She seems, however, never to have actually finished reading A la recherche. In a 1928 newspaper piece, ‘Preferences’, she writes ‘I have also bought and propose to read should my life last long enough the final volumes of Proust’s masterpiece.’ (Le temps retrouvé was published in 1927.) On 27 April 1934, she tells Ethel Smyth she’s reading Sodom et Gomorrhe. And on 21 May 1934, again to Ethel Smyth: ‘I cant [sic] write myself within its arc; that’s true; for years I’ve put off finishing it.’

  And yet in April, May, June of 1929, her three-part essay ‘Phases of Fiction’fn2 claims that Proustian psychology is an advance on Henry James, while adding the qualification that the ‘expansion of sympathy’ is almost self-defeating. Everything in Proust, however trivial, provokes an extended meditation. ‘Proust is determined to bring before the reader every piece of evidence upon which any state of mind is founded.’ The risk is that the commentary is surplus to requirements, that there is no hierarchy of importance – that the footnotes bury the trickle of text, as it were. ‘We lose the sense of outline.’

  How do we account for Virginia Woolf’s high opinion of Proust if it is so precariously founded? It is partially explained by this hyperventilating assessment to Roger Fry on 3 October 1922: ‘One has to put the book down with a gasp. The pleasure becomes physical – like sun and wine and grapes and perfect serenity and intense vitality combined. Far otherwise is it with Ulysses: to which I bind myself like a martyr to a stake, and have thank God, now finished – My martyrdom is over. I hope to sell it for £4.10. [my italics]’fn3 Joyce was right when he told Budgen: ‘I observe a furtive attempt to run a certain M Marcel Proust of here against the signatory of this letter.’ For Virginia Woolf, Proust was a way of putting her rival Joyce in his place – and a way, too, of acceding easily to the preferential judgements of homosexual Bloomsbury.

  One is queasy, however, at her little litany of praise – grapes, Evian water, pinot noir and the seafront at Cannes! – because its blowsy imprecision suggests impeccable ignorance. And although her essays refer often to Proust, one sometimes wonders if she had read as little as Evelyn Waugh.

  Her essay, ‘Pictures’, invokes a Proustian scene in a theatre, in which ‘we have to understand the emotions of a young man for a lady in the box below’. Andrew McNeillie, the editor of the essays, does not identify this minutely, yet vaguely, invoked incident. Nor can I find it. (When Marcel goes to see Berma in Le côté de Guermantes, he is in the stalls looking up at the boxes.) It is, in any case, dangerously close to nonsense: ‘At the same time our senses drink in all this our minds are tunnelling, logically and intellectually, into the obscurity of the young man’s emotions which, as they ramify and modulate and stretch further and further, at last penetrate so far, peter out into such a shred of meaning, that we can scarcely follow any more [my italics] were it not that suddenly, in flash after flash, metaphor after metaphor, the eye lights up that cave of darkness, and we are shown the hard, tangible, material shapes of bodiless thoughts hanging like bats in the primeval darkness where light never visited them before.’ As I type this out, I am hardly surprised it corresponds exactly to nothing factual in Proust. It is an hommage to Proust’s obscurity.

  Beckett wrote a brief (and intermittently unreadable) monograph about Proust and Krapp’s Last Tape is a kind of dwarf A la recherche, shrunk in the wash. On the one hand, there is the unforgettable (but ironically forgotten) physical memory of the black ball in the dog’s mouth: ‘a small, old, black, hard. Solid rubber ball. (Pause.) I shall feel it, in my hand, until my dying day.’ On the other hand, there is the hypnotic memory of the punt and the girl. Ruth Miller, an early Bellow biographer, remembered Bellow reading to her the passage in Le temps retrouvé when Marcel is stuck in his train in a field. In Herzog, Herzog persecutes his friend Nachman with ‘the engine of his memory’. And Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March owes a debt to Proust as well as a more obvious debt to Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and the American vernacular. When Augie announces that he ‘will go at things’ in his ‘own way’, ‘free-style’, and that his memories will be set down as they arrive, ‘first to knock, first admitted’, he is not in fact going at things entirely in his own way. It is also the Guermantes’ way, Swann’s way, and Proust’s way – the way of involuntary memory.

  Ignês Sodré, ‘Where the Lights and Shadows Fall: on not being able to remember and not being able to forget’

  Thus the shadow of the object fell upon the ego.

  (Freud, Mourning and Melancholia)

  It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me.

  (Melville, Moby Dick)

  As the child’s mind was growing into knowledge, his mind was growing into memory: as her life unfolded, his soul, long stupefied in a cold narrow prison, was unfolding too, and trembling gradually into full consciousness.

  (George Eliot, Silas Marner)

  ‘As the child’s mind was growing into knowledge, his mind was growing into memory’: in this amazing phrase George Eliot describes Silas Marner’s emergence from a state of severe melancholic withdrawal into full lively consciousness. The connection between the availability of significant emotional memories to conscious thought and the sense of the very existence of the self and its relation to others is central to her conception of the mind when creating her character. The direct parallel with the development of the child’s mind implies that this transformation from what she calls an ‘insect-like’ state into full humanity, this ‘trembling gradually into consciousness’, is a psychological rebirth: a new ‘stepping into the light’, in Damasio’s inspiring phrase.

  In this essay I will examine, from a psychoanalytical point of view, this particular kind of lack of ‘illumination’ in the conscious mind, a regression to a memory-less state of almost complete darkness, of being psychically reduced to the faint glow of candlelight. I will also examine the emotional inability to forget, as these apparently opposite psychological problems in fact belong to the same area of the psychopathology of memory. I am thinking about the problem of an excessive ‘illumination’ of particular events in the mind which compulsively steal the limelight, which can be the consequence of trauma, that is to say, of the ego being overwhelmed by an experience it cannot deal with. Traumatic experience may return unmodified to the conscious mind as if it is never transformed into a proper memory, psychologically remaining perpetually in the present.fn1 Excessive fear, excessive grief, or an excessive sense of grievance create situations where ordinary forgetting cannot take place.

  When considering the lack of habitual connection to autobiographical memory portrayed in Silas Marner, I am not thinking about what was Freud’s first and monumental discovery in the early days of psychoanalysis, the mechanism of repression which made disturbing memories unavailable to consciousness, with noxious effects on psychic functioning: ‘hysterics suffer from (unconscious) reminiscences’, neurotic symptoms could be resolved through the recovering of a disturbing memory. Silas’s melancholic withdrawal into what George Eliot calls ‘this Lethean influence of exile, in which the past has become dreamy because its symbols have all vanished, and the present too is dreamy because it is linked to no memories’, is a state in which all good experience has become unreal and irrelevant, rather than unconscious or obliterated; the past can be retrieved in a minimal, half-dead way, but can only be brought back in full, integrated, organic form through a powerful emotional connection that infuses it again with symbolic relevance.

  In normal functioning, the present is fully itself and at the same time illuminated by relevant bits of the past; one’s sense of identity is dependent on one’s autobiographical self: my being who I am depends on experiencing an emotionally connected ‘now’ whilst being who I was at all different stages throughout my life. (These memories are partly conscious and partly implicit in one’s way of being.) The existence of a multi-faceted future in the present of the mind (what Damasio calls ‘memory of the future’) is of course also dependent on intrinsic connections with multiple, flexible versions of past selves. Silas’s absent memories weren’t unconscious: but they had ceased to inform in a flexible lively way his moment-to-moment relationship with others and, even more fundamentally, with himself. His consciousness had become so rigidly reduced that his meaningfully connected self was constantly in a penumbra. This is clearly portrayed in the novel as a consequence of the loss of his loved objects, of trust, of his religion: a loss he was psychically unable to deal with and therefore to recover from until the point in the novel in which he is saved by the resurgence of his capacity to love a little child.

  These pathological states are connected to the incapacity to mourn unbearable losses, and the consequent melancholic states that such a disturbance produces in the mind. Remembering too much – the incapacity to allow a particular event in the past to be past, as in excessive persecutory guilt, excessive grievance, or trauma – is equally a failure of mourning; but this time a particular memory remains in the limelight of the mind, obscuring all other relationships and pursuits. These continue to exist at the fringe of consciousness, made irrelevant. The wound of grief remains unhealed, and the pain is for ever as alive and raw as in the moment of injury: one thinks of the Ancient Mariner (‘and ever and anon throughout his life an agony constraineth him to travel from land to land’, for ever compelled to tell his tale) and of his direct descendant Captain Ahab, similarly crossing the whole world from sea to sea in his ‘monomaniacal’ quest for Moby Dick. Melville reverses the direction of the guilt, so that revenge rather than atonement is the driving force informing the compulsive behaviour; but grief and grievance are in this context two sides of the same coin; the Albatross and the White Whale are for ever centre stage, in the limelight of the mind.

  Marner, a figure inspired by George Eliot’s childhood memory of a linen-weaver, a man carrying a heavy bag, moving from place to place, had his name possibly chosen because of its link to the Ancient Mariner, a poem she admired.fn2 Although he settles next to the Stone Pit near Raveloe, he cannot, like the Mariner, be part of the ordinary life of the community. He remains in exile until his redemption; and although his world is as minuscule as the Mariner’s and Ahab’s are never-ending, he, too, is dominated by one idea only. We could argue, of course, that from a psychological point of view, Silas’s almost total forgetting, the limitation of his consciousness to a tiny spot of light surrounded by constant obscurity, is also a form of unconsciously never forgetting the absence of the loved objects: a feeling memory of the overwhelming presence of absence (‘darkness visible’, illuminated by what Nerval called ‘le soleil noir de la melancholie’).

  In Mourning and Melancholia (1917),fn3 one of Freud’s most revolutionary works, he discovered the unconscious mechanism through which we internalise our lost love object and identify with it; the successful work of mourning, which is a painful and lengthy process, leads to the giving up of the object, accepting its death, thus locating it in the ‘past’ region of the mind, so that it can remain in our inner world as a symbolic presence that informs our life as a memory, both consciously and unconsciously. Failure to mourn creates an internal situation by which the lost object is excessively identified with, and the self lives in the shadow of an internal death, leading to pathological depression.

  Freud describes this primitive introjection leading to melancholia in two strikingly different ways:

  Thus the shadow of the object fell upon the ego, and the latter could henceforth be judged by a special agency [i.e. the superego], as though it were an object, the forsaken object.fn4

  And:

  The ego wants to incorporate this object into itself, and, in accordance with the oral or cannibalistic phase of libidinal development in which it is, it wants to do so by devouring it.fn5

  He further explains the process by saying:

  If the love for the object – a love which cannot be given up though the object itself is given up – takes refuge in narcissistic identification, then the hate comes into operation on this substitutive object, abusing it, debasing it, making it suffer and deriving sadistic satisfaction from its suffering.

  This description has the emotional atmosphere of my second quote above: ‘cannibalistic devouring’ goes with the sadistic abusing and killing of the object (and of the self identified with it).

  Later he says:

  [W]hen the ego finds itself in an excessive real danger which it believes itself unable to overcome by its own strength … it sees itself deserted by all protecting forces and lets itself die. Here, moreover, is once again the same situation as that which underlay the first great anxiety-state of birth and the infantile anxiety of longing – the anxiety due to separation from the protecting mother.fn6

  This has the emotional tone of the first quote about ‘the shadow of the object’. What Freud is discovering here is that in relation to catastrophic loss the self feels totally possessed by, and in possession of, the object; as if quite concretely consumed by it; and at the mercy of powerful and contradictory emotions, intense sorrow and intense hatred. The successful work of mourning will eventually transform the lost object into a proper memory. If loss is experienced as so overwhelming that it cannot be mourned, melancholia (and the defence against it, mania) gets established.

  Although it may seem odd to write about a story by one of the editors of this anthology, I would like to discuss A.S. Byatt’s ‘A Stone Woman’, since it illustrates Freud’s thoughts about the work of mourning and the processes involved in the transformation of the lost loved object into memory in a particularly illuminating way.

  ‘A Stone Woman’ starts with a woman mourning the death of her mother; as with many of Byatt’s stories, it occupies a territory in which the atmosphere of fairy tale and myth overlaps with carefully observed reality through the use of images and metaphors intensely real in their detail, yet conveying an imaginary other world. For a psychoanalyst they directly communicate the experience that our internal world, the world of dreams and unconscious phantasy (psychoanalysts call it the world of internal object relations), is at least as real as external reality. I will quote from this story of painful bereavement, touching as it does on one’s earliest, most primitive attachment, to illustrate what I have just described as Freud’s analysis of the unconscious processes involved in mourning and its potential for developing into melancholia.

  The story begins:

  At first she did not think of stones. Grief made her insubstantial to herself; she felt herself flitting lightly from room to room, in the twilit apartment, like a moth. The apartment seemed constantly twilit, although it must, she knew, have gone through the usual sequences of sun and shadow over the days and weeks since her mother died.fn7

  This is what Freud was trying to describe with his phrase ‘Thus the shadow of the (lost loved) object fell upon the ego’: ‘grief made her insubstantial to herself’, both because the loved object takes her ‘substance’ away and also because she becomes like a ghost herself, insubstantial like the departing spirit, a mother who is present only in absence.

  A few lines down, there is too much light, and a need to try again and again to take in the reality of death: rage and ashes, violence and sorrow, and the hurrying foam of Time moving, towards the frightening loneliness of the future, but also backwards into the past:

  She drew the blinds because the light hurt her eyes. Her inner eye observed final things over and over. White face on white pillow amongst white hair. Colourless skin on lifeless fingers. Flesh of my flesh, flesh of her flesh. The efficient rage of consuming fire, the handfuls of fawn ash which she had scattered, as she had promised, in the hurrying foam of a Yorkshire beck.

  She went through the motions, hoping to become accustomed to solitude and silence. Then one morning pain struck her like a sudden beak, tearing at her gut. She caught her breath and sat down, waiting for it to pass. It did not pass, but strengthened, blow on blow. She rolled on her bed, dishevelled and sweating. She heard the creature moaning. She tried to telephone the doctor, but the thing shrieked raucously into the mouthpiece, and this saved her, for they sent an ambulance, which took the screaming thing to a hospital, as it would not have taken a polite old woman. Later they told her she had had at the most four hours to live. Her gut was twisted and gangrenous.fn8

  This is what Freud was describing by his phrase ‘cannibalistic devouring’ of the object, characteristic of the early stages of mourning. What one experiences as acute, devouring pain is in unconscious phantasy exactly that: a concrete creature that devours you from inside with its horrible beak. In the unconscious, the baby self has devoured the mother, and also feels devoured by her; at the most primitive level the object is a ‘creature’ in horrible pain, as is the primitive, infant self who cannot yet fully digest the experience. The loss at this level is not experienced as an absence, but as a tearing, gut-devouring presence.

  Byatt’s imagery of the bereaved woman’s rotting insides links in my mind to Coleridge’s imagery: the guilt about killing the Albatross causes the Mariner to feel his whole world is rotting, dominated not by death-as-absence but by Life-in-Death with all its horrors:

  The very deep did rot: O Christ

  That ever this should be!

  Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs

  Upon the slimy sea.

  After her near-death experience of her ‘very deep rotting’, Byatt’s character begins to notice that she is gradually turning into stone: bits of her body become transformed into various kinds of colourful stones and jewels. In a similar way, when the Mariner’s process of regeneration starts, the rot and the slimy things turn into beautiful jewel-like creatures:

  Beyond the shadow of the ship

  I watched the water-snakes: