Читать книгу The Erotic Motive in Literature - Albert Mordell - Страница 14

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Freud first applied his theory of dream interpretation to fiction in 1907 in his study of Jensen's Gradiva (1903).

Freud might have analysed Gautier's story Arria Marcella instead of Jensen's Gradiva, which was obviously suggested by the plot of Gautier's tale. Arria Marcella appeared in 1852, over fifty years before Jensen's story. It gives one a good opportunity for studying Gautier himself and is an effective corroboration of Freud's theories on dreams.

Octavius sees in a museum a piece of lava that had cooled over a woman's breast and preserved its form. He falls in love with the original woman, though he knows she is dead. He is a fetich worshipper and is enamoured of ancient types of women preserved in art; he has even been cast into ecstasy by the sight of hair from a Roman woman's tomb. He dreams of the "glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome." He is a pagan and loves form and beauty. In his dream that night he is transported to the year of the eruption of Vesuvius and witnesses a performance of a play by Plautus in a Roman theatre. Here he sees the real woman whose shapely breast had preserved its form in the lava that killed her. She also sees him and loves him. Her slave leads him to her home. She is a Roman courtesan and her name is Arria Marcella. She tells him that she has come to life because of his desire at the museum to meet her in life. His wish in waking life is fulfilled in his dream. As a matter of fact, as the poet comments, art preserves as alive all the beauty of antiquity.

Octavius realises his wish and, soon, kisses and sighs are heard. But the charm is soon dispelled, for a Christian man comes in who reproaches her, even though she did not belong to his religion. She refuses to abandon Octavius, but the Christian, by an exorcism, makes Arria release Octavius, who awakens and swoons. He loved her for the rest of his life and when he married later, in memory he was unfaithful to his wife, for he always thought of Arria.

The meaning of all this is obvious. It is an expression of Gautier's favourite theory that Christianity is hostile to love and beauty, and has deprived the world of much of the greatness of paganism. But there is more here than Gautier himself imagined. First, the story like all dreams is a wish-fulfilment of the unconscious. Not only the girl but the world of her time becomes a reality and Octavius lives in his dream in the pagan world. There are the moments of anxiety where the Christian interferes and hinders the satisfaction of Octavius's love. Freud's theory is that an anxiety dream is formed when a repressed emotion encounters a strong resistance.

Now Octavius is Gautier, who makes a work of art cut of the dream, preserves it for humanity and gives us a valuable thing of beauty. Gautier makes up for the ugliness of to-day by preserving the beauty of the past. Gautier satisfies his longing for the old pagan world now vanished by making his hero live in it and realise the love of one of its courtesans.

This story reveals the author as much as his Madamoiselle de Maupin does. We have the same Gautier for whom only the material world existed, the Gautier who was obsessed by sex, hated Christianity and worshipped art alone. The trained psychoanalyst who wishes to go deep into the unconscious of Gautier will, I think, find some perverse qualities like fetichism, revealed not only in this tale but in others.

Gautier pursues the motive of this story in several other tales. He lives constantly in his fantasies amidst the beauties of the ancient world. It is hard to believe that many of his tales of phantom love scenes laid in ancient times were not actually dreamed by him.

His novel, The Mummy's Foot, his stories, The Golden Chain, One of Cleopatra's Nights, King Candaules, and two that are considered his best, The Dead Leman and The Fleece of Gold, show the unconscious worshipper of physical beauty in Gautier. All these stories may be analysed like dreams, for they are creatures of the author's imagination whereby he consoled himself for the loss of the pagan world. He was really a pagan transported into our time and he lived those times over in his stories.