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A review by arirang
Playthings by Alex Pheby
4.0
Disturbed by an unexpected illness, retired Senatspräsident of the High Court of Saxony, Daniel Paul Schreber, last of the great Schreber line, suffers the return of feelings and thoughts he has long kept in check.
Each chapter of Playthings opens with a scene setting title paragraph, and after the above, Chapter finds Schreber in his house, anxious and sensing something is out of the ordinary as his wife seems unusually silent in her parlour. The cook is anxious to speak to his wife but he is loathe to disturb her, the reasoning being that if a wife was not already in her husband's company, then she quite probably did not wish to be.
Looking at the cook, he remembers her prominent varicose veins on her calves, which he once surreptitiously glimpsed when he went down to the kitchen and found her, back turned to him, scrubbing the floor on her knees
As he often did, Schreber remembered those blue snakes now, standing outside the parlour with his hand on the door handle. A noise came into his head - a buzz - as if promoted by memory, and with it came a thought - that cook was a mother and that she had given birth to many children. There were the rightful scars carried by such women. Nothing. A little trap? He stepped back from the idea and thought of something else: his bedtime pipe lot and warm in the palm of his hand. The cold brass of the door handle. Something solid. A defence against his old illness, against dreams of motherhood, death and the way of things. Of God and women. Womb-thought. He put his hand on the door handle and pushed it open.
There he finds his wife semi-conscous, collapsed from a non-fatal stroke, and his reaction completes the relapse of his mental health. To his mind the person lying there isn't his wife:
She was not like this.
She would not let herself become like this. She was a rock, a mighty fortress.
But if not, then what was thing in his arms? If it was not a puppet? If it was a puppet, and not his wife, then where was that woman: calm, even-handed and haughty, dismissive even to him? What was this? This panting thing? Moaning. It was one thing or the other, this thing cradled on his arms, this grinning mannequin. It's skin was stretched pale and taut over the bones of the skull, taking on the appearance of wax, like a dressmaker' s dummy. It was a sculpture modelled on his wife's form, but without her soul.
That is not my wife he tells the attending doctor and searches first the house and then the streets for his missing real wife, going outside into a cold, windy day:
He pulled his coat tighter around his shoulders and hesitated, thinking he might turn back and have the girl bring him the calfskin gloves and perhaps even the Russian fur hat, but when he looked back down the street it was not there.
His house was not there.
Neither were the trees. No railings. No streetlamps.
On their place were representations of those things.
People too appear to him as fleeting-improvised-wretched-plaything-human-beings. Puppets, soul-less-automata, clicking and whirring and chirruping to each other on a flat street of false houses and dust blown by the perishing cold wind [...] their lives ended the moment they were put of his sight.
[...]
Playthings.
He fails to recognise even his adopted daughter (although later the novel hints that she may be his wife's illegitimate child, conceived during one of his periods of confinement) when she returns from an errand, although her appearance and, particularly, a distinctive brooch appear somehow familiar:
Hadn't he once given something like that to a thing like this.
He tells her:
You are nothing. There is nothing. A puppet. A plaything of the Lower God.
But when he touches her and finds she is not the flat flimsy facade he anticipated but firm, warm, living, breathing flesh, he temporarily regains his mental balance. Taking her hand:
It has been a most unusual morning," he said "I am not quite sure what is happening.
But the positive effect lasts only minutes, and Schreber's mental relapse ultimately sends him back to an asylum where he later describes his daughter to the doctor as:
A cruel fiction, a parody stitched together from the corpses of innumerable tiny birds, whose aim it into mock and crow and speaking of the corruption of the Schreber family line ... She has been taken over by the soul of a palsied whore who stares out from her eyes and takes lascivious pleasure in deriding your masculine pride ... her wrists and ankles are moved by the agency of the lower God.
Playthings is based on a real-life case story - I'm indebted to the Wikipedia entry for the following summary:
Alex Pheby's fascinating novel is set after the publication of his memoirs and covers his 3rd and final disorder, which saw him confined to an asylum until his death. The novel is told in the 3rd person but from Schreber's perspective, and explores the various causes of his mental state (rather rejecting the Freudian interpretation in the process).
In the novel, several years in the asylum go past but Schreber is unaware of the passing of time, believing he has been there only days or weeks, always expecting to be home for Christmas, but prevented from doing so by both his doctor, Rössler, and the reluctance of his wife, already struggling with the aftereffects of the stroke on her own health.
The real-life Schreber's memoir was intended not as a case study of psychosis but rather to discuss the legal question of 'In what circumstance can a person deemed insane be detained in an asylum against his declared will?' and in the novel the Schreber character appeals to his wife, daughter and sister to help ensure his release:
If I wish to return home, then why shouldn't I?
Don't go please! I am not well. I want to be among the people I love. These men ... I am surrounded by dogs. I despise them! They treat me as if i were a fool .. worse! A criminal or a child! I see you and realise that I must leave here. Is that too much to ask?
He is tormented by Muller the orderly, who has a grudge against judges ever since his brother Karl was executed for excessive debts (or rather for murder provoked by his financial penury), and his land confiscated and sold to build the asylum. Although as the novel progressed it is unclear whether some of Miller's excesses exist only in Schreber's mind as a projection of his guilt towards those he himself, as a former judge, had condemned down the years.
And he is berated by a Jewish fellow inmate Alexander Zilberschlag, who knows intimate details of Schreber's life. When Schreber was a boy, the similarly aged Zilberschlag lived with his family as a tenant of Schreber's father (and the association calls up hidden guilt associated with some form of pogrom), but his presence now in the asylum seems only to be in Schreber's imagination. Alexander serves serving both as a vessel for Schreber's own troubled feelings about anti-Semitism (seemingly both endorsing it, but identifying with Jewish victims of persecution), and as a reminder of Schreber's childhood, which lies at the root of his mental problems.
Schreber's father was an extremely strict disciplinarian and fitness fanatic (Straight posture. Straight thought. Straight action.) until an accident changes him completely, turning him, in Schreber's mind, to not his father but just "a statue", in echoes of his later view of his wife post her stroke (see quote above).
As if by miracle, this man was transformed from the examplar of health - as the embodiment of his own words - and made into this bent and bowed statue. He was made into disease.
What of the man who wore the uniform, with brass buttons and a peaked cap? How could that man be made into this? By a fallen ladder? Impossible! By a bang to the head? By a cut the size of a finger? A slight - so slight - depression of the skull, not even a fracture: a swelling that was gone in a week or less, stitched and cleaned and under gauze so quickly that it was barely noticed?
In a chapter introduced as "They discover pertinent facts but neither of them are in a position to recognise them", Doctor Rössler interrogated Schreber as to why he has no biological children, causing Schreber to recall (but not share with the doctor) his wife's stillbirths, with early miscarriages but also two babies carried to term but born dead, first a daughter then a son:
He would not move. Could not move. Could not be induced to move no matter what Schreber said or did. Dead. No matter how he pleased or shouted. Like a creation of a lower god. An incompetent god. A god who could not understand living things. A god who knew only corpses, and made of them his playthings, animating them by pulling their puppet strings, but refusing even that.
He tells the doctor:
It is too bright. God will see me. In my belly is an octopus and in it are God's children. Living children. There are things insist not think of.
In a dream, Schreber relives an (unsuccesful) election attempt, except in the dream the electors are automatons:
"The feeling in his stomach was intense to the point of hysteria, literal hysteria, as if a woman's organ had been placed inside him and was flooding his body with the honours that bought so many of that sex to irrationality and emotional incontinence. He could feel it in himself, he who had been chosen by these clockwork men as an example of something else: of masculinity, of continence, of fortitude and strength, of knowledge. Wasn't he a man who took after his father? They held him to be a great thinker - a great man - an opinion Schreber would never have disavowed. But he knew, as his family knew - even his mother - that the same man had been weak, bowed down by pain, despite his stoicism. Now if they could only see inside Schreber, their new ideal, who stood before them as a symbol of power and authority, inside him was the febrile machine of a woman's weakness."
A fascinating novel, although one for which I felt an inadequate reader. The novel is fictional but Pheby clearly has a real understanding of the detailed debates about the Schreber case (“the most written about document in all psychiatric literature” per Rosemary Dinnage's introduction) as well as his own theories to suggest, whereas I was previously completely unaware of Schreber and have little knowledge of psychology. And the author's afterword suggests that the novel - and the Schreber case - touch on the "psychological structure of fascism" based on Eric Santner's [b:My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber's Secret History of Modernity|1013090|My Own Private Germany Daniel Paul Schreber's Secret History of Modernity|Eric L. Santner|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1180233052l/1013090._SX50_.jpg|999214] - but that aspect rather escaped me.
The author's own commentary on the book and the case itself were very helpful to my understanding: https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-29/december-2016/schreber-plaything
Worthwhile and an absorbing read. Thanks to the wonderful Galley Beggar Press for a review copy.
Each chapter of Playthings opens with a scene setting title paragraph, and after the above, Chapter finds Schreber in his house, anxious and sensing something is out of the ordinary as his wife seems unusually silent in her parlour. The cook is anxious to speak to his wife but he is loathe to disturb her, the reasoning being that if a wife was not already in her husband's company, then she quite probably did not wish to be.
Looking at the cook, he remembers her prominent varicose veins on her calves, which he once surreptitiously glimpsed when he went down to the kitchen and found her, back turned to him, scrubbing the floor on her knees
As he often did, Schreber remembered those blue snakes now, standing outside the parlour with his hand on the door handle. A noise came into his head - a buzz - as if promoted by memory, and with it came a thought - that cook was a mother and that she had given birth to many children. There were the rightful scars carried by such women. Nothing. A little trap? He stepped back from the idea and thought of something else: his bedtime pipe lot and warm in the palm of his hand. The cold brass of the door handle. Something solid. A defence against his old illness, against dreams of motherhood, death and the way of things. Of God and women. Womb-thought. He put his hand on the door handle and pushed it open.
There he finds his wife semi-conscous, collapsed from a non-fatal stroke, and his reaction completes the relapse of his mental health. To his mind the person lying there isn't his wife:
She was not like this.
She would not let herself become like this. She was a rock, a mighty fortress.
But if not, then what was thing in his arms? If it was not a puppet? If it was a puppet, and not his wife, then where was that woman: calm, even-handed and haughty, dismissive even to him? What was this? This panting thing? Moaning. It was one thing or the other, this thing cradled on his arms, this grinning mannequin. It's skin was stretched pale and taut over the bones of the skull, taking on the appearance of wax, like a dressmaker' s dummy. It was a sculpture modelled on his wife's form, but without her soul.
That is not my wife he tells the attending doctor and searches first the house and then the streets for his missing real wife, going outside into a cold, windy day:
He pulled his coat tighter around his shoulders and hesitated, thinking he might turn back and have the girl bring him the calfskin gloves and perhaps even the Russian fur hat, but when he looked back down the street it was not there.
His house was not there.
Neither were the trees. No railings. No streetlamps.
On their place were representations of those things.
People too appear to him as fleeting-improvised-wretched-plaything-human-beings. Puppets, soul-less-automata, clicking and whirring and chirruping to each other on a flat street of false houses and dust blown by the perishing cold wind [...] their lives ended the moment they were put of his sight.
[...]
Playthings.
He fails to recognise even his adopted daughter (although later the novel hints that she may be his wife's illegitimate child, conceived during one of his periods of confinement) when she returns from an errand, although her appearance and, particularly, a distinctive brooch appear somehow familiar:
Hadn't he once given something like that to a thing like this.
He tells her:
You are nothing. There is nothing. A puppet. A plaything of the Lower God.
But when he touches her and finds she is not the flat flimsy facade he anticipated but firm, warm, living, breathing flesh, he temporarily regains his mental balance. Taking her hand:
It has been a most unusual morning," he said "I am not quite sure what is happening.
But the positive effect lasts only minutes, and Schreber's mental relapse ultimately sends him back to an asylum where he later describes his daughter to the doctor as:
A cruel fiction, a parody stitched together from the corpses of innumerable tiny birds, whose aim it into mock and crow and speaking of the corruption of the Schreber family line ... She has been taken over by the soul of a palsied whore who stares out from her eyes and takes lascivious pleasure in deriding your masculine pride ... her wrists and ankles are moved by the agency of the lower God.
Playthings is based on a real-life case story - I'm indebted to the Wikipedia entry for the following summary:
Daniel Paul Schreber (25 July 1842 – 14 April 1911) was a German judge who suffered from what was then diagnosed as dementia praecox (later known as paranoid schizophrenia or schizophrenia, paranoid type). He described his 2nd mental illness (1893–1902), making also a brief reference to the 1st disorder (1884–1885) in his book [b:Memoirs of My Nervous Illness|287490|Memoirs of My Nervous Illness|Daniel Paul Schreber|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320554617l/287490._SY75_.jpg|278922] (original German title Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken). The Memoirs became an influential book in the history of psychiatry and psychoanalysis thanks to its interpretation by Sigmund Freud.
Schreber was a successful and highly respected judge until middle age when the onset of his psychosis occurred. He woke up one morning with the thought that it would be pleasant to "succumb" to sexual intercourse as a woman. He was alarmed and felt that this thought had come from somewhere else, not from himself. He even hypothesized that the thought had come from a doctor who had experimented with hypnosis on him; he thought that the doctor had telepathically invaded his mind. He believed his primary psychiatrist, Prof. Paul Flechsig, had contact with him using a "nerve-language" of which Schreber said humans are unaware. He believed that hundreds of people's souls took special interest in him, and contacted his nerves by using "divine rays", telling him special information, or requesting things of him. During one of his stays at the Sonnenstein asylum, he concluded that there are "fleeting-improvised-men" in the world, which he believed were souls that temporarily resided in a human body, by way of a divine miracle.
Alex Pheby's fascinating novel is set after the publication of his memoirs and covers his 3rd and final disorder, which saw him confined to an asylum until his death. The novel is told in the 3rd person but from Schreber's perspective, and explores the various causes of his mental state (rather rejecting the Freudian interpretation in the process).
In the novel, several years in the asylum go past but Schreber is unaware of the passing of time, believing he has been there only days or weeks, always expecting to be home for Christmas, but prevented from doing so by both his doctor, Rössler, and the reluctance of his wife, already struggling with the aftereffects of the stroke on her own health.
The real-life Schreber's memoir was intended not as a case study of psychosis but rather to discuss the legal question of 'In what circumstance can a person deemed insane be detained in an asylum against his declared will?' and in the novel the Schreber character appeals to his wife, daughter and sister to help ensure his release:
If I wish to return home, then why shouldn't I?
Don't go please! I am not well. I want to be among the people I love. These men ... I am surrounded by dogs. I despise them! They treat me as if i were a fool .. worse! A criminal or a child! I see you and realise that I must leave here. Is that too much to ask?
He is tormented by Muller the orderly, who has a grudge against judges ever since his brother Karl was executed for excessive debts (or rather for murder provoked by his financial penury), and his land confiscated and sold to build the asylum. Although as the novel progressed it is unclear whether some of Miller's excesses exist only in Schreber's mind as a projection of his guilt towards those he himself, as a former judge, had condemned down the years.
And he is berated by a Jewish fellow inmate Alexander Zilberschlag, who knows intimate details of Schreber's life. When Schreber was a boy, the similarly aged Zilberschlag lived with his family as a tenant of Schreber's father (and the association calls up hidden guilt associated with some form of pogrom), but his presence now in the asylum seems only to be in Schreber's imagination. Alexander serves serving both as a vessel for Schreber's own troubled feelings about anti-Semitism (seemingly both endorsing it, but identifying with Jewish victims of persecution), and as a reminder of Schreber's childhood, which lies at the root of his mental problems.
Schreber's father was an extremely strict disciplinarian and fitness fanatic (Straight posture. Straight thought. Straight action.) until an accident changes him completely, turning him, in Schreber's mind, to not his father but just "a statue", in echoes of his later view of his wife post her stroke (see quote above).
As if by miracle, this man was transformed from the examplar of health - as the embodiment of his own words - and made into this bent and bowed statue. He was made into disease.
What of the man who wore the uniform, with brass buttons and a peaked cap? How could that man be made into this? By a fallen ladder? Impossible! By a bang to the head? By a cut the size of a finger? A slight - so slight - depression of the skull, not even a fracture: a swelling that was gone in a week or less, stitched and cleaned and under gauze so quickly that it was barely noticed?
In a chapter introduced as "They discover pertinent facts but neither of them are in a position to recognise them", Doctor Rössler interrogated Schreber as to why he has no biological children, causing Schreber to recall (but not share with the doctor) his wife's stillbirths, with early miscarriages but also two babies carried to term but born dead, first a daughter then a son:
He would not move. Could not move. Could not be induced to move no matter what Schreber said or did. Dead. No matter how he pleased or shouted. Like a creation of a lower god. An incompetent god. A god who could not understand living things. A god who knew only corpses, and made of them his playthings, animating them by pulling their puppet strings, but refusing even that.
He tells the doctor:
It is too bright. God will see me. In my belly is an octopus and in it are God's children. Living children. There are things insist not think of.
In a dream, Schreber relives an (unsuccesful) election attempt, except in the dream the electors are automatons:
"The feeling in his stomach was intense to the point of hysteria, literal hysteria, as if a woman's organ had been placed inside him and was flooding his body with the honours that bought so many of that sex to irrationality and emotional incontinence. He could feel it in himself, he who had been chosen by these clockwork men as an example of something else: of masculinity, of continence, of fortitude and strength, of knowledge. Wasn't he a man who took after his father? They held him to be a great thinker - a great man - an opinion Schreber would never have disavowed. But he knew, as his family knew - even his mother - that the same man had been weak, bowed down by pain, despite his stoicism. Now if they could only see inside Schreber, their new ideal, who stood before them as a symbol of power and authority, inside him was the febrile machine of a woman's weakness."
A fascinating novel, although one for which I felt an inadequate reader. The novel is fictional but Pheby clearly has a real understanding of the detailed debates about the Schreber case (“the most written about document in all psychiatric literature” per Rosemary Dinnage's introduction) as well as his own theories to suggest, whereas I was previously completely unaware of Schreber and have little knowledge of psychology. And the author's afterword suggests that the novel - and the Schreber case - touch on the "psychological structure of fascism" based on Eric Santner's [b:My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber's Secret History of Modernity|1013090|My Own Private Germany Daniel Paul Schreber's Secret History of Modernity|Eric L. Santner|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1180233052l/1013090._SX50_.jpg|999214] - but that aspect rather escaped me.
The author's own commentary on the book and the case itself were very helpful to my understanding: https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-29/december-2016/schreber-plaything
Worthwhile and an absorbing read. Thanks to the wonderful Galley Beggar Press for a review copy.