Consciousness is Destiny

Freud said “anatomy is destiny”, but one wonders if consciousness hasn’t become the rogue player making  personality into a more labile affair. How can one talk about sexual identity without cracking a smile? Flaubert said “Madame Bovary,  c’est moi.” Aren’t we increasingly becoming our own creators. Is self invention our most viral secular heresy? Can for example a middle aged married supposedly “heterosexual male” have the sensibility of a woman who loves other women? Or more bluntly have you  ever looked at the person you are making love to and wondered what they are? Some marriage counselors have pointed out that we all marry our same sex parent. Therefore a woman making love with her husband is really making love to another woman. Our woman in question has simply married a man who reminds her of her mother. Objection! you will cry. The man has an appendage called a penis which the mother, unless she had reconstructive surgery following her pregnancy, did not. But isn’t too much being made of the penis in an age when sex change operations have become so sophisticated and readily available. Granted the Supreme Court is unlikely to include vaginoplasties with the issues it undertakes to rule on when it considers the constitutionality of Obama’s health plan. For good or bad sexuality has become an intellectual and even ideological affair. Yes biology is involved, but it’s the brain rather than the genitals that is calling the shots.

True Crime

Ben Novack Jr. possessed one of the world’s largest collections of Batman objects and paraphernalia. His wife Narcisa Veliz Novack, a former stripper, is now accused of engineering his murder with the help of her brother Cristobal and two other men. Novack was found bound and gagged and bludgeoned to death in the Hilton Rye Town last summer, where he had gone for a convention. Narcisa is being accused of both leaving her husband’s suite door open and providing the pillow with which he was smothered. Novack was the son of the owner of the Fountainbleu Hotel in Miami, and his 86-year-old mother, Bernice Stempel Novack, had also died under suspicious circumstances. What we have here is a horrible crime, which also contains a bit of a jeremiad. After all, on the surface, Novack was a person of wealth and obsession who married into the underworld instead of taking the route more common to his class and background by marrying a nice Jewish girl of an equally well-to-do family, and having the kind of wedding Philip Roth described in Goodbye, Columbus. Looking at the surface details, it appears that Novack was a person of sensibility whose particular tastes (love of a superheroes) would fuel his desire to escape the seemingly narrow, safe world into which he was born. Emma Bovary committed suicide and Novack was murdered, but did they both suffer from overactive imaginations?

Brief Encounter

Joyce termed sentimentality “unearned emotion.” The same could be said for melodrama. The film Brief Encounter, based on Noël Coward's play Still Life, is a classic piece of melodrama, pulled along by the engine of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto Number #2.  Stéphane Brizé’s Mademoiselle Chambon has all the ingredients of melodrama. The music, in this case more subtly rendered by the British composer Edward Elgar, underscores the impossible love relationship between a shiftless, cultivated school teacher and a Lawrentian construction worker, Jean, trapped in the provinces, with a muted pre-verbal physicality. If there is a Madame Bovary in the film, it is in Jean’s muted aspiration for the world that Veronique Chambon represents. Yet there are so many lovely touches in Mademoiselle Chambon, underscored by the leitmotif of the window which runs through the film—the romance begins with Jean repairing Chambon’s window and ends with the vision of Jean and his wife Ann-Marie, now pregnant with a second child, viewed through a claustrophobic window shot. If there is any melodrama here, it is overshadowed by subtlety and artistry. In this regard, the movie is reminiscent of the understatement of Evan Connell’s Mr. and Mrs. Bridge novels. The affair is only one of a series of life passages Jean confronts, including a visit to a mortician with his father to decide on interment or cremation. Jean leaves a message on Veronique’s answering machine culminating in the simple phrase, “C’etait Jean,” and Veronique’s students write “Au revoir Mademoiselle Chambon” on a blackboard. In another exchange, Ann Marie says, “I think your father enjoyed his birthday,” to which Jean replies, “Yes, it was a good party.” In a previous epiphanic scene, Ann Marie, having seen the way her husband looks at his son’s teacher, understands everything. What is truly moving about Mademoiselle Chambon are the succession of moments that contain what Henry James termed “felt life.” In the end, Madame Chambon earns its emotion. 

Salt of the Earth

Salt of the earth people can’t complain. Don’t ask how they are if you are complaining about the malignity of the universe, because they invariably “can’t complain.” Salt of the earth people are always elbowing each other as a gesture of understanding. Nudge nudge. They don’t like “troublemakers.” Salt of the earth people, or SOTES, don’t care that there are cohesive forms of social organization (mostly made up of what the famed political philosopher and former Vice President Spiro Agnew referred to as the effete) that are not predicated on the idea that SOTES hold so dear, ie that ordinary folk are better than those who try to be somebody. SOTES tend not to agree with Oscar Wilde’s quote from The Picture of Dorian Gray: “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.”

   

What is this love of the ordinary, this fascination with belonging, indifference, and self-possession, that makes the SOTE such an object of curiosity? Thomas Mann alluded to this in his story Tonio Kröger, in which alienation brings with it a certain longing. SOTES don’t talk about their anhedonia, their loss of interest in things, or their feelings of longing. Madame Bovary was definitely not a SOTE. In a way, even Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, the quintessential SOTE, might not have finally qualified, due to the ironies in which the author embedded him.

   

But here are some rules. If you ever pull into town in one of those moods where you’re tired of reading Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf and want to hang with the local SOTES, if there’s a glaring sun, don’t say how Main Street reminds you of the first line of Camus’s L’Etranger: “Aujourd’hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas.” Definitely don’t mention Emile Durkheim’s classic sociological tome, Suicide, and don’t start to talk about Elizabeth Kubler Ross’s On Death and Dying. Pretend you’ve never heard of the word “dystonic.” Don’t let on that you don't know a guy named Will, the local bartender and pundit, a bully and sadist everyone in town has loved since he was an evil little boy. Don’t try to become one of the boys by imitating the derogatory tones they use to talk about the fairer sex. What sounds mildly sexist to you will end up making you seem like a serial killer. Everyone will look at you and eventually you will be run out of town.