ABSTRACT
Literary mutation is contemporaneous with the birth and development of psychoanalysis. There seems then to be a sort of avoidance on the part of psychoanalysis with regard to contemporary literature, even though their common ground is so obvious, psychoanalysis being so demonstrably present on all three sides of the literary triangle: the writer’s side, the reader’s side, and the critic’s side. Any division of the literary world into two classes, the initiate and the noninitiate, tends to produce ambivalent effects. In unbinding the text, the psychoanalytical critic does not merely set it off-centre – as it is fashionable to say. He makes it skip its groove and in so doing transfers it to another field which people claim is no longer literature. If in the process of unveiling the interrelations between the text and the unconscious another reality comes into view, it is indeed a nonliterary reality.
