It must be striking to every reader of Gradiva how often our author puts into the mouths of both the leading characters speeches which have double meaning. For Hanold these speeches are intended to have only one meaning, and only his companion, Gradiva, is affected by their other meaning. Thus, after her first answer, he exclaims: “I knew that your voice sounded so,” and the yet unenlightened Zoë has to ask how that is possible, as he has never before heard her speak. In the second conversation, the girl is for a moment puzzled by his delusion, as he assures her that he recognized her at once. She must understand these words in the meaning that is correct for his unconscious, as his recognition of their acquaintance which reaches back into childhood, while he, of course, knows nothing of this meaning of his speech and explains it only by reference to the delusion which dominates him. The speeches of the girl, on the other hand, in whose person the most brilliant mental clarity is opposed to the delusion, are made intentionally ambiguous. One meaning of them falls in with the ideas of Hanold’s delusion, in order to enable her to penetrate into his conscious comprehension, the other raises itself above the delusion, and, as a rule, gives us the interpretation of it in the unconscious truth which has been represented by it. It is a triumph of wit to be able to represent the delusion and the truth in the same expression.
Interspersed with such ambiguities is Zoë’s speech in which she explains the situation to her girl friend and at the same time rids herself of her disturbing society; it is really spoken out of the book, calculated more for us readers than for her happy colleague. In the conversations with Hanold, the double meaning is chiefly established by the fact that Zoë makes use of the symbolism which we find followed in Hanold’s first dream, in the equivalence of repression and destruction, Pompeii and childhood. Thus on the one hand she can, in her speeches, continue in the rôle which Hanold’s delusion assigns to her, on the other, she can touch upon the real relations, and awaken in Hanold’s unconscious a knowledge of them.
“I have long accustomed myself to being dead.” (G. p. 70.) “For me, the flower of oblivion is the right one from your hand” (G. p. 70). In these speeches is given lightly the reproof which then breaks out clearly enough in her last sermon when she compares him to an archæopteryx. “That a person must die to become alive again; but for archæologists that is, of course, necessary” (G. p. 102), she continues after the solution of the delusion as if to give us the key to her ambiguous speeches. The most beautiful symbolism appears, however, in the question (G. p. 88): “It seems to me as if we had already eaten our bread thus together once two thousand years ago. Can’t you remember it?” In this speech the substitution of historic antiquity for childhood, and the effort to awaken his memory of the latter are quite unmistakable.
Whence, therefore, comes this striking preference for ambiguous speeches in Gradiva? It seems to us not chance, but the necessary sequence from the preliminaries of the tale. It is nothing but the counterpart of the twofold determination of symptoms in so far as the speeches are themselves symptoms and proceed from compromises between the conscious and the unconscious; but one notices this double origin in the speeches more easily than in the acts; and when, as the pliability of the material of conversation often makes possible, each of the two intentions of a speech succeeds by the same arrangement of words in expressing itself well, then there is present what we call an “ambiguity.”
During the psychotherapeutic treatment of a delusion, or an analogous disturbance, one often evolves such ambiguous speeches in patients as new symptoms of the most fleeting duration, and can even succeed in making use of them, whereby, with the meaning intended for the consciousness of the patient, one can, not infrequently, stimulate the understanding for the one valid in the unconscious. I know from experience that among the uninitiate this rôle of ambiguity usually gives the greatest offence, and causes the grossest misunderstanding, but our author was right, at any rate, in representing in his production this characteristic feature of the processes of the formation of dream and delusion.
IV
With Zoë’s entrance as physician there is awakened in us, we said, a new interest. We are eager to learn if such a cure as she accomplishes on Hanold is comprehensible or possible, whether our author has observed the conditions of the passing of a delusion as correctly as those of its development.
Without doubt a view will be advanced denying to the case portrayed by our author such a principal interest, and recognizing no problem requiring an explanation. For Hanold nothing more remains, it might be asserted, but to solve his delusion again, after its object, the supposed Gradiva, conveys to him the incorrectness of all his assertions and gives him the most natural explanations for everything puzzling; for example, how she knows his name. Thereby the affair would be settled logically; as, however, the girl in this case has confessed her love, for the satisfaction of his feminine readers, our author would surely allow the otherwise not uninteresting story to end in the usually happy way, marriage. More consistent, and just as possible, would have been the different conclusion that the young scholar, after the explanation of his mistake, should, with polite thanks, take his leave of the young lady and in that way motivate the rejection of her love so that he might offer an intense interest to ancient women of bronze or stone, or the originals of these, if they were attainable, but might have no idea of how to deal with a girl of flesh and blood of his own time. The archæological fancy was most arbitrarily cemented into a love-story by our author, himself.
In discountenancing this conception as impossible, our attention is first called to the fact that we have to attribute the change beginning in Norbert Hanold not to the relinquishment of the delusion alone. At the same time, indeed before the solution of the latter, there is in him an undeniable awakening of the desire for love, which, of course, results in his asking for the hand of the girl who has freed him from delusion. We have already shown under what pretexts and cloakings, curiosity about her corporeal nature, jealousy, and the brutal male impulse for possession are expressed in him in the midst of the delusion, since repressed desire put the first dream into his mind. Let us add the further testimony that in the evening after the second talk with Gradiva a living woman for the first time seems congenial to him, although he still makes the concession to his abhorrence of honeymoon travellers, by not recognizing the congenial girl as newly married. The next forenoon, however, chance makes him witness of an exchange of caresses between the girl and her supposed brother, and he draws back shyly as if he had disturbed a holy ceremony. Disdain for “Augustus” and “Gretchen” is forgotten and respect for love is restored to him.