I met Madonna once. It was in New York in the autumn of 1979. I was walking down 6th Avenue late one evening, when a woman came up to me and asked if I knew the way to Spring Street subway station. She was on her way back 'home', to what sounded like a dilapidated building on 41st Street (or 43rd street). Since I was heading in that direction I said I would show her the way, and offered to carry her bag.
"Are you British?" she asked
"Yes. How do you know?"
"Because you offered to carry my bag"
For some reason I was deeply impressed by this deduction, and it seemed to me that she was an extraordinarily intelligent person.
As we talked I learnt that she was a singer. Her ambition was to be like Barbara Streisand. Her name was Madonna. "You're joking!" I said. I was taken aback by this news because I was working in my spare time on an independent film about Freud's case history of 'Dora' (what else?). A painting of the Madonna figures significantly in the story and was the subject of much discussion in the film group. When asked what she liked about the picture Dora just said 'The Madonna'. Her mention of Barbara Streisand also made me assume that she was Jewish, which complicated even further the ironic resonance of her name.
Eventually we arrived at Spring Street. I stood before her for a few seconds, desperately wanting to continue the contact. Could I invite her back to my place? Unfortunately I was living in even more squalor than she was, on the first floor of a derilect warehouse that I was helping to renovate. It looked like a building site, as my mother might have said. In fact it was a building site. Curses! For a while I stood transfixed, not by her beauty but (I have to be honest) by her sexual presence. Open mouthed with a gormless expression on my face, I waited impotently for words that never came. Then I handed over her case, wished her luck, said goodbye, walked away and never saw her again. The next day I decided to stop living like a refugee and to find myself an appartment.
The reason I have recounted this story in some detail is because I have
no certain idea that any of it is true. Or rather, I have a memory of these
events but no definite sense of their reality. It is as if we have to assume
that the sense of reality is not an indissoluble aspect of experience but
rather, as Freud maintained, a distinctive function added to experience
from somewhere else, as the provenence of an object might be guaranteed
by the stamp which says 'Made in England' or 'Made in China'. It could
be that I have wished these events into existence, that they are a kind
of retrospective hallucination or vivid daydream that has sedimented in
my mind. Or I simply embellished and distorted another, mundane experience.
I met SOMEONE, and no doubt she had a name. Perhaps only later did she
become 'Madonna', or rather the Madonna. Was it really true
that Madonna's dearest wish was to be like Barbara Streisand? Yet I have
the feeling that these events are 'true'; that they actually happened.
What is missing is the conviction of their reality, just as we might say
'I don't believe it!' when something truly amazing confronts us. If that's
the case, then it must be that something has interfered with my processing
of the experience. Something has undermined my relation to reality.
The Parthenon temple on the Acropolis
It will come as little surprise, given the context of this confession, when I say that Freud had a similar experience. He was on holiday with his brother Alexander in Trieste, when they were unexpectedly offered the opportunity to sail to Athens. It was a place Freud had often dreamed of but had never visited. However, instead of being delighted at this prospect Freud was thrown into lethargy and depression. He was going through the motions of the journey but inside it felt as if he had been denied the opportunity and was mourning the loss. When he eventually arrived, and stood at last on the Acropolis, a strange thought entered his mind: "So it really does exist, just as we learnt at school". Freud was puzzled by this expression of doubt. It was as if he had just come face to face with the Loch Ness monster, he says, and were obliged to revise his previous conviction of its non-existence. Wouldn't some expression of admiration or delight have been the appropriate response?
Normal people ignore the fleeting thoughts and sensations that bubble up continually into their minds and float away. Freud cherished them as important data. Forty years after his experience he analysed it in a paper written for his friend Romain Rolland for his seventieth birthday. Freud himself was eighty.
Freud related his experience to the phenomenon of 'de-realisation' - a feeling that 'What I see here is not real' - and put it down to the common case of something being 'too good to be true'. It was not true that he ever doubted the real existence of Athens, but he had often doubted whether he should ever see Athens. "It seemed to me beyond the realms of possibility that I should travel so far - that I should 'go such a long way'". So presented with the opportunity of achieving his heart's desire, something inside interferes with his enjoyment. He does not allow himself that sense of possession of his experience, or even of the landscape in which he found himself. Freud's explanation for this perturbation of consciousness was that going to Athens was the equivalent of going 'further than one's father', as though to excel one's father were still something forbidden. Hence one part of his mind prevented him from being fully engaged in the experience, did not allow him to really 'be there'.
Freud perhaps had no need to explain to his friend Roman Rolland that 'going further than the father' could have only one meaning within the terms of the Oedipus complex - taking possession of the mother and eliminating the father. Thus Freud quotes Napoleon to his brother during his coronation as Emperor in Notre Dame: 'What would Monsieur notre Père have said to this, if he could have been here today?' Notice the symbolically charged location in which these words were spoken - Notre Dame - and the easily overlooked fact that the evoked father is, unfortunately, dead. Freud, too, finds himself in a maternal space, overlooking the city of the goddess Athene, at the very home of her temple, The Parthenon.
Now perhaps we can see what disturbs my own sense of reality when I consider my experience in New York. In the inexorable rise of her fame and the iconic status she achieved, Madonna became for millions what she had perhaps always wanted to be - a mother figure. It is as if in the construction of her celebrity and the charismatic power it brings, she can no longer be 'daughter', 'sister', 'wife', 'lover', but can only function as the repository of phantasies of the mother (in both its 'good' satisfying aspects and 'bad' frustrating aspects). It is Madonna as a symbolic mother which I am not allowed to remember as 'real', I suggest, and it is the phantasy of possession of the mother that disturbs my memory of this event today, and makes me unsure, even now, whether it ever really happened at all.
'A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis'
(excerpts)
Schools questions
Has there ever been a female icon who is not a mother figure (who is
a 'daughter' for instance)? (Think of the symbolic meanings of the goddess
Athene, the goddess Kali, the Virgin Mary, Elizabeth 1, Princess Diana,
Marilyn Monroe, and so on)
Why do you think so many mother figures are presented as 'like a virgin'?
How many male icons can you think of who are sons?
Do real mothers feel trapped by their role as a 'mother'? Discuss