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COPYRIGHT 2005 University of Texas at Austin (University of Texas Press)
"We thought maybe you were in the plot," said Mrs. McKisco ...
"The plot?" inquired Rosemary, half understanding. "Is there a plot?" "My dear, we don't know," said Mrs. Abrams, with a convulsive stout woman's chuckle. "We're not in it. We're the gallery." (1)
Fitzgerald and the Hotbed of Psychoanalysis
It would seem an understatement to remark, as Freud once did, that "incest is not a rare occurrence even in our society" (Totem and Taboo, 901). Incest is, in fact, the event that therapists expect to hear about perhaps more than any other; it is a crucial plot point in their master-narratives of human life. For example, Freud's own early Studies on Hysteria, written with Josef Breuer, features five case histories in which the eponymous pathology arises out of forbidden father-daughter contact: Fraulein Anna O. (Breuer's patient), Miss Lucy R., Katharina _____, Fraulein Elisabeth von R., and Fraulein Rosalia H.
Psychoanalytic story-space is notably dramatized in F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1934 novel, Tender Is the Night. This book, which the author expected to be his masterwork, centers on incest as a site of narrative reorganization: Fitzgerald's Nicole Warren Diver has an adolescent sexual liaison with her father, and the stories she tells herself (and consequently that others tell themselves) about this event represent ruptures in psyche and life-story. Repairing or bridging those ruptures gave Fitzgerald the opportunity to offer comment on psychoanalysis and its theories of incest and mental disorder while experimenting with narrative form in ways that he hoped would prove revolutionary. First psychoanalysis writes a script about love in which the characters Dick and Nicole fuse into Dicole. Soon, however, human reality--personality, the narrative drive of time as opposed to Nicole's inability to move forward--ruptures the fantasy and the neonomism. To Fitzgerald, Freud provides a plot template that explains character motivation and, on an even deeper level, creates a thematic architecture of loss and destruction that holds up the novel as a whole.
Several critics have analyzed Freudian theories of incest as models for Tender's content (see Pamela A. Boker, Mary E. Burton, Richard Godden, E. W. Pitcher, and Robert Wexelblatt in Works Cited). The time is perhaps ripe for an investigation into the ways Freud's storytelling form and structure influenced Fitzgerald's attempts to express that content. While working on Tender Is the Night, Fitzgerald claimed that he was writing "something really NEW in form, idea, structure--the model for the age that Joyce and Stein are searching for, that Conrad didn't find" (Kuehl and Bryer, 104), and in 1925 he felt he had achieved some measure of success: "The novel progresses slowly but brilliantly" (Correspondence, 182). With these claims, he grouped himself with authors openly investigating the authentic representation of the psyche and of individual difference among psyches--modernists who experimented with radically new narrative voices and styles. Although Tender is Fitzgerald's most experimental novel, its form is not as radically new as, say, the prose of Stein's Tender Buttons. But it does weave back and forth in time and point of view, and its architecture is a Freudian triptych, with each section offering not only a major plot movement but also a shift in principal point of view. Book I follows "Daddy's Girl," a nubile actress named Rosemary Hoyt, as she meets the shimmering Divers on the Riviera; the section ends when Rosemary witnesses Nicole's breakdown in the bathroom. Next we jump back in time to Dick's meeting with Nicole at the Lausanne sanatorium, and we watch through his eyes as their relationship grows and falls apart. The dying off is completed in Book 3, which shows Dick's affair with Rosemary and ends with a more distant point of view, Dick being relegated to life as an obscure country doctor. Most of these events come about directly because Papa Warren slept with his younger daughter.
Tender Is the Night stretches over a classic Freudian framework of cause, effect, and blame centered on the incest issue. Dick first rises and then dives because of his relationship to the former Nicole Warren; Nicole is both damaged and damaging because of what she has done with her father. She is a daughter, in Freud's words, "detained" at an early stage "in the course of development through which the individual must pass"; therefore she has never "overcome the parental authority and never, or very imperfectly, withdraw[n her] affection from" her father (Three Contributions to a Theory of Sex, 618). She might not at first seem to fit Freud's schema, as she is a passionate lover rather than a cold and "sexually anesthetic" (Sex, 618) wife; but in fact she is passionate precisely because she sees her father in Dick, whose name provides a not-so-sly wink at the part of the father he most compellingly represents. Fitzgerald also examines the dangers of the doctor-patient relationship (transference-love) inherent in the process: Dick first enters the Warren when Nicole is his patient, and when he enters her life story as a father figure he destroys his own tale in order to keep hers suspended in thematic repetition.
Warren himself is the only character who describes "the awful story" of what happened with Nicole:
"It just happened," he said hoarsely. "I don't know--I don't know. After her mother died when she was little she used to come into my bed every morning, sometimes she'd sleep in my bed. I was sorry for the little thing. [...] We were just like lovers--and then all at once we were lovers--and ten minutes after it happened I could have shot myself [...] She almost--she seemed to freeze up right away. She'd just say, 'Never mind, never mind, Daddy. It doesn't matter. Never mind.'" (129)
The immediate trauma and repression that this episode produces are important not only because they give rise to plot but also because Fitzgerald uses the broken taboo to break and re-form Nicole along with the form and style of his novel. (2)
Of course, in thinking of incest, Fitzgerald did not draw on psychoanalysis alone. Freud did not invent the incest plot, any more than he invented plot itself. But in naming and writing about certain events and disorders in descriptive and often prescriptive essays, he not only drew attention to repressed events but also propagated them in the culture at large, even unto novelists searching for new material and form. Freud made incest visible and pandemic. (3) Having done this for a plot structure that preceded him, he changed the way we talk about incest in particular and about plots in general--the way we tell stories about ourselves and the largely fictional worlds within our memories. Fitzgerald, following him, adapted those structures and techniques--diagnosis via the sign system of symptoms, collapsed linear time, and repetition. Tender also comments indirectly on what may be missing from psychoanalysis, namely, a sense of genuine closure. If it is difficult to analyze the workings of the psyche, it is equally challenging to represent that machinery in literary form, and therein lies the innovation of Tender Is the Night.
Diagnosis, Desire, Story: The Influence of Anxiety
To his most avid proponents, Freud's psychoanalytic theories have the potential to explain virtually all of human behavior. As civilized as humankind has become, he says that our minds are nonetheless the playthings of our desire, of that animal sense of wanting that represents civilization's antithesis, chaos. As he sketches a typical life in Totem and Taboo, a boy's first object choices are always incestuous, focusing on mother and sister; men wish, like the mythical Oedipus, to kill their fathers and marry their mothers; witnessing a "primal scene," or coitus between the parents, is profoundly traumatizing; (4) and actual incestuous contact with either parent produces deep psychological scars (Totem, 819-20). Women, of course, are subject to parallel desires and traumas, and any of these situations is likely to result in a form of mental unrest, though the actual cause of the malaise may remain hidden from its sufferer for years or even decades. In many cases, only canny questioning from a trained psychoanalyst can tease out and reconstruct the truth--or what will usefully serve in its stead--the event or events that he believes underlie the disorder.
The psychoanalyst helps the patient to re-author or re-create a self; he is a narrativist and, ultimately, a fiction writer, imposing a largely imaginary structure of understanding and explanation upon the chaos of desire and trauma, explaining an unpleasant present with a plausible past and thereby unifying a subject, creating a "whole" and healthy person. The patient is cured when s/he believes in the story. As for the analyst, belief is not crucial; what matters is presenting a plausible narrative in which the patient will have faith either because or in spite of his/her desire to believe in a particular version of childhood and the past.
In his own early work, Freud first developed and then largely discarded a theory based on chronological linearity--that is, the seduction theory of neurosis. First arguing that neurosis resulted from a real-life childhood incest trauma, Freud later suggested that the women who described such traumatic events were probably fantasizing. As Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis have it, the young Freud explained the pandemic trauma of sexuality with two scenes: in the first, an adult approaches a child who doesn't understand the sexual nature of the interaction and isn't aroused himself. In the second scene, the subject undergoes puberty and discovers sexual longings, which discovery occasions a reevaluation of the first, or "seduction," scene. The trauma of the reevaluation endures throughout adulthood and is based on this clear chronological sequence. Eventually, however, Freud abandoned this theory, writing to Fliess in 1897, "I will confide in you at once the great secret that has been slowly dawning on me in the last few months: I no longer believe in my neurotica" (Standard Edition, I 259). He admitted that it wasn't possible to pinpoint seduction scenes and that under this theory "in every case the father, not excluding my own, had to be blamed as a pervert" (SE, I 259). Freud's daughter Anna wrote that "keeping up the seduction theory would mean to abandon the Oedipus complex, and with it the whole importance of phantasy life. [...] In fact, I think there would have been no psychoanalysis afterwards" (Masson, 113). There had to be a way to save Oedipus and psychoanalysis itself--to save the lovely story Freud was writing for the race. (5) Tender Is the Night does that work by presenting us with just such a seduction
scene.
Desire is widely acknowledged as a crucial element of any narrative. We don't need to read stories; we read them because we want to--first of all, we want to see what other people, even fictional characters, desire, and how they go about fulfilling those desires. (6) We want to ask questions such as Freud's famous "What do women want?" Moreover, there would be no plot if a character did not desire a change in his or her life--more money, a new lover, peace of mind. Under Freudianism, narrative desire duplicates or even...
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