As have pointed out in a number of posts here, my admiration for the novelist, Ethelind Colburn Mayne, one of the earliest translators of Freud, is unbounded.
Particularly, Ethelind’s own writings are distinguished by her own very elegant Englishing of the Conscious and the Unconscious mind, which she calls the ‘Stage-side’ and ‘Cage-side’ of human personality.
How exquisitely neat! How entirely original, sui generis!
And it gives us a glimpse of how plain meat-and-potatoes English could have provided limpid alternative terms for the complexities of Freudian thought, which by their simplicity would have had the power to confer enlightenment in a parallel universe of meaning unalloyed.
This thought reminds me of another polyglottal writer of fiction who also believed in the divine right to create works on the writer’s terms by resisting ‘all totalitarianism of meaning, all systems that claim to have captured and colonised truth’ and who went further to denounce ‘the oneiromancy and mythogeny of psychoanalysis.’
Vladimir Nabokov slammed the ‘Viennese Quack’ saying ‘. . . he’s crude, I think he’s medieval, and I don’t want an elderly gentleman from Vienna with an umbrella inflicting his dreams upon me. I don’t have the dreams that he discusses in his books. I don’t see umbrellas in my dreams. Or balloons. I think that the creative artist is an exile in his study, in his bedroom, in the circle of his lamplight. He’s quite alone there; he's the lone wolf. As soon as he’s together with somebody else he shares his secret, he shares his mystery, he shares his God with somebody else.’
And . . .
‘Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts. I really do not care.’
And . . .
‘Freudism and all it has tainted with its grotesque implications and methods appears to me to be one of the vilest deceits practiced by people on themselves and on others.’
I think it can be fairly said that Nabokov did indeed create his own language to resist a ‘totalitarianism of meaning’. However, his love of puns does rightly condemn him in the eyes of Freud, who believed punning was ‘a victorious assertion of the ego’s invulnerability’, an ‘ego’ that often blinded Nabokov, in the view of many critics, to the rigours of stylistic judgement. A pun, after all, is but simply a species of vanity that boasts of the wit to couple certain homophones which in the abstract would be otherwise irrelative.
Explicit precursor.
It’s an oddity (to me, at least) that commentators interpret this satirical print (detail) by Gillray as a licentious fashionable gathering (1796) depicting, centre stage, an ogling flunky ‘who is about to cut off a candle due to his distracted state’ of lust. An oddity, because is this not the explicit image of the candle as a precursor of Freud’s dream symbolism, existing over a century before his Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams) of 1899? Freud: ‘The candle is an object which excites female loins.' (‘Die Kerze ist ein Gegenstand, der die weiblichen Genitalien reiz.’ (Note, too, the candle snuffer-tongs and their terminal globular configurations.) As Freud remarks: ‘Hier ist eine durchsichtige Symbolik verwendet worden.’ (Obvious symbolism has been employed here.)
Whatever the case, it’s instructive and reassuring to see the Connective Unconscious can span a century intact without any corruption of meaning.
(23.01.23) Postscript. Nor should we forget Max Klinger’s etching, Ängste, from the series, Paraphrase über den Fund eines Handschuhs (1877-1878), in which a candle aflame rises from a Sea of Dreams, predating Freud’s observations by two decades. See detail (literally, ein feuchter Traum) below https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1878_Klinger_Handschuh_07_Aengste_anagoria.JPG)
Body in a trunk.
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2019/08/vladimir-nabokov-berlin-march-1922.html
For a more extended tribute to the translations of Ethelind Colburn Mayne, see : The Murder of a Doctrinaire Freudian by Her Analysand Nephew . . . . Oneiric Precognition of Parricide . . . . The Case of Hermine Hug-Hellmuth.
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2016/06/the-murder-of-doctrinaire-freudian-by.html
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| Ethel Colburn Mayne (1865 – 1941) Irish novelist, short-story writer, biographer, literary critic, journalist and first English translator of Freud. |
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