What is the difference between obsessive voyeurism and true love? Is it blameworthy when an ugly man looks at a beautiful woman? What if a handsome man possessed
‘hypnotic’ eyes: would this render what passes when someone looks any less tasteless? Presumably, the handsome Gabriel possesses hypnotic, staring eyes – after all: he’s not alive, his eyes aren’t real (they are immobile globes of glass, until replaced in a surgical procedure). Are the staring eyes those of the acephalic Landru, from those empty sockets in his pickle jar? Precisely what is he looking at?
Apropos one of the fundamental concepts of psycho-analysis, Slavoj Žižek writes (loc 204): “when I talk about other people’s opinions, it is never only a matter of what I, you, or other individuals think, but also of what the impersonal ‘one’ thinks. When I violate a certain rule of decency, I never simply do something that the majority of others do not do – I do what ‘one’ doesn’t do.” This use of the concept of ‘das Man,’ cribbed from Heidegger, illustrates Benedict’s symbolic crime perfectly: beauty, or its abject lack, is not necessarily a function of any kind of encounter with the other – for instance as a kind of benign mirror image that might pity his ugliness, and maybe find his attempts to find more pleasing models of ugliness attractive – it comes from the One: it is part of the logic of a pataphysical automatism, more real than the real, that ensures the repetition of the same basic forms, that reduces the ‘individual’ to (Žižek) “a puppet-like level beyond dignity and freedom,” (loc 767) a sapient doll. Benedict tells us that he has searched for models of a more pleasing kind of ugliness, which might not repel all women, but he has failed: his asymmetry condemns him in advance – he will never compete for Christine’s physical affections with Gabriel, in any shape or form. “A mere matter of two years ago, I imagined to myself that my apparition was not necessarily an object of terror for everyone. I knew all-too-well, alas, that I would never be pleasing to women, but I still had my illusions…A refugee in my ivory tower, standing in front of my mirror, I took to describing my ugliness as sublime. I studied my profile, my three-quarter face, I sometimes pulled faces, I tried different ways of styling my hair, I searched for models of ugliness with which it would not be disgraceful to be compared…”
The solution to this cruel problem of geometry lies in phantasy: it is the experience of phantasy that lets Benedict know what he is for others and, incidentally, prevents him from an unpleasant collision with the Real, the scene of the crime, which the many self-doubting passages in his Memoirs endeavour to evade. When we listen to Benedict’s confessions we constantly hear the voice of the One ringing in his temples, with its bellowing of great actors and buzzing of poisonous flies.
When first we encounter Christine, we’re looking through Benedict Masson’s eyes. We are witnessing his voyeuristic consumption of a phantasy. He imagines her in terms of coldness and symmetry, and contemplates her as a sacred object of simultaneous devotion and terror. “As for the face, it is a perfect oval; but fortunately the nose has a slight curvature to it that diminishes the coldness of that perfect symmetry; the mouth is an image of angelic purity, the lips not too full. Here is a living ideal of beauty.” He writes that she is “as magnificent as a pagan statue, wiser than an image from a missal,” but, at the same time, “an inexplicable monster, like a doll without a heart and without pity, like a frigid statue of beauty (that I adored nonetheless), but whom I still could not think about, in the moments when I was not transfixed under the spell of her beautiful eyes, without wrenching, heartbreaking horror,” or even “too beautiful to be anything but cruelty incarnate…” (In fact, Christine is none of these things – this description better fits Dorga – but this is the method by which this particular phantasy is structured).
Benedict’s presentation of his own flaws is also stated in geometric terms, but this time it is phrased in the form of an appeal against an unjust absence of symmetry: “Why should this awful sheath surround my brain? Why this asymmetry between the two sides of my face… (my face! )... why this sinister overhanging of the eyebrows, this abrupt projection of the inferior mandible? Why all this chaos?”
On Žižek’s Lacanian analysis, phantasy: “is not primarily the mask that conceals the Real beneath but, rather, the fantasy of what is hidden behind the mask. So, for instance, the fundamental male fantasy of the woman is not her seductive appearance, but the idea that this dazzling appearance conceals some imponderable mystery.” (loc.1807) In defence of this idea, the first sentence that we read in Benedict’s Memoirs states:
“There she is, as I had always imagined her, the one for whom I would squander my entire life; there is the one whom God has created for a virile heart that is avid for beauty and mystery. In truth, there is nothing more beautiful or mysterious in the world than this girl, called Christine. There is nothing more serene in the world. What could there be that is more mysterious, more serene, deeper and more unfathomable? These breaking waves in their fury excite me, but I am horrified at the sight of a calm sea. The calm eyes of this Christine frighten me and draw me in. I could lose myself in such eyes, they are an abyss.”
When later, after an unsolicited declaration of love, Christine protests, in almost the Irigarayan voice of the not-One: “you are wrong to say all those beautiful things to me! My garments are not strange, you have never seen me with my hair down: I am neither eccentric, nor a coquette…” etc. he ignores her protests and proceeds to accuse her of some kind of betrayal, an accusation of which she can be nothing but innocent because his ideas of the intimacies that have passed between the two of them are all imaginary constructions – he is avenging himself in the realm of the imaginary, in the form of cruelty to a phantasy. The sinister fact is that he has seen these things (and more), and she has tainted her own unwanted divinity by appealing to the quotidian real.
The One, the symbolic realm of the objet grande A, otherwise known as the ‘Big Other,’ acts as a general principle of equivalence against which Benedict could measure himself and others. A set of ideas that almost appears as an entity, the one behind T.S. Eliot’s mysterious question ‘who is the third who walks always beside you?’ it is a principle that, if he liked, could appear to watch over him, like some angelic agency that would serve to regulate all his transactions with other people (who may not see him in the same way...but they most likely will!) This third element, as Žižek writes in How to Read Lacan (Loc 182, e-book), is always present as a witness that ‘belies the possibility of an unspoiled innocent private pleasure,’ especially when this solitary pleasure is voyeuristic and implicitly intrusive in nature.
When Leroux writes of ‘the ugly man,’ a prejudice no doubt to be inherited by the implied readership, custodians of the symbolic big Other, he is appealing to the unwritten rules that decide in advance what will constitute ugliness or beauty. Guilty or innocent, true lover or sinister voyeur, Benedict is always going to be the object of mistrust because his asymmetrical ugliness violates these symbolic standards: his face will be ‘read’ and judged, in a general exercise in phrenology whose result is already understood (as in M. Pactat’s observations on the criminal traits in the face of Landru). Bearing in mind that we’re hearing this as Benedict’s confession, via the medium of his Memoirs, above all, he even mistrusts himself. All of which makes nonsense of the sentimental commonsense that ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder.’ The beholder is already the implied subject of an universal aesthetic judgement: a procrustean assembly line, ungoverned by fashion’s self-deleting timescales, whose rules, standards, measurements, traits and proportions pre-determine any act of beholding, even if they appear to inexist because they are manifest nowhere. These rules are unwritten in advance and are acquired in simulation of traditional, if not ancient standards. They appear to be absent until violated symbolically by the Benedicts of this troubled world. They are elements of the One, that serve to ensure the ceaseless repetition of the same Graeco-Roman forms. The face is an organ without a body. Beauty is a
n axiom of geometry.
Christine Norbert embodies this kind of pure, contemplative, unaffected, ‘Kantian’ beauty: cool, disinterested, above mercenary sensuality, innocent of its effect on the baser instincts of the men who surround her. She is attracted intellectually to men like Jacques and Benedict for the unsullied beauty of their accomplishments but, physically, she has eyes only for the mindless automaton, Gabriel – who conforms to all the rules of male beauty (the main thing that counts against him is that he is unable to think…he hasn’t got a brain…yet). By comparison, the physiognomy of the physically unremarkable Jacques Cotentin offends Benedict (once again in the voice of the One): “It’s not that the cousin is handsome, either: he is mediocre, which is something, in my eyes, that is much worse,” than his own affliction – grotesque, sublime ugliness. He takes vicarious pleasure in the idea that Gabriel avenges him in his intimacies with Christine, of which the fiancé is unaware, but the nocturnal voyeur has witnessed in secret.
Gabriel is Christine’s male analogue: Benedict’s descriptive passages return to the same classical standards of beauty – “a certain Apollonian profile; the eyes, fissures of almond; the shape of the mouth; the perfect oval curves of an image which may have been that of Alcibiades, or some other disciple who walked in the shaded groves of the god Akademos.” He embodies the same sculptural, cold, statuesque beauty; a beauty beyond the evocation of mere physical empathy (e.g. lust); an abstract beauty constructed out of geometrical traits: a beauty that touches symmetrical perfection. Nature Morte is the nature of the sculptural, immobile artwork, a moment of perfection snatched from nature’s decaying processes, frozen for a gilded eternity. In T.E. Hulme’s celebrated phrase: ‘deadness is the condition of art.’ Nothing living approaches the perfection of forms for more than a few moments sub specie aeternitatis, only the classical, dead forms of the timeless object endure. Gabriel is a walking dead man, in a clockwork motion that always tends downwards, arrested in the form of art, the real in the imaginary. It is the same with Benedict’s descriptions of the ghostly Marchioness – the condition of beauty is lifelessness: the pale, marbled, undead sculptural form.
For Christine, Gabriel is an experimental manifestation of the Lacanian objet petit a, the unattainable object of desire, reproduced in plastic form, that she has fashioned paying obsessive attention to the details of an assemblage of statuesque, classical masculine traits (“a certain Apollonian profile; the eyes, fissures of almond...”) It is an image she obviously feels compelled to repeat interminably. It is the form that looms out of the book covers she designs for the Marquis’ library. It appears to carve itself, guiding her hand in the act of sculpture. She cannot love him, or it, because he/it is not, strictly speaking alive, and he can certainly never return her love (can one ever be anything but seduced by the object thus?) If he possessed the mind of a Jacques Cotentin or, even, a Benedict Masson, the manifestation of the phantasy would be complete – she would have helped to build the perfect man. Gabriel is the imaginary solution to a world of Jacques Cotentins and Benedict Massons in the plastic shape of a man, fashioned from an unknown substance the nature of which is an object of much speculation – although it has to be flesh-like (suggested by the descriptions of the smell of burning meat coming from Norbert’s workshop early in the story). His archangelic name is well chosen by Leroux: Gabriel, the sexless angel that does not participate in the brutal carnality of the modern world. He also embodies the revenge of that world – or, at least, he comes to embody it when Benedict’s brain and nervous system are transplanted into his mechanical body, and immediately he abducts Christine.
Christine’s reverse comes in the form of the ultra-carnal vivacity of the enchantress, Dorga. Dorga is just as unattainable for Benedict as Christine, and just as beautiful, but he rages against her in political-economic terms: she is all-too-available to a certain kind of (rich) man – (“I felt myself in the grip of a violent hatred for the Marquis…and for all these other rich men, who have only to debase and ruin themselves financially in order to pick up women like her,”) – she’s a mercenary, almost a whore, or at least that’s what he thinks. As such she is not the object of his religious devotion, she does not approach the cold, dead ideal. She is too much of a bonne vivante. As a harbinger of the Kali Yuga, she serves a darker goddess than Artemis/Diana.
The objet petit a, the pataphorical key that opens the imaginary realm, the cause of desire and not simply its object, is a feature, possibly a tiny feature, whose presence ‘magically transforms its bearer into an alien,’ (Žižek, loc.1049) it is the feature on whose account Benedict desires Christine (but not Dorga, the sour omphax in his inner experience of La Fontaine’s fable of le Renard et les raisins), of which he is most probably unaware. His descriptions of her tally with what the standards of everything that ‘the One’ would demand. No wonder Benedict quotes Baudelaire, whose old house he inhabits; the whole dispositif of feminine beauty in Les Fleurs du Mal rests on this phantasy distinction: spleen and ideal, whore-Madonna, availability to all (for a price) versus unavailability to anyone (for any price). Dorga does not violate directly any principle of the phantasy sacred, she is its confirmation by means of a negative comparison with Christine. Dorga repels him on account of her excessive carnality and apparent availability, Christine attracts him on account of her angelic unavailability – but both are poles of the same phantasy. Benedict has already told us that no woman could ever desire him, and these two poles of unavailability appear as an insurmountable obstacle in spite of which he desires all women, with the near fatal flaw that they must almost absolutely conform to the classical geometry of the human face that his own monstrosity violates, except for ‘a slight curvature of the nose;’ the magical charm of an unexpected imperfection, like the discovery of herpetic blisters on the lips of a statue of Artemis.
All lovers in this story assemble their objects in the same way, but, in love’s mirror-games of phantasy construction, it is Christine who, in association with her father and Jacques, has fashioned a truly impossible object.
When Gabriel acquires Benedict’s nervous system and brain, and becomes a thinking machine, he has not passed from the order of the imaginary into the real. Upgraded from automaton to robot, but still a quaint copy of a man rather than an autopoietic replica, he now exists in the order of the clockwork simulacrum, a whole degree of separation further from the real, but still a figment of the imaginary realm: there is nothing behind the sculpted mask of Gabriel, he is nothing but the haggard, bloodshot eyes of an executed killer glowering from a moving statue – certainly not a classical male beauty with a promising lyrical talent, which would be what the brain and nervous system transplant would make Christine desire.
Hers is the fatal mistake that occurs when someone tries to make an unconscious desire real. The idea of beauty never escapes the realm of the imaginary. At least, in Benedict’s phantasies, Christine and Dorga are not the real mirror image, but twin faces of the ideal mirror image of the other. The real Thing is something to be avoided (the real smells of decaying organs) but, in this instance, it is a celibate machine that provokes the uncanny horror that would inevitably follow the apparition of a phantasy construction that moves independently: the sort of feeling you’d get if your image in the glass made an obscene gesture at you.
Indeed, when Benedict first becomes conscious of his embodiment as the ghost in the shell of ‘the Bloody Doll,’ (aka La Machine à Assassiner) while gazing into a mirror, in the throes of a symbolic rebirth, when he imagines he gazes at what hitherto was his ideal self, his first reaction is to withdraw into narcissism: the reborn unborn; not really alive, un-dead. For Christine, the imaginary possibility of real love’s impossible consummation with the objet petit a is replaced with witnessing an equally impossible act of self love by the objet petit a:
“Naked to the waist... the mirror reflected his image. He leaned over this image like a young god contemplating his reflection in a sacred brook.... and he swept his
hand through his hair... and he pressed his face against the glass, as close as he could. He touched himself on the cheeks, the chin, the nose, the mouth and ears.... He eyed himself with great satisfaction...”
Notwithstanding the impossible transplant of Benedict’s central nervous system, Gabriel remains an automaton that needs periodically to be wound up by an external agency – he is still a clockwork copy of a man and still exists strictly in the realm of the imaginary, although made concrete and capable of limited movements of his own volition – he does not achieve the degree of self-motivation necessary to count as a robot proper. He is still no more than a thing: a life-sized doll with a finely-tuned sense of injustice as all that remains of his previous existence as a man; a copy of a phantasy, an anthropomorphic analogue, a nuclear-powered clockwork simulacrum, constructed at two degrees of separation from the real, a properly pataphysical machine to kill.
Before long, the shambling apparition of this more than dead but less than living phantasy fills Christine with horror, rather than love. Horror is the only sensible response to the grotesque apparition of a phantasy come to life or, at least, to one that is capable of locomotion according to its own volition, once the mechanism is set in motion. Inside the crematorium at Corbillères, Jacques finds a series of scribbled notes, left by Christine, attesting to that horror:
The Bloody Doll Page 27