How many times have you heard me use, or phrase the question, "Do you understand
the story of the couple? Are we not seeing here the story of the
couple?" Do you hear my verb, "seeing" the story of
the couple? Could we see the couple, as opposed to
being really immersed as we are in this novel, in the consciousness of one of the
lovers? It's a rather different proposition about
where we're located and about what becomes visible to us.
And in order to try to shed some light on that,
I want to reference a rather famous sequence in the work of Edvard, Edvard
Munch, a series of depictions of what he called
The Kiss. And people are aware
of, and this is a canonical subject for Munch.
But what may be less known is the different, sort of, versions of it and
the sequencing of it. That the first time Munch painted this
subject, he had his two lovers fully dressed in a room in a building. They're
off to the side of the canvas, we see them embracing.
And then we see a window where we realize this building is part of a city and
there not really the center of it, even though he calls it The Kiss.
In later sequences, versions of it, Munch moves his couple to the center of the
canvas. And then, Munch, who was tireless as an
experimenter and who loved reworking his own motifs in different media, different
formats, he then begins to create lithographs.
and woodcuts, and he quickly decides to undress his lovers, so that you see a
naked man and a naked woman embracing. And I have to think that Munch, was,
obsessed to show the very possibility of connection, of fusion, of the fiction of
relationship, between these two lovers. Now, our novel has run over and over and
over into the barrier of subjectivity, of individual consciousness.
Munch, in a pictorial sense, is able to do something different.
He can not only show us two bodies locked in an embrace but he can show us
something even further than that. And as he does the woodcuts of this, and
the lithograph, he has the figuration of the two
embracing bodies, and he then erases as it were, the line between the two faces.
And it's a way of conveying a kind of fusion and connection between lovers.
That is a liberty that he takes because most of us probably know, even if we
don't always feel it, that the contours of our skin are not easily transcendable.
We can't jump out of them. Even in embracing and kissing and making
love, we remain also our own bodies. But Munch is able to erase that line,
that boundary, between two lovers who are seeking fusion.
We're going to see this motif, this issue, in other texts in this course,
a number of them. But then he comes up with what I take to
be really genius, which is that in his woodcuts, he actually in a sense, uses,
enlists the grain of the wood for conveying this common space.
And so we see the two bodies -- these are very sober types of woodcuts, there's not
much detail in them, it's stripped down -- two bodies, two faces that blend, and
then the grain of the wood, which does not know you or me, which is simply that
space which is two fused bodies. There's something sublime about this, I
mean it's really quite lovely. Because it actually goes the full route
towards fusion, it suggests that yes, two become one, at least one face there that
is a double face. It's beautiful, it seems to me.
And yet even if we say this is what embrace yearns for and wants.
If we can remember this novel it constantly tells us or at least whispers
to us that things are more complex than that.
And more troubling. That fusion is arguably far more desired
than achieved, that it entails risks as well as
pleasures -- these again, are issues that we're
going to see in text later in this course --
That it's beset fusion by a whole host of real life challenges and obstacles.
That the desire, the project of becoming one with the loved one is quite
beautiful, but it's also quite daunting, and it's faced by, as I said, challenges,
threats, some of which are environmental, some of which seem to be more complex and
absolute even than that. And above all, we come to understand that
narrative cannot do what woodcut or painting can.
Narrative cannot erase the boundary between me and you.
A narrative has to convey something of the integrity of each of those figures,
rather than the mutuality of the couple. That's what this simple novel from 1831
seems to me gets across. It tells us that consciousness, which is
the abiding force of this novel, consciousness is the desire that des Grieux
has for Manon Lescaut. It is his love for her, it leaps
on and off the page in every page of this text, about how much he cares for her.
And yet, we also learn a darker lesson which is that consciousness is locked in
and locked out. So that this novel enhances and I think
deepens and problematizes our desire for connection.
And again, it perhaps adds substance and not just name games to my title, The
Fiction of Relationship. We understand it then as a construct, as
something quite beautiful. And yet we also understand what the
integers of it are. That we as humans never quite get out of
our own skin as we yearn for something that would erase that skin.