Erotic literature -- History and criticism; Psychoanalysis and literature; Sex in literature
Now Octavius is Gautier, who makes a work of art cut of the dream,
preserves it for humanity and gives us a valuable thing of beauty.
Gautier makes up for the ugliness of to-day by preserving the beauty
of the past. Gautier satisfies his longing for the old pagan world now
vanished by making his hero live in it and realise the love of one of
its courtesans.
This story reveals the author as much as his _Madamoiselle de Maupin_
does. We have the same Gautier for whom only the material world
existed, the Gautier who was obsessed by sex, hated Christianity and
worshipped art alone. The trained psychoanalyst who wishes to go deep
into the unconscious of Gautier will, I think, find some perverse
qualities like fetichism, revealed not only in this tale but in others.
Gautier pursues the motive of this story in several other tales. He
lives constantly in his fantasies amidst the beauties of the ancient
world. It is hard to believe that many of his tales of phantom love
scenes laid in ancient times were not actually dreamed by him.
His novel, _The Mummy's Foot_, his stories, _The Golden Chain_, _One
of Cleopatra's Nights_, _King Candaules_, and two that are considered
his best, _The Dead Leman_ and _The Fleece of Gold_, show the
unconscious worshipper of physical beauty in Gautier. All these stories
may be analysed like dreams, for they are creatures of the author's
imagination whereby he consoled himself for the loss of the pagan
world. He was really a pagan transported into our time and he lived
those times over in his stories.
III
Kipling's dream story _The Brushwood Boy_ is a very good confirmation
of Freud's theories. We will analyse it psychoanalytically; it will be
seen that the artificial dream in it is inspired by the same causes
as real dreams are. The story was published in the _Century Magazine_,
December, 1895, and appeared in book form in 1901, a year after
Freud's great work on Dreams had been issued. Kipling had no knowledge
of Freud's theories, but he shows his hero suffering an unconscious
repression; Georgie saw for many years visions of a girl he had met in
childhood and apparently forgotten. He dreamed of her often and these
dreams give us an insight into the hero's anxieties and longings.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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