A psychical complex of the most intricate possible structure. - a Freudian reading of Lady Audley's Secret - no, not like that, but still Freudian

I will repeat a couple of fragments of Lady Audley’s Secret:

“My lady's portrait stood on an easel, covered with a green baize in the center of the octagonal chamber.” (I.VIII)

“The green-baize covered card-table was adorned with…”  (II.VIII, 130 pages later)

The “green baize” is mentioned several times in the novel, mostly as an accessory of the portrait.  The reader of the novel knows that the portrait plays an important part in the uncovering of Lady Audley’s secret.  In the second passage, an amateur detective is also searching for clues to the secret, and is about to find an important one.  But the presence of a common color and type of cloth is just a coincidence for the detective.  Even if he unconsciously associates that cloth with Lady Audley, its presence in someone else’s house can hardly be meaningful.

 It is only the attentive reader who can perceive the association, who sees the trace of Lady Audley.  What is meaningless in crowded reality is meaningful in spartan fiction.  It is not a coincidence for me, or for the author, who picked these particular descriptive details out of many possibilities.

Or perhaps Braddon did not create this connection purposefully, but only by chance, without thinking about it.  But she might, then, have picked the green baize unconsciously.  After all, she is the one who has been repeatedly associating Lady Audley with the green baize, going so far as to write out the words several times.  So it is no surprise when, casting about for furnishings for this room where Lady Audley had once been, the phrase “green baize” pops into her head.

In Sigmund Freud’s 1901 essay “On Dreams” (a summation of the 1900 The Interpretation of Dreams written for slackers like me), a dream is described as

a psychical complex of the most intricate possible structure.  Its portions stand in the most manifold logical relations to one another: they represent foreground and background, conditions, digressions and illustrations, chains of evidence and counter-arguments.  Each train of thought is almost invariably accompanied by its contradictory counterpart. (60)

“He is describing fiction,” I thought to myself, not just dream-fiction but all of it.  We use some different vocabulary – replace “contradictory counterpart,” for example, with “ambiguity and irony.”  I want to doctor this one, too:

The restoration of the connections which the dream-work [fiction] has destroyed [concealed] is a task which has to be performed by the work of analysis [reading]. (60)

But this is almost perfect as is:

An immediate transformation of one thing into another in a dream seems to represent the relation of cause and effect.  (61)

Lady Audley is transformed into green felt, just for a moment.  How strange that I, that a good reader of fiction, can follow Braddon’s nonsensical dream-logic.

The Freud quotations are all from the Standard Edition, Volume V, tr. James Strachey.

Five Austrian alternatives

Alternatives, expansions, appendices, problems, and ignorance.  Or:  What about…?

1.  Austria as an empire, Austrian literature beyond Austria.  Gyula Krúdy in Budapest, Italo Svevo in Trieste, and Gustav Meyrink and Franz Kafka in Prague.  Kafka is a great temptation but would swamp the boat, so to speak – too absorbing, too good.  Much like

2.  Robert Musil’s Man without Qualities (1930-42) and Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March (1932), published far beyond the period I am thinking about but perhaps even more valuable because they are influential interpretations of pre-War Austria.  I pick those two out because of their prominence,  but Austrian culture and history have been obsessively picked apart by lots of later writers like Gregor von Rezzori and Thomas Bernhard.  Hearing the narrator of Old Masters (1985) tear into Adalbert Stifter and Anton Bruckner is hilarious fun.  Poor Bruckner, what’d he do?  Perhaps if I really want to dig into Austrian aesthetics I need to spend more time with

3.  Art and music.  Bruckner, Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, and Arnold Schoenberg; Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Oskar Kokoschka.  For example.  The “worlds” of fine art and music are usually much narrower than that of literature, and the audiences, the core audiences, much smaller and easier to study.  To understand the audience, though, I do not necessarily need to spend much time with the music or paintings but rather with the

4.  Secondary literature.  Histories cultural, political and social, monographs on artists or movements, albums of photos of Viennese coffeehouses.  It turns out that I am not the first person to think turn-of-the-century Vienna might be interesting.  Please recommend relevant favorites – to save you the trouble, I have read or am reading Carl Schorske and Peter Gay, and am curious about the recent Eric Kandel book although I fear it is a bit long.

The quantity of relevant books is overwhelming – there was nothing like this for Portuguese literature.  I mean, just look at the number of books that center on

5.  Sigmund Freud.  Scientific texts either dissolve into history or are elevated into literature.  I have no apparatus to deal with Freud as a scientist, but I should spend some time with Freud the essayist, the literary Freud.  Which texts, do you think?  The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), or some of the famous case studies?

Freud has appeared only once on Wuthering Expectations in his own words, when I made use of his 1908 insightful essay “Creative Writers and Day-dreaming.”  His ideas on the concept of the Uncanny have been important to my understanding of a great deal of literature, German and otherwise.  So I am sure there is a lot more of interest even if I am ill-equipped to understand or sympathize with the “scientific” Freud.

Well, who knows how many of these ideas I will have the energy to pursue.

Anyone wondering, by the way, if there were any women writers at all in Austria, the answer is yes.  Some were internationally famous, like the Nobel Prize-winning Bertha von Suttner, author of the 1889 pacifist novel Lay Down Your Arms!  (which sounds unreadable).  Some others of greater promise are included in the gloomily titled Into the Sunset: Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Austrian Prose (1999), which I plan to investigate at some point. Thanks to Will at 50Watts for pointing me towards the book.

Wish me luck!  Please join in as you think useful and appropriate.

Night Games - Schnitzler stretches out

I read two novellas collected along with the shorter stories, Dream Story (1926) and Night Games (1927).  Please note that these works are from thirty years later than the other stories I have been writing about, and are similarly far from the composition of La Ronde.  Schnitzler’s career was impressive.

In Night Games  an Austrian officer in a single night gambles himself into massive debt.  Nothing is so artificial in fiction as the tension created by gambling, and Schnitzler is not above giving me a shot of the cheap stuff, but the wins and losses do have meaning.  Winning big means sex, because the officer will finally be able to marry; losing big means death, since the officer’s code makes it likely that he will choose suicide over dishonor.

In other words, the officer embraces or succumbs to the “death drive” as described in Freud, Sigmund, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1920.

Schnitzler’s protagonists can be generic.  They are often a bit more like representative specimens than individuals.  In La Ronde, the characters are not even given names but are just Soldier or Actress, and in most of the stories this would work just as well.  The greater length of the novella allows Schnitzler to include some idiosyncratic secondary characters in Night Games.  Since they are not part of the psychological study, they are allowed to be a little bit strange.

He looked around the circle as though he sought approval.  Everyone was silent.  Herr Elrief looked away, very aristocratically, and lit a cigarette; Wimmer bit his lips; Greising whistled nervously, almost soundlessly; and the theatre manager remarked somewhat rudely, as though it were trivial, “The lieutenant has really had bad luck today!”  (VII, 32)

The short stories did not have much room for these sorts of individualizing touches, characters who will now be packed away, never to return in the fifty remaining pages.

I have been describing the plots of Schnitzler’s stories, however compactly, more than I usually do because so much of the meaning of the stories comes directly from the plot.  A typical person, the generic representative of a particular social status (bourgeois wife, poor officer), stumbles into an atypical situation.  The steps  the character then takes begin to generate meaning, begin to individualize the character and move him from the generic to the specific.  The climax of the story is simultaneous with the complete creation of the character, the moment of greatest individuality.

So now, back in Night Games, the game has ended and the officer needs to scrounge up a lot of money, or else.  As a result he encounters the best character in the story, his aunt Leopoldine, who he happens to have known previously to her marriage to his uncle.  Sex has again intersected with death:

He saw the little gold ring with the semi-precious stone on the ring finger of her right hand, which was lying on top of the red bedspread, and the slender, silver bracelet that encircled the wrist of the left hand that she had stretched out toward him in waving him farewell from the bed as he was leaving.  She had pleased him so much that when he left he was firmly determined to see her again.  It happened, however, that just at this time another woman had prior claims on him, a woman who, since she was being kept by a banker, didn’t cost him a kreuzer – a consideration given the circumstances.  (XI, 59)

Schnitzler cleverly begins to tell Leopoldine’s story not alongside but somehow behind the rest of the officer’s story.  Because of their entanglement, because of her story, he makes a decision that is not itself a surprise; however the reason for his decision is a shock.   It’s very impressive, but aside from the variety of characters and greater intricacy of the plot, this is exactly how Schnitzler was writing stories thirty years earlier.

Schnitzler's substitute for the talking cure - He felt as if nothing bad could happen to him now

It’s all so Freudian, isn’t it, the basis of all these Schnitzler stories?  Schnitzler’s characters reveal or discover  themselves as the result of a crisis, but not through any action they take themselves.   The characters attempt to defend themselves, but the truth resides in the unconscious and is made apparent by a breach in the defenses.

Schnitzler is anticipating the Freudian “talking cure,” in which the therapist guides the patient to create his own breach without having to suffer through the actual crisis.  The errant wife can resolve to confess her affair to her husband (or not) without having the lover die in a carriage accident.  This is the idea, right?  Let no one assume I know too much about Freud or Freudianism.*

 Schnitzler was an avid reader of his neighbor Freud, but it turns out Freud was also an enthusiastic reader of Schnitzler.  Although a late novella like “Dream Story” (1926) is obviously, even blatantly indebted to The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), several of the stories in Night Games, including the ones I have written about so far, precede any significant contact with Freud’s ideas, making me wonder just how much Schnitzler there might be in Freud.  They were both studying the same set of clinical subjects, the bourgeois Viennese.

The one story in the Night Games collection not about Sex and Death, “Blind Geronimo and His Brother” (1900), shows how guilt is actually Schnitzler’s central concern.  Carlo blinded his brother when they were children, accidentally of course, but he has devoted his life to leading his blind brother around Austria and Italy, living off Geronimo’s earnings as a street musician.  A meaningless chance encounter causes a sort of crisis of faith – has Carlo’s lifetime of sacrifice been meaningless?  Rather than atone for his guilt, has he only committed more sins? And Schnitzler then woks through some plotty stuff to get us to this point, which is the end of the story – I am always quoting from the ending:

For he saw Geronimo smile in the mild, blissful way that he had not seen him do since childhood.  And Carlo also smiled.  He felt as if nothing bad could happen to him now – neither before the judge, nor anywhere else in the world – for he had his brother again…  No, he had him for the first time…  (124)

All of those ellipses are Schnitzler’s, not mine.  Please note that the Sex and Death story I wrote about yesterday, “The Dead Are Silent” (1897) literally ends with “a great calm comes over her,  as though everything will be all right again…” – in other words, with an almost identical ending.

The mention of the judge reminds me that Carlo and Geronimo end their story at a material low point, but at a psychological peak.  The intervention of a trained therapist earlier in the story would have been helpful.

*  Although I am old enough to have been assigned Freud in college, in a class called, and also about – youngsters will find this hard to believe, but it is true – “Western Civilization.”  Freud was assigned to every student getting a BA!   And read by about one in ten, I would guess.