The grace that beckons and the joy that kills: on Confessions, Part 2.

This piece should form the pendant to the previous post, in which I attempted to lay out a narratological reading strategy for showing romantic interest. As a brief side-note, those who’ve read the blog thoroughly are aware that the basic formula of my entries is a fluctuation between mawkish/bathetic confessions and obscure theoretical analyses of these emotions; I seem to be in an on-going game of sociopathic chicken with myself, where the presence of any real, felt emotions is immediately responded to by an attempt to crush them under a fearsome post-structuralist theoretical apparatus. I don’t expect this post to be any different.

To explain the title: it’s a (translated) line taken from Baudelaire’s “À une passant”, in which the narrator describes the reinvigorating effects of the gaze of desire (of one’s own, and of the Other’s desire). My interest is not particularly contextual; I’m more intrigued by the way in which the verse describes the appeal of the confession, particularly with the emphasis on its liberating qualities – the “grace that beckons”. The second element, the fatal result of this salvation, recalls for me the Siren’s song. Telling other people how we “really feel” about them possesses many of the same irresistible qualities of the Siren, and in the same manner, ultimately proves fatal (the “joy that kills”) – the connection between the love confession and the Siren as female beauty/sexuality and its effect on male suitors is one that I’m deliberately trying to create.

What am I really talking about (around) here? Quite simple. I assume that nearly everyone of my generation (and even a generation or two before) has had the experience of really, truly, desperately wanting to confess their feelings for someone. This compulsion feels ethically sanctioned (it’s reinforced by all our American cultural codes – in Rom-Coms, in Disney, in the sort of chivalrous ‘dating advice’) and more significantly, feels like the right thing to do. Clearly, the other person will be moved by this passionate display of honesty and will have no choice but to make a counter-confession. Right? Wrong, obviously. I also assume that nearly everyone who has once done this knows that it never works, or at least as good as never. It’s a terrible idea – it throws the dynamic out of all balance, makes you look foolish, the other person stammers a “Wow, that’s really flattering, I didn’t know you felt that way…”, and you spent the next several weeks/months kicking yourself for being such an idiot. Most people learn this lesson around age 16; it generally takes a while to erase the programming completely, but at some point, you swear it off completely. And yet. The temptation (better: the compulsion, the beckoning) remains, and you have to forcibly suppress it, every time – a quiet voice insisting “Well, maybe this time it will be different…” It’s like the sexual relationship in Lacan: no actual experience will ever fulfill the fantasy, and yet there’s a repetition-compulsion.

An example as narrative logic: in the film 10 Things I Hate About You, Julia Stiles makes a confession to Heath Ledger after he drives her home from the house party. She announces that he’s not as bad as he thinks he is, closes her eyes and leans in to kiss him, to which he responds “maybe we should do this another time.” With the reciprocating counter-confession refused, the relationship dynamic has reached an uncomfortable, unbalanced level. Embarrassed, she must quickly leave the car. In the ensuing scene, it’s explained by Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character that the non-reciprocal confession of attraction has embarrassed her; for the relationship to regain an equilibrium, Heath Ledger’s character must make a similar confession, except he must take pains to ensure that in order to repeat hers, she must be unable to reciprocate his confession. As such, the structural logic of the film requires the set-piece Frankie Vallie “You’re Just Too Good to be True”, which both in affect and literal, physical distance is non-reciprocable. Equilibrium restored, the relationship can continue.

The complicating element, of course, is that there’s no motivating moment to explain his counter-confession: there’s a relatively weak implication that he’s doing it because J. G-L. convinces Ledger to carry on so that J.  can date Stiles’ younger sister, and an additional, stronger explanation that Ledger has developed feelings for her (although this explanation must necessarily confront the question of why he rejects her confession so harshly). In short, there’s no air-tight narrative explanation for why it happens – the very fact that it does, and that it’s not necessary, is what transforms Ledger’s character from anti-social punk to likable anti-hero.

Is this perhaps what makes him the hero? I took a hermeneutic track as sort of a functionalist explanation in the previous post, but I wonder if there isn’t also a logic of gifts and power at work here: the true confession is, in many ways, a relinquishing of any power. It’s the figural equivalent of exposing one’s carotid, a sort of ultimate display that one holds no cards in reserve. In essence, it’s a voluntary act of putting oneself at the mercy of another, and thus grants the partner-instance a sort of Allmacht over the confessor – exposed, we are at their mercy. Perhaps this is what makes the counter-confession or reciprocal confession such a blissful fantasy; it’s an almost Christ-like notion of mercy, perhaps even grace – it’s a transfer of all power to the Other, and instead of using it against us, he relinquishes it entirely in the reciprocation. Ledger’s character becomes an anti-hero only when he not only refuses to exploit the advantage that he acquires over Stile’s character, but instead completely annuls it; there’s something about sacrifice that makes one quite sympathetic.

During the course of a verbal perambulation in a seminar today, I came across a third explanation that really should have been quite clear from the beginning, for anyone with even a passing interest in psychoanalysis: clearly, this confessing instance bears the character of a repetition, and certainly not a pleasurable repetition. It represents rather a repetition-compulsion, a sort of continual reliving of the same scene with the same outcome, although the staging varies slightly each time. I mentioned earlier that this confession seems all but doomed to fail; and yet, as the Baudelaire quote implies, it beckons with a sort of promised salvation. An interesting overlap of the metonymic and metaphoric functions in mental processes: if, as Lacan argues, desire is metonymic (which I would certainly agree with), the scenes it produces are metaphoric. And what is the metaphor? Repetition with a difference. How is it possible that simply following the course of my desire leads me to recreate the same primal scene – namely, a confession of love due to fail, one in which a certain element of myself even desires this failure.

We discussed today Freud’s claim in The Ego and the Id that the goal of therapy is to create the Wortvorstellungen in the pre-conscious area that will allow repressed elements to surface to consciousness. I think this is not quite correct (and a debate supports me); rather, what’s necessary is a dramatic reenactment, a repetition, of nearly the same scene. Crucial, however, are the differences, making it not repetition but redundancy – by virtue of their structural position in the repetition, they have the ability to locate the latent content in a way that a simple presentation of the idea would not. As Robert Rogers suggests, if the analyst correctly recognizes in the transferrence scenario that the patient is recreating the Oedipal drama, it’s not because the analyst is brilliant, but rather because of the analyst’s position with respect to the narrative. And even without an analyst, after the 4th or 5th or 15th time that one confesses in an impossible situation, and it takes precisely the same outcome, one wonders if there isn’t an instance in one self that wants this situation to recur. The conclusion from this might be that while the repressed, Oedipal drama always moves towards realization, the inevitable failure causes a certain degree of satisfaction to the super-ego and prevents the displeasure that would have been caused by a successful (re)-staging of the Oedipal moment.