Why shells, exactly (the kind that have given us the term pilgrimsmusslor, or ‘pilgrim shells’)? Hirn suggests that these souvenir scallop shells and molluscs, sometimes cast in tin or lead, originated with the pilgrimages to Mont-Saint-Michel in Normandy, which became one of Christianity’s earliest and most distinguished destinations after it was said that the Archangel Michael appeared there in the year 708. ‘The learned archaeologist Paul Gout has, in his great work on Mont-Saint-Michel, asserted that the pilgrims who visited this sacred edifice, after being forbidden by the priests to take with them pieces of the church wall or altar covering as souvenirs, began instead to remove small rocks or shells, of the kind collected from the seashore. These latter objects – with all the requisite marine associations – served best of all as displayed memories from the sacred place, in which the ignorant inland-travellers imagined seeing a final outpost of the mainland in the sea, a place “where one might not yet be in heaven, but one has already left Earth”. It was a source of pride, in one’s pious wanderings, to have gone the long way to the ocean, and so it became common custom to hang shells on one’s costume upon leaving Saint-Michel.’ Hirn, op. cit.

  A similar legend is told of Santiago de Compostela (whence, via a series of wonders, St. James’ remains had been relocated – the Holy Virgin’s dwelling, via a miracle, is also said to have been moved from Nazareth to Loreto, Italy, which turned the place into a popular destination for pilgrims). It was said that a strange fish with a shell on each of its sides swam in the ocean beyond Santiago de Compostela, and it was these shells that the pilgrims collected and sewed to their clothing.

  Shells and casts of shells soon came to provide a small souvenir industry, and they were sold at markets next to the cathedral in Santiago, in Jerusalem and in other sites of pilgrimage. Cf. Jonathan Sumption, Pilgrimage: An Image of Mediaeval Religion, 1975.

  7. Here it could be interjected that certain cosmological dreamers, such as Ghyka, Hambidge, etc. believe themselves to have glimpsed the innermost order of the world in a spiral-shaped shell, the so-called nautilus shell. The spiral of this shell takes its shape according to a ratio of numbers in the same harmonious proportion to the golden ratio, which the Renaissance mathematician Luca Pacioli named the ‘divine proportion’. The nautilus’s spiral expands logarithmically based on the numerical series, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, etc. in which each number is equal to the sum of the two previous. The ratio between the lower number and the higher one that follows makes the ‘golden number’, 1.618 (or inverted, 0.618). This number is said to be embedded in Creation, an example being the logarithmic spiral of the nautilus, but also the sunflower’s corolla, nebulas of the macrocosmos and galaxies. And in humans the golden ratio meets the centre point that once connected us to our origins, the navel; at least, Ghyka asserts, this applies to the ideal human of the Venus de Milo type (readers, by the way, can use a tape measure to check if they are of a similar type: the golden ratio is obtained by dividing one’s body height by 1.618 or multiplying it by 0.618). See Matila Ghyka, Le nombre d’or, 1931.

  8. Ibid.

  9. Already then a professor.

  10. Alluding to the shell as a souvenir – cf. the madeleine in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. It is the taste of this cake, dipped in lime blossom tea, which in the famous scene suddenly awakens childhood memories from Combray, resurrecting the past. Proust describes the madeleine’s shape: ‘short, plump little cakes called “petites madeleines”, which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim’s shell.’

  Isn’t the narrator’s memory a kind of pilgrimage to the lost paradise of the past? These, after all, are recollections that fill him with a ‘precious essence’.

  Actual pilgrimages can be found in Proust’s biography too. Soon after John Ruskin’s death in the year 1900 Proust wrote an article in Le Figaro titled ‘Pèlerinages ruskiniens en France’, where he encourages pilgrimages to the places Ruskin described, to the great Gothic northern French cathedrals in Amiens, Beauvais, Rouen. Proust, who would later take himself all the way to Venice in order to experience Ruskin incarnate in the city’s stone, followed his own urging and set off with a few friends for Rouen. In The Seven Lamps of Architecture Ruskin’s attention is drawn to the detail of a fold: carved into one of Rouen’s cathedral doors is a modest but highly bizarre bas-relief figure resting his head heavily in his hands, ‘vexed and puzzled in his malice; and his hand is pressed hard on his cheek bone, and the flesh of the cheek is wrinkled under the eye by the pressure’. As so often in Ruskin, and in Proust, the detail stands out as central. In his book Marcel Proust (1958), Richard H. Barker also makes note of this crease: ‘While he [Proust] was still busy with these tasks and while, as it happened, he was re-reading the passage in The Seven Lamps of Architecture in which, to condemn modern machinery and extol medieval handicraft, Ruskin describes some figures in bas-relief on the north door of Rouen Cathedral, the newspapers reported Ruskin’s death, and Proust immediately decided that he must make a memorial pilgrimage, obviously to Rouen. He must see the bas-relief for himself. He went with his friends the Yeatmans, approached the north door, and eagerly scanned the hundreds of figures, looking for the ones immortalized by the master. Finally Madame Yeatman said that she had found them, and there indeed they were – the dragons and the odd little man resting his head on his hand so firmly that his cheek was puffed out under the eye. Few figures on the door can have been more completely insignificant; yet Proust was quite satisfied.’

  11. 20 Jan. 1900.

  12. He says that the book is assembled of creases and folds, that it is born of the folded sheet, sometimes sealed, as in the stapled pamphlet. Its closedness is both religious and erotic. Mallarmé describes thus in Chronique the intimate rite of driving an ivory paper knife into the darkness between two as yet unslit pages. A newspaper’s shamelessly full pages, however, dispel the mystery. And he continues in the prose piece ‘Le livre, instrument spirituel’, in Divagations, observing the pile of pages stacked upon each other: ‘With regard to the large printed sheet, the folding is a sign, almost religious, which is not so striking as its settling, in density, presenting the miniature tomb, indeed, of the soul.’ The very image of the fold, of that which is folded, is, Jacques Scherer says, one of Mallarmé’s central motifs. Scherer, op. cit.

  13. Very likely gneiss. Ruskin harboured a passionate interest in geology, and the location of J. E. Millais’s famous portrait is not happenstance. It was during a trip to Scotland in the summer of 1853 that Ruskin, his wife Effie and Millais found the gneiss rock in front of the waterfall. In the rock upon which Ruskin stands, grooves and folds run like waves, like a petrified analogy to the whirling waterfall and river, along with the water flowing in the background. This choice of scenography is surely a reference to Ruskin’s observations in Modern Painters, where he describes the arrested movement of the gneiss as a form of frozen time, a memory of the mountain’s volcanic, fluid infancy: ‘The tremor which fades from the soft lake and gliding river is sealed, to all eternity, upon the rock; and while things that pass visibly from birth to death may sometimes forget their feebleness, the mountains are made to possess a perpetual memorial of their infancy.’

  14. In his public and infamous divorce case, Ruskin’s secret was brought to light. A gynaecologist could verify that his marriage with Effie had been ‘unconsummated’, and she was therefore free to marry J. E. Millais, whom she had got to know during a trip to Scotland.

  15. Norbert Hanold had ‘forgotten’ his childhood love Zoe Bertgang and replaced her with the bas-relief. Zoe had, so to speak, been masked by the art object; in it were traces of her characteristic graceful gait, which led to Hanold calling the relief ‘Gradiva’ (roughly, she who steps along brilliantly or splendidly). It turns out that it is Zoe herself, of flesh and blood, who eventually becomes his Ariadne and leads him out of the labyrinth’s shelter of oblivion and repression.

  It was C. G. Jung who first drew Freud’s attention to Wilhelm Jensen’s novel Gradiva. Freud read it with enthusiasm and then wrote a short essay titled ‘Der Wahn und die Träume in W. Jensens “Gradiva”’, published in 1907. One theme in the novel is dreams and repressed impulses, which were naturally of interest to the pioneers of psychoanalysis. Might Freud also have felt a kinship with the archaeologist Norbert Hanold, the hero of the book? The young Hanold had devoted his life to his branch of scholarship and seemed to live entirely for his research. But during a visit to the Vatican Museum he was inexplicably gripped by the bas-relief of the woman whose graceful steps can be glimpsed below the folds of her dress, and he bought a plaster cast, which he hung on the wall in his study (Freud and other analysts subsequently did the same). Some time thereafter he had an anxious dream in which he found himself in Pompeii during Vesuvius’s violent eruption in 79 A.D. And there, in a square, he suddenly caught sight of the Gradiva of the relief, alive and embodied. He followed her and she took a seat on the marble steps of the Temple of Apollo, where slowly, as if by metamorphosis, she took on the colour of the marble before being covered in ash from Vesuvius, the flowing lava of which soon buried the whole city.

  After this dream Hanold’s usual peace of mind was disturbed. Unsettled and restless, he set off on a journey to Italy and eventually ended up in Pompeii itself. Miraculously enough, wide awake and in broad daylight he again catches sight of Gradiva! Yes, she is alive and real, for she answers to his address, and good Hanold is perplexed. But, with patience, Gradiva sets him on the right path. It turns out that she is in fact called Zoe Bertgang (‘Zoe’, life; and ‘Bertgang’, roughly, ‘she with the elegant gait’) and, incidentally, is the childhood sweetheart of the archaeologist to whom he once lived next door in Munich. Hanold had buried his passionate feelings for Zoe deep in his unconscious. He could not however prevent her from making herself known in the bas-relief, which gave rise in him such an intense and inexplicable attraction, and to which he gave the name Gradiva, a substitute for Zoe’s name which seemed to have been lost to his memory.

  The analogy between the archaeologist and the psychoanalyst is clear. Freud surely could see himself in Heinrich Schliemann, who, layer by layer, dug down through ancient Troy. And Freud writes in his essay: ‘In his [Jensen’s] last simile, however, – of the “childhood friend who had been dug out of the ruins” – the author has presented us with the key to the symbolism of which the hero’s delusion made use in disguising his repressed memory. There is, in fact, no better analogy for repression, by which something in the mind is at once made inaccessible and preserved, than burial of the sort to which Pompeii fell victim and from which it could emerge once more through the work of spades.’

  16. Ibid.

  17. Doctor of Letters B. Risberg, however, has charitably reminded me that in Epistles 1, 10: 24, Horace made use of a similar image of nature’s intractability.

  18. Edmund Engelman’s photographs of Berggasse 19 reveal Freud as a passionate, if not manic, collector of archaeological material. Half his desk, and every other unused table surface and shelf is filled to breaking point with antique statuettes. Freud himself willingly admitted that his lust as a collector was exceeded only by his nicotine craving.

  19. Archaeologist but also detective. In cosy Victorian milieus at Berggasse 19 and 221b Baker Street, Sigmund Freud and Sherlock Holmes, respectively, receive those seeking help. They listen to stories both strange and detailed, behind which they eventually bring to light a no less fantastical, secret or latent context. Often the key is an insignificant fragment that passes the layman by and, aided by this fragment, they reconstruct an absent whole (just as the archaeologist reconstructs the shape of a jug from a small shard thereof). They move as if in circles, in ever-widening rounds: in the light of a hypothesis, they find and interpret individual fragments that together provide a corrected and expanded hypothesis of the whole, which helps them to then find new fragments and so on. For both, their sharp wit is unsurpassed and legendary. And when the case is finally solved, it is noted down in literary form as a case study – in turn becoming material for countless histories and myths. Do not the titles of Freud’s stories, ‘Rat Man’, ‘Wolf Man’ (in which he expressly refers to Sherlock Holmes) and ‘Little Hans’ stoke the imagination as much as ‘The Hound of Baskervilles’, ‘The Man with the Scar’ and ‘The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb’? It is also a feature of the genre that the text is occasionally interrupted by a small diagram of the crime scene or another location central to the story. Cf. Steven Marcus, Freud and the Culture of Psychoanalysis, 1984; Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Clues’, in Häften för kritiska studier (Journal of Critical Studies), no. 3, 1983.

  20. So too it has been assured, but when can the case be said to be solved and the excavations complete? Freud has described psychoanalysis as work not unlike the draining of the Zuiderzee. In place of the mysterious vegetation of the ocean’s murky depths, what remains is a dry sea bed. It’s a task that undeniably resembles that of Sisyphus, for don’t new secrets arise throughout the working process and don’t the work of dredging constantly create new furrows and leaks?

  21. The Victorian era – during the latter half of the nineteenth century – sees the birth of the great metropolis and therewith a new type of urban creature, the flâneur – a roving and curious observer of modern life. According to the encyclopaedia Le Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIX siècle, what marks out the flâneur is that he sees and hears what passes other people by; this could be apparently irrelevant phrases, fleeting sounds or innocuous situations. Here Walter Benjamin (op. cit.) makes an analogy with the detective: ‘Preformed in the figure of the flâneur is that of the detective. The flâneur required a social legitimation of his habitus. It suited him very well to see his indolence presented as a plausible front, behind which, in reality, hides the riveted attention of an observer who will not let the unsuspecting malefactor out of his sight.’

  22. ‘Dodé né ci haudan té méche métiche Astané ké dé mé véche. ‘In a trance, Hélène Smith repeats this phrase, which she has heard uttered on the planet Mars and which means, she elucidates: ‘This is the house of the great man Astané, whom thou hast seen.’ She takes somnambulant trips to Mars and reports on pastoral landscapes, lakes of blue and pink and peach-coloured earth. But further away, on Ultra-Mars, an indistinct planet beyond Mars, she seems to find herself at the outermost limit: ‘I did not see any tree, any bit of verdure.’ For several years in the late 1890s her speeches and writings and images were studied by Théodore Flournoy, the chair of the psychology laboratory in Geneva. The investigations took place during a great many séances during which the young, beautiful Hélène Smith automatically produced a number of astounding stories, languages, alphabets and images. Flournoy was an ardent opponent of spiritism and superstition and did not believe for a second that Hélène’s words came from the spirit world; instead, he asserted, they were a rare fruit of her unbridled, childlike fantasy world – her unconscious. But as soon as Flournoy tried to decipher her secret languages and visions, she would come up with new ones as a kind of defensive manoeuvre: after the Royal cycle – in which Hélène became Marie Antoinette incarnate – comes the Hindu cycle and then the Martian and, as a final outpost, Ultra-Mars.

  Faced with the mystery of Hélène Smith, Théodore Flournoy and his assistants work like sharp-witted detectives to reveal her secret. When it comes to the Hindu cycle’s alleged Sanskrit, Flournoy was aided by none other than Ferdinand de Saussure, the founder of structural linguistics. At this time, Saussure was working in Geneva as a professor of Sanskrit and Indo-European linguistics. He participated in a couple of Smith’s séances himself. Cf. Sarane Alexandrian, Le Surréalisme et le rêve, 1974; Theodore Flournoy, Des Indes à la planète Mars, 1899.

  23. Cf. Freud’s words in the lecture on symbolism in the dream: ‘The dreamer has at his disposal a symbolic means of expression of which he is unconscious while awake, and does not recognize when he sees. That is as remarkable as if you should make the discovery that your chambermaid understands Sanskrit, although you know she was born in a Bohemian village and never learned the language.’

  24. Milton, Paradise Lost, III.

  25. The researchers discussed in detail how Hélène Smith, a shop assistant in Geneva, had been able to gain knowledge of Sanskrit. Flournoy manages to trace possible signs in the literary forms of Indology, with which she may have come into fleeting contact through an acquaintance. But above all it is de Saussure who conducts the linguistic review. As his starting point he uses the two words ‘atiêyâ ganapatinâmâ’, with which Hélène, on 3 March 1895, inaugurated the Hindu cycle about Princess Simandini and Prince Sivrouka. Saussure interprets this phrase as a Sanskrit-like hybrid of the French, ‘Je vous bénis au nom de Ganapati’ (I bless you in the name of Ganapati). In a crushingly ingenious – but not entirely convincing – reconstruction he leaves no clue unexamined and spares no mental effort. Saussure suggests thus: 1. Je is forced to transform. Did there appear in her memory an exotic word for je? No, none. So she then takes at random ‘a’ instead of je. (Perhaps this ‘a’ is inspired by the English ‘I’, pronounced ‘aï’, but it is not necessarily so.) 2. ‘Vous bénis’ or ‘bénis vous’, for if the word for je was suggested by the English, it may follow that the English word order, however involuntarily, had come to mark the words placed immediately afterwards. Consequently, for ‘bénis vous’ the words ‘tiê yâ’ are given. Yâ may have been taken from the English ‘you’ (modified by the most dominant vowel in Sanskrit). Tiê, ‘bénis’, has no known origin, as is the case with the Martian language. 3. ‘Au nom de Ganapati’, Ganapati’s name, quite simply, without the previous mechanism’s rewriting; it could have been taken from anywhere. There remains ‘au nom de’, expressed as ‘nâmâ’, reminiscent of the German Name, perhaps a resurrection of the Sanskrit word nâmâ, which she could have picked up somewhere; and finally the construction that, opposite to French word order, could have come on the coat-tails of the German Name, after the German turn of phrase in Gottes Namen, in Ganapatis Namen. In brief, a gibberish that assembles its components however it can, and half the time is invented, with the only rule being to prevent the audience from suspecting that it has derived from the French. (That is, a form of Abwehr, ‘warding off’.) As for Flournoy, he wanted to ascribe atiêyâ to ‘achoo!’, the onomatopoeic word for sneeze, connected with the desire for benediction: ‘bless you’. See Flournoy, op. cit. And with this the case could be said to be closed, albeit barely adequately. For the sake of clarity I’ve illustrated Saussure’s reasoning in the following diagram:

 

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