Freud - Complete Works (321 page)

   While he was leaning out of the
window, absorbed in these thoughts, his attention was caught by a
canary warbling its song from a cage in the open window of the
house opposite. Suddenly something passed with a start through the
mind of the young man, who seems not yet to have fully woken from
his dream. He thought he saw in the street a form like his Gradiva,
and thought he even recognized her characteristic gait. Without
thinking, he hurried into the street so as to catch up with her;
and it was only the laughter and jeers of the passers-by at his
early-morning attire that quickly drove him back into his house.
When he was in his room again, the singing of the canary in its
cage once more caught his attention and suggested a comparison with
himself. He too, so it seemed to him, was like someone sitting in a
cage, though it was easier for him to escape from it. As though as
a further aftermath of his dream, and perhaps, too, under the
influence of the mild air of spring, a resolve took shape in him to
make a spring-time journey to Italy. A scientific excuse for it
soon presented itself, even though ‘the impulse to make this
journey had arisen from a feeling he could not name.’
(24.)

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1819

   Let us pause for a moment at this
journey, planned for such remarkably uncogent reasons, and take a
closer look at our hero’s personality and behaviour. He still
appears to us as incomprehensible and foolish; we have no idea how
his peculiar folly will be linked to human feeling and so arouse
our sympathy. It is an author’s privilege to be allowed to
leave us in such uncertainty. The charm of his language and the
ingenuity of his ideas offer us a provisional reward for the
reliance we place in him and for the still unearned sympathy which
we are ready to feel for his hero. Of this hero we are further told
that he was pre-ordained by family tradition to become an
archaeologist, that in his later isolation and independence he was
wholly absorbed in his studies and had turned completely away from
life and its pleasures. Marble and bronze alone were truly alive
for him; they alone expressed the purpose and value of human life.
But nature, perhaps with benevolent intent, had infused into his
blood a corrective of an entirely unscientific sort - an extremely
lively imagination, which could show itself not only in his dreams
but often in his waking life as well. This division between
imagination and intellect destined him to become an artist or a
neurotic; he was one of those whose kingdom is not of this world.
Thus it was that it could come about that his interest was attached
to a relief representing a girl stepping along in a peculiar
fashion, that he wove his phantasies around her, imagined a name
and origin for her, placed the figure he had created in the setting
of the Pompeii that was buried more than eighteen hundred years
before, and finally, after a strange anxiety-dream, magnified his
phantasy of the existence and death of this girl named Gradiva into
a delusion, which gained an influence over his actions. Such
products of the imagination would seem to us astonishing and
inexplicable if we met them in someone in real life. Since our
hero, Norbert Hanold, is a fictitious person, we may perhaps put a
timid question to his author, and ask whether his imagination was
determined by forces other than its own arbitrary choice.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1820

   We had left our hero at the
moment when he was apparently being led by the song of a canary to
decide on a journey to Italy, the purpose of which was evidently
not clear to him. We learn further that he had no fixed plan or
goal for his journey. An inner restlessness and dissatisfaction
drove him from Rome to Naples and from thence further still. He
found himself among the swarm of honeymooners and was forced to
notice the loving couples of ‘Edwins’ and
‘Angelinas’,¹ but was quite unable to understand
their goings-on. He came to the conclusion that of all the follies
of mankind ‘getting married takes first place, as the
greatest and most incomprehensible, and the senseless honeymoon
trips to Italy are, in a way, the crowning touch of this
idiocy’. (27.) Having been disturbed in his sleep by the
proximity of a loving couple in Rome, he hurriedly fled to Naples,
only to find other ‘Edwins’ and ‘Angelinas’
there. Having gathered from their conversation that the majority of
these pairs of birds had no intention of nesting among the ruins of
Pompeii, but were flying towards Capri, he determined to do what
they did not, and only a few days after his departure found himself
‘contrary to his expectation and intentions’ in
Pompeii.

   But without finding there the
repose he was in search of. The part which had so far been played
by the honeymoon couples, who had troubled his spirits and harassed
his thoughts, was now taken over by the house-flies, which he was
inclined to regard as the incarnation of all that is absolutely
evil and unnecessary. The two sorts of tormenting spirits melted
into a unity: some of the pairs of flies reminded him of the
honeymooners, and he suspected that they too were addressing each
other in their language as ‘dearest Edwin’ and
‘darling Angelina’. Eventually, he could not but
realize that ‘his dissatisfaction was not caused only by his
surroundings but that its source was in part derived from within
himself’. (42.) He felt that ‘he was discontented
because he lacked something, though it was not clear to him
what’.

  
¹
[‘August’ and
‘Grete’ in the original. The names recur frequently in
the course of the story and it has seemed best to replace them by
those conventionally applied to English honeymoon couples of the
late Victorian age.]

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1821

   Next morning he passed through
the ‘
Ingresso
’ into Pompeii, and, after getting
rid of the guide, strolled aimlessly through the town, without,
strangely enough, remembering that only a short time before he had
been present in his dream at its burial. When later on, at the
‘hot and holy’ mid-day hour, which the ancients
regarded as the hour of ghosts, the other visitors had taken flight
and the heaps of ruins lay before him desolate and bathed in
sunlight, he found that he was able to carry himself back into the
life that had been buried - but not by the help of science.
‘What it taught was a lifeless, archaeological way of looking
at things, and what came from its mouth was a dead, philological
language. These were of no help to an understanding through the
spirit, the feelings, the heart - put it as you please. Whoever had
a longing for that must stand here alone, the only living creature,
in the hot silence of mid-day, among the relics of the past, and
look, but not with bodily eyes, and listen, but not with physical
ears. And then . . . the dead wakened and Pompeii
began to live once more.’ (55.)

   While he was thus animating the
past with his imagination, he suddenly saw the unmistakable Gradiva
of his relief come out of a house and step trippingly over the lava
stepping stones to the other side of the street, just as he had
seen her do in his dream the other night, when she had lain down as
though to sleep, on the steps of the Temple of Apollo. ‘And
together with his memory something else came into his consciousness
for the first time: without being aware himself of the impulse
within him, he had come to Italy and had travelled on to Pompeii,
without stopping in Rome or Naples, in order to see whether he
could find any traces of her. And "traces" literally; for
with her peculiar gait she must have left behind an imprint of her
toes in the ashes distinct from all the rest.’ (58.)

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1822

   At this point the tension in
which the author has hitherto held us grows for a moment into a
painful sense of bewilderment. It is not only our hero who has
evidently lost his balance; we too have lost our bearings in the
face of the apparition of Gradiva, who was first a marble figure
and then an imaginary one. Is she a hallucination of our hero, led
astray by his delusions? It she a ‘real’ ghost? or a
living person? Not that we need believe in ghosts when we draw up
this list. The author, who has called his story a
‘phantasy’, has found no occasion so far for informing
us whether he intends to leave us in our world, decried for being
prosaic and governed by the laws of science, or whether he wishes
to transport us into another and imaginary world, in which spirits
and ghosts are given reality. As we know from the examples of
Hamlet
and
Macbeth
, we are prepared to follow him
there without hesitation. If so, the imaginative
archaeologist’s delusion would have to be measured by another
standard. Indeed, when we consider how improbable it must be that a
real person could exist who bore an exact resemblance to the
antique sculpture, our list of alternatives shrinks to two: a
hallucination or a mid-day ghost. A small detail in the account
soon cancels the first possibility. A large lizard was lying
motionless, stretched out in the sunshine, but fled at the approach
of Gradiva’s foot and darted away across the lava
paving-stones. So it was no hallucination, but something outside
our dreamer’s mind. But could the reality of a
rediviva
startle a lizard?

   Gradiva disappeared in front of
the House of Meleager. We shall not be surprised to hear that
Norbert Hanold pursued his delusion that Pompeii had come to life
around him at the mid-day hour of ghosts and supposed that Gradiva
too had come to life again and had entered the house in which she
had lived before the fatal August day in 79 A.D. Ingenious
speculations upon the personality of its owner (after whom the
house was probably named), and upon Gradiva’s relationship to
him, shot through his head, and proved that his science was now
completely in the service of his imagination. He entered the house,
and suddenly found the apparition once more, sitting on some low
steps between two yellow columns. ‘There was something white
stretched out across her knees; he could not clearly discern what
it was; it seemed to be a sheet of papyrus . . .’ On the
basis of his latest theories if her origin he addressed her in
Greek, and waited with trepidation to learn whether, in her phantom
presence she possessed the power of speech. Since she made no
reply, he addressed her instead in Latin. Then, with a smile on her
lips: ‘If you want to speak to me’, she said,
‘you must do it in German.’

   What a humiliation for us
readers! So the author has been making fun of us, and, with the
help, as it were, of a reflection of the Pompeian sunshine, has
inveigled us into a delusion on a small scale, so that we may be
forced to pass a milder judgement on the poor wretch on whom the
mid-day sun was really shining. Now, however, that we have been
cured of our brief confusion, we know that Gradiva was a German
girl of flesh and blood - a solution which we were inclined to
reject as the most improbable one. And now, with a quiet sense of
superiority, we may wait to learn what the relation was between the
girl and her marble image, and how our young archaeologist arrived
at the phantasies which pointed towards her real personality.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1823

   But our hero was not torn from
his delusion as quickly as we have been, for, as the author tells
us, ‘though his belief made him happy, he had to take the
acceptance of quite a considerable number of mysteries into the
bargain’. (140.) Moreover, this delusion probably had
internal roots in him of which we know nothing and which do not
exist in ourselves. In his case, no doubt, energetic treatment
would seem necessary before he could be brought back to reality.
Meanwhile all he could do was to fit his delusion into the
wonderful experience he had just had. Gradiva, who had perished
with the rest in the destruction of Pompeii, could be nothing other
than a mid-day ghost who had returned to life for the brief ghostly
hour. But why was it that, after hearing her reply delivered in
German, he exclaimed ‘I knew your voice sounded like
that’? Not only we, but the girl herself was bound to ask the
question, and Hanold had to admit that he had never heard it,
though he had expected to in his dream, when he called to her as
she lay down to sleep on the temple steps. He begged her to do the
same thing again as she had then; but now she rose, gave him a
strange look, and in a few paces disappeared between the columns of
the court. A pretty butterfly had shortly before fluttered round
her for a while; and he interpreted it as a messenger from Hades
reminding the dead girl that she must return, since the mid-day
hour of ghosts was at an end. Hanold still had time to call after
the girl as she vanished: ‘Will you return here to morrow at
the mid-day hour?’ To us, however, who can now venture upon
more sober interpretations, it looks as though the young lady had
seen something improper in the remark addressed to her by Hanold
and had left him with a sense of having been insulted; for after
all she could have known nothing of his dream. May not her
sensibility have detected the erotic nature of his request, whose
motive in Hanold’s eyes lay in its relation to his dream?

   After Gradiva’s
disappearance our hero had a careful look at all the guests
congregated for their mid-day meal at the Hotel Diomède and
went on to do the same at the Hotel Suisse, and he was then able to
feel assured that in neither of the only two hotels known to him in
Pompeii was there anyone bearing the remotest resemblance to
Gradiva. He would of course have rejected as nonsensical the idea
that he might actually meet Gradiva in one of the two inns. And
presently the wine pressed from the hot soil of Vesuvius helped to
intensify the whirl of feeling in which he spent the day.