past fantasies:
of narrative and history
As the history of Rome proves, there’s no history that can disentangle itself fully from myth.
Can a theory of narrative history disentangle itself finally from the insights got by psychoanalysis? The hypothesis that not everything that can be related of the past in a narrative actually happened—or that, if it did happen it is lost because of something more serious than interpretative failure—remains, like the possibility of an unknown future, practically intolerable.
Lost but not forgotten
The remembering of a past that has never been experienced is as old at least as Platonic anamnesis, where positing the Forms demanded a fundamental obliquity in the concept of memory. Anamnesis came as the involuted solution to the well-known dilemma: if the Forms cannot be and never have been experienced, being purely Ideal, how can it be known that there are Forms?—By the non-forgetting of them. They are not remembered—which implies a prior experience of them; rather, they are not forgotten. The theory of Forms is secured by the very fine thread of this quasi-distinction that is both preposterous and decisive.
What characterises some of the more recent work on and indirectly on narrative theory is a retention of the concept of anamnesis but nearly at the expense, perversely, of the transcendental gain—in Plato, the positing of Forms—for the sake of which anamnesis was introduced. The possibility of full remembering has suffered a privation and a renewed anamnesic, inadvertent or diminished recapitulation of the past is formulated, but in terms that are inhibited in assuming the authority which that formulation will have been offered at a transcendental level. A rendez-vous between a general Platonism and a general Lacanianism, this uneasy and self-doubting, but politically sensitive, position might be expressed in words arguing that
history is not a text, not a narrative, master or otherwise, but that, as an absent cause, it is inaccessible to us except in textual form, and that our approach to it and to the Real itself necessarily passes through its prior textualization, its narrativization in the political unconscious.
The narrative of history is an anamnesis which instead of remembering the Real, wins by a kind of loss the subdued interim between that Real and what might have been its representation. The Real is posited, but its transcendental quality is circumscribed by the impregnable block which textual forms build around it, making it 'inaccessible'; more than this, its reality is entirely speculative or fantasmatic since it already passes through the 'prior textualization' which disqualifies any authenticity it might have hoped for. This disqualification effectively impedes the Platonic power which the Real might have held, like a Form, in governing a system of mimetic representation. Extinguishing at source representations of the historical Real, there appears the warped ideological space of textual forms, these being the anamnesic pseudo-memories that are the only historiographical coinage in circulation. The quotation above is marked by a tone of deference, and with a theological resonance that might be heard more clearly by changing the subject of the sentence from 'history' to 'God'. One of the lines linking Jameson to Plato is the pathos in the implication that the human world is sheltered from the sublime, theistic thing, the Forms or the Real, which is too intense to be cognized.
Anamnesis is a negative capability or, in more Hegelian terms, a negative preservation, that retains, with a determined loss, what is necessarily effaced. But exactly how that loss is determined affects the concept of historical representation. It is tempting to play off the Platonic against the Lacanian concept as if there were an essential difference, but this is not the case. In the latter, there is what amounts to an a priori distortion of the Real such that it can never faithfully be represented, and it might seem that this sets it apart from the Platonic concept according to which mimetic representation functions by verisimilitude. But Platonic mimesis is not only a concept of regulated loss, where each copy is paler or more demotic than its predecessor, but a concept also where each copy therefore differs from its predecessor—and is thus an a posteriori (or genetic) version of the systemic (or structural) distortion present in Lacan. It is this difference or distortion, common to both, that confirms the principle of representation as variation, relation or retelling: there is no representation without variation. A saving loss is its essential form. Variety gives representation its chance for survival, and since variation can occur only through time, representation is forced to take on a temporal, ie narrative, aspect, an exigency which has the effect of historicizing the representation.
Its hastily acquired talent for gambling brings the anamnesic memory a narrative return on what it has risked forgetting, it being on the terms of this wager and on these terms only that the more complete loss threatening to replace it is stalled. This threat comes from repetition which unlike narrative variation rejects mnemic capability in favour of becoming self-identical. Repetition does not remember—memory becomes possible only on the condition of some experience of alterity—no, it merely reproduces itself, narrowing down selectively to a honed, subjective point. It "becomes what it is": Nietzsche's concept of the eternal return of the same exemplifies this model, a concept whose evolution synthesizes Nietzsche's own writing career from the still narrative Birth of Tragedy to the later works where aphorism styles the overtaking and abolishing of narrative delay. In this Nietzschean republic of one, the vexed issue of representation relents, for now it is not a loss of memory that is being determined, but its being more completely lost allowing for a different kind of determinism, more existential than epistemological, which cares only for the self as it is and as it will be; Platonic-psychoanalytic velleity ceding to ingathered subjective will—a transition arrested in Foucault's work, for example, where "will" accumulates but before becoming subjective is displaced and deployed across discrete institutions, and thus maintains (as a "will to know") its epistemological character. Nietzsche's concept suggests how foolish it would be to cleave to a notion of full remembering, a notion which would have to be based on that exact repetition which paradoxically puts memory out of action; and how compelling the possibility that anamnesis, memory strengthened by its own weakness, is the only memory there is.
But it is an anxious memory, precisely because it is given the power to determine its losses, that is, to represent. Coming into being on the back of an ideal reality, such as a Form or the Real, it has to presuppose a true, an ideally and factually true, past even though its very nature militates against it. Its nature is shadowy, undecided, made up of the strategic withdrawal of the ideal reality, wherein is suspended the division between fiction and fact. It posits the division it contradicts. Anamnesis simply does not know what is true and what is false, it can only vary the possibilities over time.
What is the rhythm of that variation and from what reserve is it dispensed?
The archive
In withdrawing, the ideal reality puts itself into reserve, saves itself, while tendering to anamnesis a contract stipulating that representations of it be produced. Not to draft this contract would result in absolute loss for the reality which stays ideal only to the extent that it does this—lets or makes itself be represented, enfranchising the quasi-ideal. The representations that follow are neither true nor false, necessarily, such ideal criteria having been suspended to allow representation to take place, but nor do they for all that do any damage to what they represent; on the contrary, they fall in with its larger plan, to which those criteria are sacrificed: by simultaneously archivizing itself and granting anamnesis a permit to research and represent it, the ideal reality ensures that it gets used but not at all used up, and this safeguards both the ideal reality, which can keep its ideality, and the anamnesis thereof. The ideal reality protects itself and anamnesis is protected from it. Varied through time, selecting rather than comprehending, the latter is a regulating of the shock, an absorbing by dividing, by staggering, of the impact it would suffer in the impossible event of the ideal reality being shown to it en bloc.
There is an archive effect. It is caused by the ideal reality, on whose side it appears, and anamnesis producing each other across an asymmetrically protective limit made possible by a logic averring that a minus times a minus, a double negative ("not forgotten" as opposed to "remembered"), does not quite make a plus. The archive can be specified in terms of work and in terms of time. Anamnesis strives to save again, but now in the mode of representation, that which because underway with saving itself (the ideal reality qua archive) cannot wholly be appropriated by the other (the role of anamnesis); it labours with a handicap as to what it can salvage, which determines it as (archive) work, and the archive as the imperious demand for that work—work in general, the instituted prohibition against the producer's transforming successfully into private property its object of production. Work is half-private, half-public, and the archive resisting full privatization means that it must remain public, opening out from a merely subjective into an historical dimension—"historical" not in the sense again of narratively variable over time, but in the sense of becoming available for consultation, a record or a document, something always capable of pertaining to a community larger than that of the archivist. Hence the archivist's jealousy, a frustrated acquisitiveness, identified by Proust as the root of historiography. The archive remains public by withholding itself. There is no purely private history. The self-withholding, or self-retention, of the archive creates in turn the temporal illusion that it is irretrievable in its ideal plenitude because no longer fully present, where in fact it never had been, for it was lost not to time but only to anamnesis, in which it forms the lack, the cavernous matrix, from which anamnesis in a reflexive parthenogenesis springs. This is why it is necessary to speak of an archive "effect", which is nothing other than the generative gap within anamnesis which anamnesis continually tries to posit outside itself in order then to interiorize and control, but this time on its own terms.
Not before the moment of its anamnesic redaction into narratives does the archive generate, so that narratives are left bereft both of the archival past which it is their essence and function to posit and, equally, of the aetiologies scanning that past which they must set to inventing. What falls before this "moment", then, is not an aetiological or temporal space, but a strictly unconscious—more unconscious than unconsciousness—preparation for the moment which by definition—it does not lie on any axis—cannot be anticipated: chance.
When in Rome
Giving an example of how the necessarily true is to be conceived, Aristotle, in Chapter 9 of the De Interpretatione, argues that while it is necessary for events either to happen or not to happen, the form of the event that actually comes about remains, until then, open to chance. Once it has come about, however, it can be understood to have been necessary, if only because this is the point where chance leaves off and something actual takes over. The falling away of chance suggests that it has been conflated with possibility or the mere potential for things to happen, a concept which bears well Aristotle's commitment to transience in the phenomenal world. But when separated again from possibility, chance more disrupts than serves Aristotle's axiology: having no elsewhere or elsewhen to retire to, starved of temporal and spatial oxygen, it accompanies or informs the moment it "prepares", usurping its eventhood and wrecking its phenomenological appointment. Narratives can be thought of as a continual reappointing of the phenomenology of events out of such rubble—a schema that is Hegelian in its dialectical tension, but deeply foreign to the Hegel who, like Aristotle but working from a different agenda, charges himself with reducing chance to the potential which has become the retrospectively necessary.
Despite this imbalance, it is Hegel's philosophy of history, particularly as it touches Rome, that captures best the relation of anamnesis to what commands it. It is a long tradition, from Virgil and before, that fixes upon Rome as an excellent—the more so for being national and public, not just intrasubjective—object of past fantasy; indeed the very notion of the public, and of course the republic, is at stake in it. In Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece, for example, the retelling of an already much-told story, the cause of Lucrece's downfall is that her husband, Collatine, boasting of her chastity, acts the 'publisher/ Of that rich jewel' which she is:
Beauty itself doth of itself persuade
The eyes of men without an orator;
What needeth then apology be made
To set forth that which is so singular?
Or why is Collatine the publisher
Of that rich jewel he should keep unknown
From thievish ears because it is his own?
The 'thievish ears' belong to the king's son, Sextus Tarquinius, who
being inflamed with Lucrece' beauty […] treacherously stealeth into her chamber, violently ravish'd her, and early in the morning speedeth away.
—a quotation from the Argument which precedes the poem with a further corner of narration. It concludes:
Lucrece, in this lamentable plight, hastily dispatcheth messengers, one to Rome for her father, another to the camp for Collatine. They came, the one accompanied with Junius Brutus, the other with Publius Valerius; and finding Lucrece attired in mourning habit, demanded the cause of her sorrow. She, first taking an oath of them for her revenge, revealed the actor, and whole manner of his dealing, and withal suddenly stabbed herself. Which done, with one consent they all vowed to root out the whole hated family of the Tarquins; and bearing the dead body to Rome, Brutus acquainted the people with the doer and the manner of the vile deed; with a bitter invective against the tyranny of the King, wherewith the people were so moved, that with one consent and a general acclamation the Tarquins were all exiled, and the state government changed from kings to consuls.
The rape of Lucrece marks the legendary inauguration of the Roman Republic, characterized in Shakespeare's text by Sextus' diverting toward his private pleasure, and on the arrogant licence of monarchy, what is twice public: Lucrece's beauty. For not only does Collatine "publish" that beauty, but it will have already published itself, persuading as it does 'The eyes of men without an orator'. It is this double publicity that draws forth the flaw in the principle of monarchy, the abuse of property, the 'thievish' channelling of public forms for private use, so precipitating the nouveau régime whose task it will be to nip in the bud aspiring monopolies—ambitions destined to be re-embodied, however, according to a very Roman typological neurosis, in Julius Caesar. As the worst transgression of marital alliance, the rape at the same time represents a violation in equal measure of republican principles, for marriage combines connubial congress with the preservation of the wife's chastity, she remaining intact and unappropriated even as she is "used"; conversely, Sextus' lust converges on Lucrece to expedite the suppression of such ambiguous generality—the very thing which provokes it. The new Republic's making over to public responsibility the mature regulation of property requires as its backbone the kind of law which Hegel argues to be typical of Roman history in the phase following "the Greek world" and prefiguring the German: in Greece, life was spontaneous and ideal, but not yet real, hence an Arnoldian sweetness and light; in Rome, that reality has been posited but not yet incorporated by the people, hence for them a yoke beneath an exteriority which is the law; in Germany, the incorporation is complete, so idealizing the reality while keeping it actual, hence a thrilling sense of repletion and destiny. Although it is the genius of the Romans to have law in this form, the law's externality to them lets it in for being wilfully distanced, and neutralized, allowing for the neglect of it which Hegel calls individualism and 'personality', the fraying of the social band. In other words, the inequality and aristocratic pretention which the Republic was formed to deter lodge in its very premiss (as in Plato, where rankings in the representationalist republic affect social classes and artefacts alike). An anamnesic tension streaks the Roman law making it half-forgettable, negotiable, helping those who help themselves. The changeover 'from kings to consuls' has failed to rub out this spot of recalcitrant opportunism.
But by the time of Marcus Aurelius, say, one of the early emperors, the law seems to have been interiorized on a model that has been noted for its similarity to that of Kant; a model too that is characteristic of Marcus' Stoicism, in part a late resistance to the doctrine of chance advanced by the rival school of Epicureans. For Kant, the law comes down to moral law because allied perfectly with the universal rational faculties needed by all to make sense of experience; each has the power of consensual judgment which is moral rightness—thus obviating, arguably, the need for law at all. By contrast, Marcus' tone in The Meditations of moody disinheritance suggests a troubling interval between personal experience and consensual judgment, the space of Stoical faith, the continual crossing of certainty with uncertainty. Marcus intuits but appears dispossessed of the kind of Kantian transcendental apparatus which might shunt his existential isolation away from tendentious dogmatizing about duty towards communal affirmation (Marcus' status as an orphan coinciding with the general orphanhood at work in this logic of dispossession). Not only does this indicate the persistence of an anamnesic injunction: duty is the miserable breaking off and exhibiting of a hard fragment of the putative ideal law, Marcus' self-regulation being no more finally grounded than the Tarquins' lack of it; it also brings Stoicism to the narrowest point between it and Epicureanism, where a difference of response to chance and its vicissitudes is all there is to distinguish them: whereas the Stoical strives for a moderate recuperation of order from a random world, the Epicurean eschews that option as getting too little too late. Both are preoccupied with the stability which although precluded by the volatility of chance is paradoxically and abundantly provided after the event by the histories ceaselessly written and revised. Hegel's history adjusts Marcus' model so that rather than the law having always to be recalled, remembered, invoked—forming a pocket between the inside and the outside of the mind—it recalls itself and so lumbers forward of its own accord, breaking open the historical path and gathering up the minds of men in its momentum; it is obliged to do this gathering without which it would balloon off into non-historical abstraction, and so puts back into play yet again the anamnesic filament both joining and dividing phenomenal and ideal.
The fecundity of this filament—angular, inadvertent, oblique, refracted—gets staged in the founding of Rome itself as a site between other sites that is tangential and fertile, fertile because tangential, grafted and on a bias rather than descended straight in a top-down fashion. Hegel remarks that
Rome arose outside recognized countries, viz., in an angle where three different districts met—those of the Latins, Sabines and Etruscans; it was not formed from some ancient stem, connected by natural patriarchal bonds, whose origin might be traced to remote times […]; but Rome was from the very beginning of artificial and violent, not spontaneous growth.
Just as Virgil had insisted on the transplanted nature of Rome from Trojan culture via Aeneas, so Hegel asserts the strained erring of destinies. It is as though the Roman métier were to be forever correcting that veering, righting the Epicurean clinamen or swerve, and by means of the sort of typological and prophetic recognitions that might match, for example, Dido's destitution with that of Lucrece—in both of whose cases the heterosexual world is traded up by the men for the homosocial one of legislative authority, while the women become used (as Cleopatra was to have been used) as trophies to commemorate that transfer. And when in his Discours de Rome Lacan chooses to cite Aulus Gellius on the origins of the 'Universal City', is it by chance that he selects from precisely that chapter where Gellius adduces an alternative to the genealogy which describes Rome as bound in to the prophetic? Lacan, having been in Rome to give a paper on speech to the psychoanalytic community in semi-exile there, speaks of the chance of a 'connivance':
As far as I was concerned, I felt considerably emboldened, however unequal I proved to be to the task of speaking about speech, by a certain connivance inscribed in the place itself.
Indeed, I recalled that well before the glory of the world's most elevated throne had been established, Aulus Gellius, in his Noctes Atticae gave to the place called Mons Vaticanus the etymology vagire, which designates the first stammerings of speech.
Gellius was in fact giving the version of Varro, through the prism of whose narrative he writes. His chapter 'Of the origin of the term ager Vaticanus' comes on the heels of a discussion of '"natural and unnatural births"':
We had been told that the ager Vaticanus, or "Vatican region," and the presiding deity of the same place, took their names from the vaticinia, or "prophecies," which were wont to be made in that region through the power and inspiration of the god. But in addition to that reason Marcus Varro, in his Antiquities of the Gods, states that there is another explanation of the name: "For," says he, "just as Aius was called a god and the altar was erected in his honour which stands at the bottom of the Nova Via, because in that place a voice from heaven was heard, so that god was called Vaticanus who controls the beginnings of human speech, since children, as soon as they are born, first utter the sound which forms the first syllable of Vaticanus; hence the word vagire ("cry"), which represents the sound of a new-born infant's voice."
This is just the kind of lucky find from the archive that Lacan can turn with only a little pressing to his advantage, and in the Discours de Rome he does not forebear to do so. Now, the "vag" root possibly comes to denote stammering and crying from its sense of spasm, constriction of the throat, the membraneous twitching or vaginal seizure the irregularity of which cultivates the further sense of the erratic, the vague and the capricious vagaries whose vagabond incorrigability can't be accounted for by prediction and which is both arrested and agitated anew by the rectitude which would splint it. To this extent the etymologies of Vaticanus contain the symbiotic antagonism between prophecy (the vatic) and chance (the vagrant); but even to a less far-fetched extent, what Varro is pointing to is the control of the god which solicits the newborn to observe him by burbling the first syllable of his name—a hugely spurious surmise prompted nevertheless by the necessity of positing the transcendental (a god) at the origin of the city and its children, a libational means of calling down to earth askance what cannot be looked at full in the face.
The newborn somehow know how to acknowledge what, since they are indeed newly born, they cannot as yet have experienced. They neither remember nor anticipate; or they do both; but either way phenomenal experience is kept for the duration of the libational moment on hold, and it is not certain that this moment ever bursts to become the wholly phenomenal reality. Similarly, when Freud visits Rome, after much dallying and in the late summer after finishing The Interpretation of Dreams, he does so guarding the memory of his anticipations; his experience is a remembering when in Rome of what his expectations of it had been, which issues in the feeling recorded in postcards sent to Martha, the wife he has left behind:
So this is what I had been afraid of for years!
It mixes eupeptic self-mocking with the nervously triumphant disappointment of the craven, Freud playing between a servility and a mastering irony over it, like an analysand whose bête noire turns out to be a pet. Above all Freud is affirming that there is an aetiology to his feeling about Rome, a fantasy endowed unassailably with a past and well lined enough as a result to cushion against the misfortune of surprise. But the cushioning of this appanage is defective, for Freud undergoes a second-order surprise—at not being surprised or afraid at all.
Cupid and Psyche
'Two hours later, Dorothea was seated in an inner room or boudoir of a handsome apartment in the Via Sistina.' Dorothea Brooke, the heroine of George Eliot's Middlemarch is honeymooning with her academic groom, Casaubon. He has gone to the Vatican archive, while Dorothea is left to her dolours. 'I am sorry to add that she was sobbing bitterly': her inarticulate sobbing is what might be expected in the region of the Vatican; '[…] And Mr. Casaubon was certain to remain away for some time […]'. Dorothea tries vaguely to recall what her expectations of the marriage now so unaccountably diminishing her had been:
Yet Dorothea had no distinctly shapen grievance that she could state even to herself; and in the midst of her confused thought and passion, the mental act that was struggling forth into clearness was a self-accusing cry that her feeling of desolation was the fault of her own spiritual poverty. She had married the man of her choice, and with the advantage over most girls that she had contemplated her marriage chiefly as the beginning of new duties: from the very first she had thought of Mr. Casaubon as having a mind so much above her own, that he must often be claimed by studies which she could not entirely share; moreover, after the brief narrow experience of her girlhood she was beholding Rome, the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in a funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.
George Eliot is as it were telling over the beads of an aetiology with her heroine, showing matronisingly her own ability to narrate Dorothea's comparative inability to do likewise, Dorothea at a loss to state 'even to herself' her malaise. The inability owes to Dorothea's failure of 'association'—she can't hook up the links which would bring her marital predicament into the clarity of psychological causation—itself as much the cause as the symptom and exacerbation of that predicament. It extends to her inability quite to make the connections of interpretation which would render intelligible the city of Rome. And, tied in with this quasi-associational logic, Rome is associated—dimly, not by a crisp allegory—with her husband.
The next but one paragraph begins:
To those who have looked at Rome with the quickening power of a knowledge which breathes a growing soul into all historic shapes, and traces out the suppressed transitions which unite all contrasts, Rome may still be the spiritual centre of the world.
Out of all this sentence's allusive richness, most relevant will be the 'historic shapes' of the soul, the trajectory of its flight and forms, referring back, intricately, to the creation myth in Genesis and the inspiration of God which 'breathes a growing soul' into the first man from whom his wife, the first woman, derives. Eliot meanwhile is pitching uneven weights on scales of knowledge and narrative facility: on the one hand, there are those who have looked at Rome, etc., the cognoscenti; on the other hand, the greener understanding, Dorothea's:
But let them conceive one more historical contrast: the gigantic broken revelations of that Imperial and Papal city thrust abruptly on the notions of a girl who had been brought up in English and Swiss Puritanism, fed on meagre Protestant histories and on art chiefly of the hand-screen sort; a girl whose ardent nature turned all her small allowance of knowledge into principles, fusing her actions into their mould, and whose quick emotions gave the most abstract things the quality of a pleasure or a pain; a girl who had lately become a wife, and from the enthusiastic acceptance of untried duty found herself plunged in tumultuous preoccupation with her personal lot.
Tumultuous too the metaphorical interconnectedness of this writing, from which only this: Dorothea has not the apt degree of sheltering to take on knowledge. Not only is she armed modestly but uselessly with nothing more doughty than hand-screens, but the Puritanism which is her meagre inheritance foregoes the levels of intercession, deference and knowing sheltering which are the accoutrements of the Imperial and the Papal, and which make up the prerequisites for a process of graduated association and interpretation from which prima facie she is debarred. Her defencelessness exposed, the hymeneal register intensifies:
The weight of unintelligible Rome might lie easily on bright nymphs to whom it formed a background for the brilliant picnic of Anglo-foreign society; but Dorothea had no such defence against deep impressions. Ruins and basilicas, palaces and colossi, set in the midst of the sordid present, where all that was living and warm-blooded seemed sunk in the deep degeneracy of a superstition divorced from reverence; the dimmer but yet eager Titanic life gazing and struggling on the walls and ceilings; the long vistas of white forms whose marble eyes seemed to hold the monotonous light of an alien world: all this vast wreck of ambitious ideals, sensuous and spiritual, mixed confusedly with the signs of breathing forgetfulness and degradation, at first jarred her as with an electric shock, and then urged themselves on her with that ache belonging to a glut of confused ideas which check the flow of emotion.
'The weight of unintelligible Rome', then, is half associated with Casaubon, as Dorothea half works through the sexual "association" with him that is so obscure, so disappointing and so bruising to a girl whose 'narrow experience' is a far cry from that of a well 'tried' 'bright nymph' and who is so breath-catchingly 'jarred' by the husband's first touch—'as with an electric shock'. Just as the sexual association is disjoint, so the faculty for representing experience by association and interpretation falters, leaving a plethora of 'impressions' of nearly delusional proportions unready to solve or salve into narrative knowing.
However: this being "Rome", that knowing finds more subliminal ducts wherein to find itself. Where Lacanian stammering articulates with the Real; and where the cry of the newborn articulates with the god; there, in Rome, by Dorothea's sobbing, arhythmically, that knowing is choked through into her memory, where its forms reside—
Forms both pale and glowing took possession of her young sense, and fixed themselves in her memory even when she was not thinking of them, preparing strange associations which remained through her after-years.
Both associated with and by that token at a remove from her husband, Dorothea will have espoused the archival Roman past of the ruins, the colossi and of the Vatican in a narrative alliance which only chance can break or renew.
'Breathing forgetfulness': anamnesis lives on. Although Dorothea is inscribed in a narrative density which she can't write out for herself, that inscription is taken up into Eliot's narrative, pleated, then backstitched—on the screen's reverse, as it were—into Dorothea's memory as 'forms both pale and glowing' taking possession of her 'young sense'. Dorothea, as it turns out, has just enough defence—the fragile span of a hymen—to be "possessed" of these demons: for defence attracts, and then contracts the knowledge which even as it is received anchors offshore of a harbouring into full consciousness. Nor is that narratorial pleat possessed in full by George Eliot who, in so far as she too is crafting a representation, will have been enjoined to give something of it back before proceeding to breathe it into the historic shape of a narrative. Rather, such a pleat might be a "function" of the writing—and if "function" calls for scare-quotes, it is because function does not function on behalf of a psychic investment by this or that entity, a "real" author or a "fictional" character, not even necessarily on behalf of a transcendental item (despite its trawling for transcendental treatment), nor, finally, on behalf of a "writing" taken to have an exterior across which it might delegate, but as a kind of entelechism without finality. A great deal of contemporary narrative theory remains naïvely constrained in working with a concept of function tethered by habit to a psychic economy, whereas an anamnesic writing severed in part from an intentional function is what that theory should turn to, perhaps, as the more prodigious form of narrative representation. If narrative does carry this entelechistic virus, the latter fails to register on narrative's own centres of apprehension, eg, its author or a character within it, which by definition cannot screen a virus lacking apprehensible coordinates. What narrative does screen is a representation of the transcendental or ideal reality produced by it as what I have called the archive effect. And what is essential to this is that unlike the volatile invisibility and delinquent proliferation of entelechism, it is an effect of unity and indivisibility, of an ultimate simplicity and archival comprehensiveness of the past.
A second hypothesis runs as follows. Psychoanalysis sustains a certain Platonism by virtue of assuming anamnesis as both a concept of memory and its way of remembering Plato, but also by shielding an intimacy between anamnesis and a theory of sexual difference. When Aristophanes in the Symposium, for example, anamnesically recalls an immemorial and archaic age before gender splitting, he activates the notion that memory is fundamentally mythopoetic, its principle a tendency to rewind to a single and ideal point of origin; and what menaces this singularity is difference—the difference of "real" history in its continually subsequent variety, whose arch determination can be inferred to be that of sexual difference. There is, in other words, an euhemerism built into the very condition of memory. As memory is turned into histories these cannot but narrate, as psychoanalysis too requires, an aetiology profoundly motivated to lead anxieties over sexual difference back to a mytho-genetic point of origin.
Yet narratives are also a means of containing anxiety over chance—by loading chance with the ratio, the retrospective necessity, that accommodates it to the proportioning undertaken by narrative reconstructions. A random narrative in psychoanalysis does not exist; "free association" signifies association that is latently necessary.
So could it be that sexual difference and chance are more than just accidentally united as objects of anxiety for the narratives which give them rhythm and form? Do they come down to the same thing, in fact? Still sobbing four pages later, Dorothea is replaying conversations with Casaubon:
When he said, 'Does this interest you, Dorothea? Shall we stay a little longer? I am ready to stay if you wish it,'—it seemed to her as if going or staying were alike dreary. Or, 'Should you like to go to the Farnesina, Dorothea? It contains celebrated frescoes designed or painted by Raphael, which most persons think it worth while to visit.'
'But do you care about them?' was always Dorothea's question.
'They are, I believe, highly esteemed. Some of them represent the fable of Cupid and Psyche, which is probably the romantic invention of a literary period, and cannot, I think, be reckoned as a genuine mythical product […]'
How else other than by an invention-myth could such an hypothesis be corroborated? It is in Cupid that the elements of sexual difference and chance converge: he brings the sexes together into the erotic experience of their difference, but being blind does so at random, for his is a chancey power of volatility. Dorothea's marriage is a grotesque parody of Cupidean matching, Cupid's buoyant blindness begun to fester, 'spreading itself everywhere like a disease of the retina' (p.226), but as a deranging of sexual difference it is also what makes for greater narrative mastery on George Eliot's part. The denaturing of Cupid—again, as in psychoanalysis, and as in The Rape of Lucrece and the story of Dido and Aeneas—assists in narrative thriving.
As for Psyche, she is the soul breathed into historic shapes, thriving in despite of Cupid, instituting chance as narrative, varying into different forms and moving her wings in the anamnesic difference between the sexes. It is a difference that affects her too: she is imbricated in it in her difference from Cupid, in an alliance characterized by her being prohibited from knowing fully who he is.
How easily the blown banners change to wings…
Things dark on the horizon of perception,
Become accompaniments of fortune, but
Of the fortune of the spirit, beyond the eye
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