Amblypygi

Still of Karin From Ingmar Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly

This could easily be a sprawling post. But since Babbitt is already knocking at the door, I want to err on the side of too sketchy than too convoluted. What I intend to do is talk a bit in depth about the spider/web imagery in the story. I had a bit of an advantage in this respect because I have read Murdoch’s first novel, Under the Net, and recalled the passage in which she gives a ready meaning to this title. It appears in a passage in the book written by one of the characters (yes, imagine, Murdoch writing a writer!), and it goes as follows:

“All theorizing is flight. We must be ruled by the situation itself and this is unutterably particular. Indeed it is something to which we can never get close enough, however hard we may try as it were to crawl under the net”

Just from this passage, we can see that the image of a net serves Murdoch as a symbol for that which mediates reality, with ‘mediate’ here taking on the double sense of giving access to reality (ie, ‘the situation’), but not IMMEDIATE reality. Murdoch, the old Platonist, uses nets in much the way Plato (the older Platonist) uses shadows in his allegory of the cave: namely, as that which comes between us and the truth AND which is taken as the truth.

In the above passage, it is “theorizing” that is seen as a net. Of course, any philosopher talking about futility of “theorizing” is actually decrying the impossibility of metaphysics: we make a thrust for reality, but find ourselves struggling (for 2500+ years now!) with a cumbersome and inescapable tangle of vague concepts, hidden contradictions, unquestioned assumptions, and dialectical dead ends. For all our books and sophisticated concepts (wiki the philosophical concept of “gunk”; or “grue”, if you want to see how decadently sophisticated are conceptual apparatus is!), and institutional machines publishing papers left and right, I doubt there has ever been a time that Philosophy has been more suspicious/doubtful/indifferent to ‘accessing the Real’.

Moving on. The net – as meditating the Real – transforms slightly to become a web in Bruno’s Dream; but the upshot is the same: we are caught up in something that immobilizes us while pulling us in contrary directions. This post will be about the human being as immobilized/torn apart by a distortive mediation of reality. There are three important occurrences in which this structure is found: the embodied self as web; the “They” as web; and thought/language/theory as web. In each case, to make this post more manageable, I will for the most part limit myself to citing and unpacking one pertinent passage for each occurrence. I’ll leave it up to you to find the thematic reoccurrences of them on your second, third, and forth reading of this book (you’re on a desert island for chrissakes!).

I. The body as obstructing the Real

The easiest way to see this correlation is by seeing the physical resemblance of Bruno to a fly caught in a web. Indeed, a close reading of the opening of ch. 11 actually follows up the image of Bruno feeling a pain in his chest with the image of a “fly struggling in a spider’s web”. The pain is described thus:

“His heart was missing jumping and missing beats like a runner who runs too fast and constantly stumbles. There was an acute pain in his chest in the region of the heart and a sense of constriction as if a wire which had been passed round his chest were being drawn tighter and tighter”

It is not only the succession of these images (of Bruno’s struggle, or the fly’s) but also the wording, of a wire being drawn tighter. If this isn’t an obvious enough allusion to a spider preparing a fly for consumption (which is non-metaphorically the body’s breakdown preparing Bruno for death), Bruno’s own final vision is of a “large housefly struggling” in the web of a spider which has “reached the fly and cast a thread around it” (302). This imagery, this correlation is repeated whenever we encounter Bruno: his helpless clawing at the ‘counterpane’ is clearly of symbolic significance (as it’s conspicuously frequent usage should cue us to), as is the brute fact that Bruno “won’t be coming downstairs anymore” (5). Bruno’s decaying body means that he is trapped – his feet are caged, his room is a prison. Why is this a mediated reality? Because, I think, of the fact that “At the end there’s nothing left to do. It’s all just thought” (125). If the body is our interface with the world, and if the world is the space for the play of our potentialities, then the only possibility left to a effectively bed bound man are possibilities of thought: “Those million-times-thought thoughts could still blind him, make him gasp with emotion and absorb him into utter oblivion of everything else” (16). Bruno lives in oblivion (forgetting – the literal meaning of ignorance to a Platonist) of everything because he is fixated on unsettled - and unsettling -  possibilities – Is there a god? (No, he thinks) Can newly gained wisdom work backwords? (No, he thinks) Can there be redemption? (No, he thinks) And most significantly, Did Janie die hating or forgiving him? This fixation causes him, among other things, to alienate Miles on his first – and for all he knew potentially last – visit.

Elaborating further the indebtedness to Plato, what we have here is the first cause of delusion in the Allegory of the Cave, namely, the simple fact that the prisoners watch the mere shadows, and cannot ascend to the light of day, because they are physically shackled to make them immobile. What possibility remains to them? To gaze upon and conjecture about mere shadows. So too Bruno is physically bound to his “prison” room, the curtains closed so only veiled light comes in at the edges, conjecturing about foregone possibilities.

II. The “they” as obstructing the Real

I’m not sure how familiar you are with Heidegger’s concept of the “they”. Basically it is who we (everyone of us) are, in our everydayness (ie., tranquilized into forgetting our mortality – not a necessarily a bad state, just a contrast with the limit situation of being (truly) faced with our inevitable End). The they-self is the unowned self. The public self. Another translation is the “One”, where this derives from expressions like “One doesn’t do that”, “One doesn’t wear white after labor day”, “One shouldn’t end a sentence in a preposition”. It stands not only for the self that is unconsciously governed by rules and customs of society – the ‘conformist’ self - but also the self for which off the rack clothing is made, the self that engineers consider when they design doors and chairs, ie., the self that is common to a people – a sort of shortcut of a self that makes society smooth and regular. It is specifiable to any role – the self of a woman, the self of a man, the self of an academic, of a pious churchgoer. These roles we inhabit spare us from deliberating on the innumerable options we are faced with each day, and give us ready-made maps for navigating the social world. Here, in Adelaide’s monologue, we see a thought processed completely bidden to social roles. 

“She wondered if life were like that for other people and thought it could not be so…And there were married people who knewthey would be together forever…And there were people who did important work and had their names printed on official lists. And people with grand families and property. There people belonged to the structure of the world, to which Adelaide did not feel herself in any way attached. She felt like something very small which rattled around somewhere near the bottom and could quite easily fall out of a hole without anybody even noticing. Her greatest certainty was Danby, and what kind of certainty was that? …He had absolute power over her status and her being” 131.

To live inauthentically means to mediate your own self-understanding by the understanding of others. Adelaide-the-maid (equating her to her social role) plainly regards herself through the reflection of society’s mirror. The validity of her own feelings is contingent upon whether “life were like that for other people”. The “structure of the world” is reduced to people secure in their own social roles, exemplified her by marriage, and people whose names appear on official lists, people with material prosperity. Unlike other characters, whose pasts are elaborated in terms of formative experiences and relationships, hers is mostly a list of jobs held. Indeed, “her greatest certaintly” (which to any philosopher since Descartes is the “I”, the self) is external, is Him, is Danby: her man. Moreover, the very next sentence effectively equates her status  with her being.

The consequence of her removal from reality is her crime: while most people are defined by their ethical code (which is tantamount to what kind of behavior they would never commit), it becomes clear that Adelaide’s own ethical code - exhibited by her claim that “…it would be perfectly wicked to steal from an old man” (53) – is just another form of inauthentic, idle talk – for the second that her Man (her status, her being) betrays her, her reaction – stealing the stamp - betrays her own self-ascribed ethical identity and her motive – to take revenge on Danby/to win Will’s favor – points to what matters to her:  not Danby, not refraining from wicked actions, but having a (any) man, which, we can surmise from what has been said earlier, is a way gaining recognition of her role as an appealing woman, of fulfilling her “need of reassurance of being wanted” 20.

The theme is not just that: Adelaide is inauthentic. It is that people’s Real identities, which are, to return to our inspiring quote, “unutterably particular” are mediated by socially generic concepts. Another way to put this, is that the “they” self exhibits the structure of replaceability.  This is a major theme in the book and I can only hint at its importance here: replaceability, qua mediating socially generic concepts, qua unReal. Adelaide’s delusion is exhibited through the interchangeability of men and of Nigel/Will in particular: “She was haunted now by a vision of a slim dark-haired boy about whom she could not decide whether he was Nigel or whether he was Will as he used to be” (46). The same with Miles with respect to Diana/Lisa when they are first introduced: “Which of them was it? The obscurity defeated his eyes as he watched the moving figure in silence” (67) [This proves to be a clever bit of foreshadowing on a second reading.]  Danby too, with Gwen/Lisa, the latter of which he tells, “I have only loved like this once before” (165). This debauched and incestuous interchangeability is I believe consummated when Lisa – hither too our most ethically “pure” character, exhibited in her almost saint-like kindness to a nearly complete (and monstrous looking) stranger – when she realizes, speaking to Danby, “I loved Miles but I could see you too” (296) – a switch that coincides with her self-interested desire to be “a woman”. In Bruno’s Dream, not only does one relate to oneself though a mediating concept – but so too does one mediate the other – not necessarily now by social roles, but by one’s own desires: the love object becomes a blank into which one may project the play of one’s own fantasy which even, in the case of Parvati/Gwen/Lisa, takes the form of phantasm (and this is not limited to romantic love, eg., Bruno’s need for Miles forgiveness). As Nigel says (who is the voice of reason if the story has one) “A human being hardly ever thinks about other people. He contemplates fantasms which resemble them and which he has decked out for his own purposes” (239)

The way that the mediated web of relations of intersubjectivity contribute to our delusion corresponds to the second stage of delusion in Plato’s cave allegory: “And if they [the prisoners] were able to converse with one another, would they not suppose that they were naming what was actually before them?” If our embodied state eventually catches us in a web, so too does our essential being-with-others, and the resultant inauthenticity which leads to self-delusion and a leveling of the particulars that make individuals interchangeable. 

III. Thought as obstructing the Real

So much for not sprawling.  This theme was already hinted upon – Bruno’s thoughts are so many spinning wheels going nowhere. He is lost in a web of possibilities. But it is not just uncertainty that immobilizes us – it is also a lack of resoluteness that pulls thought in all directions. Schopenhauer once observed that from a given concept you could move seamlessly in opposite logical directions and arrive at contraries. Sextus Empiricus remarked how any theoretical claim suspended us in a state of equipollence ie, that it pulled an unbiased thinker equally in either direction. So too the web that logical and verbal possibilities throws over the unbiased thinker (or the faithless thinker for that matter) leaves one rather helpless with respect to the Real. To Bruno:

“Death refutes induction” (8)

To be clear, this means that death makes any series incomplete, and so makes certainty regarding the general law-like or essential behavior of things forever impossible. But this also could mean that death defies induction – that because death is an experience we can only have once, we cannot draw inductive inferences about it. Bruno is, as it were, suspended between this unknowability of death (“What would it be like? Would someone be there?” (17) “Was there any point…in setting up the idea of being good now, of repenting or something?” (10)) and also his own “certainties” about death,  that death is NOT waking up, that life can NOT be redeemed, that at his stage there are no more purposes and indeed, that life is a dream which would “terminate at some moment and be gone, and no one would know what it had really been like” (10). Moreover, what seems to sweep ALL of it away (much in the same way the paradoxes of the liar and of relativity sweep themselves away) is the belief that nothing is real – just insubstantial dream stuff; how can he square this “unbearable lightness” with the his other claim, namely that “I’ve been through this vale of tears and never seen anything real. The reality…But now it’s too late and I don’t even know what it is” (304) That is, does Bruno believe that nothing is real, or that there is something real that he is missed out on? Does death refute induction and so remain a mystery but not necessarily a tragedy, or is it all just pitiful? What I read into it is that Bruno hides behind metaphysical thought; his reality is mediated/falsified by these thoughts because thought to him is a tool to reinforce his own self-pity. He irresolutely flutters from metaphysic to metaphysic, depending on which view will cast the most shadow on his being, and thought as a web of possibilities acts as another medium in which he struggles.

This impaired vision, this web of thought, this obscurity as Bruno stares into the abyss, is the final obstacle before Plato’s cave-dweller sees the sun:

“And if he is compelled to look straight at the light, will he not have a pain in his eyes which will make him turn away to take and take in the objects of vision which he can see, and which he will conceive to be in reality clearer than the things which are now being shown to him?”

For Plato, the near-blind eyes must adjust to the light that reveals the Real, and this process is painful and involves a turning away as well as a reverting to old certainties. But Bruno, one of the many Cave-dweller’s in our story, will, I claim, see the Sun before it is too late. But that I will have to save for my next post.

IV. Conclusion: The Spider

Corresponding to all three of these webs in which our characters struggle – the bodily, the interpersonal, the metaphysical – is Nigel, who, assuming his true role as Spider, gracefully navigates these webs. He flutters and dances about, moving with ease and in unobserved silence. He meddles between all the characters but always with a sort lightness that balances carefully between mischievous and holy. And finally, his ability to use thought as a way of engaging the particular situation – he could be god. Or the false God. Or god could be spiders. It matters little. “Up any religion a man may climb”. Of course, like a Spider. Nigel’s sort of faith-without=certainty is in sharp contrast to Bruno’s certain-faithlessness, the latter of whom cannot “climb up” any religion because the thread that god lowers down to him keeps breaking off in his hand (which, incidentally, is Bruno’s FINAL dream (302)).

But to complicate things (as I am wont to do) I want to close by citing a famous passage from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment that undoubtedly influenced, perhaps even served as inspiration, for the spider theme in Bruno’s Dream. It will serve to remind us that, after all, all this DEUS EX ARANEUS is actually quite a repugnant idea. And raises the question of whether anything redeeming actually takes place in Bruno’s dream [a question which I hope to address in my review]:

“But what do you say to this argument (help me with it): ghosts are as it were shreds and fragments of other worlds, the beginning of them. A man in health has, of course, no reason to see them, because he is above all a man of this earth and is bound for the sake of completeness and order to live only in this life. But as soon as one is ill, as soon as the normal earthly order of the organism is broken, one begins to realise the possibility of another world; and the more seriously ill one is, the closer becomes one’s contact with that other world, so that as soon as the man dies he steps straight into that world. I thought of that long ago. If you believe in a future life, you could believe in that, too.”

  “I don’t believe in a future life,” said Raskolnikov.

  Svidrigaïlov sat lost in thought.

  “And what if there are only spiders there, or something of that sort,” he said suddenly.

  “He is a madman,” thought Raskolnikov.

  “We always imagine eternity as something beyond our conception, something vast, vast! But why must it be vast? Instead of all that, what if it’s one little room, like a bath house in the country, black and grimy and spiders in every corner, and that’s all eternity is? I sometimes fancy it like that.”

  “Can it be you can imagine nothing juster and more comforting than that?” Raskolnikov cried, with a feeling of anguish.

  “Juster? And how can we tell, perhaps that is just, and do you know it’s what I would certainly have made it,” answered Svidrigaïlov, with a vague smile.

  This horrible answer sent a cold chill through Raskolnikov. Svidrigaïlov raised his head, looked at him, and suddenly began laughing.