Delusions and dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva (1907)1 2 страница

5 We are beginning to understand now, and to feel some hope. If the young lady in whose form Gradiva had come to life again accepted Hanold’s delusion so fully, she was probably doing so in order to set him free from it. There was no other way of doing so; to contradict it would have put an end to any such possibility. Even the serious treatment of a real case of illness of the kind could proceed in no other way than to begin by taking up the same ground as the delusional structure and then investigating it as completely as possible. If Zoe was the right person for the job, we shall soon learn, no doubt, how to cure a delusion like our hero’s. We should also be glad to know how such delusions arise. It would be a strange coincidence - but, nevertheless, not without an example or parallel - if the treatment of the delusion were to coincide with its investigation and if the explanation of its origin were to be revealed precisely while it was being dissected. We may suspect, of course, that, if so, our case of illness might end up as a ‘commonplace’ love-story. But the healing power of love against a delusion is not to be despised - and was not our hero’s infatuation for his Gradiva sculpture a complete instance of being in love, though of being in love with something past and lifeless?

After Gradiva’s disappearance, there was only a distant sound, like the laughing call of a bird flying over the ruined city. The young man, now by himself, picked up a white object that had been left behind by Gradiva: not a sheet of papyrus, but a sketch-book with pencil drawings of various scenes in Pompeii. We should be inclined to regard her having forgotten the book there as a pledge of her return, for it is our belief that no one forgets anything without some secret reason or hidden motive.

The remainder of the day brought Hanold all manner of strange discoveries and confirmations, which he failed to synthesize into a whole. He perceived to-day in the wall of the portico where Gradiva had vanished a narrow gap, which was wide enough, however, to allow someone unusually slim to pass through it. He recognized that Zoe-Gradiva need not have sunk into the earth here - an idea which now seemed to him so unreasonable that he felt ashamed of having once believed in it; she might well have used the gap as a way of reaching her grave. A slight shadow seemed to him to melt away at the end of the Street of the Tombs in front of what is known as the Villa of Diomedes.

In the same whirl of feeling as on the previous day and deep in the same problems, he now strolled round the environs of Pompeii. What, he wondered, might be the bodily nature of Zoe-Gradiva? Would one feel anything if one touched her hand? A strange urge drove him to a determination to put this experiment to the test. Yet an equally strong reluctance held him back even from the very idea. On a sun-bathed slope he met an elderly gentleman who, from his accoutrements, must be a zoologist or botanist and who seemed to be engaged in a hunt. This individual turned towards him and said: ‘Are you interested in faraglionensis as well? I should hardly have suspected it, but it seems to be quite probable that it occurs not only on the Faraglioni Islands off Capri, but has established itself on the mainland too. The method prescribed by our colleague Eimer is a really good one; I have made use of it many times already, with excellent results. Please keep quite still...’ (96.) Here the speaker broke off and placed a snare made of a long blade of grass in front of a crack in the rocks out of which the small iridescent blue head of a lizard was peering. Hanold left the lizard-hunter with a critical feeling that it was scarcely credible what foolish and strange purposes could lead people to make the long journey to Pompeii - without, needless to say, including in his criticism himself and his intention of searching in the ashes of Pompeii for Gradiva’s footprints. Moreover, the gentleman’s face seemed familiar, as though he had had a glimpse of it in one of the two hotels; his manner of address, too, had been as though he were speaking to an acquaintance.

In the course of his further walk, he arrived by a side road at a house which he had not yet discovered and which turned out to be a third hotel, the ‘Albergo del Sole’. The landlord, with nothing else to do, took the opportunity of showing off his house and the excavated treasures it contained to their best advantage. He asserted that he had been present when the pair of young lovers had been found in the neighbourhood of the Forum, who, in the knowledge of their inevitable doom, had awaited death closely embraced in each other’s arms. Hanold had heard of this before, and had shrugged his shoulders over it as a fabulous tale invented by some imaginative story-teller; but to-day the landlord’s words aroused his belief and this was increased when a metal clasp was produced, covered with a green patina, which was said to have been retrieved from the ashes beside the girl’s remains. He purchased this clasp without any further critical doubts, and when, as he left the albergo, he saw in an open window a nodding sprig of asphodel covered with white blossoms, the sight of the funeral flowers came over him as a confirmation of the genuineness of his new possession.

But with the clasp a new delusion took possession of him, or rather the old one had a small piece added to it - no very good augury, it would seem, for the treatment that had been begun. A pair of young lovers in an embrace had been dug out not far from the Forum, and it was in that very neighbourhood, by the Temple of Apollo, that in his dream he had seen Gradiva lie down to sleep. Was it not possible that in fact she had gone further along from the Forum and had met someone and that they had then died together? A tormenting feeling, which we might perhaps liken to jealousy, arose out of this suspicion. He appeased it by reflecting on the uncertainty of the construction, and brought himself to his senses far enough to be able to take his evening meal at the Hotel Diomède. There his attention was drawn by two newly-arrived visitors, a He and a She, whom he was obliged to regard as a brother and sister on account of a certain resemblance between them - in spite of the difference in the colour of their hair. They were the first people he had met on his journey who made a sympathetic impression on him. A red Sorrento rose worn by the girl aroused some kind of memory in him, but he could not think what. At last he went to bed and had a dream. It was a remarkably senseless affair, but was obviously hashed up from his day’s experiences. ‘Somewhere in the sun Gradiva was sitting, making a snare out of a blade of grass to catch a lizard in, and said: "Please keep quite still. Our lady colleague is right; the method is a really good one and she has made use of it with excellent results."' He fended off this dream while he was still asleep, with the critical thought that it was utter madness, and he succeeded in freeing himself from it with the help of an invisible bird which uttered a short laughing call and carried off the lizard in its beak.

In spite of all this turmoil, he woke up in a rather clearer and steadier frame of mind. A branch of a rose-tree bearing flowers of the sort he had seen the day before on the young lady’s breast reminded him that during the night someone had said that people give roses in the spring. Without thinking, he picked a few of the roses, and there must have been something connected with them that had a relaxing effect on his mind. He felt relieved of his unsociable feelings, and went by the usual way to Pompeii, burdened with the roses, the metal clasp and the sketch-book, and occupied with a number of problems concerning Gradiva. The old delusion had begun to show cracks: he was beginning to wonder whether she might be in Pompeii, not at the mid-day hour only, but at other times as well. The stress had shifted, however, to the latest addition, and the jealousy attaching to it tormented him in all sorts of disguises. He could almost have wished that the apparition might remain visible to his eyes alone, and elude the perception of others: then, in spite of everything, he could look on her as his own exclusive property. While he was strolling about, waiting for the mid-day hour, he had an unexpected encounter. In the Casa del Fauno he came upon two figures in a corner in which they must have thought themselves out of sight, for they were embraced in each other’s arms and their lips were pressed together. He was astonished to recognize in them the sympathetic couple from the previous evening. But their behaviour now did not seem to fit a brother and sister: their embrace and their kiss seemed to him to last too long. So after all they were a pair of lovers, presumably a young honeymoon couple - yet another Edwin and Angelina. Curiously enough, however, this time the sight of them caused him only satisfaction; and with a sense of awe, as though he had interrupted some secret act of devotion, he withdrew unobserved. An attitude of respectfulness, which he had long been without, had returned to him.

When he reached the House of Meleager, he was once more overcome by such a violent dread of finding Gradiva in someone else’s company that when she appeared the only words he found to greet her with were: ‘Are you alone?’ It was with difficulty that he allowed her to bring him to realize that he had picked the roses for her. He confessed his latest delusion to her - that she was the girl who had been found in the forum in a lover’s embrace and who had owned the green clasp. She enquired, not without a touch of mockery, whether he had found the thing in the sun perhaps: the sun (and she used the [Italian] word ‘sole’) produced all kinds of things like that. He admitted that he was feeling dizzy in his head, and she suggested as a cure that he should share her small picnic meal with her. She offered him half of a roll wrapped up in tissue paper and ate the other half herself with an obviously good appetite. At the same time her perfect teeth flashed between her lips and made a slight crunching sound as they bit through the crust. ‘I feel as though we had shared a meal like this once before, two thousand years ago’, she said; ‘can’t you remember?’ (118.) He could think of no reply, but the improvement in his head brought about by the food, and the many indications she gave of her actual presence, were not without their effect on him. Reason began to rise in him and to throw doubt on the whole delusion of Gradiva’s being no more than a mid-day ghost - though no doubt it might be argued on the other hand that she herself had just said that she had shared a meal with him two thousand years ago. As a means of settling the conflict an experiment suggested itself: and this he carried out craftily and with regained courage. Her left hand, with its delicate fingers, was resting on her knees, and one of the house-flies whose impertinence and uselessness had so much roused his indignation alighted on it. Suddenly Hanold’s hand was raised in the air and descended with a vigorous slap on the fly and Gradiva’s hand.

This bold experiment had two results: first, a joyful conviction that he had without any doubt touched a real, living, warm human hand, but afterwards a reproof that made him jump up in a fright from his seat on the steps. For, from Gradiva’s lips, when she had recovered from her astonishment, there rang out these words: ‘There’s no doubt you’re out of your mind, Norbert Hanold!’ As everyone knows, the best method of waking a sleeper or a sleep-walker is to call him by his own name. But unluckily there was no chance of observing the effects produced on Norbert Hanold by Gradiva’s calling him by his name (which he had told no one in Pompeii). For at this critical moment the sympathetic pair of lovers from the Casa del Fauno appeared, and the young lady exclaimed in a tone of joyful surprise: ‘Zoe! Are you here too? And on your honeymoon like us? You never wrote me a word about it!’ In face of this new evidence of Gradiva’s living reality, Hanold took flight.

Nor was Zoe-Gradiva very agreeably surprised by this unexpected visit, which interrupted her in what was apparently an important task. But she quickly pulled herself together and made a fluent reply to the question, in which she explained the situation to her friend - and even more to us - and which enabled her to get rid of the young couple. She congratulated them; but she was not on her honeymoon. ‘The young man who’s just gone off is labouring, like you, under a remarkable aberration. He seems to think there’s a fly buzzing in his head. Well, I expect everyone has some sort of insect there. It’s my duty to know something about entomology, so I can help a little in cases like that. My father and I are staying at the Sole. Something got into his head too, and the brilliant idea occurred to him besides of bringing me here with him on condition that I amused myself on my own at Pompeii and made no demands of any kind on him. I told myself I should dig out something interesting here even by myself. Of course I hadn’t counted on making the find that I have - I mean my luck in meeting you, Gisa.’ (124.) But now, she added, she must hurry off, so as to be company for her father at his lunch in the ‘Sun’. And she departed, after having introduced herself to us as the daughter of the zoologist and lizard-catcher and after having, by all kinds of ambiguous remarks, admitted her therapeutic intention and other secret designs as well.

The direction she took, however, was not towards the Hotel of the Sun, where her father was waiting for her. But it seemed to her too as though a shadowy form was seeking its grave near the Villa of Diomedes, and was vanishing beneath one of the monuments. And for that reason she directed her steps towards the Street of the Tombs, with her foot lifted almost perpendicularly at each step. It was to this same place that Hanold had fled in his shame and confusion. He wandered ceaselessly up and down in the portico of the garden, engaged in the task of disposing of the remains of his problem by an intellectual effort. One thing had become undeniably clear to him: that he had been totally without sense or reason in believing that he had been associating with a young Pompeian woman who had come to life again in a more or less physical shape. It could not be disputed that this clear insight into his delusion was an essential step forward on his road back to a sound understanding. But, on the other hand, this living woman, with whom other people communicated as though she were as physically real as themselves, was Gradiva, and she knew his name; and his scarcely awakened reason was not strong enough to solve this riddle. He was hardly calm enough emotionally, either, to show himself capable of facing so hard a task, for he would have preferred to have been buried along with the rest two thousand years before in the Villa of Diomedes, so as to be quite certain of not meeting Zoe-Gradiva again.

Nevertheless, a violent desire to see her again struggled against what was left of the inclination to flight still lingering in him.

As he turned one of the four corners of the colonnade, he suddenly recoiled. On a broken fragment of masonry was sitting one of the girls who had perished here in the Villa of Diomedes. This, however, was a last attempt, quickly rejected, at taking flight into the realm of delusion. No, it was Gradiva, who had evidently come to give him the final portion of her treatment. She quite correctly interpreted his first instinctive movement as an attempt to leave the building, and showed him that it was impossible for him to run away, for a terrific downpour of rain had begun outside. She was ruthless, and began her examination by asking him what he had been trying to do with the fly on her hand. He had not the courage to make use of a particular pronoun,¹ but he did have the courage for something more important - for asking her the decisive question:

‘As someone said, I was rather confused in my head, and I must apologize for treating the hand. I can’t understand how I could be so senseless... but I can’t understand either how its owner could point out my... my unreasonableness to me by my own name.’ (134.)

‘So your understanding has not got as far as that, Norbert Hanold. But I can’t say I’m surprised at it, you’ve accustomed me to it so long. I needn’t have come to Pompeii to discover it again, and you could have confirmed it a good hundred miles nearer home.

‘A hundred miles nearer’, she explained, as he still failed to understand, ‘diagonally across the street from where you live - in the house at the corner. There’s a cage in my window with a canary in it.’

These last words, as he heard them, affected him like a distant memory: that must have been the same bird whose song had given him the idea of his journey to Italy.

‘My father lives in that house: the Professor of Zoology, Richard Bertgang.’

¹ [The pronoun of the second person singular. The point of some of what follows is necessarily lost in English. In all his remarks to Gradiva hitherto, Hanold had used the second person singular, partly, no doubt, because that would be the classical usage. Now, however, that he was beginning to realize that he was talking to a modern German girl, he felt that the second person singular was far too familiar and affectionate. Gradiva, on the other hand, has used the second person singular throughout in speaking to him.]

3 So, since she was his neighbour, she knew him by sight and by name. We feel a sense of disillusionment: the solution falls flat and seems unworthy of our expectations.

Norbert Hanold showed that he had not yet regained his independence of thought when he replied: ‘So you¹... you are Fräulein Zoe Bertgang? But she looked quite different...’

Fräulein Bertgang’s answer shows us that all the same there had been other relations between the two of them besides their simply being neighbours. She could argue in favour of the familiar ‘du’, which he had used naturally to the mid-day ghost but had drawn back from in speaking to the live girl, but on behalf of which she claimed ancient rights: ‘If you find this formal mode of address more suitable, I can use it too. But I find the other comes to my lips more naturally. I don’t know if I looked different in the early days when we used to run about together in a friendly way or sometimes, by way of a change, used to bump and thump each other. But if you² had even once looked at me attentively in recent years, it might have dawned on you that I’ve looked like this for quite a time.’

¹ [‘Sie’, the German pronoun of the third person plural, which is always used in formal speech instead of the ‘du’ of the second person singular.]

² [From this point to the middle of her next speech, when, as will be seen, she finally rebels, Zoe makes a valiant attempt to use the formal ‘Sie’.]4 So there had been a childhood friendship between them - perhaps a childhood love - which justified the ‘du’. This solution, it may be, falls just as flat as the one we first suspected. We are brought to a much deeper level, however, when we realize that this childhood relationship unexpectedly explains a number of details in what had happened in their contemporary contact. Consider, for instance, the slapping of Zoe-Gradiva’s hand. Norbert Hanold found a most convincing reason for it in the necessity for reaching an experimental answer to the problem of the apparition’s physical reality. But was it not at the same time remarkably like a revival of the impulse for the ‘bumping and thumping’ whose dominance in their childhood was shown by Zoe’s words? And think, again, of how Gradiva asked the archaeologist whether it did not seem to him that they had shared a meal like this two thousand years before. This unintelligible question suddenly seems to have a sense, if we once more replace the historical past by the personal one - childhood -, of which the girl still had lively memories but which the young man appeared to have forgotten. And now the discovery dawns upon us that the young archaeologist’s phantasies about his Gradiva may have been an echo of his forgotten childhood memories. If so, they were not capricious products of his imagination, but determined, without his knowing it, by the store of childhood impressions which he had forgotten, but which were still at work in him. It should be possible for us to show the origin of the phantasies in detail, even though we can only guess at them. He imagined, for instance, that Gradiva must be of Greek origin and that she was the daughter of a respected personage - a priest of Ceres, perhaps. This seems to fit in pretty well with his knowing that she bore the Greek name of Zoe and that she belonged to the family of a Professor of Zoology. But if Hanold’s phantasies were transformed memories, we may expect to find an indication of the source of those phantasies in the information given us by Zoe Bertgang. Let us listen to what she has to say. She has told us of their intimate friendship in their childhood, and we shall now hear of the further course taken by this childhood relationship.

5 ‘At that time, as a matter of fact, up to about the age when, I don’t know why, people begin to call us "Backfisch",¹ I had got accustomed to being remarkably dependent on you and believed I could never in the world find a more agreeable friend. I had no mother or sister or brother, my father found a slow-worm in spirits considerably more interesting than me; and everyone (and I include girls) must have something to occupy their thoughts and whatever goes along with them. That was what you were then. But when archaeology took hold of you I discovered - you must forgive me, but really your polite innovation sounds to me too ridiculous and, besides, it doesn’t fit in with what I want to express - as I was saying, it turned out that you’d² become an unbearable person who (at any rate so far as I was concerned) no longer had any eyes in his head or tongue in his mouth, or any memory, where my memory had stuck, of our friendship when we were children. No doubt that was why I looked different from before. For when from time to time I met you in society - it happened once as recently as last winter - you didn’t see me, still less did I hear you say a word. Not that there was any distinction for me in that, for you treated everyone else alike. I was thin air for you, and you - with your tuft of fair hair that I’d rumpled for you often enough in the past - you were as dull, as dried-up, and as tongue-tied as a stuffed cockatoo, and at the same time as grandiose as an - archeopteryx - yes, that’s right, that’s what they call the antediluvian bird-monstrosity they’ve dug up. Only there was one thing I hadn’t suspected: that there was an equally grandiose phantasy lodged in your head of looking on me too, here in Pompeii, as something that had been dug up and come to life again. And when all at once there you were standing in front of me quite unexpectedly, it took me quite a lot of trouble at first to make out what an incredible cobweb your imagination had spun in your brain. After that, it amused me and quite pleased me in spite of its lunacy. For, as I told you, I hadn’t suspected it of you.’

¹ [Literally ‘fish for frying’. The common German slang term equivalent to ‘flapper’ or ‘teenager’.]

² [From this point onwards she finally reverts to ‘du’.]6 Thus she tells us plainly enough what with the years had become of their childhood friendship. In her it grew until she was thoroughly in love, for a girl must have something to which she can give her heart. Fräulein Zoe, the embodiment of cleverness and clarity, makes her own mind quite transparent to us. While it is in any case the general rule for a normally constituted girl to turn her affection towards her father in the first instance, Zoe, who had no one in her family but her father, was especially ready to do so. But her father had nothing left over for her; all his interest was engrossed by the objects of his science. So she was obliged to cast her eyes around upon other people, and became especially attached to her young playmate. When he too ceased to have any eyes for her, her love was not shaken by it but rather increased, for he had become like her father, was, like him, absorbed by science and held apart by it from life and from Zoe. Thus it was made possible for her to remain faithful in her unfaithfulness - to find her father once more in her loved one, to include both of them with the same emotion, or, as we may say, to identify both of them in her feeling. What is our justification for this piece of psychological analysis, which might well seem arbitrary? The author has presented us with it in a single, but highly characteristic, detail. When Zoe described the transformation in her former playmate which had so greatly disturbed her, she abused him by comparing him to an archaeopteryx, the bird-like monstrosity which belongs to the archaeology of zoology. In that way she found a single concrete expression of the identity of the two figures. Her complaint applies with the same word to the man she loved and to her father. The archaeopteryx is, we might say, a compromise idea or an intermediate idea in which her thought about the folly of the man she loved coincided with the analogous thought about her father.

With the young man, things had taken a different turn. Archaeology took hold of him and left him with an interest only in women of marble and bronze. His childhood friendship, instead of being strengthened into a passion, was dissolved, and his memories of it passed into such profound forgetfulness that he did not recognize or notice his early playmate when he met her in society. It is true that when we look further we may doubt whether ‘forgetfulness’ is the correct psychological description of the fate of these memories in our young archaeologist. There is a kind of forgetting which is distinguished by the difficulty with which the memory is awakened even by a powerful external summons, as though some internal resistance were struggling against its revival. A forgetting of this kind has been given the name of ‘repression’ in psychopathology; and the case which our author has put before us seems to be an example of this repression. Now we do not know in general whether the forgetting of an impression is linked with the dissolution of its memory-trace in the mind; but we can assert quite definitely of ‘repression’ that it does not coincide with the dissolution or extinction of the memory. What is repressed cannot, it is true, as a rule make its way into memory without more ado; but it retains a capacity for effective action, and, under the influence of some external event, it may one day bring about psychical consequences which can be regarded as products of a modification of the forgotten memory and as derivatives of it and which remain unintelligible unless we take this view of them. We have already seemed to recognize in Norbert Hanold’s phantasies about Gradiva derivatives of his repressed memories of his childhood friendship with Zoe Bertgang. A return like this of what has been repressed is to be expected with particular regularity when a person’s erotic feelings are attached to the repressed impressions - when his erotic life has been attacked by repression. In such cases the old Latin saying holds true, though it may have been coined first to apply to expulsion by external influences and not to internal conflicts: ‘Naturam expelles furca, tamen usque recurret.’¹ But it does not tell us everything. It only informs us of the fact of the return of the piece of nature that has been repressed; it does not describe the highly remarkable manner of that return, which is accomplished by what seems like a piece of malicious treachery. It is precisely what was chosen as the instrument of repression - like the ‘

furca’ of the Latin saying - that becomes the vehicle for the return: in and behind the repressing force, what is repressed proves itself victor in the end. This fact, which has been so little noticed and deserves so much consideration, is illustrated - more impressively than it could be by many examples - in a well known etching by Félicien Rops; and it is illustrated in the typical case of repression in the life of saints and penitents. An ascetic monk has fled, no doubt from the temptations of the world, to the image of the crucified Saviour. And now the cross sinks down like a shadow, and in its place, radiant, there rises instead the image of a voluptuous, naked woman, in the same crucified attitude. Other artists with less psychological insight have, in similar representations of temptation, shown Sin, insolent and triumphant, in some position alongside of the Saviour on the cross. Only Rops has placed Sin in the very place of the Saviour on the cross. He seems to have known that, when what has been repressed returns, it emerges from the repressing force itself.

¹ [‘You may drive out Nature with a pitchfork, but she will always return.’]8

Дата добавления: 2014-12-23