Tuesday, October 6, 2015

well disposed



There is a moment in Nathalie Sarraute's Do You Hear Them? (1972) when the father returns to a phrase that he ended, earlier, with an ellipsis, and provides the information that the ellipsis concealed. The story that he tells is interesting to himself but it is not an unspeakable secret; his coy and shy withholding is at least a little pathetic, and it a sign of the anxiety that eventually instructs the other characters to despise him. Here it occurs to me that the mood of sickened dread that I fall into whenever I read Sarraute is close to the feeling I have when I find a true crime website and run through the stories of murders. Consider murder as an activity by which people are made absent. When Louis Marlow, in his memoir of the Powys brothers (Welsh Ambassadors (1936)), decides to explain his friend John Cowper's reasons for eliminating his mother from his autobiography he interprets it as part of the other man's masochism, an aspect of the same self-abasement that made Powys enjoy bad striptease theatre. I was horrified when Marlow introduced the erased mother into the memoir as if she had been a normal person -- it seemed indecent and shameful; he should be ashamed, ashamed, to reveal her shockingly with these ordinary words -- "Mrs. Powys was friendly to me, well disposed; even, in her reserved way, affectionate: chiefly, I thought, because she saw me as shy and subdued."

Mrs. Powys hated success. She hated, with secret intensity, well-constituted people, or even people whose health was too good. When Llewelyn developed consumption and was determined not to die of it, she was far from friendly to his insistent will. She did not like his going to Switzerland, she did not like him having so many windows open. "These young men," she said, "seem to want to live forever."

I reflect that the unspoken gaps in Henry James' fiction seem playful by comparison, lighthearted, clever, even in Turn of the Screw, which, if Sarraute is like true crime, is like a fairytale instead, the characters standing phenomenally like symbols or metaphors inside one of the enclosures that James liked to establish: witness his palazzi, his country houses, the rooms that close in around Isabel Archer, the home that frames Miss Tita when she is transfigured, her beatitude the hidden thing to be witnessed in that story, the true core or whatever, accessible through sacrifice and ritual. "When I look at it my chagrin at the loss of the letters becomes almost intolerable."


8 comments:

  1. i understand that horror has to do with the unknown, unsuspected insides of things; i can't deal with that kind of thing too well. i like friendly, kind forms of literature; i even got upset over "the lord of the rings". something unmature in my psyche, i guess. mary calls me a "tallow-faced tweedle poop".

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Was it the nazguls in Rings, or the giant spiders? (I can remember being annoyed and puzzled at the way the language changed during the massive battle at the end. Why were we suddenly thee-ing and thou-ing, my teenage self wanted to know.)

      Delete
    2. it was both, actually, in addition to other things, and yes, i remember that somehow something peculiar happened there. i can't read stephen king, por example, i fail to understand how people can like being scared that way. i remember reading an hp lovecraft, "the mountains of madness" i think it was when i was about 16; i had terrible nightmares for years afterward. not any more, of course, but i still don't like that kind of thing. sorry to get off topic this way; it occurs occasionally, i guess...

      Delete
    3. I can't speak for other people but for me it's not a matter of liking the books, or even of being scared -- I'm not alert and fearful while I read them -- it's dread, which is like being drugged. I wonder if the amount of humiliation in these books is one of the causes. Terrorised people are humiliated people.

      Delete
  2. maybe it has to do with the mortality content. does dread imply death? or something worse? i know the familiar dread that occurs when reading a mystery on a rainy night with a cup of hot chocolate before a sputtering fire-there's an element of comfort in there somewhere. the kind i remember, though, is the soul destroying utter panic and horror that stimulates the fight/flight response; in which one knows beyond all doubt that the most unimaginable pain/experience is about to happen. maybe i've never learned to differentiate between the two...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I wonder if the object of dread has two aspects:

      1. it is incomprehensibly strong and hostile; it can do whatever it likes; it is cruel
      2. you have no power over it



      Delete
  3. i guess perspective is all; any topic can be a subject for research, depending upon one's preference; all are prejudiced in that way. makes you wonder what all the discussions really achieve... knowledge comes with experience, though, so open-mindedness is a positive trait, up to the limit of one's capacity to not react emotionally. tough, sometimes, being human. monkey's have it easier in many ways...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Harder in other ways too. If gigantic parasites decide to burrow under our skin and eat our flesh at least we have doctors who will pull them out for us.

      (I know that monkeys feel alarm when they anticipate danger but do they suffer from imaginative dread, I wonder? Do they have the monkeys equivalent of creepy stories?)

      Delete