World Within The Word

by William H. Gass

  There was a certain weight to his name, but it was the kind that attaches to kings of Persia and other far-off figures about whom not even rumors are very directly encountered. Awkward among strangers, I’d managed to wet my sherry hand with sherry. It was a mercy that I could not wonder, in the inflated terms of my type: is it my lifeline from which this sherry seeps like sap from a wounded twig? Such reflections I reserved for a better mind than mine, the one I believed wrote my journal at the time. There was the usual ruck, then: thoughts unthought, acts unacted, clutter and confusion, re-viseless speech. The Important Man was next seen shutting his back like a door in the face of a tradesman (a Balkan-faced but German-tongued librarian), the sort who seem to be, without benefit of photos, phonographs, or mirrors, multiple. I left a leaf and one damp half-shoe footprint on the rug. I wiped my sticky moist palm on my trousers. Later we were introduced but didn’t meet.

  I shall explain. A thin veneer of immediate reality is spread over natural and artificial matter, and whoever wishes to remain in the now, with the now, on the now, should please not break its tension film. Otherwise the inexperienced miracle worker will find himself no longer walking on water but descending upright among staring fish. More in a moment.

  (Transparent Things)

  Sinking slowly inside a syllable, we do discover distinct connections of another kind, and I suppose it was that which first impressed me about Nabokov’s novels: an object taken from a drawer, as a pencil is shuddered from its rest in an old desk, has not been held there by wood and physics through the years, nor does it appear now in obedience to our hero’s rough tug, as some worldly pencil might. It comes to light because it has a place in the Divine Plan, otherwise a dead moth might have slid to view instead … a matchbook, bridge tally, or a medal. Once we make that move which Nabokov, in Transparent Things, so movingly describes, and pass into the state of being of his books, forgotten pencils, mislaid memories, discarded persons, all the meaningless moments that make up life (each day nothing but a noisy rain of accidents like a spill of beans) are transformed, for now every item is a passage … is a peephole where eyes can be seen staring at staring eyes.

  “More in a moment,” Nabokov writes. And there is more: there is Jack Moore, fellow student, with whom our hero rooms at college, and who separates him from the tiny table he’s attempting to strangle in his sleep. He knocks books off, coughs drop. There is Julia Moore, a woman with whom he has a brief affair, although she figures largely in the plot. And then there’s Giulia Romeo, a whore who motivates the nightmare which will wrap itself so fatally around the neck of our hero’s wife. Another table tips on that occasion. A lamp, a book, a tumbler: tumble. So there’s Romeo and Juliet, who die of error together. Etc. And there is the Moor. Connections of another kind.

  How could I know, when I was mismeeting Nabokov that single time, that immediately inside his books I’d find such sentences as heretofore had not been wrought? Cunning paragraphs enclosed them; swallowed them, smiling, like benevolent whales; while around these, darkening as you descended, upright as it was best to try to be, in layers like blankets, there were several seas. Characters were inserted into scenes as one might, making love, contrive a cry to fit each likely mouth, or with one finger sled a thigh to somewhere warm as winter. “I delight sensually in Time,” the Master has written,

  … in its stuff and spread, in the fall of its folds, in the very impalpability of its grayish gauze, in the coolness of its continuum. I wish to do something about it; to indulge in a simulacrum of possession. I am aware that all who have tried to reach the charmed castle have got lost in obscurity or have bogged down in Space. I am also aware that Time is a fluid medium of the culture of metaphors.

  And I have come to think of his novels as clocks, each marking and making its own sweet time. Ada, for instance. Wit-wit-wit, they go when they go round. Slowly I saw what was artistically right: how they were themselves, not imitations; they were constructions to delight the heart and stir the mind. They were not stuffed, like geese, with journalistic observations, determining and moralizing milieus, intensely instructional entanglements, those shifty banalities that do credit to their authors and also to mankind, details like so many jawless clothespins, or sentiments that bless the belly of the reader for whom they are prescribed like simple soothing syrups and bready pudding. One did not hear the tinny click and whirr of toy psychologies as the eyes and loins of the characters lit up, wet, or otherwise expressed themselves, or find the weight of sex and class was heavier than shoulders.

  Thus that firm turn of Nabokov’s attention, which really was my only observation of him, although the life that occupied the gesture has escaped, remains for me a sign, like the hollow changing chamber of the butterfly, of what it is to write and to create these stillatories, metaphors, transparent things: to unfold from within what is within—fragrant petals of pure relation.

  The Anatomy of Mind

  How It Began

  Nuns Maids Virgins Barren Women Widows

  Robert Burton has set it down in Part. 1, Sect. 3, Memb. 2, Subs. 4 of his Anatomy, with respect to the melancholies of maids, nuns, and widows, in a way unimprovable, thus:

  … the most ordinary symptoms be these, a beating about the back, which is almost perpetual, the skin is many times rough, squalid … The midriff and heartstrings do burn and beat fearfully, and when this vapour or fume is stirred, flieth upward … Their faces are inflamed, and red, they are dry, thirsty, suddenly hot, much troubled with wind, cannot sleep, &c. And from hence proceed a brutish kind of dotage, troublesome sleep, terrible dreams in the night, a foolish kind of bashfulness to some, perverse conceits and opinions, dejection of mind, much discontent, preposterous judgment … Now this, now that offends, they are weary of all; and yet will not, cannot again tell how, where, or what offends them, though they be in great pain, agony, and frequently complain, grieving, sighing, weeping and discontented still, without any manifest cause …

  And with such observations it may have begun: at Charcot’s clinical theater, Brücke’s Physiological Institute, Meynert’s neurological lab, whatever it was: a thought, a therapy, a theory of nervous diseases: in the consulting room, at the bedside, on the dissecting table, where gradually whatever It was became Es and Id.

  There was the case of Anna O for a start (she threw cushions); there was Frau Emmy von N, who emitted curious clacking sounds like those of the wood grouse, Fräulein Elisabeth von R, then, who slept in her father’s sickroom (the good doctors gave to each a discreet and ladylike letter of the alphabet, an altered place, and a rubbed-out year); there was a Miss Lucy R too, one Katharina (otherwise letterless) whom Freud encountered on the summit of a mountain. Fräulein Rosalia H, Frau Cäcilie M, women whose illnesses now enliven patches of our modern faiths and fictions the way the peccadilloes of the gods once did, whatever their troubles were.

  Yes, whatever these troubles ultimately were, in lives full of sabbaths and sacrifice which nevertheless displayed all the menacing emptiness of abandoned buildings, they were tribulations marked and occasioned by severe anxieties, odd and naughty behavior, hallucinations, facial paralysis, a compulsive cough in some cases, leg pains, loss of breath in others, by unbearable disappointments in love, profound yet groundless feelings of unworthiness, perhaps the persistent odor of burned pudding or noises like Captain Hook’s ticking clock which followed the ear or nose about, embarrassing compulsions, irreparable losses, suspiciously many importunate uncles, frustrations like those of a fly abuzz in the pane of a window, constrictions of every kind, boredom beyond description; and as these symptoms accumulated like trash in a can and Freud waited for them to say where they came from or what they meant, he found among them many of his own queer tics and quirks, the same bugs biting in his own bed.

  Hobgoblins—urinary incontinence for one, chronic constipation, migraines, other bugbears and glowghosts, upsetting insecurities about travel combined unwisely with spells of wanderlust, superstitions regarding dangero
us dates and fatally significant numbers, as well as wild and sometimes sudden swings of mood—folio wed him for much of his life.

  Freud also had his share of fixed and foolish ideas whose protective function we can now readily see since he himself taught us this kind of alertness: that Shakespeare was the Earl of Oxford, that there just might be something to Fliess’s nasal theory of sexuality, or to thought transference, and so on. With all Freud’s luminous self-knowledge and characteristic control, he was still of course capable of slips and unintentional epiphanies. Like the muscleman’s ripple, his ability to hate was perhaps too finely developed to be counted a strength, and when he took his theories touring through foreign areas of information, it was sometimes with a bit more ease and arrogance than was altogether wise. Freud’s dislike for Americans was founded as much on guilt and ingratitude as on reasoned judgment, and the book about Woodrow Wilson which he wrote with William Bullitt is oddly and nervously bad.

  Freud believed and wrote a lot of twottwaddle too, and had illusions about the love of mothers for their sons, for example, or of the virgin for her husbandly penetrator. He suffered fits of fainting as well as other similar attacks of anxiety, tobacco addiction, a premature slackening of the sexual urge, and those fairybabes of tombs and graves, as Burton has it: fears for his heart, of open spaces, debilitating illness, death.

  It would be too simple to say that Freud was driven into medicine by poverty and to the study of neurological disorders by a dislike of blood, although these were factors. He was, like the psyche, an opportunist. He would make his mark, if not on this tree, then on that wall; if not with claws or teeth, then with penknife and razor.

  Freud’s patients, as it happened, weren’t all women or exclusively strangers, but they each had problems picked up at home like lint on a trouser. They suffered from their fathers, their brothers—from family, the repeated scuff of culture—the way miners do from black lung, because the job of being a son or a daughter in our day has never been easy, no one is born for it, not everyone is up to it, there’s nothing about it in the genes. Unlike the enervating injuries of poverty and economic exploitation which occupied the mind of Marx, these were illnesses of education and economic ease—cases of parlor scent and sofa sickness—not that money didn’t matter to the middle class or penis envy occur among the proletariat, but only the Unconscious of the relatively well-to-do could afford to equate shit so simply with gold and silver.

  There were the thoughtful exchanges with Breuer, the letters to Fliess, etc., but there was no one who could help Freud draw the remarkable parallels between his patients and himself which were so essential to his own analysis; there was no one who could hypnotize him or put a palm upon his brow or order his eyes to close and his mind to associate and conjure. He had his deep stubbornness and courage, of course, and his almost perfectly formulated ambitions, to drive and guide him, while his fierce delight in opposition, and the compulsion then to overcome every obstacle, would supply his theories with many of their central concepts.

  Freud had the hero’s need to be self-made to such an extraordinary degree he replaced his father first with Fliess and finally with himself.1 Will and work were his personal gods. Weakness was for others. His attitude toward suicides was severe, even brutal, and although he believed, and had chewed many a cigar while endeavoring to prove it, that character was inescapable and frequently fatal, he was often exasperated by the fact that people would not simply pull themselves together and behave like free, disciplined, and purposeful adults.2 Soon he thought he’d seen every kind of frailty and failing, and understood a good many of their causes; nevertheless, he really could not approve of his patients, or even the talented students and supporters who spanieled about him later, and his opinion of mankind grew progressively poorer as a consequence.

  In the development of psychoanalysis, Freud’s literary skills and interests, peculiar as they were, are not to be discounted either, for he saw everything extraordinarily as if it were taking place in a book, and in the same way his Jewish heritage touched everything he touched. He had the precise Jewish instinct, HD says, “for the particular in the general, for the personal in the impersonal or universal, for the material in the abstract …”3 Deutero-Isaiah had had the wit to interpret the plight of the Jewish people in terms of a determining history, and Freud would do the same. The past was a parent, and he was fully mindful of every begetting, so he admired in the little antique figures he collected the appearance of something perfect from the past which was also perfectly expressive of its period, an object recovered from the burials of time the way his interpretive techniques made ancient artifacts uncave themselves like roused bears.

  There were in addition—never secondarily—philosophical presuppositions which varied very little through a lifetime; philosophical ambitions he sometimes cautiously hid, and certainly discouraged in others, but would uncover under comfortable conditons.

  Freud has published some scientific papers, unwisely advocated the use of cocaine,4 translated Mill, persuaded Breuer to write with him a work on Anna O and the others, when he writes in the present tense to Fliess as follows:

  I see that you are using the circuitous route of medicine to attain your first ideal, the physiological understanding of man, while I secretly nurse the hope of arriving by the same route at my own original objective, philosophy. For that was my original ambition, before I knew what I was intended to do in the world.5

  And now at forty, having begun at this symbolic age his own self-analysis, and just completed the impressive “Project for a Scientific Psychology” (though eventually it will be cannibalized and banished), Freud has the necessary data warmly under his belt like a wholesome English pie; he is no longer a mere sense-struck boy but a man of analytic enterprise who is ready for smartly stepped formations, ordering and philosophy.

  It is at an exactly similar breath in life that Thomas Hobbes, with whom Freud will share matter, motion, reason, cause, some first principles, and certainly the ideal of a unity of science, glancing through ‘Euclid, cries out, “My G—, this is impossible!” only to be persuaded otherwise when he tracks the offending proposition back to its grounds.

  When he is seventy-seven, Freud’s spectacles are black round lines against his pale beard, face, and head; cancer has bitten through his lip and robbed him of his public eloquence; but the tense remains present though the task is past when he says to HD one day during her analysis:

  My discoveries are not primarily a heal-all. My discoveries are a basis for a very grave philosophy. There are very few who understand this, there are very few who are capable of understanding this.6

  There is no question that Freud used philosophical language loosely, and that, for example, he was apt to describe thought’s functional dependence upon the brain (a condition far closer to epiphenomenalism, the belief that consciousness is a material by-product of the behavior of the body) as if it were really a case of psycho-physical parallelism (the notion that mind and matter run on independent but fortunately synchronous tracks).7 He drew, in an undisciplined way, from everything that struck him, and many of his sources were derivative. He was one, as Henry James had hoped for his heroines and himself, on whom little was lost, and so from the beginning the theory which would eventually emerge from all his endeavors would be the consequence of a veritable synagogue of causes, including the fact that like Nietzsche he grew up surrounded by women, an eldest son with five sisters; that his first competitor was slain by omnipotent wish at eight months, while the arrival of others, always threatened, was put off ten years, every growl followed only by girls, until he was able to name his ultimate brother, calmly, Alexander. Instead he took a nephew for his sibling rival.

  As in a fine poem, so in a creative and productive life, relevance is the rule: he once incontinently peed in his parents’ room and was informed by his father that on this account he would surely amount to nothing; he was forty and halfway to his own death when this father died (again that
fatal age); he played catch-up-and-get-even, had heroes like Hannibal and Leonardo, Moses and Napoleon, was Viennese, knew Mach, read Schnitzler, and attended the lectures of Franz Brentano.

  Then inside Freud’s female melancholies, who were, as Burton had said, “cholerick, and soon hot, solitary, sad, often silent, watchful, discontent,” there were the actual cortical lines, the wrinkled fruit in the skull, and somehow active within these lines energies of an electrical kind passing to and fro, accumulating as a battery does, discharging sometimes with considerable zap, or influencing neighboring areas like urban blight, the rise around a wound, cathecting, magnetizing maybe, establishing fields … how or why or what wasn’t then clear, nor is it now.

  Still, a lesion could be seen and studied. The damage was visible, like flaking paint. Freud’s patients put on behavior that was particularly nerve-wracking and upside-down. Their bodies were booths in an exhibition hall where nothing was immediately for sale. When an ordinary cold compels the chest to squeeze air through its throat like the bulbous honk of a horn, the victim’s miseries are caused by that closing chest and forceful cough; they are centered on that throat and nose. Such sicknesses obey the geography of the body. They understand and are respectful of anatomy.

  However, the illnesses Freud grew concerned about were those in which the behavior of the body became expressive and symbolic in a way no measle ever was, or runny nose, so that an hysterical paralysis might define an arm by means of the shape and limits of a sleeve. The infection, in short, was that of an idea, not a common germ or fancy virus. A thought had invaded the body. Anna O, Dora later, the Wolf and Rat men, were cases in which the puzzling (perhaps impossible) meeting of mind and body had been so rudely and raucously announced, and had taken place with such sordid and raunchy results, that all the skid-and-squeamy issues of ontology seemed to solidify inside them like grease in a cold pan. Was it like the noisy mating and scratch of cats, or a holler across a chasm, this connection? Beckett’s man astride his bike? independently orbiting satellites? romantic strife or classical harmony? the apparently purposeless flutter of a thousand bats, for example, or something like the gargle made by turbulence in pipes? Whatever the eventual outcome, I daresay since the Greeks no discipline which aimed to become a science began with data so outrageously metaphysical.