Error and the Academic Self: The Scholarly Imagination, Medieval to Modern

The émigré experience took many forms. For some, positions in America lay waiting. The Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, Johns Hopkins, the University of Chicago, the New School for Social Research, and some other institutions seemed to have first pick of the Jewish intellectuals streaming out of Europe in the 1930s.¹ For others, the way out was harder. Istanbul had become a place of refuge, not just for Auerbach but (for a time) for Leo Spitzer, Herbert Dieckmann, Paul Hindemith, and many others.² Some scholars had to make their way through smaller schools in North America: the classicist Friedrich Solmsen went from Berlin and Cambridge to Olivet College in Michigan; the art historian Richard Krautheimer went from Marburg to Louisville; the artists Josef and Anni Albers went from the Bauhaus to Black Mountain College.³ And for still others, the emigration—regardless of how prestigious the landing site—remained fraught with anxiety. The political scientist Franz Neumann found himself at Columbia and, by the late 1940s, in the words of his memoirist,

As Neumann himself wrote of his, and his peers’, American sojourn: “The German exile, bred in the veneration of theory and history, and contempt for empiricism and pragmatism, entered a diametrically opposed intellectual climate: optimistic, empirically oriented, ahistorical, but also self-righteous.”⁵ The émigré became, for some, not just a resident alien but an alienated resident, a kind of marginal figure, in the words of the sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld, “who is part of two different cultures.”⁶

The historiography of émigré intellectuals has thus split along two lines. On the one hand, there are the celebrations, often written by acquaintances, or spouses, or students: chronicles of what Laura Fermi called the “Illustrious Immigrants” in her book of that title.⁷ Even the collection edited by Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn, The Intellectual Migration, for all its contributors’ sensitivities to the difficulties of transition, remains a paean to the transforming contribution of the émigré to American life. On the other hand, though, there are the dark memories and cultural reflections. Neumann’s case is but the most explicit, and it colors the collection of responses to which he contributed in 1953, The Cultural Migration.

To my mind, the most engaging of such dark reflections on the émigré experience may be found not in the memoirs of the intellectuals but in an artifact of popular culture. Perhaps the most esteemed science fiction movie of the 1950s, Forbidden Planet (released in December 1956), has long been appreciated for its blend of high culture allusion and high camp effects. With its narrative spine taken from Shakespeare’s Tempest, its investment in a vision of nuclear power, and its dramatic twist pendant on Freudian psychoanalysis, the movie seems replete with all the cultural commodities that the postwar decade saw as central to a learned life. But with its jokey dialogue, arch monsters, and near-cartoon characters (stretching from the stiff American Captain Adams, played by the young Leslie Nielsen, to the lithe beauty Altaira, played by the even younger Anne Francis, and including, quite literally, the cartoon animated “monster from the id”), Forbidden Planet comes off as a rich repository of the kitsch of that same decade. Few films have seemed as funny or as dark, as forward-looking and as retrograde, as richly textured and as hokey; and it is no wonder that it has attained a status within both the intellectual discourses of the university and the cult fandom of the Website.

Much has been made of all these elements.⁸ But little, if anything, has been said about the central character of Dr. Morbius (played by Walter Pidgeon) and his profession: philologist. Dr. Morbius embodies a popular American response to the incursions of an émigré literary study into the academy and popular culture of the 1950s. His visage, his bearing, his pursuits, and his demise all constellate around a set of social and historical events that were reshaping literary and linguistic study in the postwar period. One way of coming to this well-known film afresh—and one way of coming to the close of my book on the scholarly imagination—will be to understand the movie as a story of contemporary anxieties about learning and literature, the American and the alien. Forbidden Planet offers up an allegory of the émigré philologist—an allegory that was being played out, too, in some of the most important writings of the time by philologists themselves. In Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, Ernst Robert Curtius’s European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, the essays of Leo Spitzer, and the teaching of the classicist Werner Jaeger, the disciplines of historical philology and literary criticism are inseparably linked to notions of national identity and personal exile.

Such is the story, too, of Dr. Morbius. His movie is a legend of the ambiguities of learning, ambiguities that extend to the émigré himself. Exile or collaborator? asked the American academy of him and his ilk. Had survival depended on luck and industry, or on guile and deceit? When Morbius at the movie’s end recognizes his own responsibility for the monster that destroyed his shipmates and threatens to destroy his daughter (“Guilty, guilty!” he cries just before he swoons), he voices a larger concern about the guilt of those who made it out. Such is the theme of scholarship not just for the mid-twentieth century but for the early twenty-first, as we still work in the legacy of those whose wartime wiles have been exposed and whose critical practices and theoretical stances bear the stigma of collaboration.

The future of philology looks all too much like its past. And yet, before I turn to this particular future, I want to pause to note how science fiction and philology have long shared an uneasy alliance. In George Orwell’s 1984, the ill-fortuned Syme appears as the philological specialist in Newspeak. Charged with the compilation of the eleventh edition of the Newspeak dictionary (perhaps in mocking obeisance to the iconic eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica), Syme boasts how he and his colleagues are “getting the language into its final shape…. You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We’re destroying words—scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We’re cutting language down to the bone.” And he avers, warming to his theme, “It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”⁹ Such philological state terror hinges, as we all know, on the Newspeakers’ ability to make the old word seem is exact opposite: to transfer Peace to War, Love to Hate, Fact to Fiction. As O’Brien will phrase it later in the novel, when he speaks of historical textuality in terms oddly premonitive of more recent academic argument: “Past events … have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon” (p. 176).

But such historical and philological free-handedness is no mere Orwellian fantasy. It is the central tenet of what might be thought of as the archetypal foray into science fiction itself: Freud’s 1919 essay “The Uncanny.”¹⁰ There, after a magisterial display of lexicographical research and philological acumen, Freud can—as we now all know—assert that the unheimlich and the heimlich are but one and the same: that what we think is most alien is, in fact, most at home, most domestic. With its close reading of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman,” Freud’s essay stands as something of a template for an understanding of the science fictional. Androids haunt our imagination after reading it (how can we not see the inheritor of its mechanical Olympia as Pris in the 1984 movie Blade Runner?). Mad scientists of our imagination all seem to go back to Coppelius, not just the terrifying cryptocastrator of Freud’s interpretation but the anti-Semitic caricature of Hoffmann’s. Freud’s reading, which has, too, become the subject of much critical interpretation, reveals etymology’s ability to terrify; it places literary scholarship at the service of explicating haunting dreams or comic and macabre texts. Together with Orwell’s 1984, it shows how the ministrations of our monsters, whether they be creatures of the state or phantoms of our minds, are laid bare before the philological.

The story of Forbidden Planet is the story of the exile. The ship of Captain J. J. Adams, seeking to recover the remaining crew and colonists of the Bellerophon—sent out to Altair IV some twenty years before—finds only one survivor. In a cold and condescending voice, Dr. Morbius radios the ship as it approaches, warning them to stay away. Yet, when they do land, and he sends his robot out to fetch them, Morbius is all decorum and delight. He has them brought to his elegantly appointed house, feeds them exquisite food and drink, and tells them how most of the crew of the Bellerophon was killed off on the surface by some strange planetary force. When three barely surviving members of the crew had tried to take off in the ship, they, too, were destroyed, “vaporized,” he says, in midair. Only he and his wife (dead now, he says, of “natural causes”) were spared, perhaps immune to the force. Only their great love for the planet separated them from the others. Morbius’s daughter enters after lunch, surprising and stimulating the young men. She shows them her Edenic paradise of animal friends, and they return to the ship, only to face a series of unexplained intrusions, sabotages, and later killings of the crew.

Of course, they must return to Morbius, who tells them of the Krell, the race who once inhabited the planet (Morbius consistently uses the word “race” to describe them); he shows them their technology, their works, their writings. He takes them on a tour of Krell magnificence: everything is of an immense scale, from the “plastic educator” that enhances mental ability, to the generators that produce a seemingly infinite amount of power, to the nearly endless rows of machinery deep in the planet that maintain the power. The Krell had vanished in a single night, just on the verge of some immense discovery.

And, as we later learn, the Krell had, in fact, made such a discovery: the complete transformation of matter by thought without any instrumentality. But, having unleashed the potential for immediate transmutation, what the Krell unleashed, too, were the unconscious appetites that they had superficially conquered. “Monsters from the id,” announces Doctor Ostrow, just before he dies after having surreptitiously taken the brain boost from the plastic educator. The darkest powers of the id had been unleashed upon the Krell, just as the hidden id of Morbius himself had killed off the Bellerophon party and was now threatening the crew of Captain Adams. Once Altaira falls in love with Adams, Morbius’s secret anger lashes out at them as well: only by acknowledging his own responsibility for such a monster (“Guilty, guilty,” Morbius cries, as the invisible creature melts through the seemingly indestructible Krell metal protecting the three of them in the lab) can he call off the attack. He lets the captain and his daughter go, but not before initiating the overload of the planet’s thermonuclear reactors and assuring its, and his own, self-destruction.

Even this bare-bones outline illustrates the problematic of the intellectual in American society. The secret of the Krell, in fact, is not just technological advancement but brain building. The plastic educator is both IQ meter and IQ enhancer. The first scene with the captain and the doctor shows how conscious they all are of the measurability of intelligence: just what is the relationship between quantifiable brainpower and the ability to learn, command, feel, understand? The doctor is amazed that, with a measured IQ of 167, he can only raise the meter half has high as Morbius (who had himself taken the brain boost almost as soon as he had arrived on the planet), while Morbius remarks that the captain really doesn’t need a high IQ, “just a good strong voice.” But, of course, this is not a vision of the future but a mirror of the present. Debates on measurable intelligence were at the heart of 1950s notions of society and education. IQ testing had long been an established feature of public school life, and individual IQ had come to stand as a defining mark of potential for anyone at school or work. And yet intelligence testing served not just to advance, or hinder, academic progress; it was intimately linked with access to America itself. From the 1920s on, IQ became the marker of admission to the country—a device for separating out desirable and undesirable aliens, a supposedly quantifiable assessment of the quality of immigrant potential (and, in particular, of central European immigrant potential).¹¹

But just where does a bigger brain get you? For the linguistically trained Morbius, it enables him to read the Krell, to decipher their writings, understand—at least, in part—their vast technology, and build his robot servant. Morbius is, as Captain Adams remarks, only a “philologist, a specialist in words, their origins and meanings.” Robby the Robot, though, represents a technological advance far beyond that of current human culture. “Child’s play,” sniffs Morbius. And yet, when Morbius sits down himself before the captain and the doctor at the plastic educator, what he conjures up is not some marvel of his learning but a moving statue of his daughter. She spins to life out of the smoke of his imagination in this scene. The men express astonishment; Morbius calmly explains that she comes to life here simply because she is “alive from microsecond to microsecond” in his mind. Much has been made by recent critics of this moment. It has been linked to a potential incest theme for the movie, as Morbius’s jealousy becomes murderous, and as the Freudian subtext behind the id monster teases the viewer: is she the vision of a father’s lovely child or the seductive statue of a fantasist? Altaira postures just as much for Morbius’s delectation as for Adams’s and the doctor’s. Morbius is a fantasist of learning, one whose dark side will soon be evident in monsters from the id, but, right here, one whose vision gives us something of a foretaste of what lurks in the imagination of an old recluse.

But I think more than just inviting speculation on the prurience of their relationship, or on the fantasies spun by the movie’s captain or its critics, we must see this as a problem in philology. What are the subjects of the scholar? What does the old philologist do when he sits alone in his study? What is the nature of desire, the relationship of text and sexuality, and the paternalism of the professorial in academic life? Such questions have long been asked by practitioners of this profession. Consider, for example, Max Müller, whose powers of linguistic and cultural arbitration found themselves sapped by emotional despondency following the loss of his daughter.¹² Or, better, think of Leo Spitzer, who defined philology itself as a subset of love, where the desire for interpretation and the pleasures of aesthetics clash with the rationality and technocratics of the modern world. Writing in 1960, he could claim:

But even in the prewar Europe of the Spitzerian education, such passion was not always seen as fitting. Erich Auerbach found his contemporary’s idiom—if not his id—deeply distasteful, and, if Spitzer’s postwar protestations of his love of country resonate, in an odd way, with Morbius’s protestations about his “great love for this planet” and his own refusal to return to Earth, then Auerbach’s complaints strike at the heart of those relationships among desire, discipline, pedagogy, and paternalism that may stand not only in the background of Forbidden Planet but in the forefront of the profession of philology itself. Writing to his friend Ludwig Binswanger in 1930, Auerbach offers this caricature of Spitzer (but no less a caricature than, as I will suggest shortly, we see in Morbius and his prototypes).

What Auerbach finds so distasteful in his colleague is the unbridled passion of the pedagogue: his manic action, his barely suppressed eroticism, his need for love. The passions of Forbidden Planet find, I think, a telling antecedent here, as what is forbidden about both are forms of excessive desire and misdirected passion (indeed, Morbius is the one who forbids what, for 1950s audiences, would have been the proper passionate relationship in the film, that between the handsome and controlling Captain Adams and the brainy but ultimately submissive Altaira).

Auerbach’s portrait, too, raises some more disturbing points of contact with the movie and, more generally, with what would become a later émigré condition of the academic. For here we have not just a condemnation of desire but a physiognomy of fear. Spitzer becomes a stage Jew in this portrait—a child of a performer and a bearer of the iconography anti-Semitic caricature with his “baroque nose,” the curls, the ill-fitting cloak. These are the very characteristics of an earlier literary horror, one equally at home with fantasies of the forbidden: Coppelius in Hoffman’s “The Sandman.” Compare the vision of his big nose, growing over his lip (“über di Oberlippe gezogener Nase”); his greasy, perhaps pomaded curls (Kleblocken); and his ash-gray coat, cut in an outmoded style (“altmodish zugeschnittenen aschgrauen Rocke”). Coppelius enters the child Nathaniel’s world as the emblem of repulsiveness itself, a hateful, spectral monster (“ein häßlicher, gespenstischer Unhold”), whose visage would haunt the dreams of scholars from the early-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century.¹⁶

Auerbach’s portrait of Spitzer transforms the philologist into a nightmare creature of the Jewish other, a predatory monster, an invasive and invading id. And the terms of this portrait share in both a literary legacy and a political afterlife: a construction, as it were, of the iconography of academic aliens. For if Spitzer comes off as a Viennese stage creature, then so, too, is Morbius theatricalized: a Hollywood philologist. In contrast to the clean-cut crew, all openness and brilliant color, Morbius is bearded, dark, elusive. Dressed in black, with that Mephistophelean goatee and widow’s peak, he is the very icon of death that is the etymon of his name. Our suspicions are made explicit in the movie’s novelization by W. J. Stuart: “We stared at him. He was a big man, and striking, with a head of greying dark hair and a neat forked beard which lent the impassive face of an effect partly Oriental, partly satanic.”¹⁷ True, Morbius may be, for readers of the 1950s, more Fu Man Chu than philologue. But I cannot help seeing behind that word “Oriental,” once again, the code word of Jewishness that stretches back to Heinrich Heine’s formulation, noted, too, by George Eliot: “Judea always seemed to me like a piece of the Occident lost in the Orient.” But there is also the satanic. Compare the novelization’s phrasing with the Spitzer who would reemerge in America in, for example, the characteristically devilish reminiscences of John Freccero, who, writing of his teacher at Hopkins in the 1950s, noted: “In those days of crew cuts and white bucks, the figure of the continental virtuoso challenged every canon of male decorum.”¹⁸ More fully, Paul Zumthor’s recollections of Auerbach and Spitzer mark perfectly the iconology of the philologist.

What of those dead? Look at their pictures: Auerbach, with those sad eyes staring from the posthumous collection of essays; Spitzer, full of vision and of life; or Curtius, with that open face, beaming from the bench of a Heidelberg walkway.²⁰ None of them really looks like Morbius (indeed, Spitzer bears little resemblance either to Auerbach’s or to Freccero’s portraits of him), and that is precisely the point. For Morbius is not an accurate representation of the émigrés who entered the academy in the 1950s. Instead, he is a fantastic evocation of the Europeans who had taught them, Europeans of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: near mythic figures of repose and eminence. I search the library and find, almost at random, a clutch of illustrated Festschriften: Wilhelm Streitberg, all wing collar and goatee, staring out of his Festschrift portrait of 1924; Eduard Sievers, lost in thought before his bookshelf, similarly goateed in a 1925 photograph; Albert Debrunner, staring out beside the title page of his 1954 Festschrift, Sprachgeschichte und Wortbedeutung (a title, by the way, as clear a definition of the philologist’s calling as Captain Adams’s is), with the same hirsuted visage.²¹ These are the icons of academic fantasy, a look of European middle-aged intellectualism that is as much a part of what we might call the postwar theater of philology as Auerbach’s Hoffmannesque caricature was of an earlier age.

For such philologists, the study was the stage. Morbius’s great desk, set before a mural of a wild galactic field, juts out like some proscenium of pedagogy. When Captain Adams and the doctor enter, they find all the stage props of the discipline: the manuscript, the magnifier, and the map. We see the text but for an instant in the movie, just before Morbius returns to his study to find the two astronauts intruding on his work. “You’ll find the family silver in the cabinet and my daughter’s jewelry on her dresser,” he sardonically snaps. But, then, what would one say to any intruder—come take the money, take the jewels, but leave me, leave my work. And the surprise: we’re not interested in the money; we’re interested in the work. How many would have heard these words, heard these responses, as the treasured work of decades is appropriated, stolen, ripped apart? Turn to a Website for Forbidden Planet, and one lingers over this manuscript long enough to see it modeled on the manuscripts of old—to see Morbius’s new philology directed to deciphering what Auerbach himself had called “the spiritual patrimony of a culture.”²² When Morbius offers his tour of Krell bibliography, he sounds more like the European university professor he appears to be than the mad scientist of films that he denies he is. His benighted vision of the Krell is not unlike the émigré classicist’s imagination of a long-dead civilization—one where pettiness and want have been dismissed in favor of an elevated cultivation.

Writing about the classicist Werner Jaeger’s “humanism” of the 1930s, Moses Hadas could look back from the vantage point of 1960 with a colder eye: “What humanism seems to amount to, in Professor Jaeger’s conception, is a mystical and exclusive cult to which only a spiritual elite can have access, but which alone, in turn, can produce such an elite. Its perfect and permanent paradigm is classical Athens, where an elite conscious of the obligations of its own nobility selflessly cultivated the most exalted reaches of human potentiality. The preciosity of such a view is not so sympathetic to 1960 America.”²³ Would 1956 America had found Morbius’s view so precious? Again and again, Morbius calls his Krell a noble race, an “all-but-divine race,” whose crystal towers reached to heaven. In the novelization of the movie, Morbius is given an extended paean to this species that explicitly turns his Krell into something like Jaeger’s Athenians:

Such sad nostalgia fits precisely with the Jaegerian fantasies of a Paedeiadriven Athens and, in turn, of a resentful, cultureless America. Morbius’s fascination with his Krell is part and parcel of his abiding rejection of Earth—a place he still remembers, and which the astronauts exemplify, as one of arid anti-intellectualism. “Without the abiding respect for the antique idea of humanity in human culture,” Jaeger himself wrote in 1960, in the penultimate year of his life, “the study of classical antiquity vanishes into thin air” (schwebt die klassische Altertumswissenschaft in der luft). “Whoever does not see this should come to America and let himself bear witness to the progress of the denouement of classical studies.”²⁵.

The irony, of course, is that what Morbius has re-created on his stage set of discovery is nothing less than the American dream: a southern California–style high-modernist household, complete with landscape, furnishings, and elevations right out of, say, the work of Marcel Breuer, Mies van der Rohe, or Richard Neutra. Of course, this is a southern California house, a Hollywood stage set itself designed out of the building blocks of émigré modernism.²⁶. The movie’s plans, meticulously reproduced in the 1979 special issue of the magazine Cinefantastique devoted to the making of Forbidden Planet, are nothing if not brilliant mock-ups of this international-style contemporaneity. Indeed, the very landscape of the film’s forbidden planet—in spite of its double moon and pink sky—is a papier-mâché metamorphosis of southern California wilderness (if one has any doubt, recall the moment when the id monster approaches at night and the radar man reports, “It’s just stopped at the head of the arroyo,” a word that was opaque to me until I spent a research year in Pasadena and lived near one). Morbius, in short, lives with all the trappings of postwar émigré knowledge and technology: philology, modernist architecture, nuclear physics, aleatory music. It is a household only superficially American (the doctor, like a figure out of Donna Reed, first assumes that “Mrs. Morbius” is not at home), whose domesticities are, in the end, defined not by domestici but alieni.

“Sed inimici hominis domestici eius.” But a man’s enemies are the men of his own house. There are the words of the prophet Micah, used by Bernard of Clairvaux and quoted by Erich Auerbach in the “Adam and Eve” chapter of Mimesis. I suggested in my last chapter that this phrase stands as the fulcrum of an essay on philology and collaboration, an exercise in autoallegory where the story of the devil’s tempting of our Edenic first parents may be understood as the occasion for reflecting on the nature of collaboration, on the politics of philological inquiry, and on the relationships between the autobiographical and the historical in writing literary scholarship. I return to these words now to show us Morbius himself confronted with the same scholarly and political dilemma. “My evil self is at the door,” he cries. Spent in his study, twisted after two decades of self-absorption, steeped in the texts of Krell philology and the tableaux vivants of an old plastic educator, Morbius comes, too late, to realize his own guilt. The thing that killed his colleagues is not, as he would aver, some “planetary force” but the inimicus of his own house.

“Guilty, guilty,” he cries, as the monster from his own repressed subconscious comes to kill his daughter and her love. But what is guilt? We bring our horrors with us. Twenty years before, Morbius stood by as his crew was murdered and only he and his wife saved. Twenty years before—that is, twenty years before 1956—came the first waves of exile. In 1936 Auerbach was dismissed from Marburg and went to Istanbul; Curtius had left Istanbul and arrived at Hopkins; Jaeger showed up at Chicago (and would, by 1939, be at Harvard). For the film’s living audience, the invocation of two decades passing could not help recalling the horrors of another planet, when the monsters from submerged selves came out to shatter their own crystalline cities (in the novelization, Morbius explicitly refers to the destruction of his crew two decades earlier as “the holocaust,” [p. 43]). So, what is Morbius afraid of? He had left the confines of a sullen earth, sought refuge in a world apart from strife and anger, where he could be but a recluse, as he put it early in the film. What is the guilt here? For it is not simply that his id had vanquished those who would remove him from his paradise. Morbius and his family are not just “immune,” as he put it, from the planetary force. They are collaborators.

Those who were not touched by violence and removal were long seen as those collaborating with the enemy. Whose houses were not burnt, whose glass was not broken in that crystal night? The guilt of Morbius—whose name now most assuredly is death itself—is the guilt of the collaborator. He’s turned them all in, named names, fingered friends and family. What he brings with him in two decades of nightmares is the stain of collusion, and this guilt, precisely, is the guilt all émigrés and exiles must confront.

In the end, what is the difference between emigration and exile? For Erich Auerbach, the émigré experience may have seemed, at first glance, a simple exile. But Auerbach himself was married to a daughter of a director of the Deutsche Bank; he was in touch, throughout the war, with family and friends. True, he was there in Istanbul, without his books, and later, at Penn State and in New Haven, re-creating, still in German, the Weltliteratur of a fallen Welt. And yet, still, anxiousness remains.²⁷ The world of Auerbach’s connections may never have left him. Mimesis was reviewed, in the German philological journals, almost immediately after its publication—a German work by a German scholar, with almost (I stress “almost”) no mention of its author’s removal and exile. Soon, everyone would show up. Behind the mute tranquillity of an American pastoral—memoirs of the seminar with Spitzer, of tea with Mrs. Auerbach—lie still the nightmares of twenty years before.

The id (in Freud’s German, es) that comes to crash this alien Edenic world is maybe not so much the creature of an orthodox Freudian subconscious but, as I have suggested throughout this epilogue, the creature of the émigré’s experience itself. Writing of the phenomenon in his 1944 autobiography Die Welt von Gestern, Stefan Zweig put his finger on the pulse of emigration. The émigré experiences, he wrote, a disturbance of equilibrium (Gleichgewichtsstörung), where, as he states, “I just don’t feel that I belong together with myself anymore. Something of the inborn identity with my original and proper Ich remains forever disrupted.”²⁸ I leave that Ich untranslated, as it is Freud’s word for what we would come to know as the ego. Ich und es, the émigré now splits the parts of selfhood, and the old philologist well schooled in texts of ancient and of alien desires, cannot find himself at home in an America of Adams and new Eves. And as we leave the theater, or I close this book, we may come to see that the truly forbidden planet is not somewhere in the stars but always right beneath our feet.