94
STEVEN MARCUS
Such a passage raises more questions than it resolves. The first
sentence is a kind of conundrum in which case history, writing, and
memory dance about in a series of logical entwinements, of possible
alternate combinations, equivalences, and semiequivalences. These are
followed by further equivocations about "the record," "phonographic"
exactitude, and so forth -- the ambiguities of which jump out at one as
soon as the terms begin to be seriously examined. For example, is "the
report" the same thing as "the record," and if "the record" were
"phonographically" exact would it be a "report"? Like the prodigious
narrative historian that he is, Freud is enmeshed in an irreducible
paradox of history: that the term itself refers to both the activity of the
historian -- the writing of history -- and to the objects of his
undertaking, what history is "about." I do not think, therefore, that we
can conclude that Freud has created this thick context of historical
contingency and ambiguity out of what he once referred to as Viennese
sc
hlamperei.
The historical difficulties are further compounded by several other
sequential networks that are mentioned at the outset and that figure
discernibly throughout the writing. First there is the virtual Proustian
complexity of Freud's interweaving of the various strands of time in the
actual account; or, to change the figure, his geological fusing of various
time strata -- strata which are themselves at the same time fluid and
shifting. We observe this most strikingly in the palimpsestlike quality of
the writing itself, which refers back to
Studies on Hysteria
of 1895;
which records a treatment that took place at the end of 1900 (although
it mistakes the date by a year); which then was written up in first form
during the early weeks of 1901; which was then exhumed in 1905, and
was revised and rewritten to an indeterminable extent before publication
in that year; and to which additional critical comments in the form of
footnotes were finally appended in 1923. All of these are of course held
together in vital connection and interanimation by nothing else than
Freud's consciousness. But we must take notice as well of the copresence
of still further different time sequences in Freud's presentation -- this
copresence being itself a historical or novelistic circumstance of some
magnitude. There is first the connection established by the periodically
varied rehearsal throughout the account of Freud's own theory and
theoretical notions as they had developed up to that point; this practice
provides a kind of running applied history of psychoanalytic theory as its
development is refracted through the embroiled medium of this particu–
lar case. Then there are the different time strata of Dora's own history ,
which Freud handles with confident and loving exactitude. Indeed he is
