CHAPTER 3

THREADS THAT CONNECT THE STARS:

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND UTOPIAN IDEOLOGY

Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel's psychoanalytic theories may be particularly useful in attempting to make sense of the chiliastic, anti-rational utopianism examined in the previous chapter. Chasseguet-Smirgel herself has suggested that Fourier's utopian writings are symptomatic of the author's insanity, as well as that of his disciples.[1] This chapter pleads the case for her analysis while simultaneously acknowledging its limitations. As Paul Ricoeur has argued, it is reductive to label Fourier and his ilk simply "sane" or simply "insane":

The problem of utopias . . . is not only the margin between the unrealized and the impossible but also the margin between fiction, in a positive sense, and fancy, in a pathological sense. The utopian structure cheats our categorization of the difference between the sane and the insane. It contests their clear-cut distinction. (302)

To illustrate Ricoeur's proposition, one might note that Chasseguet-Smirgel's foregrounding of Fourierism's irrationality is at odds with Guarneri's argument that the American Fourierist movement was in many respects a rational response to problems in post-Jacksonian American culture. Neither approach can be rejected, because both are partially correct. Yet their assumptions are irreconcilable—Fourier's utopia "cheats" such categorization. Since Guarneri has amply demonstrated the rationality of American Fourierism, I will, for practical reasons, emphasize the movement's irrational aspects. Like the two possible readings of the Gestalt psychologist's figure/background diagram, neither of these readings is necessarily "truer" than the other.

Specifically, I would like to emphasize the peculiar resonance of Fourier's universal reform in the United States, the nation that came to believe in itself as the divinely-appointed agent of universal reform. Just as Emerson hoped that in America, "poetry will revive and lead in a new age," the citizens of the United States came to envision "America" as "the star in the constellation Harp, which . . . shall one day be the pole-star for a thousand years." For a brief period after the end of the Cold War, some claimed that this pretty myth was a prophecy fulfilled: America had become not merely the leader of the free world, but also the guardian of the New World Order at the End of History. Emerson's metaphor was even grander in scope: just as America was to surpass Europe, Vega was to succeed Polaris. As we have seen, many Fourierists believed that the connection between world reform and cosmic reform was more than metaphorical.[2]

It is a critical commonplace that Thomas More's juxtaposition of England and Utopia in the text of Utopia made sixteenth-century England seem more unreal and the mythical isle more realistic (e.g., Greenblatt 34). A similar argument can be made for the juxtaposition of Fourierism and the United States in the 1840's: the writers of the Transcendentalist circle who attacked the Fourierist utopia for its unreality could not do so without also becoming aware—at some level—of a similar pathology in the ideology of "this new yet unapproachable America."

I.

Ironically, Bestor's essay on Albert Brisbane performed virtually the same critical task that he claimed Brisbane's Social Destiny of Man had peformed. After dividing Fourierist theory into two compartments, the "sane" doctrines and the "insane" ones, Bestor focused on the former and supressed the latter. An alternative approach, one that Schlesinger might find congenial, would be to foreground the "insanity" of Fourierism. A psychoanalytic approach, for example, might argue that certain American Fourierists engaged in similar patterns of apparently irrational behavior because they shared the same unconscious rationale.

Chasseguet-Smirgel's neo-Freudian theory, as well as its implications for the study of Fourierism, are set forth in her most important study, The Ego Ideal: A psychoanalytic essay on the Malady of the Ideal (1975, trans. 1985). In The Ego Ideal, she argues for a return to Freud's earlier conception of the ego ideal as an "autonomous [psychic] entity" formed prior to the superego.[3] According to Chasseguet-Smirgel, the ego ideal's formation is part of the infant's response to his first crisis, his coming-to-awareness of his biological immaturity, the fact that he is helpless and must rely totally upon others.[4] With the coming of critical judgment, the infant is eventually forced to acknowledge the limits of his powers, forced to admit that he is not co-extensive with the universe. However, this narcissistic fantasy is not wholly abandoned. Even as he reluctantly recognizes the "not-me," the infant projects onto his ego ideal, a psychic agency with the function of "substitut[ing] for primary narcissistic perfection," the narcissistic omnipotence he has just surrendered. From this omnipotence "he is henceforth divided by a gulf that he will spend the rest of his life trying to bridge," the gulf between ego and ego ideal (EI 5, 6).[5] Paradoxically, the infant's desire to regress—that is, to recapture the lost fantasy of omnipotence—can spur his development. In seeking to recover this perfection, the ego ideal's omnipotence is projected onto external models, beginning with the mother. But in emphasizing that the ego ideal cannot be reduced to a mere model, Chasseguet-Smirgel hypothesizes the existence of a "transcendent ego ideal over and above other temporary, and constantly revised, ideals" (EI 8).

Psychoanalytic approaches to literary criticism always run the risk of being crudely reductive; because of its relative simplicity, Chasseguet-Smirgel's theory may be particularly dangerous in this respect. Yet this danger is partly offset by its explanatory potential. For example, it sheds light on a central theme of Romanticism, the individual's recognition of a fall from grace, as exemplified by the Intimations Ode's "Whither has fled the visionary gleam / Where is it now, the glory and the dream?" These lines may be read as a lament of the rift between ego and ego-ideal, in which Wordsworth's narrator attempts to recapture the lost unity of the subjective "me" and the objective "not-me," of the narcissistic infant whose ego-"boundaries" are the universe. While the narrator eventually comes to realize that his original project of recapturing the lost unity is impossible, he retains the hope of achieving a different reconciliation in the future. Similarly, Chasseguet-Smirgel argues that the ego ideal is not simply regressive; instead, it "implies the idea of a project," which in turn implies the recognition of the reality principle: the child realizes he cannot become omnipotent overnight. Normally, he will continue to project his ego ideal onto other models, thus spurring his further development. Even if the child successfully imitates his model, however, the ego ideal will interpret this "success" as failure. For in its quest for omnipotence, the ego ideal "prefers absolute solutions" (EI 40-41). The tension between the ego and its ideal is only lessened with maturity, when the adult, having reached Freud's "scientific" stage, acknowledges that omnipotence is unattainable by anyone (EI 29-30). Chasseguet-Smirgel postulates that the ego ideal, by "impl[ying] the promise of a return to that primitive state of fusion" (EI 43), effectively functions as a "maturation drive" (qtd., EI 44).

Unfortunately, Chasseguet-Smirgel argues, environmental factors often interfere with the maturation drive. If the child's frustrations are too great, for example, reality-testing breaks down, and his "narcissism . . . remains split off from its instinctual life and cathects an exaggerated ego ideal" (EI 32):

[These frustrations] may cause a regression towards a more archaic form of 'narcissistic reinstatement,' or even towards psychotic megalomania in which the original lack of differentiation between internal and external perceptions recurs. (EI 28)

This lack of differentiation between inner and outer worlds may help to explain the paradox of Fourier: how could he have been a brilliant social critic (and thus necessarily an astute observer of the external world) and yet also have been unable to distinguish this analysis from his own megalomaniacal fantasies? Indeed, Fourier's reminiscences emphasized the frustration he had felt in his childhood; Beecher observes that "Fourier thought of himself as a martyr, tyrannized by parents and teachers" (25).

For our present purpose, however, it is less important to account for the genesis of Fourier's fantasies than to explain why others found them attractive. Chasseguet-Smirgel attempts the latter by arguing for the ego ideal theory's relevance to the psychology of the group.[6] She claims that the ego ideal "tends to reinstate Illusion," unlike the superego, which "[tends] to promote reality" (EI 76). Because of this fundamental opposition, the superego may be "swept away, as it were, by the sudden reactivation of the old wish for the union of ego and ideal." As Freud argued in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, the authority of the group can easily be substituted for the conscience of the individual, thus removing the superego's inhibitions and licensing forbidden pleasures (EI 78-79). Taking the most notorious modern example of a group run amok, she argues that Hitler's function in Nazism was that of a "promotor of Illusion." Her explanation also suggests why some Fourierists may have found Fourier's cosmological fantasies appealing:

If one considers that [the leader's] promise [of the arrival of Illusion] stimulates the wish for the fusion of ego and ideal by way of regression and induces the ego to melt into the omnipotent primary object, to encompass the entire universe . . . one can understand, in a general way, that the propensity to a loss of the ego's boundaries makes the individual particularly liable to identify himself not only with each member of the group but with the group formation as a whole. His megalomania finds its expression in this, each person's ego being extended to the whole group. The members of the group lose their individuality and begin to resemble ants or termites. This loss of personal characteristics . . . thus allows each member to feel himself to be, not a minute, undifferentiated particle of a vast whole, but, on the contrary, identified with the totality of the group, thereby conferring on himself an omnipotent ego, a colossal body. (EI 85, emphasis added)

When this narcissistic illusion of omnipotence becomes operative in the group, the individual's agencies of psychic development—the superego and even the mature ego ideal—become "liabilit[ies]" because they are opposed to regression and therefore "may be violently and completely set aside." Such barriers are not merely removed in the individual member's psyche; all perceived enemies of the group's shared illusion must either be converted or eliminated (EI 83-84, 87).

Recall that Fourier prophesied that, after the passage of some 80,000 years, the Harmonian utopia would itself decay, and that all individuals would ultimately merge into one Being; further, Fourier mounted raging attacks on “Civilization” for postponing this Apocalypse. It certainly seems plausible that a similar “narcissistic illusion of omnipotence” attracted Fourier’s followers. But such an analysis can be pushed to extremes. For example, there may indeed by structural similarities between Hitler’s psychic need to eliminate the Jews (whose very existence undermined the racial definition of German nationality) and Fourier’s need to eliminate inclement weather through the fable of the couronne boréale (since the mere possibility of, say, a tornado threatened the utopian illusion). But to insist upon the importance of these structural similarities, as Chasseguet-Smirgel is inclined to do—this specific example is my own—does not address the obvious differences between genocide and Fourier’s apparently innocuous fantasy.[7] Having made this major qualification, and keeping in mind that Chasseguet-Smirgel extends her theory not only to "actual groupings" such as Nazi Germany, but also to individuals "united by an identical . . . politico-mystical conviction" (EI 84-85), I believe that her hypothesis may help explain the appeal of "crackpot" Fourierism to some of the Associationists.

The political consequences of Chasseguet-Smirgel's theory were explored in her next book, Freud or Reich?: Psychoanalysis and Illusion (1975), a polemical attack on the work of the Freudo-Marxist Wilhelm Reich. In a sense, her attack was superfluous: Reich's theory of the orgone is too bizarre to require refutation. But Chasseguet-Smirgel and co-author Béla Grunberger (her husband and colleague) were more interested in analyzing the resurgence of interest in Reich and Freudo-Marxism after May 1968. Freud or Reich? argues for the political significance of the theory of the ego ideal. Casting a wide net off the port side, they dismiss Reich, Marcuse, Fourier, and Marx, among others, for promoting illusory systems, each of which is an "ideology" in the narrow sense of the word. That is, the authors' definition only includes those systems of thought

whose (unconscious) aim is the actualization of an illusion, of illusion par excellence, that the ego and its ideal can be reunited by a short-cut, via the pleasure principle. The pleasure principle entails the immediate and complete discharge of the drives without any of the deferments and detours that characterize the path of its opposite, the reality principle. (FR? 15-16)

As Chasseguet-Smirgel notes, this definition parallels Engels's: a "false consciousness" obscures the "real motive forces." She rejects the Marxian explanation of false consciousness, however:

the 'real motive forces' comprise the human wish to return to a lost unity (Marx's 'total man', if you like), rather than 'the material life conditions of the persons inside whose heads this process goes on' [Engels]. (FR? 16)

Returning to the argument of The Ego Ideal, Chasseguet-Smirgel and Grunberger claim that ideology, in projecting the internal rift between ego and ideal onto the external world, insists that "[e]verything which stands in the way of the realization of the illusion . . . has to be annihilated" (FR? 16).

From these foundational assumptions, Chasseguet-Smirgel argues that the very word "Freudo-Marxist" is an oxymoron. Utopians are compelled to break with Freudianism because it only offers relative improvement: "[i]t cannot return us to the omnipotence which we experienced as a foetus . . . when we felt that we were the centre of the world" (FR? 14). Chasseguet-Smirgel's analysis of Reich, the Freudian dissident who became an insane systematizer of the libido, explains why his orgonic theory collected followers despite its insanity:

[A]s in many cases of paranoia, the coherent and systematic appearance of ideas is a symptom which allows the subject to function in an apparently normal way. The internal necessity that forces paranoiacs to persuade others as to the reality of their system of belief results in their 'recruiting' converts. These disciples will tend to be seduced by the paranoiac's ideas in so far as these deny reality and mobilize Illusion; an illusion which will be backed by manic rationalization. (FR? 109)

Here the parallels between Reich (and his twentieth-century followers) and Fourier (and his nineteenth-century followers) are in many respects uncannily close. Both found disciples all over the world, particularly in the United States (FR? 116-123). One was a Freudo-Marxist; the other has been hailed as the harbinger of Marx and Freud. Both were obsessive systematizers of the libido; despite this preoccupation, both denied the existence of infantile sexuality.[8] Both were obsessed by the fear that others would claim the credit for his discoveries (FR? 116); both were anti-Semites (FR? 97-98). Fourier's Phalanx finds its parallel in Reich's utopian community, the "Organon" (FR? 117). Just as Fourier insisted that interplanetary sexual relations would produce the Boreal Crown, Reich contended that the aurora borealis was an divine emanation of orgonic energy (FR? 113, 118). Reich's final book, The Cosmic Superimposition (1955), even developed a "delusional cosmology" similar to Fourier's, claiming, in Reich's own words, that the "orgone ocean" was "the primordial mover of the heavenly bodies" (qtd., FR? 218-219).[9]

To summarize the relevance of Freud or Reich? to the study of Fourierism: the striking parallels between Fourier and Reich strongly suggest that Fourier suffered from the narcissistic regression described by Chasseguet-Smirgel in her analysis of Reich, an interpretation that is consonant with her brief remarks on Fourier elsewhere. This psychic disorder manifested itself in Fourier's theoretical system, which proposed an illusory reform that would be rapid, permanent, and literally universal. Fourier's disciples, in accepting these reform schemes, participated in the group illusion.

In many respects, Fourier's fantasies also resemble those of Daniel Paul Schreber, author of Memoirs of My Nervous Illness and subject of Freud's famous essay on paranoia. Elias Canetti has argued that Schreber and Hitler, anti-conspirators par excellence, suffered from the same “disease of power, which involves a pathological will to sole survivorship, and a concomitant willingness, even drivenness, to sacrifice the rest of the world in the name of that survivorship” (qtd., Santner ix-x). As I have already suggested, it may be overreaching to impute the same “will to sole survivorship” to Fourier. Nevertheless, the utopian was willing to sacrifice all existing societies to his private vision. If his “disease” is milder than Schreber’s, its form is similar. Schreber and Fourier both claim to take a scientific attitude towards their discoveries—in the preface to his Memoirs, Schreber acknowledged that “some of my earlier opinions need revision” (31). Yet Schreber has no doubt that his religious experiences, “when generally acknowledged as valid[,] will act fruitfully to the highest possible degree among the rest of mankind” (33). Schreber’s belief that planets can become sentient beings is also Fourierist doctrine. The judge’s obsession with spiritual rays and their effect on our world has a close equivalent in Fourier’s (and Reich’s) spiritualized, fecundating aurora borealis. For example, Schreber writes:

There is a tendency innate in the Order of the World, to unman a human being who has entered into permanent contact with rays. This is connected on the one hand with the nature of God’s nerves, through which Blessedness […] is felt, if not exclusively as, at least accompanied by, a greatly increased feeling of voluptuousness; on the other hand it is connected with the basic plan on which the Order of the World seems to rest, that in the case of world catastrophes which necessitate the destruction of mankind on any star, whether intentionally or otherwise, the human race can be renewed. (Schreber 72)

The paranoid insists upon the connections between his mysterious, spontaneous sex-change and a total reform of human sexuality, a total reform of human society, a total reform of the universe. Freud claimed that such passages provided the key to Schreber’s illness:

The culminating point of the patient's delusional system is his belief that he has the mission to redeem the world, and to restore mankind to their lost state of bliss. . . . The most essential part of his mission of redemption is that it must be preceded by his transformation into a woman. (Freud, Standard Edition 12:16-17)

Chasseguet-Smirgel points to the case of Schreber (1911) as an important anticipation of the ego ideal theory elaborated in "On Narcissism" (EI 225-229). Freud argued that paranoids constructed such delusional systems "as a means of warding off . . . [passive] homosexual wishful phantas[ies]" (SE 12:59). Compare Fourier's only declared sexual proclivity, his "mania of Sapphianism." He discovered this preference "by chance" at the age of thirty-five (OC 7:389; qtd., Beecher 84), or roughly one year before the publication of TQM. Also note Fourier's sadomasochistic fantasy of a "third sex" in the era between "Civilization" and Harmony. These hermaphrodites "would prove with a beating of rods that men as well as women are made for its pleasure" (OC 1:219; qtd., Manuel and Manuel 674).

The theory of the ego ideal can be used to construct a plausible explanation for the "insane" tenets of Fourier's writings, as well as for certain American Fourierists' otherwise puzzling enthusiasm for these tenets.[10] In Desire and the Political Unconscious in American Literature: Eros and Ideology (1990), Sam B. Girgus deploys Chasseguet-Smirgel for a different end, arguing that in providing a psychic basis for ideological thought, the theory of the ego ideal has particular relevance for American literary history.[11] If Girgus's claim has merit, then it is possible that Chasseguet-Smirgel's work may be particularly helpful in explaining American authors' responses to Fourierist texts. Before returning to the discussion of Fourierism's sanity, I would like to sketch brief psychoanalytic readings of three works from the canon of antebellum American literature. These readings offer suggestive parallels to the psychoanalytic reading of Fourier and Fourierism.

II.

The first of these texts, Edgar Allan Poe's Eureka (1848), actually included a brief examination of Fourier's cosmology. Poe dismissed it as the work of a second-rate philosopher "whose genius . . . has a strongly-pronounced washer-womanish bias, doing every thing up by the dozen" (1343). Like Chasseguet-Smirgel, Poe implied that Fourier's analogical cosmology was the product of a disordered intellect, one that had lost the "struggle against its propensity for analogical inference—against its monomaniac grasping at the infinite" (1342). His closing judgment, "It is hardly worthwhile, perhaps, even to sneer at the reveries of Fourier" (1343), may seem like the level-headed opinion of a seeker of scientific truth. In an earlier passage, Poe had rejected "fantastic efforts" to explain the principle underlying the law of gravitation made by the adherents of "Magnetism, or Mesmerism, or Swedenborgianism, or Transcendentalism, or some other equally delicious ism of the same species" (1289).

Indeed, while Fourier's law of passional attraction was founded upon a pseudoscientific analogy with Newtonian attraction, Poe could have argued that his own cosmology was based on the work of respectable nineteenth-century scientists. One of Poe's major sources was an influential popular treatise by the British astronomer John Nichol that summarized Pierre-Simon Laplace's nebular hypothesis. Poe also appropriated Nichol's prediction that gravitational attraction would eventually contract all the matter in the universe into a single mass.[12] As its dedication to Alexander von Humboldt signals, Eureka paid tribute to several well-known scientists of the era. Furthermore, some of Poe's scientific speculations hold up surprisingly well. For example, he partially anticipated Maxwell's unified electromagnetic field theory (1281); one can also find proto-Einsteinian arguments for the space-time continuum (1340), against the ether hypothesis (1349-1352), and for the identity of mass and energy (1355). Poe even offers a Big Bang-like account of the formation of the visible universe (1276-1280). While Poe's scientific reputation may not deserve rehabilitation, many of his speculations were reasonable; his frequent citation of authorities and his arguments against pseudoscience added a veneer of respectability to Eureka.

As many readers have noted, however, Eureka echoes Auguste Dupin's argument in "The Purloined Letter" for the mathematician-poet's superiority to the mere mathematician; Poe launched a similar tirade against those scientists who were "mathematicians solely" and lacked "Imagination" (1290). Despite the scientific plausibility of many of Poe's cosmological speculations, Eureka is also a self-proclaimed "Prose Poem" that explicates his personal theology. Poe's pantheistic God created the material world in order to scatter His Being throughout the expanding universe in "almost Infinite Self-Diffusion." The creatures in this universe were not just part of the Divine Being; collectively, they comprised the Divine Life: “[T]he general sum of [these creatures'] sensations is precisely that amount of Happiness which appertains by right to the Divine Being when concentrated within Himself” (Poe 1358). This theo-mathematics became the basis for Poe's wacky cosmogony. He held that our universe would not expand forever because its intelligent creatures eventually become aware of their "identity with God" and long to restore the Divine Being's "Concentrated Self."[13] With this coming-to-consciousness, the expansion of the material universe would end and Poe's version of the Big Crunch would begin, activated by matter's "inclination for Unity" (1353), each atom's "sympathiz[ing] with the most delicate movements of every other atom" (1286). Poe claimed to have discovered the principle underlying Newtonian physics: particles of matter gravitated towards each other because they wanted to! Despite Poe's renunciation of Fourier, his delusional theory of the universe remarkably resembles Fourier's. The utopian socialist claimed that the passions attract us to our destiny in a fashion analogous to gravity; Poe claimed that passional attraction was the principle underlying gravitational attraction.

Eureka offers evidence that Poe had undergone the narcissistic regression described by Chasseguet-Smirgel. Kenneth Silverman's excellent biography similarly argues that Eureka's pathology is revealed by its opening and closing references to the death of its author. See, for example, the final note[14]:

The pain of the consideration that we shall lose our individual identity, ceases at once when we reflect further that the process, as above described, is, neither more nor less than that of the absorption, by each individual intelligence, of all other intelligences (that is, of the Universe) into its own. That God may be all in all, each must become God. (Poe 1359n)

For Silverman, Eureka is symptomatic of Poe's refusal to accept the reality principle, specifically, the reality of death: his "cosmological theorizing lends itself readily to gratifying consolatory fantasies of divinity and omnipotence" (Silverman 534). I would add that Poe's very title suggests more than a hint of megalomania. So does the philosophical digression preceding the exposition of Poe's cosmology, a "letter" from the year 2848 refuting the philosophical errors of previous millennia (1263-1271). The correspondent from the future argues for the superiority of the analogical method over the deductive philosophy of "Aries Tottle" and the inductive philosophy of "Hog" [i.e., Bacon].[15] In both substance and tone, Poe's irreverent dismissal of the two received philosophical methods is reminiscent of Fourier's splenetic rejection of the "uncertain sciences" in the introduction to Quatre mouvements (OC 1:14-19). In addition to Poe's obsession with analogy, one shared with Fourier, Silverman also notes the recurrence of the theme of Universal Unity (531-532). Such fixations, especially in conjunction with Poe's claims that he was carrying on the work of Newton and that matter has a "desire . . . to return into the Unity whence it was diffused,"[16] are strikingly reminiscent of Fourier. Like Fourier, Poe saw the present state of the universe as "abnormal" and predicted a "return into Unity" (1278).

While Fourier does not seem to have been a significant influence upon Poe, Eureka is congruent with Chasseguet-Smirgel's theory of regression to primary narcissism. Of course, one could run virtually any nineteenth-century Romantic text through this psychoanalytic reading machine, grind it up, and stuff it into the (appropriately phallocentric) sausage-casing of the ego ideal theory. But this theory offers a sensible explanation for some otherwise bizarre coincidences between Fourier's writings and Eureka: both championed a vitalist cosmology which insisted upon the analogy between gravitational attraction and volition, both barely concealed their authors' megalomania, both rejected received philosophy, both expressed dissatisfaction with the present order of things, and both searched for a Universal Unity to be achieved by a merger of all beings into the Godhead.

While Eureka did not inspire a social movement, one can hypothesize that a vision of social unity in which all people were to become part of the "One Man" might be regarded as an intermediate step in achieving cosmic unity. The potential relevance of Chasseguet-Smirgel's analysis to Whitman's "Song of Myself" has already been implied by Girgus (20-25). Indeed, Whitman's desires for cosmic, cultural, and psychic unity are inextricably knotted. Note, for example, the sequence of the poem's initial mystical vision. Whitman's narrator first rejects much of American society as the Other: "Trippers and askers surround me / [. . . .] / But they are not the Me myself" (29-30, ll. 55-65), thus projecting the "tripping and asking" part of the narrator's psyche (in Chasseguet-Smirgel's terms, the ego conscious of having fallen short of its ideal) onto the American body politic. This projection and rejection is immediately followed by the epiphanic reunion of the narrator's "my soul" with his "the other I am" (30, l. 73)—the reunion of ego and ideal—which in turn precipitates the orgasmic utopia of cosmic, social, and natural oneness (30-31; ll. 82-89). As the distinctions between birth, copulation, and death collapse in the vision of universal unity, the narrator reassures us, "Who need be afraid of the merge?" (31-33; ll. 101-136), a line that would not be out of place in Eureka. In the middle of another famous passage, one montage of images offers striking support for this psychoanalytic reading:

Through me many long dumb voices,

[. . . .]

Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion,

And of the threads that connect the stars—and of wombs, and of the fatherstuff (50; ll. 509, 513-514)

The heretofore repressed "threads that connect the stars" suggest a very Fourierist vision of interstellar intercourse. In the same line, the narrator discloses his seemingly incongruous desire to speak for womb and semen, which signals the ultimate regression fantasy: regression to the moment of conception. The juxtaposition of these two desires further suggests the equivalence of the individual and the stars, paralleling Fourier's theory of cosmogonic metempsychosis. Furthermore, the immediate context connects this cosmic fantasy of regression with the project of social reform: Walt also speaks the password primeval not just for the threads that connect the stars, but also for slaves, prostitutes, and deformed persons. Granted, these passages were probably not directly influenced by Fourier. On the other hand, Gay Wilson Allen has suggested Social Destiny of Man as a possible source for the cosmic imagery in the 1855 edition.[17]

Nor would I suggest that "Song of Myself," for all its wackiness, is "insane" in the clinical sense. It seems to me, however, that this always-fuzzy distinction can only be sustained on aesthetic grounds—if schizophrenia is bad poetry, then Whitman is very healthy. Even as Eureka dispenses with the narrative frame in presenting the same bizarre pseudo-scientific theories advanced and defended by the historical Poe (Silverman 338, 342), the text repeatedly insists upon its literary status as "prose poem," thus undermining those critics (myself included) who collapse the distinction between author and narrator. Conversely, if we argue that the textual "Walt" is more self-conscious of his self-projection than the the "Poe" of Eureka—knows he is proclaiming himself a "kosmos," knows he is taking himself "the exact dimensions of Jehovah"[18]—then does this self-consciousness make him less or more deluded than Eureka's narrator?

Another, possibly more fruitful distinction can be drawn between the two texts. Eureka, like many of Poe's other writings, made virtually no reference to American culture. In contrast, the 1855 "Song of Myself" was the first installment of Whitman's national poem; Walt is "an American, one of the roughs" before he is "a kosmos." Girgus's line of reasoning suggests that the very "American-ness" of a text with utopian tendencies may have significance for a psychoanalytic reading. As evidence, I offer a group of Hawthorne's tales published in 1843-1844—the period when American interest in Fourierism was at its peak. Like "Song of Myself," these tales—"The Hall of Fantasy," "The Procession of Life," "The Celestial Rail-road," and "Earth's Holocaust"—are self-conscious about their nationality. They were formally self-conscious as well: in her insightful study of spiritualism in antebellum literature, Carolyn Karcher points to them as the beginning of a new genre, the antireform satire (69). But I would suggest that the self-conscious detachment of these tales is their most important trait. That is, while the lay analysis conducted above treats Fourier's, Poe's, and Whitman's writings as "patients," Hawthorne's narrator is not merely another object for analysis. He performs the analyst's task, with America as his patient.[19] In this respect, Hawthorne's critique is more radical than Whitman's: it suggests that the American experiment in government may be an illusory reform.

None of the allegorical tales named above mention Fourier or his American followers[20]; the occasional snide references to French philosophy in these stories are probably aimed at Voltaire, Rousseau, and the Encyclopedists rather than at the nineteenth-century socialists. Yet in all of these stories, Hawthorne's narrator attacks the perfectionism of the era as regressive. For example, the "self-styled reformers" found in the Hall of Fantasy include "innumerable theorists" with "schemes for a better life" that are "as wild as fancy could make [them]"; they "look [at the whole external world] through pictured windows" and "mistake" their view "for the whitest sunshine" (Tales 741). Each of the reformers in the Procession of Life "is apt . . . to fancy that there is no other good to be done on earth but that self-same good to which he has put his hand" and that "his scheme must be wrought out . . . or the world is no longer worthy of a position in the universe" (Tales 803-804). A closely related subgenre, Hawthorne's mad scientist tales, may be read as allegorical proof that reformers are doomed by their perverse desires. Aylmer ("The Birth-mark") and Rappaccini practice perfectionism on a microcosmic level, ultimately killing their beloved subjects. The upshot of the social experiment in Rappaccini's Paduan garden—a microcosmic representation of America—suggests that Eden cannot be recovered by giving free rein to the passions. Thus, Hawthorne wrote several variations on The Blithedale Romance's major theme in the period of Fourierism's greatest popularity, some eight years before he began Blithedale. In both the anti-reform satires and the mad-scientist tales, a supposedly perfectionistic reform ultimately reveals its true, regressive nature. Furthermore, several of these tales were published in John L. O'Sullivan's Democratic Review, a major forum for debates on the Fourierist program.

Of all Hawthorne's anti-reform allegories, perhaps "The Celestial Rail-road" most closely parallels Chasseguet-Smirgel's critique of utopianism. In this high-tech rewrite of Pilgrim's Progress, Mr. Smooth-it-away's railroad offers the narrator a effortless ride, with the Celestial City as its ostensible destination. Ultimately, Mr. Smooth-it-away reveals himself to be the Devil, and his railroad has actually delivered its passengers to the ferry bound for Hell. The allegory, a didactic and mildly amusing variation on Bunyan's Christian typology, also has resonance in secular contexts. On one level, "The Celestial Rail-road" warns against placing too much faith in technological progress. The Devil's very pseudonym promises that all former difficulties can be smoothed away in the Industrial Age. But those who believe in painless progress eventually find themselves in a dystopia.

An alternative reading might borrow from Leo Marx in mapping Hawthorne's use of the railroad metaphor onto "the landscape of the psyche" (27-28). If we anachronistically read Pilgrim's Progress as an allegory of Chasseguet-Smirgel's theory, the Christian pilgrim becomes the ego (the pilgrim's sense of fallenness standing in for the ego's awareness of having lost the state of primary narcissism), the Celestial City becomes the ego ideal, and the pilgrim's long and difficult journey symbolizes the maturation of the ego. In "The Celestial Rail-road," Mr. Smooth-it-away has glad tidings for the pilgrims: they no longer must endure the painful maturation process. Many new conveniences ease the pilgrims' progress: they can use a new bridge to cross Bunyan's Slough of Despond (808-809); they can take their burdens off their shoulders and deposit them "snugly" in the baggage-car (810); and, instead of making an arduous climb up the Hill Difficulty, they can relax while the train travels through a recently-bored tunnel. As Hawthorne's narrator half-perceives, however, these shortcuts offer no real progress. The bridge across the Slough of Despond "vibrated and heaved up and down, in a very formidable manner." At the end of the line, the pilgrims must retrieve their burdens from the baggage-car. Hawthorne's narrator implies doubt about the tunnel's sturdiness in typically ironic fashion: "unless the rocks and earth should chance to crumble down, it will remain an eternal monument of the builder's skill and enterprise" (813). In the end, the illusory nature of all these reforms is revealed. In reading "The Celestial Rail-road" as a psychoanalytic morality tale, we learn that true progress can only be made by accepting the Freudian project and acknowledging the reality principle. Readers in the 1840s, the age of freedom's ferment, might well have inferred a more specific moral: world-reformers such as Fourier offer nothing but mirages.

The application of this reading to all of Hawthorne's anti-reform tales has a blind spot, however. It fails to account for the narrator's occasional expressions of sympathy for reformers. For example, the visitor to the Hall of Fantasy praises all reformers for their idealism. Whether they are inspired or misguided, he "love[s] and honor[s] such men" (Tales 740). Another tale from this period, "The New Adam and Eve," shows that an unfallen couple would find existing social institutions disagreeable. The conflict between noble passions and ignoble culture is a quintessentially Fourierist theme. Likewise, the narrator of "The Procession of Life" appeals to our "innate sense of something wrong" with all past and present schemes of organizing humanity. He describes his tale as a speculative attempt to make "a true classification of society" (Tales 795), a goal for which Fourier also strove.

Hawthorne's critique of utopian alternatives in these self-referential American tales implicitly underwrites his audience's faith in the cultural status quo. At the same time, his praise of visionary utopians has the potential to undermine his audience's faith in the ultimate success of the American experiment. In asking what Chasseguet-Smirgel's analysis of Fourier omits, I will argue for Fourierism's relevance to the American ideology.

II.

After reading "The Celestial Rail-road" through Chasseguet-Smirgel's framework, one might offer the tale as a post-Cold War allegory. Hawthorne's narrator suddenly wakes from his dream to discover that he has barely escaped being delivered to the Dark Valley. Similarly, Chasseguet-Smirgel implies that socialist history is a nightmare from which we should be trying to awake. From this perspective, Fourierism becomes a particularly convenient ideological opponent, easily debunked and useful in calling its socialist progeny into question. Daniel Bell, for example, who has articulated a narrow definition of "ideology" similar to Chasseguet-Smirgel's, has also written one of the most strident attacks upon Fourierism.[21] The opening sentences of Bell's well-known essay on American Marxism, reprinted in The End of Ideology, mock utopian longing: "Socialism was an unbounded dream. Fourier promised that under socialism people would be at least ten feet tall" ("Background" 1:215).

Even self-proclaimed socialists have resorted to the strategy of rejecting alternative socialisms by associating them with Fourierism. The nineteenth-century German socialist Eugen Dühring dismissed Saint-Simon, Enfantin, and Owen, but reserved his most contemptuous remarks for Fourier, as a contemporary critic noted:

With Fourier [. . .] Herr Dühring completely loses patience. For Fourier "revealed every element of insanity . . . ideas which one would normally have most expected to find in madhouses . . . the wildest dreams . . . products of delirium . . . ." "The unspeakably silly Fourier," this "infantile mind," this "idiot" is withal not even a socialist; his phalanstery is absolutely not a piece of rational socialism, but "a caricature constructed on the pattern of everyday commerce."

And finally:

"Anyone who does not find these effusions" (of Fourier's, concerning Newton) ". . . sufficient to convince himself that in Fourier's name and in the whole of Fourierism it is only the first syllable" (fou—crazy) "that has any truth in it, should himself be classed under some category of idiots." (MECW 25:31)

Indeed, Fourier's profound influence upon the early writings of Marx and Engels—even upon the Manifesto, despite its critique of the utopian socialists—has been taken as an manifestation of the implausibility, impossibility, or even lunacy of Marxism, if not of socialism in general.[22] Indeed, The German Ideology is peppered with favorable allusions to Fourierism, including Marx and Engels's attack upon the "true socialist" Karl Grün for his misreading of Fourier (MECW 5:510-519). Fourier's parallel critique of mercantilism and marriage was the model for The German Ideology's comparison of the exploitation of labor in the family with that of the social order.[23] This dual critique became the theoretical basis for the Manifesto's call for the abolition of the family in the classless society. Even Marx's utopia, in which the unalienated laborer would be able to hunt, fish, rear cattle, and criticize in the same workday "without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd, or critic" (MECW 5:47), was inspired by Fourier's plan for serial labor. In the Phalanx, all work was to be done in two-hour shifts in order to satisfy the alternating, or "butterfly" passion's need for variety (Beecher 294). And what overarching passion is communist society designed to satisfy if not Fourierist "unityism"?

But there is a fundamental problem with the attempt to tar Marxism with the insanity of Fourierism. The critic who cited Dühring's dismissal of Fourier was, of course, Engels in his Anti-Dühring (1878). It was here that Engels introduced the distinction between "scientific" and "utopian" socialism and emphatically rejected the latter as counterproductive. Yet Engels defended Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Owen, arguing that they could not have been expected to transcend their historical situation: "To the crude conditions of capitalist production and the crude class conditions corresponded crude theories" (MECW 25:246). Engels even singled out Fourier's "criticism of the existing conditions of society" for praise. In his eyes, Fourier was a brilliant economic satirist and the first feminist theorist. Most significantly from the Marxist perspective, Engles lauded Fourier for developing a theory of history that, in "prov[ing] . . . that civilisation moves in a 'vicious circle,' in contradictions which it constantly reproduces without being able to solve them . . . . uses the dialectic method in the same masterly way as his contemporary Hegel" (MECW 25:247-248).

How could Engels reconcile this portrait of Fourier the "masterly" dialectician with that of the crackpot visionary? He had first addressed this question more than thirty years earlier, in his 1846 translation of "A Fragment of Fourier's on Trade."[24] In the introduction, Engels faulted the overtheoretical, "Hegelianised" German socialists for only paying attention to "what is worst and most theoretical" in French socialism. He cited Fourier as an exemplary socialist critic, but with the qualification that his social writings needed to be divorced from his "speculative constructions":

It is true that Fourie