Read The Art of Intimacy Online
Authors: Stacey D'Erasmo
The Art of Intimacy (4 page)
Somewhere between the world itself and the possible worlds of the subjunctive is the image. It is a flexible and expansive place for characters to meet, one that doesn’t even require the characters to be physically in the same room or to talk with or touch one another; they can be united in the capacious mind of the author, brought together by simile and metaphor. Though it isn’t always the case and doesn’t have to be, beauty is attracted to the image, or perhaps the image to beauty. Among many other things, beauty has a way of dissolving the reader’s defenses, opening up a zone of possibility. In her brilliant little book
On Beauty and Being Just,
Elaine Scarry writes that “Beautiful things . . . always carry greetings from other worlds within them.” The image lends itself as well to creating those other worlds, and to uniting its characters there in ways that they may not themselves even be quite aware of. Bringing characters into intimacy via a powerful image doesn’t actually require their participation, nor does that intimacy, in contrast to Lawrence, Bowen, and Maxwell, have to change the characters psychologically. This use of the image is more a sort of benevolent tyrant, or maybe a guru—the image reveals an almost spiritual connectedness underneath known by the author, but not necessarily by the characters, or all the characters. It’s the aquifer, the air that surrounds them, a sea of connection and interconnection.
The master, or one of the masters, of the image is Virginia Woolf. In Woolf, the image is the meeting ground for any and all human beings everywhere; it is communion, erotic space; it is transformational, a way of knowing; it’s magic, capable of moving outside the confines of time and space, leaping at will from person to person. In her novel
To the Lighthouse,
there’s a scene about midway through the book where everyone in the Ramsay household is at dinner together. The candles have just been lit.
Now eight candles were stood down the table, and after the first stoop the flames stood upright and drew with them into visibility the long table entire, and in the middle a yellow and purple dish of fruit. What had she done with it, Mrs. Ramsay wondered, for Rose’s arrangement of the grapes and pears, of the horny pink-lined shell, of the bananas, made her think of a trophy fetched from the bottom of the sea, of Neptune’s banquet, of the bunch that hangs with vine leaves over the shoulder of Bacchus (in some picture), among the leopard skins and the torches lolloping red and gold. . . . Thus brought up suddenly into the light it seemed possessed of great size and depth, was like a world in which one could take one’s staff and climb hills, she thought, and go down into valleys, and to her pleasure (for it brought them into sympathy momentarily) she saw that Augustus too feasted his eyes on the same plate of fruit, plunged in, broke off a bloom there, a tassel here, and returned, after feasting, to his hive. That was his way of looking, different from hers. But looking together united them.
Now all the candles were lit up, and the faces on both sides of the table were brought nearer by the candle light, and composed, as they had not been in the twilight, into a party round a table, for the night was now shut off by panes of glass, which, far from giving any accurate view of the outside world, rippled it so strangely that here, inside the room, seemed to be order and dry land; there, outside, a reflection in which things wavered and vanished, waterily.
Some change at once went through them all, as if this had really happened, and they were all conscious of making a party together in a hollow, on an island; had their common cause against that fluidity out there.
Notice the engine of transformative intimacy in this passage: the agency in the scene belongs to the flames, the light that begins by drawing the table “into visibility,” making it appear; almost, it seems, bringing it into existence and then adding that dish of fruit that, transformed into image in Mrs. Ramsay’s mind, an image that plunges first to the bottom of the sea, then to Bacchus, then becomes an alternate world, then brings Mrs. Ramsay and Augustus together. These two characters could not be more different, “but looking together united them.” The light brings the object into the world, the object as an image, a thing that one looks at—literally bringing greetings from other worlds, bringing alternate worlds alive in the mind’s eye—and that seeing unites, first, two people. Then Woolf returns to that image of the candlelight, and now she moves the circle of intimacy wider—“the faces on both sides of the table were brought nearer by the candle light, and composed, as they had not been in the twilight, into a party round a table.” That flame, that image, brings the people at the table together in a composition—the people themselves are not moving together; they are not necessarily experiencing this growing intimacy. The light is experiencing it; the reader is experiencing it.
And then Woolf moves the circle of intimacy wider still—“Some change at once went through them all . . . and they were all conscious of making a party together”—so now the light that has composed them wakes them up to their communion, their togetherness. They feel themselves to be united “against that fluidity out there,” a fluidity that is an echo and a reflection of the fluidity inside the room, the permeability of boundaries between and among the people at the table, who are now so intimately connected that they all change “at once.” Those panes of glass are all that stands between the border less human beings inside the lighted room and the dark, wavering world outside the room—communion, in a sense, is everywhere all the time, everything is just on the verge of melting at any given moment. It’s probably too bald to suggest that the border-dissolving light inside the room is eros and the border-dissolving light outside the room is thanatos—Mrs. Ramsay is, after all, just a few pages away from her death—but I think I’ll make that bald suggestion anyway. We readers are naturally drawn to the light, but Woolf puts that darkness right next to it, driving us even closer to it; we are drawn into closeness with the Ramsay family as well, making a party with them against the encroaching darkness.
All of this work is being done, basically, by the image of the candlelight. No one at the table is turning to anyone else and saying, “You know, I’ve always wanted to tell you . . .” or holding hands or exchanging lingering glances or even thinking of one another. Woolf brings them together, and brings us together with them, in that image, which is, of course, also actual candlelight, eight candles at the table. It’s not a one-to-one intimacy; it’s not romantic; it’s not, in a way, personal at all. And yet we feel a tremendous tenderness upon reading this scene, a welling-up of sympathy; we feel very close to the Ramsay family, as if we understand something incredibly private about them, nearly as if we’re with them at a family moment when outsiders really shouldn’t be there. Looking together at an image, an image that is itself mobile and perhaps appears differently to each viewer, we are united with them, and they are united with one another. What might we call this union through looking? It isn’t scopophilia, although it might be called, perhaps,
scopoagape,
or brotherly love through looking—a word that doesn’t exist. It may be that what I experienced at the Goldin exhibit could be described as
scopoagape,
a shared sense of visual desire, and of expressing desire via a visual image.
In his novel
The Soul Thief,
Charles Baxter creates a sense of
scopoagape
among characters and reader through his use of an image in a sex scene. The two characters having sex are an odd couple: Nathaniel, the novel’s beleaguered narrator, and Jamie, a woman who generally sleeps only with women, but is having an affair with Nathaniel. Baxter writes,
Half an hour later, his eyes closed, then suddenly opened, tears and sweat dripping down onto her, he calls out her name, and in response Jamie comes at the same time that he does. Her facial expression is one of pleasure mixed with horrified surprise. After a moment—she has broken out into quick shocked laughter—he looks into her eyes and imagines that her spirit, without knowing how or why, has suddenly disobeyed the force of gravity that has governed it. Her soul, no longer a myth but now a fact, ascends above her body. Like a little metallic bird unused to flight, unsteady in its progress, her soul rises and falls, frightened by the heights and by what it sees, but excited, too, by being married to him for a few seconds, just before it plummets back to earth.
Jamie, it should be said, is an artist and the image of the metallic bird here is also a reference to the metallic birds she makes herself. Nathaniel knows her work, so that’s why the image comes to his mind—it’s not just randomly pretty. So this, obviously, is an ordinary intimacy, the intimacy of lovers for however brief a time, and they’re doing a recognizably intimate thing, nothing fancy. The image, like that image of the candlelight, is beautiful, it’s lyrical—the soul in flight, a bird; as a description of orgasm, it’s lovely and it goes very far out of its way to cede the floor to her, imagistically speaking; Nathaniel, wide awake, is busy not thinking of his own soul, but imagining hers in detail. He is a gentleman, undoubtedly, though one senses that he might be possibly a tiny bit pleased, secretly, that her soul, apparently “unused to flight,” has been released from the heavy hand of gravity by having sex with him.
The lovers are united in the image, first, by the fact that this is Nathaniel looking at Jamie and imagining her, making an image of her most intimate experience of herself, in the same way that Maxwell’s narrator imagined Cletus Smith or Henrietta imagined Leopold. He sees that bird, a much more intimate thing than seeing her naked, having sex with her, even coming with her. He is actually able to see, and make a metaphor of, her experience of her own soul. But also embedded, even somewhat hidden in the image of the bird in flight is an equally powerful insight into Nathaniel. Watch what happens: the bird is rising, “frightened by the heights and by what it sees, but excited, too, by being married to him for a few seconds.”
This is syntactically complicated; we must look closely to discern the subtle, inverted image. Baxter reverses the literal positions of the lovers not in physical space, but in psychic space—within the image that Nathaniel conceives of Jamie’s soul. When the passage begins, Nathaniel’s sweat is dripping down onto Jamie, so he’s on top, but in the image she, as that metallic bird, a soul, is looking down at him, she is seeing him and in that seeing she is “married to him”; in other words, in her pleasure, the pleasure he gives her and that they have together, she recognizes him, she sees him, they are united in her gaze from above. It is a moment of transcendent intimacy for both of them, very brief, “a few seconds,” before that plummet back to earth, but that flight she takes isn’t only for her pleasure—it’s so that, from her vantage point, he might actually be seen, be “married”; the powerful intimate gaze, here, the gaze that unites, is mutual. It’s almost as if the narrative lofts Jamie’s soul so high in order for her to look down at Nathaniel and see him whole, see him from a point of view that no human being actually could see from, an encompassing, aerial, almost divine point of view.
Again, this is subtle, mostly off the page, but if you follow the logic of the image it’s easy to see that, gentleman though he is, Nathaniel isn’t as self-effacing as he might seem. His desire is bound up in that image as well, and also, of course, his loss: the plummet back to earth. The recognition he has so desired, that he has worked so hard for and that came off so well, so lyrically, even beautifully, lasts for only a few seconds. It’s post-Lawrentian in terms of explicitness, but also post-Lawrentian in terms of the optimism, or lack thereof, about what this particular kind of intimacy can do—sex and desire do have a ferocious, disturbing power, but only for a moment or so now and then. Inevitably, the moment passes, both the decentering and the marriage are brief, the characters remain local, citizens only of their own skins.
Up to this point, I have been discussing intimacies in fiction that might be more or less described as emanating from eros—the life instinct, the generative force. In Bowen, Maxwell, Lawrence, Woolf, and Baxter, the space between is a creative one, producing art and insight and communion. However, the space between can also emanate from thanatos—the death drive, the destructive force. The intimacy that can seam can also rend, and the writer’s task is similar: to draw readers into that dark space and to persuade them of its meaning and its gravity. If the reader, in the novels that I’ve discussed so far, is a seduced voyeur, an invisible participant in these scenes of union and expansion of consciousness, in other, darker fictions, the reader is drawn into complicity with intimacies that may well do harm. Moreover, the harm may lie not only in the literal action on the page, but also in the reader’s very engagement with that harm, with the act of reading itself. It means one thing to spy on a scene of love of whatever variety, but what might it mean to spy on a scene of intimate destruction? Are readers implicated by their desire to turn the pages? One method by which writers create a space between in which to do intimate damage is the use of blur, penumbra, and darkness. Under cover of syntactical and literal twilight, crimes take place, often in such a way that it can be difficult to discern, at first glance, that a crime has taken place at all.
In Joseph Conrad’s
The Secret Sharer,
unsettling questions of power and identity are intricately folded into a yarn that is also a strange love story, and a story about the love of strangeness itself, of the stranger within and of strange lives unlived. The shimmering, almost over-determined homoeroticism of
The Secret Sharer
should not entirely blind us to the fact that, as much as this is a novella about a liminal love, it is also a novella about a murder, a splitting, a forceful and conscious subduing as one man literally masters another in order to constitute his own authority. That the man who is ultimately subdued is himself a murderer should alert us to what kind of topos this is: a deadly one, in which power is a zero-sum game.
The plot of
The Secret Sharer,
which is less than fifty pages long, is fairly simple: an unnamed sea captain, embarking on his first commission in the Gulf of Siam on an unnamed ship, harbors a fugitive sailor named Leggatt who has more than likely murdered a man on a nearby vessel, the
Sephora.
The captain stashes Leggatt in his rooms on the ship; over the course of a few days, the two men develop a deep, secret intimacy; the captain feels that Leggatt is his double both literally and psychologically; he hides Leggatt from the authorities, risking his own commission; in the climactic final scene, the captain sails perilously close to an island in order to enable Leggatt’s escape. Watching Leggatt swim away, the captain feels that “the secret sharer of my cabin and of my thoughts, as though he were my second self, had lowered himself into the water to take his punishment: a free man, a proud swimmer striking out for a new destiny.”
It’s a curious sentence, tacking paradoxically between self and other, punishment and freedom, longing and rejection. That it is the final sentence of the book is more curious still, and only increases the sense of ambivalence in the main character and unease in the reader. What, exactly, has happened between these two men? What “secret” has passed between them?
This scene of Leggatt swimming for freedom in the water echoes the scene in which the captain first discovers Leggatt, lurking just beneath his ship:
The side of the ship made an opaque belt of shadow on the darkling glassy shimmer of the sea. But I saw at once something elongated and pale floating very close to the ladder. Before I could form a guess a faint flash of phosphorescent light, which seemed to issue suddenly from the naked body of a man, flickered in the sleeping water with the elusive, silent play of summer lightning in a night sky. With a gasp I saw revealed to my stare a pair of feet, the long legs, a broad livid back immersed right up to the neck in a greenish cadaverous glow. One hand, awash, clutched the bottom rung of the ladder. He was complete but for the head. A headless corpse! . . . He raised up his face, a dimly pale oval in the shadow of the ship’s side. But even then I could only barely make out down there the shape of his black-haired head. However, it was enough for the horrid, frost-bound sensation which had gripped me about the chest to pass off. . . .
As he hung by the ladder, like a resting swimmer, the sea lightning played about his limbs at every stir; and he appeared in it ghastly, silvery, fishlike. He remained as mute as a fish, too. He made no motion to get out of the water, either.
Later, when the captain is hiding Leggatt in his small cabin belowdecks, Leggatt is described in similarly nonhuman, sometimes corpselike or wraithlike, terms. He is “glimmering white”; he appears from out of a closet without making a sound; he is “noiseless as a ghost”; he holds entirely still as he stands against the wall in small spaces, “his face looking very sunken in daylight, his eyelids lowered,” like a corpse propped upright; he is prone to vanishing; the captain even wonders at one point if Leggatt is visible to others. Indeed, when Leggatt is speaking of his forthcoming escape by sea, he remarks, “It would never do for me to come to life again. . . . As I came at night so I shall go.”
The recurrent image of Leggatt as glimmering, shimmering, silvery, mute, and still, uncannily poised between the animate and the inanimate, is, of course, an image of a reflection in a mirror. The captain constantly reinforces this image by seeing Leggatt as his double, his twin, his second self. In the long passage quoted here, the position of the captain as Leggatt raises his face up is akin to the position of a man looking at his reflection in water; like a reflection in water, Leggatt’s face, “upturned exactly” under the captain’s, is blurry, a “dimly pale oval.” More than once, the captain confides that, with Leggatt hidden in his cabin, he frequently feels “in two places at once” and only feels “less torn in two when I [am] with him.”
However, there is little on the page to suggest that Leggatt is literally the captain’s double either physically or psychologically. The reader is told, repeatedly, by the captain, that Leggatt is the captain’s double, but the work of this doubling is done by the continual mirror positioning of the two men more than by any articulated attributes. The captain even remarks at one point, “He was not a bit like me, really.” When we read the long account given by Leggatt of his violent rage on the
Sephora
during a storm, a rage that resulted in another sailor’s death, we infer that the captain must harbor such a rage himself because of the curious blankness of his own inner life. Leggatt’s guilt points to a similar sense of guilt somewhere in this preternaturally quiet captain. Neither the captain nor his ship is named in the story; the captain never describes himself physically. Of the two, the captain is actually the far more shadowy figure, the ghost. Leggatt is merely a man. Conrad relies on the reader to make the obvious connections that the captain is unwilling to make, even as he finds himself so powerfully drawn to Leggatt. Leggatt—named, seen, clearly marked out in every way, naked—must, by analogy, be the notably unvoiced, invisible interior of the captain. Who is this elusive captain, we wonder, what secrets is he hiding, and why is he so over identified with Leggatt, so determined to see his own reflection in a man who may or may not be “a bit like” him at all? Why does he, in the discovery passage quoted here, put his head, visually, on Leggatt’s “headless” body? But then again, why does the passage remove Leggatt’s head in the first place?
We might also ask why Conrad so carefully dims the lights. The topos of
The Secret Sharer
is, literally, the dark. The men first meet at night; they “whisper together” in the captain’s bed all night; when Leggatt makes his escape, it is at night. Throughout, the novella is penumbral, hushed, full of shadows and odd flashes of light, glimpses, nighttime nakedness in the sea, whispers, hidden spaces. The images are appealing to eye and ear: silky, luminescent, dusky. More often than not, Leggatt is wearing the captain’s pajamas, his “sleeping suit,” an image as cozy as it is sexual. Complementing and amplifying this darkness is Conrad’s use of blur. Consider, for example, the very first sentence: “On my right hand there were lines of fishing stakes resembling a mysterious system of half-submerged bamboo fences, incomprehensible in its division of the domain of tropical fishes, and crazy of aspect as if abandoned forever by some nomad tribe of fishermen now gone to the other end of the ocean; for there was no sign of human habitation as far as the eye could reach.” This sentence seems almost willfully confusing and difficult to parse visually. Whose right hand? The fishing stakes—staked into what, we aren’t quite sure—resemble bamboo fences, which, if they were there (which they aren’t) are “incomprehensible,” “crazy,” “abandoned” by a nomad tribe, which doesn’t exist, but which isn’t in the scene, anyway, because there is “no sign of human habitation” in this place, whatever it might be.
A sentence farther on, our narrator continues his obfuscating description: “And when I turned my head to take a parting glance at the tug which had just left us anchored outside the bar, I saw the straight line of the flat shore joined to the stable sea, edge to edge, with a perfect and unmarked closeness, in one leveled floor half brown, half blue under the enormous dome of the sky.” Here, the sea is “stable” (the last quality that the sea might be said to possess), and it is seamlessly joined to the shore, the two elements, edgeless, boundaryless, in “a perfect and unmarked closeness.” As with the scene where Leggatt appears, naked and phosphorescent and headless, floating by the side of the ship, this opening scene seems to go out of its way to displace the reader visually, to blur geography, as the earlier scene blurred anatomy, nearly to the point of illegibility. One can easily miss the radical, even surgical, operations behind the shimmering language. In fact, heads do not travel so easily back and forth from body to body, nor do the shore and sea generally meet in straight, flat, stable, perfectly unmarked planes. Quite the opposite. Often defying logic and the rules of time and space, the novella is continually in a state of whisper and blur, of small, confusing interiors that seem to have oddly endless entrances and exits; and/or of large land masses that both by day and by night appear to be indistinguishable from the sea.
It is tremendously appealing. Conrad turns the reader round and round in the half-dark, shining lights here and there unpredictably, whispering secrets the reader can’t hear, making the reader complicit in the captain’s literally closeted double life, blending sea and shore and sky, shredding individual identity in a looking-glass world of misperception shadowed by offstage violence and demirepressed sexuality. The captain’s unnamed ship is a dream, a cozy, erotic liminal zone where both appearance and disappearance are deceptive and unstable. Moreover, by asking the reader to contemplate a first-person narrator as obviously repressed and unreliable as the captain—he won’t even tell us his name—Conrad blurs the boundaries as well between reader and narrator, inviting us to fill in so much that the captain can’t or won’t admit; to, in effect, write the secret history of the main character ourselves. This, too, is tremendously appealing both to the intelligence and to the heart, and we willingly connect the blurry, luminous dots. We like being party to the captain’s secrets; we delight in the subterfuge, in the sly, graceful manner that Leggatt slips around the captain’s cabin, undetected by the authorities.
And yet that very pleasure is perhaps both our and the captain’s undoing. Conrad so beguiles us with all the ways that Leggatt gives everyone the slip that we continue that enchantment right through to the end, merrily waving Leggatt off as he jumps overboard into a nighttime sea next to an island that may well be uninhabited. It feels so much like a certain kind of happy ending (“a free man, a proud swimmer”) that we can easily bounce right past the other aspect (“his punishment”) of this ambiguous gesture, even though Conrad is not concealing it from us. The captain, in risking so much to secure the other man’s freedom, also consolidates his previously shaky authority as his crew stands in awe of his nautical daredevilry, while simultaneously dispatching the evidence of his much more peculiar, ambivalent, erotic, murderous urges. Leggatt looks, textually, like a double, but he functions narratively and thematically as a scapegoat. Having first removed Leggatt’s head and transformed him via metaphor, albeit lovely metaphor, into a corpse; dressed the other man in his own “sleeping suit,” the suit in which he dreams; and loaded Leggatt up with projections of his own unruly emotions, the captain then arranges to have Leggatt willingly throw himself overboard and make of the captain a hero. Leggatt was never his double; the captain tells us that himself. Leggatt was, instead, a fugitive opportunity, an unwitting actor in the captain’s intrapsychic drama, a drama that the captain orchestrates straight through to its conclusion: Leggatt’s disappearance, which is not entirely unlike a suicide by drowning. “It had been a confounded lonely time,” remarks Leggatt early on of his relief at being found by the captain. “I wanted to be seen, to talk with somebody, before I went on.” The captain’s response to this confidence is to tell Leggatt to get into his bed, where the captain is struck by how closely Leggatt resembles him.
Why this response to Leggatt’s desire to “be seen”? Would we really call this love? And what of our pleasure—which surely can’t be that secret to us—in watching one man co-opt, dominate, and dispatch another into exile, if not death? Where do we really think Leggatt is going? The space between, in
The Secret Sharer,
is a transactional one in which the shadow side of one character is sewn, Peter Pan–style, to the heels of another. Our suspicions might be raised by how frequently our narrator insists that he and Leggatt are just alike, are twins, are doubles, nearly to the point of suggesting that there can hardly be need of two of the same man in the world. But so beguiled are we by the atmosphere, the dusk, the whispering, and the general air of exceptional, privileged intimacy that we don’t think to question why the captain is selling us on this so hard. We are lulled by the near-dark, seduced by our own cleverness in articulating what the captain refuses to articulate about himself, reading clues off of Leggatt’s body.