Two scenes, over 50 years apart, one from a novel, the other from a film, have always struck a chord with me.
In 1915 Franz Kafka published “Metamorphosis” which opens with Gregor Samsa waking up to find he has changed into some kind of beetle or cockroach. He still feels like Gregor Samsa but is trapped inside an exoskeleton – a hard outer shell from within which he looks out at the threatening world ruled by his father.
Mike Nichols’ film “The Graduate”, released in 1969, contains a scene in which Benjamin Braddock, played by Dustin Hoffman, is presented at his graduation party wearing the all-encasing diving-suit and goggles his parents have given him as a present. We have already become aware of Benjamin’s anxiety about the teenage pressures of girls, family and future prospects. Nichols takes us inside the wetsuit and we hear Benjamin’s laboured breathing and feel the claustrophobic smothering of the suit as we look out through the goggles at the demanding, threatening world of adults.
I think these scenes are more than metaphors for alienation. I believe they represent felt experience, the explanation for which can be found in psychology.
In 1960 the psychologist R.D. Laing published “The Divided Self” in which he refers to the schizoid anxieties of psychologically insecure people. He identified a condition known as “engulfment” in which the individual feels he is being buried or drowned by the world around him. Such a person commonly dreads turning from a living being to a dead thing, an automaton, a robot. To come to terms with these feelings he seeks isolation, withdraws within a shell, and comes to feel as if his real self is trapped within an alien body, and this self looks out from within a fixed exterior which serves as a shield against a threatening outside world.
Both Gregor and Benjamin are suffering from anxiety and in particular from engulfment. There is a difference in the degree of this anxiety represented by the form of their outer shells. Benjamin’s wetsuit is restricting and uncomfortable – comic even. Gregor’s insect exoskeleton, however, evinces a dreadful fear and disgust. There is a world of difference between the uncomfortable squirming felt by Benjamin Braddock and the anguish and dread felt by Gregor, but they belong to the same condition. Laing tells us that psychosis is a continuum. On a scale of 1 to 10 Benjamin is at 2 and Gregor at 9.
In “The Graduate” Dustin Hoffman’s acting style was a perfect fit. It is the same mechanical, “rabbit-in-the-headlights” style he used later to good effect as the autistic brother in “Rainman”.There is an early shot of him in “The Graduate” gliding on a moving walkway, staring ahead, rigid and robot-like. Hoffman was a proponent of “method” acting, which involves drawing on personal experience to lend authenticity to the emotions being portrayed. What experience was he drawing on when he played Benjamin Braddock?
Engulfment is not just a theory. It exists. I know it exists because I have experienced it myself. There was a time when I felt that the physical thing seen by other people was not me but a false outer shell being operated from within by a hidden real me. It is common for people to put on a false front behind which they can hide their real feelings. This was different, though. Engulfment led me to experience my two selves as a physical reality. I had an exoskeleton. For a time I was Gregor the Graduate.
The tour had been long and exhausting. Audiences were huge and everywhere ecstatic. The artist performed his usual greatest hits and was mobbed in the street outside the theatre. Profits were enormous and ticket touts had a field day. The performer found sleep impossible after the usual adrenaline rush and took to using sedatives. Who’s this, you might ask. Frank Sinatra in the 1950s? Mick Jagger in the 60s? Actually, no. This is Charles Dickens on his American Tour in 1857.
Few people read Marcel Proust. When one of the most popular current means of communication limits utterances to 140 characters it is little wonder that a work containing a 30 page description of the author trying to get to sleep appears unattractive to modern tastes. There is another problem, however. There is a general misconception of the aim of his series of novels. This is due to the unhelpful mistranslation of the title of his work – in French, “À la recherche du temps perdu”. The weakest translation was the first one – “Remembrance of things past”, later updated to the generally accepted, but little better, “In search of lost time”. The problem is that these titles encourage the popular belief that Proust’s work is nostalgic, that it is primarily about the world of memory. This is confirmed in people’s minds by the importance placed by critics on the “Madeleine” scene, in which the taste of a Madeleine cake awakens in the author’s mind a vivid, involuntary childhood memory. In my experience people see this as the point of the book and their response is “So what?” This idea – that we recall the past through the senses of taste and smell – is commonplace. Is Proust famous because he wrote several volumes to show what we all know – that when we get into a new car the smell of the interior reminds us of our first car?
About 20 years ago dad gave me a photo album. It was full of postcards collected by his mother Mary Ellen. These postcards are now just over 100 years old. Some had been sent by her brother from France during the 1st World War. They helped me get a picture of a side of the family I know little about, because dad hardly ever talked about it. But it’s more than that; it’s a social history too.
The cards show what people – soldiers and the general public – thought the war was going to be like – stirring cavalry charges, glory and honour. As we now know it was far from that. The soldiers discovered this to their cost. The general public never did. Because of the propaganda of postcards such as this the truth was hidden from them. So there was a split between those who went to war and those who didn’t. And the split was never healed because the returning soldiers wouldn’t, or couldn’t, talk about it. Why? Well think what it’s like trying to tell others that your pain is worse than theirs. They tend not to believe you, or they suspect you of being a martyr. So you keep quiet.
my chautauqua 