Here I'll present some clarifications on matters addressed in last month's bytewars with Noah Berlatsky.
After I wrote "Ho-Hum, Batman's Gay-- Again" in response to his "Comics in the Closet Part 1" essay, he responded thusly at the end of "Comics in the Closet Part 3:"
"Gene Philips correctly points out that there are types of desire other than homosexual or homosocial which can be dealt with through art, and, sure, I don't have any problem with that (I talk at great length about bondage on this site for instance.) But relationships between men — tinged as all relationships are with desire — seem to me to be especially important, inasmuch as men, even now, play a disproportionate role in running the world."
Noah's response was, so far as it went, appropriate with respect to the context of "Gay Again." In that essay I put forth other examples of "kink" and "deviancy" that I felt were neglected by his overly broad applications of queer theory. Therefore, all the counter-examples I listed-- incest, bestiality-- fall under the category of what Socrates called "eros," which he defined as an appetite or desire for some specific thing. Noah may have a wide-ranging theory of erotism as it applies to literature, but I still fault the essay criticized for taking too doctrinaire a view.
My "Gay Again" critique necessarily focused only on other types of desire, but that's really not the key difference in our respective outlooks. Noah's above-cited remarks about my remarks follow a section dealing with how the concept of desire relates to fictional characters and the fictional lives they lead.
I do agree with this:
"The irony, of course, is that a lot of aesthetic criticism is tied to determining whether a given piece of art is free of desire, or pure, in particular ways. Art that seems clearly intended to make money, for example, is often denigrated as being inauthentic or impure. Similarly, art that caters to observers' prurient interests (which is clearly erotic, in other words) is often downgraded."
But not this:
"Nonetheless, I don't see how you separate aesthetics and desire. You identify with a character because you like something about him or her, and affections are (for humans) tied to desire. Even if you're talking about abstractions, you're talking about beauty, which is certainly linked to desire."
I don't think "desire" (which Noah defines as inherently erotic) is at the heart of human experience. I think that desire is but one interdependent chamber of a three-chambered heart that Socrates chose to call "the tripartite soul," with the other two parts being nous (intellect) and thymos (passion).
But I hear some wonder whether or not "desire" and "passion" aren't the same thing. Here's how Socrates illustrated the distinction with a specific example:
"Well, I said, there is a story which I remember to have heard, and in which I put faith. The story is, that Leontius, the son of Aglaion, coming up one day from the Piraeus, under the north wall on the outside, observed some dead bodies lying on the ground at the place of execution. He felt a desire to see them, and also a dread and abhorrence of them; for a time he struggled and covered his eyes, but at length the desire got the better of him; and forcing them open, he ran up to the dead bodies, saying, Look, ye wretches, take your fill of the fair sight."
Socrates then derives the general rule from the particular example:
"And are there not many other cases in which we observe that when a man's desires violently prevail over his reason, he reviles himself, and is angry at the violence within him, and that in this struggle, which is like the struggle of factions in a State, his spirit is on the side of his reason; --but for the passionate or spirited element to take part with the desires when reason that she should not be opposed, is a sort of thing which thing which I believe that you never observed occurring in yourself, nor, as I should imagine, in any one else?"
(REPUBLIC quotations tr. by Benjamin Jowett)
Thus Socrates demonstrates that what we translate as *passion* (though the most accurate translation seems to be "spiritedness," as the root word for thymos comes from "breath"), is not identical to desire since it can oppose desire. I can think of examples in which *passion* might side with desire against intellect, but that doesn't undermine Socrates' distinction, for in both cases thymos is still a separable concept. Further, this *spiritedness* has a lot to do not with just satisfying one's temporary appetite to have something, be it food or money or sex, but to have esteem for oneself regarding one's own personal self-control. Socrates' example applies to one's internal esteem but it obviously has a wealth of applications with respect to gaining the esteem of others in more social situations.
Socrates does not apply the concept of *thymos* to literature, but I've long thought that there was fertile ground for comparison there.
Again I return to this sentence from above:
"You identify with a character because you like something about him or her, and affections are (for humans) tied to desire."
I don't believe that an an audience-member's identification with a character-- or for that matter, a plot-situation or even a mood called forth by a musical piece-- can be fairly called "desire." One can say that one desires to have food or sex, but should one really say that a reader's desire for a particular type of character is a desire of the same nature?
I think audience-identification is far more complex than that, particularly since in narrative fiction the identification doesn't simply stop with one character. For instance, readers of DAVID COPPERFIELD may want the titular character to be an "everyman" because that's the easiest type of character with which identify. However, the novel also provides several more colorful characters, so Copperfield's colorlessness would seem to be a narrative strategy designed to make the colorful figures more accessible. No one who starts out reading the novel does so with the intention of "identifying" with the comic Mr. Micawber, or even with the villainous Uriah Heep. Yet as Dickens presents the characters, and reveals to us some clues about why they are the way they are, the reader will identify with them, if only in a broad way.
I consider audience-identification to partake less of particularized "desire" than thymotic "passion." The reader has his own passions, his own sense of self-esteem, which will probably not correspondly closely with those of Micawber or Heep, but the reader can identify with those characters in terms of their fictional "spirits." Indeed, even though Socrates/Plato presents reason as being the charioteer who keeps passion and desire in their proper places in the ideal human life, in literature I see a different arrangement: thymos is the charioteer, and reason and desire are pulling the chariot.
Thymos, also, can be connected with the Jungian concept of libido, which I addressed earlier as a corrective to overly Freudian readings:
'I don't know if Freud or any of his spiritual heirs were aware of the kind of "pleasure," to which Pallas alludes, that comes from the exercise of one's abilities. As I discussed earlier, Jung was aware that all human energies did not come down to sexuality, which is why he tried (though he failed) to advance "libido" as a term to describe all potential human energies, sexual and otherwise. I have, as some may know, advanced "dynamization" as a substitute neologism for Jung's "libidinization," and will be using it somewhat in the next essay in this series.'
All this and Nietzsche too, in Part Two.
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