When I see a spade, I’ll call it a cat.
When I see a cat, I’ll call it an egg.
As Freud wrote to his friend Arnold Zweig: “I, as is well known, do not like cats.”8
As soon as I see anything, I’ll break it.
DENISE RILEY
There is a lonely hour which never quite arrives, of the nonmetaphoricity of language.9
Maybe it is a place, not an hour, or maybe it’s a time and a place. A hotel, with a window, but also a lace curtain, or a double-glazed pane, that darkens in response to light from outside. Something indirect, a metaphor, a slip of the tongue says Freud, can be direct as nothing else is.
VIII
Dora’s Case of Hysteria is also her mother’s case, which is a jewel case.
Like Dora, I do not wear jewels, and do not have a jewel case with me, but I have my suitcase. In it I keep my clothes. They are important to me. I have been told that they become me and, in them, I have always the option of being transported. You do not give me jewelry. You want to, you say, but, unlike Dora’s father, you say I must choose. If you choose, you say, I may not like it. I want you to choose, I say, because if I choose, it is not a gift. One day, as Herr K to Dora, you give me a jewelry box. You chose it. I try to disguise that I think it is ugly. Some years later you tell me you think it’s ugly too.
I am still using it.
I pack my suitcase, with its two wheels and a pullout handle, with so few things, that they barely cover one half of its empty shell. It shuts like an oyster. When I turn a corner, it hops on one wheel.
Here is its other foot.
For several years before I reached the age of ten I kept a bag under my bed containing my most treasured possessions so that I could escape in case of fire. I can’t remember for how many years this went on, but it meant that I seldom used my most treasured possessions. The bag did contain a money box, though not a jewelry box. My money box was beautifully made: wooden, in the form of a dice. Its sides slid open in a secret combination of moves. I still have it, though it is broken.
“There was never a real fire at our house,” said Dora.
Because I was always ready for escape, the fire in my house never happened.
IX
FREUD
At first the symptom is the unwelcome guest of the psychical life.
What if I went from cause to cure, without manifesting any symptom, direct from the situation of illness to the situation of cure, from home to hotel? A hotel looks like an escape route, but Freud tells me there’s always something inside something else. Just as a guest must fit the desires the hotel offers to satisfy, so symptoms are broken down into a series of recognizable categories: a room for each guest, a symptom for each neurosis, or sometimes, as in a hotel, for several. Freud also says the symptom can remain after the cause is lost, that the symptom can become its own cause, hollowed out. To seek a cure is a symptom, perhaps. To stay in a hotel is, itself, a symptom.
FREUD
The practical goal of the treatment lies in the abolition of all possible symptoms.
What am I being cured from anyway? I’ve forgotten. You can go to hotels to be cured long after you know your disease.
A hotel produces its own symptoms.
If I lose my symptoms, I may disappear.
They are eggshells of desire.
7 HOTEL MARX (BROS.)
“You don’t have to be mad to work here, but it helps.”
Cast:
Wilde:
a playwright
English person:
a registrar
New Zealander:
a patient
Leo:
a playwright
Groucho:
an entrepreneur
Repo Man:
a repo man
Margaret Dumont:
a straight woman
Chico:
a Marx Bro.
Hotel Inspector:
a hotel inspector
Woman:
a love interest
Harpo:
a-phonic
When they could no longer stand it, or themselves, Freud’s clients went to a hotel. And when a hotel no longer met their needs, they moved to a spa, then to sanatorium, where, sometimes, they would die.
The first hospitals were little different from almshouses. Hospitals were for the poor, who could not be treated at home, whose ailments excluded them from home. Hotels, whose treats cannot be given at home, are for the rich — both are bound to their clients by cash, or lack of it.
OSACR WILDE
(In a hotel)
I am dying beyond my means.
The first hospitals’ guests also lacked social capital — children, the sick, the elderly, those who could not do home work — and also those who would not, whose refusal made them indecent: prostitutes, unmarried mothers, the homeless, the disabled, the unacceptable, and those whose mental symptoms would now be treated in a clinic. The poor were more likely to be indecent, and the indecent were more likely to be hidden in hospitals. Even the unhomely must find a home somewhere.
Oscar Wilde was arrested at a hotel in London, for “gross indecency.” At his trial he was forced to defend the decency of his writing, which was brought in evidence against him. Sometimes words enact off the page. Sometime later, Wilde died in a hotel in Paris, right across the river from God’s hotel — The Hotel Dieu — which is a hospital. A hospital (in premedical times, when it was also an almshouse) used to be more like a hospice. It was for terminal decline. A cure was not expected. It was an overnight stop between this world and the next, where no one lived for long.
Let’s decline:
To be hospitable.
To be hostile.
To be hospital.
To be hospice.
Now there are even hotels in hospitals,1 so the well can stay alongside the sick, though in different quarters now disease is no longer familiar, but a private matter (common factors: the possibilities of service, cleanliness, ghosts, death, authority, hospitality, and being thrown out). Both guests and patients are given over to the care of strangers. I worked in a hospice for a while. It was white, mostly. Some patients like to decorate their rooms, I was told; others leave them blank: white walls, white sheets. Some people prefer to make an end only in somewhere that looks a hotel.
I have also stayed in the hotel where Oscar Wilde died, but not in his room. The wallpaper in the Wilde Room, which I did not see, is not white, but richly colored and patterned. I stayed in another room that overlooked the back of the hotel.
WILDE
(Dying)
Either this wallpaper goes, or I do.
This is a misquote. He really said, “The wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.”2 This is not parapraxis but elision. Time’s elided too: I have read that Wilde said this several weeks before he died. Still, it is a joke and, like a hospital, and a hotel, a joke draws attention to the fact that it contains something that also remains hidden.
ENGLISH REGISTRAR
Did you come here to die?
NEW ZEALAND PATIENT
(Perhaps KM)
No, I came here yester-die.
Perhaps it was not a registrar, but a receptionist; perhaps the patient mistook the hospital for a hotel. It’s easy enough: many jokes take place in hotels; most involve a misunderstanding between the server and the served. Well I guess it serves them both right. This joke triangulates on our knowing how British and New Zealand English enact off the page. Most puns depend on a familiarity with the unfamiliar. Many jokes involve strangers. Most jokes deal with anxiety that, Freud said, is the reenactment of the memory of an approaching terror. No one likes to speak of death, especially in a hospital, or a hotel.