A Horneyan approach helps us to understand not only the leading characters of these plays but also the relationships on which they are focused. The interaction between Nora and Torvald becomes intelligible only when we see how their defenses both harmonize and clash. The relationship between Hedda and Ejlert is at the center of the play, and we can appreciate why Ejlert is so important to Hedda only when we recognize how she tries to use him to escape her inner conflicts through the vicarious fulfillment of her needs.
4 The End of the Road
While Ibsen’s plays clearly lend themselves to Horneyan analysis, it may seem that John Barth’s The End of the Road is a less appropriate choice. Nora, Torvald, and Hedda are mimetically drawn characters in realistic works, but Jake, Joe, and Rennie have been treated by most critics as illustrative figures in a philosophic tale. Although Barth may not have been aiming at psychological realism, his characters are brilliant mimetic portraits nonetheless. This novel is a little masterpiece that I have taught every year for the past several decades and have found to be endlessly elusive and fascinating. Jacob Horner is an excellent example of the detached protagonist common in modern literature, and the bizarre marriage of Joe and Rennie Morgan will remind us of Nora’s morbid dependency on Torvald. It will also help us to understand the equally bizarre relationship between patient Griselda and Walter.
Like Ibsen’s, Barth’s characters are presented with almost no prior history and would be difficult to analyze with a theory that explains the present in terms of the past. But they display the kinds of defenses and inner conflicts that Horney describes and are intelligible in terms of her structural approach. The plot of the novel evolves from the interaction of the characters’ defensive strategies, which both draw them together and cause them to clash. Although there are triangles in Ibsen, his great psychological dramas tend to be focused on a dyadic relationship—between Nora and Torvald, Hedda and Ejlert, Solness and Hilde, Rosmer and Rebekka West. The situation is more complicated in The End of the Road, since the Jake-Rennie-Joe triangle is at the heart of the book. There are three relationships to be considered—Jake and Joe, Jake and Rennie, and Rennie and Joe—each of which is complex in itself and must be understood in relation to the other two.
Since this is the text with which readers are least likely to be familiar, I shall tell more of the story than when I discuss other works. The novel’s narrator and central character, Jake Horner, is a Masters candidate in English at Johns Hopkins who becomes psychologically paralyzed in a Baltimore railroad station on his twenty-eighth birthday and is rescued by a black man, known as the Doctor, who prescribes various therapies to treat his condition. Two years later, on the Doctor’s advice, Jake takes a job teaching prescriptive grammar at Wicomico State College, where he becomes friendly with Joe Morgan, who is working on a Ph.D. in History at Hopkins, and with Rennie, his wife. It is Jake’s relationship with Joe that precipitates the action.
Jake Horner is a descendant of Dostoevsky’s underground man and other paralyzed intellectuals in literature, such as Hamlet, Diogenes Teufelsdröckh in Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, Conrad’s Martin Decoud (Nostromo) and Axel Heyst (Victory), Harry Haller in Hesse’s Steppenwolf, and Sartre’s Antoine Roquentin in Nausea. Saul Bellow’s Moses Herzog follows him within the next decade. One of the most striking similarities between Jake and the underground man is that both see their paralysis as the result of superior intelligence and a heightened awareness of the human condition. The underground man attributes his inertia to the fundamental laws of over-acute consciousness and contrasts himself with the dull, strong-nerved, normal men who are able to act because they fail to perceive that there is no foundation on which to base their choices. Jake Horner attributes his paralysis to “the malady cosmoposis”: when we fix our gaze on “ultimacy,” we see that there is “no reason to do anything” (ch. 6). He contrasts himself with the “shortsighted animals” around him in the railway station who hurry “across the concourse toward immediate destinations” while he sits “immobile on the bench.”
Both Jake and the underground man are paralyzed, it seems to me, not by the intellectual insight and philosophic problems to which they attribute their difficulties, but by psychological conflicts and self-alienation (see Paris 1974). In Karen Horney’s terms, they are predominantly detached individuals who have powerful aggressive and self-effacing tendencies they cannot suppress and that pull them in opposite directions. In order to defend themselves against inner turmoil, they distance themselves from their feelings and withdraw from the external world. They inadvertently become involved with others—the underground man with Liza and Jake with Joe and Rennie—who engage their emotions and activate their conflicts. Traumatized by their involvement, they become even more detached.
Jake writes The End of the Road at the Doctor’s Remobilization Farm about two years after the events he describes. The book is an elaborate rationale for his sterile, defensive way of life. Unlike the short-sighted animals around him, Jake sees human beings from a cosmic perspective: they are insignificant creatures living in an indifferent universe, and their values are entirely arbitrary. Not only are the heavens empty, but there is no essential human nature. The Doctor and Jake reject the old humanistic view of man as having a stable self that can generate values and be the measure of all things. There is nothing inside of us that gives direction to our lives; our ego consists only of masks. We must create our identity through our actions, but since we have no essence to begin with, we must choose without a basis for choice. With neither an external nor an internal authority to guide us, it is no wonder that we are inconsistent or paralyzed.
The greatest threat to Jake’s rationale is Joe Morgan, who also starts from the premise that nothing has ultimate value but who believes that each person has a set of “psychological givens,” an essential nature, that generates values which are “subjective absolutes” (ch. 4). Joe’s project is to live coherently, in a way that is consistent with his values, but he does not expect others to approve his decisions since they will be operating from their own psychological givens. From Jake’s point of view, the flaw in Joe’s position is that it “implies a self, and where one feels a plurality of selves,” as does Jake, “one is subject to the same conflict on an intensely intramural level” that Joe posits “between individual points of view”: “each of one’s several selves [claims] the same irrefutable validity for its special point of view that, in Joe’s system, individuals . . . may claim” (ch. 10).
Jake acknowledges that he has always lacked a strong sense of personal unity, but he concludes from this not that he has psychological difficulties but that “the individual is not individual after all” (ch. 10). His entire philosophic position is an effort to disown his personal problems by generalizing them. From a Horneyan perspective, Jake is alienated from his real self, the source of authentic values, and he experiences his tendencies to move toward, against, and away from people as separate selves that dominate him by turns and between which he has no basis for choosing. The Doctor’s view of the ego as an assemblage of masks reinforces Jake’s rationalizations and makes him more comfortable with his neurosis; but the Doctor’s therapies cannot help Jake to resolve his problems, since they do not address his self-alienation but merely provide him with techniques for making decisions while remaining detached.
Jake is triumphant in the novels’s contest of ideas. His version of human nature proves to be more accurate than Joe’s. Joe is as full of contradictions as Jake claims everybody is. He is deluded about Rennie, about himself, and about their relationship, and his intellectual approach to life is inadequate. But Jake is not shown to have a better approach. From a Horneyan point of view, Joe and Jake offer only a choice of neurotic solutions, each of which generates an inadequate view of human nature. Alienated from himself and full of inner conflicts, Jake is bound to deny the existence of a stable, authentic identity. Because he, too, is inwardly divided,