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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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

Shaking Bell Towers of Notre Dame and the Deluge of Boiling Lead . . . ‘Built by a Magician’ claims the Duc d’Égypte . . .

All eyes were raised to the top of the church. They beheld there an extraordinary sight. On the crest of the highest gallery, higher than the central Rose Window, there was a great flame rising between the two towers with whirlwinds of sparks, a vast, disordered, and furious flame, a tongue of which was borne into the smoke by the wind, from time to time. 

Below that fire, below the gloomy balustrade with its trefoils showing darkly against its glare, two spouts with monster throats were vomiting forth unceasingly that burning rain, whose silvery stream stood out against the shadows of the lower façade. As they approached the earth, these two jets of liquid lead spread out in sheaves, like water springing from the thousand holes of a watering-pot. Above the flame, the enormous towers, two sides of each of which were visible in sharp outline, the one wholly black, the other wholly red, seemed still more vast with all the immensity of the shadow which they cast even to the sky.

Their innumerable sculptures of demons and dragons assumed a lugubrious aspect. The restless light of the flame made them move to the eye. There were griffins which had the air of laughing, gargoyles which one fancied one heard yelping, salamanders which puffed at the fire, tarasques* which sneezed in the smoke. And among the monsters thus roused from their sleep of stone by this flame, by this noise, there was one who walked about, and who was seen, from time to time, to pass across the glowing face of the pile, like a bat in front of a candle.

Without doubt, this strange beacon light would awaken far away, the woodcutter of the hills of Bicêtre, terrified to behold the gigantic shadow of the towers of Notre-Dame quivering over his heaths.

The Duke of Egypt, seated on a stone post, contemplated the phantasmagorical bonfire, glowing at a height of two hundred feet in the air, with religious terror. Clopin Trouillefou bit his huge fists with rage.

    “Impossible to get in!” he muttered between his teeth.
    “An old, enchanted church!” grumbled the aged Bohemian, Mathias Hungadi Spicali.
    “By the Pope’s whiskers!” went on a sham soldier, who had once been in service, “here are church gutters spitting melted lead at you better than the machicolations of Lectoure.”
     “Do you see that demon passing and repassing in front of the fire?” exclaimed the Duke of Egypt.
     “Pardieu, ’tis that damned bellringer, ’tis Quasimodo,” said Clopin.
     
“Is there, then, no way of forcing this door,” exclaimed the King of Thunes, stamping his foot.
      The Duke of Egypt pointed sadly to the two streams of boiling lead which did not cease to streak the black facade, like two long distaffs of phosphorus.
     “Churches have been known to defend themselves thus all by themselves,” he remarked with a sigh. “Saint-Sophia at Constantinople, forty years ago, hurled to the earth three times in succession, the crescent of Mahom**, by shaking her domes, which are her heads. Guillaume de Paris, who built this one was a magician.***”

The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

by Victor Hugo (1831)

*     The representation of a monstrous animal recognised in Tarascon and other French towns.

**   The Mohammedans.

*** Guillaume de Piedoue was the third Mayor of Paris whose family financed the second part of the construction of Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral between 1250 and 1345.

D-r Tchékhov, Detektiv . . . the Problems of Englishing a Completist. Too anorakish?

It is well-known that, like Kipling, Tchékhov prided himself on his hyperdetailed understanding of the habits, customs and manners of the toilers from his own great sprawling multicultural empire. 

Filth! The place was one mass of it. Filth underfoot – filth on the walls, the rafters and the beams – filth floating on the hot, heavy pestiferous air.                                    (‘Zola,’ Tchékhov thought, ‘would revel in a minute description of this reeking den.’)                                    Anton placed his enamel tray on the workbench.   Old Vańuška cleared a space by removing an ancient fowling-piece, and a peculiarly shaped stump which Anton knew to be a leg-guard used by the cannoneers.  (When two shaft-horses drew a field-gun, one horse was ridden by a postilion who would have this clumsy-looking, very comical piece of wood fixed to his right leg.)

By comparison with a later text (see below), the Englishing of this modest display of military intelligence did not fox my father when first confronted with the ‘Chekhov manuscript’, labelled The Fatal Debut (understood to be a provisional title) in Anton’s own hand on the wax paper wrapper containing the putative Chekhov novel, bartered in 1946 by a prisoner of the Nürnberg Trials for ‘. . . half a carton of Chesterfields, two tins of cocoa and one can of condensed milk . . .’ (My father was an interpreter with SHAEF at the trials when he became acquainted with the possessor of the ms, General Vadim Ignatyvich Kulikov, who, following demands from the Soviets for his repatriation, was returned to Russia where after a show trial in Moscow he was executed for treason.)

Trainspotting credentials.

My father complained that Chekhov’s completism became more pronounced as the novel (he retitled the ms D-r Tchékhov, Detektiv: A Textbook Case) progressed towards its denouement and the measure of the challenges he faced may be grasped from his tackling of a particularly anorakish Chekhovian line, which warrants, I think, a more protracted textual exegesis . . .

From D-r Tchékhov, Detektiv: A Textbook Case, conclusion of Part 1, The Unvarnished Truth . . .  

Soon, the double yolk of a yellow approach-signal shimmered in a glair of mist.

I do believe my father’s erudite translation has the distinction of conveying Chekhov’s meaning with the very lightest touch. The preceding sentence, sets the scene . . .

In the far distance, a railway engine laboured on a curve, and then the railway lights came into view over the brow of a hill, and a high column of grey smoke and sparks shifted fretfully hither and thither, trapped in the cutting between the forest trees.

The elegance of the ‘double yoke’ is matched, in this case, by D-r Tchékhov’s apposite usage of a practically untranslatable Cheremissian word for a particularly serpentine river mist, which is also a homograph for ‘egg white’. (My learned father wittily employs the Scottish Gaelic word, glair, which has a very similar double meaning.)

The Soviet Railroad Signals Manual (see diagram) certainly confirms D-r Tchékhov’s trainspotting credentials and, indeed, does not contradict his observations of a ‘ramassage train’ for the fortress general’s remounts approaching signals set for their diversion to the marshalling yard. (Diagram: Switchgear for points, inwards, with a graduated outward crossover plate to the running line.) 

For the opinion of a Marxist footplatemen on the aridity of matters literary, see :
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2011/10/solitary-truck-euphonious-assonance.html

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A number of extracts from the as-yet-unpublished crime novel, D-r Tchékhov, Detektiv, have been posted here over recent years :

The Unvarnished Truth
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2018/11/ur-gumshoe-d-r-tchekhov-detektiv.html
A Skirmish with Wolves, 

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2015/01/d-r-tchekhov-skirmish-with-wolves-and.html 

or Winter Rules,

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2015/03/winter-rules-and-le-diable-boiteux.html

or Chekhov’s talking raven,

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2014/02/khar-r-r-kai-khar-r-r-kai-khar-r-r-kai.html 

or Dead Wife, New Hat,

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2012/10/dead-wife-new-hat-femme-morte-chapeau.html

or Inductive Detection,

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2011/10/inductive-detection.html

or D-r Tchékhov, Detektiv. A long lost novel, 

https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2011/10/d-r-tchekhov-detektiv-long-lost-novel.html

The transcription and restoration of a long lost crime novel by Chekhov (he, himself, referred to such a work in progress in 1888) has been a task requiring considerable cerebral vigour, which I confess demands a savviness I can no longer own.

The novel relates the misadventures of the morphine-dependent D-r Anton Tchékhov, aged 28 years, when investigating the mysterious duelling death of an aristocratic cadet in a remote snowbound northern garrison. 

From unpublished notebooks of L v. K

In a deserted room

the mirror shows 

a hyacinth

above

the fireplace

hyacinth

fireplace

a circumstantial affinity

the glass

does not

deny

L v. K  (Paris 1937)                                            

In a previous post . . . 
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/dotty-premature-embalmment-of-anti-art.html
. . .  is found mentioned a particularly recherché (even prophetic) example of la poésie concrète from The Eleven Surviving Works of L v. K.  It prompted me to add a further example of L v. K’s ‘deep continent’ brand of polymathy, see . . . 
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2016/04/circo-perfuso-fato-sanguinis.html
The eleven works are exhibited at the Arts Council Poetry Collection website administered by the Poetry Library at Royal Festival Hall in London’s Southbank Centre:

http://poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/recordbfb6.html?id=9440 

The Eleven Surviving Works of L v. K 

(1902-1939)

A Memoir of a Numeromaniacal Futurist

Lower than dirt

Once I lived lower than dirt; below,
in the basement area,

under the steps to my master’s front door.

I would dread his return
from the brickyards where
of those mute slaves 
there was not one who did not fear
their hellbent master
and quake at his tread.

Many times, on his approach, 
the brute would bawl my name;
stamp a tantrum at his door
to bid his craven drudge:
‘Take off my boots!’

And there, on that door step,

so near above my head,
there at that boot scraper,
under his tyrant heel

he stamps out the dirt
while I, his bootblack,  
suffer his taunts to bear 
all the cold earth

all the cold earth
he rains down
 to mire my hair.

Ranting.
Ever stomping
to mire my hair.

Until the day I fled away
and seven years passed before
the Time of Rain and Retribution brought
a brown mudslide to bury 
all the master’s works:

the city 

the brickyard

his house

he had built to
last a thousand years.

Misfortune seldom comes alone to a house.

                                             Catherine Eisner             

                                    25.01.2019             

   

For the photograph of the 19th Century boot scraper that lends substance to this text we are indebted to the documentarian, Areta, and her fascinating explorations of the former Austrian empire in her scholarly website:

http://forgottengalicia.com/