Intellectualization in Merimee's "La Venus d'Ille".(Prosper Mirimee)

It can be viewed as a feature of the fantastic as a literary genre that its texts present "intellectuals:" scientists and scholars, travelers and museum-goers, antiquarians and collectors alike are concerned with explaining the riddles posed in the tales. In Merimee's "La Venus d'Ille" (1837), two men of learning speculate at length about the meaning of the fragmented inscriptions engraved upon a statue of Venus. (1) While the newly unearthed statue inspires great fear in the villagers, the archaeologist-narrator and his learned host, Monsieur de Peyrehorade, display a purely intellectual interest in it. (2) The tale opens with the narrator's Catalan guide recalling his fear on discovering the Venus's black hand under an olive tree in Monsieur de Peyrehorade's garden (82) and Madame de Peyrehorade blames the statue for breaking a workman's leg when he lifts it up (86). In contrast we learn that her husband could not wait to examine the discovery (82), just as the Parisian narrator immediately enquires into its nature (82-83). Both scholars ridicule the villagers' superstitious fear of the statue: they regard the Venus not as a threat, but rather as an intellectually challenging and perhaps historically valuable piece of bronze sculpture.

While the two men's enthusiasm about the statue is great, neither is particularly preoccupied with the forthcoming wedding of Alphonse, the host's son. The narrator considers it a mere inconvenience; his host refers to it as a "bagatelle" (85). Monsieur de Peyrehorade is convinced that the Parisian is un homme grave who is no longer interested in women sexually, and has no doubt that he can provide his guest with something far more interesting than women. He naturally has the statue of Venus in mind (85). Michael Tilby concurs that Merimee's scholars as a rule function as asexual beings. According to Tilby, Monsieur de Peyrehorade is too old; and the narrator an ageing bachelor and therefore unsuited for passion or marriage (34-35). It is true that the Parisian is not married and that he displays absolute indifference to love and passion. He never speaks about his own attitude towards women or about any love relations that he might have had, which might be natural in the context of a forthcoming wedding. Yet it is precisely the fact that the Parisian insists repeatedly on his disinterest in women, combined with his simultaneous enthusiasm about the statue, which reveals that he is not asexual but rather that his attitude towards eroticism is generally problematic. It is as though the Parisian shied away from the sensual, taking refuge in the intellectual or academic. His repressed interest in women appears to be displaced onto the statue in defense.

Freud, in his 1926 essay on "Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety," describes "defense" as "a general designation for all the techniques which the ego makes use of in conflicts which may lead to a neurosis" (20: 136). The mechanisms of defense work by withholding from consciousness painful or unendurable ideas or affects. Typically, a variety of defense mechanisms are employed simultaneously and repression--that is, the involuntary removal from awareness of any threatening impulse, idea, or memory--is common to all (A. Freud 44). It is significant that defense occurs in fantastic literature. In "La Venus d'Ille," the narrator, as I will argue, engages in intellectual discussions about archaeology in a defensive displacement of his personal problem with the sensual, thus transforming--or sublimating--his sexual impulses into a socially productive and valued form. (3) The Parisian's style of thinking and verbalization is particularly relevant here: his treatment of the statue of Venus is characterized by an extreme emphasis on technical knowledge and seemingly objective judgment. Whereas the villagers are frightened of the statue, the archaeologist-narrator views the sculpture from a purely intellectual perspective. Emotionally, he is entirely detached from it. Psychoanalysis refers to this unconscious isolation of affect--the simultaneous separation of threatening emotions from the associated thoughts or events and a reaction on a purely intellectual level--as intellectualization (Ewen 35, Kestenbaum 671).

The mechanism of intellectualization is one of the main techniques through which the broad defensive aim of isolation of affect can be achieved. In addition to the need to regard everything as an intellectual task and to emphasize the technical and objective, intellectualization is characterized by a preference for dealing with words, abstractions, and symbolic references (Credaschi/Rossel/ Mercera 47). The maintenance of a precise and analytical, as well as detached and impersonal, approach allows for the avoidance of the raw impact of the affective and subjective aspects of one's experience. Since intellectualization involves a dissociation between one's thoughts and feelings, an experience may be rendered in a formally correct way, and yet the account will fail to convey that which is felt (Schimek 576, Parker 451, Ryckman 45). Freud, in theorizing defense, never used the specific term "intellectualization." Anna Freud coined it in her 1936 book on The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense. I will rely on her account of intellectualization in my exploration of the important relation between this defense mechanism and the fantastic.

Anna Freud describes intellectualization in the context of puberty. At the outset she draws attention to the paradoxical fact that adolescents often appear to become more intelligent during puberty, whereas one would normally expect the increased libido which characterizes this period in life to bear an inverse relation to the subject's intellectual activity (158). Yet as Freud examines how the adolescents' apparent intellectual development fits into the more general picture of their lives, she realizes that the adolescents' mental performances in fact fail to be translated into reality in any useful way and remain unfruitful to a large ...