Stephen Watt

The Materialist Dream Theatre: Affect and Value, Freud and Simmel

This chapter argues that many of the dreams that Sigmund Freud analyzes in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and On Dreams (1901) not only link monetary value and feeling, but also take as their mise en scenes social spaces and events such as parties, dinners, visits to the theatre, and so on. In doing so, the affective dimensions of social encounters, many of which are concerned with a class affiliation inscribed by wealth and so much a part of the “chronic impecuniosity” of Shaw’s early years in London, return as motifs in dream narratives, adding performative dimension to definitions of a “material” psychology. The chapter then turns to Georg Simmel’s The Philosophy of Money (1900) to explore the larger sociological ramifications of money, value, and the emotional life of modern subjects.

Cashel Byron’s Blush—And Others

Psychic economy or material psychology? Several chapters ago, this question was raised, accompanied by reasons for replacing “psychic economy” with another phrase that might more effectively encapsulate defining elements of a Shavian psychology—and a Shavian theory of psychology—exhibited by characters in his novels. Part of the reason for doing so, and prefatory to a reading of Shaw’s fourth novel Cashel Byron’s Profession, is to underscore and amplify the near omnipresence of observable physiological change in the novel and to assess its provenience in such negative affects as shame. The confirmation of shame’s existence through the blush, the stooped shoulder, or the averted gaze, in other words, is as material as the appearances of such explicitly materialist disagreements and anxieties over value, overpayment, and utility in Freud’s dreams and those of his patients. Further, particularly where the prospect of marriage is concerned in Shaw’s novel, the intrusion of social class and money frequently catalyzes blushing and other physiological signs of powerful feelings and deep emotion.

Entr’acte at the Theatre: Marriage, Money, and Feeling in Love Among the Artists

In the middle of Love Among the Artists—in an interval or “entr’acte” beginning in a theatre box before a pair of marriages occur and the prospects of other romantic attachments are dashed—Shaw provides a kind of precis not just of this novel, but of the larger material psychology that informs his fiction and much of his later work as well. Given the fact that this is the only one of Shaw’s novels lacking any introductory commentary—for, although not preceded by a substantial preface, even An Unsocial Socialist has a brief “Foreword”—my reading of this scene at the theatre and the one immediately following it might be considered, much as Shaw’s prefaces are, as a distillation of its themes. Moreover, after the lengthy treatment of Immaturity and The Irrational Knot in the previous chapter and the sustained examination of blushing and feeling in Cashel Byron’s Profession that follows, this brief essay might also serve, like an interval at the theatre, as a salutary respite from the lengthy interpretive action that surrounds it.

Of Migrants and Men: Networks and Nations in the Millennial Bond Text

This essay traces the evolution of James Bond in both contemporary cinema and recent fiction. Its principal aim, after theorist Vilem Flusser, might be termed an assessment of heimat in these texts construed not only as homes “encased in mystification” and grown “hallowed by habit”, but also as homelands. As Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem) taunts Bond (Daniel Craig), encircled by computers in Skyfall (2012), “England. The Empire. MI6. You’re living in a ruin”. Our argument, however, focuses less on the devolution of Britain than on the migrant flows and global networks that, for better or worse, vex the very notion of the nation-state in Skyfall and Spectre (2015). In this context, the recent cinematic incarnation Bond stands as a transformed figure who exists within digital networks that transcend the Cold War binaries recent Bond novels tend to perpetuate. That is to say, unlike previous Bonds who, in the films’ final moments, enjoy dalliances in lifeboats or mini-submarines not far from the gaze of M, British intelligence, or the military – or report for duty (Skyfall) or announce their continuing service (Quantum of Solace) – in the final scene of Spectre Bond and Madeleine Swann (Lea Seydoux) speed away from London (and not in a new Aston Martin DB10 either, but in a replica of the almost talismanic DB5 that was destroyed in Skyfall). They and the fictional heimat where 007 once resided could be going anywhere – or everywhere. Keywords: James Bond; Daniel Craig films; nation; network; migrant; nomadicism.

Sam Shepard, Irish Playwright

In his introduction to Sam Shepard’s Fifteen One-Act Plays (2012), Conor McPherson makes a cogent observation I hope to cultivate here: And I might contend that this most European-seeming of American playwrights, ironically, elevates the myth of the American West to its theatrical zenith precisely because his existentialism feels so European. Yes, his plays are set in the cinematically beautiful American prairie, but this West is so barren a man might die of loneliness. (xiii)