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Melville’s Secrets: The Walter Harding Lecture, 2010

Yesterday afternoon I gave the 2010 Walter Harding lecture at SUNY Geneseo. The lecture series is named after Walter Harding, who taught for decades in Geneseo and was the preeminent twentieth-century scholar of Henry David Thoreau, and I felt it was a tremendous honor to have been asked. I talked about Melville’s secrets—in particular, about a distorted Platonic myth that I suspect may be present in Moby-Dick. “Ishmael,” I claimed, “might be considered a final, uninvited guest to Plato’s banquet, and his tale a postscript to Diotima’s.”

SUNY Geneseo has already uploaded a video of my talk (perhaps also embedded below, if I’ve coaxed the html sufficiently); a downloadable audio is forthcoming. I’m not going to post a transcript, because I’m hoping to revise the talk into a scholarly paper in the not-too-distant future. To that end, if any of you who heard the talk yesterday or who listen to it online have suggestions, corrections, or comments, please get in touch.

I had a great time at SUNY Geneseo. Many thanks to Marjorie Harding, for the gift that made the lecture series possible; it was an honor to meet the Harding family. I’m very grateful to Geneseo’s English department for their hospitality and great questions. I’m especially grateful to department chair Paul Schacht for his support and guidance, to associate professor Alice Rutkowski for a very kind introduction, and to the college president and English professor Christopher Dahl and his wife Ruth Rowse for a lovely dinner.

In Despair’s cave

Desultorily, with no ambitions for speed or even completion, I have been reading Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene (1590-1609). I had always been daunted by its reputation (long, boring), but Keats goes on and on about Spenser in his letters, and in The Magician's Book, my friend Laura Miller offhandedly suggests that the sort of children who like C. S. Lewis's Narnia books may grow up to be the sort of adults who like the Faerie Queene, so I thought I should show a little gumption.

Spenser's vocabulary was deliberately archaic even in the sixteenth century, and that's an obstacle. You win quite a few rounds of OED bingo while reading Spenser. (To win a round of OED bingo, a game of my own devising, when you come across a word you don't know, you look it up in the OED, and if you find the same passage that you've been reading among the usage examples, you win. For example, if, like me, you don't know the meaning of stound, then upon discovering the word in a line of Spenser's, you turn to the OED, learn that it refers to a sharp pang, attack, or shock, and just below this definition you find the lines of verse that sent you there:

Then when his deare Duessa heard, and saw
The evill stownd, that daungered her estate . . .

Bingo! I've also won rounds while reading Trollope. Boody, meaning "to sulk," is a word that only Trollope seems ever to have used.)

The Faerie Queene isn't like Spenser's lyric poetry, which I've liked since college; it's more impersonal, even monumental. Moreover, it's allegory—another obstacle to modern enjoyment. In principle I don't mind it that one character stands for virtue, another for virginity, etc., but many of Spenser's characters represent their ideas so impartially that they don't quite come across as people. Add in the poem's resort to fantastical and sometimes gruesome imagery, and the reader sometimes feels as if he is trapped in another person's unconscious, prey to mysterious forces incarnated as monsters, elves, and beauties, all lacking the sort of personal self that might in a pinch be negotiated with.

An exception to this generalized quality is the character Despair, who appears in book 1, canto 9. Despair, rather modernly, not only represents an idea but gives voice to it and has an almost personal way of thinking about it.

Personal and creepy. He's thoroughly unpleasant. Greasy-haired and lantern-jawed, he is discovered by Red Cross, the first canto's hero, sitting on the floor of a cave beside a man whom he has just encouraged to stab himself. The corpse, Spenser reports, is still wallowing "in his owne yet luke-warme blood." Red Cross threatens to kill Despair, who in his defense points out that he didn't kill the man beside him: "None else to death this man despayring drive, / But his owne guiltie mind deserving death." Moreover, Despaire continues, the man is now at peace, which it's hardly kind for Red Cross to begrudge him:

He there does now enjoy eternall rest
And happie ease, which thou doest want and crave,
And further from it daily wanderest:
What if some little paine the passage have,
That makes fraile flesh to feare the bitter wave?
Is not short paine well borne, that brings long ease,
And layes the soule to sleepe in quiet grave?
Sleepe after toyle, port after stormie seas,
Ease after warre, death after life does greatly please.

Everyone dies, Despair continues; so why try to avoid death? Humans are naturally sinful, and therefore the longer they live, the more sin they commit. Despair reminds Red Cross, for example, that not long ago Red Cross betrayed his beloved Una with the fetching but evil Duessa. Isn't Red Cross himself guilty enough already? Does he really want to live longer and risk adding to his budget of misdoing? "Then do no further goe, no further stray," Despair counsels, "But here lie downe, and to thy rest betake." Despair hands Red Crosse a dagger. Red Crosse lifts it up . . .

Una herself stops him. She calls Red Cross "faint harted," which isn't quite fair, but she reminds him that she's relying on him to fight a dragon, and that's sufficient to liberate him from Despair's spell.

Not long after reading Red Cross's encounter with Despair, I picked up the psychologist Thomas Joiner's recent book Myths about Suicide (Harvard University Press, 2010). Unhappily, several friends of mine have died by their own hand over the years, so I was reading for the personal reason of wanting to understand. Joiner is out to explode a number of canards about suicide that he believes untrue. He's more impatient with the psychoanalytic tradition than I am, though I'm sympathetic with his exasperation, particularly with the orthodoxies of mid-twentieth-century American psychoanalysis, which got quite sclerotic. He repeats some of his material from chapter to chapter, but perhaps that's because he expects people to read the book in pieces, turning to the myth that they're curious about, rather than all the way through, as I happened to.

I learned a great deal from Joiner's book. I think he would give Edmund Spenser's representation of suicidal despair a B+. He wouldn't have approved of Una's aspersion on Red Cross's bravery, for example, because he considers the notion that suicides are cowards to be false. A suicide has to overcome natural aversion to self-harm, and the effort sometimes requires near-incredible will-power and toughness. Joiner would, however, have overwhelmingly approved of Una's intervention, and of her indication to Red Cross that he is wanted and needed.

Joiner is a strict logician, and his angriest debunking is of the psychoanalytic notion that "suicide is an act of anger, aggression, or revenge." According to this theory, first mooted by Freud, Red Cross's real impulse for trying to stab himself would have been anger or resentment of someone close to him. Who, though—Una? The notion "fails to explain why so many people who die by suicide take steps to make their deaths easier on loved ones," Joiner writes. Survivors of a suicide often feel angry and may perceive themseves to have been attacked by the deed, but suicides motivated by anger, Joiner suspects, are rare. Those contemplating suicide are much more likely to feel "that they are bereft and that their deaths will be a service to others."

Joiner believes that one reason suicides are so difficult for others to understand is that suicide is the end-result of three long processes that change the way suicidal people think about themselves and the world: "learned fearlessness, perceived burdensomeness, and failed belongingness." It isn't natural to harm oneself, and suicides have learned to be fearless about self-hurt, either because their careers (the practice of medicine, military service) or life experiences (Holocaust survival, anorexia) have inured them to pain and trauma, or because they have managed to inure themselves by repeated attempts. By "perceived burdensomeness," Joiner explains, he means that suicides come to hold "the view that one burdens others to such a degree that one's death will be worth more than one's life." By "failed belongingness," he means that they feel "profoundly alienated from others." Una's request for Red Cross to fight a dragon at once offsets his perception of himself as a burden—as the pit of accumulating sinfulness that Despair is trying to insinuate into his self-image—and reintegrates him into the social world.

That sense of integration seems crucial. Not much in the study of suicide is based on rock-solid scientific proof, Joiner explains, because it's not the sort of phenomenon that it would be ethical to experiment with. Intriguingly, however, the only clinical intervention proven to lower death rates is a very simple one: if patients hospitalized for a suicide attempt later receive "brief expressions of concern and reminders that the treatment agency was accessible when patients needed it," fewer of them go on to die by suicide. The benefit was first demonstrated with personalized, signed letters, but a later study showed that the benefit persisted even if the expression took the form of a computer-generated postcard. Even a small gesture had a powerful effect.

There's overwhelming evidence, in fact, that it's untrue that "If people want to die by suicide, we can't stop them." Una's no-nonsense yanking of Red Cross from Despair's cave is, here too, a model. Studies have repeatedly shown that when suicide-prevention barriers are added to a bridge, the number of suicides from that bridge drops, and the number of suicides from other bridges nearby does not rise. After 1963, Joiner reports, suicides in Britain dropped by a third merely because that year "Britain switched from coke gas to natural gas for domestic use" and "coke gas is far more lethal." The rates didn't rise again later. Similarly, when Britain outlawed packages of acetaminophen and aspirin containing more than 32 pills, deaths by overdose of those drugs dropped 22 percent, and that decrease, too, became permanent. After Australia banned automatic and semi-automatic weapons in 1996, suicide by firearms dropped from about 492 yearly to 247, and no increases in other methods of death was observed.

Everyone who attempts suicide is ambivalent, Joiner believes, and therefore apparently contingent factors can be decisive, such as access to means and minor positive or negative social signals. The person contemplating suicide isn't seeing the big picture, and this is why only about a quarter leave notes, and why those few notes tend to focus on practical, short-term matters, like where to find the keys to the car. Joiner refers to this as "cognitive constriction," and Red Cross certainly falls into it. He forgets, after all, about a whole dragon.

Traumdeutung at the movies

Over at the Paris Review, I synthesize my quack science-fiction criticism and my recent reading of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams into a blog post about Christopher Nolan’s new movie Inception.

Left on the cutting-room floor was a comparison between the movie’s diagram of dreaming and Freud’s—too geeky even for the Paris Review, and offered as an outtake here:

As part of a recruiting pitch, the dream invader Cobb, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, draws the following diagram in Christopher Nolan’s new movie Inception:

While the mind is dreaming, Cobb claims, it creates a world and experiences it simultaneously, and the tightness of the feedback loop is what makes dreams so potent and intoxicating.

For comparison, here is the diagram that Sigmund Freud drew to explain dreaming:

Read from left to right, Freud’s diagram represents waking life. At the far left, stimuli (sounds, images, tastes, etc.) enter the human mind through the perceptual system, which Freud labels “Pcpt.” Once inside the mind, the perceptions leave a memory trace, labeled “Mnem”—a record of the sensation and of associations between them. Over the course of a lifetime, a person has many experiences and therefore accumulates many layers of memories and associations. Freud suggests these layers by adding a level “Mnem-prime” after “Mnem” and then adding ellipsis dots after that. These memories are for the most part unconscious, though many of them can be made conscious. Also unconscious (“Ucs”) are many of a person’s wishes and fears, some of the most powerful of which are the oldest, which derive from memory traces laid down in childhood, when a person is most impressionable. In responding to a new experience, a person may be motivated by his unconscious but only takes action through his preconscious mind (“Pcs”). It’s the preconscious that brings memories and associations into consciousness and controls motor activity—the downward arrow exiting the diagram on the far right.

In waking life, excitation moves from left to right, in the direction of the arrow that Freud drew along the bottom of his diagram. But in dreams, Freud suggests, excitation moves backward—from right to left. Dreams begin as wishes in the unconscious and move backward through memory until at last they reach the perceptual system, which they stimulate into hallucination.

Freud’s diagram seems at first to lack a loop like the one in Cobb’s, but in fact it does contain one. That’s because the outside world appears both at the far left of Freud’s diagram and at the far right. The world is both the source of sensation and the domain upon which a person acts. In Freud’s understanding, a dream breaks the loop through the outer world, sending excitation into a short circuit that never leaves the mind. Whereas in waking life a person acts upon the world in order to attain remembered pleasures, a dreamer merely hallucinates the satisfaction of his wishes. Freud thinks that infants for a while attempt the same psychic shortcut even while awake. But “the bitter experience of life,” Freud drily notes, forces a child to concede in time that an imaginary bottle of milk is not as good as a real one.

Interpretation and recognition

Revisiting his dream of the botanical monograph in chapter 6, Freud reveals that behind his jocular association to his favorite flower, the artichoke, lies a further association, to Italy. It isn't hard to guess the link; fried artichokes were no doubt a specialty of Roman restaurants already in Freud's day. The pertinence of Italy to the dream's underlying wish isn't hard to guess, either, given all that Freud has said in relation to other dreams about Hannibal and Rome. Oddly, though, Freud doesn't seem aware that he hasn't yet demonstrated Italy's pertinence to this particular dream. As the fastidious and tactful translator, James Strachey, observes in a footnote, the mention of Italy "seems to be a reference to an element in the dream-thoughts not previously mentioned." Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that his friend Fliess was visiting Italy without him, as he reveals in his analysis of another dream of his? What if Fliess gets to Rome first? Generals have to worry about that sort of thing. In any case the lapse suggests that Italy was so fixed in Freud's mind that it was hard for him to keep track of whether he'd already mentioned it.

Meanwhile, there's an almost self-punitive tone to Freud's continuing revelations about his feelings for Fliess. He reports that after Fliess, "a man of importance," was attacked "by an unknown young writer" in print, Freud dreamed about the great German author Goethe attacking a young man, "Herr M." In Freud's dream, he misremembered the year of Goethe's death, substituting instead the year that one of his patients had been born, and he explains that dreams sometimes include such a deliberate reversal of facts in order to signal that the dream itself is to be reversed during interpretation—that the state of affairs in the dream is to be understood under the rubric "just the reverse." Fliess/Goethe didn't deserve to be attacked; the young critic should have been. The interpretation is plausible but not convincing, and at the conclusion of his example, Freud added in 1911 this comment: "It is remarkable to observe . . . how frequently reversal is employed precisely in dreams arising from repressed homosexual impulses." Suddenly Freud's interpretation seems even less convincing. A little later, he reports a dream whose chief characteristic was the sense Freud had at the time of its startling clarity: the dream was about presenting Fliess with "a difficult and long-sought theory of bisexuality"—a theory not itself included in Freud's dream, to his sorrow. Many, no doubt, are the men who have wished for a brilliant theory of bisexuality to explain troubling feelings to themselves. That Freud eventually came up with such a theory doesn't make this dream any less telling.

One doubts, too, Freud's interpretation of his dream of seeing a placard with the sentence "You are requested to close the eyes" or "You are requested to close an eye." Freud says that he dreamt it the night before his father's funeral, that the closing of two eyes referred to the funeral, and that the closing of one expressed his wish that his relatives would "wink" at the modesty of the service that Freud had organized, in accordance with what he felt were his father's wishes. But Strachey, ever the detective, notes that Freud wrote in a letter to Fliess at the time that he dreamt this dream the night after his father's funeral. A historian is obliged to prefer the contemporaneous testimony. Instead of looking ahead to the funeral with anxiety, the dream must have looked back to his father's death with remorse, and in that case, the one eye may have been the one that his father submitted to Freud's colleague for glaucoma surgery, and the two may have belonged to Oedipus—the psychological significance of whose story Freud had just set forth, for the first time in history, in chapter 5.

Of course I can't prove that the interpretations I'm sketching here are any more valid than those given by Freud himself. Decisive proof is hard to come by, in dreamland. If dreams may mean the reverse of what they seem to represent, if affectionate feelings in dreams may disguise hostile wishes, if logical and causal relationships are dissolved in dreams, and if a word in a dream may mean either itself or its opposite or simply refer to a context in which the dreamer recently heard it's used, then it's hard to see how one could decide between interpretations impartially. There are too many variables in the equation; there's freedom along too many axes. In practice, though, the freedom proves not to be too great, or at least one doesn't feel that it is, because one experiences an almost physical relief upon solving a dream. One recognizes the answer. All the pieces of the puzzle click into place.

I had a dream last night, for example, to some extent inspired by our Freud reading group, in which a young man with a cat-like moustache said, "It's sexy," and in the dream I said to myself, Oh, he meant to say 'sexual.' The reference might have been to the erotic frisson incidental to discussing psychology with friends—to the slippage between sexual and sexy. This morning's meeting, for instance, featured a digression about male versus female wet dreams. But Freud says unequivocally that spoken words in a dream always derive from spoken words in waking life, and I couldn't at first recall hearing anything like the words "It's sexy" in our reading group or anywhere else. The notion of a cat-like moustache seemed strange, because I didn't exactly know what it meant. Cats made me think of dogs, though, and suddenly I remembered.

A few days ago, walking our dog, I crossed paths with a young man with a pit bull. The young man was taciturn; the pit bull was straining at the end of his leash ambiguously. I asked, of the pit bull,
"Is he friendly?"

"It's sexy," the man answered.

I was baffled. "It's what?" I asked.

"Her name is Sexy," he said. He had misheard my question. Sexy was friendly, as it turned out, and the two dogs played nicely together—which must have been my wish for the reading group, too.

The feeling of recognition seems superior to everything Freud offers by way of method. But his theory of recognition, like that of bisexuality, seems to have been left out.

Ambition and ambivalence

Further contributing to Freud’s charm is his candor about his ambition, which is associated in his mind—or perhaps one should say, in his case—with bedwetting, a confession that can’t help but win him powerful allies, since all the most interesting people wet their beds until an advanced age. Freud reports that when reproached for the offense at age two, “I consoled my father by promising to buy him a nice new red bed in N., the nearest town of any size.” At age seven or eight, upon urinating in his parents’ bedroom, Freud was dismayed to hear his father say, “The boy will come to nothing.” The verdict was to haunt Freud’s dreams into adulthood, when his dreams would still be endeavoring to disprove it.

In the promise to buy his father a bed, Freud sees “all the megalomania of childhood,” and his manner of confession lets the reader know that he is alert to the humor of the megalomania. He recounts that at his birth, an “old peasant-woman” prophesied to his mother that “she had brought a great man into the world”—a prophesy he deprecates by noting that the world is full of “mothers filled with happy expectations” and of old peasant-women eager for a chance to please someone. In boyhood, he confesses, he dreamed of visiting Rome in emulation of no less than Hannibal, “the favorite hero of my later school days.” Freud saw Hannibal as a fellow outsider. “To my youthful mind, Hannibal and Rome symbolized the conflict between the tenacity of Jewry and the organization of the Catholic church.” Hannibal, moreover, took arms against his sea of troubles, whereas, in the Moravian town where Freud was born, Freud’s father had had his cap knocked off by a Christian who shouted, “Jew! get off the pavement!” and had done no more than pick up his cap and walk on. “Hannibal’s father,” Freud recollected, pointing the contrast, “made his boy swear before the household altar to take vengeance on the Romans.” The child Freud aspired, in other words, to vanquish Christendom and rule the world. Indeed, when pealing bells nearly awoke the adult Freud, one morning during a vacation in the Tyrol, he revenged himself on the Tyroleans’ piety by rolling over and dreaming that “the Pope was dead.” In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud was to famously describe the mind as resembling Rome in its juxtaposition of ancient and modern structures, but even in the Interpretation there are already hints that Freud sees psychoanalysis as his Roman campaign. In my favorite passage, Freud adds a footnoted postscript to his regret that scheduling conflicts kept him from visiting Rome before 1899: “I discovered long since that it only needs a little courage to fulfil wishes which till then have been regarded as unattainable; and thereafter became a constant pilgrim to Rome.”

Ambition isn’t all that unflattering a thing to confess. But as he did in the dream of Irma’s injection, Freud continues in the middle chapters of the Interpretation to make somewhat more imprudent confessions as well, whose effect on readers he seems less aware of or in control of. He repeatedly announces that he’s not revealing everything:

For reasons with which we are not concerned, I shall not pursue the interpretation of this dream any further.

I can assure my readers that the ultimate meaning of the dream, which I have not disclosed, is intimately related to the subject of the childhood scene.

I must desist at this point because the personal sacrifice demanded would be too great.

Nonetheless he repeatedly reveals far more than is necessary to demonstrate his ostensible point. Of his dream about a botanical monograph, for example, Freud writes that “my only purpose in reporting it was to illustrate by an example the relation between the content of a dream and the experience of the previous day which provoked it.” But it sheds light on a great deal more. It links Freud’s pride in having aided in the discovery of cocaine as an anaesthetic to his chronic self-indulgence as a bookworm and to the triumph he felt when his father—the one who didn’t think Freud would ever amount to anything—was given cocaine anaesthesia by one of Freud’s friends while another of Freud’s friends operated on his glaucoma. Freud’s feeling of triumph or perhaps defiance returns in a long dream of his with a “Revolutionary year 1848” coloring, which ends with Freud presenting a “male glass urinal” to a one-eyed man—again a reference to Freud’s ambition and to his father’s glaucoma, which blinded his father in one eye. “What [the dream of the botanical monograph] meant was: ‘After all, I’m the man who wrote the valuable and memorable paper (on cocaine)’ . . . [and] ‘I may allow myself to do this.'” The feelings of pride and entitlement are understandable, maybe even excusable, but the triumph over his father raises questions. Was it to vindicate the father whose hat was knocked off that Freud vowed to conquer Rome? Or was it to replace him? Rome, after all, is a type of power and authority. If the discoverer of the Oedipal complex did set out to seize the paternal authority, didn’t he feel a little, well, guilty about it?

In the preface to the second edition of the Interpretation, Freud writes that he came to understand later that the book constituted “a portion of my own self-analysis, my reaction to my father’s death.” I wondered in my earlier post if Freud’s revelations in the book could be read as an invitation, but I began to wonder, while considering the middle chapters, whether this invitation might not have been an altogether conscious one—whether in communicating more than he needed to about his dreams Freud might have been acting on a wish of which he was not fully aware. In that light, consider the most disquieting revelation in Freud’s account of the dream of the botanical monograph, a daydream that he had the morning after:

If ever I got glaucoma, I . . . thought, I should travel to Berlin and get myself operated on, incognito, in my friend’s [Fliess’s] house, by a surgeon recommended by him. The operating surgeon, who would have no idea of my identity, would boast once again of how easily such operations could be performed since the introduction of cocaine; and I should not give the slightest hint that I myself had had a share in the discovery.

Like a hysteric, Freud is imagining a connection through a bodily ailment. In the dream of Irma’s injection, he had imagined a link (pain in the left shoulder) between himself and a young female patient whom he had turned over to Fliess for an operation. Now he is imagining a link (glaucoma) between himself and his father, and wishing that he could turn himself over to Fliess for an operation. The operation is to be in a strangely impersonal way a triumph for Freud, as a co-discoverer of cocaine anaesthesia, but it is impossible to keep from noticing that it would also put Freud in the position of the triumphed-upon—of the father whom he has shown up. The most disturbing element of the fantasy is the role assigned to Fliess: the man with the knife. Like the real-life Emma Eckstein who lay behind Irma, Freud is not suffering from an illness that justifies a wish to have Fliess cut him open. Perhaps he wishes to submit to punishment by Fliess as a compensation for what he feels that by writing the Interpretation he is doing to his father. Fliess, however, is proving unsatisfactory as a father substitute, because the confidence he offers—the confidence that shores up Freud’s—has little to do with evidence. Just a few pages prior, in fact, Freud in a very lengthy and rather boring footnote, added in 1911, shows that he can’t find any grounds for agreeing with Fliess that men’s dreams follow a 23-day cycle or women’s a 28-day one. It is dawning on Freud that Fliess’s confidence may be arbitrary and that he may therefore be dangerous. If, because you feel guilty about your own assault on authority, you go searching for it in others, you may make yourself vulnerable to punishments you don’t in fact deserve.

Perhaps Freud’s oversharing could be thought of as his search, after the loss of his father, for someone to submit to who isn’t Fliess. Perhaps he was redirecting his wish for submission toward an ideal. As an intentional act, The Interpretation of Dreams represents an enormous assumption of authority—the establishment of no less than a new understanding of the human mind. To compensate for the authority that he was establishing over his reader, perhaps Freud felt compelled to submit himself for analysis to that same reader—to the reader whom the book itself was calling into existence.