Freud - Complete Works (323 page)

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1830

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

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

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1831

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

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1832

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1833

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

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

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

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

  
²
[From this point to the middle of her next
speech, when, as will be seen, she finally rebels, Zoe makes a
valiant attempt to use the formal
‘
Sie
’.]

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1834

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

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1835

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

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

  
²
[From this point onwards she finally
reverts to ‘
du
’.]

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1836

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