Family Realisms: Freud and Greek Tragedy

Abstract

MEANWHILE. You can begin in medias res, but you cannot begin with ‘meanwhile’ – at once the most devious and the least dispensable of temporal markers in any would-be realistic narrative. ‘Meanwhile’, upstairs or downstairs, across the street, or on the other side of the world – a relationship is implied and established on the basis of nothing more than a timely coincidence. Like the pseudo-causal narrative logic of post hoc ergo propter hoc – what comes afterwards follows from what comes before – ‘meanwhile’ covers a multitude of otherwise unconnecting gaps between two places. I'd like to begin with a particularly stretched and specific example of this pseudo-relation – constructing a potentially realistic and familial tie between otherwise widely separated persons and events. My temporal tie took place – linked two places – exactly a hundred and fifty years ago. In May and June of 1856, on the coast of north Devon, in Ilfracombe to be precise, two writers were visiting for a few weeks. One of them, following a craze of the time among clerics, critics, and others, was zoologising on the seashore, collecting and analysing specimens of rock-pool life. The other, when not assisting him, was writing an essay about the German social thinker Wilhelm Heinrich von Riehl. Meanwhile, several hundred miles to the south and east, in a small town called Freiberg in Moravia, the young wife of a wool merchant had just given birth to her first child, born on 6 May, two days before the writers travelled down from London to Devon. George Eliot kept a journal of her visit to Ilfracombe with G. H. Lewes, but no details survive of the as yet unhistoric event of the birth of Sigmund Freud.