I want to remind you of a passage that I earlier cited, when Manon surprises des
Grieux by coming to his speech or recitation at St. Sulpice
and he is overcome, once again, with the feelings that he thought were quiescent,
but that rise up with all of their, sort of, imperious power, once again.
And here was the way he put it: "I was shuddering," he says, "I was
horror-stricken at the contrast between the serenity of but a few moments ago and
the wild stirrings of desire I could already feel within me.
I was shuddering as you do when you find yourself alone at night on some desolate
moorland, when all familiar bearings are lost,
and a panic fear comes over you that you can dispel only by calmly studying all
the landmarks." It's the landscape of passion, its
passion as being really kidnapped, abducted, taken away at night and thrown
into a kind of measureless landscape where you have no bearings at all.
It's, it's anarchic, it's chaotic you can't find your way.
You have no orientation. It has all the markings of a place.
It's, it's, it's like a world unto itself.
And so, if I just argued a moment ago that Manon Lescaut is the new world of
this book, I want obviously to now say, so too is the world of affect and the
world of passion. That it's like a planet.
It's, it's a place that we live in. That we wrongly think of it as simply
something that exists docilely inside of us and that now and then makes itself
heard or felt. I think in this book there's something
much grander going on. It's as if affect, emotion, feeling.
These are the markers of human stature, des Grieux has argued,
they're other markers of divinity, des Grieux has argued with Tiberge.
But they are also, the features of a world that we find ourselves in, and that
we have a very difficult time domesticating, or charting, or finding
our way in. That there is a sense of shock, as there
is in the passage that I just quoted to you.
A shock of being kidnapped and thrown somewhere else when the world of passion
takes over, takes us hostage in some sense.
And the book is going to actualize this. The book is going to make good on this
view of passion as a place. In one of the arguments that they have,
particularly des Grieux with Tiberge. Tiberge, who represents the straight and
the narrow, Whose goal in life is to somehow
save des Grieux, make him return to the path of virtue.
Bring, make him, again, come back into the church.
And they tease him, they taunt him. That's when des Grieux explains to him
that, I have found a bliss here on earth which dwarfs the one that you yourself
are subscribing to. Because it is certain whereas yours is
uncertain. So Tiberge in a moment of great anger
says this to them: "May your guilty pleasures vanish like a
shadow. May your fortune perish utterly.
Leaving you naked and alone to learn the vanity of these worldly possessions with
which you and your folly are so intoxicated."
Here then is the counter position: all of the things that you love whether it's
riches whether in fact it's human sexual love.
Whether it's the two of you exulting and exalting in your own romance.
All of this is going to vanish. All of this is going to turn into
nothing. "May it perish utterly leaving you naked
and alone." And that conjuction, that curse.
And you know, a curse is kind of an interesting figure of speech.
A curse, when it works, a curse is something where language
actually has the power to change the material world.
If a curse becomes true it's as if the indwelling power of those words becomes
operational and changes the existing physical scene.
This plot behaves according to those lines.
As I told you, this couple will end up in America, that's how the book starts, but
we won't read about it until very late. They'll be in America, and at the end
they will leave New Orleans, which is already a pretty primitive place, and
make their way into the American Wilderness.
And Pr?vost, wants us to hear the kind of figurative logic of all of this.
"Here we were in New Orleans," this is at the end of the book,
"as though, in the middle of the sea. That is to say, cut off by measureless
spaces from the rest of the world. Where could we run away?"
Remember Tiberge's curse. "Where could we run away?
To some unknown country, either a wilderness or peopled by savage beasts,
and men equally savage?" This is 1731 picture of New Orleans.
It's not quite Mardi Gras. This sense of the new world as being the
wilderness outside of New Orleans where the lovers will end up and where she will
die is brought to us as the embodiment of the
curse and where it all becomes physically real.
"We walked on as long as Manon's courage kept her going.
That is to say about two leagues, for her matchless devotion made her refuse to
stop sooner. At last, overcome by weariness, she had
to admit she could not go on any further. Night had already fallen.
We sat down in the middle of a great plain, not having been able to find a
single tree to shelter us." "May your fortune perish utterly, leaving
you naked and alone." To learn the vanity of those worldly
possessions, it has come true. It has been enacted.
You know, it's something really quite wonderful about this.
It's as if, the novel were showing us that some things are so urgent, have such
an abiding authority, that they are, they become the reality
principle. They alter the givens of the physical
world that we think to be unalterable. They make their own reality, they make
their own landscape. This curse is going to be actualized in
New Orleans. It's as if Pr?vost has enlisted affect,
feeling, and passion, as the motor forces of life.
And he has done that, page after page. And then shown that it can generate a
universe of its own and by book's end, we are there.
By book's end, we are there. We're not just there.
We have been brought there. It's the arch, the trajectory, the
journey of reading, it's the way in which literature and art make their reality.
They don't just depict it or reflect it. They make it.
They bring us into this new world. Not necessarily New Orleans or America or
Manon, but a world of feeling, which now has a
kind of overpowering reality of its own. We're there, the voyage of art.
Now, that is one way of getting at what the fiction of relationship brings about.
That's where so called fiction achieves its own truth.
It achieves its own reality. And yet I want to close these comments by
turning away from that and asking some of the key epistemological questions
that undergird and make relationship possible and impossible.
I mean, what draws us into the desire to be one with someone else?
It's a desire to know another person. To be as close as possible.
To fuse with another. We're going to see that kind of driving
energy. That kind of yearning for connection and
for oneness in book after book after book in this course and yet, I use the term
'epistemological' because the question nonetheless is raised: What can we know
of another? Certainly, it must be evident to all of
you that this text is larded, riddled with blindness.
That des Grieux loves and desires and values Manon but he does not know her.
He cannot understand her ethos, her way of being,
her perspective. That was my initial question.
Who are you? Are you part of a couple or are you an
individual consciousness itself. And so can des Grieux ever know Manon?
Is she a world that he can chart or understand?
And you, what do you know of Manon when you read this book.
Does any reader have a clue what color hair or eyes she has?
There are many lovely illustrations of this book.
Where we see artists trying to suggest that.
And yet, we don't know. We do know that she is the book's object
in some way. She's the object of male gaze,
as the feminists would say, but also of hunger, of desire and in that light as
well she is commoditized, reified by this book.
She is the central item in the book's marketplace.
And yet, what if we subjectivise her, which is what I've been trying to do.
What if we see her as a rival consciousness?
As an independent consciousness in itself.
Then go a step further. What on earth would this novel read like
if it were being told by Manon Lescaut?
What if it were her story? How would des Grieux come across in this
book? Could you imagine inventing her
narrative? And if you can, start to extrapolate.
Can you imagine someone else inventing your narrative.
Or you inventing that of someone else. It- that's what literature is about.
It offers us the subjective experience of reality.
It offers us an invitation as we read to experience subjectivity that is not our
own. And so we try on these characters.
We become in a virtual sense them as we read the book.
That's at least the allegation. That's one of the prime reasons for
reading. It allows us to be other, different,
with every novel that we read. I think it's one of the things that
finances reading. It's why people read.
There's something elemental in this. And yet, theoretically, this is a very
vulnerable position. After all, this book is nothing but pages
with print. It's not living people, des Grieux, Manon-.
They are the constructs of an author whose name was Pr?vost.
Roland Barthes, the important French critic of the 20th century, claimed that
literature does not express the inexpressable, which is what I've been
thinking it does. It tells us things that we could never
know otherwise about life. Barthes goes on to say, it in-expresses
the expressible, by which he's trying to say literature offers us this depiction
of other subjectivity and yet if we take a step back we must realize that this is
a construct. That this is just what is produced by the
mirage on the page, it's what we consent to, as we read.
My own view is, we can't prove or disprove these matters.
I think there is much to be said for the construction of selves through art.
For that imagination of other's subjectivity.
Which I think teaches us something, lessons us
about the fact that our own is only our own, and is subject to be misunderstood,
or not even taken account of by others, whom we may love, or by the world where
we live.