Psychobiographic Profiles: The Inner World of Three Giants of Literature

The true personalities of creative figures of world literature too often have gone unexplored. But in a post-Darwinian world of heightened interest in human nature and human behavior, there is increasing curiosity about the person behind the captivating literary product. It is the psychobiographer’s explicit task to uncover and explicate what drives these individuals in their extraordinary endeavors.

In the case of the exceptionally gifted, early-20^th-century writer, Franz Kafka, we find a sterling example of how conflict with paternal authority can leave its indelible stamp on the author’s work. Kafka’s mature literary form, with its clear, concise, and pleasing style, is in striking contradiction to the anxiety-ridden, mystical, conflict-laden plots of his narratives. Imaginatively woven into a number of his stories, the protagonist is variably struggling to gain understanding of an inscrutable, faceless, unreachable authority (The Castle) or to clear his name in an impersonal court of justice that investigates one charged with an undefined and never proved crime (The Judgment). In a quite daring literary format, the same drama—that is, the son’s desperate effort to gain father’s loving attention—is played out in a symbolic representation of the son’s emotional pain, humiliation, isolation, and sense of hopelessness (The Metamorphosis). He lived for writing, Kafka used to say, but was far from being emotionally free for doing so. This became clear from his ruminative, 50-page analysis of the father-son relationship (Letter to His Father).

The other two authors here considered were noted by the literary historian, Gustave Lanson, as the two great parvenus of French literature: Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-1592) and Voltaire (1694-1778). The former took great pride in his social rank, while the latter, of unremarkable social background, tried all his life to be fully accepted in the circles of nobility. Important for us here is the markedly diverse intra-family dynamics, specifically, the father-son relationship and its effect on the author’s emotional

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development. Young Montaigne’s upbringing was characterized by the uncommonly circumspect planning by his father for creating a favorable atmosphere for both intellectual and emotional growth. In order to experience how simple folks lived, the son was for the first three years of his life placed in a cottage with a peasant family. For the next three years, tutored by a known scholar of the classics, he was surrounded by people, including his mother and all servants, who were to speak to him in Latin only. Then, he was enrolled in a prestigious boarding school, with emphasis on the classics. During vacations, it was his father’s policy to put no pressure on the youngster so that he may fully enjoy his freedom, to play with friends, take a nap, and listen to music. After completing his studies in law and serving for a few years as a counselor to the parlement in Bordeaux, he was appointed courtier at the court of Charles IX.

After father’s death, Montaigne freed himself from the demands of public life, retired to his “citadel” in the tower of Chateau de Montaigne in the Dordogne and, surrounded by his library of about 1,500 volumes, devoted the rest of his life to reflections on the human condition. In what became his famous Essais (Essays), he leisurely free-associated in whatever struck him as noteworthy about how people went about their lives, considering everything with an eye for the minutiae. Protecting his precious independence and individuality, Montaigne practiced the philosophy of an amiable skeptic, believing that the only thing certain in the world is that nothing is certain. The human condition, he maintained, is neither good nor evil; it is the locus of good and evil, depending on what you make of it. His secularism enabled him to question the rigid ethics of orthodox Christianity and view bodily pleasures as natural as the pleasures of the soul. High up in the tower of the Chateau, he remained unbiased politically as well as theocratically, while a bloody sectarian conflict was raging around him in Europe.

Two centuries later, another free-spirited movement, the French Enlightenment, appeared on the scene. This was Voltaire’s era. A compilation of his voluminous writings is still an ongoing project, conducted by scholars of the prestigious Voltaire Foundation at Oxford. But the massive literary output is not what made his name an enduring feature in the archives of early-modern European

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history. The crucial social and political changes that took place during that period could hardly be fathomed without the role played—on the scene and, most effectively, behind the scene—by the poet-philosophe through a flood of inflammatory anti-regime pamphlets, leaflets, and occasional pieces, distributed primarily via clandestine channels.

The poet’s struggle with oppressive authority had deep roots. Francois-Marie Arouet, alias Voltaire, growing up under senior Arouet’s determined maneuverings to block his son’s plans for a career in literature, became afflicted with a troubling father complex that plagued him for the rest of his life. The nature and course of associated feelings became, then, a major stumbling block for biographers. As processing such feelings was not within the poet’s limited capacity for dealing with negative emotions, neither as a child nor later, they had to be sealed off and kept out of conscious awareness. Consequently, because none of his writings contained any mention of the discord with his father or of the chronic residual resentment, biographers had remained as unaware of these feelings as was Voltaire himself. So, they had no way of connecting the poet’s typically friction-prone relationship with authority, on the one hand, and the unprocessed, conflict-laden emotions seething in the cauldron of his unconsciousness on the other. As if the shrewd old fox had thrown a monkey wrench into his biographers’ research, the real Voltaire remained unknown for another two-and-a-half centuries.

Only post-Freudian clinical understanding of unconscious processes would offer insight into the complex not visible to the naked eye. Clinically speaking, a pathologically entangled father-son relationship, such as we have here in two of our cases, calls for a scholarly study by the proper methods of investigation. It was after my retirement from active clinical practice that I decided to undertake a thorough, in-depth clinical-psychological assessment of the poet-philosophe’s hitherto unexplored inner world (published as Voltaire’s Tormented Soul: A Psychobiographic Inquiry, 2008). The dominant, pernicious conflict between father and son in the families of the two creative figures, Kafka and Voltaire, finds dramatic emphasis when set against the story-book background of the uncommonly propitious paternal design for child-rearing, such as

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can be seen in the young life of our third creative literary giant, the famed 16^th-century essayist Michel de Montaigne. In Voltaire’s case, what had complicated matters was a psychological make-up that kept the unresolved conflict repressed, that is, out of conscious awareness and, thus, unavailable for being processed and eventually resolved. Indirect discharge of negative feelings toward sundry authority figures as substitute targets had complicated his social and political affairs.

In the life of Kafka, we have a variation on the same theme: a father-complex that is in his case not sealed off in the deep caverns of the unconscious as we have seen in Voltaire. Instead, resentful feelings against a callous and dictatorial father are channeled, in part, into masterful short stories and plays as referenced above. Then, in the open letter to father, written in a polite and obsessively ruminative style, he is eager to communicate his true feelings but never really succeeds. A number of Kafka’s writings have been received as innovative pieces of literature, paving the way for the movement of existentialism. Quite early in his career, when barely an adult, he was experimenting with a highly unusual, boldly symbolic literary format (The Metamorphosis).

The works of both of these remarkable literary personages, Voltaire and Kafka, are virtually saturated with emotions originating in the unresolved conflict that had plagued and drained both throughout their lives. One may wonder: was exceptional literary fecundity of assistance in their attempt to lighten their burden, or was the burden itself actually a critical impetus for their creative literary engagement? As an answer to these questions the typical reaction of our third author, Michel de Montaigne, a classical skeptic of his era, comes to mind: “Que sais-je?” (“What do I know?”)

In conclusion, the vast range of variation in personal motivation and source of energy for creative literary productivity would deserve more attention than what it has been receiving. This is especially true in an age when the educated reader’s mind is more open to consider that there is a layer to the self not clearly in our conscious awareness, and that may at times, at least fleetingly, assume control of our thoughts, decisions, and actions. Much of great literature has been, in an indirect fashion, dealing with this phenomenon. More vigorous collaboration between relevant academic

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disciplines would facilitate insight into this subtle but vital aspect of human behavior.

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