A Crisis of Paternity

Abstract

Leslie Fiedler, commenting on Stevenson’s inclination to play the role of child and to fall in love with older women, says of his marriage to the forty-year-old Fanny van de Grift that ‘there can be little doubt that one of Stevenson’s motives in marrying was to become a child — and finding himself at the age of 30 at long last a child enabled him unexpectedly to become for the first time a real creative writer’.¹ Having delivered himself of this assured analysis of Stevenson’s psycho-sexual drives and the nature of the literary imagination, Fiedler doesn’t really attempt any very serious justification. Which is probably just as well since his colourful diagnosis, while it may be winsomely paradoxical, seriously misrepresents Stevenson’s problems with authorship — literary and biological.

Death of the Father would deprive literature of many of its pleasures. If there is no longer a Father, why tell stories? Doesn’t every narrative lead back to Oedipus? Isn’t storytelling always a way of searching for one’s origin, speaking one’s conflicts with the Law, entering into the dialectic of tenderness and hatred?

Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text

‘Who doesn’t desire his father’s death?’

Ivan in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov