On Freud’s Jensen’s Gradiva

 

This was a talk given at the Freud Museum on 15 January 2008:

as part of its Gradiva Project. The title there was :

Shaping the Dream-Lover : Immortal Longings in Gradiva& Solaris

 

[I begin with the talk as given. Appended are a Timeline of the novel: 

some notes explaining the key terms and the references for the film collage.

The Jensen text is Green Integer 2003: quotes preceded by ‘J’. The Freud is Penguin 14.]

 

SECTION 1 : INTRODUCTION

 

Let’s begin with two stories:

 

(i)

“The immoral daughters of Propoetus” Ovid tells “dared to deny that Venus was the goddess. For this, because of her divine anger, they are said to have been the first to prostitute their bodies and their reputations in public, and, losing all sense of shame, they lost the power to blush, as the blood hardened in their cheeks, and only a small change turned them into hard flints."  Observing their degradation, Pygmalion decides he is “not interested in women.” But of course he is, and he shapes his ideal woman in ivory, Galatea: and then prays to Venus to bring her to life.  They marry and live happily!  As Diana Ross knew: “Stoned love – oh yeah!”

 

(ii)

Another sculptor, of Jensen’s time, a real person, but now spoken of as an almost mythic renaissance genius, also seemingly felt neither interest nor even grace towards women. Then at his mid-life crisis, the forty-year-old predatory yet conflicted homosexual “fell in love” with the much younger Marguerite. He imagines marrying her but on condition that they do not have sex. When I read his diary entry, “For three hours we kissed each other a great deal and it was very nice”  I burst out laughing at this piece of schoolgirl juvenilia. Then I was angry at the wretched dishonesty of it. It was, you might have guessed, Wittgenstein. Had he been a pagan & not been a disavowing Jew & a recalcitrant Catholic, he’d have probably prayed to the old gods for her to be turned to manageable marble. (N1)

 

Jensen’s story is of another man who “had never given his feminine contemporaries the least consideration” [J:p.14] but then falls in love with a stone-relief.

 

The kinds of possible beings in the world, and how humans may be connected to them or ought to be disconnected from them, varies from age to paradigm. In the Ancient World – Greece, India, Rome China – humans accepted multiplicities of beings and consequently a variety of human+other hybrids: humans and gods, demi-gods, demons, plants, stones etc…

 

Monotheistic faiths instituted successive culls of these other life-forms and the possibilities of them helping, fighting or loving one has been severely circumscribed. But this has not made any easier the lifelong task of maintaining an integrated ego: one must remain vigilant in exactly the same measure against the psychopathological temptation to surrender  viz Schrader or  Peter Sutcliffe.

 

Before coming to the twentieth century stories of Gradiva and Solaris, I want to briefly sketch the delineations of their realm given by three earlier geniuses.

 

 

1: DANTE

 

There came to me in dreams a stammering woman,

  Squint in her eyes, and in her feet distorted,

  With hands dissevered and of sallow hue.

 

I looked at her; and as the sun restores

  The frigid members which the night benumbs,

  Even thus my gaze did render voluble

 

Her tongue, and made her all erect thereafter

  In little while, and the lost countenance

  As love desires it so in her did colour.

 

When in this wise she had her speech unloosed,

  She 'gan to sing so, that with difficulty

  Could I have turned my thoughts away from her.

 

"I am," she sang, "I am the Siren sweet

  Who mariners amid the main unman,

  So full am I of pleasantness to hear.

 

I drew Ulysses from his wandering way

  Unto my song, and he who dwells with me

  Seldom departs so wholly I content him."

 

Her mouth was not yet closed again, before

  Appeared a Lady saintly and alert

  Close at my side to put her to confusion.

 

"Virgilius, O Virgilius! who is this?"

  Sternly she said; and he was drawing near

  With eyes still fixed upon that modest one.

 

She seized the other and in front laid open,

  Rending her garments, and her belly showed me;

  This waked me with the stench that issued from it.

 

 

This is one of the most astonishing dreams in world literature. It is a brilliant description not only of the uncontrollable, protean nature of the sleeping imagination viz the unconscious – even in the blessed state of Purgatory – but of the mechanism of projection. Residues of desire transform the hag into the siren. But precisely because Dante is fundamentally contrite & so saved, he also produces in his dream the good parents, the Lady and Virgil, who will rescue him from his unconscious. Those who have made it to the top of Purgatory know that one of the first beings that Dante sees in the Earthly Paradise is a sort of cousin of Gradiva, walking with ravishing grace in a meadow picking flowers, Matilda.

 

 

2: MARLOWE

The spiritual & intellectual crisis unleashed by the Renaissance and the Reformation finds one crux in Marlowe’s Faust. Its most famous line carries all the misery and hope of the project:

Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships

And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?

Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.

 

Even though by now his atheism is fragmenting, he can’t call on Christianity’s top-girl Mary Magnificat for eternal life. Most heterosexual men would imagine sex with the superlative Helen. The defeated philosopher longs for the perfect kiss.

 

The Pygmalion prayer and the Faustian bargain are the two most common tragedies of ordinary, as well as mythical, life. They are the perfect synthesis of psychopathology because they are so distant from the line of adult maturation: which is to negotiate with the other person on the basis of freely stated preferences how separate and mutual satisfactions of all kinds might happen. In their miserific awareness of the loss of omnipotence, Pygmalion and Faustus call on numinous powers to restore them to the joys of the pleasure-principle, complete control of all matter. These not-quite-human women will not have, in George Eliot’s sublime phrase “an equivalent centre of self, whence the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain difference.”

 

3 : SHAKESPEARE

Shakespeare knew Marlowe had set him a puzzle about other-beings, and he tried to answer this in Macbeth and The Tempest. Prospero decked in his cape & staff, in a cell-full of books, recalls Faustus in his study. But the Bard was no more able than Marlowe, of integrating the female principle – both of intellection & sensuality. Sycorax is trashed as his negative & despatched in offstage exposition. His wife fades away in clichés of purity. The play starts at the time when his daughter’s budding sexuality more inescapably disturb his incestuous longings.

 

4: BYRON

Finally, as a comparison, here is someone whose reality-principle coincided with his pleasure-principle: what he imagined getting, he got. Men & women threw themselves at him. He famously said "If a girl of eighteen comes prancing to you at all hours, there is but one way."  I like the choreography of foreplay suggested by prancing.

 

 

Before moving to 20C narratives, I must acknowledge two massive weaknesses in this genre. Firstly, there are not many female equivalents of Faustus or Pygmalion. Sister Jeanne of Loudhon, in the book & film The Devils  is a tragic, religious sex-hysteric. Charles William’s Mrs Sammele is the closest, but we don’t get to know the minutiae of her bargain.  It is admirable that Cobbing’s video installation at the Freud Museum has both the clay-headed man & the woman blindly viz unconsciously trying to reshape their lover

Secondly, the tales do carry the pathetic whiff of the male menopause. Contemporary journalists have given us the apt noun middle-youth to describe the inability of those well past mid-life to “put away childish things”.  Though we must at least acknowledge that the men in Faustus, Gradiva, and Solaris, are all brainiacs and not mere toe-tapping middle-management wonks, partial to the weekend snort. The first pair are introduced as ascetic celibates who’ve put in decades of solitary thought, their noses filled with midnight candle smoke not cocaine. Clearly their principal passion was epistemophilia. Freud, whose nose was full of both, of course would describe, not reduce, this as an almost unhealthy intensity of sublimation: their seeming preference for the touch of paper rather than flesh merely disclosing their terror of the embrace that can be withheld.

 

I think these pre-20C stories are vital to an understanding of Jensen’s Gradiva and of Freud’s Jensen. Temporal logic would suggest that I now turn to the former, written in 1903. But as my experience of these texts was preceded by an engagement with Lem and Williams, I will introduce them first. Consider these two scenes, both featuring men who’ve spent countless hours among books:

 

(i) WILLIAMS

Wentworth, a former-soldier and military historian, still unmarried in his fifties, becomes obsessed with an engaged young-woman, Adela, in the village theatre-group. He has a series of bad dreams, comes to bitterly envy & hate her fiancé, and finally she appears to him in delusory form:

“If he woke the phantom would be there by his side, petting or crooning to him: until one night he thought how pleasant it would be to wake and look on her asleep, and the next time he woke, there indeed she was, disposed to his wish. It sat in his room, and talked to him, with his own borrowed intelligence. But the thing could not astonish him nor could it be adored. It perplexed. He was haunted by a memory of another Adela.”  [p.132,82,135,]

 

 (ii) LEM

Kris a scientist has arrived on the space station on planet Solaris, which is covered almost entirely by an ocean, and under two suns, red and blue. Astronomers have been investigating the nature of the ocean for decades. He finds the place in disarray: and the cosmonauts traumatised and cagey. They advise him to:

“Keep a hold on yourself and be prepared to meet…anything”. Only hours later .

 

“Overcome with exhaustion…I fell asleep with the lights on… I reopened my eyes with the impression of having dozed off only for a few minutes.

I lay there, the bedclothes pushed back, completely naked. The curtains were half-drawn, and there, opposite me, beside the window-pane lit by the red sun, someone was sitting. It was Rheya. She was wearing a white beach dress, the material stretched tightly over her breasts…. Evidently the dead do not change. My first thought was reassuring: I was dreaming, and I was aware that I was dreaming. ”

He lies there, opening and closing his eyes, thinking. Then…

“I heard a metallic noise, and opened my eyes again. Rheya was sitting beside me on the bed... I smiled at her. She smiled back at me and leaned forward. We kissed… I did not wake… I should have to endure this dream right to the bitter end. I was afraid.”  [pp54-6]

 

The first is from Descent into Hell by Charles Williams. It was written in 1937 and is the greatest and most original development of Shakespeare’s Tempest in four centuries. Prospero, the cramped, misogynist, egomaniacal scholar that Shakespeare over-defends is realised in the tragically bitter and graceless historian Wentworth. But there is also a genuine magus of new understanding and gender-blind kindness, realised in the dramatic poet Stanhope. The novel very subtly presents the theme of the necessity of the  experience of the dilation of time, and the way this opens the possibility of communication & influence, rescue & reparation, between the living and the dead. Contrasted with these is the hell of the pursuit of merely narcissistic satisfactions. A generation later, Lem stood beside Marlowe and produced a Faustus for a secular age. We will return to this.

 

FREUD

 

Coming now to Freud, one gets a strange intellectual frisson when one reads his 1907 gloss on the word ‘unconscious’ “ a term which has today become unavoidable in psychopathology”  [p.72]. For us, an obligation is disclosed, to imagine the pre-Freudian climate and being struck by the lightening of his ideas. Jensen uses the received slightly mystical phrase “sixth sense”  [J:p.115] When I read that line of Freud’s, I immediately thought of the advent of the precise term oxygen out of the gas-soup of phlogiston in 1774, a century before him.  Closer to his day, is the shadowy presence of Aristotle. It is said that Frege’s 1879 work marked the most significant development in logic since Aristotle, over two millennia earlier. I believe that Aristotle’s Poetics is the foundation of all literary criticism. Its criteria for the appraisal of any narrative – plot, character, diction, thought, song, and spectacle - and its foregrounding of metaphor as the central device of diction, remain unsurpassed. Freud’s brilliant development was to show how his theory of unconscious processes could explain the formation of particular metaphors, the symbols chosen and, more generally, the thought processes of the characters, and behind them the author’s thought processes and structural ideas of the work-as-a-whole.

 

Though he was to speak of Jensen’s story as having “no particular merit in itself”  and to mock the “usual happy ending in marriage”  for providing “satisfaction [for] his female readers” , he also acknowledged that it was the perfect story with which to demonstrate the range of application of his new conceptual tool, dream theory, and that the author had produced a “perfectly correct psychiatric study”  [pp 30, 110, 68]

 

I will not give a detailed exposition of either Jensen’s story or Freud’s paper or in fact refer much to Freud’s later work. I will, rather, give a brief description of Freud’s analytical device and then offer some comments on his hesitations in using it here.

 

As a good Darwinian and amateur classicist, Freud was haunted by the axiom “ontogeny reproduces phylogeny.”  [anon]. Even before being given Gradiva, he was struck by the aptness of the archaeological metaphor for his researches into layers of human motive & meaning. In Strachey’s phrase Freud shows “almost presti-digital skill [in how he ] extracts this wealth of material” from Hanold’s one relief, three dreams, four encounters with Zoe and assorted symbols of flora & fauna.

 

Imagine Newton writing a review of a new book on how to build a faster four-horse stage-coach, whose author knew nothing of gravity and aerodynamics. I hope this analogy helps you to keep in mind Part II of Freud’s first piece of psychoanalytic criticism where he offers “the technical terminology of our science” to explain dreams and delusions. [p.69].   

 

Two consequences of Freud’s mighty ideas about the unconscious are the assertion that childhood sexuality exists & shapes adult sexuality and the denial of amnesia.

“Ever since Binet [1888] we have in fact tried to trace fetishism back to erotic impressions in childhood.” [p.71]  

“It is our belief that no one forgets anything without some secret reason or hidden motive.”  [p.48]

One of the implications for lit-crit of this belief is that the critic can & must fill-in plausible details & omissions with respect to both the characters & the plot, and offer good reasons for the author’s lacunae.

 

He proposes that the following mechanism will unravel such “secret reasons and hidden motives”. Immature childhood erotism may develop psycho-logically or pathologically. The latter sequence proceeds thus:

1: There is “the suppression of a part of instinctual life.” [p.78]

2: “and the repression of the ideas by which the suppressed instinct is represented.” [p.78]

3 : There is a repressing agency and means.

4:  “The formation of symptoms [occurs] by means of compromises between the two mental currents struggling against each other.” [p 78-9]

5: “The struggle between the power of erotism and that of the forces that were repressing it” manifests as the symptom of delusion. [p.74]

6: The means of repression are also the means of de-repression, arousal.

“The arousing of the repressed erotism came precisely from the field of the instruments that served to bring about the repression” viz science & archaeology. [p.74]

7: “The first & immediate aim of reality testing is, not to find an object in real perception which corresponds to the one presented, but to refind such an object , to convince oneself that it is there.”  The ur-object is the mother’s breast. [Negation : Freud 11:p.440]

 

Freud’s scepticism of the possibility of uncomplicated normal people is given by his aphorism “Dreams are the physiological delusions of normal people” [p.87]

 

 

COMMENTARY

One can read into Freud’s own day-dreams, not delusions, that he longed to equal if not surpass his contemporary Marie Curie, heroine of one of the smallest groups in the history of the world – double Nobel Prize winners. Freud imagined getting one for science, for producing like Mendaleyev, another contemporary genius, a table of all the possible human instincts and psychic forces : and one for literature for telling the human stories of their interactions as beautifully as Goethe, who wrote Elective Affinities as well as Faust.  So it is odd to find in the middle of this paper such self-lacerating generalisations as:

i)“[There is] in the psychiatrist’s view… a tendency to coarsen everything”

ii) “all such symptoms of nomenclature and classification of different kinds of delusion according to their subject matter have something precarious and barren about them.” [p.70]

Please keep that word ‘barren’ in mind. Perhaps against the tendency to coarsen, he remarks of the women & girls in the street that Hanold is researching:

“[They] must, of course, have taken another, crudely erotic view of his behaviour, and we cannot but think them right.”  [p.75]

 

There is a strange, untypical prissiness here – what is non-coarse psychiatry and what is a non-crudely erotic view! Jensen gives his gormless celibate a sexual metaphor for science as an “old dried-up/barren aunt”  [J:p.55]  fitting his transition towards a healthy sexual life. But what of Freud, who was to be fearlessly free in his associations and conjectures about unusual sexual longings.

 

TERMS

Before moving on to my interpretations, I want to comment briefly on the two words central to Jensen ‘interest’ and ‘phantasy’ When I was young enough to be charmed by etymology, I was delighted to learn that the remark  “X is interesting” is a minimal and almost useless judgement for the word interesting means ‘between being’ viz uncommitted. Of the committed states, with respect to a possible sexual connection, we can distinguish three by the make-up of the psycho-sexual energy

a) pure love – a perfect balance of invested psychic and sexual energy

b) pure lust – a condition with minimal psychic investment, manifest mostly as a puzzlement at the sense of inescapability from the body’s demands.

c) fascination – a condition with minimal sexual investment and the consequent puzzlement at the sense of a pointless but still inescapable pursuit of someone’s company.

 

Psychoanalytic theory complicates this naive picture by introducing the concept of sublimation -  the unconscious direction of psycho-sexual energy towards a non-sexual use and release. But it does also posit the necessity of ordinary sexual release.

 

Fantasy-with-an-F is the conscious musing of someone who has attained the anaclitic position.

Phantasy-with-a Ph is the unconscious musing of someone who has regressed to the narcissistic position.

This is a technical but not moral distinction made by Freud. (see Appendix below)

 

One good way to understand declarations of uninterestedness in young adults is through the wonderful remark by Ray Connolly:

“Show me a boy who doesn’t want to be a rock star, and I’ll show you a liar.”  

That was the seventies. Nowadays young girls share such fanatsies – Britney, Paris, Gwen, Amy et al. The failure of the fantasy is such a narcissistic wound that the desire is conveniently forgotten. – “Oh not me, I never wanted to be a rock star. I always wanted to do accounts & wash lepers.”  It is worth noting that though George Eliot introduces the teenage Dorothea as fantasising about emulating St Theresa, there would surely have been an earlier moment when she wished that like Rosamund Vincy, she could imagine being the Helen of the Middlemarch ball.

 

 

 

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TENDENTIOUS INTERPRETATIONS

 

Being less mindful than Freud of  “tendentious interpretation”  [p.68] I will offer a few plausible extrapolations of my own from where he paused. I will head each of the baker’s dozen of remarks with the name of a film, but will leave you to make the connection and invite you to dispute them.

 

 

1: LORD OF THE FLIES

At the nadir of his repression and misogyny Hanold equates the ordinary flies of a hot summer with fertile honeymooners, and contradictorily with that, also with absolutely barren superfluity. His designation of one as a “black monster” and “absolute evil” [J:pp 110 & 43]  is nearer to hysteria than a literary allusion to Mephistopheles. Perhaps they also symbolize the protean ineluctable nature of sexual desire – one can’t shake a stick or penis at them or scatter them with an admonishing word. Given the crucial scene of the experiment with the fly on Gradiva’s hand, it is remarkable that a classicist like Hanold (or Freud) would not mention Ovid’s flea: the poet envying and imagining the insect’s freedom to explore his lover’s body. Connected with this is the other ancient fantasy of freedom, of having the ring of Gyges whose invisibility allows one to see (and measure) any female part one wanted.

 

The transition from rage at black-monster-flies to being charmed by the butterfly, like that from the asphodel to the rose, marks his passage to health. One is reminded of an even more disturbed traveller: the once young, now ancient mariner. In his breakdown he sees :

“slimy things did crawl with legs

Upon the slimy sea…

The water, like a witch's oils”

It is when he comes to “bless them unawares” that his healing begins. This is of course a mystical not psychoanalytic cure and it is imperfect for he uses his experience of enlightenment sadistically on others, like the wedding-guest.

 

 

2 : AMERICAN BEAUTY

From the Ancients to Robbie Burns to Orson Welles to Kevin Spacey’s cheerleader fantasy, the rose has been the visually consonant symbol of the vagina. As a Christian classicist, Hanold would have known of the pathetic attempts of the Church Fathers to de-eroticise the rose, putting in its place the concept of the “mystic rose”, the setting and symbol of the Virgin Mary in paradise. Jensen and Freud use the rose with no more depth than a Mills & Boon hack. Hearst knew better and could only rage like Kane that Welles & Mankiewicz had made public his pet name for Marion Davies’s clitoris – Rosebud.

 

 

3 : A TASTE OF HONEY

Contrary to the hope of Ecclesiastes, I was, as a teenager, instantly seduced by his proverb.

“The lips of a strange woman drop honey,

And her mouth is smoother than oil”

Where can I get one, I thought, even if, as the Preacher added, “her feet go down to hell.”?  

 

The lack of gloss or interpretation by Jensen & Freud on ‘honey’ is surprising. ‘Honeymoon’ is a surviving ancient pagan borrowing. No doubt honey is a synecdoche for the socially-sanctioned allotted-time for all appetitive pleasures. It also symbolizes the stickiness of sex, most particularly vaginal secretion. Even the Preacher knew that much. Can one conjecture that Hanold and Zoe knew of such stickiness below from their play-fights?

 

But in his hotel room, overhearing the lovers play-talk next door, he experiences what can only be described as hysterical synaesthesia:

“It seemed to Norbert Hanold that he had had thin honey poured upon from all sides and that he had to dispose of it swallow by swallow. A sick feeling came over him and he ran out to the nearest osteria to drink a glass of vermouth.”  [J:p.38] The film correlate to this scene is the gay-orgy money-shot in Jarman’s Sebastian.

 

He finally sees the goodness of such honey when he mints the metaphor for science as “an old dried-up aunt”. [J:p.55]

 

 

4 : THE TRAP

Here are two plain-prose scientific descriptions:

(i)“He placed a snare made of a long blade of grass in front of a crack in the rocks out of which the small iridescent blue head of a lizard was peering”  [p.49]

(ii)“He noticed in the wall a narrow cleft wide enough to afford passage to an unusually slender figure. [J:p.88]

Aren’t these images almost clichés of phallic symbolism – long-blade, lizard  as  penis : crack, gap, cleft as vagina? Whatever the German word is Strachey translates it as ‘narrow gap’. [p.96/100] As you know, Doris Lessing’s last fantasy had the primal race of women called ‘clefts’. Some would argue that if the actions had been dream-material Freud would have pounced on the associations. But he still doesn’t when the dream-Gradiva has the teasing penis.

 

5: SHREK

Before Strachey’s footnote referring to a footnote, p.71, and how apt is that, Freud states in his own that he believes that “the indications of paranoia are absent [from Hanold’s delusions]” [p.70] This leaves us with the puzzle of Hanold’s fear of penetration/intercourse given by the passage:

“a couple of times when he had been with her, the feeling had seized him that she looked as if she were seeking for access to his inmost thoughts and were looking about them as if with a bright steel probe”   [J:p:102]

Given his age, I wonder if Jensen had been tormented by the child-raising steel & leather apparatus devised by Schreber’s father.

 

6: THE ROARING TWENTIES

We are told of the play-fights, and food-sharing that took place in the young lives of Zoe and Hanold. But the only clues to their ages are that they stopped soon after they were called ‘flappers’, and that he is now a now a doctor-docent. So he is anything between 24-30 : and she too. Artist’s often ‘forget’ to clarify time & age in their compelling stories: eg Othello and Hamlet. One imagines the Prince as young as 17 but not the text-calculated age of 29: for then one wonders what have he and Ophelia been doing all their twenties and can they be so hysterically naïve . Freud describes Zoe as “the embodiment of cleverness and clarity”  [p.58]. So why wasn’t she as cunning as Elizabeth Bennett, whose dad is also a benign scholarly dreamer? I know women put up with appallingly long periods of being dangled by geniuses viz Kierkegaard and Kafka but they usually come to their senses. That Zoe waits is no better explained by Jensen than the reason for the rift. One plausibly implied reason is that his ambitious parents thought she wasn’t good enough, but this is weak.

 

7: OEDIPUS REX

 Due to the travel and the heat, Hanold goes to bed early but is woken by a couple in the adjacent room talking. Then, Jensen continues:

“Norbert heard another ill-defined rustling and moving of chairs”

In the quiet following this, he falls asleep again and dreams that he : 

“saw Apollo Belvedere lift up the Capitoline Venus, take her away and place her safely upon some object in dark shadow; it seemed to be a carriage or cart  on which she was to be carried off, for a rattling sound was soon heard”  [Jp.33-34]

It is understandable that Jensen doesn’t spell things out, for he is the artist. But it is amazing that Freud doesn’t say much more than that that he was “disturbed in his sleep.” [p.51] Isn’t Hanold’s disavowal of knowledge – what more definition does he want – his denying silence so as to sleep, and then the dream of mythic elopement and rattling of the carriage/bed – a regression to the fear produced by witnessing (seeing or at least hearing & imagining)  the primal scene. It is important to note that he doesn’t seem ever to have experienced a benign triangle: and this feed his singleton rage at couples. One’s parents are the first pair of “inseparables”  as Hanold calls the honeymooners that one has to deal with.

 

8: PEEPING TOM

Hanold’s mass or rather Miss observation in the streets is introduced by Jensen by: “For him it was a question of critical judgement” [J:p.13]  But as Freud remarks “even this action was screened by conscious scientific motives” [p.75]. Alas, he did not live to see this metaphor of the ‘screen’ grow in complexity as TVs and PCs and the internet increased the varieties of virtual experience, dreaming and delusion.

 

I believe we must charge both Jensen and Freud with some naivety in their indulgence of Hanold’s street-survey. It is too close to Pete Townsend & Chris Langham’s untenable defence that they were researching child-abuse for artistic reasons. The honourable punter or scholar seeks the assistance of the relevant public work-group. The delusional person has drifted into a solipsistic adulthood (for whatever reason). They are not in a moral dialogue with other adults and they reject the shared pursuit of truth-testing of both personal desire and shared science. Jensen does not give the dialogue with the so called “anatomist-friend” because any true rendering would have had the other expose – as a friend can gently – Hanold’s hypocrisy & desire.

 

The preoccupation with footfall is a transposition of the puzzle of human contact – two surfaces connecting, the kiss, holding hands, the genital flesh-lock etc The fetishism of the right-angle the erect foot should make with the pavement surely associates to both the erect penis which is rarely at right angle to the pubis: and the literal puzzle about the right angle to judge women. In one of his celebrated two-liners the mighty Max Miller asks:

“Do you prefer women with long legs or short legs?” and answers:

“I prefer something in between!”  

How Aristotelean!

 

For men, leg and foot talk, point one way. It is rarer but not uncommon for the first legs of infancy to be remembered, even if one doesn’t quite know why! A strange thing happened while I was writing this talk. As I was walking out of a café with a school-friend, I said to him – in the futile, pining Aschenbach tone – “Did you notice that girl’s legs, they were most perfect?”  He replied “Yes” There was a pause and he added “My new girl friend has great legs”  But then, after another pause, and in a tone I can’t describe, he added twice “My mother has great legs”.  She is now in her nineties. Neither of us developed this point.

 

Later in the story, Hanold asks himself “what could be the nature of the bodily apparition of a being like Gradiva” [p.45] And though he had not many days earlier been ogling scores of women, neither then nor now does any memory come to mind of his mother’s body: or of the ordinary life-task of transferring desire from kin to non-kin. Nor does Jensen introduce her feet.

 

9 : MOURNING BECOMES ELEKTRA

The most perfect narrative plot and the most common experience in real-life, in any culture, is the Oedipal triangle meeting the Elektral triangle. But it is so rare to see it attempted, let alone as brilliantly as in American Beauty. One should always note the degrees of cowardice in an author by the number of parents omitted from the fore-grounded story of young lovers. I’ve written elsewhere on Shakespeare’s failure with regard to mothers in his comedies. Here Hanold is placed beyond moral dialogue both with peers and elders and Zoe’s dad is just a useless, bumbling fellow.

 

10: THIS SPORTING LIFE

For me, the most interesting passage in the whole of Jensen’s story is Zoe’s  description of the physicality of their “remarkable attachment : [we] used to run about with each other as friends every day, and  occasionally beat and cuffed each other for a change.. I pulled your hair so often” (J:p.126 & 128)

 

I was reminded of the strangely enchanting lines from the 80’s love song:

Somewhere in my Heart  :

“Who cares what people say

We walk down love's motorway

Ambition and love wearing boxing gloves

And singing hearts and flowers”

 

Zoe provides evidence of an unusual bodily access. I read that phrase “beat & cuffed”  several times and tried to grasp it in mental images Cuffing and even beatings between boys is common, between girls rarer, and across gender rarest of all. If it had been merely tiresome or frightening bullying in either direction, then it would have ended and perhaps been remembered as trauma producing a later inhibition. How much eroticism, these encounters, especially the moments or minutes of wrestling, contain depends on age and latency. The play-fight is different from playing at soldiers or even doctors & nurses and real-fighting. We are to infer that Norbert and Zoe were precocious children: so it is reasonable to conjecture that a clever classicist would know of and perhaps even imitate the end of The Iliad with its hint of a fight between the Athenians and the Amazons. Given her adult confidence, and the erotically charged invitation to produce a lizard snare, one may guess that young Zoe wasn’t shy.

 

It is worth offering Strachey’s translation of the phrase “[we] used to bump and thump each other” [p.57] . What is bumping but fore-play to grinding?

 

The psychoanalyst X (check name) suggested that another of the necessary tasks for the infant is to make the transition from needing & using soft-things and the experience of softness that they give, to needing & using hard-things and the experience of hardness they give. Though both genders can be for-the-infant a soft-thing or a hard-thing, both anatomically and by delicate intention to allow the infant to nuzzle and merge, he/she learns that mothers and in fact all women are ‘more’ soft. Perhaps it is the familiar puzzle of contraries and primary process thinking that infants learn not-softness (hardness) by the male/dad being not-mum. The literal and symbolic form of this transition is given by breast to penis. Of course for children there is not an absolute localisation of physical sensitivity (and desire for it) – thus the thesis of polymorphous perversity. 

 

This aspect of childhood theorising was beautifully presented in Noble & Webster’s installation Scarlett, shown here in the Museum a few months ago. There was an anvil not far from the bits of dolls and diagonal to the sliced, feathered-bird. When I saw this I immediately thought of two things:

 

i) Even if we don’t see them commonly now, the anvil was for millennia the cross-cultural reference point of hardness: eg Vulcan & Pip at the family forge. This thing was used to make hard-things like swords, guns and horse-shoes, so must be harder than them. I remember from very early on – six even – being defeated by and then using to defeat others, the riddle "What is heavier: a ton of iron or a ton of feathers?". The wrong answer comes from the emotional associations to ‘feathers’ – the cause of flight, which is not-weight. Only much later, do children learn of diamonds cutting glass.

 

ii) In the loveliest metaphor for the cunt, and Rochester did use this word, the poet spoke of it as  "on this soft anvil all mankind was made"

 

Centuries later, Burroughs developed this metaphor for the whole human body, calling it a ‘soft machine’. Young boys and girls are socialised differently into the virtues of softness & hardness: and into the cultural norm of exclusivity. That is why there could be a question/insult to a boy/man – and it was used as a play-title in the 70s - "Are you a girl or a soft?" The latter ascription was a synonym for gay, not-routinely-hard man.

 

How strange to learn, in the children’s game, that paper beats stone, the envelope beats the pillar, the vagina ‘beats’ the penis. Then what is the scissors? The tongue? Sticks and stones may….

 

An embrace, especially a hug, in infancy or old age, is a curious experience combining sensations of softness and hardness. It is an absolutely necessary learning as well as soothing experience: which includes not only the identification of two types of sensation, but also the identification of negotiation – a part of one’s body may be requested, offered, received or denied to another person – to facilitate them. Children only get a sense of their own body’s boundary from pressing on another person’s. It is exhilarating to press with all one’s might. But for the other person to be whole-enough, alive-enough, themself-enough for me to use, I must not crush them metaphorically or literally. Even girls, six or sixteen, like to wrestle, to press hard, to have their softness & hardness meet another person’s softness & hardness. This fact was known even in a far more sexist era. I was in awe when I heard a 16 year-old girl of Amazonian fitness at my school singing with her girlfriends:

 

If I was the marrying kind,

And thank the Lord I’m not Sir.

The kind of man I would marry

Would be a rugby full-back.

He’d push hard, and I’d push hard

We’d push hard together.

We’d have fun in the middle of the night,

Both pushing hard together!

 

I’ve added the emphasis to that final mighty line. It is the most perfect definition of good (with-gusto) human sex: what is to be known of one’s own body and of one’s partner’s body is knowable here, in this way. Interestingly it also beautifully appropriates the homo-eroticism in the actual rugby match! Anything other than that mutually respectful and coordinated pushing hard is perverse – bullying, sadism masochism etc etc… The pre-pubescent version of this is of course kids, girls & boys, just pushing and then embracing and both falling-down laughing. As I said above there is something intrinsically troubling, madly compensatory for a failure to negotiate and coordinate pushing, in trying-to-know through fisting.

 

Given this line of thinking, I disagree entirely with Freud’s thesis of “aggressiveness as a man’s inevitable duty in love-making” [p.63] At best it is a true description of a culturally enforced distortion.

 

A few days ago I casually asked a 40 year-old work-colleague and then a 30 year-old friend of their memories of pushing and shoving and strange hitting in the playground. Both women could recall instantly scenes of bizarre male behaviour starting at twelve and in some cases still there at 16-17 in the workplace.

 

11: SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION

“The most important of all the explanatory and exculpatory factors” states Freud “ remains the ease with which our intellect is prepared to accept something absurd provided it satisfies powerful emotional impulses.”  [p94]

 

Eliot famously observed that Shakespeare does not provide us with an “objective correlate”  for Hamlet’s response. Though, Like Freud, I disagree with that, I do feel that in Jensen’s tale both expositional and explanatory scenes are missing, leaving some given-details quite stranded. Given Jensen’s character note that Hanold  “Possessed a faultless memory”  (47) it is completely implausible  to omit any explanation for Hanold’s forgetting such extensive repeated pleasures and his adult lack of interest in women. Freudians require a trauma-correlate for repression to make sense.

 

12: CABARET

Having given his word early to resist tendentious interpretation Freud keeps it all the way through, and then at the end succumbs. Having naughtily sketched the possibility of sado-masochistic elements in Hanold’s character he erases the idea and signs off and leaves the KitKat Club of the mind.

 

13: SHALLOW GRAVE

But also near the end, he does a curious & profoundly interesting thing, both at the level of style & interpretation. “I know of a doctor”  he begins, like a seductive storyteller. He tells a beautifully concise tale of this doctor mistaking a live patient suffering from Grave’s disease for a dead one, he failed to save, and experiencing a range of emotions : dread, relief, shame. Then he adds  “The doctor was none other than myself” [p.95]. There is a charmingly innocent ambition revealed by this : to be like Jensen the storyteller: for the device of anonymity & revelation is irrelevant to the clinical point.

 

14:  SOLARIS (at last!)

The defining human problem from infancy to the last breath is contact: knowing how much desire one feels to merge with others (in all varieties of human intercourse) and how much it feels necessary to be alone to preserve one’s sense of self. This is hard enough when the loved-object is alive. Some people speak of even brief-separation as a little death. But given human mortality, the puzzle becomes tragically & eternally insoluble when real-death happens. For not only will there be no opportunity to repeat simple yet deep satisfactions, but there will never-ever be an opportunity to offer reparation.

 

Freud was a dozen years from formulating his most controversial concept, the death instinct, but in this tiny story of the aptly named Graves’ patients, we get a glimpse of its power and consequences. He movingly describes the unspoken yet inescapable longing of the anonymous doctor that “the dead can come back to life” : so that he might offer to the dead woman his reparation, at least at the level of explanation and sorrow for a “thoughtless prescription” , if nothing more material. [p.95] His longing is so great he mis-sees her sister.

 

The planet Solaris is a realm where the ineluctable conscious and unconscious human longings for a second chance to repair and reunite with a loved one that one hurt finds the possibility of fruition. The means is an ocean that somehow is attuned to that longing and somehow can produce a material simulacrum of the loved one who died, and even of the phantasy one never yet found or won on earth. Perhaps the ocean is a benign worldwide impersonal Superego!

 

Kris, like Freud, “hoped to turn back the clock and her ask his suicidal lover’s forgiveness”  [p.57]

 

But Kris, the earthly astronaut cannot escape his human reason, which cannot easily forget or disavow time & difference, no matter how much this ancient ache is willing temporary blindness. The tragedy deepens when the simulacrum, which is after all comprised of the projections of one’s infinite longing, cannot bear to be separated. This is illustrated spectacularly when Rheya tears the metal door with her own hands. Unlike in the book and Gradiva the film notes the very subtly notes the Oedipal through the similar dress styles of Kris’ mother and lover. Alas, the film does not and perhaps could not, give visual form to two of the other sublime ideas in the book.

 

 

a) Solaristics.

This is the science of the ocean of Solaris. We are told that after decades of visits, earth scientists have produced libraries of conjecture about the life-status of the ocean: just as Hanold wonders about the life-status of his apparition.  But they know nothing useful, they don’t know how to make contact. Perhaps like Marlowe’s Faust this is to chasten rather than mock human epistemophilia – as Lem puts it

“the urge to understand what lies beyond the grasp of mankind” (p.177) I’d argue that Lem does this better than Marlowe. Kris’s colleague Sartorius is mocked as “Faust in reverse.” (192)

 

b)The Possibility of Contact.

At the end, the broken Kris finally steps for the first time onto the beach. The ocean is lapping towards him. He plunges his arm into the ‘water’. It seems to rise to meet him, it envelopes his arm but doesn’t actually touch it. He repeats the move, and then the ocean seems to get bored, won’t play. But he feels “somehow changed”  (212)

 

This is a Beckettian ending that Freud would have liked : genuine contact that can give predictable sustenance will fail, but Try Again. Fail Better

 

My trying is over.

 

================================================================

 

APPENDICES

 

1 :  THE TIMELINE OF THE STORY  

 

		GR=Gradiva Relief : GD = Dream figure :                         GZ= Pompei Figure
TIME	PLACE	ACTION	DREAM / DELUSION
1877	Germany	Hanold is born: the son of a Professor of  Antiquities
1889		At 12: his parents die.
88 - 92		At  11-15, he regularly plays with Zoe at school.
95-00		University: where he is expected to follow his dad’s career
1901		He is a private (docent) University lecturer: rich, lonely & celibate .
------------------------------------------- THE NOVEL BEGINS--------------------------------------------------------------
1897	Italy	Hanold  visits Pompei & Rome. He  sees  a relief.
97-01	Germany       .	He  gets a cast & names it  Gradiva. For years, he is fascinated by it & develops  a story about her : GR as Greek Pompeian patrician.
1901		He  does ‘research’ on women’s foot-angles, in the street.
April			1: Dream-Self in 79                                                                                                                 Pompeii  sees  GR                                                                                                             in danger& warns                                                                                                                   her. She lies down, and becomes stone
Next Morn		He can’t shake dream. He hears a caged bird across street & identifies                 with it. He sees a woman outside & senses its GR:  chases, loses her.
Night		Feeling empty & bereft but hopeful, he begins a journey South
+1.5 Days	Rome	He feels vexed by honeymooners everywhere, & in the next room.	2: Pompeii: Apollo takes Venus.
+ 1	Naples	He takes the cheap train. Again, he feels revolted  by honeymooners’ sexy finger-talk.  He drinks vermouth to erase thoughts of them.	Drink = bleach for thoughts
+ 1	Pompei	He feels vexed by flies.	Flies=lovers
Noon	Ruins	He recalls ancient beliefs of  ‘hot holy noonday’ spirits. He sees a woman go into Casa Meleager.  He sees poppies. Then he sees GZ with paper. He addresses her in Greek & Latin.  She asks for German. He asks her to imitate GR & GD.  A butterfly appears and she leaves.	6th sense: drowsy. Sees GZ = GR. Feels he is sleepwalking
Later	Hotels	He checks other hotels, then returns to his own hotel & lies down.	Bed = poppybed Fly= butterfly
Morn	Ruins	He picks an asphodel plant
Noon	Casa M	He sees GZ. They talk. He asks her to walk like GR. He notices she is without sandals.  She introduces herself as Zoe (life). He gives her the plant:  She mentions roses and forgets book. He takes it.
Eve	Ruins	On walk, he sees but doesn’t recognise old man lizard catcher (Z’s dad)
	Hotel Sole	Barman hustles him an old brooch showing young lovers.  He sees  an asphodel in hotel window. He feels reassured by this sign.	Brooch-girl = GZ
	Own Hotel	He sees a new couple, the woman with a rose : and is charmed.	Couple=siblings
Night			3: GZ=lizardcatcher Voice suggests that he gets roses.
MORN		He carries GZ’s book. He picks roses &  smells them.	Rose =forget food
Noon	Casa Fauno	He sees the charming couple kiss: and sees it as sacred.
	Casa M	He sees GZ. She asks for her book. He gives the roses.  He accuses her over the brooch.  He is dizzy.  She offers lunch &  they eat. She recalls their other shared lunches.  Desperate for proof of her reality, he tries to clap the fly on her hand. Outraged, she uses his full name. The charming couple enter &  call Z.   He goes out in a daze.	Dizzyness = near hysteria.
	Casa M	Z & the couple talk. He wanders. He feels fear & shame and death-wish  but also exhilarating hope.	Sense of sleepwalk
	Villa D	He sees GZ & rushes to leave: she points out rain. She teases him for not recognising her & not remembering their shared past. Finally, he understands GR=GD=GZ=ZOE. He ‘sees’ a fly on her cheek: and tries to bite it. He sees it on her lips and he kisses her & proposes becoming honeymooners.   JOY!	Z’s dimple=fly

 

 

The first part of the table is mere conjecture: constructed from hints in the text.

I have conjectured that Hanold is 24 and that Jensen set the novel a year or so before he wrote the book.

 

=====================================================================

 

2 : Freud’s RULES OF DREAM THEORY & PHANTASY (in this paper)

 

1 : “a dream is invariably related to the events of the day before the  dream”  [p.82]

 

2 : If on waking, the dream feels unshakeable, “this is a psychical act on its own” , an assurance of the truth of the dream and the dreamer’s rightness in believing it. [p.82]

 

3: “Phantasies are substitutes for and derivatives of repressed memories, [and] are precursors of delusions”  [p.82]

 

4 : The conscious personality misunderstands the phantasies, making them “fit in with the dominant psychical current” : all knowledge, science, is placed “completely at the service of imagination”  [pp 83,43]

 

5: “The anxiety in anxiety dreams corresponds to a sexual affect”  and  is not related to plausible anxiety-inducing content in the dream. [p.85]

 

6 : “A speech heard in a dream is always derived from one that has been heard or made by the dreamer in waking life.”  [p.97]

 

7: “When one person is replaced by another or when two people are mixed up together… the two people are being equated… there is a similarity between them.”  [pp 97-98]

 

8: “Two riddles often solve each other” [p.101]

 

9: “If ridicule, derision, or embittered contradiction occurs in the dream-thoughts, this is expressed by the manifest dream being given a senseless form, by absurdity in the dream.  [p.105-6]

  

10 : “Speeches are themselves symptoms and, like them,  arise from compromises between the conscious and the unconscious. [p.108]

 

11 : “The two chief characteristics [of delusions] are

a)     [they] do not produce a direct effect upon the body but are manifested only by mental indications.

b)    Phantasies have obtained belief and acquired influence over action.

 

 

========================================================================

 

3 : ANACLITIC & NARCISSISM                  

 

A) The Anaclitic Position

 

There are two basic ways a person – infant, adult, gerontian – can relate to others: the narcissistic and the anaclitic. The distinction derives from Freud’s 1914 paper. I will speak of these as positions. The maturational task is to move from narcissistic conceptions & self-satisfactions to anaclitic negotiations & shared satisfactions using food, words, play, work and one’s sexual body. The defining criterion of the anaclitic position is that the other-person’s continuing integrity of identity and their expression of a true desire, in whatever modality - talking eating, working, playing sex -  is a necessary condition of one’s own satisfaction.  One accepts, even desires the uncertainty of what they will desire. Another way to put this is to ask how frequent, and so how ordinary, is it in a relationship, of whatever kind, do those involved say these three mighty statements:

“Would you like to state a preference?”

“May I offer the grace of satisfying your preference?.”

“Might we take turns in the satisfaction of preferences?”

 

 It is implicit in the anaclitic position that no kind of humiliation is ever involved.

 

 My own experiences have shown easily someone is discomfited when you ask, even in a gentle tone :  “Would you like to state a preference?”

 

There are always circumstances in which one might relapse.

 

With respect to one’s sexual identity in the anaclitic position, there is a spectrum of possibilities: at the poles of which are the Romantic lover and the Heroic lover. (Kakar) In the former, one imagines oneself being all-possible-partners to a single-partner who is all-possible-partners for oneself. In the latter, one imagines oneself as seducing all-possible-partners, almost careless of their loyalty. It is the difference between imagining oneself as the sun and as the milkyway. In the West, the icons of these pole-positions are Romeo & Juliet and Casanova & Messalina. Given human greed for all possible experiences, the ‘ideal’ progress is to have a sort-of Romeo & Juliet experience in youth, a middle period as Casanova & Messalina, and end as Anthony & Cleopatra rather than Darby & Joan. (The other cultures & gay equivalents are honoured if not stated). A person might retain an interest – episitemophilia or fascination – for the spectrum path less travelled.

 

The defining criterion of the anaclitic position is that the other-person’s desire & the integrity of their sexual-identity is a necessary condition of one’s sexual satisfaction. Given this, whatever sexual behaviours a person freely consents to are permissible. It is plausible to conjecture that Hanold, who does negotiate his scopophiliac satisfactions – getting Zoe to do the Gradiva walk and also the dream lying-down– might have also fantasised about a ‘foot job’, as in the film. In a familiar comedic trope, fat Peter, from Family Guy is shown preferring food to sex: chicken leg to chick’s breast: but he does move to Lois’s hair.

 

Perhaps one can say that fantasy-with-‘f’  is the ideal sexual mis-en-scene of those who have attained the anaclitic position, both egos have sufficient integrity to maintain negotiation: it can’t be sick, perverted (or immoral). The playmate from Apocalypse Now longs for this recognition.

 

 

B)  The Narcissistic Position

 

The defining criterion of the narcissistic  position is that the other-person’s desire & the integrity of their sexual-identity is a minor condition of or even irrelevant to one’s sexual satisfaction. One does not negotiate, one shapes, manoeuvres, grooms, or coerces, the other-person to be what one wants, even if they don’t (really) want to be that type. This demented spectrum has at its ends a living-person-as-doll (child or adult) and a non-living-doll.

 

Perhaps one can say that phantasy-with-‘ph’  is the ideal sexual mis-en-scene of those who are stuck in the narcissistic position: at least one, possibly both egos, do not have sufficient integrity to maintain negotiation: it will inevitably tend towards the sick, the perverted (or immoral).

 

The helicopter scene from Apocalypse Now, with the playmates and the Viet-grunts is a sublime rendering of the mis-seeing and desperate re-shaping intrinsic to human sexuality. The younger soldier drifts between the homoeroticism in men applying camouflage paint and that in girls playing with makeup. At least it is tenderly done. Whereas the older man, even when given the extraordinary luck of getting a real playmate instantly wants to turn her into a photo he’d seen. The women try to introduce themselves as people with histories and talents – one of them, like Gradiva, carries a picture book - but the men aren’t listening.

 

The fine 2007 Real Doll tv-documentary shows a lonely but not ugly middle-aged Englishman, tragically named Everard!  A recent documentary in the BBC series Masterpieces of Vienna features his lahdedah ‘ancestor’, the bohemian lover-artist Kokoschka. Their similarities are strangely reassuring. Both the fantasist and the phantasist can only rely on available materials & technology to make a loveable doll. Tthey might conduct ‘scientific research’ like Hanold or send to the technician detailed drawings & notes like Kokoschka  but they can only have what’s makeable: as the old Gods no longer answer any man or woman's prayers.

 

OTHER RELATED THEMES & THEORIES

 

1: RETURNING TO THE SCHOOL OF DREAMS

In the brilliant moral fable Boogie Nights there is an extraordinary series of overlapping scenes on the theme of ‘shame’ and ‘respect’. One section resonates powerfully with Jensen’s ‘Friends Reunited’ theme. When the ‘street-stud’ asks the sex-worker, Roller-Girl, “Didn’t we go to the same school?”  she begins to fragment. For him it’s a chance to live-out the fantasy of fucking a girl he couldn’t have got at school. For her it’s the humiliation of being fucked by a kid she wouldn’t have even noticed then. This shame turns to murderous rage. Jensen’s phantasy give hope to all the old geeks.

 

2 :  JOYCESENSE

 

Ulysseys contains those strange, forbidding phrases about how humans can and can’t escape taking in information through the senses:

ineluctable modality of the visible & ineluctable modality of the audible.

 

Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo to show a common modern fantasy of a virtual film-being coming across the silver-nitrate manifold into one’s world, just to help one escape one’s miserably ordinary life. But then he cleverly intensifies the theme by having the character fantasise about escape.

 

The Family Guy scene beautifully shows children’s reactions to hearing the primal scene. Meg tries to shut it out. Chris, the dopey boy, is caught between knowledge and disavowal. The response of little Stewie – the odd character who moves between being the stroppy baby and a louche, waspy, gayman – is perfectly Freudian. He sleeps on, incorporating the bed-rocking into dreams of power, like Tennesse Williams’s landowning Big Daddy.

 

3 : INELUCTIBLE MODALITY of the REPRESSED

 

Freud’s ‘law’ states:

“The arousing of the repressed erotism came precisely from the field of the instruments that served to bring about the repression”.

He acknowledges that artists in earlier generations had understood this very well: and mentions the artist Rops. [p.60]

 

Sister Jeanne’s crucifixion phantasy scene from The Devils is, like Rops, an instance where the religious scene - which is meant to bind or displace the erotic scene – becomes charged with desperate eroticism that even self mutilation cannot displace.

 

CSI series offers an episode on foot fetishism. Las Vegas is as far from a closed-order in a religious city-state like Loudhon as one could get: there dissipation of all kinds is mandatory. But poverty is the snake in this wanton paradise: and to witness one’s mother under a parade of men surely shatters one’s sexual fantasies forever, leaving only unbearable anger and a disassociated aestheticism  - nail painting.

 

Welles famously said of the final scene of Kane that it was ‘dollar-book Freud’.  So only a couple of years after Freud’s death, artists were anxious about providing explanations for the bizarre behaviour of their characters that seemed too neat. Nowadays, writers get their scepticism in first. So Captain Brass reiterates the inexhaustible randomness of psycho-pathology!