[sic] by Joshua Cody

Author:Joshua Cody
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2011-08-23T04:00:00+00:00

Now were we to approach the delusion as a dream, and if we were to some extent Freudians (which we are, of course, we eminent Victorians), many elements are clearly recognizable as “residue,” as Freud called the distorted figurations of objects we fear or desire that our waking selves refuse to acknowledge, leaving that task to the unconscious, including Dorothy Gale’s unconscious in The Wizard of Oz. In this film (premiered, incidentally, in Wisconsin, in 1939), a twelve-year-old girl, traumatized by the realization that she is homosexual, experiences an elaborate delusion in which her dreary, homophobic relatives and friends in Depression-era Kansas are transformed into celebratory marchers in a sort of gay pride parade in Technicolor. (Now I’m mixing Jung in with Freud, but who cares. “I’m a writer, not a psychologist,” he growled from downstairs; and she, just like the time before, and surely just like the next, sighed and pretended not to hear him. Wait, hold on, I’m not writing fiction.)

In real life, my mother is a gifted musician, just as she was in the morphine dream; and she suffered an emotional breakdown not unlike that experienced by my Viennese mother. The thing about my European family living in pre–World War I Alexandria was unconsciously cribbed from Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Empire, a book I’d been reading in the hospital. My father hadn’t been killed, but he had died. Budapest? A city I love, where I’ve eaten deep-fried calves’ brains for dinner, and heard folk musicians playing hammer dulcimers. I’d had a good friend in high school named Andy, who was a gifted musician but went on to study law. The Liszt Academy stands in for Northwestern University’s School of Music—a separate school, rather than a department, thus nearly a conservatory, rare for universities. Valentina was based on a college girlfriend who really is Bulgarian, really is a wonderful pianist, really is exceedingly lovely. The composers are real, I’ve met both of them; their stories are real; I’ve really written music journalism. Et cetera.

In other words, the morphine acted as the classic unreliable narrator, unleashing this elaborate yarn in the great tradition of Vladimir Nabokov, William Faulkner, and David Fincher. But if the elements of the story—the characters and motifs, the place settings and odd little details—are distortions of things I fear and desire in real life, then, as my father would have said, what’s this movie about?

It’s about guilt. I’d transferred the notion of hospitalization for treatment of an illness to imprisonment for having written an article about music. My own ambivalence about life choices—that is, the pursuit of a career in the arts and humanities, rather than in finance—thus surfaces in a classic twist ending, in a most unexpected, colorful, and terrifying manner.

The guilt of the ill—especially the guilt of those who have done nothing to help create their state—is a theme on which we’ve touched, and on which we’re sure to touch again, but for now consider the interesting notion that if a person

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