my body when it is
Nov. 28th, 2015 12:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
toujours_nigelI've been--for non-Yuletide purposes--reading The Charioteer yet again. That this novel and Hopkins' poetry satisfy me in a peculiar fashion probably points to some deep problems in my emotional and gender presentation and constitution, not least being my identification with neurotic white men I'd probably slap silly if ever I met. Anyway.
What strikes me in this re-read is how strongly and how non-sexually the erotics of the body are evoked. Not even unexceptionally the male body but the pancake on the prostitutes and Madge (Laurie, Laurie you incurable insufferable snob and prude) or the rawboned unfinished beauty of Nurse Adrian, or Lucy looking like a polished little song-bird. And of course among the men. Bunny's movie star good looks, of course, like trying to read dazzling paper, or Andrew sinking from angelic splendour into a boy with good brown skin and rather pruny hands, but Sandy's white eyelashes, or Alec being narrow headed and nearly good looking. Laurie himself, at the climacteric of his good looks in school and having a rather nice face thereafter.
Obviously the point of this is to go into raptures over Ralph, who for all his restraint and reticence is rather brutally, splendidly a physical presence throughout, very much of the body as opposed to not simply Andrew, which is obvious, but even say Bunny. He's not described as handsome, particularly, and all those bits and bobs I think might make up for a rather hard and peculiar face, too strong for beauty.
But so much of the novel is expressed in terms of loss, lack, fading away. The knee and the mangled hand--of which we make perhaps too much in fic--but also the sense, strange in a man of twenty-three though less so perhaps in war, of time is time was time is past. That Ralph had had beautiful hands, or that Laurie had moved well. Too an extent Andrew, forcibly unravaged by war, is also a possibility of return to untouched youth and Laurie freezes him there like an eternal song of innocence. Yet that freezing deprives the reader and arguably Laurie of a chance to see Andrew correctly.
It's tempting to say this is characteristic of Renault, but in her Alexander trilogy at least all her paeans are to a whole splendour, though yes the most touching bit on LotW to me is Alexias getting under Lysis' cloak so perhaps it's the trilogy that's the exception, but in TC at any rate so much of the heart-wrenching stuff is about the lack of perfection, the exhaustion of being alive and unwell and of continuing to open oneself up to further wounding. Laurie's knee being massaged, or Bim being led away at the party, or hell even Ralph and Alec at loggerheads. Ralph getting dead drunk by accident and being belligerent over it. Or to go back to the erotics, not that the knee stuff isn't ♥, Ralph's hand on Laurie's shoulder in the dark in the chapel, or in the morning after the whole bit with the outstretched hand and the dead sleep.
Or Ralph, acutely conscious of its broken state, presenting his body as an erotic object and a bait for love. Mostly that. I think a lot of what is perhaps presented or received as hawt in the novel--the bit in the chapel, e.g--I just find incredibly sad and wrenching, but nothing as much as that scene. I do so want to smack Laurie there, but that's rather the point of the text, isn't it? Eventually, all morals aside, what you desire in your lover is his body.
I should probably quit reading TC and go have my anti-depressants.
What strikes me in this re-read is how strongly and how non-sexually the erotics of the body are evoked. Not even unexceptionally the male body but the pancake on the prostitutes and Madge (Laurie, Laurie you incurable insufferable snob and prude) or the rawboned unfinished beauty of Nurse Adrian, or Lucy looking like a polished little song-bird. And of course among the men. Bunny's movie star good looks, of course, like trying to read dazzling paper, or Andrew sinking from angelic splendour into a boy with good brown skin and rather pruny hands, but Sandy's white eyelashes, or Alec being narrow headed and nearly good looking. Laurie himself, at the climacteric of his good looks in school and having a rather nice face thereafter.
Obviously the point of this is to go into raptures over Ralph, who for all his restraint and reticence is rather brutally, splendidly a physical presence throughout, very much of the body as opposed to not simply Andrew, which is obvious, but even say Bunny. He's not described as handsome, particularly, and all those bits and bobs I think might make up for a rather hard and peculiar face, too strong for beauty.
But so much of the novel is expressed in terms of loss, lack, fading away. The knee and the mangled hand--of which we make perhaps too much in fic--but also the sense, strange in a man of twenty-three though less so perhaps in war, of time is time was time is past. That Ralph had had beautiful hands, or that Laurie had moved well. Too an extent Andrew, forcibly unravaged by war, is also a possibility of return to untouched youth and Laurie freezes him there like an eternal song of innocence. Yet that freezing deprives the reader and arguably Laurie of a chance to see Andrew correctly.
It's tempting to say this is characteristic of Renault, but in her Alexander trilogy at least all her paeans are to a whole splendour, though yes the most touching bit on LotW to me is Alexias getting under Lysis' cloak so perhaps it's the trilogy that's the exception, but in TC at any rate so much of the heart-wrenching stuff is about the lack of perfection, the exhaustion of being alive and unwell and of continuing to open oneself up to further wounding. Laurie's knee being massaged, or Bim being led away at the party, or hell even Ralph and Alec at loggerheads. Ralph getting dead drunk by accident and being belligerent over it. Or to go back to the erotics, not that the knee stuff isn't ♥, Ralph's hand on Laurie's shoulder in the dark in the chapel, or in the morning after the whole bit with the outstretched hand and the dead sleep.
Or Ralph, acutely conscious of its broken state, presenting his body as an erotic object and a bait for love. Mostly that. I think a lot of what is perhaps presented or received as hawt in the novel--the bit in the chapel, e.g--I just find incredibly sad and wrenching, but nothing as much as that scene. I do so want to smack Laurie there, but that's rather the point of the text, isn't it? Eventually, all morals aside, what you desire in your lover is his body.
I should probably quit reading TC and go have my anti-depressants.
no subject
Date: 2015-11-28 09:31 am (UTC)I tend to think that much of the sense of loss you feel in The Charioteer is down to the setting: early in the war, relatively speaking; but not from the perspective of the characters, so you get the sense that the whole country is in a state of shock over the changes, but especially they are, given all that has happened to them. So, in many ways, they are wanting to live in the past, which is golden to them (think of the light in Chapter Two, which is nostalgia in the extreme). However, at the same time, they are living very much in the present, precisely because their future is uncertain in so many ways—and for so many reasons, all of which ultimately boil down to the one overwhelming historical reason, i.e. the war.
So Laurie's leg, which is made more of in the '53 edition: it destroys his able past while making his future uncertain (until he comes to terms with it). However, it is also very much present—every time it twinges and stabs him, in fact. Or the fact that the Bridstow scene perforce live in the present, being thrown together only by being stationed there. They have no common past; and all present connections are in peril of breaking in the imminent future, whether by death (Bim) or by graduation and deployment (Sandy and Alec).
And yes: Laurie (so much the p.o.v. character) is intensely aware of bodies. His own, obviously and negatively. Others, because he has eyes in his head and a young, fundamentally healthy body that is gradually healing and wakening back to sexuality. As you point out.
no subject
Date: 2015-11-28 10:06 am (UTC)Yes to all of that, the sense of reeling from the unthinkable. But I meant to focus on, rather than everything being so fragile and tenuous, the fact that what is gone is gone entirely, and these are losses of what one assumes permanant--body parts and parents--and not of friends chance-met. The relationships we get to really see after all, are not born of war: Sandy and Alec are students together since before the war; Ralph and Alec are lovers and friends of fairly long standing; Ralph and Laurie were at school together; Gareth and Lucy are brought together because he shifts to her parish; even Laurie and Andrew would have met at Oxford had they not been torn or kept from it by war. The relationships that form because of the war, whether in-scene or Laurie's friendship with Reg, are treated as marked by war and a ruptured temporality, especially in case of Bunny and Reg who are both also not Our Sort. The others do have a common past, whether personally or simply in commonalities of socio-economic standing.
The present certainly is uncertain, but that only brings more starkly into focus the past, both what truly was and what in Laurie's mind might have been, to say nothing of reminiscences of past imaginings of a now-impossible future. The whole lovely thing about seven years and cells. The past is in one's body, and cannot be shed. Surely that is much of the trouble in the novel?
I frankly detest Laurie in the 'come and say goodbye to me' bit. I mean, yes I get his hesitation and trauma, but oh how awful to be in Ralph's place and to know that one is valued, in the end, as a body. It takes that to hold Laurie's attention, after all. Love he can get from Andrew, but sex he's too squeamish to ask for.
no subject
Date: 2015-11-28 10:39 pm (UTC)I see Ralph's self-doubt as symptomatic of his feelings of loss and self-doubt related to the injuries and loss of his career. At some level he does know otherwise; but when he is feeling low he falls back to this self-doubt. And then I could shake Laurie for puttin him through it.
I like Andrew but he is an 18 yr old debutante who is all too absorbed in his own views, and Ralph is a mature adult. Andrew may well grow up to someone pretty special but as he is now? I take Ralph any day!
no subject
Date: 2015-11-28 11:22 pm (UTC)Oh, she makes me feel bad for Alec. It's almost better to be downright ugly. No medal but a certificate of distinction, what's the point?
a bait for love.
Oh dear oh hell. Ralph.
no subject
Date: 2015-11-29 05:04 am (UTC)Ralph is about right. I hate that scene virulently. All the arguments he offers and then, well, what to give the unwillingly celibate twenty-three year-old to make him stick around isn't exactly much of a question, butstill.