The Ends of Satire: Legacies of Satire in Postwar German Writing by Bowles Daniel

Author:Bowles, Daniel [Bowles, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: De Gruyter
Published: 2015-01-23T05:00:00+00:00

The Construction of Hysteria as Myth

Defined by the frigid sterility of language that chronicles her thoughts and repressed emotions, Erika Kohut reenacts through her masochism, outbursts, and sexual habitus the narratives of hysteria played out not only in the analyses of Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer, but also in the theatrical spectacles and spectacular theatrics of Jean-Martin Charcot’s patients a generation earlier.302 For Freud and Breuer, the early cases of hysteria in Anna O., Dora, and Nora came to determine the very methodology of psychoanalysis through the development of the “talking cure,” thus linking hysteria inextricably with language and speech. Yet hysteria also continually plagued Freud’s attempts to form a coherent conception of the female psyche and, in his wake, has become a central antagonist of both femininity and the theoretical considerations of feminism.303 Concomitantly, it signifies the tenebrous neurotic and psychotic disturbances for which psychoanalysis came into being. It is, to quote a colleague of Charcot’s, “A Proteus who presents himself in a thousand guises and cannot be grasped in any of them.”304 Hysteria is, as it were, a cipher for psychoanalysis as much as it is for the slippery conceptualizations of feminine identity: “It was the symptom, to put it crudely, of being a woman. And everyone still knows it.”305 Formulated more pointedly, as a product of mimesis propagated by photography, hysteria crystallizes as a myth, a second-order system of signification that pathologizes womankind and echoes the claims of sexual frigidity projected onto the female subject.

By photographing and thus documenting and preserving the hysterical paroxysms of his female patients, Charcot (one of Freud’s teachers, incidentally) created a visual model for hysterical outbursts and behavior.306 Charcot himself did not so much archive images of hysteria for posterity as he provided the conditions for the possibility of its invention and pathologization. After Charcot, hysteria is thus nothing more than a performance of a pathology, a product of a medial intervention –in short, posing for the camera. The hysteric woman, in her appropriation and proliferation of pathological symptoms, “is thus (also) an actress.”307 Through performance, the hysterical female body and its shifting symptoms and signifiers defy attempts to read them and impose upon them a diagnosable meaning. In the pathological sickness imposed by a masculine order, the hysterical female body thus remains a locus of feminine meaning hermetically sealed off, illegible and opaque to the therapeutic, ostensibly rehabilitative male gaze.

Both the imitative aspect of hysterical performance308 and resistance to signification appear in Jelinek’s novel. Unlike Charcot’s hystérie traumatique, however, the hysteria one might recognize in Erika Kohut derives less from histrionics and a desire to escape the sanitarium than, to speak with Freud, libidinal and psychic disturbances that manifest themselves variously in her acts of self-mutilation, numbness, emotional and sexual frigidity, and voyeurism. Evidence of psychological perturbations and nervous disorders proliferate in the text, which might be read as an analytical case study of hysteria (not a legitimate diagnosis). 309 These physical and psychic symptoms – Erika’s pathological behavior, that is

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