106
PARTISAN REVIEW
Ulrich seems to have an acute awareness of his own, personal in–
volvement in these acts of constitution. He senses
his
eye muscles, the
movements of
his
psyche,
his
ways of looking at things. Many who have
written on the culture and sensibility of the last few decades would sug–
gest, however, that this sense of idiosyncratic selfhood and personal
subjectivity is rapidly turning passe and being replaced by the more
anonymous sense of irreality carried by the flood of media images that
now surround us like an atmosphere. For as we enter more fully into the
postmodem world, all seems to pale before the power of the image,
causing old distances and distinctions to waver and collapse. The very idea
that something real might preexist the image or the simulacrum and re–
main beyond its grasp begins to fall away. So does the idea of some id–
iosyncratic or private realm that would be the locus of a true or inner self.
Instead of the old pathos of distance, with its sense of inwardness and de–
tachment, the condition of an inner self cut off from some unattainable
reality, we enter into a universe devoid ofboth objects and selves, where
there is only a swarming of "self-objects," images and simulacra filling us
without resistance.
Mutations like this are never sudden, never absolute , so naturally we
find both conditions existing side by side. We find the old existentialist
alienation along with the new postmodern hysteria, euphoria, and
malaise. That the aestheticized psychoanalysis of Donald Spence remains
largely within the first order is suggested by his continuing belief in a real
past and "true memories," even at times a yearning for closer contact with
it. Spence does assert, however, that like a kind of Kantian
Ding-an-sich,
this formless, unformulable world is virtually impossible to reach: " . ..
language is always getting in the way between what the patient saw or felt
and the way this experience appears (variously transformed) in the analytic
conversation. We never make contact with the actual memory or dream;
language is always the elusive go-between."
It seems that Richard Geha, perhaps more fully at ease in the
postmodern age, would dismiss all such yearnings for the solid or the
unattainable. There is no past, he tells us; it was already only a fiction.
Even the mind, what might have seemed to be the origin of all this
imagery, turns out to be "a purely mythical site," with only a "fictional
status." And this, in Geha's view, should be cause for rejoicing, not for
frustration or regret. So, instead of the anguished if rather comical
confusion of Musil's character Ulrich, Geha offers us the postmodernist
message of the novelist Richard Federman: there is no cause for worry
since reality "does not exist, or rather exists only in its fictionalized
version."
Mimesis
is but a dream; there is only
poesis .
The difference between Spence and Geha might be compared to a
