“Dread name of love”: The Perverse Aesthetics of Enjoyment as Disgust in Barnes and Beckett

Abstract

“Dread name of love”The Perverse Aesthetics of Enjoyment as Disgust in Barnes and Beckett Michelle Rada Jouissance is simply overrated. It is not so wonderful that everyone really wants it, the pervert supposedly being the only one who refuses to give it up and who is able to go out and get it. The psychotic suffers due to an uncontrollable invasion of jouissance in his or her body, and neurosis is a strategy with respect to jouissance—above all, its avoidance. Perversion too is a strategy with respect to jouissance: it involves the attempt to set limits thereto. Bruce Fink, “Perversion” setting some limits A copy of Djuna Barnes’s 1916 poem, “Birth,” appears with the word “awful” handwritten by Barnes herself. In the poem, the anatomically graphic moment of a child being born is suspended by a somewhat melodramatic contemplation of death as the aim of all life, the child’s cries prophesizing its own end. Read as a self-critical inscription, Barnes’s “awful” marks her poem as bad, as a piece of writing retrospectively evaluated and rejected. In this scene of birth, an incisive ambivalence sets the scene, the fifth line declaring how “Both love and hate creep” through a certain blade. Barnes’s “awful” poem binds this awful visual and awful experience to a kind of “love,” a kind of enjoyment of its gross object, aesthetic or otherwise. The inscription of “awful” can be read not just as the writer’s critical backwards glance at her own work, but rather as part of the text itself, through which birth is figured as an awful moment, ambivalently announcing a specific form of enjoyment of the awful, the bad, and the disgusting as such. Describing the structure of perversion as a triumphant transgression of “the factor of disgust” by the libido, Freud writes that the “sexual instinct in its strength enjoys overriding this disgust” (Three Essays 17–18). As such, perverse enjoyment is experienced precisely during the subject’s act of reconstituting the limits of disgust, and thus also of jouissance. Cited above, Fink’s account of perversion presents the underside of Freud’s, emphasizing the “attempt to set limits” to jouissance as that which constitutes perversion. Enjoyment takes place at the site of an ambivalent [End Page 171] act, in which a boundary or law is transgressed and simultaneously replaced with a new one. In Disgust: Theory and History of a Strong Sensation, Winfried Menninghaus discusses perversion in Freud as concomitant with “the violation of postinfantile barriers of disgust,” perversion thus being “the absence of disgust in a context where reactions of disgust and repression are normally expected” (194). Adding Menninghaus’s and Fink’s accounts to Freud’s, perversion entails setting new limits to the possibility of enjoyment and erecting new barriers of disgust, not simply doing away with the existing law but reconstructing it as well. The perverse subject, then, at once refuses the law and refashions it, and it is within this transgressive yet self-restrictive act that enjoyment is ambivalently discovered. In Barnes’s novel Nightwood (1937), the coincidence of a love object with an object that produces disgust or repulsion conditions the possibility for enjoyment in and of the text. Specific sites of enjoyment necessarily coincide with the disarmingly strange and the uncomfortably close. While not the most obvious texts to read alongside Nightwood, Samuel Beckett’s novella First Love (1968) and short story “Enough” (1973) depict and produce close encounters of this kind, through which the law is objected to and abjected. These texts reconstitute the limits of the gendered body and posit an aesthetic that is read here as perverse. Often psychoanalytically inflected, Barnes and Beckett criticism returns over and again to the psychical and affective registers of shame, trauma, and melancholia to read these texts and the ways through which they complicate enjoyment as a form or effect of different experiences of loss and repression. A model for cathexis and attachment distinct from the self-reflexive splitting of shame, the uncanny returns of trauma, and the ambivalent hauntings of melancholia, perversion makes room for these strange texts and the aesthetic responses they generate to be read otherwise. There...