<< Literature Today | Front Page | Macbeth and any half-decent contracts lawyer >>
Tuesday, July 04, 2006
Theory & Comics, Together At Last (Again); or, What If…?
[X-posted to Acephalous. The reason for the “again” above, if you’re curious.]
Passage from a letter excerpted in Ernest Jone’s The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (3:392):
If I had my life to live over again, I should devote myself to telepathy rather than to psychoanalysis.
To which I can only say this:
What would the world look like if Freud had his druthers? What would theory debates look like? What claims made? I planned on outlining this all, but got so involved in the gimmick I’m too tired to make the joke.
Comments
But ... we would be able to empirically verify telepathy. Subject A draws a card from the deck and looks at it. Subject B (in another room) tells the experimenter which card A can see. And gets it right, repeatedly and repeatably. All good experimental science.
The existence of telepathy would also make it much easier to reason about authorial intent. We could know what an author really meant by reading their mind directly. This could be experimentally repeatable because anyone who wants to can read the author’s mind themselves, and check that the author really is thinking what the critic claims they are thinking.
Roger Luckhurst’s The Invention of Telepathy (Oxford, 2002) is a very good book to read if you’re interested in the cultural history of telepathy.
Dude, why settle for cultural history? I want to read people’s minds.
What if the author changes his mind?
ISSUE #1
INT. DR FREUD’S LABORATORY.
A man is strapped to a chair, with electrodes taped to his skull. The electrodes are connected to a Rube Goldberg contraption of giant capacitors, Tesla coils, etc. A projector screen on the wall shows a martian from “Quatermass and the Pit”.
DR FREUD: At last! I have perfected the device!
(cut to projected image of martian)
DR FREUD (VOICE OVER): I can see into men’s minds!
(cut to close-up of Dr Freud)
DR FREUD: There will be no more misunderstandings! No more war!
DR FREUD: A new era of human happiness!
INT. BOARD ROOM.
Five middle-aged men in dark suits sit around a table.
COMMITTEE MEMBER #1: Does Dr Freud have any idea what we will do with his invention?
COMMITTEE MEMBER #2: Not a clue.
COMMITTEE MEMBER #3: He’s a useful idiot.
Susan, that’s what I’d have like to have written, had I still the energy to do so then.
Jonathan, Alison Winter’s Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain is also interesting.
mythusmage, I suppose we’d have to create a hierarchy of intention, in which the most valuable intent statements would be those made in the weeks and months immediately after the passages in question were written.
Another interesting question would be: what would we do if the author answered “I don’t know” and we read his mind and, in fact, he didn’t. Character X has a scar on his left arm just because. Could that still be meaningful?
I’d be interested to hear a bit more about Freud’s useful idiocy, from either Scott or Susan. How so, in your opinion?
Patience, CR, patience. I’m getting there. (You’ll remember, of course, that that was precisely the topic of inaugural post here. I still think it may be had, but it’ll have to be earned, not granted.)