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Out from Under Gogol's Overcoat: A Psychoanalytic Study. By Daniel Rancour-Laferriere. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1982. 251 pp. $19.50

This book of loop-holes and disclaimers offers a mode of psychoanalytic peekaboo, while acknowledging that Gogol' is probably something more, and leads a merry chase along a course strewn with red herrings. The author declares himself "no biographer," yet he feels drawn "toward a psychobiography of Gogol'." Rancour-Laferriere alludes pointedly here and there to tasks of old and new literary history which will someday serve him well in his quest for the Gogolian telos. One basic premise is that Gogol "s style is a disguise, an illusion that must have a purpose, or at least commensurate purposes, "for Gogol and for the reader who enjoys Gogol's text." This reasonable but problematic assumption holds out the hope of human contact with the author of "The Overcoat," primarily through scrupulous introspection and analysis of one's own responses. Rancour-Laferriere derives this method from Norman Holland but does not apply it in any systematic fashion. Although he feels "impelled toward an understanding of the strong surges of emotion" triggered in himself and others by Gogol' 's text — a desire to know "why [I felt] the way I did" — he does not specifically describe, chronicle, or analyze these emotions. Instead, the author offers us a random, diffuse set of allusions to various readers. A coherent subject for psychoanalysis is lacking. This is a disappointment because the author might have discovered valid forms of empathy through such introspection. The time might be ripe for broader surveys of Russian reader response along lines suggested by Bruno Bettelheim and by I. A. Richards, but if criticism is to be psychoanalytic, it must have a whole subject: a dynamic organism, not a single intricately encoded text. This is a principle sometimes articulated by Rancour-Laferriere but not rigorously applied. What should follow from the premise is old-fashioned textology and biography. Meticulous attention to subtexts, demonstrated with brilliance by the author in other publications, is neglected here. It could provide another obvious method for discerning psychic movement or the direction of the text's hidden message — a vector of the telos. The essential problem of GogoF's "Overcoat" is suggested by a passage from Otto Fenichel, which notes that human pity may be either a facade for sadism or a sublimation that really supplants it. In either case a form of identification is implied by gestures of pity, but what a world of difference in the human face of the message! The author's reading of Gogol' offers no final decoding, but many a provocative speculation. For instance, could GogoF's great tale prove to be "just a piece of paper covering an essentially anal aperture, a repulsive nether zero which leads nowhere?" This reviewer, for one, has no quibble with such conjectures.