WILDE
I am glad to say that I have never seen a spade!
The play appears to be a serious play, a play about social issues, about hard work, and also about death (it is a tragedy); it is about things that cannot be given house room in the hotel. The play takes place in the country. There are no hotels there. It is a play about people who cannot afford to stay in hotels, or to go to the theater. When the actors call each other “comrade,” everyone applauds (it is 1938).
Hidden in the audience, Leo gives himself away by calling “Author! Author!” He calls for himself in the third person, as he is dead. HARPO appears on stage playing dead, on a bier. Though his appearance must have been unexpected, none of the actors seems surprised. Harpo wears a lumberjack shirt, which fits the action of the play. No one is sad. This is because he is only acting. But the actors have stopped acting (if they were still acting, they’d act sad). Or maybe the play has changed from a tragedy to a comedy.
Death, like Wilde’s hotel, is beyond my means. A hotel is nowhere to end up, not really. Tragedy is impossible there. Death in a hotel — what a joke! Wilde was right. In a hotel, death is deflected as it is by a joke, where meaning is never allowed to dwell for long. It blocks any hope of ending. But I might like to die in a hotel, clinically, on clean sheets, to make a clean sweep onto a tabula rasa, like being born. Famous last words?
ALL
(singing, onstage and off)
Swing low, sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home.
8 THE TALKING CURE
“The capacity of lacerating accusation to indwell may be such that while its target is fearful that it may be true, she’s also fearful that it may not be true, which would force the abandonment of her whole story.”
Cast:
Freud:
a psychoanalyst
Dora:
a teenage girl
KM:
a guest
I
So I wrote my hotel reviews, and I was not paid, but I exchanged words for things, the sort of things you find in hotels. The exchange rate was not set, but the exchange always happened. My words enacted off the page, and some kind of transference occurred, or rather, my words pre-acted, as I often knew what was required of my writing before I’d stayed. It was a matter of formula. My words were turned into white beds, and white baths, and towelling robes, and dinners, none of which I could hold onto, none of which I wanted to. In the end the things were more transient than the words, in that they stopped, and the words are still there.
Katherine Mansfield wrote a story in which the daughter of Baroness von Gall came to the German Pension to take the cure. She was dumb. She was there, perhaps, for a talking cure. The guests could not tell, because the baroness’s daughter could not tell them. She also could not tell them that her companion, whom they so fêted, was not the baroness’s unwed sister, but her maid.
Aphonia is only interesting in the unmarried. So is talking.
KM
Love which becomes engaged and married is a purely affirmative affair.
I have been (or possibly am still) married and I claim the right to words. But what can I say? I can tell and tell and talking does not change anything, not even in me.
I am in my hotel, and you are not there. I thought the hotel would be an escape from you but instead your absence fills it, though, in the hotel, there is nothing of you. I don’t want to talk to you anyway. I can’t get on with you. I can’t get on without talking to you. If we talk to each other we will say nothing. You like to talk to me about things, about things I mean, like beds, and baths, and towelling robes, and dinners. You like to talk to me only if nothing is said.
The screen fills the screen, waiting for the talking to begin.
(The talking that is, of course, writing.)
It does not, so it is never disappointing.
I only want to talk to you when I am not talking to you.
And then I want to talk to you all the time.
You can say “My love,” and do nothing loving. Whenever you say it, I believe it.
It is a word without symptoms, unless you count those in me.
I am your word’s symptom.
Dora’s aphonia, said Freud, was a “conversion disorder” of mental into physical symptoms. The exchange rate was not set, but the conversion always happened. Aphonia is only one possible hysterical symptom, but it is not the complaint. Hysteria is the complaint.
Some women go to hotels in order to complain.
Some women go to hotels for a cure.
Others go for the talking cure.
Freud talked to Dora, then he talked about Dora (to herself), then he wrote about Dora. Through it all she continued to complain with her silent body, which could have meant anything. We don’t even see her. We can only read his words. Show the body; take the body away. Distance is the only cure. Getting away is a question not only of space, but time. And aphonia makes sense to me, even now.
FREUD
She had been listening, without contradicting as she usually did. She seemed moved, said goodbye as sweetly as anything, with warmest wishes for the new year and — never came back.
Freud will not call Dora back.
(You will not call me back.)
Dora will not demand a cure.
(I will not demand a cure.)
They will use no more words on each other.
(We will use no more words.)
Aphonia. If you won’t talk to me, at least I can write it down.
FREUD
She lived for her studies, and did not think of marriage.
In the end, Dora cured herself by talking, but not to Freud. She told Frau K she knew of her father’s affair. She “forced” (says Freud) Herr K to admit “the scene by the lake.” (It was a scene, like in a play, just as Freud told her: those canvas trees, those references to high art, that turned into sex.)
Herr K admitted Dora was right.
FREUD
One need only turn each individual reproach back on the speaker.
The right words had been there all the time.
Dora had only to wait for the right speaker.
II
On the screen, I keep checking the time: where I am, where you are, the thickness of hours between.
I cannot wait any longer.
The thick white hotel towels are restless. They want me to get into the water. There are the white pills. Usually you snap them in half, which makes a satisfactory sound — no, the echo of a sound, no noise.
My head put the noise in.
I cannot remember the time where you are. It’s in a different zone. I look. Then away, then back again. I still cannot remember.
What’s the right time? I can wait a little longer before we speak.
Whatever time it is you will not answer, not with anything I can hear.
There is no point looking up the time any more.
And then I know the time. But it’s no use. Whatever time it is where you are, what I say will disappoint you in the end.
White invites a sacrifice.
The square white bath has a crack across its corner. I turn on the tap. I get into the bath. It bends and bows. It circles the square. A pool pools underneath. I call room service. It is not my fault, but I must leave the room and walk through the white streets under the white sun until it is fixed.
It is not my fault.