the company of another man, and becomes so excited about it that he can
find no other greeting for her than the question: “Are you alone?” With
difficulty she makes him realize that he has picked the roses for her;
he confesses to her the latest delusion, that she is the girl who was
found in the Forum in her lover’s embrace and to whom the green brooch
had belonged. Not without mockery, she inquires if he found the piece in
the sun. The latter—here called “Sole”—brings to light many things of
that sort. As cure for the dizziness which he admits, she proposes to
him to share a lunch with her and offers him half of a piece of white
bread wrapped in tissue paper; the other half of this she consumes with
apparent appetite. Thereat her faultless teeth gleam between her lips
and, in biting the crust, cause a slight crunching sound. To her remark,
“It seems to me as if we had already eaten our bread thus together once
two thousand years ago. Can’t you remember it?” (_G._ p. 88.) he cannot
answer, but the strengthening of his mind by the nourishment, and all
the evidences of present time in her do not fail to have effect on him.
Reason stirs in him and makes him doubt the whole delusion that Gradiva
is only a noonday ghost; on the other hand, there is the objection that
she, herself, has just said that she had already shared her repast with
him two thousand years ago. As a means of settling this conflict there
occurs to him an experiment which he executes with slyness and restored
courage. Her left hand, with its slender fingers, is resting on her
knees, and one of the house-flies, about whose boldness and
worthlessness he formerly became so indignant, alights on this hand.
Suddenly Hanold’s hand rises and claps, with no gentle stroke, on the
fly and on Gradiva’s hand. This bold experiment affords him twofold
success: first the joyous conviction that he actually touched a really
living, warm hand, then, however, a reprimand, before which he starts up
in terror from his seat on the step. For from Gradiva’s lips come the
words, after she has recovered from her amazement, “You are surely
apparently crazy, Norbert Hanold.”
Calling a person by name is recognized as the best method of awakening
him, when he is sleeping, or of awakening a somnambulist. Unfortunately
we are not permitted to observe the results, for Norbert Hanold, of
Gradiva’s calling his name, which he had told to no one in Pompeii. For
at this critical moment, the congenial lovers appear from the Casa del
Fauno and the young lady calls, in a tone of pleasant surprise, “Zoë!
You here, too? and also on your honeymoon? You have not written me a
word about it, you know.” Before this new proof of the living reality of
Gradiva, Hanold flees.
Zoë-Gradiva, too, is not most pleasantly surprised by the unexpected
visit which disturbs her, it seems, in an important piece of work. Soon
composed, she answers the question with a glib speech, in which she
informs her friend, and especially us, about the situation; and thereby
she knows how to get rid of the young couple. She extends her
compliments, but she is not on her wedding-trip. “The young man who just
went out is labouring also under a remarkable delusion; it seems to me
that he believes a fly is buzzing in his head; well, every one has, of
course, some kind of bee in his bonnet. As is my duty, I have some
knowledge of entomology and can, therefore, be of a little service in
such cases. My father and I live in the ‘Sole’; he, too, had a sudden
and pleasing idea of bringing me here with him if I would be responsible
for my own entertainment and make no demands upon him. I said to myself
that I should certainly dig up something interesting alone here. Of
course I had not reckoned at all on the find which I made—I mean the
good fortune of meeting you, Gisa.” (_G._ p. 92.) Zoë now feels obliged
to leave at once, to be company for her father at the “Sole.” So she
goes, after she has introduced herself to us as the daughter of the
zoologist and lizard-catcher, and has admitted in ambiguous words her
therapeutic intentions and other secret ones. The direction which she
takes is not that of the “Sun Hotel,” in which her father is awaiting
her, but it seems to her, too, that in the region of the Villa of
Diomede a shadowy form is seeking its burial-place and disappears under
one of the monuments; therefore, with foot poised each time almost
perpendicularly, she directs her steps to the Street of Tombs. Thither,
in shame and confusion, Hanold has fled, and is wandering up and down in
the portico of the court without stopping, occupied with settling the
rest of his problem by mental efforts. One thing has become
unimpeachably clear to him; that he was utterly foolish and irrational
to believe that he communed with a young Pompeiian girl who had become
more or less physically alive again; and this clear insight into his
madness forms incontestably an essential bit of progress in the return
to sound reason. On the other hand, however, this living girl, with whom
other people also communicate, as with one of a corporeal reality like
theirs, is Gradiva, and she knows his name; for the solution of this
riddle his scarcely awakened reason is not strong enough. Emotionally,
also, he is not calm enough to be equal to so difficult a task, for he
would most gladly have been buried two thousand years ago in the Villa
of Diomede, only to be sure of never meeting Zoë-Gradiva again. A
violent longing to see her struggles meanwhile with the remnants of the
inclination to flee, which has persisted in him.
Turning at one of the four corners of the colonnade, he suddenly
recoils. On a fragmentary wall-ruin there sits one of the girls who met
death here in the Villa of Diomede; but that attempt to take refuge
again in the realm of madness is soon put aside; no, it is Gradiva, who
has apparently come to give him the last bit of her treatment. She
interprets rightly his first instinctive movement to flee, as an attempt
to leave the place, and points out to him that he cannot escape, for
outside a frightful cloudburst is in progress. The merciless girl begins
the examination with the question as to what he intended in connection
with the fly on her hand. He does not find courage to make use of a
definite pronoun, but acquires the more valuable kind needed to put the
deciding question.
“I was—as they say—somewhat confused mentally and ask pardon that
I—the hand—in that way—how I could be so stupid, I can’t
understand—but I can’t understand either how its owner could use my
name in upbraiding me for my—my madness.” (_G._ p. 98.)
“Your power of understanding has not yet progressed that far, Norbert
Hanold. Of course, I cannot be surprised, for you have long ago
accustomed me to it. To make that discovery again, I should not have
needed to come to Pompeii, and you could have confirmed it for me a good
hundred miles nearer.”
“A good hundred miles nearer; diagonally across from your house, in the
corner house; in my window, in a cage, is a canary,” she discloses to
the still bewildered man.
This last word touches the hero like a memory from afar. That is surely
the same bird whose song has suggested to him the trip to Italy.
“In that house lives my father, Richard Bertgang, professor of zoology.”
As his neighbour, therefore, she is acquainted with him and his name. It
seems as if the disappointment of a superficial solution is threatening
us—a solution unworthy of our expectations.
As yet Norbert Hanold shows no regained independence of thought, when he
repeats, “Then are you—are you Miss Zoë Bertgang? But she looked quite
different——”
Miss Bertgang’s answer shows then that other relations besides those of
neighbourliness have existed between them. She knows how to intercede
for the familiar manner of address, which he has, of course, used to the
noonday spirit, but withdrawn again from the living girl; she makes
former privileges of use to her here. “If you find that form of address
more suitable between us, I can use it too, you know, but the other came
to me more naturally. I don’t know whether I looked different when we
used to run about before with each other as friends, every day, and
occasionally beat and cuffed each other for a change, but if, in recent
years, you had favoured me with even one glance you might perhaps have
seen that I have looked like this for a long time.”
A childhood friendship had therefore existed between the two, perhaps a
childhood love, from which the familiar form of address derived its
justification. Isn’t this solution perhaps as superficial as the one
first supposed? The fact that it occurs to us that this childhood
relation explains in an unexpected way so many details of what has
occurred in the present intercourse between them makes the matter
essentially deeper. Does it not seem that the blow on Zoë-Gradiva’s hand
which Norbert Hanold has so splendidly motivated by the necessity of
solving, experimentally, the question of the physical existence of the
apparition, is, from another standpoint, remarkably similar to a revival
of the impulse for “beating and cuffing,” whose sway in childhood Zoë’s
words have testified to? And when Gradiva puts to the archæologist the
question whether it does not seem to him that they have once already,
two thousand years ago, shared their luncheon, does not the
incomprehensible question become suddenly senseful, when we substitute
for the historical past the personal childhood, whose memories persist
vividly for the girl, but seem to be forgotten by the young man? Does
not the idea suddenly dawn upon us that the fancies of the young man
about his Gradiva may be an echo of his childhood memories? Then they
would, therefore, be no arbitrary products of his imagination, but
determined, without his knowing it, by the existing material of
childhood impressions already forgotten, but still active in him. We
must be able to point out in detail the origin of these fancies, even if
only by conjecture. If, for instance, Gradiva must be of pure Greek
ancestry, the daughter of a respected man, perhaps of a priest of Ceres,
that predisposes us fairly well for an after-effect of the knowledge of
her Greek name—Zoë, and of her membership in the family of a professor
of zoology. If, however, these fancies of Hanold’s are transformed
memories, we may expect to find in the disclosures of Zoë Bertgang, the
suggestion of the sources of these fancies. Let us listen; she tells us
of an intimate friendship of childhood; we shall soon learn what further
development this childhood relation had in both.
“Then up to the time when people call us ‘Backfisch,’ for some unknown
reason, I had really acquired a remarkable attachment for you, and
thought that I could never find a more pleasing friend in the world.
Mother, sister, or brother I had not, you know; to my father a slow-worm
in alcohol was far more interesting than I, and people (I count girls
such) must surely have something with which they can occupy their
thoughts and the like. Then you were that something, but when archæology
overcame you, I made the discovery that you—excuse the familiarity, but
your new formality sounds absurd to me—I was saying that I imagined
that you had become an intolerable person, who had no longer, at least
for me, an eye in his head, a tongue in his mouth, nor any of the
memories that I retained of our childhood friendship. So I probably
looked different from what I did formerly, for when, occasionally, I met
you at a party, even last winter, you did not look at me and I did not
hear your voice; in this, of course, there was nothing that marked me
out especially, for you treated all the others in the same way. To you I
was but air, and you, with your shock of light hair, which I had
formerly pulled so often, were as boresome, dry and tongue-tied as a
stuffed cockatoo and at the same time as grandiose as an—archæopteryx;
I believe the excavated antediluvian bird-monster is so called; but that
your head harboured an imagination so magnificent as here in Pompeii to
consider me as something excavated and restored to life—I had not
surmised that of you, and when you suddenly stood before me
unexpectedly, it cost me some effort at first to understand what kind of
incredible fancy your imagination had invented. Then I was amused and,
in spite of its madness, it was not entirely displeasing to me. For, as
I said, I had not expected it of you.” (_G._ p. 101.)
So she thus tells us clearly enough what, with the years, has become of
the childhood friendship for both of them. With her it expanded into an
intense love affair, for one must have something, you know, to which
one, that is, a girl, pins her affections. Miss Zoë, the incarnation of
cleverness and clarity, makes her psychic life, too, quite transparent
for us. If it is already the general rule for a normal girl that she
first turns her affection to her father, she is especially ready to do
it, she who has no one but her father in her family; but this father has
nothing left for her; the objects of science have captured all his
interest. So she has to look around for another person, and clings with
especial fervour to the playmate of her youth. When he, too, no longer
has any eyes for her, it does not destroy her love, rather augments it,
for he has become like her father, like him absorbed by science and, by
it, isolated from life and from Zoë. So it is granted to her to be
faithful in unfaithfulness, to find her father again in her beloved, to
embrace both with the same feeling as we may say, to make them both
identical in her emotions. Where do we get justification for this little
psychological analysis, which may easily seem autocratic? In a single,
but intensely characteristic detail the author of the romance gives it
to us. When Zoë pictures for us the transformation of the playmate of
her youth, which seems so sad for her, she insults him by a comparison
with the archæopteryx, that bird-monster which belongs to the archæology
of zoology. So she has found a single concrete expression for
identifying the two people; her resentment strikes the beloved as well
as the father with the same word. The archæopteryx is, so to speak, the
compromise, or intermediary representation in which the folly of her
beloved coincides with her thought of an analogous folly of her father.
With the young man, things have taken a different turn. The science of
antiquity overcame him and left to him interest only in the women of
bronze and stone. The childhood friendship died, instead of developing
into a passion, and the memories of it passed into such absolute
forgetfulness that he does not recognize nor pay any attention to the
friend of his youth, when he meets her in society. Of course, when we
continue our observations, we may doubt if “forgetfulness” is the right
psychological term for the fate of these memories of our archæologist.
There is a kind of forgetting which distinguishes itself by the
difficulty with which the memory is awakened, even by strong objective
appeals, as if a subjective resistance struggled against the revival.
Such forgetting has received the name “repression” in psychopathology;
the case which Jensen has presented to us seems to be an example of
repression. Now we do not know, in general, whether, in psychic life,
forgetting an impression is connected with the destruction of its
memory-trace; about repression we can assert with certainty that it does
not coincide with the destruction, the obliteration, of the memory. The
repressed material cannot, as a rule, break through, of itself, as a
memory, but remains potent and effective. Some day, under external
influence, it causes psychic results which one may accept as products of
transformation or as remnants of forgotten memories; and if one does not
view them as such, they remain incomprehensible. In the fancies of
Norbert Hanold about Gradiva, we thought we recognized already the
remnants of the repressed memories of his childhood friendship with Zoë
Bertgang. Quite legitimately one may expect such a recurrence of the
repressed material, if the man’s erotic feelings cling to the repressed
ideas, if his erotic life has been involved in the repression. Then
there is truth in the old Latin proverb which was perhaps originally
aimed at expulsion through external influences, not at inner conflict:
“You may drive out natural disposition with a two-pronged fork, but it
will always return,” but it does not tell all, announces only the fact
of the recurrence of repressed material, and does not describe at all
the most remarkable manner of this recurrence, which is accomplished as
if by malicious treason; the very thing which has been chosen as a means
of repression—like the “two-pronged fork” of the proverb—becomes the
carrier of the thing recurring; in and behind the agencies of repression
the material repressed finally asserts itself victoriously. A well-known
etching by Félicien Rops illustrates this fact, which is generally
overlooked and lacks acceptance, more impressively than many
explanations could; and he does it in the typical case of the repression
in the lives of saints and penitents. From the temptations of the world,
an ascetic monk has sought refuge in the image of the crucified Saviour.
Then, phantom-like, this cross sinks and, in its stead, there rises
shining, the image of a voluptuous, unclad woman, in the same position
of the crucifixion. Other painters of less psychological insight have,
in such representations of temptation, depicted sin as bold and
triumphant, near the Saviour on the cross. Rops, alone, has allowed it
to take the place of the Saviour on the cross; he seems to have known
that the thing repressed proceeds, at its recurrence, from the agency of
repression itself.
If Norbert Hanold were a living person, who had, by means of archæology,
driven love and the memory of his childhood friendship out of his life,
it would now be legitimate and correct that an antique relief should
awaken in him the forgotten memory of the girl beloved in his childhood;
it would be his well-deserved fate to have fallen in love with the stone
representation of Gradiva, behind which, by virtue of an unexplained
resemblance, the living and neglected Zoë becomes effective.
Miss Zoë, herself, seems to share our conception of the delusion of the
young archæologist, for the pleasure which she expresses at the end of
her “unreserved, detailed and instructive lecture” is hardly based on
anything other than her readiness to refer his entire interest in
Gradiva to her person. This is exactly what she does not believe him
capable of, and what, in spite of all the disguises of the delusion, she
recognizes as such. Her psychic treatment of him has a beneficent
effect; he feels himself free, as the delusion is now replaced by that
of which it can be only a distorted and unsatisfactory copy. He
immediately remembers and recognizes her as his good, cheerful, clever
comrade who has not changed essentially; but he finds something else
most strange—
“That a person must die to become alive again,” says the girl, “but for
archæologists that is of course necessary.” (_G._ p. 102.) She has
apparently not yet pardoned him for the détour which he made from the
childhood friendship through the science of antiquity to this relation
which has recently been established.
“No, I mean your name—Because Bertgang has the same meaning as Gradiva
and signifies ‘the one splendid in walking.’” (_G._ p. 102.)
Even we are not prepared for that. Our hero begins to rise from his
humility and to play an active rôle. He is, apparently, entirely cured
of his delusion, lifted far above it, and proves this by tearing asunder
the last threads of the web of delusion. Patients, also, who have been
freed from the compulsion of their delusion, by the disclosure of the
repression behind it, always act in just that way. When they have once
understood, they themselves offer the solutions for the last and most
significant riddles of their strange condition in suddenly emerging
ideas. We had already believed, of course, that the Greek ancestry of
the mythical Gradiva was an after-effect of the Greek name, Zoë, but
with the name, Gradiva, we had ventured nothing; we had supposed it the
free creation of Norbert Hanold’s imagination, and behold! this very
name now shows itself to be a remnant, really a translation of the
repressed family-name of the supposedly forgotten beloved of his youth.
The derivation and solution of the delusion are now completed. What
follows may well serve as a harmonious conclusion of the tale. In regard
to the future, it can have only a pleasant effect on us, if the
rehabilitation of the man, who formerly had to play the lamentable rôle
of one needing to be cured, progresses, and he succeeds in awakening in
the girl some of the emotions which he formerly experienced. Thus it
happens that he makes her jealous by mentioning the congenial young
lady, who disturbed them in Meleager’s house, and by the acknowledgment
that the latter was the first girl who had impressed him much. When Zoë
is then about to take a cool departure, with the remark that now
everything is reasonable again, she herself not least of all, that he
might look up Gisa Hartleben, or whatever her name might now be, and be
of scientific assistance to her about the purpose of her stay in
Pompeii, but she has to go now to the “Albergo del Sole” where her
father is already waiting for her at lunch, perhaps they may see each
other again some time at a party in Germany or on the moon, he seizes
upon the troublesome fly as a means of taking possession of her cheek,
first, and then of her lips, and assumes the aggressive, which is the
duty of a man in the game of love. Only once more does a shadow seem to
fall on their happiness, when Zoë reminds him that now she must really
go to her father, who will otherwise starve in the “Sole.” “Your
father—what will he——?” (_G._ p. 106.)
But the clever girl knows how to silence the apprehension quickly.
“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.” Should the father, however, by way of exception, in
this case, have an opinion different from hers, there is a sure method.
Hanold needs only to go over to Capri, there catch a _lacerta
faraglionensis_, for which purpose he may practise the technique on her
little finger, then set the animal free again here, catch it before the
eyes of the zoologist and give him the choice of the _faraglionensis_ on
the mainland or his daughter, a proposal in which mockery, as one may
easily note, is combined with bitterness, an admonition to the
betrothed, also, not to follow too closely the model after which his
beloved has chosen him. Norbert Hanold sets us at rest on this matter,
as he expresses, by all sorts of apparently trivial symptoms, the great
transformation which has come over him. He voices the intention of
taking a wedding trip with his Zoë to Italy and Pompeii, as if he had
never been indignant at the newly married travellers, Augustus and
Gretchen. His feelings towards this happy couple, who so unnecessarily
travelled more than one hundred miles from their German home, have
entirely disappeared from his memory. Certainly the author is right when
he cites such weakening of memory as the most valuable mark of a mental
change. Zoë replies 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_,” (_G._ p. 108), that she does not yet feel
quite alive enough for such geographical decision.
Beautiful reality has now triumphed over the delusion. Yet an honour
still awaits the latter before the two leave Pompeii. When they have
arrived at the Hercules Gate, where, at the beginning of the Strada
Consolare, old stepping-stones cross the street, Norbert Hanold stops
and asks the girl to go ahead. She understands him 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.” With the
triumph of eroticism, what was beautiful and valuable in the delusion is
now acknowledged.
With the last comparison of “the childhood friend excavated from the
ashes,” the author of the story has, however, put into our hand the key
of the symbolism which the delusion of the hero made use of in the
disguise of the repressed memory. There is no better analogy for
repression, which at the same time makes inaccessible and conserves
something psychic, than the burial which was the fate of Pompeii, and
from which the city was able to arise again through work with the spade.
Therefore in his imagination the young archæologist had to transport to
Pompeii the original figure of the relief which reminded him of the
forgotten beloved of his youth. Jensen, however, had a good right to
linger over the significant resemblance which his fine sense traced out
between a bit of psychic occurrence in the individual and a single
historical event in the history of man.
II