Being and Seeming: "The White Hotel"

Abstract

this novel had on them, and their enthusiastic response brought Thomas world-wide attention, including the belated and sometimes grudging respect of his countrymen in England. The excitement generated by the novel stems in part from the author's calculated subversion of twentieth-century science and metaphysics, and in part from his handling of a venerable theme: the multitudinous ways appearance and diverge. The author realizes these ends through a complex layering of fictive elements: he deploys several narrative voices, he doubles or mirrors his plot details, he introduces echoes of myth, and, most importantly, he chronicles the entire course of his central character's psychoanalysis. With its gradual penetrating of the psyche's elaborate and destructive defenses, psychoanalysis is an ideal structural device for a fiction concerning appearance and reality. The Freudian therapist deals with a world of deceptive appearances that he or she must pierce before reaching psychological bedrock. Indeed, the system resembles those forms of philosophical idealism based on the idea-it has roots in Christian, Gnostic, and Neoplatonic thought-that imperfect sensory apparatus makes direct apprehension of a hidden difficult. But Freudian psychoanalysis does not countenance an ultimately transcendental reality. Freud rejected all forms of supernaturalism. Though he saw that the unconscious lies beneath many layers of repression, he resolutely refused to believe that the psychic mechanisms he studied might have ontological or epistemological analogues. Thus in his writings he often refers to a positivistic reality that the healthy mind must recognize and accept. For this principle Freud favored a Greek word, ananke, and his fictional counterpart in Thomas's novel puns on it when he makes Anna G.-he would pronounce the G hard-the case-history pseudonym for Lisa Erdman.