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LESLIE A. FIEDLER
sights such as
this,"
he wrote much later, toward the end of
his
life,
"fall to one's lot but once in a life-time."
And publishing the first fruits of that illumination, he prefaced
it with a quotation reflecting his sense of how monumental and
monstrous a task he was beginning to undertake:
((Flectere
si
nequeo
Superos, Acheronta movebo."
If
I cannot influence the Gods above,
I will set the world below in motion-set Hell in motion, he means
really, but he chooses to call it "Acheron," to draw on Classical
rather than Hebrew mythology, perhaps because he realizes how
Faustian, Satanic, blasphemous his boast finally is. And he further
clarifies what he means by quoting, in the Foreword which immedi–
ately follows, Aristode's dictum (once more the source is our other,
non-Jewish antiquity) that "the dream is not Godsent but of demon–
ic origin." But precisely in his turning from the supernal to the in–
fernal interpretation of dreams, Freud declares himself a true modern,
which is to say, quite another sort of Joseph; though the first Joseph,
to be sure, began his journey toward success with a descent into the
pit.
Unlike the original Joseph, however (for whom there could be
no Happy Ending unless his father survived to relish his triumph),
Freud could not begin his acherontic descent until after the death of
his father-called Jacob, too, by one of those significant "accidents"
which Freud himself would have been the first to point out in the
case of another, but on which he never commented in his own. He
could not even make the preliminary trip down, much less the
eventual trip up, until his darkest wish-dream had been, in guilt and
relief, achieved: not to do his rival siblings down in the eyes of his
father, but to be delivered of that father-his last tie to the Jewish
past-and thus be freed to become an Apostle to the Gentiles, a coun–
selor at the Court of his own doomed Emperor. Yet, before releasing
his published book to the Gentile world, or even lecturing on its sub–
stance at the Gentile University of Vienna, Freud rehearsed it in
one lecture at the Jewish Academic Reading Hall, and two (however
incredible it may seem) before that most bourgeois of Jewish Fratern–
al Organizations, the B'nai Brith; tried out his vision, that is to say,
before the assembled representatives of the community to which his
dead father had belonged.
Yet, despite the pieties with which he hedged his blasphemy
