KSRC: Reflections on Marriage (continued)
Ooof! This is heavy-going. Not only is there much I fail to understand, but there are quite a few passages for which I’m not even sure how to frame a question. Sometimes I want to make an objection, and then very soon it is answered, maybe only partially, and it is then that I feel caught, trapped really, in a kind of web from which I’m not able to extricate myself. For example, near the beginning SK writes:
Alrighty then … glad we’ve got that cleared up. Then SK gets to the point.
But SK must be getting at something here, because while I read I find myself growing in some kind of awareness, perhaps even experiencing a kind of shock of spiritual recognition. After all, haven’t we all engaged in such fantasies about the abstract nature of our potential lives? Isn’t that what SK is doing here: stating clearly the kind of validation we’ve hoped to be given for the daydreams we’ve entertained ourselves with from the time we were young? After all, the judge’s first essay was in fact called “The Aesthetic Validity of Marriage”, and isn’t this really more of the same?
I think that perhaps the satisfaction of reading SK comes from decoding what seems to be purposefully obtuse language. And frequently it is obtuse when he is writing about very different things, so that at one point he can be understood to be expressing something about what he calls ‘the spiritual’, while at another point he is understood to be writing about the erotic (what exactly does he mean by ‘immediacy’? wouldn’t we now just call it sexual arousel? No? What then?), and the resulting conflation of the two makes for a heady mix that sends the mind reeling.
This is tough going, but I'll try to pick up the pace. I really am out of my depth with this stuff. And I'm not just stating that to win through paradox. I really am ignorant here. Maybe I should study Danish.
Mmmm... danish...
In paganism there was a god for love but none for marriage; in Christianity there is, if I may venture to say so, a God for marriage and none for love.‘Well,’ I thinks to myself, ‘this is all wrong. Of course the ancients had a god for marriage; it was Hera (Juno for the Romans), and she was thought to preside over all wedding ceremonies. And as for love in Christianity, if by love SK means sex, one can refer to any number of passages used in wedding ceremonies that allow for sexual love, even the “man should leave his mother and father and cleave to his wife” directly from the lips of Christ himself. And then SK reverses himself in the next paragraph and writes, ‘there is something to tie to after all in the fact that Zeus and Hera had a special predicate as the guardians of marriage: τελειοs and τελεια.’ Well, so much for that. SK seems to have covered himself there, and if there’s any doubt, he gives us a sentence like this:
I do not hide my ignorance, and knowing for my own part that I lack the necessary erudition, I am not disposed to boast of a spiritual falcon-eye which would warrant me in heaping scorn upon classic learning and classic culture, which remains when all is said and done the pithy pabulum of the soul, far more nutritive green food or the speculator’s guess as to “what the age demands.” To me it is important only that I be allowed to apply these words τελειοs and τελεια to married people – Jupiter and Juno I leave out of account, not being inclined to make a fool of myself by wanting to solve the historico-philologic difficulty.
Alrighty then … glad we’ve got that cleared up. Then SK gets to the point.
Marriage I regard as the highest τελοs of the individual human existence, it is so much the highest that the man who goes without it cancels with one stroke the whole of earthly life and retains only eternity and spiritual interests – which at the first glance seems no slight thing but in the long run is very exhausting and also in one way or another is the expression of an unhappy life.This strikes me as abstraction to the point of willful naivete. Surly SK had witnessed unhappy marriages, and assuming he had, did he just ignore them? Or did he hold that however unhappy they may have been in any concrete sense of the word, they were nevertheless ‘happy’ in an abstract sense? To such a degree that maybe they couldn’t even be aware of their unhappiness? This seems to me grossly unfair to anyone who finds him or herself in an unhappy marriage. Of course he is here remarking on the man who does not marry, but it seems to me he is being equally simplistic in condemning that man to unhappiness. Of course he is setting the ‘stage’, here, priming the reader for the extraordinary exception, the higher happiness that makes his earthly unhappiness half tragedy and half sacrifice, and already he strikes me as cruel, and all I can think about is Regine, poor Regine, you were lucky to get out when you did.
But SK must be getting at something here, because while I read I find myself growing in some kind of awareness, perhaps even experiencing a kind of shock of spiritual recognition. After all, haven’t we all engaged in such fantasies about the abstract nature of our potential lives? Isn’t that what SK is doing here: stating clearly the kind of validation we’ve hoped to be given for the daydreams we’ve entertained ourselves with from the time we were young? After all, the judge’s first essay was in fact called “The Aesthetic Validity of Marriage”, and isn’t this really more of the same?
I think that perhaps the satisfaction of reading SK comes from decoding what seems to be purposefully obtuse language. And frequently it is obtuse when he is writing about very different things, so that at one point he can be understood to be expressing something about what he calls ‘the spiritual’, while at another point he is understood to be writing about the erotic (what exactly does he mean by ‘immediacy’? wouldn’t we now just call it sexual arousel? No? What then?), and the resulting conflation of the two makes for a heady mix that sends the mind reeling.
This is tough going, but I'll try to pick up the pace. I really am out of my depth with this stuff. And I'm not just stating that to win through paradox. I really am ignorant here. Maybe I should study Danish.
Mmmm... danish...
posted by Quin Finnegan at 12:13 PM
3 Comments:
I'm finding that Judge William (or SK, whichever way you want to look at it) becomes more lucid as the essay proceeds. I'm about two thirds of the way through it now and sailing along, almost like reading someone like C.S. Lewis.
Also, there is a specific passage later on that briefly touches on the case of an unhappy marriage -- but only from the woman's point of view: "Finally, let the wife be tried and tested in the worst of fates: let her be unhappily married. What is the brief suffering of a deceived girl compared with this daily torment, what is the core of her pain compared with the thousand-tongued misery, this wretchedness that no one can bear to look at, this slow torturing that no one can track down -- and this may be why we forget how beautiful, in turn how far more poetic, the wife is than the young girl. Great is Desdemona because of her 'sublime lie'; we admire her, we should admire her. And yet she is greater for her angelic patience, which if it were to be described would fill more books than the largest library contains, even if it fails to fill up the boundless abyss of jealousy and disappears as if it were nothinig -- indeed, almost stimulates the hunger of passion." (Hong, p. 142).
Here's the Lowrie version:
"Finally, let the wife be tried by the hardest fate, let her be unhappily married. What is the brief suffering of the deceived maiden in contrast with this daily torture? What is the pith of her sorrow comapared with the wretchedness which laments with a thousand tongues, this misery which none can bear to look upon, this slow agony which none can follow? And presumably it is because none can follow it that one forgets how beautiful, how far more poetic, here again the wife is than the young girl. Great is Desdemona by reason of her 'sublime life'; one admires her for this, and yet she is greater by reason of the angelic patience which, if it were to be described would fill more books than the greatest library contains, although it is of no avail to fill up the bottomless abyss of jealousy, where it disappears as nothing, yet almost incites the hunger of the passion" (Lowrie 142)
There's not a whole lot to seperate the two here; 'pith of her sorrow' rather than 'core of her pain' and 'life' rather than 'lie', but they actually match up pretty well.
Regarding the analogy itself, I was going to point out that Desdemona IS a young, deceived girl rather than a wife tried by 'slow torturing' over the long years of a marriage. But after thinking about it a little more, I think that SK's use of Othello still work pretty well. I think the characters, or the emotional responses evoked by the characters, are universal and avail almost any number of perspectives - including Kierkegaard's here.
However, something in me still protests. What if the husband were jealous, not because of some Iago, but because he was shagging one of the waitresses at the Denny's down the street? And that she were then rightly jealous herself?
Perhaps I'm wrong to question the justifiablility of the passion or the jealousy, and perhaps it's not at all a matter of degrees, but of type. But I think there is a real danger in poeticizing suffering. It seems a small step to then sentimentalize suffering, and thus harden one's self to it.
Although I guess that's SK's point here: that far from causing one to harden one's heart against suffering, this suffering (at least when combined with the virtue of 'angelic patience') then 'stimulates the hunger of the passion.'
And indeed we do beautify suffering, and we can see that in what eons of artists have done with the crucifixion.
Desdemona in 'Othello' fascinates me, and (hopefully) I will see the play again, many times over, drawn almost entirely by the portrayal of suffering. And now compounded somewhat by SK's treatment of it. But Desdemona in real life? What a horrible, horrible fate. I've seen too many victims of pathological jealousy, and there's nothing beautiful about it.
Hey, the word verification I have here is 'bepasiv'. What does that tell us?
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