Here and Now: Letters (2008-2011) by Paul Auster, J. M. Coetzee Page A
Authors: Paul Auster, J. M. Coetzee
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classic Freudian equation: sublimation of desires through cryptic symbols and often oblique imagery, each thing standing in for something else. His theory has no place for what I experienced. As I recall, I was not disturbed by what was happening inside the dream, but after I woke up I was shocked and revolted.
Shocked because at bottom I suppose I accept the taboo as inviolate. Not just incest between parents and children but between brother and sister as well. Whether what happens in my book with Walker and Gwyn really happens is open to question, but I had to write those passages from a position of absolute belief, and I confess that it was difficult for me—as if I had cut through the barbed-wire fence that stands between sanity and the darkness of transgression. And yet I fully agree with you that the book will not be met with howls of outrage (at least not on that count!). In fact, I think I already have proof of that. Earlier this week, Siri and I did a joint reading at Brown University in Providence at the invitation of Robert Coover (an old friend whom we hadn’t seen in a while). I read some pages from the second part (which included the “grand experiment” but not the full-bore incest of 1967), and although Siri reported that some students tittered nervously behind her, after the reading was over not a single person mentioned those paragraphs. “Nice reading,” they said, or “Very interesting, can’t wait to read the book,” but nothing about the content of what they had heard.
Bouncing off your remarks about animal husbandry, I was reminded of a book I translated many years ago by the French anthropologist Pierre Clastres— Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians —an excellent, beautifully written study of a small, primitive tribe living in the jungles of South America. There is one homosexual in the group, Krembegi, and this is the astonishing account of what person(s) he can sleep with—and why:
The ultimate bases of Atchei (Guayaki) social life are the alliances between family groups, relations that take form and are fulfilled in marriage exchanges, in the continual exchange of women. A woman exists in order to circulate, to become the wife of a man who is not her father, her brother, or her son. It is in this manner that one makes Picha, allies. But can a man, even one who exists as a woman, “circulate?” How could the gift of Krembegi, for example, be paid back? This was not even imaginable, since he was not a woman, but a homosexual. The chief law of all societies is the prohibition against incest. Because he was kyrypy-meno—(literally, an anus-lovemaker)—Krembegi was outside this social order. In his case, the logic of the social system—or, what amounts to the same thing, the logic of its reversal—was worked out to its very end: Krembegi’s partners were his own brothers. ‘Picha kybai (meaning kyrypy-meno) menoia.’ “A kyrypy-meno man does not make love with his allies.” This injunction is the exact opposite of the rules governing the relations between men and women. Homosexuality can only be “incestuous”; the brother sodomizes his brother, and in this metaphor of incest the certainty that there can never be any real incest (between a man and a woman) without destroying the social body is confirmed and reinforced.
Extraordinary, no? Encouraging incest in order to discourage it. The head spins . . .
On another note, I want to congratulate you on your piece for the New York Review on Beckett’s letters. Thorough, compassionate, and just. Siri was especially pleased by the space you devoted to Bion. In the wake of your article and in anticipation of the talk I have agreed to deliver in Ireland this coming September, I dutifully plowed through the book, and now that I have come to the end, I want to revise my earlier comments to you. It is not boring. Far from it, and what moved me most was to watch his slow and painful evolution from an arrogant, know-it-all prick into a
Shocked because at bottom I suppose I accept the taboo as inviolate. Not just incest between parents and children but between brother and sister as well. Whether what happens in my book with Walker and Gwyn really happens is open to question, but I had to write those passages from a position of absolute belief, and I confess that it was difficult for me—as if I had cut through the barbed-wire fence that stands between sanity and the darkness of transgression. And yet I fully agree with you that the book will not be met with howls of outrage (at least not on that count!). In fact, I think I already have proof of that. Earlier this week, Siri and I did a joint reading at Brown University in Providence at the invitation of Robert Coover (an old friend whom we hadn’t seen in a while). I read some pages from the second part (which included the “grand experiment” but not the full-bore incest of 1967), and although Siri reported that some students tittered nervously behind her, after the reading was over not a single person mentioned those paragraphs. “Nice reading,” they said, or “Very interesting, can’t wait to read the book,” but nothing about the content of what they had heard.
Bouncing off your remarks about animal husbandry, I was reminded of a book I translated many years ago by the French anthropologist Pierre Clastres— Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians —an excellent, beautifully written study of a small, primitive tribe living in the jungles of South America. There is one homosexual in the group, Krembegi, and this is the astonishing account of what person(s) he can sleep with—and why:
The ultimate bases of Atchei (Guayaki) social life are the alliances between family groups, relations that take form and are fulfilled in marriage exchanges, in the continual exchange of women. A woman exists in order to circulate, to become the wife of a man who is not her father, her brother, or her son. It is in this manner that one makes Picha, allies. But can a man, even one who exists as a woman, “circulate?” How could the gift of Krembegi, for example, be paid back? This was not even imaginable, since he was not a woman, but a homosexual. The chief law of all societies is the prohibition against incest. Because he was kyrypy-meno—(literally, an anus-lovemaker)—Krembegi was outside this social order. In his case, the logic of the social system—or, what amounts to the same thing, the logic of its reversal—was worked out to its very end: Krembegi’s partners were his own brothers. ‘Picha kybai (meaning kyrypy-meno) menoia.’ “A kyrypy-meno man does not make love with his allies.” This injunction is the exact opposite of the rules governing the relations between men and women. Homosexuality can only be “incestuous”; the brother sodomizes his brother, and in this metaphor of incest the certainty that there can never be any real incest (between a man and a woman) without destroying the social body is confirmed and reinforced.
Extraordinary, no? Encouraging incest in order to discourage it. The head spins . . .
On another note, I want to congratulate you on your piece for the New York Review on Beckett’s letters. Thorough, compassionate, and just. Siri was especially pleased by the space you devoted to Bion. In the wake of your article and in anticipation of the talk I have agreed to deliver in Ireland this coming September, I dutifully plowed through the book, and now that I have come to the end, I want to revise my earlier comments to you. It is not boring. Far from it, and what moved me most was to watch his slow and painful evolution from an arrogant, know-it-all prick into a
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