You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The death of Jim Conklin, including the peculiar ceremony that accompanies it, is the turning point, but only the turning point, in Fleming's slow coming-about to his final mastery of fear. He turns again after Conklin's death to his old task of mastering his fear, but this time his technics are limited by his experience and by the unconscious latencies in his identification with Jim Conklin. We may summarize (without, however, shirking an explanation) Fleming's reaction to Jim Conklin's death by saying that he overcomes his fear of death by the strength of his identification with Conklin. Once again death has been domesticated; Jim Conklin becomes retroactively all dead men. The living in this ocean of the dead and dying are anomalous to the normal order of things, and the old invitation to sleep takes on more somber tones. In his death, seeking with antique formality (Oedipus at Colonnus comes immediately to mind) his fated piece of earth, Jim Conklin directs Fleming to an intuition that was inchoate when he saw the “invulnerable corpse” and conceived of death as “nothing but rest.”
Fleming's actions immediately following Conklin's death are symptomatic of his unconscious adjustment. His first thoughts, involving his disgrace, are along the lines of what has come to be called the “world destruction fantasy.” It accompanies, paradoxically enough, that cozy sense of collective security that men experience in the face of a common crisis. It amounts to a projection outward of the fear of personal destruction, the establishment of an inverted norm, like the felicities of the early dynastic Egyptian underworld