Stage Fright and Cage Fighting . . . a Parallel Universe of Freudian Terms.

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.

If one doubted the crypto-sexual properties of a candlesnuffer in the case histories of impassioned adventurers or adventuresses, then please examine a case from the memoirs of Detective Thomas Furlong of the Furlong Secret Service Company of St. Louis.

The Preller Murder Case. St. Louis. 1885. ’To remove the underwear, Maxwell (alias of Englishman Hugh M. Brooks, murderer) used a candlesnuffer, which is very much like a pair of scissors, only the cutting surface had a half-circle. He cut the undergarments the full length of the limbs so that he could easily strip them off. Then he managed to pull his own garments on the body. Maxwell’s clothing was marked with name of Hugh M. Brooks, and they were entirely too small for the body of Prellar (victim).  He emptied out the trunk belonging to Preller and pressed the body into it.’

 

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See also Vladimir Nabokov Berlin March 1922
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

Ethel Colburn Mayne (1865 – 1941)
Irish novelist, short-story writer, 
biographer, literary critic, journalist
and first English translator of Freud.

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Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html
and Listen Close to Me (2011)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 

and A Bad Case (2015)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html

Take One Home for the Kiddies: More Palimpsestic Wordplay? (Part 3.)

As an archivist or – more grandly – a conservator I am quite hopeless.

In the poetry cuttings book I compiled in my early teens, mould grows on the petroleum gum I foolishly used to tack down clippings from literary periodicals, which in many cases I recognise as the first published appearance of what anthologists would regard as classic English poems of the mid to late twentieth century.

Thus, my once cherished pages are more than ‘slightly foxed’ (to borrow an antiquarian bookseller’s term). 

Despite this, these pock-marked pages never seem to lose their appeal.  The texts, of course, are perforce of a certain vintage yet they continue to stimulate closer study.

A Nagging Sense of a Familiar Echo.

For instance, thumbing once more through my collection the other night, I was struck once again by the ‘palimpsestic effect’ of a number of them; distinctive poems, which – like Dylan Thomas’s Hunchback in the Park – appear to give rise to unsettling resonances . . . a nagging sense of a familiar echo just barely heard . . . see my earlier foray into this phenomenon . . .
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/the-humbert-in-park-more-palimpsestic.html

Am I misguided to detect concordances between the following popular Victorian verses for a child’s recitation and a well known squib by Philip Larkin? Folk memory . . . an oral tradition . . . the Connective Unconscious . . . call it what you will, the similarities of these morbid drolleries that subvert the Age of Innocence certainly suggest a perseveration of a creative impulse spanning two centuries, and one that measures infant mortality by the spit of a spade.

The Doll’s Funeral

When my dolly died, when my dolly died, 

I sat on the step and I cried and cried;

And I couldn’t eat any jam and bread, 

’Cause it didn’t seem right when my doll was dead. 

And Bridget was sorry as she could be, 

For she patted my head, and ‘O,’ said she, 


‘To think that the pretty has gone and died!’ 

Then I broke out afresh and I cried and cried.

We dug her a grave in the violet bed, 

And planted violets at her head; 


And we raised a stone and wrote quite plain, 

‘Here lies a dear doll who died of pain.’ 


And then my brother, said he, ‘Amen,’ 

And we all went back to the house again, 


But all the same I cried and cried, 

Because I’d a right when my doll had died.

And then we had more jam and bread, 

But I didn’t eat, ’cause my doll was dead. 


But I tied some crape on my doll house door, 

And then I stood and cried some more. 


I couldn’t be happy, don’t you see! 

Because the funeral belonged to me. 


And then the others went home, and then 

I went out and dug up my doll again.

On the other hand, perhaps it’s only the patina of age now disfiguring my keepsake book that prompts me to suggest, hereinabove, that the pungency of the English Cautionary Verse tradition is a taste indistinguishable even when savoured a century apart.

Take One Home for the Kiddies

                                         On shallow straw, in shadeless glass,
                                         Huddled by empty bowls, they sleep:
                                         No dark, no dam, no earth, no grass —
                                         Mam, get us one of them to keep.

                                         Living toys are something novel,
                                         But it soon wears off somehow.
                                         Fetch the shoebox, fetch the shovel —
                                         Mam, we’re playing funerals now. 

Two cuttings of Philip Larkin’s verse
as they first appeared in literary periodicals.

For further musings on palimpsestic texts and the versifying impulse see also: 

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/lure-of-list-doomed-excavations-of-ur.html

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/solitary-truck-euphonious-assonance.html

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Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 
and A Bad Case (2015)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html