Waiting For Gertrude, Bill Richardson, 2001

Alice B Toklas is dead. Her bones are buried next to Gertrude Stein’s remains in the Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris but Alice’s soul resides in the body of a feral cat. She is in exciting company as the souls of celebrities as famous and accomplished as Oscar Wilde, Jim Morrison, Maria Callas, Colette, Isadora Duncan, Heloise and Abelard, La Fontaine, Frederic Chopin, Sarah Bernhardt, Marcel Proust and a host of other cultural luminaries wander the cemetery, also in the bodies of cats. Each of these personages has changed only in form - their personalities are intact: they love and hate and lust after all that they did in their previous life. 

Poor Alice wants Gertrude but Gertrude’s soul has not yet found a feline host and the story begins to heat up when Alice sets a giant midnight orgy in motion, headed by the silent, slightly menacing but intoxicatingly sexy tomcat, Jim Morrison. Will the dozens of kittens born to the Pere Lachaise community two months hence yield up a new Gertrude? And who among the inhabitants is stealing body parts and trinkets? Who is opening letters and revealing secrets? 

 Waiting for Gertrude by Bill Richardson is a cleverly conceived, original and ultimately unclassifiable novel. If I were shelving this book in a library, I’d be spoiled for choice. It is part fable and Jean de La Fontaine, the original 17th century fabulist, himself a cat, chronicles, in mocking fashion, the goings-on in the community. It is part epistolary novel with letters flying from Oscar to Jim, Colette to her mother and also to Jim, Isadora to Modigliani. Waiting for Gertrude is part journal: many entries are penned by Alice who provides the reader with local colour and helps progress the plot. The book shares tropes with crime novels. It is certainly a romance where both consummated and unrequited love feature. It is a bedroom farce marked by mistaken identities and sexual innuendo, light pornography features as does the occasional slamming of doors and the “beating of hasty retreats” at just the right moment. But most of all, Waiting for Gertrude is a neo-gothic tale. It is subtitled a “graveyard gothic” and while it is comic and light of touch and not particularly scary, the usual elements that define a gothic novel are all there: omens and curses, the supernatural, nightmares, a mustachioed villain, a damsel (or two) in distress and a happy ending. If I were a librarian I would place Waiting for Gertrude on the “highly recommended” shelf with a tag that suggests it be read on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

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The Passions of the Mind: A Novel of Sigmund Freud by Irving Stone, 1971

This discussion of Irving Stone’s biographical novel, Passions of the Mind: A Novel of Sigmund Freud 1971, is my latest effort at amateur literary sleuthing. It has led me through essays on the changing definition of the biographical novel, the death of the liberal humanist subject, the rise and fall of the postmodernist subject and emerging 21st century movements like ecocriticism and Darwinian literary studies. 

Having finished the novel (a slow and thorough telling of a life, quite pleasant, if slightly formal in language) I next read an essay by the same author called The Biographical Novel, from 1957. It is a brilliant document, transparent in meaning and method, a work that captures the ideological presuppositions that have lain at the foundation of western ontological thought from Descartes onwards. His opening sentence captures the ideas and the mood, the self-assuredness and the belief in the existence of self-evident “truths” that informed the scholarship and zeitgeist of Stone’s era. 

Stone writes, “The biographical novel is a true and documented story of one human being’s journey across the face of the years, transmuted from the raw material of life into the delight and purity of an authentic art form.” If Stone’s definition is reliable and if he has followed the rules he has enumerated in his essay then “Passions of the Mind” ought to be considered a “true” and “documented” story of Sigmund Freud’s “journey”.1 And if the “raw material” is “transmuted” into an art form that is “authentic”, verifiable and if it is treated by expert hands, this biographical novel should be considered true. We can indeed know Freud: mid 20th century positivists like Stone tell us so and they teach us how to do it. 

Enter the postmodern biographer and reader and everything changes. Recent writers like Massih Zekavat2 investigate the history of the construction of identities and remind us of the paradigm shift that ushered in the postmodern moment. After 1970, thinking about identity and its representation moved laterally and the existence of the stable, unified subject disappeared. The quest for the “authentic” self became not only impossible but irrelevant.  The postmodern generation might expect a biographical novel based on the life of Freud to ask different questions, to be more speculative and to take more risks. To rewrite Stone’s definition, “the material selected from sources that are sometimes unusual or unauthorized or problematic will give up multiple meanings. The resultant ‘art form’ or text, while it will not produce something ‘pure’ or ‘authentic’, may nevertheless ‘delight’, particularly if it calls attention to its artifice.” Can we know Freud? Which Freud? Deleuze and Guattari’s Freud? Juliet Mitchell’s Freud? There are many to choose from.

Time passes. The postmodern subject grows old. The discursive language around issues grows strident. Contestatory positions appear and new appeals are being made to science to solve the problems brought on by the neglect of facts and figures. The individual is now reoccupying the agent position. Human nature is back and ecocriticism, Darwinian literary critics and other biology based movements applaud its return. 

What would Irving Stone make of these monumental shifts in the formulation of ideas about ourselves? Is it nature over nurture or vice versa? Are we whole or fragmented subjects? And who was Freud, in the end?

1Of the 837 pages that comprise the novel, 28 pages detail the scholarship involved in the researching of the book.

2Zekavat, Massih., Evolution of the ‘Subject’: Postmodern and Beyond., 2010

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Un peu du passé - Marie Palumbo Argentieri - 2005

I love immigrant literature, particularly autobiographies, and especially those written by ordinary people who are able to distill experiences into a few, well chosen vignettes which quickly get at the heart of a life lived. Sometimes long, chronological, detail-laden books are undesired. Marie Palumbo Argentieri’s two slim volumes of reminiscences entitled “Un peu du passé” - “A Bit of the Past” are the perfect size for the reader wishing to spend an afternoon visiting the early days of an Italian family who emigrated to Nice, France in between the two world wars.

Argentieri, an amateur writer who has come late to writing, was born in Italy in 1924, emigrated to France while still an infant and published her work in 2005 at the age of 81. Her stories are written in simple, elegant French and they evoke feelings as varied as apprehension, pride, fear and contentment all the while avoiding sentimentality.

Argentieri describes certain small events that mark the family’s initiation into French society from their early encounters with authority (the police, the school teacher) and neighbours and co-workers (both French and Italian). These stories, however, are much more than gentle, episodic recollections of people’s struggles to assimilate into a foreign culture - they are also cleverly wrought little morality tales. The author’s narrative skills keep her audience curious about the outcome of the little adventures and indignities suffered by her family.

Argentieri manages the expectations of the reader, inserts details into the stories only when needed, and she uses dialogue to impart information that cannot be delivered any other way. Her style is economical and her narrative decisions are effective. The bicycle story exemplifies the author’s story telling skills. We travel with young Marie and her father to the commissariat's office to pay a fine they cannot easily afford, passing by the building’s facade upon which is sculpted an image of the scales of justice, “perfectly even”, according to Marie but which “sometimes tip in one direction” warns her father. Inside, we hear the father defending himself in broken French, sentences immediately followed by Marie’s clever translation of his words. She is politic and the fine is reduced. We all cheer - justice, dosed with humanity has  been served. The story of the crayons is equally lovely and well worth reading.

These stories have not yet been translated into English but the language is not difficult if readers have only secondary school French.

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Salvador Dali - Freud's Moses and Monotheism

Salvador Dali is a kind of magician whose sleight of hand is all his own: it takes the form of fanciful obfuscation, it plays with the audience’s expectations and confirms the long-held opinion that Dali’s art is ultimately more about Dali than the world it represents. Frequently, unashamedly and unselfconsciously, Dali will insert ideas and images derived from his early childhood experiences, or his dreams, or his self-professed obsessions into his artworks. Take his 1975 work entitled “Moses and Monotheism”, a set of ten lithographs which are based on his interpretation of Sigmund Freud's essay of the same title. Here, in each of the ten lithographs, two layers of material are superimposed onto the painted surfaces: the primary material, whose themes are suggested by the titles of the lithographs, and the secondary material, the intensely personal images, found again and again in Dali’s art but which bear no relationship to the primary work.

Ants, crutches, elephants with spindly legs and snails, four of his favourite recurring images, appear in the depictions of Moses and his travails. None appear in Freud’s text, none help to advance Freud’s radical proposals but a little bit of research into Dali’s meeting with Freud may explain at least one of the odder images. In “Moses Saved from the Waters”, Dali starts with the story of the three-month-old Moses, who in the Bible is placed by his mother and sister Miriam in a papyrus basket set afloat on the banks of the Nile. Dali paints water, sky and reeds in keeping with the traditional telling of events but substitutes a giant snail for the basket and adds crutches and bones to the scene. Moses is depicted as a baby with rays emanating from his head, one leg and arm are extended and he is lying in the opening of the giant snail which is being held up by bones. Crutches are holding the entire bizarre edifice above the water.

The snail does not, of course appear in the biblical telling of the Moses story, neither does it appear in Freud’s version of the story. It is wholly a Dali invention, borne, he tells us, of several moments where real-life snails produce epiphanies which involve Freud, at least tangentially.

One occurs on July 19th, 1938 during the much anticipated meeting between Dali and Freud. Dalí writes that he was captivated by the sight of a snail on a bicycle outside Freud's house and connected the snail with the image of Freud’s head.

Dali also writes that while eating snails in a restaurant in France he notices a photo of Freud in a newspaper. "I uttered a loud cry. I had just that instant discovered the morphological secret of Freud! Freud's cranium is a snail! His brain is on the form of a spiral - to be extracted with a needle!"

The question of why a snail houses a baby in its shell still remains unanswered, of course. All we know is that Freud’s cranium is a snail, snails transport angels, they save babies from drowning and in Dali’s world, anything goes.

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On Translating God's Name - David Goldstein - 1987

Imagine coming across an essay called On Translating God's Name. Could you ignore it and move on to something more conventional and less esoteric or would the subject matter intrigue you? If you’re seeking a challenge, pick up the article written by David Goldstein and be prepared to be perplexed and frustrated but certainly philosophically stretched. And entertained.

The article starts with a description of the etymology of the word 'cabal' giving both the negative and positive uses of the word and its derivatives. It then moves to other examples of short phrases, images and two-word oxymorons that have multiple or convoluted meanings and these explanations are book-ended by snippets of facts that give the reader hope that information about translating God's name is possible. Not so fast.

The article is made up of two layers of explication that cannot be decoupled and discussed separately because the subject matter is non-linear and highly poetic: first, the Zohar is a series of commentaries on the foundational texts of an ancient religion, the words of which are multi-definitional and so can be made to refer to numerous ideas or situations or moral positions. Second, the author is suggesting that the translation of the original text and the subsequent commentaries (commentaries on the commentaries are still being written and are therefore in need of translation too) is subject to the near-impossible task of finding English words equivalent to the ancient Semitic ones.

I am not without bible fire-power myself. Matthew tells us that John the Baptist announces that while he is baptising people with water, someone is coming who 'shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire'. That would be Jesus Christ. And the fire could also be a premonition of the fires that martyrs will be facing once the pagan backlash begins in late empire Rome. And today the phrase means jumping into a new situation unprepared. So, non-Biblical experts who enjoy reading about the construction of religious ideas and those who like complex wordplay take heed but tackle the text — the universe described is worth trying to unpack but it will most assuredly be a baptism by fire.

On Translating God's Name by David Goldstein appears in The Translator's Art, Essays in Honour of Betty Radice, edited by William Radice and Barbara Reynolds 

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Les Hysteriques - Francis Berezne (2002-2008)

Painting One

The painting is predominantly black and white, impressionistic in style, the background is pitch black and the subject is a young woman, lying on a bed covered in white sheets. She is wearing a white night dress, her face is turned towards us, her eyes are wide open, eyeballs an unnatural white, this in contrast to her otherwise calm, serene demeanor.

Painting Two

The same figure is now sitting up on her bed, her head raised, looking at someone who is standing to her right. One arm is folded across her chest and the other is raised, bent, elbow held high, suggesting defiance. Perhaps she is resisting someone’s effort to restrain her. Her lips are downturned.

Painting Three

The background is again black, the figure is in her bed, lying down, her arms are crossed atop her chest, suggesting a supplicatory attitude.The young woman’s eyes are closed, she is smiling. Her bed frame is metal, the bars along the back and sides are vertical. It looks like a hospital bed.

Painting Six

Now, the figure is sitting up, her legs are crossed unevenly, one knee is higher than the other, her arms are lifted up high suggesting prayer, her eyes are raised, she is smiling, ecstatic, unnatural. This is the giveaway image for me — I now know what I am looking at: these are modern impressionistic paintings based on a series of photographs taken by hospital photographer Albert Londe in the neurology ward of the Salpetriere hospital in Paris in the latter half of the 19th century. The figure depicted in the original photos and immortalised in subsequent paintings, in reconstructions of hospital scenes in films and art galleries and in reproductions in science textbooks is Louise Augustine Glezies, a patient of Jean Martin Charcot, a doctor of neurology and exponent of hypnotism.

Painting Sixteen

Suspicions confirmed. And this painting is the biggest piece of the puzzle, one which unlocks the origin of these odd and unsettling paintings. A huge work, it isolates and enlarges a segment of a famous painting by Andre Brouillet (1887) which features Charcot, a group of colleagues and another favourite patient called Blanche Marie Wittman, a woman who was hypnotised at the weekly hospital meetings and made to enact, for the edification of the doctors and certain interested members of the public, the common pathologies associated with hysteria and epilepsy. In this painting, the patient is bent over backwards, supported by a doctor and two nurses while Charcot stands nearby and explains the drama to his audience. Coincidentally, Sigmund Freud, himself a student of Charcot, hung a copy of this painting in his consulting room in Vienna.

This collection of twenty four paintings is executed between 2002 and 2008 by French artist, author, teacher and mental health patient Francis Berezne. And despite the devastation brought on by mental illness (Berezne spends some twenty years intermittently in hospitals and eventually hangs himself at the age of 64), he produces some poetic writings and haunting paintings that portray beauty in impossibly troubling situations. Two years before his death he writes of this series of works,

It appears that those who look after these people want to classify them, their symptoms, their crises, as one classifies plants in a herbarium. The photographer is looking at them as a botanist discovering a specimen, or as an entomologist pinning a butterfly in a box. But the result is of great beauty, showing women extraordinarily alive, who suffer, who enjoy, who know limit states, who sometimes take pleasure in posing in front of the lens. I have chosen these photographs, brush in hand, for their undeniable beauty, because they speak of the human condition, the fate of women and madness in general.

This moving collection of paintings is called “Les Hysteriques” and occasionally travels to small art galleries.

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The Ballad of the Sad Café, Carson McCullers, 1951

The Ballad of the Sad Café by Carson McCullers is a masterpiece of American Gothic writing. Published in 1951, the novella is set in a small town in the American south and populated by the bizarre, freaky, rural, ill-educated, violent and often lonely and bored characters that populate many of the novels and films that represent this tradition. In the case of Ballad, essentially a story of failed couplings, an impossible love triangle drives the action: Miss Amelia is the fierce, disagreeable giantess who is opaque of heart and in love with Cousin Lymon. Lymon Willis is a self-indulgent hunchback of indeterminate age, in possession of an inconstant heart and mad not for Amelia, but for Marvin Macy. Marvin is Miss Amelia’s spurned husband, “evil” by all accounts, and determined to take revenge on his wife for her rejection of his love. Love triangles are not uncommon in art, even when the characters are as unlikely as these three: a giantess, a hunchback, and a killer. But the nature of the love that each of these three offers and the reaction of the beloved to that love are quite unique and complex. In the case of Amelia, she marries reformed lothario and thug Marvin for reasons she doesn’t understand, and she resists his advances for ten nights, after which Marvin disappears only to return a decade later, a hardened criminal, bent on destroying Amelia. Amelia in time falls in love with Cousin Lymon, “spoils him to a point beyond reason”, ignores his “mischief making”, his rumour mongering, his masochistic attraction to Amelia’s enemy Marvin, and worst of all, his inconstant heart. Amelia is a woman troubadour, loving her beloved from afar, with a love that is chaste and turned on its head: her beloved is not good or fine or deserving of her care. What is the nature of this love? Cousin Lymon’s ears begin to twitch when he sets eyes on Marvin for the first time (Lymon is like a bat or a living gargoyle, ugly but attuned to his physical reaction to Marvin). He suffers abuse at Marvin's hands and foils Miss Amelia’s attempts to rid the town of Marvin's disruptive presence. Cousin Lymon’s love may well be homosexual, a latent sort, perhaps, chaste, and certainly unrequited but he is dogged in his pursuit of Marvin. Marvin Macey, the third factor in this bizarre sexual triangulation is cruel, abusive and feared by young girls in the community. His desire for the conspicuously hard and masculine Miss Amelia, his unexpected gift (he transfers his property to Miss Amelia, an act of selflessness, perhaps even a sign of self-emasculation), are all strange and inexplicable: he is a heterosexual man who loves a woman who is like a man who cannot consummate her marriage. Carson McCullers is the ideal person to write of the complexities of human sexualty, herself having had a fraught relationship with both men and women. The southern gothic atmosphere, the narrator, herself invested in the history of the town and the peculiar personalities that played out the life and death of the Sad Café has made for an unforgettable novella.

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