Hugh Stoddart

Book review for Contemporary Visual Arts no.26 2000
http://www.sharonkivland.com/

A CASE OF HYSTERIA

Possible preconceptions about artists’ books are liable to be wrong in this instance: Kivland’s book is a large one, and filled primarily with text. The text is broken up by softened black and white images - many rather beautiful - fragments of snaps, enigmatic portraits, images of notes preserved , unexplained houses and places glimpsed, and amongst these are many recurring images of stairs - which function in dreams, as good Freudians know, as suggestive of sex. I’m not well informed about Freud myself, but I don’t believe the enjoyment of this book is predicated on that prior knowledge.

A CASE OF HYSTERIA encompasses many things, but mainly it’s an investigation into the famous (and endlessly re-examined) case of Dora - not, as the Guardian would say, her real name. “Dora” was a patient of Freud’s in about 1900, caught up in a psychologically damaging menage involving her father (who first brought her to Freud because of apparently psychosomatic symptoms) and a married couple who were friends of her family - the wife was having an affair with Dora’s father and the husband made sexual advances towards, and possibly had sex with, Dora. Kivland has plucked a chicken, and after I’d finished her book, the feathers didn’t settle: troubling issues of truth and authorship continued to float about my head. I’ve made a living out of telling stories, yet tend to believe that the truth, kept firmly apart from fiction, is always there, somewhere. But both in the Dora case itself and the way Kivland tackles it, I’m teased by the feeling that truth is not, in fact, always there. Maybe it’s hardly ever there. I’m reminded of my brief involvement with the legal profession: contrary to courtroom dramas, in a real court of law the truth is rarely revealed. There’s just a competition between two pieces of theatre, prosecution and defence.

And so what emerges in therapy? Our drama of ourselves? This book is built on the foundation of psycho-analysis, and it assumes therefore that we accept the existence of the unconscious - more, that we accept its power to make our dreams, to give meaning to jokes, and to shape patterns of accident and illness. So involved in dreaming is Kivland’s book, it’s like a universe: she is spinning the mind’s threads together, lines are not straight, time and space seem to be one. The section in the form of dialogue I found difficult, and so I felt she seems happiest with the single voice. But that single voice mutates and shifts, full of relish for affectionate parody and using often an inspired excess. She slips between so many things: from what might be actual occurrences in her own life, for example, to what might be extracts from writings by a governess who knew the famous Dora, to what might be recollections by Dora herself, to dozens of footnotes which seem to be penned by Sigmund himself and yet are bolted on to text in which he’s described in the third person … And then there are the “case histories” where various American-sounding female private investigators talk obsessively and repetitively (though often with a nicely judged self-deprecating humour) about themselves. I wonder: is a “P.I” the ultimate fantasy figure for a contemporary woman? A million miles from the hapless Dora: living alone, gun carried when necessary, diving into other people’s lives on a professional basis, fucks when wanted and family kept at a decent distance; that co-habitation shit has been tried, you know, and forget it. OK, we can have too much of the gender stuff - I mean, me, I can find a woman more like me than some men are likely to be like me … But easing off the safety catch and pulling my male hat low over my dead-eyed glare, I’d say, overwhelmingly, this is a book both immersed in and wonderfully revealing of, prime woman experiences: as child, as daughter, as mother, as lover.

It’s not an easy book; it’s even exhausting in places, and broken up into numerous sections, and sometimes I felt too much in the midst of games - which I don’t like much, though that’s unfashionable. But if tantalising, it’s engrossing too ; it’s intrepidly investigative and yet full of extended furbelows. Finally, it touches deeply painful things: I was rather moved, unexpectedly so. It’s an inward Odyssey: so get lost in it, and emerge in the morning refreshed.