Misanthropy Page 22

  All right, I’ll tell you. … I’m afraid of men. And I’m even more afraid of women. And I’m very much afraid of the whole bloody human race. (GMM, p. 144)

  What initially underlies Rhys’s misanthropy is her acute eye for ‘human misery’ (GMM, p. 155). She was unremittingly conscious of it, hunted it down everywhere, not in the places most ostentatiously deserving of charity, but in obscure holes and corners that the good prefer not to notice, like the prison in which Stefan is incarcerated in Quartet. ‘When you come out’, he begins, then adds, ‘but you don’t come out. Nobody ever comes out’ (Q, p. 106). Rhys fastens melancholically on the myriad zones of blight, because they are infinitely more significant and expressive than those of light, the parties, fairs and carnivals, the public rejoicings and official celebrations, the respectable and comfortable world of solid citizenship, prosperous circumstances, responsible toil and satisfied conscience, good lives well led.

  For the trouble with the zones of light is that they dazzle one so much that they make what lies beyond them invisible. The law of the world at large, the ‘malignant world’, is in the first instance cruelty (Q, p. 28). As Rhys’s Sophia murmurs (again): ‘Homo homini lupus’ (GMM, p. 21). Hence Rhys’s own special version of ‘a room of one’s own’: ‘A room’, as Sophia says, ‘is a place where you hide from the wolves outside and that’s all any room is’ (GMM, p. 33). All of Rhys’s heroines know how crucial it is to be able to flee to one’s room. But the room of one’s own is not only a bolthole from cruelty. Nor is it just a refuge from the inexorable rule of an injustice which determines that cruelty shall not matter. It is a haven from those who shrug indifferently, the ‘inscrutable people, invulnerable people’ (Q, p. 79). For ‘they are without mercy’ (GMM, p. 146). Where exactly does one otherwise go, in a world which can observe dispassionately that a princess was once left screaming for ten days while rats ate her? ‘The mean things they got away with – sailed away with – smirking’, thinks Marya, in Quartet. ‘Nobody caring a bit’ (Q, p. 29). The roots of Rhys’s misanthropy partly lie in her belief that she inhabits a world of radical untruth.

  What most terrifies Sophia about people, however, is not their cruelty, though she knows that they are ‘horribly cruel’, but the fact that it is ‘rosy, wooden, innocent cruelty’ (GMM, p. 81). The image is of a painted doll or effigy: see below. But Sophia’s point, here, is not rank cruelty or rampant self-interest but rather what she otherwise exclaims against as naivety. The naivety of people as manifested in their clichés and above all their belief in their clichés is peculiarly disturbing. For clichés, received ideas both disguise ignorance and make it serviceable. Furthermore, they work. Best therefore to learn to ‘gabble without thinking as the others did’, as schoolgirl Antoinette ruefully muses in Wide Sargasso Sea.39 Marya’s ‘vague and shadowy fear’ in Quartet is of something cruel but also ‘stupid’ in people ‘that had caught her and would never let her go’ (Q, p. 28, my italics).

  People, in fact, are idiots, and the world is idiotic. (Idiocy is an insistent refrain in After Leaving Mr Mackenzie). As philosopher Clément Rosset emphasizes, the Greek root of the word idiot, ἴδιος means private, one’s own, particular. Only subsequently does it come to mean deprived of intelligence or reason. That which is idiotic is singular unto itself. It has a blank or expressionless surface; it cannot communicate or register a fellow communicator. It is incapable ‘of appearing as its double in the mirror’.40 The great sources of Rhys’s imagination lay in Dominica and, more loosely, the Caribbean. She spent her whole life working towards a full recognition of that inspiration. Wide Sargasso Sea, her great Caribbean work of fiction, was published some thirty years after its predecessor, but many of its imaginative features were already present in the earlier writing. For Rhys, the Caribbean is the site of extreme beauty. But its beauty is that of an evil flower. There is the original, historical evil: ‘French and English like cat and dog in these islands for long time. Shoot, kill, everything’ (WSS, p. 80). There is the evil done in return. ‘The people here hate us’, says Mason (WSS, p. 27). The blacks shun Antoinette and her Creole family as ‘white cockroaches’ (WSS, p. 20). This is a deeply poisonous world (though Wide Sargasso Sea destroys any presumption of a superior, anthropological understanding of the nature of the poison).

  ‘The devil prince of this world’, says Godfrey (WSS, p. 16). Rhys’s Caribbean swarms with monster crabs, cockroaches, giant ants and snakes. But it is also a world of zombies, voodoo, effigies, obeah, curses and spells and blood-sucking vengeance. According to Pizzichini, ‘Jean spent much of her childhood screaming, crying or collapsing in terror’.41 She did this less in her later years in Europe, but the same sensibility is never far away. In Rhys’s fiction, vision is inextricable from hallucination; it is hard to know which is which. Demonic forces are always close at hand, if seldom palpable. Compare Sophia on the struggle for life:

  I’m not talking about the struggle when you are strong and a good swimmer, and there are willing and eager friends on the bank waiting to pull you out at the first sign of distress. I mean the real thing. You jump in with no willing and eager friends around, and when you sink you sink to the accompaniment of loud laughter. (GMM, p. 10)

  But who is laughing? The lost or fair-weather friends? Bystanders? Or demons (who may have taken their forms)? Rhys’s marvellous, eerily subtle talent is to deliver a world in which human beings discreetly mutate and appear as the alien spirits they really always were. People are ghosts, shadows, obscure presences, djinns. Above all, they wear masks. Indeed, there are moments ‘when all the faces are masks and only the trees are alive and you can almost see the strings that are pulling the puppets’ (GMM, p. 75). The mask is even the truth of the face, inexpressive, uncommunicative, definitively indifferent, singular unto itself. Sometimes people’s eyes seem to turn to stone. ‘How terrifying human beings were, Marya thought’ (GMM, p. 76). This is ‘hell’, the hell of the human thing possessed, where the incubus is more real than the shell it has taken over, and the only salvation from it is ‘the heaven of indifference’ (Q, p. 57). But in what indifference of their own can Rhys and her characters themselves trust, given that the rest of the world is indifferent already? Rhys, it seems, found little salvation. But she left behind her an astonishing secularization of voodoo vision, the black arts as a misanthropic mode of imagining the human world.

  *

  Like Rhys’s, the world of Nathalie Sarraute’s fiction offers us a world of creepy-crawly people, but creepy-crawly in a different way. Sarraute has no interest in the satisfactions traditionally provided by the novel: plot, character, psychology, development. The novelist, she says, must rather deprive the reader ‘of all indications of which … he takes hold in order to fabricate [such] illusions’.42 Her concern was rather with what she called tropisms. Tropisms are ‘inner “movements” … hidden under the commonplace, harmless appearances of every instant of our lives’.43 We are ‘hardly cognizant’ of them. They ‘slip through us on the frontiers of consciousness in the form of undefinable, extremely rapid sensations. They hide behind our gestures, beneath the words we speak and the feelings we manifest, all of which we are aware of experiencing and are able to define’ (PR, p. 8). They are more basic than ‘our conversations, the personality we seem to have, the person we seem to be in one another’s eyes, the stereotyped things we believe we feel, as also those we discover in others’ (PR, p. 9). They seemed to Sarraute to ‘constitute the secret source of our existence, in what might be called its nascent state’ (PR, p. 8). They are not individual, however, and do not individualize. They are like tremors in ‘a substance as anonymous as blood, a magma without name or contours’ which courses through all of us and is present ‘in all men and in all societies’ (ES, p. 1586, 1593). This substance is ‘an indefinable, anonymous matter of which all humanity’ is ‘composed’ (TAS, p. 1588). So Sarraute’s, again, is a ‘general view’, and she obscures clear distinctions between her people precisely in order to make
it appear so.

  The formless and often nameless figures who clutch tentatively at others in Sarraute start out from lack. Their founding condition is ‘nothingness … an interior void’.44 Since, whatever the notions of character, personality and changeless traits that they and others may invent, they are as amorphous as a flow of lava, they suffer from a deep-rooted insecurity, a fear that they have no being. No one escapes this condition. Those who seem solid and substantial, whose identity appears to be anchored in some special way – ‘compact and hard … as immobile as one could wish’45 – invariably disappoint: the novel Martereau hinges on the breakdown of such an illusion (about Martereau himself). However, the subject is also driven by an imperious ‘instinct for self-preservation’, and this makes the Sarrautean predicament seem unbearable (M, p. 50). The only possible way of dealing with it is by appropriating the outside world to fill the subjective hole. Thus Sarraute’s people are always groping towards others, as plants grope towards the light: Sarraute actually tells us that the tropisms in her novels ‘resemble the movements made by certain living organisms under the influence of outside stimuli’ (PR, p. 9). The work of appropriation, however, is bound to fail, because others invariably suffer from the same condition and are themselves tropistically feeling their own way outwards.

  This makes Sarraute’s world and her people horrible. First, her people are mean. The issues at the centre of the novels are almost always bourgeois and petty, though the responses to them are hypersensible (hypersensitive, a favourite word of Sarraute’s). The father in Portrait d’un homme inconnu broods profoundly on what he believes to be his daughter’s theft of a slice from his soap bar. When Tante Berthe in Le Planétarium discovers that workmen have fitted an ‘appalling nickel handle’ to her front door, the ‘soft, warm world in which she had been so snug’ flies to bits, ‘and on the smoking ruins, crushing them beneath their feet, the conquerors advanced. … They installed a new order, a new civilization, whilst she wandered miserably amidst the ruins’ (LP, pp. 2, 14–15). This is the kind of collapse into grand panic that takes place when the subject’s effort to plug the inner gap by taking hold of the world has failed.

  Secondly, since tropisms ‘hide behind our gestures’, the really important processes in Sarraute’s world tend to take place surreptitiously, beneath the surface, which makes her people chronically furtive and secretive. Furthermore, the aspects of themselves that they strive to conceal are usually displeasing if not repellent. This is not surprising, since Sarraute’s characters are concerned with the outside world only insofar as they imagine it may supplement their own lack of being. Sarraute found the same preoccupation with concealment in her favourite novelists. In Kafka, she writes, ‘“others” are half-human beings with identical faces, whose infantile, incomprehensible gestures … conceal a malign cleverness that is at once wily and obtuse’ (ES, p. 1574). According to Sarraute, Ivy Compton-Burnett (no less) tells us of ‘a savage game’ in which ‘there is concealed danger in these sweet-sounding sentences, murderous impulses worming their way into affectionate concern, an expression of tenderness abruptly distils a subtle venom’ (ES, p. 1606). In Sarraute, the concealed impulses may be violent: Alain in Le Planétarium, for instance, imagines using his fists on ‘the enormous, immobile mass’ that is his aunt (LP, p. 187). But they are more likely to be resentful, grudging, nosy, intrusive, self-insinuating, self-regarding, deceitful, obsessive, coldly destructive, brusquely crushing, disproportionately intense, deeply paranoid yet pathetically shamefaced and diffident – or just plain weird. It is hard, if not impossible, to find a single honourable, serious emotion in Sarraute’s novels. Her subterranean creatures never rise that far. After all, for Sarraute, human behaviour ‘has more in common with that of ants and plants than with free moral agents’.46

  But what is most loathsome in Sarraute’s world is its texture. The metaphors she finds for tropisms repeatedly make them seem repulsive. Tropisms lurk and crouch, like hyaenas or spiders.47 They uncurl themselves like snakes (see PHI, p. 36). They seethe, swarm, squirm and wriggle, like dung-beetles or cockroaches in their lairs, ‘repugnant creatures crawling in humid darkness amongst foul odours’ (PHI, p. 48, M, p. 132). They resemble ‘leeches’ and ‘slugs’. They slime things ‘with their ignoble understanding’.48 The novels pullulate with images of snails, lampreys, toads and frogs, caterpillars, carnivorous plants, larvae, ‘spectres and ghouls’, vampires and ‘hungry, pitiless parasites’ (PHI, pp. 52, 64, 71, 114, 128, T, p. 17). It is equally a world of the fluid and the viscous, oozing, seeping and trickling things – ‘sticky slaver’ (T, p. 5), ‘gluey coatings’ (PHI, p. 111), vitriols and poisonous or acid secretions – as it is of dire infections, ugly contagions, sickening smells, morbid excrescences, ‘miasmas, fatal emanations’ (M, p. 290). Sarraute, however, has a special fondness for images of underwater creatures, particularly polyps and invertebrates, those with ‘soft little suckers’ that cling and palpate (M, p. 169), ‘tiny tentacles that at every instant stretch out towards the nearby partner’ (ES, p. 1575). They suit her because they seem appropriate to the groping movements of tropisms. Since Sarraute’s creatures are much inclined to observe other people’s ‘means of defence’ (PHI, p. 112), with their hard shells and their tendency to stay under cover, crustaceans figure a great deal, too.

  ‘Why am I a misanthropist? Why that?’ asks one of Sarraute’s speakers in Tropismes (T, p. 7). The answer is not far to seek: Sarraute’s creatures feel abandoned ‘in a hostile universe’ (T, p. 8), and are rebuffed by others, whom they are therefore bound to hate. The hatred and distrust will necessarily be reciprocal. In Sarraute, both social life and the psyche sometimes seem altogether given over to sado-masochistic drives, if usually of a rather surreptitious kind: hence her frequent resort to images of teased and tormented animals. The point is not that the subject cannot recognize the other person’s tropisms. Rather, he or she needs to see the other as an alien (and cruel) fixity with a ‘fearful, implacable’ will to destruction, whereas the other takes itself to be ‘the frightened little animal that hides as best it can at the bottom of its hole’ (M, pp. 23, 33). At all events, contentment in relationships is mere self-persuasion, self-preservation, a repression of the tropisms. Our natural state is mutual wounding, not least through language.

  *

  Neither Sarraute nor her characters take their chronic misgivings about other people as far as a desire for death. But the interest in killing oneself, or imagining one’s own death, ‘dying like a woman’, is repeatedly present in the work of various modern women misanthropists. Indeed, the other themes we have identified with these writers often seem to point in that direction. Dying like a woman is not like ‘dying like a man’. The second of course is a familiar concept, often with heroic implications, whether the heroism in question be military, athletic, intellectual, artistic or bohemian. Dying like a woman does not share in this ethos. It is not first and foremost a promotion of the woman’s supposed courage, strength, adventurousness, awesome intellectual extremism or genius. It is rather a testimony to the failure of the human world tout court.

  Dying like a woman has two principal features: first, absolute and uncompromising sensibility. From 1935, Virginia Woolf was increasingly a hostage to this.49 There had always been strains of misanthropy in her work. In the context of the novel in which it appears, for example, Jacob’s Room, Rose Shaw’s judgement – ‘life is damnable, life is wicked’50 – carries a great deal of conviction the novel finds it hard to resist. Woolf’s fiction in general repeatedly balances delicately between a cynic, pessimist, melancholic or misanthropist (Helen Ambrose, Katherine Hilbery, Septimus Smith, Rhoda), and a character or characters who might seem close to sharing his or her premises but who refuse to take the same path. That structure seems to reflect a hard-won equilibrium in Woolf’s mind. If so, however, in 1935, it began to fail. Her husband Leonard would later write of both of them as suffering ‘the erosion of life by death’ in the 1930s, ‘a process whic
h gathered momentum as we went downhill to war’.51 With Hitler’s invasion of the Rhineland in 1936, theirs was becoming a ‘world of horror’.52 Not for the first time, the guns were getting near to Woolf’s private life. She had even grown to hate her beloved London (‘crowded, arid, sordid, unhuman’).53 When war broke out it was, she said, ‘the worst of all my life’s experiences’.54 While she remained obstinately unpatriotic and a pacifist, many of her erstwhile friends and allies now backed the military effort. Meanwhile, she was reading Freud for the first time, and finding in him confirmation that ‘we ourselves are like primeval man, a gang of murderers’.55 ‘World aggression’, she now believed, had ‘psychological, deeply buried, inherited human sources’.56 In the end, only one response to it seemed possible. As Julia Briggs puts the point, ‘driven by mass murder, hatred and cruelty’ towards ‘those darker aspects of our inner life that we normally resist or dismiss’,57 on Friday, 28 March 1941, Woolf walked out of the house and died like a woman.

  Virginia Woolf tended a tiny little utopian flame of her own in the teeth of the radical insufficiency of the world around her. When that flame was finally, brutally snuffed out, the misanthropic nightmare became total and the pain was unbearable. There is however a second mode of dying like a woman that is different from Woolf’s. This involves a kind of staging or performance. Here, dying like a woman becomes a masquerade, or better, a counter-masquerade, since, if as Joan Riviere and later Lacan suggested, femininity itself is a masquerade that defines the identity of a woman, even her womanhood as such,58 then the masquerade of dying like a woman passes judgement on the masquerade of living a woman’s life.