Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- List of Figures
- Introduction
- 1 The Roots that Clutch: John Buchan, Scottish Fiction and Scotland
- 2 A Civilizing Empire: T. H. Green, Lord Milner and John Buchan
- 3 A Very Modern Experiment: John Buchan and Rhodesia
- 4 ‘The Ministry of Information’: John Buchan's Friendship with T. E. Lawrence
- 5 Masculinities in the Richard Hannay ‘War Trilogy’ of John Buchan
- 6 John Buchan and the Emerging ‘Post-Modern’ Fact: Information Culture and the First World War
- 7 The Spy-Scattered Landscapes of Modernity in John Buchan's Mr Standfast
- 8 The Soul's ‘Queer Corners’: John Buchan and Psychoanalysis
- 9 John Buchan, Myth and Modernism
- 10 John Buchan and the American Pulp Magazines
- 11 What Kind of Heritage? Modernity versus Heritage in Huntingtower
- 12 Living Speech, Dying Tongues and Reborn Language: John Buchan and Scots Vernacular Poetry
- 13 John Buchan in Canada: Writing a New Chapter in Canada's Constitutional History
- Notes
- Index
8 - The Soul's ‘Queer Corners’: John Buchan and Psychoanalysis
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- List of Figures
- Introduction
- 1 The Roots that Clutch: John Buchan, Scottish Fiction and Scotland
- 2 A Civilizing Empire: T. H. Green, Lord Milner and John Buchan
- 3 A Very Modern Experiment: John Buchan and Rhodesia
- 4 ‘The Ministry of Information’: John Buchan's Friendship with T. E. Lawrence
- 5 Masculinities in the Richard Hannay ‘War Trilogy’ of John Buchan
- 6 John Buchan and the Emerging ‘Post-Modern’ Fact: Information Culture and the First World War
- 7 The Spy-Scattered Landscapes of Modernity in John Buchan's Mr Standfast
- 8 The Soul's ‘Queer Corners’: John Buchan and Psychoanalysis
- 9 John Buchan, Myth and Modernism
- 10 John Buchan and the American Pulp Magazines
- 11 What Kind of Heritage? Modernity versus Heritage in Huntingtower
- 12 Living Speech, Dying Tongues and Reborn Language: John Buchan and Scots Vernacular Poetry
- 13 John Buchan in Canada: Writing a New Chapter in Canada's Constitutional History
- Notes
- Index
Summary
At the outset of Buchan's 1924 novel The Three Hostages, a conversation between Richard Hannay and his friend Dr Greenslade conveys a sceptical attitude to psychoanalysis. The occasion is a poignant consideration of the horror of recent history that emerges from a discussion of a detective story. ‘Have you ever realized, Dick’, Greenslade asks, ‘the amount of stark craziness that the War has left in the world?’ For the bluff, straight-talking Hannay this development is attributable to the centuries-old notion of original sin, but for Greenslade sin is not enough. Rather, he posits (somewhat vaguely) ‘a dislocation of the mechanism of human reasoning, a general loosening of the screws’ that comprises something more than Hannay's conventional view. The crisis of modernity Greenslade hypothesizes is a favourite topic of Buchan's, particularly of his ‘shockers’ with their recurrent figuring of a civilization beleaguered by forces bent on its destruction. As the doctor goes on diagnosing the West's cultural malaise, he reaches what sounds very much like a Freudian approach to this persistent theme:
All history has been an effort to make definitions, clear rules of thought, clear rules of conduct, solid sanctions, by which we can conduct our life. These are the work of the conscious self. The subconscious is an elementary and lawless thing.
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- Chapter
- Information
- John Buchan and the Idea of Modernity , pp. 125 - 140Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014