Thursday, September 07, 2006
(10:14 PM) | Anonymous:
Fay Weldon: Antichrist
Not the least stupid of Fay Weldon's recent stupidities is her advice for married couples in the grip of primitive "Darwinian" urges that propel them ineluctibly into the embraces of other sexual partners: give in, but just the once, and then knock it off before any more serious consequences have a chance to ensue.It should be acknowledged that this is not without its merits as practical advice; the stupidity is ethical rather than pragmatic, or rather it lies in Weldon's conviction that this manner of compromise constitutes an authentic response to a "moral issue", the proper employment of a humane and worldly moral intelligence (e.g. hers...), rather than the sneaking evasion of responsibility it so obviously is.
The model of libidinal economy endorsed by Weldon is essentially that of middle-class parenting: let your children have the smallest possible amount of what they clamour for - sweets, television, computer games - and make their access even to that conditional on an unremitting parade of good manners and the assiduous consumption of vegetables. In such a manner is exorbitant desire acknowledged through gritted teeth - when it is not being exploited to secure obedience. All of this is fair enough in extremis, which is where most parenting of small children is done, but it is nauseating to encounter an adult person still willingly enthralled by such a ruthlessly petty system of restraint and reward. If adolescence has any purpose at all, it is to shatter those bonds.
One should take note of the inherent contradiction in Weldon's prescription: if you cannot help doing it, then you should do it. This is in line with her advice for victims of sexual assault: if all else fails, lie back and accept - perhaps even enjoy - the inevitable. In ordinary usage, "should" implies "can not": a moral prescription is always implicitly addressed to someone who could do otherwise, and would perhaps tend to do otherwise in the absence of such guidance. Yet to be the passive victim of "Darwinian" primitive urges - be they one's own or someone else's - is to be subject to a force outside the domain of the social, a purely contingent - and morally intractable - natural impetus. What Weldon's prescription unwittingly reveals, however, is that the inevitable is made to appear as such precisely in the gesture of resignation with which the "social animal" recognises and accommodates it. The victim of a horrifying assault who proclaims that she would "rather have died" raises a counterfactual retort to this accommodation: that she would prefer not to live as someone to whom this had been done. Her very survival falsifies the purported inevitability of what has happened: it testifies that the perpetrator could in fact have done otherwise and that it is unacceptable - under any circumstances - that he did not. Weldon's literal-minded response - "in that case, girl, well, die" - simply affirms the causal necessity of the criminal act, and ratifies the reasoning of the perpetrator.
What is the alternative to doing what you cannot help but do? It is not to escape causation, but to be caused to do otherwise: to resolve the causal overdetermination of one's acts in a different direction. As Zizek argues, it is only through such resolution that a causal chain can appear at all: the differential field of contending putative causes only assumes the structure of a chain through the operation of "freedom", which in each instance is the freedom to assume responsibility for one's own causes. Weldon's moral universe of primal urges (Sin) on the one hand contending with ethical prescriptions (the Law) on the other misses entirely this dimension of reflexivity (it is in fact the most un-Christian moral universe imaginable, a universe in which no incarnation - the subjective splitting in which the différance Man/God is inscribed within Man himself - can ever have taken place).
In any case, the question of ineluctible causation is surely moot: adultery is no more "Darwinian" (in the sense of "primitively instinctual") than marriage itself: as a genre of erotic misadventure, it is entirely parasitic on the institution it mocks. The deceived spouse is doubly sexually exploited: firstly in continuing to fulfil unawares the duties of a contractually violated union, and secondly in providing the libidinal support for the other person's private erotic theatre of abjection. It is not the irrepressible upsurge of raw animal lust that capsizes marriages; it is the expensively-maintained solipsism of the poor, unique, misunderstood soul, who in reality is nowhere more transparently and readily "understandable" than in the ridiculous contortions of sexual deceit. Adultery is the flight from the traumatic singularity of sexual passion into the reassuring embrace of cliche. It is - to paraphrase Auden - the one thing every married man can do.
Weldon would like to offer a one-time pardon - a get-out-of-divorce-free card - to all first-time adulterers, on condition that they promptly curtail their exploits and keep quiet about them thereafter. At the level of pure economic calculation, it is undoubtedly true that few things - certainly few adulteries - are worth going through a divorce for. What is ethically noisome, however, about Weldon's calculation is that it is made on behalf of the erring party, in such a way that it pre-empts the necessary appeal to the other person's charity. The adulterer's logic is then: "Because it is the sensible thing for you to do to forgive me, I will permit myself to deceive you - and will uphold the deception indefinitely, so that you need never suffer the distress of having to decide for yourself whether the deception is forgivable". One does not presume in this way upon forgiveness.
We should consider a counter-argument here, which is that it is only in the moment of disclosure by the unfaithful party that the harm - the humiliation and violent breaking of trust - of adultery is actualised: isn't it better to keep mum, to refrain from symbolisation, since it is this alone that involves the deceived partner in the deceit, both immediately and retroactively? (The humiliation of discovering that one has been deceived is at least in part the humiliation of having always known that this might be so, of having deceived oneself. This is the point - to borrow Zizek's analogy - at which the cartoon character looks down and discovers that he is racing in mid-air; and then gravity takes hold...). Weldon is arguing, after all, for the stoical acceptance of private guilt, rather than the corrosive indulgence of public confession. Is it better to spit or to swallow?
"Guilt" here is repressed symbolisation, the onus of having something to tell that cannot be told; the heaviness of guilt is that of a psychic object that can neither be digested nor expelled. Guilt is thus "useless" by definition: it cannot be put to work, since the moment it is symbolized and put into circulation it begins to dissipate. Weldon's argument is that adulterers dissolve existing marriages and begin new ones, in an idiotic series of emotional blunders, because they feel they have to assuage their guilt: divorce and remarriage are guilt's work, the work in which guilt is produced and consumed. Is it not better to hang on to one's guilt, that useless moral obstruction, than to let it be transmuted into compulsively repeated acts of contractual engagement and violation?
It's a false choice, of course: only someone for whom marriage in its contractual aspect was the symbolic anchor of the world would move so quickly from adultery to divorce, and from "think[ing] and feel[ing] about the authenticity of his being" to remarriage. Weldon's imperative of non-symbolisation, of being willing to "put up with the guilt of having erred and shut up", is the counterpart of a compulsion to symbolise, to turn every affair into the beginning and end of a marriage. Again, what is striking about the moral universe Weldon constructs is its complete tone-deafness to the message of the Christianity to which she claims to have converted: it is a universe without charity, a universe of Law in which the singularity of others' pain and desire need never intervene. What Weldon has to offer is devices for the practical management of sin; but she presupposes not only a fallen human nature, but one which can never have been redeemed.
