Ah, the voyeur, literature’s most beloved creep. Voyeurism, now so inextricably written into our contemporary psychology, hardly needs an introduction. Usually driven by scopophilia (the love of looking), voyeurs fix their gaze on the unaware other, and their drive is typically sexual in nature.

So what happens when we are presented with a voyeur who trades looking for listening? What happens when we use our ears instead of our eyes to penetrate the other’s private realm? What is the aural version of a scopophile? Ellen Ullman’s latest novel, By Blood, offers us a voyeur who embodies this strange twist – he’s a peeping tom who can’t actually see the woman he’s watching.

A disgraced professor (we never learn exactly what he’s done, but does it really matter?) with a history of mental disturbance rents an office in downtown San Francisco and discovers that the neighboring office belongs to a psychoanalyst. Luckily for his obsessive tendencies, one of her patients despises the whirr of the white noise machine, and he’s gifted with hours and hours of pure overheard therapy. He quickly becomes obsessed with the patient, an adopted lesbian who is toying with the possibility of finding her birth parents. As he begins stalking her solely through auditory signals, we quickly find ourselves in the more covert realm of voyeurism, that of the eavesdropper. In between the private and the public there is a thin wall, and our narrator has his ear pressed right up against it.

Sitting in the dark, making himself invisible, he is reeled in by one of the most seductive and overlooked qualities of all: sound. “She had inherited the more profound interior configuration of the body: the subtle crenellations of lung and diaphragm and sinuses, the delicate architecture of the airways; all which combine to produce that aspect which is last noted but finally most determinant of one’s overall feelings about a person….that which can make the plainest woman magnetic, the most visually lovely one an irritant: the voice.”

Her voice carries him into her narrative, an analysis centering around her adoption, or as she likes to call it, her “mysterious origins.” The narrative becomes perfectly triangulated when the analyst’s past makes treating her patient almost impossible; the countertransference (the analyst’s emotional entanglement with her patient’s case) proves to be just one more snarl in this seductive web that Ullman spins.

Upon listening, his ears become such attuned little radios, attenuated to every small noise. He’s able to suss out the shift of pantyhose (“cicada-like”), the inhalations, the sighs, the lighting of the post-therapeutic cigarette. Ullman allows us to revel in the seductive pull of the audible, ramping up the sex of every sound.

Set in early 70’s San Francisco, Ullman’s highly stylized prose walks along the backbone of that heightened era, teasing out the center of binary opposites: liberation and capture, public and private, voyeur and exhibitionist.

The voyeur asks the exhibitionist: are we really that different? Aren’t we both, in essence, trying to be seen?

Ellen Ullman

Our narrator’s opening statement, the very first line of the book, “I did not cause her any harm. This was a great victory for me,” sets the creepy tone. Yet he’s not a convicted criminal (yet), and part of his trajectory is learning how to safely use the other. Our disgraced professor can only begin his path of self-discovery through safely using the patient’s narrative as an entry point for his own problems.

Ullman’s insight into character is astounding. She writes of the professor’s darkness: “It was a time of the truest of lonelinesses (since loneliness is plural various in its aspects and effects); and by this I mean not simply the absence of companionship but a complete estrangement from all feelings except self-loathing. The world tolerated me, I believed, only because of my subterfuge: the fraud I perpetrated which fooled them into thinking I was human.”

It’s so easy to write our protagonist off as a creep. In fact the novel hints that you should find him despicable. But isn’t more interesting to ask what drives his desire? Freud wrote that “analysis shows us in a shadowy way how the fact of a child at a very early age listening to his parents copulating may set up his first sexual excitation, and how that event may, owing to its after-effects, act as a starting-point for the child’s whole sexual development.” It could be that there are two camps of people: those whose sexual introduction comes first through the eyes, and the other, through the ears. When one overhears, there is much to be left to interpretation and fantasy. Perhaps our disgraced professor, like many of us, finds himself in murky sexual territory, because he is stuck in the realm of fantasy. He is unable to deal with his own psychological mire, and instead chooses to live vicariously through the other.

Our protagonist, who seems to be drawn in a way in which we are encouraged to find him odious, sits in the dark, sustaining his silence, in order to weave together not only the threads of the patient’s life, but also unknowingly, his own. So why was it so easy to relate to this “creep”? Because in his hushed state of hiding, we see ourselves. By choosing a voyeur as the narrator, Ullman allows us position ourselves at a safe distance from the act we readers are also engaged in: voyeurism.

What is reading if not the ultimate act of voyeurism? Who could be more “safely” situated than the reader? The act of reading is the greatest perversion; we readers are such creeps –yet it’s important to ask what is behind our literary perversion. What dark creature turns the wheel of that machine? Ultimately perversion is an attempt to get closer to something perceived unattainable. The other. The object of desire. How do we get close to all of the things that seem beyond us? Sometimes, we start by listening.

The etymology of the term eavesdrop comes from a literal spot, that of standing under the eave of a home, next to the tiny opening where private sounds from the house are audible. The physical positioning of the eavesdrop makes it so that the listener, should it rain, would likely get wet (erotic implied.) Our professor observes, “as always, we analysands dangle ourselves before the fire only when we know it is about to go out”. Similarly we readers hang out, under the eaves, ears peeled, where we’re sure to get wet. Ullman is a master of seduction, and By Blood is a glorious downpour.

By Blood takes place on a single inhale. Ullman allows us to inhale, and makes us hold that uncomfortable, oxygen-draining pose, for the entire novel, as she winds us through the knotted, anxious web between voyeur, patient, and analyst. The eavesdropper inhabits a liminal border space, a wall, straddling the private and the public. Ullman makes her readers take the same stance, and the constant threat of danger gives the entire novel a charged unrequited sexual state of agitation. She allows us to exhale literally on the last page, in a type of exhaustion, rather than jouissance. I closed the last page, breathless and wiped out. By Blood is an affirmation that not only is the novel nowhere near dead, it’s panting breathlessly in the next room.

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• Steve Almond’s Bad Poetry Corner #13: In Hiroshima
• Beyond the Pleasure Principle

In Hiroshima

In Hiroshima, after the bomb
the sick lay close as lovers,
the strong put tags on those
who stood no chance
later to be flayed by fire

They brought peace, then, there,
by splitting the smallest thing men know
and here, now, you and
I divide the opposite
asking without speaking:

are we ready for such a tag
and who will put on who,
which of us will lie half-awake, lovedying,
shocked at the sharp end of something
wielded by the other?

You know how it works in the Bad Poet game: everything is exalted, everything is glowing with the malignant radiance of your own ego, everything is fodder. So John Hersey, unbeknownst to himself, was not just writing the seminal account of the 20^th century’s preeminent atrocity. No, he was also writing to provide me a rather dubious metaphor for one of the many grudges by which I wiled away my days in graduate school. I can’t remember who it is I was writing this poem about, or at. It could have been a hundred convenient antagonists. So many feuds, as the French say, so little temp.

You will notice, in addition to my loose appreciation of the comma and its correct grammatical deployment – a hallmark of the Bad Poet – my use of the compound neologism (“lovedying”). This no doubt means I had been reading Faulkner. I remember Light in August giving me quite a tumble.

But what was I really writing about? What are we ever really writing about? Our families. Our kin. The authentic ghosts, the folks we can’t rid ourselves of by other means. So this must have been about one or both of my brothers, and the fierce, calamitous love that has fired us into different orbits. All the big explosions, the ones you later inappropriately compare to mass murders, they must happen to us in childhood, when we feel most helpless.

Auden had it right. Freud wasn’t just some sexist relic, to be poked at by angry PhD candidates. He was our prophet of the inner past, a man who loved children and recognized the long toll of their injuries, who showed us what evil is, not, as we thought/deeds that must be punished, but our lack of faith/our dishonest mood of denial. Jesus. Auden. We should give that guy a fucking holiday.

As it is, I had only this Bad Poem, this dishonest mood of denial, which I suppose he would have endured and even forgiven me.

Here’s Ms. Kay Johnson, of Frost Junction, Idaho, who has her own bridge to burn. Ms. Johnson appears, like so many of us, deeply entrusted to her misery…

Flame Flickers

wax wanes
wick slides down
walls remain
barriers tremble
by will of heat
a slow, slow race
to claim defeat

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A review of Vienna Triangle, by Brenda Webster

Vienna Triangle is much more than the construction of a fiction around historical facts and figures.

The creation of an historical work of fiction is problematic at best; populating a balanced narrative with well-known personages requires a writer who takes chances. Brenda Webster is such a writer. Her new novel, Vienna Triangle, depicts Sigmund Freud’s fin de siècle Vienna through the lens of 1960s America, two similarly tumultuous periods. Effortlessly, this author interlaces the two eras, along with characterizations and ideologies indigenous to each.

No stranger to this subject matter, Webster has previously written an essay on Helene Deutsch’s relation to Freudian theory (“Helene Deutsch: A New Look”) as well as a memoir chronicling her family’s century-long involvement with psychoanalysis (The Last Good Freudian).

The fictitious protagonist of Vienna Triangle is 28-year-old Kate Berg, who juggles graduate study in psychology and a not-so-perfect relationship with a young sociology professor named Keith, with taking care of her convalescent mother. While writing her dissertation about female psychoanalysts, she happens to meet octogenarian Helene Deutsch, a prized member of Freud‘s inner circle, later unfairly blamed by feminists for not having rejected Freud‘s premise of inherent female masochism; they failed to recognize the liberating nature of Deutsch’s work with patients. The fortuitous liaison between Kate and Helene not only aids Kate in her research but leads her to the surprising discovery of a family secret: a diary that discloses an aspect of her heredity connected to Helene. Thus, these two women provide the novel’s parallel points of view, juxtaposed in a way that accentuates their bond and introduces a vital dynamic early in the story.

The relationship triangle referred to by the title is the historic one between Freud, his brilliant disciple Viktor Tausk, and Lou Andreas-Salomé, Tausk’s lover and Freud’s muse. Related in flashbacks, their affiliation serves as a catalyst for the actions of the contemporary characters. Other, less dominant triads keep popping up over the course of the book, both past (Helene/Tausk/Freud) and present (Helene/Kate/Emily, Kate/Keith/Helene).

Initially, some of the relationships come off as convenient to the plot. Eventually, however, they become a statement of the function of synchronicity in the universe. The novel’s focus on Tausk’s controversial suicide reinforces the role of will-versus-fate and the notion that one must assume culpability for the consequences of one’s actions. This was especially true in the case of Freud’s attitude towards his followers, especially Tausk. Here Webster raises as many questions as she answers: Did Freud’s genius render him incapable of acknowledging the actual sources of his ideas? Did he purposefully appropriate the work of his associates because he was intolerant of competition and assumed that the collective results would exonerate him anyway? Finally, was Freud really Tausk’s rival in love affairs as well as intellectual ones, or was it simple lack of empathy that made him suspicious of his supporters? The overall implication is that Tausk’s suicide could have been prevented had there been a better understanding between these great minds.

Kate’s periodic reading of the found diary results in an effectively paced revelation of her family’s ties to Freud’s universe. Her research thus becomes more personal than academic. Disclosure of pivotal plot points via the diary balances nicely with the viewpoint of Helene Deutsch, whose loyalty to Freud makes her unreliable. Webster doles out this information sparingly, in a writing style reminiscent of the best detective novels but without recourse to the clichés of that particular genre.

The fact that the diary is a total fabrication, but contains real people and events, enables it to act as a medium that connects the novel’s past with its present day. More precisely, it unites characters with mutual ties to the past, even when they were unfamiliar to one another. Furthermore, the diary establishes possible underlying reasons for Tausk’s behavior, embodying the same masculine principles that interact so well with Kate’s feminine values in her world.

Vienna Triangle is much more than the construction of a fiction around historical facts and figures. It brings to light some virtually unknown aspects of the inner workings of psychoanalysis as well as the origins of the movement itself. But this novel’s major success is that it provides a lesson in growth through wisdom, sympathy and humility.

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• Cold-Blooded and Bothered
• Triumph and Oblivion
• Steve Almond’s Bad Poetry Corner #13: In Hiroshima