Frau K is not liked by her husband.
Frau K is liked by Dora’s father.
HERR K
You know I get nothing from my wife.
DORA’S FATHER
I get nothing out of my own wife.
Dora’s father gives Frau K something. He gives Dora, Frau K, and his wife jewelry that is alike, but he does not like white jewelry. He does not like his wife’s pearls. He substitutes a bracelet.
DORA
Mama. got a lot of it from papa.
Herr K likes Dora.
Herr K, says Freud, is like Dora’s father.
Dora, says Freud, thinks Freud is like Herr K.
Dora is nothing like her mother, so she says.
(Freud never doubts her on this one.)
Dora’s father is impotent.
Frau K asks her husband to give her nothing.
Nothing happens in Frau K.
Dora thinks she is ideal.
THE WHITE HOTEL
The room becomes a structure for welcoming micro-events in relation to the concept of space. In this way, comfort goes beyond mere physical or visual comfort. This is comfort at work, produced by the generosity and simplicity of the structures which, like operating instructions, invite us to take advantage of the present moment. These spaces are based on an openness of volumes, a non-specialisation of structures. This has the effect of smoothing the transition from one activity to another and of sharing one’s [sic] experiences.
Sic.
All sic.
Where is marriage?
In what white room furnished.
Where were the white flowers?
With its own presents.
Does the hotel stay in us?
Can I cure myself of home here?
Dreamwork
I came to the hotel with a kind of tiredness I can’t sleep away. Is it from being on these toes, tipped forward all day in hotel heels? When I am asleep, I am still paying (or working) for my hotel though I am not making the most of it. Or perhaps I am.
FREUD
Every dream is a desire represented as fulfilled. Only unconscious desires, or those that extend into the unconscious, have the power to form a dream.
I don’t remember any of the dreams I’ve had in hotels.
The en-suite
Is all angles, and the angles reflect, white: the tiles, the corner of the shower head, unexpected. Me?
Yes you are, but what am I?
In the mirror, I don’t see myself, perhaps because I’m not at home here. In the en-suite of a railway compartment, Freud failed to recognize himself.
FREUD
A more than usually violent jolt of the train swung back the door of the adjoining washing-cabinet, and an elderly gentleman in a dressing gown and a travelling cap came in.5
It was himself of course. But Freud didn’t want to travel in a train that would have someone like him for a member.
(Wait — was that a Freudian slip?)
FREUD
One need only turn each individual reproach back on the person of the speaker.
Edward James, the patron of Dalí’s Mae West sofa, also commissioned Magritte’s painting Not to be Reproduced in which we see a man’s suit-clad torso from behind. He looks into a mirror, which, instead of reflecting his face, shows the back of his own head repeated. Although the subject has no recognizable features, it is said to be a portrait of James.
Herr K, Frau K, Dora, Dora’s Mother, Dora’s Father, Freud look into their mirrors. They see each other. It is impossible for them to recognize themselves as they are seen by any of the others.
Wife or mother, daughter or lover, father or teenager: each can be substituted for several of the others. That’s why A Fragment never ends.
(En-Suite, because “in-room toilet” sounds anything but glamorous.
Suite means “next.”
So, next.)
The restaurant
I The bar
Is, like the lobby, a link to the outside. You can enter it from the street door, or from the hotel.
Is a place to see and be seen, which is difficult: it is almost impossible to do something, and, at the same time, see yourself doing it.
De 5 à 7 (or from 6 to 8, or whatever), waiting, I am at home. I’m waiting, because I have the waiting habit. Commuters are lucky — their time taken up by from and to. Even if they don’t remember the connections, their waiting, at least, is moving. At home, at this time I’d be waiting to make the food, waiting while making the food, waiting for people to eat it, unable to leave, to do anything else, in case they arrive. Too early to drink (though I will); too late to get started on anything. In the hotel restaurant, over the stoned olives’ little assholes, I will put myself at the mercy.
This is not the same kind of waiting as at home, as the waiter, eventually, and not even after a very long pause, arrives.
I wait to be waited on. A double pleasure.
Not so much to feel cared for as to be seen to be cared for.
See.? Feel.?
I can only fall in love bypassing the waiter. But, already anticipating my desires, he is everywhere.
II The restaurant
Since I left home, I’ve been a hotel ghost, living on chocolates, coffee, dregs of champagne and candle ends. There’s no longer such a thing as lunch, or dinner, only a series of atomized teatimes and cocktail hours, tiny meals (it is not so easy to be hungry in the midst of plenty).
The older people sat in the restaurant and the younger people sat in the bar, not that they were so very young, the men still dressed in hoodies, and the women smarter and not eating bread because they’d heard somewhere some movie star didn’t and, although they didn’t of course believe that they themselves were movie stars or even potential movie stars, they might have believed themselves to be on some kind of parallel track, perhaps in the story of a movie. They made me nervous. Imitating them, I didn’t order a starter, then regretted it. People are uglier when there are a lot of them together.
Why are hotel restaurants almost always disappointing? Salty, beefy, sweet, brittle.
Well, hunger meets what meets it.
How women eat together. You see everything: the private in public, the pressing of things on each other, the forced-sharing; I’ll have one of those, but only if no one else wants it. I’ll order one if you’ll have some. They order the sourdough with tough crusts. They order toast with nothing, one egg between them. They have had a lifetime behind them of taking leftovers. It is no fun dining with other women, only with men who will order the T-bone, who will graciously share their fries. “It’s nice toast though,” the women say, “it’s a nice cup of tea.”
The women are wearing dresses, mostly, which shows that they are here to enjoy the food, or to enjoy their enjoyment of each other eating the food, which is something that can be eaten up by the eye.
Or maybe they wear the dresses for work.
The woman sitting at the table across the room is so pretty. And to notice that, additionally, she has an inner life, however carefully she hides it from the man sitting opposite. She does not show it very often. But she will show it here, to you, now. There are other women, but they are carefully hiding their inner lives — they’d not like to show to just anyone — and no one notices. But here is one who has. And yet she looks so pretty too. And later, when she is older, she will be all inner life and no outer, not that anyone would notice her then. But right now her inner life is all yours. But without the outer, who would bother? Without the pretty case she is nothing but an unshelled snaiclass="underline" soft and ugly, not even nice to eat. How delightful! Your discovery. Women who look like that, you have been taught, have no inner life. Yet here is one who both looks and lives, though she will not show both to many, not to many who will notice. Only to you.