Siri Hustvedt - The Blazing World

It is the dark thing, the inexplicable lump of a thing that gives you real doubts, Harry. And the dark thing is not in Rune but in you, isn’t it? It is in you as Richard Brickman. And Rune knows this. He is sensitive to undercurrents, just as you are. I see him pick up the mask and put it on. That is what you wanted, isn’t it? You wanted to play. But there is the fear of the burning arousal between your legs born of the game, out of control. The secret: I am not attracted to Rune, except when I’m Richard and he’s Ruina, but in order to play one has to take both parts. There’s a confession. Do I dare tell Dr. F.?

I am responsible for the drama (or whatever it was). I, Mistress of the Masks, have created the whole shebang. Rune played along with it, nothing more. He played well. He was game, but it was my show, wasn’t it? Where is the boundary between the two inventions, Harry, the absurd masked beings on the screen? Can you draw the line? Have you given too much away? Are you vulnerable? That is the melody of your doubt.

And now, as you write these words, you see your not-yet-old father sitting in silence at the end of the table in the Riverside Drive apartment, a speechless statue. Then you see your old mother many years later wearing her lilac robe in the hospital. She is telling you the story of how he punished her for wanting to speak. He punished her by saying nothing, and you, Harry, blurt out the words, That was cruel! He was cruel! Your mother agrees. It was cruel.

Of this I am certain: There has been more than one turn of the screw.

I. J. G. Ballard, The Day of Creation (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), 64.

II. J. G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (London: Fourth Estate, 1990), 27.

III. The popular quote about Aristotelian logic is from a character in Dick’s novel VALIS , not from Dick himself. In her notebooks, Burden frequently returns to what she calls “the limits of logic.” Her attempt to engage Rune in a discussion of various forms of logic fails. Boolean logic, named after the nineteenth-century mathematician George Boole, is an algebraic binary system in which all values can be reduced to true or false, a logic fundamental to the design of computer hardware. Paraconsistent three-valued logic systems are designed to retain forms of traditional logic but also tolerate inconsistencies: “the unknown or the ambiguous.” In 1931, Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorem demonstrated that any system of mathematics or logic cannot be both consistent and complete because it must rely on unproven assumptions that lie outside the system.

IV. “Overdetermined: The fact that formations of the unconscious (symptoms, dreams, etc.) can be attributed to a plurality of determining factors.” J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), 292. Burden suggests that her sudden coming upon the name Brickman is derived from multiple unconscious sources.

V. The art historian Aby Warburg (1866–1929) developed the term Pathosformel to describe the emotive formula of visual representations. For Warburg, works of art were charged with psychic energies expressed in a gestural language. See Warburg’s The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance , trans. David Britt (Los Angeles, Calif.: Getty Research Institute, 1999).

VI. Burden is referring to the master/slave chapter in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind , in which the philosopher argues that self-consciousness is achieved only through an agonistic battle with the other.

VII. Judith Butler coined the term performativity : “Gender proves to be performance, that is, constituting an identity it is purported to be. In this sense gender is always a doing, though not a doing by the subject who might be said to pre-exist the deed.” In Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 25.

I confess there were times when I found Harry’s intensity about her pseudonymous project rather exhausting. At our weekly teas, her eyes shone as she reported on her voluminous reading and how it fit into her larger schema. She showed me drawings and charts, handed me books of philosophy, science papers on mirror systems in the brain, and she wanted my opinions on all of them. Every once in a while, an article or book caught my attention, but often I had to tell her that I didn’t have time to work my way through it. I never met Rune or witnessed Harry designing or building the project, but she discussed it regularly with me and worried continually about the risks they were taking by introducing elements he had never used in his work before. I know she imagined a great victory waiting for her at the end of the tunnel, redemption for her years of toil and oblivion, and I admit that this fantasy had an irrational coloring to it; but to those who believe that Harry lied about her work with Rune, I say it is not possible, and to others who have argued that she lost her hold on reality altogether and no longer knew whether she was coming or going, I can say firmly as a psychiatrist that Harry was not psychotic. She was not delusional. Her friend the Barometer was psychotic and delusional. Harry was no more deluded than the average neurotic.

In fact, she was hell-bent on understanding the psychology of belief and delusion, which, let us be frank, are often one and the same thing. How do preposterous, even impossible ideas take hold of whole populations? The art world was Harry’s laboratory — her microcosm of human interaction — in which buzz and rumor literally alter the appearances of paintings and sculptures. But no one can prove that one work of art is truly superior to another or that the art market runs mostly on such blinkered notions. As Harry pointed out to me repeatedly, there is not even agreement on a definition of art.

In some cases, however, delusions become apparent. Harry and I were both fascinated by what have been called “moral panics,” outbreaks of spreading terror, often directed at one supposedly “deviant” group or another — Jews, homosexuals, blacks, hippies, and, last but not least, witches and devils. During the 1980s and early 1990s, satanic cults popped up all over the United States, and their gruesome rites were all soberly reported in the newspapers. Countless arrests, trials, imprisonments, and wrecked lives resulted from that hysterical contagion. Social workers, psychotherapists, law enforcement officials, and the courts were all swept up in the panic. In the end, there was no evidence of a single accusation having been true. One conviction after another has been overturned. Caught in an epidemic of traveling thoughts, hundreds of people were eager to believe that the woman or man at the day-care center, the sheriff, the coach, the neighbor down the street were monsters who raped and mutilated children, who drank their blood and ate their feces for breakfast. Gruesome memories sprouted from the minds of grown-ups and children, accounts of Black Sabbath masses, of sodomy and untold numbers of murders, but no one ever found a dead body or any marks of torture on a single person. And yet people believed. There are those who still believe.

Think of the stories that bloomed and circulated after 9/11, that no Jews were killed at the World Trade Center and that the U.S. government had manufactured the atrocity. This nonsense had adamant followers, as, of course, did the Bush administration’s big lie about the same carnage and Iraq. It is easy to claim that those who are swept up in these beliefs are ignorant, but belief is a complex mixture of suggestion, mimicry, desire, and projection. We all like to believe we are resistant to the words and actions of others. We believe that their imaginings do not become ours, but we are wrong. Some beliefs are so patently wrong — the proclamations of the Flat Earth Society, for example — that dismissing them is simple for most of us. But many others reside in ambiguous territory, where the personal and the interpersonal are not easily separated.