Dictations: On Haunted Writing (review)

Goethe Yearbook 321 with reality. "Everyone," Goethe warned, "should chart his own path and not let himself be impressed by authority, people should not let themselves be overwhelmed by conformity and be swept away by fashion." This, more than anything else, characterizes Goethe's critical theory. Readers must experience the work for themselves, must be open to its possibilities. Theories and interpretations are necessary for making rational coherence of the work, but are also necessarily provisional, bound as they are to their time and place. Like Faust, the reader must always remain unsatisfied, must always be ready to reread, to reexperience. Armstrong State College Thomas L. Cooksey Ronell, Avital, Dictations: On Haunted Writing. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. In Dictations, Avital Ronell examines two instances of what she calls the "Goethe-effect," not so much Goethe's direct influence as the effect of the idea or fantasm of Goethe upon Sigmund Freud and Johann Peter Eckermann. Ronell's free interweaving of biography, literary criticism, and psychoanalysis focuses on the manner in which Goethe haunts these two writers, "dictating" to them the form and content of their dreams, inner lives, and writing. Interested in questions of "possession, self-possession and dispossession, authorship, genre and gender, of life arrested on paper" (72), Ronell draws her methodology from several recent directions in literary theory. Her largest, though in some ways least specific debt is to Derrida. The resolute focus on the apparently marginal, the eagerness to exploit the polysemy which arises when seemingly stable signifiers are set free in an endless chain of associative logic, and, most important, the intense scrutiny accorded to the differences between spoken and written discourse — all of this points to her roots in deconstruction. More specifically, Ronell relies heavily on the work of the French psychoanalysts Maria Torok and Nicholas Abraham. Their theory of "cryptonomy" finds in discrete elements of language the generative principle of the "text" of the unconscious; any word can become the entryway into a subterranean labyrinth where series of related signifiers are spun off the original word and receive a potent psychoanalytic charge. (Although Lacan's name is never mentioned his assumption that the structure of the unconscious is analogous to that of a language is everywhere apparent.) Whereas Torok and Abraham focus on readings of Freud's case studies, Ronell applies the method first to Freud's dreams about Goethe and then to Eckermann's relations to Goethe himself. Part One centers on the interpretation of three of Freud's own dreams in which he is haunted by the figure of Goethe. Ronell bases her argument that Goethe's dream presence has a decisive effect on the birth of psychoanalysis (Goethe emerges as the "eponymous hero" of psychoanalysis, p. xv.) almost exclusively upon the complex webs of linguistic interconnections which characterize her enterprise. This is, for example, her reading of the sentence fragment "meine kritische Überzeugung 322 Book Reviews im Wachen reicht hierfür nicht aus": "In my waking state I cannot read the critical question of engenderment; this dream to which I cannot attain in waking is about engenderment (über Zeugung), a kind of sadistic engenderment (Über-Zeugung) whose witnesses (Zeugen) must not be asked to testify (zeugen); and thereby they must not return to the root of testifying, to the testicles. The cutting of (kritische) the testicles to which I in my sleep bear witness [...] and so forth" (20-21). As this quotation makes clear, Dictations is the sort of work which is difficult to evaluate without taking a stand on its methodological assumptions. Readers who take general exception to this kind of reading, with its attempts to corrode and to supplement even seemingly straightforward utterances, its endlessly patient unraveling of encrypted significance, will no doubt also be exasperated here. If this is much the weaker of the two sections of the book, though, this has less to do with the method than with its application. Ronell's provocative assertion that Goethe's haunting of Freud produces key features of psychoanalysis remains unsubstantiated — first, because Goethe never emerges as more than a fantasm, a name which recurs in key piaces, and second, because Ronell fails to show us the connections between...