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Literatur
Sigmund Freud,Civilization and its Discontent, ed. and trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), p. 24.
“Tatsächlich wird aber das Ich nach der Vollendung der Trauerarbeit wieder frei und ungehemmt.” Sigmund Freud, “Trauer und Melancholie,”Studienausgabe, III (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1982) p. 199.
Contemplating the 96th anniversary of her deceased father's death, Virgina Woolf writes: “I used to think of him and mother daily; but writing theLighthouse laid them in my mind ... (I believe this to be true—that I was obsessed by them both, unhealthily; and writing of them was a necessary act.)” Virginia Woolf,A Writer's Diary, ed. Leonard Woolf (London: Hogarth Press, 1954), p. 138. See also Woolf,Moments of Being, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (Sussex: The University Press, 1976), pp. 80–81. For a detailed analysis of the psychological significance ofTo the Lighthouse, the relationship between fact and fiction, see Mark Spilka's excellent article: “On Lily Briscoe's Borrowed Grief: A Psycho-Literary Speculation,”Criticism, 21 (1979), pp. 1–33.
“Später merkte ich, daß das Objekt meiner Erzählung gar nicht so eindeutig sie, Christa T., war oder blieb. Ich stand auf einmal mir selbst gegenüber, das hatte ich nicht vorgesehen.” Christa Wolf, “Selbstinterview,” inDie Dimension des Autors, Essays und Aufsätze, Reden und Gespräche 1959–1985 (Darmstadt und Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1987), p. 32.
Sylvia Schmitz-Burgard in her essay, “Psychoanalyse eines Mythos. Nachdenken über Christa T.,” understands “die Angst um die eigene Person” as the driving force behind the remembrances of the narrator.Monatshefte, 79, No. 4 (1987), p. 465.
Spilka,Criticism, p. 1.
“Daher wird Literatur, wird jedenfalls für mich das Schreiben immer mehr ein Instrument zur Öffnung unbewußter Bereiche; der Weg zu dem Depot des Verbotenen, von früh an Ausgesonderten, nicht Zugelassenen, Verdrängten; zu den Quellen des Traums, der Imagination und der Subjektivität—was auch bedeutet, daß Schreiben für mich eine Dauer-Auseinandersetzung mit jenen Bindungen ist, die auch durch Wörter wie ‘Staat’, ‘europäisch’ und ‘Literatur’ gekennzeichnet sind. Die Spannung, die aus dieser Konfliktlage entsteht, ist, wie ich hoffe, nicht zerstörerisch, sondern ein kleiner Teil jener Energie, die in unserer Gegenwart auch, zum Glück, auf unserem alten Kontinent, daran gewendet wird, das Überleben durch ein neues Wertgefüge zu sichern.” Christa Wolf. “Preisrede aus Anlaß der Verleihung des Österreichischen Staatspreises für europäische Literatur”, in:Der Falter 6, 1985, S. 25–26.
Christa Wolf,Kindheitsmuster (Berlin: Aufbauverlag 1976), p. 85.
Wolf,Kindheitsmuster,, p. 8.
This ambiguity of identity is a distinguishing feature of Christa Wolf's work. For a further discussion of this topic see: Helen Fehervary, “Christa Wolf's Prose: A Landscape of Masks,”New German Critique, 9, No. 27, (Fall 1982), pp. 57–87.
See the letter to Molly MacCarthy, October 2nd, 1924 inThe Letters of Virginia Woolf ed. Nigel Nicolson and Johanna Trautmann (New York and London: Harcourt Brace & Jovanovich, 1975–1980), Vol. III, p. 134 f. Woolf seemed unimpressed, especially, by what she perceived to be the effects of psychoanalysis on some of her friends: “The last people I saw were James and Alix [Strachey], fresh from Freud —Alix grown gaunt and vigorous—James puny and languid—such is the effect of 10 months psycho-analysis”. In:The Letters, V. II, p. 482. “Freud has certainly brought out the lines in Alix. Even physically, her bones are more prominent. Only her eyes are curiously vague.” V. II, p. 135.
Woolf,Moments of Being, p. 81. Rachel Bowlby in her bookVirginia Woolf; Feminist Destinations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988) quotes this passage to support her view that “Woolf drew directly on psychoanalytic insights in her prose writing (especiallyThree Guineas), but she also made use of them in her fiction”. (p. 65.) This, however, seems to be somewhat of an overstatement, especially since Woolf's relationship to Freud is difficult to determine. In a letter to Harmon H. Goldstone, March 1932, she seems to deny any direct influence: “I have not studied Dr. Freud or any psychoanalyst—indeed I think I have never read any of their books; my knowledge is merely from superficial talk. Therefore any use of their methods must be instinctive”.The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. III, ed. Nigel Nicolson & Johanna Trautmann (New York & London: Harcourt Brace and Jovanovich, 1975–1980), p. 36. Though writingLighthouse might have freed her temporarily from the obsessive preoccupation with her deceased parents, the fact that after completing it she felt “nearer suicide, seriously, since 1913”, might suggest that the effect of her “self-analysis” was only temporary.A Writer's Diary, p. 229.
“Mr. Joyce's indecency inUlysses seems to me the conscious and calculated indecency of a desperate man who feels that in order to breathe he must break windows.” Virginia Wolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” inThe Virginia Woolf Reader ed. Mitchell A. Leaska (New York: Harcourt Brace and Javanovich, 1984), p. 210.
Virginia Woolf,A Writer's Diary, ed. Leonard Woolf (London: Hogarth, 1954), pp. 60–61.
Woolf,A Writer's Diary,, pp. 60–61.
Woolf,A Writer's Diary, p. 60.
Virginia Woolf,To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1927), pp. 201–02. Henceforth, all references in the text will be to this edition.
Though the lighthouse does seem to symbolize some kind of union of opposites, it does not, I believe, represent “an ideal state of being, associated with Mrs. Ramsay”, as Herbert Marder asserts. See:Feminism and Art: A Study of Virginia Woolf (Chicago: The Univ. of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 141.
Mrs. Ramsay's ability to be a kind of mirror for others has, of course, also a negative side. In fact, one might argue that in this she is merely playing to perfection the role society traditionally assigned to women. InA Room of One's Own Virginia Woolf expresses similar thoughts on the relationship between famous male writers and the women that inspired them: “What they [men] got, it is obvious, was something that their own sex was unable to supply; and it would not be rash, perhaps, to define it further... as some stimulus, some renewal of creative power which it is in the gift only of the opposite sex to bestow” (90). And even more pointedly: “Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size. Without that power probably the earth would still be swamp and jungle... mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action. That is why Napoleon and Mussolini both insist so emphatically upon the inferiority of women, for if they were not inferior, they would cease to enlarge” (35f). (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1957).
Though negative thoughts about Mrs. Ramsy cross Lily's mind frequently she doesn't seem to be able to endure them without a considerable degree of guilt, which in turn causes her to lash out against herself: “She [Mrs. Ramsay] was willful; she was commanding (of course, Lily reminded herself, I am thinking of her relations with women, and I am much younger, an insignificant person...” (p. 76). “Poor William Bankes, she [Mrs. Ramsay] seemed to be saying, as if her own weariness had been partly pitying people, and the life in her, her resolve to live again, had been stirred by pity. And it was not true, Lily thought; it was one of those misjudgements of hers that seemed to be instinctive and to arise from some need of her own rather than of other people's.” (128).
J. Hillis Miller, “Mr. Carmichael and Lily Briscoe: The Rhythm of Creativity inTo the Lighthouse” inModernism Reconsidered, Harvard English Studies, no. 11 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1983), p. 177.
Louise A. Poresky also understands the line Lily draws in the middle of the canvas as uniting “all the opposites that have fought within her [Lily] until now,” and as such, emblematic, of the “wholeness” of the self. However, seen against the backdrop of Virgina Woolf's godless universe, I find Poresky's allegorical assertion that “the lighthouse represents God” and that Lily's new-found sense of self owes, therefore, to “God within the Self”, far-fetched. See Poresky,The Elusive Self (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1981), pp. 128 and 152.
And not just Lily, but Mr. Ramsay, James and Cam, too, gain some important insights into themselves and each other during their trip to the lighthouse, completing in actuality, as befits people of action, the journey Lily, the artist, undertakes in her mind. In the end they have all, each in his or her own way, achieved some victory “over the impersonal powers of chaos and death through their concentration on the task in hand and through the intensity of emotion which they possess or inspire.” Hermione Lee,The Novels of Virginia Woolf (London: Methuen, 1977), p. 136.
Christa Wolf,Nachdenken über Christa T. (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 1975), p. 17. Henceforth, all references in the text will be to this edition.
For Johannes R. Becher, writer and cultural minister during the early years of the GDR, this “Zu-sich-selber-Kommen des Menschen” was nothing less than the fullest realization of an individual's potential. “Es ist die Erfüllung aller der Möglichkeiten, wie sie dem Menschen gegeben sind.” Becher, quoted in Sonja Hilzinger,Christa Wolf, Realien zur Literatur, v. 224 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1986), p. 33.
See especially, Ernst Bloch,Vom Geist der Utopie (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1971);Das Prinzip Hoffnung I (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1959), engl.The Principle of Hope (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986). Also Andreas Huyssen, “Auf den Spuren Ernst Blochs.Nachdenken über Christa T.,” inChrista Wolf; Materialienbuch, ed. Klaus Sauer (Darmstadt/Neuwied: Luchterhand 1979), pp. 81–87.
Andreas Huyssen sees the building of the house as a positive step in Christa T.'s self-realization process, as “individuell verwirklichte Hoffnung”, which fails only because as personal “Heimat” it does not connect her with the social realm. Huyssen, “Auf den Spuren”, p. 87. I would like to argue, however, that the building of the house puts the kind of drain on her energies that prevent her from ever developing her potential as a writer and is, as such, a hindrance in her self-actualization process.
Christa T.'s writing cannot become socially productive, for as Sonja Hilzinger points out, “für eine solche unpolitische, auf der Genauigkeit wahrheitsgemäßer Verarbeitung der jüngsten Vergangenheit beruhenden Erinnerung ist noch nicht die rechte Zeit”. Hilzinger,Christa Wolf, p. 40.
“Wo das Abrufen der Gedächtnisinhalte nicht geschehe, sei die Energie des Ich gebunden, darum dessen Fähigkeit zu handeln eingeschränkt.” Bernhard Greiner in seiner Diskussion von Christa Wolf'sKindheitsmuster in “Die Schwierigkeit, ‘ich’ zu sagen: Christa Wolfs psychologische Orientierung des Erzählens”,Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift, 55, (1981), 329.
In her difinition of illness as the result of unrealized potential, Christa Wolf echoes, again, Johannes R. Becher for whom this condition resulted in unhappiness and despair: “Unlust und Unbehagen schafft Traurigkeit, und die Traurigkeit steigert sich zur Angst, zur Schwermut und Verzweiflung, da wir das Leben nicht leben, das uns zu leben gegeben wäre”. Quoted in Hilzinger,Christa Wolf, p. 33.
Schmitz-Burgard sees in the two figures of Christa T. and the narrator the expression of a divided “ich”, which the one half, the narrator, seeks to restore through reflection and self-analysis: “Die scheinbare Dualität des Ichs, die fiktive Spaltung in Gesellschafts-und Einzelwesen, wird als Mittel herangezogen, um die Selbstzensur zu überwinden”. Schmitz-Burgard,Psychoanalyse eines Mythos”, p. 470.
“Die Beziehung zwischen ‘uns’—der Christa T. und dem Ich-Erzähler-rückten ganz von selbst in den Mittelpunkt: die Verschiedenheit der Charaktere und ihre Berührungspunkte, die Spannung zwischen “uns” und ihre Auflösung, oder das Ausbleiben der Auslösung. Wäre ich Mathematiker, würde ich wahrscheinlich von einer ‘Funktion’ sprechen: Nichts mit Händen und Füßen Greifbares, nichts Sichtbares, Materielles, aber etwas ungemein Wirksames”. Christa Wolf, “Selbstinterview”, inDie Dimension des Autors; Essays und Aufsätze, Reden und Gespräche (Darmstadt und Neuwid: Luchterhand, 1987), p. 32.
Franz Kafka,Briefe 1902–1924 (New York/Frankfurt/Main, 1958), 0. 27.
Wolf, “Selbstinterview”, p. 35.
See Christa Wolf's remarks in footnote 5.
“Jetzt tritt sie hervor, gelassen auch vor der Nichterfüllung, denn sie hatte die Kraft, zu sagen: Noch nicht. Wie sie viele Leben mit sich führte, in ihrem Innern aufbewahrte, aufhob, so führte sie mehrere Zeiten mit sich, in denen sie, wie in der “wirklichen”, teilweise unerkannt lebte, und was in der einen unmöglich ist, gelingt in der anderen. Von ihren verschiedenen Zeiten aber sagte sie heiter: Unsere Zeit.”Christa T., p. 194.
Colin E. Smith faults Christa T. for her “inability to contribute to a ‘Lernkollektiv’” and to “sacrifice things which arouse her personal interest... in favor of dispassionate academic work,” attributing these failings on the one hand to her ability as a gifted individual to “look beyond the demands of the present moment,” on the other to her inability to accept her role as writer and outsider (90f). He seems to miss the point, however, for it is precisely the repressive political climate of Christa T.'s world that prevents her from being a writer, (or an effective humanistic teacher), forcing her to fall back on her self, with few avenues for self-expression, except those which might strike one as socially less “responsible”. Furthermore, there is no contradiction between Christa T.'s assertion of a “tiefe Übereinstimmung mit dieser Zeit”, and her inability to find a niche in it, since this is simply a reflection of the contradiction inherent in the humanistic theory (which she supports) and intolerant practice (of which she is a victim) of the political reality of her world. Colin E. Smith,Tradition, Art and Society: Christa Wolf's Prose, Germanistik in der blauen Eule, vol. 10 (Essen: Die blaue Eule, 1987), pp. 90–92.
Anna K. Kuhn,Christa Wolf's Utopian Vision: From Marxism to Feminism, Cambridge Studies in German (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988), p. 77
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Asher, E.W. The fragility of the self in Virginia Woolf'sTo the Lighthouse and Christa Wolf'sNachdenken über Christa T. . Neohelicon 19, 219–247 (1992). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02028620
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02028620