanne, produced in Provence, France, in the final years of his life. Brooks showed several of Cezanne's late paintings, drawing attention to the way in which "the paint is diminishing and blank canvas is beginning to take over."
Brooks described these paintings as "strikingly non-representational" and yet "utterly lucid and readable."
Brooks said that Cezanne was able to revert to a state of "infantile vision" at the end of his life due to his infirmity, a state he had desired to achieve earlier in his career.
The main body of Brooks' lecture included a discussion of Freud's later works which, according to Brooks, "cast a troubling retrospective light on the 19th century historicisms" with which he began his career.
"I only discovered Freud in my early 30s," Brooks later said in an interview with The Dartmouth.
Brooks found that his own feelings regarding human beings corresponded to Freud's work.
"It just seems to make so much sense of things," he said.
In his work "Analysis Terminable and Interminable," Freud "famously declares psychoanalysis to be an impossible profession," Brooks said in his lecture. Freud's work "Moses and Monotheism," which he produced between 1934 and 1938, presents a compositional structure so strange that one wonders why he did not totally revise it, Brooks said. The work contains two prefaces, a host of repetitions and apparent non sequiturs, according to Brooks.
Within the course of the work, Freud "effectively declares a pox on both the major houses of religion at this time," Brooks said.
Brooks questioned why Freud, who had such a negative view of religion, felt the need to write a book about Moses. Brooks said that "Freud has thoroughly self-identified with the man Moses," which can be seen in the way that he portrays his sense of his own future importance.
Discussing the book's conclusions, Brooks said that Freud's acute awareness of Nazi aggression and the purging of Jews following the Anschluss is clear. He foretells a vaster murder of the bearers of ethical consciousness, according to Brooks.
Brooks went on to discuss the way in which Freud "addresses the ethics of psychoanalysis," stating that the work of analysis involves two people, each of which have a distinct role. It is the patient's role to remember even that which has been forgotten, and it is the analyst's role to make out and construct what has been forgotten from the traces of what has been left behind.
Freud gave a final reading of Honore de Balzac's novel "La Peau de Chagrin" before he died, which Freud said was an appropriate text for the end of life because it is all about shrinking, according to Brooks. It is significant that he chose to read this before his death because "all of Freud's late system of thought really lies in a nutshell in the first of Balzac's great novels," Brooks said.
Brooks said that, like Yeats, Cezanne and Matisse, Freud's response in later life was to reject forbearance and "to write the most provocative stuff of his long and provocative career."
Comparative literature professor Lawrence Kritzman described Brooks as "one of the most outstanding literary critics in both French and [comparative literature]." Kritzman described Brooks's work as "groundbreaking," and said Brooks knows texts like few others.
German and comparative literature professor Klaus Mladek expressed disappointment that the question-and-answer session after the lecture did not last longer and was not more lively. He said the passages from Freud quoted by Brooks were very strong and were provocative enough to stimulate discussion.
Brooks' lecture, titled "Late Work," was part of the annual James Hoffman 1982 Memorial Lecture, co-sponsored by the comparative literature program, the Leslie Center for the Humanities and the French and Italian, German and art history departments.
The lecture series is held in honor of James Hoffman '82, a comparative literature major who was killed in a car crash by a drunk driver the summer following his graduation, according to French professor Roxana Verona. Verona said Hoffman's thesis, "The Political Connection in Literature: A Study of Four Socialist Novels," reflected "his social awareness and his interest in socialism."
The memorial lecture, established by Hoffman's family and the comparative literature department, invites scholars who reflect Hoffman's "vision of literature as a means of social change." Previous speakers include world-renowned literary critic Edward Said and architect Teddy Cruz.
Brooks' work "resonates soundly with the spirit of the Hoffman lecture," Verona said.
Discussing Brooks' work, Verona said there was a strong thread of psychoanalysis from the beginning.
"I wonder if desire is not the password for understanding Peter Brooks' work," Verona said.
