Oedipal Narratives and the Exilic Ovid

Abstract

‘…we think [for example] of the wordwriting(schreiben) and immediately before us we have the image of two men, one man carrying the other on his back…’So wrote G. Schubert in his study of dream symbolism (Die Symbolik des Traumes) published in 1814—one of many works of dream theory that served as a resource for Freud, whosemagnum opus—The Interpretation of Dreams—would appear at the turn of the century. Schubert offers the example of the nonsensical association of theword‘writing’ with theimageof two men (‘one carrying the other on his back’) in an effort to argue a thesis later challenged by the work of Freud: that a ‘daytime language of words’ exists independent of, and unaffected by, a ‘nighttime language of dreams’. Read nearly a century after Freud, the passage is ironic, as Neil Hertz has observed, largely because Schubert's exemplary ‘nonsensical’ combination of word and image is richly suggestive of one of the principal concerns of poststructuralist psychoanalysis: how writing is a process of bearing the burden of the past and shouldering the father, an (oedipal) narrative of the son coming to terms with paternal authority: ‘The weight of the older man's body, the pressure of his will give substance to the voiced word…[w]riting, Freud would have us say, is Oedipal, a coming to terms with the Father, a shouldering of the burden of the past.’