Playroom (6): Crimes of Love
A book opens and the room alters as if a slight subsidence. The title names crimes and love in one breath and the conjunction is already a sentence that refuses to choose its subject. We are placed inside short narratives that behave like chambers. Each chamber has a strict door and an appointed exit. Between both there is the light of voices that try to persuade themselves that they know what they are doing while another light, colder and patient, measures them without speaking.
The author presents these rooms as tales for instruction and yet what they instruct is not what their speakers think. They instruct us in the insistence with which a desire for certainty lays out a plan, and in the clarity with which the world unworks that plan at the moment of its triumphant declaration. The style is simple because the theatre is relentless. Persons who take themselves for agents proceed across sentences that move them like rails. What they call freedom is the precision with which the rails arrive at a cul de sac.
The first effect is a quieting of the reader’s impulse to hurry. There is no hurry here. The page requires a waiting that is more exact than patience. As in a corridor where one hears a footfall that will not reach the door, the tales keep returning to the same posture. One person wills. Another consents, obeys or refuses, and the outcome is given before it happens by the form of willing itself. Love speaks its own vocabulary, and yet the book is indifferent to the names lovers adopt in order to ennoble their occasions. Crime speaks its own vocabulary, and yet the book is indifferent to the tremors criminals hope will validate their astonishment. The sentences are even. Equal measure is granted to seduction, to fear, to calculation, to piety. In the evenness one hears the noise of a machine that does not stop. Human motive is ground into the powder the tale requires for its next ornament. The ornament falls, and another motive is converted in turn.
The reader expects indecency and finds instead a remarkable economy. The acts that would shock if dwelt upon are treated with the same brevity as an email received or a horse saddled or a door shut against the rain. The shock belongs to another book that these tales do not need. Here the body is a sign and the sign is never allowed to eclipse the sentence that carries it. If a jealousy blooms it does so in the straight line of a plan. If a betrayal is foreseen it is foreseen with the serenity of a plot that has extracted consent from the very person who will protest. The book grants each plan its inward yes before the event arrives, which is why the event cannot astonish us even when it tears the lives of the characters open. The surprise is never in the story. It is in the clarity with which necessity is drawn.
Clarity is the scandal. The tales occupy the domain where virtue and vice have become rival rhetorics for the same design. The design is to place the human creature under a law that proceeds without appeal. The law is not the law of judges or of scripture, though judges and scriptures resound through these pages with the authority of instruments. The law is the neutrality of consequences that follow from the structure of a decision. One decides to govern, therefore one will be governed by the decision’s hidden content. One decides to resist, therefore one will be bent under the weight of the resistance itself. One decides to love, therefore one will be punished by the fiction that the beloved could belong to anything but time. In this theatre the law is the exactness of a relation. If the relation is false, the exactness remains. If the relation is true, the exactness remains. The reader comes to understand that justice here is the persistence of form beyond any plea.
Minds speak at length. The discourse is not ornament. It is the trial the characters bring upon themselves when they mistake speaking for sovereignty. Each defence is an accusation in disguise. Each confession is a subtle acquittal that fails at the last step. The book does not mock them. It gives them space and then lets the space narrow of its own accord. In the narrowing one hears a kind of courtesy that is not human. It is the courtesy of a sentence that allows its subjects to finish, then places the period where they did not imagine it would be. The period is not cruel. It is the mark by which a world refuses to be exhausted by the intention of those who move within it.
The stories are ancient and new at once. Ancient because their architecture belongs to fable and novella, to the exemplum that proceeds from temptation to fall to bitter fruit with all the ceremony of the catechism. New because the author removes the consolation that has always accompanied the exemplum. There is no inducement to believe that a moral has been secured. There is no invitation to rejoice in the exposure of hypocrisy. Exposure is so complete that nothing remains to celebrate except the completeness itself, a cleanliness of outcome that has the chill of a morning in a bare room. The didactic frame is kept for the sake of its precision. It is never allowed to resolve what it has trapped.
Names multiply and their multiplication is itself a device. The profusion of proper names announces a social world with rules of honour, kinship, confession, property, office. Yet the tales are careful to show that the proper name does not protect the person from anonymous operations. A lady of strict virtue and a lady of easy temper are equally unprepared for the law that binds them. A libertine full of reasoning and a libertine who capers without thought meet the same end. The book refuses to give intelligence a privilege. Intelligence accelerates the destiny it imagined it could outwit. Stupidity delays it and thereby lays a heavier hand upon those who hoped to be spared by the slackness of mind around them.
The author is present, and absent in the manner of a host who places guests in the correct room then removes himself to another part of the house where the heating does not reach. In that other part he writes prologues and postscripts that would seem to claim instruction as the purpose of the evening. The claim is formal. It does not penetrate the cold in the rooms where the guests act. What looks like a sermon is only the sign that the author has not forgotten to dress the windows. The true sermon is the unadorned sequence of events. When one returns to the prefaces and discourses one discovers that they were left there as a reassurance for those who cannot endure the absence of reassurance. This is a different kind of hospitality, the one that offers no comfort beyond the exactness of a meal.
The book is preoccupied with the limit where innocence and knowledge exchange. It is not the standard threshold where innocence is defeated and knowledge takes the stage with a smirk. It is a threshold where knowledge realises that it has been acting a part assigned to it by innocence. The character who knows too much is the one most governed by the naïve belief that knowledge confers privilege in a world of consequences. The character who knows nothing is the one most likely to trigger an intelligence in others that will destroy them both. The tales are unkind to wisdom that announces itself and unexpectedly tender to the accident by which a person who planned nothing merely bears what arrives. If there is a virtue here it is not the virtue of the will. It is the virtue of a neutrality that sometimes saves the one who did not demand to be saved.
Because the scenes repeat their arrangement the book compels a different attention. We stop looking for what happens and begin to listen to how the happening is divided by rooms and letters and pauses. There is always a letter. The letter is the moment when language believes it is safe because it has hidden itself in the white border of the page. The letter is always the instrument of a catastrophe that would not have taken place without it. The letter is discovered, is misread, arrives late, arrives early, fails to arrive and is presumed to have arrived. In each case the letter fulfils its purpose, which was never to tell the truth but to make sure that the timing of a truth could not be forgiven. When the author chooses the epistolary mode he is not seeking variety. He is making the writing itself the last resort of a fate that would otherwise hesitate.
In these narratives love is not a theme. It is a pressure. It forces structure to reveal itself. Those who declare love become its functionaries, whether the declaration be chaste or lawless. The functionary believes that he is giving voice to an irresistible interior certainty. The book is indulgent for a line or a page, then it withdraws indulgence and the certainty continues to speak without realising that no one is listening to its proof any longer. Love makes plans. The plans belong to another master. The master is the plumb line that descends through each plan and shows that its weight is not where the speaker thought it was. The reader comes to see that love in this world is not a feeling but a machine that reconfigures all the relations around it until the very possibility of feeling is left with nothing to attach itself to.
If cruelty appears it does so without theatre and without shame. It appears as the steadiness with which one creature uses another to reach a conclusion that was laid down before either could consent. The cruelty is not in the blow or in the insult. It is in the ease with which the blow or the insult slides into the next action as if both had been part of the furniture all along. The author withholds adjectives at these moments and the withholding is the true violence. We are not told what to think at the very point where thinking would rescue us. We are left with the nakedness of a relation that has found its true level. The nakedness is not erotic. It is mathematical. One knows the step that must follow as one knows a sum that one had hoped to miscalculate.
Public power paces the threshold of these rooms and occasionally enters to bring a verdict as cold as the verdict already delivered by the arrangement of chairs and letters and doors. Courts, fathers, priests, magistrates are invoked with both the humility and the disdain of those who know that the last speech is never the last act. The tales respect the office because offices are good cages for consequences, but the respect is measured and it ends at the moment a sentence is pronounced. The sentence is then absorbed into the more severe sentence that the book enforces. The severe sentence is the congruence between what was said at the beginning and what is now done at the end. If there is scandal in the author’s reputation, it lies less in the offences one can count than in this cool fidelity to consequence without consolation.
The landscapes are few and become indistinguishable. Gardens are entirely composed of straight lines along which servants and lovers and enemies can meet and fail to miss one another. Rooms are antechambers to other rooms. Churches and boudoirs are made of the same wood. Country houses and prisons share a plan with slight differences of ornament. The sameness is not a failure of invention. It is the fact that the same scene repeats because the scene is the form of a relation that will not accept new furniture. The reader is not asked to enjoy these settings. The reader is asked to remain until the door that stands between one posture and its opposite has been closed.
At times a tale will offer the possibility of an interruption. A character draws back. A coincidence doesn't occur. A dream within the story displaces the emphasis for a few moments and we breathe as if reprieved. The book accepts the breath and then resumes the pressure. Interruption is not salvation. It is part of the exactness with which a system pretends to injure itself. The more precise the pretence the more assured the result. What looks like freedom is the tolerance a design permits itself in order to confirm its mastery. The reader learns to distrust the generous gesture as soon as it appears, not because generosity is false, but because the tales have established that the world here cannot afford generosity that is not identical with restraint.
In such a climate the question of innocence becomes sharp and nearly unspeakable. Who can be called innocent when every act completes a sentence begun before the actor opened his mouth. The book ventures two answers that do not reconcile. First, innocence is a function of ignorance and ignorance is never innocent. Second, innocence is the name we give to the one person who did not attempt to force time and who therefore is wronged by those who did. The tales do not tell us which answer to keep. They show us scenes in which both are true at once and the impossibility of choosing becomes the only fidelity we can offer to either. To read is to be held there, without the reward of selection.
The author enjoys paradox but abandons wit when wit would dilute the pressure he has spent so many sentences to secure. Irony arrives, and instead of releasing us, weights the line. Irony here is not a relief. It is the proof that what is said knows what it is not saying and goes on. Only in this sense do these narratives resemble fables. A fable touches upon the distance between meaning and event with a smile. These pages touch the same distance and maintain a face without expression. Expression would be a breach and there is no breach permitted in a structure that wishes to contain the last motion of the last character without a drop of spilt tone.
Because the tales are short we imagine that they will spare us the feeling of having lived with them. The opposite occurs. The brevity installs itself in memory the way a verdict installs itself in a town. People go about their lives under it and their gestures come to imitate its grammar. The reader notices that conversations outside the book begin to resemble the arranged speeches inside it, not because the world has become wicked and theatrical, but because the air between people has been made audible for a while, and we recognise in that sound the neutrality that governs our intentions when we speak plainly. A story that was meant to be an example becomes the measure by which examples seem juvenile.
What then is the book’s kindness, since it must have one to keep us in the room. It is the courtesy of form. The author does not deviate from his promise. He offers a sequence that will not betray its conditions. Choices are made by characters and the narrative honours them by refusing to pretend that choices can undo their structure. The courtesy is severe. It is also the only hospitality that does not lie. To be kept at the exact distance where a thing shows itself is a finer mercy than all the pardons the tale could have invented. In that distance one can begin to forgive persons without forgiving the designs they serve, and one can begin to forgive designs without ceasing to see the persons they injure.
If there is a page where the author speaks to us as if we were students, we listen politely and wait for the story to continue. When the story returns we understand that the instruction we have received is not what he intended to give. He intended to frighten us with the spectacle of vice defeated, or to hearten us with the spectacle of virtue vindicated. He gives us instead the spectacle of people delivered over to a necessity that will not agree to wear the name we prefer. Virtue in one tale is only the timing of a letter. Vice in another is only the angle of a door left ajar. There are books in which these accidents are guided by Providence. There are books in which they are guided by a devil. Here they are guided by the relations that the sentences have set in motion. We have been admitted to a court not of Heaven or Hell but of grammar.
The book we hold travels well across languages because what it preserves is not a national scene but an architecture of will and form. It speaks easily in the tongue that is given to it and the neutrality of its instruction is not diluted. One hears the same evenness, the same refusal to decorate, the same accounting of rooms and letters, the same dryness with which the skin of a plan is shown to be thinner than the plan believed. Readers who come to it through such a window are not kept at a distance by the shift in idiom. The distance has been decided elsewhere and is the same for all who submit to the order of these pages. The exactness is portable and so is the refusal of pathos that protects it.
To read these crimes of love is to learn a discipline of looking at the hour as it arranges itself without us. The figures act and their movements are recorded without adornment, as if the book had elected to be a register rather than a picture. In the register there is a secret generosity. No one is more important than the line that carries them. No one is less important either. We are spared both contempt and envy. We are given only the equality of beings under a form they did not design. If there is any freedom here it is the freedom to accept that equality and to leave the page without insisting that it say more than it has said.
The last impression is not of crime and not of love. It is of a patience that outlasts both. The patience belongs to language when it refuses to be pressed into the service of our needs and yet goes on speaking in the register that allows us to live together without illusion. That register is thin. It is also durable. We close the book and carry a small exactness with us, a way of setting the cup on the table and of reading our messages and of standing in a doorway that has learned that every gesture confirms a law the gesture cannot name. We do not become better. We become more equal to what will happen. In that equality the tales finish their work and release us to the hour that continues with or without our consent.