‘THE FIRST HUMAN AESTHETIC’
In my view certain developments in Winnicott’s thought which have been introduced by Christopher Bollas illuminate, and are illuminated by, Ibsen’s presentation of Hedda’s quest to realise her life in terms of her own dramatic idiom. In The Shadow of the Object Christopher Bollas summmarises his thought about ‘the first human aesthetic’ in the following way:
The mother’s idiom of care and the infant’s experience of this handling is one of the first if not the earliest human aesthetic. It is the most profound occasion when the nature of the self is formed and transformed by the environment. The uncanny pleasure of being held by a poem, a composition, a painting, or, for that matter, any object, rests on those moments when the infant’s internal world is partly given form by the mother since he cannot shape them or link them together without her coverage. (1987, p.32)
The first aesthetic moment belongs to a phase of experience which is pre-cognitive and certainly pre-verbal. At the same time it remains beyond the subject’s cognitive grasp or verbal articulation; it is ‘neither social nor moral; it is curiously impersonal and even ruthless.’ What is also to be noted is that ‘transformation does not mean gratification…[and], likewise, aesthetic moments are not always beautiful or wonderful – many are ugly and terrifying but nonetheless profoundly moving because of the existential memory tapped.’ (p.29) While ‘the search for symbolic equivalents to the transformational object, and the experience with which it is identified, continues in adult life’, the quest may be pursued ‘to the utter shock or indifference of the person’s subjective experience of his own desire. A gambler is compelled to gamble. Subjectively he may wish he did not gamble, even hate his compulsion to do so.’ (p.27) Bollas concludes the second chapter of his book with this statement: ‘Transformational object-seeking is an endless memorial search for something in the future that resides in the past. I believe that if we investigate many types of object relating we will discover that the subject is seeking the transformational object and aspiring to be matched in symbiotic harmony within an aesthetic frame that promises to metamorphose the self.’ (p.40) I am suggesting of course that Hedda Gabler is seeking just such a transformation of the self.
Aware that the spectre of ‘reductionism’ haunts such accounts of human experience, Bollas observes: ‘It is possible to see how the reduction of spiritual experiences to the discrete administration of the mother always strikes us as somehow an insult to the integrity of uncanny experience, as the sacred precedes the maternal. Our earliest experience is prior to our knowing of the mother as an object in her own right.’ (p.39) What seems to me more important than this ingenious observation, however, is that in introducing the category of the aesthetic he makes it possible to think the relationship between psychoanalysis and art in a way which does not ‘privilege’ the one against the other, or ‘insult’ the experience of being a person. Considered from this point of view Ibsen and Freud are alike in that they think of becoming a person as the struggle to shape a style out of an inheritance. Winnicott’s contribution can then be taken to suggest a revised formulation to the effect that becoming a person is the process of staging our inheritance in the space of (the) play.
FATE AND DESTINY
Embedded in this metaphor is the issue which haunts our thinking about psychoanalysis and literature. Does psychoanalytic interpretation commit us to the idea that literary characters (and real human beings) are to be seen, necessarily, as acting out a script which is always already written? In my view the issue has been greatly clarified by certain formulations which Christopher Bollas has developed in Forces of Destiny (1989) and Being a Character (1993). The essence of the matter is the distinction he makes between ‘fate’ and ‘destiny’. In the earlier book he writes:
A person who is fated, who is fundamentally interred in an internal world of self and object representations that endlessly repeat the same scenarios, has very little sense of a future that is at all different from the environment they carry around with them. The sense of fate is a feeling of despair to influence the course of one’s life. A sense of destiny, however, is a different state, when the person feels he is moving in a personality progression that gives him a sense of steering his course. (1989, p.41)
The first two sentences give us an extraordinarily apposite description of the haunted world which Hedda Gabler inhabits during most of the play. The third sentence encapsulates the mode of existence she is reaching for – in which the ’spontaneous gesture’ would open up the sense of a living future. It is the difference between conforming to a blueprint and fulfilling a potentiality; between living out time and creating one’s own arc in time. In an earlier chapter of the book Bollas formulates the ’sense of destiny’ in a passage which, again, might have been composed with Hedda Gabler in mind:
The fashioning of life is something like an aesthetic: a form revealed through one’s way of being. I think there is a particular urge to fashion a life, and this destiny drive is the ceaseless effort to select and use objects in order to give lived expression to one’s true self. Perhaps the creativity of a human lifetime is the talent in articulating one’s idiom. If the person continues to be and feel true to himself (not living compliantly) and is surprised by the continuing elaboration of his self, then he is fulfilling his destiny. (1989, p.110)
My suggestion is that Hedda’s despair arises from the fact that she is not able ‘to use objects in order to give expression to [her] true self’. She is not able to do so because, from a Winnicottian point of view, she scarcely lives in a world of objects at all. Bollas takes up the obvious question:
What does it mean to ‘live a life in the world of objects’? Do we not all live in a world of objects’? Do we know of anyone who does not? The issue Winnicott addresses can only be understood if we grasp that he does not assume that we all ‘live’ a life. We may construct the semblance of such and certainly the false self attests to this. But to live a life, to come alive, a person must be able to use objects in a way that assumes such objects survive hate and do not require undue reparative work. (p.26)
The word ‘object’ is of course laden with ambiguities, and very usefully so, I think. In the first place it may refer to a physical object, or, in ‘object-relations’ theory, to a human figure; but in the second place it may also refer to external or to internal objects, that is, internalised figures or ‘part-objects’ (the breast, the phallus). As we know, it is the question of the relationship between the subjective and objective which energises a great deal of Winnicott’s thinking. In ‘The Use of an Object’ he makes a remarkable contribution to our understanding of the way in which the subjective/objective distinction is established in the course of individual development. It is in assigning a positive value to aggression within this process that, as Adam Phillips writes, Winnicott ‘makes his final, and in some ways decisive, revision of the work of Freud and Klein’. Phillips goes on to summarise the Winnicottian argument as follows: ‘If, in Winnicott’s terms, the self is first made real through recognition, the object is first made real through aggressive destruction, and this, of course, makes experience of the object feel real to the self. The object, Winnicott says, is placed outside omnipotent control by being destroyed while, in fact, surviving the destruction.’ (1988, p.131) In other words the object acquires a quality of ‘out-thereness’ as a result of surviving (repeatedly) its destruction in phantasy. Consequently, as Winnicott himself writes, ‘the subject may now have started to live a life in the world of objects, and so the subject gains immeasurably…’ (1969, p.90) The gains are those that have been extensively elaborated upon by Christopher Bollas in his discussion of the way we ’select and use objects’ to give expression to an individual idiom or ‘aesthetic’.
My reading of Ibsen’s play can now be stated in a very few words. The figure of the book-child is a wonderfully imagined device for exploring the theme of ‘the use of an object’. Within the play as a whole this object is, firstly, both human and non-human; secondly, both internal and external; and thirdly, both literal and metaphoric. Thus we may think of the book-child as the play’s transitional object and we can go on to say that the reason why Hedda Gabler is unable to ‘fashion a life’ is that, in her personal world, objects (for the most part) do not survive. That is to say in the realm where it matters they do not survive her envious hate and destructiveness, and are therefore not available to be used creatively.
Why does Hedda Gabler commit suicide? It is a moment of astonishing complexity. She has been trapped by Judge Brack and the humiliation of it is too much for her to live with perhaps. At the same time she is in despair at the failure of L*vborg’s suicide to ennoble his life, or hers. Yet, almost concealed by the superficial ironies, a greater despair haunts the following exchange:
HEDDA …Doesn’t it feel strange to you, Thea? Here you are sitting with J*rgen Tesman just as
you once sat with Ejlert L*vborg.
MRS ELVSTED. Well, if only I could inspire your husband too –
HEDDA. Oh, that will come out all right – in time.
TESMAN. Yes, do you know, Hedda, I really think I am beginning to feel something of the kind.
But you go back and sit down with Judge Brack again.
HEDDA. Is there nothing here I can help you two with?
TESMAN. Not a thing in the world… (HG, p.362)
How ironic that Tesman should have the unwitting power so to exclude Hedda Gabler from the circle of life, and that the two objects of her envious scorn, Tesman and Thea, should unite to restore the object she has destroyed. And how ironic also that they should begin to use the book-child (however ineptly and improbably) to create a new future. A moment later, with inevitable dramatic logic, Hedda Gabler ‘goes into the inner room…draws the curtain’, and sits down at her instrument: ‘Suddenly she is heard playing a wild dance tune on the piano’. The last nail is hammered home when, on account of Aunt Rina, and ‘Ejlert’, Tesman cuts short her first defiant gesture of aesthetic self-expression. Then, within Hedda’s hearing, he goes on to suggest to Mrs Elvsted that she should move into Aunt Julle’s house so that they can continue their work together. During these moments Hedda Gabler is thrust back, even more deeply, into the void of her self-experience: it is as if life has no place for her, whether as begetter or begotten.
In whatever terms we think of it Hedda Gabler’s inheritance is death and despair, absence and loss. Experiencing herself as an uncreated void her ‘unthought’ project is to stage the scene of her own conception. Yet at the same time the play reveals in all its workings that Hedda has no ‘inner image of psychic procreativity.’ (Bollas, 1993, p.84) While the play as a whole is struggling to create such an image the troubling enigma of the central character is that for her this same struggle constitutes a maddening aporia: to conceive the inconceivable. The logic by which the dilemma finds its resolution is even more strange. It is when she destroys everything – that is to say, herself and the future (her unborn child) – that Hedda Gabler finally succeeds in making her own idiomatic gesture. To destroy everything is to leave nothing left to want, nothing left to envy. If nothing is left to be reduced to nothing, something may begin to be. ‘A terrible beauty is born’, and a destiny is fatefully fulfilled.
EPILOGUE – STAGING THE PLAY
Finally I shall claim that the two best known and most distinguished productions of Hedda Gabler in recent years lend support to t