Sublime Anamnesis: Hysteria and Temporality in Thomas’s The White Hotel

Abstract

In his authors note to The White Hotel D. M.Thomas describes the of [his] novel as the landscape of hysteria, a terrain one could not travel far in ... without meeting the majestic figure of Sigmund (6). But the Freud applauded by Thomas is not the scientist but the poet, a writer possessed of myth-making power {Memories 46) *; writing about the great and beautiful modern myth of psychoanalysis, Thomas calls it a poetic, dramatic expression of a hidden {White Hotel 6). But this truth remains as elusive to psychoanalysis as it is to other forms of representation. In the fictional case history of Frau Anna G. in The White Hotel (83-1 32), Thomas s Freud indeed gets it wrong. He interprets the meaning of Frau Anna's (Lisa Erdman's) history in terms of sexual hysteria2 when her destiny in the narrative reveals her suffering to be a premonition of her death in the Shoah the massacre by the Nazis of over 33,000 Ukrainian Jews in two days at the ravine of BabiYar in 1941. Freud says that hysterics suffer from reminiscences, but Thomas's Lisa suffers from anticipations. Her hysterical hallucinations during lovemaking and the acute pains in her left breast and abdomen are indecipherable presentiments of the Nazi jackboot that cracks into her breast and pelvis as she lies in the ravine in the massacre and of the bayonet that is thrust