Earl Jackson, Jr
SHOCKS OF RECOGNITION: ROBERT GLÜCK'S SCANDALOUS NARRATIVES
"To merely record what happened requires an imaginative effort
similar to falling in love"
Robert Glück, Jack the Modernist
Narrative Aphanisis
Local phallic melancholia supports a representational interface between the
psychosexual constitution and the signifying practices of the deviant subject,
in that the negating affirmation of the sexual subject becomes an aphanitic
self-exposition of a narrating subject informed throughout with a consciousness
of its own fictionality.iii Glück's melancholic narrators accept the experience
of lack that motivates sexuality, and the lack-in-being that structures their
acts of self-signification. They express this radical acceptance (which is in
itself this melancholia) in narrative articulations that transvalue both
"lacks." In Jack, Bob's narration acknowledges his desire as a
lack-in-being; but in so doing, he posits himself as a lack-in-being, since the
narrative that "presents" him realizes him as an effect of the
signifying chain. Glück's narrators reflect an idiosyncratically conscious
practice of aphanisis. The narrating personae are coextensive with the askesis
of writing oneself out (in both senses of the phrase). The subject is realized
intradiegetically as a first-person narrator / character constituted by the loss
of the real that even lovemaking is based on and reenacts, and metadiegetically
through the highly reflective transposition of this subject into language, a
system whose signifiers connote the absence of the referents they posit:
"Prolonged scrutiny can become an expenditure of self. . . . I've come to
experience the unreeling of interiority and sexual disclosure as such a loss,
and also part of a historical trajectory. It's a writing activity that
privileges the aggression of naming . . . an ongoing colonization of self into
one's own language" (Glück, "Fame" 6). The meta- and
intradiegetic levels of representation often converge in the "boyfriend
orientation" of the work, through which the boyfriend functions as "a
disjunction to project into, a longing for unity, and the medium through which
form itself is contemplated as a mystery" (Glück, qtd. Jackson,
"Robert" 165). In their elegiac moments, Glück's narrators display
one of the aspects of Freud's melancholia that is not a significant feature of
Cooper's: "an extraordinary diminution of self-regard, an impoverishment of
his ego on a grand scale. In mourning it is the world which has become poor and
empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself" (Freud, "Mourning"
246). Glück frequently describes the lost object of desire in terms of how its
aftermath conditions the narrator's "self," a withdrawal which does
not so much deplete that self as expose the lack founding it: "Rejection
coincides too well with a tired romantic song of who I really am, some cancelled
trip, some mix-up of modes of transportation, stone steps descending into a
lake" ("Denny Smith" 505). Glück's stories of past
relationships, lost lovers, or broken promises, concatenate the vagaries of the
self as a continually renewable sense of abandonment. The intense attention the
narrating persona gives the processes of its own figuration circumscribe the
narrator's deferral to the desired object as a gravitational center of greater
ontological density, as something more real that provides the substantial
texture of the narrator's emotive-affective relation to the world. After Jack
leaves Bob, the narrator engages in a long inventory of possible ego-imagos of
"Bob" gleaned from porn magazines and personal ads. He interrupts this
list to address the absent Jack: "Jack, to be frank with you, I find that
the more wicked of us is not myself. Nasty hypocrite . . . If I believed in my
existence as I believe in yours" (Jack 113).iv Fabulous Objects of Desire
Glück retailors narratives from "world literature" into allegories of
desire and its impossible object which resonate variously with their textual
environment and the given communities of address. In Jack the Modernist, Bob
tells his writing workshop the story of Pwyll and the Maiden from the
Mabinogion. Every day Pwyll would see a beautiful woman slowly riding by on a
white horse. Each day he would send a man after her to find out her name, but no
matter how fast they ran or rode, the woman got farther and farther away,
although she never increased her speed. Pwyll tried pursuing her himself with no
success. Finally, he shouted to her, "'Maiden . . . for his sake whom thou
lovest best, stay for me. 'I will, gladly,' said she, 'and it had been better
for the horse hadst thou asked me this long since.'" The story entranced
everyone, because it "seemed plucked from the center of a dream. . . . All
his straining forward does not equal a small gesture of communication, although
it gives that gesture a wonderful import. . . . Desire equals meaning in a
cruder, simpler way than we might be comfortable believing" (25-27). As his
realization of the impending end of his relationship with Jack grows, Bob
consoles himself with the Japanese story of "Yuki-onna," the snow
woman. A man married a woman named "Yuki," and, after several years of
wedded bliss, the man, reminded of something by the way a light shone on his
wife's face, told her an incident that had happened to him before he had met
her. Caught in a blizzard, he and an older companion sought shelter in an
abandoned hut. "A snow spirit named Yuki-onna entered and breathed over the
older man. She approached the younger and told him she would spare him if he
promised never to mention her visit. The old man was dead in the morning"
(Jack 121). Upon hearing the story, the wife became enraged, and transformed
herself into Yuki-onna. She tells her husband that she is sparing him only for
the sake of the children, and melts into a puddle on the floor. The husband in
Glück's version blames himself not so much for a broken covenant with the
supernatural, as for an insufficiency in his storytelling technique - not a
moral but a stylistic failure : "'Well, I told it badly. . . . I should
have made more of the weather the night the old man died, modulated the tempo,
added a metaphor or two. . . . And I didn't describe Yuki-onna . . . bringing
through the storm the absolute silence of a mirror, the silence of an object
standing midair, completely out of context, alienating. I could only describe
her figure by the break in space it created" (121). In both stories, the
object of desire is wholly Other. In each case its transcendent essence was
contained - at least temporarily - by an earthly, intelligible form; at other
times both women were characterized as utterly unattainable. The reality of the
Yuki-onna exceeded the husband's ability to describe it - it could be connoted
only by a lacuna in the discourse, a diffractory representation that merely
marked the incommensurability of language to desire, an ecstatic signifying
failure. The Yuki-onna story serves as an allegory for desire in general, and in
Glück's contexts also as an allegory of the subversive effects of gay male
sexuality on the heteropatriarchal fantasy of the transcendence of the phallus.
Yuki-onna is the Phallus, the ultimate object of desire and the transcendental
signifier in the dominant order. Gay male desire for penises as penises, and
their representations of them as penises, is the blasphemy of the husband who
tells the truth about the "god," a discursive act "intolerable to
this divinity who exists above or below articulation." The divergent
effects of the husband's story also support this analogy: "The story
partializes her; for him it makes her actual" (121). She vanishes, violated
by the shock of recognition of herself in her husband's narrative. The Pwynn
fable, on the other hand, deals with the internally distancing structuration of
the have-have melancholia of gay male sexuality, conditioning both pornographic
representation and intersubjective sexual experiences. For Dennis Cooper, the
image of the porn star Jeff Hunter is a hierophany: "It's not Jeff who
moves me. . . . He's the part I can relate to. It's as though some concept way
over my head has taken human form so we can communicate, like aliens did in B
films" ("Square One" 84). Sexual acts also exceed the facticity
of pleasurable friction and involuntary muscle spasm: "We fuck intensely in
order to assuage a longing for happiness predicated on a beautiful turn of the
head, good forearms, nice basket, nice ass, a dark Russian smile, a blond smile,
a glower - longing based on distance; distance is compelling and these
encounters are the erotics of distance" (Glück, Jack 123). The erotics of
distance are embedded in the Pwynn fable, but further extended into pornographic
representation, in that the object is both there and not there, a distance as
insurmountable as either of the uncanny personifications in Glück's stories.
Narrative focuses on the impossibility of attaining the object of desire, the
specular deals with its enigmatic possibility. This returns us to the sexual
identity politics in the relations established between the specular and
narrative modes of representation, which we shall consider here with particular
attention to the deviant strategies for narrative articulations of these
tensions and narrative interventions therein.
Fuente: http://www.anotherscene.com/detective/melan2.htm
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