Love as Iconoclasm
Robert Johnson, citing eminent psychoanalyst Carl Jung, suggested that “if you find the psychic wound in an individual or a people, there you also find their path to consciousness” (We xii). According to Johnson, that wound is romantic love. The nature of the wound, he further stated, is that “when we are ‘in love,’ we spend much of our time in a deep sense of loneliness, alienation, and frustration over our inability to make genuinely loving and committed relationships” (xii). Everything we have read this semester has dealt with some aspect of this wound of alienation and frustration. Within each novel and movie a principle character sustains a wound which is also a painful awakening, a moment of possible insight and clarity, which to a greater or lesser degree echoes the words of Elizabeth Benet from Pride and Prejudice, “Till this moment, I never knew myself” (Austen 159). Looking at A Grief Observed, The Remains of the Day, We, and a few thoughts from other thinkers who have grappled with the problems and pains of relationships and being in relation to “the other” we can begin to explore these concepts. I will use these works to try and illuminate this moment of awakening and its implications, to see if they can take us closer to a greater consciousness regarding the struggle to find companionship in a loving, committed relationship.
Pat Benatar, grammy-award winning singer, sang in one of her most popular songs that “love is a battlefield.” This lyric raises an interesting and foundational issue. “Metaphor is all,” wrote Dr. Lundquist. It structures our perceptions of reality and is the skeleton upon which reality and our experience of it hangs and is given form and meaning. Problems can arise if the informing metaphor of love is that of a battlefield (among many other negative or destructive images); it suggests that both participants in a relationship stand in opposition to each other, each fighting for ground in a violent pursuit of their own interest. Robert Johnson said of this situation that “this is why men and women put such impossible demands on each other in their relationships: We actually believe unconsciously that this mortal human being has the responsibility for making our lives whole, keeping us happy, making our lives meaningful, intense, and ecstatic!” (61). The war metaphor implicitly suggests this, as those desires become something you take from the other person, implying that they are ultimate source and provider of those same fulfillments. Within divorce there is a winner and a loser, the spoils are distributed based on who fights most effectively and powerfully, and the casualties are often various aspects of the psyches of the people involved.
Another author who has dealt extensively with the difficulties that must be overcome in a relationship and in metaphors is C.S. Lewis. It is difficult to read A Grief Observed without noticing the prolific use of metaphor on every page. Ostensibly paradoxical, then, is his statement that “all reality is iconoclastic” (xvii). Despite this confession Lewis’s language is that of metaphor. Lewis is faced with the death of his beloved as she has “lost the fight” to a terminal disease. Loss, barrenness, and impotence are the resultant feelings that consume and enervate. Describing what remains after “H” has died Lewis explicitly refers to a war-time event and what remains once the beloved is gone, “Only the locked door, the iron curtain, the vacuum, absolute zero” (8, emphasis added). Lewis is overwhelmed by his loss and his metaphors render him unable to think about precious little else. “Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything” (11). If this is a war between himself and the force which took her life, which he lost, there must be a party he was fighting against, as his opponent clearly was not his wife. He frames the situation thus: “She was in God’s hands all the time, and I have seen what they did to her her…For in the only life we know He hurts us beyond our worst fears and beyond all we can imagine” (28). And again, “When he seemed most gracious He was really preparing the next torture” (30). Even his particular descriptions of God are approached through metaphor, “The real question is whether he is a vet or a vivesector” (40). Though Lewis is often speaking about God it is still a god in relationship to his marriage with H. What Lewis is discovering, I feel, is the need to get beyond and outside the hermeneutic self and attempts to reduce another person or situation to an image or concept, a process Emmanuel Levinas called “totalization.”
The destructive nature of reductive thinking is laid bare in Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Remains of the Day and operates via some of the same mechanisms as metaphor in the sense of the limitations and boundaries it places on things which ultimately remain irreducible. Mr Stevens is the focus in the novel's exploration of totalization. This theme is present from the very beginning of the novel. About his profession he said, “let me now posit that 'dignity' has to do crucially with a butler's ability not to abandon the professional being he inhabits” (42). The novel is a severe and cruel revelation of the consequences of limitation. Unable to be anything but a butler, not a son, a friend (really), a lover, a confidant, unable to disclose or offer anything but his “dignity” in an ascetic starvation of the other aspects of his life and nature. He reiterates that “a butler of any quality must be seen to inhabit his role, utterly and fully; he cannot be seen casting it aside one moment simply to don it again the next as though it were nothing more than a pantomime costume” (169). Social theorist Jean Baudrillard in his book Simulation and Simulacra, outlined the stages symbol and images of representation go through when they become more significant than the reality they formerly attempted to describe. In the first, positive stage, “it is the reflection of a profound reality,” and in the second “it masks and denatures a profound reality,” in the third “it masks the absence of a profound reality,” and in the final stage “it has no relation to any reality whatsoever” (6). Mr Steven's self fragmentation mirrors this as his role is masking and “denaturing” his other roles and aspects of identity. The very phase “inhabit his role” as butler is a metaphor, equating his job with a house in which he lives, which is ironically both his metaphor and reality. For Jung the house was representative of consciousness. In one interpretation of this metaphor one could surmise that Steven's concsiousness is shaped and controlled by the metaphor of the “butler-house.” There is a “profound reality” that lies outside of his boundaries, obscured and effectually destroyed by this reduction. The relation of this reduction to the present topic is forcibly demonstrated in the wilting potential of relationship and human warmth as could have been experienced with Mrs Kenton.
Baudrillard's term for the final stage is “simulacrum.” This is a form of illusion that has no referential association with reality. In his book Human Intimacy Victor Brown applies a similar idea to relationships, “Illusions deal with fragments of human beings, not with whole humans themselves” (Brown, 6). Mr Steven is unable to explore any avenue of communication with Mrs Kenton outside of their work-persona. Their fireside visits consist of talk revolving around the affairs of the household. When personal issues do come up, as in the case of the two Jewish girls who are let go, he is unable to relate to Miss Kenton on a personal level. About that incident she reflected, “Do you realize...how much it would have meant to me if you had thought to share your feelings last year?” (152). She continued, “I suffered so much over Ruth and Sarah leaving us. And I suffered all the more because I believed I was alone” (154). Robert Johnson responded to the problem of fragmentation when he said, “Human love affirms that person who is actually there, rather than the ideal we would like him or her to be or the projection that flows from our minds” (191). Mr Stevens is incapable of moving beyond his fragmentation of Miss Kenton until it is too late. This realization of “a more profound reality” finally penetrates through the house he inhabits to the self within when Miss Kenton reveals the nature of her former feelings, “And you get to thinking about a different life, a better life you might have had. For instance I get to thinking about a life I may have had with you, Mr Stevens” (239).
This constitutes a variation on the Elizabeth-Benet-self-revelatory-moment for Mr Stevens. He discloses that the implications of Miss Kenton's words “were such as to provoke a certain degree of sorrow within me. Indeed--why should I not admit it?--at that moment my heart was breaking” (239). In a small, inconspicuous passage directly after this breakthrough, Mr Stevens enters into conversation with a stranger and says that, “at this point, I felt it appropriate to reveal my identity” (241). In veiling his identity behind a role he devastated Mrs Kenton and amputated what would and could have been the revelation of “a more profound reality.”
For both C.S. Lewis and Mr Stevens the pain they went through served iconoclastic ends as their erstwhile held perceptions were shattered against their experience of an-other. C.S. Lewis said that, “Images of the Holy easily become holy images—sacrosanct. My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of his presence?” (66). While C.S. Lewis is referring to God, this echoes an earlier statement about H., “The earthly beloved, even in this life, incessantly triumphs over your mere idea of her” (xvii). Therefore the presence of another is a sort of continuous “shattering.” To put this in banal language all we need to do is look to the example of Mr Stevens who restricts himself and Miss Kent to very specific “images.” She escapes his attempts at control and character reduction and ultimately breaks free of the house, or the symbol of his consciousness and mediating symbol between himself, others, and reality. She cannot be contained and the result for him is a breaking heart, a “shattering” of his former paradigm and ruling metaphor.
The moment of enlightenment when C.S. Lewis is finally able to give up the controlling metaphors he's been constructing comes when he has a visionary memory of H, “an instantaneous, unanswerable impression” (45). He later relates, “For a good wife contains so many persons in herself...She was my daughter and my mother, my pupil and my teacher, my subject and sovereign; and always, holding all these in solution, my trusty comrade, friend, shipmate, fellow-soldier” (47). I would like to think that in the healing memory of his wife he received this witness of her identity and existence as wholly other, pluriform and irreducible. He affirmed this saying, “H. rushes upon my mind in her full reality, her otherness” (55). Finally a “more profound” reality than the enveloping grief is able to shatter the barrier and his conceptualization of both his wife and God change.
Similar to Robert Johnson and C.S. Lewis who employed mythology and theology, Levinas grapples with the idea of two radically and irrevocably distinct beings coming together in a unified relationship through the lens of ethical philosophy. He said, “The idea of a love that would be a confusion between two beings is a false romantic idea. The pathos of the erotic relationship is the fact of being two, and that the other is absolutely other” (66). He continued, “Love consists...in an insurmountable duality of beings; it is a relationship with what forever slips away.“ (Levinas 68). He is suggesting that the idea of surrender or ownership are false; any time that one figure is eclipsed by the other it is a false love. Robert Johnson explained that “human loves affirms that person who is actually there, rather than the ideal we would like him or her to be or the projection that flows from our minds...Love causes us to value that person as a total, individual self, and this means that we accept the negative side as well as the positive, the imperfections as well as the positive” (191).
Mr Stevens has a slightly different witness of this fact. As stated earlier the idea of “banter” comes up in key passages in the novel, including the final paragraphs after Stevens's awakening. He says, “After all, when one thinks about it, it is not such a foolish thing to indulge in—particularly if it is the case that in bantering lies the key to human warmth” (245). At the heart of bantering is a saying and response which requires two distinct “I”s. The implied lightheartedness of bantering suggests something radically opposed to a battlefield. It is more of a dance, or any sort of back and forth interaction that does not imply a victory or subjection. Johnson suggests that romantic love is not directed at another person, but at oneself, eliminating the possibility of rich implications of “bantering” as the key to human warmth. At the heart of bantering is unpredictability, a constant elusiveness as response always answers the saying, as if on is constantly “catching up” and being exceeded.
Despite their insight these realizations seem to me to be inadequate. For Lewis it was the experience of grief that opened him to the realization of his wife's nature, as well as the role of God and his relationship within that triad. Emmanuel Levinas, like Viktor Frankl, saw the foundations of human interaction called into question in the concentration camps, and Mr Steven's entire life was unveiled as an empty house before the germination of his own transformation came. How much do we sacrifice ourselves in the name of the “otherness” of another person before it becomes abuse? How do we deal with differences in commitment if what is needed is to let go of our own desires, even if they are not being met to the detriment of our well-being? Perhaps one of the implicit suggestions of these texts is that “to be forewarned is to be forearmed.” The words of Elizabeth, “till this moment I never knew myself,” cannot be replicated from a reading of the text only, though they may coax the realization out of us within the context of our own subjectivity. Jung taught the technical principles of psychoanalysis cannot be understood if they have not been experienced. In each of these texts the authenticity and power of the statement lies not in the profundity and powerful imagery of the words alone but in the context of the experiences of the characters as well. If anything these texts are an affirmative hope that on the other side of pain lies consciousness and healing that can safeguard us against despair and give us a framework to give shape to those experiences so as to make meaning possible.
