Carnivals of Lightand the Fairytales of Inspirationand the Mysteries Imagination
No fairy tale of human relate
to us more fascinating scenes than are realized in Nature’s carnivals of the
sea. Not only is the surface of the
ocean, when lashed into foam by the tempest, luminous, but the greater depths,
where the water is cold, near the freezing-point, and subject to pressure so
great that instruments of glass are shattered and reduced to powder, abound in
living lights.[1]
This is a study of strange phenomena of light which throws light on some
aspects of the imagination and how to study figurative language in poetry and
dreams, symbolic action and unconscious social relationships. As writers in the nineteenth and early
twentieth century attempted to describe and understand such phenomena, they
also questioned how they were able to perceive these flashing and sparkling
visual occurrences and what processes of thought became involved in their
attempts to draw meaning from the mystery.
Although we cannot draw on actual events before our own eyes and thus
rely on verbal documents, confessional, fictional, poetic and scientific, with
some occasional glimpses at paintings, photographs and other illustrations, our
goal is something other than literary criticism or discourse analysis in a
psychoanalytical sense. We are limited
by the fact that we cannot interfere or interact with the material we are
discussing, and thus do not seek to change either the circumstances of history
nor the conditions under which they were recorded in words and images: our
understanding, however, will, I hope, change the way in which we can see, feel,
think, remember and act on what we deal with.[2] As Herman and Vervaerck put it: “It seems to
us that it is impossible to see the present properly unless one sees it in its
dynamic, productive relation with the past, and not as a sort of container of
the past.”[3]
Memory is now known to be recreated almost creatively each time one engages in
a recall or is subject to the unconscious influences of such a memory
stimulated by current circumstances, and therefore our actions, including those
of analysis, interpretation and application, do not spring either from a
conscious act of the will based on an objective or accurate reproduction of the
past nor do they operate freely with no regard or response to memories,
documentary records, illustrative mnemonics—but in a far more complex way.
Unlike the Freudian paradigm of psychoanalysis where the analyst has to provoke
transference, resist the temptations of counter-transference and deal in a
symbolic way with the present in order to fill out the discourses of the past
and change the structures of the personality which were originally shaped by
the misapprehensions and misprision of trauma,[4]
our goal is to work with the ongoing relationship to the past event or
character.
For that reason, I will draw on such processes and concepts drawn from
Aby Warburg’s art history: processes such as the after-life (Nachleben) of icons and ideas, the
emotional charging and recharging of remembered and institutionalized concepts
(Pathosformeln) whereby primary and
secondary formations of those conventional formulations are kept alive both on
the surface where they fulfil conscious needs and the deep inner levels of
suppressed or repressed remembrance where they keep irritating and deforming
the flow of psychological and social significance. To be sure, the flow itself does not consist
only of surface currents in a progressively articulate stream of memories: there
are such interferences as ruptures, disconnections, discontinuities, breaches
and misarticulations rather than smooth narrative progress and logical progress
to be taken into account,[5]
matters that cannot be argued away or filled in by sentimental dream-work; for
they are not necessarily signs of madness, ignorance, perversity or structural
amnesia—they are, in fact, the essence of the problem (and not the problem
itself) to be discussed. We deal with palimpsests, collages, split-screens, and
other multi-layered combinatory and encrypted texts of human experience. Moreover, behind this complexity and
conflictual terrain there does not lie a single originary moment or event or
memory to be disclosed, cleansed of extraneous materials or filled in from
other distant and embedded sources.[6] That kind of reconstructed text—that mode of
repairing the intricate relations between inner and outer worlds of human
experience—would be a fiction or a work of art. and while satisfying to see
performed on stage or in dreams would do no good to anyone trying to understand
how historical reality works. Such a tikkun ha-olam is a reduction (sometimes
a reductio ad absurdum), an abstract,
poetical pattern, a subjection of the inner tensions and anxieties to the
external laws of philosophical logic.
[1] Charles Frederick Holder, Living
Lights: A Popular Account of Phosphorescent Animals and Vegetables (London:
Samson Low, Marston, Searle and Livingston, 1887). Preface, p. vi.
[2] Compare these remarks on theory and method with Luc Herman and Bart
Vervaeck, “The Schreber Connection: Interpretation in Psychoanalysis and
Literature,” a review of C. Barry Chabot, Freud
on Schreber: psychoanalytic Theory and the Critical Act (Amherst, MA:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1982) in the Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 61-3 (1983) 591-608;
available through Persée online at
http://www.persee.fr/revues/hpome/prescript/article/rbph_0035-0818_1983_num61_3_3433
[3]Herman and Vervaeck, “The Schreber Connection”
599.
[5] Herman and Vervaeck, “The Schreber Connection” 601. Here the authors follow Michel Foucault, whom
they cite, along with his followers.
No comments:
Post a Comment