REVIEWS

Camila Noguez - A Infamiliar Frank

What does the monster show? Mary Shelley’s work prepares the ground for something that, almost 100 years later, Freud called unheimliche the sinister, the odd, more recently translated as The Unfamiliar (1919/2019). 

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“I was traveling by myself in the bed wagon of a train when, in a sudden change of speed, the door for the neighboring toilet opened up and I could see an old man wearing pajamas and a traveling cap. I imagined that he had taken the wrong direction, leaving the cabinet that was between two compartments, and entered by mistake into my compartment, and I stood up to explain that to him, but I soon recognized, perplexed, that the intruder was my own image, reflected on the mirror of the communicating door.” (FREUD, 1919, p.307)

In the game of mirrors of a train wagon, Freud sighted an older gentleman, soon realizing that that stranger was, in fact, himself, it was his weird and unfamiliar image. The unfamiliar speaks of an apparition that misleads us about something that concerns us. Unfamiliar as the feeling of recognizing something by the strangeness that it provokes, something that would already have passed more amicably in the familiar sphere. But precisely this fact is withheld from us, the familiar element reappearing as if it were from the outside. Thus, when we laugh at Victor and his embarrassing clumsiness, in a way, we laugh at ourselves. In the wagon scene, it was as if Freud picked up the shattered pieces of the mirror that did not reflect his integrity and identity cohesion. And so tries Victor as well, when he puts together elements that do not equate completely; there is always some leftover, the unpredictable of a creation - which does not exempt us from the responsibility of being aware of our desire, of our creature, of seeking and continuing to create. As part of the human condition, or at least of the psychoanalytic subject, Victor lacks something, and Victor fails any promise of cohesion and resourcefulness. Maybe that's why he is so captured by everything that comes together and separates - an operation of great challenge to be carried out between him and his own creature, eager for history, for the street, for a heart that is his own. As a third party in the relationship, the street is what undoes the dyad's exclusivity and illusory completeness. The game of mirrors and its inevitable discrepancies already carry with it the condition for Frank to become unique. The street, third instance, is what will open the pathway for Frank to tell its own story to the stolen child: “hand, no, laboratory”. The creation (of a story) is what is placed between the creature and the child. Or yet, it is through the fiction around the demands, assumptions, and responses that a child can come up with, that the child can become a being of language. It is in the fictionalized misunderstanding between “no” and “hand” that Frank insists on and claims a story.

The end of the play warns: in the face of the strange, the different, and the unknown that somehow summons us, let us be kind. It is not about eliminating the enemy, it is more about taking responsibility for investigating why this enemy mobilizes us so much.

FREUD, Sigmund. (1919/2019). The Unfamiliar / Das Unheimliche, followed by O Homem da Areia. Translated by Ernani Chaves, Pedro H. Tavares e Romero Freitas. Belo Horizonte: Autêntica.

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