Introduction: What Does the Woman Want?
- The release of Jane Campion's The Piano (1993) was almost an epochal
event. It arrived to mark the zenith of a phase of extraordinary creativity in
Australian cinema in the 1970s and 1980s with films such as Picnic at Hanging
Rock, My Brilliant Career, The Lighthorsemen,
Breaker Morant, and Gallipoli. In the following decade, close
on the heels of Strictly Ballroom, Romper Stomper, and
The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Campion's film won the
Palm D'Or at Cannes and three Academy Awards (see Orr 151, Coombs and Gemmell, "Preface"
vii). Highly successful at the box office, the film elicited praise and stirred much
passionate debate among critics and ordinary filmgoers. Neither were audiences oblivious
to its sheer ambition in cinematic technique.[1] That
ambition foregrounds itself here in virtuoso camera movement, as when the camera seems to
enter a character's pocket, and there in an homage to a grand auteur, as when a
close-up of Ada McGrath's (Holly Hunter's) hair tied in a tight spiral knot, in evoking
an ocular vertigo, invites comparison to an emblematic shot in Hitchcock's
Vertigo and with equal point, for in this gesture the camera in each case
indexes the female object of its fascinated gaze.[2]
Inviting attention to its own gaze, the camera elevates the piano to the level almost of
a character in the film, even a gendered character, as Felicity Coombs argues (85). And
if the music "made" by the piano is in some ways the real voice of the speechless
protagonist, her voiceover also functions as a kind of spectral extradiegetic intrusion,
particularly in a crucial scene when Ada becomes the victim of savage violence at the
hands of Stewart, her husband. Ada's haunting voice-over, however, is not just a trick:
it functions at the ideological level as a counter to the customary "othering" of the
feminine voice in cinema, and at the representational level to problematize the real
versus the symbolic. The visual language of the film is frequently as telling. In one
scene, for instance, an important and mischievous point about Ada's second husband's
twisted libido is made by the camera. Stewart is voyeuristically spying on his wife and
her lover, whose face is buried in her skirts. As he watches, her lover's pet dog,
possibly this man's only (or best) friend, licks Stewart's open palm.
- Above all, the film was, and remains, thought provoking.
It became the focus of intense debates about the postcolonial critique of
New Zealand's--and Australia's--colonial past (and, by implication, their
neocolonial present and their multicultural future); about feminine desire
and its institutional containment within marriage; and about the
psychological perplexities of human relationships, particularly love, that
are the film's main subject. These debates raise issues that remain vital
in contemporary cultural studies--the inarticulacy of what enables women's
agency, the possibility of alternative forms of desire and human
intercourse, the quandaries of aspirations to a meaningful postcolonial or
ethnic citizenship that does not slip into the quagmire of racial and
identity politics. However, when reviewing these central debates focused
on feminine agency in the film, one has a
strange sense of irresolution, as though some of the major issues were
being abandoned without being fully developed, let alone resolved. The
crux of these debates has to do with this question: what does Ada want? In
this essay I offer a contribution to the debate that seeks to reinterpret
this as a question not only about what Ada wants from love, but as a
question about what drives her beyond love--a question about the structure
of that drive.
- Love, after all, is the telos of melodrama, which is
itself the focus of one important trend in the film's reception. The
nineteenth century saw the rise of melodrama in an age where traditional
anchors of society in organized religion and hierarchical authority were
on the wane. Into the vacuum came the private individual as the locus of
meaning. This individual, however, was defined primarily by his or her
role within the nuclear family (Vasudevan 310), and needless to say,
the role assigned to the woman within the bourgeois family was
particularly narrow, restricting the orbit of her desire and imagination.
Indeed, where the modernist work of art in the West was coded as an
autonomous, "masculine," form (see Huyssen), the mass cultural form of
melodrama was itself coded as "feminine" and addressed to women as those
who were subjugated or even rendered voiceless by that masculinist
discourse. This view is in line with Peter Brooks's The
Melodramatic Imagination (1976), which provides an important formal
schematization of the silencing that is constitutive of melodrama,
although since the publication of Brooks's work, melodrama has come to be
regarded as having as much claim to facilitating the democratic revolution
as realism (Prasad 56).[3] If Brooks
offered a formal account of melodrama, then an important feminist advance
in theorizing melodrama was achieved by Mary Ann Doane, who is credited
with the most widely cited claim about the way in which classical women's
melodrama portrays the suppression of women's agency by patriarchal
structures of society (The Desire to Desire).
- As melodrama came more and more to be addressed to women
it gave rise in the Hollywood of the 1950s to a "women's melodrama." In
the age of classical Hollywood cinema, as Neil Robinson notes, women's
melodrama "tells the story of a woman who attempts to resolve the tensions
between her own subjectivity and erotic desire, and the patriarchal world
in which she lives" and in doing so the melodrama seeks to "[re]define the
contours of... community" (19). The Piano is, in these
terms, a women's film (see Barcan and Fogarty). But what is often missed
in such a claim about this film is precisely that The Piano's
spin on melodrama is not to posit the goal of reintegration into community
as in traditional melodrama. It is not even a "critique [of] the false
either/or choices which patriarchy offers to both women and men" as
Robinson puts it (20), for that too implies a desire to be reintegrated
into a regenerated community. Doane was criticized for being too
pessimistic to recognize melodrama's potential for enabling feminine
agency: "the woman's film," she concluded, "does not provide us with an
access to a pure and authentic female subjectivity, much as we might like
it to do so" (4). Whatever the merits of this criticism, perhaps we
should not make of melodrama a Procrustean bed, simply in order to cut
Campion's film down to size so that it will fit the structure of
melodrama, as Robinson does when he writes that "Patriarchy is a nightmare
from which Ada is trying to awake, and her near death [near the end of the
film] demonstrates that only by the narrowest of margins does she escape
its prohibitions against female desire" (37). Similarly, Bridget Orr, an
otherwise astute reader of the film, can only conclude that "it seems
curious that Ada's resistance... [at the end of the film] should be
rewarded by her establishment in white picket contentment" (158). If we
read The Piano as merely one more women's melodrama, even
what Richard Allen describes as a "gothic melodrama" (44-45), we might
fail to see something crucial about the ending. I argue below that it is
structured around a darker intensity, a jouissance that
constitutes a
deformation of melodrama and betrays no wish to be so reintegrated. This
deformation involves a kind of radical exceptionalism and implies an
erotics that is better described, as I argue at the acknowledged risk of
overinterpreting the film, in terms of courtly love as a negation of
romantic love.
- Campion does offer, in this "women's film," an
oppositional structure of desire, or at least of a woman's desire, that
counters both the tepid agency that is freed up for women in women's
melodrama and the more realist script of restrictive bourgeois
domesticity with an alternative erotic structure. This is a structure
that Bruce Fink specifices as a "feminine structure," namely a
"position or stance with respect to (an experience of)
jouissance" (Lacanian Subject 117). That oppositional
structure of desire is homologous, I suggest, to the structure of courtly
love in that it respects both the erotic attachment familiar to anyone who
has been in love or has desired another body and the
"impossibility" of the sexual relation, as Jacques Lacan has insistently
theorized it. The sexual relation is "impossible" because sexual
difference is enigmatic, because it is as though feminine desire and
masculine desire were not speaking the same tongue. But beyond this
always failing love is something else that we can trace, an inhuman love.
The Structure of the Essay
- In the light of what has been said above, the essay is structured
in three sections of unequal length:
Section I:
- In the first section, the shortest because it treats themes given
relatively lower prominence by the film, I discuss the colonial context of
the film, describing the significance of its setting in New Zealand and
developing its critique of colonialism. It is as easy to offer a
reductive reading of such a film as to claim too great a sophistication
for it. Still, I suggest that the film is informed by the insights of
postcolonialism and is sensitive to postcolonialism's own reinscription of
the advances of poststructuralist discourse.
Section II:
- In the second section I discuss Campion's exploration of feminine
desire, or at least of Ada's irregular desire within the context of her
relationship to Baines--and therefore to romantic love. This is a way not
only of critiquing received ideas about love but of revisiting related
issues: choice of sexual object, desire as a support of subjectivity, and
femininity as an epistemological category. It is equally a way of asking
about masculine desire, when it exceeds the bounds of normative sexuality.
Just as Campion critiques the structuring of (colonial) racial
minorities and women, she is also sensitive to the class differentiations
among women as a group, and she is committed to the destabilization of
pieties
about sexual relations and social institutions. This section of course is
intimately linked to the first and the third, and in this section I
discuss what I see as the surface of the film: its narrative of a woman's
struggle to connect with her "dark talent."
Section III:
- In the final and necessarily densest section, I come to Ada's
radical, psychoanalytically suggestive, and intriguing psychic structure.
I employ here a Lacanian terminology of desire and drive because I believe
Campion is interested in exploring a particular psychic structure that
captures Ada's desire, a desire that transgresses the melodrama of
bourgeois domesticity and is outside the ken of patriarchal discourse.[4] While I invoke a Lacanian paradigm in
order to highlight this transgressive excess, I am not unaware of the
accusation (leveled by Judith Butler in Antigone's Claim,
for instance) that Lacanian psychoanalysis
lends itself to a support of a patriarchal status quo. Insensitivity to
this accusation would be especially egregious in my generally appreciative
reading of Campion's film, a reading that is aligned with feminist
approaches. I am not appealing to the Lacan who has been construed as
ultimately tethered to a defence of a patriarchal, phallic order, in which
a woman of course has no real agency, no real voice. But neither do I
preoccupy myself here with an exposé of Lacan's patriarchal blind
spots by way of noticing how woman's voice is indeed suppressed. It would
be a real disservice to Campion to turn her exquisitely complex portrayal
of Ada into merely a representation of this muteness. I turn instead to
another Lacan who, even if his oeuvre betrays him as a man of his era and
a creature of a patriarchal worldview, offers a useful vocabulary that
moves beyond pat, dismissive accounts of his theoretical advances.
- A couple of further clarifications seem in order at this
juncture. First, many contemporary critics (particularly feminists) have
rightly discredited the thesis of the autonomy of the aesthetic, removed
from the political, the linguistic, the cultural, or the psychoanalytic.
Therefore it is appropriate to present a "cultural studies" approach to
the film, not only to read the film as aesthetic object but to see it as
presenting a politicized representation of a psychic problematic. Second,
my suggestion is that Lacan offers a particularly useful vocabulary of
drive, of courtly love, of the "real" body, of "das Ding," of the
partial object, of desubjectivation or acephalous subjectivity. As I
develop my argument, the significance of this difficult terminology will,
I hope, become evident. I don't want to detain the reader by a long
excursus on definitions. But let me say here that one of the most
important features of Ada's structure as it is represented in filmic
language is a kind of excess. I propose that the secret to her desire is
this excess, and my essay furthermore tracks the relationship between her
and George Baines (Harvey Keitel) as anchored to their mutual, but
differently inflected, gendered orientation to excess.
- Ada's excess is synecdochically, if ironically,
represented by her darkly eloquent, voluntary muteness. If the Lacanian
paradigm of subject formation is customarily understood in film studies to
propose that the advent of the subject is coeval with the moment of entry
into the symbolic, we should note that Ada's elective muteness may not
contradict this mechanically reproduced truism of that conventional
application of Lacanian theory to film studies. But neither does it lend
itself unproblematically to the kind of recuperative utopian narrative of
a Tania Modleski, whose "project," in the words of Ruth Barcan and
Madeleine Fogarty, is "to save the possibility of referential language for
a feminist future when the traditionally mute body, the mother, will be
given the same access to the names--language and speech--that men have
enjoyed" (5). It marks instead an inverse trajectory
whereby Ada's silence signals her withdrawal from a conventional
individualization within the bourgeois patriarchal narratives into which
she has been interpellated, first as the daughter of a father who
practically sells her into marriage, and then as the wife of a man whom
she has not chosen, never met, and can never love. The film projects her
straining to move beyond the straitjacket of the identity positions
sanctioned for her within the patriarchal symbolic. Yet, and this is a
diacritic of my approach, many readings of Ada-as-subject limit themselves
to a narrow interpretation of "symbolic" identity. Lacanian discourse,
in elaborating the beyond of the symbolic (in other words, the realm of
the "real" associated with the drive), better approximates Ada's--and
Baines's--psychic structures.
- For the purposes of structural contrast between normative
heterosexual coupling and the odd (even strange) couple of Ada and Baines,
I have recourse late in the essay to the structure of "courtly love."
Beyond the banalized "symbolic" interpretation of subject-formation that
has bedeviled some readings of the film, Lacan's elaboration of the
structure of courtly love helps explain the excess of Woman, what Lacan
terms the "not All," over and above romantic love and the sexual relation.
I maintain that this ostensibly archaic structure, as it is reappropriated
by Lacan (and glossed by Slavoj Zizek and Renata Salecl), helps us
appreciate Ada's relinquishment of romantic love and what I call her
instrumentalization of sexuality. The Lacanian reading of
courtly love as a psychic structure also permits a
perspectivization of the strange arrangement, or structure, of her
relationship with her lover, George Baines, and of Baines's own equally
irregular desire. In spelling out what I have called their mutual
orientation to excess of enjoyment, I refer to the vocabulary of the
"subject of drive" oriented to jouissance, as opposed to the
subject of
(the Other's) desire. As I understand it--and this understanding is
substantiated by the fastidious exegeses of Bruce Fink--desire and drive
are ultimately along the same continuum, but desire belongs to the realm
of the symbolic, while drive circulates in the (Lacanian) real (see
A Clinical Introduction). The real, and this is a
fundamental distinction in Lacan, is distinguished from quotidian reality.
And jouissance, which is itself associated with drive, not desire,
is as
much about pain as it is about pure pleasure. Jouissance indeed
also indexes what must be protected against, if the subject is to be
maintained: falling into jouissance entails desubjectivation.
- The alternative structure of courtly love is of course to
be read in terms of a filmic code in this instance, rather than as
"straight" psychoanalysis. It is in the interaction of the visual,
narrative, and sound elements of the film that Ada's desire is
represented, and here Lacanian psychoanalysis functions as no more than an
aid in understanding the workings of Ada's desire and drive--it helps us
understand the representation of Ada as a subject constituted by conscious
desire and unconscious drive.
Section I:
Nature Denaturalized; Or, Postcolonial Critique in The Piano
- Ada has been married off by her father and sent to join her new
and as yet unseen husband, Stewart, in New Zealand in the 1850s.
Accompanying Ada on this journey from a satellite of the former imperial
center, Scotland, to New Zealand is Flora (Anna Paquin), her daughter from
an earlier marriage. Stewart is a pakeha pioneer (neither truly
"European" nor accepted as one of the local Maori natives). Sam Neill
describes Stewart as rendered vulnerable by his unrequitable love/lust for
a woman who happens to be his wife but remains truly strange to him: he is
"a man who has lost all his skin" (qtd. in Bilborough 147). Campion takes
great pains to portray Stewart's utterly benighted attitude to the land,
which he can only see as property. He wants to buy Maori land, which they
don't "use" but hold sacred, and he asks Baines, "What do they want it
for?" and "How do they even know it's theirs?" In fact the land has
always been sacred to Maori, and more recently has been a major bone of
contention between Maori and the Pakeha. Stewart is marooned
within the colony as a pakeha and within heteronormative
conventionality as an unfulfilled man in desperate need of a wife--he is
so uptight about his sexuality that Maori call him "Old dry balls." Ada
rejects him in all but name as husband. But Ada is a misfit too. An
elective mute from age six, she relies mainly on Flora for communication.
To the spectator she speaks in voiceover--in her "mind's voice," as she
says. A newcomer to the settler postcolony, she is no less a border
figure than Stewart.
- The film's postcolonialist representation of colonial New
Zealand raises the question of the significance of the lush colonial
setting. Is this only an aesthetic convention? Richard Allen rightly
suggests that the setting is not arbitrary: he observes that Campion has
filmed the bush as "a muddy, glutinous, fecund landscape, a kind of primal
swamp that is filmed in a luminous aquamarine. In Campion's naturalist
vision, the bush is a feminine landscape, boldly celebrated as an antidote
to the denaturing of the land enacted by a patriarchal colonialism"
(46-47).
- The film's treatment of landscape, in other words, is
construed as informed by a progressive politics. I would argue that it is
more, and it is less. It is more than a critique of the "colonial
narrative of origin... as the appropriation and enclosure of landscape as
the first and only expression of civilisation" (Coombs and Gemmell,
"Preface" ix). It is "a liminal zone," as Laurence Simmons observes, "of
beaches of encounter and boundary fences between self and savagery"--the
topos of a landscape of liminality is crucial to the film (132), but I
argue here that landscape, particularly the ocean itself, is also a
liminal zone in that it metaphorically suggests a porous border between
the realms of the symbolic and the real. Campion herself has intimated
the psychic allegory subtended by the film's re-presentation of the
natural: "The bush has got an enchanted, complex, even frightening
quality to it, unlike anything that you see anywhere else.... I was after
the vivid, subconscious imagery of the bush, its dark, inner world" (qtd.
in Bilborough 139). It is the "dark continent," the psychic landscape of
unconscious desire and (death) drive modulated as opposition to the life
force represented in the physical landscape, that the film seeks to
fathom. Precisely because an examination or problematization of subject
construction within a colonial context is a central project of the film,
the "beautiful" as a category of audience reception is problematized by
making this beautiful setting the context for the territorial violence of
the colonial expropriation of Maori land, as well as for sexual violence.
- The film presents a strange love story, but a love story
set in a specific location, and in a specific historical, socio-political,
and discursive context; moreover it is a love story that undoes itself.
Ostensibly, Ada's struggle is to achieve agency--faithfulness to her own
desire--in a social and physical environment that hinders it. Noting some
of the complicating subtexts of this struggle, Bridget Orr observes that
"arguably, The Piano's feminocentric narrative seeks to
recentre its female protagonist by writing her out of history into
romance; to absolve her from settler guilt by linking her through an
erotic economy to Maori" (149).
- There is evidently much contemporary appeal in this
emancipatory narrative of gender as tied to the representation of nature.
However, in articulating the natural environment and the national romance,
Campion ironically invites the question whether her representation of the
relationships among landscape and racial hierarchy and material conditions
is not somewhat unreconstructed. In this sense, the film's treatment of
landscape is less than politically progressive. Anna Neill has rightly
noted that "despite, or more precisely, because of the way the film's
luscious footage of remote bush trades in the exotic, it brings New
Zealand right into the global economic arena, offering its hardly touched
landscape up to the tourist's (or foreign investor's) eye" (137).
However, Campion is aware that nature, as the "first" world of Maori
culture, cannot be simply counterposed to pakeha or colonial
civilization.
- Whether representing social arrangements such as marriage
or expressions of the body such as desire, the film refuses to participate
in the simple opposition of nature and culture. Thus the life force
represented by the lush natural environment is contrasted not only with
the deadening conformity of a dislocated European culture, but also with
Ada's "dark talent" for self-annihilation, which her father had
presciently identified as fundamental to her being. This opposition of
the death drive and life force is repeated in the mother-daughter pairing
of the austere and "driven" Ada with the aptly named Flora, as a young
girl full of life and as much at home in the landscape as Maori children.
- Denaturalization, I would suggest, is an overdetermined
figure for the film: the denaturalization of identitarian and libidinal,
as well as ontological, social, or epistemological objects. If landscape
has often functioned to territorialize the imagined national identity,
this denaturalization has a critical function. The liminal space of the
colony is an appropriate context in which to dramatize the
destabilizations of subject-position: Campion's film works to destabilize
identities or subject positions with regard to race and gender or sexual
position in order to interrogate the relations between pakehas and
Maoris,
and to suggest that a colonial structure depends on the subordination and
"feminization" or queering of Maoris, as well as on the subordination of
women in a hierarchical structure. Colonialism is about racial and sexual
oppression. The postcolonial setting of The Piano emphasizes
that Stewart is a placeholder for bourgeois postcolonial white
masculinity in New Zealand, an identity that is specifically in
crisis.
- The political and economic inflections of this crisis are
muted in the film, but it is clear that the location is not incidental.
Linda Dyson has argued that the film "re-presents the story of
colonization in New Zealand as a narrative of reconciliation." Here in
the periphery of the former empire, argues Dyson, "the film addresses the
concerns of the dominant white majority... providing a textual palliative
for postcolonial anxieties generated by the contemporary struggles over
the nation's past" (267). Dyson remarks that "the critical acclaim
surrounding the film constructed The Piano as a feminist
exploration of nineteenth-century sexuality and tended to ignore the way
in which 'race' is embedded in the text" (267). The film rehearses a
familiar Orientalist trope: Maoris are once again on the wrong side of the
nature/culture, primitive/modern divide. They are "on the margins of the
film as the repositories of an authentic, unchanging and simple way of
life"--a paradise or "New Jerusalem" which could become the site for the
self-regenerative project of the whites "energized by the utopian fantasy
of building a society free of the political and economic divisions and
inequalities of Europe" (268). The British Crown in 1840 actually signed
the Treaty of Waitangi with five hundred Maori tribal leaders acquiring
land from Maori, who in return could see this moment as marking their
achievement of sovereign national status. The Crown did not honor the
treaty, and Maori have frequently had to fight over the issue of land
acquisition. The treaty has become a rallying point for a bicultural
Maori Renaissance, but today, despite the worldwide recognition of Maori
claims, they remain a peripheral people in political and social terms
(269-70).
- Near the film's conclusion, the relocation of Ada and
Baines to a house in Nelson, because it is a landscape of apparent
contentment, has misled some critics to conclude, reading the film's own
narrative too literally, that Ada has chosen "life" at the end of the
film. Felicity Coombs and Suzanne Gemmell, the editors of what they
themselves describe as "an authoritative collection" of criticism on
the film (x), venture the editorial generalization that the film
"establish[es]"
a "colonial narrative" only to "disrupt" it "via the narrative
machinations of romance, whereby desire transcends the unequal relations
of power and, albeit violently, the colony releases the heroine to pursue
her fortunes with her lover. Such an ending is a testament to the
problematic terrain that the film must negotiate in order to resolve the
converging post-colonial themes it employs en route" (viii-ix). Even
critics who do not, against the evidence of the film's ending, endorse a
sentimental narrative of the integration of Ada within a completely
fulfilling marriage to Baines in Nelson--and Dyson is a good
example--undertheorize the film's conclusion with regard to Ada herself.
Dyson fails to underscore what I would argue is crucial--the imbrication
of the sexual with the sociopolitical and postcolonial registers. I don't
wish to single out Dyson but to point up a blockage in the body of
criticism of the film: that it inadequately conceptualizes the
interlinkages even when it takes the trouble to mention them. The result
is a substantial underinterpretation or a partial understanding. This
essay demonstrates that such readings miss an important dimenson of
irresolution: the crucial trajectory of the drive that retains, at least
as fantasy, Ada's passages to jouissance against the semblance of
happy matrimony.
Section II:
A Beautiful Relationship or a Perverse Couple?
- In this section I discuss the film's representation of Ada as
desiring subject, a subject that also seeks access to the freedom to
pursue an "other" satisfaction than the one she is officially granted
within the family romance. My intention is to raise the question of why
Ada seeks something beyond the limits of what looks like the best human
love can offer: a relationship that grows into a non-exploitative,
mutually respectful, and erotically complete arrangement, one that
culminates in an apparently happy marriage with room for growth. This, as
I indicated at the outset, is an issue around which the most vigorous
debates about the film have raged: What does Ada want? What other
satisfaction does she seek if she rejects marriage? Could marital bliss
with a man who comes to love her be really all that she desires--and does
the film's power not lie in its unmasking of the power relations
undergirding the institution of conventional marriage? Why does Ada
consent to the "bargain" Baines proposes, which as he himself observes as
the relationship develops, makes a "whore" out of her, if she is a figure
on whom so many viewers have projected (cathected?) a passionate
resistance to patriarchal relations? I will discuss these important
issues. But first I want to re-emphasize here that ultimately it is the
relationship with Baines that allows us to recognize Ada's access
to that satisfaction, so a consideration of Baines must be a part of any
analysis of Ada's dark talent, her drive toward satisfaction.
- The film received a great deal of attention as a riveting
and profoundly disturbing portrait of a woman's self-assertion. It has
less frequently been discussed as an equally powerful representation of
the remaking of masculinity in the postcolony. Many critics, while
offering illuminating, complex, and even confessedly ambivalent and
multiple readings of Ada (Barcan and Fogarty, for instance),
underestimate the role of Ada's partner, Baines, as though his desire were
beneath serious consideration. Dyson, in an essay that is in many ways
solid and helpful, focuses almost exclusively on Ada, missing a crucial
dimension of the film by underestimating the significance of Baines's
borderline subjectivity and unorthodox libidinal impulses--although
admittedly Campion herself cannot sustain the oddity of Baines's "love"
and too quickly contains it in a more conventional, tranquil domesticity,
as if he had suddenly relinquished his journey toward going native and
had become a respectable burgher in colonial garb, embracing a new
domesticity in Nelson with Ada. Many other persuasive readings, such as
Bridget Orr's, that purport to be attentive to the "speaking subjectivity"
and "accession to agency" of Ada as a resistant and "desiring subject,"
underestimate the importance of Baines's desiring subjectivity. Orr's
interpretation cannot go beyond noticing the film's "final wish-fulfilling
retreat from the 'frontier,' the back-blocks site of pioneer endeavour, to
the gentility of Nelson, [which] concludes a process by which Baines is
transformed into the sentimental hero of female desire, while Stewart is
left alone in the bush" (149). The film in such
accounts appears little more than a narrative, albeit an admittedly
complex one, of a white man saved from going native by a process of
something like embourgeoisement--a return to the settler colonial
fold and a return to domesticity.
- I want to redirect exclusive attention from Ada onto her
relationship with Baines, the perplexities of which are precisely the
source of the puzzlement of even friendly feminist spectators with whom I
align myself.[5] I propose that a signal
contribution of The Piano lies in its representation of the
erotic attachment and detachment that constitute this
relationship. The film is certainly gripping, but it is also unusual (and
this is insufficiently emphasized in the critical reception of the film)
in that here in the settler postcolony it is the white male
subject (whiteness being the presumptively invisible marker of
race)--represented by Stewart--who is represented as being in crisis. It
is the white man in the film who, emerging from the nightmare of
colonialism, seems in need of therapeutic transformation, not the
distressed colonial black- or brown-skinned subject. But Baines too is a
subject in crisis--except that he is in transition toward going native,
as indicated by the unfinished moko on his face. So in a sense
he is in a quite different psychosocial place from Stewart.
- There is a noticeable effort on the part of the filmmaker
to point the way to the redemption of the white male colonial subject in
the case of Baines. As the third element in the love triangle with Ada and
Stewart, Baines is a pivotal figure whom Ada first resists as an "oaf" but
gradually warms to when he turns out to have unsounded depths. In addition
to transgressing the border of sexual identification, he also crosses
cultural barriers, as Harvey Keitel states: "Baines has given up his
culture--he's not a pakeha and he's not a Maori. He's nowhere,
looking for a place to be" (qtd. in Bilborough 143). If Baines is culturally
borderline he is, even more intriguingly, sexually liminal. This is
visually indicated in an early scene in which both a Maori woman and a
young man "dressed as a woman" (Campion 53) make sexual overtures to him:
clearly he appeals to both men and women, and this already introduces a
degree of doubt about his desire, a doubt that is encouraged by the fact
that he is living apart from his wife, who never appears in the film. But
this visual index of his ambiguous sexuality does scant justice to the
radically "border" status of Baines's eroticized body in the film, and in
some ways is really a red herring if it suggests a latent homosexuality: I
argue that in his own way Baines wants "something else" too, like Ada.
- The need to complicate the structure of what Baines
really wants as a subject is indicated in the screenplay of the film where
Campion repeatedly describes Baines as a kind of radically innocent or
culturally naive voluptuary, who desires neither an ordinary relationship
of the kind consecrated in marriage nor a kind of crude sexual encounter,
however sustained. Baines, I would argue, wants in some way to
"suffer"--and to enjoy through the suffering, which is precisely the
meaning of jouissance--the body of the other in this subjective
sense. In
her own screenplay directions, Campion repeatedly emphasizes Baines's "odd
sensual pleasure-taking" (Campion 61). When he has secured his "bargain"
with Ada, we see an indication of what he really wants: "Twice he closes
his eyes and breathes deeply. BAINES is experiencing an unpractised
sense of appreciation and lust" (Campion 56; emphasis added). The
discordant yoking together of "appreciation and lust" is an index of
Campion's struggle to demarcate the psychic territory of drive that she is
trying to map--the territory one might say of a kind of "perverse
couple."[6] She is entirely uninterested
in either the hydraulics of sex or the soap operas of romance.
- Contrary to what some commentators insist, even the
infamous "bargain" for the piano is something more or less than sexual
harassment; and it is not simply rape (see Barcan and Fogarty 7). One
reviewer, Kerryn Goldsworthy, even suggests the compact is of a kind that
"doesn't really have a name" (qtd. in Barcan and Fogarty 10). For one
thing, Ada herself is actively bartering for her piano from the very
beginning of the film, even before Baines says that he wants to "touch"
her as she plays. Certainly it is Ada who approaches Baines to arrange
for the piano to be retrieved from the beach, so that one could say that
it is she who endows the piano with its commodity character (exchange
value) as well as its symbolic value for her. Yet it is Stewart who, at
the suggestion of Baines, barters piano lessons from Ada in exchange for
land--and Baines approaches Stewart first with his proposal. At this
initial phase Ada has little say in the bargain. Stewart has a key role,
and he and Baines both treat her at least initially as a tradeable
commodity--woman as a means of exchange between men. This homosociality
complicates the bargain Ada and Baines strike together for the piano
itself. Ada does not or cannot refuse the lessons, but neither does she
communicate, even in writing to Stewart, how Baines queers the barter.
- A crucial turning point in the relationship is marked by
the moment when she comes to find the mere fulfilling of the bargain
without the erotic component unsatisfactory to her. By this time Baines
has practically given the piano to her to his own disadvantage, so
for Ada it is no longer just about winning back the piano, at least in the
later stages of the game. As Neil Robinson correctly notices, Baines
gives her the piano because he too has come to feel that the body cannot
be enjoyed unless affect is also invested in it (31).
Yet this is not to say that it is simply a matter of Ada and Baines
growing fonder (in the sense of romantic love) of each other despite the
"ugliness" of the barter--nothing makes this point more indisputable
than the actual ending of the film, and this ending is emphatically not
the scene of happy matrimony as so many have suggested. It is the frankly
erotic nature of the terms that fuels their "love." I would add that
the apparent domestication, or taming, of Baines's specific libidinal
drive suggests a failure of energy or nerve on the part of the
filmmaker--Campion's interest in sustaining the symmetry of Baines's drive
appears to flag in comparison with her pointed concern to retain Ada's
exorbitant drive, which courses well beyond the boundary of bourgeois
domesticity, as I argue below. Surely we have here a relationship that is
more than the enforced prostitution of a desperate woman without choices
by a sexually predatory male, even though there are elements of both
prostitution and predation in play?
- I suggest that what is "more" is precisely the excess
that I am trying to trace, particularly in Section III of the essay. It
has to be acknowledged that the relationship grows as the story develops,
but there is something about the ending of the film that suggests that
ordinary bourgeois domesticity, no matter how emancipated the partners,
does not speak the language of the drive, which is so crucial in fathoming
Ada's continuing urge to tarry with the negative even when she has
available to her the sunny positive of married life in Nelson. It is an
excess of the drive speaking through the body--the real body, and not just
the fleshly. Explicitly and self-consciously, Campion plumbs the
unconscious or extraconscious intelligence of the body:
My exploration can be a lot more sexual [than if she had been writing in
the nineteenth century], a lot more investigative of the power of
eroticism, which can add another dimension. Because then you get involved
in the actual bodyscape of it as well, because the body has certain
effects, like a drug almost, certain desires for erotic satisfaction which
are very strong forces too. (qtd. in Bilborough 140)
Campion's epigraph to the screenplay unwittingly captures something of
this excess, although she elects a banal vocabulary: "the romantic impulse
is in all of us," she writes, "but it's not part of a sensible way of
living. It's a heroic path and it generally ends dangerously. I treasure
it in the sense that I believe it's a path of great courage. It can also
be the path of the foolhardy and the compulsive" (7). Campion's monitory
tone echoes Lacan's account of the attraction of transgression. But the
"romantic impulse" as conceived within the bourgeois ideal of happiness is
a lure; for Lacan, love requires moving beyond a limit. Whatever Campion
says, the film itself has complex resonances for a reader of Lacan.
- It would be perverse to suggest that Baines, and
masculine sexuality, are more important in the film than the issue
of feminine sexuality, or to focus on his desire to the exclusion of
female desire in the film. And of course there are other women in the
film besides Ada, and a discussion of the sexual economy in this colonial
context cannot ignore the structural position of those other women within
it. They help us to see Ada's desire more clearly, if only by contrast.
But they also complicate our understanding of Ada's structural positioning
in settler colonial society. Many of the other white women in the film
are presented in rather complex hierarchies of race and class. One of the
white women, Nessie, who has designs on Baines as in effect a bachelor (he
is separated from his wife), is presented as infantile and a creature of
petty jealousies and dreams. But even the white matriarch, Aunt Morag, is
presented as gullible and controlling, hardly an attractive figure. Her
gullibility is only redoubled when one recognizes to what extent she has
incorporated settler colonial ideology. The native women have a natural
vitality, but they and their men remain even more gullible than Morag and
Nessie (as when the Maori in the audience are taken in by the shadow play
performance of Bluebeard wielding an ax, in a foreshadowing of Stewart's
own act of chopping off Ada's finger; the whites in the audience do not
have the same reaction). In effect, Maori remain relegated to the natural
world, outside of "culture," that is to say opposed to the "civilized"
world of the colonial white man. Under the colonial regime, natives and
whites cannot occupy the same cultural space except as divided from each
other. Baines straddles the border between the races, at least in the
first half of the film, but ultimately he cannot bring it down, even in
himself, which perhaps is why our final view of him is of him dressed
again in white settler clothes. There is, in short, much that is
troubling about the way Maori are presented in the film, although one does
not have to go as far as a 1993 newsletter of the Coalition against Sexual
Violence, which reviewed The Piano as a racist and even
sexist film (Barcan and Fogarty 7).
- Campion is not entirely insensitive to race and class
concerns. At some level the film also makes the white female colonial
subject exorbitant to the colonial economy, since the film's theme is
resistance and agency. Ada and her daughter are able in the worst
circumstances to carve out a zone of intensely private fulfillment and
therefore an empowerment; this empowerment is not commensurate with the
empowerment that would be available in the public sphere to women. The
film also subtly ironizes the claims of Western modernity and
civilization, suggesting that the white male postcolonial subject may
redeem himself not by a return to the former metropolitan center but by
way of a self-deconstruction. The film's double project, then, is to
trace the unmaking of postcolonial subjectivity and to imagine a
radical reconceptualization of love--between subjects that are no longer
merely subjects of desire. The film does give fresh meaning to the
cliché that love requires the dissolution of the self by
provocatively exploring the contours of an "inhuman" love as a
constitutive contradiction of ordinary romantic love. Perhaps no film
could fully succeed in such a project.
- The film works hard to save Baines from heteronormative
conventionality as a subject. Unlike Stewart, whose desire for Ada is
conventional and desperate, Baines's desire for Ada appears tepid
to a casual viewer. But if his desire seems attenuated, he is psychically
driven by a lust for an "other satisfaction" that also drives
Ada. Campion herself emphasizes the word "satisfaction" in this
connection (qtd. in Bilborough 140) and explicitly indicates her interest
in something like the drive as associated with satisfaction: "We grow up
with so many expectations around [sex], that it's almost like the pure
sexual erotic impulse is lost to us" (qtd. in Bilborough 138). The film
also eroticizes Baines's body. In one charged scene, the nude Baines
caresses Ada's piano, while Campion's camera's gaze in turn "caresses" his
buttocks, at eye level. Sue Gillett's observation here is that "jealously
[Baines] wishes to be the piano, to be the receiver of such rapturous
touching,... to have such haunting music evoked in and through his own
body, to tremble under the powerful cadences of [Ada's] transcendence"
(278-9). Yet Gillett says little about the nature of Ada's transcendence
or Baines's wish to "be the piano." The "other satisfaction," according
to Lacan's formulae of sexuation, is available only to Woman. But
Baines's desire to "tremble," the transcendence Baines "really wants," is
to enjoy and be enjoyed as Woman.
- Campion's own notation is suggestive of Baines's unusual
orientation to jouissance: in the direction to a scene when Ada is
playing contrary to Baines's wishes, she writes, "Ada starts playing
again; Baines feels powerless. He no longer admires her absorption with
the piano, he is jealous of it" (67). In the notes to the scene in
which Baines caresses the piano Campion hints at Baines's aspiration to a
kind of ec-stasy, or transcendence of the body: "As he wipes the smooth
wood he becomes aware of his nakedness. His movements become slower until
he is no longer cleaning, but caressing the piano" (49). And the
film's transgressive momentum lies in its ability to tease us into a
beyond where even an inhuman love could be conceived as affording an other
satisfaction, where "being played like the piano" might function as a
figure for the play of the drive through the real body enjoying
jouissance
beyond the reach of "speaking being." My attempt is to resituate that
inhuman love at the heart of the film.
- The trajectory of Campion's project involves a
deconstruction and reconstruction of masculinity, as well as the
deformation and retexturing of racialized postcolonial
subjectivity. If the film has a purpose in refashioning postcolonial
masculinity, it is precisely to offer an alternative to the violence
(epistemological, existential, sexual, emotional), not only of colonialism
but of conventional love. In his relations with Ada, the film seems to
present Baines as being redeemed as a "sensitive" ("non-masculine") man, a
fool for love, in short the regenerate man of women's melodrama. But this
is an inadequate description. It turns out that his "hysterical" desire is
not so much to love or have sex with Ada as to be loved. In
Gillett's words, "contravening the Oedipal logic of desire, Baines comes
to the realization that his desire, crucially, has the passive aim
'normally' allotted to woman. His desire is for her desire" (282). His
passivized--one might even call it masochistic--masculinity is a major
theme of the film, in stark contrast to the violent and stereotypical
phallic masculinity of Stewart. He rises out of the confines of his raced
and gendered body, as well as beyond the confines of the Oedipal
structure. I had earlier quoted a comment by Harvey Keitel to the effect
that Baines is "looking for a place to be, and he finds it through his
ability to suffer" (qtd in Bilborough 143). I want to read Baines's
desire to suffer as a desire to enjoy the body of the other through
suffering--which is precisely the meaning of jouissance.
- Stewart's entrapment in the melodramatic orthodoxy of
bourgeois love, within the parameters of which he is condemned to being
uncomplicatedly masculine, is understandable in terms of the arc of
desire. But Baines's fantasmatic ambition is clearly of another order,
and the film fascinatingly makes us distinguish between Stewart's and
Baines's dispositions to desire, by first soliciting the viewer's
identification with Stewart, followed by a disidentification, and
therefore a return of the look to Baines's strange positioning as a
subject.[7] The difference between these
two pakeha men is also clear in that Stewart is much more anxious
to retain some anchor for his endangered postcolonial masculinity, much
more anxious not to open himself to feminization than is Baines. Stewart
is defensive about all the markers of European superiority in matters of
society and sexuality. By contrast, Baines is presented in the position of
eroticized object, part of the film's tactic (noted by Barcan and Fogarty)
of offering female viewers opportunities for erotic identification that
are rare in contemporary mainstream cinema (7). Stewart is anerotic;
Baines becomes an erotic object not only for Ada but for the (female)
viewer. But my point is not so much to dwell on the contrast between the
two men, to condemn one and praise the other, as to mark the subtle way
the film explores an alternative to the melodrama of love.
- More than being increasingly drawn to Baines (which is
partly true), Ada finds herself increasingly drawn by Baines's desire to
be loved by her: "I want you to love me, but you can't," he says. This is
in proportion to the degree to which she is repulsed by Stewart's
desperate and violent desire to possess her. Stewart's desperation
(metonymic of the pakeha's desperate confrontation with the fact
of his
own impotent interstitiality in the postcolony) is not lost on the Maori.
Baines offers her the promise of a love that an ordinary (violent) man
could never offer her. It is this promise, the film seems to
suggest, that draws the elective mute out of her silence and her death
wish--for it is clear that the typical heterosexual domesticity, marriage,
or love she had previously been offered were among the aspects of a
woman's fate Ada was declining through her exorbitant silence.
- But it is precisely here that many astute observers and
commentators, such as Gillett and Gordon, tend to turn the film into an
exploration of issues of consent, rape, and Ada's progression toward a
sentimental love, even a love contained within the paradigm of bourgeois
domesticity (see Gordon 197). But such interpretations, I have argued,
make the film seem a rather simpler artifact than it is, set the viewer up
for "disappointment" and, worse, obliterate a crucial "remainder" or
"excess," a conatus of negativity to which Ada cleaves and to which
cleaves the sentimental narrative. The excess seems to be minimized even
by those who, like Dyson, register Ada's resistant performative. Dyson
focuses on the presumed choice of "life" that Ada makes, ultimately
undertheorizing both the excess as well as the issue of postcolonial
masculinity that she also recognizes is at the heart of the film: "At the
end of the film, Ada chooses 'life' after jumping overboard with her
piano. She leaves the instrument (the symbol of European bourgeois
culture) at the bottom of the ocean, thus severing her connection with the
imperial centre and begins her life anew with her man who has already
'gone native'" (268).
- On the contrary, I would suggest that if she renounces
one instrument she also takes up another--that Baines becomes Ada's
instrument and Ada his. This is why Ada can ultimately renounce the
piano, and not because Baines has given her marital bliss and love. This
brings us closer to understanding why Ada, who has taken such a
significant step in renouncing ordinary love and sexual relationships as
having elected to go mute, should consent so readily to the strange
compact with Baines. Even some critics such as Barcan and Fogarty, who
find the category of romantic love apposite to describing Ada and Baines's
relationship, admit that it fails to capture something important about the
"affective economy" of the relationship, and it is not just that this
economy is "subtended by an economic one" (12). My sense is that Ada's
"surrender" has in the final analysis less to do with loving that
particular man and more to do with finding, or at least seeking, a kind of
pleasure--not love but a kind of jouissance. Nor is it Baines's
"actual lived body"--to use Donald Lowe's phrase--that she wants to
"enjoy" in jouissance.
- If the film disappoints, it is in losing track of Baines's
transgressive drive, his aspirations to jouissance, while Ada is
permitted to remain complex and mysterious. The film also seems to leave
underdeveloped the ethics of Baines's transgressive performative, which is
really a crucial foil to Ada's performative.[8] In the final moments of the film, her memory of
jouissance persists as her subversive secret, interrupting the
trajectory
and temporality of melodrama and refusing the idyll of bourgeois
domesticity. Yet Campion allows Baines to turn back into a frog, into a
happily married white burgher, after having gone so far to save him from
erotic and racialized conventionality. In part, this essay's project is
an anamnesis, or re-membering of Baines's lost enjoyment. If we do not
attend to Baines's orientation to an other jouissance, we risk
reading
only his desire and misconstruing his relationship with Ada, just as we
would if we read only Ada's desire in her consenting to a "deal" to regain
her piano and to a marriage with Baines.
- Readings that focus on desire are too reductive
to account for the refractions of love that the film presents to us.
After Stewart discovers what Ada has been doing instead of giving Baines
piano lessons, he first tries to assault her, but since she coldly rejects
him, he boards her up in the house with her daughter. Alone in her bed,
she is seen kissing her own reflection in a hand mirror: this is neither
narcissism nor an example of a woman newly in love. It is a portrait of a
woman re-discovering a pleasure that exceeds its object or makes
an accident of its object. At night, in bed with her daughter,
she first lasciviously caresses the little girl and then, in a scene
rarely commented on, approaches Stewart, running her hands over his
chest and then between his buttocks. This is the first time
she makes a sexual advance to Stewart, whom she has always rejected with
phobic energy. But when Stewart reacts with relief admixed with panic,
she turns away, and he finds himself unable to grasp the opportunity that
has been his obsession: he is "unmanned" by this advance, as Campion
tells us (92). Ada's is not a gesture of rapprochement; she
still denies him. Shortly afterwards, in a fit of jealous rage, Stewart
chops off Ada's index finger in a symbolic castration for which Baines
will later try to compensate with a prosthesis of his own fashioning.[9] But where is Ada's jouissance?
What does the woman want?
- Certainly phallic jouissance. But Ada seeks
something
else through Baines than what "Old dry balls" Stewart could offer. Were
Ada simply "in love" with Baines, it would be strange for her to transfer
desire onto her daughter and then, without missing a beat, onto
Stewart. It is more productive to recognize in this strange recathexis an
anamorphic emblem of the circuit of the drive as it seeks an other
satisfaction in keeping with Lacan's dictum that "all the needs of
speaking beings are contaminated by the fact of being involved in an other
satisfaction" (Four Fundamental 51). Clearly, it is not
Stewart she wants, but erotic fulfillment; nor is he a stand-in for Baines,
for sex with Baines is evidently quite as satisfying as one could expect
it to be. Rather, we are witnessing here a token of the
instrumentalization of love in the service of an other satisfaction, and
Campion's notation confirms that "Ada seems removed from Stewart as if she
has a separate curiosity of her own" (Campion 90). Ada wants to be a
subject not wholly defined by the Other's desire--to be what Fink
calls a "subject [that is] someThing else" ("Desire" 37).
- If we take Baines's own pleasure as seriously as Ada's
drive toward satisfaction, it is hard to ignore the fact that while there
is clearly some sympathy and affection that Baines feels for Ada, there is
also, from the beginning, something radically narcissistic in Baines's
desire to be looked at with the gaze of love, to "be the piano."[10] In truth, from his perspective too this
is a non-reciprocal relationship, not constrained within the paradigm of
melodrama. Baines does not want only romantic love, any more than Ada
thinks good sex or good companionship negates her misgivings about sexual
relationships within patriarchy or about marriage and its social meaning
within the Oedipal paradigm. A description of the forms of their
jouissance requires a different structure.
Section III:
Not Courtship But Courtly Love
- If I have returned to this film that has already been discussed at
such length, it is in part because of a dissatisfaction with the
discussion I have already described, but also because of the lessons to be
gleaned from Campion's suggestive exploration of the psychic economy of
love. Some of these lessons are anticipated by the Lacanian distinction
between romantic courtship and courtly love. Sam Neill, who plays
Stewart, observes that "this film explores both the desperate and the
wonderful things that happen between men and women in a way that's not
often done in films. And these things make for moments of sublime ecstasy
and moments of the most terrible fear, of terror. It's been pretty scary
territory to be acting in--it helps to have had a little life experience"
(qtd. in Bilborough 147). Life experience provides, if nothing else, a
recognition that we never find a total, blissful love. We contrast this
actually experienced imperfection of human love with what one might call
the myth (myths being something other than mere falsehoods) of a perfect,
and therefore inhuman, love.
- A useful framework for understanding the irregular
dispositions of the two main characters toward pleasure or
jouissance is
Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic adaptation of "courtly love." While courtly
love may appear to be an outmoded discursive paradigm, it can help us
to grasp something of the real power of the film's representation of Ada's
strange relationship with Baines.[11]
What's more, the admittedly extreme artificiality of courtly love today is
precisely its strongest recommendation because it defamiliarizes the
category of bourgeois sexual relationship afresh and reperspectivizes the
overdetermination of Baines's cultural and sexual liminality as
well.
- Within the optics of courtly love's categories adapted to
a psychoanalytic understanding, we need no longer agonize over whether
Baines and Ada are involved in a romance or a rape, or whether they really
find domestic bliss in Nelson. Ada's strange compact with Baines comes
into sharper focus as neither simply the quid pro quo of desire, nor a
reciprocation of exactly contrapuntal trajectories of desire. It is
rather a mutual a-relational groping after jouissance that is
nevertheless
supported by the scaffolding of a relationship. How else might we explain
the fact that images of Ada's near-drowning intrude immediately after the
scenes of her new, happily married life with Baines? Why does Ada not
choose between these two "endings"? What is this trace of trauma that is
nurtured by Ada in the midst or embrace of married bliss?
- Ada's settling into married life with Baines is certainly
shocking in its bathos and tameness.[12] "Feminist friends," Gillett writes, "have
criticized the film for offering [an] apparent return [at the end of the
film] to sexual conventionality" (280); but as Gillett observes,
this is not really the "end" of the film:
The seeming closure offered by the domestic ending is only temporary. It
is immediately undercut by another vision: Ada's body is floating
underwater above her piano, Victorian dress ballooning around her. The
return to this second image, coming so soon after Ada's rescue from
drowning, unsettles the happily-ever-after of the couple, not in that it
forebodes an end to this happiness but in its recognition of the insistent
presence of another territory and mode of experience. (281;
emphasis added)
In part agreeing here with Gillett, I argue that this "other territory" is
the territory of the Lacanian real (distinguished from the symbolic and
the imaginary). The image of a delicious death is not merely
"consign[ed]... to fantasy" (Bruzzi 266; emphasis added); it
irrupts into the idyll of the actual, disappointing Gillett's "feminist
friends," perhaps, but redeeming the melodramatic bourgeois idyll of love
through the anamorphotic ideal of courtly love in the real.
Apparently some viewers--like Gillett--have the experience of being
"affected... very deeply" by the film, "entranced, moved, dazed" (Gillett
286). But if those feminist viewers were often nonplussed or felt
betrayed first by Ada's participation in the not very feminist "bargain"
and then by her apparent scuttling of the narrative of feminine resistance
by acquiescing to a conventional and conventionally happy marriage to
Baines, could it not have been because they had the experience but missed
the meaning? That they underestimated the tour de force of Ada's
displacement, her anamorphosis, of "love" from the actual to the real,
even if they acknowledged that, like Gillett herself, they felt that they
had visited "another territory," and therefore felt
"reluctant to re-enter the everyday world after the film had
finished" (286; emphasis added)?
- The last moments of the film do seem a letdown. But as I
have already suggested, it is not so much because Ada settles into a
conventional settler marriage, "a sensible way of living," in Campion's
equally sensible phrasing. In some minor respects the film is bathetic
because, even if Ada retains at least the memory of jouissance as
a subversive secret splitting the temporality of the film, the film loses
track of Baines's jouissance. Baines has a crucial role
in enabling Ada's passage to jouissance and her safe passage back
from what otherwise could be annihilation for her. Like the knight of
courtly love, his service to his lady is to enable her access to
"enjoyment," jouissance--an "other" satisfaction. They are
partners in supporting each other, "renouncing" romantic love as well as
taking satisfaction through each other.[13]
- Lacan's formulae of sexuation suggest that an other
satisfaction is theoretically available to the position "Woman," even if
no actual women experience it. "Woman" is a category under erasure. The
Woman is an empty category. But that is what makes possible the fantasy of
occupying that position. As fantasy, it can be indulged equally by
anatomical men and anatomical women. In theorizing the problem to which
courtly love offers an alternative, Lacan says that there is no sexual
relation: "the only basis of analytic discourse is the statement that
there is no--that it is impossible to pose--sexual relation" (qtd. in
Heath 53). In the Lacanian misprision of the paradigm of courtly love,
the Woman is coded as the Lady, the obscure object of the courtly lover
who must renounce sexual relations (not the same thing as "the sexual
relation") with her. To "have" her he must forgo her. But in what sense
does the courtly lover forgo her?
The Anamorphosis of Anamorphosis
- Everybody "falls in love" sometime, as the song goes; people fall
in and out of love, experience its successes and its failures, and sex has
its place. How is courtly love different? If Lacan's disillusioned
perspective (that there is no sexual relation) is meaningful, what does
the distance between everyday or ordinary notions of love and Lacan's
technically evacuated category of love and the sexual relation signify? In
the first place, as Charles Shepherdson puts it, "sexuality" is not
completed--does not achieve satisfaction--in sexual intercourse. Rather,
if we remember the Lacanian distinction between the object of need and the
object of demand, "the first being necessary to biological life, the
second designating an object that belongs to the field of the Other,"
sexuality "emerges in the difference between need and demand,
and... its object and its modes of satisfaction, are distinct from the
satisfaction of biological need," although sexuality may find expression as
the bodily inscription of demand (139). Sexuality is "not all" contained
in the symbolic register, but exceeds the law. The excess can be enjoyed
only by God or Woman, both of which are structural positions and not
people. Since ordinarily women never experience this excessive
jouissance, and since the structural position "Woman" is under
erasure, Woman's completion occurs in the real where the sexed Other
obtains. Courtly love formulates this (phantasmatic) perfected love as
anamorphosis. If the inamorata, the Lady of courtly love, is allowed
access to a real jouissance with the real sexed God, then the
courtly
lover, or knight, might also be imagined as wishing for a real
jouissance
and completion according to the Lacanian formula "There is some One."
- But I want to disfigure even this anamorphotic figure of
courtly love, and to suggest that the courtly lover's goal may be not the
Lady (even as sublimated) but her real jouissance: her experience
that "There is some One" ('Y a de l'un). The Piano
points obliquely to this insight by making Baines an instantiation of the
anamorphic courtly lover. What the sexually liminal Baines "really wants"
(unconsciously fantasizes) is to enjoy the jouissance of Woman, as
though
he occupied the empty position. The film represents this anamorphically
in the attenuation of his desire. Baines seems to recognize the
impossibility of love ("I want you to love me but you can't," he tells
her, more truly than even he understands) and the inevitable failure
covered over in love by what we usually call the "consummation" of love,
namely the coming together, in sexual union, of the lovers. He "chooses"
to renounce that always imperfect love, his act of abnegation mirroring
the much more obvious election of silence on Ada's part, for a higher,
more ritualized and purer love--in short, an anamorphosis of ordinary love.
It is in this sense that the courtly lover, here represented by Baines,
forgoes romantic love with the lady--but one "forgoes" only in the hope of
attaining some higher goal.
- Ordinary romantic love is circumscribed in the ambit of
desire, converging there with, at best, what Lacan would call "phallic"
jouissance, which can be experienced by women as well as men, in
sex. By
contrast, courtly love, precisely because it is a formal, ritual
sacrament that displaces God in the realm of jouissance, affords a
satisfaction that love could never promise. (This ability finally to enjoy
enjoyment [Fink, "Desire and the Drives" 41] is something even a thinker
of the order of Marx could miss in the admittedly odd arrangement called
courtly love.)[14] Desire and
satisfaction are really at odds in romantic love and ordinary sex; Lacan
notes that most adults never want to wake up--"when something happens in
their dreams that threatens to cross over into the real, it distresses
them so much that they immediately awaken... they go on dreaming"
(Seminar XX 53). Fink observes that the later Lacan of
The Four Fundamental Concepts does not argue that the subject
who has traversed his most basic fantasy in order to live out the drive
[vivre la pulsion] "becomes a kind of non-stop pleasure-seeking
machine, but rather that desire stops inhibiting the subject from
obtaining satisfaction" (41). Desire is also "a defense against
satisfaction" (43). You can have your cake and eat it.
- Courtly love, as an anamorphosis of ordinary love,
obviates the premises of romantic love and the usual laments of
"sublunary" lovers. It shows how for Baines Ada is something more, or
less, than a woman he falls for and seduces, just as it shows that Ada is
after something that is not "in" Baines. The principle of courtly love is
a kind of abnegation of ordinary completion or consummation, a denial from
the outset of what ordinary lovers are said to pine for. Then why
do they have sex? How, to return to one of the key questions I
posed above, should we read the sexual relationship of the couple, which
has caused such flutter even among the film's more sophisticated
commentators?
- I would argue that as mere mortals Baines and Ada can
hardly help seeking satisfaction through sex and romantic love--but that
is not where satisfaction obtains, and they "know" this without perhaps
understanding it. As Lacan writes in Seminar XX, "all the needs
of speaking beings are contaminated by the fact of being involved in an
other satisfaction... that those needs may not live up to" (51).[15] That men and women couple or marry
does not mean that they have contradicted the Lacanian nostrum that there
is no sexual relation. The failure of the sexual relation is inevitable
because, as Lacan's formulae of sexuation suggest, it is only God as a
sexed Other who perfects the sexual relation and the jouissance
of the Woman. This sexed God is not the Christian God but is
"unsignifiable" in speech, beyond language, in Serge André's terms
(91). "The sexual act of coitus," André goes on to say,
takes on then the figure of an eternal missed act where repeatedly the
absence of the sexual relation, the failure to reunite the subject with
the Other to form one body, is verified. The resulting satisfaction can
only be defined as the failure of the jouissance of the body and
the return to the jouissance of the organ. Lacan gives to it a
pretty name: jouissance of the idiot--'idiot' should be
understood according to its Greek root--that is to say,
jouissance that can do without the Other" (98).
The sexual act of coitus remains the "figure of an eternal missed act,"
writes André (91), represented in courtly love's eternal
deferral of union between lover and Lady. In this (missed act),
satisfaction "can only be defined as the failure of the jouissance of the
body and the return to the jouissance of the organ"--but this obtains only
if the Other can be killed off, and castration refused. The
is an
anamorphosis of the inhuman love in which the drive would find an other
satisfaction, and in which the Woman would find her real partner, not just
the Other's desire with whom all castrated beings must deal. In the film,
the anamorphosis of love reveals-and-conceals that what binds the lovers
is that they are each after "someThing else" (Fink, "Desire and Drive" 37):
this pursuit of
"someThing else" is operative at the level of fantasmatic drive.
- The fact that Baines and Ada actually have sex is thus
merely the predictable human attempt to achieve an ideal, or it represents
a conscious or unconscious covering-over or endless deferral
(tuxn) of the recognition of the ideal's unachievabliity. Men and
women
want to sleep together because "in fact, they want 'encore,' to unite with
the real Other, even if they are supposed to know that the latter is out
of reach," André writes (97). And furthermore:
"Post coitum omne animal triste," the saying goes. But it
should be corrected in the sense that only the speaking being has a
fundamental reason to experience some sadness. In fact, only for him
alone can aiming toward the Other and failing to reach it make any sense.
Language, in short, does not keep its promises: it makes us believe in the
Other and by the same token takes it away from us; it evokes the horizon
of a jouissance of the body, but makes it inaccessible to us.
Sexual jouissance can only connote dissatisfaction. (98)
The sadness of the speaking being is the inevitable end(point) of the
sexual relation, which as Lacan insists "does not take place" (Lacan,
Feminine Sexuality 138). The other jouissance is by
definition beyond. The heuristic frame of courtly love psychoanalytically
interpreted allows us to negotiate the question of satisfaction,
jouissance, in connection with the status and signification of
the body.
- My emphasis on Ada's jouissance and drive is not
intended to suggest that her desire is inoperative--precisely the
contrary. Ada's desire, however, points beyond itself. Playing Ada,
Holly Hunter was conscious that Campion "was very brave in holding out for
a more original kind of sexuality and sensuous quality in Ada" (qtd. in
Bilborough 149). And in her analysis of the film, Gordon herself
acknowledges that there is indeed a "something else"--not just
desire--that circulates in the film, although her gloss on it is somewhat
different from the one I have given it above:
On first reading "The Piano debate," I was struck by the
curious sense that something else had gone missing, in addition
to... [the] loss of a referent for the negativity that the film entertains
in its account of female desire. Something both more and less than the
brutal violence (attempted rape, "castration") depicted onscreen: "more"
because the film stages a potentially unlimited replay of that violence as
an affect [sic] of cinematic spectatorship; and "less" because the final
violation of the woman's body is rehearsed at repeated moments of
spectatorship within the film. (193-94)
- It turns out that while she draws upon Freud and Lacan,
all Gordon means by negativity is "the mechanism by which destructiveness
can exert a threat on, and provide the means for, the subject" (194).
Her interest is to suggest that "to the extent that [the film] provides a
commentary on the negativity of female desire and female spectatorship...
this negativity is inextricable from the sexually differentiated dynamics
of cinematic looking" (197).
- Ada's renunciation of speech (a "negativity" that permits
self-assertion for Ada) represents something like an intuitive grasp of
André's point that
the fact of being caught in language implies a loss for the human being at
the level of the body--as much of his body as of the body of the Other.
This loss appears as a loss of being whose tongue carries its
trace: one does not say of man that he is a body, but rather that
he has a body. By the fact that he speaks, the human being is no
longer a body: a disjunction is introduced between the subject and his
body, the latter becoming an external entity from whom the subject feels
more or less separated. The subject that the effect of language brings
into existence is as such distinct from the body. What remains for him is
to inhabit it or to reach that of the Other. But he can only do so by way
of the signifier, since it is the signifier that, to start with, tells us
that we have a body, indeed, induces in us the illusion of a primordial
body, of a being-body prior to language. Language intervenes
between subject and body. This intervention constitutes at the same
time an access and a barrier: access to the body insofar as it is
symbolized, and a barrier to the body insofar as it is real.
[André 94; emphasis added]
This account better approximates Ada's experience of the disjunction
between body and speech. The disjunction is absolutely central to her
character. Ada has renounced speech. And as Campion herself has stated,
the conceit of making Ada an elective mute is at one level not some grand
feminist statement but merely the result of a formal decision about how to
make the piano figure as a larger presence in the film: "I felt that if
[Ada] couldn't speak, the piano would mean so much more to her" (qtd. in
Barcan and Fogarty 8). Nevertheless, to say that she "communicates
through her piano, and that is why she does not need to speak" is to make
only the most banal observation about her uncanny ability to divorce body
and speech, and fails to address the enormous power of the film to speak,
at least to women, of a specifically gendered muting. Campion also says
that Ada's muteness makes her "sexier"; this has been interpreted "both
as fashionably feminist, for example, by Neil Jillett, and as alarmingly
conservative" (Barcan and Fogarty 8).
- In any case, it is inaccurate to say that the piano says
in music what Ada cannot say in speech. It would be more accurate to say
that the function of the piano represents the insight that art, as Julia
Kristeva puts it, enables the "flow of jouissance into language" and that
music in particular connects us "directly to the otherwise silent place of
its subject" (167). But even this optimistic and harmonious metaphor does
not capture Ada's access to jouissance, which occupies another place from
the place occupied by music in her life, as I trust my analysis will show.
The piano is not just her way of communicating. The music is, for one
thing, not Ada's own, although Michael Nyman, who based his compositions
on Scottish folk and popular songs, also intended the pieces to be
received as Ada's repertoire "as if she had been the composer" (qtd. in
Coombs 92). As Kirsten Thompson has demonstrated in her fine essay on the
film, the progression of Ada's complicated relationship with Baines, and
as I would argue the progression of erotic complications of her libidinal
investments, "is charted through the narrative structuring of six piano
lessons, the final one of which ends with the two making love. The subtle
transformations are marked in this relationship by the shift in the music
played by Ada, beginning with scales (first visit), Silver
Fling (the first lesson), Big My Secret (the second
lesson), and The Attraction of the Pedaling Ankle (the third
lesson)" (71). Other key moments are also marked by music, again mostly
that of Michael Nyman. As I noted at the outset of this essay, in crucial
scenes the music has an extradiegetic presence. The thawing of Ada's
resistance to Baines, her choice to open herself to him, is signaled by "A
Bed of Ferns," a nondiegetic melody (75) accompanying a dolly shot that
focuses on Ada, who is facing away from the camera. This allows the
camera's "eye" to enter the whirlpool of her coiled hair in a Hitchcockian
reference, indicating the intensification of her erotic energies. That
she now wants Baines's attention is signaled by yet another brief melody,
"Little Impulse," when she looks around to see if Baines is watching her,
and stops because he is not. Perhaps the most stirring accompaniment
occurs in the sequence when Stewart takes one of Ada's playing fingers
with his ax, to the score of the again appropriately titled "The
Sacrifice," played very loudly. Other important musical accompaniments
include Chopin's "Prelude in E," as Allen reminds us (54), and the
especially apposite title "The Heart Asks Pleasure First." Again, the
piano does not simply "stand in" for Ada's lost voice in a simple
compensatory relationship, for that would imply that the melodic strains
of the piano adequately contain Ada's "big secret." On the contrary, as I
argue, Ada's drive toward "pleasure" is in excess of such harmonious
equations.
- Not only does Ada's daughter translate for her, but more
importantly with Ada it is almost as if her body, not just her piano,
"speaks." She tells Flora that with Flora's father, her teacher, "I
didn't need to speak, I could lay thoughts out in his mind like they were
a sheet." Ada's relinquishment of the speech of the physical body is a
metonymy for her choice of jouissance over language as support of
subjectivity. But the choice cannot be final: only an inhuman being could
dwell in or with jouissance. There is something homologous in
her dilemma and in the "lethal factor" that characterizes the Lacanian
"alienating vel" between Being and Meaning. Lacan suggests that the
concept of the vel, derived from Hegel, describes a (non-)choice
framed as "Your money or your life" or "Your freedom or your life" or
"freedom or death"--choosing one the subject loses the other; there is no
good choice (Four Fundamental 211-13).
- Ada is a being for death much the way Lacan's
Ethics seminar (number VII) situates Antigone between two
deaths, at the limit or [16] She arrives and stays at this limit at the film's
conclusion as a result of her calculated traversal (which implies both
formal denial and "crossing through") of the choice between acquiescing
completely to the bourgeois and sentimental idyll of marital bliss with
Baines, and surrendering completely to the other, darker bliss she has
already tasted in the depths of the ocean. It is this traversal that many
critical approaches miss. Understanding Ada's jouissance is
facilitated by
the Lacanian (dis)articulation of desire and drive because we find
ourselves continually having to discriminate between Ada's absence of
diegetic speech and her extradiegetic speech that is saturated with
negative passion (and for Stewart with palpable force); we are similarly
confronted repeatedly by the contrast between the stunted or restricted
desire of Ada's physical body and the excessive and transgressive drive of
her real body, and by the division between the real body and the fleshly
body.
The Heart Asks Pleasure First
- What would it mean for a human being to aspire to or to
approximate a perfect bliss--to respond to the demand encapsulated in the
title of one of The Piano's signature musical pieces by
Nyman, "The Heart Asks Pleasure First"? If the "heart" asks
pleasure first, what is the nature of its demand? Do we not see here the
demand of the drive, rather than some sentimental notion of romantic love?
Wouldn't "pleasure" construed in the radical sense of jouissance,
a sense that is apposite in the film, be at once total ecstasy and
terror--like the experience of trauma?
- When we mention trauma, we are already in the realm of
the unconscious. To pursue this question I consider here the role of the
body in Ada's erotic investments. There is also the matter of the
subject, however, a linguistic effect. That (always divided) subject is
the subject of desire, $<>a. But at the structural level of drive
there is no identification as desiring subject. A freeing of drive
entails desubjectivation of the signified subject. Parallel to the
distinction between desire and the drive is that between the "actual lived
body" that experiences the failed sexual relation and the real body that
could enjoy an other jouissance. Jouissance obliterates
being: for where there is jouissance there is only a real body.
- The split between the ontic body and the real body
appears most clearly when Stewart has an uncanny experience with this
voiceless "speech." As she is recuperating from having her finger chopped
off by Stewart, he tries to rape her. But he is stopped in his
tracks by her black stare and her disembodied voice, which seems to strike
him on his forehead. "I am frightened of my will," she says, "Let Baines
try to save me." What is this disembodied voice but a "real" body's
language, a body for which the will (or drive) has a kind of
suprasubjective status? This traumatic moment of physical mutilation is
tied to the equally traumatic event of near-drowning; in both she is
situated at a limit, between will and aphanisis. In the latter scene,
following her will (or her drive), which her father had already diagnosed as
her "dark talent," she allows herself to be dragged off a boat by her own
piano. As Campion details the moment, the force of the drive is neatly
emblematized as a "fatal curiosity": "As the piano splashes into the sea,
the loose ropes speed their way after it. Ada watches them snake past her
feet and then, out of a fatal curiosity, odd and undisciplined, she steps
into a loop" (Campion 120-21). Slipping into the ocean depths she enjoys a
kind of jouissance until she kicks away the rope and allows herself
to be
saved from the completion of the death drive's circuit--or should we say
that the symbolized body reasserts itself against the real body's
jouissance. Back on the boat of life she "says" in her spectral
voiceover, "What a death! What a chance! What a surprise!"
(Campion 121; see also Campion and Pullinger 214).
- One could call Ada a masochist. Baines, too, has
corresponding masochistic traits.[17]
The masochist's question is, in André's words, about "knowing what
is experienced by the body that the other enjoys through whiplashes or
signifiers" (100)--or actually enjoying what the other enjoys. Lacan
observes that "Man cannot reach Woman without finding himself run aground
on the field of perversion" (qtd. in André 100); André
explains, "the masochistic man manifests something on the order of a
feminine position.... The masochist is woman or tries hard to be one"
(101). A masochistic courtly lover, Baines sublimates the Lady at one
level, and at another desublimates her in order to occupy her place as
desubjectivated subject of drive. He recognizes that the enjoyment he
seeks is not sexual relation. Baines, too, wants to enjoy as Woman. Thus
Baines's subjectivity is, like Ada's, constituted not so much in terms of
desire as in terms of drive. And he understands very clearly that
enjoyment is only for a "body" that is not simply the biological
organism. As we have seen, only the Woman under erasure can enjoy such
enjoyment. From Baines's point of view, Ada as a woman merely embodies
the metaphor of the Other, something made clear in André's
theorization: "If a woman can incarnate the body that the subject tries
in vain to unite with, it is because woman, or the body of woman, has the
value of the metaphor of the Other to which there is no signifiable
relation: like the Other, the woman is discompleted, not-all subjected to
the signifying law" (97).[18] Baines
does not want so much to seduce Ada or even to love her as to be
loved, to be in the gaze, in psychoanalytic terms. Now it becomes
clear that even though he can say in the film that "I want you to care for
me, but you can't" he is in love, as they say, with love. He does not
merely desire--and now it becomes clear why Gillett is less than
precise when she writes that "His desire is for her desire" (282).
Gillett herself recognizes that things are more complex:
Baines calls the bargain [between Ada and himself] to end, realizing that
he cannot buy, and Ada cannot sell, the personal connection, the
experience of love, which he desires. Her desire, which he
desires, does not exist in market terms: "I am giving the piano
back to you. I've had enough. The arrangement is making you a whore and
me wretched."
Irigaray writes: "The economy of desire--of exchange--is man's
business." Baines experiences the poverty of this economy. He yields to
this knowledge, allowing it to make him sick.... Baines's experience of his
own femininity does not lead to a usurping of the feminine for the
bolstering of a threatened masculinity at the expense of the woman
herself. It is effected through both an imaginative inquiry into
Ada's experience and an acceptance of his own lack of power with
regard to the otherness presented by her, and leads him to turn away from
the appropriative aims of a phallicly defined masculinity. (282-83;
emphases added)
- But Gillett does not pursue (or fully grasp?) the
implications of her own observations. What, for instance, are the
parameters of Baines's "imaginative inquiry" into Ada's experience? To
what extent is he himself able to enter a non-phallic, feminine
"experience"? I would submit that the model of courtly love offers the
best answer. Baines does idealize Ada, but this idealization is what
enables Baines to enjoy the experience of love. He does not merely desire
Ada's sexual body. If the Lacanian Woman-under-erasure enjoys
jouissance, she also knows that the sexual relation is
impossible. It is because Baines knows this too, at some level, that he
idealizes Ada. What motivates Baines, even if he does not recognize this,
is the drive--he embodies the Lacanian understanding, perhaps not
entirely consciously or self-reflexively, that "it is not heterosexual
genital reproductive sexuality that is sought by the drives, but a partial
object that provides jouissance" (Fink 41). This is a central issue in
the eroticization of Baines's colonial male body. His orientation to love
evokes the paradoxical questions posed by André: "Why does Achilles
pursue the tortoise, why does a man relentlessly seek Woman, why does the
subject drive himself crazy to rejoin his body?" (96). Baines's wish to
enjoy as Woman is tellingly evoked when he crawls under the piano as Ada
plays. He asks her to hike up her Victorian skirt higher and higher and
closes his eyes rapturously--Campion in her directions uses the word
"enthralled" (57)--and inserts his finger through a hole in her black
stocking, under which lies the blankness of her skin. It is as if this
were the black hole through which the impossible Thing could be accessed,
but also kept at bay.
Narcissism and Renunciation: Self-Reflexivity and Self-Silencing
- Baines wants to "enjoy" a jouissance, a state of being in
the gaze,
a gaze here instantiated as the gaze of a woman he has idealized
as the Lady of courtly love, Ada. But what is the nature of this
idealization? Zizek reminds us that the Lady of courtly love is idealized
in the sense of becoming an "inhuman partner," as she is raised to the
status of das Ding.[19]
Furthermore, there is a certain sublime narcissism about Baines's
sublimation of Ada that is frequently missed. Lacan glosses the
narcissistic dimension of the sublimation of the Lady as das
Ding:
The object in front of us, our anamorphosis, will also enable us to be
precise about something that remains a little vague in the perspective
adopted, namely, the narcissistic function.... The element of idealizing
exaltation that is expressly sought out in the ideology of courtly love
has certainly been demonstrated; it is fundamentally narcissistic
in character. (Seminar VII 151)
If Woman is the limit of courtly love, das Ding, the courtly
lover attempts to place himself at that limit, which means going
beyond the Lady. It is by a kind of anamorphosis that the
courtly lover's position coincides with that of the Woman of the sexuation
graph--not that of the Lady of courtly love. (Lacan defines anamorphosis
as that which "geometral researches into perspective allow to escape from
vision" [Four Fundamental 87].) There is something
essentially unself-reflexive about this narcissistic becoming Woman in
jouissance, something exemplified by St. Theresa:
As for Saint Theresa--you only have to go and look at Bernini's statue in
Rome to understand immediately that she's coming, there is no doubt about
it. And what is her jouissance, her coming from? It is clear
that the essential testimony of the mystics is that they are experiencing
it but know nothing about it. (Lacan, Feminine
Sexuality 147)
This theme of unself-consciousness is crucial--one cannot have
jouissance as well as self-reflexivity about knowledge. Lacan
writes,
There is a jouissance proper to her, to this "her" which does not exist
and which signifies nothing. There is a jouissance proper to her and of
which she herself may know nothing, except that she experiences it--that
much she does know.... The woman can love in the man only the way in which
he faces the knowledge he souls for. But as for the knowledge by which he
is, we can only ask this question if we grant that there is something,
jouissance, which makes it impossible to tell whether the woman can say
anything about it--whether she can say what she knows of it.
(Feminine Sexuality 144-45, 159)
I bring up this point about unself-reflexivity to suggest why the
filmmaker instinctively insists on Baines's illiteracy, his
"oafishness"--to employ the terms of Ada's initial reaction to him. It is
precisely because he makes no pretense to knowledge, mastery, control,
understanding, and power, because he does not question Ada's own
deliberate self-silencing and self-disempowerment, that Ada finds the
route to her own jouissance through him, and he through her.
Through the operation of das Ding, they both "[come] to desire
death" as Lacan puts it (Seminar VII 83). Ada, too, renounces
knowledge in favor of the delicious surrender to the possibility of
jouissance (most explicitly when faced with the prospect of
drowning). Ada and Baines are thus linked in their renunciation of
self-reflexivity: their "non-knowledge or even... anti-knowledge" is in
fact an epistemological vel, just as there is a vel
between meaning and being.[20] It could
be argued that both Ada and Baines choose "being" over "meaning," just as
they seek jouissance over desire. But the point about
non-knowledge must not be precipitated into a question merely of feminist
resistance.
- For Mary Ann Doane, ultimately, "the question is why the
woman must always carry the burden of the philosophical demonstration, why
she must be the one to figure truth, dissimulation, jouissance,
untruth, the abyss, etc., why she is the support of these tropological
systems--even and especially anti-metaphysical or anti-humanistic systems"
(Femmes Fatales 74). Thus for Doane, but not for me, the
issue is a matter of a return of the look:
Usually, the placement of a veil over a woman's face works to localize and
hence contain dissimulation, to keep it from contaminating the male
subject. But how can we imagine, conceive her look back? Everything
would become woven, narrativized, dissimulation. Derrida envies that look
[and, as Doane suggests, Lacan as well: c.f. Lacan's
"invidia"].... It would be preferable to disentangle the woman
and the veil, to tell another story. As soon as the dichotomy between the
visible as guarantee and the visible as inherently destabilized, between
truth and appearance, is mapped onto sexual difference, the woman is
idealized, whether as undecidability or jouissance.
The necessary incompletion or failure of the attempt to leave behind the
terms of such a problematic is revealed in the symptomatic role of the
woman, who takes up the slack and becomes the object of a desire which
reflects the lack that haunts theory. (75; emphasis added)
Placing the emphasis elsewhere, I suggest that at least in courtly love,
which I am treating without evaluative prejudice as a rarefied and
"purified" form of love as such, the idealization of the woman as Lady is
not the real issue. Certainly the Lady in courtly love is
idealized, elevated to sublimity as das Ding. But the
"completion" of love occurs in the real, at the level of
jouissance, for it is impossible in the actual.
The Sublimated Lady and the Acephalous Subject
- Zizek cautions that it is not enough to rehearse commonplaces
about the differences between the Lady of courtly love and actual women,
and that it will not do to say merely that the Lady in courtly love
"stands for the man's narcissistic projection which involves the
mortification of the actual, flesh-and-blood woman." Instead, he says, we
must address the larger question about narcissism: "where does that empty
surface come from, that cold, neutral screen which opens up the space for
possible projections? That is to say, if we are to project onto the mirror
our narcissistic ideal, the mute mirror-surface must already be there.
This surface functions as a kind of 'black hole' in reality, as a limit
whose Beyond is inaccessible" (97).
- The Lady of courtly love is idealized; indeed she is
idealized away, beyond the point of sexual consummation. She functions as
das Ding that covers the hole in the real. But in the real she
allows the courtly lover, the chevalier or knight, a kind of
jouissance that is beyond phallic jouissance. But it is
available only to an acephalous subject, or a subject who is not construed
as a desiring subject. Perhaps it would be useful to specify further the
nature of that idealization and that acephalousness. As Fink writes:
What Lacan comes to see in the later stage of his work is that the
unconscious desire is not the radical, revolutionary force he once
believed it to be. Desire is subservient to the law! What the law
prohibits, desire seeks. It seeks only transgression, and that makes
desire entirely dependent on the law (that is, the Other) that brings it
into being... we can say that desire remains inscribed... within the
Other, while the subject is someThing else [sic]. ("Desire and the
Drives" 37)
What is that "someThing else"? How can it escape the ambit of the Other,
the law? Fink traces the shift in Lacan's thinking from conceiving the
subject as/of Demand to the subject as/of desire to, in the late stage,
the subject as/of drive. The significance of this is that the desiring
subject, not to speak of the subject of Demand, is blocked from enjoyment
or jouissance precisely by that desire, which is always the
desire of the Other (38, 39). When the subject is conceptualized as
drive, there opens up, in this almost utopian move, the theoretical
possibility of the pursuit of satisfaction: "Subjugated first by the
Other's demands and then by the Other's desire, the drive is finally freed
to pursue object a" (39). This subject, constituted after the traversal
of fantasy, is the subject in the real, the acephalous subject as
drive. I am suggesting that Baines, though admittedly he may be no great
prize, embodies (if that's the word) such a subjectivity. He is motivated
not to seek the aim of his desire, but to pursue his enjoyment, or
jouissance. First, however, he must go beyond the petty
narcissism of the subject as desiring.
- Lacan speaks of a "something that in its subsistence
appears as possessing the character of a beyond of the sacred--something
that we are precisely trying to identify in its most general form by the
term, the Thing. I would say it is primitive subsistence viewed from the
perspective of the Thing" (Seminar VII 140). This is what
Baines is after. It is a something else, something not violent but
violence's contradiction in him, that Ada recognizes as basic to his
being, and it is that something else which she finds it possible to
respond to, to yield to. Is there not a certain receptivity in Baines
that allows her to make nearly arbitrary demands on him, like the Lady of
courtly love, and does not Baines on occasion ostentatiously present
himself as submitting to these (unspoken?) demands quite readily? This
helps explain also the nature of the compact Ada enters into with Baines.
But why bother with getting married if bourgeois marriage is not really
the source of the deepest satisfaction for either of them? Why construct
a barrier to the real satisfaction?
The Construction of Obstacles to Love as Aids to the Metaphor of Love
- For Lacan, courtly love is "an altogether refined way of making up
for the absence of sexual relation by pretending that it is we who put an
obstacle to it. It is truly the most staggering thing that has ever been
tried. But how can we expose its fraud?" (Feminine 141). We
might emend this to, what is at stake for us in not exposing the fraud of
what Lacan, following Aristotle, calls "Entasis" or obstacle (141)? The
construction of the obstacle is self-protective on the part of the
subject. Renata Salecl writes: "One of the greatest illusions of love is
that prohibition and social codes prevent its realization. The
illusionary character of this proposition is unveiled in every 'self-help'
manual: the advice persons desperately in love usually get is to establish
artificial barriers, prohibitions, and make themselves temporarily
inaccessible in order to provoke their love object to return love" (179).
The difference in The Piano is that the prohibitions and
social codes preventing realization do double duty; in their case a
prohibition is also constructed barring them from jouissance. As
Zizek writes, to have power we must limit our access to power; "the
impediment that prevents the full realization of love is internal" ("There
Is No" 209). Baines demonstrates a degree of renunciation: to have
ordinary love, the lovers must renounce complete love, must renounce
jouissance, for as Zizek suggests through a pithy quotation from
Edith Wharton, "I can't love you unless I give you up" (qtd. in Zizek,
209). The reward Baines seeks is not the seduction of Ada, but access to
jouissance through her, along the lines of courtly love. One
could as well say that Baines engages in a certain psychic detour: as
Lacan puts it, "The techniques involved in courtly love... are techniques
of holding back, of suspension, of amor interruptus" (152).[21]
- Courtly love, at least, is not a wholesale seduction by
the lure of love. It is emancipated, for instance, from the belief in
complete reciprocity between lover and beloved. This is what Lacan means
when he says in "God and the Jouissance of The Woman" that "in the case of
the speaking being the relation between the sexes does not take place"
(Feminine Sexuality 138). Similarly, the knight in courtly
love is not a figure representing a delusion about the delusion
we commonly call "love." The knight seeks no cheap solace in keeping
alive a hope that the Lady will actually enable him to achieve the sexual
relation, which is already marked as impossible. The metaphor captured by
the technically obsolete and limited social formation that goes by that
name is a figure for the willed suspension of disbelief, and therefore a
canny self-seduction into the uncanny: canny because it requires a
recognition that those who presume to be non-duped about love do
err, a recognition that the sexual relation is impossible, except in the
real, but also that love does not have to be reciprocal precisely because
it is not wholly within the ambit of desire.
- While Lacan says that there is no sexual relation and
that love is a lure, Zizek reminds us that love is available as a
metaphor. But what are the contours of this metaphor? In the first
place if there is a reciprocity, it is a reciprocity within an asymmetry.
In the first instance, the beloved (eromenos) turns, and in the
turning becomes the loving one, the lover (erastes). But the
complementary moment is that the subject himself (now) attains the status
of "an answer of the real" (qtd. in Zizek, "Courtly Love" 105). The
subject himself becomes the beloved of the beloved: but this reciprocity
is not the real thing called love. It is a reciprocity within a more
general asymmetry, for love remains unattainable: "the other sees
something in me and wants something from me, but I cannot give him what I
do not possess--or, as Lacan puts it, there is no relationship between
what the loved one possesses and what the loving one lacks" (106). But
the significance of this reversal is not to be obscured. Zizek observes
that "although we have now two loving subjects instead of the initial
duality of the loving one and the loved one, the asymmetry persists, since
it was the object itself which as it were confessed to its lack by way of
its subjectivization. There is something deeply embarrassing and truly
scandalous in this reversal by means of which the mysterious, fascinating,
elusive object of love discloses its deadlock and thus acquires the status
of another subject" (106). But how do we understand this in the heuristic
frame of courtly love?
- Again, Zizek explains that "in courtly love... the
long-awaited moment of the highest fulfilment, called Gnade,
mercy (rendered by the Lady to her servant), is neither the Lady's
surrender, her consent to the sexual act, nor some mysterious rite of
initiation, but simply a sign of love from the side of the Lady, the
'miracle' of the fact that the Object answered, stretched its hand back to
the supplicant" ("Courtly Love" 106). I would emphasize that it is
only a sign, not a performative act of love, and it may well be a fantasy
projected by the knight. It is not a reciprocal act of love; there
is no sexual relation, except "in the real." It is in this
nonreciprocity that Baines's love is most pure, and the relationship
between Ada and Baines is by the same token least compelling when it
degenerates into mere "reciprocal" domesticity. In his purest moments,
furthermore, Baines wants not so much to love Ada as to be loved, to be
looked at. Baines, as I have said, seeks in fact to take the place of the
Woman under erasure, not merely to admire and love the Lady. Reciprocity
indeed has little to do with it.
- Salecl notes that in Plato's Symposium,
Socrates deliberately declines Alcibiades' "courting" (203) and denies his
own elevation as the loved one because, as Lacan points out in Le
transfert, for Socrates, "there is nothing in himself worthy of
love. His essence was that ouden, emptiness, hollowness"
(qtd. in Salecl 203). If I follow Salecl's line of reasoning, Socrates'
declining of the elevation to the status of the loved one is a denial of
"agalma"--the "something" precious that Alcibiades asks for "without
knowing what it is" (Lacan, Four Fundamental 255) or even
presumably without knowing that he is asking for it.[22] Salecl writes that "Socrates's denial is a denial
too of the discourse of the Master in preference for the discourse of the
Analyst. It is in courtly love that this agalma, this "someThing
else" exists, the thing that Baines and Ada seek without knowing what it
is. As Holly Hunter, who plays Ada, recognized from the outset, the
script had "one ingredient that almost every script I read does not have:
a vast dimension of things being unexplained to the audience or even to
the characters themselves--and that's just a real haunting part of the
story, very, very haunting" (qtd. in Bilborough 149). Salecl adds
helpfully,
One can ask whether Socrates does not act in a similar way to the lady in
courtly love when she also constantly refuses to return love. It can be
said that both Socrates and the lady occupy the same place--both are
objects of unfulfilled love. However, the function that they perform at
this place is different. The lady is the master who constantly imposes on
her admirer new duties and keeps him on a string by hinting that sometime
in the future she might show him some mercy. Socrates, on the other hand,
refuses the position of master. With his refusal Socrates points to the
emptiness of the object of love, while the lady believes that there is in
herself something worthy of love. That is why she puts herself in the
position of the Master (S1), from which she capriciously gives orders.
Socrates opposes this attitude altogether and does not want to encourage
false hope. (203, n. 53)
In a subsequent note, Salecl continues this thread:
Socrates's position is similar to that of the analyst, since both of
them occupy the position of the object a and try to "keep that
nothingness," emptiness, the traumatic and horrifying nature of the
object. Putting oneself in the position of the object accounts for the
fact that the subject is not represented by any signifier--what we have
here, is therefore the subject as pure emptiness. The analyst is not a
Master whom the analysand would identify with and who would impose duties
on the subject. By occupying the place of the object, the analyst enables
the subject to find the truth about his or her desire. (207, n. 55)
- I agree with Salecl that in courtly love the Lady's
discourse is the discourse of the Master and Socrates' that of the
analyst. But my disagreement with Salecl is on the following grounds: I
would suggest that the courtly lover--André's
knight--enters the "contract" of courtly love in the full recognition that
the Lady's "mercy" is always already deferred; the object is always
already suffused with différance. That is, as I have argued,
precisely the essence of courtly love. The knight knows that the
Lady is elevated precisely because she is inaccessible. She is not the
object of a lovelorn romantic lover. Furthermore, I believe we must also
emend Salecl's argument that "With his refusal Socrates points to the
emptiness of the object of love, while the lady believes that there is in
herself something worthy of love. That is why she puts herself in the
position of the Master (S1), from which she capriciously gives orders"
(203). In fact, even if the lady does "believe" anything, her belief is
irrelevant; the lady who "believes" is in some sense not the Lady who is
elevated to the level of the Real, to the level at which God has
jouissance. Woman as mystic does not "know," as Lacan himself
recognizes.
Conclusion
The Anamorphic Inamorata is sublimated, therefore, in the following
manner. In the first place, the Object is elevated to the status of
das Ding but remains only a "stand-in" for the Thing. Second, it
is both spatially and temporally anamorphotic: it can only be viewed from
an oblique perspective, although it transforms the experience of the
whole; and it is susceptible to a perpetual deferral--as Zizek writes,
"the Object is attainable only by way of an incessant postponement, as its
absent point-of-reference" ("Courtly" 101). As Zizek himself says,
"'sublimation' occurs when an object, part of everyday reality, finds
itself at the place of the impossible Thing. Therein consists the
function of artificial obstacles which all of a sudden hinder our access
to some ordinary object: they elevate the object into a stand-in for the
Thing" (101). Similarly, Salecl writes that "what love as a demand
targets in the other is... the object in him or herself, the Real, the
nonsymbolizable kernel around which the subject organizes his or her
desire. What gives to the beloved his or her dignity, what leads the
loving subject to the survalorization of the beloved, is the presence of
the object in him or her" (192). The object is what plugs the lack in the
Other, and it is in these terms, Salecl tells us, that we can
differentiate the two relations of the subject to this object. Used as a
plug or stopper, the object "renders invisible" the lack in the
Other--this is the function of the object in romantic love. But
in sublimation we encounter
a circulation around the object that never touches its core. Sublimation
is not a form of romantic love kept alive by the endless striving for the
inaccessible love object. In sublimation, the subject confronts the
horrifying dimension of the object, the object as das Ding, the
traumatic foreign body in the symbolic structure. Sublimation circles
around the object, it is driven by the fact that the object can never be
reached because of its impossible, horrifying nature. Whereas romantic
love strives to enjoy the Whole of the Other, of the partner, the true
sublime love renounces, since it is well aware that we can [as Lacan puts
it in Seminar XX] "only enjoy a part of the body of the
Other.... That is why we are limited in this to a little contact, to touch
only the forearm or whatever else--ouch!" (Salecl 193)
Salecl notes that such a sublimation is "well exemplified" in The
Piano. But where is the true renunciation in The
Piano? My argument about The Piano is rather
different from Salecl's. First, we need to be clear about the vectors of
renunciation, which indeed does play an important role in
courtly love. Here Baines's "sublimation" of Ada is not a spiritualizing,
chaste adoration; nor is it a matter of desiring sex with the "ideal
mate." As Zizek observes, the sublimated Lady "is in no way a warm,
compassionate, understanding fellow-creature" (95).
- Sublimation as renunciation can take two trajectories:
the first is an Aristotelian renunciation: Aristotle says in the
Nicomachean Ethics that "most people seem... to wish to be
loved rather than to love" (482). And loving someone means in fact
wishing the loved one well, rather than merely desiring that the look of
love is returned by the loved person, or that, as Zizek puts it, the hand
of love is extended by the loved one to the loving one. The Aristotelian
renunciation is the renunciation of the wish to be loved as object of
romantic affection, which is, in one sense, no more than a fetish covering
over the "someThing else." The second renunciation is the willed
suspension of reciprocity: here the loving one is like the knight or the
mystic, or indeed Woman--there may not be a noble love here, but there is
a one-way jouissance that is precisely not constrained by phallic
jouissance. It does not require a response from the loved one,
indeed the
loved one (God) is reduced to an idiotic (to exploit the etymological
connection with idios, meaning private, own, peculiar to one's
own universe) construct, an "as if."
- The model of the courtly lover's elevation of the Lady
and of his accompanying self-abnegation is only half the story--it only
marks once again the failure of mortal love. The interest of courtly love
is that there is an excess, a jouissance, which theoretically the
knight or courtly lover could access. What Baines wants is the gaze as
jouissance, an intense form of auto-erotism, defined as the turning
away
of sexuality "from its natural object" and its "find[ing] itself delivered
over to phantasy" (Laplanche and Pontalis 46); it is not just a question
of Baines's "desire... for her desire," as Gillett formulates it (282).
For Gillett, the iconic moment is the one in which Ada kisses her own
mirrored reflection as a rejection of her husband and a preference for
auto-eroticism. But Gillett fails to clarify that there are
two trajectories of auto-eroticism--Baines's as well as Ada's. In a
similar undertheorization, Gordon, following Bruzzi, reads Baines as a
"masochistic male" subject whose "desire" merely "mirrors" Ada's and "is
constituted in the staging of the non-reciprocity of desire"
(199). Thus,
Masochistic male desire... is also part of a logic of
recuperation where the impossibility of desire's absent object can be
substituted. Here, it is the woman's desire that stands in for the
return on the man's. The question of the woman's desire, then,
continually shifts from the proximity of the object to its absolute
alienation. Indeed, auto-erotism similarly teeters on the brink of
masochism proper, and ultimately suicide. The scene of the lips that kiss
themselves, then, circumscribes precisely the mutual association of danger
and enablement that complicates, and makes especially apposite, the
relation of auto-erotism to The Piano. (199)
- This analysis is too simple. Baines is like the courtly
lover whose aim may be the Lady, but whose goal really is the
jouissance
of the Woman under erasure. It is not the flesh of the Lady/Ada that is
desired, but the "body" of the Woman under erasure--this is the focus of
Baines's masochism, as again André makes plain: "The man who lets
himself be humiliated, insulted, whipped by his associate seeks in reality
to take the place of the woman" (99)--the woman being analogous to the
Woman under erasure, not the Lady of courtly love in this instance, and
the masochism being largely a matter of discursive enunciation or
emotional disposition.[23] As
masochist, Baines is not simply interested in loving Ada, but in
discovering the conditions of his own enjoyment, in a nonreciprocal way,
beyond sexual intercourse. The masochist's question is about an enjoyment
beyond. Thus, André continues, "The question that the
masochist puts to the test through his practice is that of knowing what is
experienced by the body that the other enjoys through whiplashes or
signifiers: does this body enjoy as well? and does it enjoy beyond what
is provided by the instrument that marks him?" (100).
As Lacan himself writes in Television, "a woman only
encounters Man (l'homme) in psychosis.... She is a
party to the perversion which is, I maintain, Man's" (40).
- Furthermore, there is a way in which the masochistic man
"manifests something on the order of a feminine position: it is his
position as subject that is feminine.... The sense of the expression
'feminine masochism' is... not that woman is masochistic, but really that
the masochist is woman or tries hard to be one" (André 101;
emphasis
added). Finally, we can see why Baines's feminization, his crossover
sexuality, and his hybridized postcolonial interpellation as subject are
the key to his eroticization--he is Woman under erasure, but he also
displaces whiteness as a postcolonial subject. His relationship with Ada
conforms to a model of courtly love. It is only courtly love's
anamorphosis that enables Baines and Ada to say to each other, "I love in
you something more than you."
- One could therefore propose that the usefulness of the
category of courtly love is that it allows us to see the relationship in
terms of the psychoanalytic model of Lacan's formulae of sexuation, which
more fully addresses the unconscious or phantasmatic motivations
of Baines and Ada. It is in this connection that an ambiguity in
André's argument about the meaning of wanting to enjoy as Woman
emerges. God is the sexed real Other because in the real there
is a sexual relation, whereas in the case of the divided subject
of desire there is not. One possible outcome of the constellation of
positions presented in Lacan's formulae of sexuation is that it is
possible that the knight's Lady is analogous to the Woman under
erasure, in that they are both idealized (and the Woman is under erasure
because she is--in Lacanian terms--not the ordinary, divided subject). I
think the more likely analogy is that the knight himself is, to some
extent, similar to the Woman under erasure, for his fantasmatic relation
to the Lady is like that of the Woman who has a fantasmatic relation to
God. The knight and the Woman (the reference of course is not to any
actual biological female) are isomorphically disposed toward das
Ding and God the Other in the real. Das Ding, the Thing, is
that absent or "excluded" center around which "the subjective world of the
unconscious [is] organized in a series of signifying relations" (Lacan,
Seminar VII 71). Appropriating the language of Paul's
Epistle to the Romans, Lacan implies that the Thing is that which the Law
forbids and makes desirable to the point of self-annihilation: "the Thing
finds a way by producing in me all kinds of covetousness thanks to the
commandment, for without the Law the Thing is dead. But even without the
Law, I was once alive. But when the commandment appeared, the Thing
flared up, returned once again, I met my death.... Through it I came to
desire death" (83).
- I contend therefore that the knight in courtly love can
be installed in the place of the Woman under erasure. The knight is thus
also beyond phallic jouissance,[24] and since the knight elevates the Lady to the place
of das Ding, the jouissance of speech displaces phallic
jouissance, although as we have seen, the jouissance of
speech fails relative to the jouissance of being (André
89). In courtly love, the knight is disposed to the Lady in a
relationship where he enjoys a sexual relation that is unavailable in
ordinary sex. The knight, prototype for Baines, seeks the enjoyment
enjoyed by the Woman in the real. This Woman under erasure enjoys
jouissance with God in the real (this God is "sexed" so that a "real
sexual relation" is "completed" again in the real as it could never be in
sex). Finally, there is an analogous relation in the real between "the
subject" and "the body" (which in André's phrase has a real sexed
consistency), but the relation between subject and body is cleaved by
language, since the subject is only the subject of a signifier. The film
approximates this schema in that Baines elevates ("sublimates") Ada to the
position of the Lady of courtly love, while he himself is structurally in
the discursive site, the place of the Woman under erasure. I maintain
that Baines and Ada seek the experience of sexuality as satisfaction of
the drive, beyond the "actual lived body," but this point requires some
clarification.
- For the later Lacan, Fink reminds us, in the subject who
has traversed his fundamental fantasy to live out the drive, "desire stops
inhibiting the subject from obtaining satisfaction," although desire is
also a needed defence against jouissance ("Desire and the Drives"
41, 43).
This subject has evolved from a relation to demand to a relation to a
partial object of the drive--ultimately the death drive. No longer
identified with unconscious desire but with satisfaction, he becomes an
acephalous subject with head enough to heed "symbolic constraints" in
order to manage jouissance (to have protection and
pleasure, and
protection of pleasure) (Fink, Clinical 208). Ada and Baines,
like courtly lovers, manage their inhuman love by acquiescing to bourgeois
domesticity as symbolic constraint but simultaneously preserve perversion,
as if to say with Lacan that they seek "something in you more than you."
This acquiescence is a kind of complicated masquerade: Baines masquerades
as a man, while Ada masquerades femininity, although in fact she (and Baines
to some extent) are really seeking to be in the place of Woman.[25]
- Ada manages her approach to the impossible Thing
not by the process of sublimation described by Zizek as the erection of
artificial obstacles that "hinder our access to some ordinary object: they
elevate the object into a stand-in" for das Ding (101). For Ada,
the Thing is not sublimated but sublated by the ordinary stand-in of the
edifice of heteronormativity itself. The film stages this in cutting from
the scene of their new domestic bliss to Ada's re-memoration, as Toni
Morrison might put it, of the encounter with das Ding: "At night
I think of my piano in its ocean grave and sometimes myself floating above
it. Down there everything is so still and silent it lulls me to sleep.
It is a weird lullaby. And so it is. It is mine." Ada eroticizes the
negative, das Ding. And Campion's final image of Ada is of the
perfection of a kind of inhuman love, or jouissance: "Ada's
piano on the sea bed... Above floats Ada, her hair and arms stretched out
in a gesture of surrender, her body slowly turning on the end of the rope.
The seaweed's rust-coloured fronds reach out to touch her" (Campion 122).
Ada's unusual satisfaction approximates Lacan's idea, in Four
Fundamental Concepts, phrased as a rhetorical question: "Is there
no satisfaction in being under the gaze?" (75). In the gaze, the subject
experiences an extreme pleasure (jouissance) precisely through an
aphanisis or desubjectivation, when the subject's pleasure comes from
filling a lack in the Other. Baines functions merely as a stand-in for
the Other, for whom Ada is also an object. Ada takes some erotic
satisfaction, of course, from Baines's erotic satisfaction; but her
jouissance lies elsewhere, in her own desubjectivation.
- This is the secret of this perverse couple's ec-static
relationship: something other than human love, and it is thus that Ada and
Baines hold the Thing at bay, recognizing that humankind cannot bear very
much Lacanian "reality," and that the other satisfaction each seeks is
agalma if kept at a ritualized distance but turns monstrous if
approached
too closely. The Piano, then, is an exemplary if not fully
self-conscious staging of the dialectic between erotic attachment and
de-tachment, sublimation and sublation, desubjectivation and
subjectification--a dialectic that must remain unresolved.
English Department
Bentley College
sdayal@bentley.edu
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Notes
1. The ambition is evident even in the
sequences that appear close to the beginning of the film, such as when Ada
McGrath, the protagonist, plays on the beach in New Zealand--sequences
which Campion edits, as Kirsten Thompson notes,
with alternating
close ups of Ada, medium shots of [her lover-to-be] Baines, and full shots
of her daughter [Flora]. The dominant impression is one of movement,
accentuated by Campion's constant use of camera movement within shots,
mimicked through the visual arc Baines paces around Ada, and echoed in the
lyrical movements of her daughter's ballet.... The final shot of this
central sequence is a crane shot showing the three in long shot, mother
and daughter walking off together, with Baines slowly joining the two
ahead. Their footprints in the sand form a triangle, counterpointed by
the spiral swirls of Flora's seahorse sculpture. This graphic patterning
allegorically foreshadows the future narrative formation of this
particular family. (69)
2. And this is not a purely gratuitous
homage, for as in Hitchcock's film, the close-up of the hair functions as
a visual metaphor for the vertigo of the core mystery the film wants to
plumb: what Ada wants.
3. Brooks, as Prasad points out,
theorized not only the characteristically hyperbolic gesture of melodrama
and its signature melody (melos), but also the muting or
suppression of the protagonist.
4. I consistently speak of desire and
drive as being discrete but also as part of the same dynamic circuit.
This reading of the continuity of desire and drive is, I believe, faithful
to Lacan. Bruce Fink makes this continuity clear.
5. It need hardly be said that my
approach in no way disparages a viable feminist approach or denies the
importance of the film's representation (Darstellung) of
dissident femininity. Nor do I wish to deprecate the fascination of the
(albeit negative) expression of feminine agency in the film. I would,
however, like to consider briefly one example of how a reading that almost
exclusively privileges a critical focus on the feminine can prove
inadequate in the case of this film. Indeed, it is significant that not
only are women's spaces separated from and valorized above masculine
spaces (the male sphere of action), but there are also differentiations
among the women in the film, even differentiations among the white women
in terms of class and age, not to mention differentiations between white
women and Maori women in terms of culture versus nature. But such a
reading leads Dyson, for instance, to the misleadingly underdetermined
conclusion that "While never relinquishing his whiteness, [Baines] is able
to arouse Ada's passions because he is closer to nature than Stewart"
(271). The misled viewer/reader, if she or he follows this line of
reasoning, is then drawn into an extremely narrow understanding of the
erotic dimensions of the film (which are in themselves admittedly crucial
here). We are told that although Baines is a "member of the lower
orders--in an early scene Ada describes him as an 'oaf' because he is
illiterate"--Baines's "baseness is constructed through the eroticization
of his body" (271), as if Baines's own erotic imagination were never an
issue. My reading seeks in part to restore precisely this issue to its
rightful importance, at least so that we can better understand what makes
the relationship between the two principals so undeniably riveting--and I
do so precisely by complicating the eroticization of Baines's "body,"
something which is inadequately articulated by Dyson and other critics
even when they notice or thematize that body. Even a feminist analysis of
the film, I would also insist, ought to do justice to the complex and
subtle relay of the sexual and the sociopolitical vectors that define
Baines's place between pakeha and Maori positionalities:
especially, it
ought not to ignore the problematization of colonial masculinity.
6. Zizek, as well as scholars such as
Jean Clavreul, emphasize the conceptual importance of the perverse couple.
He writes, "history has to be read retroactively: the anatomy of man
offers the key to the anatomy of ape, as Marx puts it. It is only the
emergence of masochism, of the masochistic couple, towards the end of the
last century, which enables us to grasp the libidinal economy of courtly
love" ("Courtly Love" 95).
7. Pace Stella Bruzzi's too-sweeping
assertion that "our look is most emphatically not aligned with Stewart's"
as we watch Baines and Ada making love (262), I would argue that we are
congruently situated with Stewart. That is, we are almost caught,
at least for a moment, in the position of identification with Stewart,
although of course the audience must subsequently reject any
identification with this voyeuristic or fetishistic position. In the
scene where Stewart discovers what Ada has been doing instead of giving
Baines piano lessons, the director goes to extreme lengths to portray him
in a degrading act of voyeurism. As he watches Baines kneel before Ada,
his face buried under her skirt, he doesn't notice that Baines's dog is
licking his palm. Stewart then crawls under the floorboards, positioning
himself the better to experience their lovemaking vicariously.
Could this be seen as the film's way of juxtaposing and contrasting
ordinary heterosexual desire with an other economy of love? The
effectiveness of the mise en scène is precisely that first
there must be an identification before there can be this element of
renunciation of the male voyeur position in which the audience shares, an
experience of a renunciation analogous to Baines's performative: a
relinquishment of unambivalent masculinity, of pure whiteness, of the
former colonizer's presumed superiority. Stewart "watches" Baines and Ada
making love because he himself wants to be where Baines is; he is
condemned forever to watching Ada as a husband who cannot himself enjoy
her but must fantasize such a scene with someone in his (Stewart's)
"rightful" place. Thus one can conclude that ultimately the point of the
audience's initial, momentary structural identification with Stewart,
followed immediately by a rejection of emotional identification, is to
defamiliarize the masculine or phallic position. Such a defamiliarization
is consistent with the defamiliarization of colonial masculinity effected
by Baines. In saying this, I acknowledge the possibility that the very
feminization could be yet another masculinist turn. But it is precisely
because the renunciation of an unambivalent masculinity has a fundamental
and fantasmatic dimension--it is not just an act--that this possibility
seems remote.
8. The "ethical" here is Lacan's almost
catachrestic conception of ethics, which has very little of the Kantian
"ought." He speaks rather of the knotting of moral questions with the
fatal attraction of transgression (Seminar VII 2), tied to the
death instinct.
Glossing Freud, Lacan explains that "that 'I' which is supposed to come to
be where 'it' was... is nothing more than that whose root we already found
in the 'I' which asks itself what it wants" (7). The transgressive subject
is finally able to ask the question of its deepest satisfaction, when the
drive functions according to the classic formula, "Wo es war soll Ich
werden."
In other words, subjectivation beyond divided subjectivity is made
possible by a freeing of the drive, a transgression enabling the subject
to enjoy an "other jouissance" than phallic jouissance. The
distinction between two kinds of jouissance maps onto the crucial
(dis)articulation of drive and desire. It is desire that, according to
the Lacanian ethical credo, the subject must not cede. Since drive is
anterior to the advent of the divided subject, the drive is also amoral,
exorbitant to the ethical. To privilege a subjectivation beyond divided
subjectivity (as the subject of the drive able to enjoy the other
jouissance) is therefore a post-ethical position.
The post-ethical imperative confronts the subject who would enjoy the
other jouissance with two alternatives. The first is death. The
second is transgression, the attraction of which is that it promises an
other jouissance, but which requires a certain brinkmanship or
management of jouissance. This is encapsulated in the Lacanian
misprision of the paradigm of courtly love. While it implies an
irresolvable dialectic, the attraction of transgression need not be
forsaken, as I argue in this rereading of Campion's film.
9. "The Piano literalizes
the woman's castration," as Suzy Gordon notes, in presenting Ada's chopped
finger as "a prosthetic substitute and an actual bodily lack ('visible'
because invisible)"--a lack that constitutes the subject (Gordon calls it
"identity," wrongly, in my opinion). But "it does so simultaneously with
an insistence on the trauma of male subjectivity, the impotency of which
serves to conceal the violence of the colonial encounter" (201). This is
too linear a reading of colonial masculinity, in my view, rendering
Campion's impulse to put masculinity in question too flatly, as though the
only interest one ought to take in this problematizing of masculinity were
to critique and then dispose of the category of masculinity, presumably to
focus on the really important issue of femininity. The film certainly
does not "conceal the violence of the colonial encounter," but rather
emphasizes it and articulates it as an element of the overdetermined
problematization of postcolonial masculinity in the film.
10. The only place in The Four
Fundamental Concepts where Lacan presents himself explicitly in the
mode of desiring to be looked at is in the episode of the sardine can that
looks at him. This is a moment of a curious loss of energy, a near
dissolution. Lacan's rhetoric is more "feminine" here than anywhere else.
My contention is that in The Piano this wished "looked
at-ness" is Baines's essential position.
11. With Slavoj Zizek, I would argue
that the paradigm of courtly love remains a powerful one for understanding
the continuing, even increasing, charisma of and public attraction to
icons such as Marilyn Monroe, the Kennedys, Lady Diana, and even Ronald
Reagan, not to mention Bill Clinton. This is in spite of and to some
extent because of their peccadilloes and failings as ordinary mortals.
The metaphor of love encapsulated in the formulae of courtly love helps to
explain how these figures maintain their charisma precisely because they
are unlike the people with whom we ordinarily find ourselves able
to conceive a reciprocal romantic attachment. They are not sexual objects
for us even though the scaffolding of our relationships to these public
figures may involve the structure of our erotic projection or libidinal
investment in them. While "courtly love has remained an enigma," as
Lacan writes,
Instead of wavering over the paradox that courtly love appeared in the age
of feudalism, the materialists should see this as a magnificent
opportunity for showing how, on the contrary, it is rooted in the
discourse of fealty, of fidelity to the person. In the last resort, the
person is always the discourse of the master. For the man, whose lady was
entirely, in the most servile sense of the term, his female subject,
courtly love is the only way of coming off elegantly from the absence of
sexual relation. (Feminine Sexuality 156, 141)
We should perhaps insist that there is more at stake for the man than for
the woman. Lacan also writes that "what it is all about is the fact
that love is impossible, and that the sexual relation founders in
non-sense, not that this should in any way diminish the interest we feel
for the Other" (Feminine 158). "Ultimately," he
says, "the question is to know, in whatever it is that constitutes
feminine jouissance where it is not all taken up by the man--and I
would even say that feminine jouissance as such is not taken
up by
him at all--the question is to know where her knowledge is at" (158).
Lacan asks the question of what purpose is served by the
jouissance of the body if there is in fact no sexual relation
(Feminine 143). His answer is that "short of castration,
that is, short of something which says no to the phallic function, man has
no chance of enjoying the body of the woman, in other words, of making
love":
Contrary to what Freud argues, it is the man--by which I
mean he who finds himself male without knowing what to do about it, for
all that he is a speaking being--who takes on the woman, or who can
believe he takes her on.... Except that what he takes on is the cause of
his desire, the cause I have designated as the objet a. That is
the act of love. To make love, as the term indicates, is poetry. Only
there is a world between poetry and the act. The act of love is the
polymorphous perversion of the male, in the case of the speaking being.
(143)
12. See Suzy Gordon, Stella Bruzzi,
Sue Gillett, and Lynda Dyson.
13. One could say then that the film
poses an ethics of relinquishment as the radical alternative to these
positions of privilege and power through the figure of Baines as well. Of
course, this ethics of relinquishment is explicit in the case of Ada, who
has relinquished speaking as a kind of ethical withdrawal. One could also
suggest that Ada enacts a renunciation in accord with Lacan's suggestion,
in Television, that women are to be credited with an even
more quotidian renunciation or accommodation, "to the point where there is
no limit to the concessions made by any woman for a man: of her body, her
soul, her possessions" (44). Women renounce Man so that their man
"remains a man" (André 103). This is why Lacan can say
that "some ingrates" cease to recognize her ethical position, even her
generosity (Television 44). But one could also argue that
both Ada and Baines also aim to relinquish "speaking being" in favor of
the Other jouissance, in Lacanian terms.
14. Marx writes,
Although monogamy was the only known form of the family out of which
modern sex love could develop, it does not follow that this love developed
within it exclusively, or even predominantly, as the mutual love of man
and wife. The whole nature of strict monogamian marriage under male
domination ruled this out. Among all historically active classes, that
is, among all ruling classes, matrimony remained what it had been since
pairing marriage--a matter of convenience arranged by the parents. And
the first form of sex love that historically emerges as a passion, and as
a passion in which any person (at least of the ruling classes) has a right
to indulge, as the highest form of the sexual impulse--which is precisely
its specific feature--this, its first form, the chivalrous love of the
Middle Ages, was by no means conjugal love. On the contrary, in its
classical form, among the Provencals, it steers under full sail towards
adultery, the praises of which are sung by their poets. (233)
15. Lacan notes that here he is
returning to the notion of "the jouissance on which that other
satisfaction depends, the one that is based on language" (Seminar
XX 51).
16. See also Lacan's Four
Fundamental Concepts (273).
17. Harvey Keitel conceives of the
character he plays in the film as a masochist in Freud's sense; masochist
fanstasies "place the subject in a characteristically female situation"
(Freud 124). André cites a passage from Pierre Klossowski's
Sade My Neighbor to the effect that the pervert (masochist)
seeks to enjoy the body of the victim of his sadistic torturer "in the
subjective sense of the expression rather than in the objective sense"--by
putting himself in the victim's body and seeing his own body as foreign.
André deduces from this that "the sadistic act, from this point of
view, is supported by a masochistic fantasm" (99).
18. The "tension between Woman and the
Other," André says,
can be analyzed... as that of the relation of the subject to the body.
The apprehension of the body by the subject reveals, in fact, the same
polarities that we have identified regarding the Other: the place where
the signifier is inscribed and as such exists and is identifiable as a
being of signifiance, and on the other hand, as a real sexed
consistency
that is unnameable as such. This disjunction between the Other of desire,
which exists, and the Other of jouissance, which does not exist, is
thus reproduced at the level of the body. (93)
19. As Zizek writes in "Courtly Love,"
The Lady is... as far as possible from any kind of purified spirituality;
she functions as an inhuman partner [and Lacan uses this very word] in the
precise sense of a radical Otherness which is wholly incommensurable with
our needs and desires; as such, she is simultaneously a kind of automaton,
a machine which randomly utters meaningless demands. This coincidence of
absolute, inscrutable Otherness and pure machine is what confers on the
Lady her uncanny, monstrous character--the lady is the Other which is
not our "fellow creature," i.e., with whom no relationship of
empathy is possible. This traumatic Otherness is what Lacan designates by
the Freudian term das Ding, the Thing. The idealization of the
Lady, her elevation to a spiritual, ethereal Ideal, is therefore to be
conceived as a strictly secondary phenomenon, a narcissistic projection
whose function is to render invisible her traumatic, intolerable
dimension.... Deprived of every real substance, the Lady functions as a
mirror onto which the subject projects his narcissistic ideal. ("Courtly" 96)
20. Here it is not a question of a
Nietzschean anti-hermeneutics of truth, as Mary Ann Doane describes it,
where "woman" is veiled because she knows that there is no truth behind
the veil of femininity (Femmes 57). While Luce Irigaray
criticizes Nietzsche for contructing femininity as "the living support of
all the staging/production of the world" and thus of masculinity, Jacques
Derrida approves of Nietzsche's anti-essentialist account, as Doane
observes, quoting Derrida:
There is no such thing as the essence of woman because woman averts, she
is averted of herself.... And the philosophical discourse, blinded,
founders on these shoals and is hurled down these depthless depths to its
ruin. There is no such thing as the truth of woman, but it is because of
that abyssal divergence of the truth, because that untruth is "truth."
Woman is but one name for that untruth of truth. (qtd. in Doane 58)
Doane points out that Nietzsche's woman induces in herself a state of
innocence, of non-subjectivity. As Doane puts it, "The philosopher-voyeur
sees quite well that the woman 'closes her eyes to herself' [Nietzsche's
phrase]. She does not know that she is deceiving or plan to
deceive; conscious deception would be repellent to the man and quite
dangerous. Rather, she intuits or 'divines' what the man needs--a belief
in her innocence--and she becomes innocent. Closing her eyes to
herself she becomes the pure construct of a philosophical gaze" (59). And
"a woman is granted knowledge when she is old enough to become a
man--which is to say, old enough to lose her dissembling appearance, her
seductive power. And even then, it is a kind of 'old wives[']' knowledge,
not, properly speaking, philosophical" (59). But as I understand it, if
the woman is naive, the man is not so much sentimental as duped. The
courtly lover is not a dupe in that sense. It is he who "becomes
innocent" in courtly love. Neither is he just a lover of appearances. On
the contrary, we see again how he comes, in his peculiar devotion, to
occupy not the place of (old) women, or of women no longer invested in
lending themselves to the uses of masculinity, but the place of the
"jouissant" Woman. He can therefore afford to yield to the
arbitrary whims of the Lady, for he is not just a man whose masculinity
depends on the willed innocence of women, nor on a woman, on the other
hand, whose very being depends on an illusion.
21. Lacan tells us that the reward in
the tradition of courtly love is the "strange rite, namely, reward,
clemency, grace or Gnade, felicity" (146). The detour to
jouissance is described in terms of asceticism as an "ethical
function of eroticism":
It is an artificial and cunning organization of the signifier that lays
down at a given moment the lines of a certain asceticism, and... the
meaning we must attribute to the negotiation of the detour in the psychic
economy. The detour in the psyche isn't always designed to regulate the
commerce between whatever is organized in the domain of the pleasure
principle and whatever presents itself as the structure of reality. There
are also detours and obstacles which are organized so as to make the
domain of the vacuole stand out as such. What gets to be projected as
such is a certain transgression of desire.
And it is here that the ethical function of eroticism enters into play.
Freudianism is in brief nothing but a perpetual allusion to the fecundity
of eroticism in ethics, but it doesn't formulate it as such. (152)
22. This is presumably different from
what Aristotle speaks about as the "attribute" (325) called "happiness,"
that is to say, "something final and self sufficient, and... the end of
action" (317); this "attribute" of happiness "belong[s] to the happy man"
(322; see also 323-24, 529, 531). Rather, Alcibiades seeks something that
answers the drive. This is to go beyond both the deontological and the
teleolgical as Aristotle conceives them: what Alcibiades "seeks" is both a
good in itself, for him, as well as a good that always defers its own
ends. At the same time the demand of Alcibiades, insofar as its
fantasmatic goal is a partial object ultimately responsive to the partial
drive, cannot be reduced to mere selfishness. (Aristotle asks, "Do men
love... the good, or what is good for them?" [472].) Nor for that
matter can Alcibiades's goal in loving be judged as a shortfall within a
rationalistic calculus, what Aristotle points to as definitive of Man when
he speaks of "an active life of the element that has a rational principle"
(318; see also 315, 317).
23. André usefully asks, "what
distinction should be made between the two forms of cleavage that are
implied by the perverse position and the feminine position?" This
important question receives the following answer:
In both cases, the subject sees itself divided between two sides: one
where castration is recognized and subjectified, the other where it is
neither recognized nor subjectified. In what does the nonrecognition (the
denial) of castration by the pervert differ from a woman's
nonsubjectification (the not-all)? This question is equivalent to asking
what logical distinction separates the two parts of the Lacanian
table of sexuation. This table shows us indeed that on one side a
cleavage is made between subjection to castration (.) and the negation
of castration (.~), while on the other side,
the cleavage operates
between the affirmation of a partial nonsubjection (.~) and the
negation of the negation of castration (~.~). The masochistic
position, whatever it may have in common with the feminine position
regarding its aim, thus remains distinct from it: it is only a caricature
of it. This difference becomes more apparent if we note that the pervert
himself believes in the Other, in the subjective jouissance of
the Other, while a woman does not have to believe it--she simply finds
herself in the place of where the question of the Other is formulated.
For the masochist, the bar is never really inscribed on the Other and
must, consequently, replay incessantly the scenario in which the Other
receives this mark from his partner, while what woman attests to is
actually the irremovable character of this bar--that is to say, the
impossible subjectification of the body as Other. The pervert
appears able to slide into the skin of this Other body like a hand into a
glove; women themselves repeatedly say that this body does not fit them
like a glove, that it is Other to them as well, and that the
jouissance that can be produced here is foreign to them and is
not subjectifiable. (101-2)
24. We must acknowledge, as
André cautions, that "Phallic jouissance should not be
confused with what happens in the lovers' bed--in any case it cannot be
restricted to it. One of the fundamental revelations of the analytic
experience consists in this recentering of the jouissance called
sexual: its space is less the bed [lit] than the
said [dit]. This is the reason why jouissance
is repressed and unrecognized by the subject: jouissance does not
even fulfill the requirement that the subject properly meet its partner in
bed!" (90-91).
25. See Joan Rivière's
"Womanliness as a Masquerade" and Mary Ann Doane's "Film and the
Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator."
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