D. M. Thomas's The White Hotel - a Postmodern View: Creativ
D. M. Thomas's The White Hotel - a Postmodern View: Creative and Critical Power of Imaginary NarrativeIn this essay, I treat D. M. Thomas's The White Hotel as a kind of 'imaginary false document'. In a rigid scientific view, literary works or any artistic works are special types of false document, which would not help us discover so-called 'truth'. E.L. Doctorow argues that literary narratives, including novels, poetry and drama, are kinds of false document. However they have enough capability of revealing intuitive and creative truth better than any scientific and official documents do: 'false documents [are] more valid, more real, more truthful than the "true" documents of the politicians or the journalists or psychologists' . While he emphases on the imaginative power of literary narratives, Doctorow is against a discriminating hierarchy between scientific and imaginative narrative.False documents have an equal significance to 'imaginary ' narratives. In a postmodern sense, we cannot insist exclusively on the superiority between scientific and imaginative narratives; they are just different literary genres - different forms of same 'imaginary order'. To be a scientific or to be an imaginative narrative
The fictional Freud answers, 'No doubt fate would find it easier than I do to relieve you of your illness. One of the most significant strength of The White Hotel is the imaginary way in which this narrative reveals the socio-cultural and historical cruelty as a determinative force of Lisa's psyche. What constructs her subjectivity is her Jewishness, which is a historical determination in the field of socio-political power. In the flux of the fragmented images of self, Lisa's multivalent egos are driven by the unconscious desire, continuously transforming into an endless oscillation from Madame Cottin, to the heavily busted woman, to Vogel's sister and to the niece, etc. It is an anxiety-dream which reveals the source of her trauma, and in the novel is also a sign of the obsessional war neurosis or an holocaust. She admitted to thinking about it almost all the time' (W. When she confesses her mother's adultery to the fictional Freud, she does not consciously remember the real primal scene (the earlier scene of the three way sexual intercourse between uncle, her mother and aunt). Lisa also becomes Madame Cottin; Madame Cottin's ring helps bear her husband's death, which is not only the dream-allusion to her aunt's sorrow, but also Lisa's sorrow over her mother's death. Her unconscious desire continues to identify with various objects, things and people, creating visions of hallucinatory power: 'The lovers went on to the balcony to see the orange grove fall in the lake. The fragmented images of self may indeed indicate a 'selflessness' of the human subject; the fundamental 'self' is the play of unconscious desire, a kind of formless, shapeless, non-aesthetic and non-mental energy. ' The fictional Freud goes on to try to identify the hidden factor that causes Lisa's neurosis to break out.
Common topics in this essay:
White Hotel,
Lisa Symbolic,
Madame Cottin,
Hotel Womb,
Russian Jewish,
Anna G',
Freudian Lacanian,
Christmas Lisa,
Imaginary Symbolic,
Pleasure Principle',
white hotel,
fictional freud,
madame cottin,
'gastein journal',
unconscious desire,
mother aunt,
mother uncle,
mother's death,
primal scene,
sexual intercourse,
mother uncle died,
creative force false,
hotel mother uncle,
fictional freud concludes,
mother aunt uncle,
|
Acceptance Essays
