Cooper, Freud and the Origins of Culture

We know now that we have inherited, from earlier generations of critics, a legacy of confused opinion on James Fenimore Cooper. And today we undertake to describe his accomplishment in those areas of thought where his genius most fully presents itself, in the realm of fable and legend. For we realize that Cooper, assuming the role of myth-maker, was nearly as inventive as the Indians and frontiersmen whom he prized, as quick as they to infer a thing in the thicket from the lightest quiver of a twig. The work in which his special gifts are most fully exploited is The Prairie, his own favorite fiction in the Natty Bumppo series, and the only one of his novels which is both programmatic and emblematic but not a tract or an allegory. It is also the sole work in which his ideas are argued by characters whose lives are buttressed by an accurate psychology. And though the novel is nowadays much analyzed, no one has recognized that its peculiar strength is rooted in what we must call a striking achievement of Cooper's unconscious imagination. Even D. H. Lawrence, who was first to notice that The Prairie is a “strange, splendid book,” full of the “shadow of violence and dark cruelty,” was unable to say exactly why it filled him with “the sense of doom.” Lawrence sensed that this novel, at its core, harbored “the aboriginal demon.” (1) But he did not realize that Cooper's demon was the same one that preoccupied Freud and was described first in Totem an Taboo