The Threshold

At crucial points in his autobiographical project, Sassoon recounts physically returning to specific sites of his past, which generate recurring symbols and tropes of longing and provoke fascinating, uncanny collisions between present and prior selves.

On the verge of such confrontations, often announced by the image of a threshold, Sassoon apprehends a spatial and temporal gap, a liminal moment of heightened perception of subjectivity. I contend that Sassoon's engagement with these uncanny spaces, at once distantly familiar and strangely new, demonstrates fissures in his pseudo-Victorian model of aesthetics that reveal an unexpected affinity for the modernist preoccupation with representing fragmented subjectivity.

Once again, Rivers offers a personal and psychological context for two rich literary symbols prevalent in Sassoon's autobiographical writing: the unconscious configured as a room, and the stairway as a means to gain access to its threshold. In Instinct and the Unconscious, Rivers describes in uncharacteristically vivid visual detail an interior space remembered from childhood, observing that he has ‘a more definite knowledge of the topography of the house I left at the age of five than of any of the many I have lived in since’. He attributes this fact to the innately visual nature of childhood mental development, a quality subsumed by the formation of his abstract, scientific way of thinking.