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Some Reflections on Freud, Fantasy & the Jewish Condition

1. Freud had ideas, he was ceaselessly in pursuit of himself. Up and down the corridors of retrospection and memory did Freud stomp, beard flying to and fro, cigar ("sometimes it is merely a cigar") poised at the ready, a detective of motive, seeking the endless, unreeling self concealed behind this will and that to think of him, even at this great remove of time (he has been dead as long as I have been alive) is to be seized by respect for the man, to consider with awe yet again what he was able to do. Saddled with the arc of the century, given unhappy, grumbling, overheated Viennese with whom to deal, granted his own philology and constraint, Freud had to generalize from the most unpromising material yet there he is, towering over our century just yet and dead for a considerable part of it. How winning his smile, how dashing his tact, how moving his tears! His grief is our grief and abandoned by him, we must forage—as did Freud himself—for little nuggets of insights hidden behind the arras of identity. Oh, why did thou ask such questions, Freud, only to deny us and depart? These are the fundamental questions, our ontology recapitulates your philology, we are not to be put off by easy or even intricate excuses.

2. Chagall's flying cows, flying rabbis, arched and floating houses, scheming Jews, wounded cattle reminds us of the open and wounded places of ourselves, those places toward which Freud, Sherlock Holmes of the underground has stalked. Chagall's visions are mild, Freud's are pointed. Freud makes us assassins whereas Chagall knows that we merely want a meal, a minyan, a place to put our shoes, but they emerge from the same secret places where our desires and our dreams can be said to mingle. Like Dali, like Picasso, Chagall became very old and sinister in his age, in the possession of those cells which made him an icon but he never lurched into self-parody or repetition; Chagall was parody from the outset . . . representational of that which could barely be defined and a huge laugh for anyone in the shtetl who thought that God was watching or thought that God was not watching or took God as a wounded cow. Together and at rest now, Freud and Chagall conspire against us, the one with bleak and shrouded visions, the other with a merciless abstruseness that always, always fold back but in the morning it is Chagall's village, not Freud's caverns which claims us as we go off into the mild light, seeking a gentle and perceptive cow who will fill out the minyan of our desire.

3. Chagall's murals dominate the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center; when the house opened in 1965 they were controversial, a scandal to some, large, slashed with color, naive, somehow reductive the analysts said, of the really intricate and always secular phenomena which were taking place in the house. But Chagall knew better: Berg's Lulu was on that stage and indeed it was Barber's Antony and Cleopatra which opened the Metropolitan: what matter if the Barber failed and Lulu, in its truncated state, needed the composer's widow to die so that the bitter, adulterous yearnings of its unknown third act could be revealed? Chagall's concern was never with repertoire, his grieving or elated peasants, his Cossacks twirling on the red points of silky shoes, his commissars and duchesses rushing into the central hall knew better than any of their witnesses how deeply symptomatic they were, not cause but outcome, not representation but at the center.

4. Freud and Chagall chatting about the role of fantasy in the Jewish psyche and literature, two old Jews walking together around a pond, enjoying the sunset in these last, smudged vestiges of their life before they move into their separate and ever so perfectly fitting purgatoria. "Time is a river without banks," Chagall points out, "it overflows, it catches us by surprise, it catches us with our pants down to the ankles doing unspeakable or merely embarrassing things in the chamber and it says, 'caught you out, boy, ho there!' Time is that medium in which, all fish, we swim; the aquaria itself is the universe, or don't you think that this is the case Sigmund?" Freud shrugs; he is not elfin or fey in the way that he takes Chagall to be but he is not devoid of humor himself. Largely he is confused, the century has gotten away from him, his disciples have gotten away from him, here he gave all these principles and devotions and what have they done with it? The rubble of the century is evidence of their misdirection, he thinks. "I don't really know, Marc," he says, "it's hard to understand; guilt, guilt is the medium in which we swim, though, this is what we think. And then fantasy is the means by which we try to extract ourselves from our guilt, even if we are not Jews which as a matter of fact most of us are. Jews are the paradigm of the century." Freud is an earnest man, in his school days he was the kind who always answered the questions first, reflected later if at all, tried to keep up with his studies, tried to present a solemn and devoted mask to his instructors. Asked to devolve upon fantasy and the Jewish psyche he means to stick to the subject, even if Chagall cannot. "It wasn't easy," Freud says. He points up at the sky which looks remarkably like a Chagall landscape, smokestacks in the high distance. "Do you see what I mean?"

Chagall looks up with him, looks away, skips along in a rapid hobble which meets but does not mesh with Freud's pace. "You take all of this too seriously," he says. "Think of it as a joke, as a burlesque, a giant hand reaching within and tearing things away, leaving us with the necessities which are the quotient of our existence. Quotidia? Either way, that is the only fashion to consider this; we make pictures and dance." Chagall gives Freud an idle kick in the calf, not enough to hurt him, antic resolve, really, but it is enough to infuriate Freud who has always felt that dignity was at the center of his persona and that without that dignity he would be what he most feared as a quotidian result: a defenseless Jew in an overcoat, a bearded Jew with a cigar, a clown in a shiny suit constructing parables to explain away his useless and towering pain. Freud, thus enraged, turns on Chagall to swat him, to beat him, to show this gamboling artist that his persona cannot be dealt with so cheaply, so egregiously but as he reaches toward Chagall it is as if he sees him for the first time, sees the features unfold to grant him the quivering, open heart of Marc Chagall, an artist so close to the spiritual needs of the average Jew that he can only mock them and Freud backs away then, quite flabbergast, his hand trembling. "Jewish fantasy and psychoanalysis and tradition and the Judaic promise, they are all the same," he says. "There are no differences, no barriers. The only barriers are those we erect." So saying, Freud begins to giggle, it is a relieved giggle yet one with tones of hysteria within and around it and as, with some detachment the head of the Freudian school considers himself, he begins to realize the truly ominous indications of his condition. Chagall fans himself, waves to something in the sky, beams upon Freud. They seem to have reached some kind of impasse. Or perhaps it is a breakthrough.

5. We think of Freud—"we" not being Chagall now, Chagall has gone home, he has gone away, he has gone to that place where Bracque and Picasso and lecherous little Modigliani play at banco and consider their prospects in the eternal, never-ending high stakes posterity game—at an earlier stage, Freud in the throes of his practice at the turn of the century, exposed to the hysterical anguish of superheated and lonely females. This one says she has been f- by her father, another claims to have suffered an uncle's hand upon her genitals when she was eight, a third, a fourth, a fifth report half-remembered tangled memories of illicit connections of all sorts. Thinking of Freud, considering his agony and his angst as he hears these confessions, we must feel some sympathy for him; it is not easy to face the fact that so many of these women have been misused, misused in childhood by trusted male relatives, have had their genitals and their most private thoughts violated. If this is true, and Freud's initial impulse is to accept the revelations, then humanity is unspeakable; if his mild, troubled Viennese are capable of such horrid indiscretion and calumny, then what will be said of the masses when, some three or four decades in the future, they really become inflamed?

Concerned with this, concerned with his own fantasies which for all we know might be composed of lecherous desire for these women (one thing that Freud has come to admit of his own school of therapy is that it is an interesting way to meet otherwise inaccessible women on the most riotous and glaring of terms), concerned with the proprieties of his situation and the century, Freud comes to a decision. This cannot be. The women cannot be telling the truth; their hysteria and superheated mode is indeed the product of agitation but the agitation comes not from sexual misuse or violation but from the desire for it. They must, his new patients, have inveigled this pattern of behavior to define impulses which otherwise would have been unacceptable. Accordingly, Freud recants. He recants upon his earlier testimony, his earlier apprehensions, writes his friend Fleiss a letter, several letters, pointing out the revisions in his thinking. "It is fantasy," Freud writes, "it is an aspect of their neurosis, it is a disease, a sickness." He feels great security in saying this. After all, it is a neurotic century, a century of fantasy. In the years to come, the most unspeakable desires and inner needs will be played out with smokestacks upon the canvas of the century. Like Chagall, the technicians will make the cows fly, the rivers overflow, but they will do it with machinery, with the gleaming arc of technology, not with the gentler works of pastels or oils against wood.

"It is a century of fantasy," Freud says quietly, turning to look for our assent in the small room devoted to his ponderings and writing. He has come in these recent years to imagine the presence of auditors in the room who bear witness and will comment to those outside about his condition and he considers this a dream so benign, so devoid of actual menace or dysfunctional aspect that he permits himself this dialogue without embarrassment. How pleased he would be to know that what he imagines is actually true and that we have come, decades and decades later, toward the end of the century, to consider him in exactly this way! "To understand is to forgive," Freud murmurs, "this is the core of my philosophy," and who is to say that he is wrong? Understanding nothing, knowing nothing, we have been poised for disaster for years and years, the rubble of our potential is all around us: surely we can find it within ourselves to pity Freud. Surely it was not his fault that he determined the women were engaged in fantasy; he had the advantage of firsthand interviews, contact, affect, in a way which we never will. Considering him in this way, permitting ourselves for the first time to unstop the gush of affection from our Jewish souls for our Jewish forebear, which of us is so stiff-necked as not to relent, as not to say, "You were innocent; you confronted the darkness with the innocence you had and then sprung it upon the world!" Which of us cannot say this? Not that there are so very many of us in the room, of course, there are only a very few permitted such perilous connection.

6. "I would like to add a few words about fantasy, Judaism, Freud and the human condition," Alban Berg says. He is the small man, the adulterous (in mind if not deed) composer who set the Wedekind plays to music, then died in 1935 at the age of 50, just in time to bring the Second Viennese school to a definitive, premature end. "In my opinion, my humble opinion," Berg says, making a point (as do all arrogant men) of his humility, "the three of them must be regarded as the same, as a synchronicity. It is a Jewish century, a Freudian century, a fantasy century. Consider Lulu, all of these factors take part in her single-minded arc toward the sewer and at the end she is done in by Jack the Ripper. I don't even want to talk about Wozzeck but any soldier who can drown in a pool with a foot of water is an unhappy, a disconcerting symbol, wouldn't you think?" The final act of Lulu, supposedly, contains musical anagrams and duedocacophonic statements of Berg's lust for a younger woman; the widow Berg, no musician but possibly with a keener eye than ear, suppressed the last act throughout her lifetime. None of this, however, seems to have much bearing upon Berg's demeanor which is grim. "I will tell you about fantasy," he says, "fantasy is as terrible if it is explored as if unexplored; once it exists in sufficient color to be apprehended, it will change everything whether you acknowledge it or not!" Thinking of Freud's hysterical women as we must, struck by the force of Berg's argument, we can only nod. "I tell you, in the 20th century, just as in the historical Jewish condition, if something can happen, then it has already happened, will happen, over and over again, consider the third act of that wretched opera," Berg says and laughs and laughs and begins to dissolve in front of us. Curiously insubstantial, unlike the earthy and corporeal Freud, unlike the elfin and jolly Chagall, the sullen and distracted Berg begins to disassemble before our eyes leaving us soon enough, perhaps even sooner than that, with nothing to look upon but the manuscript score of Lulu and somewhere beyond that in the smoky, lowering haze, an image of Chagall's cows, now dancing with one another above orange rooftops which leak softer steam into the grey and desperate smoke which seems to close in upon us, if only momentarily.

7. So, standing outside the Metropolitan Opera House, using the central fountain as backdrop while tourists industriously take our picture (they attended to the rumors that all of us, Berg, Freud, Chagall, and the committee to honor them would be at the performance of Lulu tonight and would assemble at the plaza for a quick photo opportunity before dispersing to our separate parts of the opera house), we feel for the first time in this long and difficult odyssey through all the 48 agonizing years since Freud left us that we may have attained a little perspective. "Replacement, it is always a matter of replacement, that is right, isn't it?" we say. Freud lifts his cigar in a pleasant wave. "We can hope to replace the sinister with the less sinister, the benign with the cheerful, that is all, right?" "Exactly," Chagall says, leaping to a perch beside the fountain, putting his hand on his heart. "Exactly, precisely that is right." Berg shrugs; he was always a moody sort and the true sense of the assemblage has, once again, left him. Nonetheless he does not protest. "Time, time, a river without banks," Chagall says merrily and flipflops into the fountain, a porpoise he emerges from the fountain whiskers agleam, flippers poised at great flight and departs from us, moving at great height, increasing velocity toward the top of the Metropolitan Opera. Freud extends a hand; we reach forward to grasp it. Some kind of accommodation seems at the offing. Freud points to Chagall, twinkling above us in the sky. "We have converted human misery into ordinary unhappiness," he says. And so, in this millennial century, will all of you.

 

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Framed