Ghostlier demarcations

An Honest Ghost

A Novel

by Rick Whitaker

 

A book that furnishes no quotations is no book — it is a plaything. Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it. How frequently the mere purchase of a book is mistaken for the appropriation of its contents.  Many will read the book before one thinks of quoting a passage.

 

This book consists of quotations and nothing but quotations.  They are ordered according to a rigorous system of semantic relationships, which like an invisible hand guides the seeker to his "lucky” find.  In this case, a love story with a somewhat bizarre and morbid twist. 

 

But isn't that what David Markson did (for longer) in This Is Not A Novel?  No. Not at all. This book is different, for all its seeming fragmentation, nonetheless obstinately cross-referential and of cryptic interconnective syntax.  Here's a guy who has turned his genre into a vehicle for serious ideas and serious emotion--and has never, unlike Markson, been tempted to write more than necessary.  Markson hesitates to label his work "experimental" and instead characterizes his novels -- both "literally crammed with literary and artistic anecdotes" and "nonlinear, discontinuous, collage-like, an assemblage" -- as "playful."  There is no linear (or nonlinear) sequence of events to exploit with a wink-nudge because there is no novelistic time employed at all, no events that would require such sequencing.

 

Whitaker deserves more credit.  What he’s doing is harder.  And much more entertaining.  More like Christian Marclay. Watch the Clock.  Time, so to speak, is everywhere in the movies, and the delight of the experience is that the grab bag becomes a fun house: you never know what’s going to pop up.

 

A book may measure so-called reality as a clock measures so-called time; a book may create an illusion of reality as a clock creates an illusion of time; a book may be real, just as a clock is real (both more real, perhaps, than those ideas to which they allude); but let's not kid ourselves - all a clock contains is wheels and springs and all a book contains is sentences.

 

But what else is love?  Words heated originally by the breath of others.  The value of a sentence is in the personality which utters it, for nothing new can be said by man or woman. The hidden life of love is in the most inward depths, unfathomable, and still has an unfathomable relationship with the whole of existence. Call those works extravagance of breath, of the incalculable amount of tenderness contained in the world; of the fate of this tenderness, which is either crushed or wasted, or transformed into madness; of neglected children humming to themselves in unswept corners; of beautiful weeds that cannot hide from the farmer.  And bid them love each other and be blest.

 

 

Punishment and resentment

Nevertheless, despair is veritably a self-consuming, but an impotent self-consuming that cannot do what it wants to do.  What it wants to do is to consume itself, something it cannot do, and this impotence is a new form of self-consuming, in which despair is once again unable to do what it wants to do, to consume itself; this is an intensification, or the law of intensification. --Kierkegaard [Hong translation of The Sickness Unto Death, p. 18]

Kierkegaard is interested in the disanalogy that the analogy between despair and vertigo suggests:

Upon [the spirit] rests the responsibility for all despair at every moment of its existence, however much the despairing person speaks of his despair as a misfortune and however ingeniously he deceives himself and others, confusing it with [the] case of dizziness, with which despair, although qualitatively different, has much in common, since dizziness corresponds, in the category of the psychical, to what despair is in the category of the spirit, and it lends itself to numerous analogies to despair. [p. 16]

Robert Frank, in Passion within Reason, discusses some aversive experiments with rats.  Cause them pain when you give them a certain food, and they'll stop eating that food, of course.  But you can reverse this experience by reversing the modalities.  If you cause them pleasure, later, when they are forced to eat that food, they'll unlearn their avoidance.  On the other hand, if you cause them nausea when they eat a certain food (even several hours later), they'll never unlearn their aversion.

Nausea (which Derrida points out is a central affect for the purposes of judgment [as Freud suggests in his great essay "Negation"], but one that Kant fails to discuss in the Critique of Judgment) and vertigo are differently aversive from pain.  How?  Well, for one thing, they are somehow totalizing.  Pain is something that just happens to one, and in most cases it is possible to sustain some clarity of thought even in pain - clarity of thought about the pain it may be (as I know from having had a kidney stone), but still clarity of thought.  Nausea and dizziness are different, all-engrossing, panic-inducing, mind-eroding.

Now it seems to me that our fantasies of revenge (and people's actual acts of revenge) are massively more about causing pain (including the psychic pain of grief, whose analogy to physical pain J.B. Pontalis has brilliantly defended) than about causing nausea or vertigo.  It's not that pain is worse (though of course it may be).  It's that pain is more in tune with the idea of punishment than nausea or vertigo are.

I think that this is because punishment is not so much about the gratification of seeing someone else suffer as it is about making that person understand why he or she is justly suffering.  Resentment is about making those you resent see why you resent them, where that "why" has the full force of justice behind it (cf. P.F. Strawson's great essay on "Freedom and Resentment").  Pain is external, or feels external.  (Elaine Scarry points out that the vocabulary for pain is always instrumental: burning, stabbing, piercing, even throbbing, as though being squeezed.)  Pain speaks to a relation to the outside world, to external things that injure us.  So injuring another is being in a relationship to them.  In French injurier means insult; etymologically injury (from injuria) means counter to the law, so counter to justice: injustice or wrong.  So injury in English suggests one person doing something to another: causing them pain and the damage that pain represents.  It attacks their bodily integrity (or the integrity of their world), but leaves their mind whole.

And so too does punishment.  Thomas Harris's fantasy of Mason Verger's fantasy of revenge on Hannibal Lecter would have Hannibal watching himself being eaten alive by hogs, kept alive and alert to his own consumption.  I think punishment can go only a little farther (as it does in ancient mythology): being forced to eat yourself (or your children), not because the idea is nauseating but because it brings the externalized destruction of body integrity to its zenith, while preserving the mind whole.  (Harris probably goes a little to far and loses a bit of his force when Clarice and Hannibal eat the brain of the conscious Paul Krendler from his open skull, carpaccio by carpaccio.  Here though we might have a fantasied rediscovery of Leibniz's view that all is surface, that the stripping away of each surface of the brain still constitutes and act of bodily harm and can still be perceived by the mind facing its own imminent death.  But I don't think Harris sells it, and the scene is nauseating rather than gratifying.  Though that may be the point; but still it doesn't feel like punishment.)

So why do we want to keep the mind whole?  For the same reason that we fantasize our enemies in  hell knowing their own sinfulness, knowing what they've done to deserve this.  It's because punishment aims at teaching -- this is what's crucial to the idea of altruistic punishment, even though not spelled out in most of its analysts -- at reform and correction, and so there's an acknowledgement in punishment of the humanity of its objects.  That's why Ugolino is conscious and aware of what he's doing in eating Ruggieri's head: Ugolino is still human, and his punishment is also a means of communication.  The communication is two-way: punishment communicates his crime to him, and makes him feel it; he can describe how he feels to the rest of us, because punishment is still a way of keeping others in the nexus of the human. Causing nausea or vertigo lacks that essential criterion for punishment.

So what about despair then?  Despair, we could say, is something like the successful vector towards correction that punishment aims at.  It affects the soul even as it keeps it whole, mindful of its sins and conscious of them.  Despair is the the borderline between punishment and aversiveness which no longer belongs to the ethical world of punishment.  If we can get someone to despair, we've succeeded. Punishment has had a moral success.  Anything more, like vertigo or nausea, has nothing to do with punishment, and becomes pointlessly dreadful.  Pain always seems structured as though it has a point.  (Obviously I'm talking about how we meditate or fantasize about these things, not about the truth of real pain.)  Despair is where that point or purpose disappears: it is a vanishing point or moment of transition.

It's not that pain causes despair directly (though it can cause despair, it can't cause what Kierkegaard means by despair directly).  It's that pain can remind you of what you've done to others, and that can bring home to you a reason for remorse (etymologically: eating yourself up alive!) and despair.

(Although I'm not so sure that this connection works elegantly, what's important about it is how it helps distinguish despair from vertigo.)

The Unimmediate Stages of the Erotic

I claimed in my last post that people are needlessly confused by "When the Lamp is Shattered." But that's not quite right. The poem is confusing, the way the fate of love is confusing. It's confusing because, as with love, you lose track of the pronouns.  So it's worth looking at them carefully.

Here, again, are the last two stanzas:

When hearts have once mingled,
Love first leaves the well-built nest;
The weak one is singled
To endure what it once possessed.
O Love! who bewailest
The frailty of all things here,
Why choose you the frailest
For your cradle, your home, and your bier?

Its passions will rock thee,
As the storms rock the ravens on high;
Bright reason will mock thee,
Like the sun from a wintry sky.
From thy nest every rafter
Will rot, and thine eagle home
Leave thee naked to laughter,
When leaves fall and cold winds come.

The important thing to remember abut Shelley is the supernatural delicacy of his effects ("Ah, sister, desolation is a delicate thing"). You can see that delicacy in the mingled interchange of reference.  As the opening stanzas make clear, this poem is an example of a particularly  Shelleyan version of allegory. "The light in the dust lies dead" can't quite mean that you can see light in the dust of the ground (as though the oil were still burning), because the light is dead. It almost means that, but it means that only if you understand that "the light in the dust" also and more deeply means: the light of life and love that animates the dust that we are, to which we will return. We've lost our spark, alive but loveless. The light in the dust that is still biologically alive has been extinguished.

Allegory figures through externalization, so the allegorical figuration of that is light actually lying dead in the dust, as on a battlefield, exteriorized. This is not quite an image, though it sounds like one. It's a verbal substitution for an image, a verbal form which can never be imagined as a pure image, since you would have to imagine light and its extinction at once. I do imagine that, but only by personifying the image of light prone and dead somehow in the dust, light still but dead, like Burke's not quite imaginable "angel of the Lord."

This is the mode of the last two stanzas as well. After love has expressed itself (when the hearts have mingled and mingle no longer, "when the lips have spoken), it does not last. Not for both: the weak one still loves though love is over. This is the meaning of the self-discrepancy of the light lying dead in the dust. Love is dead, the weak one still loves.

The well-built nest decays when love leaves it. Who leaves? The one who doesn't love anymore, and so: love departs. Who stays? The one who loves, debilitated by loss, and so: love stays. It does both at once.  Each is the equivalent of the other.  Love's departure brings out the love felt by the one who's lost all, and from whom love can never depart.

Love doesn't return to its eagle home; its only nest now is the place where the weak remains forlorn since love is gone. Love is gone, and what's left is love. Allegorical exteriorization is just the right figure for this discrepancy within experience: what is inside can only be seen now from the outside, and that fact tells powerfully and devastatingly on inner experience and brings us back to inner experience.

So in the last stanza, the pronouns are only hard to fix if you think they have to be fixed. "Thee" is Love, addressed already in the second person in the previous stanza: "Why choose you the frailest / For your cradle, your home, and your bier?" So "its passions" are the passions of the "weak one" who must "endure what it once possessed."

And yet: it's the passions of love that must be rocking the weak one, who endures it. The change in antecedent this reading implies is confirmed by the shift from "you" ("Why choose you the frailest") to "thee," the weak one.

The final, deepest allegorical figure of love is the person whom love abandons, leaving that person to be love's image, the frail and sorrowful personification of love's frailty. What's left when love is faithless and abandons you is the truest image of the faithfulness of love, faithful love.

"What may I do when my master feareth, But in the field with him to live and die? For good is the life ending faithfully."