Catherine Eisner

Sunday, 22 September 2019

Et vocavit Adam nomen uxoris suæ, Eva . . . de ligno autem scientiæ boni et mali ne comedas.

She gave him the

apple merely to

sweeten his breath.

According to Dr. Yitzhaq Hayut-Man, scholar of Torah and Kabbalah,
we should pay regard to the picture of Creation ‘. . . drawn by Rabbi
Yitzḥaq of Acre (who lived in the 13-14th century, well before the late
Physicist Stephen Hawking) . . . [for the medieval Rabbi] combined
a Kabbalistic calculation: (1) as his predecessors already agreed there
were six cycles of seven thousand years making 42,000 years; (2) this
is multiplied by 1,000 “... for a thousand years in Thy sight are but
like yesterday when it is past . . .” [Book of Psalms, 90:2] and (3) this,
in turn, is multiplied by the 365 days in each divine year, yielding
15,330,000,000 of our years. Which accords with Hawking's estimate.’

Monday, 2 September 2019

The Art of Humdrum Angst . . . Dream-like Displacement Activity as Wish-Fulfilment in Popular Fiction.

In The Interpretation of Dreams (Die Traumdeutung 1899), Sigmund Freud examines subconscious desires revealed by dream symbolism, in which familiar dream episodes of transgressive acts – appearing in public naked or skimpily clad among clothed onlookers, for example – are shown to be products of social repression, often stemming from infancy and the disciplines of the nursery:

The dreamer's embarrassment and the [dream] spectator’s indifference constitute a contradiction such as often occurs in dreams. It would be more in keeping with the dreamer’s feelings if the strangers were to look at him in astonishment, or were to laugh at him, or be outraged. I think, however, that this obnoxious feature has been displaced by wish-fulfilment, while the embarrassment is for some reason retained, so that the two components are not in agreement.

That these words were written in the same century in which popular authors similarly reflected this subconscious wish-fulfilling displacement in their fictive narratives surely, then, lends substance to Freud’s theories of wish-fulfilment explored in Die Traumdeutung’s Chapter III, Der Traum ist eine Wunscherfüllung :

‘. . . in colloquial language the dream is predominantly the gracious fulfiller of wishes. “I should never have imagined that in my wildest dreams,” we exclaim in delight if we find that the reality surpasses our expectations.’

Captain John Good . . . he always wore an eye-glass in his
right eye. It seemed to grow there, for it had no string,
and he never took it out except to wipe it . . .
‘How is it, O strangers,’ asked the old man solemnly,
‘that this man (pointing to Good, who was clad in nothing but
boots and flannel shirt, and had only half finished his shaving)
grows hair on one side of his sickly face and not on the other,
and who wears one shining and transparent eye . . . ?’

Makers of Wildest Dreams.

And, indeed, under the spell of that wish-fulfilling dream-analogue – i.e. 19th Century fiction – those narrative passages when ‘reality surpasses our expectations’ take place for the passive reader while they repose, dream-like, within the safety of their suspension of disbelief.

In a word, Escapism.

As you have certainly noticed, it’s almost a cliché how late 19th century popular fiction seems to sublimate existential fear by its manifestation as anxiety over trivial hindrances to the rituals of domestic routine when, in a crisis, the manners and decorum of the petite bourgeoisie are assailed by perceived barbarism.

Its effect on the hearth-bound armchair reader and on the fictive protagonist is to console them with a kind of displacement activity that runs counter to their unease as participants in racy narratives that inflict greater threats of mortal jeopardy from conflicts that cannot be so lightly resolved . . . fighting Zulu warriors, say, or striving to girdle the earth in eighty days to win a wager of the longest odds . . .

May I, then, give you three examples of this literary ‘Displacement Activity Effect’ evident in a trio of popular Victorian classics of high adventure? They are works, it seems to me, characterised by the humdrum angst of finding one’s amour propre under assault in a Freudian nightmare of repression in which forbidden wishes are fulfilled in foreign lands far from civilisation’s censures.

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Toilette Interrupted . . . King Solomon’s Mines.

The symbolic components of the Quest for King Solomon’s Mines (1885) conceived by the fabulist H. Rider Haggard yield a superb case in point to illustrate how the subconscious reveals latent affinities between the writer’s chosen emblemata, which, as in dreams, are identified as the hidden interconnectedness that, for Freud, suggests that ‘. . . ideas which are apparently without connection, but which occur in immediate succession, belong to a unity which has to be deciphered . . .’

The eager reader of King Solomon’s Mines will readily perceive the marvellous interconnectedness of the potent symbols that can be identified with the novel’s ‘Sancho Panza’ figure, Captain John Good R.N., on his party’s expedition to Kukuanaland that becomes a mission to restore the rightful king of the Kukuanas:

Monocled right eye.
  Half-shaven face.
  Pseudo-celluloid collar made of white gutta-percha.
  False teeth.
  Eclipse of the Moon.

So let us examine the most significant oneiric vignettes in Good’s seemingly unpredictable adventures, semi-naked (Freud’s ‘exhibition-dreams’?), in the wildernesses of Darkest Africa to see how latent dream-content (as to Haggard’s ‘artless’ humdrum fictive images) is made manifest :

He (Captain Good, the sidekick to the quest’s leader, Sir Henry Curtis) was broad, of medium height, dark, stout, and rather a curious man to look at. He was so very neat and so very clean-shaved, and he always wore an eye-glass in his right eye. It seemed to grow there, for it had no string, and he never took it out except to wipe it . . . He put it in his trousers pocket when he went to bed, together with his false teeth, of which he had two beautiful sets . . .

‘Perfect order’ courts disaster . . .

There he [Captain Good) sat upon a leather bag, looking just as though he had come in from a comfortable day's shooting in a civilised country, absolutely clean, tidy, and well dressed. He wore a shooting suit of brown tweed, with a hat to match, and neat gaiters. As usual, he was beautifully shaved, his eye-glass and his false teeth appeared to be in perfect order, and altogether he looked the neatest man I ever had to do with in the wilderness. He even sported a collar, of which he had a supply, made of white gutta-percha . . . ‘You see, they weigh so little . . . and I always like to turn out like a gentleman.’

Half-shaven, untoothed . . .

At last he succeeded in getting the hair off the right side of his face and chin, when suddenly I, who was watching, became conscious of a flash of light [a hostile spear] that passed just by his head. Good sprang up with a profane exclamation (if it had not been a safety razor he would certainly have cut his throat) . . . ‘I see that ye are spirits,’ [the Kukuana warrior] said falteringly, ‘did ever man born of woman have hair on one side of his face and not on the other, or a round and transparent eye, or teeth which moved and melted away and grew again?’

Infantile paranoia of nakedness . . .

‘Look here, Good,’ said Sir Henry; ‘you have appeared in this country in a certain character, and you must live up to it. It will never do for you to put on trousers again. Henceforth you must exist in a flannel shirt, a pair of boots, and an eye-glass.’ . . . ‘. . . and with whiskers on one side of your face and not on the other.’

Imperial wish-fulfilment, thanks to Greenwich . . .

‘I think that I have it,’ said Good exultingly; ‘ask them to give us a moment to think.’ I did so, and the chiefs withdrew. So soon as they had gone Good went to the little box where he kept his medicines, unlocked it, and took out a note-book, in the fly-leaves of which was an almanack. ‘Now look here, you fellows, isn’t tomorrow the 4th of June?’ he said. ‘Very good; then here we have it — 4 June, total eclipse of the moon commences at 8.15 Greenwich time . . . Tell them we will darken the moon to-morrow night.’

Synthesis of component symbols . . .

Slowly the penumbra, the shadow of a shadow, crept on over the bright surface, and as it crept I heard deep gasps of fear rising from the multitude around. ‘The light of the transparent eye of him with the half-haired face shall destroy you . . . Now tell me, can any mortal man put out that moon before her hour of setting, and bring the curtain of black night down upon the land?’ . . . Now to my intense joy and relief [I] saw that we—or rather the almanack—had made no mistake. On the edge of the great orb lay a faint rim of shadow, while a smoky hue grew and gathered upon its bright surface . . . The great pale orb seemed to draw near and to grow in size. . . . ‘The moon is dying—the white wizards have killed the moon,’ yelled (the Pretender King] at last. ‘We shall all perish in the dark . . .’

The Semi-Adumbrated Face of Western Man.

In other words, another imperial miracle wrought by the ‘Children of the Stars, children of the Shining Eye and the Movable Teeth, who roar out in thunder, and slay from afar [Winchester repeating rifle].’ Nonetheless, we cannot escape the Victorian notion of Western Man as a lone explorer in the jungle’s heart of darkness who yet dresses for dinner, belches, and primly covers his mouth, though none can see or hear . . . not even Nanny. So, apparently, even in fiction devised for sports club hearties, Freud’s ‘dream-censor’ is at work, for as he observes, ‘Displacement is the principle means used in the dream-distortion to which the dream-thoughts must submit under the influence of the censorship.’

No. Under the residual strictures of the Victorian nursery, no one is permitted to go native . . . not entirely.

For, as the dream of King Solomon’s Mines seems to tell us, even when pitched into a fabulist’s nightmare of naked savagery it may be seen the soi-disant ‘civilised’ explorer is only half effaced . . . the semi-self-effacement of the symbolised dreamer.

(Curiously enough, Freud in his Interpretation of Dreams has this to say about the dream-content discoverable in a novel by Rider Haggard: ‘A strange book, but full of hidden sense . . . the eternal feminine, the immortality of our emotions—’ Such ‘dream-books’ doubtless include the following narrative, which – published 1836 — very nearly scraped in as Victorian.)

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A Wish-Fulfilling Transfiguration . . . Midshipman Easy

Let us consider next the picaresque adventures of Mr. Midshipman Easy (1836) by Captain Frederick Marryat, which in my view answers very neatly to Freud’s premise in Interpretation of Dreams . . .

We have already become acquainted with the rule of interpretation that every element of the dream may be interpreted by its opposite, as well as by itself. One can never tell at the outset whether to set down the one or the other; only the connection can decide this point. A suspicion of this state of affairs has evidently got into popular consciousness; dream books very often proceed according to the principle of contraries in their interpretation.

And Freud continues . . .

Such transformation into opposites is made possible by the intimate concatenation of associations, which in our thoughts finds the idea of a thing in that of its opposite. Like every other displacement this serves the purposes of the censor, but it is also often the work of the wish-fulfilment, for wish-fulfilment consists precisely in this substitution of an unwelcome thing by its opposite. The emotions of the dream thoughts may appear in the dream transformed into their opposites just as well as the ideas, and it is probable that this inversion of emotions is usually brought about by the dream censor.

We have before stated how disfigured
the countenance of poor Mr Jolliffe
had been by the smallpox . . .

An Inversion of Emotions . . . his Countenance came off like a Mask.

An innocent abroad, the young midshipman, Jack Easy, is shown his berth, and recoils from . . .

. . . Mr Jolliffe, the master’s mate, who had fixed his eye upon Jack, and to whom Jack returned the compliment. The first thing that Jack observed was, that Mr Jolliffe was very deeply pockmarked, and that he had but one eye, and that was a piercer; it appeared like a little ball of fire, and as if it reflected more light from the solitary candle than the candle gave. ‘I don’t like your looks,’ thought Jack—‘we shall never be friends.’ But here Jack fell into the common error of judging by appearances, as will be proved hereafter.

The appearance of Jolliffe is disturbing to the young midshipman . . .

[Jolliffe] had suffered martyrdom with the small-pox, which probably had contracted his lineaments: his face was not only deeply pitted, but scarred, with this cruel disorder. One eye had been lost, and all eyebrows had disappeared—and the contrast between the dull, sightless opaque orb on one side of his face, and the brilliant, piercing little ball on the other, was almost terrifying. His nose had been eaten away by the disease till it formed a sharp but irregular point: part of the muscles of the chin were contracted, and it was drawn in with unnatural seams and puckers. He was tall, gaunt, and thin, seldom smiled, and when he did, the smile produced a still further distortion. Mr Jolliffe was the son of a warrant officer. He did not contract this disease until he had been sent out to the West Indies, where it swept away hundreds.

A shipboard ammunition chest blows up and the master’s mate is saved . . .

. . . when of a sudden a tremendous explosion took place on the deck of the vessel, and bodies and fragments were hurled up in the air. Our hero went up to examine, and to assist . . . in disengaging the body from a heap of ropes and half-burned tarpaulins with which it was entangled . . . it was poor Jolliffe, whose face was burned as black as a coal by the explosion. He had also lost three fingers of the left hand, but as soon as he was brought out on the deck he appeared to recover, and pointed to his mouth for water, which was instantly procured.

Transformation into opposites . . .

Jolliffe and the wounded men were taken on board, and all of them recovered. We have before stated how disfigured the countenance of poor Mr Jolliffe had been by the smallpox—so severely was it burned that the whole of the countenance came off in three weeks like a mask, and every one declared that, seamed as it still was, Mr Jolliffe was better looking than he was before. It may be as well here to state that Mr Jolliffe not only obtained his promotion, but a pension for his wounds, and retired from the service. He was still very plain, but as it was known that he had been blown up, the loss of his eye as well as the scars on his face were all put down to the same accident, and he excited interest as a gallant and maimed officer. He married, and lived contented and happy to a good old age.

Note: For a further extract, describing Midshipman Easy’s Three-Cornered Duel, see . . .
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2016/11/d-r-tchekhov-textbook-case-prof.html

Grave Error of Gas Bill . . . Around the World in Eighty Days.

You know the novel. Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne (published 1873) tracks the race-against-the-clock of wealthy Londoner Phileas Fogg (he has open credit at Barings Bank), accompanied by his French valet Passepartout, as they attempt to circumnavigate the world in 80 days to win a £20,000 bet (i.e. valued at £2.25 million today).

The valet Passepartout and his master
Phineas Fogg depicted by L. Benett,
Around the World in Eighty Days,
first Fully Illustrated Edition, 1873.

Unfinished business.

Can there be any more comprehensive example of a ‘dream-book’ in which the extreme anxiety of ‘dangerous wanderings’, in Freud’s words, is displaced by a wish-fulfilling anodyne angst. In this case, the alarming realisation by the valet Passepartout that the servant has betrayed the trust of his master . . . a domestic catastrophe that will preoccupy them with a wish-fulfilling Displacement Activity, a relatively harmless neurosis to distract them from the greater fear, the unwelcome thought of failure that’s been supplanted.

Just as the train was whirling through Sydenham, Passepartout
  suddenly uttered a cry of despair.
‘What's the matter?’ asked Mr. Fogg.
‘Alas! In my hurry—I—I forgot—’
‘What?’
  To turn off the gas in my room!’
‘Very well, young man,’ returned Mr. Fogg, coolly, ‘it will burn—
  at your expense.’

On their return to London, Fogg is in despair, believing ‘He had lost the wager!’ . . .

  Knowing that Englishmen governed by a fixed idea sometimes resort
  to the desperate expedient of suicide, Passepartout kept a narrow watch
  upon his master, though he carefully concealed the appearance of so doing.
First of all, the worthy fellow had gone up to his room, and had
  extinguished the gas burner, which had been burning for eighty days.
  He had found in the letter-box a bill from the gas company, and he
  thought it more than time to put a stop to this expense, which he
  had been doomed to bear.

The absurd banality of finicky household budgetary details, following the exotica of Fogg’s headlong globe-trotting jaunt, contrasts strikingly with the final plight of this eccentric specimen of ‘Anglais monomanes’ in mortal danger under ‘la pression d’une idée fixe’, which, as we can see, also substitutes the fixation of a new anxiety to conveniently displace the pain of defeat . . . thus demonstrating, in the terms of Freud’s own paradox, how ‘a psychic process developing anxiety may still be a wish-fulfilment . . .’

However – these three time-honoured ‘dream-books’ apart – for an application of Freud’s ‘classical’ interpretation of psycho-sexual neuroses, coloured by the wisdom of archetypes drawn from Greek mythology, we need look no further than Jane Eyre for the last word . . . a dream-book whose publication (1847) pre-dates the Freudian era by a decade.

Repressed passion . . . . the many faces of orphaned
Jane Eyre in her formative years from childhood though
her schooldays to adulthood make her the favourite heroine
of Eng. Lit. doctors for literary psychoanalytical studies of
ambivalent and self-denying emotional complexes.

An Obstacle Course of Frustrated Wishes and Repressed Passion . . . Jane Eyre.

Jane Eyre is blatantly such stuff as daydreams are made of . . .

[Jane Eyre at its] core is the Oedipus situation, with Mr Rochester playing father-figure. The marriage of Jane Eyre and Mr Rochester is foiled at the very altar by the impediment which prevents every little girl from marrying her father, namely that he is married already. (Such a tiresome impediment, mama — mad, of course, and dangerously incendiary.) Mrs Q. D. Leavis [literary critic], the author of that introduction which asserts Jane Eyre’s superiority to Dickens and George Eliot, records that ‘Mr Rochester has been the object of a good deal of derision’ and grants ‘Unfortunately, unlike Jane Austen, who was immune to the vulgarization of the Romantic movement represented by Byronism, the Brontës’ daydreams had clearly been formed on Byronic lines.’ (If Mrs Leavis’s syntax is to be taken seriously, she is stating that Jane Austen was not formed on Byronic lines, but it may be safer to guess she intends to speak of Jane Austen’s daydreams.) It is more to the point, however, that Charlotte Brontë’s daydreams had clearly been formed by the Oedipal stress. The little girl can escape the guilt of her erotic relation to her father if her father is castrated : before Jane Eyre can marry her father-figure, he is mutilated in the fire that destroys his house. He loses an arm and almost all his sight — an emphatic symbolic castration, betokened twice over, by the direct loss of a limb and by the blinding that is the symbol used in the Oedipus story itself. (Mr Rochester is phallicized and castrated yet again by being likened to a tree — whose blasting by lightning forecasts, according to Mrs Leavis, his mutilation.) . . . the fire which, by maiming him, has removed the psychological impediment to their marriage, has conveniently destroyed also the legal impediment, his wife.

These words are from the excoriating Fifty Works of English Literature we could do without, which displays the unsheathed claws of Brigid Brophy’s feline wit to full advantage (this 1967 demolition job on English and American classics has contributions from BB and Michael Levey and Charles Osborne). I assume this passage is by BB as it seems characteristic of her insights but, please note, all fifty hatchet jobs have no byelines.

For my appreciation of the enviable wit of Brigid Brophy, see:
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2013/10/slaves-to-seconal-droguee.html

Sunday, 18 August 2019

Vladimir Nabokov. Berlin March 1922.

  The book fell off his bed into a dream
  of souls unnumbered, their new imperium
  a ballroom silent, stored with harvest grain,
  and libraries torched, fed by a hurricane

  of clamant voices raised against his house
  to pierce the membranous film of solace —
  blind summoners of a windowless vehicle
  that breaks the butterfly under its wheel.

Catherine Eisner

Detail from cover design:
The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov by Andrea Pitzer
(published 2013 Pegasus Books)
A must-read for Nabokovian scholars and those in awe of this anti-Freudian iconoclast.

On the evening of 28 March 1922, in Berlin, Vladimir Nabokov records in his diary that, just before the moment the news reached him of the murder of his father by a monarchist assassin, he was reading a verse by Alexander Blok that condemns a city for its naked betrayal (Vsya obnazhilas' bez styda. ‘All naked without shame.’) Nabokov returned to Trinity College, Cambridge, for his final Easter Term four days after his poem, Easter, memorialising his father, was published in Berlin in his father’s Russian émigré newspaper, Rul.

For Nabokov’s anti-Freudian iconoclasm see Stage-Fright and Cage-Fighting:

https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2019/05/stage-fright-and-cage-fighting-parallel.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. 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 (2014)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html

Monday, 10 June 2019

Arbour. Amour. Affaire de Coeur . . . Saboteur.

At the farther end of our garden, behind the boxwood maze, there was a bower with

honeysuckle and other creeping plants overlooking the tennis court. That evening I sat with Douglas on the swing-seat within the trellised shadows of

the arbour. Douglas had been singles champion at our village club.

Boy, my kid brother, knew perfectly well how I first met Douglas, from that
auspicious day I returned home from a match with a tennis ball I’d mistaken for my own.
Douglas had written his name on it in indelible ink: DE SHERRARD (the ‘E’ stood for Eric, I was to learn eventually, of course, but at first I’d been willing to believe the ‘de’ was the nobiliary particle, because Douglas was such a perfect gentleman). I have the ball still.
The fringes of our fingers were touching. I felt an electrical charge passing between us.

A crescent moon rocked gently in the cradle of a pine crest.
Above us, in the twilight, hung yellow roses so brilliant that for a moment I’d almost mistaken them for lanterns. Beyond the rhododendrons, the chalk lines of the tennis court glowed in the dusk, and I glimpsed a pair of bats dipping low over the net.
I nestled on Douglas’s shoulder as he talked of warring Dayak tribesmen.
‘When drums speak out, laws hold their tongues,’ he said gravely, puffing on his pipe.
‘In a remote place of flies and midges men don’t need permission to smoke,’ he added thoughtfully in parenthesis, striking another match.
Suddenly I felt Douglas’s shoulders stiffen and he slowly reached down and I saw his hand close on a large windfall apple, which with a lightning move he hurled into the darkness.
There was a yelp of pain from the shrubbery and Boy emerged.
‘Listen, chummy,’ Douglas drawled, ‘there’s a difference between staring and being stark blind.’
Douglas was a crack shot with a sporting rifle; he could shoot the eye out of a mosquito, or so he claimed. And he also said he slept with his eyes open like a hare.
‘What do you want here?’ Boy asked in a shrill quavering voice.
‘Your sister,’ Douglas boomed.
‘No one wants to marry a quaint old thing in a poke bonnet,’ Boy sneered. ‘Besides,’ he continued, ‘Mummy says she would not let a daughter of hers marry a Roman Candle.’
It was true. Mother and Boy had got up a whispering campaign against me when they had learned Douglas was a Roman Catholic.
Boy ran off up the path, shouting, ‘She’s got it bad, Mummy! She’s got it bad!’
‘Sawn off little runt,’ I heard Douglas mutter.
‘What did you expect?’ my brother grinned evilly, when the next evening my new beau arrived looking glum. ‘Rosaries all the way?’

Dispossession, pages 292 and 293, Sister Morphine (2008)

•

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

Thursday, 16 May 2019

‘Chubby Boy’ Orwell’s Earworm . . . Rural Bard or Faltering Palimpsestic Balladeer . . . ?

Has any Orwellian scholar, I wonder, checked the verses of their subject against the Suffolk heritage of his youth?

As it is, I believe this dedicated champion of the proletariat most probably heard a neural echo of certain lines composed by a celebrated early nineteenth century Suffolk versifier and ‘the first of Rural Bards’*, when he (George Orwell) wrote the concluding couplet of an unfinished poem that must have persisted like an earworm from his days in Southwold . . .

When good King Edward ruled the land
And I was a chubby boy.

Compare, then, this palimpsestic (?) verse with Robert Bloomfield’s Suffolk Dialect Ballad . . .

When once a giggling Mawther [girl] you,
And I a red-faced chubby boy.

A couplet from Bloomfield’s Rural Tales, Ballads and Songs 1802. (The Walk to the Fair, page 5.)

* The poet Robert Bloomfield, of humble parentage, was celebrated as the author of The Farmer’s Boy (published in 1800 with woodcuts by Thomas Bewick); he was born in Suffolk two hundred and fifty years ago, in December 1766, and has a lasting reputation as one of the most significant of the uneducated rustic poets of the English tradition.

The poet John Clare, (‘a poetical genius . . . in the humble garb of a farm labourer’) called Bloomfield ‘the first of Rural Bards’ and recognised his mastery of rustic descriptive verse.

•

As I have conceded readily enough in earlier posts, I am very much an amateur literary sleuth hound, but I would be interested to know whether the Bloomfield/Orwell connexion has ever been made by contributors to the Orwell Foundation at University College London.

For more literary sleuthing, see . . .
Grim Secrets of Room 101 which traces the horrors of the Ministry of Truth to their source in the works of the Hungarian Tabori Brothers
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2018/06/grim-secrets-of-room-101-is-it-time-to.html
and
Year Zero ‘A Thing with One Face’ : Prescient Words of the Godfather Who Foresaw the Birth of Winston Smith
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2017/03/year-zero-thing-with-one-face-prescient.html
Maimed Hero: Frankenstein Exhumed . . . Tragic Monster in Nelson’s Own Image? A Bicentennial Investigation
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2016/06/maimed-hero-frankenstein-exhumed-tragic.html
and
Three haikus in homage to John Clare
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2017/02/three-haikus-in-homage-to-john-clare.html

•

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

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

Wednesday, 8 May 2019

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)

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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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see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

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