‘Pure? What does it mean?’: Transcendence and ‘Pure’ Failure in The Bell Jar
I am too pure for you or anyone.Your bodyHurts me as the world hurts God – Fever 103°
‘People and trees receded on either hand like the dark sides of a tunnel as I hurtled on to the still, bright point at the end of it, the pebble at the bottom of the well, the white sweet baby cradled in its mother’s belly’
1: ‘I began to think vodka was my drink at last. It …. made me feel powerful and godlike.’2: ‘I lay in that tub on the seventeenth floor of this hotel for-women-only… and I felt myself growing pure again’3: ‘And the vodka looked clear and pure as water’
The water Esther lies in is piping hot but heat can scold, water gets cold (ineffectual), and she’ll have to leave the women-only hotel eventually to enter the disastrous world of desire. The purity here is thus provisional. Meanwhile vodka may look as ‘pure as water’ but it’s the devil’s drink – I can attest that throwing Glenn’s down one’s throat does not make one feel ‘godlike’ (notice correlation to Fever 103°) for very long, but instead means one runs through fences, takes ones clothes off and inevitably produces a chain of impure actions that result in substantial regret: 6 years, tried and tested. Perhaps the biggest issue of all is that Esther also desires people, and so she is left with the question of whether to desire or not desire, which for her, I suggest, is also a question of ‘to be or not to be’ as to desire results in impurity which negates from the totality of self that ‘pureness’ would offer her. The ‘issue’ then is that pureness is a state of mind, and if the narrator’s purity-gaining actions involve annihilating or causing harm to her body then the purity methods she uses are inherently impure or destructive. It’s an impossible double bind. Then on top of this, almost every other character within the novel makes Esther an object of study, an object of desire, an object of labour and an object of sex which only makes that gap between divisible and indivisible even more unbearable. Hence, ‘natureculture’ is what causes this sickness; it is a sickness of being alive in every sense of its meaning, of hating the body, hating the mind for hating that body and hating the society that makes that body so obvious. The links to Invisible Man and its centralisation of the ‘disembodied voice’ are latent whilst the unbearable bind desire offers to Esther relates directly to Sasha’s dilemma of desire in Good Morning, Midnight where she either allows herself to be desired by unbearable men or she chooses to be left alone to suffer unbearable loneliness.
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Nothing but Thieves are incredible and the type of band that need to be listened to loudly or on headphones because mannnn the background riffs and drums are so good. The first link is their song ‘Honey Whiskey’ – more orientated towards the desire and drinking themes I’ve discussed whilst the refrain of ‘I think I better go before I do something I might regret’ really captures that sense of resistance, social alienation and psychological struggle. The little choir bits also have something angsty and yet somehow spiritual about them, again fitting for this concept of failed purity:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOdf_AbiXQ0
This second song ‘Unperson’ is pretty apt for the course themes more generally but the lines ‘now my spirit can barely function, its ugly, no longer fit for public consumption, well I guess that’s something’ seems to echo what I’m trying to say here. Also whatever that man’s voice does between 2:30-2:42, holy shit, gets me every time.
I love your opening reference to ‘Fever 103°’ here, a poem that seems in parts like it might have been co-written by Septimus and Clarissa, not least in its close balance of the painfully real and the gloriously surreal (and the flowers! All the flowers!). You take up the question Sarah and I ask ourselves every time we come back to this novel (this year has been no exception, even though she’s teaching elsewhere now) – the great ‘purity’ vs ‘pureness’ debate. My contributions have included wondering if pureness is the quality, and purity the degree (a position I think I reversed later on, wondering if purity was absolute whereas pureness had increments or degrees); most recently Sarah suggested that pureness might be ‘a state to achieve’ and purity ‘a practice.’ Your reading seems to agree with my original understanding, and Sarah’s suggestion (I think! – this stuff is tricky, so correct me if I’m wrong!). In this understanding, there is a strong sense of morality as measure and model: by ‘morality’ I mean, as I think you do, a contingent and normative sense of ‘value’ through which difference, rather than equality (or even equity) is upheld, particularly in questions of gender and its impact on our existence as social beings.
I’d like to hear a bit more about the relationship you envision between Cartesian understandings of selfhood and the ‘natureculture’ model, if you felt like expanding this entry later: I have a strong sense of your meaning here, and I find it most convincing, but I’d love to see it slowed down and worked through just a wee bit more.
I had to look up the Wordsworth poem you refer to here (it is many moons since I have read WW at length, and even then I think I was mostly interested in printing processes and paratexts – I was some craic as an undergraduate!), but I found your reading here quite compelling: there is more to work out with regards the value placed on individuation in modern and contemporary psy discourse, I think, and it’s nothing you’d need to be doing at this immediate moment (god knows you are doing plenty as it is!!), though I do think some of this is material we might come back to when looking at Claudia Rankine at the end of our course.
The question of annihilation that you raise here is a wonderfully phrased one, going beyond that mode of dis/integration we have looked at so far on the course to ask bigger questions about what total lack (rather than absence) might mean in terms of subjectivity and selfhood. The links to GMM here are very strongly revealed, and the distinction between ‘blotting out’ and ‘destroying’ (or annihilating) seems very significant in your reading. You raise what might be one of the central questions of our course here too, as regards the questions of harm and humanity: what constitutes destruction, and what is salvation, when the struggle one experiences is with life itself? (I am sorry to pose this question so starkly; I know this is probably something you have thought about yourself, particularly given your own experience of loss.) I was so taken with the following sentence: ‘Hence, ‘natureculture’ is what causes this sickness; it is a sickness of being alive in every sense of its meaning, of hating the body, hating the mind for hating that body and hating the society that makes that body so obvious.’ This is such a wonderful way to describe the suffering induced by prescriptive and proscriptive models of identity and the way these are woven into discourses of authority. More than this, it is a wonderfully understanding and careful reading of what it is to struggle with what some people call life: the business of living, and all the complex ways it is constituted.
This is an insightful and moving response to the novel, and I continue to be grateful for all your contributions and, of course, your ever-growing course playlist. One question remains, however: you’re not really drinking Glenn’s these days, are ye?! (A facetious way of saying, great reading of the way in which ‘purity’ is illusory to the point where what looks completely benign might be most malignant – vodka for water, indeed. Inebriation – the dropping of boundaries – as power. Hm. Well.)
PS I have a wee book for you that I think you’ll like – remind me if I forget to bring it to our next class would you?!
Ah yeah I see what you mean about Fever 103 seeming as if it were co-written by Septimus and Clarissa, such an interesting way of reading it! Hahah yes the ‘pureness’ has always bothered me so I thought I’d give it a go. You’re entirely correct: I think that idea of seeing morality as both ‘measure and model’ is a superb way of putting it – would have saved me some words but that’s basically what I tried to say. R.e Cartesian and natureculture- Sure thing, I’ll expand on it when I get some time. I realise just dumping it there as a throw away comment may be a little disorientating but certainly a reading I’m working on conceptually – just need to work out how to convey it in language. Hahah printing and paratexts, rogue and niche but pretty cool.
‘There is more to work out with regards to the value placed on individuation in modern and contemporary psy discourse’ – I can see how Don’t Let Me Be Lonely would be engaging with this. I’m not quite sure if I’m barking up the wrong tree but my understanding of individuation is gaining clarity of self separate from the identity of others i.e becoming a unique individual i.e a separate psychological totality (loosely – though all the stuff about collective unconscious and personal conscious is a little hazy) I mean that’s something I hadn’t really considered in my reading and I really wish I had. Perhaps that the desire to achieve that almost transcendentalist totality of self i.e ‘pureness’ is inherently destructive within its own right. Interesting that Ashbery is (I think) wrongly read as a transcendentalist poet – I think instead his poems present a failure to reach transcendence, to dwell instead in uncertainty or negative capability as Keats would have it. Seems moronic and paradoxical to say but I love the unknowable aspects of myself and other people because it means we never stop surprising ourselves and each other. I have also been thinking about the notion of self-actualisation a lot with my diss given that Doty and Ashbery present the self as this constantly evolving, ‘becoming’ entity that never fully fixes. I think there’s a lot to be said about how that might relate to discourses surrounding stability in particular, i.e questioning whether stability of self is really something we should aim for and maybe looking at how that term unstable has grown to have such negative connotations despite the fact we may actually understand it as something which allows for freedom. That maybe acknowledging we exist as a divisible beings whose ‘beingness’ is forged relationally would make us happier people (Glissant again omg love him) but then discourses (psy and general) seem to suggest we should always aim for stability, perfection etc etc. Interesting….
‘What constitutes destruction, and what is salvation, when the struggle one experiences is with life itself’ Bloodyhell, this hit like a plate in the face! Yeah I’ve had my fair share of self-destructive habits and seen a lot of people I love self-destroy so this is a question I’m really interested in. I think when life destroys an individual so catastrophically (as it has a habit of doing) then destroying that ‘self’ has salvational power I guess. I don’t want to romanticise death and I hate the narrative of suicide as redemption because it’s a horrible thing end-to-end for the person and the people who love that person (because everyone is loved in some way by someone) but I do think if destruction feels good then its hard to deem it as destruction. You speak of the ‘business of living’ – I like that a lot. We don’t ever just exist, we live out our existences as a task and whilst it’s a task I often adore there are days where it’s the worst task imaginable, when I think hmmm this bitch of a day is doing its best to destroy me, so I think, ‘I want to be the one destroying me.’ – is destruction therefore about control? Inebriation = power to… collapse boundaries, certainly, but also power to destroy on one’s own terms. If power feels good but its a power to destroy then is that power good or bad? Tough one…
More a wine/beer girl but yes when I truly hate myself I go for Glenn’s lol – looking forward to the book.
God, the above was formatted when I wrote it – sorry for the block text!