Delusion and Dream : an Interpretation in the Light of Psychoanalysis of Gradiva

Our interest for the way in which story-tellers make use of dreams is not, however, made less intense by this disillusionment. Even if the investigation should teach nothing of the nature of dreams, it may perhaps afford us, from this angle, a little insight into the nature of creative literary production. Actual dreams are considered to be unrestrained and irregular formations, and now come the free copies of such dreams; but there is much less freedom and arbitrariness in psychic life than we are inclined to believe, perhaps none at all. What we, laity, call chance resolves itself, to an acknowledged degree, into laws; also, what we call arbitrariness in psychic life rests on laws only now dimly surmised. Let us see!

There are two possible methods for this investigation; one is engrossment with a special case, with the dream-creations of one writer in one of his works; the other consists in bringing together and comparing all the examples of the use of dreams which are found in the works of different story-tellers. The second way seems to be by far the more effective, perhaps the only justifiable one, for it frees us immediately from the dangers connected with the conception of “the writer” as an artistic unity. This unity falls to pieces in investigations of widely different writers, among whom we are wont to honour some, individually, as the most profound connoisseurs of psychic life. Yet these pages will be filled by an investigation of the former kind. It so happened, in the group of men who started the idea, that some one remembered that the bit of fiction which he had most recently enjoyed contained several dreams which looked at him with familiar expression and invited him to try on them the method of Traumdeutung. He admitted that the material and setting of the little tale had been partly responsible for the origin of his pleasure, for the story was unfolded in Pompeii, and concerned a young archæologist who had given up interest in life, for that in the remains of the classic past, and now, by a remarkable but absolutely correct détour, was brought back to life. During the perusal of this really poetic material, the reader experienced all sorts of feelings of familiarity and concurrence. The tale was Wilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva, a little romance designated by its author himself “A Pompeian Fancy.”

In order that my further references may be to familiar material, I must now ask my readers to lay aside this pamphlet, and replace it for some time with Gradiva, which first appeared in the book world in 1903. To those who have already read Gradiva, I will recall the content of the story in a short epitome, and hope that their memory will of itself restore all the charm of which the story is thereby stripped.

A young archæologist, Norbert Hanold, has discovered at Rome, in a collection of antiques, a bas-relief which attracts him so exceptionally that he is delighted to be able to get an excellent plaster-cast of it which he can hang up in his study in a German university-city and study with interest. The relief represents a mature young girl walking. She has gathered up her voluminous gown slightly, so that her sandalled feet become visible. One foot rests wholly on the ground; the other is raised to follow and touches the ground only with the tips of the toes while sole and heel rise almost perpendicularly. The unusual and especially charming walk represented had probably aroused the artist’s attention, and now, after so many centuries, captivates the eye of our archæological observer.

This interest of the hero in the described bas-relief is the basic psychological fact of our story. It is not immediately explicable. “Doctor Norbert Hanold, docent of archæology, really found in the relief nothing noteworthy for his science.” (Gradiva, p. 14.) “He could not explain what quality in it had aroused his attention; he knew only that he had been attracted by something and this effect of the first view had remained unchanged since then,” but his imagination does not cease to be occupied with the relief. He finds in it a “sense of present time,” as if the artist had fixed the picture on the street “from life.” He confers upon the girl represented walking a name, Gradiva, “the girl splendid in walking,” spins a yarn that she is the daughter of a distinguished family, perhaps of a “patrician ædile, whose office was connected with the worship of Ceres,” and is on the way to the temple of the goddess. Then it is repulsive to him to place her in the mob of a metropolis; rather he convinces himself that she is to be transported to Pompeii, and is walking there somewhere on the peculiar stepping-stones which have been excavated; these made a dry crossing possible in rainy weather, and yet also afforded passage for chariot-wheels. The cut of her features seems to him Greek, her Hellenic ancestry unquestionable. All of his science of antiquity gradually puts itself at the service of this or other fancies connected with the relief.

Then, however, there obtrudes itself upon him a would-be scientific problem which demands solution. Now it is a matter of his passing a critical judgment “whether the artist had reproduced Gradiva’s manner of walking from life.” He cannot produce it in himself; in the search for the “real existence” of this gait, he arrives only at “observation from life for the purpose of enlightenment on the matter” (G. p. 18). This forces him, to be sure, to a mode of action utterly foreign to him. “Women had formerly been for him only a conception in marble or bronze, and he had never given his feminine contemporaries the least consideration.” Society life has always seemed to him an unavoidable torture; young ladies whom he meets, in such connections, he fails to see and hear, to such a degree that, on the next encounter, he passes without greeting, which, of course, serves to place him in an unfavourable light with them. Now, however, the scientific task which he has imposed upon himself forces him in dry weather, but especially in wet weather, to observe diligently the feet of ladies and girls on the street, an activity which yields him many a displeased and many an encouraging glance from those observed. “Yet one was as incomprehensible to him as the other.” (G. p. 19.) As a result of these careful studies, he finds that Gradiva’s gait cannot be proved to exist really, a fact which fills him with regret and annoyance.

Soon afterwards he has a terribly frightful dream, which transports him to old Pompeii on the day of the eruption of Vesuvius, and makes him an eye-witness of the destruction of the city. “As he stood thus at the edge of the Forum near the Jupiter temple, he suddenly saw Gradiva a short distance in front of him. Until then no thought of her presence there had moved him, but now suddenly it seemed natural to him, as she was, of course, a Pompeiian girl, that she was living in her native city and, without his having any suspicion of it, was his contemporary.” (G. p. 20.) Fear about her impending fate draws from him a cry of warning, in answer to which the unperturbed apparition turns her face toward him. Unconcerned, she continues her way to the portico of the temple, sits down there on a step and slowly rests her head upon it, while her face keeps growing paler, as if it were turning to white marble. As he hastens after her, he finds her, with calm countenance, stretched out, as if sleeping, on the broad step; soon the rain of ashes buries her form.

When he awakes, he thinks he is still hearing the confused cries of the Pompeiians, who are seeking safety, and the dully resounding boom of the turbulent sea; but even after his returning senses have recognized these noises as the waking expressions of life in the noisy metropolis, he retains for some time the belief in the reality of what he has dreamed; when he has finally rid himself of the idea that he was really present, nearly two thousand years ago, at the destruction of Pompeii, there yet remains to him, as a firm conviction, the idea that Gradiva lived in Pompeii and was buried there in the year 79. His fancies about Gradiva, due to the after-effects of this dream, continue so that he now, for the first time, begins to mourn her as lost.

While he leans from his window, prepossessed with these ideas, a canary, warbling his song in a cage at an open window of the house opposite, attracts his attention. Suddenly something like a thrill passes through the man not yet completely awakened from his dream. He believes that he sees, in the street, a figure like that of his Gradiva, and even recognizes the gait characteristic of her; without deliberation he hastens to the street to overtake her, and the laughter and jeers of the people, at his unconventional morning attire, first drive him quickly back home. In his room, it is again the singing canary in the cage who occupies him and stimulates him to a comparison with himself. He, too, is sitting in a cage, he finds, yet it is easier for him to leave his cage. As if from added after-effect of the dream, perhaps also under the influence of the mild spring air, he decides to take a spring trip to Italy, for which a scientific motive is soon found, even if “the impulse for travel had originated in a nameless feeling” (G. p. 28).

We will stop a moment at this most loosely motivated journey and take a closer look at the personality, as well as the activities of our hero. He seems to us still incomprehensible and foolish; we have no idea of how his special folly is to acquire enough human appeal to compel our interest. It is the privilege of the author of Gradiva to leave us in such a quandary; with his beauty of diction and his judicious selection of incident, he presently rewards our confidence and the undeserved sympathy which we still grant to his hero. Of the latter we learn that he is already destined by family tradition to be an antiquarian, has later, in isolation and independence, submerged himself completely in his science, and has withdrawn entirely from life and its pleasures. Marble and bronze are, for his feelings, the only things really alive and expressing the purpose and value of human life. Yet, perhaps with kind intent, Nature has put into his blood a thoroughly unscientific sort of corrective, a most lively imagination, which can impress itself not only on his dreams, but also on his waking life. By such separation of imagination and intellectual capacity, he is destined to be a poet or a neurotic, and he belongs to that race of beings whose realm is not of this world. So it happens that his interest is fixed upon a bas-relief which represents a girl walking in an unusual manner, that he spins a web of fancies about it, invents a name and an ancestry for it, and transports the person created by him into Pompeii, which was buried more than eighteen hundred years ago. Finally, after a remarkable anxiety-dream he intensifies the fancy of the existence and destruction of the girl named Gradiva into a delusion which comes to influence his acts. These performances of imagination would appear to us strange and inscrutable, if we should encounter them in a really living person. As our hero, Norbert Hanold, is a creature of an author, we should like to ask the latter timidly if his fancy has been determined by any power other than his own arbitrariness.

We left our hero just as he is apparently being moved by the song of a canary to take a trip to Italy, the motive for which is apparently not clear to him. We learn, further, that neither destination nor purpose are firmly established in his mind. An inner restlessness and dissatisfaction drive him from Rome to Naples and farther on from there; he encounters the swarm of honeymoon travellers, and, forced to notice the tender “Augustuses” and “Gretchens,” is utterly unable to understand the acts and impulses of the couples. He arrives at the conclusion that, of all the follies of humanity, “marriage, at any rate, took the prize as the greatest and most incomprehensible one, and the senseless wedding trips to Italy somehow capped the climax of this buffoonery.” (G. p. 30.) At Rome, disturbed in his sleep by the proximity of a loving couple, he flees, forthwith, to Naples, only to find there another “Augustus” and “Gretchen.” As he believes that he understands from their conversation that the majority of those bird-couples does not intend to nest in the rubbish of Pompeii, but to take flight to Capri, he decides to do what they do not do, and finds himself in Pompeii, “contrary to expectations and intentions,” a few days after the beginning of his journey – without, however, finding there the peace which he seeks.

The rôle which, until then, has been played by the honeymoon couples, who made him uneasy and vexed his senses, is now assumed by house-flies, in which he is inclined to see the incarnation of absolute evil and worthlessness. The two tormentors blend into one; many fly-couples remind him of honeymoon travellers, address each other probably, in their language, also as “My only Augustus” and “My sweet Gretchen.”

Finally he cannot help admitting “that his dissatisfaction was certainly caused not by his surroundings alone, but to a degree found its origin in him.” (G. p. 40.) He feels that he is out of sorts because he lacks something without being able to explain what.

The next morning he goes through the “ingresso” to Pompeii and, after taking leave of the guide, roams aimlessly through the city, notably, however, without remembering that he has been present in a dream some time before at the destruction of Pompeii. Therefore in the “hot, holy” hour of noon, which the ancients, you know, considered the ghost-hour, when the other visitors have taken flight and the heap of ruins, desolate and steeped in sunlight, lies before him, there stirs in him the ability to transport himself back into the buried life, but not with the aid of science. “What it taught was a lifeless, archæological view and what came from its mouth was a dead, philological language. These helped in no way to a comprehension with soul, mind and heart, as the saying is, but he, who possessed a desire for that, had to stand alone here, the only living person in the hot noonday silence, among the remains of the past, in order not to see with physical eyes nor hear with corporeal ears. Then – the dead awoke, and Pompeii began to live again.” (G. p. 48.) While thus, by means of his imagination, he endows the past with life, he suddenly sees, indubitably, the Gradiva of his bas-relief step out of a house and buoyantly cross the lava stepping-stones, just as he had seen her in the dream that night when she had lain down to sleep on the steps of the Apollo temple. “With this memory he became conscious, for the first time, of something else; he had, without himself knowing the motive in his heart, come to Italy on that account, and had, without stop, continued from Rome and Naples to Pompeii to see if he could here find trace of her – and that in a literal sense – for, with her unusual gait, she must have left behind in the ashes a foot-print different from all the others.” (G. p. 50.)

The suspense, in which the author of Gradiva has kept us up to this point, mounts here, for a moment, to painful confusion. Not only because our hero has apparently lost his equilibrium, but also because, confronted with the appearance of Gradiva, who was formerly a plaster-cast and then a creation of imagination, we are lost. Is it a hallucination of our deluded hero, a “real” ghost, or a corporeal person? Not that we need to believe in ghosts to draw up this list. Jensen, who named his tale a “Fancy,” has, of course, found no occasion, as yet, to explain to us whether he wishes to leave us in our world, decried as dull and ruled by the laws of science, or to conduct us into another fantastic one, in which reality is ascribed to ghosts and spirits. As Hamlet and Macbeth show, we are ready to follow him into such a place without hesitation. The delusion of the imaginative archæologist would need, in that case, to be measured by another standard. Yes, when we consider how improbable must be the real existence of a person who faithfully reproduces in her appearance that antique bas-relief, our list shrinks to an alternative: hallucination or ghost of the noon hour. A slight touch in the description eliminates the former possibility. A large lizard lies stretched out, motionless, in the sunlight; it flees, however, before the approaching foot of Gradiva and wriggles away over the lava pavement. So, no hallucination; something outside of the mind of our dreamer. But ought the reality of a rediviva to be able to disturb a lizard?

Before the house of Meleager Gradiva disappears. We are not surprised that Norbert Hanold persists in his delusion that Pompeii has begun to live again about him in the noon hour of spirits, and that Gradiva has also returned to life and gone into the house where she lived before the fateful August day of the year 79. There dart through his mind keen conjectures about the personality of the owner, after whom the house may have been named, and about Gradiva’s relation to the latter; these show that his science has now given itself over completely to the service of his imagination. After entering this house, he again suddenly discovers the apparition, sitting on low steps between two yellow pillars. “Spread out on her knees lay something white, which he was unable to distinguish clearly; it seemed to be a papyrus sheet” (G. p. 55). Taking for granted his most recent suppositions about her ancestry, he speaks to her in Greek, awaiting timorously the determination of whether the power of speech may, perhaps, be granted to her in her phantom existence. As she does not answer, he changes the greeting to Latin. Then, from smiling lips, come the words, “If you wish to speak with me, you must do so in German.”

What embarrassment for us, the readers! Thus the author of Gradiva has made sport of us and decoyed us, as if by means of the refulgence of Pompeiian sunshine, into a little delusion so that we may be milder in our judgment of the poor man, whom the real noonday sun actually burns; but we know now, after recovering from brief confusion, that Gradiva is a living German girl, a fact which we wish to reject as utterly improbable. Reflecting calmly, we now await a discovery of what connection exists between the girl and the stone representation of her, and of how our young archæologist acquired the fancies which hint at her real personality.

Our hero is not freed so quickly as we from the delusion, for, “Even if the belief brought happiness,” says our author, “it assumed everywhere, in the bargain, a considerable amount of incomprehensibility.” (G. p. 102.) Besides, this delusion probably has subjective roots of which we know nothing, which do not exist for us. He doubtless needs trenchant treatment to bring him back to reality. For the present he can do nothing but adapt the delusion to the wonderful discovery which he has just made. Gradiva, who had perished at the destruction of Pompeii, can be nothing but a ghost of the noon hour, who returns to life for the noon hour of spirits; but why, after the answer given in German, does the exclamation escape him: “I knew that your voice sounded like that”? Not only we, but the girl, too, must ask, and Hanold must admit that he has never heard her voice before, but expected to hear it in the dream, when he called to her, as she lay down to sleep on the steps of the temple. He begs her to repeat that action, but she then rises, directs a strange glance at him, and, after a few steps, disappears between the pillars of the court. A beautiful butterfly had, shortly before that, fluttered about her a few times; in his interpretation it had been a messenger from Hades, who was to admonish the departed one to return, as the noon hour of spirits had passed. The call, “Are you coming here again to-morrow in the noon hour?” Hanold can send after the disappearing girl. To us, however, who venture a more sober interpretation, it will seem that the young lady found something improper in the request which Hanold had made of her, and therefore, insulted, left him, as she could yet know nothing of his dream. May not her delicacy of feeling have realized the erotic nature of the request, which was prompted, for Hanold, only by the connection with his dream?

After the disappearance of Gradiva, our hero examines all the guests at the “Hotel Diomed” table and soon also those of “Hotel Suisse,” and can then assure himself that in neither of the only two lodgings known to him in Pompeii is a person to be found who possesses the most remote resemblance to Gradiva. Of course he had rejected, as unreasonable, the supposition that he might really meet Gradiva in one of the two hostelries. The wine pressed on the hot soil of Vesuvius then helps to increase the day’s dizziness.

The only certainty about the next day is that Norbert must again be in Meleager’s house at noon; and, awaiting the hour, he enters Pompeii over the old city-wall, a way which is against the rules. An asphodel cluster of white bell-flowers seems, as flower of the lower world, significant enough for him to pluck and carry away. All his knowledge of antiquity appears to him, however, while he is waiting, as the most purposeless and indifferent matter in the world, for another interest has acquired control of him, the problem, “what is the nature of the physical manifestation of a being like Gradiva, dead and alive at the same time, although the latter was true only in the noon hour of spirits?” (G. p. 64.) He is also worried lest to-day he may not meet the lady sought, because perhaps she may not be allowed to return for a long time, and when he again sees her between the pillars, he considers her appearance an illusion, which draws from him the grieved exclamation, “Oh, that you were still alive!” This time, however, he has evidently been too critical, for the apparition possesses a voice which asks him whether he wishes to bring her the white flower, and draws the man, who has again lost his composure, into a long conversation. Our author informs us, readers, to whom Gradiva has already become interesting as a living personality, that the ill-humoured and repellent glance of the day before has given way to an expression of searching inquisitiveness or curiosity. She really sounds him, demands, in explanation of his remark of the preceding day, when he had stood near her as she lay down to sleep, in this way learns of the dream in which she perished with her native city, then of the bas-relief, and of the position of the foot, which attracted the young archæologist. Now she shows herself ready to demonstrate her manner of walking, whereby the substitution of light, sand-coloured, fine leather shoes for the sandals, which she explains as adaptation to the present, is established as the only deviation from the original relief of Gradiva. Apparently she is entering into his delusion, whose whole range she elicits from him, without once opposing him. Only once she seems to have been wrested from her rôle by a peculiar feeling when, his mind on the bas-relief, he asserts that he has recognized her at first glance. As, at this stage of the conversation, she, as yet, knows nothing of the relief, she must be on the point of misunderstanding Hanold’s words, but she has immediately recovered herself again, and only to us will many of her speeches appear to have a double meaning, besides their significance in connection with the delusion, a real, present meaning, as, for example, when she regrets that he did not succeed in confirming the Gradiva-gait on the street. “What a shame; perhaps you would not have needed to take the long journey here.” (G. p. 69.) She learns also that he has named the bas-relief of her “Gradiva,” and tells him that her real name is Zoë!

“The name suits you beautifully, but it sounds to me like bitter mockery, for ‘Zoë’ means ‘life.’”

“One must adapt himself to the inevitable,” she responds. “And I have long accustomed myself to being dead.”

With the promise to be at the same place again on the morrow, she takes leave of him, after she has obtained the asphodel cluster. “To those who are more fortunate one gives roses in spring, but for me the flower of oblivion is the right one from your hand.” (G. p. 70.) Melancholy is suited to one so long dead, who has now returned to life for a few short hours.

We begin now to understand and to hope. If the young lady, in whose form Gradiva is again revived, accepts Hanold’s delusion so completely, she does it probably to free him from it. No other course is open; by opposition, one would destroy that possibility. Even the serious treatment of a real condition of this kind could proceed no differently than to place itself first on the ground story of the delusion-structure, and investigate it then as thoroughly as possible. If Zoë is the right person, we shall soon learn how one cures delusions like those of our hero. We should also like to know how such a delusion originates. It would be very striking, and yet not without example and parallel, if the treatment and investigation of the delusion should coincide and, while it is being analysed, result in the explanation of its origin. We have a suspicion, of course, that our case might then turn out to be an “ordinary” love story, but one may not scorn love as a healing power for delusions; and was not our hero’s captivation by the Gradiva-relief also a complete infatuation, directed, to be sure, at the past and lifeless?