Jealousy

Jealousy

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It is time for intimate words expressing the up-to-then hidden experiences of carnal pleasure. Let the jealous accusations turn into a waterfall of arousal. But the shift is harder than it might seem to the sane mind, although the new circumstances are favourable. During Joyce’s first trip to Dublin a direct plea for mental sex through letters is not yet possible. The feeling of profanating the idealised vision of love is for the last time stopping the eruption of carnal lust. Another, mighty powerful, blow will be needed before the wall falls and the bodily juices finally squirt out. The illusion of glazed spiritual love will finally disintegrate during Joyce’s second stay in Dublin. Again, the decisive tool will be jealousy. An accidental event, quite fleeting in nature, will ignite the jealous spark, which will establish itself as a traditional stance, something that can never more be avoided. With its all-embracing focus the jealous eye will become the mechanism opening wide the door to carnival, to the feast of the body and its dances.
During his second journey home the jealous Joyce clearly demonstrated that obsession was capable of ever more powerful outbursts. He once more started scrutinising the matter ostensibly put away, this time even more persistently; his thirst for learning the details about Nora’s imagined erotic adventures is almost unbelievable. What was she doing to him? Did he have an orgasm? Suspicions are nourished by all possible signs that might conceal undisclosed erotic experiences. Everybody is a potential suspect, everybody is against Joyce: what if Nora, too, is just a cunning snake seducing him with her purity and playing treacherous games behind his back?
The key to the question of whether or not Nora was faithful to him must be in her past actions. But Joyce’s scrutiny is based on very scarce information. Nevertheless, despite the inadequate starting points, the past with its fascinating secrets pulls him into a whirlpool of even stronger doubts. To the territory, which – by sinking into nothingness – irrevocably escaped his visitations and empirical attempts: his eye would never reach it. What is opening up behind the milky screen of the past? When Joyce thinks about Nora’s past, his jealousy acquires the quality of a sieve filtering every inch of their relationship with doubts about her sincerity. A possibility of a decisive experiment and final judgement is forever washed away. The witch cannot be thrown into the water to see whether she’ll drown or swim ashore.

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Joyce described what was for him the truly painful part of Nora’s past in the outstanding novella The Dead. It is personified by the only man whom Nora was ever in love with before Joyce. He was a boy from Galway, who was connected to Nora in deep mutual affection, but the possible development of their love came to a halt with the boy’s death. The tragic death froze the love and made it resistant to time. It is definitely no coincidence that, in The Dead, Nora’s alter ego – Gretta Conroy – believes that the boy died for them in order to glorify their love. In The Dead Joyce revealed the fatal dimension of the perspective from which he looked upon Nora’s important experience. Joyce’s alter ego, the young intellectual Gabriel Conroy, upon leaving the annual celebration suddenly realises that his wife is his only ally in the midst of social senility, even hostility. Pleasant memories are intertwined with sexual desire. The arena for their lust is to be a hotel room. However, at this point his awareness is pierced by another shocking blow. Gretta’s confession faces the hero with the fact that while he was totally absorbed in their story, she abandoned herself to memories from the past. Their separate minds run in two different directions. The dead man is the phantom that breaks into their reality. Although – in the ritual toast – Gabriel was exalting the living above the dead, he suddenly feels the cold presence of the latter. The image of two blank pages, the whiteness of which started filling up in the shelter of their love, finally dissolves. Their worlds are two ships, which came sailing from different seas to fatally meet at an accidental crossing. The total equality of their cargoes was just an illusion. The absolute has different measures. The snow, which erases differences, and covers the living and the dead with the coat of oblivion, is gently merging with the echoing melody of Joyce’s novella.
Only jealousy can colour the experiential split with anger, with the feeling of a kind of spiritual and corporal deprivation. From Joyce’s inside there crawl out accusations about the selfishness of the beloved person, who buried within herself more hidden treasures than the unwritten contract of their high-frequency love, based on the total compatibility of their souls, foresaw. Now he’s more than ever before interested in the details. When you were with him in the dark at night did your fingers never, never unbutton his trousers and slip inside like mice? Did you ever frig him, dear, tell me truly or anyone else? … The boy from Galway is just a channel for the general question: Did you never, never, never feel a man’s or a boy’s prick in your fingers until you unbuttoned me? Let her – in the name of sincerity – confess all the sins, in which he did not take part! For Joyce very well remembers how she, on their first date, had shamelessly ‘frigged’ himself. For him, the erotic part of their experience is the decisive blow, which opens up the wound, infected with aching doubts. Has she had more pleasure than him? Are their common experiences the peak of their awareness? Have they truly experienced together what seems to be the decisive and unique in their lives? In fact, Joyce is troubled by his own status. Is he really the one who – with his sharp intellect – brought to life the decision, which was fundamental: to flee together from their homeland? Is he the one who is controlling the situation and directing it – or is his so glorified reason just a helpless illusion defending him from the truth that she has been the one who has whole-heartedly participated in the game of life from the very beginning, and he has been just a ridiculous by-stander, doomed to the twistings of reason, and to his own absurd blabbering.
The passionate doubt necessarily led to doubting his own superiority; what else could his desire for dominating the whole of Nora’s life be? At the very heart of uncertainty the erotic charge – so typical of Joyce’s jealous storm – had to break and turn to its object, torn out of all possible contexts. The desire for even more intense participation in actual intercourse prevails over the spiritual search. Merging of their beings becomes the imperative of volition, and no longer a motto, which could freeze their relationship into a stable and measurable monolith. Instead of territorial colonisation, the siege of yesterday, today and tomorrow, Joyce is focused on the now and measures the potential for a dizzy takeoff. Darling, darling, tonight I have such a wild lust for your body that if you were here beside me and even if you told me with your lips that half the redheaded louts in the county Galway had had a fuck at you before me I would still rush at you with desire. The liberated lust becomes the bridge across which Joyce will try to sneak to heaven.

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The jealous doubter is turning into an orgiastic, passionate man, who finally admits that – in addition to spiritual yearning – he has a strong desire for Nora’s body. But, side by side and inside this spiritual love I have for you there is also a wild beast-like craving for every inch of your body, for every secret and shameful part of it, for every odour and act of it. My love for you allows me to pray to the spirit of eternal beauty and tenderness mirrored in your eyes or to fling you down under me on that soft belly of yours and fuck you up behind, like a hog riding a sow, glorying in the very stink and sweat that rises from your arse… Joyce’s words are no longer accusations, but an avalanche of quite open sexual insinuations. In addition to all the tender nicknames Nora becomes his little fucking whore. The distance between Trieste and Dublin makes actual intercourse impossible, so their letters become an unbridled expression of their desire, the documents of absence, on the one hand, and a kind of helping tool for masturbation on the other. Joyce often praises Nora’s sincerity and encourages her to write as dirty as possible. The body finally settles in the conscious part of their relationship and vehemently enters the sphere of volition. The restless flesh with all its members, juices and secretions. The letters, which once were full of spiritual heights, now burn with the flaring tones of jealousy, with the fever of hedonism, with all possible bodily actions.
This sudden eruption of sensuality is not happening on a totally isolated stretch of their love relationship. It emerged from – or at least in close connection with – their deep spiritual kinship and affection. Georges Bataille claims that without prohibition, which is immanent to human beings in order to regulate life and prevent its annihilation, there is no step over, no transgression, where all limitations would be erased in orgiastic pleasure, and where the absolute might open up in the ecstatic annihilation of the self. Even if we cannot entirely trust Bataille’s dialectic and apply it to all possible variations of erotic relations, it seems useful for an explanation of the development of the relationship between Joyce and Nora. There is no doubt that the magnetism of their relationship was from the very start based on spiritual commitment, while the surge of sensuality was triggered off by the awareness of the sin, of the violation of the axiom fundamental to their union. The stakes were too high. If their experiences are never identical, if their spirits meet only at intersections, and not in every experienced shiver, they might ascend to that distant point, where the edges of awareness disappear in the mist, where – instead of the voluptuous horizontal – opens up the vertiginous vertical. What is important now is the quality of experience, the exclusive feeling of the immense limit, the experience of utter presence, which – with its radicalness – for a moment ignores the usual routine, lights it up with the flare of the infinite and the transient, to finally return to the known territory, which will never be quite the same again. The exhausted lovers return to everyday life as secret allies. The original spiritual tie acquires an even more intense form. Their secret knowledge is a liability urging them to seek further: where are the limits of our story? How far can the souls reach, how intensely can the bodies whirl? Where is the edge of our lives, where does death begin? How far will we get? The fatal adventure is not over yet, although the calm of the haven is more than welcome.

AuthorMitja Čander
2018-08-21T17:23:19+00:00 September 1st, 2005|Categories: Reviews, Literature, Blesok no. 44|0 Comments