Free Prometheus Rising by Aaron Johnson Page A

David Copperfield. So
    overt is this sequence, indeed, that it is hard to believe it was
    actually written half a century before Freud's clinical writings.
    Dickens describes an idyllic infanthood in which David lives
    with a widowed mother who can safely be characterized as a
    human embodiment of the bona dea (good goddess) of the
    ancients (who lingers still as the "fairy godmother" in children's
    tales). Onto this happy scene intrudes the horrible step-father Mr.
    Murdstone whose "Jehovah complex" makes him an avatar of
    the punishing father-god. There is no way of obeying all of
    Murdstone's rules; there are too many of them, and they are
    mostly unstated and implicit anyway. David undergoes some
    monumental lashings on the buttocks (for his own good, of
    course, although Dickens emphasizes in a quite Freudian way the
    obvious enjoyment Murdstone obtains from these sessions).
    Quite naturally, David begins to internalize this anal system of
    values and imagines he is quite a guilty little wretch and richly
    deserves this torture. Then Dickens inserts the following scene,
    when David returns from a year at school:
    I went in with quiet, timid step. God knows how infantile the
    memory may have been that was awakened in me at the sound
    of my mother's voice in the old parlour when I set foot in the
    hall. I think I must have laid in her arms and heard her singing
    to me when I was but a baby. The strain was new to me but it
    was so old that it filled my heart brimful like a friend come
    back from a long absence.
    I believed from the solitary and thoughtful way in which
    my mother murmured her song that she was alone, and I went
    softly into the room. She was sitting by the fire, suckling an
    infant whose tiny hand she held against her neck. Her eyes
    were looking down upon its face and she sat singing to it. I
    was so far right that she had no other companion. I spoke to
    her and she started and cried out. But seeing me she called me
    her dear Davy, her own boy: and coming half way across the
    room to meet me, kneeled down upon the ground and kissed
    me, and laid my head down on her bosom near the little
    creature that was nestling there, and put its hand up to my lips.
    88 Prometheus Rising
    I wish I had died. I wish I had died then, with that feeling
    in my heart. I should have been more fit for heaven than I have
    ever been since.
    The dream of return to oral bio-security is too overt to require
    commentary.
    Similarly, in Joyce's monumental novel of the mind of a man
    asleep, Finnegans Wake, the Father and the Father-God are
    always associated with war and excretion, as Joyce scholar
    William York Tindall has noted. As "Gunn, the Farther," the
    terrifying anal monster combines pistol, deity and flatulence; as
    "Delude of Israel," he is the jealous (territorial) Old Testament
    "Lord of Hosts," i.e., of battles. His insignia, the hundred letter
    thunder-word which recurs ten times in the dream, always combines
    Fatherhood, menace, defecation and war: for instance, in
    its first appearance on page 1, it is:
    bababalalgharaghtakamminaronnkonnbronnton
    nerronntounnthunntrovarrhounawnskawn
    toohoohoondenthurnuk
    Here we find Baba (Arabic, father), phonetic Abba (Hebrew,
    father), phonetic Canbronne (the general who so appropriately
    said merde when asked to surrender the territory), phonetic
    Gaelic scan (crack: of thunder or of the anus), ronnen (Germanic,
    excretion), the suggestive orden implying both Germanic
    medal for valor and English ordure, etc. The terrifying Father-
    God elsewhere "Makes his manuvres in open ordure" and
    preaches all the anal-authoritarian values: "No cods before me...
    Thou shall not commix idolatry... Love my label like myself."
    He is the villain of the "goddinpotty" (garden party)—the trickster-
    god who set the baited trap in the Garden of Eden; the ego
    internalized in toilet-training (potty); the god of thunder and
    wrath (god-din).
    Fleeing him, the "unhappitants of earth" always seek