“Saxa loquuntur: Freud and Archaeology,” boundary 2 20.1 (1993): 146-73

Saxa Ioquuntur: Freud's Archaeology of the TextAuthor(s): Sabine HakeSource: boundary 2, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Spring, 1993), pp. 146-173Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/303180 .

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Saxa Ioquuntur: Freud's Archaeology of the Text

Sabine Hake

In 1799, a stele bearing a polyglot inscription was discovered near the town of Rosetta, Egypt. The black basalt conveyed in different scripts (Greek, demotic, and hieroglyphic) what appeared to be an identical mes-

sage. The repetition enabled the French Egyptologist Jean-Frangois Cham- pollion to solve the riddle of the hieroglyphic, the "sacred signs." As a visual representation of the problem of interpretation, this stone of Rosetta shows the abyss that separates writing from meaning and proposes ways of closing it. The recurrence of a number of signs at certain points in all three panels suggests an identity of meaning that is confirmed by the presence of a king, Ptolemy, whose name structures this discursive order. At the same time, the three systems of writing attest to a fundamental difference between representation and interpretation that can only be overcome

by means of a figure that inhabits both the realm of signs and the realm of

reality. This figure draws attention to the analogies between different systems of writing and, in so doing, provides a point of entry into the text's hidden meaning. Champollion was able to unearth pockets of meaning, discover rules and regularities, and create an alphabet that eventually replaced

boundary 2 20:1,1993. Copyright ? 1993 by Duke University Press. CCC 0190-3659/93/$1.50.



Hake / Saxa loquuntur 147

the analogous method with a more systematic method. The interpretative tool, in other words, set up the paradigm of interpretation. Not surprisingly, Freud was fascinated by the metadiscursive quality of the stone of Rosetta, and he used its characteristics to discuss fundamental problems of interpretation in psychoanalysis. In "The Etiology of Hysteria" (1896), which, in many ways, represents the first archaeological site of psychoanalysis, he writes:

Imagine that an explorer arrives in a little-known region where his interest is aroused by an expanse of ruins, with remains of walls, fragments of columns, and tablets with half-effaced and unread- able inscriptions. He may content himself with inspecting what lies exposed to view, with questioning the inhabitants-perhaps semi- barbaric people-who live in the vicinity, about what tradition tells them of the history and meaning of these archaeological remains, and with noting down what they tell him-and he may then proceed on his journey. But he may act differently. He may have brought picks, shovels and spades with him, and he may set the inhabitants to work with these implements. Together with them he may start upon the ruins, clear away the rubbish, and, beginning from the visible remains, uncover what is buried. If his work is crowned with success, the discoveries are self-explanatory; the ruined walls are part of the ramparts of a palace or a treasure-house; the fragments of columns can be filled out into a temple; the numerous inscriptions, which, by good luck, may be bilingual, reveal an alphabet and a language, and, when they have been deciphered and translated, yield undreamed- of information about the events of the remote past, to commemorate which the monuments were built. Saxa loquuntur [Stones talk!].1 This paragraph from "The Etiology of Hysteria" marks one of the

first instances in which the young discipline of psychoanalysis relies on archaeological imagery in order to describe its methods and techniques. Their association is no coincidence. The references to archaeology appear at a moment that is dominated by Freud's studies on hysteria, and they bring into play the problem of femininity in a situation that is charged with methodological questions. It is the disquieting spectacle of hysteria that

1. Sigmund Freud, "The Etiology of Hysteria" (1896), in The Standard Edition of the Com- plete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: The Institute of Psycho-Analysis, The Hogarth Press, 1953-74), 3: 189. Subsequent references to the Standard Edition are cited in my text as SE, followed by volume and page numbers.



148 boundary 2 / Spring 1993

forces Freud to turn to another discipline, archaeology, in his struggle for discursive mastery. While the question of sexual difference becomes the foundation on which all later investigations are carried out, its association with archaeology defines the conditions under which the metadiscourse on interpretation takes place. At the center of this reading formation stands the female body, which is always the hysterical body and which brings together seemingly disparate elements: the woman as archaeological site, archaeology as the paradigm of interpretation, and the problem of femininity as the test case of psychoanalysis. The reports from Freud's own practice confirm the significance of these configurations. No longer the embodiment of an unspoiled nature or the representative of primeval times, Freud's hysterical patients abound with forgotten stories and suppressed desires. Hidden under layers of repression, inaccessible to themselves and others, their desires resemble the ruins and relics of antiquity. The analyst, like the archaeologist, excavates the objects from the past in order to make sense of the present. Like the archaeologist, the analyst develops a method of analysis and a theory of interpretation in order to transform the past into history and history into narrative. Yet, it requires a theory of repression to trace back the hysterical symptoms to their point of origin and, eventually, to read them as a visual representation of desire and its denial. Archaeology, from its belief in stratification to its desire for reconstruction, provides the most convincing imagery for such an undertaking.

Through the many references to archaeology that appear, after 1896, in Freud's writings like signposts, a triangular configuration is established between the problem of femininity, the theory of repression, and the emer- gence of psychoanalysis as a theory and as an institution. To be sure, the project of interpretation that holds together these disparate elements depends not exclusively on the theory of repression for inspiration and veri- fication. Comparisons between the female body and the buried cities of antiquity also pave the way for other, more precarious analogies: those between archaeology and interpretation, and those between woman and text. The demystification of woman becomes an archaeology of the text. Obviously, the female body invites comparisons to the archaeological site because of its similar topography of surface and depth, the visible and the hidden. Her body, however, can also be likened to writing, in that it appears both as a text that needs to be deciphered and as an empty page into which male desire is inscribed. In both cases, the woman must remain passive, like the earth that is invaded and the page that is filled, in order to make possible her positioning as Other in literary and theoretical discourse. Thus,




she emerges as the object of investigation and provides the methods of inquiry. As the female body comes to represent the hidden, the absent, and the Other in the purest form, interpretation is called upon to prove its claims to mastery by first creating its own object of inquiry and then defining that object according to its needs. Archaeology enters into the service of interpretation as a powerful spatiotemporal metaphor, while interpretation develops its methods and goals based on archaeology as a critical model; the woman and the problem of femininity are their coordinating point.2

In light of this double movement, there is more at stake in the association of archaeology and interpretation than what is often referred to as the archaeology of the soul, an investigation laden with traditional notions of interiority. Metaphors, after all, not only convey but also generate meaning. From the sites of the unconscious, the metaphor of archaeology returns to psychoanalysis and brings into existence a metadiscourse on interpretation. The mise-en-sc6ne as mise-en-abyme: These two imaginary locations define the precarious position of archaeology between representation and self-reflection. On the one hand, Freud's optimistic "the finds are self-explanatory" and his allusion to the Stone of Rosetta ("with bilingual inscriptions") evoke the countless possibilities arising from every encounter between two discourses. On the other hand, they show their dependence on strategies of interpretation, which, as we shall see, inevitably lead back to the question of femininity. For Champollion, it was a royal name that made him understand the signs and uncover their hidden meaning. For Freud, it was the woman who allowed him to develop methods of interpretation and to find a similar tension between sameness and difference in what might be called human texts. The following essay on the function of archaeology in the work of Freud will address some aspects of this problematic, first in more general terms and later through a return to Freud's greatest archaeological challenge, Wilhelm Jensen's novel Gradiva.

1

For Freud, the usefulness of archaeology as a metaphor in the classical sense (as a figurative representation of the real in the unreal) has its origins in external features and in cultural tradition. The archaeological

2. On the metaphors of hysteria, see also William J. McGrath, Freud's Discovery of Psychoanalysis: The Politics of Hysteria (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), especially the chapter "The Architecture of Hysteria." I am indebted to Nancy Kaiser for this bibliographical reference.




metaphor makes visible the invisible, structures the seemingly unstructured, and conveys an overall sense of purpose and direction in a world of complexity and contradiction. Its visual qualities increase his readers' ability to imagine and to comprehend, and its historical significance validates (at least at the time of Freud) their cultural preferences as members of the edu- cated middle class. Also, its poetic variations offer the writer an effective means of persuasion, according to the rhetorical dictum of docere, delec- tare, and movere. Thus, empowered by classical tropology, the metaphor of archaeology prepares the ground for a topography of psychoanalysis.3

At the same time, the archaeological metaphor ignores the limitations of tropes in the traditional sense, that is, of remaining passive and subservient. As a generative metaphor, it creates through its images the very objects and processes that it professes to represent. Both mystify- ing and demystifying, the archaeological metaphor stands, in the words of Donald Kuspit, "emblematic of the psychoanalytic approach as such."4 Its means establish the conditions under which the literal enters into the realm of representation, namely as the figurative. This explains the usefulness of the archaeological metaphor for both the theory of the unconscious and the first topological model, the latter of which relies on a similar spatiotemporal order. Psychoanalysis shares these topological models and topographical methods with other nineteenth-century master discourses: German ideal- ism and its hierarchy between appearance and reality; Marxism and its base

superstructure model; and historicism and its inquiries into the past "as it

really was." All of these discourses rely on stratification as a figure of speech through which to address central issues in philosophy, aesthetics, politics, and economy. The humanities, in turn, share this approach with the natural sciences and modern technologies, especially mining, which, with its com-

plicated structure of tunnels and shafts, embodies the topical model in its

purest form. In each case, the main goal is to map the grounds and layers, develop the appropriate methods and devices, and determine the value of

3. As another psychoanalytic theory and topography of interpretation, cryptonymy is con- cerned with similar configurations. See Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Wolf- Man's Magic Words (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), especially the foreword by Derrida. 4. Donald Kuspit, "A Mighty Metaphor: The Analogy of Archaeology and Psychoanaly- sis," in Sigmund Freud and Art, ed. Lynn Gamwell and Richard Wells, preface by Peter

Gay (New York: State University and Freud Museum London, 1989), 14. Also see Carl E.

Schorske, "Freud: The Psychoarcheology of Civilizations," Proceedings of the Massa- chusetts Historical Society 92 (1980): 52-67.




the hidden treasures, both in the material and in the theoretical sense. Just as the exploitation of the earth reaches a natural limit, however, so, too, does the archaeological metaphor require a boundary of interpretation, the crossing of which either obliterates its riches or falsely glorifies them as the last repository of a truth waiting to be unearthed.

Three basic assumptions underlie Freud's use of the archaeological metaphor: his dependence on a model of stratification that obliges the analytical method to a strictly temporal-historical perspective; his emphasis on the continuing presence of the past, either in the form of repressed childhood memories or the legacies of antiquity; and his identification with the role of the archaeologist, who makes possible the return of what is forgotten or assumed to be dead. With these implications, the archaeological metaphor appears for the first time in "Studies on Hysteria" (1895), written in collaboration with Josef Breuer. In this essay, Freud compares his first complete analysis of hysteria, the case of Elisabeth von R., with "the technique of excavating a buried city" (SE, 2: 139). The archaeological metaphor is thus introduced as a metaphor of conquest-a slow and tedious process, to be sure, but (almost) always successful. After that publication, Freud uses it primarily in moments that present a critical impasse or a seemingly insurmountable obstacle, which he overcomes with acumen and finesse. The implicit aggressiveness is most evident in the metaphor's sexual overtones, such as the phallic intrusion (of the spade) and the passive receiving (of the earth). Consequently, the power of the analyst as archaeologist is reflected in the image of archaeology as an active, intrusive, and explicitly male activity, while the woman, who, as terra incognita, makes his quest for knowledge both necessary and possible, is regularly identified with images of the unknown: the buried city, the hidden treasure. Both sides of the metaphor, its eroticism and its sexism, are fully present in the treatment of Elisabeth von R., when Freud reports triumphantly that the sudden mention of a young man "had opened up a new vein of ideas (Schacht) the contents of which I now gradually extracted" (SE, 2: 145). Whereas the link between femininity and interpretation is established in the almost-classical constel- lation of male analyst and female analysand, its metaphorical dimensions are explored further in distinctly theoretical contexts: the interpretation of dreams, the theory of the unconscious, the notion of repression, and so forth. Detached from the world of real patients, the archaeological metaphor organizes the project of interpretation along the lines of gender.

Not surprisingly, archaeology enables Freud to come to terms (quite literally, one might add) with the problem of femininity. At times, women sup-




port his "excavations"; one female patient even reveals to him freely what otherwise remains hidden under many layers. Whenever a crisis occurs, however, persistence and coincidence no longer suffice. In order to master such moments and, if necessary, to compensate for what is missing or unknown, the analyst must avail himself of the skills of the poet: creativity, perceptiveness, and imagination. In his preface to "Fragment of a Case of Hysteria" (1905), the famous Dora case, Freud confesses: "In the face of the incompleteness of my analytic results, I had no choice but to follow the example of those discoverers whose good fortune is to bring to the light of day after their long burial the priceless though mutilated relics of antiquity. I have restored what is missing, taking the best models known to me from other analyses; but, like a conscious archaeologist, I have not omitted to mention in each case where the authentic parts end and my constructions begin" (SE, 7: 12). To restore "what is missing" may give the archaeologist his most satisfying moments. Psychoanalysis, however, has at its disposal neither the distinct outlines according to which "fragments" can be joined together nor the ideal shapes according to which its "finds" can be reconstructed. The connecting points between the symptom and the cure exist only in and through the analytical situation; they are a function of certain theoretical assumptions. Comparing a symptom to an archaeological find objectifies that symptom and, rather than exploring its ever-changing manifestations, transforms it into an identifiable and marketable good, available for exhibition and trade. Moreover, the objectification of the symptom mir- rors that of woman, who, once transformed into an archaeological site, witnesses silently how her body is mined for hidden treasures and how her sexuality is undermined in the process. The comparison achieves precisely that which the archaeological find personifies: ossification. Ultimately, that means turning something living into something dead in order to make life accessible to interpretation.

Freud's first writings on hysteria, dreams, and repression, as well as his ongoing interest in questions of analytical technique, are motivated by the desire to expose to rigorous critical strategies something that seems as "inaccessible" and "inexplicable" as the human soul and to use "human" texts, and not literature, as the primary medium for confronting the problem of interpretation. To this undertaking, archaeology brings powerful means of self-criticism and self-presentation. It initiates the metadiscourse of psychoanalysis and, at the same time, legitimates its claims to power, both in the theoretical and in the institutional sense. In order to better understand this double function, we must explore more closely an aspect of archaeology




that, even in its absence, influences Freud's use of the archaeological metaphor to a considerable degree. I am referring here to the reconstructive side of archaeology, the main goal of which is the exhibition of, and commercial trade in, archaeological finds. Both have an equivalent in the analytical endeavor, namely as the "exhibition" of and "trade" in interpretations. In Freud's writings, images of digging and excavating describe a critical project that, like archaeology itself, is characterized by its inquisitive nature and its alternately daring and cautious moves. References to archaeology serve to illustrate questions of analytic technique and create an atmosphere of ongoing reflection. The few comments on the labor of reconstruction, however, also link the project to more conservative pursuits, such as classification, preservation, and evaluation. In so doing, these comments draw attention to the affinities between psychoanalysis and the discourse of the museum and the archives. Representation, rather than interpretation, remains the collector's main concern. From the archaeologist's perspective, such con- cerns represent, at best, a negligible, yet necessary, aspect of his work and, at worst, the downfall of the archaeological enterprise. Whenever the value of archaeological finds is determined according to antiquarian standards, the analytical side of archaeology disappears in the background and makes room for an almost fetishistic involvement with possession. The critical im- petus no longer governs the confrontation with the past but is overruled by the desire for reconstruction. Similarly, the act of digging no longer stands for the entire archaeological project but is complemented by various other methods of putting together, of replacing, and, indeed, of eliminating the cracks and fissures that are the traces of history. Thus, the quest for knowledge comes to an end precisely in the moment that archaeology is forced to accommodate the needs of the present-that is, when the politics and the economics of representation determine its functions. With this in mind, the place of the archaeological metaphor in psychoanalysis has to be similarly located between the forces of explanation and belief that are responsible for its existence and the principles of analysis and reconstruction that make up its critical potential. The resultant conflict between analytic theory and analytic technique has enabled psychoanalysis to come into its own as a master discourse, and it continues to prevent its ossification as a discipline and as an institution.

Given this imbalance within the metaphor between the skepticism of the archaeologist and the conservatism of the antiquarian, it is all the more surprising to what degree the methods of the latter contribute to the analytic endeavor. This becomes clear in the disturbing identity of construction and




reconstruction proposed by Freud in "Constructions in Analysis" (1937): "His [the analyst's] work of construction, or, if it is preferred, of reconstruction, resembles to a great extent an archaeologist's excavation of some dwelling-place that has been destroyed and buried or of an ancient edifice" (SE, 23: 259). "Excavated" and, one is tempted to add, reconstructed as the simulacrum of a truth that remains forever hidden in the fragments of the past. In this statement, Freud not only equates reconstruction and construction, thereby validating his own "constructive" role, but he also uses their alleged identity to separate again the project of psychoanalysis from its "inferior" metaphor, claiming "that for the archaeologist the reconstruction is the aim and end of his endeavors while for analysis the construction is only a preliminary labour" (SE, 23: 260). "Preliminary labour" for what? one might ask, then point to the contradictions that result from this assertion of identity/nonidentity. At one point, for instance, Freud compares the foundations of the walls and the depressions in the ground with the "excavated" pieces of memory recovered through the talking cure and free association. Yet, his comparison ignores the enormous effort involved in placing these fragments and traces within a new meaningful configuration. Moreover, it fails to distinguish between various degrees of destruction that complicate and, at times, even thwart the intentions of the archaeologist. In the unconscious, there exists no process comparable to natural decay. The childhood experience, whether it falls prey to forgetting or takes on different shapes in the memory, lives on unchanged, as if in a vacuum. Only its "excavation" (if one wanted to continue in the spirit of the archaeological metaphor), its bringing into the light of day, puts an end to this eternity of the past and can (but must not) lead to an irreversible process of decay. Knowledge, while liberating and rewarding, always comes at the price of a secret revealed and an innocence lost. Freud comments briefly on these dangers when he shows the Rat Man some objects from his collection of antiquities: "They were, in fact, only objects found in a tomb, and their burial had been their preservation: the destruction of Pompeii was only beginning now that it had been dug up" (SE, 10: 176). The same holds true for the process of interpretation.

Since Freud uses the archaeological metaphor primarily for reconstructive purposes, its destructive side remains, for the most part, unex- plored. Its implications, however, are of great relevance for the positioning of woman in the metaphorical spaces of archaeology and psychoanalysis. With the equation of female body and archaeological site, the true battlefield has been reached: the hysterical body, in which the traces of the repressed




are inscribed and from where the sites of the unconscious can be reached most easily. Here, the approximation of body and text comes to an end as well: in the image of writing, in the process of inscription, and in the never-ending search for other meanings. In order to decipher this body- text, psychoanalysis must develop a critical method based on the same oscillation between writing and desire that the former attempts to preserve. Once these conditions are established, the redemption of the past in the present becomes possible, and the ground is prepared for the reconciliation of reason and imagination. This project, however, is successful only insofar as it acknowledges the fundamental difference between the realm of metaphors and the world of the living, who create and use these metaphors. After all: "'Archaeological interests are no doubt most praiseworthy, but no one undertakes an excavation if by doing so he is going to undermine the habitations of the living so that they collapse and bury people under their ruins'" (SE, 21: 34).

As a way of facilitating the transition from these more theoretical remarks to Freud's key archaeological text, "Dreams and Delusions in Jensen's 'Gradiva,'" a few biographical comments may be useful. Rather than promoting intentionality, such a "detour" through the biographical (i.e., as the discourse of biography) will help to reconstruct the material conditions under which the archaeological metaphor assumed such a central position in Freud's work. His personal interest in archaeology began as that of a homme de lettres and private collector. Freud was familiar with the most important art historical books of his time. Jacob Burckhardt's History of Greek Civilization (1872), for instance, opened for him "unexpected par- allels,"5 he confessed to Wilhelm Fliess in a letter. The beginnings of his extensive collection of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman antiquities correspond to the years of self-analysis and (supposedly) greatest professional iso- lation.6 With growing public recognition came more valuable acquisitions, all of which Freud made with considerable expertise and business sense. Nevertheless, the collection, which eventually grew to contain more than two thousand pieces and which, for the most part, accompanied him into the London exile, remained a highly personal affair. Photographs give an

5. The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904, ed. and trans. Jeffrey M. Masson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 342. In the same letter, Freud also speaks of his "predilection for the prehistoric." 6. Many critics (among them Bernfeld, Cassirer, Gamwell) have seen a link between the death of Freud's father and his intense preoccupation with objects that make possible encounters between the world of the living and the world of the dead.




impression of how Freud must have worked at his overcrowded desk, sur- rounded by papers, books, and small sculptures. They reveal that, to him, the figures represented less aesthetic objects than meditation aids and imaginary partners in an ongoing silent dialogue.7

Nonetheless, Freud's remark to Stefan Zweig "that he really read more archaeology than psychology"8 must be interpreted as wishful thinking. His fascination with archaeology was typical of members of the edu- cated middle classes who sought refuge in humanistic traditions as they were forced to give up their social and cultural privileges. The passing comments on the important archaeological discoveries of the nineteenth century, the open preference for the Rome of antiquity, and the many bor- rowings from Greek mythology all show a deep appreciation of the classical heritage that he shared with his class and that, in turn, helped him to gain their respect, even in view of the scandal of psychoanalysis. Taking advan- tage of the widespread popularity of archaeology, Freud could, therefore, base his daring advances into the realm of the unconscious on the solid foundation of tradition, at least with regard to his choice of tropes. In so doing, he gave psychoanalysis an aura of respectability.

Freud's passion for archaeology defies "normal" standards when it comes to his virtually inexhaustible interest in the excavations of Troy and his identification with Heinrich Schliemann, the famous German archaeologist and discoverer of Troy.9 In an important letter to Fliess, Freud compares his analytical breakthroughs with the discoveries of Schliemann: "It is as if Schliemann had again excavated Troy, which had hitherto been deemed a fable."10 For Freud, who read Schliemann's Illios (1881) with great enthu- siasm, the discovery of Troy must have meant the sudden fulfillment of all dreams. The recognition that myth prepares the ground from which the real emerges remained an integral part of Freud's analytical method: as intuitive

7. On Freud as a collector, see Lynn Gamwell, "The Origins of Freud's Antiquities Collec-

tion," in Gamwell and Wells, Sigmund Freud and Art, 21-32. 8. Freud, letter to Stefan Zweig (7 Feb. 1931), in Briefe, 1873-1939, ed. Erich and Lucie Freud (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1968), 399; translation mine. 9. For a psychoanalytic reading of Schliemann's life, see William S. Niederland, "Analy- tische Studie uber das Leben und Werk Heinrich Schliemanns," Psyche 18 (1964/1965): 563-90. 10. The Complete Letters (21 Dec. 1899), 391-92. Also compare the dream reported by Freud, in which a premonition of death turns into a wish fulfillment when he suddenly finds himself in an old Etruscian grave "which he has climbed down into, happy to find his

archaeological interests satisfied" (SE, 21: 17).




belief and speculative courage. At the same time, the identification with the discoverer of Troy gave rise to peculiar anxieties and inhibitions. For instance, Freud notes with envy that Schliemann lived and worked at the sites of antiquity, while Freud himself was held back by a strange fear to travel at all. Temporarily resigned to his fate, he writes: "Otherwise I am reading Greek archaeology and reveling in journeys I shall never make and treasures I shall never possess.""11 These ambivalent feelings were perhaps the result of early childhood experiences-after all, even Schliemann describes his interest in archaeology as "the natural consequence of the impressions I received in my earliest childhood."12 Thus, in a psychoanalytical interpretation of Freud's fascination with archaeology, Suzanne Cassirer Bernfeld evokes the year 1859, when the Freud family moved from Freiberg, Mora- via, to Vienna: "This simple geographic change was a catastrophe for Freud and he spent the next forty years of his life trying to undo it. Freiberg became Pompeii and he became its Schliemann."13 For Bernfeld, Freud's interest in Schliemann originated in an almost obsessive preoccupation with the places of his childhood and, one might add, the figure of the overpowering father, for whom Freud eventually found a more than worthy successor in Schliemann.

Feelings of ambivalence also characterize Freud's relationship to Rome, the Eternal City.14 As with Winckelmann before him, both the desire to reach the city of his dreams and his fear to fail (as did the Semitic Han- nibal) culminate in a series of abortive attempts. Even after the conquest is achieved, biographically and theoretically speaking, his anxieties find a new outlet in the disdain for the Rome of the Renaissance and Baroque. Consequently, the historically grown city becomes the place where the archaeological metaphor, too, reaches its limitations. Faced with the city's complexity, the metaphor's destructive forces surface with full force; here, its struggle for unambiguity draws to a close. This conflict between the signs of ambiguity and chaos, on the one hand, and the need for clarity and order, on the other, points to a fundamental problem of interpretation, with Rome as a methodological crisis area. The analogies are suggestive: Every object

11. The Complete Letters (14 Oct. 1900), 427. 12. Heinrich Schliemann, Ilfios. The City and Country of the Trojans (New York and Lon- don: Benjamin Blom, 1968), 1. 13. Suzanne Cassirer Bernfeld, "Freud and Archeology," The American Imago 8 (1951): 113. 14. On Freud and Rome, see Walter Sch6nau, Sigmund Freuds Prosa. Literarische Ele- mente seines Stils (Stuttgart: Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1968), 192-207.




of inquiry, whether it consists of images, letters, or material things, exists only in and through time. Buildings and cities, however, differ from literary texts in that they preserve continuity through the contiguity of different forms and styles. As time becomes space, and space turns into meaning, a complicated topography develops, complete with sedimentations, inclu- sions, and faults. Drawing an accurate map of the ancient city would require the unearthing of her ancient foundations and would ultimately lead to the destruction of what has made possible its glorious history and architectural diversity. But like the body of the hysteric, the city triumphs over the analyst's desire to uncover the foundations: Her buildings, after all, are inhabited by people.

The place of archaeology in psychoanalytic discourse would be much more problematic if the encounter with the Eternal City had not brought about important insights. Above all, these involve the recognition that "in mental life nothing which has once been formed can perish-that everything is somehow preserved and that in suitable circumstances . .. it can once more be brought to life" (SE, 21: 69). These Roman speculations from "Civilization and Its Discontents" (1930) draw attention to the redemptive project that leaves its mark on the archaeological metaphor, in spite of the dangers involved, for what cannot be lost also has the chance to be saved: for the present conjunction, for the project of interpretation, for a better understanding of femininity. In anticipation of such possibilities, Freud may have turned, more than twenty years earlier, to Jensen's Gradiva.

2

Given the importance of archaeology to his early work, it is not surprising that Freud, in 1907, turned to an archaeological novel to explore certain issues relevant to the interpretation of dreams. During the second half of the nineteenth century, this hybrid genre was especially popular with bourgeois readers.15 The stories of excavations and discoveries satisfied their nostalgia for the world of German classicism, and the traditional form confirmed their rejection of literary modernism. Like the historical novels of

15. The enormous success of Edward Lord Bulwer's The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) inspired a number of epigonic works, including Ferdinand Gregorovius's Euphorion. Eine Dichtung aus Pompeji in vier Gesangen (1858), Waldemar Kaden's Pompejanische Novellen (1882), Hermann von Lingg's Clythia. Eine Szene aus Pompeji (1884), Otto Behrend's Der Bildhauer. Ein Unterhaltungsroman aus Pompeji (1907), and Gustav Adolf Miller's Das sterbende Pompeji (1910).




Felix Dahn and Georg Ebers, the archaeological novel combined entertain- ment, edification, and historical consciousness in an appealing mixture. The absence of literary qualities was frequently compensated for with a surplus of historical facts and an exaggerated interest in detail; hence the deroga- tory term professorial novel. More importantly, the hybrid genre managed to put to use, and rather skillfully, the symbolic qualities of archaeology. These concern its secret affinities with the rhetoric of domination, both with regard to discursive formations and cultural politics. By the end of the nineteenth century, few academic disciplines were still able to accommodate, with such ease, the demand for a classical education, artistic intuition, and precise scientific method. Endowed with these qualities, archaeology came to em- body the possibility of peaceful coexistence in the status quo. At the same time, its narratives of domination satisfied a very important need: that of achieving control over the Other in the self and the self in the Other. Thus, when Werner Achilles Miller, a student of Josef Nadler, calls archaeology one of the major "sciences of conquest of the nineteenth century,"16 he unintentionally identifies the subtexts that gave archaeology its initial attrac- tion. As is proven by the archaeological novel, these affinities manifested themselves with particular clarity in the disguise of mediocrity.

Freud read Jensen's Gradiva at Jung's suggestion. He considered the work, as such, of little literary value: "It has no particular merit in itself" (SE, 20: 65). Even a brief correspondence with Jensen (SE, 9: 94ff.), a prolific, but minor, writer, showed his disinterest in the autobiographical elements of the Hanold-Zoe relationship. Instead, "Delusions and Dreams in Jensen's 'Gradiva' " (1907) opens with the question of whether the dreams "created by imaginative writers and ascribed to invented characters in the course of a story" (SE, 9: 7) can be interpreted like real dreams. In the discussion that follows, psychoanalysis clearly remains the master discourse. It defines the critical framework and provides the main concepts and arguments. The work of literature, on the other hand, is exposed to a symptomatic reading that reduces its characters to patients and its narratives to case stories. Typically enough, Freud describes the novel as "the imaginative picture (dichterische Darstellung) of the history of a case and its

16. Werner Achilles MOller, Die archaologische Dichtung in ihrem Umfang und Gehalt (K6nigsberg: Grafe und Unzer, 1928), 2. Josef Nadler wrote a controversial literary history based on national characteristics, Literaturgeschichte der deutschen Stamme und Landschaften (3 vols., 1912-1918). On Pompeii in literature (including a brief discussion of Gradiva), see Wolfgang Leppmann, Pompeii in Fact and Fiction (London: Elek Books, 1968), 145-54.




treatment" (SE, 9: 44). With this approach to literature, an endless number of fictional cases are added to the critical project of psychoanalysis as an illustration and demonstration of its interpretative methods. The lack of concern for the literary text, however, ultimately prevents the kind of critical insights that come from reading literature through psychoanalysis and psychoanalysis through literature. Only a return to the text of the novel and, in particular, only a return to the archaeological metaphor in the novel will show its actual contribution. Fortunately, the absence of notable literary qualities (in the conventional sense) turns out to be a blessing in disguise. Jensen's Gradiva not only illustrates, to the point of redundancy, the functioning of the archaeological metaphor but also shows an almost uncanny receptiveness to psychoanalytic readings. This doubling effect has to do with the novel's overly constructed plot, its flat characters, its use of stereo- types and clich6s, and its turgid prose. Jensen's pretentious style adds to the impression that there are no secrets left, no treasures to be found, and his professed ignorance about psychoanalysis confirms the petty-bourgeois attitude of the popular author. That which distinguishes Gradiva as trivial literature, however, also constitutes its usefulness in this particular chain of readings-from Jensen's formulaic interpretations of fiction to Freud's challenging fictions of interpretation.

Gradiva: A Pompeiian Fancy contains the basic elements of the

archaeological novel: a famous archaeological setting, an important discovery, a beautiful woman, and the obligatory young archaeologist, Norbert Hanold, through whose scholarly, and later erotic, interests the narrative is set into motion. The story begins with Hanold's discovery of an unusual bas- relief in the antique collections in Rome. Portraying the so-called Gradiva ("the girl splendid in walking"), the relief shows "a complete female figure in the act of walking: she was still young, but no longer in childhood and, on the other hand, apparently not a woman, but a Roman virgin about in her twentieth year."17 Something in her appearance captures Hanold's attention, something that calls for the knowledge of art rather than archaeology. Torn between his sensual enjoyment of the image and his professional interest in its history, the young archaeologist sets out to find an answer to the question, "Where had she walked thus and wither was she going?" (148).

The unusual position of Gradiva's right foot marks the point of depar-

17. Wilhelm Jensen, Gradiva: A Pompeiian Fancy, trans. Helen M. Downey, in Delu- sion and Dream and Other Essays, ed. Philip Rieff (Boston: Beacon Press, 1956), 147. Subsequent references to this work are cited in my text by page number only.




ture for the novel's underlying story of an investigation. This investigation proceeds through a series of disassociations and dislocations: from North to South, from the present to the past, from the reality of everyday existence to the world of dreams and delusions. It is propelled forward by Hanold's desire to make sense of the woman's discourse, both literally and figura- tively speaking. Determined to find out "whether a woman's manner of walking was different from that of a man" (151), Hanold begins by carrying out "pedestrian investigations" (153) on female passersby but is soon stopped by their indignant reactions to such fetishistic behavior. Then he turns to his most valuable skill in avoiding direct contact with the world while still partaking in its pleasures, namely his vivid imagination: "It created for him, with the aid of his knowledge of antiquity, the vista of a long street" (150). A dream transports Hanold to Pompeii, on 24 August, A.D. 79, moments before the eruption of Vesuvius. Before he can even address the apparition that he recognizes to be Gradiva, "her face became paler as if it were changing to white marble" (154). Once the woman turns to stone, the dream comes to an end, as well-a first indication of the equation between ossification and sexual repression around which the novel revolves. Hanold's speculations bring forth the spectacle of Gradiva and motivate her subsequent transformations. Despite Gradiva's participation, these scenarios only confirm her primary function as a beautiful object and visual spectacle-first for the archaeologist, and later for the man.

Hanold's knowledge of archaeology brings him on the trail of the woman. Increasingly, however, the Pompeiian fantasy is invaded by real women who "had formerly been for him only a conception in marble or bronze" (152). In order to understand their appeal, the archaeologist must return to the archaeological site. Moreover, he must confront the ossification in his own life, including his sexual repression. Jensen alludes to this problem in Hanold's relationship to the materials of his profession, since "for his feelings marble and bronze were not dead, but rather the only really vital thing which expressed the purpose and value of human life" (159). Driven by an inexplicable need to know, to solve the secret of Gradiva's gait, Hanold departs for Italy, therein following a specific German tradition, the educational journey (Bildungsreise). Instead of facilitating his emotional recovery, the southern landscape allows his dreams to take on a new dimension; as delusions, they gradually take over the archaeological discourse. Finding reflections of his own past everywhere, the streets of Rome suddenly remind Hanold of the "noisy quarry" (165) he just left behind, and he develops an "uncanny horror of antique collections" (165). Only the de-




serted streets and houses in Pompeii enable the young archaeologist to conjure up an image that seems as close and palpable as it must remain distant and unattainable. Once his sense of vision, and his longing for the spectacle of woman, takes over all other senses, the old beliefs begin to crumble: "For his traveling companion, science, had most decidedly much of an old Trappist (Trappistin) about her; she did not open her mouth when she was not spoken to, and it seemed to him that he was almost forgetting in what language he had communed with her" (172). No longer able to rely on the old methods of interpretation, Hanold succumbs to the forces of the unconscious. They come to him in the form of speculations, dreams, and free associations. Without a critical language that grants mastery, and without a discipline that promises order, Hanold withdraws into a state of passive anticipation. Instead of fighting the collapse of the discursive order, he deliberately exposes himself to the glaring sunlight until "what had formerly been the city of Pompeii assumed an entirely changed appearance, but not a living one; it now appeared rather to be becoming completely petri- fied in dead immobility" (175). The process of ossification, though originally the vehicle of sexual repression, now allows desire to return to the surface. Under the rule of a newly discovered sensuality, language and reason are no longer necessary: "Not only had all his science left him, but it had left him without the least desire to regain it; he remembered it from a great dis- tance, and he felt that it had been like an old, dried-up, boring aunt, the dullest and most superfluous creature in the world. .... What it taught was a lifeless archaeological view, and what came from its mouth was a dead, philological language" (179). In the place of a science that has no need for the present, the body demands acknowledgment of its basic needs: "Then something came forth everywhere without movement and a sound- less speech began; then the sun dissolved the tomb-like rigidity of the old stones, a glowing thrill passed through them, the dead awoke, and Pompeii began to live again" (179). With Gradiva's second appearance among the ruins, the reality (Wirklichkeit) of her existence gives way to the effect (Wir- kung) of his desire: "Thus, under the glowing sun of the Campagna, there was a mythological-literary-historical-archaeological juggling in his head" (183). In the moment that these critical categories reveal their full absurdity, the inquisitive look of the archaeologist turns into a man's desiring gaze.

The crisis of discourse, however, leads neither to complete madness nor to unrestrained eroticism. In accordance with the genre's affirmative nature, Gradiva offers an alternative solution that, despite its suggestive overtones, completes the collection of hackneyed tropes and motifs; it introduces the equation of woman and text. Hanold's return to reason takes



Hake / Saxa Iloquuntur 163

place through the woman's body, "excavated from the ashes" (236), and requires the inscription of the new discourse into her features. In order to achieve this goal, he must have "a full view of her face," which looks "at the same time unknown and yet also familiar" (186). Once the identity between the woman of stone and the woman of flesh is confirmed, the enjoyment of female beauty is no longer limited to the world of art (i.e., as the "brush of antiquity," [184]). Increasingly, Gradiva comes to be asso- ciated with the instinctual forces of nature that break through the old stones and that make the lava streams flow again, as another of Jensen's sexual metaphors would have it. Once Hanold succumbs entirely to his delusions, Gradiva achieves for him, through her bodily presence, the reconciliation of interpretation and desire. In her beautiful features, the mediation of nature and culture becomes possible; through her fine lines, the alphabet of reconciliation is spelled out with seductive simplicity. As Jensen notes succinctly: "One could read in her countenance" (188).

The conflation of woman and text revives Hanold's sexual desire, but the spectacle of woman has to be animated through speech in order to complete this process. Gradiva returns and, speaking a prosaic German rather than Latin or Greek, introduces herself as Zoe. By seemingly joining in his delusion, the woman assumes yet another role: from the beautiful artwork to an uncanny apparition, from the Pompeiian girl to the German maiden, she now becomes Hanold's personal analyst-the ideal preparation for her future role as his wife. Through free association, transference, and counter- transference, all of which resemble traditional female qualities, she frees Hanold of his delusions. Fulfilling the meaning of her name (in Greek, life), Zoe brings Hanold back to life: from the gaze to the touch, from oppressive silence to liberating laughter, from the views of science to the voices of love. Consequently, her look increasingly controls the changing states of reality. What begins as an "expression of searching curiosity and inquisitiveness" (195) soon betrays a "friendly" interest, while at the same time acquiring a somewhat "penetrating" quality. Diagnosing Norbert as the victim of a "strange delusion" (220), it is now Gradiva/Zoe who refers to the spectacle of the delusional man as a rare "find." A complete reversal has taken place, it seems, with the archaeologist haunted by the products of his imagination and the woman promoted from an archaeological fantasy to a successful psychoanalyst. Far from suggesting the woman's empowerment, this moment only underscores Hanold's triumphant return to masculinity, for it was he who, not unlike Pygmalion, "imparted to her his life-strength" (209) in order to receive from her his new/old identity.

For the denouement, Hanold returns once more to the archaeological




site. No longer the mise-en-scene of his delusions, the buildings and streets

convey a "gloomy distinctness" that reflects their origins in the distant past. Here, Zoe reveals to him, with her last name, Bertgang, the truth about their relationship: They are childhood friends. Once her double existence as the repressed (the childhood memory) and the return of the repressed (the fascination with the relief) has been explained, nothing stands in the way of Hanold's "return to sound reason" (223). With the forgotten childhood memories, his sexual desires return, as well. The fetishes and trophies of the past, on the other hand, lose their power. Accordingly, the story ends with a tender kiss, a passionate embrace, and the couple's plan to return to Pompeii on their honeymoon. It is the woman's discourse that completes the circle and upholds the challenge: "And raising her dress slightly with her left hand, Gradiva rediviva Zoe Bertgang ... crossed with her calmly

buoyant walk, through the sunlight, over the stepping stones, to the other side of the street" (235).

These daring movements could have provided the point of departure for a new psychoanalytic approach to literature. Freud, however, as "the partisan of antiquity and superstition" (SE, 9: 7), takes another direction. Instead of reading Jensen's novel as a dream about the problem of

interpretation, he limits his analysis to Hanold's dreams and turns them into his very own archaeological finds.18 As a result, "Delusions and Dreams"

resembles, at times, the psychoanalytic readings of literature that Freud re-

peatedly criticized as wrong and misguided in discussions with Rank and Sachs. His statement that Gradiva represents less a "Pompeiian fancy" than a "psychiatric study" (SE, 9: 41) ignores entirely its existence as a work of literature and is hardly invalidated by a later suggestion "to exclude

any possibility of measuring it by the standards of clinical reality" (SE, 9:

70). Yet, it has been argued repeatedly that the presence of the archaeo-

logical metaphor in the Jensen novel makes possible other readings. The

archaeological heroine, Gradiva, and the suggestive imagery of Pompeii reintroduce, almost clandestinely, the problem of femininity and interpretation that has accompanied the novel from the very beginning, namely as the subtext that motivated Freud's reading and as the context that had to be denied.

18. Comparing dreams to archaeological finds, Freud approvingly quotes Strumpell, who describes "how dreams sometimes bring to light, as it were, from beneath the deepest piles of d6bris under which the earliest experiences of youth are buried in later times, pic- tures of particular localities, things or people, completely intact and with all their original freshness" (SE, 4: 15).




Following a lengthy plot summary, "Delusions and Dreams" introduces three analogies, all of which illuminate important aspects of the archaeological metaphor. These include the analogies between childhood and antiquity, between the process of repression and the burial of ancient cities, and between the discourse of psychoanalysis and the discourse of archaeology. Hanold's life story, according to Freud, shows the simi- larity "between a particular mental process in the individual and an isolated historical event in the history of mankind" (SE, 9: 40). Even Freud's professional involvement with archaeology reveals this longing for temporal identity, since "he had made his own childhood coincide with the classical past (SE, 9: 51). Here, Pompeii provides the means for the return of the repressed and becomes the medium for representing repression in visual terms. Representation, in other words, is repression in reverse: "It is precisely what was chosen as the instrument of repression . . . that becomes the vehicle for the return: in and behind the repressing force, what is repressed proves itself victor in the end" (SE, 9: 35). Furthermore, the archaeological mise-en-scene translates repression into spatial and temporal terms: "There is, in fact, no better analogy for repression, by which something in the mind is at once made inaccessible and preserved, than burial of the sort to which Pompeii fell a victim and from which it could emerge once more through the work of spades" (SE, 9: 40). With these two statements, the stage seems set for a compelling demonstration of the power of interpretation.

In the remaining three sections, however, Freud uses the archaeological metaphor exclusively for his analysis of Hanold's rejection of eroticism. He neglects all aspects of the novel that have to do with Pompeii as the site of the return of the repressed. His preoccupation with the male character distracts attention from Gradiva and her remarkable rise from an archaeological hallucination to an analytical mastermind. All critical insights are subordinated to the logic of the cure, as is evidenced by the happy ending that Freud's interpretation shares with Jensen's novel.19 Hanold's delusions, Freud concludes after analyzing two (of Hanold's four) dreams, disappear in the moment that his desire shifts from a dead science to a living woman: "It was right that an antique, the marble sculpture of a woman, should have been what tore our archaeologist away from his retreat from love and warned him to pay off the debt to life with which we are burdened

19. Commenting critically on the novel's ending, Freud remarks that "the author, in short, had quite arbitrarily tacked a love story onto his archaeological phantasy" (SE, 9: 87). Yet, his own interpretation of a successful analysis does nothing else.




from our birth" (SE, 9: 49). In the process, the novel is reduced to a mere reflection of Hanold's unconscious, with the hero wandering among the ruins of his life. Though a fictional character, he joins the ranks of Freud's other famous male patients (e.g., the Rat Man, the Wolf Man, President Schreber) who exhibit similar sexual identity problems. The relief of Gradiva, doubly present as the object of desire in the narrative and as a plaster copy in Freud's study, is transformed into a precious object, unreachable and, at the same time, endlessly reproducible. And Zoe Bertgang, the woman behind the image, assumes her double role as Jensen's imaginative muse and Freud's perceptive double.

Despite these narrative and interpretative strategies, something remains in the cracks and fissures of the archaeological metaphor, something that brings back to the fore the problem of interpretation. It will be the purpose of this essay's third part to describe some of its characteristics-but as a play with the Freudian metaphors rather than as a sustained argument for another model of literary criticism. What has already been suggested in the introductory remarks on the archaeological metaphor and what has been tested in the analysis of the novel must now be formulated in more

general terms. Ironically, this possibility suggests itself precisely because of the ideas that inform Freud's own reading of Gradiva.

3

Jensen's Gradiva and Freud's "Delusions and Dreams" each tell the

story of an interpretation. The one recounts Norbert Hanold's search for and encounter with Gradiva/Zoe; the other gives, among other things, a detailed account of Hanold's dreams. Both authors define their objects of

inquiry in spatial terms, that is, through the archaeological site and the body of woman. Both also draw attention to the close links between critical discourse (in this case archaeology) and the question of sexual difference.

Yet, whereas the archaeological metaphor foregrounds the problem of in-

terpretation, the emphasis on the female body puts desire at the center of all investigations. Whereas Gradiva stands for the legacies of history, "Delusions and Dreams" evokes the problem of difference in its countless manifestations. Sustained by these tensions, Gradiva and "Delusions and Dreams" come together through and in the body of a woman, who, whether carved in stone or made of flesh, guarantees their functioning. Gradiva's

physical body, and its transfer from the immortality of stone to the less stable realm of dreams and delusions, defines the place of woman within




the archaeological metaphor. But it requires the presence of a real woman to set into motion these processes. Thus, Gradiva/Zob rises from the realm of

metaphor to assume three major roles: as archaeological find, as archaeo-

logical site, and as Freud's analytical double.

Compared to Freud's analytical detours in "Delusions and Dreams," Zoe Bertgang has all the makings of the better analyst. Even Freud describes her skills with admiration: "She was evidently entering into his delusion, the whole compass of which she elicited from him, without ever contra-

dicting it." His conclusion that she "was probably doing so in order to set him free from it" (SE, 9: 21) must be interpreted as a direct reference to the cathartic (i.e., psychoanalytic) method that he developed in collaboration with Breuer. By "taking up the same ground as the delusional structure and then investigating it as completely as possible" (SE, 9: 22), however, Zoe performs the kind of close textual reading that Freud himself refuses

(or fails?) to produce vis-a-vis the literary text. Whereas Freud pays little attention to the novel's structure, Zoe "exhibits an intentional ambiguity" (SE, 9: 84) that prevents her from arriving at any premature conclusions. Her approach is in no way invalidated by the fact that it serves increas-

ingly personal interests. Transference prepares the ground for what Freud

appropriately calls "the model of a cure by love" (SE, 9: 90), but counter- transference also results in a real love relationship. By ignoring the rules that normally separate the analyst and the analysand, Zoe creates a discourse that is based on, and maintained through, love. Freud's remark that "if the treatment of the delusion were to coincide with its investigation and if the explanation of its origins were to be revealed precisely while it was

being dissected" (SE, 9: 22) refers precisely to the identity of analysis and

reconstruction-again, the two sides of the archaeological metaphor-that requires Zoe's mediating presence.

It is Freud himself who prepares the ground for such conclusions, and he does so primarily through the elisions, emphases, and misreadings that constitute "Delusions and Dreams" as a text worthy, like Gradiva, of a symptomatic reading. Freud provides us with the necessary critical tools to read such apparent failures as manifestations of a submerged text waiting to be "excavated" through interpretation. This becomes clear when he speaks of the mistakes patients make when retelling their dreams, mistakes that provide important clues to their actual significance. Freud refers to them as "the weak spot in the dream's disguise: they serve my purpose just as Hagen's was served by the embroidered mark on Siegfried's cloak" (SE, 5: 515). His own retelling of Gradiva in "Delusions and Dreams" bears such an




embroidered mark, namely the misreading of archaeology as archaeologist. In the German original of the Jensen novel, Zoe says: "DaB Jemand erst sterben muB, um lebendig zu werden. Aber for die Archaologie [my emphasis] ist das wohl notwendig."20 Freud, again in the German original, "Der Wahn und die Traume in Jensen's 'Gradiva,' " appropriates this sentence with a sweeping gesture of displacement when he quotes "aber for den Archaologen [my emphasis] ist das wohl notwendig."21 As is so often the case, the full force of Freud's thinking manifests itself through misreadings that reverse, or even negate, his arguments-but only to confirm them in the end. Through the personification, the discourse of archaeology disappears behind the case story of an archaeologist, and its critical challenges are contained within the problematic of the individual. Through this simple metonymic shift, the conservative side of archaeology regains strength over the analytical-theoretical side, including its different interests. Nonetheless, the very existence of Freud's misreading proves that the archaeological site in Gradiva has much more to offer than a convenient metaphor of repression. Like the return of the repressed, the misreading draws attention to the

problem of interpretation that continues to haunt the text. Jensen's Gradiva and Freud's "Delusions and Dreams" create, through their differences, new

configurations between fictitious and theoretical texts. In so doing, they restore the archaeological metaphor to the center of the metadiscourse on

interpretation.22 "Delusions and Dreams" was written as a continuation of The Inter-

pretation of Dreams but lacks the latter's critical rigor and speculative drive. There is also little evidence of the mastery that characterized earlier works, such as "The Psychopathology of Everyday Life" (1901) and "Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious" (1905), and that, only one year later, inspired an important essay on the similarities between "Creative Writers and Daydreaming" (1908). While these works take specific texts (e.g., slips of the tongue, jokes) or phenomena (e.g., the creative imagination) as their

20. Wilhelm Jensen, Gradiva. Ein pompejanisches Phantasiestuck (Dresden and Leipzig: Carl Reissner, 1903), 141. 21. Sigmund Freud, Studienausgabe, ed. Alexander Mitscherlich, Angela Richards, James Strachey (Frankfurt/Main: S. Fischer, 1969), 10: 37. In the Standard Edition, Strachey translates the sentence as follows: "but no doubt that must be so for archaeologists" (SE, 9: 37). Similarly, Downey's translation of Gradiva reads: "for an archaeologist that is necessary, I suppose" (230). 22. This is also true of Freud's later works on art and literature, for instance "The Man Moses" and "The Uncanny."




point of reference, "Delusions and Dreams" dismantles the textual structure of Gradiva for the sake of two dreams. Moreover, Freud's interpretation of these dreams concentrates on the most basic dream symbols. Crucial aspects of the dream work, such as displacement and condensation, are ignored; respective movements of signification within the texts remain unmentioned.23 Because of these shortcomings, which might even be regarded as another weak spot in the disguise of the Freudian reading, nothing seems more appropriate than to submit Gradiva to the strategies of the "interpretation of dreams [which] is the royal road to a knowledge of unconscious activities of the mind" (SE, 5: 608). Furthermore, nothing seems more appropriate than to shift (or, rather, to expand) the notion of dream from the dreams of a fictional character to the textual structure of an entire novel.

As recent psychoanalytic criticism has shown, the rapprochement of text and dream poses a threat to the representational order that relies on notions like primary and secondary for its continuing existence. Their substitution by manifest and latent, however, does not necessarily eliminate

23. Although many literary critics have described "Delusions and Dreams" as a turning point in the history of psychoanalysis, they seem almost driven, and rightly so, to overcome its shortcomings and reveal its explosive force. The conception of this essay does not allow for a more detailed discussion of their contributions, but some quotations may be in order to at least indicate the nature of such rampant discontent. Guided by the motto of Deleuze/Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, "Gradiva, Freud had never gone so far," Sylvere Lotringer sets out to confront the analytical enterprise with its own doings, so to speak. "Instead of forcing ("applying") psychoanalysis on literature to the point of identifying one with the other," the author proposes "to turn literature against psychoanalysis" (in Sylvere Lotringer, "The Fiction of Analysis," trans. Daniel Moshenberg, Semiotext(e) 2 [1977]: 174). Focusing on the delusional structure of "Delusions and Dreams," Sarah Kofman, on the other hand, describes Freud's Pompeii as a place that allows for plurality but, at the same time, increases the desire for simplicity: "Freud shatters the different symbolic layers of the text and retains only a single one which determines the text's meaning, dis- pelling the ambiguity of the city and delivering the hero from crisis.... Once again the text is treated as a delusional production" (in Sarah Kofman, The Childhood of Art: An Interpretation of Freud's Aesthetics [New York: Columbia University Press, 1988], 183). For a longer reading of Gradiva, also see Kofman's Quatre romans analytiques (Paris: Galilee, 1974), 100-134. Finally, it is Jean Bellemin-No6l who, in his rereading of the novel, not only offers a new French translation of Gradiva but follows the novel on the steps of the woman and the letter (au pied de la lettre): attending to every detail, registering every move, and shifting the archaeological metaphor to the place where it belongs, that is, to be a metaphor of femininity and interpretation (see Jean Bellemin-Noel, Gradiva au pied de la lettre [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1982]).




such hierarchies. Rather, the shift from categories of originality (primary, secondary) to categories of representation (manifest, latent) reflects more accurately the process of interpretation, including its pleasures and frustra- tions. This process has little in common with reading literature as psychoanalysis or with reading psychoanalysis as literature.24 From the perspective of the archaeological metaphor, it means reading an archaeological novel as a dream about interpretation and desire. Approaching Gradiva as a dream, however, requires that the latent dream thought be discovered behind the manifest dream content, which consists of stories, characters, motifs, and

everything else that constitutes a work of literature. Exposed to the act of

interpretation, the primary text sets into motion a never-ending process of

telling and retelling, reading and rereading. The secondary text that is created in the process does not give privileged access to the truth but, at least, guarantees a more open involvement with texts and the uncertainties of

reading. Freud's writings on the interpretation of dreams provide the frame-

work through which to carry out such an endeavor; their importance for an understanding of the archaeological metaphor, and the interrelation of

femininity and interpretation, is considerable. The expedition into the text's substrata begins with the operations of the dream work, which include condensation, displacement, considerations of representability, and second-

ary revision. Freud defines condensation as a process of concentration: "Condensation is brought about (1) by the total omission of certain latent elements, (2) by only a fragment of some complexes in the latent dream

passing over into the manifest one and (3) by latent elements which have

something in common being combined and fused into a single unity in the manifest dream" (SE, 15: 171). As a means of representation, condensation stands closest to metaphor; it virtually constitutes the archaeological metaphor. By creating composite figures and structures, by superimposing elements onto each other, overdetermination establishes itself as the main

principle of condensation. These qualities find a most adequate expression in the image of Gradiva's foot, which moves through the story as the fetish of female sexuality, the embodiment of the quest for knowledge, and the

driving force behind the narrative. The uncanny identity of the muse and the act of writing captured in this image find expression in the foot's oblique

24. See, on this point, Shoshana Felman, "To Open the Question," in Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading, Otherwise (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univer-

sity Press, 1982), 5-10, and Frangoise Meltzer, "Introduction: Plays, Pipe Dreams," in The Trials of Psychoanalysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 1-7.




position, which resembles that of a pen on a page. Her seemingly effort- less jumping from stone to stone, as well as her silent coming and going between the relics of the past, anticipates and reflects each turn taken by the narrative. The archaeological site provides the ideal setting in which her discourse can find its stage, comparable again to the scene of writing.

Displacement is an equally crucial part of the dream work. Accord- ing to Freud, displacement means that "in the first [way] a latent element is replaced not by a component part of itself but by something more remote- that is, by an illusion; and in the second, the psychical accent is shifted from an important element onto another which is unimportant, so that the dream appears differently centred and strange" (SE, 15: 174).25 "Delusions and Dreams" works with two kinds of displacements. As has been noted above, the metonymic substitution of a science, archaeology, by one of its representatives diverts attention from the underlying problem of interpretation. Yet, through his misreading, Freud also effects a displacement from the entire body of the novel to significant parts that subsequently come to represent its meaning. While Hanold's dreams assume center stage, the other aspects of the novel-that is, the story of an excavation/interpretation-are reduced to mere backdrop. Consequently, Freud's intervention into the novel's textual structures must be seen as a wish fulfillment. He shifts the text from the analysis of problems inherent in interpretation to an exemplary study on dreams and delusions.

Condensation, displacement, and considerations of representability fall under the expertise of dreamers and poets. As the "transforming [of] thoughts into visual images" (SE, 15: 175), the third activity of the dream work is responsible for all of the visual aspects of the archaeological metaphor: its spatial expanses, its temporal depths, its hidden treasures, and, of course, its real heroes, the archaeologists, who constantly try to negotiate the destructive and reconstructive side of their work. The wider meanings of the archaeological metaphor have already been discussed above. The particular example of Pompeii in Gradiva also adds a dimension that has to do

25. Lacan links displacement to "the idea of that veering off of signification that we see in metonymy, and which from its first appearance in Freud is represented as the most appropriate means used by the unconscious to foil censorship" (in Jacques Lacan, "Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious," Ecrits, trans. Alan Sheridan [New York: W. W. Norton, 1977], 160). Similarly, Lacan associates condensation with the "structure of the superim- position of the signifiers, which metaphor takes as its field, and whose name, condensing in itself the word Dichtung, shows how the mechanism is connatural with poetry to the point that it envelops the traditional function proper to poetry" (160).




with the circumstances of its sudden burial. While most other archaeological sites exhibit various degrees of destruction and involve different historical periods, Pompeii's disappearance as a place of the living proved to be as

complete and terminal as the subsequent preservation of its monuments and artifacts for the archaeological project. Given these unique qualities, Pompeii establishes a critical paradigm that may be misleading with regard to its implications for the project of interpretation. As the great exception in archaeology, however, it brings out Freud's underlying assumptions with

unprecedented clarity. Unlike the considerations of representability, the process of second-

ary revision is reserved for the philosopher and the critic. Secondary revision, according to Freud, describes that aspect "whose business it is to make something whole and more or less coherent out of the first products of the dream-work. In the course of this, the material is arranged in what is often a completely misleading sense and, where it seems necessary, in-

terpolations are made of it" (SE, 15: 182). Accordingly, analogies can be found between Jensen's novel and the dream thought and between Freud's

reading and secondary revision. Hanold's dreams and Freud's interpretation of these dreams establish the conditions under which the process of

secondary revision takes place. The desire "to make something whole" determines the choice of critical method and structures the insights that it

brings forth. What Freud calls "business" affects even more profoundly that which is changed or eliminated in the process; its impact, in fact, can be measured best by what is referred to above as a "completely misleading sense." Therefore, the impression of coherence conveyed by "Delusions and Dreams" is nothing less than a demonstration of Freud's theory of

repression. The literary text is repressed in order to support a theory of

repression. Fortunately, this process is a productive one. It has nothing to do

with misrepresentation and everything to do with the power of influence. Freud himself indicates such a possibility when he discusses the way psychic systems relate to each other: "Strictly speaking, there is no need for the hypothesis that the psychical systems are actually arranged in a spatial order. It would be sufficient if a fixed order were established by the fact that in a given psychical process the excitation passes through the systems in a

particular temporal sequence" (SE, 5: 537). Like the psychic systems, the various layers of meaning that form around the text in the act of reading are not obliged to a spatial order, with the deepest one representing the locus of truth. The reading of texts calls for a similar distinction between




the categories of space and time if the futile search for the original is to be replaced by more dynamic models of interpretation. At first glance, the archaeological metaphor seems to resist such intentions, given its depen- dency on stratification and its infatuation with history. Once its contribution to the metadiscourse on interpretation is complemented by other spatial tropes, however, more fluid configurations become possible. Then, histo- ricity, which stands for a chronological interpretation of time, and tempo- rality, which defines the trajectory of reading, can be disassociated from each other and can contribute to the making of a discursive space that invites, rather than prevents, intertextuality. As the embodiment of chaos and miscegenation, Freud's Rome provides the ideal setting by means of which to reflect on these propositions. Through the city's spatial layout, buildings from different periods and of different styles become simultaneous in the present, and with every addition the older layout is salvaged for the present. This simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous also applies to the work of literature and the readings that follow it, like a shadow or a double. Not only is the critic called upon to develop new configurations between texts and discourses, but every critical intervention invariably redefines the conditions of reading. Seen in this light, Gradiva has never been lost but is only forever changing in the encounter with its interpretations. Precisely this ongoing process safeguards the relevance of Gradiva and "Delusions and Dreams" for the present conjunction.

In this essay, I have tried to describe the place of the archaeological metaphor within psychoanalysis. I have explored its close ties to the problem of femininity and the metadiscourse on interpretation that makes such associations both possible and necessary. I have also exposed a key archaeological text, Jensen's Gradiva, to a double reading that reflects this configuration with all its strengths and weaknesses. While the first reading has restored the discourses of archaeology and femininity to their central position in the novel, the second reading has taken Freud's "Delusions and Dreams" as a point of departure for assessing the novel's contribution to psychoanalysis from the perspective of a misreading. The dream-text thus conceived has shed new light on the various discursive movements that are contained in the archaeological metaphor. Consequently, the place of archaeology is perhaps described best through the notion of redemption. In this sense, we must also interpret the old saying Saxa loquuntur.



Documents

“Saxa loquuntur: Freud and Archaeology,” boundary 2 20.1 (1993): 146-73