Significant Moments: Deep Structure

Pathetic fallacy is the word for the literary rhetorical device when the weather reflects the mood of the story. It is a broader term meaning the projection of human emotions onto phenomena in the natural world.

There are several instances of pathetic fallacy in my book, Significant Moments.

Richard Wagner's operatic masterpiece, Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg takes place on and about June 21, St. John's Day -- the day the summer solstice occurs, that is, the longest day of the year.

The action of James Joyce's novel Ulysses takes place on a single day, June 16.   Joyce chose the date as it was the date of his first outing with his wife-to-be, Nora Barnacle; they walked to the Dublin suburb of Ringsend.

A section of my book, Significant Moments comprises a fictional letter from Sigmund Freud to his best, perhaps his only friend, Wilhelm Fliess.  Notably, the letter features quotations from both Die Meistersinger and Ulysses.

The fictional letter is meant to be an expression of Freud's warm feelings for Fliess at the high tide of their friendship.  The friendship would later end in a bitter break-up with the paranoid Fliess accusing Freud of trying to murder him.

That both Meistersinger and Ulysses take place in mid-summer, at the time of the summer solstice, has important symbolic significance relating to the friendship of Freud and Fliess.

The section of the book relating to the Freud-Fliess friendship parallels another section of the book that describes another passionate, but ill-fated friendship -- that between Richard Wagner and the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche:

[N]o clouds shaded those early bewitching and refreshing days at the lake, where Nietzsche, submissively lost in adoration, passed golden hours stolen from his . . .  
Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, and His Music.
  . . . professorial . . .  
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams.
  . . . duties at Basel.  
Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, and His Music.
For the rest of his life he would remember . . .  
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude. 
  . . . one summer morning . . .  
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams.
  ... on the lake.  
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities.
They were seated in the boat, . . .  
Ernest Hemingway, Indian Camp.
 . . . facing each other like two mirrors, . . .  
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude.
  . . . Nietzsche . . .  
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams. 
. . . in the stern, . . .  
Ernest Hemingway, Indian Camp. 
  . . . Wagner . . .  
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams. 
  . . . rowing. The sun was coming up over the hills. A bass jumped, making a circle in the water.  
Ernest Hemingway, Indian Camp.
Nietzsche . . .  
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams.
  . . . trailed his hand in the water. It felt warm in the sharp chill of the morning. In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with . . .  
Ernest Hemingway, Indian Camp.
  . . . his mentor . . .  
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude.
  . . . rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die.
Ernest Hemingway, Indian Camp.  
_____________________

The following is the fictional letter from Freud to Fliess: 

I got your last letter to me and thank you very much for it.

James Joyce, Ulysses.
Recently, . . .
Sigmund Freud, Letter to Wilhelm Fliess.
William,
James Joyce, Ulysses.
. . . the Meistersinger afforded me a strange pleasure. A parallel between [my friend and protector] Breuer and H. Sachs is forced upon me by the circumstance that he too was in the theater. I was sympathetically moved by the "morning dream interpretation melody . . . ”
Sigmund Freud, Letter to Wilhelm Fliess.
. . . which bears out what . . .
Richard Ellmann, Preface to James Joyce, Ulysses.
. . . I myself . . .
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.
. . . have said more abstractly.
Richard Ellmann, Preface to James Joyce, Ulysses.
Moreover, as in no other opera, real ideas are set to music, with the tones of feeling attached to it lingering on as one reflects upon them.
Sigmund Freud, Letter to Wilhelm Fliess.
—Ah, listen to this for God’ sake, . . .
James Joyce, Ulysses.
WALTHER:

I had a wonderfully beautiful dream.

SACHS:

That bodes well! Tell it to me!

WALTHER:

I scarcely dare even to think of it:

I fear to see it vanish from me.

SACHS:

My friend, it is precisely the poet's task

to interpret and record his dreamings.

Believe me, man's truest madness

is disclosed to him in dreams:

all poetry and versification

is nothing but true dream interpretation.

Richard Wagner, Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg.
This is . . .
Carl Gustav Jung, The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious.
. . . my dream theory . . .
Sigmund Freud, The History of the Psychoanalytic Movement.
. . . in unadorned, primitive concreteness of vision.
Carl Gustav Jung, The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious.
Odd, don’t you think?
Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago.
There is of course no need to return . . .
Sigmund Freud, Letter to Wilhelm Fliess.
. . . the galleypage . . .
James Joyce, Ulysses.
. . . I am sending to you. Since you did not take exception to anything in Chapter 1 . . .
Sigmund Freud, Letter to Wilhelm Fliess.
. . . of my dream book . . .
Lucy Maud Montgomery, The Story Girl: A Compound Letter.
. . . I can unhesitantly sign off to . . .
Edward Jay Epstein, Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald.
. . . the first batch of quirefolded papers.
James Joyce, Ulysses.
Nothing else has yet been set in type. You shall receive the proofs as soon as they arrive and the new parts will be marked in them. — I have inserted a large number of new dreams, which I hope you will not delete.
Sigmund Freud, Letter to Wilhelm Fliess.
Have you got that?
James Joyce, Ulysses.
The whole thing is planned on the model of an imaginary walk. At the beginning, the dark forest of authors (who do not see the trees), hopelessly lost on wrong tracks. Then a concealed pass through which I lead the reader—my specimen dream with its peculiarities, details, indiscretions, bad jokes—and then suddenly the high ground and the view and the question: which way do you wish to go now?
Sigmund Freud, Letter to Wilhelm Fliess.
What do you think?
Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago.
Forgive me if I seem to boast.
Robert Frost, Excerpt from An Unstamped Letter in Our Rural Letter Box.
Today, on a superb Sunday marred only by leaden tiredness, . . .
Sigmund Freud, Letter to Wilhelm Fliess.
. . . the necessity of repose, obviating movement:
James Joyce, Ulysses.
I am very sedentary.
Sigmund Freud, Letter to Wilhelm Fliess.
Proof fever.
James Joyce, Ulysses.
But on the next rainy day I shall tramp on foot to my beloved Salzburg, where I actually unearthed a few Egyptian antiquities last time. These things put me in a good mood and speak of distant times and countries . . .
Sigmund Freud, Letter to Wilhelm Fliess.
. . . of Isis and Osiris, of Horus and Ammon Ra.
James Joyce, Ulysses.
With the most cordial greetings and thanks for your cooperation in . . .
Sigmund Freud, Letter to Wilhelm Fliess.
. . . what I jocularly call . . .
Dale Vander Veen, Dale’s April Devotions.
. . . the Egyptian dream book
Sigmund Freud, Letter to Wilhelm Fliess.
____________________


Incidentally, Ammon Ra is the ancient Egyptian sun god.