Shabby Chic – Choicest Colourways. The Bare Necessaries to Furnish a Cell for Solitude and Repose. Hadrian VII and Des Esseintes Share Know-How.

Drab.

Drab is, actually, a colour. It’s a dull, shabby, light brown. 

A Subfusc Aesthetic. 

And let’s not forget that it is from gris (grey) that we derive grisette, the 19th Century French working woman, traditionally classified by the humble grey fabric she invariably wore.

The grisette pictured below is from Fécamp in the Normandy region of France. Her modest counter-colours are very much in evidence, as you can observe.

Grisette de Fécamp  

Such are the caste colours of subjection . . . yet, perversely, the muted colours of this subfusc aesthetic once appeared conspicuously desirable to its two arch proponents – Joris-Karl Huysmans and Frederick William Rolfe – whose all-consuming hypersensitive preciosity bears the same relation to humility as the masquerades of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette bore to the mock-heroic shepherds and shepherdesses of their pastorale in the rusticised hamlet they made their pleasure-ground at Versailles.

The Unassuming Palette of Pseudo-Monasticism?

So let’s be clear. The romance of transcendental monasticism and ritualism – including a fascination with self-mortification and martyrology of the grossest sort – continues to have a strong appeal for masochistic sensualists; particularly it holds an appeal for certain literary adherents drawn to the theatrics of a penitential Catholicism whose credo often may be likened to the highly selective self-denying practices of a sybaritic hermitage.

Agreed, this is my own rather jaded view of so-called fin-de-siècle Decadents . . . but, please, compare the not unrelated narratives of these two writers, Huysmans and Rolfe (Baron Corvo) – two laundry lists of indulgently fulfilled desires, emblematic of a new genre of ‘narcissistic asceticism’ – separated by exactly twenty years . . . 1884 and 1904 . . . and it’s for you to decide. A husk-mattress, anyone?

Imitations d’Humilité.

    . . . he had hung a disturbing sketch by El Greco in his bedroom. It was a Christ done in strange tints, in a strained design, possessing a wild colour and a disordered energy: a picture executed in the painter’s second manner when he had been tormented by the necessity of avoiding imitation of Titian.

        This sinister painting, with its wax and sickly green tones, bore an affinity to certain ideas Des Esseintes had with regard to furnishing a room.

        According to him, there were but two ways of fitting a bedroom. One could either make it a sense-stimulating alcove, a place for nocturnal delights, or a cell for solitude and repose, a retreat for thought, a sort of oratory.

        . . .  For the second instance,—and now that he wished to put behind him the irritating memories of his past life, this was the only possible expedient—he was compelled to design a room that would be like a monastic cell. But difficulties faced him here, for he refused to accept in its entirety the austere ugliness of those asylums of penitence and prayer.

        By dint of studying the problem in all its phases, he concluded that the end to be attained could thus be stated: to devise a sombre effect by means of cheerful objects, or rather to give a tone of elegance and distinction to the room thus treated, meanwhile preserving its character of ugliness; to reverse the practice of the theatre, whose vile tinsel imitates sumptuous and costly textures; to obtain the contrary effect by use of splendid fabrics; in a word, to have the cell of a Carthusian monk which should possess the appearance of reality without in fact being so.

        Thus he proceeded. To imitate the stone-colour of ochre and clerical yellow, he had his walls covered with saffron silk; to stimulate the chocolate hue of the dadoes common to this type of room, he used pieces of violet wood deepened with amaranth. The effect was bewitching, while recalling to Des Esseintes the repellant rigidity of the model he had followed and yet transformed. The ceiling, in turn, was hung with white, unbleached cloth, in imitation of plaster, but without its discordant brightness. As for the cold pavement of the cell, he was able to copy it, by means of a bit of rug designed in red squares, with whitish spots in the weave to imitate the wear of sandals and the friction of boots.

        Into this chamber he introduced a small iron bed, the kind used by monks, fashioned of antique, forged and polished iron, the head and foot adorned with thick filigrees of blossoming tulips enlaced with vine branches and leaves. Once this had been part of a balustrade of an old hostel’s superb staircase.

        For his table, he installed an antique praying-desk the inside of which could contain an urn and the outside a prayer book. Against the wall, opposite it, he placed a church pew surmounted by a tall dais with little benches carved out of solid wood. His church tapers were made of real wax, procured from a special house which catered exclusively to houses of worship, for Des Esseintes professed a sincere repugnance to gas, oil and ordinary candles, to all modern forms of illumination, so gaudy and brutal.

À Rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans (1884) 

Let Us have all of the simplest, without ornament.

They went out into the corridor; and re-entered the apartment by the first antechamber. 

        ‘Cover all the walls and ceilings with brown-packing paper - yes, brown-packing paper - carta straccia,’ the Pope repeated. 

        ‘Stain all the woodwork with a darker shade of brown. The gilding of the cornices can remain as it is. No carpets. These small greenish-blue tiles are clean; and they soothe the eye. Curtains? You may hang very voluminous linen curtains on the doors and windows, greenish-blue linen to match the tiles, and without borders. Furnish all those ante-chambers with rush chairs and oaken tables. Remember that everything is to be plain, without ornament - In this room you may place the usual throne and canopy: and that crucifix from downstairs - (how exquisite the mother-of-pearl figure is!) - and the stools, and twelve large candlesticks - iron or brass - Now this room is to be a workshop. Let Us have a couch and three armchairs, all large and low and well-cushioned, covered with undyed leather. Get some of those large plain wooden tables which are used in kitchens, about three yards long and one and a half wide. Put writing-materials on one of them, there, on the right of the window. Leave the middle of the room empty. Put three small bookcases against that wall and a cupboard here - Make a bedroom of this room. Let the bed be narrow and long, with a husk mattress; and let the back of the head be toward the window. Put one of the large wooden tables here and a dozen rush-chairs -’ (He spoke to the bishop) ‘Do you know that there is no water here at all, except in little jugs?’ (He continued to the Major-domo) ‘Line the walls of this room with greenish-blue tiles, like those on the floor. Put several pegs on both doors. In this corner put a drainpipe covered with a grating; and, six feet above it, let a waterpipe and a tap project rectangularly two feet from the wall. Yes. Six feet from the floor, two feet from the wall; and let there be a constant and copious supply of water - rain water, if possible. Do you understand?’ 

        The Major-domo understood. The Master-of-the-Chamber shivered. 

        ‘And lamps. Get two plain oil-lamps for each room, with copper shades: large lamps, to give a very strong light. Paint over both doors of the bedroom, on the outside of each, Intrantes excommunicantur ipso facto. When We have finished here,’ He addressed the Master-of-the-Chamber again, ‘you will parade your staff; and We will select one person and provide him with a dispensation from that rule as long as he behaves himself well. He will have charge of the bedroom and the sole right to enter it.’ (The Pope passed into the next room: paused, and whispered explicit directions to the Major-domo; and moved on to the farther room.) ‘The clothes-presses from downstairs can be moved into this room. They will serve. And you had better make a door here, so that it can be entered from the corridor.’ (He went on again.) ‘This room is to be the vestry - and this the oratory. Let Us have a plain stone altar and the stations, and the bare necessaries for mass, all of the simplest. Let everything, walls, floor, ceiling, everything, be white - natural white, not painted; and make a door here, also leading into the corridor, a large double door convenient for the faithful who assist at the pontifical mass. The rooms beyond - you will take order about them at a convenient occasion.’ 

        Hadrian and the bishop returned to the pontifical apartments downstairs. 

        ‘Your Holiness will excuse me -’ 

        ‘Yes?’

        ‘- but have You ever contemplated the present situation?’’

        ‘No. Why?’

        ‘Well, Your Holiness seems to have everything cut and dried.’

Hadrian the Seventh by Frederick Rolfe (1904) 

•

The Psychopathology of Hedonistic Abasement.

The interior decorator manqué, His Holiness, claims he has not contemplated the ‘present situation’!? My eye! 
        Good artists borrow, great artists steal. This is almost certainly the case in Rolfe’s theft (from Huysmans) of the Psychopathology of Hedonistic Abasement to colour the idée fixe of his novel‘s eponymous hero, an undisguised self portrait.

The fetishisation of monastic self-denial, we might imagine, also displaces for both authors the anxieties of a co-existing obsession by substituting the psychical pain of libidinous neuroses with a convenient sublimation. 

I will not mention the present day pontifical inclination to shun residence in the apostolic apartments in favour of modest quarters in a sort hostel for visiting clergy, some distance from the papal palace, on the other side of the Vatican city state. 

Product Placement . . . the Keys of Saint Peter are British-Made.

However, Shabby Chic apart, I will note here that, according to Hadrian the Seventh, the Keys of Saint Peter, the symbol of papal authority, are manufactured to the highest specification by London's oldest and most prestigious lock manufacturer.

        ‘A master key, Holiness, I have just got one too.’ The bishop shewed his own ring.
        ‘‘Capital! Where do you get those things made?’
        ‘At a place in Band Street [sic] —Brahma [sic] I think the name is.’  
        ‘Tell your Brahma people to fit all the doors upstairs with locks which have separate keys, . .  and also to send a man who is capable of making an episcopal ring for Us which shall contain a master key to all those locks.‘
        ‘Very well, Holy Father.’

Note: After 103 years in Piccadilly and Bond Street, Bramah Locksmiths have moved to 7 Goodge Place, Fitzrovia, London, W1T 4SF. 
The present Managing Director is a member of the Bramah family.
http://www.bramah.co.uk/Chronological%20History.pdf

Sham Pain.

For The Pallette of Pain, an account of painter Francis Bacon’s use of ‘violence as an activity’, the ‘sham pain’ he proposed for his friends and rendered on canvases, regarded by the cognoscenti as transgressive art – yet expressive of a consummate passive-aggressive masochist with a bent for self-abasement – see also :
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2014/05/i-am-serial-killer-diarist-unremarked.html

•

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

O Fruit of that Forbidden Tree whose Mortal Taste Brought All Our Woe . . .

     . . . or did they misunderstand

 and neither heard the rattle 

of a serpentine warning

when Eve thrust the apple 

into Adam’s hand?

The Fall of Man
(1592, detail)
by Cornelis van Haarlem
(1562–1638)  

(Newspaper report, 17 October 2019)         The true way for testing a ripe Cox’s Orange Pippin apple is to shake it. The pips should rattle in the core.

See also: 
Et vocavit Adam nomen uxoris suæ, Eva . . . de ligno autem scientiæ boni et mali ne comedas. 
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2019/09/et-vocavit-adam-nomen-uxoris-su-heva-de.html
and
That space the Evil One abstracted . . . and attention gained with forked tongue . . .
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2018/05/that-space-evil-one-abstracted-and.html

A Young Girl Dressed Deeply in Black.

‘The finding of the missing girl was due to disciplined legwork,’ the Police Commander leading the investigation into the unnamed teenager’s disappearance explained last night. 

     The first bulletin released a description of the runaway, he went on, which stated, ‘Jane Doe, age fourteen years, eyes blue, blonde hair, height 5 ft 2 ins, slim build, scar on left elbow, quiet-spoken, and possibly amnesiac.’

     

     Acting on operational intelligence, however, after the grandmother of the runaway revealed certain details of the traumatic effects of a recent bereavement on the girl, a city-wide all-points police broadcast to patrolmen swiftly resulted in the subject of the search being traced.

     Since the tragic death of her parents, both killed instantly in a fatal multi-vehicle expressway crash in November last year, the teenager it was understood had become profoundly affected by her loss and she had vanished from her home. Investigators believed that the girl, due to profound grief, had lost her memory and according to latest reports this appears to be the case.

     The fact that the girl wore mourning attire of a distinct character meant that a large number of witnesses came forward who remembered vividly her last movements, as it unusual to see a young girl dressed deeply in black, and her whereabouts were soon known to close the case without undue delay, or distress to the missing teenager.

Anti-Chekhovian Sentiments.

‘Why do you always wear black?’
    This question recalled Masha’s famous opening line in the first act of The Seagull, Jane Doe later reminded a policewoman (she had studied Chekhov’s play at junior high school). 

      ‘But don’t think for all that I am in mourning for my own life,’ she insisted. ‘Let there be no doubt it is the lives of my devoted parents I devoutly mourn.’  In detention the grieving girl had also stated, ‘I can’t be treated as if I were any normal girl of fourteen.’

      Curiously, this run-in with a police squad, so early in Jane Doe’s formative years, would come to be seen as a significant precursor to a later encounter with NYPD patrolmen on the occasion of her sensational disappearance, age twenty-four, in the case once popularly known as the Nuke-Shelter Spy Nest Affair.

      In 2008, when a notice heralding the authorised account of the notorious case first appeared (Thought Police, see page 414 of Catherine Eisner’s Sister Morphine published by Salt), the announcement concluded that ‘. . . when, even the Press have so far failed to uncover clues to solve the mystery of her disappearance, tantalisingly, the publication of a full account of her astonishing story must be delayed until the next edition of this work [i.e. A Room to the End of Fall Salt 2014].’ 

      This earlier commentary observed that, frustratingly, the occasion of Jane Doe’s disappearance, corroborated by a number of witnesses, had been more closely documented and reported more faithfully than the bizarre circumstances of her discovery. 

The Second Disappearance . . . Burrowing Under the Floor . . .

In Thought Police there is a sketch of the scene outside Jane Doe’s city apartment house, the day before her disappearance, that gave rise to the narrative’s title. A police patrol car halts beside her as she stands immobile in an unseasonable flurry of snow, dressed in a thin housecoat, staring fixedly at a drain cover where the snowfall had melted in a perfect dish-shaped concavity.

      The cops are friendly and polite. 

      They had merely put to her one question: ‘Something on your mind, maybe?’  

      ‘No. It’s nothing,’ she answers dryly with a false smile. ‘Unless, perhaps, you’re a deputation from the Thought Police.’

      A day later she vanishes without a trace to reemerge half a decade later.

      In Thought Police in 2008 there are quoted a few key passages from her diary into which she had copied extracts from Chekhov’s sinister cautionary tale, The Bet, whose unnamed young hero has himself incarcerated voluntarily for fifteen years in a well-stocked library – in solitary confinement – to win a bet of two million roubles wagered by a banker.

      ‘The prisoner (writes Jane Doe), amazingly, in four years, reads over six hundred volumes and when, after fifteen years of confinement in which he imbibes the world’s classics, he emerges into daylight, his appearance is almost spectral. His face is yellow, his cheeks are hollow, his hair is streaked with silver, and no one can believe that he is only forty! He is a skeleton with the skin drawn tight over his bones and long matted curls like . . . like, well, like my own, if I’m honest. But what does the prisoner declare upon his release that I would not myself assert were I to meet that hateful unconscionable banker!?

      ‘ “Your books have given me wisdom. All man’s unresting thought from the ages is compressed into the small compass of my brain. I know that I am wiser than all of you. And I despise your books, as I despise wisdom and the blessings of this world. It is all worthless, fleeting, illusory, and deceptive, like a mirage . . . as though you were no more than mice burrowing under the floor . . .” ’

Anomie and related neurotica. 

‘Jane Doe’ evidently empathised strongly with Chekhov’s disillusioned bookish captive, but she herself denied at the time a Freudo-Marxist view of alienation to explain her own anomie and other related neurotica. 

     Despite admitting to severe psychological adjustment problems, she claimed her sense of dislocation from a once familiar world was due, essentially, to the extreme mistrust and suspicion with which she regarded her literary agent, Sherman Seymour Dane. Specifically, she falsely accused Dane of ghostwriting the major portion of her novel, An Auroral Stain, which was published to mixed reviews during her enforced absence. ‘For Seymour, it was more than a case of corpus delicti when I disappeared,’ Jane Doe alleged, ‘it was a case of a missing opus whose inconvenient absence was remedied when he presumed to “complete” the work without my authorisation.’ 

     That she was wholly misguided in this belief the narrative A Room to the End of Fall now happily remedies. See her unredacted text in A Bad Case, 2014. Please note: To allay suspicions of editorial tampering (spelling, punctuation, usage, etc.), which for very sound reasons this American narrator maintains, her native US orthography in this account remains unchanged.

•

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

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.’

See also: 

O Fruit of that Forbidden Tree whose Mortal Taste Brought All Our Woe :

https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2019/10/o-fruit-of-that-forbidden-tree-whose.html
and
That space the Evil One abstracted . . . and attention gained with forked tongue . . .
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2018/05/that-space-evil-one-abstracted-and.html

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. 

•

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

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