Here and Now: Letters (2008-2011) (7 page)

Which is to say, I am with you. The idea is not to win but to do well, to do the best you can. Your chess match with the stranger on the ship brought you face-to-face with some demonic part of yourself, and when you saw what you had become, you recoiled in disgust. I have never had a similar revelation. I don’t think, in fact, that I have ever been as hungry to win a match of any kind as you were with that German fellow in 1965. Does it have something to do with the difference between team sports and individual sports? All through my boyhood and adolescence I played on teams (primarily baseball and basketball) but rarely competed in one-on-one activities (running, boxing, tennis). Of all the hundreds of games I participated in, I would guess my teams won and lost in roughly equal measure. Winning was always more enjoyable than losing, of course, but I can’t remember ever feeling devastated by a loss—except for the few times when I bungled a crucial play and felt responsible for letting down my teammates.

In individual sports, however, I imagine the ego must be far more significantly engaged—and far more at risk. Hence your compulsive replaying of the chess match on that gruesome bus ride to Texas. You felt you were the better player, then
proved
you were, and cursed yourself for having accepted a draw. But what happens when the opposite is true, when you know you are
not
the better player?

I am thinking of tennis, a sport I never spent much time with and am not very good at (awful backhand)—but which I nevertheless like to play. My father, who lived and breathed tennis, whose very existence was defined by his love of tennis (for many years, he would wake at six in the morning in order to play for a couple of hours before going to work), could still beat me most of the time when he was in his sixties and I was in my twenties. Even though I knew I probably couldn’t win, I always gave maximum effort when we played and measured my successes by how long I could keep volleys going, by how much I felt my game was improving, etc. Losses never stung. On the other hand, I have found that some victories are empty, even distasteful. About fifteen or eighteen years ago, I once played tennis with a writer friend, who turned out to be so bad at it, so tragically inept, that he didn’t manage to win a single point against me. I felt no pleasure in winning. I merely felt sorry for my poor, brave opponent, who had jumped into the deep end of the pool without knowing how to swim.

The pleasure of competition, therefore, is most keen when the opponents are evenly matched.

With best thoughts,

Paul

April 24, 2009

Dear Paul,

Thank you for sending me
Invisible
, which I read in two long sessions—two gulps, as it were.

You told me last November that there would be incest in your next book, but I didn’t appreciate—given the added complication you introduce, namely the question
Where does the act of incest take place, in the bed or in the mind or in the writing?
—how close to the heart of the book incest would be.

It’s an interesting subject, incest, one to which I have not given much conscious thought until now (how would one dare to deny, post Freud, that one has not given it unconscious thought?). It strikes me as curious that, even in the popular tongue, we use the same denomination for sex between brother and sister as for sex between father and daughter or mother and son (let’s put aside the various homosexual combinations for the moment). It’s hard to experience the same frisson of repugnance about the first as about the latter two. I don’t have a sister, but I find it all too easy to imagine how alluring sex games might be to a brother and a sister of more or less the same age—sex games proceeding to more than sex games, as in your book. Whereas sex with one’s own offspring must seem quite a step to take. I would have thought we would have developed different terms for two very different moral acts.

There was a case last year in rural South Australia in which a father-daughter couple who had been living for decades as man and wife in fairly isolated circumstances were prosecuted. I don’t remember all the details, but the court ordered that they be separated, the father/husband being enjoined not to come anywhere near his daughter/wife under threat of a jail term. It seemed to me a cruel punishment, given that the complaint had come not from either of the partners but from neighbors.

Having sex with one’s parents or children must be just about the last sexual taboo that survives in our society. (I confidently predict that
Invisible
will not be greeted with howls of outrage, confirming my sense that brother-sister sex is OK, at least to talk about and write about.) We have come a long way from societies divided into castes within which sexual relations had to be confined. I suppose that the arrival of easy contraception marked the demise of sexual taboos: the bugaboo that the woman might give birth to a monster lost its force.

Not enough attention has been given, I think, to the role that the lore of animal husbandry played in the creation of sexual and racial taboos—lore dictating what species might be allowed to mate with what other species, or within a bloodline how many degrees of separation there had to be, evolved in the course of hundreds of generations of stock raising.

Anyway, today pretty much everything seems to go. The righteous fury that used to be able to play over a whole range of tabooed sex acts (including adultery!) has been focused on a single act, namely grown men having sex with children, which is, I suppose, our way of extending the coverage of the father-child taboo.

Interesting that when in benighted corners of the world (most notably benighted corners of the Muslim world) adulterous couples are punished, we criticize the law that punishes them for ignoring their human rights. What kind of world are we living in in which it is our
right
to break a taboo? What is the point of having a taboo (your Byronic Adam Walker might ask) if it is OK to violate it?

All the best,

John

April 25, 2009

Dear John,

So happy that
Invisible
reached you and that you have consumed it so quickly.

No, I haven’t given much conscious thought to the subject of incest either—at least not until I wrote the novel. Unlike you, I do have a sister, but she is nearly four years younger than I am, and the thought of going down that road with her never once crossed my mind. On the other hand, when I was eighteen or nineteen, I dreamed one night that I was making love to my mother. The dream baffled me then and continues to baffle me today, since it seems to demolish the classic Freudian equation: sublimation of desires through cryptic symbols and often oblique imagery, each thing standing in for something else. His theory has no place for what I experienced. As I recall, I was not disturbed by what was happening inside the dream, but after I woke up I was shocked and revolted.

Shocked because at bottom I suppose I accept the taboo as inviolate. Not just incest between parents and children but between brother and sister as well. Whether what happens in my book with Walker and Gwyn really happens is open to question, but I had to write those passages from a position of absolute belief, and I confess that it was difficult for me—as if I had cut through the barbed-wire fence that stands between sanity and the darkness of transgression. And yet I fully agree with you that the book will not be met with howls of outrage (at least not on that count!). In fact, I think I already have proof of that. Earlier this week, Siri and I did a joint reading at Brown University in Providence at the invitation of Robert Coover (an old friend whom we hadn’t seen in a while). I read some pages from the second part (which included the “grand experiment” but not the full-bore incest of 1967), and although Siri reported that some students tittered nervously behind her, after the reading was over not a single person mentioned those paragraphs. “Nice reading,” they said, or “Very interesting, can’t wait to read the book,” but nothing about the content of what they had heard.

Bouncing off your remarks about animal husbandry, I was reminded of a book I translated many years ago by the French anthropologist Pierre Clastres—
Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians
—an excellent, beautifully written study of a small, primitive tribe living in the jungles of South America. There is one homosexual in the group, Krembegi, and this is the astonishing account of what person(s) he can sleep with—and why:

The ultimate bases of Atchei (Guayaki) social life are the alliances between family groups, relations that take form and are fulfilled in marriage exchanges, in the continual exchange of women. A woman exists in order to circulate, to become the wife of a man who is not her father, her brother, or her son. It is in this manner that one makes Picha, allies. But can a man, even one who exists as a woman, “circulate?” How could the gift of Krembegi, for example, be paid back? This was not even imaginable, since he was not a woman, but a homosexual. The chief law of all societies is the prohibition against incest. Because he was kyrypy-meno—(literally, an anus-lovemaker)—Krembegi was outside this social order. In his case, the logic of the social system—or, what amounts to the same thing, the logic of its reversal—was worked out to its very end: Krembegi’s partners were his own brothers. ‘Picha kybai (meaning kyrypy-meno) menoia.’ “A kyrypy-meno man does not make love with his allies.” This injunction is the exact opposite of the rules governing the relations between men and women. Homosexuality can only be “incestuous”; the brother sodomizes his brother, and in this metaphor of incest the certainty that there can never be any real incest (between a man and a woman) without destroying the social body is confirmed and reinforced.

Extraordinary, no? Encouraging incest in order to discourage it. The head spins . . .

On another note, I want to congratulate you on your piece for the
New York Review
on Beckett’s letters. Thorough, compassionate, and just. Siri was especially pleased by the space you devoted to Bion. In the wake of your article and in anticipation of the talk I have agreed to deliver in Ireland this coming September, I dutifully plowed through the book, and now that I have come to the end, I want to revise my earlier comments to you. It is not boring. Far from it, and what moved me most was to watch his slow and painful evolution from an arrogant, know-it-all prick into a grounded human being. A note to one of the last letters (the book is not in front of me, so my wording might be off) quotes a letter from Maria Jolas to her husband in which she says something like: Beckett is better now—implying, I think, that they never cared for him personally and were now beginning to change their opinion.

And yes, the notes represent an extraordinary undertaking. But do we really have to be told that Harpo Marx’s real name was Arthur?

Best thoughts,

Paul

May 11, 2009

Dear Paul,

One further remark on sport: most of the major sports—those that draw masses of spectators and arouse mass passions—seem to have been selected and codified in a spurt around the end of the nineteenth century, in England. What strikes me is how difficult it is to invent and launch a thoroughly new sport (not just a variant of an old one), or perhaps I should say launch a new game (sports being selected out of the repertoire of games). Human beings are ingenious creatures, yet it is as though only a few of the many possible games (physical games, not games in the head) turn out to be viable.

I have been reading Jacques Derrida’s little book on the mother tongue (
Monolingualism of the Other,
1996). Some of it is high theorizing, some quite autobiographical, about Derrida’s relations with language as a child born into the Jewish-French or Jewish French or French-speaking Jewish community in Algeria in the 1930s. (He reminds us that French citizens of Jewish inheritance were stripped of their citizenship by Vichy, and were therefore in fact stateless for several years.)

What interests me is Derrida’s claim that, though he is/was monolingual in French (monolingual by his own standards—his English was excellent, as, I am sure, was his German, to say nothing of his Greek), French is/was not his mother tongue. When I read this it struck me that he could have been writing about me and my relation to English; and a day later it struck me further that neither he nor I is exceptional, that many writers and intellectuals have a removed or interrogative relation to the language they speak and write, in fact that referring to the language one uses as one’s mother tongue (
langue maternelle
) has become distinctly old-fashioned.

So when Derrida writes that, though he loves the French language and is a stickler for correct French, it does not belong to him, is not “his,” I am reminded of my own experience of English, particularly in childhood. English was to me simply one of my list of school subjects. In senior school the list was English-Afrikaans-Latin-Mathematics-History-Geography, and English happened to be a subject I was good at, Geography a subject I was bad at. It never occurred to me to think that I was good at English because English was “my” language; it certainly never occurred to me to inquire how one could be bad at English if English was one’s mother tongue (decades later, after I had become, of all things, a professor of English, and begun to reflect a little on the history of my discipline, I did ask myself what it could possibly mean to make English into an academic subject in an English-speaking country).

Insofar as I can recover my childhood way of thinking, I thought of the English language as the property of the English, people who lived in England but who had also sent out members of their tribe to live in and, for a while, rule over South Africa. The English made up the rules of English as they whimsically chose, including the pragmatic rules (in what situations you had to use what English locutions); people like myself followed at a distance and behaved as instructed. Being good at English was as inexplicable as being bad at geography. It was some quirk of character, of mental makeup.