Cultures of Fetishism (40 page)

If I were to have let these matters stand as they were, it would have been tantamount to succumbing to the fetishism strategy. Of course, I might simply have deleted or amended the offending “Mother-Infant” passages and no one would have been the wiser—except myself.

I decided to leave my fetishism aberration as it was and proceed to write a more challenging ending; one that would encompass the vital importance of human dialogue but also, at the same time, be commensurate with the complex psychological dilemmas I have been posing in this book. In fact, as

I stressed in my earlier discussions of the apocalyptic narratives in films:

It would constitute a symptomatic narrowing of vision to focus exclusively on the violence . . . and thereby overlook the themes of intimacy and emotional transformation. There is a discordance, however, between the violence and sex- ual violence of the first half of the film(s) and the journey toward a mystical reunion in the second half. In order to animate the full text of the film and bring it into full focus it is essential to discern and interpret the discordance. To attempt to mask the trauma of loss, by counterposing an experience of grandiosity and elation is a fetishism strategy that enhances and perpetuates the repression of trauma—which then will always return, perhaps the next time in a more devastating form.
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To conclude with a lullaby on the significance of the mother-infant dialogue could be an invitation for a repetition of the traumas. On the other hand, to delete all evidence of the mother-infant dialogue would not solve the problem, either. The resolution resides in an understanding of the
discordance
between the trauma of loss and the embracing lullabies.

I have, on several occasions, verged on becoming a victim of the fetishism strategy. Immediately preceding my imposturous memoir, A-Hsui’s
“My Beloved and Terrible Lotus,”
I predicted that I might look back upon the words I had given A-Hsui and detect in them elements of the fetishism strategy.
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I questioned briefly then, and now I question even further and more deeply, some of the assumptions that guided the writing of that chap- ter. There is, for example, a whisper of magical thinking that hovers over both my wish to write this imposturous memoir and the way in which I wrote it.

The most obvious magical thinking has to do with my belief that I could attenuate the virulence of A-Hsui’s body mutilations by offering her sexual pleasure. As I was writing those conciliatory scenes of erotic pleasure, I already questioned them, wondering if I was employing these “gifts” to dis- guise and cover over the traumas suffered by A-Hsui? At this point, after hav- ing reviewed the manifestations of the fetishism strategy in several cultural endeavors, I would have to conclude that I was being deceptive, but mainly because I had been deceiving myself. I was deceived by my therapeutic zeal, my overpowering wish to effect a cure; as if the obscuring of trauma by an offering of pleasure could ever amount to an amelioration of mental suffering. My greatest self-deception was my belief in the power of the written word.

After recognizing that I couldn’t bear to make A-Hsui’s “entire life a litany of unspeakable sufferings,” I turned my attention to the transformative power of writing.
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I said that writing was comparable to the remembrances, dreams, fantasies, and wishes that emerge in the course of psychotherapy. This magical thinking about the power of writing became the servant of my therapeutic zeal—a cure of suffering through writing.

Later on, as I was trying to reconcile the carbon-based vitalities of human life with the silicon-based energies of robots, I again brought in the subject of writing. I cited Robert Sokolowski, a pioneer in the artificial intelligence

community who depicted writing as the link between natural human intelligence and the artificial intelligence of computers and other machines. Though I did not agree entirely with Sokolowski’s resolution, it led me, nevertheless, to conclude “Robots and Humans” with Primo Levi’s medita- tion on carbon. Levi describes how within the nerve cell in his brain an atom of carbon is in charge of his writing. “It is that which at this instant, issuing out of a labyrinthine tangle of yesses and nos, makes my hand run along a certain path on the paper, mark it with these volutes that are signs.”
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My compelling and irresistible attraction to Levi’s “volutes that are signs,” my magical belief in the transformative power of writing, had been given expression in an earlier chapter, “Writing on the Skin,” when I called atten- tion to some words of Peter Greenaway’s heroine Nagiko. At one point, shortly after the first fiery destruction takes her out of Japan and immediately preceding her search for a calligraphy lover who possesses the talent to write on her skin, Nagiko says, “Writing is an ordinary thing but how precious. If writing did not exist what terrible depressions we would have.”
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And I, car- ried away by my passionate longing to believe in the magical powers of writing, follow up Nagiko’s prescription by recommending writing as a form of therapy that protects the writer from succumbing to depression and anxiety.

But here we come upon a crucial irony. Writing, an expression of human vitality, writing, a source of transformative energy, can also be an avoidance of the trauma of loss. Writing can serve as a disavowal of death. “Yes, he is dead,” but, “No he is really still alive.” Writing, then, is a most ingenious and convoluted method of having it both ways. Insofar as writing is a disavowal, it is, to that extent, a servant of the fetishism strategy. Perhaps if I just keep on writing, I will have the illusion that I am creating a better ending for this book. At the same time I may also be attempting to assure that this book never comes to an ending. The analogy I am making between ending a book and ending a life has not escaped me.

As I contemplated the double-faced imago of the writing enterprise, I was reminded of the way I expressed, and to some extent tentatively resolved, these dilemmas in “Archive Fever: Writing Lives:” As I said, the biographer stands at the abyss between life and death:

Writing a biography is an enterprise fraught with the dangers and duplicities of fetishism. There is a susceptibility in the biographical impulse that makes it one of the more telling illustrations of the insidious manner in which material force may be employed to stultify human life. Desiring only to bring to life the flesh- and-blood essence of another human being, the biographer all unknowingly stands at the abyss between Life and Death, always haunted by the prospect of drowning in the fathoms of facts she amasses, always verging on crushing her subject under the weight of the archival detritus she has marshaled in her earnest efforts to be true-to-life.
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Two of the most illustrious early-twentieth-century writers seemed hell- bent on exposing the death instinct as it worked silently and prodigiously to

sabotage the biographical impulse. Lytton Strachey said of biography: “These two fat volumes, with which it is our custom to commemorate the dead—who does not know them, with their ill-digested masses of material, their slipshod style, their tone of tedious panegyric, their lamentable lack of selection, of detachment, of design? They are as familiar as the
cortege
of the undertaker, and wear the same air of slow, funereal barbarism.”
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And then, of course, there was his comrade-in-arms, Virginia Wolff, who knew exactly how to express the loveliness of Strachey’s allegiance to life and also their shared contempt for biographers afflicted with archive fever. She tells us that the first duty of a “true” biographer “is to plod without looking to right or left, in the indelible footprints of truth, unenticed by flowers; regardless of shade, on and on, methodically till we fall plump into the grave and
finis
with a tombstone over our head.”
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The
cortege
of the undertaker, the slow, funereal barbarism, the falling plump into the grave

with a tombstone over our head.
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Could all this dirge and dread be the monstrous outcome of a desire to bring a subject to life? What could possibly be so sinful about the desire to write a biography? Why does it summon forth images of death? And then, here am I, wanting to convince you about the crucial importance of the written word for expressing and preserving the human spirit, and instead haranguing on the impulse to murder vitality with words, words, words, and more words. What am I doing? Why do I seem to be arguing against my most cherished beliefs?

I am not a very good devil’s advocate. Of course, I do believe and will always believe in the transformative power of writing. However, in every creative human undertaking there seems to be a struggle between an impulse to bring out the vitalities of the human spirit and a contrary impulse to squelch and destroy that spirit. Biography, a particularly susceptible genre of writing, has a form that brings out the nature and consequences of that struggle.

When I started to conclude this book with an image of the mother-infant embrace, I was trying to forget about the forces of destruction and aggres- sion which had been so much a central theme of this book. The fetishism strategy is not entirely a force of evil or entirely a foremost enemy of human life. It also protects us from the full force of destruction. Though I have on several occasions discussed the fifth principle of the fetishism strategy “destruction-tinting itself in erotic colorations,” I did not take full account of the subtle interactions between the erotic elements and the destruction it was disguising. The erotic is not just a duplicitous tint. It is also a counterforce that tames, limits, and regulates destruction. If it were not for that “tint,” we would be faced with the grinning mask of death in all its horror.

The discordance in an apocalyptic narrative has to do with glorifying ide- alizing the mother-infant dialogue, the hymns to Mother Nature, as though

such regressive fantasies could counteract the traumas of loss, violence, and destruction also represented in those narratives. The promise of eternal life and eternal goodness is being used as a way of avoiding confrontation with the traumas. In many religions, as in many ordinary human fantasies, the promise of perpetual erotic bliss in an afterlife in a land of milk and honey is promulgated as a solution to trauma—and, even more dangerously—as an excuse for encouraging violence and destruction in the name of the Holiness of some God or other.

This fantasy of the land of milk and honey that awaits us after death does not originate in the mind of an infant. It is the outcome of a wish that can originate at any juncture in a human life when there is some aching sense of disappointment and loss. When the infant becomes a child who must reckon with the humiliation that he is forever excluded from the passionate excite- ments that cement his mother and father into a bond of oneness, he looks back at “the time that was”—the heavenly days when he was cradled in a milky embrace with mother, and there was no father, or work, or friends, or shopping to come between them. He creates a fantasy of “the time that was” retroactively to console himself for the humiliations and losses in the time that is now. When faced with the inevitablity of a separation from mother, a young child often tries to create a fantasy of oneness.
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Then, later, during adolescence, when a child on the brink of adulthood experiences the sense of all that she is leaving behind, once again there is that look backward, but this time the longed-for past is experienced in conjunc- tion with the conviction that it will never come again.
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We call this bitter- sweet emotion, “nostalgia.” The infancy years were pure and innocent. No matter how frightening or humiliating infancy might sometimes have been, we fantasize it as the glorious time.

The heartbreak and grief of the adolescent years are often difficult to bear. By arousing memories of a delicious and joyous infantile past, the disap- pointments of the present are mitigated.
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The family rivalries and jealousies revived by the adolescent passions are screened out by “memories” of having been an infant or child who was perfect and absolutely adored. In a nostalgic mood it is always the romance of infancy that is revived; never the frustrations and defeats. The adult romancers would have it that “Heaven lay about us in our infancy,” or that infancy was “The happy highways where I went/and cannot come again.” “Time it was and what a time it was. It was a time of innocence. A time of confidence and hope.” “Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio?” What has once been is gone. It cannot be brought back—except in those fantasies we call memories and in longing for the time that was. Nostalgia softens grief. It takes the sting out of the sense of loss.
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This universal wish to envision infancy as the golden time, the time of perfection and bliss, is also a device for avoiding the challenge of trying to understand and possibly reconcile the contradictions and conflicts between erotic discourses and the discourses of aggression and destruction. The everlastingly entangled relationships between these two basic forms of human experience—the erotic and the destructive—are difficult to articulate, nearly

impossible to fully grasp. So, more often than not, the search for understand- ing the complex relationships between the erotic and the destructive is short- circuited by evoking the fantasy of a mystical reunion with Mother Nature.

I shall speak, just for a moment, of these inevitable everyday conflicts in the abstract language of Eros and Thanatos. Abstractly, there is always this doubt, this eternal and everlasting doubt: Is it because the death drive tints itself in erotic colors that we become susceptible to the deceptions of the fetishism strategy? Or, do our susceptibilities to the deceptions of the fetishism strategy arise from the fantasy of Eros holding Thanatos—the death drive,—in abeyance? This uncertainty has been present in every chapter. Moreover, this very uncertainty and ambiguity has sustained the movement of this book.