Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 1, February 2001 | Page 12
Popular Culture Review
blends childhood memory and fantasy (Everett 365). Everett’s study of “fantastic
remembrance” in SEE and “Julia” identifies three categories of memory themes in
Beatle songs (361-64):
a. Memory can protect the singer-narrator from current misery;
in “There’s a Place” (1964) the singer-narrators invoke
memory as “a place where [one] can go/when [one] feel[s]
low [or] blue.”
b. Memory can also be, paradoxically, a repository of pain; in
“If I Fell” (1964) the singer-narrator hesitates to give his
“heart,” because he “must be sure from the very start that”
his potential beloved “would love [him] more than her.”
c. Memory can also recast the past in a roseate tone.
Everett contends SEE’s lyrics illustrate the latter two categories of Beatle
commemoration: They may be read as a recollection of the painful time in Lennon’s
childhood that he passed in an orphanage. But, Everett argues, by marking (thrice
over) “Strawberry Fields” as a haven where “there’s nothing to get hung about,”
Lennon sentimentalizes—or, to coin a term, roseates—what were more likely to
have been grim years. The very phrase “Strawberry Fields,” the recording’s producer
wrote, “evoke[s] a sunny meadow in shimmery warm sunshine, where you can
drift and dream in a wonderful limbo” (Martin 14). For a Midwestern adult who
was attending university when the song was released, SFF depicts “a fantasy world.”
Consistent with this, the very color of the strawberry; the “red, red” (Shakespeare)
of the rose; fosters this sentimentalization. “In reality” the real Strawberry Field
“was hardly the stuff of romance” (14).
Psychoanalytic literary theory provides another lens through which Lennon’s
lyrics may be viewed, a lens that magnifies Martin’s and Everett’s observations
about them. According to literary theorists who subscribe to many schools of
criticism that have been called psychoanalytic, the very act of writing is an attempt
to bridge. To lyricize, writes Claridge, is to both confront desire and to defer it, or
alternately, to build a span that joins the “is” to the “desired,” the “ego” to “reality”
(Schapiro xii). In this context SFF may be heard as Lennon’s attempt to construct
such a bridge; the lyric, “It’s getting hard to be someone,” both confronts the
narrator’s painful present and, at the same time, defers complete realization of any
wish he may harbor for relief. Even more, the line links the expressed wish for a
separate, integral identity —”to be someone”— to reality’s resistance to the
formation of such an identity.