To Love, an Intransitive Verb Donaldo Schüler http://www.schulers.com/donaldo/love.htm Copyright,1997 |
From the Symposium, a dialogue by Plato, to the To Love, an Intransitive Verb, a novel by the Brazilian novelist Mario de Andrade, we come from knowledge to idiosyncrasy, from the public to the private space. In the private space, hierarchical and biological differences are firmly established. In place of speech, the command, the complaint, the insult, mourning - expressions of the body rather than of reason. The walls of the house isolate the nucleus that has the mission do reproduce itself and to remain healthy, transmitting to posterity the legacy of past generations. The public space has deteriorated in such a degree that de farmer Souza Costa turns Elza, a public woman , provided with a work contract for specific aims, the sexual initiation of his adolescent son Carlos. Street cars get private. These, entering Sousa Costa's sphere, lose the characteristic of public transport assuming grave and solemn faces proper to the aristocratic ambiance in which they move. The links with objectivity are broken. Gardens embrace the house with a hug of domesticated nature. Impression gives place to expression. Everything (nature, gestures, machines) expresses the house. We are in the domain of privacy, of intimacy, of expressionism. Panoramic vision, bonds between one nucleus and another, don't exist. The whole appears fragmented and there are no ties between the splinters.
In the absence or speech, the farmer Sousa Costa adopts authoritarian behavior. He preserves the characteristic of the ancient basileus, origin of life and justice, judge of good and evil. Under Sousa Costa's shadow everybody keeps silence. Diminishing them to mere objects, he gets rid of them the moment he doesn't need their service any more. The pattern, subjectively elaborated, is impressed on what surrounds him: all reflect the image of him who dominates.
Plato, placing patterns outside and above men, abolishes hegemonies. leveled, all grow toward the same eminence. Men come to light integrated. The farmer, taking silently the eminent place, depresses the longing for autonomy, for large perspectives, for escape from the established borders. Pluralism, which flourishes only in neutral space, perishes, smashed. Silence having been imposed, obstructed the way for information, the absolute eminence of the farmer doesn't admit equals. Eliminated conjoined action, source of power, Souse Costa exercises an uncontested authority. in this speechless tiny world, nothing is visible. Each of the family's members is a mysterious isle with secret purposes. Seeing that everyone has secrets, seeing that information doesn't flow freely, one spies on the other's movements, in a vigilance that doesn't lead to superior understanding levels.
Social organization concentrates on property or on transmission of ancestral legacy. The farmer cares for his family's health. Failing the support of speech, which doesn't exist, Eros looks for the shelter of medicine. Associated with the art of healing, we have already seen Eros in the reflections of Eryximachus, although ranged on a higher level. Symposium's physician presented medicine as a chapter of cosmology. For the farmer, his house is the universe. This is his empire. It is there that he watches over the health of his family, the place for procreation, for the continuity of his lineage. The body, first step of the Platonic dialectic, snatches the center of the farmer's attention. Confined to the body and to the reproduction of matter, cogitation not related to immediate circumstances doesn't afflict him. Love, restricted to the house and to individual interests in the house, appears intransitive. Speech, which could redeem from confinement, has been split. Lacking speech, gestures become eroticized, incapable of elevating Eros to larger dominions than those encircling the individuals directly implicated in amorous experience. Deprived of plurality, confined to private ambiance, Eros vegetates powerless. Wanting protection against adventitious infirmities, he survives, entrusted to the specialized care of pedagogues, before the avalanche of psychiatrists.
The house becomes a metaphor of the authoritarian state, intransitive. At the top reigns the rural class, relying upon coffee and cattle. To the advantage of this class, the country was still governed in the twenties. Protest, the space of the deprived, didn't yet generate, in those days, a speech of multiple voices for the benefit of all. Violence, noxious to the power exercised by all, acts argumentless, wordless, not taking reaction into account. Governmental paternalism, heir of the empire, encourages inequality in order to attain the opportunity to show benevolence to the unprotected. In a chain of benefactors and beneficiaries, what should be a public space, preserves the characteristics or private space.
The public space, in other times held together by speech, appears in To Love, an Intransitive Verb occupied by merchandise. This circulates, favoring the consumers with sociability and pleasure. Even women become commodities, the market displaying them in a varied scale of prices and savour, accessible to every income, even to the most modest.
The houses are self-sufficient isles in a universe where one literally reproduces the other. Thus gyrate the lives and the cultural fragments. Octavio Paz called them signs in rotation, lacking a center. Associated with the narrators of the twentieth century, prose writers or poets, Mario de Andrade seeks the fragments to join them. He neither behaves like the nostalgic ones (Eliot), engaged in recovering lost paradises, nor like utopists (Pound), who collect what they find to construct the future. The vision of Mario de Andrade is sufficiently critical to resist the romantic dream of a past greatness, nor does he suffer visionary vertigo. Mario de Andrade enters the flow of history, not expecting the stream to lead him to the security of an anchorage. This position, having already been declared pessimistic, conquers vast expanses in the latter part of our century. Reaching the end of To Love, an Intransitive Verb, one realizes that life continues. Where to? The answer isn't in the novel. Lost is Platonic meaning, previously given, nor does the teller occupy a privileged searching position, inventing a play in which characters meet and pass. The pleasure to which the reader in invited consists in observing feeble ties that vanish rapidly, pleasure stained with pain. In place of the abolished monarchies, a new sovereignty glitters, one that puts writer and reader at the same level. Writing is a territory common to all of us.
How to imagine transitivity in a world in which those who act doubt the existence or real objects past or to come? To love is consumed in the act of loving, to make is consumed in the act of making, to teach is consumed in the act of teaching. There exist transitions; transitive verbs don't exist any more. Grammar is confined to a museum of overruled relics.
The speakers of the Symposium diverged in many things, but in respecting transitivity of love there was consensus. Eros could be the desire for a body, for psychic values, for the beautiful itself. The nature of the object raised doubt, not its reality. How did the conception of intransitive love appear? The answer is to be sought in the passage from antiquity to modernity. The twelfth century showed strong indexes on intransitivity. provençal poetry detached the subjectivity of the lover from the concrete circumstances in which the beloved woman is inserted. The rules of courtly love were not touched by matrimony, social position, reasonableness, viability. What is important is to love. The lady figures as a mere external circumstance of feelings demanding expression. Don Quixote, depository of the tradition, turns a public girl into Dulcinea with the same idealizing devotion we find in Carlos, who causes Fräulein to be the fairy of his juvenile dreams. Dulcinea and Fräulein struggle entangled in the meshes of the same net. Where Platonic ideas once were, sweet visions of illusory concretizations now dance.The swiftness of the years overcomes hope.
Enunciating the distance between concrete reality and the constructions of the spirit, renowned philosophers throw doubt on the objectivity of universal concepts at the end of the Middle Ages. William of Ockham is categorical: the individual man exists, the universal man doesn't exist. The same is true for the other beings. Universals were diminished to subjective constructions and were engaged in organizing the world that had been objectively pluralized. Ockham's nominalism cuts the natural interaction from one being to another, attributing to the spirit the task or restoring it. Subjectivity and the uncertainty of all the intellectual universes stand established. Cervantes shows in Don Quixote the mistakes of one who doesn't perceive the difference between the reality of things and thesubjective ideals. Kant, on the road opened by Ockham, denies objective reality to time and space, reducing them to subjective concepts with which we value what we perceive. According to him, the representation of whatever is doesn't coincide with the object itself, presenting only manifestations of something and the manner it affects us. In Kant's system intransitivity becomes clear: man cannot go outside himself. Having been split the Parmenidic identity of being and thought, conflict broke out between man and the universe, perceptible in Sade's novels. Characters love, reason, act, speak in a realm of absolute loneliness. The others, excluded from subjectivity, are accomplices or victims. Considering that the arguments don't get across, there in no intention to convince; imperative language refuses rhetoric or dialectic. Violence took the place of persuasion. Violent Eros, pushed to the incult periphery by Pausanias in the Symposium, now demands rights of citizenship. Transcendental ideal having been lost, heaven is refused. Instead of ideal universality, infinite repetition; quantity over quality. Man transformed into a thinking machine, behaves authoritatively. The gearbox is not interested in individuals. Instead of the beloved, the tortured, instead of the loves, the torturer. The latter causes the victims resistance. Resistance increases his pleasure. Take, for example, Justine. Or take Gilles Deleuze on Sade. Masoch: the victims look for a torturer; speech survives to persuade the torturer of torturing necessity. As occurs in Sadism, the relation torturer-tortured substitute for the dualism lover-beloved. Yet contrary to Sadic possession, Masochism contracts an alliance with the torturer. The despotic woman, insecure in her role, is formed by the tortured. Venus, the Aphrodite of the Romans, dislodges Eros. She passes by marmoreally. Cruelly seductive, she tortures with unfaithfulness, with beauty, with reason, with passion. Devastating the feelings of the tortured, she delivers the speech the tortured wishes to hear in order to nourish the flames of his hell of pleasures. A devilish pact between two lonely characters is a substitute for Eros, who, in Plato, united the parts of the whole. Sade and Masoch are two testimonies of intransitive love when modernity became conscious of itself.
To love an intransitive verb... In the last two centuries, loving still had subjects: Clarissa, Tom Jones, Werther, Anna Karenina; and had an object. It was unsteady, ruined, but yet an object, and the cause of notorious conflicts. To love, in the infinitive, signals the failure of the subject and the object as well. Man doesn't exist any more, he has played all his roles (Foucault). What remains? Pure relationship, structure, to love without inflections, without pronouns, to love in the infinitive. Being intransitive, the verb to love doesn't contain the relationship lover- beloved. Loving that doesn't look for anything beyond loving may crystallize as technique.
Mario de Andrade substitutes cinematographic fragments and alternateness of levels for the whole speech. In place of logical enchainment, we have mere images. Man, a prisoner of the cave, of which the dark room is a metaphor, doesn't perceive the light source which, protected by the back wall, projects moving shadows on the screen. The articulation of discourse having been eliminated, fragments move unattached, asking for the intelligent eye of the audience to unite them. Montage excludes dialectics: the latter aims at the unseen beyond the text, the former offers units departing from the text. From pre-Platonic philosophy to Plato, we observe the transition from speech to writing. From Plato to Mario de Andrade occurs the substitution of the lacunose text for the whole text. Cinema contributes powerfully to this step with the technique of disjointing the observed reality, offering it fragmented to the audience. The receiver, who once attended a performance that was firmly linked, is asked now to reconstruct what has been disconnected, cooperating in an uncompleted task.
Having challenged the word or half-words, of command, of authoritarianism, and of silence, Mario de Andrade recreates discourse as writing. Rhetorical tricks that enchanted audiences in the early decades of the present century were unsatisfying to him. Not only poetry did move as a slave manacled by academic precept; prose suffered from the same constraint. Two main aspects characterize rhetoric: concern for form and persuasion of the audience. The reader's right to construct his own imaginary world, departing from the text, disavows persuasion. the conflict between dialectic and rhetoric having been renewed, the latter triumphs as the art of form. If there is nobody to convoke and to persuade, neither can there be hidden objects to reveal. Instead of an absent sense, there is the task of constructing and of deconstructing significations in which narrative and historical issues, narrator and reader work together without hegemonic instances to predetermine directions. Since we deny theoretically the coincidence of author and narrator or -using linguistic terminology- since we affirm a rigorous distinction between the subject of the enunciated and the subject of the enunciation, we destroy the roads that could lead from the subjectivity of the writer to the objectivity of the printed page. We turn writing into a field of continuous working, where words and sentences move in liberty, previsionless as playing cards. The expressionistic intent to intervene in the course of social facts with the power of subjectivity has been annulled by the linguistic and the literary theories in force. Reluctant to approve feelings requiring expression, we emphasize construction of the text, a place where, with the word, the constructor himself is constructed. That means the triumph of rhetoric as art of the word. And Eros? He sought shelter in the gears and rotors of speech. If reading causes pleasure, that may in part be ascribed to the text, which with its embraces and its shunning, seduces for an endless adventure. In the era of intransitive writing, Eros becomes intransitive. To love, an Intransitive Verb thus defines our time.
It is convenient to make a distinction between intransitivity and intransitivity: one represents frustrated action, authoritatively inhibited; the other is intransitivity moving through the metonymic succession of objects on the way to unity, to what is absent, to the foundation, to the Other, absent and seductive. We point out the letter as erotic intransitivity because in unites that which vanishes in passing. Confronted with the transcendent, every speech is intransitive. So also is the speech elaborated in full force of metaphysical beings, be they called God, gods, primary substance, One, Whole... It is forbidden to jump over the borderline of speech. There is, it is true, mystical experience in which the part dives into the whole. But mystical experience may only be attained in silence, speech being abolished. Plato, although seduced by what happens far from the borders, doesn't escape the meshes of the semiotic net, product and prison. What he offers are verbal systems, precarious and provisional totalizations, historical constructions, testimonies of historicity, his and ours. What distinguishes us, children of an epoch in which linguistics and literary theory have advanced our textual comprehension, is the more rigorous knowledge of verbal texts. We have lost the illusion, nourished for centuries, of attaining what we imagined to be lodged outside language. While our position is intransitive confinement, transitive was the plan of antiquity.
Having subtracted global intransitivity, which is immovable, we arrive at internal limits, arbitrarily established, clumsy attempts aiming to raise walls, to contain history's march, acts that cut and absolutize what they don't know how to gather. History is dotted with men and systems that, like Narcissus, in love with their own image, projected in the waters, want it to be definitive and try to impose it on us. Such violence detains the vitality of what happens and keeps down the production of the new. We turn our weakness into strength by making free gestures, apt to catch all the possibilities offered those who ascend from anonymity to the condition of emitters. That was always the work of writers and poets.