Nora Foster Stovel, University of Alberta
Tatiana’s letter is an extraordinary example of a literary legacy. Originating in Alexander Pushkin’s 1833 narrative poem Eugene Onegin,[1] orchestrated by Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky in his 1878 opera, choreographed by John Cranko in his 1965 ballet, and finally returning to literary form in D. M. Thomas’s 1981 novel The White Hotel,[2] Tatiana’s letter is an eloquent example of intertextuality through different historical periods and artistic genres. Tracing the peregrinations of Tatiana’s letter through these several settings can illuminate its various artistic contexts and demonstrate how these versions resonate through Thomas’s quintessentially postmodernist fiction to provide a palimpsest that complicates his portrait of female subjectivity.
Pushkin composed Eugene Onegin, subtitled A Novel in Verse, in 1823-31. Tatiana, the solitary ingenue, is addicted to novels, especially epistolary novels written in a romantic vein: “She found in a romantic story / All one might care to be or know; / Living the chapters through, she’d glory / In Richardson as in Rousseau” (2, 29). Clearly the reference here is to Samuel Richardson, author of Clarissa (1747-48), the most influential epistolary novel in English from the eighteenth century. “And so her quick imagination / Reveals herself in every scene; / She is the novelist’s creation: / Julie, Clarissa, or Delphine …” (3, 10). Tatiana’s identification with Clarissa does not bode well for her future fate. Predictably, Tatiana falls in love with the Byronic misanthrope Onegin. Not as villainous as Clarissa’s Lovelace, this cynical sophisticate models himself more on George Gordon’s morose Childe Harold and rakish Don Juan. Not only does Onegin keep Byron’s works in his library, he even hangs the British bard’s portrait on the wall.
Pushkin borrows the epistolary element from Richardson in highlighting two letters that frame his tale of romantic passion. Tatiana writes a letter to Onegin, declaring her undying love: “I write you, and my act is serving / As my confession. Why say more? / I know of what I am deserving—That you should scorn me, or ignore …” (174). She explains her compulsion to confess: “It was decreed … the will of Heaven / Ordains it so: I am your own. / All my past life has had one meaning— / That I should meet you. God on High / Has sent you, and I shall be leaning / On your protection till I die …” (176). She wonders, perhaps prophetically: “Are you a guardian angel to me? / Or but a tempter to undo me?” Still, she concludes: “I wait: when once your look has spoken, / The heart once more with hope will glow, / Or a deserved reproach will show / The painful dream forever broken!” (176). Tatiana predicts her destiny accurately in those last lines, as Onegin responds dispassionately: “I must confess, though loth to hurt you, / I was not born for happiness; / I am unworthy of your virtue; / I’d bring you nothing but distress” (4, 14). The affair ends most ironically as, years later, the jaded Onegin falls hopelessly in love with the matured Tatiana, now married to his kinsman Prince Gremin.
It is then Onegin’s turn to write a letter, a declaration of adoration, which forms an ironic mirror image of Tatiana’s original epistle to him, as he explains, “How justly now I am afflicted”: “If you but knew how agonizing / It is to parch with hot desire, / By mental effort tranquilizing / The blood that burns with frantic fire; / To long to clasp your knees, and, throbbing / With anguish, pour out at your feet / Appeal, complaint, confession, sobbing / The wretched story out, complete—” (292). Onegin appreciates the irony of the reversal, as he concludes his letter: “Now I am at your mercy, guided / But by your will; my fate’s decided …” (292). But Tatiana disdains to respond to his letter. When he importunes her in person, she replies: “I love you (why should I dissemble?) / But I became another’s wife / I shall be true to him through life” (8, 47). Lamenting that “happiness was so possible, so close,” Tatiana rejects Onegin. Declaring, “my fate is fixed” (8, 47), she leaves him forever. Thus, the letters provide a framework for Pushkin’s portrayal of passion, underlining through their parallels the irony of this ill-fated, or ill-timed, love.
Tchaikovsky modeled his most famous opera, Eugene Onegin, subtitled Lyric Scenes, very closely on Pushkin’s influential poem. Remaining faithful to his original in this opera, composed for a Russian audience that would be familiar with Pushkin’s poem, Tchaikovsky nevertheless shifts attention toward his heroine by focusing his opening on Tatiana rather than Onegin. This shift reflects the status Tatiana had by that time attained as the “first lady” of Russian literature.
Tatiana’s letter provides one of the most brilliant arias in this opera—a dramatic, as well as an operatic, challenge for any diva. Reputedly, Tchaikovsky composed this musical monologue, first suggested by singer Elizaveta Lavrovskaya, in one night of feverish composition before he even planned the rest of the opus. Although Tchaikovsky employed Konstantin Shilovsky to compose dialogue to replace the narrative voice of Pushkin’s poem, he preserved Pushkin’s words precisely to provide the libretto for this aria. The composer’s setting of Tatiana’s letter is a musical imitation of Pushkin’s poetic epistle—its pulsing rhythms echoing the impetuous ingenue’s reckless passion and perhaps reflecting the passionate love letters that Tchaikovsky received from Antonina Milyukova, the piano student whom he married in 1877 with such disastrous consequences.
As in Pushkin’s poem, Tatiana’s epistolary outburst in Tchaikovsky’s opera is answered mockingly by Onegin’s dispassionate response and then mirrored ironically by his desperate declaration of passion in the concluding scene. Thus, the letters structure the entire opera, just as they did Pushkin’s verse narrative, providing the most memorable musical moments in the work. Here again, although he exhibits greater license in other aspects of the narrative, Tchaikovsky preserves Pushkin’s poem conscientiously in his operatic version of Onegin’s letters, composing a musical setting that mirrors the libretto eloquently. Onegin’s rejection of Tatiana’s love is a musical monument to indifference, whereas the rushing rhythms of his final aria reflect the recklessness of her original declaration of devotion.
Choreographer John Cranko, as Artistic Director of the Stuttgart Ballet, created his balletic version of Eugene Onegin in 1965, although it did not receive its North American premiere until 1969, when the production took New York by storm, according to New York Times dance critic Clive Barnes, when it was first performed by the Stuttgart Ballet Company at Lincoln Center.
Music Director Kurt-Heinz Stolze, perhaps wisely, chose to eschew Tchaikovsky’s familiar score for the opera and, instead, selected lesser-known works by the Russian composer—perhaps because Cranko required greater license in translating a literary work to a wordless art form and wished to avoid close comparison with his poetic and operatic predecessors. A Western audience, less familiar with the Russian masters, would also be less disapproving of any departure from the original. So Stolze selected themes from Tchaikovsky’s less famous 1885 opera The Caprices of Oxana, his symphonic tone poem Romeo and Juliet (1869), The Seasons (1876), and his Compositions for Piano (volumes 51-53), especially the Piano-Cycle op. 37, arranging and orchestrating the themes into leitmotifs for Cranko’s kinetic narrative.
The scene of Tatiana’s letter posed a problem for the choreographer because balletomanes would be impatient with a motionless ballerina. But Cranko’s imagination overcame the challenge of rendering an epistle in dance form. He translates Tatiana’s letter in a mimetic metamorphosis through the use of a mirror motif and a dream sequence. As Tatiana sits at her desk writing silently, her head soon droops onto her arms, and she drifts into sleep. In her dream, Onegin enters through the cheval-glass of her bedroom (like Nijinski through the window in his Spectre de la Rose). A passionate pas de deux ensues, the mirror image of the polite pas de deux the pair danced in the previous scene when they were first introduced. Onegin then departs, as he arrived, through the mirror. Thus, Cranko succeeds in translating Pushkin’s poem into a plastic, visual mode through dance and stage design without the aid of literary language. But perhaps Cranko’s conception was inspired by Pushkin’s poem, for Tatiana’s original letter declares: “You came in dreams: I feared to waken, / I loved your image even then; … / Just now, did I not see you flitting / Through the dim room where I am sitting, / To stand, dear vision, by my bed?” (175-76). D. M. Thomas will preserve both mirror motif and dream device in his novel The White Hotel.
In Cranko’s balletic version, Onegin responds in the flesh to Tatiana’s message the following morning. With mute eloquence, he rejects her ingenuous declaration of devotion dramatically by tearing her letter into little pieces and pressing them between her palms. She lets them fall, like leaves, as she raises her hands to cover her face in chagrin. Onegin’s own missive, the mirror image of Tatiana’s, meets a similar fate. After a passionate pas de deux that is more Apache dance than supported adagio, Tatiana tears up his letter and returns it to him. Letting the pieces cascade to the floor, in an eloquent echo of her earlier gesture, Onegin leaves Tatiana forever, whereas in the poem and opera, it is Tatiana who abandons Onegin. This alteration focuses the drama on the ballerina by both opening and concluding the ballet with Tatiana, rather than Onegin.
Tatiana’s letter returns to a literary context in D. M. Thomas’s quintessentially postmodernist novel, The White Hotel (182-84). So the literary legacy comes full circle, originating in Pushkin’s “Novel in Verse” and culminating in Thomas’s novel in poetry and prose. Not coincidentally, Thomas published his translation of Pushkin’s verse, entitled The Bronze Horseman and Other Poems, in 1982, the year after he published The White Hotel, suggesting that he was translating Pushkin while composing his novel. The connections with Tchaikovsky’s opera are also explicit, whereas the connections with Cranko’s ballet are implicit, as I will demonstrate. While The White Hotel mirrors its literary origin quite clearly, I will argue that it also gains resonance from the echoes of the operatic and balletic metamorphoses of Eugene Onegin, weaving these strands into a complex postmodernist tapestry.
Lisa Erdman, the central character of The White Hotel, suffers from inexplicable pains in her left breast and pelvic region, as well as a chronic respiratory condition, plus hallucinations that accompany any attempt at sexual intercourse. Consequently, she enters analysis with Professor Sigmund Freud, one of the dramatis personae of The White Hotel, who diagnoses a sexual hysteria. Lisa offers her analyst two pieces of writing—first a set of fantastically erotic verses entitled Don Giovanni and written between the staves of Mozart’s opera, and subsequently an expanded third-person prose version called The Gastein Journal, written in a child’s exercise book—which Freud plans to publish as a case study named Frau Anna G.
Letters play just as critical a role in Thomas’s narrative as in Pushkin’s poem. In the epistolary Prologue which provides a framework for the novel, Freud writes to a colleague that Lisa’s pseudocyesis lends credence to the theories couched in his 1920 essay, Beyond the Pleasure Principle: “One of my patients, a young woman suffering from a severe hysteria, has just ‘given birth’ to some writings which seem to lend support to my theory: an extreme of libidinous phantasy combined with an extreme of morbidity. It is as if Venus looked in her mirror and saw the face of Medusa” (12-13). Freud’s analogy may reflect Thomas’s epigraph to The White Hotel, quoted from W. B. Yeats’s poem “Meditations in Time of Civil War,” from The Tower (1928): “We had fed the heart on fantasies, / The Heart’s grown brutal from the fare; / More substance in our enmities / Than in our love …”(n.p.). The application of this epigraph and of Freud’s analogy become apparent in Lisa’s final fate.
The links which connect Thomas’s novel to both Pushkin’s poem and Tchaikovsky’s opera are quite explicit. Appropriately, Lisa Erdman is an opera singer by profession. Curiously, Freud protects Lisa’s privacy in his published case study, Frau Anna G., by identifying her as a cellist rather than a singer, throwing “a mask over her true identity” (161-62), as he puts it. So the male psychoanalyst deprives the female patient of her voice; instead, he provides her with a cello, an instrument with potent phallic connotations. Who is being psychoanalyzed here, one wonders—patient or doctor? Thomas’s reference to “the beautiful modern myth of psychoanalysis” (n.p.) in his Author’s Note suggests that Freud is the real patient in this novel. The “mask” that Freud places over Lisa’s true identity may also reflect the painful prosthesis, which Freud terms a “monster” (161), that his cancer of the jaw, result of chain-smoking cigars, forces him to wear during his terminal illness. Significantly, in “The Health Resort” segment of The White Hotel, Lisa Erdman is summoned to La Scala in Milan to sing the role of Tatiana in a production of Eugene Onegin, because the Kiev diva, Vera Serebryakova, has broken her arm in a fall, and the understudy, Lucia, is not fluent in Russian. Lisa is so overwhelmed by the opportunity that she suffers from an attack of asthma that threatens to deprive her of her voice. Ultimately, Lisa replaces Vera as understudy in more than just the role of Tatiana. Following the death of the diva in childbirth, Lisa marries Vera’s husband, Victor Berenstein, and mothers her son, Kolya.
Several significant letters are embedded in the omniscient narrative of “The Health Resort.” When Victor Berenstein writes to Lisa Erdman to propose marriage to her, he explains that he has been invited to produce Mussorgsky’s 1874 opus Boris Godunov for the Kiev Opera, but that he was making it a condition of his acceptance that Lisa be invited to sing the role of Marina, bride of the Pretender. Lisa self-consciously imitates Pushkin and Tchaikovsky by couching her reply to Victor’s proposals in verses that deliberately echo Tatiana’s letter to Onegin: “As if I were a child, I tremble: / The pen is shaking in my hand. / Tanya could not her thoughts dissemble; / My thoughts—I do not understand” (182). Lisa articulates the parallel: “In one way only I resemble / Reckless Tatiana—that my breast / Is all on fire and cannot rest” (182). She explains how she differs from Pushkin’s ingenue: “It is too late to teach my heart, / Which is worn through, Tatiana’s part, / To flower, and open, as your bride …” (183). Anticipating her fearful fate, Lisa wonders: “I do not know why I am frightened / To pick the blossom that I crave, / As if my body were a grave …”(183). Lisa then echoes Tatiana’s letter explicitly: “Who are you? Angel of salvation, / Or an insidious temptation? / And who am I? A still naive / Young girl in wrinkled flesh …” (184).
Finally, she conveys her response to Victor’s invitation to sing the role of Marina: “So be it, then! I make my choice. / I shall not come to play the Polish / Tsarina” (184). She gives as her reason: “The throat is hoarse that once was tender. / … Harsh as the raven, / Who was almost a nightingale” (184). Lisa does accede to Victor’s proposal of marriage, however: “Yes, I will come, though not to sing. / Except, perhaps—behind the curtain” (184). As a postscript, Lisa rehearses Tatiana’s own lines: “‘Perhaps this is all idleness, / Delusions of an inexperienced soul, / And what is fated is something quite different … / Imagine: I am here alone! / No one understands me! …’ For a few moments, waiting for the ink to dry, she was a lovesick girl of the 1820s, foolishly and recklessly laying bare her heart to a cynic” (184), Thomas concludes.
Lisa’s imitation of Tatiana’s letter is not the only significant epistle in “The Health Resort” section of The White Hotel. Sigmund Freud writes to Lisa in 1931 to ask her permission to publish his case study, Frau Anna G. Lisa’s letter of response to Freud holds the key to this labyrinthine character portrait because in it Lisa reveals her deception of Freud—and hence exposes his own false diagnosis and the prejudices about female sexuality that underlay them. Thus, “Thomas’s fictional Freud aids in deconstructing the Freud that has become culturally constructed fiction.”[3] Hutcheon observes, “The White Hotel is, like post-structuralist feminist theory, a contestation of many of the bases of humanistic discourse.”[4]
Lisa’s long letter to Freud confirms what one has already suspected—namely that Lisa may be romantically attached to her analyst in what is commonly referred to as “transference.” She tells him that in his (false) diagnosis he was “penetrating far more deeply into me than anyone else has ever done” (163). She confesses that she deliberately copied her erotic verses between the staves of her score of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni—recalling Byron’s poem Don Juan, so relevant to Eugene Onegin—in order to pique his interest. In those verses, Lisa gives her lover the identity of Freud’s son Martin, who had been a prisoner of war, as Freud recalls telling her. She writes: “I was split open / by your son, Professor, and now come back, a broken / woman” (20). The fact that Freud gives Lisa the name of his beloved daughter Anna in his case study, in which she is named “Frau Anna G.,” also suggests that Lisa’s attachment may be unconsciously shared by her analyst in this rather incestuous nexus of relationships. The even stranger fact that Lisa predicts accurately the death of both Freud’s daughter Sophie and his grandson Heinz suggests that a superrational relationship may exist between doctor and patient.
The influence of Pushkin’s poem and Tchaikovsky’s opera in Thomas’s novel are thus rendered explicit in the use of Tatiana’s letter and the opera motif. Lisa considers she was “only a medium for Tchaikovsky’s music and Pushkin’s words” (138), and she echoes poem and opera explicitly when she twice repeats Tatiana’s lament: “Happiness was so possible, so close!” (142-43).
There are also implicit suggestions of the influence of Cranko’s ballet on Thomas’s novel— although the fact that Lisa was a dedicated ballet student until her developing female form put an end to her dance career may constitute an explicit link. The influence of Cranko’s choreography becomes most apparent in Thomas’s emphasis on mirror metaphors and dream devices, echoing Cranko’s pivotal use of the mirror motif and dream sequence in his balletic translation of Tatiana’s letter scene. In the epistolary Prologue to the novel, Freud introduces the mirror analogy in his statement: “It is as if Venus looked in her mirror and saw the face of Medusa” (13). Mirrored images permeate The White Hotel, reflecting the fractured psyche of the protagonist, as The White Hotel “develops repeated scenes of reflection-distortion.”[5]
Freud’s mirror metaphor is echoed in Lisa’s own letter to Freud. She explains the origin of her sexual frigidity when, as a child, she observed her mother Marya and her mother’s identical twin sister Magda engaged in a sexual act with Magda’s husband: “I thought I was seeing my mother’s (or perhaps my aunt’s) face reflected in a mirror; but no, they were both there. I thought my mother (or perhaps my aunt) was kneeling in prayer; my uncle kneeling behind her. Quite clearly it was intercourse a tergo” (165). Lisa wished to believe it was her aunt having intercourse with her uncle, while her mother overlooked the scene, but later Lisa acknowledges to herself that she always knew it was her mother—her identity revealed by her silver crucifix—who was engaged in adulterous intercourse “more ferarum” (172). This traumatic vision triggers what Lisa terms her “mirror phobia” (172). Newman says, “Lisa’s mirror phobia coincides with her reading of Freud’s case of the Wolf Man, who was obsessed with intercourse more ferarum,” and notes that the Wolf Man blends the mirror motif with intertextual connections to Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, for “The Wolf Man’s wife is referred to as ‘Tatiana’ from Eugene Onegin [and] his sister is named Anna.… The combination of human and savage captivates Lisa and finds expression in her attribution of Medusa/Ceres … to her mother’s and aunt’s mirroring.”[6]
This tell-tale crucifix, which Lisa fingers in moments of stress, plays a significant role in Lisa’s life, as well as providing an umbilical link with the mother and with “the preoedipal stage which psychoanalytic theory locates as central in the investigation of the mother-child bond,” as Stearns and Bartkowski theorize in “The Lost Icon in The White Hotel.”[7] Freud believes that Lisa’s toying with the crucifix indicates that she is lying, and he is right in a way, as we will see.
This traumatic vision triggers Lisa’s “mirror phobia” (172), but it also inspires her reflections in her letter to Freud on the mirroring of good and evil: “the grimacing woman, joyful; and the smiling woman, sad. Medusa and Ceres, as you so brilliantly say! [Freud said Venus and Medusa, not Medusa and Ceres.] It may sound crazy, but I think the idea of the incest troubles me far more profoundly as a symbol than as a real event. Good and evil coupling, to make the world” (171).
Lisa’s metaphor of monstrous coupling is rendered horrifically real at Babi Yar, reflecting not only her own and Freud’s emblem, but also the quotation from Yeats’s “Meditations in Time of Civil War” employed by Thomas for his epigraph to The White Hotel.
The dream device, suggested by Pushkin and developed by Cranko, is also elaborated by Thomas in The White Hotel. Sigmund Freud, who has been called the father of dream psychology, introduces the subject in his letters to his colleagues concerning Lisa Erdman’s hysterical condition in the epistolary Prologue to the novel. The fantasies that Lisa describes in Don Giovanni and The Gastein Journal are as surreal as dreams. Combining sex and violence, they play right into the hands of the author of Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1919) in their union of death and desire: as Lisa acknowledges, “if I’m not thinking about sex, I’m thinking about death” (77). Freud is indeed excited by Lisa’s surreal visions, which he terms “libidinous phantasy” (13).
Sigmund Freud is not the only interpreter of dreams, however, and Thomas’s novel can be seen as an attempt to bridge the split between Freud and Jung that is given a precursory mention in the 1909 letter of Sandor Ferenczi to his fiancée Gisella that forms the Prologue to the novel. In “The Spirit of The White Hotel,” Marsha Kinder argues that Thomas invokes Freud and Jung:
The White Hotel encourages us to read its various texts like a series of recurring dreams, not only in the Freudian manner of tracing multiple associations to key recurring images in the manifest content in order to decode the repressed infantile wishes from the dreamer’s personal history that control the dream’s deep structure, but also in the Jungian manner of tracing the mythical resonance of archetypal images both to the prehistoric past and to the future and of converting them into germinal images for the active imagination.…[8]
The dream motif also connects Thomas’s novel with Pushkin’s poem. On January 20, the eve of Saint Agnes, patroness of virgins, Tatiana, an inveterate dreamer, sleeps with a mirror under her pillow in the hope of seeing her future husband in a tradition memorialized in Keats’s 1820 poem “The Eve of St. Agnes.” Tatiana has a surrealistic nightmare that would have fascinated Freud, in which a bear chases her to a house where she discovers Onegin as a master of monsters—perhaps inspiring the monstrous men who inhabit The White Hotel, including Freud’s Wolf Man, who so fascinates Lisa Erdman. Horrified by her nightmare, Tatiana searches for clues in a book by Martin Zadeka, a renowned interpreter of dreams. Tatiana’s nightmare may prefigure Lisa’s.
Lisa Erdman’s fantasies of death and destruction involve the four elements, as she imagines the visitors to the White Hotel being destroyed by fire and flood. She also envisions people falling through the sky to their death from cable cars and ski lifts and being buried alive by avalanches. These deliberate fantasies elaborate the involuntary hallucinations of “a storm at sea, and a fire at a hotel” (86) that forever afflict Lisa, along with searing pains in the left breast and pelvic region, during her attempts at sexual intercourse, in fantasies that John Burt Foster, Jr., categorizes as “Magic Realism.”
Not until the penultimate section entitled “The Sleeping Carriage,” based on Dina Pronicheva’s account in Anatoli Kuznetsov’s 1970 documentary Babi Yar, do readers understand the origin of Lisa’s dreams, when her fantasies are fulfilled in a brutal bayonet rape. Yanking the silver crucifix from the neck of Lisa Erdman-Berenstein, as she lies dying in a mass grave, an SS soldier senses life and kicks his jackboot first into her left breast and then into her pelvis. Then a gravedigger, unable to rise to his colleague’s challenge to “fuck her” (219), rapes her with his bayonet. Lisa’s hallucinations are realized when, years later, Kiev attempts to eliminate the mass of corpses of Babi Yar by first burying them, then burning them, then flooding them, but even these efforts fail to eradicate this modern nightmare.
Thus, Thomas disproves the roots of Freudian psychoanalysis, for Lisa’s pain originates not in the past but in the future. Freud acknowledged Lisa’s psychic powers of prescience, demonstrated in her prophecy of the death of his daughter. “Lisa’s physiological clairvoyance pinpoints a major shift in literary assumptions from nineteenth-century classic realism to magic realism, as new attitudes toward epistemology and historical experience transform the author’s handling of felt history.”[9] Prescience is a power that Lisa shares with Tatiana, whose St. Agnes Eve dream prophesies Onegin’s killing of Lensky when she envisions the light flash on the knife before Onegin plunges it into Lensky’s heart. Lisa also dreams of lightning, and her vision is realized in the flash of light on a bayonet blade. Lisa writes to Freud, “Clarification! Anagnorisis! I’ve just sung in a new oratorio called Oedipus Rex—can you tell?! I like the idea of clarification. ‘More light! More light!’ More light—and more love” (178). In the final section of The White Hotel, entitled “The Camp” and set in the Promised Land, Lisa says, “‘I think wherever there is love, of any kind, there is hope of salvation.’ She had an image of a bayonet flashing over spread thighs, and corrected herself hastily: ‘Wherever there is love in the heart’“ (237).
Thomas defeats Freud and the tyranny of trauma by engulfing past, present, and future in Lisa’s transcendental vision of timelessness. Linda Hutcheon states: “The overt use of multiple intertexts (Freud’s case histories, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Anatoli Kuznetsov’s Babi Yar, the operas Don Giovanni and Eugene Onegin) suggests a textualized refusal to ‘express’ either singular subjectivity or single meaning.”[10] But Lisa has a vision of unity: “It was not a memory from the past but the past itself, as alive, as real; and she knew that she and the child of forty years ago were the same person.… She was still there, even at the beginning of all things. And when she looked in the opposite direction, towards the unknown future, death, the endless extent beyond death, she was there still” (190). So Freud’s interpretation of Lisa’s White Hotel as the mother’s womb proves a partial truth, for the White Hotel unites birth and death, as a symbol of the soul.
Thomas’s use of three temporal moments as the cause of Lisa’s “trauma” works to dislodge the primacy of both Freud and psychoanalytic narratives that categorize individual experiences into general theories of subject formation. Hutcheon writes: “The empirical basis of the humanist concept of knowledge—trust in observation and experiment—is called into question through the novel’s challenge to ‘Freud’s’ psychoanalytic reading of the protagonists’ ailments: the cause of her pain is not to be found in her individual (but universalizable) psychic past as a human, but rather in her collective (though individually suffered) future as a Jew at a certain moment in history.”[11] In one of his letters to Lisa, Freud quotes Heraclitus: “The soul of man is a far country, which cannot be approached or explored.” But Freud dares to doubt the classical maxim, commenting suggestively: “It is not altogether true, I think; but success must depend on a fair harbour opening in the cliffs” (174). D. M. Thomas, however, aims to prove Heraclitus correct, as he concludes his horrific account of the Nazis’ mass murder of Jews at Babi Yar with this passage:
The soul of man is a far country, which cannot be approached or explored. Most of the dead were poor and illiterate. But every single one of them had dreamed dreams, seen visions and had amazing experiences.… Though most of them had never lived outside the Podol slum, their lives and histories were as rich and complex as Lisa Erdman-Berenstein’s. If a Sigmund Freud had been listening and taking notes from the time of Adam, he would still not fully have explored even a single group, even a single person. (220)
Perhaps this is the purpose of fiction—a ventriloquism of the imagination that allows the mind to penetrate the numbing effect of numbers by entering one spirit and multiplying that by six million. Thomas concludes, there are “a quarter of a million white hotels in Babi Yar” (221).
In conclusion, then, is Lisa only Lisa, as her pine tree vision proves, or is she also Tatiana? Her chameleon character, signified by her various proper names and pseudonyms—Elizabeth, Lisa, Anna—and her several family names—Morozova, Erdman, Berenstein (225)—suggests a Cubist portrait by Pablo Picasso presenting profile and full face simultaneously to portray a splintered persona in the several segments of the novel that view the character from various perspectives. “On a first reading, this array of names appears as disarray; the confusion, however, makes the reader confront the complexity of naming—the always provisional constitution of the self in language.”[12] Lisa’s “multiple self-inscriptions and the extensive intertextual layerings all work to combat any fixed identity for either protagonist or text, and any fixed identification for the reader.”[13] The intertextual repercussions from Pushkin’s poem, Tchaikovsky’s opera, and Cranko’s ballet give an impression of a palimpsest, which, as Newman notes, forces the reader to “read backward as we move forward. Through repetition of images we experience no erasure; instead we have memory and revision of memory.”[14] Ultimately, this intertextuality suggests Lisa Erdman is not only quintessentially herself, but also everywoman.
NOTES
[1]
Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, trans. Babette Deutsch, The Poems, Prose and Plays of Alexander
Pushkin, ed. Avrahm Yarmolinsky (New York: Random House, 1936) 111-314. All
references are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text.
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[2]
D. M. Thomas, The White Hotel
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981). All references are to this edition and are
cited parenthetically in the text.
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[3]
Frances Bartkowski and Catherine Stearns, “The Lost Icon in The White Hotel,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 1.2 (1990): 295.
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[4]
Linda Hutcheon, “Subject in/of/to History and His Story,” Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism 16.1 (1986): 83.
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[5]
Bartkowski and Stearns 289.
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[6]
Robert D. Newman, “Thomas’ The White
Hotel: Mirrors, Triangles, and Sublime Repression,” Modern Fiction Studies 34.2 (1989): 198.
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[7]
Bartkowski and Stearns 183.
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[8]
Marsha Kinder, “The Spirit of the White Hotel,” Humanities in Society 4.2-3 (1981): 150.
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[9]
John Burt Foster, Jr., “Magic Realism in The
White Hotel: Compensatory Vision and the Transformation of Classic
Realism,” Southern Humanities Review
20.3 (1986): 217.
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[10]
Hutcheon 84.
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[11]
Hutcheon 84.
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[12]
Bartkowski and Stearns 28485.
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[13]
Hutcheon 87.
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[14]
Newman 195.
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