"She Who Steps Along": Gradiva, Telecommunications, History

Abstract

was able to return love which was making its way from unconscious into consciousness, but doctor cannot. had herself been object of earlier, repressed love; her figure at once [sofort] offered liberated current of love a desirable aim. To indicate and [Auskunftsmitteln und Surrogaten] of which doctor therefore makes use to help him to [nahern] with more or less success to model [Vorbilt] of a cure by love which has been shown us by our author--all this would us too far from task before Sigmund Freud, Delusions and Dreams in Jensen's Gradiva A receptionist must know how connections are tolerably made, determining which opening will establish communication between two parties or two things--in brief, she must understand how to manipulate switchboard or she would lose her post. Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book Introduction As is clear from terms in which citation above is couched, Sigmund Freud's 1906 study, Delusions and Dreams in Jensen's is in part concerned with directness, proximity, and distance. Although certain expedients and substitutes are an irreducible part of doctor's method, his task is nonetheless to reduce dimension of distance and detour as far as possible: he is to approximate a certain immediacy, modeled by Gradiva. To indicate relation between mediation and immediacy, however, Freud writes, would take us too far from task before us. In this paper, I intend to follow up, not the task before us, but rather very detour that Freud cuts off--to proceed along lines that he indicates but does not follow in passage cited, in order to end up much too far away from immediate task. That is, I will not privilege immediacy and proximity over distance and detour; rather, I will examine relation between two, by analyzing technical structures of mediation that enable (an approximation to) immediacy in Gradiva. I do not specify here whether I mean Freud's 1906 study or Jensen's 1903 novel. Indeed, for reasons that will become clearer in course of this analysis, I will consistently resist drawing a simple distinction between Jensen's and Freud's reading of it; rather, I will consider Freud's Jensen's (or Freud's Jensen's Gradiva) as its own entity, text-in-its-reception. This is not to say, however, that Gradiva, character in Jensen's novel as it is received by Freud, receives a determinable identity that lacked, or that Freud's reading of gives us more direct (or, for that matter, more mediated) access to a who could be considered outside of inter-textual relation in which she is caught. In fact, I argue that, insofar as can be said to have an identity, this identity is constituted by particularity of relation between mediation and directness, between an original context (in Jensen's novel, say) and a reception (in Freud's study), in which she participates. By reframing distinction between mediation and directness, figure of allows us instead to read structures of mediation that allow direct communication between present and past texts. I will show this through a reading of Gradiva's footprint, which connects first-century C.E. Pompeii with (fictional) early twentieth-century Germany, just as a telephonic receptionist connects disparate parties across distances on a technical apparatus. My task here, too, is a receptionist's task: establishing a tolerable connection between two quotations with which I opened this paper. Although nothing in either text immediately authorizes me to place them in communication--Avital Ronell's text does not address Gradiva, for example--it should be clear that Ronell, like Freud, attends in passage cited to distance, closeness, mediation, and immediacy; moreover, her attention to teletechnological figures suggests that distance and detour may be an irreducible dimension of connection or reception. …