CHARLES MAURON'S THEORY OF PSYCHOCRITIC: THEORETICAL PRINCIPLES OF ANALYSIS OF A LITERARY WORK

Abstract

The article presents an attempt to analyze Charles Mauron's theory of psychocriticism, namely its theoretical principles of analyzing a literary work, such as the "personal myth of the writer", the "method of superimposing texts", the author's "social self" and "creative self", "network of intrusive metaphors". Charles Mauron invented and developed the theory of psychocriticism, which is one of the trends in new French criticism of the 50s-60s of the 20th century. Other representatives of French new criticism often remained in the shadow of the glory of Roland Barthes and Jean-Paul Sartre. This study is prompted by the need to draw attention to the work of Charles Mauron and its analysis. The article systematizes and analyzes the main provisions of Mauron's critical theory, emphasizing its importance for expanding the interpretative possibilities of literary criticism and for understanding unconscious processes in the work of writers. In the process of research, it was found that Charles Mauron emphasizes the linguistic nature of the unconscious, suggests not to delve into the biological depths down to the cellular level in search of authentic motifs, but to analyze the associative surface of texts (associative network). The overlapping of texts by one author allows us to reveal a network of intrusive metaphors, behind which lies a certain logic of the unconscious. Further identification of variants and invariants of this network forms an “image of a personal myth”, which is an expression of the “unconscious personality” (Mallarmé’s decadence, for example). Particular attention is paid to the correlation of the conscious and the unconscious in the creative act, the problem of the repetition of phantasms and their connection with trauma or internal conflicts. At the same time, Mauron distinguishes psychocriticism from psychoanalytic criticism, which studies the author’s unconscious, and not the work. Criticism is interested, first of all, in the study of the work, and psychoanalysis only in the case when it can be useful to the work, and will not use it for its own purposes. Following Mauron, supporters of the psychoanalytic method of literary research became interested in the necessity of analyzing the work of art.