Zoë Bertgang finished her unreserved, detailed and instructive lecture,
and it was indeed notable how exactly she then resembled the figure of
Gradiva on the bas-relief, not only in her features, her form, her eyes,
expressive of wisdom, and her charmingly wavy hair, but also in her
graceful manner of walking which he had often seen; her drapery, too,
dress and scarf of a cream-coloured, fine cashmere material which fell
in soft, voluminous folds, completed the extraordinary resemblance of
her whole appearance. There might have been much foolishness in the
belief that a young Pompeiian girl, destroyed two thousand years ago by
Vesuvius, could sometimes walk around alive again, speak, draw and eat
bread, but even if the belief brought happiness, it assumed everywhere,
in the bargain, a considerable amount of incomprehensibility; and in
consideration of all the circumstances, there was incontestably present,
in the judgment of Norbert Hanold, some mitigating ground for his
madness in for two days considering Gradiva a resurrection.
Although he stood there dry under the portico roof, there was
established, not quite ineptly, a comparison between him and a wet
poodle, who has had a bucketful of water thrown on his head; but the
cold shower-bath had really done him good. Without knowing exactly why,
he felt that he was breathing much more easily. In that, of course, the
change of tone at the end of the sermon—for the speaker sat as if in a
pulpit-chair—might have helped especially; at least thereat a
transfigured light appeared in his eyes, such as awakened hope for
salvation through faith produces in the eyes of an ardently affected
church-attendant; and as the rebuke was now over, and there seemed no
necessity for fearing a further continuation, he succeeded in saying,
“Yes, now I recognize—no, you have not changed at all—it is you,
Zoë—my good, happy, clever comrade—it is most strange——”
“That a person must die to become alive again; but for archæologists
that is of course necessary.”
“No, I mean your name——”
“Why is it strange?”
The young archæologist showed himself familiar with not only the
classical languages, but also with the etymology of German, and
continued, “Because Bertgang has the same meaning as Gradiva and
signifies ‘the one splendid in walking.’”
Miss Zoë Bertgang’s two sandal-like shoes were, for the moment, because
of their movement, reminiscent of an impatiently see-sawing wagtail
waiting for something; yet the possessor of the feet which walked so
magnificently seemed not at present to be paying any attention to
philological explanations; by her countenance she gave the impression of
being occupied with some hasty plan, but was restrained from it by an
exclamation of Norbert Hanold’s which audibly emanated from deepest
conviction, “What luck, though, that you are not Gradiva, but are like
the congenial young lady!”
That caused an expression as of interested surprise to pass over her
face, and she asked, “Who is that? Whom do you mean?”
“The one who spoke to you in Meleager’s house.”
“Do you know her?”
“Yes, I had already seen her. She was the first person who seemed
especially congenial to me.”
“So? Where did you see her?”
“This morning, in the House of the Faun. There the couple were doing
something very strange.”
“What were they doing?”
“They did not see me and they kissed each other.”
“That was really very reasonable, you know. Why else are they in Pompeii
on their wedding trip?”
At one blow with the last word the former picture changed before Norbert
Hanold’s eyes, for the old wall-ruin lay there empty, because the girl,
who had chosen it as a seat, teacher’s chair and pulpit, had come down,
or really flown, and with the same supple buoyancy as that of a wagtail
swinging through the air, so that she already stood again on
Gradiva-feet, before his glance had consciously caught up with her
descent; and continuing her speech directly, she said, “Well, the rain
has stopped; too severe rulers do not reign long. That is reasonable,
too, you know, and thus everything has again become reasonable. I, not
least of all, and you can look up Gisa Hartleben, or whatever new name
she has, to be of scientific assistance to her about the purpose of her
stay in Pompeii. I must now go to the ‘Albergo del Sole,’ for my father
is probably waiting for me already at lunch. Perhaps we shall meet again
sometime at a party in Germany or on the moon. Addio!”
Zoë Bertgang said this in the absolutely polite, but also equally
indifferent tone of a most well-bred young lady, and, as was her custom,
placing her left foot forward, raised the sole of the right almost
perpendicularly to pass out. As she lifted her dress slightly with her
left hand, because of the thoroughly wet ground outside, the resemblance
to Gradiva was perfect and the man, standing hardly more than two
arm-lengths away, noticed for the first time a quite insignificant
deviation in the living picture from the stone one. The latter lacked
something possessed by the former, which appeared at the moment quite
clear, a little dimple in her cheek, which produced a slight,
indefinable effect. It puckered and wrinkled a little and could
therefore express annoyance or a suppressed impulse to laugh, possibly
both together. Norbert Hanold looked at it and although from the
evidence just presented to him he had completely regained his reason,
his eyes had to again submit to an optical illusion. For, in a tone
triumphing peculiarly over his discovery, he cried out, “There is the
fly again!”
It sounded so strange that from the incomprehending listener, who could
not see herself, escaped the question, “The fly—where?”
“There on your cheek!” and immediately the man, as he answered, suddenly
twined an arm about her neck and snapped, this time with his lips, at
the insect so deeply abhorrent to him, which vision juggled before his
eyes deceptively in the little dimple. Apparently, however, without
success, for right afterwards he cried again, “No, now it’s on your
lips!” and thereupon, quick as a flash, he directed thither his attempt
to capture, now remaining so long that no doubt could survive that he
succeeded in completely accomplishing his purpose, and strange to relate
the living Gradiva did not hinder him at all, and when her mouth, after
about a minute, was forced to struggle for breath, restored to powers of
speech, she did not say, “You are really crazy, Norbert Hanold,” but
rather allowed a most charming smile to play more visibly than before
about her red lips; she had been convinced more than ever of the
complete recovery of his reason.
The Villa of Diomede had two thousand years ago seen and heard horrible
things in an evil hour, yet at the present it heard and saw, for about
an hour, only things not at all suited to inspire horror. Then, however,
a sensible idea became uppermost in Miss Zoë Bertgang’s mind and as a
result, she said, against her wishes, “Now, I must _really_ go, or my
poor father will starve. It seems to me you can to-day forego Gisa
Hartleben’s company at noon, for you have nothing more to learn from her
and ought to be content with us in the ‘Sun Hotel.’”
From this it was to be concluded that daring that hour something must
have been discussed, for it indicated a helpful desire to instruct,
which the young lady vented on Norbert. Yet, from the reminding words,
he did not gather this, but something which, for the first time, he was
becoming terribly conscious of; this was apparent in the repetition,
“Your father—what will he——?”
Miss Zoë, however, interrupted, without any sign of awakened anxiety,
“Probably he will do nothing; I am not an indispensable piece in his
zoological collection; if I were, my heart would probably not have clung
to you so unwisely. Besides, from my early years, I have been sure that
a woman is of use in the world only when she relieves a man of the
trouble of deciding household matters; I generally do this for my
father, and therefore you can also be rather at ease about your future.
Should he, however, by chance, in this case, have an opinion different
from mine, we will make it as simple as possible. You go over to Capri
for a couple of days; there, with a grass snare—you can practise making
them on my little finger—catch a lizard _Faraglionensis_. Let it go
here again, and catch it before his eyes. Then give him free choice
between it and me, and you will have me so surely that I am sorry for
you. Toward his colleague, Eimer, however, I feel to-day that I have
formerly been ungrateful, for without his genial invention of
lizard-catching I should probably not have come into Meleager’s house,
and that would have been a shame, not only for you, but for me too.”
This last view she expressed outside of the Villa of Diomede and, alas,
there was no person present on earth who could make any statements about
the voice and manner of talking of Gradiva. Yet even if they had
resembled those of Zoë Bertgang, as everything else about her did, they
must have possessed a quite unusually beautiful and roguish charm.
By this, at least, Norbert Hanold was so strongly overwhelmed that,
exalted to poetic flights, he cried out, “Zoë, you dear life and lovely
present—we shall take our wedding-trip to Italy and Pompeii.”
That was a decided proof of how different circumstances can also produce
a transformation in a human being and at the same time unite with it a
weakening of the memory. For it did not occur to him at all that he
would thereby expose himself and his companion on the journey to the
danger of receiving, from misanthropic, ill-humoured railway companions,
the names Augustus and Gretchen, but at the moment he was thinking so
little about it that they walked along hand in hand through the old
Street of Tombs in Pompeii. Of course this, too, did not stamp itself
into their minds at present as such, for a cloudless sky shone and
laughed again above it; the sun stretched out a golden carpet on the old
lava-blocks; Vesuvius spread its misty pine-cone; and the whole
excavated city seemed overwhelmed, not with pumice and ashes, but with
pearls and diamonds, by the beneficent rain-storm.
The brilliance in the eyes of the young daughter of the zoologist
rivalled these, but to the announced desire about the destination of
their journey by her childhood friend who had, in a way, also been
excavated from the ashes, her wise lips responded: “I think we won’t
worry about that to-day; that is a thing which may better be left by
both of us to more and maturer consideration and future promptings. I,
at least, do not yet feel quite alive enough now for such geographical
decisions.”
That showed that the speaker possessed great modesty about the quality
of her insight into things about which she had never thought until
to-day. They had arrived again at the Hercules Gate, where, at the
beginning of the Strada Consolare, old stepping-stones crossed the
street. Norbert Hanold stopped before them and said with a peculiar
tone, “Please go ahead here.” A merry, comprehending, laughing
expression lurked around his companion’s mouth, and, raising her dress
slightly with her left hand, Gradiva _rediviva_ Zoë Bertgang, viewed by
him with dreamily observing eyes, crossed with her calmly buoyant walk,
through the sunlight, over the stepping-stones, to the other side of the
street.
_PART II_
DELUSION AND DREAM
IN
WILHELM JENSEN’S _GRADIVA_
BY
DR. SIGMUND FREUD
DELUSION AND DREAM
I
In a circle of men who take it for granted that the basic riddle of the
dream has been solved by the efforts of the present writer,[1] curiosity
was aroused one day concerning those dreams which have never been
dreamed, those created by authors, and attributed to fictitious
characters in their productions. The proposal to submit this kind of
dream to investigation might appear idle and strange; but from one
view-point it could be considered justifiable. It is, to be sure, not at
all generally believed that the dreamer dreams something senseful and
significant. Science and the majority of educated people smile when one
offers them the task of interpreting dreams. Only people still clinging
to superstition, who give continuity, thereby, to the convictions of the
ancients, will not refrain from interpreting dreams, and the writer of
_Traumdeutung_ has dared, against the protests of orthodox science, to
take sides with the ancients and superstitious. He is, of course, far
from accepting in dreams a prevision of the future, for the disclosure
of which man has, from time immemorial, striven vainly. He could not,
however, completely reject the connections of dreams with the future,
for, after completing some arduous analysis, the dreams seemed to him to
represent _the fulfilment of a wish_ of the dreamer; and who could
dispute that wishes are preponderantly concerned with the future?
I have just said that the dream is a fulfilled wish. Whoever is not
afraid to toil through a difficult book, whoever does not demand that a
complicated problem be insincerely and untruthfully presented to him as
easy and simple, to save his own effort, may seek in the above-mentioned
_Traumdeutung_ ample proof of this statement, and may, until then, cast
aside the objection that will surely be expressed against the
equivalence of dreams and wish-fulfilment.
We have, however, anticipated. The question is not now one of
establishing whether the meaning of a dream is, in every case, to be
interpreted as the fulfilment of a wish, or, just as frequently, as an
anxious expectation, an intention or deliberation, etc. The first
question is, rather, whether the dream has any meaning at all, whether
one should grant it the value of a psychic process. Science answers,
_No_; it explains the dream as a purely physiological process, behind
which one need not seek meaning, significance nor intention. Physical
excitations play, during sleep, on the psychic instrument and bring into
consciousness sometimes some, sometimes other ideas devoid of psychic
coherence. Dreams are comparable only to convulsions, not to expressive
movements.
In this dispute over the estimation of dreams, writers seem to stand on
the same side with the ancients, superstitious people and the author of
_Traumdeutung_. For, when they cause the people created by their
imagination to dream, they follow the common experience that people’s
thoughts and feelings continue into sleep, and they seek only to depict
the psychic states of their heroes through the dreams of the latter.
Story-tellers are valuable allies, and their testimony is to be rated
high, for they usually know many things between heaven and earth that
our academic wisdom does not even dream of. In psychic knowledge,
indeed, they are far ahead of us ordinary people, because they draw from
sources that we have not yet made accessible for science. Would that
this partizanship of literary workers for the senseful nature of dreams
were only more unequivocal! Sharper criticism might object that writers
take sides neither for nor against the psychic significance of an
isolated dream; they are satisfied to show how the sleeping psyche stirs
under the stimuli which have remained active in it as off-shoots of
waking life.
Our interest for the way in which story-tellers make use of dreams is
not, however, made less intense by this disillusionment. Even if the
investigation should teach nothing of the nature of dreams, it may
perhaps afford us, from this angle, a little insight into the nature of
creative literary production. Actual dreams are considered to be
unrestrained and irregular formations, and now come the free copies of
such dreams; but there is much less freedom and arbitrariness in psychic
life than we are inclined to believe, perhaps none at all. What we,
laity, call chance resolves itself, to an acknowledged degree, into
laws; also, what we call arbitrariness in psychic life rests on laws
only now dimly surmised. Let us see!
There are two possible methods for this investigation; one is
engrossment with a special case, with the dream-creations of one writer
in one of his works; the other consists in bringing together and
comparing all the examples of the use of dreams which are found in the
works of different story-tellers. The second way seems to be by far the
more effective, perhaps the only justifiable one, for it frees us
immediately from the dangers connected with the conception of “the
writer” as an artistic unity. This unity falls to pieces in
investigations of widely different writers, among whom we are wont to
honour some, individually, as the most profound connoisseurs of psychic
life. Yet these pages will be filled by an investigation of the former
kind. It so happened, in the group of men who started the idea, that
some one remembered that the bit of fiction which he had most recently
enjoyed contained several dreams which looked at him with familiar
expression and invited him to try on them the method of _Traumdeutung_.
He admitted that the material and setting of the little tale had been
partly responsible for the origin of his pleasure, for the story was
unfolded in Pompeii, and concerned a young archæologist who had given up
interest in life, for that in the remains of the classic past, and now,
by a remarkable but absolutely correct détour, was brought back to life.
During the perusal of this really poetic material, the reader
experienced all sorts of feelings of familiarity and concurrence. The
tale was Wilhelm Jensen’s _Gradiva_, a little romance designated by its
author himself “A Pompeian Fancy.”
In order that my further references may be to familiar material, I must
now ask my readers to lay aside this pamphlet, and replace it for some
time with _Gradiva_, which first appeared in the book world in 1903. To
those who have already read _Gradiva_, I will recall the content of the
story in a short epitome, and hope that their memory will of itself
restore all the charm of which the story is thereby stripped.
A young archæologist, Norbert Hanold, has discovered at Rome, in a
collection of antiques, a bas-relief which attracts him so exceptionally
that he is delighted to be able to get an excellent plaster-cast of it
which he can hang up in his study in a German university-city and study
with interest. The relief represents a mature young girl walking. She
has gathered up her voluminous gown slightly, so that her sandalled feet
become visible. One foot rests wholly on the ground; the other is raised
to follow and touches the ground only with the tips of the toes while
sole and heel rise almost perpendicularly. The unusual and especially
charming walk represented had probably aroused the artist’s attention,
and now, after so many centuries, captivates the eye of our
archæological observer.
This interest of the hero in the described bas-relief is the basic
psychological fact of our story. It is not immediately explicable.
“Doctor Norbert Hanold, docent of archæology, really found in the relief
nothing noteworthy for his science.” (_Gradiva_, p. 14.) “He could not
explain what quality in it had aroused his attention; he knew only that
he had been attracted by something and this effect of the first view had
remained unchanged since then,” but his imagination does not cease to be
occupied with the relief. He finds in it a “sense of present time,” as
if the artist had fixed the picture on the street “from life.” He
confers upon the girl represented walking a name, Gradiva, “the girl
splendid in walking,” spins a yarn that she is the daughter of a
distinguished family, perhaps of a “patrician ædile, whose office was
connected with the worship of Ceres,” and is on the way to the temple of
the goddess. Then it is repulsive to him to place her in the mob of a
metropolis; rather he convinces himself that she is to be transported to
Pompeii, and is walking there somewhere on the peculiar stepping-stones
which have been excavated; these made a dry crossing possible in rainy
weather, and yet also afforded passage for chariot-wheels. The cut of
her features seems to him Greek, her Hellenic ancestry unquestionable.
All of his science of antiquity gradually puts itself at the service of
this or other fancies connected with the relief.
Then, however, there obtrudes itself upon him a would-be scientific
problem which demands solution. Now it is a matter of his passing a
critical judgment “whether the artist had reproduced Gradiva’s manner of
walking from life.” He cannot produce it in himself; in the search for
the “real existence” of this gait, he arrives only at “observation from
life for the purpose of enlightenment on the matter” (_G._ p. 18). This
forces him, to be sure, to a mode of action utterly foreign to him.
“Women had formerly been for him only a conception in marble or bronze,
and he had never given his feminine contemporaries the least
consideration.” Society life has always seemed to him an unavoidable
torture; young ladies whom he meets, in such connections, he fails to
see and hear, to such a degree that, on the next encounter, he passes
without greeting, which, of course, serves to place him in an
unfavourable light with them. Now, however, the scientific task which he
has imposed upon himself forces him in dry weather, but especially in
wet weather, to observe diligently the feet of ladies and girls on the
street, an activity which yields him many a displeased and many an
encouraging glance from those observed. “Yet one was as incomprehensible
to him as the other.” (_G._ p. 19.) As a result of these careful
studies, he finds that Gradiva’s gait cannot be proved to exist really,
a fact which fills him with regret and annoyance.
Soon afterwards he has a terribly frightful dream, which transports him
to old Pompeii on the day of the eruption of Vesuvius, and makes him an
eye-witness of the destruction of the city. “As he stood thus at the
edge of the Forum near the Jupiter temple, he suddenly saw Gradiva a
short distance in front of him. Until then no thought of her presence
there had moved him, but now suddenly it seemed natural to him, as she
was, of course, a Pompeiian girl, that she was living in her native city
and, _without his having any suspicion of it, was his contemporary_.”
(_G._ p. 20.) Fear about her impending fate draws from him a cry of
warning, in answer to which the unperturbed apparition turns her face
toward him. Unconcerned, she continues her way to the portico of the
temple, sits down there on a step and slowly rests her head upon it,
while her face keeps growing paler, as if it were turning to white
marble. As he hastens after her, he finds her, with calm countenance,
stretched out, as if sleeping, on the broad step; soon the rain of ashes
buries her form.
When he awakes, he thinks he is still hearing the confused cries of the
Pompeiians, who are seeking safety, and the dully resounding boom of the
turbulent sea; but even after his returning senses have recognized these
noises as the waking expressions of life in the noisy metropolis, he
retains for some time the belief in the reality of what he has dreamed;
when he has finally rid himself of the idea that he was really present,
nearly two thousand years ago, at the destruction of Pompeii, there yet
remains to him, as a firm conviction, the idea that Gradiva lived in
Pompeii and was buried there in the year 79. His fancies about Gradiva,
due to the after-effects of this dream, continue so that he now, for the
first time, begins to mourn her as lost.
While he leans from his window, prepossessed with these ideas, a canary,
warbling his song in a cage at an open window of the house opposite,
attracts his attention. Suddenly something like a thrill passes through
the man not yet completely awakened from his dream. He believes that he
sees, in the street, a figure like that of his Gradiva, and even
recognizes the gait characteristic of her; without deliberation he
hastens to the street to overtake her, and the laughter and jeers of the
people, at his unconventional morning attire, first drive him quickly
back home. In his room, it is again the singing canary in the cage who
occupies him and stimulates him to a comparison with himself. He, too,
is sitting in a cage, he finds, yet it is easier for him to leave his
cage. As if from added after-effect of the dream, perhaps also under the
influence of the mild spring air, he decides to take a spring trip to
Italy, for which a scientific motive is soon found, even if “the impulse
for travel had originated in a nameless feeling” (_G._ p. 28).