Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 2 Number 2, August 2007

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Transgression and Victim:

Mnemic Traces in Conrad's Fiction

By

Leonard Orr

Washington State University

          In a provocative 1995 essay on the "originary impetus" in Almayer's Folly, Priscilla L. Walton argues that the "locus of Conrad's writing. . . points to a desire to return to the beginning, or the origin, and this movement is mirrored in the motivations of the characters of Almayer's Folly. Within the novel, Almayer seeks to return to Europe, which he perceives as his origin; Mrs. Almayer seeks to return to colonial Sambir, and Nina, their daughter seemingly chooses to return to her Malay roots."  The desire of originary return among Conrad's characters is mirrored by Conrad in his production first of Almayer's Folly, second,  the reduplicative prequel An Outcast of the Islands, and then in Conrad's return in such memoirs as A Personal Record to explain how he came to write these early works (Walton 1995: 95). Walton, drawing support from Edward Said, Reynold Humphries, Gayatry Spivak, and Daniel Schwarz, sees in this trend a postcolonialist discourse in which the past is read as a text and rejected by the native peoples and the women of the present, and is finally a failure of imperialism and sexism. Christopher GoGwilt's 1995 book, The Invention of the West: Joseph Conrad and the Double-Mapping of Europe and Empire (Stanford University Press), makes many of the same points, connecting the analysis to the urban fiction of revolution and terrorism.

          Such an explanation is useful, especially for the Malay novels, Heart of Darkness, and perhaps Nostromo. But it misses the larger factors of repetition of situation, character, and even descriptions and techniques that we find throughout Conrad's work. Moreover, the arguments concerning Conrad and race, women, and imperialist or colonialist discourse have themselves become so repetitive and widespread, they threaten to become a new doxa, fixing and stultifying readings.1 With all the work on these areas done in the eighties and nineties, there is considerable disagreement among critics on Conrad the prejudiced vs. Conrad the arch-ironist and subversive. More importantly, by looking at the external and biographical, we are missing the internal and genetic implied by “originary impetus.” Conrad returns obsessively to the lowest and most damaging psychic moments not to expose them but to sublimate or delete them from his consciousness, not to work through the traumatic but to attempt to close it off and treat as fiction rather than personal memory, the mnemic traces dispersed throughout his novels.

          We still lack a means to discuss, or even to observe comprehensively, the patterns of repetition any reader of Conrad may observe. There are recent works on repetition of particular subjects, for example, on Conrad's reiteration of imagery and situations of death, such as Alan Warren Friedman's excellent 1995 treatment of Conrad in Fictional Death and the Modernist Enterprise (Cambridge University Press, 1995) or Aaron Fogel's fine Coercion to Speak, on silence, solitude, and confession in Conrad's works. But besides the straightforward biographies of Karl, Najder, and Batchelor, the last general analysis of Conrad's repeated situations and characters, not so much style and technique, is probably Bernard Meyer's 1967 Joseph Conrad: A Psychoanalytic Biography (Princeton University Press, 1967), which does move easily among the fictional and the ostensibly nonfictional works. Meyer's thoughtful and well-researched work provides traditional Freudian symbolic explanations of, for example, repetition of teeth and cannibalism, and the "preponderance" of suicide in Conrad's fiction, both unsurprisingly connected, in Meyer's view, with Conrad's difficulties with women and sexuality.

          Like the physicists' quest for a unified field theory, or an explanation of everything, my notion of a comprehensive approach to the patterns of repetition of situation and character in Conrad would entail the provision of a sort of master-plot, based on a catalogue of the repeated elements, together with a theoretical argument that convincingly explains the reason the patterns exist. Here I will just attempt to outline this master-plot for one set of Conrad's repetitions, that set dealing with the nexus of transgression, victimage, and punishment, together with a theoretical argument based on the work of Gilles Deleuze.

          Conrad's repetitions in this set might be found to include the protagonist's profound sense of guilt, the presence of scapegoats or surrogate victims, self-punishment, the entire group of confession-technologies Michel Foucault analyzes, including the legal system, surveillance, examination, punishment or torture, and finally death.2 The larger question is not so much "can these elements be found 'in preponderance' in Conrad's work?," since clearly they can, as much as this psychological question: "why does Conrad choose to dwell on these aspects and return repeatedly to what would seem to be fictionalized versions of the most painful aspects of his own actual life and memories?"

          Thomas Hardy's novels often begin with what we may call the inciting mistake: a man gets drunk and sells his wife at a village fair; a scholarly clergyman informs a peddler of his aristocratic ancestry. These inciting mistakes bring about the tragic episodes that follow. Conrad's works, on the other hand, often are centrally structured with a transgression that creates guilt. Willems "steps off the path of virtue" by embezzling from his employer. Jim abandons his ship along with the rest of the disreputable crew in the belief that the Patna, with its 800 passengers, will sink. An earnest student beginning to write an essay for a scholarship becomes a government informer and causes the death of his fellow-student. A marvelously bold and loyal factotum in a Central American country in the throes of civil war ends by stealing a lighter of silver ingots. A young captain seeking only adventure and excitement in one of the last blank spaces on the map, becomes complicit with slavery, imperial exploitation, "unpeakable rites," and lies, although he hates and abhors dishonesty above all things.

          It is easy to find various causes for Conrad to have felt guilt. Besides whatever psychological repressions from his family background, and the inevitable unrecorded breaks from his rigidly held and self-mythologized code of conduct, the most commonly mentioned biographical reason for Conrad's personal sense of guilt is his desertion or abandonment of Poland, and his change of identity and language as a British author. One need only cite the well-known 1899 attack by Polish writer Eliza Orzeszkowa:

And since we are talking about books, I must say that the gentleman who in English is writing novels which are widely read and bring good profit almost caused me a nervous attack. . . . Creative ability is the very crown of the plant, the very top of the tower, the very heart of the nation. And to take away from one's nation this flower, this heart and to give it to the Anglo-Saxons who are not even lacking in bird's milk, for the only reason that they pay better for it--one cannot even think of it without shame. (quoted in Meyer 1967: 65).

These accusations are repeatedly mentioned by Conrad himself in such memoirs as A Personal Record: "I have the conviction that there are men of unstained rectitude, who are ready to murmur scornfully the word 'desertion.' Thus the taste of innocent adventure may be made bitter to the palate."

          Perhaps only James Joyce has been the recipient of as much critical attention as Conrad devoted to establishing the correspondence between the author's real life and the fictive recastings or regenerations. These studies in Conrad always demonstrate the way in which the true life has been more successfully or romantically skewed in the various versions, notably in pseudo-biographemes of Carlist gun-running, the steady rise to mastery and recognition in the English merchant fleet, and, most notoriously, in the duel fought over a woman that turns out to be a suicidal shot through the chest because of debts. While every autobiographical account by other fiction writers may be found to have some similar heroic recastings, in Conrad it is especially pronounced because of its repetitive and transgeneric, transtextual nature.

          Pace Walton, Said, Spivak, Schwarz, and the others, it would seem that Conrad is not engaged in a search for origins but instead an occultation of origins, a casting into the darkness rather than the light, through the fictive layerings over the real-life memories. We might draw attention here to Freud's 1899 essay "Screen Memories" that "[i]t may indeed be questioned whether we have any memories at all from our childhood: memories relating to our childhood may be all that we possess" (Freud, Standard Edition, vol. III, p. 322). The concept of screen-memory is used by Freud to account for symptoms with a false mnemic content. But Conrad's fictive recasting of the most unpleasant memories is clearly related to the way in which "[w]ithin the unconscious, the flow of energy becomes bound up with certain memory-traces, developing the character of unconscious wishes that strive continually to break through against the counterforce exerted by the ego. . . . The drives or wishes can get through in disguise, as the so-called 'compromise formations' of the return of the repressed" (Wright 1984: 12). In his 1923 “The Ego and the Id,” following directly from “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” Freud describes a variety of mnemic residues, including the verbal, that may be reactivated into consciousness (or as hallucinations where the person cannot tell what is trace memory and what is current reality).

          In A. R. Luria's The Mind of Mnemonist, we learn about a man who has such a prodigious memory that he deletes the memory material he does not need by writing them out on pieces of paper; they are permanently removed when he burns the papers. This seems to be analogous to Conrad's continuous mining of the most painful memories by writing about them already distorted into compromise formations about Marlow or Decoud or Jim. Where traditional Freudian psychology such as Bernard Meyer's sees this as multiple projections and introjections, it is also erasure in Derrida's sense. For Derrida, memory exists as mnemic traces written, as it were, into the unconscious archives, and treated textually, subject to editing and revision (see Derrida 1978).

          If we find that inciting guilt has a central structural place in Conrad's fiction, and we understand the memory mechanism for generating fiction, thereby obliterating factual memory through the compromise-formation of the return of the repressed, then we can move onto the other steps in the Conradian master-plot.

          Guilt is displaced ritualistically in traditional societies through the mechanisms of the sacrificial victim, the surrogate victim, or the scapegoat. This has been treated most extensively in literature through the works of René Girard and in the 1994 study by Michiel Heyns, Expulsion and the Nineteenth-Century Novel (see also Vickery and Sellery 1972; Yamaguchi 1988). As Heyns notes,

Scapegoating is, as René Girard has shown, a mob effect, the mobilization of prejudices of a society in times of crisis. Clearly, then, to talk of the scapegoat in the novel is to posit some form of transference of societal attitudes to the narrative dynamic, and to take some liberties with the scale on which these attitudes manifest themselves. If we define the scapegoat as that figure that has to bear the burden of guilt of a particular community, usually by being sacrificed or expelled, then, in my model, the narrative itself constitutes a community, generating pressures that eventually expel those characters that disturb the equilibrium which it is the aim of narrative closure to restore (Heyns 1994: 4).

Heyns's study has a chapter on Lord Jim, but this understanding of the scapegoat or surrogate victim can easily be extended into other works.

          If we consider Nostromo in these terms, for example, Nostromo is led to the theft of the silver that is the inciting guilt in the work because he is the scapegoat of all the international interests exploiting the people and resources of Costaguna. Mine-owner Charles Gould, the American investor Holroyd, and loquacious Captain Mitchell are all impervious to the any notions of guilt, and they all continue to succeed through all of the revolutions and governments and president-dictators of Costaguana. The country's peasantry also seem accustomed to the civil ups-and-downs. Interestingly, the group that is scapegoated in Costaguana are the members of the Aristocratic Club of Sulaco, especially the diplomatic and peaceful Don José Avellanos. "Suppressed arbitrarily innumerable times by various Governments, with memories of proscriptions and of at least one wholesale massacre of its members, sadly assembled for a banquet by the order of a zealous military comandante (their bodies were afterwards stripped naked and flung into the plaza out of the windows by the lowest scum of the populace). Subject to attack, torture, extortion, imprisonment, and forced labor during times of national crisis, the members of the Aristocratic Club are simply the impotent victims-in-waiting. So is Dr. Monaygham, oppressed with the guilt of giving information of little import while suffering torture under Father Bérol.

          Most notably, in this regard, is Martin Decoud, an apolitical dandy who is drawn into becoming a supplier of weapons, a propagandist, a newspaper editor and columnist, and finally an idealist writing the constitution of the Republic of Sulaco. When the Sulacan forces are about to be captured by Sotillo and the Monteros, Decoud realizes that he will be the scapegoat for the collapsed republic. That certainty, and his illusions of heroism, makes him set out with the other scapegoat, Nostromo, and the lighter of silver, the symbol of power and international desire, into the dark abyss of the Golfo Placido. The scapegoats in Nostromo are suffering illusions and idealism: Nostromo, Giorgio Viola, Don José, Monaygham, Decoud. They are either non-Costaguanan or they have become deracinated mixtures, Don José with the British, and Decoud with the French.

          Similarly, in Heart of Darkness, one reason for Marlow's complicitous identification with Kurtz, his defensive and long-standing interest in contemplating the meaning of Kurtz's evolution and death before finally, after so many years, divulging the story in the darkness only to his most intimate friends, and the epilogue in Brussels, is that Kurtz is not only the monster in the story, but the scapegoat figure. His excessive methods that, the manager announces, have ruined the area for the company, in some way absolve the horrors practiced elsewhere by the company, methods that have resulted in slavery and countless, unrecorded deaths. Kurtz takes away the guilt of the company; his death and Marlow's lie absolve the Intended of the guilt for requiring him to earn sufficient money to marry her. By living through and demonstrating the most extreme loss of self and control to Marlow, Kurtz helps rid Marlow of his restless ambitions. These ambitions lead him into the river coiled like a snake across the blank spot in the most vulnerable continent, submissive subject of the city of the whited sepulchre.

          We can elsewhere see the enactment of the scapegoat or surrogate victim in Razumov and Haldin, Stevie, Winnie, and even Verloc, Jim, Dain Waris, Señor Hirsch, Willems, and others. In the case of some of these, such as Willems, Razumov, and Verloc, the scapegoat notion may be difficult to see at first, but it might be clarified if we consider their behavior in terms of autopunition, or self-punishing. They have a desire to be punished or to fail, a notion explored in Freud's 1924 essay on "The Economic Problem of Masochism." As Carolyn Dean has noted, "Freud had developed the concept of autopunition in order to explain various obsessional neuroses. He used it to evaluate the 'moral masochism' of the supremely 'sensitive conscience' as well as to explain the desire to fall ill, to fail, or to commit crime. The origin of self-punishment (Freud called it a 'need for punishment') was the introjection of a sadistic impulse. . . . Furthermore, moral masochism eroticizes guilt, makes it a source of libidinal pleasure. . . . The subject thus unconsciously desires to be guilty, 'craves' an unconscious and eroticized 'punishment and suffering,' and this desire manifests itself in various ways and in various neuroses" (Dean 1992: 37-38). This concept helps to clarify further the self-destructive career and actions of Lord Jim, Winnie, Razumov, Decoud, and Kurtz. We might also consider the notion of autopunition when rereading the self-lacerating letters of Conrad, especially in dealings with his agent James Pinker and the editor David Garnett, or in connection with the constant excessive expenditures, illnesses, injuries, accidents, fires, and lost or ruined manuscripts (Razumov, Decoud, and Kurtz, like Michaelis, the ticket-of-leave apostle from The Secret Agent, Don José Avellanos, and Peter Ivanovich are also writers and memoirists).

          The most extreme degree of autopunition is, of course, suicide, and the statisticians have found seven actual suicides and agree in "Almost fifteen in all, if we include those who put themselves knowingly into suicidal situations: Jim, Razumov, Heyst, Brierly, Peyrol, Flora de Barral, and Decoud, among others, from every stage of Conrad's writing career" (Karl 1979: 203n).3 The death of Jim who allows himself to be shot in the chest by Doramin after the massacre of Dain Waris and Jim's other followers, and the solitary suicide by Decoud in the Golfo Placido, who weighs himself down with silver ingots before shooting himself in the chest, have both been connected by commentators with the once-secret suicide attempt by Conrad in Marseilles, where he shot himself through the chest. In "The Idiots," "An Outpost of Progress," and The Secret Agent, characters commit suicide after first killing husbands or colleagues. But the largely agreed-upon number of fifteen in Conrad's fiction is probably low, if we consider such characters as The Professor in The Secret Agent, always encased in dynamite with the rubber bulb of a detonator in his hand at all times, prepared to blow himself and any number of policemen up, if they attempt to seize him. And Alan Friedman argues that "The unexpected 'rash act' early in Lord Jim is Captain Brierly's suicide; he kills himself as surrogate for Jim. But it also adumbrates Jim's own metaphorical and spiritual suicide: like Brierly's, Jim's death is both an act of supreme arrogance and an admission of 'unmitigated guilt'. . . . (Friedman 1995: 152).

          Beyond this self-killing in Conrad's work, we should consider the generally death-drenched rhetoric. There are corpses everywhere, and they are often unburied, mutilated, showing signs of torture. Marlow meets his predecessor in the Congo, Capt. Fresleven, when he finds his skeletons with grass growing between the ribs. Many characters (Almayer, Willems, Jim, Kurtz, Señor Hirsch) are described while still alive as if they were already corpses. Further, the same corpses are described repeatedly and often by different characters (again Señor Hirsch in Nostromo, and the body floating in the river in Almayer's Folly; see Orr 1987).

          In Freud's 1920 essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle in which Freud sought an explanation for the fact that some people repeat unpleasant and traumatic experiences again and again through recurring dreams, obsessive rituals, and repeated types of relationships, contrary to his earlier understanding of the drive to pleasure or dreams as wish-fulfillments; here was revealed, it would seem, a death-drive, a desire to return to the inorganic. "We cannot escape a suspicion," Freud writes, "that we may have come upon the track of a universal attribute of instincts and perhaps organic life in general which has not hitherto been clearly recognized or at least not stressed. . . an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things." The drive towards death is presented now as part of the conservative tendency of drives, since "the inanimate was there before the animate." As Samuel Weber has observed, once Freud hit upon this explanation, he searched for evidence from the lives of "nonneurotic persons."

          Everywhere Freud finds. . . the same: the same story of ingratitude, betrayal, inconstancy, love--like the child, who not finding what it is looking for, is destined to repeat that search ever after as an adult. . . . Thus Freud continues to recount stories, drawn not from the experience of psychoanalysis, but from "the lives of normal people": "There is the case, for instance, of the woman who married three successive husbands, each of whom fell ill soon afterwards and had to be nursed by her to death. . . " (Weber 1982: 133).

          Far too much has been written recently on Beyond the Pleasure Principle for us to do much with it in this essay, but its usefulness for this complex web of narration is clear.4 Lacanians, for example, take up the notion of the entrapment of both the narrator and the critic within the repetition. This obsessive and ambivalent repetition of textual elements and texts, and the continual return by writers to the same scenes, structures, words, devices, plots, characters, even while they complain bitterly about the process of writing has perhaps found some explanation through the various revisionary analyses of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. "Why does the narrator do such a thing?" asks Stuart Schneiderman. "To avoid anxiety, you might say, and this failure is repeated in the writer who takes his writing to be a repetition of what the narrator has done. There is anxiety that something might be spoken, then it might be addressed to the subject and that the subject might have to do something about it. To ward off this anxiety, to make sure that nothing is spoken at all, all you have to do is to keep writing" (Schneiderman 1991: 156).

          In Conrad's works the escape is from the home is made following the grids of maps along lines of flight, escaping to the blank spaces, margins, or contested boundaries or sanctuaries for impotent revolutionaries. All such deterritorializations are necessarily an entrance into another territory, a reterritorialization. Lord Jim cannot go back to England, Kurtz cannot return to Belgium, Stein cannot return to Bavaria, Nostromo and the Garabaldino cannot go back to Italy. Razumov can go back to Russia only as a dying man. Deleuze argues that the activity of writing is intimately linked both to the lines of flight and a territorialization of the self as well as a becoming-other, a becoming-minority, an effacement, an enactment of the trickster and traitor. According to Deleuze, the finality of writing, beyond any specific instance of becoming-other, is "the final enterprise of becoming imperceptible. . . . Writing has no other end than to lose one's face, to jump over or pierce through the wall, to plane down the wall very patiently" (Deleuze 1987: 45).

          Society makes the "face," and through writing the writer unmakes it, to keep the secrets secret, to keep even the fact that there are secrets secret by the seeming continual confession of public writing and a foregrounding of voice. Contrary to traditional romantic notion of the sincerity or self-expression of the writer, Deleuze argues that "in reality writing does not have its end in itself, precisely because life is not something personal. Or rather, the aim of writing is to carry life to the state of a non-personal power" (Deleuze 1987: 50).

          We started this essay by considering the argument that Conrad repeats characters and situations because he is searching for origins. As we can see, his search is instead for obliteration and forgetfulness, a gap of consciousness. The memories are represented again and again, each time differently distorted, in order to distance them from the retentive memory, to lift up the wax sheet from the Mystic Writing Pad, attempting to eliminate the mnemic traces by making concentric circles, in the manner of Stevie's meticulous and eccentric doodling.

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Notes

 1 In addition to Walton's essay, on Conrad and race see the following: Bill Brown, "Writing, Race, and Erasure: Michael Fried and the Scene of Reading," Critical Inquiry 18.2 (Winter, 1992), 387-410; Michael Fried, "Almayer's Face," Critical Inquiry 17.1 (Autumn, 1990), 193-236; Robert Hampson, "'Heart of Darkness' and 'The Speech that Cannot Be Silenced,'" English: Journal of the English Association 39 (Spring, 1990), 15-32; Thomas Hruska, "The Influence of Joseph Conrad's Attitude Toward Race on the Dramatic and Thematic Structure of His Fiction," DAI 36 (1975), 3689A; Heliena Krenn, Conrad's Lingard Trilogy: Empire, Race, and Women in the Malay Novels (NY: Garland, 1990); Bette London, "Reading Race and Gender in Conrad's Dark Continent," Criticism 31.3 (Summer, 1989), 235-52; and Claude Rawson, "Gulliver, Marlow and the Flat-Nosed People: Colonial Oppression and Race in Satire and Fiction," Dutch Quarterly Review of Anglo-American Letters 13.3 (1983), 162-78; 13.4 (1983), 282-99.

          On Conrad and women or Conrad approached through gender see Barbara Adams, "Sisters Under Their Skins: The Women in the Lives of Raskolnikov and Razumov," Conradiana 6 (1974), 113-24; Rita Bode, "'They Should Be Out of It': The Women of Heart of Darkness," Conradiana 26.1 (Spring, 1994), 20-34; Susan Lundvall Brodie, "Conrad's Feminine Perspective," Conradiana 16.2 (1984), 141-54; Randy Brooks, "Blindfolded Women Carrying a Torch: The Nature of Conrad's Female Characters," Ball State University Forum 17.4 (1976), 28-32; Joe L. Cash, "The Treatment of Women Characters in the Complete Works of Joseph Conrad," DAI 33 (1972), 2925A-26A; Thomas R. Cleary and Terry G. Sherwood, "Women in Conrad's Ironical Epic: Virgil, Dante, and Heart of Darkness," Conradiana 16.3 (1984), 183-94; Peter Hyland, Peter. 1988. "The Little Woman in the Heart of Darkness," Conradiana 20.1 (Spring, 1988), 3-11; Mahmoud Kharbutli, "The Treatment of Women in Heart of Darkness," Dutch Quarterly Review of Anglo-American Letters 17.4 (1987), 237-48; Herbert G. Klein, "Charting the Unknown: Conrad, Marlow, and the World of Women," Conradiana 20.2 (Summer, 1988), 147-57; Heliena Krenn, Conrad's Lingard Trilogy, cited above; Anne Luyat, "Conrad's Feminine Grotesques," The Conradian 11.1 (May, 1986), 4-15; Padmini Mongia. 1993. "Empire, Narrative, and the Feminine in Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness," in Keith Carabine, Owen Knowles, and Wieslaw Krajka, eds. Contexts for Conrad (Boulder CO: East European Monographs, 1993), 135-50; Ruth Nadelhalf, "Women as Moral and Political Alternatives in Conrad's Early Novels," in Gabriela Mora and Karen S. Van Hooft, eds., Theory and Practice of Feminist Literary Criticism (Ypsilanti MI: Bilingual, 1982), 242-55; Farida Rihani. 1991. "The Role of Women in Conrad's Political Novels," DAI 51.8 (1991), 2757A-58A; Andrew Michael Roberts, "'What Else Could I Tell Him?': Confessing to Men and Lying to Women in Conrad's Fiction," L'Epoque Conradienne 19 (1993), 7-23; Andrew Michael Roberts, ed. Conrad and Gender (Amsterdam and Atlanta GA: Rodopi, 1993); Valerie F. Sedlak, "'A World of Their Own': Narrative Distortion in the Portrayal of Women in Heart of Darkness," College Language Association Journal 32.4 (June, 1989), 443-65; and Gordon W. Thompson, "Conrad's Women," Nineteenth-Century Fiction 32 (1978), 442-63.

2 On Foucault's analysis and on the confession technologies see Conroy 1985; Cousineau 1986; Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983; Foucault 1979; Heimer 1967; Roberts 1993; Seidel 1986; Sheridan 1980.

3 "Suicides (7): Kayerts ('An Outpost of Progress'), Jim, Decoud, Captain Whalley, Renouard, Heyst, Peyrol. . . . The total incidence of suicide in Conrad's fiction is much higher--15--and includes Susan ('The Idiots'), Brierly (Lord Jim), Linda Viola (Nostromo), Winnie Verloc (The Secret Agent), Erminia ('Gaspar Ruiz'), Sevrin ('The Informer'), De Barral (Chance), Jorgenson (The Rescue)" (Meyer 1967: 274n). On suicide and Conrad see Berman 1977; Clark 1967; Cox 1973; Currelli 1981; Karl 1979; Mitchell 1986; Paccaud-Huguet 1994; Rising 1991; Staten 1986; Willy 1982.

4 On Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle see Edward Bibring, "The Concept of the Repetition Compulsion," Psychoanalytic Quarterly 12 (1943), 468-519; Jacques Derrida, "Freud and the Scene of Writing," in Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 196-231, and also "Spéculer sur "Freud,'" in La Carte postale: de Socrate a Freud et au-dela (Paris: Flammarion, 1980), 277-437; Hans W. Loewald,  "Some Considerations on Repetition and Repetition Compulsion," International Journal of Psychoanalysis 52 (1971), 59-66.

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