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Aspects of the Novel by E.M. Forster (1927)

‘Aspects of the Novel’ is based on a series of weekly lectures which E. M. Forster gave at Trinity College Cambridge in 1927, in which he discussed the English novel. Forster used examples from classic novels to describe what he claimed to be the seven universal aspects of the novel, namely:

story
characters
plot
fantasy
prophecy
pattern
rhythm

The book was mocked when I was a student for its rambling, amateurish, belle-lettreist approach, lacking all reference to any kind of smart theory. Forster knew it lacked intellectual depth and modestly described it as ‘a ramshackly survey’, but he deprecates to deceive. Although eschewing scholarship and expertise, he says many interesting things, and it’s fascinating to read the comments on eminent books and authors by one of themselves.

Introduction

Forster doesn’t make grand statements or general rules, in fact he’s all about how difficult it is to define or discuss the novel. What, even, is a novel?

He adapts the suggestion of Monsieur Abel Chevalley that it is ‘a fiction in prose of a certain length’, adding it probably needs to be over 50,000 words long. He doesn’t say this, but the issue reminds me of all those Joseph Conrad stories which are too long to be short stories but don’t quite make Forster’s word count. ‘Heart of Darkness’ is 37,906 words long. Is it a novel or a novella? D.H. Lawrence wrote half a dozen works more complex than short stories, but without the full weight and length of novels, so they are called novellas.

Forster wants to talk about the ‘English’ novel, so what does ‘English’ mean in this context? Does it refer to the country? No. To any long fiction work written in English.

It’s notable that Forster doesn’t worry about the implications of American fiction swamping British fiction. In 1927 maybe it was still seen as the poor relation. He’s much more concerned with the influence on the English novel of the Continent. But this, he says, is in fact negligible. English fictions writers are sometimes influenced by the French, but rarely by the Spanish, Italian, Germans or any other national literature. In this, as everything else, the English are insular and generally hold aloof from the Continent.

But he makes a few chastening points about English fiction in a nominal league table of achievement:

No English novelist is as great as Tolstoy—that is to say has given so complete a picture of man’s life, both on its domestic and heroic side. No English novelist has explored man’s soul as deeply as Dostoevsky. And no novelist anywhere has analysed the modern consciousness as successfully as Marcel Proust.

English poetry is world class. English fiction less so. He cites Bronte, Hardy, Gaskell, Meredith and says they’re fine in their way, often give vivid portraits of particularly English areas and types. But set next to War and Peace or The Brothers Karamazov? No.

He is extremely averse to the notion of ‘periods’ (the Victorian novel, ‘Edwardian fiction’ etc) much beloved by academics. Ditto the idea of ‘influence’, that this or that writer is writing under, or seeking to evade, the influence of this or that other writer.

Forster prefers to think of all the writers he deals with sitting in the British Library Reading Room with pens in hand, at the same time, dealing with the same kinds of problems, unaffected by their times or predecessors, an attitude he summarises as:

History develops, Art stands still.

A note on scholarship. Genuine scholarship, defined as having read everything in your subject and something from around the fringes and having taste and discrimination, is extremely rare. Most people are pseudo-scholars who know about particular authors or periods. This is why pseudo-scholarship likes specialising in particular periods, or authors, or subjects, and compiles a mocking list.

The literature of Inns, beginning with Tom Jones; the literature of the Women’s Movement, beginning with Shirley; the literature of Desert Islands, from Robinson Crusoe to The Blue Lagoon; the literature of Rogues—dreariest of all, though the Open Road runs it pretty close…

Obviously all these objections have been swept away by a century of pseudo-scholarship. His approach is going to be to quote from various classic novelists and make comments.

He gives passages from Samuel Richardson and Henry James before making the point that both are anxious rather than ardent psychologists. Each is sensitive to suffering and appreciates self-sacrifice but falls short of the tragic, though a close approach is made.

Then H.G. Wells (Mr Polly) and Dickens (Great Expectations). They are both humorists and visualizers who get an effect by cataloguing details. They are generous-minded and hate shams. They are valuable social reformers. Sometimes the lively surface of their prose scratches like a cheap gramophone record, a certain poorness of quality appears. Neither of them has much taste: the world of beauty was largely closed to Dickens, and is entirely closed to Wells.

Then Tristram Shandy and Virginia Woolf. They are both fantasists. They start with a little object, take a flutter from it, and settle on it again. They combine a humorous appreciation of the muddle of life with a keen sense of its beauty. There is a rather deliberate bewilderment, an announcement to all and sundry that they do not know where they are going. But their tones are very different. Sterne is a sentimentalist, Virginia Woolf is extremely aloof. Virginia Woolf’s her aim and general effect both resemble Sterne’s (discuss).

Technique changes and develops. Sterne and Woolf may have certain things in common but Woolf’s way of expressing them is more developed and advanced.

Anti-theory (obviously). The Bloomsbury emphasis on friendship and affection as the ultimate moral criteria.

Principles and systems may suit other forms of art, but they cannot be applicable here… I am afraid it will be the human heart, it will be this man-to-man business, justly suspect in its cruder forms. The final test of a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.

Sentimentality… will lurk in the background saying, ‘Oh, but I like that,’ ‘Oh, but that doesn’t appeal to me,’ and all I can promise is that sentimentality shall not speak too loudly or too soon. The intensely, stiflingly human quality of the novel is not to be avoided. The novel is sogged with humanity; there is no escaping the uplift or the downpour, nor can they be kept out of criticism.

Story

The basis of a novel is a story, and a story is a narrative of events arranged in time sequence

He postulates three (rather wishy-washy silly) attitudes to story in the novel, and says his one is:

Yes — oh, dear, yes — the novel tells a story.

He is really against the need for a story in a novel. Some call it the backbone of the text, but he calls it the tapeworm. That is the fundamental aspect without which it could not exist.

He calls it the ‘low atavistic form’ and paints a picture of the crudest Neanderthal people sitting round a fire at the end of a day hunting mammoth and being enthralled by the group’s resident storyteller, the urge to tell goes back that far and the urge to hang on each development of the plot.

The classic example is the Thousand and One Nights in which Scheherazade tells a story each night but ends abruptly when the sun rises, this keeping her wicked husband in perpetual suspense to hear what happens next.

We are all like Scheherazade’s husband, in that we want to know what happens next. That is universal and that is why the backbone of a novel has to be a story. Some of us want to know nothing else—there is nothing in us but primeval curiosity, and consequently our other literary judgments are ludicrous. And now the story can be defined. It is a narrative of events arranged in their time sequence — dinner coming after breakfast, Tuesday after Monday, decay after death, and so on. Qua story, it can only have one merit: that of making the audience want to know what happens next. And conversely it can only have one fault: that of making the audience not want to know what happens next. These are the only two criticisms that can be made on the story that is a story. It is the lowest and simplest of literary organisms. Yet it is the highest factor common to all the very complicated organisms known as novels.

He then posits two ways of thinking about time. One is pure chronology, one event after another, what he calls the time-sense. But there is also ‘life by values’ where we live for, and remember, only certain special intense moments. The cheapest novels (typically, detective novels and thrillers) exist simply to tell what happens next. More sophisticated examples dwell on values i.e. on the special moments, for example turning points, in characters’ lives. Thus the novel has a double allegiance, to life by time and life by values.

But no matter how much you prefer the values approach, you can never relinquish plot. The novelist must cling, however lightly, to the thread of their story, they must touch the interminable tapeworm, otherwise they become unintelligible.

One novelist has tried to abandon all signs of plot, Gertrude Stein who ‘hoped to emancipate fiction from the tyranny of time and to express in it the life by values only.’

She fails because as soon as fiction is completely delivered from time it cannot express anything at all… [it was a noble experiment but doomed to failure because] the time-sequence cannot be destroyed without carrying in its ruin all that should have taken its place; the novel that would express values only becomes unintelligible and therefore valueless.

Back to the basic need for a story, Walter Scott is a prime example of a storyteller which is why Forster doesn’t like him. Scott has ‘a trivial mind and a heavy style.’ He cannot construct. He has neither artistic detachment nor passion. He only has a temperate heart and gentlemanly feelings, and an intelligent affection for the country-side and this is not basis enough for great novels.

Forster gives a long summary of the plot of Scott’s (1816), the third of the Waverley novels to show how one damn thing happens after another, Scott deploying characters’ comings and goings purely to extend the plot, till he runs out of steam and ties everything up with the wedding of the nice young people. It is a classic example of a novelist focusing on ‘the life in time’, which leads to ‘slackening of emotion and shallowness of judgment, and in particular to that idiotic use of marriage as a finale’.

He compares this with Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale which is a book dominated by time: ‘Time is the real hero of The Old Wives’ Tale’, showing the growth and ageing and death of the lead female characters. This has more integrity and depth than Scott plonking down event after event but, in the end, isn’t enough. The Old Wives Tale is ‘strong, sincere and sad but misses greatness.’

He contrasts both these with Tolstoy’s War and Peace which also shows characters growing old but makes the interesting point that the hero of Tolstoy’s novel is not time but space, the immense area of Russia, over which episodes and characters have been scattered, from the sum-total of bridges and frozen rivers, forests, roads, gardens, fields, which accumulate grandeur and sonority after we have passed them.

Many novelists have the feeling for place — Five Towns (Bennett), Auld Reekie (Scott), and so on. Very few have the sense of space, and the possession of it ranks high in Tolstoy’s divine equipment. Space is the lord of ‘War and Peace’, not time.

A note about ‘voice’. Forster reverts to his description of:

the voice of the tribal narrator, squatting in the middle of the cave, and saying one thing after another until the audience falls asleep among their offal and bones. The story is primitive, it reaches back to the origins of literature, before reading was discovered, and it appeals to what is primitive in us.

People

Characters are ‘word masses’ arranged and grouped by the writer, given characteristic gestures or phrases, and assigned names and slowly accumulating into characters.

What is the difference between people in life and people in books? History gives us the outward actions of people. Only the novelist can take us inside minds to show their motivation.

In daily life we never understand each other, neither complete clairvoyance nor complete confessional exists. We know each other approximately, by external signs, and these serve well enough as a basis for society and even for intimacy. But people in a novel can be understood completely by the reader, if the novelist wishes; their inner as well as their outer life can be exposed. And this is why they often seem more definite than characters in history, or even our own friends; we have been told all about them that can be told; even if they are imperfect or unreal they do not contain any secrets, whereas our friends do and must, mutual secrecy being one of the conditions of life.

He suggests there are five basic facts of human existence: birth, food, sleep, love and death (you could add others, but these seem central), then gives a brief description of each.

About birth we know nothing and Forster is surprised how few novelists really describe it or the mental state of the baby or infant. Tristram Shandy and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man stand out as two exceptions.

Death on the other hand, is extremely popular with novelists, for two practical reasons. 1) The death of a character in the middle of the story can be used to trigger emotion; 2) death of the main character is a handy and time-honoured way to end the story. He doesn’t mention them, but think of the tragedies of the ancient world.

Food is strangely ignored in fiction; often characters just eat something, sometimes provender is ignored for pages and days.

Sleep is also usually neglected in fiction. We all sleep for about a third of our lives, yet fiction ignores this unless it needs to mention disturbed sleep or specific dreams.

Love:

You all know how enormously love bulks in novels, and will probably agree with me that it has done them harm and made them monotonous. Why has this particular experience, especially in its sex form, been transplanted in such generous quantities?

( Forster has no answer but I have: Darwin. Of course we obsess about love (and sex) because it is one of our deepest biological imperatives, to mate and breed, and even after breeding the imperative (in men at any rate) to mate and ejaculate continues as an urgent force until the end of our lives. Women on the other hand, bearers of babies for nine long months and then their carers for decades afterwards, naturally want to marry well, and so spend an inordinate amount of time picking and choosing who to marry / mate with. It is the theme of all Jane Austen’s novels.)

Back to Forster, he sees two reasons why love is so monotonously prominent in fictions:

1) As part of the general over-sensitiveness of all fictional characters:

The constant sensitiveness of characters for each other — even in writers called robust like Fielding — is remarkable, and has no parallel in life, except among people who have plenty of leisure. Passion, intensity at moments — yes, but not this constant awareness, this endless readjusting, this ceaseless hunger. I believe that these are the reflections of the novelist’s own state of mind while he composes, and that the predominance of love in novels is partly because of this.

2) We wish love to be perfect. This is one reason so many narratives end in marriage, while the future is imagined to be a perfect harmony which the reality of being married, obviously, undermines. Ending narratives with marriage is ending with hope and promise.

He introduces the entertaining concept of Homo fictus. He

is generally born off, he is capable of dying on, he wants little food or sleep, he is tirelessly occupied with human relationships. And — most important — we can know more about him than we can know about any of our fellow creatures, because his creator and narrator are one.

He ends with an extended meditation on the character of Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, admiring her good sense, high spirits, kindness and humour. He thinks Moll Flanders is an:

example of a novel, in which a character is everything and is given freest play. Defoe makes a slight attempt at a plot with the brother-husband as a centre, but he is quite perfunctory, and her legal husband (the one who took her on the jaunt to Oxford) just disappears and is heard of no more. Nothing matters but the heroine; she stands in an open space like a tree, and having said that she seems absolutely real from every point of view.

He asks when do we feel that a character in a book is ‘real’?

It is real when the novelist knows everything about it. He may not choose to tell us all he knows — many of the facts, even of the kind we call obvious, may be hidden. But he will give us the feeling that though the character has not been explained, it is explicable, and we get from this a reality of a kind we can never get in daily life.

I was really comforted by Forster’s explanation. I worry all the time that I don’t really ‘get’ people, the people at work and people in social situations (at the school pickup, at parties). I worry all the time that I don’t understand people and so am saying the wrong thing. It is precisely because novels give us the illusion that we can and do understand people, that we find them so comforting. This is Forster’s view.

Human intercourse… is… haunted by a spectre. We cannot understand each other, except in a rough and ready way; we cannot reveal ourselves, even when we want to; what we call intimacy is only a makeshift; perfect knowledge is an illusion. But in the novel we can know people perfectly and… can find here a compensation for their dimness in life. [Fictional characters] are… people whose secret lives are visible or might be visible: we are people whose secret lives are invisible. And that is why novels, even when they are about wicked people, can solace us; they suggest a more comprehensible and thus a more manageable human race, they give us the illusion of perspicacity and of power.

They give us the comforting illusion that life is more ‘manageable’ than, in reality, it actually is. Or indeed, more explicable.

People (part 2): types of character and points of view

But Moll is an exception. She is a solitary. Most characters in most novels exist in relationship to a number of characters. Taking them out of context is like taking half the bushes out of a mature and well planned shrubbery: everything looks sparse and bare as a result. Their canny arrangement is the key.

But characters can be anarchic. Given too much vigour they can destroy the plan and lopside the plot.

1. Two types of character, flat and round

Flat characters used to be called humours or caricatures, can be summarised in a line.

Flat characters are very useful to him, since they never need reintroducing, never run away, have not to be watched for development, and provide their own atmosphere — little luminous disks of a pre-arranged size, pushed hither and thither like counters across the void or between the stars… He is the idea, and such life as he possesses radiates from its edges and from the scintillations it strikes when other elements in the novel impinge.

They are often more memorable than main characters precisely because they don’t change and so comforting or reassuring.

All of us, even the sophisticated, yearn for permanence, and to the unsophisticated permanence is the chief excuse for a work of art. We all want books to endure, to be refuges, and their inhabitants to be always the same, and flat characters tend to justify themselves on this account.

The special case of Dickens, almost all of whose characters are ‘flat’, yet his incredible vitality gives his books an amazing depth. Similarly most of H.G. Wells’s characters are flat but come to life because of the author’s tremendous brio. Dickens and Wells are good at transmitting force which animates everything, even when they’re only puppets.

Why are Jane Austen’s characters round?

She is a miniaturist, but never two-dimensional. All her characters are round, or capable of rotundity… her characters though smaller than his are more highly organized. They function all round, and even if her plot made greater demands on them than it does, they would still be adequate… All the Jane Austen characters are ready for an extended life, for a life which the scheme of her books seldom requires them to lead, and that is why they lead their actual lives so satisfactorily.

The test:

The test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way. If it never surprises, it is flat.

2. Point of view

He cites Percy Lubbock who said point of view is the central weapon in the novelist’s armoury and defined three types:

from outside characters, as an onlooker
omniscience i.e. can describe everything from within
take the part of one of the characters and be in the dark about the motives of all the others

Forster thinks this privileging of point of view is a symptom of ‘critics’ wanting to make The Novel a special case with its own rules and techniques. Personally, he thinks it less important than a proper mix of characters and the writer’s ability to ‘bounce’ us into believing them.

Gide’s ‘Les Faux Monnayeurs’ plays with different points of view and tactics but is too clever to be involving.

The Plot

Aristotle thought character was revealed through action, but then he was talking about drama, the stage. Forster thinks action (the plot) is less important for the novel.

A story is a series of events. A plot is a series of events with some element of causality and explanation involved. Curiosity is enough to understand a story (‘when happened next?’). Understanding a plot requires memory (for facts scattered earlier) and intelligence (to piece together and interpret them).

George Meredith is now unfashionable but was once, around 1900, all the rage. Forster thinks he is one of the great contrivers of plots. His contrivances are plausible and they alter characters.

A writer who is far greater than Meredith, and yet less successful as a novelist — Thomas Hardy. Hardy seems to me essentially a poet, who conceives of his novels from an enormous height. They are to be tragedies or tragi-comedies, they are to give out the sound of hammer-strokes as they proceed; in other words Hardy arranges events with emphasis on causality, the ground plan is a plot, and the characters are ordered to acquiesce in its requirements. Except in the person of Tess (who conveys the feeling that she is greater than destiny) this aspect of his work is unsatisfactory. His characters are involved in various snares, they are finally bound hand and foot, there is ceaseless emphasis on fate, and yet, for all the sacrifices made to it, we never see the action as a living thing as we see it in Antigone or Berenice or The Cherry Orchard.

Most novels are feeble at the end because the plot takes over. The novelist needs to end the thing and so character and other aspects are all put on hold while the bits and pieces of the plot are tied up. Which is why novel ending are so often flat and disappointing.

Forster devotes five pages to describing Gide’s attempts to deconstruct novel writing in ‘Les Faux Monnayeurs’ which, I must say, sound contrived and clunky.

Fantasy

There is more in the novel than time or people or logic or any of their derivatives, more even than Fate. And by ‘more’ I do not mean something that excludes these aspects nor something that includes them, embraces them. I mean something that cuts across them like a bar of light, that is intimately connected with them at one place and patiently illumines all their problems, and at another place shoots over or through them as if they did not exist. We shall give that bar of light two names, fantasy and prophecy.

His sections on fantasy and prophecy are suddenly incoherent, under-developed. He gives no very useful definition of fantasy. He sounds very like Forster in introducing the notion of fauns and dryads and Pan: this sounds like his strange short stories. He also sounds like Forster in claiming the great god Muddle stands behind Tristram Shandy. This is the first place where I felt his opinion was inadequate and embarrassing.

He gives a long rather embarrassing summary of a now unknown book called ‘Flecker’s Magic’, by Norman Matson, in which a boy is given a wishing ring by a witch etc. He goes on to summarise and quote Max Beebohm’s fantastical comic novel ‘Zuleika Dobson’, ‘a highly accomplished and superbly written book whose spirit is farcical’. His quotes make it sound tiresome. Much has happened to the genre of Fantasy over the past 100 years to make his comments seem vain.

Parody. Very useful for the type of writer who has a lot to say but doesn’t take to creating characters: they can simply parody someone else’s. After mentioning Lowes Dickinson’s book ‘The Magic Flute’ he wastes a couple of pages giving a surprisingly unsympathetic summary of James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’. I was disappointed to see Forster takes the Bloomsbury / Virginia Woolf line that Ulysses is a book about dirt and smut:

It is a dogged attempt to cover the universe with mud, it is an inverted Victorianism, an attempt to make crossness and dirt succeed where sweetness and light failed, a simplification of the human character in the interests of Hell (!).. an epic of grubbiness and disillusion.

He thinks the aim of the book is ‘to degrade all things and more particularly civilization and art, by turning them inside out and upside down’. On this page I stopped respecting Forster’s opinion and realised how trapped he is in his timid, bourgeois English tea-party provincialism.

Prophecy

When the author wants to say something about the universe, a visionary, bardic strain. It is predominantly a tone of voice. To fully appreciate it you have to suspend your sense of humour, your sense of the absurd. He mentions D.H. Lawrence in this regard.

He quotes a long passage from ‘Adam Bede’ by George Eliot and makes the sage point that her writing depends on her ‘massiveness,’ because ‘she has no nicety of style’. Then a passage from ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ to show what it means to say that Dostoyevsky was a prophet. It means that everything means more than it says, reaches out to have cosmic implications.

We are not concerned with the prophet’s message, or rather (since matter and manner cannot be wholly separated) we are concerned with it as little as possible. What matters is the accent of his voice, his song.

Fantasy is diffuse, sparkles with fragments, whereas prophecy is focused on a great central vision. Fantasy is more often than not funny whereas prophecy requires suspension of humour.

Forster gives an extended summary of Herbert Melville’s classic novel ‘Moby Dick’, dwelling on its visionary prophetic character. It is more song than novel. And he adds a summary of the short story ‘Billy Budd’. Both of them are allegories of good and evil (though he doesn’t use the word allegory).

He makes the striking point that Melville wasn’t hampered by a conscience ‘that tiresome little receptacle… which is often such a nuisance in serious writers and so contracts their effects.’

Then D.H. Lawrence, ‘the only prophetic novelist writing today’. He makes the shrewd point that Lawrence was also a preacher and lots of people are irritated or angered by the preaching. But the real writer lies ‘far, far back’ behind the surface antagonisms and speaks with the voice of the Norse god Balder.

The prophet is irradiating nature from within, so that every colour has a glow and every form a distinctness which could not otherwise be obtained. Take a scene that always stays in the memory: that scene in ‘Women in Love’ where one of the characters throws stones into the water at night to shatter the image of the moon. Why he throws, what the scene symbolizes, is unimportant. But the writer could not get such a moon and water otherwise; he reaches them by his special path which stamps them as more wonderful than any we can imagine. It is the prophet back where he started from, back where the rest of us are waiting by the edge of the pool, but with a power of re-creation and evocation we shall never possess.

He rightly realises that Lawrence writes as if from an entirely new world.

He ends with ‘Wuthering Heights’ by Emily Brontë. It is a book of storms, visions and prophetic tone of voice. The notorious thing about ‘Wuthering Heights’ is that no one can remember the plot, they just remember the giant passion of the central characters.

Pattern and Rhythm

He discusses some books with patterns: the hour glass of ‘Thais’ Anatole France in which two characters swap plights; the daisy chain in ‘Roman Pictures’ by Percy Lubbock in which one character is passed along through a sequence of encounters with others.

Pattern and Henry James

Far more complicated is ‘The Ambassadors’ by Henry James. He summarises the plot and has a few words of praise for James:

He is so good at indicating instantaneously and constantly that a character is second rate, deficient in sensitiveness, abounding in the wrong sort of worldliness; he gives such a character so much vitality that its absurdity is delightful.

Like a lot of people I am put off reading James by the reputation for hyper-sensibility which surrounds him and then, on the few occasions I’ve tried, have struggled to penetrate through the prose and understand what is going on. So it is a relief to read Forster’s criticisms of The Master.

The basic one is that 1) James wrote works of art but at the cost of leaving most of human life out of them. And then 2) Forster says he has a very restricted number of character types who recur in all his novels, namely:

the observer who tries to influence the action
the second-rate outsider
the sympathetic foil, very lively and frequently female
the wonderful rare heroine
sometimes a villain
sometimes a young artist with generous impulses

Forster’s summary is comic: ‘And that is about all. For so fine a novelist it is a poor show.’ And then 3):

The characters, beside being few in number, are constructed on very stingy lines. They are incapable of fun, of rapid motion, of carnality, and of nine-tenths of heroism. Their clothes will not take off, the diseases that ravage them are anonymous, like the sources of their income, their servants are noiseless or resemble themselves, no social explanation of the world we know is possible for them, for there are no stupid people in their world, no barriers of language, and no poor. Even their sensations are limited. They can land in Europe and look at works of art and at each other, but that is all. Maimed creatures can alone breathe in Henry James’s pages — maimed yet specialized.

As interesting as Forster’s points is the vivid way he expresses them:

The longer James worked, the more convinced he grew that a novel should be a whole—not necessarily geometric like The Ambassadors, but it should accrete round a single topic, situation, gesture, which should occupy the characters and provide a plot, and should also fasten up the novel on the outside—catch its scattered statements in a net, make them cohere like a planet, and swing through the skies of memory.

And:

Put Tom Jones or Emma or even Mr. Casaubon into a Henry James book, and the book will burn to ashes.

Conclusion:

Though they [Henry James characters] are not dead — certain selected recesses of experience he explores very well — they are gutted of the common stuff that fills characters in other books, and ourselves. And this castrating is not in the interests of the Kingdom of Heaven, there is no philosophy in the novels, no religion (except an occasional touch of superstition), no prophecy, no benefit for the superhuman at all. It is for the sake of a particular æsthetic effect which is certainly gained, but at this heavy price.

H.G. Wells wrote a very funny satire of James which he cheerfully sent to The Master and was surprised when James was profoundly upset. Wells thinks the novel should overflow with people and ideas and life. Interestingly, Forster concludes:

My own prejudices are with Wells. The James novels are a unique possession and the reader who cannot accept his premises misses some valuable and exquisite sensations. But I do not want more of his novels.

So James demonstrates the limitations of seeking Pattern, which is to say, seeking formal Beauty, in a novel. The chances are: the more Beauty, the less life and humanity.

To put it in other words, the novel is not capable of as much artistic development as the drama: its humanity or the grossness of its material hinder it (use whichever phrase you like). To most readers of fiction the sensation from a pattern is not intense enough to justify the sacrifices that made it.

Rhythms large and small

Two types of rhythm, large and small, macro and micro.

Micro rhythms Proust has examples of micro rhythms but not macro. Forster makes the bold claim that ‘À la recherche du temps perdu’ ‘is chaotic, ill constructed, it has and will have no external shape; and yet it hangs together because it is stitched internally, because it contains rhythms.’

By rhythms what he appears to mean are recurring facts, connections and coincidences. He gives the specific example of a phrase from a piece of music which recurs only at long intervals of hundreds of pages:

Rhythm can develop, and the little phrase has a life of its own, unconnected with the lives of its auditors, as with the life of the man who composed it. It is almost an actor, but not quite, and that ‘not quite’ means that its power has gone towards stitching Proust’s book together from the inside, and towards the establishment of beauty and the ravishing of the reader’s memory. There are times when the little phrase — from its gloomy inception, through the sonata into the sextet — means everything to the reader. There are times when it means nothing and is forgotten, and this seems to me the function of rhythm in fiction; not to be there all the time like a pattern, but by its lovely waxing and waning to fill us with surprise and freshness and hope.

Macro rhythms Very large scale repetitions and shape as in a classical symphony (in this case, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony). In fact, very candidly, Forster tells us he can’t think of an example of this macro rhythm in fiction.

Maybe in drama because drama is more tightly structured, in drama characters submit to the dramatic shape which is known from the start. But fiction, as he sweetly puts it, ‘Human beings have their great chance in the novel.’

Early on, in the chapter about plots, Forster lamented that novels have to end, pointing out how lifeless the endings of most novels are, as the logic of closing the plot overrides the human vitality which has preceded it. Now, at the end of the book, he returns to the same idea. He says that at the end of a performance of a Beethoven symphony you hear chords or sense shapes which were never actually expressed in the music, which tower behind it. Then optimistically wishes the same kind of aesthetic effect could be achieved in a more open-ended type of fiction.

Music, though it does not employ human beings, though it is governed by intricate laws, nevertheless does offer in its final expression a type of beauty which fiction might achieve in its own way. Expansion. That is the idea the novelist must cling to. Not completion. Not rounding off but opening out.

When the symphony is over we feel that the notes and tunes composing it have been liberated, they have found in the rhythm of the whole their individual freedom. Cannot the novel be like that? Is not there something of it in ‘War and Peace’? the book with which we began and in which we must end. Such an untidy book. Yet, as we read it, do not great chords begin to sound behind us, and when we have finished does not every item even the catalogue of strategies – lead a larger existence than was possible at the time?

Conclusion

It’s fashionable to make predictions about The Future of the Novel but he won’t. All sorts of scientific discoveries and social transformations may occur but the task of the novelist will stay broadly the same. He repeats his motto: ‘History develops, art stands still.’ He imagines human nature will remain pretty fixed but gives himself a slight glimmer of hope.

If human nature does alter it will be because individuals manage to look at themselves in a new way. Here and there people — a very few people, but a few novelists are among them — are trying to do this. Every institution and vested interest is against such a search: organized religion, the State, the family in its economic aspect…

Maybe he meant his friends in the Bloomsbury Group, overinflating, as they all did, their own importance. Anyway, the state and the family have hardly been abolished because it seems like we need both of them. Organised religion, on the other hand, the personal repression, legal persecution and censorship exercised in the name of the Church of England, have largely withered away, like the Church itself. But, it turns out, via social media, the philistine press and other, rising religious organisations, we have invented new ways to judge and censor ourselves. That will never change.

As to The Future of the Novel, despite a century of pessimistic prognostications, this year, 2024, more novels than ever before were published. The Novel is doing fine.

Thoughts

1. Style

Only towards the end of the book did I notice the absence of Style from his handful of aspects. Style, the order of words in the sentence, the way sentences are assembled into paragraphs, is probably the aspect of novels which interests me most. It feels like Forster consciously avoided it, knowing what a minefield it is.

2. Forster’s oddly strange or incisive phrasing

Forster almost goes out of his way to appear a gentlemanly old buffer, an amiable old cove, and yet his writing often contains disconcerting turns of phrase and thought, which seem unexpectedly modern, harsh or violent.

In his fiction this is most obvious in the short stories, which are surprisingly weird, but these oddities crop up continually in everything he writes. For example, his opening comparison of ‘the story’ to a tapeworm. Here are some other oddities:

We move between two darknesses. Certain people pretend to tell us what birth and death are like: a mother, for instance, has her point of view about birth, a doctor, a religious, have their points of view about both. But it is all from the outside, and the two entities who might enlighten us, the baby and the corpse, cannot do so, because their apparatus for communicating their experiences is not attuned to our apparatus for reception.

Then food, the stoking up process, the keeping alive of an individual flame, the process that begins before birth and is continued after it by the mother, and finally taken over by the individual himself, who goes on day after day putting an assortment of objects into a hole in his face without becoming surprised or bored.

When a baby arrives in a novel it usually has the air of having been posted.

[Characters] are creations inside a creation, and often inharmonious towards it; if they are given complete freedom they kick the book to pieces, and if they are kept too sternly in check, they revenge themselves by dying, and destroy it by intestinal decay.

One of our foremost writers, Mr. Norman Douglas, is a critic of this type, and the passage from him which I will quote puts the case against flat characters in a forcible fashion. The passage occurs in an open letter to D. H. Lawrence, with whom he is quarrelling: a doughty pair of combatants, the hardness of whose hitting makes the rest of us feel like a lot of ladies up in a pavilion.

Credit

Aspects of the Novel by E.M. Forster was published 1927 by Edward Arnold. References are to the 1962 Pelican paperback edition.

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by Simon on January 24, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in English literature, Literary criticism

Tagged 1927, Abel Chevalley, Adam Bede, Anatole France, André Gide, Arnold Bennett, Aspects of the Novel, Balder, Beethoven, Billy Budd, Bloomsbury Group, British Library Reading Room, Bronte, Cambridge, character, characters, Charles Darwin, D.H. Lawrence, Daniel Defoe, Dickens, Dostoevsky, E.M. Forster, Fantasy, flat and round characters, Flecker's Magic, Gaskell, George Eliot, George Meredith, Gertrude Stein, Great Expectations, H.G. Wells, Hardy, Heart of Darkness, Henry James, Herbert Melville, Homo fictus, James Joyce, Jane Austen, Joseph Conrad, lecture, Les Faux Monnayeurs, literary criticism, literary theory, Lowes Dickinson, macro rhythms, Marcel Proust, Max Beebohm, Meredith, Micro rhythms, Moby Dick, Moll Flanders, Mr Casaubon, Mr Polly, Norman Douglas, Norman Matson, novel, parody, pattern, Pattern and Rhythm, Percy Lubbock, plot, Point of view, Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man, prophecy, rhythm, Samuel Richardson, Scheherazade, story, Thais, The Ambassadors, The Brothers Karamazov, the English novel, The Magic Flute, The Old Wives' Tale, Thomas Hardy, Thousand and One Nights, Tolstoy, Tom Jones, Trinity College, Tristram Shandy, Ulysses, Virginia Woolf, Walter Scott, Waverley novels, Women in Love, Wuthering Heights, Zuleika Dobson

Posted by Simon on January 24, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/01/24/aspects-of-the-novel-e-m-forster/

The Ghost Sonata by August Strindberg (1907)

Swedish playwright August Strindberg wrote four ‘chamber’ plays in 1907. To emphasise their affinity with music and that they were a cycle on related themes he gave each one an opus number. The Ghost Sonata is Opus 3. Strindberg later wrote that the four pieces taken together made up ‘his last sonatas’ on the analogy of a composer like Beethoven. Themes and ideas from one play were picked up and modulated in others. Some critics have made direct analogies to sonata form, describing the first of the play’s three scenes as a busy allegro, followed by scene 2 as a largo punctuated by long silences, the third and final scene being an andante, followed by the coda of the Student’s final speech.

The Ghost Sonata and its three cousins were written after another hiatus in Strindberg’s play-writing (the first one 1892 to 1898; this one 1902 to 1906).

Chamber pieces were very much a la mode. Max Reinhardt had just opened the Kammerspiele in Berlin. Strindberg was approached to write smaller pieces by actor and impresario August Falk who created a small theatre seating 161 guests in Stockholm, and named the Intimate Theatre, which for the 3 years of its existence became a centre of theatrical innovation.

Translator and editor of the Oxford University Press edition, Michael Robinson, quotes passages from Strindberg’s letters explaining what a chamber theatre was. The bit that caught my eye says, ‘No predetermined form is to restrict the author, for the motif determines the form. Consequently, freedom in treatment restricted only by the unity of the ideas and the feeling for style’ (quote Introduction page xxxi).

The Ghost Sonata is surprising from the start, the initial surprise being that it’s set outside. If any playwright suited grim claustrophobic interiors it’s Strindberg but this one is set outside a modern (in 1900) block of flats. Also, for the first time it doesn’t have a small cast (The Father: 6, Miss Julie: 3, Dance of Death: 3) but a relatively large one of 16. Mind you, they are all given generic type names (the Old Man, the Student, the Milkmaid and so on).

But all this is trivial compared with what follows. Although it has a realistic enough setting, the relations between all these people are a dreamlike fantasia.

The Ghost Sonata is in three scenes, each of which (rather inevitably) contains a death. Having read 13 plays by Chekhov, Ibsen and Strindberg I wonder if these Great Playwrights knew how to write a play which doesn’t end in a death of one sort or another (murder, suicide, accident).

Is The Ghost Sonata a modernist version of a fairy tale? The Old Man and the Student both explicitly compare what’s going on to a fairy tale. On this reading a heroic young Student, born on a Sunday and therefore in folklore able to see more clearly than other people, is introduced into an expensive modern house which from the outside he regards as paradise, through the intervention of an all-powerful fairy godfather (the Old Man, also named Hummel) and here encounters the fair damsel he had glimpsed from the street and who languishes in thrall to a vampire-like Cook.

True up to a point but, like the musical analogy, this interpretation leaves out all the weird details and the unaccountable reversals. The young damsel he’s meant to rescue fades away and dies. The fairy godfather who smuggled him in and, at many points of Scene 1 is compared to the Devil or Mephistopheles, half way through Scene 2 his powers desert him and he too is killed.

Or you could summarise The Ghost Sonata as: an eighty-year-old man in a wheelchair named Hummel overhears a thirsty Student named Arkenholz asking what appears to be thin air for a drink. (The Student thinks he is asking a Milkmaid for a drink. Why can no one else see her but him?). Anyway, this Hummel enlists the Student to enter a haunted house on a beautiful Sunday morning and rescue a young woman trapped inside…

But the characters are uncanny and unpredictable. Inexplicable things keep happening. At the formal dinner which is the centrepiece of Scene 2 the Old Man unmasks everyone present, pointing out that they’re hypocrites with false identities. And yet somehow it’s he, the unmasker, who meets his death. Not violently. He just shrinks and fades away.

What are we to make of the Mummy who, the first time we’re shown into her room talks and behaves like a parrot and yet slowly gains ascendency over the Old Man until it is he who starts talking parrot style.

There is much talk of this world being a hell or purgatory in which nobody is who they seem, in which nobody is responsible for their actions. The student calls it:

STUDENT: This world of illusion, guilt, suffering and death, this world of endless change, disappointment and pain…

Michael Robinson associates this with Strindberg’s late conversion to the teachings of Swedish theologian Emanuel Swedenborg who thought the visible world was a purgatorial preparation for a better one after death. But Strindberg characters talked like this before he’d read Swedenborg (and in fact so do Ibsen’s characters). It seems to have been standard Scandi noir, the same Scandi attitude that inspired Edvard Munch to his cheery paintings.

In any case, none of these ‘rational’ explanations account for the Old Man standing up in his wheelchair addressing a crowd of beggars, for the vampire cook, for the Colonel who is an impostor and only held together by his corset, or for the Mummy who starts out talking like a parrot, who hides herself away from the room which contains a statue of her as a nubile young woman, and who ends up stopping time itself!

At the end of the play the entire room, the ‘hyacinth room’ where the Student meets his admired beloved, disappears – presumably this just means the lights are dimmed right down to darkness – and replaced by a large copy of painter Arnold Böcklin’s famous and super-symbolist painting, The Isle of the Dead.

The Ghost Sonata lacks the relatable angst of ‘The Father’, ‘Miss Julie’ or ‘A Dance of Death’ and yet in many ways, because of the teasing transformations, the general absurdity and uncanny, dreamlike transformations, I think I enjoyed reading it the most.

The Ghost Sonata anticipates surreal plays and writings – the entire dream ethos of surrealism– and foreshadows the theatre of the absurd which was to become a dominant force in mid-twentieth century theatre.

Credit

I read ‘The Ghost Sonata‘ in the Oxford World’s Classics edition of ‘Miss Julie and Other Plays’, translated and introduced by Michael Robinson, and first published in 1998.

Strindberg reviews

The Father (1887)
Miss Julie (1888)
Dance of Death (1900)
The Ghost Sonata (1907)

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by Simon on October 21, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Play, Sweden, Theatre, Translation

Posted by Simon on October 21, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/10/21/the-ghost-sonata-august-strindberg/

The Wild Duck by Henrik Ibsen (1884)

‘Oh really! There’s no end to all these comings and goings!’
(Hjalmar Ekdal accurately summarising the busyness of an Ibsen play)

The backstory is carefully concealed and takes two acts to leak out but it is this: a generation ago Old Ekdal and Haakon Werle were in business together. Something happened whereby Old Ekdal was sent to prison, to do hard labour, and emerged a broken man, whereas Werle went on to become a business tycoon, managing a booming timber company. The play starts 20 or so years later and focuses on the sons of these two men, Hjalmar Ekdal, Old Ekdal’s son (who has become a photographer and lives in shabby poverty with his uneducated, former-serving girl wife Gina) – and rich old Werle’s son, Gregers Werle, who has grown up in a wealthy household but has a yen to improve the world. Feeling guilty for his unspecified role in Old Ekdal’s fate, Werle has given broken old Ekdel a sinecure of a job ‘copying’ papers which helps keep the Ekdal household afloat, but otherwise keeps him hidden away like a shameful secret…

Cast

Werle – merchant, factory owner and so on
Gregers Werle – his son
Mrs Sörby – Werle’s housekeeper who he plans to marry

Old Ekdal, broken, alcoholic fantasist
Hjalmar Ekdal – Old Ekdal’s son, a photographer
Gina Ekdal – Hjalmar’s wife
Hedvig – their daughter, 14 years old

Dr Relling – a doctor who lives downstairs from the Ekdals
Molvik – a former theology student who lives downstairs from the Ekdals

Graberg – book-keeper to Werle
Pettersen – servant to Werle
Jensen – hired waiter

Act 1

A grand dinner at Werle’s house which he is giving for his son, Gregers. The pair, father and son, don’t get on and only communicate via business letters. Werle is cross that Gregers invited his old schoolfriend Hjalmar because it took the number of guests to unlucky 13. We are introduced to two or three of the guests who are portrayed as fat and greedy (and named only as types – the bald guest, the fat guest, the short-sighted guest) although it is also repeated that they move in ‘Court circles’, strongly suggesting the ambience of wealth and influence which old Werle operates in.

The play starts in a studiedly indirect way: instead of going straight in with the main characters we are shown below-stairs chat between Werle’s servants, gossiping about the old man, about his reputation for being a lad when he was young and about the fate of Old Ekdal, hiw one-time business partner who ended up in prison.

The main events in Act 1 are:

1. Gregers talks to his old school-friend Hjalmar who he hasn’t seen for years and discovers that a) his training as a photographer was funded by Werle and b) Hjalmar married a former servant woman at the Werle house, Gina Hansen.

Interrupting this, Old Ekdal himself appears, he’s been working late with a colleague named Graberg the book-keeper and, the other gates being locked, the only way the pair can exit is via the living room where the grand party is happening. Old Ekdal’s appearance is like Banquo’s ghost, all the guests fall silent as he shuffles across the room and his own son, Hjalmar, turns to the fireplace in order to ignore him. Shame all round…once he’s gone conversation picks up and Mrs Sörby promises to play the piano to entertain the guests.

After interacting badly with the rich sophisticated guests (very pointedly he is made not to understand the idea that ‘vintage’ wines are older and more valued), Hjalmar makes his apologies and leaves. The other guests are being entertained by Werle’s housekeeper Mrs Sörby in the back room, which allows for:

2. A confrontation between Gregers and his father in which all kinds of things come out:

it was Werle who set Hjalmar up as a photographer, out of guilt at ruining his father
around the same time Werle fixed up for Hjalmar to marry the former maid Gina and this was because…
Gina was just the latest female servant Werle had been carrying on with, then tired off and so dismissed from his service, sent her home to live with her mother, but engineered her marriage to Hjalmar
Werle’s wife, Gregers’s mother, knew all about her husband’s infidelities and told Gregers

As to why Werle has given this whole party for his son, and invited so many outsiders, Werle says he wants to make Gregers a business opportunity, he wants to bring him into the family firm as a partner. But Gregers discerns the Machiavellian scheme beneath this – Werle is going to marry his housekeeper Mrs Sörby and so he set up this party because … he wanted to present a respectable face to the important people in his community – this is why the guests Gregers doesn’t know are at ‘his’ party, because it’s nothing to do with him, it’s to do with his father wanting to put on a show of happy father and son and, by implication, of his son happily accepting his (Werle’s) forthcoming marriage to Mrs Sörby. A tableau for public consumption.

Werle has, typically, used his son, as he always has, and as he always used and betrayed his mother. Gregers is beyond angry, he overflows with contempt for his father, who feels it.

In their final skirmishing Werle renews his offer of a partnership in the business but Gregers turns this down, revealing that he has just discovered a new purpose in life. The rest of the play reveal that this purpose is to save and redeem the much-abused Ekdel family…

Act 2

The setting switches to Hjalmar Ekdel’s photography studio, which is also the main room for Hjalmar and Gina. It’s the same evening as Werle’s dinner. Gina is sitting with their 14-year-old daughter Hedwig. Their conversation is designed to show how poor they are, not illiterate peasant poor but scrimping to make ends meet. Gina talks about the high cost of butter and both are thrilled that they’ve managed to let their spare room which will bring in a bit of extra money.

(Apparently, in the original language Gina’s speech is littered with grammar mistakes and malapropisms i.e. getting words mixed up, to indicate her lack of education, though English translations struggle to convey this.)

Old Ekdal appears with a bundle of documents to copy and shuffles across to his room. Although he tries to hide it Gina and Hedvig realise he’s got a bottle of booze. Years in prison broke him. He is an alcoholic.

Hjalmar arrives, he shows off some of the knowledge he acquired at the party (the banter about vintages) which impresses the girls but Hedvig had been telling Gina how excited she was because he promised to bring her something, but he forgot. He rummages around for the menu from the party to give her but Hedvig can’t help crying with disappointment.

Then Gregers arrives. He is rather shame-faced in front of Gina. His polite enquiries reveal that Hedvig is 14 and Gina and Hjalmar married 15 years ago. I think we are meant to deduce that Hedvig is old Werle’s child i.e. the old man got his serving maid pregnant, sent her home to her mum, who then engineered for her to be married off to the naive Hjalmar.

When she is out of the room fetching their guest a beer, Gina and Hjalmar also reveal that Hedvig has a degenerative disease of the eyes. They haven’t told her but a doctor has confirmed it. When Hjalmar says the doctor said it was hereditary Gregers starts in a way that suggests he realises it was inherited from his father. As in Ghosts, the implication seems to be that sexually transmitted infections are hereditary, which is incorrect. The symptoms of an STI such as syphilis would only be passed to Hedvig if the mother, Gina, had them but here she is apparently right as rain.

The act ends when, as part of telling them about the apartment, Gina and Hjalmar mention that there’s a spare room they want to let out. Now in fact, before the men arrived home, Gina and Hedvig had been gleefully celebrating that they’d managed to let the room and would thus be generating family income but had agreed not to tell Hjalmar till the following day. The result of this decision is that Hjalmar doesn’t know the spare room is let and when Gregers asks if he can have it, Hjalmar promptly says yes, although the girls look at each in mortification.

But the most important part of the act is when Old Man Ekdal insists on letting Gregers into their secret – this is that the entire back part of the loft, which they reveal by rolling apart two sliding doors, is a kind of menagerie: it contains hutches for rabbits and hens along with loads of pigeon roosts.

And Old Ekdal proudly displays his latest acquisition, a wild duck which was shot by Gregers’s father during a shoot, which was winged and fell into the lake and down into the water but was rescued by a plucky hunting dog. They took it back to Werle’s grand house where it didn’t thrive to Werle ordered it killed but his servant, Pettersen, who we met in Act 1, is friendly with Old Ekdal and saved it and passed it on to him. And now it’s been given pride of place in a special manger, here in the Ekdal attic.

Act 3

Same scene, the main room at Hjalmar Ekdal’s which is to be the setting of all the remaining scenes. Next morning. Hjalmar is grumpily getting on with touching up the most recent photographs. He snaps at Gina who has booked a couple to come and have their photo done. It becomes plain that he is a difficult man to live with, partly because he feels the weight of so many responsibilities.

Gregers and Hedvig: Gregers finds himself alone with Hedvig and finds out more about her, discovers that Hjalmar has stopped her going to school (because of the strain on her sight, though she doesn’t know that), promised to home school her but hasn’t found the time. Instead she helps out round the house and spends her spare time in the back room which, besides being a menageries is a lumber room full of old books which she loves to read or rather gaze at the pictures. Hjalmar realises she is a sensitive child full of untapped potential.

Gregers and Hjalmar: a lengthy exchange in which Hjalmar reveals that he doesn’t like photography and leaves most of that to Gina. His heart lies in his inventions. Some of this is tinkering, for example making not just the sliding doors which partition off the menagerie but also a kind of curtain which can be raised from the floor. He also likes stripping down, oiling and fixing his father’s antique rifle. He is, in other words, good with his hands, not with the aesthetics of photography.

And it’s now that Hjalmar reveals to Gregers he’s working on a marvellous invention which will restore the good name of the Ekdel family name. It’s only commitment to this project which keeps his head up above all these ‘petty things’ i.e. the shabby life he is forced to lead. We don’t get any detail about the invention but a strong feeling that Hjalmar is bonkers.

He also has a pistol, in fact to Gregers’ alarm he fires it in the menageries then, realising Hjalmar is here, emerges to explain that he indulges his father’s whim and fantasy that he is a still a proud lieutenant in the army. He places the gun on a shelf telling Hedvig to be careful with it as it still has a round in the chamber.

You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to instantly suspect that a loaded gun, on a stage, must inevitably go off. From this point onwards the only question is who is going to get killed.

In fact talk of the gun triggers a monologue explaining how brave and proud Lieutenant Ekdel was in his prime, a hunter of bears, a commander of man but reveals that when he was sentenced there was a moment when he was alone with his pistol and put it to his head but… failed to pull the trigger. And then, even more upsettingly, tells Gregers about the time that he, Hjalmar, the son of a disgraced army officer, crushed by circumstance, also held the gun against his breast, but also bottled out – despite all his ill fate, determined to live (p.166).

Trying to make light of all this, Gregers says there’s something of the wild duck about Hjalmar, what with being shot and winged, and mauled by a hunting dog and plunged down to the depths of a lake. He continues the metaphor, telling his friend he is living in a poisoned atmosphere, a swamp (from which Gregers obviously means to save him) but Hjalmar becomes offended and asks him to stop (p.167).

Lunch. Gina has invited to the two men who live downstairs, Dr Relling, a doctor, and Molvik, formerly a student of theology. Lunch is, of course, the setting for several further revelations. Just as the two guests from downstairs are greedily tucking in, Old Ekdal emerges from the loft with a fresh rabbit skin, announcing that he’s just killed, skinned and salted a rabbit. Tender-stomached Molvik makes to vomit and rushes out the room.

But the main revelation is Dr Relling telling everyone that, when he was young, Gregers used to go among the cottages of the labourers up at his father’s works preaching about ‘the claim of the ideal’. In other words, Gregers is an inveterate idealist, preacher and saver of souls. This adds depth to his attempts to heal the Ekdel household.

Hjalmar has just offended everyone, especially Gina, by telling them he doesn’t like the poisonous atmosphere, when there’s a knock at the door. Just as in ‘An Enemy of the People’, the set is busier than Piccadilly Circus.

To everyone’s surprise it is the villain of the piece, old Håkon Werle. He asks to see his son in private so the others vacate the stage. Werle asks Gregers if there’s any chance of his returning home or accepting the partnership in the firm to which his son, inevitably, says No. What does he expect to achieve here? To open Hjalmar’s eyes to the truth. And does he expect Hjalmar to thank him for having his eyes opened?

Lastly the father asks his son if he’s going to return up to the works? No, he regards himself as having quit his employ. How is he going to live? Oh he has a few savings which will last as long as it takes. This exchange strongly confirms the sense that Gregers is going to carry out his mission then kill himself.

His father leaves, the other characters re-enter the stage and Gregers invites Hjalmar for a walk, he has a few things to tell him. Both Relling the doctor and Gina tell him not to go but Hjalmar asks what possible harm could there be?

Well, the audience realises, the vast harm of having the bottom ripped out of his world.

Act 4

Later the same day, Gina had handled the appointment with the couple who wanted to be photographed and is getting anxious about Hjalmar. He arrives home and is a changed man. Gregers has foolishly and selfishly told him everything. For a start he forgets that it’s his daughter’s 15th birthday tomorrow. When she mentions the wild duck he rashly says he wishes he could wring its neck which reduces her to tears. He hugs her and sends her off for her evening walk.

This allows Hjalmar to confront Gina with all the lies she’s told. She clarifies that she didn’t sleep with Werle when she was in her service, it was afterwards, when she’d gone back to live with her mother and her mother encouraged her to in order to make money. So Hedvig is old Werle’s child.

One last point: Gina has always done the household accounts so Hjalmar’s never realised how much money Werle contributed to them, allegedly pay for Old Ekdal’s copying work. Hjalmar thought he was supporting his family but turns out even this is a lie.

Gregers, in his idealistic stupidity, knocks and comes in expecting to find a scene of seraphic sweetness and light so is disappointed to find the couple in deep gloom. Gina curses him. Relling the doctor comes in, quickly learns the situation and warns them all that it’s the children who suffer most in broken marriage.

At which point there’s another knock on the door and it’s Mrs Sörby. She’s come to say goodbye because she’s going up to the works at Höidal because she’s getting married to old Werle. They all react surprised but Dr Relling reminisces when they knew each other when they were younger. At least Werle won’t beat her up like her first husband, now dead. Gregers toys with telling his father his new wife once had a thing for Dr Relling but Mrs Sörby says she’s told her husband-to-be everything about her past, no secrets at all.

She reveals she will be a useful housemeet to Werle considering that he’s going blind. Now we see the genetic link between Werle and Hedvig.

Hjalmar now invokes the same stupid idea Dr Relling accused Gregers of peddling to the labourers, ‘the claim of the ideal’, and in this spirit announces to Mrs Sörby that he pledges to pay off the entire ‘debt of honour’ i.e. all the money Werle has given to his household under cover of paying Old Ekdal. This is, obviously, a stupid and impractical thing to do.

Re-enter Hedvig who is girlishly excited because she met Mrs Sörby going out who gave her an advance present for her birthday, a letter. When she shows it the others realise it is addressed in Old Werle’s hand. Hjalmar opens it and it is a splendid gift from old Werle; that Old Ekdal need do no more work but will be awarded a pension of 100 crowns a month and when he dies, this sum will pass to Hedvig! Hedvig is, of course, thrilled and says she’ll give it to her mummy and daddy and asks why they aren’t happy.

Gregers asks Hjalmar what kind of man he is and, in effect, goads him until Hjalmar calmly tears the letter in two. He then asks Gina why the old man encouraged her to marry him and Gina reluctantly explains that Werle expected to be able to call by and shag her after her marriage. Hjalmar asks Gina point blank whether Hedvig is his child and she says she doesn’t know.

Hjalmar says he can’t stay in the same house a moment longer. Gregers says he must stay in order to win through to ‘that sublime mood of magnanimity and forgiveness’ which he is so obsessed with promoting, like all zealots, like all interfering busybodies.

Hedvig comes out of the kitchen as Hjalmar prepares to leave, he refuses to hug her, she clings on to him screaming, he can’t bear it, pushes her away and walks out. Gina says he’ll go fetch him back and exit.

This leaves Gregers along with Hedvig. She doesn’t understand why her Daddy has left, was it something she did? She mentions the wild duck and Gregers decoys the conversation onto that. Turns out she’s added the wild duck to her regular evening prayer for her father. Gregers makes the preposterous proposal that Hedvig should kill the wild duck as a sacrifice in order to win her father back, to show that she is ready to make the biggest sacrifice in her world for his love.

Gina comes back saying Hjalmar’s gone out with Dr Relling and Molvik on the piss, and ruing the interference of clever strangers.

Act 5

Next morning, heavy snow on the skylights. Gina discovers Hjalmar did go out with the boys the night before and spent the night at Dr Relling’s i.e. downstairs.

Dr Relling arrives and delivers a blistering reality check. he tells Gregers he has a bad case of inflamed scruples; he is addicted to finding heroes to worship who are not heroes at all, like this Hjalmar who was very plausible at college because he was handsome and could quote other people’s ideas and words but was always a hollow man.

Dr Relling goes on to deliver what may be the play’s Big Idea which is the crucial importance of the LIFE-LIE. This is the lie about ourselves which enables us to go on living. Dr Relling has invented a category, the demoniac, to describe Molvik, who wears it as a badge of pride which explains his behaviour. Old Ekdal has invented his own life-lie and treats the loft with its old Christmas trees and rabbits as if it’s a vast forest which the he-man hunter bravely treks through. And Hjamar had a life-lie of himself as Provider for his family who was on the cusp of making the Great Invention which would free his family, until Gregers came along to destroy it.

Gregers disapprovingly asks if Dr Relling equates his ‘life-lie’ with Gregers’ notion of ‘the ideal’ and Dr Relling says, Damn right he does.

Hedvig enters. When Gregers points out that she hasn’t killed the wild duck, Hedvig very sensibly says she woke up this morning and it seemed like a silly idea. Ah, says Gregers, that is because you are a mere child and haven’t learned the ‘joyous spirit of self-sacrifice’. He really is a sanctimonious wanker.

Gregers leaves and Old Ekdal enters from the loft. Hedvig gets him to describe how he would go about hunting and shooting a wild duck – in the chest, that’s the place, he explains. After he’s pottered out Hedvig goes over to the shelf where Hjalmar left the pistol with one bullet in it and is touching it when Gina enters and she quickly turns away.

Hjalmar knocks and enters. Hedvig runs crying over to him but he cruelly pushes her away. He’s only come for his scientific books. (It’s a telling detail that Gina tells him these books a) lack spines i.e. they’re knackered and old but at the same time b) haven’t had the pages cut i.e. he’s never read them. The entire inventor thing is a palpable life-lie.)

When Hjalmar goes to go into a bedroom to look for his autobiography and other papers he sees Hedvig again. She comes out and tries to cling to her but he pushes her away. It’s then that she starts to think about the wild duck, about Gregers’s suggestion to sacrifice it. She goes to the shelf, takes down the pistol, hides it and sneaks backstage into the loft without her parents noticing, as they fuss and fret about which suitcase Hjalmar can use to take his stuff etc.

Gina asks if he wants to take his flute but he says no, just the pistol. They both look for it but can’t find it and assume the old man’s gone off with it.

Gina is admirably restrained. With the common sense of the uneducated she doesn’t make a scene or listen to any of Hjalmar’s fluff about the ideal and instead makes him a hot breakfast and cup of coffee. Erst fressen, den der Moral. Even as he craps on with his typically male grandiloquence and self-flattering visions of going from door to door in the snow asking someone to give him shelter, Gina tops up his coffee, brings him butter and feeds the animal, and the animal softens and asks, well, would it be possible for him to maybe bunk down in the living room for a few days. A process of healing the mind through the body.

In a similar spirit he comes across the letter from old Werle which he tore up yesterday, fingers it a bit, then asks Gina to bring some glue and more paper, and pastes it back together. After all, what right does he have to deprive someone else (his father) of their property.

Unfortunately the meddling imbecile Gregers arrives but Hjalmar is tired of his guff. When Gregers tells him he has his invention to live for, Hjalmar pooh-poohs that there’ll ever be an invention; anything good has already been invented. He reveals it was Dr Relling who gave him the idea of making a Great Invention in Photography, at which Gregers and we the audience go, aha – so this was the life-lie Dr Relling gave him – and that it made Hjalmar intensely happy to have one.

Now his life is in ruins. Above all he wonders whether Hedvig has ever loved him or whether she’s overheard Mrs Sörby and the other women talking, has realised she isn’t Hjalmar’s child, and has played him for a fool, just waiting for the opportunity to get money from her real grandfather and leave. What if Werle and Mrs Sörby come along and entice her away with a better life. Now his love for his daughter has been crushed.

It’s at this point that the gunshot we’ve been waiting for ever since we saw the pistol rings out. Gregers explains that Hedvig got her grandfather to shoot the thing that means most to her, the wild duck, in order to prove her love for her father. Hjalmar takes this at face value and is transformed, saying everything’s going to be alright now.

Unfortunately Old Ekdal comes out his bedroom door wondering what the shot was about. Gregers is even more impressed, that Hedvig has shot the wild duck by herself, but when they throw open the door to the animal loft they, of course, see her lying on the floor.

They carry her out and lay her on the table while Gina shouts down the stairs for Dr Relling who comes running and, after an examination, declares her dead, shot in the heart.

Hjalmar is thrown into an absolute delirium of anguish, if only he could call her back just for a minute, just long enough to tell her how much he infinitely loves her, oh God God, why won’t you allow me to tell her etc.

They carry her body into her bedroom for privacy and Gina tells Hjalmar that now they are the child’s parents, united in sorrow.

Dr Relling tells Gregers it was suicide. The powder burn on the dress indicates it was pressed right up against her chest. Gregers tries to salvage something by saying at least the child’s death will have an ennobling effect on the parents. Dr Relling witheringly replies, Give it nine months. Hjalmar is no poet or hero. He will spend the rest of his life wallowing in sentimentality and self pity. And Dr Relling sums up, maybe, the moral of the story:

RELLING: Life wouldn’t be too bad if only these blessed people who come canvassing their ideals round everyone’s door would leave us poor souls in peace.

Comments

Secrets and lies in marriage (yawn), combined with two of the half dozen oldest stories in the world – the rich and powerful man who has adulterous affairs and children with his servants and the innocent man who is palmed off with someone else’s child.

As the play went on, the simple-minded religiose language of Gregers, who insists his friend is undergoing a great spiritual revival, began to really irritate me. He’s an interfering twat.

Similarly, I got tired of his repeated use of the key phrase ‘claim of the ideal’. a) It’s such a stupid phrase in itself, but b) Ibsen has Gregers repeat it in a totally unrealistic way, more like a parrot than a man. This obtrusive repetition of the play’s catchphrase reminded me of the over-use of the phrase ‘enemy of the people’ which dominates the second half of the play of the same name.

According to the introduction, many critics consider ‘The Wild Duck’ Ibsen’s greatest play and, certainly, all the backstories and information are released in instalments with great cunning and artistry. But, in my opinion, all this artistry is in support of a dull premise. A poor man discovers his child may not be his after all and that his family is secretly supported by wealthy man who’s probably the child’s real father…

The symbolism of the wild duck hung very heavy round the neck of the narrative from its first mention – is it a poor, delicate, wounded and vulnerable creature like the girl who adopts it? Yes.

On top of this is the sheer dumb obviousness of the loaded gun. Everyone knows if you bring a loaded gun onstage in a play it is sooner or later going to be fired, from the moment it appeared the only question was who was going to snuff it and Ibsen plays with this by having Hjalmar tell Gregers about both his and his father’s suicide attempts. But these turn out to be not-so-clever decoys from the true victim.

And I was very upset by the suicide which ends the play but not in the way Ibsen intended: rather than bursting into tears at the sacrifice of this sweet innocent I was upset by how flagrantly manipulative it was.

A digression about opera: in my late 20s and 30s I went to lots of operas, at the Royal Opera House and the English National Opera, at festivals and experimental theatres. All in all I went to about 100 operas. Eventually I started to get a bit fed up with several things about seeing opera, like how long they are and how hot it gets up in the gods at opera houses. But it was something very specific which made me stop buying tickets. I happened to see a run of four or five nineteenth-century operas in a row and in every single one the female lead died. Carmen, Tosca, Madame Butterfly, La Traviata, suddenly I had a kind of revelation. I looked around me and saw hundreds of people all being entertained by the spectacle of women being tortured, blackmailed, threatened, dying of disease or tormented into killing themselves and suddenly, in a flash, it disgusted me. The whole notion of women being subjected to grotesque suffering for my entertainment sickened me. I stopped and I’ve never been back.

So that is the mood in which I read the description of poor sweet Hedvig’s suicide and I felt that same revulsion all over again, that I was being emotionally manipulated and that a 14-year-old girl was the tool of my manipulation. Yuk!

In the same scene Hjalmar’s thrashing around begging for God to give him just one more minute so he could tell his daughter how much he loved her etc… I’d had enough.

It’s extremely well constructed, deeply pondered, the work of a master, but I didn’t like it at all.

Repelled by the exploitative melodrama of the climax, I realised I most enjoyed the opening scenes at old Werle’s party. I liked the banter between the servants Pettersen and Jensen. I liked the simple honest excess of the fat man and the bald man boasting about how much they could eat at a sitting. Gross but in a straightforward way which does nobody any harm except themselves.

A bit more subtly I liked the way Gina, with the wisdom of the uneducated, knew she didn’t have to engage in all this man talk about ideals and life-lies but simply had to lay on coffee and toast to begin to win her man back. I liked the subtlety of that scene and I think Gina emerges as the most sympathetic character, with almost all the men behaving like idiots.

But the constantly reappearing figure of Gregers, whose idiotic ‘idealism’ ruined every life he touched and killed a lovely little girl, left a very bad taste in my mouth.

James McFarlane’s introduction

In 1881 Ibsen began to draught an autobiography. He didn’t get further than his boyhood but that was enough to revive memories of: his sister, who was called Hedvig (!); his father who was bankrupted, suffering social ostracism and reducing the family to penury; the cramped attic where the Ibsen family was forced to live; the mess of furniture, old books and junk left by the previous occupants. In other words, there’s a surprising amount of autobiography in ‘The Wild Duck’.

McFarlane brings out how the world of the Ekdal household, although built on ‘a lie’ is a lovely fantasy. Hedvig lives a child’s fantasy of her father. Old Ekdal is away in his fantasies of hunting in the great pine forests. Hjalmar lives for his fantasy of becoming the Great Inventor, despite the complete lack of evidence for this. Only the down-to-earth Gina doesn’t live in a fantasy which is ironic because she is the one at the heart of the ‘lie’ i.e. the knowledge of how the entire fantasy world is sustained by Old Werle who used her as his mistress.

Like many of Ibsen’s plays ‘The Wild Duck’ comes ready-made for critical analysis. It is perfectly designed to be converted into a Sparks Notes summary of characters and themes. It is prime A-level material. ‘Discuss the role of truth and deception in…’ etc.

The central conceptual clash, I suppose, is between Dr Relling’s notion of the life-lie, the self-deceptions necessary to make the harsh realities of life bearable, to give life a meaning – and Gregers’ insistence on the claim of the wretched ‘ideal’, namely remorseless truth-telling at any cost. There’s enough there for a good essay. What McFarlane’s introduction made me realise was there’s a third big philosophy of life, which isn’t given a big name and is hiding in plain sight, and this is the worldly wisdom of Old Werle.

Werle makes no great speeches, wields no big ideas, but he represents the triumph of savoir faire, how to get on in the world, how to run a successful business for decades, how to arrange and manipulate everyone around you to suit your needs. As the play proceeds, what we see and sympathise with is the systematic destruction of all Hjalmar’s delusions: he thought he was happily married, he thought his wife was faithful, he thought he had fathered a beautiful little girl, he thought he was the provider and keeper of his little family – and he is wrong on every single on of those counts. Werle is presented as his nemesis, as the evil wizard behind all his woes. What’s not so obvious is to see it from the other end of the telescope, as a play about Werle’s triumph. This is what worldly wisdom looks like.

Apparently, we have Ibsen’s drafts of many of his plays and McFarlane explains what the drafts of ‘The Wild Duck’ tell us. This is that all the characters existed in early drafts but then he moved them around, gave them names or removed names, to create a sense of foreground and background characters. And the same with issues or events. McFarlane points out how the precise details of Old Ekdal’s crime, the murky references to Old Werle mistreating his wife, and above all the exact status of Hedvig’s paternity, these are all important but left deliberately vague and blurred, like the background in a painting.

Lastly, McFarlane devotes a page to the symbol of the wild duck itself which I found boring. He says it fulfils two functions: it means something but something different to every individual in the play; and it binds together the many strands of the play. Although it is never seen and not mentioned for long periods, in some sense it binds together not only the characters but the many themes of the play.

I can see how this is true and I can appreciate the extraordinary skill of the play’s construction. But it’s an entertainment based on the killing of a 14-year-old girl and I couldn’t overcome my simple revulsion at that fact.

Credit

I read ‘The Wild Duck’ in the 1960 translation by James McFarlane which was packaged up, along with his translations of ‘An Enemy of the People’ and ‘Rosmersholm’ into a World’s Classics paperback in 1988. I read the 2009 reprint.

Ibsen reviews

The Doll’s House (1879)
Ghosts (1881)
An Enemy of the People (1882)
The Wild Duck (1884)
Rosmersholm (1886)
Hedda Gabler (1890)
The Master Builder (1892)

Play reviews

Play reviews

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by Simon on October 4, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Play, Theatre, Translation

Posted by Simon on October 4, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/10/04/the-wild-duck-henrik-ibsen/

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More by Roald Dahl (1977)

And what marvellous exciting fun it was!
(Lucky Break)

This 1977 collection of Roald Dahl short stories is, as one of his schoolboys might say, a bit of a swizz because, out of the seven texts in this collection only four of are actually short stories – the last two are autobiographical sketches about the war and ‘The Mildenhall Treasure’ is a factual article from way back in 1946, all three of which had been previously published elsewhere.

The Boy Who Talked With Animals (story)
The Hitch-Hiker (story)
The Mildenhall Treasure (article)
The Swan (story)
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (story)
Lucky Break (memoir)
A Piece of Cake (memoir)

They’re all children’s stories, even the war memoirs – not for small children, exactly; probably for younger teens. It’s indicative that the edition I read was published by Puffin, Penguin’s imprint for children. One of aspects of the children-y approach is the gleeful hyperbole found throughout the pieces:

As a matter of fact, he told himself he was now almost certainly able to make money faster than any other man in the entire world. (page 144)
‘You will be the richest man on earth.’ (p.156)

Another minor verbal tic which indicates their target audience is the liberal use of Dahl’s favourite words, ‘marvellous’ and ‘fantastic’, both of which, of course, appear in the titles of two of his most popular children’s books.

And now, very quickly, there began to come to him the great and marvellous idea that was to change everything. (Henry Sugar, page 153)

The Boy Who Talked with Animals (23 pages)

A strange and eerie story told by a narrator who’s gone on holiday to Jamaica. The taxi driver taking him to the hotel spooks him with stories of weird voodoo stuff which still goes on in the mountains. Then when he arrives at the hotel it’s perfectly pleasant and yet it gives him a bad vibe. And then the maid tells him all about a guest, a Mr Wasserman who was taking a photo of the sunset from the beach when a huge coconut fell on his head and knocked him dead. Although all this is quite serious it has a comic-book simplicity about it.

Anyway, the main action kicks off when the narrator, idling sitting on his balcony one day, hears a great hubbub from a crown of guests assembling on the beach.

This is a first-person fiction piece of medium-length writing. The narrator, on advice from friends, decides to vacation in Jamaica. One night, a sea turtle, ancient and huge, is caught by a group of fishermen. Rich people want to buy it, while the manager of a nearby hotel wants to make turtle soup out of it, but both plans are foiled when a little boy appears and shames the crowd for their cruelty. His parents explain that he has a deep affinity for animals, and even talks to them. The boy’s father pays off the fisherfolk and hotel manager, and the turtle is set free. The next day, the boy is missing, and the fisherfolk reveal that they have seen the child riding on the back of the sea turtle into the distance.

A turtle has landed on a resort beach in Jamaica and everyone wants to kill it for the meat and its shell. A small boy David becomes hysterical and tries to save the turtle. His parents explain that he is very sensitive to animals and they volunteer to buy the turtle from the resort owner. While they are haggling over the price, David talks to the turtle and tells it to swim away. During the night the boy himself disappears and next day two local fishermen come back with a crazy story – they have seen David riding the turtle out in the middle of the ocean!

The Hitch-Hiker (15 pages)

That rare thing, a Roald Dahl story with a happy ending, no revenge or poisoning or murder in sight.

The narrator is driving up to London in his brand new BMW 3.3 Li when he spots a hitchhiker. As the man gets in the narrator observes his rat-like features and long white hands, his drab grey coat which makes him look even more rattish. They talk about the model of car the narrator’s driving and when the narrator boasts that its top speed is 129 mph, the hitch-hiker encourages him to put the manufacturer’s claims to the test. So the narrator puts his foot down, 80, 90, 100, 105, 110, 115 miles an hour. Just as they get into the 120s they both hear a police siren go off and realise a police motor cycle is after them.

The traffic cop is strict, unbending and sarcastic. He takes his time and is rude and officious to both of them before writing out a ticket and hinting that breaking the limit by such a whopping margin will definitely result in a big fine and maybe even a prison sentence. With that threat he motors off leaving the narrator to resume his journey at a sensible law abiding speed.

The narrator frets over the doom awaiting him and so the hitchhiker sets about cheering him up. He challenges the narrator to guess his true profession. As a clue he starts to reveal various items from the narrator’s person starting off, improbably enough, with his belt, before going on to reveal the narrator’s wallet, watch and even shoelace.

Gobsmacked, the narrator calls the hitchhiker a pickpocket but the latter is a bit miffed and insists on being called a ‘fingersmith’ – just as a goldsmith has mastered gold, so he has mastered the adept use of his long and silky fingers, which he refers to as his ‘fantastic fingers’.

After his initial amazement at his friend’s abilities the narrator relapses back into gloom at the prospect of being charged, fined and maybe even imprisoned for his moment of madness. At which point, in a dazzling conclusion to the story, the hitchhiker reveals that he has stolen both of the police officer’s notebooks, which contain the cop’s copies of the tickets he gave them and the details of their offence.

Delighted, the narrator pulls over and he and the hitchhiker gleefully make a little bonfire of the policeman’s notebooks. A rare example of a Dahl story with a joyful ending.

The Mildenhall Treasure (1946: 27 pages)

Not a short story at all, but a factual article.

A modern preface explains that Dahl was unmarried and living with his mother when he read about the discovery of the Mildenhall treasure. He motored over to interview the hero of the story, Gordon Butcher, a humble ploughman, and this 27-page text is a kind of dramatisation of events.

Put simply, in January 1942 the owner of some farmland in Suffolk contracted one Sydney Ford to plough his fields for him and Ford sub-contracted the job to Gordon Butcher. Butcher was ploughing away when his plough struck something. When he investigated he found the edge of a big metal disc. Not sure what to do he went to see Ford who accompanied him back to the field and the pair dug out over thirty pieces of obviously man-made metal objects. As they did it snow began to fall and eventually the hole was covered in snow and Butcher’s extremities had gone numb with cold so he was happy enough when Ford told him to go home to his wife and a roaring fire and forgot all about it.

Meanwhile Ford took the treasure home in a sack and, over the following weeks and months, used domestic metal cleaner to clean off the tarnish and reveals the objects for what they were, the most impressive hoard of buried Roman treasure ever found in Britain.

Now all this took place during wartime, and from Ford’s house he could hear Allied bombers taking off to pound German cities and many of the norms and conventions of civilian life had been suspended. On the face of it, according to law, Butcher and Ford should have reported the find; it would have been claimed in its entirety by His Majesty’s government but Butcher, as the first finder, would have been eligible for the full market value of the trove, which Dahl gives as over half a million pounds.

But neither man reported it, in breach of English law. The digging in the increasingly heavy snowfall is the first significant or dramatic scene. The next one comes when Dahl describes the mounting excitement of Ford as he uses ordinary domestic cleaner to slowly work off the centuries of grime and reveal the sparkling silver underneath.

The third one comes when Ford has an unexpected visitor, Dr Hugh Alderson Fawcett, a keen and expert archaeologist who used, before the war, to visit Ford once a year to assess whatever finds Ford had made for, as the text explains, old arrowheads and minor historical debris often crop up in the fields of Suffolk which were, in the Dark Ages, the most inhabited part of Britain.

Anyway, by some oversight Ford kept most of the treasure under lock and key but had left out two beautiful silver spoons, which each had the name of a Roman child on them and so were probably Roman Christening spoons. The most dramatic moment in the story comes when Ford welcomes Fawcett into his living room but then realises the spoons are on the mantlepiece, in full sight. He tries to distract the doctor’s attention but eventually Fawcett sees them, asks what they are, and, upon examining them, almost has a heart attack as he realises their cultural importance and immense value.

Ford reluctantly confesses to when he found them and even more reluctantly admits there are more. When he unlocks his cupboard and shows the hoard to Fawcett the latter nearly expires with excitement.

In a way the most interesting moment comes when Dahl, showing the insight of a storyteller, admits that the most interesting part of the tale, all the dramatic bits, are over. Now it’s just the bureaucracy and administration. The hoard is reported to the police and packed off to the British Museum. In July 1946 a hearing is held under the jurisdiction of a coroner but it’s a jury which decides to award both Ford and Butcher £1,000, a lot of money but nowhere near the half million Butcher might have got if Ford had told him to report the find immediately.

You can read up-to-date information about the treasure on the Mildenhall Treasure Wikipedia page, including a reference to what Wikipedia calls Dahl’s ‘partly fictional account’.

The Swan (25 pages)

His lazy truck driver Dad buys thick, loutish Ernie, a .22 rifle for his 15th birthday. He and his mate Raymond go straight out on this fine May morning and start taking potshots at songbirds, stringing their bodies up from a stick Ernie carries over his shoulder. Then they come across school swot, weedy bespectacled 13-year-old Peter Watson.

At which point commences the main body of the story in which these two thugs really seriously bully Peter. First of all they march him to the nearby train line where they truss him hand and foot and then tie him to the sleepers. It is genuinely tense as Peter lies there trying to work out how low a train’s undercarriage is, and systematically moving his head and feet back and forth to try and dig deeper into the gravel. Dahl gives a tremendously vivid description of the express train suddenly appearing like a rocket, and roaring over Peter’s head till he feels like he’s been swallowed by a screaming giant.

But he survives, dazed and in shock. The bullies have watched from the nearby verge and now stroll down and untie Peter but keep his hands trussed. They push him ahead of them as they set off for the lake. Here they spot a duck and, despite Peter’s heartfelt please, shoot it. At which Ernie has the bright idea of treating Peter as their retriever, forcing him to wade into the water and bring back the corpse of the duck.

Next they spot a swan, a beautiful swan sitting regally atop a nest in the reeds. Peter begs them, tells them it’s illegal, tells them that swans are the most protected birds in the country, they’ll be arrested etc, but these guys are idiots as well as hooligans and Ernie raises his gun and shoots the swan dead. Then they threaten to kick and beat Peter unless he wades into the reeds and fetches the body.

It’s at this stage that things start to take a turn for the macabre or gruesome or possibly surreal. Peter loses all restraint and accuses Ernie of being a sadist and a brute at which point Ernie has another of his brainwaves and asks if Peter would like to see the swan come back to life, flying happily over the lake?

Peter asks what the devil he’s talking about, but then Ernie asks Ray for his pocket knife and sets about sawing off one of the swan’s wings. He then cuts six sections from the ball of string he always carries in his jacket and then…tells Peter to stretch out his arm. While Peter says he’s mental, Ernie proceeds to tie the swan’s wing tightly to Peter’s arm. Then he cuts off the other wing and ties it to Peter’s other arm. Now Peter has two swan’s arms attached to his arms.

So far so weird, but now the story moves towards a line or threshold, for Ernie now insists that Peter climbs a weeping willow growing by the lakeside, climbs right to the top and then ‘flies’. Peter seizes the opportunity of escaping from the bullies and makes the best of struggling up through a willow tree while encumbered with two whopping great swan wings, but eventually reaches the highest branch capable of bearing his weight, some 50 feet above the ground.

If he thought he could escape the bullies he was mistaken for they have stepped back to have clear sight of him, and Ernie proceeds to shout at him, telling him to fly. What madness, Peter thinks and doesn’t budge. At which point Ernie tells him he must fly or he will shoot. Peter doesn’t budge. Then Ernie says he’ll count to ten. He gets to ten and fires, deliberately shooting wide, in order to scare Peter who still doesn’t budge. Then, getting cross, Ernie shoots him in the thigh.

Now, at this pivotal moment, Dahl interjects a bit of editorialising. he tells us that there are two kinds of people, people who crumble and collapse under stress, pressure and danger or the smaller number of people who abruptly flourish and triumph. This, we take it, is experience garnered during his service in the war. But it also serves to paper over the crack, the red line, where the narrative crosses over from weird but plausible into wholly new realm of magical realism.

For, transformed by rage and frustration, Peter spreads his swan’s wings and…flies! The bullet in his leg knocked both his feet from under him but instead of plummeting to earth he sees a great white light shining over the lake, beckoning him on, and spreads the great swan wings and goes soaring up into the sky.

The narrative cuts to the eye witnesses in the village who see a boy with swan wings flying overhead and then cuts to Peter’s mother, doing the washing up in the kitchen sink when she sees something big and white and feathered land in her garden and rushes out to find her beloved little boy, to cut him free from the wings and start to tend the wound in his leg.

The transcendence of this, the tying on of wings and a boy’s transformation into a bird, remind me of the several J.G. Ballard short stories which depict men obsessed with flying like birds, in particular the powerful 1966 story Storm-bird, Storm-dreamer.

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (71 pages)

By far the longest of Dahl’s short stories, this tale is more accurately described as a novella, whose length justifies the compilation and naming of the book around it. Having just finished it I can see that it could possibly have been a book in its own right, padded out with illustrations to book length. Instead the publishers padded it out to book length by adding a couple of other stories and some already-published war memoirs.

It’s an odd production, firstly in that it contains lengthy stories nested within each other, as you’ll see. We start with an extended introduction to the character of Henry Sugar who is painted as a thoroughly despicable person. He has inherited great wealth, is lazy and idle and spends most of his time, like many of his class, gambling on anything that moves.

Sugar goes to stay with a posh lord (Sir William Wyndham at his house near Guildford) and when his friends set up a game of canasta he draws the short straw and is the odd man out, so he wanders disconsolately into the library and mooches around till he finds an old exercise book in which is written the second story, the story-within-a-story.

For the exercise book turns out to be an account written by a British doctor in India in 1934. It is titled ‘A Report on an Interview with Imhrat Khan, The Man Who Could See Without Eyes, by Dr John Cartwright, Bombay, India, December 1934’.

This is a long, detailed account in its own right. This Cartwright is sitting with others in the Doctors Rest Room in Bombay Hospital when an Indian comes in. He calmly explains that he can see without using his eyes. After their initial mockery the doctors test him by putting a temporary sealant on his eyes, covering them with bread dough, then cotton wool, then bandaging them thoroughly. But, to their astonishment, the man heads out into the corridor, avoids other people, manages the stairs just fine, walks out the building, gets onto a bicycle and cycles out into the roaring traffic all without the use of his eyes.

It turns out that this fellow makes his living as part of a travelling circus where he’s one among many gifted performers such as a prodigious juggler, a snake charmer and a sword swallower. Dr Cartwright finds this out when he goes to see the circus that evening (at the Royal Palace Hall, Acacia Street). He then goes backstage to Khan’s dressing room and asks if he can interview him about his amazing powers. He will write up the account and try to get it published in something like the British Medical Journal. Khan agrees so Cartwright takes him to a restaurant and over curry Khan tells him his story.

So this is the third account, a story-within-a-story-within-a-story, which switches to a first-person narrative. Khan explains that he had a lifelong fascination with magic. When he was 13 a conjurer came to his school. He was so entranced that he followed him to Lahore where he became his assistant. but is disillusioned when he discovers it is all trickery and not real magic. He learns about the yogi, holy men who develop special skills. While looking for one he joins a travelling theatre company to make a living. Then he learns that the greatest yogi in India is Mr Banerjee, so he sets off to find him. He tracks him down to the jungle outside Rishikesh where he hides and witnesses the great man praying and levitating. When he steps forward to introduce himself Banerjee is furious at being spied on and chases Khan away. But the boy returns day after day and his persistence wears Banerjee down. Eventually he agrees to talk, says he never takes disciples, but recommends a colleague, Mr Hardwar.

Hardwar takes him on and thus begins a series of challenging physical and mental exercises, for three years. Eventually he needs to earn a living and rejoins a travelling show where he performs conjuring tricks. In Dacca he comes across a crowd watching a man walk on fiery coals and, when volunteers are requested, he goes forward and walks on burning coals himself.

He has heard tell that the ultimate test of a yogi’s powers is to see without using your eyes and so sets his heart on achieving this skill. (p.123). Slowly he realises that our senses have two aspects, the outer obvious one, and the inner version of that sense. He cultivates his inner sense of sight and the narrative form allows Dahl to convince us that Khan slowly slowly acquires the ability to see objects with his eyes closed.

By 1933 when he is 28 he can read a book with his eyes closed. He explains to Cartwright that the seeing is now done by any part of his body and demonstrates it by placing himself behind a door except for his hand which he sticks round the door. Then he proceeds to read the first book Cartwright takes off the shelf with his hand. Cartwright is staggered.

It is now late and time for Khan to go to bed. Cartwright thanks him and drives him home, then goes back to his own place but can’t sleep. Surely this is one of the greatest discoveries ever made! If this skill can be taught then the blind could be made to see and the deaf to hear! Cartwright gets a clean notebook and writes down every detail of what Khan has told him.

Next morning Cartwright tells all to a fellow doctor and they agree to go to the performance that evening and afterwards take Khan away from the tacky world of travelling performers and set him up somewhere safe where scientists can study him.

But when they get to the Royal Palace Hall something is wrong, there is no crowd and someone has written ‘Performance cancelled’ across the poster. When Cartwright asks he is told that ‘The man who can see without eyes’ died peacefully in his sleep. At one point in his long narration, Khan had made a point of telling him that a good yogi is sworn to secrecy and is punished for divulging his secrets. Well, this is the handy narrative contrivance Dahl has used to eliminate his wonder-worker. He told his secrets, he died.

Cartwright is devastated, finishes writing up his account with this sad coda, signs it and…40 or so years later, this is the old exercise book which Henry Sugar has just randomly picked up and read in the library of Sir William Wyndham!

Sugar has read it alright but the only thing he took from it was one throwaway remark by Khan that he could read the value of playing cards from behind because he could see through playing cards. As an inveterate gambler Sugar is dazzled by the possibilities of this power. He steals the notebook and sets about copying the exercises detailed in it. Months pass and he thinks he’s beginning to acquire the ability to empty his mind and visualise.

At the end of one year of hard training to focus and visualise Sugar tests himself and discovers that he can see through the back of a playing card to see its value, although it takes about four minutes to do so. A month later he can do it in 90 seconds, six months later he’s got it down to 20 seconds. But thereafter it gets harder, and it takes another eight months before he gets it down to 10 seconds. By now he has developed phenomenal powers of concentration but getting his reading time down to his target of four seconds takes another whole year, making three years and three months in total.

Then commences the real core of the story. In a sense all the preliminary matter about the Indian yogi is so much guff; conceivably it could have been a scientific inventor coming up with the discovery or any other kind of pretext or excuse which gets the protagonist to this point, namely, Being able to see the value of concealed cards at a casino.

For on the evening of the day when he finally visualises a card in 4 seconds, Henry puts on a dinner jacket and catches a cab to one of the most exclusive casinos in London, Lord’s House. Here he discovers he can predict which number is going to come up at roulette, bets £100 and wins at odds of 36 to 1. (I was surprised at this because all the effort of the preceding narrative has been about seeing what’s there with his eyes shut whereas this, his first trick in a casino, is entirely about predicting the future, which is a completely different ability altogether.)

What makes these children’s stories, but very effective children’s stories, is their vivid exaggeration. Everyone and everything is always the best in the world:

[The cashier] had arithmetic in his fingers. But he had more than that. He had arithmetic, trigonometry and calculus and algebra and Euclidean geometry in every nerve of his body. He was a human calculating-machine with a hundred thousand electric wires in his brain. (p.145)

Also the simplicity of the thoughts, and of the layout which emphasises that simplicity. The following should be a paragraph but isn’t, it is laid out like this because it is catering to children:

And what of the future?
What was the next move going to be?
He could make a million in a month.
He could make more if he wanted to.
There was no limit to what he could make.

Anyway, the surprising thing is that Henry is not thrilled by his staggering winnings. A few years earlier such a win would have knocked his socks off and he would have gone somewhere and splashed the cash on champagne and partying. Not now. To his surprise Henry feels gloomy. He is realising the great truth, that ‘nothing is any fun if you can get as much of it as you want’ (p.148).

Bored and a bit depressed Henry stands at the window of his Mayfair flat and, out of boredom, lets one of the £20 notes of his winnings be taken away by the breeze. An old man picks it up. He lets another go and a young couple get it. A crowd begins to form under his window. Eventually Henry throws his entire winnings of thousands of pounds into the street which, predictably, causes a small riot and blocks the traffic.

A few minutes later a very angry policeman knocks on his apartment door and tells him not to be such a blithering idiot. Where did he get the money from etc and Henry gives details of the casino, but what strikes home is the copper says if you want to chuck money away, why not give it to somewhere useful like an orphanage.

This gives Henry a brainwave. After thinking it through a bit he decides he will devote his life to charity. he will move from city to city, fleecing the casinos for huge sums before moving on to the next. And he will use all the money he makes to set up orphanages in each country.

He’ll need someone to handle the money side so he goes to see his accountant, a cautious man named John Winston. Winston doesn’t believe him so Henry a) tells him the values of cards laid face down on his table b) wins a fortune in matchsticks from a little game of blackjack they have in his office c) takes him to a casino that evening (not the Lord’s House) where he wins £17,500.

Winston agrees to be his partner but points out that the kind of revenue he’s suggesting will all be taken by the taxman. He suggests they set up the business in Switzerland so Henry gives him the £17,500 to organise the move, set up a new office, move his wife and children out there.

A year later Henry has sent the company they’ve set up £8 million and John has used it to set up orphanages. Over the next seven years he wins £50 million. Eventually, as in all good stories, things go wrong and trigger the climax. Henry is foolish enough to win $100,000 at three Las Vegas casinos owned by the same mob. Next morning the bellhop arrives to tell him some dodgy men are waiting in the foyer. The bellhop explains that, for a price, he’ll let Henry use his uniform to get away. But he must tie the bellhop up to make it look kosher. This he does, tucks a grand under the carpet as payment, and makes his escape dressed as a bellhop.

He catches a plane to Los Angeles because the use of a disguise has given him an idea. He goes to see the best makeup artist in Hollywood, Max Engelman. He explains his special powers and asks if he wants to earn $100,000 a year. Max joins him and together they travel the casinos of the world appearing at each one in disguise. The story has now become a full-on children’s story, revelling in the sheer pleasure of dressing up in ever-more preposterous identities, using faked passports and id cards.

Eventually the story ends when Henry Sugar dies. The narrator tots up the figures. Henry died aged 63. He had visited 371 major casinos in 21 different countries or islands. During that period he made £144 million which was used to set up 21 well-run orphanages around the world, one in each country he visited.

In the last few pages Dahl gives a children’s style version of how he came to write the book, namely John Winston rang him up, invited him to come and meet him and Max, showed him Cartwright’s notebook, and commissioned him to write a full account. Which is what he’s just done. No matter how absurd and fantastical the story, it is treated with Dahl’s trademark clear, frank limpidity.

Lucky Break

This is a non-fictional account of how Dahl became a writer, condensing material from his two autobiographical books, ‘Boy and ‘Going Solo’. It highlights key events from his childhood, school days and early manhood up to the publication of his first story.

A Piece of Cake (1946)

From Wikipedia:

An autobiographical account of Dahl’s time as a fighter pilot in the Second World War. It describes how Dahl was injured and eventually forced to leave the Mediterranean arena. The original version of the story was written for C. S. Forester so that he could get the gist of Dahl’s story and rewrite it in his own words. Forester was so impressed by the story (Dahl at the time did not believe himself a capable writer) that he sent it without modification to his agent, who had it published (as ‘Shot Down Over Libya’) in The Saturday Evening Post, thereby initiating Dahl’s writing career. It appeared in Dahl’s first short story collection ‘Over to You’, published in 1946.

Credit

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More by Roald Dahl was published by Jonathan Cape in 1977. References are to the 2001 Puffin paperback edition.

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by Simon on May 22, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Short stories

Tagged A Piece of Cake, Archaeology, autobiographical sketches, blackjack, BMW 3.3 Li, Bombay, British Medical Journal, British Museum, bullying, C.S. Forester, canasta, casino, childrens stories, Christening spoons, Dacca, Dahl, Dark Ages, Dr Hugh Alderson Fawcett, Dr John Cartwright, Fantasy, fiction, fingersmith, gambling, Gordon Butcher, Guildford, Henry Sugar, Imhrat Khan, India, J.G. Ballard, Jamaica, John Winston, London, Los Angeles, Lucky Break, Max Engelman, Mayfair, Mr Banerjee, Mr Hardwar, Peter Watson, Roald Dahl, Roman Britain, Roman treasure, roulette, Second World War, short stories, Shot Down Over Libya, Sir William Wyndham, Storm-Bird Storm-Dreamer, Surrealism, Switzerland, Sydney Ford, The Boy Who Talked with Animals, The Hitch-Hiker, The Man Who Could See Without Eyes, The Mildenhall Treasure, The Saturday Evening Post, The Swan, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More, war

Posted by Simon on May 22, 2024

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The Fantastical World of Mervyn Peake: Islands and Seas @ the British Library

The British Library acquired the Mervyn Peake Visual Archive in 2020. To accompany its huge Fantasy exhibition, the Library is staging a relatively small and FREE display in the Entrance Hall showcasing 20 or so of Peake’s wonderful book illustrations.

Portrait of Mervyn Peake © The Mervyn Peake Estate

The display is titled ‘The Fantastical World of Mervyn Peake: Islands and Seas’ and does what it says on the tin, consisting of 20 or so display boards each one with a full-size illustration of a story about the sea, either from a classic text such as Treasure Island or from one of the many stories which Peake wrote himself.

In this early seascape minutely detailed islands and a whale teeter atop titanic waves in a sort of comic pastiche of the famous Wave by Japanese artist Hokusai. The combination of clarity of line with absurdist details reminds me of Heath Robinson.

Floating islands on the waves by Mervyn Peake © The Mervyn Peake Estate

There are illustrations from an unpublished book he worked on with a friend, Gordon Smith – Smith wrote nonsense rhymes which Peake then illustrated, both vying to create the most fantastical creatures which slowly became the outlandish inhabitant of an island where their hero has been shipwrecked.

Just before the Second World War, Peake published a book with the great title Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor (1939). The hero starts out as a typically swashbuckling pirate but eventually gives up pirating to live quietly on an island with the Yellow Creature, who he met on his travels.

A first edition of ‘Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor’ by Mervyn Peake (1939) © The Mervyn Peake Estate

Peake had a lifelong love of pirate stories, not least the godfather of them all, i. He read it again and again as a boy growing up in distant China. Following a highly successful illustration of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, he was commissioned to produce illustrations for a new edition, which he worked on between 1947 and 1949.

These are masterpieces. The simple flat blocks of black or white which we saw in the wave drawing has evolved into something completely different, a masterly use of drawing techniques such as cross-hatching, stippling and shading, to create fantastically evocative images.

Long John Silver by Mervyn Peake © The Mervyn Peake Estate

The last selection in this little display, though far from Peake’s final work, is some images from his edition of Johann Wyss’s classic adventure story, The Swiss Family Robinson (c.1950).

This small display is probably only worth making the pilgrimage to the British Library for if you’re a real Peake devotee. But if you’re visiting the Library’s massive Fantasy exhibition, you should make a point of including these lovely treasures in your visit.

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by Simon on January 14, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Adventure, Art, Childrens, Exhibition, Illustration

Posted by Simon on January 14, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/01/14/the-fantastical-world-of-mervyn-peake-islands-and-seas-the-british-library/

Fantasy: Realms of Imagination @ the British Library

This is a huge, beautifully designed exhibition. It’s encyclopedic in scope, endlessly fascinating, full of visual and imaginative pleasures. It makes you realise how widespread the impulse to Fantasy has been throughout the history of literature, and is in today’s culture, having undergone explosive growth in the last 50 years. In that period Fantasy has broken beyond books into graphic novels, TV and movies, into board and card games, in what we used to call video games and innumerable online games, plus a host of live action events where fans can dress up as their favourite Fantasy characters.

The exhibition pulls together examples of Fantasy in all these media, namechecks scores and scores of authors, and builds up a dizzying sense of the multiple, limitless worlds of Fantasy. It features over 100 exhibits, including historical manuscripts, rare printed books and original manuscripts, drafts of iconic novels, scripts and maps, illustrations, clips from Fantasy TV shows and movies, film props and costumes, and much, much, much more.

‘The Battle of Helm’s Deep’, watercolour illustration by Alan Lee for ‘The Lord of the Rings’ by J.R.R. Tolkien, published by Harper Collins (1992) © Alan Lee

Structure

The curators must have had a lot of fun figuring out how to structure the exhibition. It’s divided into four main sections, but the sub-themes or genre within each topic, the themes and ideas the exhibition addresses, keep overflowing these containers, so there are sub-sections within each theme, so that it looks something like this:

Fairy and Folk Tales
- Faerie worlds
- The dark enchanted forest
- Endings
Epics and Quests
- Into battle
- Journeying and seeking
Weird and Uncanny
- Architects of the strange
- Gods and monsters
- Peculiar affinities
Portals and Worlds
- Gateways and thresholds
- Forging realms
- Worlds of fandom

I’ll be candid and say I struggled to contain the overflow of ideas raised by the show within this structure, so I loosely use the big four themes/rooms to structure this review but also go off at tangents sparked by individual exhibits or wall labels.

Here’s one of Piranesi’s Carceri pictures from the mid-18th century. As well as an artist, Piranesi was an architect and archaeologist who studied the layered history of Rome. The Carceri etchings depict vast, imaginary prisons filled with stairs, shadows and machines. In the second edition the images seem to have been edited to make some of their geometries physically impossible, further shifting them into the realm of the fantastical.

‘Carceri Etchings’ by Giovanni Battista Piranesi,(1750 to 1761) © British Library Board

1. Fairy and Folk Tales

‘An ancient mappe of Fairyland newly discovered and set forth’ by Bernard Sleigh (1918) © British Library Board

Fairie

Fairie is the archaic word denoting the place where fairies live, a world of fairy folk such as witches and warlocks, goblins, elves, sprites and trolls. Stories features themes of transformation, magic spells, bewitchment. he exhibition includes the 12 ‘Coloured fairy books’ by Andrew Lang, published between 1899 and 1910 which bring together myths, legends, romances, histories, epics and fables from around the world, an encyclopedia of Fantasy as it was defined in the Edwardian era.

Origins

Fantastical elements are present in the earliest literature, gods and monsters appearing in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and in the even earlier Epic of Gilgamesh, written nearly 4,000 years ago.

These are all represented by venerable old editions of these classics, the Iliad by a 14th century handwritten manuscript which is covered in notes and glosses. The great epic of our ancestors, the Anglo-Saxons, Beowulf, describes a hero battling superhuman monsters. Although the possessor of superhuman strength, the poignancy of the poem comes from the fact that in his final battle he is mortally wounded and dies.

‘Beowulf’ in the Cotton MS Vitellius A XV, f.193 r © British Library Board. Photo by the author

Stories about heroes battling gods and monsters obviously helped humanity categorise, makes sense of and manage what were, until living memory, the terrors of being alive.

Multicultural

The exhibition makes a bold effort to cast its net beyond the Anglophone tradition and so has displays about Europeans Franz Kafka and Mikhail Bulgakov, as well as about the Arabian Nights and the adventures of Sinbad, a version of the Chinese Monkey legend and the African Ananci stories – both in their original forms and as reimagined by modern writers and comic book authors.

‘Sinbadnama, the Story of Sinbad’ in an anonymous Persian version © British Library Board

Pilgrimage

The idea of pilgrimage was invented as early as the 3rd century AD, but the idea of a hero going a journey in which he faces death and learns wisdom is not only much older but appears in all human cultures. The moral seems to be universal: to learn wisdom you must leave home.

King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table

The huge, complex and rich series of legends surrounding the court of King Arthur and his knights circles around the idea of the holy quest. In England its most famous spin-off is the medieval poem ‘Gawayne and the Green Knight’ where the hero has to undergo trials of strength and fidelity which he, in the event, fails.

Original illustrated manuscript of ‘ Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’. Photo by the author

There’s a typically handsome illustration of Sir Thomas Malory’s Birth, Life and Acts of King Arthur by the fabulous Aubrey Beardsley. It’s worth pointing out that, although from another era, dealing with a completely different subject, the huge series of tales about king Arthur, like Beowulf end in failure as Lancelot’s infidelity breaks up the Round Table and Arthur is fatally wounded in the Last Battle. These are flawed heroes.

And then, subverting the earnest seriousness of Gawayne or the Welsh version of the stories in The Mabinogion, is a nearby of a display about Monty Python’s movie Monty Python and The Holy Grail (1975), complete with killer rabbit and the Knights Who Say Ni. To be precise, it’s a notebook showing Michael Palin’s very early drafts for the movie screenplay.

Epic then folk then fairy

Epic came first, stories about gods and heroes, in Europe epitomised by the primal monumentality of Homer. The primary epic of Homer was copied and civilised in the great Aeneid of Virgil but it’s instructive to see how Virgil softens the hardness of the all-male Iliad, introducing the love story of Dido and Aeneas, and lending his story a strong sense of magic, specifically in Aeneas’s journey to the underworld in search of wisdom.

Folk stories are the popular versions of the literature of the elite. They are found in the ancient world and appear throughout the Middle Ages, when they were often Christianised as legends about saints and martyrs. The exhibition includes an edition of the most famous collection of European folk stories, by the Brothers Grimm.

‘Children’s and Household Tales’ by the Grimm Brothers (1819) © British Library Board

Fairy tales come a lot later and are the sanitised cousins of the folk tale, cleaned up and given a happy ending suitable for children, with an improving moral thrown in. The exhibition includes classic collections of fairy stories, including ones by Charles Perrault and Hans Christian Andersen (rare early editions of both on display here).

Gothic In the late 18th century there was a fashion for Gothic works such as ‘The Mysteries of Udolpho’ (1794) and Mary Shelley’s great masterpiece, ‘Frankenstein’, both represented here by old editions and informative labels. Critics always say that narratives like this combine elements of fantasy, horror, crime and even science fiction. What they’re really proving is that those sub-genres had not yet been divided up and crystallised.

Specialist genres The explosion of genres came at the end of 19th century when cheaper printing and publishing technology encouraged a proliferation of specialist magazines and journals which could afford to cater to niche tastes and so encouraged the creation of literary genres and sub-genres. Science fiction, detective stories, horror and fantasy were just some of the sub-genres which began to find shape and definition at the turn of the twentieth century.

Two books provide evidence for my thesis: The Story of the Glittering Plain is a fantasy novel by William Morris published in 1891 and, according to Wikipedia, perhaps the first modern fantasy writer to unite an imaginary world with the element of the supernatural, and thus the precursor of much of present-day fantasy literature. The second is George MacDonald’s novel Lilith, published in 1895 and widely seen as one of the first modern Fantasy novels. My point being that both were published in the decade which, I’m suggesting, saw the emergence of so many specialist genres and movements.

The emergence of Fantasy

Yoking together examples of Fantasy which stretch all the way back to the Iliad, via Beowulf, Paradise Lost, Gulliver’s Travels and Frankenstein into the 20th century prompts a thought: in those older works, classics of European and English literature, the Fantasy element is embedded in a larger worldview, often in a religious theology. The Iliad depicts the gods of Olympus as most ancient Greeks actually believed them to be, beliefs which continued to be held across the ancient world well into the Christina era.

Similarly, Paradise Lost is explicitly a work of Christian propaganda, its stated aim being to justify the ways of God to men i.e. defend orthodox Christian belief. In their ways two other classic works, Thomas More’s Utopia and Gulliver’s Travels, are heavily embedded in serious Christian debates about the ideal state and human morality, about the value of learning and education. The element of Fantasy is subordinate to what you could call the serious or adult aim of the work.

‘Utopia’ by Thomas More © The British Library Board

Now we can begin to see that the modern concept of Fantasy emerges and becomes clearer when it steps free of these ideological frameworks. Fantasy emerges as the fantastical elements in those previous works but shorn of their serious ideological context. It is set free. It becomes more playful because unrestricted by ‘serious’ aims, by those ‘adult’ agendas. As the 20th century progressed Fantasy was set free and has gone on to have stranger and more complex adventures.

My impression is that countless fantastical elements and works existed previously, but it was in the mid-twentieth century that Fantasy fiction was crystallised by J.R.R. Tolkien’s magisterial Lord of the Rings (published in 1954 and 1955) and has continued to grow in popularity ever since.

My impression is that the genre has undergone explosive growth since the 1990s; it was turbocharged by the advent of the internet which has allowed all kinds of fan fiction to proliferate. Alongside this has gone the huge growth in fantasy video games, many of which have led the technical, graphic and operation development of online games, to become a vast market spanning the world. And spreading from Japan, the spread of manga comics and, alongside the growing respectability of graphic novels.

The purposes of Fantasy

Arguably, Fantasy helps its consumers navigate profound difficulties we face in life.

Small

When we’re small this is panic-fear of the unpredictable giants known as grown-ups, who tell us strange fantastical stories and about whom we ourselves make up all kinds of stories. In childhood we live among networks of stories, our imaginations are formed by countless stories, many or most unfettered by the constraints of ‘reality’.

Teenagers

When we are troubled, alienated teenagers, it is simultaneously reassuring, thrilling and/or terrifying to think that there are other worlds than this one, ones where life is more exciting and dramatic and where, maybe, we or our representatives in the story can perform heroic actions. I’m thinking of the four ordinary schoolchildren who go through the back of a wardrobe and into Narnia where they play a pivotal role in the future of an entire world.

(The exhibition includes notes C.S. Lewis made for his Narnia books, plus the original map of Narnia he drew before handing it over to the series’ illustrator Pauline Baynes to bring to life.)

Grown-up

When we ourselves are grown up, the simplest function of Fantasy is to take us away from our boring mundane lives but it also has the power to take us back into the intense emotional worlds of childhood and youth. It can be an escape into pure fantasy, or an escape back to our earlier, simpler selves.

Video games

This wish to be elsewhere doing elsewise is maybe most obvious in the final sections of the exhibition about videogames like Dark Souls and The Elder Scrolls, plus a playable mini-game by Failbetter Games designed especially for the exhibition, based on the Fallen London universe.

LARP

And in the very last section which describes the real-life world of conventions and events where fans can dress up as their favourite Fantasy characters. Apparently, this is referred to as Live Action Role Play or LARP. Right at the end there’s a stand of life-size costumes and a video of fans at a convention explaining their motivation for dressing up as elves and fairies and orcs.

Just some of the scores of thousands of costumes Fantasy fans make for themselves or hire and wear at numerous Fantasy fan events and conventions. Photo by the author

I was very struck by these vox pops of young people dressed up for a LARP event somewhere because they all said basically the same thing: which is that dressing up like this gave them a sense of identity, attending these events gave them a great sense of belonging, putting on Fantasy costumes helped them accept who they are and how they feel. And to be able to do it in a safe space among thousands of like-minded fans gave them a tremendous feeling of being accepted.

As a satirically-minded young man I would have laughed at all this, until I had children of my own and had to support them through their troubled teenage years, had to help my daughter in particular to ‘find her tribe’ – so now I am much more accepting of this kind of thing. In fact I found these artless happy vox pops rather moving and ended my visit to the exhibition feeling unaccountably emotional.

The importance of play

Psychologists know that ‘play’ is absolutely vital for the development and ongoing health of human beings. From this point of view Fantasy can be seen not as an escape from the ‘real world’ but an escape into a much more intense version of the world we inhabit. It represents all the slight irritations and small emotions of everyday life (the bus is late, my boss is nagging me) transformed back into the enormous primal emotions we experienced as children.

Is Fantasy childish?

I think the answer is a straight Yes, as long as we use at least two positive definitions of childhood: 1) as a time in our lives when we were subject to simpler, more intense emotions derived from simpler, more primal situations, and 2) when we were free to play – to dress up and be whoever we wanted to.

Board games

I’ve mentioned video games but there were also lots of examples of board games. The most famous might be Dungeons and Dragons, ‘a fantasy tabletop role-playing game originally created and designed by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson and first published in 1974’. There’s a display of original boxes and cards.

There’s also a display of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, the first of Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone’s ‘Fighting Fantasy’ interactive gamebooks. And Martin Wallace’s board game A Study in Emerald based on Neil Gaiman’s story of the same name.

There’s one devoted to Magic: The Gathering a tabletop and digital collectible card game in which players use cards to take on the role of Planeswalkers, powerful wizards who can cast spells and summon spirits.

And there’s a nifty display case of Warhammer models, ‘a tabletop miniature wargame with a medieval fantasy theme created by Bryan Ansell, Richard Halliwell and Rick Priestley, and first published by the Games Workshop company in 1983’. My son went through an intense Warhammer phase and we not only bought the models but really got into painting them properly, attending a painting course at one of the many Warhammer shops.

Display of Warhammer models. Photo by the author

2. Epics and Quests

The ‘Epics and Quests’ section introduces us to iconic heroes and villains ranging from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to Xena Warrior Princess, and explores how ancient tales have helped to shape modern Fantasy epics. On display is a version of Gilgamesh, the oldest known epic story.

It’s also a rare opportunity to see items related to The Lord of the Rings, including J.R.R Tolkien’s notes for the 1955 to 1956 BBC Radio adaption of the book. There’s a funny story about Tove Jansson the beloved author of the Moomin books. In 1960 she was thrilled to be commissioned to make illustrations for a Finnish version of The Hobbit. However, a note tells us, Tolkien didn’t like her illustrations that much and took particular exception to her depiction of Gollum as a giant troll, significantly taller than the hobbit Bilbo Baggins. Her misinterpretation of the character led Tolkien to insert the word ‘small’ into descriptions of Gollum in subsequent editions.

‘Bilbo: En Hobbit’s Aventyr’, front cover designed by Tove Jansson (1962) © Tove Jansson Estate

This section also includes Ursula K. Le Guin’s drafts and drawings for her Earthsea novels, on display in the UK for the first time, a site of pilgrimage for Le Guin’s many fans.

Some of Ursula K. Le Guin’s notebooks showing her working out the world of her classic trilogy ‘Earthsea’. Photo by the author

Sword and sorcery

There are, these days, a bewildering variety of sub-genres and categories of Fantasy. ‘Sword and Sorcery’ is the phrase used to describe the kind of Fantasy which features sword-wielding heroes engaged in exciting and violent adventures. The genre is said to originate in the early-1930s in the works of Robert E. Howard but the actual term ‘sword and sorcery’ was only coined in 1961, by Fritz Leiber in a Fantasy fanzine.

I was intrigued to read the carefulness of the definition which is that S&S takes place in a world before any technology, dominated by muscle-bound heroes fighting evil powers, witches and dragons etc but that, crucially, these are purely personal adventures and battles which don’t affect the world they take place in – a contrast with a lot of other Fantasy stories in which the fate of the alternative world is often at stake.

I associate them with the Conan the Barbarian, the character invented by Howard and embodied in the terrible 1982 movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger (which was remade in 2011). The genre is characterised by a very distinctive iconography of an absurdly muscle-bound hunk wearing armour and wielding an immense sword, generally being adored by a scantily clad busty beauty sitting or kneeling in a posture of adoration. Different strokes for different folks.

3. Weird and Uncanny

This section focuses on iconic monsters, sinister landscapes filled with eerie edifices and the darkness at the heart of Fantasy.

Visitors are presented with the roots Fantasy in works like the Gothic masterpiece Frankenstein or the macabre short stories of Edgar Allan Poe. We learn how Piranesi’s atmospheric Carceri etchings, a kind of hallucinatory vision of a decaying 18th century city, inspired the design of Susanna Clarke’s novel Piranesi. There’s a displayaboutf G.K. Chesterton’s nightmarish thriller The Man Who Was Thursday and much more.

There’s also section on classic anti-heroes, starting with the (initially) charismatic figure of Satan from Paradise Lost through to the lead characters in Mervyn Peake’s classic series, Gormenghast.

4. Portals and Worlds

Having encountered monsters and weird creatures, visitors move on to explore the imagined worlds these creatures inhabit in the ‘Portals and Worlds’ section. It’s a distinctive characteristic of Fantasy that its texts involve imagining and describing entire worlds i.e. world-building. The ability to create ‘strange new worlds’ gives Fantasy writes almost unlimited scope to create wonder and amazement, at one end of the spectrum, or worlds of darkness and horror. Or to create cities, in particular, which satirise the cities we live in now, strange mashups of recognisable features.

Fantasy maps

And if you’re creating new worlds, then chances are you need a map. The curators could have gone to town on the theme of Fantasy maps along, given that so many Fantasy stories involve journeys. In the event there’s Branwell Brontë’s map of the Glass Town Federation, C.S. Lewis’s own draft map of Narnia, and a bigger, more finished map of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld.

Installation view of the fold-out ‘Discworld Mapp’ devised by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Briggs (1995) Photo by the author

Talking of Pratchett, it is, of course, possible to satirise this genre, to pastiche and caricature and play it for laughs. If Monty Python mock the Grail quest theme, Diana Wynne Jones did something similar in her Derkholm series.

Portal Fantasy

The concept of the portal or doorway to another world plays a very large part in Fantasy, as in Science Fiction. Think of all those mysterious doorways into another time and space: maybe the wardrobe in the Narnia stories is the most classic portal, although platform nine and three-quarters at King’s Cross is possibly the most famous secret doorway of our times. On a moment’s reflection you realise that both the Alice in Wonderland books contain portals which the heroine passes through, falling down the rabbit hole into Wonderland or passing through the Looking Glass in its sequel.

Authors

Huge range of authors, ancient and modern. I’ve mentioned Homer, but classics of English literature include:

Gulliver’s Travels (1726) demonstrates a completely different aspect of Fantasy, namely the Journey to Fantastic Lands
Paradise Lost (1667) because Milton’s version of Satan is an archetype of the charismatic baddie, archetype of the Dark Lord who appears in so many Fantasy and Horror stories

‘Paradise Lost’ illustrated by Gustav Doré (1888) photograph © British Library Board

Other classic authors include:

The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliff (1794)
Percy Bysshe Shelley for his early poem, Queen Mab (1813), which uses fairy tale elements as allegory to convey Shelley’s radical political views
The Bronte sisters for the Fantasy world Gondal they invented and wrote stories about in the 1830s
Edgar Allen Poe for his stories of mystery and the imagination (1839)
Lewis Carroll Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
Christina Rossetti for Goblin Market (1862) which combines elements of fairy tale, children’s story and Fantasy
William Morris for his Fantasy novel The Story of the Glittering Plain (1891)
Charlotte Perkins Gilman for her short story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ (1892)

1900s

Frank Baum for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)
J.M. Barrie for Peter Pan (1904) and his adventures among pirates and faeries in Neverland
G.K. Chesterton The Man Who Was Thursday (1908)
E. Nesbit for The Magic City (1910)
Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett aka Lord Dunsany, for his 1905 book, The Gods of Pegāna and his 1924 fantasy novel, The King of Elfland’s Daughter
H.P. Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu (1928)

‘Tales of Mystery and Imagination’ by Edgar Allen Poe illustrated by Harry Clarke © British Library Board

Modern i.e. post-war authors include:

Jorge Luis Borges for the fantastical stories in Labyrinths (1940s)
Mervyn Peake for his Gormenghast books (1946 to 1959)
C.S. Lewis for the ‘Chronicles of Narnia’ (1950 to 1956)
J.R.R. Tolkien for The Hobbit (1937) and Lord of the Rings (1954 to 1955)
Philippa Pearce for Tom’s Midnight Garden (1958)
T.H. White for the Once and Future King series (1958)
Mikhail Bulgakov for The Master and Margarita (1967)

Notebooks of text and sketches by Mervyn Peake for his ‘Gormenghast’ novels

Contemporary authors include:

1960s

Alan Garner, for children’s books like The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960), The Moon of Gomrath (1963), Elidor (1965) and The Owl Service (1967)
Susan Cooper for The Dark is Rising series (1965 to 1977)
Ursula K. Le Guin for her Earthsea novels (1968 to 2001)

1970s

Angela Carter for rewriting traditional fairy tales in The Bloody Chamber (1979)
M. John Harrison for his Viriconium stories (1971 to 1984)

1980s

Terry Pratchett for his series of comic Fantasy Discworld series (1983 to 2015)
Robert Holdstock for Mythago Wood (1984)
John Crowley, Little, Big (1981) and his Ægypt series (1987 onwards)
Neil Gaiman, especially for The Sandman comic book (1989 to 1996)

1990s

Robin Hobb for her ‘Realm of the Elderling’ novels (1995 onwards)
George R.R. Martin’s epic sequence A Song of Fire and Ice (1996 to the present)
J.K. Rowling for the cultural phenomenon which is the seven Harry Potter books (1997 to 2007) and movies and stage plays
Diana Wynne Jones for her Derkholm series (1998 to 2000)

2000s

China Miéville particularly for Perdido Street Station (2000)
Patricia A. McKillip for Ombria in Shadow (2002)
Susanna Clarke for her debut novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004)

2010s

Nnedi Okorafor for her Nsibidi Scripts series (2011 to 2022)
Monstress, an ongoing epic fantasy comics series written by Marjorie Liu and drawn by Sana Takeda, since November 2015
Naomi Novik for Uprooted (2015)
Aliette de Bodard for her Dominion of the Fallen series (2015 onwards)
Seanan McGuire for his Wayward Children series (2015 to the present)
Jeannette Ng for her 2017 novel Under the Pendulum Sun
The Deep (2019) by Rivers Solomon, with Daveed Diggs, William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes

2020s

N.K. Jemisin for her novel The City We Became (2020)

The exhibition is being staged by a library so most of these authors are represented by editions of their books – often old and precious early editions – but also by quite a few displays of notebooks and manuscripts. These include manuscripts and notebooks by J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S, Lewis, the Bronte sisters, Michael Palin, Ursula K. Le Guin, original sketches and outlines for Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, notes for his Fantasy epic Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake, and more.

Costumes

There are the costumes worn by Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev in the Royal Opera House’s 1968 ballet production of The Sleeping Beauty which is, of course, based on Charles Perrault’s 1697 fairy tale. And costumes from the 2003 musical ‘Wicked’ and the 1982 movie The Dark Crystal.

Costume for Kira in ‘The Dark Crystal’ (1982) © Brian and Wendy Froud

But the best prop is probably the very staff used by actor Ian McKellen playing Gandalf in the three-movie epic version of Lord of the Rings. I know it’s valuable and all, but I think the Library missed a trick by displaying it in a glass case: it should have been free-standing and they should have encouraged children to touch it and pose with it. It might have got a bit knocked about but imagine the magic it would have brought into thousands of children’s lives!

Installation view of Gandalf’s staff, pipe and concept art from ‘The Lord of the Rings’ by Alan Lee. Photo © Justine Trickett

Transformation and metamorphosis

Generally heroes of Fantasy remain themselves but are transported to otherworlds like Narnia or the worlds visited by protagonists of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series. They rarely themselves change shape or person. Slightly odd is the inclusion by the curators of Franz Kafka’s famous short story The Metamorphosis, represented here in a version illustrated by Rohan Daniel Eason.

Movies and TV

The exhibition includes excerpts from Fantasy TV series such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997 to 2001), Xena the Warrior Princess (1995 to 2001), Twin Peaks (1990 to 1991), the Netflix series The Witcher (started 2019 and still ongoing).

And from Fantasy movies such as The Dark Crystal (1982), the Studio Ghibli film Princess Mononoke (1997), Lord of The Rings (2001 to 2003), Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), and more.

I was surprised at the space the curators gave to The Wizard of Oz and to learn quite what a cultural phenomenon it was in its time. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by Frank Baum was published in 1900. It was, apparently, ‘the first Fantasy series with continuity provided by the imagined world rather than by the characters’. Baum wrote no fewer than 14 books set in Oz, but at the same time cashed in on the books’ popularity by writing a stage musical and a comic strip. He concocted an elaborate touring spectacle involving dozens of actors, a full orchestra, a slideshow and moving picture clips.

A movie version was made in 1910, silent and in black and white and running for just 13 minutes. Most of us are more familiar with the 1939 version starring a young Judy Garland, directed by Victor Fleming.

In the past 124 years there have been scores of spin-offs, but the most successful of recent times is probably Gregory Maguire’s 1995 reworking of the story in ‘Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West’, which was adapted into a popular Broadway musical in 2003.

Exhibition design

The design of the exhibition allows visitors to journey through different Fantasy landscapes, from a dark enchanted forest, through epic mountains and a sinister fallen city to sunrise on a new world.

Installation view of the ‘Fairy and Folk Tales’ section of ‘Fantasy: Realms of the Imagination’ at the British Library. Photo © Justine Trickett

Anniversaries

Interestingly, a little fleet of Fantasy anniversaries are coming up. Last year marked the 40th anniversary of the publication of The Colour of Magic, the first novel in Terry Pratchett’s immensely successful comedy fantasy Discworld series. It also marked the 50th anniversary of Susan Cooper’s best-selling novel, The Dark is Rising. This year marks the 50th anniversary of Dungeons and Dragons.

Events

These anniversaries, the achievements of numerous Fantasy authors, as well as themes and topics (Queer Fantasy, Black Fantasy) are explored in a comprehensive series of events:

Calendar of British Library Fantasy events

Reading list

On one level the entire exhibition is like an animated reading list. When you emerge from the exhibition into the British Library shop the temptation is to buy every book in sight – Lewis, Tolkien, Le Guin, Melville, Garner, and scores of others – take them home in a suitcase, lock yourself in your bedroom and not come out for a year. Why not? It’s not as if the so-called ‘real world’ is anything to celebrate right now.

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by Simon on January 13, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition, fairy tale, Fantasy

Tagged A Song of Fire and Ice, adventures of Sinbad, Alan Garner, Alan Lee, Alice in Wonderland, Alice Underground, Aliette de Bodard, Ananci, and much, Andrew Lang, Angela Carter, Anglo-Saxons, Ann Radcliff, Arabian Nights, Architects of the strange, Arnold Schwarzenegger, art, Aubrey Beardsley, ‘A Study in Emerald’, Ægypt series, Æneid, Battle of Helm's Deep, Beowulf, Bernard Sleigh, bewitchment, Bilbo Baggins, Bilbo: En Hobbit's Aventyr, Board games, Books, Branwell Brontë, Brian Froud, Broadway, Bronte sisters, Brothers Grimm, Bryan Ansell, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, C.S. Lewis, Carceri, Carceri etchings, card games, Charles Perrault, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, China Miéville, Christina Rossetti, Conan the Barbarian, costumes, Cotton MS, Dark Souls, Dave Arneson, Daveed Diggs, Derkholm, Diana Wynne Jones, Dido and Aeneas, Discworld, Discworld series, Dominion of the Fallen, Dungeons and Dragons, E. Nesbit, Earthsea, Earthsea novels, Edgar Allan Poe, Edgar Allen Poe, Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Elidor, elves, Endings, Epic of Gilgamesh, epics, Epics and Quests, exhibition, fables, Faerie worlds, Failbetter Games, Fairie, fairies, Fairy and Folk Tales, Fantasy, fantasy characters, Fantasy literature, Fighting Fantasy, film props, Forging realms, Frank Baum, Frankenstein, Franz Kafka, Fritz Leiber, G.K. Chesterton, Gandalf, Gary Gygax, Gateways and thresholds, Gawayne and the Green Knight, George MacDonald, George R.R. Martin, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Glass Town Federation, Goblin Market, goblins, Gods and monsters, Gollum, Gondal, Gormenghast, Gormenghast series, graphic novels, Gregory Maguire, Grimm Brothers, Gulliver's Travels, Gustav Doré, H.P. Lovecraft, Hans Christian Andersen, Harry Clarke, Harry Potter, historical manuscripts, histories, history, Homer, Ian Livingstone, Ian McKellen, Iliad, Imaginary Prisons, Into battle, J.K. Rowling, J.M. Barrie, J.R.R. Tolkien, Jeannette Ng, John Crowley, Jonathan Snipes, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Jorge Luis Borges, Journeying and seeking, Judy Garland, King Arthur, King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table, Labyrinths, Lancelot, LARP, legends, Lewis Carroll, Lilith, Literature, Little Big, Live Action Role Play, Lord Dunsany, Lord of the Rings, M. John Harrison, magic spells, Magic: The Gathering, Margot Fonteyn, Marjorie Liu, Martin Wallace, Mary Shelley, Mervyn Peake, Michael Palin, Middle Ages, Mikhail Bulgakov, Monstress, Monty Python, Monty Python and The Holy Grail, Mythago Wood, myths, N.K. Jemisin, Naomi Novik, Narnia, Narnia books, Neil Gaiman, Neverland, Nnedi Okorafor, Nsibidi Scripts, Odyssey, Ombria in Shadow, online games, Pan's Labyrinth, Paradise Lost, Patricia A. McKillip, Pauline Baynes, Peculiar affinities, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Perdido Street Station, Peter Pan, Philippa Pearce, pilgrimage, Piranesi, Planeswalkers, Portals and Worlds, Princess Mononoke, Queen Mab, rare books, Realm of the Elderling, Richard Halliwell, Rick Priestley, Rivers Solomon, Robert E. Howard, Robert Holdstock, Robin Hobb, Rohan Daniel Eason, romances, Rome, Royal Opera House, Rudolf Nureyev, saints and martyrs, Sana Takeda, Seanan McGuire, Sinbadnama, sprites, Stephen Briggs, Steve Jackson, Studio Ghibli, Susan Cooper, Susanna Clarke, Sword and sorcery, T.H. White, Tales of Mystery and Imagination, Terry Pratchett, The Bloody Chamber, The Call of Cthulhu, the Chronicles of Narnia, The City We Became, The Dark Crystal, The dark enchanted forest, The Dark is Rising, The Dark is Rising series, The Deep, The Elder Scrolls, the Fallen London universe, the Games Workshop company, The Gods of Pegāna, the Green Knight, The Hobbit, the Iliad, The King of Elfland's Daughter, the Knights Who Say Ni, The Lord of the Rings, The Mabinogion, The Magic City, The Man Who Was Thursday, The Master and Margarita, The Metamorphosis, The Moon of Gomrath, The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Once and Future King, The Owl Service, The Sandman, The Sleeping Beauty, the Story of Sinbad, The Story of the Glittering Plain, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, The Witcher, the Wizard of Oz, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The Yellow Wallpaper, Thomas Malory, Thomas More, Tom's Midnight Garden, Tove Janson, transformation, trolls, Twin Peaks, Under the Pendulum Sun, Uprooted, Ursula K. Le Guin, Utopia, Victor Fleming, video games, Virgil, Viriconium, Warhammer, Warhammer shops, warlocks, Wayward Children, Weird and Uncanny, Wendy Froud, Wicked, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, William Hutson, William Morris, witches, Worlds of fandom, Xena the Warrior Princess, Xena Warrior Princess

Posted by Simon on January 13, 2024

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An Outline of Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud (1940)

Note: to avoid misunderstanding, I believe Freud is a figure of huge cultural and historical importance, and I sympathise with his project of trying to devise a completely secular psychology building on Darwinian premises. Many of his ideas about sexuality as a central motive force, about the role of the unconscious in every aspect of mental life, how repressing instinctual drives can lie behind certain types of mental illness, his development of the talking cure, these and numerous other concepts have become part of the culture and underlie the way many people live and think about themselves today. However, I strongly disapprove of Freud’s gender stereotyping of men and women, his systematic sexism, his assumption of Western superiority over ‘primitive’ peoples, and so on. Despite the revolutionary impact of his thought, Freud carried a lot of Victorian assumptions over into his theory. He left a huge and complicated legacy which needs to be examined and picked through with care. My aim in these reviews is not to endorse his opinions but to summarise his writings, adding my own thoughts and comments as they arise.

***

Background

Freud was allowed to leave Austria by the newly installed Nazi authorities in early June 1938. The unfinished manuscript of ‘An Outline of Psychoanalysis’ bears the date July 1938, so scholars think that he began to write it either while waiting for permission to leave Austria or soon after his arrival in England. By early September he had written 63 sheets of notepaper but broke off to undergo a serious operation for the spreading cancer of his jaw and he never resumed work on it.

The manuscript was discovered among his papers after his death in September 1939. The editors of the Pelican Freud Library point out that although it might be unfinished, it is not incomplete. The final chapter is shorter than the others but appears to complete the prospectus laid out in the preface.

Almost all Freud’s previous works (for example, the Introductory and New Introductory Lectures) were aimed at the general public. The Outline, the editors explain, is not. It is more like a refresher course for established students of psychoanalysis with the result that the style is clipped and many matters alluded to only briefly, on the assumption that the reader is already familiar with sometimes quite detailed aspects of the theory.

The work is in three parts. Part one describes the structure of the mind, its division into id, ego and superego, and the pressure of the external world. It lays out the nature of the two great categories of primal drive – the sexual urge to procreate (Eros) and the organism’s wish to cease stimuli and excitation (the death drive or Thanatos).

In part two, Freud discusses the technique of psychoanalysis, what its aims are, how it works.

In part three, Freud (briefly) situates psychoanalysis within the broader realms of philosophy and psychology, before recapping the theory.

Preface

The teachings of psychoanalysis are based on an incalculable number of observations and experiences and only someone who has repeated these observations on himself and on others is in a position to arrive at a judgement of his own upon it.

Part 1. The mind and its workings

Chapter 1. The psychical apparatus

The oldest part of the psyche is the id. It contains everything inherited at birth, which means the instincts. The id develops an outer layer to mediate with the external world, the ego. The ego has the task of self-preservation. As regards external events it does this:

by storing up stimuli in the memory
by avoiding excessively strong stimuli (through flight)
dealing with moderate stimuli (through adaptation)
learning to bring about change in the external world to its own advantage (activity)

As regards the internal world the ego performs its task of self-preservation by gaining mastery of the instincts, deciding which ones will gain satisfaction and when, or vetoing them altogether.

It is guided in these decisions by tensions caused by (internal and external) stimuli: raised tension is experienced as unpleasure, lowered tension is experienced as pleasure. The ego strives after pleasure and to avoid displeasure. A foreseeable increase in unpleasure leads to anxiety. From time to time the ego retires from its job of mediation into sleep, which appears to be necessary to rest the body and brain.

The long period of human childhood leaves behind a precipitate of parental strictures, the superego. The ego has to satisfy the demands of 1) the superego, 2) the id and 3) external reality. The superego is formed not only from the strictures of the specific parents but from the family, national and racial demands, as well as the demands of the immediate social milieu; and then, along the way, incorporates material from teachers and other authority figures.

The id is the forces of nature, of heredity; the superego, the broad forces of culture and environment; the ego is formed as a result of the accidental experiences of the individual.

Chapter 2. The theory of the instincts

The general theory of instincts is not well understood. Insofar as instincts replace each other and displace energy onto each other there may be thousands of instincts. To be simple, psychoanalysis discriminates two basic instincts, Eros and the destructive instinct, elsewhere referred to as Thanatos. (Contrasting instincts of self-preservation and preservation of the species, between ego-love and object-love, fall within the realm of Eros).

Eros sets out to bind things together and preserve them; Thanatos seeks to tear things apart and destroy them. Thanatos tends ultimately to an inorganic state, hence it is also known as the Death Drive.

The two instincts can combine or oppose. Thus eating is an act of killing something for our satisfaction; sex incorporates aggression with reproduction. A surplus of the destructive instinct turns the lover into Jack the Ripper; a deficit, into a peeping Tom.

The two instincts exist alongside each other in the childish ego-id. The death instinct is easily detected when directed outwards in aggression; when the superego is constructed, the death instinct is attached to it and can operate self-destructively against the organism itself. Holding back aggressiveness can be just as detrimental as restraining sexual desire.

The libido is detectable in the primary infant state of pure narcissism when the ego takes itself as object. As the child develops it projects libido onto external objects. Throughout life the ego remains the reservoir of the libido from which libido is sent out to cathect (or charge) objects and to which it returns. Only when the subject is completely in love is the majority of the libido cathected onto the object which takes the place of the ego.

The nature of the libido has been deduced from its behaviour in the form of the sex instinct. This aspect of the libido develops out of the contributions of a succession of component instincts which are variously attached to different erotogenic zones.

Chapter 3. The development of the sexual function

The traditional view has it that human sexual life consists in bringing your genitals into contact with the genitals of someone of the opposite sex, with accompanying phenomena such as like kissing and touching. This activity is supposed to start at puberty. How does the traditional view then deal with the fact that:

a) some people are attracted to people of their own sex with similar genitals?
b) some people seek sexual satisfaction but ignore the genitals or other people altogether (called ‘perverts’)?
c) some children take an early interest in their own genitals (called ‘degenerate’)?

In contrast to the evident failure of the traditional theory, psychoanalysis has discovered that:

a) sexual life doesn’t begin at puberty but soon after birth
b) it is necessary to distinguish between sexuality and genitality, the former vastly outcompassing the latter
c) sexual pleasure can be obtained from many zones of the body and that these often only imperfectly overlap with the organs of reproduction

Childhood sexuality develops to a peak in the fifth year and thereafter falls into a lull during which much is forgotten: the latency period.

The onset of sexuality in man is therefore diphasic, first occurring in infancy, falling into latency, and re-efflorescing in puberty. The latency period seems to play a vital role in the process of acculturation unique to man, the passing on of traditional wisdom and knowledge to the next generation.

The first stage of childish development is the oral phase of suckling; the continuation of sucking after the baby is fed is evidence of the separation of pleasure-seeking and physiological need. This – the separation of strict physical need from the enjoyment of physical pleasure – is the justification for describing the baby as ‘sexual’.

Elements of sadism are present in the baby biting the nipple. This sadism is expanded in the next stage, the anal-sadistic phase, where biting and defecation become sources of pleasure.

Finally comes the phallic period when the child detaches sexual pleasure from bodily functions altogether and associates it with playing with its penis or clitoris. The little boy playing with his penis obscurely associates this pleasure with his mother; he wants to be the sole object of its mother’s attention and to do away with the father who keeps taking her away. This is the Oedipus Complex. The little girl, as and when she comes to see or hear about a boy’s genitalia, perceives the absence of a penis as a loss and conceives penis envy. The childish turning away from sexuality which this produces in women often lasts a lifetime.

These developmental phases do not develop in a simple pattern but overlap, often becoming fixated at particular levels. With the onset of puberty these earlier patterns return to influence sexual behaviour. Some early pleasures become focussed on traditional genital activity; some remain in residue as types of foreplay; some become the object of perverted sexual practice; some are repressed, or employed by the ego in forming character traits, and the energy of still others are sublimated into higher and socially acceptable cultural activity.

These discoveries mean that:

a) the phenomenology of the subject has to be examined from a dynamic or economic point of view
b) the aetiology of later mental illness is to be found in the patient’s early life

Chapter 4. Psychical qualities

What is the psyche? Behaviourism says there isn’t one, that we observe and quantify each other like machines.

Traditional psychology says there is a psyche and that it is synonymous with consciousness. Consciousness is hard to define but we all know what we mean by it. A psychology which confines itself to consciousness studies the difference between perceptions, feelings, thought-processes and wishes. But it is clear to self-reflection that these processes are not as continual, as transparent or sequential as earlier philosophers, for example John Locke, thought.

What are we to make of the gaps, the blanks, the dysjunctions in attempts to describe our mental life which trouble the ‘continuous consciousness’ model of the old view?

Psychoanalysis shifts the whole playing field by saying that the overwhelming bulk of psychic life is unconscious. It cannot be known (as the workings of chemistry or physics in the brain cannot be experienced) but its activity can be deduced and general laws governing its behaviour worked out by observation.

Some things out of consciousness become conscious easily; they originate in the pre-conscious, a kind of ante-chamber to consciousness and can be readily accessed. But the lion’s share of mental activity is unconscious and therefore can only ever be inferred or deduced from other evidence

Preconscious material makes its way into our conscious mind with little effort, but unconscious material can only be reclaimed for consciousness by a great effort. One is aware of resistance to its extraction. Sometimes unconscious material forces its way into consciousness and dominates it – as in psychotic illness. Sometimes preconscious material can be subject to repression and become inaccessible – as when we lose our memory.

Animals may well function with just an ego-unconscious. In men this happy state is complicated by the existence of speech which links perceptions to mnemic images and residues of perception, or memory. We don’t operate in a permanent present; we accumulate a huge weight of experiences.

In human beings, since the invention of language, internal events, thanks to being verbalised, can acquire a kind of reality which rivals outer perceptions. To test which is coming from where the ego develops methods for reality-testing. Errors which easily arise due to the new situation – where we mistake internal psychic experiences for ‘reality’ – are called hallucinations or dreams.

The inside of the ego is largely preconscious, with a thin layer of consciousness monitoring outside perceptions and an inner stream of consciousness. The id is entirely unconscious. What the nature of the physical processes are which make the biochemical changes which the mind is capable of perceiving remain a mystery.

Chapter 5. Dream interpretation as an illustration

A model mind is one in which the frontiers of the ego are safeguarded from the encroachments of the id by effective repression, and in which the superego and the ego work together as one. To find out how these forces work together we should see them malfunctioning and an easy way to begin is with dreams.

Everyone dreams. In dreams our experiences are hallucinatory, surreal, bizarre, nonsensical – everything we believe the unconscious to be. Dream interpretation distinguishes between the manifest content, what we remember of the dream upon waking, and the latent content, the real message of the dreams.

In a dram unconscious material has forced its way past the slumbering defences of repression into the preconscious; here it is scrambled by the Censor in such a way as not to disturb the sleep which the human organism requires. In other words, dreams enable refreshing sleep to occur because, although we are more vulnerable to raids from the unconscious, the censor steps in to distort the latent content of the impulse.

Dreams can originate from either suppressed wishes deep in the unconscious or from preconscious traces of the day’s activities to which deeper unconscious urges attach themselves.

Evidence that dreams are indeed the irruption of the repressed are:

a) dreams contain a high degree of material forgotten or inaccessible to waking consciousness
b) dreams partake of linguistic symbols derived from earlier stages in the subject’s development
c) dreams often repeat scenes from childhood which are repressed in waking life
d) dreams incorporate memories not accessible to the individual, possibly memories from the origins of the race

But Freud has called dream interpretation ‘the royal road to the unconscious’ because dreams make accessible to us the bizarre laws to which unconscious life is subject. These include processes of distortion called condensation and displacement.

The deduction from dreams is that the unconscious is desirous of expending its energy regardless of object. The dream is the guardian of sleep because it fulfils this rude instinct, this pressing unconscious wish, in the shape of a fantasy.

Anxiety dreams, which seem to disprove the thesis that dreams are fulfilments of wishes, happen when the instinct overpowers the Censor and is threatening to storm the ego in the full ugliness of its naked lust. The only option open to the ego is to wake up, switch defences up to full, and stuff the repressed material back into oblivion – but at the cost of an all too palpable effort (sweats, adrenalin, anxiety etc).

Part 2. The practical task

Chapter 6. The technique of psychoanalysis

A dream, then, is a psychosis which remains under our control. By contrast other mental illnesses are less controllable. They may come about when the urgings of the id unbalance the ego, or when the superego makes impossible demands, or when both gang up on the poor ego.

In analysis the analyst comes to the ego’s aid with a promise to reinforce his mechanism of defence in return for the subject giving us the complete honesty and candour we need to examine the unconscious. [N.B. it is this bolstering of defences which was pursued in the work of ego psychology developed by Freud’s daughter, Anna Freud].

Psychotics who have completely abandoned contact with reality are beyond the terms of this pact and cannot be treated by psychoanalysis. But there is another class of psychiatric patient who still has enough contact with reality to undertake the pact required to carry out therapy – ‘the vast number of people suffering severely from neuroses.’

The therapeutic pact If the neurotic gives us his full story in full candour we will help rebuild his ego. Sounds like the role of the master-confessor from the olden days of religion? Yes, except for the all-important distinction that a psychoanalyst can learn from the patient what he does not know himself, which Christian confession can never do.

In order to do this the psychoanalyst must extract everything whatever that comes to the patient’s mind, no matter how trivial. It is from this material that the analyst deduces the unconscious urges which are dominating the patient.

But the analyst will meet resistance. And after resistance, transference. The patient will begin to project onto the analyst all the feelings evoked by their memories of childhood, for example, the ambivalent love-hate feelings which every child projects onto its first authority figure, the Father.

Transference has the advantage that the analyst can then act with the authority of the father and the patient may make great efforts to please Daddy. Plus, the analyst has the advantage of seeing a key period from the patient’s life acted out in front of them rather than inconclusively reported by a confused patient.

Unfortunately, transference has a negative side as the repressed anger and defiance of the patient, also, can be projected onto the analyst. Worse, the repressed erotic wish for the parent of the opposite sex can emerge in the shape of the patient falling in love with the analyst.

If the patient thinks these are real experiences, it’s tricky; the analyst has to disabuse them and make them see that these are just repetitions of childhood feelings. Once transference is acknowledged, the patient can begin the process of rebuilding, of broadening the area of control of, the ego.

The second part of the cure is the overcoming of resistances. The ego, threatened from within and without, expends a lot of energy clinging to certain anti-cathexes, resistances to repressed material. It is the job of analysis to embolden the ego, to give it the power to regain mastery over its whole domain and not to feel threatened and embattled (anxious, hysterical, neurotic or obsessive).

As resistances to the expression of forbidden material are overcome, welcome mental energy is liberated for the ego to redeploy across its kingdom. When the analysis has progressed this far, two factors now become evident. The first is Guilt, which is the shape taken by resistance in the superego, which expends energy punishing the ego. The superego insists that:

The patient must not become well but must remain ill because they deserve no better.

The analyst has to make the unreasonableness of this self-punishment clear to the patient. The second factor is a complete takeover of the ego by the will to destruction, the death wish, which often leads to suicide.

Chapter 7. An example of psychoanalytic work

One fundamental discovery of psychoanalysis has been that neurotics have the same pathology as normal people, they have the same innate disposition as normal people, the same experiences, the same problems to solve. They are simply people who find this framework of requirements too much, resulting in misery, anxiety, symptoms.

On closer investigation, it appears that almost all these neuroses have their origin in childhood. Hardly surprising when you consider the primal power of the id and the vulnerability of the still-developing ego, feeble, immature and incapable of resistance.

The ego copes with excess stimuli from the external world with flight; with excess stimuli from the internal world with repression, attempts at mental flight, denial and rejection. It later turns out that these have been paid for at the cost of full development, and that the libidinal energy devoted to holding these instincts back, permanently cripples and disables the ego; stunts its proper development.

Why has evolution permitted such an apparently costly mechanism to afflict the young animal? Because it’s a small price to pay compared to the epic task which the ego has to achieve in its first five years:

In the space of a few years the little primitive creature must turn into a civilized human being; he must pass through an immensely long stretch of human cultural development in an almost uncannily abbreviated form. This is made possible by hereditary disposition; but it can never be achieved without the additional help of upbringing, of parental influence which, as a precursor to the superego, restricts the ego’s activities by prohibitions and punishments and encourages the setting-up of repressions.

Thus, the influence of civilisation is among the determinants of neurosis. It is easy for a barbarian to be happy – he gives way to all his basest desires, represses nothing and so has no neuroses. For a civilised man it is a long strenuous journey, with many pitfalls.

The central role of sexuality in this developmental journey has been proved by psychoanalysis time after time:

The symptoms of neuroses are either a substitutive satisfaction of some sexual urge or measures to prevent such a satisfaction; usually some kind of compromise between the two.

Why should this be so surprising? The one essential role of every organism is to reproduce; preparation for reproduction is crucial; and yet in the rise of civilisation no instinct is more thoroughly repressed than sexuality. Given such strong opposing forces why be surprised that so many people fall victim in one way or another to illness caused by the repression of their innermost desires?

Central to the child’s experience is the Oedipus Complex. Freud approaches it via a developmental history of the child.

The child’s first erotic experience is sucking at the breast, the primary model of gratification (‘Love and hunger meet at a woman’s breast’, The Interpretation of Dreams, page 295). Initially breast and baby are one polymorphously perverse substance.

Soon the breast is differentiated and becomes cathected (i.e. charged) with conflicting feelings of love and hate (tiny aggression is shown by biting the nipple) in the oral phase. Soon the breast forms itself into the whole of the mother who pampers and plays with the child, prompting a galaxy of feelings, gratifications and frustrations, pleasures and rages.

Thus the mother is the first seducer, the prototype of all later love-relations.

At three and four, in the phallic stage, the baby boy is aware of the pleasure given by playing with his penis and shows it off proudly to his mother. He associates this pleasure with her and wants to possess her, according to the prompting of obscure feelings. If the child shares the Mother’s bed and then Daddy comes home and he is returned to his cot, the feelings of little Oedipus can be imagined. Rage and hatred and lust and desire seethe in the toddler mind. Eventually the mother or father tell little Johnny to stop playing with himself or being so stubborn or bad tempered and all these injunctions are accompanied by the explicit or implicit threat to deprive the boy of the source of his greatest pride and pleasure, his penis.

This is the castration complex and is the most terrifying experience of a small boy’s life. It echoes down the ages in the Greek myths where successive gods castrate their father, and in the age-old practice of circumcision by which pubescent boys submit to authority, in both Judaism and Islam.

In response to this terrifying fear the child suppresses its masturbatory activities and sublimates them into fantasies. It fosters resentment, defiance and fear of the father and practices a total renunciation of the mother or slavish identification with her, in order to be spared by the Father.

It is precisely because this ‘nuclear complex’ paves the way for so many strategies of defence that psychoanalysis calls it the founding moment in the development of human character. All these seething feelings are repressed in childhood, go underground during the latent phase. But then they return in new guises at puberty that explosive period of sexual and egoistic efflorescence, with the arrival of full-blown sexual awareness. The revival of repressed material with the onset of puberty plays a large role in determining character.

On this model girls are born inferior. Their lack of a penis leads to penis envy. Their attempts at masturbation are failures, hence a general turning away from sexual life in girls and women.

They may try to introject the masculinity they lack and become lesbians. They may turn to hatred of the mother who brought them into the world without a penis and so turn their love toward the father. In this narrative the girl’s attempt to be like their father and to incorporate his penis-authority is finally sublimated into the wish to take the mother’s place, to bear Daddy a baby. Once formulated, this wish may, like the boy’s forbidden fantasies, be repressed into the unconscious but, with the onset of puberty, the wish is revived but directed outwards, so that the young woman goes off to attach herself to the first suitable male who reminds her of Daddy.

Part 3. The theoretical yield

Chapter 8. The psychical apparatus and the external world

Ultimate reality is itself unknowable. All we can know is reality as mediated by our sense perceptions and ‘known’ as it is perceived by our organ of knowledge, the mind.

Thus, in describing the workings of the mind most psychology, and most ordinary people, have to work with concepts which are largely metaphorical, concepts like height, depth, width or more advanced concepts like time, like cause and effect, which have no physical, tangible ‘reality’. We have imposed them on ‘reality’ because they provide us with a working model, a way of getting on with the real world.

Psychoanalysis is no different. It invokes metaphorical concepts like the unconscious, the repressed, the libido and so on. We can never know exactly what these things ‘are’. Possibly, we will one day be able to correlate them to specific physical, biochemical changes in the brain. In the meantime we use them because they provide a workable explanation of the many other phenomena we observe in the mind.

To recapitulate: the id is the realm of unconscious drives; it is ruled by two broad instincts 1) the desire to fulfil every instinctual wish 2) the equal and opposite drive to reduce tension. Ultimately, the second wish is pushing for the cessation of all tension and stimuli (‘Nirvana’). The two broad streams of instincts are assigned to two broad categories: the desire for pleasure, of which sexual pleasure is a subset, fall under the heading of Eros; and the wishes for all stimuli to cease fall under the death instinct.

Mediating between the id and external reality is the ego. The ego attempts to control the instincts of the id such that they can be fulfilled at the most propitious moments in the external world. Sometimes desires which threaten the ego’s function have to be entirely repressed and the ego has to expend energy doing this. The id is driven exclusively by desire for pleasure, the Pleasure Principle, while the ego is driven by a desire for safety, the Reality Principle.

Most of the ego is preconscious. Occasional strands of association, images and verbal residues, drift across the part of the psyche which is capable of self-reflection, often puzzling or even bewildering us.

The ego develops and separates itself off from the primal id at a price. Its autonomy is always contingent and subject to disruptive incursions from ‘below’, from the unconscious, and to a constant stream of punitive demands from ‘above’, from the superego. And the ego is constantly under attack from the terrifying forces of external reality.

No wonder the ego often cracks under the strain and has a ‘breakdown’. It is at this stage that psychoanalysis sets out to trace the fissures, the cracks of the breakdown, back to their earliest origins in childhood. And, once the repressed material has been dragged into the light of consciousness, the patient can acknowledge the long buried childhood experiences which are at the root of the problem and begin rebuilding new, better ego defences with which to face the world.

Chapter 9. The external world

Guilt is the punitive action of the superego upon the ego. The superego is the concentrate of injunctions laid upon us by our first objects, the parents. Thus the psyche has three parts:

the deep inner world – the id
a special part of the outside world introjected or brought inside – the superego
a bit that mediates between outer and inner – the ego

The superego is the heir to the Oedipus Complex. Its intensity has nothing to do with the actual strictness of the real-life parents, but is a function of the intensity of the Oedipal feelings which the child had to repress.

It is a dim perception of this sense of a planting-from-outside which has led theologians to account for conscience as being implanted in us by a higher cause, God.

The superego is initially based on the residue of the Oedipus Complex, but attracts to itself all the teachings of the parents, of teachers and authority figures, general social morality and the accumulated wisdom of the past…

[Here the manuscript breaks off in mid-sentence. The editors of the Pelican edition end the text with ellipses…Quite poignant.]

Comment

This is Freud’s most concentrated theoretical exposition of psychoanalysis, rich in new insights and cross-connections and very persuasive, especially where he gives a bit of wider context, mentioning (albeit briefly) psychoanalysis’s position vis-a-vis philosophy and other psychological theories i.e. it goes deeper than both, far, far deeper.

The passage describing the actual process of psychotherapy is the clearest, most persuasive summary of how the analytic therapy works which I have read.

Possibly it is so effective because he largely eschews the florid metaphors he is so prone to in the rest of his work (analysis as archaeology etc) and also because he doesn’t waste time going off on one of his rants against religion or into a long digression on a literary text (Gradiva, Hamlet etc).

Instead, he bases the theory on the basis of a materialist, biological interpretation of the human organism and human mind, stopping to consider what the evolutionary reason or advantage for this or that mental strategy might be – and this gives it more scientific weight and authority than almost anything else I’ve read by him.

If you were going to read one work by Freud, maybe this is the one; it’s barely 70 pages long in the Pelican Freud Library paperback.

Credit

The history of the translation of Freud’s many works into English forms a complicated subject in its own right. ‘An Outline of Psychoanalysis’ was first translated into English by James Strachey in 1964 as part of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. My quotes are from the version included in volume 15 of the Pelican Freud Library, published in the 1986.

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by Simon on July 12, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Psychoanalysis

Tagged aetiology, ambivalence, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, Anna Freud, anti-cathexes, anxiety dreams, Austria, authority figure, castration complex, cathexis, childhood, childhood sexuality, Christianity, confession, death drive, denial, dream interpretation, dream-work, dreams, drives, ego psychology, ego-love, Eros, erotic wish, erotogenic zones, Evolution, family romance, Fantasy, flight into illness, Freud, genitality, Greek myths, guilt, hallucinations, instincts, introjection, lesbianism, libidinal energy, libido, love-hate, love-relations, masculinity, mental illness, narcissism, Nazis, Nirvana principle, nuclear complex, object-love, penis, penis envy, perception, perversion, polymorphous perversity, preconscious, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, psychosis, psychotherapy, Puberty, rejection, repressions, Resistance, sadism, Science, sexual desire, Sigmund Freud, suicide, Thanatos, the anal-sadistic phase, the Censor, the death instinct, the death wish, the ego, the id, the latency period, the Oedipus Complex, the oral phase, the Pleasure Principle, the psyche, the psychical apparatus, the Reality Principle, the royal road to the unconscious, the superego, the unconscious, the will to destruction, transference, unconscious drives

Posted by Simon on July 12, 2023

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Three Essays on Sexuality by Sigmund Freud (1905)

Note: to avoid misunderstanding, I believe Freud is a figure of huge cultural and historical importance, and I sympathise with his project of trying to devise a completely secular psychology building on Darwinian premises. Many of his ideas about sexuality as a central motive force, about the role of the unconscious in every aspect of mental life, how repressing instinctual drives can lie behind certain types of mental illness, his development of the talking cure, these and numerous other ideas have become part of the culture and underlie the way many people live and think about themselves today. However, I strongly disapprove of Freud’s gender stereotyping of men and women, his systematic sexism, his occasional slurs against gays, lesbian or bisexuals and so on. Despite the revolutionary impact of his thought, Freud carried a lot of Victorian assumptions into his theory. He left a huge and complicated legacy which needs to be examined and picked through with care. My aim in these reviews is not to endorse his opinions but to summarise his writings, adding my own thoughts and comments as they arise.

***

Introduction and overview

Freud’s aim was to show the ubiquity and the strangeness of sex and use the sex instinct, massively expanded and redefined, as the basis of an entire new theory of human psychology.

According to historian of psychoanalysis Frank Sulloway, Freud found the sex instinct most suitable as the central vehicle or basis for the new and emphatically physiological type of psychology he wanted to devise, because it is a) so strong and b) so flexible.

In these three ground-breaking essays on sexuality, Freud set out to widen the concepts of sexuality, the sex instinct, libido, so as to encompass a much broader sphere of activity than ever previously imagined in order to make them underpin almost every aspect of human nature.

In Freud’s psychology people’s characters are like complicated family trees, all descended from the same one huge fountain of libido which is channelled and rechannelled into ever-smaller rivers and streams.

It is these rechannellings, the repressions and redirections and reaction-formations and sublimations and so on which come to make up your character – a collection of habits based on infantile pleasures, of disgust or shame (reaction-formations) or heroic ambition (sublimation) or guilts and anxieties (the neuroses).

Thus the Three Essays On The Theory of Sexuality (1905) is Freud’s second most important book after The Interpretation of Dreams (1900).

Essay 1 begins with a detailed look at the state of Victorian knowledge about homosexuality and perversions, because they reveal:

the infinite malleability of the sex instinct
how easily the sex instinct can be rerouted away from its ‘proper’ channel of ‘normal’ sexuality
how even ‘normal’ sexuality is in fact built up of a network of pretty weird behaviour (Freud’s most striking example is kissing, which doesn’t make any sense the more you look at it)

In Essay 2 Freud shows that sexuality is not only present but vitally important in the life of infants and children. This idea was the biggest single cause of opposition to Freud’s theories in his lifetime, from Church and State, from commentators and populist politicians, and from decent people everywhere. It still is.

Freud is not very much interested in ‘love’. Love is the psychological effect of the ‘overvaluation of the sexual object common to almost all manifestations of the libido’:

It is only in the rarest instances that the psychical value set on the object as being the goal of the sexual instinct stops short at the genitals. The appreciation extends to the whole body of the sexual object and tends to involve every sensation derived from it. The same overvaluation spills over into the psychological sphere: the subject becomes, as it were, intellectually infatuated (that is, his powers of judgment are weakened) by the mental achievements and perfections of the sexual object and he submits to the latter’s judgments with credulity.

For Freud sex and love are interchangeable terms. He contrasts the overvaluation of the love-object found in the Western tradition with the more relaxed approach of the ancient world:

The most striking distinction between the erotic life of antiquity and our own no doubt lies in the fact that the ancients laid the stress upon the instinct itself, whereas we emphasise its object. The ancients glorified the instinct and were prepared on its account to honour even an inferior object; while we despise the instinctual activity in itself, and find excuses for it only in the merits of the object.

The Greeks held Bacchic orgies and had a god, Priapus, dedicated to the male organ; by contrast we in our time appear to fear the penis more than ever and instead reverence the idealised object of libido, the dream partner of the opposite sex (or the same sex), and the institution of Marriage.

And despite all the rhetoric from feminists and LGBTQ+ activists about interrogating and subverting this, that or the other stereotype and convention, we still appear to be in thrall to the narrow concept of finding ‘love’ in a faithful, monogamous, committed relationship, every bit as much as our Victorian forebears – very narrow and limited compared to the polymorphous, open and pluralistic attitudes of the 30 or so ancient Roman authors I read last year.

THREE ESSAYS ON THE THEORY OF SEXUALITY (1905)

This long work sets out to show the importance of sexuality in all human achievements, to establish a wider-than-usual definition of sexuality, and to prove the existence of infantile sexuality.

Freud’s recurring tactic is to make the ordinary, the everyday, look strange; to look again without conventional blinkers at things we think we know, and to show that our attitudes are complacent, superficial and contradictory.

1. The sexual aberrations

Popular opinion credits two universal instincts, Hunger and Sexuality. Sex is supposed to set in at the time of puberty and manifest itself in irresistible attractions between adults of the opposite sex with the ultimate end of genital sex, itself with the purpose of reproduction (as taught in Christianity and most of the other world religions).

Let us call the desired one the sexual object, the act towards which the instinct tends, the sexual aim.

(1) Deviations in respect of the sexual object

If popular opinion is true and God made sex solely for reproduction, how do we account for homosexuals?

(A) Inversion

Behaviour of ‘inverts’. For a start there are different types:

a) absolute inverts, totally repelled by the opposite sex
b) amphigenic inverts i.e. bisexuals
c) contingent inverts, depending on circumstances

Some inverts accept their condition as natural; others feel it a torment. Some were gay as far back as they remember; for others, homosexuality cropped up at puberty; others only ‘come out’ as adults, sometimes after they’ve followed a straight career with wife and kids.

Nature of Inversion

The first observers thought inversion the result of nervous degeneracy because it was first found among mental patients studied in asylums.

Degeneracy

But then it was late-Victorian fashion to blame anything you didn’t understand on ‘degeneracy’: criminals are degenerate, the working class is degenerate, Africans are degenerate etc.

Freud defines degeneracy in rigorous Darwinian terms as the actual impairment of an organism’s efficiency and survival probability. In these, practical, terms inversion is not degenerate. Not only is it found in people otherwise perfectly normal, but it is found in people ‘who are indeed distinguished by specially high intellectual development and ethical culture.’

Innate character

Some gays insist homosexuality is absolutely innate. But the existence of the late-developers or of contingent homosexuals argues against this. Far from being innate, much evidence suggests that homosexuality is acquired:

the case of many ‘inverts’ in whom an early impression left a permanent gay after-effect
later influences and life experiences which have fixed contingent gayness e.g. the army, prison, monastery etc

Almost all ‘inverts’ will be found to have been subjected to some experience like this (for example, public school). But on the other hand, so were many people who went on to be perfectly hetero. So it remains hard to say whether homosexuality is acquired or innate.

Bisexuality

Havelock Ellis says a clue might be that homosexuality is a form of psychical hermaphroditism, a mental equivalent of having the organs of both sexes.

Richard von Kraft-Ebing says that the brain contains female and male brain centres which are activated by a ‘sex gland’. (It wasn’t only Freud who was having batty, speculative ideas at this time.)

Whoever is right, it seems that most authorities accept the idea of an innate bisexuality in everyone, and that ‘inversion’ owes something to early disruption of development.

Later, Freud would write:

It is well known that at all times there have been, as there still are, human beings who can take as their sexual objects persons of either sex without the one trend interfering with the other. We call these people bisexual and accept the fact of their existence without wondering much at it … But we [psychoanalysts] have come to know that all human beings are bisexual in this sense and their libido is distributed between objects of both sexes, either in a manifest or a latent form.

Sexual object of inverts

Popular opinion holds that ‘inverts’ simply desire the qualities of the opposite sex. An inverted man is like a woman in desiring the qualities of the opposite sex, of masculinity, in his sex object.

But what about gays who love pretty boys, boys who demonstrate all the qualities of a girl, being beautiful, hairless, young and coquettish?

What about transvestites who do a good trade dressing up as women for gay clients? In ancient Greece older men regularly looked after shy, young, girlish boys.

So the sex object is a compromise between an impulse that seeks for a man and one for a woman (in the same way that a symptom is a compromise between a wish and reality).

Psychoanalysis’s explanation is thus: in his childhood the future ‘invert’ passes through a brief but intense attachment to a woman (normally his mother). After leaving this behind he identifies himself with this woman and take himself as his sexual object. Invoking infantile narcissism, ‘inverts’ identify themselves with a woman and set out to find a boy whom they can mother and love as their mother loved them.

The situation will be exacerbated by the absence of a strong father. Think of Oscar Wilde and his imperious mother; of W.H. Auden’s father away at the Front while his mother dressed him in girl’s clothing; of the plays of Joe Orton.

So, says Freud, being gay is being in endless flight from women.

But, Freud emphasises, this isn’t weird. Psychoanalysis has established that everyone makes homosexual object choices in their unconscious mind; that the freedom to range wide over male or female objects is found in childhood, in primitive societies, in early history and in the ancient world, and is the original basis of sexuality.

It is only as a result of later, Victorian social restrictions that people are forced into one fixed, standardised and regimented mould, heterosexual or homosexual, or their modern equivalent which demands that people be in monogamous committed couple relationships.

In reality a person’s final sexual orientation is not decided until after puberty, and then only as the result of innumerable obscure influences. That there is a multiplicity of determining factors is indicated by the extraordinary range of sexual practices and attitudes to be found in mankind.

Thus psychoanalysis regards so-called ‘normal’ sexuality as achieved only under intense pressure and great restriction of the original wider options for pleasure. In fact it’s so-called ‘normal’ sexuality, the genital attraction between man and woman, which is historically problematic and just as much in need of explanation as any other form.

Sexual aim of ‘inverts’

No one single aim can be laid down for the sexuality of ‘inverts’, as it can for the ‘normal’ behaviour of straights; there is too great a variety.

Conclusion

We have been in the habit of regarding the link between the sexual aim and the sexual object as more solid than it is. In fact the object appears to be no more than soldered onto the instinct, and which aim takes which object is a great deal more problematical than previously thought, because the sexual instinct is more free-flowing and independent than we previously suspected.

(B) Sexually immature person and animals as sexual objects

Light is thrown on the sexual instinct by the fact that it permits of so much variation in its objects and such a cheapening of them.

That children can be the objects of sex, or even animals, tells us about the vicissitudes of the sex instinct (along with rapes, sexual assaults and perverse murders). It seems as if the sex instinct will do almost anything to achieve satisfaction.

The impulses of sexual life are among those which, even normally, are the least controlled by the higher activities of the mind… In the process of human cultural development, sexuality is the weak spot.

(2) Deviations in respect of the sexual aim i.e. perversions

Popular opinion says the sexual aim is the union of the genitals in copulation which leads to the release of sexual tension. But a moment’s reflection tells you that, even in ‘normal’ sexuality, people kiss – bringing together two parts of the digestive system – for pleasure. And most people linger to some extent over intermediate stages, such as looking and touching. So the seeds of ‘perversity’ are all around us.

Perversions are sexual activities which either:

extend in an anatomical sense beyond the parts of the body designed for sexual union
linger or halt at the intermediate stages on the path to sexual union

(A) Anatomical extensions

Overvaluation of the sexual object

The first and prime perversion of sex from its object is the overvaluation of the object i.e. ‘love’. For all practical purposes ‘love’, for Freud, is this (potentially pathological) overvaluation of the love object.

It is only in the rarest instances that the psychical value set on the object as being the goal of the sexual instinct stops short at the genitals. The appreciation extends to the whole body of the sexual object and tends to involve every sensation derived from it. The same overvaluation spills over into the psychological sphere: the subject becomes, as it were, intellectually infatuated with (that is, his powers of judgment are weakened) by the mental achievements and perfections of the sexual object and he submits to the latter’s judgments with credulity.

This sexual overvaluation is something that cannot easily be reconciled with [society’s] restriction of the sexual aim to union of the actual genitals and it helps to turn activities connected with other parts of the body into sexual aims.

Once a sexual object has been chosen, the ordinarily effective higher activities of the mind – judgment and civilised restraint – all too often go out of the window. In most people this results in crushes, infatuations, sometimes in grands amours: once the libido sees an opening, it tends to pour forth like a flood.

How the subject (carried away by powerful libido) and the (perhaps reluctant) object cope with the situation is the theme of most of Western literature from Hero and Leander to Madame Bovary.

(I can see an evolutionary explanation for all this which Freud doesn’t mention, which is that: having made a sexual choice, overvaluation follows from a) opening the floodgates of an instinct otherwise fiercely repressed b) to ensure a strong libidinal attachment to the woman who you’re planning to impregnate – so it is a blind Darwinian instinct designed to make the impregnator bond with their mate and remain to look after their offspring; but, as all of human history tells us, this often clashes with the other biological imperative affecting men which is impregnating as many women as possible, hence the many men who eat, shoot and leave.)

Sexual use of the mucous membrane of the lips and mouth

Freud proceeds with his agenda of making everything about sex and love look strange and uncanny.

The use of the mouth as a sexual organ is regarded as a perversion if the lips (or tongue) of one person are brought into contact with the genitals of another, but not if the mucous membranes of the lips of both of them come together.

Why do people find kissing acceptable and cunnilingus or fellatio disgusting? Freud here points to the purely conventional, culturally-determined nature of our feelings.

Has ‘disgust’ (a powerful reaction-formation) played a large part in forming our cultural conventions – or is it simply a product of the increasing self-repression which characterises us in the West (unlike other contemporary civilisations, primitive cultures and the cultures of the ancient world, which were and are much more liberal in their sexual practices)?

Freud seems to think the ancients were more honest in this, as in so much else.

The most striking distinction between the erotic life of antiquity and our own no doubt lies in the fact that the ancients laid the stress upon the instinct itself, whereas we emphasise its object. The ancients glorified the instinct and were prepared on its account to honour even an inferior object; while we despise the instinctual activity in itself, and find excuses for it only in the merits of the object.

The progress of civilisation seems to require a steadily increasing restriction of the sexual instinct, bought at the price of a growing sense of disgust. Hence the genitals of men and women, worshipped by the Greeks as holy, are now banned as dangerously corrupting.

There is no doubt that the genitals of the opposite sex can in themselves be an object of disgust and that such an attitude is one of the characteristics of all hysterics.

One thinks of John Ruskin (allegedly) driven into paroxysms by the discovery on his wedding night that, unlike the Greek statues which he adored, his wife had pubic hair. Or, more up to date:

Indecent exposure, sometimes known as ‘flashing’, is a serious sexual criminal offence, which carries a custodial sentence of up to 2-years at its most severe. (Old Bailey solicitors)

Does ‘disgust’ drive the repression of sexuality i.e. is disgust natural, a ‘God-given’ reaction of the ‘God-given’ conscience to the spectacle of fallen sexuality? A question related to: is conscience ‘God-given’ and so universal? Or is ‘conscience’ created by culture and therefore morally relative across different cultures? Morality and disgust on the one side, pragmatism and sexual libertarianism on the other.

Or is disgust an entirely material, biological reaction-formation to the compulsory repression of sexuality enforced by a coercive society, no God or morality required?

Sexual use of the anal orifice

People who think sodomy is disgusting because we defecate through the anus are as correct as women who say the penis is disgusting because men urinate through it or men who think the vulva is disgusting because women menstruate through it.

Which is to say, all these opinions are correct in their own terms, but missing the point. These organs can (clearly) be put to various uses. Should they be? Or should they be restricted to their ‘God-given’ purposes? But then who is to say what their correct usage is? A bunch of old men wearing purple dresses in the House of Lords? Imams and rabbis? Agony aunts? TV shows. Gender studies lecturers? Where is the authority for this?

Significance of other regions of the body

What seems to be common to all human sexuality is:

overvaluation of the sexual object
a versatile ability on the part of the sexual aim to use any part of the body as the sexual object for gratification

Unsuitable substitutes for the sexual object: fetishism

In fetishism the sexual instinct replaces the primary object (the genitals) and the overvalued secondary object (the person attached to the genitals) with unlikely tertiary objects – parts of the body, locks of hair, feet – or linked objects, such as underwear or other items of clothing.

A certain amount of fetishism is habitually present in normal love, especially of those stages of it in which the normal sexual aim seems unattainable or its fulfilment prevented.

A lock of your true love’s hair. Or as Goethe put it in Faust:

‘Get me a kerchief from her breast,
A garter that her knee has pressed.’

These objects can justifiably be likened to the fetishes of primitive peoples. Inscribed in fetishes is a primitive symbology, comparable with the symbolism of dreams. For example, the foot is an age-old symbol for the penis. Fur is linked to the hair of the mons Veneris. The shoe or slipper is a symbol of the female genitals (as in Cinderella) into which the male foot neatly slips, and so on.

(B) Fixations of preliminary sexual aims

Appearance of new aims

External factors (danger, unavailability of a sexual object, risk of disease) tend to fix libido at the preparatory activities. Truly, every normal aspect of ‘love’ carries the seeds of a perversion.

Touching and looking

Seeing is an evolutionary derivative of touching. A look can be as exciting as a touch.

Both seeing and touching are ‘ordinary’ parts of ‘normal’ sexual activity – unless lingered over, or unless they become ends in themselves, in which case we have voyeurism/exhibitionism and various types of masturbation.

Freud thought exhibitionism the result of either wishing for a reciprocal showing of the other person’s genitals; or a triumphant assertion against the Castration Complex: ‘Look, I’ve still got my willy!’

He doesn’t seem to take into account the sadistic urge to offend or scare women, a kind of sublimated form of rape, visual rather than physical rape.

The power of vision is shown by just how upset some women can feel, how physically defiled, just because a strange man showed them his penis. I’m not downplaying the offence or upset caused.

The concealment and revelation of the sexual parts of the body go hand in hand with the rise of civilisation and progressive sexual repression. It is unlikely that the Greeks had strip clubs; instead they had orgies, the real thing. We have strip clubs because of the immense repression to which our sexuality has been subjected.

For Freud the concept of ‘beauty’ itself originates in sexual excitement but is sublimated away from the genitals onto the body as a whole, which is perceived as ‘beautiful’, a concept or feeling which can then be transferred onto other types of object, and then onto objects created and enjoyed for their ‘beauty’ alone i.e. works of art.

This explains why women are more often the object of art than men – even in women painter’s paintings – because men are more sexually predatory than women. And why the sight of the genitals themselves is rarely ‘beautiful’; all pleasure has been sublimated out of them leaving only the reaction-formation of ‘disgust’.

Sadism and masochism

These were given their names by Richard von Kraft-Ebing (Viennese) in the 1890s, after the Marquis de Sade (French) and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (Viennese) As with the other perversions, a moderate amount of sado-masochism is generally regarded as ‘normal’:

The sexuality of most male human beings contains an element of aggressiveness – a desire to subjugate. The biological significance of it seems to lie in the need for overcoming the resistance of the sexual object by means other than the process of wooing. Thus sadism would correspond to an aggressive component of the sexual instinct which has become independent and exaggerated and, by displacement, has usurped the leading position.

Many types of sexual relationship which are regarded as ‘normal’ contain a high amount of aggression; sadism becomes an actual perversion when pleasure is derived from violence alone.

Masochism is sexual excitement aroused purely by receiving pain or humiliation. Later in his career, after he’d outlined the new theory of the superego, Freud distinguished between purely physical masochism and moral masochism, the desire to be found guilty of sins, to be punished for them and so on, an internal submission of the ego to the overbearing superego which plays such a large part in religious life.

Freud thinks masochism is secondary, a deflection of primary sadism – which the subject is too weak to inflict onto others – back onto the self. Masochism is for weaklings; or for the weakling part of even strong people.

The history of human civilisation shows beyond any doubt that there is an intimate connection between cruelty and the sexual instinct.

But nobody really knows why. Some people think aggression is a development of the primal desire to eat, to master objects by putting them in the mouth – an instinct seen in children and in the holy meals at the centre of many religions. Others think there is some intimate biochemical link between pleasure and pain.

Suggestive for Freud’s bisexual thesis – the mingling of the ‘feminine’ and the ‘masculine’ in all of us – is Havelock Ellis and Kraft-Ebing’s agreement that masochism and sadism are often found in the same person.

(3) The perversions in general

Variation and disease

Medical men first identified perversions in the insane and perversion was blamed (like homosexuality) on ‘degeneracy’. What Freud has shown is that the perversions are implicit in even ‘normal’ love.

No healthy person, it appears, can fail to make some addition that might be called perverse to the normal sexual aim; and the universality of this finding is enough to show how inappropriate it is to use the word ‘perversion’ as a term of reproach. In the sphere of sexual life we are brought up against peculiar and, indeed, insoluble problems as soon as we try to draw a sharp line to distinguish mere variations within the range of what is physiological from pathological symptoms.

On one side the liberal Freud, on the other a vast army of censorious Christians, trying to draw precisely that line, trying to tell people exactly just which type and forms of ‘love’ are permissible and which aren’t, from the Pope to Mary Whitehouse.

For the Moral Majority it is always other people who are degenerate, other people who are the helpless prey of, for example, homosexual men in the homosexual age of consent debate.

Freud is saying, if you only look at the acts themselves you may be tempted to define them as unchristian or degenerate, pathological or perverted etc. But if you look at the instinct which carries so many people to such lengths, it is the same instinct and it is in all of us – it is what our minds are made of.

The mental factor in perversions

Despite the sometimes disgusting ends to which the love instinct is put, all these behaviours are to some extent idealisations of the libido, in the sense of abstractions of it away from its normal role.

The omnipotence of love is perhaps never more strongly proved than in such of its aberrations as these. The highest and the lowest are always closest to each other in the sphere of sexuality.

Two conclusions

Every individual plays a double existential role:

to reproduce, to pass on its genes and preserve the species
to preserve itself while it does this

Sometimes the two purposes clash and this is the basis of Freud’s psychology, the clash between the unconscious libidinal drive to have sex, all the time, with everyone and everything; and the rational ego’s struggle to redirect this blind drive into socially acceptable forms which help the individual survive and help it be at peace with itself. So the origins of any person’s sexuality must be looked for in two places: in the history of the species and the accidents of the individual.

Our study of the perversions has shown us that the sexual instinct has to struggle against certain mental forces which act as resistances, and of which shame and disgust are the most prominent. It is permissible to suppose that these forces play a part in restraining that instinct within the limits that are regarded as normal; and if they develop within the individual before the sexual instinct has reached its full strength, no doubt they then determine the course of its development.

These forces, which act like dams upon sexual development – disgust, shame and morality – must also be regarded as historical precipitates of the external inhibitions to which the sexual instinct has been subjected during the psychogenesis of the human race. We can observe the way in which, in the development of individuals, they arise at the appropriate moment, as though spontaneously, when upbringing and external influence give the signal.

In the second place we have found that some of the perversions are only made intelligible if we assume the convergence of several motive forces. If such perversions admit of analysis, that is, if they can be taken to pieces, then they must be of a composite nature. This gives us a hint that perhaps the sexual instinct itself is no simple thing but put together from components which have come apart again in the perversions.

(4) The sexual instincts in neurotics

Psychoanalysis

Here Freud reiterates his belief that all the psychoneuroses are based on sexual instinctual forces and that the psychoneuroses can only be investigated using the method perfected by Josef Breuer and himself – psychoanalysis. He gives a useful summary of the famous cathartic method:

By this I do not merely mean that the energy of the sexual instinct makes a contribution to the forces that maintain the pathological manifestations (the symptoms). I mean expressly to assert that that contribution is the most important and only constant source of energy of the neurosis and that in consequence the sexual life of the persons in question is expressed in these symptoms. The symptoms constitute the sexual activity of the patient!

The removal of the symptoms of hysterical patients by psychoanalysis proceeds on the supposition that those symptoms are substitutes – transcriptions, as it were – for a number of emotionally cathected mental processes, wishes and desires which, by the operation of a special psychical procedure (repression) have been prevented from obtaining discharge in psychical activity that is admissible to consciousness.

These mental processes, being held back in a state of unconsciousness, strive to obtain an expression that shall be appropriate to their emotional importance – to obtain discharge; and in the case of hysteria they find such an expression (by means of the process called conversion) in somatic or bodily phenomena, that is, in hysterical symptoms [cf Anna O’s inability to drink water, choking sensation etc].

By systematically turning those symptoms back (with the help of psychoanalysis) into emotionally cathected ideas – ideas that can now become conscious – it is possible to obtain the most accurate knowledge of the nature and origin of these formerly unconscious psychical structures.

Findings of psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis has shown that:

Symptoms represent a substitute for impulses the source of whose strength is derived from the sexual instinct… The character of hysterics shows a degree of sexual repression in excess of the normal quantity, an intensification of resistance against the sexual instinct (which we have already met with in the form of shame, disgust and morality), and what seems like an instinctive aversion on their part to any intellectual consideration of sexual problems.

In the case of someone predisposed to hysteria, the onset of his illness is precipitated when, either as a result of his own progressive maturity or of the external circumstances of his life, he finds himself faced by the demands of a real sexual situations. Between the pressure of the instinct and his antagonism to sexuality, illness offers him a way of escape. It does not solve his conflict but seeks to evade it by transforming his libidinal impulses into symptoms.

(See Jensen’s Gradiva, written two years later, which is a textbook example of hysteria as the self-deluding flight into illness. The archaeologist Norbert’s escape from the reality of an emotionally demanding sexual situation – his awakening love for Zoe – into delusions about the light-tripping woman on the antique frieze whom he names ‘Gradiva’, and then Norbert’s actual fleeing to Italy, to Pompeii, to escape the sexual situation, only to meet Zoe magically transformed into the woman in the frieze –– from the heart of the reaction-formation returns the repressed. In the novel Norbert is then cured through love, by the redirecting of his libido – unhealthily cathected onto the Gradiva-delusion – back to the reality of his flesh-and-blood love, Zoe, by the love object herself.)

Neurosis and perversion

Moreover, neurotics’ symptoms, upon psychoanalysis, often turn out to be conversions not just of ‘normal’ sexuality, but to include what are called the perversions i.e. neurotics’ unconsciousnesses are often raging with perverse wishes deflected into symptoms. Hence Dora’s persistent cough is a (transmuted) wish for oral sex with Herr K.

a) The unconscious life of all neurotics shows inverted impulses, fixation of the libido on persons of their own sex.

b) The unconsciouses of neurotics show tendencies to every kind of anatomical extension of sexual activity, particularly oral and anal.

c) An especially prominent part is played by the fact that the instincts involved are component instincts. Thus the perversions often come in opposing pairs: exhibitionism and voyeurism; the active and passive forms of the instinct for cruelty.

It is through such an opposition, a component tying together of libido and cruelty, that the transformation from love into hate takes place, the transformation from affectionate into hostile impulses.

(You can see here the embryonic shape of Freud’s later division of all the instincts into Sex instincts and Death instincts, Eros and Thanatos which would formulate nearly 20 years late, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.)

(5) Component instincts and erotogenic zones

If we trace back the positive and negative aspects of the perversions (masochism/sadism, voyeurism/exhibitionism) they appear to derive from component instincts which themselves admit of further analysis.

When sexual excitement derives from a particular organ or area of the body we refer to that as the erotogenic zone.

Thus, under the right circumstances, the anus or the mouth can become an erotogenic zone. Or the surface of the skin in touching. Or the eye itself in voyeurism where, through the eye alone is felt excitement comparable to that of sex in a ‘normal’ person.

(6) Reasons for the apparent preponderance of perverse sexuality in the psychoneuroses

But just because neurotic symptoms often contain a perverse wish doesn’t mean that neurotics are closer to perverts than to ‘normal’ people. Neurotics are normal people whose libido, either because of innate predisposition or due to accident, has been dammed up.

Most psychoneurotics fall ill after the age of puberty as a result of the demands made upon them by normal sexual life. Or else illnesses of this kind set in later, when the libido fails to obtain satisfaction along normal lines. In both these cases the libido behaves like a stream whose main bed has become blocked. It proceeds to fill up collateral channels which may hitherto have been empty.

Where the constitution is predisposed to illness maybe no external factor will be required. On the other hand, a great shock in real life may tip a robust constitution into neurotic illness.

Might there be a link between the perversions wished for by the neurotic’s unconscious, between the erotogenic zone it highlights, and innate constitution?

In a word, can you define personality types by predisposition to a particular perversion/erotogenic zone? (This is what Freud does in the following essay, about childhood sexuality, defining and describing the oral, anal types and so on.)

(7) Intimations of the infantile character of sexuality

“By demonstrating the part played by perverse impulses in the formation of symptoms in the psychoneuroses, we have quite remarkably increased the number of people who might be regarded as perverts. It is not only that neurotics in themselves constitute a very numerous class, but it must also be considered that an unbroken chain bridges the gap between the neuroses in all their manifestations and ‘normality’….

Thus the extraordinarily wide dissemination of the perversions forces us to suppose that the disposition to perversions is itself of no great rarity but must form a part of what passes as the ‘normal’ constitution…

There is indeed something innate lying behind the perversions but it is something innate in everyone, though as a disposition it may vary in its intensity and may be increased by the influences of actual life. What is in question are the innate constitutional roots of the sexual instinct. In one class of cases (the perversions) these roots may grow into the actual vehicles of sexual activity; in others they may be submitted to an insufficient suppression (repression) and thus be able in a roundabout way to attract a considerable portion of sexual energy to themselves as neurotic symptoms; while in the most favourable cases, which lie between these two extremes, they may by means of effective restriction and other kinds of modification bring about what is known as ‘normal’ sexual life.

Thus the germs of our character, the way our sexual instincts will be channelled, are probably laid down in childhood. In the next essay Freud looks at the play of influences which govern the evolution of infantile sexuality until its outcome in perversion, neurosis or normal sexual life.

Essay 2. Infantile sexuality

Neglect of the infantile factor

In Essay 2 Freud sets out to smash the popular opinion that children have no sexual feelings; that sexual feelings only set in with puberty. On the contrary, all the literature, and a chat with any nurse, will tell you that many babies play with their willies or fannies and suck various bits of themselves, but these stories are generally only mentioned as exceptions and monstrosities.

Why do we not remember our sexual feelings from our own childhood years?

Infantile amnesia

We definitely behave lively in every respect during childhood, giving every evidence of feeling joy, love, rage, delight. Why do we forget so much of this? Freud says that under analysis patients often remember events from their earliest years. Therefore the memories are stored somewhere – but are repressed from everyday access. Why? Nobody knows.

(1) The period of sexual latency in childhood and its interruptions

Based on a) scattered reports of the so-called exceptional behaviour of infants in the literature and b) the memories of neurotics revealed by psychoanalysis, Freud will sketch out a theory of infantile sexuality.

Freud thinks of the sex instinct as being innate in the child; that it grows as the child grows; that it is overtaken by suppression at the age of 5 or 6; then it revives and develops further at puberty, developing in a pattern of fits and starts. Childhood sexuality only emerges into the light of observable day in the third or fourth year of life.

Sexual inhibitions

It is during this same period that the mental forces are built up which are later to impede and block the flow of the sexual instinct – feelings of disgust (at an object), feelings of shame (at oneself) and moral and aesthetic ideals (as it were, objective guidelines we build for ourselves).

Reaction formation and sublimation

These are the two methods by which these dams are erected to prevent the return of repressed material into the conscious mind.

Sublimation is a widely reported phenomenon, the diverting of instinctual sexual energies into ‘higher’, more socially acceptable ones.

A reaction formation is:

a defence mechanism in which emotions and impulses which are anxiety-producing or perceived to be unacceptable are mastered by exaggeration of the directly opposing tendency

Freud thinks that reaction formations are the result of a series of unpleasurable experiences, either of internal unpleasure (excessive playing with the genitals leads to unpleasure) or external tellings-off, which create, as it were, a psychological allergic reaction to the erotogenic zone and experiences in question. Told off for touching his winkle enough times and the small boy genuinely come to believe it is dirty and disgusting.

[A digression on Freud’s final theory of sexual development

A lot later, Freud was to elaborate and fine-tune the notion that the human infants evolve through a set number of stages, namely:

polymorphous perversity – undifferentiated pleasure in the whole body
oral phase (0 to 1 year) – the infant gets most of their pleasure from their mouth, for example eating and thumb-sucking: if an infant’s oral needs aren’t met it can develop an develop oral fixation which continues into adult life
anal phase (1 to 3 years) – controlling bladder and bowel movements, potty training, when successfully accomplished leads to praise from parents and a sense of achievement and independence; but if parents take an approach that is too lenient, Freud suggested that an ‘anal-expulsive personality‘ – could develop whereby the adult has a messy, wasteful, or destructive personality, while if parents are too strict, he believed this could lead to an ‘anal-retentive‘ personality which is over-strict, rigid, and obsessive.
phallic stage (3 to 5 years) – focus of the libido is on the genitals and children begin to discover the difference between boys and girls
- in boys this gives rise to the Oedipus complex as boys view their fathers as a rival for the mother’s affections: the Oedipus complex describes these feelings of wanting to possess the mother and replace the father. But at the same time the little boy worries that his father will punish him for having these feelings, a fear Freud termed castration anxiety
- other Freudians suggested the term Electra complex to describe a similar but mirror set of feelings experienced by small girls, namely the wish to be possessed by their father and rid of their mother, accompanied by parallel feelings of guilt and anxiety
- Freud, however, believed that instead of the Electra complex, girls experience what he notoriously called penis envy i.e. the wish to be a boy, the lack of a penis forever leaving girls feeling inadequate. Even in Freud’s own day female psychoanalysts deplored this idea, and female followers have denied it and overwritten it ever since]
latency phase (6 to puberty) – the superego or conscience gains in power, the libido and memories of all those early physical pleasures are suppressed; instead boys or girls enter school and become more concerned with peer relationships, hobbies, and other interests; a time of exploration in which the sexual energy repressed or dormant, still present but sublimated into other areas such as intellectual pursuits and social interactions
genital stage (11, 12, 13 onwards) – at puberty the libido becomes active again and teens develop a strong sexual interest in the opposite sex: if all the previous stages have been successfully navigated, the person becomes a rounded, balanced individual]

Freud therefore thinks that the development through the oral, anal and phallic stages is partly achieved by the erection of these reaction formations which act as ‘dams’ or road blocks saying ‘No Going Back’.

That this may be the origin of feelings of ‘shame’ and ‘disgust’ is an interesting theory to ponder; that this process is the basis of all civilised morality, as Freud claims, was clearly a provocative thing to say, and which sparked much outraged opposition to him and his theories.

Interruptions of the latency period

Not all children’s sexuality goes underground at about five years old. There may be all sorts of exceptions, single strands of sexual pleasure continuing into the latent period.

(2) The manifestations of infantile sexuality

Thumb-sucking

This emerges early and often persists into adolescence. Sometimes accompanied by the rubbing of an erotogenic zone it can act as an introduction to masturbation. Because it is accompanied by pleasurable rubbing, and sometimes even by orgasm-type physical reactions, Freud makes thumb-sucking the prototype of infantile sexuality.

Auto-erotism (coined by Havelock Ellis in 1898)

Infants initially derive pleasure from their own bodies. Sucking thumbs or lips or any other part of the body is a repetition of the initial oral activity, sucking at the breast.

No-one who has seen a baby sinking back satiated from the breast and falling asleep with flushed cheeks and a blissful smile can escape the reflection that this picture persists as the prototype of the expression of sexual satisfaction in later life.

As the child grows it experiments with enacting the sexual pleasure of sucking when the breast is absent: sucking any part of its own body, taking itself as a source of pleasure. In later life the pleasures of lingering kissing re-enact this primal sexual experience. In some children there is a constitutional intensification of the labial region (lips):

If that significance persists, these same children will grow up to become epicures in kissing, will be inclined to perverse kissing or, if males, will have a powerful motive for drinking and smoking. If, however, repression ensues, they will feel disgust at food and will produce hysterical vomiting.

Thus, for Freud, entire character types and types of adult behaviour can be traced right back to earliest childhood behaviour.

(3) The sexual aim of infantile sexuality

Characteristics of erotogenic zones

Erotogenic zones are a moveable feast. Particular parts of the body seem predisposed to resonate with sexual pleasure (the genitals, lips, nipples, anus, the surface of the skin generally) and if an infant, in its auto-erotic stage, chances on one of these to suck or play with, that part easily becomes the model of sexual pleasure, of reassurance etc in later life.

Any part of the body can acquire the same susceptibility to stimulation as is possessed by the genitals and can become an erotogenic zone.

It is hard to think of a view more contrary to the popular, conventional view that a) infants have no sex life and that b) sex appears only at puberty and is exclusively confined to the genitals.

The infantile sexual aim

Although all the body is susceptible to sexualisation, certain zones seem predisposed to be especially erotogenic, generally zones which are physiologically designed for other activities and pleasures which the child can then repeat by auto-erotic stimulation: the lips for eating, the penis for peeing, the anus for defecating can all be co-opted by the libido.

(4) Masturbatory sexual manifestations

Activity of the anal zone

Psychoanalysis of patients has revealed the surprising extent to which the anus is not only a source of pleasure in infancy but retains its pleasurable power throughout life.

Children who are making use of the susceptibility to erotogenic stimulation of the anal zone betray themselves by holding back their stool till its accumulation brings about violent muscular contractions and, as it passes through the anus, is able to produce powerful stimulation of the mucous membrane. In so doing it must no doubt cause not only painful but highly pleasurable sensations.

One of the clearest signs of subsequent eccentricity or nervousness is to be seen when a baby obstinately refuses to empty its bowels when he is put on the pot and holds back that function till he himself chooses to exercise it. He is naturally not concerned with dirtying the bed, he is only anxious not to miss the subsidiary pleasure attached to defecating.

Faeces come to have another important meaning for the child.

They are clearly treated as part of the infant’s own body and represent his first ‘gift’: by producing them he can express his active compliance with his environment and, by withholding them, his disobedience…

The retention of the faecal mass, which is thus carried out by the child intentionally to begin with, in order to serve, as it were, a masturbatory stimulus upon the anal zone or to be employed as a weapon in his relation to the people looking after him, is also one of the roots of the constipation which is so common among neuropaths.

Activity of the genital zone

The glans of the penis in boys and the clitoris in girls:

The anatomical situation of this region, the secretions in which it is bathed, the washing and rubbing to which it is subjected in the course of a child’s toilet, as well as accidental stimulation, make it inevitable that the pleasurable feeling which this part of the body is capable of producing should be noticed by children even during their earliest infancy, and should give rise to a need for its repetition.

Girls often masturbate simply by rubbing their thighs together. Boys tend to use hands.

The preference for the hand which is shown by boys is already evidence of the important contribution which the instinct for mastery is destined to make to masculine sexual activity.

Second phase of infantile masturbation

In this early essay Freud posits three periods of sexual activity: a first phase of infantile sexuality; a second phase flourishing around the fourth year; then the eruptions of puberty.

The second phase of infantile sexual activity may assume a variety of different forms which can only be determined by a precise analysis of individual cases. But all its details leave behind the deepest unconscious impressions in the subject’s memory, determine the development of his later character, if he is to remain healthy, and the symptomatology of his neurosis, if he is to fall ill after puberty.

Return of early infantile masturbation

The return of infantile sexuality at around 4 and 5 years is determined by all sorts of factors, internal and external. But Freud is careful to mention the external factor of infantile seduction (or child abuse, as we would say) as a way many of his patients recall being jolted, as it were, into sexual life, and made aware of the erotogenicity of the genitals.

Polymorphously perverse disposition

In and as a result of sexual abuse, children can be induced to all manner of perversions thus revealing, for Freud, an innate disposition to polymorphous perversion.

The same, he asserts, is true of many women, as witness the large number of prostitutes who can accommodate any type of sexual taste for their clients.

It becomes impossible not to recognise that this same disposition to perversions of every kind is a general and fundamental human characteristic.

[At one and the same time this notion is typical of Freud’s throwaway sexism, but also of the immense tolerance and acceptance of a huge variety of sexual predilections implicit in his theory.]

Component instincts

Exhibitionism, voyeurism and cruelty are all apparent as perversions in potentia in children. Small boys proudly display the thing which gives them so much pleasure and which they pee through, their penis, which thus symbolises at least two types of infantile ‘mastery’.

Looking is the child’s earliest way of relating to the world. Once it has established its own erotogenic zones it is curious to see them in others: voyeurism.

Cruelty comes relatively easily to the childish nature, since the obstacle that brings the instinct for mastery to a halt at other people’s pain – namely a capacity for pity – is developed relatively late…

It may be assumed that the impulse of cruelty arises from the instinct for mastery and appears at a period of sexual life at which the genitals have not yet taken over their later role…

Children who distinguish themselves by special cruelty towards animals and playmates usually give rise to a just suspicion of an intense and precocious sexual activity arising from erotogenic zones…

The absence of the barrier of pity brings with it a danger that the connection between the cruel and the erotogenic instincts, thus established in childhood, may prove unbreakable in later life.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions show that early beating on the buttocks can easily be linked with erotogenic pleasure and form the basis of a fusion of the instincts of sex and cruelty in later life.

(5) The sexual researches of childhood

The instinct for knowledge

At the same time as children reach an early peak of sexuality (3 to 5 years) they display an instinct for knowledge. For Freud this is a sublimated form of the instincts for mastery and of seeing, voyeurism.

Psychoanalysis has shown that the first problem to awaken the childish thirst for knowledge are sexual problems, where do I come from? why does my wee-wee make give me pleasure?

The Riddle of the Sphinx

Freud gave this typically grandiose title to the core question of infancy: where do babies come from?

Sex differences aren’t important at this stage since boys assume all babies have penises.

Castration complex and penis envy [this section was added in 1915]

Only painfully do boys realise there’s a whole category of person who doesn’t have a penis and become petrified that they too might lose their mighty weapon. This he calls the castration complex.

The discovery that girls don’t have one gives many boys an enduringly low opinion of girls. For girls, the discovery that boys have this toy which they can play with induces in them penis envy and an enduring sense of being second-rate. Penis envy culminates in the girl’s wish to be a boy.

[The whole concept of ‘penis envy’ is probably the single most outrageous example of Freud, despite being a revolutionary on one level, nonetheless often reinscribing the sexist prejudices of his Victorian times in a new language.]

Theories of birth

All children speculate about where babies come from, especially if their mother is pregnant again. The central feature of most theories is that the baby is got by eating something (as in many fairy tales) and delivered through the anus.

Sadistic view of sexual intercourse

Many children see or overhear their parents making love. Children feel intense curiosity about it. It seems to have to do with some joint activity involving peeing or defecating. But many children pick up on the apparent violence involved (hard physical movements, screaming) and this is another way in which cruelty may attach itself to a child’s fantasy world and resurface in a person’s adult attitudes to sex.

Typical failure of infantile sexual researches

No matter how subtle the sexual theories of children they are invariably wrong; for how could they know about semen and ovaries? But the whole attempt is important to Freud as a symbol of the growing independence of the child. These researches:

constitute a first step towards taking an independent attitude in the world, and they imply a high degree of alienation of the child from the people in his environment who formerly enjoyed his complete confidence.

(6) The phases of development of the sexual organisation

Infantile sexual pleasure is the opposite in every way of ‘normal’ adult sexuality. It is essentially auto-erotic, and its component instincts are generally disconnected and scattered over all manner of activities: this is the meaning of polymorphous perversity.

Compare and contrast with adult sexuality aims at genital contact with some external object.

Pregenital organisations

I.e. sexual patterns before the instinct settles on the genitals:

1. The oral or cannibalistic phase: the aim is the incorporation of the sexual object, to eat it, to master it by ingesting it and stimulating the mucous membranes of the lips at the same time.

This is the origin of cannibalism in primitive peoples; of the primitive relic of a holy meal found in most religions; and of the higher intellectual activity of identification with a hero figure.

The primitive and intellectual functions are brought together in the Eucharist where we eat the body of Christ at the same time as we acknowledge Him lord and master.

2. The sadistic-anal phase: it is at this early stage that the sex instinct can be seen dividing into the active-passive division which characterises all later sexuality: the masculine drive to mastery, of defecating at our own time and pleasure; and the feminine pleasure derived from the anus; a sadistic and a passive pleasure intermingle.

Ambivalence

This duality is the basis of later ambivalence, a word coined by the Swiss psychiatrist Paul Eugen Bleuler (Bleuler was a prolific coiner of neologisms; he also invented the terms ‘schizophrenia’, ‘schizoid’ and ‘autism’).

Ambivalence became central to Freudian theory. It describes the holding of contradictory feelings, classically love and hate, towards the same object. Thus the child can both love but be terrified by their father.

Phallic phase

Freud distinguishes one last phase of infantile sexuality, where a love-object has emerged but the instinct in both boys and girls focuses on the penis alone, when boys develop pride in their penis and girls develop a painful sense of lack of penis, giving rise to penis envy (see comments above).

Diphasic choice of object

To summarise, Freud can claim that, completely contrary to the popular view, the distinctive thing about human sexuality is:

that it is present, in various forms, in infants from the earliest time
that it develops through a series of stages
that each of these stages carries the risk of arrest or error which deforms the child’s feelings and emotions around libido
that infantile sexual choices and activity are progressively repressed by reaction-formations (guilt, shame) by the age of about 5
that the entire set of experiences goes underground during the latency period (5 or 6 to puberty), is repressed and forgotten
that it resurfaces in a more explicitly sexual mode at puberty but with shapes and flavours conditioned by those earliest experiences

These infantile longings become the basis of later ‘affectionate’ feelings:

Their sexual aims have become mitigated and they now represent what may be described as the ‘affectionate current’ of sexual life. Only psychoanalytic investigation can show that behind this affection, admiration and respect there lie concealed the old sexual longings of the infantile component instincts which have now become unserviceable.

(7) The sources of infantile sexuality

These conclusions have been reached by the psychoanalysis of adult patients and the observation of children. Sexual excitation in children seems to arise from:

a) repetition of satisfaction achieved in normal organic processes (sucking, defecating)
b) through external stimulation of erotogenic zones
c) as the expression of fundamental instincts

Mechanical excitations

Children love swinging and being thrown and caught. Psychoanalysis has shown the recurrence of these sensations in adult dreams i.e. that they lay down patterns of the earliest pleasures, for example, fantasies of flying, air blowing against the skin and genitals.

It is well known that rocking is habitually used to induce sleep in restless children. The shaking produced by driving in carriages and later by railway travel exercises such a fascinating effect upon older children that every boy, at any rate, has at one time or another in his life wanted to be an engine driver.

It is a puzzling fact that boys take such an extraordinarily intense interest in things connected with railways and, at the age at which the production of fantasies is most active (shortly before puberty), use those things as the nucleus of a symbolism that is peculiarly sexual. A compulsive link of this kind between railway travel and sexuality is clearly derived from the pleasurable character of the sensations of movement.

In the event of repression, which turns so many childish preferences into their opposite, these same individuals, when they are adolescents or adults, will react to rocking or swinging with a feeling of nausea, will be terribly exhausted by a railway journey, or will be subject to attacks of anxiety on the journey.

Muscular activity

Many patients report their first memories of sexual excitation when romping, fighting and playing with playmates. Organised games are done at school to keep the body healthy and divert adolescent attention away from sexuality: Freud says what this is doing is channel sexuality back into one of its specific components.

Affective process

Powerful emotions have sexual effects. Terrified or anxious children may touch their genitals for reassurance. The erotic aspect of terror, fright and so on may become intimately associated with sexuality so that adults find fear and terror thrilling; either in real life, in fantasies of rape or masochistic punishment; or in imaginary worlds of books or the cinema.

Pathways of mutual influence

If the taking in of food gives rise to sexual pleasure then the reverse may be true. If healthy sexuality accompanies healthy eating, then disturbance of sexuality may lead to disturbance of nourishment. Thus a sexually disturbed hysteric may cease eating.

We can speculate about a whole network of pathways by which sexual instincts may be channeled both towards basic organic functions (for example, eating) and also rerouted towards higher functions (that is, sublimated, into thinking, planning, deciding).

Essay 3. The transformations of puberty

Infantile sexuality is polymorphously perverse and auto-erotic, finding pleasure as it learns to control and play with its own body.

The latency period sees the repression of sexuality in the name of various reaction-formations and sexuality’s sublimation into all kinds of games and fantasies.

With puberty the genitals become active and the subject actively seeks a love object outside itself. The new sexual aim of genital union appears and all the scattered erotogenic zones with their sex impulses become focused on, and subordinate to, genital union. Hopefully.

‘Normal’ sexuality consists of the uniting of the affectionate current (the sublimated remains of childhood sexuality) and the sensual current (mainstream libido).

So proper human sexual development is the coming together of affection/love and sex/pleasure, focussed on the genitals, to produce the ‘normal’ healthy adult. But, as always, there can be all kinds of hiccups along the way.

(1) The primacy of the genital zones and fore-pleasure

At puberty the sex organs grow and become ready for use. They can be excited in three ways:

excitation of the erotogenic zones from outside
from the organic interior
from mental life, the storehouse of impressions and ideas

Sexual excitement is felt in two ways:

perception of a mental tension of an extremely compelling type
physical preparation: erection of the penis, lubrication of the vagina

Sexual tension

How come sexual excitation is perceived as both pleasurable but also as an unpleasurable tension?

The mechanism of fore-pleasure

Touching or seeing clearly give rise to a) pleasure in themselves b) a perceived raising of sexual tension.

It is as if the fore-pleasure derived from stimulating the erotogenic zones is designed to increase the incentive to move onto the act of sexual union.

Initial pleasure thus disguises increasing tension (unpleasure) so you are led relentlessly on towards copulation, the aim of the entire organism.

The whole pattern leads up to orgasm and the release of the appropriate sexual substances. It would seem that orgasms are designed to extinguish libido, if only temporarily. They are the height of pleasure, the abrupt release of tension by the blood thronging the penis or clitoris rushing back into the body as the scrotum or vagina undergoes a series of muscular contractions perceived as pleasurable.

And this release of tension takes you right the way back to square one i.e. normal bodily function; the overwhelming compulsion towards sex evaporates, the rational mind returns to full control.

Freud divides the two stages into fore-pleasure and end-pleasure.

A distinction similar to the fore-pleasure offered by the telling of jokes which prepare you for the greater release of libidinal pressure (laughing).

[He uses the same division in his essay Creative Writers and Daydreaming to describe the fore-pleasure afforded by aesthetic or formal literary techniques which prepare the way for the deeper pleasure of sharing unconscious fantasies (tales of damnation and salvation, risk and adventure, Ian Fleming and Barbara Cartland).]

Dangers of fore-pleasure

But fore-pleasures are clearly yet another balancing act; the incentive of pleasure must be balanced by an increase of tension which successfully propels you towards sex. If the yield of orgasmic pleasure doesn’t live up to the growth in tension, you may become stuck at the fore-pleasure stage.

Obviously enough, you may be predisposed to this through any number of accidents which emerge in infancy. Extreme attachment to various types of fore-pleasure, to a particular erotogenic zone or to the mental equivalents of them (stimulation of the anus – masochism/inversion) may develop into full-blown perversion.

But these very complex combinations will have some influence over the shape of even the most healthy adult sexuality.

Not only the deviations from normal sexual life but its normal form as well are determined by the infantile manifestations of sexuality.

Again, if this is an accurate account of the growth of sexuality, it shows that it will be very hard to police, to draw a hard and fast line between ‘normal’ and perverse.

Freud is making the controversial claim that ‘the normal’ is built on ‘the perverse’ and most of its activities contain the seeds of perversity.

(2) The problem of sexual excitation

Part played by the sexual substances

Maybe sexual tension is produced, in men, by the accumulation of semen in the testicles? Kraft-Ebing thought so. But if so, how can this account for sexual excitation in children and women?

Importance of the internal sexual organs

Arguing against that theory, observation of castrated men shows that sexual excitement continues to operate with no semen at all.

Chemical theory

Freud speculates that the key role is played by substances released by the sex glands. In his day there was no convincing biological theory of sex.

The discovery of the class of chemicals called ‘hormones’ (at around this time, 1905, in England) paved the way to our present understanding of how sex works.

It’s worth pointing out, though, that even today one of the great mysteries is: Why Sex? And, as Steve Jones says, If Sex, why only two sexes?

(3) The libido theory

Libido is:

a quantitively variable force which serves as a measure of processes and transformations occurring in the field of sexual excitation

A kind of electricity. Freud imagines that libido is distinguished from the other main instinct, hunger, chemically. Libido is a chemically unique force. Psychoanalysis has shown that libido is derived not just from the genitals but from all sorts of organs, including the skin.

We thus reach the idea of a quantity of libido, to the mental representation of which we give the name of ego-libido, and whose production, increase or diminution, distribution and displacement should afford us possibilities for explaining the psychosexual phenomena observed.

Psychoanalysis can only observe ego-libido as it becomes attached to objects i.e. becomes object-libido, as it is attached to, detached from, swapped around various objects (for example, images, fixations, words and ideas) directing the subject’s activity towards sex. For the act of sex, in particular orgasm, results in the temporary extinction of libido.

Psychoanalysis observes the outflowing of libido from the ego and its return thereto.

The ego acts as a psychic reservoir for libido.

In the earliest phases every ego is narcissistic, that is, focusses libido on itself (during the auro-erotic stages of infantile sexuality). Only later does the ego develop the ability to project energy onto external objects and Freud (or his English translators) label these object-cathexes.

The slightest damage to the organism (for example, illness) results in a return to infantile narcissism, as do psychic wounds.

Narcissism is also evoked by particularly self-contained objects, by aloof women, by cats, and by babies (see Freud’s 1914 essay On Narcissism).

In later editions of the Three Essays Freud attacks Jung for watering down libido to make it mean psychical instinctive forces in general.

But the whole point of having a distinct sexual instinct, chemically differentiated from all other instincts, whose special operations can be studied through observation and analysis, in fact all Freud’s efforts and theories, are destroyed if you thus throw out the distinguishing sexual element of libido theory.

(4) The differentiation between men and women

Libido is masculine i.e. active, in character.

In levels of autoerotism and masturbation boys and girls are similar, though girls develop the reaction-formations of shame and disgust more easily than boys (i.e. mental forces which damp down their libido).

Freud suggests three meanings of masculine and feminine:

passive versus active personalities
biological i.e. defined by sex organs
sociological i.e. observing the actual behaviour of men and women

Freud uses masculine and feminine to denote active and passive. To say libido is masculine means it is, in this value system, always active. As to the sociological aspect:

Such observation shows that in human beings pure masculinity or femininity is not to be found either in a psychological or biological sense. Every individual, on the contrary, displays a mixture of the character-traits belonging to their own and to the opposite sex and shows a combination of activity and passivity…

Without the fundamental idea of innate bisexuality I think it would scarcely be possible to arrive at an understanding of the sexual manifestations that are actually to be observed in men and women.

Leading zones in men and women

The clitoris is what little girls masturbate, as boys the penis. Both become erect i.e. engorged with blood during excitation. But Freud thinks that at puberty, whereas boys receive a fresh wave of sexual excitement, girls undergo a profound sexual repression; this takes the form of moving their chief erotogenic zone from the clitoris to the vagina.

The ‘normal’ woman has thus repressed her masculine active organ (the clitoris) in the name of vaginal excitation designed for sex and procreation:

The fact that women change their leading erotogenic zone in this way, together with the wave of repression at puberty which, as it were, puts away their childish masculinity, are the chief determinants of the greater proneness of women to neurosis and especially to hysteria.

[This is, of course, complete rubbish. Women retain their chief sexual excitation through the clitoris. The rediscovery and widespread publicisation of clitoridal sexuality was one of the great achievements of the feminists in the 1960s and 1970s. By the 1980s I was well aware that many women cannot orgasm through vaginal stimulation alone but need clitoral stimulation as well and I think (I hope) this has now become common knowledge. Thus Freud’s theorising away of the clitoris, along with all his theories about the inevitable inferiority of women, are the grossest example of his simply recasting the patriarchal prejudices of his time in a new language.]

(5) The finding of an object

[Expanded in the 1915 essay On Narcissism.]

A person may love:

1. according to the anaclitic (attachment) type:

the woman who feeds him
the man who protects him

2. according to the narcissistic type:

what he himself is
what he himself was
what he himself would like to be i.e. an idol
someone who was once part of themselves i.e. a baby

Suckling at the breast is the prototype of all pleasure and love.

From 1915 Freud introduces the idea of narcissism into his theory. The physical pleasure of suckling at the breast is now accompanied by the psychic pleasure of self-love, the earliest attachment of libido to the ego, the ego to itself, as it grows and comes to consciousness.

After puberty all love objects will partake of these two earliest loves; all love objects will have an element of narcissism and of attachment (cupboard) love.

The finding of a love-object is always a refinding of this original pleasure. A recapturing of what we once had. Falling in love is always a return to lost happiness.

The sexual object during early infancy

Everyone’s first love is for their mother. Freud goes further to say everyone’s first sexual object is their mother. Mothers stroke and kiss and caress babies, thus awaking the erotogenic zones and sex instincts. There is nothing perverse in this. The mother is only fulfilling her task in teaching the child how to love. Later in life, the former baby will itself stroke and kiss and caress a love object. How else does it learn to do this except by unconscious recall of its own childhood caresses?

Infantile anxiety

Infantile anxiety is caused by the loss of the person the infant loves. They are afraid of the dark because in the dark they cannot see the person they love. An infant who turns his love/libido into anxiety when it cannot be satisfied is behaving exactly like an adult neurotic.

The barrier against incest

‘Normal’ development means the transmutation of the early sexual attachment to the mother into ‘affection’ i.e. aim-inhibited libido. One of life’s great tasks is overcoming this love and learning to reattach it to socially acceptable objects.

This happens partly due to internal psychic development but is hugely reinforced by social and moral pressures. In Totem and Taboo (1913) Freud writes about the fundamental taboo against incest which is, in his view, the beginnings of society and morality.

Nonetheless, incest remains a possibility in the unconscious mind, in dreams and fantasies.

Puberty is particularly rich in fantasies as the adolescent tries out various combinations of object and experiments with its new strong feelings obsessively in the mind, before attempting to put them into practice.

Some fantasies are particularly common: the adolescent’s fantasies of overhearing his parents having sex; of having been seduced in infancy; of having been threatened with castration; fantasies of life in the womb; and the so-called Family Romance, the fantasy of being the abandoned child of rich beautiful parents – a rationalisation of infantile perception of parental omnipotence.

In overcoming renewed childhood sexual fantasies about his parents the adolescent also has to make the crucial break with them; to rebel against parental authority, particularly the father.

Some people never make it and remain in thrall to their parents. Many women never properly escape and remain as loving and passive as they were in childhood. Girls have a tendency to rebel against their sexual destiny, against sexuality itself and to flee into exaggerated affection for siblings or parents. To become virgin carers.

It falls to some men to become the complete rebels against authority which are required by the furtherance of the race.

After-effects of infantile object-choice

These powerful loves of childhood cast a pall over the rest of our lives. Women often look for older, more mature, authoritative husbands who are quite obviously father-substitutes. Men, even more often, are looking for the unconditional love of their mothers.

Prevention of inversion

It seems that the presence in our childhood of the same sex parent as a figure of a) resented authority and b) sexual rivalry, contributes to our early love for the opposite sex parent, all of which is motivated by the hormones at puberty.

But if the family unit is disturbed, if one of the parents is lacking, this is a powerful accidental stimulus to homosexuality (innate predispositions aside).

SUMMARY

* Neuroses are the mirror image of perversions: both represent aberrations from normal sexuality. Neurotic symptoms are generally a reinvoking of infantile perversions, at least in fantasy and transferred symptoms, as libido flees an unbearable sexual situation.

* Perversions are the fixation of the libido onto particular components of sexuality at the expense of normal heterosexual genital union.

A disposition to perversions is an original and universal disposition of the human sexual instinct and ‘normal’ sexual behaviour is developed out of it as a result of organic changes and psychical inhibitions occurring in the course of maturation.

* Any departure from established sexuality is therefore an instance of developmental inhibition and infantilism, a regression.

* The sexual instinct is put together from various factors and, in the perversions, these components fall apart.

* ‘Normal’ sexuality integrates these instincts and submits them to socially-condoned genital aims.

* Children bring sexuality into the world with them. After an efflorescence of sexuality from ages 2 to 5 the sex instinct undergoes a repression, entering the latency period. Sexual feelings continue during this period but rerouted:

a) to develop secondary characteristics such as affection and friendship (aim-inhibited libido)
b) into ‘reaction-formations’ to sexual activities, which are now perceived as dirty, shameful, disgusting and so on, into a predisposition to receive moral education. These reaction-formations will be critical in establishing the channels along which libido can flow after puberty; too strong and they will react badly to the arrival of puberty and real sexual situations, causing all sorts of havoc, not least the flight into illness which characterises neurosis.

* Children develop through three phases: oral (breastfeeding), anal-sadistic in which ambivalence emerges, and phallic, part of which is the Oedipus complex. Then it is all buried in the latency period.

* The diphasic onset of sexuality i.e. in two stages, allowing for a latency period during which the socialising process can get going, seems to be a precondition for humanity’s civilised achievements. But, being so long and precarious, the latency period also explains mankind’s predisposition to neurosis and mental illness, and to the various failures and perversions of the sex instinct.

* The perversions of infancy, the finding of pleasure in erotogenic zones, returns with puberty but subordinated, as fore-pleasures, to the great act of copulation itself.

* Children find their first sex object in the opposite sex parent but this lust is repressed and redirected by the primeval psychological taboo against incest.

Factors interfering with development:

Every step on this long path of development can become a point of fixation, every juncture in this involved combination can be an occasion for a dissociation of the sexual instinct.

Constitution and heredity

Nature/nurture, which comes first? Imponderable. Except to say that in families with a predisposition to sexual failure, the men will tend to be perverts, the women, “true to the tendency of their sex to repression”, will become negative perverts i.e. hysterics.

Further modification

Whatever the hereditary predisposition, it is clear the sex instincts undergo further modifications:

Perversion: at puberty the libido may find the genital zone too weak for the tasks asked of it, and so revert to fixation on earlier infantile perverse zones.

Repression: the instincts in question are repressed and travel underground until they can find their expression disguised as hysterical symptoms. They can have perfectly normal sex lives but accompanied by psychological problems.

Sublimation: excessive sexual dispositions can be redirected into socially acceptable fields, thus yielding greater psychic efficiency and providing a strong evolutionary advantage. Maybe this is the reason why sublimation is the basis of much human mental life.

Reaction-formation: the building up during the latency period of strong counter-forces to perverse instincts, abetted by education which is designed to channel sexuality into ‘normal’ ends.

What we describe as a person’s character is built up to a considerable extent from the material of sexual excitations and is composed of instincts that have been fixed since childhood, of constructions achieved by means of sublimation, and of other constructions, employed for effectively holding in check perverse impulses which have been recognised as unutilisable.

Credit

All Freud’s works have complicated histories in translation. The Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality were first translated into English in 1953 as part of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. References in this blog are to the revised version, published in 1977 as part of ‘On Sexuality’, Volume 7 of the Pelican Freud Library.

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by Simon on June 19, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Psychoanalysis

Tagged Affective process, allergic reaction, ambivalence, anal phase, anal-expulsive personality, anal-retentive personality, ancient Greece, ancient Greeks, Anna O, anxiety, auto-erotic stage, auto-erotism, Bacchic orgies, Barbara Cartland, Beyond The Pleasure Principle, bisexuality, bisexuals, Bleuler, cannibalism, castration anxiety, castration complex, cathartic method, character, childhood sexuality, Christ, Christianity, Cinderella, clitoridal sexuality, clitoris, conscience, copulation, cruelty, cunnilingus, Darwin, defecating, defence mechanism, degeneracy, deviations, Diphasic choice of object, dreams, Electra complex, end-pleasure, Eros and Thanatos, erotogenic zone, erotogenic zones, erotogenicity, Eucharist, exhibitionism, Fairy Tales, Fantasy, father-substitute, fellatio, Feminism, fetishism, flight into illness, fore-pleasure, Frank Sulloway, Freud, gay, genital stage, genital union, genitals, glans, Goethe, Gradiva, guilt, Havelock Ellis, heterosexuality, history, homosexuality, homosexuals, hormones, human psychology, hysteria, hysterical symptoms, Ian Fleming, incest, incest taboo, infantile amnesia, Infantile anxiety, infantile masturbation, infantile narcissism, infantile object-choice, infantile sexual aim, infantile sexuality, instincts, internal sexual organs, Inversion, inverts, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jensen, Joe Orton, John Ruskin, jokes, Josef Breuer, Jung, kissing, latency phase, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, LGBTQ+, libido, libido theory, Literature, love, Lust, Marquis de Sade, marriage, masculine sexual activity, masochism, masturbation, mons Veneris, morality, neuroses, neurosis, normal sexuality, Oedipus Complex, oral fixation, oral phase, Oscar Wilde, overvaluation of the love object, Paul Eugen Bleuler, penis, penis envy, perversion, perversions, perversity, Phallic phase, phallic stage, phases of development, physiology, polymorphous perversion, polymorphous perversity, polymorphously perverse disposition, Priapus, primitive societies, procreation, psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, psychoanalysts, psychogenesis, psychological taboo, Psychology, Puberty, rape, reaction-formation, reaction-formations, religious life, repression, Richard von Kraft-Ebing, sadism, sadistic-anal phase, sado-masochism, seduction theory, semen, sex, sex instinct, sex organs, sexual energy, sexual excitation, sexual inhibitions, sexual intercourse, sexual latency, sexual objects, sexual tension, sexuality, shame, Sigmund Freud, Sociology, sodomy, Steve Jones, sublimation, sucking, suckling, Superego, the diphasic onset of sexuality, the ego, The Interpretation of Dreams, the latency period, the libido, The Riddle of the Sphinx, Three Essays On The Theory of Sexuality, thumb sucking, Totem and Taboo, transformations of puberty, transvestites, vagina, vaginal excitation, Victorian age, voyeurism, W.H. Auden, Western literature

Posted by Simon on June 19, 2023

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Freud’s Antiquity: Object, Idea, Desire @ the Freud Museum

The Freud Museum

The Freud Museum is located at 20 Maresfield Gardens, London NW3 5SX, a six or seven minute walk from Finchley Road tube station.

It’s the house which Freud’s English colleagues and supporters bought for him and his family to come to after the Nazis annexed Austria and Freud’s lifelong home town of Vienna in March 1938, forcing him to flee the country.

Freud himself was already very ill with the throat cancer which would kill him 18 months later in September 1939. But after his death Maresfield Gardens remained the Freud family home until his daughter, Anna Freud, herself a pioneer of child psychoanalysis, died in 1982. The house opened as a museum four years later.

It’s a fascinating place to visit at any time, light and clean and airy, with a comprehensive bookshop at the back, opening into a modest, leafy London garden.

But the centrepiece of the museum is the ground floor where Freud recreated the study from his house in Vienna and which has been lovingly restored to how it was in his time. You can see the desk where he wrote so many great works, his bookshelves packed with leather-bound volumes of psychology, history and literature.

Freud’s desk at the Freud Museum, London (photo by the author)

You can see the famous couch, smothered in dark patterned rugs, where his patients came and lay and free associated their thoughts, projecting their hopes and fears and fantasies onto the inventor of psychoanalysis, who sat quietly listening.

Freud’s couch at the Freud Museum (photo by the author)

So far, so Victorian, in décor and furnishings.

But maybe the most striking and unexpected aspect of the room is the astonishing number of antiquities scattered everywhere. There are half a dozen or more glass cases packed with ancient statuettes and figurines, vases and jugs, there are busts on platforms and stands, lined up along shelves all round the room, and a double row of small antique figurines on his desk right in front of him, in his field of vision every day as he either wrote or listened to his patients.

Freud was an obsessive collector of ancient figures and antiquities all his life, building up a collection of several thousand by the time he died, and literally hundreds are stacked on shelves, in cases, on mantlepieces and stands. Everywhere you look, in every direction, hundreds of ancestral presences sit silently, looking out at you with a cold timeless regard, from very angle.

Another view of Freud’s study, showing desk (in the foreground), shelves and glass cases packed with antiquities

And that’s what this exhibition is about. It’s a small but powerful exploration of Freud’s lifelong fascination with archaeology and antiquity and the role they played in his writings, his practice, in his deepest formulations of the new ‘science’ of psychoanalysis which he invented and developed through 40 intensely productive years, and in the successive models of the human mind which he developed, refined and publicised.

Freudian reservations

Let me explain my position regarding Freud. Very like the other two world-shattering geniuses, Karl Marx and Charles Darwin, Freud’s influence is so enormous and all-pervasive, so underpins almost everybody’s modern notions of human nature and our behaviour in the world, that it’s more or less irrelevant whether most or all of it is ‘true’ or not.

The various versions of his theories and the hundreds of insights they generate have provided mental maps, sociological constructs amounting to an entire worldview which we all now inhabit, thronged with insights, phrases and terminology (Freudian slip, the unconscious, the ego, being repressed, ‘anal’ behaviour, Oedipal conflict) which are freely used in newspapers, magazines and conversation.

With regard to the psychoanalytical method – the talking cure – my understanding is that many scientific trials have been undertaken to assess the efficacy of psychoanalytical therapy compared with other depth psychologies, with more orthodox psychiatric treatment, with cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), and with drugs. But the attempt is problematic for quite a few reasons. For a start no two people are alike so what works for one patient might simply not work for another. It’s impossible or very challenging to set up a double-blind, controlled study.

For another thing, Freudian psychoanalysis doesn’t necessarily aim at a fixed outcome. CBT may cure a symptom which is preventing you from living your life happily, but Freudians would say it’s only addressed a symptom, not the underlying cause. Freudian psychoanalysis can be open-ended, can indeed last the whole of the rest of your life – which leads cynics and critics to attack it as a money-making scam, hooking the vulnerable into an endless sequence of sessions, at an exorbitant fee.

I was offered and took depth therapy on the NHS in my 20s, and know lots of people who’ve had extended psychotherapy of one sort or another. It didn’t cure me of anything but it certainly helped to be listened to, at length, discussing issues and memories which became quite painful to recall.

Nut even then, in the 1980s, there were lots of varieties and schools and flavours of psychotherapy and my understanding is that the range of practices and theories underlining them has continued to grow. But my understanding is that Freud invented the paradigm of counselling, of extended therapy which aims to dig deep to resolve deep psychological problems, on which all other schools of therapy are based.

Another line of attack is the number of scandals which have come to light about abusive analysts, drunk analysts, power-mad analysts, and so on. The analyst-analysand (therapist-patient) relationship does give the therapist an unprecedented amount of power to steer and control the emotional lives of the very vulnerable. But my understanding is that this kind of thing, like the abuse of power in many other positions (in the church, in sports coaching) can be reported and handled by the relevant professional bodies as well as the police and legal system.

Another line of attack comes from feminists who, right from the start, pointed out the hair-raisingly sexist nature of almost everything Freud wrote and protested his engrained view of women as biologically, physically and mentally inferior to men. You can’t deny it, it’s there on almost every page, along with entire essays dedicated to proving women’s inferiority. Feminist Freudians have tried to overwrite concepts like the notorious ‘penis envy’ which he thought girls and women suffered from, but in this and many other concepts and assumptions, Freud remains rebarbatively sexist.

Then there’s the earliest and most unimaginative argument against Freud, that his obsession with sex, sexual drives, libido, anal eroticism, fetishism and so on prove that he himself was a sex maniac, a pervert, and so discredit the theory. You can see why a one-sided reading of his earlier theory, especially the early focus on the sexuality of children, would trigger this attack. But, for me, it betrays ignorance of the wider context of the theory which, especially in its later, expanded form, is just as interested in aggression, anger, depression, group psychology, and spends a lot of time exploring the idea of the conscience, the part of the mind which holds us to high standards and punishes us for our failures.

And most powerful of all is the accusation that, although many of his patients in the 1890s told him they had suffered real, physical sexual abuse as children, he was so disturbed by its apparent ubiquity that he couldn’t countenance it, couldn’t accept it; and that one of his central claims – that children fantasise about sexual activity (sex with the parent of the opposite sex, while hating the parent of the same sex, the insight he named the Oedipus complex) – was a denial of the reality of child abuse; that Freud made what we now regard as the cardinal sin when treating child abuse, which is to refuse to listen and refuse to believe what his patients were telling him.

If true, this was obviously shameful for a physician, sworn to help his patients; but, more powerfully, successive critics have argued that this rejection of actual real-world abuse compromises his entire theory, leading to the accusation that the entire theory is based on a self-serving lie. His rejection of the fact of child abuse and transformation of it into the realm of infantile fantasy may be the most difficult accusation to counter and one which resonates to this day.

So I hope I’m aware of the battery of arguments which can be brought against Freud the man, against his theories, against his personal attitudes, against the inefficacy and/or luxury nature of his type of therapy, of the disproveability of the efficacy of the talking cure, along with plentiful historical examples of its abuse.

But, in my opinion, although many of these attacks deserve to be taken seriously, especially the final one, none of them can really dent the incalculable impact, for good or ill, which Freud has had on the vast shared set of values, ideas, concepts, phrases and ideas which we call Western culture.

Ancient figurine of the sphinx, central player in the legend of Oedipus, symbolising for Freud, as for generations of thinkers before him, the riddle of human existence, but which Freud boldly (arrogantly) thought he had solved

Until Freud’s time most psychologists, most philosophers and lawyers and, following them, most people thought of the human mind as basically Rational, a thinking machine which is aware of its own thoughts, can order and control them, home to Reason which guides our behaviour to rational, definable ends.

If people behaved irrationally then experts directly involved with human nature, such as philosophers or theologians or lawyers, developed explanations and excuses for this falling away from Ideal reason, ideas of possession by outside forces, or temporary madness and so on, notions which explained away people’s irrational behaviour in such a way as to preserve the basic premise that man is the Rational Animal.

In the Christian tradition which dominated western thought for a thousand years, and which in fact predates Christianity, going back through Stoic philosophy for centuries before Christ (cf Cicero and Seneca) – in this immense tradition, human beings have been endowed with reason by the Creator of the universe and, although this spark of Divine Reason may sometimes be clouded by ‘passions’ or frenzy or extreme emotion or drink or drugs, these are temporary aberrations from the basically rational soul which God has given each of us.

Freud’s theory blasts this model to smithereens. By the 1890s there had been plenty of secular thinkers, especially in the life sciences which were swiftly converted to Darwin’s revolutionary theory of evolution by natural selection, but no-one who undermined the old models of a God-given, rational mind so completely.

For Freud the mind is a battlefield, a site of endless conflict between conflicting psychological forces, drives, urges, instincts, wishes, dreams, fantasies, angers, anxieties and many more. His fundamental insight was that the human mind, far from growing into a stable, mature and reliable tool for managing our way through the world, is a dynamic, ever-changing site of tremendous psychic conflict.

Because – second big idea – the majority of mental activity is unconscious. We are only dimly aware or not aware at all, of the tremendous forces, urges, drives and so on which motivate us every waking moment and haunt us in our dreams. Why do so many people behave so irrationally? Why are so many people in the grip of compulsive behaviour which they know is self-destructive (smoking, alcohol, over-eating, drugs, risk-taking, outbursts of psychopathic anger or helpless despair) yet feel powerless to change?

Because we are driven by tremendously powerful unconscious forces which we repress and prevent ever emerging into full consciousness.

As Freud stumbled deeper into these discoveries in the 1980s, trying to make sense of what his clinical patients were telling him, engaging in the slightly dubious ‘self analysis’ of his own dreams and memories and feelings, and corresponding with his friend and intellectual confidant Wilhelm Fliess, he threw again and again used metaphors around the idea of having to dig down below the level of conscious thought, having to excavate layer after layer to get down to the basic fears, anxieties and so on which seemed to be driving his patients.

“Thus it came about that in this, the first full-length analysis of a hysteria undertaken by me, I arrived at a procedure which I later developed into a regular method and employed deliberately. This procedure was one of clearing away the pathogenic psychical material layer by layer, and we liked to compare it with the technique of excavating a buried city.”
(Studies on Hysteria, 1895)

Again and again Freud referred to the work he was doing with his patients to try and rediscover their childhood memories in order to free them of their adult illnesses, and the parallel work he was doing on himself, digging deeper and deeper into his own repressed memories, as forms of archaeology.

And it’s this, the meeting place between Freud’s continua use of the metaphor of excavation and archaeology, and the ancient objects derived from the actual practice of real world archaeology which Freud obsessively collected and packed into his study and invoked in his writings from the start to the end of his career as a thinker and writer – which this exhibition addresses and explores. Which it excavates.

The exhibition

The exhibition space is upstairs. It’s only one room but, considering the ideas whose origin it describes and investigates went on to transform all human culture and to underpin how almost everyone alive today conceives of human nature and of themselves, it feels like it contains an entire world. An atom bomb of ideas.

Installation view of ‘Freud’s Antiquity: Object, Idea, Desire’ at the Freud Museum, showing three of the six themes and their display cases, being Oedipus, Charcot and Dreams. Note the small number of items on display. But it isn’t the number of artefacts, it’s the ideas behind them that fill the room.

Exhibition structure

The exhibition selects twenty-five key objects – antiquities, figurines and statuettes, books and prints – each normally hidden from view, extracted from the clutter of Freud’s study for special attention and investigation at close range, to illustrate how Freud’s collecting was bound up with his development of the concepts and methods of psychoanalysis.

The exhibition is divided into six themes, which I’ll briefly list here then explore in greater detail:

Oedipus:
Charcot
Dreams
Gradiva
Totem and Taboo
Moses

1. Oedipus: the riddle of desire

Inevitably the narrative must start with Oedipus who gave his name to Freud’s notion of the Oedipus Complex. This is in fact just one part of the process of growth and maturing which Freud thought all boys go through. At around the age of 5 all boys have grown enough, and experienced enough pre-pubescent sexual feeling, to sense that they want to be very close to their mother and come to resent their father’s possession of her. In the unconscious mind, the boy wants to have sex with his mother and kill his father. Freud introduced the idea in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) and coined the term in his paper A Special Type of Choice of Object made by Men (1910).

The Oedipus story is super well-known ad previous thinkers had interpreted it and its symbolism. Freud used it to dramatise what he saw as a universal condition, a universal experience of all growing boys which they have to completely suppress in order to mature properly, but whose repression leaves its marks on the adult and, in some men, is constantly threatening to return, so that it has to be staved off with harsh mental defences which sometimes result in florid mental beliefs, patterns and behaviour.

But early on in the myth of Oedipus he has to solve the riddle put to him by the sphinx and so the story had another significance for Freud: for trying to excavate down into the psyche of each patient could also be described as solving their riddle.

Objects on display

On display from Freud’s collection are six objects connected with Oedipus, three vases, a statuette, an amulet and a print of Ingres’ classic painting of Oedipus and the Sphinx.

2. Charcot: from iconography to archaeology

Jean-Martin Charcot was a French neurologist and professor of anatomical pathology. Freud went to study with him in Paris in 1885 (when Freud, born in 1856, was 29). Charcot used hypnosis to treat patients who displayed physical symptoms with no organic cause, a class of patients categorised as ‘hysterics’. His work made the subject of ‘hysteria’ a popular one for doctors interested in psychology across Europe. A book was published containing comprehensive descriptions of Charcot’s work and numerous prints of his hypnosis of hundreds of patients.

A Clinical Lesson at the Salpetriere. Print of engraving by E. Pirodon after the oil painting by Andre Brouillet (1888)

But this stuff about Charcot is really here because Charcot was about the surface. There was a fair amount of showmanship in Charcot’s demonstrations, made to auditoriums full of admiring students, and Freud came to dislike the way Charcot exaggerated the patient’s superficial symptoms in order to cure them.

In reaction against Charcot, Freud set off in the opposite direction. His cures would be conducted not in public but in private; they would not be wonder cures achieved in one flashy demonstration, but the result of sustained engagement over a prolonged period of time. And above all they would not work by bringing florid symptoms (hysteria, weeping, sobbing, moaning, screaming) to the surface of the human mind, but quite the opposite, entail a systematic, extended, and ever-deeper excavation down through layer after layer of the human psyche.

Which is why the exhibition places next to the Charcot print a copy of the big leather-bound volume of Ilios, the huge work in which the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann described his discovery of the legendary city of Troy (in western Turkey). Freud was going to be an archaeologist of the human psyche.

3. Dreams: decoding the way to the wish

From ancient times through the Middle Ages and Renaissance, dreams were given a special place as omens, as warnings from the gods, as indicators of good or bad fortune for the dreamer, and thousands of books had been written interpreting the universal symbolism of dreams. In 1880s and 1890s scientific circles the view was the opposite: that dreams are the meaningless by-products of physiological processes of the mind.

In his breakthrough book, The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud proposed a middle way: that dreams do have a meaning, a symbolic purpose, but that they are not universal to mankind. Each dream has a meaning which is specific to the dreamer. Each dreamer’s mind selects images which symbolise individual and specific hopes, fears etc.

Each dream is a wish fulfilment but what exactly the wish is, and how it is converted into particular images, can only be established by lengthy, in-depth excavation down through the layers of the conscious mind and into each patient’s unconscious.

The display case shows an ancient wine jug, a bust and a warrior figurine. The Interpretation of Dreams includes scores of Freud’s own dreams. In one of them his wife Martha gives him a drink from an Etruscan cinerary urn like the one on display here. The urn represents satisfaction of a basic instinct (thirst) but also symbolises the wished-for return of an object like it which he had given away then regretted.

It’s a fairly simple demonstration of the way we humans give objects multiple everyday or conscious meanings, and then how images of the objects are recombined in the unconscious to emerge in strange combinations, accompanied by sometimes haunting, sometimes terrifying, sometimes blissful emotional feelings, in our dreamlife.

4. Gradiva: tracing the pathways of archaeological desire

Gradiva plays a special role in the history of Freud’s writing about writing i.e. about literature, which he was to come to have such a seismic influence on. In 1907 he published his first full-length analysis of a literary text, a novel by the German writer and poet Wilhelm Jensen titled Gradiva: A Pompeian Fantasy which had been published in Vienna in 1902, so it was quite a current work.

Straightaway the word Pompeii should alert us to the fact that the book is going to play straight into Freud’s fascination with ancient ruins. Freud refers to the relevance of Pompeii, where secrets had been long buried and were now being excavated and restored to the light, to his own concepts of psychoanalytical therapy, in his letters to Fliess in the mid-1890s, and he actually visited Pompeii itself in 1902.

In this novel the hero, Norbert Hanold, who is studying archaeology, ‘falls in love with’ (becomes obsessed with) an ancient bas-relief of a young woman striding along in a Roman toga.

Cast relief of ‘Gradiva’ (1908)

Since the relief was found as part of the excavation of the buried city of Pompeii (just recently being unearthed) the hero decides to travel to Italy, and to the archaeological site, to find this woman, or her spirit, or her reincarnation.

So you can straightaway see how the novel is about a man in the grip of a delusion and a compulsion, psychological territory Freud was striving to make his own during the later 1890s and early 1900s.

In the end, after failing to find the modern avatar of the beautiful statue anywhere in the real world and after some painful self-analysis, Hanold comes to realise that who the woman reminds him of is a childhood friend who lives opposite him back home, returns, tells her of his love etc.

For Freud the novel is rich in confirmations of his theories. The hero had youthful erotic feelings for this neighbour but his strict upbringing forbade him from acknowledging them. Instead he repressed them and sublimated them i.e. redirected his psychic energy into the socially acceptable medium of studying archaeology and ancient history.

When he came across the bas relief as part of his studies, he was seized, possessed by something about it which he couldn’t define. Well, that’s because he had completely repressed his childhood longing for his sweetheart. the feeling remained but divorced from its source. So the bas relief became what Freud calls a compromise formation i.e. a real-world object which can ‘satisfy’ his libidinal drive and desire, but in a socially acceptable mode (i.e. a perfectly natural part of his adult studies).

The obsession he develops with it, however, obviously goes beyond the bounds of the ‘normal’ and this is like the patients who came to see Freud, people in the grip of obsessive, compulsive, neurotic thoughts or behaviour which they couldn’t explain and couldn’t shake off.

It also plays right into Freud’s hands that the hero is depicted as having numerous florid and bizarre dreams, thus allowing Freud to apply the insights he’d recorded in The Interpretation of Dreams to show how Hanold’s dreams were continually urging acknowledgement of his real-world love, but were blocked from doing so by the forces of repression and so emerged in complex combinations of symbols and imagery.

And the way the heroine, Zoe, cares for Hanold after his breakdown, slowly coaxing him back to health and to accept his love for her, is comparable to the psychoanalytic method Freud had devised, the famous listening cure.

Objects on display

On another level, the novel is about the journey of a repressed north European to the warm south which has, for centuries, symbolised release into and acceptance a world of sensual pleasures which we uptight northerners deny ourselves in order to function in our advanced capitalist economies.

The excavations of Herculaneum and Pompeii had unearthed a surprising number of explicitly sexual objects, specifically depictions of the erect penis, often with wings, a magical object worthy of veneration or kept as a lucky charm or amulet. The fact that this is still regarded as shocking or bizarre shows you how far we are from the ancient world’s frank acceptance of the facts of sex.

Six phallic objects and amulets from various cultures of antiquity, part of Freud’s collection. You are free to regard these as sinister, sexually suggestive, funny (as I do), or as examples of the ancient world’s frank acknowledgement of the importance of sexuality in human life, which had to be censored, suppressed and policed in industrialised, capitalist societies. At the same time, this or any other view you have is quite obviously a projection of your own personal ideas, memories, associations and patterns of thought onto simple, cold, inanimate objects, and it is this power of mental projection onto objects which it is part of the aim of the exhibition to both explore and to demonstrate.

5. Totem and Taboo: the search for origins

Another criticism of Freud is that he quite early on strayed beyond his area of supposed expertise i.e. psychology (theory of the mind) and psychiatry (practical cure of mental illness) into subjects quite beyond his speciality. And it’s true. He not only produced a substantial body of literary and art criticism (essays and book-length studies) but did the same in anthropology and theology.

In 1913 he published Totem and Taboo. It was partly a response to his protegé Carl Jung who was rebelling against Freud’s insistence on the centrality of repressed sexuality and the Oedipus Complex in all human development. Therefore it ups the stakes by asserting that the Oedipus Complex is not only a part of the normal development of every boy, but explains a founding event in actual, real-world history.

Freud asserted that the founding event of ancient societies was an actual parricide, where the sons of the chief rose up and killed him, then claimed access to the queen or women of the harem. A sexual rebellion. But, crippled by guilt at murdering their father, the sons then set about repressing all memory of it, denying and blocking anything which would indicate their great crime. And this is the origin of the compulsive taboos which contemporary anthropologists observed in so many ‘primitive’ societies.

Freud then goes on to make the grandiose claim that this Primal Event was the foundation stone of all religion, morality, society and related art.

Objects on display

On display are copies of ‘The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion’, the hugely influential compendium of myths, legends gathered from all round the world by the Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer, which influenced a generation of writers and thinkers. A two-volume edition had been published in 1890 but Freud owned the twelve volumes of the third edition, published serially from 1906 to 1915. His copies, some of which are on display here, are covered with pencilled notes and he incorporated much material from the book into Totem.

Amusingly, Freud sent a copy of Totem and Taboo to Fraser, who didn’t deign to reply.

The curators don’t mention this but my understanding is that almost every aspect of Totem and Taboo has been disproved. It very obviously represents a kind of imperial ambition by Freud to move his theory out of the world of private practice and discreet papers written for specialist journals, and stake a claim to making major discoveries in history, anthropology, the origins of religion, morality and so on.

Although the specific claims made about ‘primitive’ societies being comprehensively rejected by actual anthropologists, Freud successfully made a new myth about himself and his role as explainer of everything. It was the kind of grandiose ambition which drove one-time followers like Jung, and others like Adler and Rank, to secede from the official psychoanalytic movement and set up their own variations.

A digression on Freud’s sociological writings

This world-claiming ambition, this tendency to stray way beyond his area of expertise and set himself up as a master explainer of society is evident in many of Freud’s later works. In The Future of An Illusion (1927) he sets out to disprove religious belief by rewriting every religious belief and practice in terms of psychoanalytic terminology (repression of sexual urges, ‘sublimated’ into love of an all-powerful father, accompanied by a world of obsessive-compulsive rituals and ceremonies).

In 1930’s Civilization and Its Discontents Freud applies psychoanalysis to sociology, arguing that modern, mass, industrial, capitalist societies need to enforce widespread suppression and control of people’s libidinal urges, not just to sex but to express other needs and drives, and it is this systematic repression of human needs which makes so many people unhappy in modern society. In many ways this turned out to be Freud’s most influential work, because it influenced social reformers and would-be revolutionaries, especially in the utopian 1960s.

Anyway, this final display is about Freud’s deepest foray into myth, legend and so on as he took on the roots of Christianity and, behind it, of Christianity’s parent, Judaism.

Freud was a Jew who accepted his secular inheritance but rejected the religious aspects of Judaism. Running alongside the obsessive references to archaeology throughout his writing career, which this exhibition focuses on, was Freud’s parallel obsession with denying and debunking religious belief and practice at every opportunity.

There are quite a few Freudian explanations of this noticeable obsession. One is that he was guilty about rejecting the religion of his forefathers and so spent his entire life trying to deny its reality. A subtler one is that Freud didn’t so much deny the reality of the Jewish religion as attempt to rewrite it in his own terms. In his imperial way, he attempted to overwrite religion, to write it away. Coming from a different angle, you could say that this ‘obsession’ was a response to the lifelong anti-semitism which he and his family and Jewish friends and colleagues suffered on an almost daily basis, in personal encounters but also in the press and culture of turn of the century Vienna.

Everyone mentions the fact that from 1897 to 1910 Vienna was run by the unusually powerful mayor, Karl Lueger, who oversaw the transformation of the city into a modern metropolis but at the same time exploited populist and anti-semitic feeling, legitimising widespread and semi-official antisemitism which some historians think established a model for the psychotic racism promoted by Adolf Hitler who was, of course, Austrian and an impressionable teenager during Lueger’s time in office.

You can take your pick of interpretations or mix and match all of them and this, also, is a Freudian idea which he called over-determination. In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud speculated that individual dream images or narratives can operate on multiple levels or be representing more than one wish or drive. Same with the symptoms his patients presented with. Overdetermination occurs when a single-observed effect is determined by multiple causes any one of which alone would be sufficient to account for the effect.

Thus I routinely describe historical events as ‘over determined’, such as the First World War, for which historians have proposed a vast number of causes. The Freudian notion of over-determination i.e. multiple cause for one event, frees you up, allows you to accept a number of different explanations, allows you to experiment with apportioning different levels of responsibility for different events.

It’s an example of the way Freud’s theory gives conceptual definition to the complexity of life, motivation, simple and complex events which we all know are multi-levelled and multi-motivated. Freud’s theory provides a theoretical underpinning for this multiplicity of viewpoints, about anything.

6. Moses: the return of the repressed

Freud’s last published work was not a grand summary of his theory (although he was working on one, which remained unfinished). It was the long, densely argued and eccentric work of religious sociology, Moses and Monotheism. In it he applies the Oedipus story to the entire history of the Jewish people, his people, in an attempt to dethrone the founder of Judaism, Moses. It was itself a nakedly Oedipal attempt to overthrow the father and assert his (Freud’s) moral and intellectual independence.

For Freud makes the scandalous assertion that Moses was not himself Jewish. Freud argues that Moses was in fact an Egyptian prince, but one who followed the heretical teachings of the pharaoh Akhenaten. From what we can tell, Akhenaten, the tenth pharaoh of the 18th dynasty, who ruled from 1353 to 1336 BC, attempted to overthrow the Egyptians’ traditional polytheism i.e. belief in a large and florid pantheon of gods, and replace it with worship of the One True God.

Tasked with overseeing the Israelite captives in their slave tasks, this Egyptian prince, Moses, tried to impose Akhenaten’s strict monotheism on them but they rose up and, as in the classic Oedipal narrative, murdered their father figure. But, like all good Oedipal actors, they then couldn’t cope with the guilt of their deed and repressed it, wiping out all memory of the historical event, and instead reinventing Moses as one of their own and a wise and good teacher.

Following the basic model of the mind he had postulated as long ago as 1897, Freud speculated that knowledge of their collective murder kept threatening to leak out and so the Jews, as a people, instituted a comprehensive system of taboos and restrictions, the most famous being not to eat pork, but there are hundreds of others. As time went by these taboos were expanded and elaborated until they dictated almost every aspect of everyday life, as well as a host of religious rituals.

This last display takes Moses and Monotheism to be not only the climax of Freud’s career as a writer but of his vaulting ambition to establish a psychoanalytical version of human history, society, and the origins of religion and morality. Like Totem and Taboo there’s something slightly mad about this book, disreputable about its theories and the interpretations which Freud applies to history and strain to breaking point. It’s absurd. But there’s also something awe inspiring about the man’s grandiose ambition.

If you stop thinking about it as a serious piece of archaeology or sociology and consider it as simply a piece of imaginative writing, the ambition and the ingenuity with which Freud attaches his theory to every aspect of Jewish history, theology and practice are dizzying.

Objects on display

A small statuette of the Egyptian god Amon-Ra, who Akhenaten promoted as the one true God. A print of Rembrandt’s famous painting of Moses coming down from the mountain holding the tablets of the law. An edition of the Philippson edition of the German Bible. And a small hannukah lamp, associated with domestic Jewish ritual.

The end wall and right-hand wall of the exhibition, showing the section about Gradiva (at the end) and Totem and Moses, on the right

Objects and meanings

The title of the exhibition includes the word ‘objects’ because among Freud’s many insights is the way all of us project wishes, desires, anxieties onto all the objects around us all the time. We not only relentlessly anthropomorphise the world – that’s level one psychology; we also personalise the world by investing all manner of objects around us with value and meaning. And these meanings alter over time, over very short periods as our moods or memories change, as events invest them with new auras of meaning, some of them over lifetimes.

In other words, all the objects around us are invested with some measure of significance, we can’t stop ourselves. And so the exhibition’s attention to the objects which Freud a) collected obsessively b) positioned all around him in his working environment c) described, discussed, referred to and invoked endlessly in all his writings from start to finish is both an ‘exploration’ of the significance of some of the objects, but also the evocation of all kinds of associations and feelings in us, the visitors.

H.D.’s interpretation

Freud arrived in London before his belongings. When these arrived, especially the crates containing his carefully wrapped antiquities, his friend and former patient, the American poet H.D., sent Freud a bunch of gardenias with a note ‘to greet the return of the Gods’.

HD is also represented by a short but powerful quote on the main introductory wall label. Here she is recorded as noting, in her memoir of Freud and her psychoanalytical treatment, what we’ve already observed, that his rather staggering array of figurines, statuettes and antiquities were intimately bound up with his development of the concepts and methods of psychoanalysis. But she goes on to say something more. She has the insight that they helped Freud to ‘stabilise the evanescent thought’ that was continually at risk of dissipation.

This is a new and powerful insight. I’ve already mentioned the idea of ambivalence, which follows from Freud’s dual structure of the mind (conscious mind struggling to repress all kinds of unconscious urges). Once developed, this explains how we can all have ambivalent or contradictory feelings about objects, because there is so much going on in the unconscious which we’re not aware of, and because the human psyche’s tendency to project these feelings, moods, anxieties, desires onto all manner of inanimate objects around us.

So much for ambivalence. And so much for the notion that Freud used the antiquities to inspire his ideas about excavating and archaeology. It’s a typically voodoo, Freudian, psychoanalytical insight, one which appears absurd on the surface but slowly makes more sense the more you ponder it, that the figurines littering his desk and study, also in some sense, limited and controlled his thought.

Because if there’s one thing about Freud’s achievement as a writer, it’s that he was so very fecund with ideas. From the initial insights around 1900 were to spring an exploding, ever-ramifying, ever-more complex system or network or matrix of ideas and insights and categories and theories and terminology which he never ceased developing and refining, and which he consciously amplified and spread beyond psychology into disciplines far removed from his area of expertise, as this exhibition makes abundantly clear.

So maybe the figurines not only inspired his writing (and his treatment) but also brought him back to the thing he started writing about, focused things back on the project in hand. They were instruments of inspiration and control.

Who’s to say whether this is ‘true’ or not, but by this stage, hopefully, you have joined me in not being so concerned about the truth of a lot of this so much as its interpretive and, above all discursive power. It enables the imagination. Psychoanalysis’s uncanny combination of scientific phraseology applied to ideas which sometimes seem acute, sometimes way off beam, sometimes suck you in and make you see the world in a completely different way, this all leaves the pragmatic world of truth values far behind as we go romping through a wild and shaggy, dense and huge, huge and fascinating imaginative realm.

Three figurines from Freud’s collection. Which one – smooth elegant Egyptian, primitive fertility figure, or happy dancer – do you identify with, and why?

Digital archive

The exhibition is accompanied by a digital multimedia resource, containing video recordings, podcasts, photos of rarely seen objects from the collection, and a list of suggested reading.

Digital archive accompanying the exhibition

Related books

The Museum has produced a comprehensive catalogue for the exhibition, with essays expanding the themes raised in the wall labels. But, unsurprisingly, there also turn out to be quite a few book-length academic studies of Freud’s fascination with antiquity and obsession with collecting:

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by Simon on June 12, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Archaeology, Biography, Psychoanalysis

Tagged A Special Type of Choice of Object made by Men, Adolf Hitler, Akhenaten, Amon-Ra, ancient Egypt, Anna Freud, Anschluss, antiquities, Archaeology, Carl Jung, CBT, Charcot, Charles Darwin, Christianity, Cicero, Civilization and its Discontents, cognitive behavioural therapy, collecting, compulsion, depth therapy, desire, dreams, exhibition, Fantasy, figurine, Freud, Freud's couch, Freud's desk, Freud’s Antiquity: Object, Freudian psychoanalysis, Freudian slip, Gradiva, Gradiva: A Pompeian Fantasy, H.D., HD, Heinrich Schliemann, history, hypnosis, hysteria, Idea, Ilios, Judaism, Karl Lueger, Karl Marx, libido, Literature, monotheism, Moses, Moses and Monotheism, Nazis, neurosis, Norbert Hanold, Oedipus, Oedipus Complex, penis, penis envy, polytheism, projection, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Rembrandt, repression, Seneca, sex, Sigmund Freud, Sir James George Frazer, statuette, Stoic philosophy, Studies on Hysteria, The Bible, the ego, The Freud Museum, The Future of An Illusion, The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion, The Interpretation of Dreams, the Jews, the Salpetriere Hospital, the Sphinx, the unconscious, therapist, Therapy, Totem and Taboo, Troy, Vienna, Western culture, Wilhelm Fliess

Posted by Simon on June 12, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/06/12/freuds-antiquity-object-idea-desire-the-freud-museum/

The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges (1967)

This is an alphabetical list of fantastical and imaginary beasts from myth and legend, compiled by Borges with the assistance of his friend, Margarita Guerrero, and, to be honest, it’s a bit boring.

The Penguin paperback edition of The Book of Imaginary Beings has three prefaces which, among other things, point out that the collection grew, from 82 pieces in 1957, to 116 in 1967, to 120 in the 1969 edition. It’s an example of the pleasurable way all Borges’s collections – of poems, essays or stories – accumulate additional content over successive editions and, in doing so, hint at the scope for infinite expansion, and the dizzying sense of infinite vistas which lie behind so many of his fictions.

Imaginary beings

Strictly speaking there’s an endless number of imaginary beings since every person in every novel or play ever written is an imaginary being – but, of course, the authors have in mind not imaginary people but imaginary animals, fabulous beasts concocted by human fantasy. They have aimed to create:

a handbook of the strange creatures conceived through time and space by the human imagination

The book was created in collaboration with Borges’s friend Margarita Guerrero, and between them they tell us they had great fun ransacking ‘the maze-like vaults of the Biblioteca Nacional’ in Buenos Aires, scouring through books ancient and modern, fictional and factual, for the profiles of mythical beings from folklore and legend.

One of the conclusions they make in the preface was that it is quite difficult to make up new monsters. Many have tried, but most new-fangled creatures fall by the wayside. For example, Flaubert had a go at making new monsters in the later parts of The Temptation of Saint Anthony, but none of them really stir the imagination. There appear to be some archetypal patterns which just seem to gel with the human imagination, which chime with our deepest fears or desires and so have lasted through the centuries in folklore and myth, and are found across different cultures.

We are as ignorant of the meaning of the dragon as we are of the meaning of the universe, but there is something in the dragon’s image that appeals to the human imagination, and so we find the dragon in quite distinct places and times. It is, so to speak, a necessary monster, not an ephemeral or accidental one, such as the three-headed chimera or the catoblepas.

There are entries for 120 imaginary beasts, arranged in alphabetical order across 142 pages, making an average of 1.2 pages per entry, much shorter even than his short stories, about the same length as the ‘parables’ included in Labyrinths. Where possible, the authors include references to the source documents or texts where they discovered good descriptions of the beast in question.

But book actually references quite a few more than the 120 nominal beasts since many of the entries are portmanteau headings of, for example, the imaginary fauna of Chile (6 beasts); the Fauna of China entry (taken from the T’ai P’ing Kuang Chi) describes 12 imaginary beasts and 3 types of mutant human (people whose hands dangle to the ground or have human bodies but bat wings); the Fauna of America entry describes nine weird and wonderful animals. In other words, the book actually contains names and descriptions of many times 120 beasts, at a rough guess at least three times as many.

Thoughts

This should all be rather wonderful, shouldn’t it? But although it’s often distracting and amusing, The Book of Imaginary Beings almost entirely lacks the sense of wonder and marvel which characterises the extraordinary contents of Labyrinths.

Ultimately, the long list becomes rather wearing and highlights the barrenness of even the most florid creations if they are not brought to life by either a chunky narrative (I mean a narrative long enough for you to become engaged with) or by Borges’s magic touch, his deployment of strange and bizarre ideas to animate them.

Borges’s best stories start with wonderful, mind-dazzling insights and create carapaces of references or narrative around them. These encyclopedia-style articles about fabulous creatures, on the other hand, occasionally gesture towards the strange and illuminating but, by and large, remain not much more than a succession of raw facts.

For example, we learn that the word ‘basilisk’ comes from the Greek meaning ‘little king’, that the fabulous beast it refers to is mentioned in the authors Pliny and Chaucer and Aldrovani, in each of which it has a different appearance; we are given a long excerpt about the basilisk from Lucan’s Pharsalia.

Well, this is all very well and factual, but where are the ideas and eerie insights which make Borges’s ficciones so mind-blowing? Nowhere. The entries read like raw ingredients which are waiting to be cooked by Borges into a dazzling essay… which never materialises. More than that, it’s full of sentences which are uncharacteristically flaccid and banal.

Suggested or stimulated by reflections in mirrors and in water and by twins, the idea of the Double is common to many countries.

Really? In some of his stories this idea comes to dazzling life; in this collection of articles, it lies dead on the page.

A bestiary manqué

You could argue that the whole idea is an updating of the popular medieval genre of the ‘bestiary’. Wikipedia gives a pithy summary of the genre:

A bestiary is a compendium of beasts. Originating in the ancient world, bestiaries were made popular in the Middle Ages in illustrated volumes that described various animals and even rocks. The natural history and illustration of each beast was usually accompanied by a moral lesson.

I think the key is in that final phrase: bestiaries may well have fired the imaginations of their readers, amused and distracted them, but they had a purpose. Indeed, to the medieval mind the whole natural world was full of meaning and so every single creature in it existed to point a moral, to teach humans something (about God, about the Christian life, and so on). Bolstering every anecdote about this or that fabulous animal was a lesson we could all take away and benefit from.

Whereas, being 20th century agnostics and, moreover, of a modernist turn of mind which prefers clipped brevity to Victorian verbosity, the authors write entries which are deliberately brief and understated, and shorn of any moral or reflection, or analysis.

Whereas Borges’s fictions tend to build up to a bombshell insight which can haunt you for days, these entries just end and then you’re onto another item on the list, then another, then another, and after a while the absence of analysis or insight begins to feel like an almost physical lack.

Pictures

Given its static nature as a rather passive list written in often lifeless prose, what this book would really, really have have benefited from would have been being published in a large, coffee table format with an illustration for each monster.

I googled a lot of the entries in the book and immediately began having more fun on the internet, looking at the weird and wonderful illustrations of the beasts – comparing the way the basilisk or chimera or behemoth have depicted through the ages (and in our age which has seen an explosion of fantastical illustrations) than I had in reading Borges and Guerrero’s rather drab texts.

The two-headed bird-dragon Ouroboros from the Aberdeen bestiary illuminated manuscript

Favourites

On the up-side, here are some things I enjoyed:

I was delighted that The Book of Imaginary Beings contains not one but two entries for made-up creatures in C.S. Lewis’s science fiction novel, Perelandra.

To be reminded of the strange fact that Sleipnir, the horse belonging to Odin, king of the Norse gods, had eight legs.

A Chinese legend has it that the people who lived in mirrors were a different shape and size and kind from the people in this world. Once there were no borders and people could come and go between the real world and the mirror world. Then the mirror people launched an attack on our world but were defeated by the forces of the Yellow Emperor who compelled them to take human form and slavishly ape all the behaviour of people in this world, as if they were simply our reflections. But one day they will rise up and reclaim their freedom (Fauna of Mirrors).

The Hidebehind is always hiding behind something. No matter how many times or whichever way a man turns, it is always behind him, and that’s why nobody has been able to describe it, even though it is credited with having killed and devoured many a lumberjack. The Goofus Bird builds its nest upside down and flies backward, not caring where it’s going, only where it’s been.

At one point Borges lingers on the dogma of the Kabbalists and, for a moment, the real deep Borges appears, the one fascinated by the paradoxes of infinity:

In a book inspired by infinite wisdom, nothing can be left to chance, not even the number of words it contains or the order of the letters; this is what the Kabbalists thought, and they devoted themselves to the task of counting, combining, and permutating the letters of the Scriptures, fired by a desire to penetrate the secrets of God.

A Platonic year is the time required by the sun, the moon, and the five planets to return to their initial position; Tacitus in his Dialogus de Oratoribus calculates this as 12,994 common years.

In the middle of the twelfth century, a forged letter supposedly sent by Prester John, the king of kings, to the Emperor of Byzantium, made its way all over Europe. This epistle, which is a catalogue of wonders, speaks of gigantic ants that dig gold, and of a River of Stones, and of a Sea of Sand with living fish, and of a towering mirror that reflects whatever happens in the kingdom, and of a sceptre carved of a single emerald, and of pebbles that make a man invisible or that light up the night.

Threes

The Greek gods ruled three realms, heaven ruled by Zeus, the sea ruled by Poseidon, and hell ruled by Hades.

In ancient Greek religion the Moirai, called by the Romans the Parcae, known in English as the Fates, were the incarnations of destiny: Clotho (the ‘spinner’), Lachesis (the ‘allotter’) and Atropos (the ‘unturnable’, a metaphor for death).

Cerberus, the huge dog guarding hell, had three heads.

In Norse mythology, the Norns are female beings who rule the destiny of gods and men. In Snorri Sturluson’s interpretation of the Völuspá, there are three main norns, Urðr (Wyrd), Verðandi and Skuld. They are invoked in the three weird sisters who appear in Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

There are many valkyries – choosers of the dead –but tradition names three main ones as Hildr, Þrúðr and Hlökk.

Hinduism has Trimurti (Sanskrit for ‘three forms’) referring to the triad of the three gods Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva.

The Christian God is a Trinity of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.

Jesus is resurrected on the third day after his crucifixion (counting Good Friday, Saturday and Sunday as days), an event prefigured by the three days the prophet Jonah spent in the belly of the whale.

In The Divine Comedy Dante journeys through the three parts of the afterworld, hell, purgatory and paradise.

According to Moslem tradition, Allah created three different species of intelligent beings: Angels, who are made of light; Jinn (‘Jinnee’ or ‘Genie’ in the singular), who are made of fire; and Men, who are made of earth.

Jinnee or genies grant three wishes.

Humans divide time (if it exists, that is) into the past, the present and the future.

The three billygoats gruff. The three bears. The three little pigs.

Fours

The four horsemen of the apocalypse.

The four gospels of the four evangelists, each one symbolised by an animal: to Matthew a man’s face, Mark the lion; Luke the calf; and John, the eagle.

In Babylon, the prophet Ezekiel saw in a vision four beasts or angels, ‘And every one had four faces, and every one had four wings’ and ‘As for the likeness of their faces, they four had the face of a man, and the face of a lion, on the right side: and they four had the face of an ox on the left side; they four also had the face of an eagle.’

John the Divine in the fourth chapter of Revelations: ‘And before the throne there was a sea of glass like unto crystal: and in the midst of the throne, and round about the throne, were four beasts full of eyes before and behind. And the first beast was like a lion, and the second beast like a calf, and the third beast had a face as a man, and the fourth beast was like a flying eagle. And the four beasts had each of them six wings about him; and they were full of eyes within…’

In the most important of Kabbalistic works, the Zohar or Book of Splendour, we read that these four beasts are called Haniel, Kafziel, Azriel, and Aniel and that they face east, north, south, and west.

Dante stated that every passage of the Bible has a fourfold meaning: the literal, the allegorical, the moral, and the spiritual.

The four corners of the earth. The four points of the compass.

The Greeks divided visible matter into the four elements of fire, earth, air, and water, and attributed the four humours which match them, black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood, themselves the basis of the four temperaments of mankind, choleric, melancholic, phlegmatic and sanguine, respectively.

The four magic animals of Chinese cosmogony.

The four animals of good omen, being the unicorn, the dragon, the phoenix, and the tortoise.

A Borges reading list

This is an incomplete list of the texts most frequently referred to in The Book of Imaginary Beings. Laid out like this you can see how, beyond the respectable tradition of the classics, this is a kind of greatest hits selection of the esoteric and mystical traditions of world literature.

Reflecting on the list of texts, I realised they have one thing in common which is that they are all pre-scientific and non-scientific. Personally, I believe in modern cosmology’s account of the creation of the universe in a big bang, in the weird discoveries of particle physics which account for matter, gravity, light and so on; and, when it comes to life forms, I believe in a purely mechanistic origin for replicating life, and in Darwin’s theory of natural selection as improved by the discovery of the helical structure of DNA in 1953 and the 70 subsequent years of genetic science, to explain why there are, and inevitably have to be, such an enormous variety of life forms on earth.

For me, taken together, all the strands of modern science explain pretty much everything about the world around us and about human nature: why we are why we are, why we think and behave as we do.

None of that is recorded in any of these books. Instead everything in the books listed here amounts to various types of frivolous entertainment and speculation. It could be described as highly decorative rubbish. Homer and the Aeneid may well be the bedrocks of Western literature and Dante one of the central figures of European civilisation but, having lived and worked in the world for over 40 years, I’m well aware that the vast majority of people neither know nor care, and care even less about the more remote and obscure books on this list. They are for the pleasure of antiquaries and lovers of the obscure; people, dear reader, like thee and me.

Ancient world

The Epic of Gilgamesh
The Iliad and the Odyssey by Homer
Hesiod’s Theogony and Book of Days (700 BC)
The Old Testament
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
The Mahābhārata (3rd century BC?)
The Argonautica by Apollonius Rhodius (3rd century BC)
The Aeneid by Virgil (29 to 19 BC)
Metamorphoses or the Books of Transformations by Ovid (8 AD)
De Bello Civili or the Pharsalia by Lucan (30 AD?)
On the Nature of the Gods by Cicero
The Natural History by Pliny the Elder (77 AD)
History of the Jewish Wars by Flavius Josephus
The New Testament (1st century AD)

Middle Ages

Beowulf
The Exeter Book (tenth century)
The Song of Roland (11th-century)
The Poetic Edda (13th century)
The Prose Edda (13th century)
The Zohar, primary text of the Kabbalists
The 1001 Arabian Nights
The Golden Legend compiled by Jacobus de Voragine (thirteenth century)
The Travels of Marco Polo (1300)
The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (1320)
Travels of Sir John Mandeville (1360s)
Autobiography by Benvenuto Cellini (1563)
Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto (1532)

Early modern

The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes (1605 and 1615)
The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton (1621)
Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial, or, a Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns lately found in Norfolk by Sir Thomas Browne (1658)
Peter Wilkins by Robert Paltock (1751)
The World as Will and Representation (1844) by Arthur Schopenhauer
The Temptation of Saint Anthony by Gustave Flaubert (1874)
The Golem by Gustav Meyrink (1915)

Would be a challenge, fun and interesting to read all these books, in this order. A nutritious slice through Western civilisation.

Borges reviews

A Universal History of Infamy (1935 trans. 1972)
Labyrinths (1962)
The Book of Imaginary Beings (1967, trans. 1969)
Dr. Brodie’s Report (1970)
The Book of Sand (1975 trans. 1977)
Jorge Luis Borges on Franz Kafka (1981)

1 Comment

by Simon on May 7, 2021 • Permalink

Posted in Latin America, Literature, Middle Ages, Mythology

Tagged 1001 Arabian Nights, Aldrovani, Allah, angels, Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica, Arthur Schopenhauer, Atropo, autobiography, Æneid, Þrúðr, basilisk, Benvenuto Cellini, Beowulf, bestiary, Biblioteca Nacional, Book of Imaginary Beings, Book of Splendour, Books of Transformations, Borges, Brahma, Buenos Aires, Byzantium, C.S. Lewis, Cerberus, Chaucer, China, Cicero, Clotho, cosmogony, Crucifixion, Dante, Dante Alighieri, Darwin, De Bello Civili, Divine Comedy, DNA, dragon, Epic of Gilgamesh, evangelists, Exeter Book, Ezekiel, Fantasy, Fates, Flaubert, Flavius Josephus, God the Father, God the Holy Spirit, God the Son, Golden Legend, gospels, Greek gods, Gustav Meyrink, Gustave Flaubert, Hades, Hell, Hesiod, hidebehind bird, Hildr, Hinduism, History of the Jewish Wars, Hlökk, Homer, Hydriotaphia, Iliad, imaginary beasts, imaginary beings, Jacobus de Voragine, Jesus, Jinn, John the Divine, Kabbala, Labyrinths, Lachesis, legend, Lucan, Ludovico Ariosto, Macbeth, Mahābhārata, Margarita Guerrero, Metamorphoses, Middle Ages, Miguel de Cervantes, Moirai, myth, Natural History, natural selection, New Testament, Norns, Norse gods, Odin, Odyssey, Old Testament, On the Nature of the Gods, Orlando Furioso, Ouroboros, Ovid, Paradise, Parcae, Perelandra, Pharsalia, Phoenix, Pliny, Pliny the Elder, Poetic Edda, Poseidon, Prester John, Prose Edda, Purgatory, Revelations, Robert Burton, Sanskrit, Shakespeare, Shiva, Skuld, Sleipnir, Snorri Sturluson, Song of Roland, Tacitus, Temptation of Saint Anthony, The Anatomy of Melancholy, The Book of Imaginary Beings, The Golem, The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, The World as Will and Representation, The Zohar, Theogony and Book of Days, Thomas Browne, Tibetan Book of the Dead, tortoise, Travels of Marco Polo, Travels of Sir John Mandeville, Trinity, unicorn, Urðr, Urn Burial, Völuspá, Verðandi, Virgil, Vishnu, Zeus, Zohar

Posted by Simon on May 7, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/05/07/book-of-imaginary-beings-jorge-luis-borges/

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All posts tagged Fantasy

Introduction

Story

People

People (part 2): types of character and points of view

1. Two types of character, flat and round

2. Point of view

The Plot

Fantasy

Prophecy

Pattern and Rhythm

Pattern and Henry James

Rhythms large and small

Conclusion

Thoughts

1. Style

2. Forster’s oddly strange or incisive phrasing

Credit

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Strindberg reviews

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Cast

Act 1

Act 2

Act 3

Act 4

Act 5

Comments

James McFarlane’s introduction

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Ibsen reviews

Play reviews

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The Boy Who Talked with Animals (23 pages)

The Hitch-Hiker (15 pages)

The Mildenhall Treasure (1946: 27 pages)

The Swan (25 pages)

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (71 pages)

Lucky Break

A Piece of Cake (1946)

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Structure

1. Fairy and Folk Tales

Fairie

Origins

Multicultural

Pilgrimage

King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table

Epic then folk then fairy

The emergence of Fantasy

The purposes of Fantasy

Small

Teenagers

Grown-up

Video games

LARP

The importance of play

Is Fantasy childish?

Board games

2. Epics and Quests

Sword and sorcery

3. Weird and Uncanny

4. Portals and Worlds

Fantasy maps

Portal Fantasy

Authors

1900s

1960s

1970s