Buffalo is a very poor, segregated city with many homeless people. A lot of them flock to my neighborhood, which is in the wealthier, gentrified section of the city, and stand outside of the stores on Elmwood Ave (the main shopping area), begging. I encounter at least one or two every day, and I'm really torn on how to respond to them. Is it better to refuse the homeless person there before you in the flesh and donate to a charity or a shelter instead? I'm uncertain of that mentality, because it seems too abstract, even if it ultimately does more good than to give to an individual; that individual still matters, that person right before you, appealing to you for help. The endless obligation to the other, when confronted with the other face-to-face. The face-to-face matters, the reality and individuality of the other is far more demanding, and more difficult to respond to, than the abstract vision in the mind when donating to an institution. I feel really guilty when I refuse that, but I often do refuse. Most of the time, I apologize and say that I don't have any cash on me, which is true; I very seldom carry cash. This was the case yesterday; I was walking to the corner store to buy some oatmeal for breakfast, when I saw a woman leaning up against the side of the building. I've seen her multiple times before; mid to late 40s, heavy-set, disheveled hair, the same clothes every day, flagging down every person who walks by and asking for cash. She's not aggressive or threatening, like some of the other visible homeless who regularly frequent the area. I've given her cash before when I've had paper money on me. As I approached the entrance of the store, she asked me if I could spare any money; I only had my credit card on me, so I started apologizing as I thought of maybe asking for cash back when I purchased my oatmeal, when she asked if I could buy her food. I was a little surprised, because just a few days ago, Jarrod and I had talked about people begging on the street and how our responses are really constrained. Both of us wanted to buy something for the people-- food, a sweatshirt, something-- but didn't know how to offer it. The act of begging is inherently uncomfortable in the overt recognition of class differences, a stark demarcation of those with excess and those with nothing. There's instantly a tense dynamic between the beggar and the other, an accusation of being selfish if you refuse to give some of your excess, an accusation of being wealthy. Granted, as a grad student, I don't have much excess, but my very position as a grad student designates me as privileged.
I agreed; she asked me if I could buy her food and I said, sure and she followed me into the store, clearly surprised and pleased. The dynamics of this encounter weren't aggressive or threatening, but it was still strange. She disappeared into the aisles of the store as I went for my oatmeal, and for a minute, I thought she had gone back outside and was expecting me to choose her meal. Then I thought about it, and she was probably embarrassed by my acceptance, even though she was clearly happy that I had agreed to buy her a loaf of bread and sandwich meat. I was self-conscious myself, looking around for her, wondering if she was going to thrust the items into my hands and leave the store. I thought of the reversal of the physical discrepancies between the privileged and the poor in the 21st century; this woman easily outweighs me by 60 lbs, but heaviness no longer indicates wealth and the ability to feed oneself to excess. It's because she's forced to eat convenience store food, buying bags of Doritos and 99 cent donuts with the spare dollars she collects, while I walk another block to buy fresh produce at the local co-op. I rounded the corner and headed towards the check-out line and noticed her standing off to the side, holding a loaf of bread and a package of bologna. I made eye contact, and she placed her items on the counter before me. The cashier, a grim-faced older woman, asked me gruffly if I was paying for her things and I said yes. The homeless woman requested a separate bag, I paid, and headed for the door; she thanked me again and I just nodded and said no problem.
Did I handle this well? I obviously helped this woman; the loaf of bread and sandwich meat would probably make 10 sandwiches, so maybe she wouldn't have to stand outside and beg for the rest of the afternoon. I didn't look back to see where she went; she was still inside the store when I left, and I sort of didn't want to know what she did after. I had the impulse to disengage, to slip back into anonymity and have no one else confront me, recognize me, ask of me. I think I did something good, but am I obligated to do this every time I encounter a homeless person? Is it my personal responsibility to triple the cost of my order to buy food for others when I'm rationing that container of oatmeal so it lasts for the last month or so of the semester? I'm not sure if there's any good solution, if it's my responsibility to take on, but I also feel like I couldn't have refused. In total, it only cost about $10 for my food and hers, giving her $7 that she just didn't have, $7 that I could spare. Perhaps that's the difficulty of all of this-- what, exactly, can you spare?
Showing posts with label the other. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the other. Show all posts
Sunday, April 3, 2011
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
Resuming the Search
A few months ago, I stated that it was my goal to read all of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time; of course, this is not only a Proust blog, and I've obviously read a lot of other things (and will continue to do so), but the Proust entries are returning! I recently finished the first part of Volume II, Within a Budding Grove.
The narrator's admiration of Gilberte Swann evolves from a simple longing to gain access to her mysterious and forbidden world into romantic and sexual desire. Part One, titled "Madame Swann at Home," details his romantic quest for Gilberte; love is, of course, the major theme of this section, and many of the previous conclusions about love in Proust's work hold true here. Lack of control over the beloved both induces love, sustains it, and makes it a miserable state of being. Like Swann's desire for Odette, the narrator's love for Gilberte is sustained by her unreachability and strangeness from him; his alienation from her spurs his desire to possess her. He is vexed by her unpredictability and his lack of control, but this only deepens and strengthens his attraction. Love originates in difference, even though the experience of alienation from the beloved is painful. The narrator's ability to love depends on his inability to possess Gilberte, just as Swann's jealous love depended on his futlity in stopping Odette's infidelities.
Love originates also in the imagination of the lover, which can simultaneously ease that sense of distance and exacerbate it. Swann sustained his jealous love for Odette through imagining her infidelities, and comforted himself by picturing her innocence. Imagination, however, plays a very different role in the narrator's love of Gilberte. Swann's imagination drifted towards Odette's nefarious activities out of his view because his love depends on jealousy. The narrator, however, tends to imagine only the complete happiness that he could derive from unity with Gilberte, because his love depends on the possibility of possession. He spends his time imagining conversations he might have with her, in which she says all of the things he longs to hear. At times, his happiness is heightened by his imagination: "We are, when we love, in an abnormal state, capable of giving at once to the most apparently simple accident, an accident which may at any moment occur, a seriousness which in itself it would not entails. What makes us so happy is the presence in our hearts of an unstable element which we contrive perpetually to maintain and of which we cease almost to be aware so long as it is not displaced" (Proust 213-214). The increasing acceptance that the Swanns show to the narrator, inviting him to tea with Gilberte and dinners with Bergotte, causes him to view his possession of Gilberte as determined; with her father's approval, the narrator assumes that he has greater influence over her, and so he went to "see Gilberte as often as I chose, with enchantment if not with peace of mind" (Proust 213). That peace of mind, however, was soon disrupted by the same impulse to attach immense importance to insignificant, neutral, or ambiguous events.
Like Swann's jealousy, however, the narrator's desire for complete possession eventually leads to the destruction of love. His imagination first causes him to view reality as deficient, in comparison with his visions of potential happiness with Gilberte. She fails to react in the desired way, and the very quality of otherness that attracted him begins to vex him. He begins to sense that Gilberte is annoyed by his constant presence in her house and views him as an obstruction to her other activities; for example, she wishes to go to a dance with her friends, but her mother requires her to stay at home to entertain the narrator. Like Odette had with Swann, Gilberte rather effortlessly proves her independence from the narrator; both lovers are painfully desirous to do the same and prove their independence from Odette and Gilberte. The narrator eventually succeeeds, although he realizes, too late, that the attainment of that goal necessitates the death of love.
As in Swann's Way, love is presented as a tormented, humiliating experience in Within a Budding Grove, an experience which the narrator can only enjoy in memory. Hurt by Gilberte's perceived indifference, aggrieved that her parents' acceptance of him have failed to win him control over her, and convinced that Gilberte will find his affection for her unforgivably repulsive, the narrator decides to cure himself of his love; he ceases to contact her directly, refuses her invitations, and wallows in the voluptuousness of his melancholy. He succeeds in destroying his love, and the self that loved Gilberte; the self-imposed separation gradually diminishes his desire and he is relieved from the incessant anxiety that, in Proust, is essential of love.
He reflects on his former love for Gilberte and marvels "How infinitely we prefer to any such interview the docile memory, which we can supplement at will with dreams in which she who in reality does not love us seems, on the contrary, to be making protestations of her love, when we are all alone! How infinitely we prefer that memory which, by blending gradually with it a great deal of what we desire, we can contrive to make as sweet as we choose, to the deferred interview in which we would have to deal with a person to whom we could no longer dictate at will the words that we want to hear on her lips, but from whom we can expect to meet with new coldness, unforeseen aggressions!" (Proust 270). Swann does something similar in his approach to Odette; rather than view her only through memory, he chooses to view her through the veil of art. Odette is no longer a human subject, but an artistic object, which Swann can manipulate at his will, convince himself of her aesthetic value, and thereby appreciate. The narrator finally gains control over Gilberte through relegating her to memory; he surrenders the real, present, separate Gilberte for the phantom Gilberte of memory. The separateness of the other, the beloved, creates love, but it also creates the desire to escape the unstable state of being in love.
The narrator's disappointment and humiliation in his love for Gilberte is characteristic of a problem that extends beyond the experience of love; happiness is always deferred to a distant future, in which the internal conditions of the narrator will have changed so much as to render that happiness impotent. The narrator writes that "happiness can never be achieved. If we succeed in overcoming the force of circumstances, nature at once shifts the battle-ground, placing it within ourselves, and effects a gradual change in our hearts until they desire something other than what they are about to possess... Having failed in everything related to the sphere of life and action, it is a final impossibility, the psychological impossibility of happiness, that nature creates. The phenomenon of happiness either fails to appear, or at once gives rise to the bitterest reactions" (Proust 274). The narrator's earlier excursion to see Berma, his favorite actress, perform at the theater is a precursor to his love for Gilberte; he had longed to see Berma and built up impossible expectations of rapture and intellectual enlightenment upon finally seeing her performance, but his anxiety to catch every word she said and his extravagant hopes left him feeling bitterly disappointed. He could not enjoy the performance at all; he recognizes Berma as she appears on stage, "But at the same time all my pleasure had ceased" because he cannot slow down time and dissect the performance as it appeared (Proust 26). Pleasure is only possible in anticipation, and as soon as the anticipated happiness appears, as he wrote later, happiness becomes impossible.
Swann's Way was an account of an awakening of desires, but Within a Budding Grove is a narrative of the inevitable disappointment of those desires. The narrator expects his great hopes to reify, but the materialization of his longings inevitably falls short of his imagination. Although the narrator seems to experience life more deeply than most, he is also perpetually anxious or disappointed; he is as incurable a malcontent as his Aunt Leonie was an invalid, because, like his great aunt, he revels in his accute sense of disappointment, his suffering, his incurable state of discontent. The narrator is something of a youthful Underground Man; Proust mentions Dostoevsky in this volume, so I think a comparison between the narrator and Dostoevsky's Underground Man could be useful. Expect more on this subject in the future... just don't expect too much, because you're bound to be diappointed.
The narrator's admiration of Gilberte Swann evolves from a simple longing to gain access to her mysterious and forbidden world into romantic and sexual desire. Part One, titled "Madame Swann at Home," details his romantic quest for Gilberte; love is, of course, the major theme of this section, and many of the previous conclusions about love in Proust's work hold true here. Lack of control over the beloved both induces love, sustains it, and makes it a miserable state of being. Like Swann's desire for Odette, the narrator's love for Gilberte is sustained by her unreachability and strangeness from him; his alienation from her spurs his desire to possess her. He is vexed by her unpredictability and his lack of control, but this only deepens and strengthens his attraction. Love originates in difference, even though the experience of alienation from the beloved is painful. The narrator's ability to love depends on his inability to possess Gilberte, just as Swann's jealous love depended on his futlity in stopping Odette's infidelities.
Love originates also in the imagination of the lover, which can simultaneously ease that sense of distance and exacerbate it. Swann sustained his jealous love for Odette through imagining her infidelities, and comforted himself by picturing her innocence. Imagination, however, plays a very different role in the narrator's love of Gilberte. Swann's imagination drifted towards Odette's nefarious activities out of his view because his love depends on jealousy. The narrator, however, tends to imagine only the complete happiness that he could derive from unity with Gilberte, because his love depends on the possibility of possession. He spends his time imagining conversations he might have with her, in which she says all of the things he longs to hear. At times, his happiness is heightened by his imagination: "We are, when we love, in an abnormal state, capable of giving at once to the most apparently simple accident, an accident which may at any moment occur, a seriousness which in itself it would not entails. What makes us so happy is the presence in our hearts of an unstable element which we contrive perpetually to maintain and of which we cease almost to be aware so long as it is not displaced" (Proust 213-214). The increasing acceptance that the Swanns show to the narrator, inviting him to tea with Gilberte and dinners with Bergotte, causes him to view his possession of Gilberte as determined; with her father's approval, the narrator assumes that he has greater influence over her, and so he went to "see Gilberte as often as I chose, with enchantment if not with peace of mind" (Proust 213). That peace of mind, however, was soon disrupted by the same impulse to attach immense importance to insignificant, neutral, or ambiguous events.
Like Swann's jealousy, however, the narrator's desire for complete possession eventually leads to the destruction of love. His imagination first causes him to view reality as deficient, in comparison with his visions of potential happiness with Gilberte. She fails to react in the desired way, and the very quality of otherness that attracted him begins to vex him. He begins to sense that Gilberte is annoyed by his constant presence in her house and views him as an obstruction to her other activities; for example, she wishes to go to a dance with her friends, but her mother requires her to stay at home to entertain the narrator. Like Odette had with Swann, Gilberte rather effortlessly proves her independence from the narrator; both lovers are painfully desirous to do the same and prove their independence from Odette and Gilberte. The narrator eventually succeeeds, although he realizes, too late, that the attainment of that goal necessitates the death of love.
As in Swann's Way, love is presented as a tormented, humiliating experience in Within a Budding Grove, an experience which the narrator can only enjoy in memory. Hurt by Gilberte's perceived indifference, aggrieved that her parents' acceptance of him have failed to win him control over her, and convinced that Gilberte will find his affection for her unforgivably repulsive, the narrator decides to cure himself of his love; he ceases to contact her directly, refuses her invitations, and wallows in the voluptuousness of his melancholy. He succeeds in destroying his love, and the self that loved Gilberte; the self-imposed separation gradually diminishes his desire and he is relieved from the incessant anxiety that, in Proust, is essential of love.
He reflects on his former love for Gilberte and marvels "How infinitely we prefer to any such interview the docile memory, which we can supplement at will with dreams in which she who in reality does not love us seems, on the contrary, to be making protestations of her love, when we are all alone! How infinitely we prefer that memory which, by blending gradually with it a great deal of what we desire, we can contrive to make as sweet as we choose, to the deferred interview in which we would have to deal with a person to whom we could no longer dictate at will the words that we want to hear on her lips, but from whom we can expect to meet with new coldness, unforeseen aggressions!" (Proust 270). Swann does something similar in his approach to Odette; rather than view her only through memory, he chooses to view her through the veil of art. Odette is no longer a human subject, but an artistic object, which Swann can manipulate at his will, convince himself of her aesthetic value, and thereby appreciate. The narrator finally gains control over Gilberte through relegating her to memory; he surrenders the real, present, separate Gilberte for the phantom Gilberte of memory. The separateness of the other, the beloved, creates love, but it also creates the desire to escape the unstable state of being in love.
The narrator's disappointment and humiliation in his love for Gilberte is characteristic of a problem that extends beyond the experience of love; happiness is always deferred to a distant future, in which the internal conditions of the narrator will have changed so much as to render that happiness impotent. The narrator writes that "happiness can never be achieved. If we succeed in overcoming the force of circumstances, nature at once shifts the battle-ground, placing it within ourselves, and effects a gradual change in our hearts until they desire something other than what they are about to possess... Having failed in everything related to the sphere of life and action, it is a final impossibility, the psychological impossibility of happiness, that nature creates. The phenomenon of happiness either fails to appear, or at once gives rise to the bitterest reactions" (Proust 274). The narrator's earlier excursion to see Berma, his favorite actress, perform at the theater is a precursor to his love for Gilberte; he had longed to see Berma and built up impossible expectations of rapture and intellectual enlightenment upon finally seeing her performance, but his anxiety to catch every word she said and his extravagant hopes left him feeling bitterly disappointed. He could not enjoy the performance at all; he recognizes Berma as she appears on stage, "But at the same time all my pleasure had ceased" because he cannot slow down time and dissect the performance as it appeared (Proust 26). Pleasure is only possible in anticipation, and as soon as the anticipated happiness appears, as he wrote later, happiness becomes impossible.
Swann's Way was an account of an awakening of desires, but Within a Budding Grove is a narrative of the inevitable disappointment of those desires. The narrator expects his great hopes to reify, but the materialization of his longings inevitably falls short of his imagination. Although the narrator seems to experience life more deeply than most, he is also perpetually anxious or disappointed; he is as incurable a malcontent as his Aunt Leonie was an invalid, because, like his great aunt, he revels in his accute sense of disappointment, his suffering, his incurable state of discontent. The narrator is something of a youthful Underground Man; Proust mentions Dostoevsky in this volume, so I think a comparison between the narrator and Dostoevsky's Underground Man could be useful. Expect more on this subject in the future... just don't expect too much, because you're bound to be diappointed.
Monday, April 26, 2010
An ode to the arse: profanity and vulgarity in Molloy
After reading The Unnamable, I decided that I ought to read all of Beckett's trilogy. So I am now half-way through Molloy, and one of the most prominent motifs in this novel is Molloy's propensity for the vulgar and the profane. He constantly talks about his bodily functions, partially because he is so embodied through his failing health (his legs stiffened and he found it increasingly difficult to move as his journey progressed, and in the present-day narration, he is entirely bed-ridden and still in pain). But I think the preoccupation with excrement has a greater thematic significance.
Freudian psychology associates creativity with anal fixation; the pleasure a child gets in controlling his bowels is tied to the recognition of something that he created, an original product of his own body. Narration is a similar act of control and creation; the author acts as God in the world of the story, he creates and controls. Beckett does not hesitate to point out that the product of the human body is waste; excrement is the sum of the body's creative powers. But what about the mind?
Molloy's narrative is evidence of his creative impulse, but he is hardly in control of his work. He admits that he is uncertain of his purpose, and the more he writes, the less sure he becomes of his memory and his sense of self. His narrative is a decomposition; Molloy's body deteriorates, and so does narrative cohesion and his sense of identity. He often pauses and asks himself what he has been talking about, but the thread of thought is lost forever. Sentences begin, grow confused, and trail off unfinished. Molloy fills the role of creator through authorship, but his narrative seems destructive at worst, and at best unproductive, fading into impotent silence and inescapeable confusion.
Reproduction and sexuality would seem to be evidence of the body's ability to create something other than waste, to create new life, another human being. Molloy, however, claims that his mother "brought me into the world, through the hole in her arse," and he confuses the rectum and the vagina later on as well, as though both organs produced the same thing, served the same function, and were interchangeable (Beckett, 12). This confusion implies that humanity is created and expelled in the same way as feces, perhaps that humanity amounts to nothing but feces.
But Molloy does not seem to suggest that, despite his self-descriptions. He apologizes for his vulgar language and frequent references to the "arse hole," but he goes on to say that,
"Perhaps it is less to be thought of as the eyesore he called by its name than as the symbol of those passed over in silence, a distinction due perhaps to its centrality and its air of being a link between me and the other excrement. We underestimate this little hole, it seems to me, we call it the arse-hole and affect to despise it. But is it not rather the true portal of our being and the celebrated mouth no more than the kitchen-door. Nothing goes in, or so little, that is not rejected on the spot, or very nearly. Almost everything revolts it that comes from without and what comes from within does not seem to receive a very warm welcome either."
Beckett, Molloy, p. 74
The true portal of our being, according to Molloy, is that which is rejected as impolite and repulsive, cannot be mentioned in conversation, must be hidden and whose products are shameful and must be disposed of immediately. Excrement is a symbol of the self, not because humanity is nothing but waste, but because the true self is something that is hidden and repressed, something we are told is shameful and must be covered with perfumes and rituals. The gradual dissolution of the fictions of Molloy's self is disorienting and unsettling. He creates himself through the destruction of the traditional narrative and modes of identification. What remains, the by-product, the waste, is the self as it really is, stripped of all the fictions that make it palatable. Like the "little hole," Molloy begins to reject everything that comes from without; he frustrates others' expectations and social norms (e.g., when the police officer demands that he present his papers, Molloy hands him a handful of newspaper scraps), he offends others with his remoteness, his refusal to identify himself and explain himself, even his physical characteristics are offensive. And what comes from within Molloy does not receive a warm welcome; he deconstructs his own memory, dissolves his identity, questions everything he thinks and experiences. Molloy is somewhat inviolate in this sense; he rejects the common markers of identity, and exposes the truth that he is diffuse, unstable, fragmented, ever-changing, and incomprehensible.
The subject of sexuality is closely linked to the imagery of excrement throughout Molloy; as mentioned earlier, Molloy occasionally confuses the female reproductive organs and the rectum/ He is equally preoccupied with genitalia and excretion, and the two often are mentioned simultaneously or in close succession. In Beckett's work, sexuality is almost always alienated from reproduction and the life cycle; there are more old men than children in his plays. In Waiting For Godot, Vladimir and Estragon are tempted to hang themselves to escape boredom, but also the possibility of an erection-- sexuality is linked to death, not the creation of new life. The Unnamable posits that he is the drying, dying sperm on a pubescent boy's sheets, the waste product of a nocturnal emission; this is a wholly non-productive, solitary, and unconscious sexuality.
This theme is also present in Molloy; sexuality is alienated, lonely, incapable of creating new life, and associated with waste. Molloy's one significant sexual relationship was with an older woman; little else is certain about her, since his descriptions are confused and contradictory. But the most consistent descriptions are laden with references to her infertility; she had no breasts to speak of, she is arthritic, and described as an "old crone" he could have easily confused with his mother or even grandmother, presumably well past her fertile years. Molloy claims that he is sterile as well: "from such testicles as mine... there was nothing more to be squeezed, not a drop," and calls them "decaying circus clowns" (Beckett, 31). Their sexual union is sterile in the lack of a chance for new life, although in Beckett's literature, the cycle of life and death is so repetitive, that originality, true creation, seems impossible. The two met in a "rubbish dump," and that was the site of their first sexual encounter; a fittingly decrepit setting to emphasize the theme of waste. Sex for Molloy is devoid of passion as well; their liaisons are mechanical and routine, and he describes them so prosaically that he seems to have felt no physical attraction to her at all: "I toiled and moiled until I discharged or gave up trying or was begged by her to stop" (Beckett 51). He had other motivations to seek out a sexual partner.
Sexuality did not forge any intimacy between them either, nor any significant knowledge of the other. When he first mentions her, Molloy cannot remember her name, and as he ruminates on her memory further, he grows less certain of any of her characteristics. The narrative again serves to deconstruct, to make her even more remote from him. This is also indicative of Molloy's deep sense of alienation from all other people, his radical solitude, even in the most intimate physical contact.
Molloy's involvement with her was a response to an irrepressable, solitary need for sexual release, for a mucous membrane (it mattered not whose); his desire was wholly unrelated to emotional intimacy, or even a strong physical attraction, since he seems rather repulsed by this woman's attributes. Their relationship was defined by alienation. She remains anonymous and remote from him in every aspect; for instance, they could only have sex with him entering from behind, so he never saw her face during intercourse. This position put greater physical distance between them, touching only at the genitals and nowhere else. She might have been anyone, and Molloy even considers the possibility that he had actually had anal sex with her, then posits that she might have been a man holding his testicles during the act. She is so unknown to him that he cannot be absolutely certain of her gender (again, there is the issue with the free interchange of rectum for vagina, that sexuality is analogous to excretion in producing only waste).
Molloy's sexuality is extremely diffuse and, thereby, completely solitary; he does not self-identify with any sexual orientation, since he considers the possibility that this woman was actually a man with little distress. What does trouble him is the possibility that his relationship with this woman wasn't "true love," because of the manner of sex. His definition of love is, as one might infer, far from sentimental:
"But love is no doubt above such base contingencies. And not when you are comfortable, but when your frantic member casts about for a rubbing-place, and the unction of a little mucous membrane, and meeting with none does not beat in retreat, but retains its tumefaction, it is then no doubt that true love comes to pass, and wings away, high above the tight fit and the loose."
Beckett, Molloy, p. 53
There is no spirituality, no emotial involvement, no meanings beyond that physical interaction, and the other, of whom sexuality ought to allow deep knowledge, remains incomprehensible and radically remote.
Sexuality in Beckett is a topic worthy of separate exploration, and I think this is a topic that I should develop further, this interaction between sexuality and excrement.
Freudian psychology associates creativity with anal fixation; the pleasure a child gets in controlling his bowels is tied to the recognition of something that he created, an original product of his own body. Narration is a similar act of control and creation; the author acts as God in the world of the story, he creates and controls. Beckett does not hesitate to point out that the product of the human body is waste; excrement is the sum of the body's creative powers. But what about the mind?
Molloy's narrative is evidence of his creative impulse, but he is hardly in control of his work. He admits that he is uncertain of his purpose, and the more he writes, the less sure he becomes of his memory and his sense of self. His narrative is a decomposition; Molloy's body deteriorates, and so does narrative cohesion and his sense of identity. He often pauses and asks himself what he has been talking about, but the thread of thought is lost forever. Sentences begin, grow confused, and trail off unfinished. Molloy fills the role of creator through authorship, but his narrative seems destructive at worst, and at best unproductive, fading into impotent silence and inescapeable confusion.
Reproduction and sexuality would seem to be evidence of the body's ability to create something other than waste, to create new life, another human being. Molloy, however, claims that his mother "brought me into the world, through the hole in her arse," and he confuses the rectum and the vagina later on as well, as though both organs produced the same thing, served the same function, and were interchangeable (Beckett, 12). This confusion implies that humanity is created and expelled in the same way as feces, perhaps that humanity amounts to nothing but feces.
But Molloy does not seem to suggest that, despite his self-descriptions. He apologizes for his vulgar language and frequent references to the "arse hole," but he goes on to say that,
"Perhaps it is less to be thought of as the eyesore he called by its name than as the symbol of those passed over in silence, a distinction due perhaps to its centrality and its air of being a link between me and the other excrement. We underestimate this little hole, it seems to me, we call it the arse-hole and affect to despise it. But is it not rather the true portal of our being and the celebrated mouth no more than the kitchen-door. Nothing goes in, or so little, that is not rejected on the spot, or very nearly. Almost everything revolts it that comes from without and what comes from within does not seem to receive a very warm welcome either."
Beckett, Molloy, p. 74
The true portal of our being, according to Molloy, is that which is rejected as impolite and repulsive, cannot be mentioned in conversation, must be hidden and whose products are shameful and must be disposed of immediately. Excrement is a symbol of the self, not because humanity is nothing but waste, but because the true self is something that is hidden and repressed, something we are told is shameful and must be covered with perfumes and rituals. The gradual dissolution of the fictions of Molloy's self is disorienting and unsettling. He creates himself through the destruction of the traditional narrative and modes of identification. What remains, the by-product, the waste, is the self as it really is, stripped of all the fictions that make it palatable. Like the "little hole," Molloy begins to reject everything that comes from without; he frustrates others' expectations and social norms (e.g., when the police officer demands that he present his papers, Molloy hands him a handful of newspaper scraps), he offends others with his remoteness, his refusal to identify himself and explain himself, even his physical characteristics are offensive. And what comes from within Molloy does not receive a warm welcome; he deconstructs his own memory, dissolves his identity, questions everything he thinks and experiences. Molloy is somewhat inviolate in this sense; he rejects the common markers of identity, and exposes the truth that he is diffuse, unstable, fragmented, ever-changing, and incomprehensible.
The subject of sexuality is closely linked to the imagery of excrement throughout Molloy; as mentioned earlier, Molloy occasionally confuses the female reproductive organs and the rectum/ He is equally preoccupied with genitalia and excretion, and the two often are mentioned simultaneously or in close succession. In Beckett's work, sexuality is almost always alienated from reproduction and the life cycle; there are more old men than children in his plays. In Waiting For Godot, Vladimir and Estragon are tempted to hang themselves to escape boredom, but also the possibility of an erection-- sexuality is linked to death, not the creation of new life. The Unnamable posits that he is the drying, dying sperm on a pubescent boy's sheets, the waste product of a nocturnal emission; this is a wholly non-productive, solitary, and unconscious sexuality.
This theme is also present in Molloy; sexuality is alienated, lonely, incapable of creating new life, and associated with waste. Molloy's one significant sexual relationship was with an older woman; little else is certain about her, since his descriptions are confused and contradictory. But the most consistent descriptions are laden with references to her infertility; she had no breasts to speak of, she is arthritic, and described as an "old crone" he could have easily confused with his mother or even grandmother, presumably well past her fertile years. Molloy claims that he is sterile as well: "from such testicles as mine... there was nothing more to be squeezed, not a drop," and calls them "decaying circus clowns" (Beckett, 31). Their sexual union is sterile in the lack of a chance for new life, although in Beckett's literature, the cycle of life and death is so repetitive, that originality, true creation, seems impossible. The two met in a "rubbish dump," and that was the site of their first sexual encounter; a fittingly decrepit setting to emphasize the theme of waste. Sex for Molloy is devoid of passion as well; their liaisons are mechanical and routine, and he describes them so prosaically that he seems to have felt no physical attraction to her at all: "I toiled and moiled until I discharged or gave up trying or was begged by her to stop" (Beckett 51). He had other motivations to seek out a sexual partner.
Sexuality did not forge any intimacy between them either, nor any significant knowledge of the other. When he first mentions her, Molloy cannot remember her name, and as he ruminates on her memory further, he grows less certain of any of her characteristics. The narrative again serves to deconstruct, to make her even more remote from him. This is also indicative of Molloy's deep sense of alienation from all other people, his radical solitude, even in the most intimate physical contact.
Molloy's involvement with her was a response to an irrepressable, solitary need for sexual release, for a mucous membrane (it mattered not whose); his desire was wholly unrelated to emotional intimacy, or even a strong physical attraction, since he seems rather repulsed by this woman's attributes. Their relationship was defined by alienation. She remains anonymous and remote from him in every aspect; for instance, they could only have sex with him entering from behind, so he never saw her face during intercourse. This position put greater physical distance between them, touching only at the genitals and nowhere else. She might have been anyone, and Molloy even considers the possibility that he had actually had anal sex with her, then posits that she might have been a man holding his testicles during the act. She is so unknown to him that he cannot be absolutely certain of her gender (again, there is the issue with the free interchange of rectum for vagina, that sexuality is analogous to excretion in producing only waste).
Molloy's sexuality is extremely diffuse and, thereby, completely solitary; he does not self-identify with any sexual orientation, since he considers the possibility that this woman was actually a man with little distress. What does trouble him is the possibility that his relationship with this woman wasn't "true love," because of the manner of sex. His definition of love is, as one might infer, far from sentimental:
"But love is no doubt above such base contingencies. And not when you are comfortable, but when your frantic member casts about for a rubbing-place, and the unction of a little mucous membrane, and meeting with none does not beat in retreat, but retains its tumefaction, it is then no doubt that true love comes to pass, and wings away, high above the tight fit and the loose."
Beckett, Molloy, p. 53
There is no spirituality, no emotial involvement, no meanings beyond that physical interaction, and the other, of whom sexuality ought to allow deep knowledge, remains incomprehensible and radically remote.
Sexuality in Beckett is a topic worthy of separate exploration, and I think this is a topic that I should develop further, this interaction between sexuality and excrement.
Thursday, April 15, 2010
If you never say your name outloud to anyone, they can never ever call you by it
I've returned! The grad school dilemma has been solved, for the most part, so now I'm back to writing these rambling little entries on literature and life.
I've inadvertantly encountered a number of discourses concerning identity and language in the past weeks, from very different sources: Samuel Beckett's novel The Unnamable, an interview on NPR, and the final chapter of Marcel Proust's Swann's Way. The essential question at hand is, what is the relationship between narrative and identity? And a subset of that is, what is the function of names in constructing an identity? Can there be a narrative without names?
I have asked these questions on this blog before, but these are questions to which I must return, continuously.
Each source provides a very different answer. The scholar on NPR insisted that there is no essential relationship between narrative and reflective consciousness; humans are not naturally narrative, and should not always use narrative as a tool in the process of reflecting on their experiences. He cited Sartre in the claim that narratives distort reality, and that reminded me of a post I had written earlier, in the particular distorting power of names. As soon as a thing is named, its identity pinned down to a consistent signifier, the name fails to address the thing's reality. A name cannot contain the thing itself, and neither can a narrative-- even a six volume narrative consisting of thousands of pages.
This notion of unnamability relates closely to Beckett's The Unnamable. The narrator of this strange novel, which has no real plot to speak of, is constantly beset by many voices, which define him and control him, forcing him to speak through a voice that is not his own, in a language that is not his own. The Unnamable longs and strives to find his own voice in this bewildering narrative, but he also desires silence. He seems to recognize that any narrative will fail to constitute an identity, or worse, will only impose on him a false identity. He yearns to recover his authentic voice, rather than continue to speak through their voices, and say something final about himself so that he may stop speaking altogether, fall into silence, and exist in pure selfhood. The tension between speech and silence is paradoxical; the only way, in the Unnamable's mind, to achieve full selfhood is to speak himself into silence, to recover his voice and then stop. I think that this is because the authentic self is so fleeting, that if he were to speak more than that single, definitive word or phrase, the voice of the other would inevitably resurface and he would have to begin the process of recovering himself again. If he could only identify when he has spoken something true of himself, and then fall silent, he would achieve ontological consistency.
According to Maimaitiming Aila, however, Beckett's characters are unwilling to entirely relinquish narrative because, without it, they sink into irrevokable oblivion. They cease to exist outside of the language that they use, especially the Unnamable, who seems to exist only as a voice. That language, though, is very inconsistent and confusing; names shift and metamorphosize, highlighting the tension between identity and anonymity. Characters have names, but they are temporally influenced; the names change over time, and through different places, suggesting that identity is not stable. Rather than the proper name functioning as "a reliable sign to designate a person, the narrators in the trilogy [of Beckett's novels Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable] hold it as a sign of the existence of a particular discourse, a moment in the stream of consciousness, and an expression of certain perceptions and ideas" (Aila, "Nothing but Dust: A Philosophical Approach to the Problem of Identity and Anonymity in Samuel Beckett's Trilogy," p. 129). This harkens back to the opening lines of The Unnamable: "Where now? Who now? When now?" These are three questions of identity; the "who" follows "where," is inseparable from "when." Time and space, then, determine identity, and because these are constantly in flux, identity is never stable.
Names are used to designate objects. In Beckett, the object changes, and the subject too, with time and place, with every possible world in which the object exists, and often, so does the name: "Beckett's practice of renaming characters reflects the idea that language obscures the reality it is attempting to depict. A name brings with it a superficial sense of a person's identity" (Rubin Rabinovitz, "Repetition and Underlying Meanings in Samuel Beckett's Trilogy," Rethinking Beckett, p. 52). The commentator on NPR would likely agree with Rabinovitz's assessment here; that language, and narrative in particular, obscures reality and is therefore inessential to the creation of an identity, perhaps even detrimental.
In The Unnamable, the difference between self and other erodes and the two become indistinguishable; the narrator is Mahood, Molloy, Worm, and all of the others who make up the shifting "they," whose voices he cannot stop from blending with, and overpowering, his own. Gradually, all of the distinguishing factors that comprise identity fall away: physical deterioration and uncertainty of the physical characteristics of one's own body (the Unnamable first says, for example, that he feels his hands are stuck to his knees, then later claims that he has no limbs at all), memory, and name, including the pronoun "I." The Unnamable questions his identity so radically that he claims that he can just as easily replace "I" with "they" or any other pronoun, any other word for that matter, and it would make no difference, because it is not he who is speaking.
In contrast to these views questioning the utility of narrativity is Proust. For Proust's narrator, language and narrative, and in the last chapter of the first volume, names are essential to comprehending reality. Language is an important part of reifying internal experience; although speech is part of the life of the mind, it also provides a link to sensual experience and physical reality. Speech is symbolic, but it's inseparable from the physical manipulation of the mouth and vocal chords; when the narrator seeks any opportunity to speak the name Swann, it's to bring Gilberte from the unreachable fantasy world she occupies in his imagination and into the concrete reality of his world. He is aware that saying words associated with her and repeating her name do not impact her at all, but they do bring something of her essence into his sphere and bridge the gap between them.
Proust does not promote the idea that the name is fully stable, however; when the narrator falls in love with Gilberte, every word and name connected with her is endowed suddenly with new meaning. His reaction to the names changes, even if the names themselves do not; the objects themselves also remain constant, uneffected by the referential shift the narrator experiences. The important thing is that the narrator's consciousness has changed, and this is why, in the final pages of Swann's Way, he laments the inability to fully recover the past; the physical relics of the past are insufficient, and so are linguistic re-tellings of past events. What he seeks to recapture is his consciousness at the time. Like the Unnamable and other characters in Beckett, the narrator is not the child whose experiences he recounts, although he remembers them. He cannot return to the consciousness of that particular moment, waiting for Gilberte in the Champs-Elysees, or to catch a glimpse of Madame Swann's carriage passing under the trees in a park. He continues to search for lost time, but he knows that it must remain, at least in part, permanently, irrecoverably lost, because he can never be that boy again. Time and place have changed, and so must he.
On that point, Proust and Beckett appear to agree (keep in mind that Samuel Beckett was a Proust scholar); a past consciousness cannot possibly be recaptured. In Krapp's Last Tape, the titular Krapp bears some resemblance to Proust's narrator; he searches his memory (for Krapp, it's recorded on spools of tape) and attempts to comprehend his past self. At times, Krapp does not recognize the voice on the tape, even though it is his own; there are considerable gaps in his memory. And there are things that he wishes he did not remember and impatiently skips over portions of his former self's narrative. At the end of Swann's Way, Proust's narrator appears to experience a similar kind of alienation from the former self. This narrator's memory is more reliable, perhaps, than Krapp's, but he nevertheless fails in the same task of recovering something of the past: "how paradoxical it is to seek in reality for the pictures that are stored in one's memory, which must inevitably lose the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from their not being apprehended by the senses. The reality that I had known no longer existed... The places we have known do not belong only to the world of space on which we map them for our convenience. They were only a thin little slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years" (Proust, p. 606).
This is how Swann's Way ends, with a tinge of regret that the years can never be brought back to life, that places changes and the moment that has passed is gone forever. The narrative of memories that the narrator presents, however, seems to be at least a partial remedy for the impossibility of recapturing moments in the senses; he can, it seems, recapture these moments, even his former consciousness, through the act of constructing a narrative. This is where the debate arises; the NPR guest would claim that the narrative is falsifying and that he is never recapturing anything of the past, but only imposing a pseudo-reality onto his experiences. For the characters in Beckett's Trilogy, narrative adds to confusion and the oblivion of self, not the establishment of an identity. The characters' identities gradually disintegrate, and in The Unnamable, the monologue also deteriorates, slipping into contradiction and tormented uncertainty, culminating in the final words, "You must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on." While Proust's narrator can revisit and experience the entirety of his consciousness, "Beckett implies that our consciousness at its most fundamental level is elusive and anonymous, and that there will always remain an unthematic, unreflective, and opaque spot in the life of the subject" (Aila, p. 138).
Yet the narrative continues; the characters are not completely anonymous, not even the Unnamable. There is a measure of self-awareness that allows for narrative and prevents them from slipping away entirely into opaqueness. Language is an essential component of retaining a sense of self; Aila writes that "there is no point outside of language from which we come to express ourselves... the power of language becomes more and more a case of excess to such a degree that it anonymously speaks in the void: It speaks solitarily with itself in the end" (Aila, p. 141). Later, it is claimed that "Beckett thinks there is no 'I' prior to stories, to narrative, and, above all, to language. The self is a mere abstraction and fictional entity created in and through the effect of language, narrative, and self-perception" (Aila, p. 143). I'm not sure that I agree with that interpretation; language is important in Beckett, but silence, I think, is infinitely more important. On a metatheatrical level, as soon as the words end, the characters meet their demise; the curtain falls after they lapse into silence. But throughout the plays, from Hamm to Vladimir and Estragon to Krapp, the characters feel that there is something essential and authentic in silence, and so they strive toward it. It may be the end of this fabricated self created through narrative, but there could be a more genuine self, a pure experience of being without the falsifications of language, in the silence.
And what about the actor in Catastrophe? Like The Unnamable, the actor is bombarded with commands and manipulated by words, he is molded into something he is not; but then, he defies the narrative. He raises his face when he was told to keep it bowed. This is an act of self-assertion, I think, and it is wholly non-linguistic.
This post has rambled on to excessive lengths, so I think that I must lapse into silence and let this monologue end. I won't go on here, but I will be back to speak more of other things.
I've inadvertantly encountered a number of discourses concerning identity and language in the past weeks, from very different sources: Samuel Beckett's novel The Unnamable, an interview on NPR, and the final chapter of Marcel Proust's Swann's Way. The essential question at hand is, what is the relationship between narrative and identity? And a subset of that is, what is the function of names in constructing an identity? Can there be a narrative without names?
I have asked these questions on this blog before, but these are questions to which I must return, continuously.
Each source provides a very different answer. The scholar on NPR insisted that there is no essential relationship between narrative and reflective consciousness; humans are not naturally narrative, and should not always use narrative as a tool in the process of reflecting on their experiences. He cited Sartre in the claim that narratives distort reality, and that reminded me of a post I had written earlier, in the particular distorting power of names. As soon as a thing is named, its identity pinned down to a consistent signifier, the name fails to address the thing's reality. A name cannot contain the thing itself, and neither can a narrative-- even a six volume narrative consisting of thousands of pages.
This notion of unnamability relates closely to Beckett's The Unnamable. The narrator of this strange novel, which has no real plot to speak of, is constantly beset by many voices, which define him and control him, forcing him to speak through a voice that is not his own, in a language that is not his own. The Unnamable longs and strives to find his own voice in this bewildering narrative, but he also desires silence. He seems to recognize that any narrative will fail to constitute an identity, or worse, will only impose on him a false identity. He yearns to recover his authentic voice, rather than continue to speak through their voices, and say something final about himself so that he may stop speaking altogether, fall into silence, and exist in pure selfhood. The tension between speech and silence is paradoxical; the only way, in the Unnamable's mind, to achieve full selfhood is to speak himself into silence, to recover his voice and then stop. I think that this is because the authentic self is so fleeting, that if he were to speak more than that single, definitive word or phrase, the voice of the other would inevitably resurface and he would have to begin the process of recovering himself again. If he could only identify when he has spoken something true of himself, and then fall silent, he would achieve ontological consistency.
According to Maimaitiming Aila, however, Beckett's characters are unwilling to entirely relinquish narrative because, without it, they sink into irrevokable oblivion. They cease to exist outside of the language that they use, especially the Unnamable, who seems to exist only as a voice. That language, though, is very inconsistent and confusing; names shift and metamorphosize, highlighting the tension between identity and anonymity. Characters have names, but they are temporally influenced; the names change over time, and through different places, suggesting that identity is not stable. Rather than the proper name functioning as "a reliable sign to designate a person, the narrators in the trilogy [of Beckett's novels Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable] hold it as a sign of the existence of a particular discourse, a moment in the stream of consciousness, and an expression of certain perceptions and ideas" (Aila, "Nothing but Dust: A Philosophical Approach to the Problem of Identity and Anonymity in Samuel Beckett's Trilogy," p. 129). This harkens back to the opening lines of The Unnamable: "Where now? Who now? When now?" These are three questions of identity; the "who" follows "where," is inseparable from "when." Time and space, then, determine identity, and because these are constantly in flux, identity is never stable.
Names are used to designate objects. In Beckett, the object changes, and the subject too, with time and place, with every possible world in which the object exists, and often, so does the name: "Beckett's practice of renaming characters reflects the idea that language obscures the reality it is attempting to depict. A name brings with it a superficial sense of a person's identity" (Rubin Rabinovitz, "Repetition and Underlying Meanings in Samuel Beckett's Trilogy," Rethinking Beckett, p. 52). The commentator on NPR would likely agree with Rabinovitz's assessment here; that language, and narrative in particular, obscures reality and is therefore inessential to the creation of an identity, perhaps even detrimental.
In The Unnamable, the difference between self and other erodes and the two become indistinguishable; the narrator is Mahood, Molloy, Worm, and all of the others who make up the shifting "they," whose voices he cannot stop from blending with, and overpowering, his own. Gradually, all of the distinguishing factors that comprise identity fall away: physical deterioration and uncertainty of the physical characteristics of one's own body (the Unnamable first says, for example, that he feels his hands are stuck to his knees, then later claims that he has no limbs at all), memory, and name, including the pronoun "I." The Unnamable questions his identity so radically that he claims that he can just as easily replace "I" with "they" or any other pronoun, any other word for that matter, and it would make no difference, because it is not he who is speaking.
In contrast to these views questioning the utility of narrativity is Proust. For Proust's narrator, language and narrative, and in the last chapter of the first volume, names are essential to comprehending reality. Language is an important part of reifying internal experience; although speech is part of the life of the mind, it also provides a link to sensual experience and physical reality. Speech is symbolic, but it's inseparable from the physical manipulation of the mouth and vocal chords; when the narrator seeks any opportunity to speak the name Swann, it's to bring Gilberte from the unreachable fantasy world she occupies in his imagination and into the concrete reality of his world. He is aware that saying words associated with her and repeating her name do not impact her at all, but they do bring something of her essence into his sphere and bridge the gap between them.
Proust does not promote the idea that the name is fully stable, however; when the narrator falls in love with Gilberte, every word and name connected with her is endowed suddenly with new meaning. His reaction to the names changes, even if the names themselves do not; the objects themselves also remain constant, uneffected by the referential shift the narrator experiences. The important thing is that the narrator's consciousness has changed, and this is why, in the final pages of Swann's Way, he laments the inability to fully recover the past; the physical relics of the past are insufficient, and so are linguistic re-tellings of past events. What he seeks to recapture is his consciousness at the time. Like the Unnamable and other characters in Beckett, the narrator is not the child whose experiences he recounts, although he remembers them. He cannot return to the consciousness of that particular moment, waiting for Gilberte in the Champs-Elysees, or to catch a glimpse of Madame Swann's carriage passing under the trees in a park. He continues to search for lost time, but he knows that it must remain, at least in part, permanently, irrecoverably lost, because he can never be that boy again. Time and place have changed, and so must he.
On that point, Proust and Beckett appear to agree (keep in mind that Samuel Beckett was a Proust scholar); a past consciousness cannot possibly be recaptured. In Krapp's Last Tape, the titular Krapp bears some resemblance to Proust's narrator; he searches his memory (for Krapp, it's recorded on spools of tape) and attempts to comprehend his past self. At times, Krapp does not recognize the voice on the tape, even though it is his own; there are considerable gaps in his memory. And there are things that he wishes he did not remember and impatiently skips over portions of his former self's narrative. At the end of Swann's Way, Proust's narrator appears to experience a similar kind of alienation from the former self. This narrator's memory is more reliable, perhaps, than Krapp's, but he nevertheless fails in the same task of recovering something of the past: "how paradoxical it is to seek in reality for the pictures that are stored in one's memory, which must inevitably lose the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from their not being apprehended by the senses. The reality that I had known no longer existed... The places we have known do not belong only to the world of space on which we map them for our convenience. They were only a thin little slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years" (Proust, p. 606).
This is how Swann's Way ends, with a tinge of regret that the years can never be brought back to life, that places changes and the moment that has passed is gone forever. The narrative of memories that the narrator presents, however, seems to be at least a partial remedy for the impossibility of recapturing moments in the senses; he can, it seems, recapture these moments, even his former consciousness, through the act of constructing a narrative. This is where the debate arises; the NPR guest would claim that the narrative is falsifying and that he is never recapturing anything of the past, but only imposing a pseudo-reality onto his experiences. For the characters in Beckett's Trilogy, narrative adds to confusion and the oblivion of self, not the establishment of an identity. The characters' identities gradually disintegrate, and in The Unnamable, the monologue also deteriorates, slipping into contradiction and tormented uncertainty, culminating in the final words, "You must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on." While Proust's narrator can revisit and experience the entirety of his consciousness, "Beckett implies that our consciousness at its most fundamental level is elusive and anonymous, and that there will always remain an unthematic, unreflective, and opaque spot in the life of the subject" (Aila, p. 138).
Yet the narrative continues; the characters are not completely anonymous, not even the Unnamable. There is a measure of self-awareness that allows for narrative and prevents them from slipping away entirely into opaqueness. Language is an essential component of retaining a sense of self; Aila writes that "there is no point outside of language from which we come to express ourselves... the power of language becomes more and more a case of excess to such a degree that it anonymously speaks in the void: It speaks solitarily with itself in the end" (Aila, p. 141). Later, it is claimed that "Beckett thinks there is no 'I' prior to stories, to narrative, and, above all, to language. The self is a mere abstraction and fictional entity created in and through the effect of language, narrative, and self-perception" (Aila, p. 143). I'm not sure that I agree with that interpretation; language is important in Beckett, but silence, I think, is infinitely more important. On a metatheatrical level, as soon as the words end, the characters meet their demise; the curtain falls after they lapse into silence. But throughout the plays, from Hamm to Vladimir and Estragon to Krapp, the characters feel that there is something essential and authentic in silence, and so they strive toward it. It may be the end of this fabricated self created through narrative, but there could be a more genuine self, a pure experience of being without the falsifications of language, in the silence.
And what about the actor in Catastrophe? Like The Unnamable, the actor is bombarded with commands and manipulated by words, he is molded into something he is not; but then, he defies the narrative. He raises his face when he was told to keep it bowed. This is an act of self-assertion, I think, and it is wholly non-linguistic.
This post has rambled on to excessive lengths, so I think that I must lapse into silence and let this monologue end. I won't go on here, but I will be back to speak more of other things.
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Taboos
"French writer. Total loser. Never had a real job. Unrequited love affairs. Gay. Spent twenty years writing a book almost no one reads."
Frank (Steve Carell) on Marcel Proust, Little Miss Sunshine, 2006
I have largely ignored the autobiographical aspect of In Search of Lost Time, and while Little Miss Sunshine is far from an authority on Marcel Proust, I quoted Frank here because he is a gay character who uses Proust's homosexuality as a reason he was a "total loser." Certainly, Frank's description is tongue-in-cheek and has a self-deprecating air, but it also indicates the otherness of homosexuality in any conversation about human relationships and love. In Swann's Way, heterosexuality is central (the narrator, his parents, and Charles Swann are all heterosexual), and when homosexuality appears in the novel, it is on the margins, it is other, a perversion.
Proust was not exclusively homosexual; he carried on a few affairs with women, although his most intense relationships were with men and appears to have strongly preferred young men. By 1906, he was open about his unconventional sexuality, but he continued to be tormented by his sexual identity. He hid his homosexuality while his parents were alive, and his affairs were often tortured, brief, or unrequited.
There are two prominent characters who are not strictly heterosexual in the first two chapters of Swann's Way. Mademoiselle Vinteuil carries on a lesbian affair, partly in rebellion against her father, and Odette admits to several sexual liaisons with other women. In both instances, homosexuality is presented as a perversion and an indication of moral decay; Mademoiselle Vinteuil's affair is widely held responsible for her father's death, and she and her lover mock Mr. Vinteuil shortly after his death. Similarly, Odette's lesbian affairs are evidence of her outrageous, uncontrollable sexuality. He does not merely object to her promiscuity and betrayal of his trust, but this particular sexual transgression of relationships with other women. For both Mademoiselle Vinteuil and Odette, their lesbian affairs imply their complete lack of sexual morality. Odette's many infidelities were painful enough to Swann, but her homosexual affairs shock and offend him most of all; he forgave her loose morals (he knew from their first meeting that she was a courtesan) when men were the object of her seductions, and he even forgave her liaisons with his acquaintances. But her affairs with women were utterly unfathomable to Swann, and they force him to recognize her wild lifestyle, her burgeoning sexuality that, he now fears, lacks all boundaries.
But why would Proust present homosexuality in such a negative light? He struggled to accept his own homosexual longings, so some of this could be internalized prejudice. In early 20th century France, homosexuality was so far outside the norms of accepted sexual practices that it also provides a convenient indicator of Odette's outrageousness, her extreme unconventionality and separation from the society Swann had hitherto frequented. It is also important to note that, in any form, heterosexual or homosexual, love is morally threatening. In the beginning of "Swann in Love," the narrator observes that love is reserved for the idle rich, and Swann's voluptuous wallowing in the emotions and desires aroused by Odette indicate the complete lack of duties and responsibilities in his life. Swann can afford to live for love alone, and his moral character is degraded because of it. Although love can also provide moments of transcendence and ecstatic joy, it also humiliates and disgraces the lover, through jealousy, obsession, and indulgence of fantasy. Swann is not degraded solely because Odette is a sexual deviant, but because he seeks to control her sexuality.
The lesbian affairs present a threat to male dominance; part of Mademoiselle Vinteuil's attraction to her lover is the horror it caused her father and polite bourgeois society (although she seems embarrassed at the same time), and Odette's homosexual affairs designate her radical independence, to the point of alienation, from Swann. I think part of why Swann is so scandalized by Odette's homosexual activities is due to the fact that this is a world in which he holds no place. Proust also experienced consuming jealousy and a sense of deep betrayal when he discovered that one of his male lovers had cheated on him with women, and I think that this incomprehension of and separation from the sexuality of one's partner make Odette's lesbian infidelities so painful to Swann. They present the ultimate obstacle to masculine understanding of female sexuality, which is already ominously mysterious to the male characters of Swann's Way.
I'm still perplexed as to why Proust would choose to present homosexuality only among women; this would seem to be the least familiar form of sexuality to Proust. In Search of Lost Time is obviously not autobiography, and the narrator is not Proust, but it's still curious why, in a story that has so far presented a wide range of sexual and romantic relaionships, male homosexuality is completely absent, not even implied. The narrator, however, inhabits a strongly feminine world; he is extremely close with his mother, his aunts, and his grandmother, he is fascinated by Gilberte Swann and Madame de Guermantes, he dreams about actresses and women who will reveal the secrets of love and life to him. Swann is the most prominent male figure in the narrator's life at Combray, and he is also deeply encsonced in a feminine atmosphere. As such, there is a clearer portrait, and wider range, of feminine sexuality than masculine; as a boy, the world of men is still somewhat remote from the narrator, represented in his distant relationship with his father and grandfather. He is obviously an outsider to the feminine realm, but he can observe it more easily than the activities reserved for men; he is still dependent on his mother and spends most of his day in the company of women. He is fascinated by the women he encounters and attempts to capture something of their consciousness, to comprehend what they feel and form images of their private lives, of which he can only catch a glimpse. Sexuality is by no means the only preoccupation; the narrator is just as intrigued by Gilberte's dinners with Bergote as he is by Mademoiselle Vinteuil's affiar. But it is a significant part of life, and the narrator is not blind to that; he is losing some of that childish innocence, that complete ignorance of love and sexuality as his own capacities for both are developing. Swann's Way presents a wide variety of the forms of sexuality and romance: Swann's torrid affair with Odette, the idealized medieval romance of the Guermantes line, lesbian encounters, the perpetual maidenhood of his aunts, his parents' marriage, his uncle's proclivity for actresses and women of ill-repute. These forms of sexuality and love are all emerging before the narrator's eyes and becoming clearer in his consciousness, and as a curious, sensitive person, his narrative is an attempt to comprehend it.
Frank (Steve Carell) on Marcel Proust, Little Miss Sunshine, 2006
I have largely ignored the autobiographical aspect of In Search of Lost Time, and while Little Miss Sunshine is far from an authority on Marcel Proust, I quoted Frank here because he is a gay character who uses Proust's homosexuality as a reason he was a "total loser." Certainly, Frank's description is tongue-in-cheek and has a self-deprecating air, but it also indicates the otherness of homosexuality in any conversation about human relationships and love. In Swann's Way, heterosexuality is central (the narrator, his parents, and Charles Swann are all heterosexual), and when homosexuality appears in the novel, it is on the margins, it is other, a perversion.
Proust was not exclusively homosexual; he carried on a few affairs with women, although his most intense relationships were with men and appears to have strongly preferred young men. By 1906, he was open about his unconventional sexuality, but he continued to be tormented by his sexual identity. He hid his homosexuality while his parents were alive, and his affairs were often tortured, brief, or unrequited.
There are two prominent characters who are not strictly heterosexual in the first two chapters of Swann's Way. Mademoiselle Vinteuil carries on a lesbian affair, partly in rebellion against her father, and Odette admits to several sexual liaisons with other women. In both instances, homosexuality is presented as a perversion and an indication of moral decay; Mademoiselle Vinteuil's affair is widely held responsible for her father's death, and she and her lover mock Mr. Vinteuil shortly after his death. Similarly, Odette's lesbian affairs are evidence of her outrageous, uncontrollable sexuality. He does not merely object to her promiscuity and betrayal of his trust, but this particular sexual transgression of relationships with other women. For both Mademoiselle Vinteuil and Odette, their lesbian affairs imply their complete lack of sexual morality. Odette's many infidelities were painful enough to Swann, but her homosexual affairs shock and offend him most of all; he forgave her loose morals (he knew from their first meeting that she was a courtesan) when men were the object of her seductions, and he even forgave her liaisons with his acquaintances. But her affairs with women were utterly unfathomable to Swann, and they force him to recognize her wild lifestyle, her burgeoning sexuality that, he now fears, lacks all boundaries.
But why would Proust present homosexuality in such a negative light? He struggled to accept his own homosexual longings, so some of this could be internalized prejudice. In early 20th century France, homosexuality was so far outside the norms of accepted sexual practices that it also provides a convenient indicator of Odette's outrageousness, her extreme unconventionality and separation from the society Swann had hitherto frequented. It is also important to note that, in any form, heterosexual or homosexual, love is morally threatening. In the beginning of "Swann in Love," the narrator observes that love is reserved for the idle rich, and Swann's voluptuous wallowing in the emotions and desires aroused by Odette indicate the complete lack of duties and responsibilities in his life. Swann can afford to live for love alone, and his moral character is degraded because of it. Although love can also provide moments of transcendence and ecstatic joy, it also humiliates and disgraces the lover, through jealousy, obsession, and indulgence of fantasy. Swann is not degraded solely because Odette is a sexual deviant, but because he seeks to control her sexuality.
The lesbian affairs present a threat to male dominance; part of Mademoiselle Vinteuil's attraction to her lover is the horror it caused her father and polite bourgeois society (although she seems embarrassed at the same time), and Odette's homosexual affairs designate her radical independence, to the point of alienation, from Swann. I think part of why Swann is so scandalized by Odette's homosexual activities is due to the fact that this is a world in which he holds no place. Proust also experienced consuming jealousy and a sense of deep betrayal when he discovered that one of his male lovers had cheated on him with women, and I think that this incomprehension of and separation from the sexuality of one's partner make Odette's lesbian infidelities so painful to Swann. They present the ultimate obstacle to masculine understanding of female sexuality, which is already ominously mysterious to the male characters of Swann's Way.
I'm still perplexed as to why Proust would choose to present homosexuality only among women; this would seem to be the least familiar form of sexuality to Proust. In Search of Lost Time is obviously not autobiography, and the narrator is not Proust, but it's still curious why, in a story that has so far presented a wide range of sexual and romantic relaionships, male homosexuality is completely absent, not even implied. The narrator, however, inhabits a strongly feminine world; he is extremely close with his mother, his aunts, and his grandmother, he is fascinated by Gilberte Swann and Madame de Guermantes, he dreams about actresses and women who will reveal the secrets of love and life to him. Swann is the most prominent male figure in the narrator's life at Combray, and he is also deeply encsonced in a feminine atmosphere. As such, there is a clearer portrait, and wider range, of feminine sexuality than masculine; as a boy, the world of men is still somewhat remote from the narrator, represented in his distant relationship with his father and grandfather. He is obviously an outsider to the feminine realm, but he can observe it more easily than the activities reserved for men; he is still dependent on his mother and spends most of his day in the company of women. He is fascinated by the women he encounters and attempts to capture something of their consciousness, to comprehend what they feel and form images of their private lives, of which he can only catch a glimpse. Sexuality is by no means the only preoccupation; the narrator is just as intrigued by Gilberte's dinners with Bergote as he is by Mademoiselle Vinteuil's affiar. But it is a significant part of life, and the narrator is not blind to that; he is losing some of that childish innocence, that complete ignorance of love and sexuality as his own capacities for both are developing. Swann's Way presents a wide variety of the forms of sexuality and romance: Swann's torrid affair with Odette, the idealized medieval romance of the Guermantes line, lesbian encounters, the perpetual maidenhood of his aunts, his parents' marriage, his uncle's proclivity for actresses and women of ill-repute. These forms of sexuality and love are all emerging before the narrator's eyes and becoming clearer in his consciousness, and as a curious, sensitive person, his narrative is an attempt to comprehend it.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Hey Jealousy
I'm back to write more about love and literature, this time just about Proust; and I begin with the inquiry, does romance depend on mystery?
After suffering the pangs of jealousy as he imagines Odette's infidelities, Swann eventually realizes that "the state for which he so longed was a calm, a peace, which would not have been a propitious atmosphere for his love. When Odette ceased to be for him a creature always absent, regretted, imagined, when the feeling that he had for her was no longer the same mysterious turmoil that was wrought in him by the phrase from the sonata, but affection and gratitude, when normal relations that would put an end to his melancholy madness were established between them-- then, no doubt, the actions of Odette's daily life would appear to him as being of little intrinsic interest" (Proust, p. 435-426).
In Swann's Way, love is only experienced as anguish and an irreconcilable conflict of desires. On the one hand, Swann wants to possess Odette completely, to know every action and to infiltrate her consciousness. But Swann also must have that titillating thrill of Odette's separate life of perverse pleasures, the painful sensation when she imposes prohibitions on him and refuses to see him. He loves her most when they are apart and she exhibits indifference towards him, when he goes to painful lengths to see her and expects her angry rejection.
Indeed, Swann begins to love Odette only when she is inaccessable and no longer at his disposal. For several weeks, he had been accustomed to seeing her every evening at Odette's friends, the Verdurins' home. But one evening, Swann had deliberately delayed his arrival until after dinner was over, and arrived to receive the message that Odette had assumed he was not coming and had left already. Swann immediately became consumed by passion and spent the night searching for her, imagining every man he encountered as a potential rival for Odette's affections. When he finally found her in a cafe late at night, she took him to his home and had sex for the first time. Although Swann attained the physical possession of Odette he desired in the sexual act, he then became haunted by the realization that he could never fully possess her. She had already eluded his grasp and he would never know what she was doing for those hours without him.
Thus far in Proust, I've already noted that love is a desire for control and complete possession, but that desire is inseparable from the intrigue of remoteness. Swann's love is thus characterized by jealousy, a combination of yearning for Odette and needing her to have a secret life apart from him. There must be an element of the forbidden in love: Odette's lowly social status as a demimondaine, the exotic items in her home (Chinese lanterns, Indian rugs, etc.), her infidelity, her refusals all feed the flame of Swann's intrigue and keep the mystery alive. His imagination aids this considerably, in his willed refusal to imagine her other lovers or even precisely what she does in her life away from him; he prefers to keep it vague, so that the mystery is never solved and he remains in that pleasing, painful suspense.
In Swann's Way, love is also a state of moral degradation. Swann finds himself justifying immoral behavior, from spying on Odette to bribing doormen, and convinces himself that it is an intellectual task, this obsessive interest in Odette's life apart from him, on par with his former studies of history and art. He searches for meanings in her actions, and seems to deliberately mislead himself by interpreting her prohibitions against him seeing her in public as proof of her love, or at least of her setting him apart from all other men in her life. Swann thus leads himself away from truth, and becomes obsessed with his meaning-making games and his quest to possess Odette.
This is not only applicable to Swann in his love for an amoral woman, either. The narrator is not overjoyed by his mother consenting to spend the night in his room. He is miserable and guilty, and spends the whole night crying. He feels as though he has, in his quest for his mother (and in his success), failed to exercise proper self-control, and as he pushes forward in this quest, he is feverishly conscious of his transgressions but at a loss to stop himself. Like Swann's physical conquest of Odette through sexual intimacy, the narrator's conquering of his mother's will provides no lasting pleasure. The next night brings the same routine of torture as he anticipates bedtime and parting from his mother. Physical possession, again, does not satisfy; rather, as Sartre wrote, love demands the possession of the other's consciousness. There is something transgressive about this, as though the narrator and Swann are cognizant of the impossibility of total possession. Swann indeed acknowledges this predicament when he says that the calm he seems to desire would mark the end of his love for Odette.
I do not think that this is the only way to experience love, but this point of moral degradation is comprehensible in the context of the obsessive relationships depicted in Swann's Way. The characters become intoxicated by the oscillation between power and subjugation, complete unity with the other and remoteness. Love is not based on the qualities of the loved person in Swann's Way, but on the sensations produced in the individual who loves. It's a very egocentric love, a love of what one projects from within and can only observe without, through the medium of the other.
After suffering the pangs of jealousy as he imagines Odette's infidelities, Swann eventually realizes that "the state for which he so longed was a calm, a peace, which would not have been a propitious atmosphere for his love. When Odette ceased to be for him a creature always absent, regretted, imagined, when the feeling that he had for her was no longer the same mysterious turmoil that was wrought in him by the phrase from the sonata, but affection and gratitude, when normal relations that would put an end to his melancholy madness were established between them-- then, no doubt, the actions of Odette's daily life would appear to him as being of little intrinsic interest" (Proust, p. 435-426).
In Swann's Way, love is only experienced as anguish and an irreconcilable conflict of desires. On the one hand, Swann wants to possess Odette completely, to know every action and to infiltrate her consciousness. But Swann also must have that titillating thrill of Odette's separate life of perverse pleasures, the painful sensation when she imposes prohibitions on him and refuses to see him. He loves her most when they are apart and she exhibits indifference towards him, when he goes to painful lengths to see her and expects her angry rejection.
Indeed, Swann begins to love Odette only when she is inaccessable and no longer at his disposal. For several weeks, he had been accustomed to seeing her every evening at Odette's friends, the Verdurins' home. But one evening, Swann had deliberately delayed his arrival until after dinner was over, and arrived to receive the message that Odette had assumed he was not coming and had left already. Swann immediately became consumed by passion and spent the night searching for her, imagining every man he encountered as a potential rival for Odette's affections. When he finally found her in a cafe late at night, she took him to his home and had sex for the first time. Although Swann attained the physical possession of Odette he desired in the sexual act, he then became haunted by the realization that he could never fully possess her. She had already eluded his grasp and he would never know what she was doing for those hours without him.
Thus far in Proust, I've already noted that love is a desire for control and complete possession, but that desire is inseparable from the intrigue of remoteness. Swann's love is thus characterized by jealousy, a combination of yearning for Odette and needing her to have a secret life apart from him. There must be an element of the forbidden in love: Odette's lowly social status as a demimondaine, the exotic items in her home (Chinese lanterns, Indian rugs, etc.), her infidelity, her refusals all feed the flame of Swann's intrigue and keep the mystery alive. His imagination aids this considerably, in his willed refusal to imagine her other lovers or even precisely what she does in her life away from him; he prefers to keep it vague, so that the mystery is never solved and he remains in that pleasing, painful suspense.
In Swann's Way, love is also a state of moral degradation. Swann finds himself justifying immoral behavior, from spying on Odette to bribing doormen, and convinces himself that it is an intellectual task, this obsessive interest in Odette's life apart from him, on par with his former studies of history and art. He searches for meanings in her actions, and seems to deliberately mislead himself by interpreting her prohibitions against him seeing her in public as proof of her love, or at least of her setting him apart from all other men in her life. Swann thus leads himself away from truth, and becomes obsessed with his meaning-making games and his quest to possess Odette.
This is not only applicable to Swann in his love for an amoral woman, either. The narrator is not overjoyed by his mother consenting to spend the night in his room. He is miserable and guilty, and spends the whole night crying. He feels as though he has, in his quest for his mother (and in his success), failed to exercise proper self-control, and as he pushes forward in this quest, he is feverishly conscious of his transgressions but at a loss to stop himself. Like Swann's physical conquest of Odette through sexual intimacy, the narrator's conquering of his mother's will provides no lasting pleasure. The next night brings the same routine of torture as he anticipates bedtime and parting from his mother. Physical possession, again, does not satisfy; rather, as Sartre wrote, love demands the possession of the other's consciousness. There is something transgressive about this, as though the narrator and Swann are cognizant of the impossibility of total possession. Swann indeed acknowledges this predicament when he says that the calm he seems to desire would mark the end of his love for Odette.
I do not think that this is the only way to experience love, but this point of moral degradation is comprehensible in the context of the obsessive relationships depicted in Swann's Way. The characters become intoxicated by the oscillation between power and subjugation, complete unity with the other and remoteness. Love is not based on the qualities of the loved person in Swann's Way, but on the sensations produced in the individual who loves. It's a very egocentric love, a love of what one projects from within and can only observe without, through the medium of the other.
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