SOURCE: Campbell, Ewing. “Dark Matter: Barthelme's Fantastic, Freudian Subtext in ‘The Sandman’.” Studies in Short Fiction 27, no. 4 (fall 1990): 517-24.

In its farewell to Donald Barthelme The New Yorker reminded readers that he had been variously defined “as an avant-gardist, a collagist, a minimalist, a Dadaist, an existentialist, and a postmodernist” (22). It is an extensive, but incomplete list, for Rosemary Jackson in her Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion places him among the literary fantasists (164). As the embodiment of a literary period—American postmodernism—he was all of the above and more. Responses to his work were intense and often at variance. It was daunting to some, nonsense to others, abstract, concrete, irreverent, wonderful, trivial, each qualifier depending on the humor and sensibilities of those making the judgment, but his fiction was always rich enough and elusive enough to bear the weight of serious inquiry. “The Sandman,” an epistolary fiction abounding in arcane references, is no exception. Although its surface text seems simple enough, appropriated and concealed subtexts complicate any detailed discussion to the point of confusion, creating a situation that justifies a compass for keeping us on course. The four points of that compass are the following:

• •First, the primary text is a story by Donald Barthelme called “The Sandman,” which takes the form of a letter to a lover's psychiatrist. As such it possesses an internal writer, the correspondent, and an internal reader, Dr. Hodder.
• •Second, the title of the story recalls E. T. A. Hoffmann's fantastic tale “The Sandman,” although the correspondent disingenuously claims he has the sandman of nursery rhyme in mind.
• •Third, Hoffmann's tale was interpreted by Sigmund Freud in his essay “The ‘Uncanny’” as an Oedipal struggle in which a father-castrator figure destroys the son. This figure appears as two different men with the names of Coppelius and Coppola in different parts of the tale.
• •Fourth, Dr. Hodder, as a psychiatrist, would have known Freud's essay, and the correspondent's arcane references reveal his own knowledge of psychological literature, making his awareness of Freud's sandman-castrator equation evident to Hodder, which in turn explains the doctor's annoyance at being called a sandman. It also subjects the letter writer's protestation of innocence to irony.

The invisible presence of Hoffmann's tale and Freud's interpretation addresses Dr. Hodder and us in a dialogue of texts. As Mikhail Bakhtin insists the word, “permeated with the interpretations of others,” is never innocent (202).¹ Some, however, are less innocent than others, and Barthelme's fiction is the least innocent of all. In the absence of innocence an elucidation of the story by means of other texts is justifiable because it takes into account the literary space of prior voices, a space analogous to the dark matter of galaxies—present, measurable, but unseen.

In a confrontational voice the letter writer assails psychiatry and indirectly portrays the doctor as a modern extension of Hoffmann's sandman even though the two stories are superficially different. One conveys well-motivated hostility toward a lover's psychiatrist; the other is a tale about a young man's obsessive fear of losing his eyes to the sandman. One of the effects of approaching this story contextually is that such a method reveals the similarity of the two as Oedipal struggles while exposing the complex layers of an assault that uses Freudian interpretation against itself.

Hoffman's tale begins with a series of letters, the first recounting Nathaniel's childhood memories of being sent to bed with a warning that the sandman is coming, a warning always accompanied by the heavy tread of a visitor. Hoffmann's use of folklore occurs when Nathaniel's nurse explains that the sandman throws sand into children's eyes, making those organs jump from their sockets to be gathered up by the sandman and carried away. On occasion after occasion of grotesque fantasy one encounters the severed part as a defining feature of the genre. So it is not surprising to see it in a tale that depends on tradition for much of its effect.

This is significant in the context of Freud's analysis of the tale, which asserts that psychoanalytic experience teaches us fear for one's eyes is a childhood anxiety often retained by adults and morbid concerns about eyes and blindness are manifest fears of castration: “In blinding himself, Oedipus, that mythical law-breaker, was simply carrying out a mitigated form of the punishment of castration—the only punishment that according to the lex talionis was fitted for him” (137).

Freud goes on to contend that, in spite of all arguments to the contrary, dreams, myths, and fantasies establish a substitutive relation between the eye and the reproductive organs. Without offering examples other than Oedipus, he writes, “All further doubts are removed when we get the details of their ‘castration-complex’ from the analyses of neurotic patients, and realize its immense importance in their mental life” (138).

One literary example supporting this contention in graphically violent and sexual scenes is Georges Bataille's Story of the Eye. Juxtaposing an eye and a bull testis Bataille explicitly equates the two in the following passage from that novel:

Thus, two globes of equal size and consistency had suddenly been propelled in opposite directions at once. One, the white ball of the bull, had been thrust into the “pink and dark” cunt that Simone had bared to the crowd; the other, a human eye, had spurted from Granero's head with the same force as a bundle of innards from a belly. This coincidence, tied to death and to a sort of urinary liquefaction of the sky, first brought us back to …

(75-76)

The ghastly sight of Granero's dangling eye produces a monorchid image as he is borne away. Another example less esoteric than Bataille's novel is the familiar story of Samson's emasculation and blinding, which lends conviction to the idea.

Nathaniel's childhood fear is powerfully felt, but not enough to negate his voyeuristic attraction to the threat. Resolving to see the sandman the child hides in his father's study and sees Coppelius the lawyer, who calls out while working at the hearth, “Eyes here! Eyes here!” (Hoffmann 6). Nathaniel reveals himself involuntarily and is seized by Coppelius. The father's plea saves the boy's eyes from the glowing coals Coppelius is about to deliver to them, but does not save him from a thorough shaking at the hands of his tormentor or prevent a long illness.

At a later, similar visit from Coppelius the father is killed by an explosion. Freud stresses the intimate connection between the student's anxiety about his eyes and his father's death and Hoffmann is clear about linking Nathaniel's father and Coppelius:

Good God! as my old father bent down over the fire, how different he looked! His gentle and venerable features seemed to be drawn up by some dreadful convulsive pain into an ugly, repulsive Satanic mask. He looked like Coppelius.

(6)

The father-Coppelius figures represent the two opposites created by the child's ambivalence toward his father: one threatens to blind (castrate) him, the other saves his eyes.

Years later while away at school Nathaniel receives in his room Coppola, an itinerant optician in whom the student sees his old nemesis, now saying, “What! Nee weatherglasses? Nee weatherglasses? 've got foine oyes as well—foine oyes!” (20). He offers spectacles for sale and a telescope, which Nathaniel purchases. The motivation for this act is unclear until we see that it allows him to look across into Professor Spalanzani's house, a second manifestation of voyeurism, to see the professor's strange daughter, Olympia. Obsession follows; his love for Clara at home is forgotten; but he soon discovers the professor and the optician struggling over Olympia, the wooden doll they have contrived to give life to, shaking her eyes out of her head as Coppola carries her off. Spalanzani snatches up her eyeballs from the floor and throws them at Nathaniel, claiming Coppola has stolen them from the student.

Freud proceeds to identify Olympia as the personification of Nathaniel's narcissism so that the struggle between Coppola and Spalanzani over Olympia can be seen as a doubling of the earlier struggle over Nathaniel's eyes by the father-Coppelius figures.

As might be expected, the susceptible Nathaniel enters his second long illness, going mad, crying out, “Fire wheel—fire wheel! Spin round, fire wheel! merrily, merrily! Aha! wooden doll! spin round, pretty wooden doll!” (31). In this condition he attempts to strangle the authority figure of the professor, but the murder is prevented by neighbors.

The second illness is followed by apparent recovery and plans for Clara and Nathaniel to marry. Walking with his betrothed, he agrees to mount the tower of the town hall. She draws his attention to a curious figure coming along the street. Unable to resist the voyeuristic impulse in spite of all that has occurred, Nathaniel gazes through his telescope at the figure. One look through the glass reveals Coppelius and is enough to trigger the third illness of the tale, a new madness in which he attempts to fling his fiancée from the tower as he shouts, “Spin round, wooden doll!” (34). Her brother saves her, leaving the raving man above, shrieking, “Spin round, fire wheel! Spin round, fire wheel!” (34). When the people want to go up and overpower the lunatic, Coppelius laughs and says, “Wait a bit; he'll come down of his own accord” (34). And he is right. Catching sight of the lawyer, Nathaniel suddenly shrieks, “Ha! foine oyes! foine oyes!” (34) and throws himself down to the pavement.

According to Freud, the child's repressed death wish against the father finds expression in the father's death, but the full responsibility for the death of the father shifts to Coppelius, thus if not exonerating Nathaniel of all complicity in the death, at least transferring the guilt and providing an object for his hostility, which he actively directs against the authority figure of the lawyer Coppelius and his double, the optician Coppola. “I am resolved to enter the lists against him and revenge my father's death, let the consequences be what they may” (9). However, the solution—which is only a displacement of culpability—is no solution at all, for in the end Nathaniel succumbs to the will of authority. The very presence of Coppelius is sufficient to compel his self-destruction.

Although the three instances of spying seem to invite Freudian attention to voyeurism, to its built-in tensions of attraction and the need to keep a careful distance, and to their roles of introducing the three illnesses, which parallel Coppelius's function of interrupting sexual fulfillment, Freud passes up the opportunity to avail himself of that material and topic.

Before we finish reading the first paragraph of Barthelme's story, we see a request from the letter writer: “Please consider this an ‘eyes only’ letter’ (191). It is the sort of expression—a commonplace of confidential notes, reports, and memoranda and a category of governmental secrecy—we might expect from a correspondent who is writing his lover's psychiatrist, an act that is itself transgressive and a power play. By virtue of the phrase's naturalness it slips through unless we remember it is addressed to the individual most likely to understand the sexual connotations of visual organs in a Freudian context. Still early on—in the second paragraph of the letter—Barthelme's correspondent admits he knows Hodder is irked by his little nickname for him, but insists he means nothing malicious by it:

I know, for example, that my habit of referring to you as “the sandman” annoys you but let me assure you that I mean nothing unpleasant by it. It is simply a nickname. The reference is to the old rhyme: “Sea-sand does the sandman bring / Sleep to end the day / He dusts the children's eyes with sand / And steals their dreams away.” (This is a variant; there are other versions, but this is the one I prefer.)

(191-92)

Some who read the reference to the sandman of rhyme may wish to take this assurance as a reliable disclaimer. However to accept it at face value is to be misled by the correspondent's partial concealment of the appropriated text. He wants the doctor to know what he meant while being able to deny it. Concealing his source, rather than depriving it of interest, works to increase the density and force of that interest through its multivalence. If we frame our reading of the story with Hoffmann's tale and Freud's psychoanalytic text, we can see the letter writer's words are not innocent. They have been inhabited and conditioned by others. This prior conditioning reveals the letter writer's intention of going beyond, or behind, his utterance by means of context. His words would have a meaning quite different from their ironic content were he not writing to a psychiatrist who shares his lover's favors.

For someone initiated into the specialized reading of Freud's “The ‘Uncanny’” sandman could never be simply a nickname; for Dr. Hodder it would be an accusation of castrator. The sinister effect of an apparently innocent term depends on the correspondent's ability to convey to the doctor his knowledge of standard psychological texts. Hence the references to Percy's “Toward a Triadic Theory of Meaning,” Straus's “Shame as a Historiological Problem,” and Ehrenzweig's The Hidden Order of Art. They support his arguments, but they also ensure Dr. Hodder's recognition that the allusions are intentional, the denials insincere. Toward that end the letter writer enrolls the chastening trope of irony and the sharp edge of wit to undermine his rival's position.

Barthelme's correspondent locates the origin of his hostility toward the authority of psychiatry in his earlier trusting visits to a Dr. Behring, who blusters indignantly about a civil rights injustice, but fails to act in any way to correct it, demanding instead to know what the writer is going to do about the situation. Barthelme's reworking of this hostility from the Hoffmann text seems clear enough once it is recognized. However his narrator is so convincingly motivated that we may not read Doctors Behring and Hodder as extensions of father/Coppėlius and Spalanzani/Coppola, those projections of Nathaniel's ambivalence toward his father.

Although Freud avoids voyeurism as a topic the letter writer explicitly reminds Dr. Hodder that he has diagnosed Susan's openness as voyeurism, “an eroticized expression of curiosity whose chief phenomenological characteristic is the distance maintained between the voyeur and the object” (195). According to this position the tension created by opposing emotions—the desire to draw near and the need to maintain distance—is what the voyeur seeks. Unavoidably we are reminded of Nathaniel's fear of losing his eyes, while at the same time unable to resist the desire to see the very sandman who would steal his eyes away. The correspondent first denies that distance is one of Susan's needs, then suggests that the doctor is actually attempting behavioral modification which will interfere with her sexuality. And interfering with sexual fulfillment is exactly the function of Hoffmann's sandman each time he appears in one of his guises, as Freud points out—separating Nathaniel from his betrothed, destroying Olympia, and compelling madness and suicide just as the lovers are reconciled and about to marry.

At the end of the epistle Barthelme's correspondent returns to this theme with a telling anecdote after alluding to the doctor's attempts to undermine his relation with Susan by saying he is not supportive enough during her depressions:

One night we were at her place, about three a.m., and this man called, another lover, quite a well-known musician who is very good, very fast—a good man. He asked Susan “Is he there?” meaning me, and she said “Yes,” and he said “What are you doing?” and she said, “What do you think?” and he said, “When will you be finished?” and she said, “Never.” Are you, Doctor dear, in a position to appreciate the beauty of this reply, in this context?

(197-98)

In this context he drops all pretense of innocence, turning to the immediacy of sexuality in his relations with Susan, and declares his commitment to that sexuality without the repression we see in Hoffmann's tale. Unlike Nathaniel he will not yield to authority and self-destruction. The ringing taunt hurled at the psychiatrist is clear: No sandman—neither the good, fast musician, nor Dr. Hodder—is going to interfere with his love and steal his dreams away.

To a crucial extent Barthelme's letter writer is an agent of transformation, attempting to subvert the authority of Dr. Hodder, and a conserver of the status quo, seeking to maintain his relationship with Susan. The contradiction parallels Barthelme's successful attempt to conceal superficially his appropriated text, rendering it invisible, while at the same time making it possible to measure its dark presence. The other texts function for the letter writer as commentaries on Dr. Hodder and are useful in his attack on psychiatry, an attack that is not itself completely free from the Freudian myth. For we can hear a little too much protest in the correspondent's defiance to be thoroughly convinced he has thrown off the bonds of the father. This dependence on subtexts is the dialogic imperative insisted on by the principle of prior voices, and in this instance it is essential for a full appreciation of Barthelme's “The Sandman.”

Notes

1. For additional discussions of the role prior voices play in narrative see also M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: U of Texas P, 1981).

Works Cited

Bakhtin, M. M. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.

Barthelme, Donald. “The Sandman.” Sixty Stories. New York: Putnam's, 1981. 191-98.

Bataille, Georges. Story of the Eye. Trans. Joachim Neugroschel. New York: Urizen, 1977.

Freud, Sigmund. “The ‘Uncanny.’” On Creativity and the Unconscious. Trans. Alix Strachey. New York: Harper Torchbooks-Harper, 1958. 122-61.

Hoffmann, E. T. A. “The Sandman.” The Tales of Hoffmann. Trans. J. T. Bealby. New York: Heritage, 1943.

Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. London: Methuen, 1981.

“The Talk of the Town.” The New Yorker, 14 August 1989: 22-24.