John Crowe Ransom and the Transformation of Desire

John Crowe Ransom's 1947 essay "The Iconography of the Master" begins in typical New Critical fashion by pointing out syntactical figures at work in a poetic text (by Shakespeare). Interesting, but standard stuff. The second half of the essay gets into a fascinating discussion of "teleological speculation." In other words, what is the purpose of a given poem? Ransom argues that this is much more complicated than it might seem (at least, for poetry of quality).

I'm interested in Ransom's use of Freud to answer this question. Ransom begins with a binary opposition between thought-work and substance, which reflects a more fundamental opposition between the ego and the id. (He uses this distinction earlier in the essay when he asserts that mixed poetic diction indicates an interplay between the id and the ego). But in teleological terms, he has trouble fully contrasting these two. If most critics tend to pit the two against each other in a zero-sum power struggle, I think Ransom is trying to remind us that the two were originally theorized to work in concert with one another. That is, the id is too "childish" and demanding to actualize its needs. It needs the special qualities of the ego, one of which is the ego's "aggression against the environment" to help procure the satisfaction of the id's drives.

While the two may work toward the same end, it's also possible that the ego may "fixate" on natural objects in a way that doesn't satisfy the id's drives. While he doesn't provide a lucid discussion of this prospect, nor does he give a clear example, he seems to set up a continuum upon which the two psychic entities interact. The task of criticism then becomes assessing a poem's placement on this continuum. He writes, "we must see how our psychic fixation serves the long-range needs of the biological organism."

With these concerns as a backdrop, it is interesting to look at a Ransom poem like "The Equilibrists," which situates two lovers between their physical desire and the "honor" that requires its restriction:

At length I saw these lovers fully were come
Into their torture of equilibrium;
Dreadfully had forsworn each other, and yet
They were bound each to each, and they did not forget.

And rigid as two painful stars, and twirled
About the clustered night their prison world,
They burned with fierce love always to come near,
But Honor beat them back and kept them clear.

The poem is a complex and ambivalent tale of desire left unfulfilled. While the lovers appear to be the primary figures of the poem, the real subject, the teleological catalyst, is "Honor." The egos fixate upon honor as the sort of restriction instituted by the ego to ensure a later pleasure. But the poem interrogates the possibility of this later pleasure, leaving the lovers in cold graves eternally separated from one another. Honor does not seem to serve our long-range physical needs.

But in true ambivalent style, Ransom also hints at the danger in caving to one's desires:

Great lovers lie in Hell, the stubborn ones
Infatuate of the flesh upon the bones;
Stuprate, they rend each other when they kiss,
The pieces kiss again, no end to this.

What a terrifying image, the body torn into ever smaller bits, each of which continues to seethe with desire. This ambivalence leaves the question of desire in the poem in the same sort of agonized equilibrium experienced by the lovers. I would argue, however, that the aesthetic pleasure of these representations of equilibrium is its own sort of consummation, and the reader who encounters it on the page has obtained the satisfaction unique to poetry.