Intimations of Posthumanity in the novella Homefaring

 

Intimations of Posthumanity in the novella Homefaring

As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end…..If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility – without knowing either what its form will be or what it promises – were to cause them to crumble, as the ground of Classical thought did, at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.

—Michel Foucault, The Order of Things

     If it were not for the narrative alibi in Robert Silverberg’s “Homefaring” of a scientific laboratory experiment in a technology of “transtemporalized consciousness,” Jim McCulloch’s migration into a sentient lobster millions or billions of years into the future would have sounded pretty much like the schizophrenic voyages and becomings that R.D. Laing wrote about that became celebrated in Anti-Oedipus and in which he defined

the schizophrenic process as a voyage of initiation, a transcendental experience of the loss of the Ego, which causes a subject to remark: "I had existed since the very beginning ... from the lowest form of life [the body without organs] to the present time...."

This whole spectrum represents real material intensities through which a nomadic subject passes.

[E]verything commingles in these intense becomings, passages, and migrations—all this drift that ascends and descends the flows of time: countries, races, families, parental appellations, divine appellations, geographical and historical designations, and even miscellaneous news items..... We pass from one field to another by crossing thresholds: we never stop migrating, we become other individuals as well as other sexes, and departing becomes as easy as being born or dying. ¹

     In these migrational becomings where there is only a mobile field of intensity, it is only by convention of language that we still speak of a “self.” ² The nomadic subject that drifts and migrates can become anything, completely disaggregated from the molar forms or transcendental images like the ego in a process that Deleuze and Guattari call “desubjectification.” In the becoming-animal of Jim, this schizophrenic migration is framed as a scientific temporal voyage, but it performs the same shattering movement of dehumanization. There is nothing degrading in this dehumanization; instead, in Jim’s migration into a futuristic sentient lobster, the anthropocentric view of the world and history is paradoxically decentralized via humanese, the same human language in which the process is communicated to us. Hence, the question of whether or not it is really possible for the inhuman other to speak through us (in lobsterese, let’s say) will accompany this brief discussion all throughout.

     We can see this problematic of a real dialogue between the human and the inhuman put forward in a passage tinged with the same soft ironic humour that suffuses the entire novella. Asked about the existence of lobsters in the anthropocene era, Jim was forced to be circumspect with his reply:

   McCulloch hesitated. "Creatures somewhat like you do exist in the seas of the former world. But they are smaller and simpler than you, and I think their civilization, if they have one, is not a great one."

   "You have no discourse with them, then?" one of the lobsters asked.

   "Very little," he said. A miserable evasion, cowardly, vile. McCulloch shivered. He imagined himself crying out, "We eat them!" and the water turning black with their shocked outbursts—and saw them instantly falling upon him, swiftly and efficiently slicing him to scraps with their claws. Through his mind ran monstrous images of lobsters in tanks, lobsters boiling alive, lobsters smothered in rich sauces, lobsters shelled, lobsters minced, lobsters rendered into bisques—he could not halt the torrent of dreadful visions. Such was our discourse with your ancestors. Such was our mode of interspecies communication. He felt himself drowning in guilt and shame and fear.

    It is through this migratory fusion where borders of identities become blurry—even hypothetically effaced in a humanese that requires borders to conduct its discourse—that Jim (if we can still call him that without quotes ³) saw the bigotry of the anthropocentric view of the universe. Here, billions of years into the future, the very notion of humanity seems like an incredible improbability, a very faint dream.

He had become, it seemed, a lobster, or, at any rate, something lobster-like. Implied in that was transition: he had become. He had once been something else. Blurred, tantalizing memories of the something else that he once had been danced in his consciousness. He remembered hair, fingers, fingernails, flesh. Clothing: a kind of removable exoskeleton. Eyelids, ears, lips: shadowy concepts all, names without substance, but there was a certain elusive reality to them, a volatile, tricky plausibility. Each time he tried to apply one of those concepts to himself—"fingers," "hair," "man," "McCulloch"—it slid away, it would not stick. Yet all the same those terms had some sort of relevance to him.

In another conversation held earlier in the text, we can fully note the semantic, even ontological, incommensurability that holds between humanese and lobsterese:

—Are you awake?

—I am now, McCulloch answered irritably.

—I need definitions. You are a mystery to me. What is a McCulloch?

—A man.

—That does not help.

—A male human being.

—That also has no meaning.

—Look, I'm tired. Can we discuss these things some other time?

—This is a good time. While we rest, while we replenish ourself.

—Ourselves, McCulloch corrected.

—Ourself is more accurate.

—But there are two of us.

—Are there? Where is the other?

McCulloch faltered. He had no perspective on his situation, none that made any sense.

—One inside the other, I think. Two of us in the same body. But definitely two of us. McCulloch and not-McCulloch.

—I concede the point. There are two of us. You are within me. Who are you?

—McCulloch.

—So you have said. But what does that mean?

—I don't know.

     The border between Human and Inhuman is held up paradoxically by the necessity of the human-directed tale at the very moment of its declared impossibility. The impossibility of the tale is bound up with the impossibility of the other speaking as the other, and the impossibility of the other inhabiting its own alterity. Here the other can really speak only if all notions of self and identity are suspended. But these are not just the main humanese concepts that we begin to suspend. The notions of “species,” “body,” “mind,” “individual,” “memory,” “language”, “society,” “history,” “habitat” or “territory,” “differences,” “culture,” “intelligence,” “nature,” “time,” and “space,” and even “Earth” no longer have their validity. ⁴ For our self-declared mastery or dominion over the world is facilitated and enthroned by these humanese terms, the language by which we claim hegemonic colonization of all species we consider inferior.

     This anthropocentrism, however, does not want to be silenced so easily. Before encountering the new god of this future era, a telepathic cephalopod measuring about 15 to 20 meters in diameter, “Jim” had the mistaken belief that he at least migrated into a creature of the same superior intelligence that a human being had, and is therefore also the dominant species of that future world. This is, no doubt, a compensatory concession for the recognition of the possibility that humans are not the only intelligent species on Earth. Lobsters, McCulloch reflected,

are low-phylum creatures with simple nervous systems, limited intelligence. Plainly the mind he had entered was a complex one. It asked thoughtful questions. It carried on civilized conversations with its friends, who came calling like ceremonious Japanese gentlemen, offering expressions of solicitude and good will. New hypothesis: that lobsters and other low-phylum animals are actually quite intelligent, with minds roomy enough to accept the sudden insertion of a human being's entire neural structure, but we in our foolish anthropocentric way have up till now been too blind to perceive.

His exhausted metaphors, indeed, contribute to this persistent blindness. However, “Jim/lobster” is/are not the epitome of superior sentience on the new Earth.

—What is it?

—We are approaching a god, the lobster replied.

—A god, did you say?

—A divine presence, yes. Did you think we were the rulers of this world?

   In fact McCulloch had, assuming automatically that his time-jaunt had deposited him within the consciousness of some member of this world's highest species, just as he would have expected to have landed, had he reached the twenty-second century as intended, in the consciousness of a human rather than in a frog or a horse. But obviously the division between humanity and all sub-sentient species in his own world did not have an exact parallel here; many races, perhaps all of them, had some sort of intelligence, and it was becoming clear that the lobsters, though a high life-form, were not the highest. He found that dismaying and even humbling; for the lobsters seemed quite adequately intelligent to him, quite the equals—for all his early condescension to them—of mankind itself. And now he was to meet one of their gods? How great a mind was a god likely to have?

     Secondly, and most importantly in terms of history, Jim had the mistaken messianic belief that his singular presence and arrival in the lobster’s world constituted the “omen” of an epoch-changing critical and transitional moment. Even in a decentralized historical continuum, the anthropocentrism of world events persists to anchor the semantics of an all-too-human philosophy of cosmic time. This absurdly privileged point of view is now about to be equally debunked:   

   "I'm—not ready to go home yet," he said. "There's so much I haven't seen yet, and that I want to see. I want to see everything. I'll never have an opportunity like this again. Perhaps no one ever will. Besides, I have services to perform here. I'm the herald; I bring the Omen; I'm part of this pilgrimage. I think I ought to stay until the rites have been performed. I want to stay until then."

   "Those rites will not be performed," said the octopus quietly.

   "Not performed?"

   "You are not the herald. You carry no Omen. The Time is not at hand."

McCulloch did not know what to reply. Confusion swirled within him. No Omen? Not the Time?

—It is so, said the host. We were in error. The god has shown us that we came to our conclusion too quickly. The time of the Molting may be near, but it is not yet upon us. You have many of the outer signs of a herald, but there is no Omen upon you. You are merely a visitor. An accident.

   McCulloch was assailed by a startlingly keen pang of disappointment. It was absurd; but for a time he had been the central figure in some apocalyptic ritual of immense significance, or at least had been thought to be, and all that suddenly was gone from him, and he felt strangely diminished, irrelevant, bereft of his bewildering grandeur. A visitor. An accident.

     Or, in lobsterese, Jim is only a “revenant”:

   "When will you show it to us?"

   "Ah, that cannot be done. It has no real existence, and therefore I cannot bring it forth."

   "What is it, then? A wanderer? A revenant?"

   "A revenant, yes. So I think. And a wanderer. It says it is a human being."

   "And what is that? Is a human being a kind of McCulloch?"

   "I think a McCulloch is a kind of human being."

   "Which is a revenant."

   "Yes, I think so."

     A specter, a shadow that keeps returning, that haunts the text and language, a hold-over from an ineffaceable humanese. As Foucault had said, man’s disappearance is a “wager” since he himself understood how, in speaking of this impossible presence of a face drawn on the sand, that the erasure, by having taken place, retains paradoxically what was effaced, in both memory and metaphor. As a presence in metaphor, or as metaphor, above all, with all the paradox this entails. For a literal non-presence cannot logically disappear, and a dramatics of disappearance only re-enshrines the presence it explicitly denies. It is in this way that both the human and the inhuman are the two sides of the same language.

  

     Can the other of this language really speak? Can the lobster really speak lobsterese? Can the inhuman speak, or can the human speak as human through the inhuman, even when the human can no longer speak except as inhuman? And when the inhuman speaks, can we still believe the human can speak through? In the end, what we are hearing are neither but language, the habitat and intersection of both, and is neither human nor inhuman. For language, which we thought to be human, is neither one nor the other. It is simply the place of an imaginary dialogue, the conjuring space of both humanity and inhumanity as such. The dissolution of the image of the human cannot happen fully without the correlative effacement of the image of the inhuman.

     Similar to the “characters” that traverse texts like magical wholes which summon souls and organize the plausibility of events, the “self,” human or inhuman, is nothing but a heuristic unity. It is more aptly the invocation of the unlocatability of the essence of the “human” in language and reaffirms the irreducible enigma of our presence as pure migratory passage in a becoming more inhuman than human, something that the myths, before the advent of reason, had known all along.

Notes

1. Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, tr. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, & Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), pp. 84-85.

2. In one passage in his book Consciousness Explained (1991, p. 413-14) we would think that Daniel Dennett had read Robert Silverberg’s “Homefaring” when he spoke of the transitional moment of the invention of the “self”:

People have selves. Do dogs? Do lobsters? If selves are anything at all, then they exist. Now there are selves. There was a time, thousands (or millions, or billions) of years ago, when there were none — at least none on this planet. So there has to be — as a matter of logic — a true story to be told about how there came to be creatures with selves. This story will have to tell — as a matter of logic — about a process (or a series of processes) involving the activities or behaviors of things that do not yet have selves — or are not yet selves — but which eventually yield, as a new product, beings that are, or have, selves.

     The transitional event is theorized as located at the critical moment of the birth of reason:

[T]he birth of reasons was also the birth of boundaries, the boundary between "me" and "the rest of the world," a distinction that even the lowliest amoeba must make, in its blind, unknowing way. This minimal proclivity to distinguish self from other in order to protect oneself is the biological self, and even such a simple self is not a concrete thing but just an abstraction, a principle of organization. Moreover the boundaries of a biological self are porous and indefinite. Border crossings are thus either moments of anxiety… or something to be especially enjoyed.

     Coupling and mating are such types of border-crossings and are actually conceptually within the limits or “normal” human practice (marriage, nationhood, groups, corporations, etc.). The “porousness” of boundaries is not just the property of a socio-erotic dynamic but also of physical systems in general. Extending this logic to the ontology of the self, Dennett asks: The normal arrangement is one self per body, but if a body can have one, why not more than one under abnormal conditions? Aren’t we only the fleeting guests of our own minds, the same way we are the mere transient travellers in the body or bodies that we share as the host of a multitude of other organisms? As strangers to ourselves, our horizon is always elsewhere.

3. Deleuze and Guattari (op. cit., p. 86), on this notion of proper names, write:

The theory of proper names should not be conceived of in terms of representation; it refers instead to the class of "effects": effects that are not a mere dependence on causes, but the occupation of a domain, and the operation of a system of signs. This can be clearly seen in physics, where proper names designate such effects within fields of potentials: the Joule effect, the Seebeck effect, the Kelvin effect. History is like physics: a Joan of Arc effect, a Heliogabalus effect—all the names of history, and not the name of the father.

4. Echoing the difficulty of finalizing the boundaries of the natural from the human, Hans Bertens (2008) asks and affirms:

Where do we draw the line between nature and ourselves, that is to say, between nature and culture? Perhaps the conclusion must be that the attempt to define nature, or the wilderness, in any objective way, leads us to back to the constructedness of our concepts, to their discursive character. Nothing in the real world announces itself as ‘wilderness’. We must accept that we do not know where our discursive construction of nature, or ‘wilderness’, ends and nature itself begins.

The delimitation of the natural, of course, carries the ambiguous poles of valuation and devaluation not only in terms of human exploitation and transformation but also in terms of conservation or preservation. The deep Hegelian resonances of this dialectic in terms of history and human identity where Nature is negated to be posited and sublimated finds its revisionary rephrasing in Slavoj Žižek’s idea of “desublimation” in Michel Houellebecq's Les Particules élémentaires (1998), another posthumanist novel.

This notion that we are entering a new era in which humanity will leave behind the inertia of the material bodies, was nicely rendered by Konrad Lorenz's somewhat ambiguous remark that we ourselves (the "actually existing" humanity) are the sought-after "missing link" between animal and man. Of course, the first association that imposes itself here is the notion that the "actually existing" humanity still dwells in what Marx designated as "pre-history," and that the true human history will begin with the advent of the Communist society; or, in Nietzsche's terms, that man is just a bridge, a passage between animal and overman. What Lorenz "meant" was undoubtedly situated along these lines, although with a more humanistic twist: humanity is still immature and barbarian, it did not yet reach the full wisdom. However, an opposite reading also imposes itself: the human being IS in its very essence a "passage," the finite opens into an abyss.

The Adventure of the Image of Perversion in Allende’s “Niña Perversa”

The Adventure of the Image of Perversion in Allende’s “Niña Perversa”

In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas / corpora;

[My mind leads me to speak now of forms changed / into new bodies.]

—Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book I.1-2, tr. Martin Charles

When that egg hatched in the swamp, Helen appeared. Some authors say

the Dioscuri were huddled in the same egg. So right from the start, Helen,

the unique one, is linked to the notion of twinship and division. The unique

one appears as the Double. When people speak of Helen, we can never know

whether they are referring to her body or her phantom copy.

 –Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, 122

     Like a confused mirage in the distance whose tenuous form wavered between fantasm and corporeality, the image of Elena Mejías glided along the surface world of the short narrative of Isabel Allende’s “Niña Perversa,” as if this image awaited some real embodiment as its inevitable adventure.¹ And its adventure—even if forthrightly announced as her future of becoming “la criatura apasionada que en verdad era” [the passionate creature that she truly was],² a logically circular entelechy that the text already predetermined as her destiny—still remained resistant to Desire’s clasp, for it is the logic of Desire to keep the image and its realization always apart so that it can remain Desire.³ The “passionate creature that she truly was” remained disentangled, always returning as an image so that this perverted state only foregrounded the irreducible double work of forgetting and fantasy by which it can continue to exercise its subjective hold via deferral and imaginary substitutions in the libidinal guise of a passion.

     How do you locate an image in a text that is already an image of itself? There must be an adventure in it, a mix of risk and possibility, an opening into the future, into time and its other, and into time as an other. That is, it must deploy this adventurous opening as a language of transformation of forms of bodies into other forms of bodies. It does not matter yet if the absolute cause of this transformation cannot be ascertained (an Unmoved Mover). What matters for the moment is coincidence, the concurrent circumstantial appearance of several items in the same place. As an ancient language where we witness humans becoming birds, ancient forgotten gods becoming humans, and humans turning into stones, new gods, flowers or stars, metamorphosis always intervenes as if there were an always potentially unstable and porous barrier of differences that held all things apart in the universe. A barrier that keeps them all apart, yes, but at the same time cannot fully do so without failing to succeed (the ambiguity here is deliberate). For how can we expect transformation to continue to work if it finds itself suddenly and immediately diffused among mutually self-identical, homogeneous things, or among absolutely heterogeneous things separated by an unbridgeable gap?

    Thus, we read: “the transformation of Elena Mejías coincided with the arrival of Juan José Bernal, the Nightingale,” “a small-time adventurer.”* Of course, it will not just be Elena’s transformational adventure; it will be everyone’s as well: her mother’s and Bernal’s, too. This is the adventure that the text must undertake to locate Elena’s perversion (in both the passive and active senses, the possessive and the objective cases), the preparatory work of the language of narrative that is absolutely necessary so that it can find a way to dislodge her from her state of virtual in/visibility and carve out a means by which she can finally be displayed as an exemplar of the Subject of Passion (in all senses of this phrase) whose very emergence depended on a self-reflection activated by Bernal’s room filled with the signs of the other. That is, by the substitute traces of the desired other who is currently not present, but not totally absent either. This is the (dark) Room where the play of sameness and differences attain their most intense passage by the action of redoubled images bi-constructing a sexual fantasy that culminates in the emergence of the Subject of Passion as jouissance.⁴

     Let us, then, trace this movement. As a child that’s barely “noticed” by people around her, someone who blended so well with the decor that she was almost indistinguishable from the fixture of the pension house her mother owned and managed, Elena possessed attributes and aspects that played on metaphors of surface and depth, interior and exterior: “Nothing in her appearance revealed her torrid dreams nor announced the passionate creature that she truly was. She passed imperceptibly between the ordinary furniture and the faded draperies of her mother's pension” [Nada en su aspecto delataba sus sueños tórridos ni anunciaba a la criatura apasionada que en verdad era. Pasaba desapercibida entre los muebles ordinarios y los cortinajes desteñidos de la pensión de su madre]. “She came out only to go to school or to the market” [Sus salidas eran sólo a la escuela o al mercado]. In other words, there is a latent  homogeneity between her and the house itself (i.e., diegetic, both textual in essence), allowing her to play her role as her mother’s spy over the guests. “These spying tasks have accentuated the disembodied condition of the girl, who vanished in the shadows of the rooms, existed in silence and appeared suddenly, as if she had just fully returned from an invisible dimension” (my italics) [Esos trabajos de espía habían acentuado la condición incorpórea de la muchacha, que se esfumaba entre las sombras de los cuartos, existía en silencio y aparecía de súbito, como si acabara de retornar de una dimensión invisible].

     This network of voyeurism is portrayed to be under the control of Elena’s mother herself who “had an implacable practical sense and a very clear notion of what happened under her roof” [Tenía un implacable sentido práctico y una noción muy clara de cuanto ocurría bajo su techo]. Despite the innumerable responsibilities she has in running the pension house “like a seminary,” a daily business grind that leaves her very little time or energy to care for her only daughter, she is still somehow capable of not only maintaining a panoptical surveillance of the entire house but also of “infallibly detecting” Elena’s fantasies and whatever she was hiding. We find it therefore inconsistent to learn that, even with her very close eye on things, “she did not know when Elena began to mutate into a different being” [de modo que no supo cuándo Elena empezó a mutarse en un ser diferente]. And even after Elena’s discovery of her mother’s affair, the latter attributed Elena’s “twilight state” [estado crepuscular] and lack of appetite to the beginning of puberty. This proportional distribution of visibility and invisibility represents, hence, the structurality of the text’s transformational rhetoric, the text already foreseeing Elena’s entelechy in which the emergence of her image from the invisible dimension has been predestined. At the same time, this voyeuristic network is simply the mirror of the textual surface at work, opening up subjectivities to view not only as moments of passion but also as a simulation of the transparent and obscure topographies/typographies of the terrain of reading. We as readers espy on them spying on others and on one another, and thereby participate in the same game play of the differential/deferential dialectic between the Seen and the Unseen, or the Manifest and the Latent.

     To pinpoint the absolute source of metamorphosis is difficult unless we give in to the all-too-obvious idea of an original Source. In “Niña Perversa,” it is simply the arrival of an other with the name “Bernal” who was ordained to play the function of the narrative pivotal point around which Elena’s world would now take a new turn. It was as if the short story was rehearsing the many instances in Greek mythology where so many women’s lives suddenly took a turn after the arrival of a stranger. Look at Europa, Ariadne, Aura, Erigone, Coronis, and even Helen after seeing Paris. There was a time, as Calasso retells it, that the gods mingled openly with mortals, as if human beings had an absolute access to the Cosmos, a transparency that banished shadows, offered no disguises, or presented no doubles. But it all changed: “Then came another phase, during which a god might not be recognized. As a result the god had to assume the role he has never abandoned since, right down to our own times, that of the Unknown Guest, the Stranger.”⁵ After this, gods must transform and disguise themselves often, and the “most notorious motive which prompts the gods to undergo metamorphosis is erotic passion.”⁶ By some mythic logic, erotic passion always arrives in the safer form of the double of an absolute other, as if this paradoxical alterity triggered the arousal of Desire, and maintains this Desire only insofar as the other retained the traces of a stranger, a guest, an adventurer. The familiar kept our interest only if it had an inexhaustible reserve of the unfamiliar.

     The arrival of Bernal in the pension house had the same repercussions as did the arrival of Cadmus, the first Greek hero and the source of the Greek alphabet (hence, writing), in Queen Electra’s court, the mother of Harmony.

Why had her mother decided to give her to this stranger who told tall tales and had nothing to offer but the tackle of his ship? He was a drifter, a fugitive, a sailor, a man with neither hearth nor home. It wasn't Electra who finally convinced Harmony but the girl’s friend Peisinoe. She came and shut herself in Harmony's room with her. She wanted to confess, she had this sensation of emptiness just above her stomach, of burning, and she couldn't stop thinking of the handsome stranger. With a little girl's infatuation, she described Cadmus's body, fantasized his hand boldly touching her round breasts, fantasized herself uncovering the nape of his neck. Harmony listened and realized that something was changing inside her: she was falling in love with her friend's desire, and at the same time she went on looking around in desperation, because she knew that, if once she left, she would never see this room again.⁷ 

     Elena also at the start did not fall for the charm of the stranger, even if his very presence already announced that “all had changed” for her and her mother. “For several weeks, Elena hated that man who was claiming all the space in the house and all her mother’s attention.”* The stranger has taken over, and is now slowly changing the organizational configuration of the visible and the invisible in the whole house. Bernal did not fit the “image of the ideal boarder” in many ways; his habits, the way he turned the clock around, his mannerisms, his pretensions, his tall tales of adventure. It was only after hearing him play the guitar that Elena finally “felt the heartrending words of the songs and the lament of the guitar in every fiber of her body, like a fever.”* As someone barely noticed around the house, Elena was not yet seduced by the order of the Visible. That will now be altered by the order of the audible, that is, the Vibrational, the irresistible and inescapable tactility of invisible atoms undulating like the mythical music of Orpheus that made even stones dance: for what Orpheus sung was Desire itself for the missing body of another beloved, one phrased in deep mourning for his dead Eurydice. They who kept their eyes open to spy on guests now trembled or danced, as if for the first time there is an order of the body superior to the abstraction of the gaze; her mother with “her eyes closed and her head tipped back, [swaying] like a sheet drying in the breeze[,] lost in her dance.” In this very dance, Desire and Death, the Visible and the Invisible meet once more the same way warm and cold air do in the rotating vortex of a storm filling up with the fire of living bodies.

     Thus, when we read that “From that night Elena saw Bernal with new eyes” [Desde esa noche Elena vio a Bernal con ojos nuevos], this vision is not like the theoretical and spying eye whose goal is to lay out everything on a plane while remaining detached, a floating eye that sees but is not seen. Suddenly, this eye can tremble, can feel a flush on the skin, have confusion in the heart, or feel a fever. And even if she observed him stealthily still, it is no longer to regard as if from a distance, but to imagine how the other’s body can be inhabited by her desire, to make the other’s body her own body:

She was filled with an insupportable longing to be close enough to him to bury her face against his dark-skinned chest, to hear the resonance of the air in his lungs and the beating of his heart, to smell his scent, a scent she knew would be sharp and penetrating, like good leather or tobacco. She imagined herself playing with his hair, examining the muscles of his back and legs, discovering the shape of his foot, dissolving into smoke and filtering down his throat to inhabit his entire body.*

    

At the same time, there is a dread in meeting the other’s eye, as if Desire feared the very thing it desired:

But if he happened to look up and meet her eyes, Elena, trembling, would run and hide in the farthest and densest corner of the patio. Bernal had taken possession of her thoughts; she could not bear how time stopped when she was away from him. In school, she moved as if in a nightmare, blind and deaf to anything except her inner thoughts, where there was room only for him.... Later, when she heard him leaving his bath, whistling, she was tormented by impatience and fear, sure that she would die of pleasure if he touched her, even spoke to her, dying for him to do just that but at the same time ready to fade into the furniture, because although she could not live without him, neither could she endure his burning presence.*

     Here, echoing the elements of oblit, folie, and ira from Medieval French love poetry, and in the mode of classical Lacanian jouissance, the pleasure of the subject of Desire strains all the poles in the differential tug of war that maintains its central dynamic of possibility. Although orbiting around the fantasy of union with the other, this imaginary fusion also holds both a certain dread or terror and a pleasure bordering on pain and death. We are now at the very contradiction lying at the heart of Desire, which is also the desire of the text to inhabit a body that it itself imagined, to fuse with its imagined other in the adventure of reading.

     The body of the other is a “fiery presence” [ardiente presencia], perhaps recalling the pure theophanies of the gods without disguise, a searing and an electrifying unmediated presence that mortal shells cannot endure. Even though a most ideal situation, meeting a god face to face without his or her double will mean instant Death (pure indifference). Elena is no longer an image floating among the fixtures of the house, portrayed as a disembodied and almost unnoticeable entity, yet paradoxically already named well ahead, hence, already perceptible from the start, visible, readable. Her “invisibility” is actually just the effect of the narrative’s textual economy, her disembodied state a pure nomenclature which the text’s logic of transformational rhetoric will now revert or pervert by creating the semblance of giving her form a new body, but a body that can only be referenced in the image of the body of the other.

     Now, she has become more visible than the visible, and has finally arrived from an “invisible” dimension. That is, the image of the body and the body of the image encounter each other in a circular dance of passion, as if it were the critical moment required that Desire realizes itself beyond its form as subjectless persona and attains the full subject of passion it supposedly lacked before. By her status indistinguishable from the house at the start, Elena has not yet gained the image of herself reflected in the mirror of the other through which she now becomes the subject of passion that she truly was. The attainment of this subject of passion entailed the dual operative attribution of self-reflection and incorporation where the awareness of embodiment coincided with the moment of erotic self-recognition in the body of an other, as if the Subject were structurally Erotic through and through, are one and the same passion, entity, force, energy, substance, or drive.

     The transformational dynamics is cast in a series of metaphorical stages of development, topologically assigning sites of the surfacing of the passionate subject realizing itself in images, in absences, in veiled appearances, in spectrality: mirror, darkness, the darkening of the surface in inverse proportion to the brightening of the underground, passion as fire, or passion as excessive energy that is about to surface, the feeling of being filled with emotions, fear, etc. The whole metaphorical network that informs the textual scenes after Elena saw with “new eyes” can be seen to be divided and organized between the physics of reflective images and the physiology of living organic bodies.

     The central scene of the narrative is not when Elena attempted to effect a “real” union with the other, although the “rejection” here is actually just the second mirror of the impossible union in the mirror scene where Elena experienced jouissance (universal tumescence) in the “bodily” absence of the other, a jouissance that actually only required the disguised presence, double, or traces of the other. The impossible union of the self and the other that Desire perpetuates and that perpetuates Desire is the differential tension that allows the transformational rhetoric of forms into bodies and bodies into forms to become executionable in the form of the Subject of Passion (living death). The Subject of Passion that Elena becomes is not incarnated in the perversion of a proper body, but in its attribution as a body of Desire that, in the final analysis, is nothing but an image desiring its own body in the image of the other's body it imagines itself becoming.    

    

Notes

1. The word “adventure” will be used here in the various senses of "that which happens by chance, fortune, luck" and as that which is “about to happen," "to come," as if the unforeseen were the other of time or time as the other, the invisibility that is time itself. Thus, what arrives by chance is the invisible other, whose very arrival allows time to arrive as a visible fortune or accident. To adventure, then, is to open oneself to the adventure of time itself, to the vagaries of coincidences and the transformation of the other. The rich history of this word, its own adventures, cannot be explored fully here. See the entry under “adventure” at http://www.etymonline.com/word/adventure.

2. Unless otherwise indicated, the rough translation from the Spanish is mine. Peden’s cited translations will be marked by an asterisk (*). The title “Niña Perversa” by Isabel Allende appears as “Wicked Girl” in The Stories of Eva Luna, tr. Margaret Sayers Peden (NY: Washington Square Press, 1989).

3. Slavoj Žižek: "Desire's raison d'être is not to realize its goal, to find full satisfaction, but to reproduce itself as desire." In Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso 1997), p. 53.

4. The French word jouissance has had a varied history within French critical thought. In Barthes, it is a transgressive moment when a reading goes beyond the confines of the “readerly text” or explodes structural limits. In Lacan,

The pleasure principle functions as a limit to enjoyment; it is a law which commands the subject to ‘enjoy as little as possible’. At the same time, the subject constantly attempts to transgress the prohibitions imposed on his enjoyment, to go ‘beyond the pleasure principle’. However, the result of transgressing the pleasure principle is not more pleasure, but pain, since there is only a certain amount of pleasure that the subject can bear. Beyond this limit, pleasure becomes pain, and this ‘painful pleasure’ is what Lacan calls jouissance; ‘jouissance is suffering’ (S7, 184). The term jouissance thus nicely expresses the paradoxical satisfaction that the subject derives from his symptom, or, to put it another way, the suffering that he derives from his own satisfaction.

(In Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (NY and London: Routledge, ), p. 93.)

Here, I am using it primarily to indicate the moment when the subject “comes” into her own image as a form of passion or Deleuzian “intensity.”

5. Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, tr. by Tim Parks (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), p. 53

6. In Richard Buxton, Forms of Astonishment: Greek Myths of Metamorphosis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 158, 164, we read:

The most notorious motive which prompts the gods to undergo metamorphosis is erotic passion.... The pursuit of eros, the wish to escape, the desire to conceal, the will to punish: these are the gods’ principal motives in self-transformation.

7. Calasso, op. cit., p. 383. Italics mine.