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• 1 2020-09-18T16:39:22-04:00 Close Reading 12 plain 2020-11-18T15:32:59-05:00

  "I was right about Clarimonda's reproachful look because I went out with the Inspector last Friday. I asked her to forgive me. I said it
  was stupid of me, and spiteful to have gone. She forgave me, and I promised never to leave the window again. We kissed, pressing our lips against each of our window panes. 

  Wednesday, March 23 I know now that I love Clarimonda. That she has entered into the very fiber of my being. It may be that the loves of
  other men are different. But does there exist one head, one ear, one hand that is exactly like hundreds of millions of others? There are always differences, and it must be so with love. My love is strange, I know that, but is it any the less lovely because of that? Besides, my love makes me happy. 

  If only I were not so frightened. Sometimes my terror slumbers and I forget it for a few moments, then it wakes and does not leave me. The fear is like a poor mouse trying to escape the grip of a powerful serpent. Just wait a bit, poor sad terror. Very soon, the serpent love will devour you." 

  The Spider, Hanns Heinz Ewers, 1915 

  
  
  
   

  Desire in Containment : The Window and The Screen 

  This passage from Hanns Heinz Ewers 1915 novella The Spider is steeped in the desires of its narrator, a young medical student Richard Bracquemont, as he falls further into the trappings of a mysterious young woman known to the reader as Clarimonda. Richard is staying in a run-down guest house to investigate the occurrence of three consecutive “suicides” when he notices Clarimonda in the window opposite the street from his. This passage appears towards the end of the story - the moment Richard verbalizes his love marks the start of his overt desire to be completely dominated by Clarimonda, and eventually leads directly to his demise. In the current context of the coronavirus pandemic, Ewer’s articulation of Richard’s desire forges a powerful entry point for the desire of the reader themself. In her piece “Close Reading,” Rita Charon elucidates the importance of desire itself in the deep analysis and embodied experience of a textual source. She states, “Desire powers the production and the consumption of a text” (124). Central to the act of reading is the fulfillment of desire. Our desire to experience and be nourished by creative products, to advance our knowledge, to simply engage with anything, is defined by the boundaries of our love. When I first read this story, I felt an extreme resonance - stirring excitement even - with Richard’s predicament. The generative constraints of the window, looming terror, yearning for “oneness,” and language of materiality present in this passage illuminate the contentions of desire’s tenacious attempt to thrive amidst a landscape of contagion. 

  At the start of the passage, Richard promises to never leave the window again. His satisfaction is dangerously located within its four sides and uncompromising 90 degree angles. As I sit in front of my laptop now, I am immersed - and bound - within a similar frame. Behind this document, I can see hints of a multiplicity of interior “windows” within the master frame of the screen: a stream of text messages between myself and my girlfriend Laurie, a spotify playlist, a pdf reading about the feminist craft movement, my calendar, zoom, and so on. I gaze at the screen with a necessary adoration; for the past eight months it has contained almost everything. Reading about Richard’s obsession with his window, the crucial mediation between himself and Clarimonda, is reminiscent of this unsettling desire for my screen. I began to ponder the inarguably solid nature of the flat surface of both a window and a screen - and yet you can see “through” them. The world on the other side of the screen - a world we must now necessarily inhabit for the safety and health of one another - reconfigures the temporality, intensity, and language of my desire in surprising ways every time I eagerly step in. One day I leave a facetime call with a close friend feeling entirely deflated by the inability to physically connect. The next I feel energized reading an article materialized by the very same pixels that composed my friend’s dissatisfying digital presence just prior. Sometimes I text Laurie for three hours and it feels like three minutes. The screen’s warped mimesis of the physical world starts to become “real” such that I couldn't help but laugh when Richard kissed the window pane. 

  When the window is finally breached, Richard meets his death. Albeit subconsciously, he must anticipate this end. “If only I was not so frightened” he writes, expressing as his love grows, a simultaneous overwhelming terror. He uses animalistic simile to express an instinctual, essential fear: “The fear is like a poor mouse trying to escape the grip of a powerful serpent.” There exists an inherent intertwinement of fear and desire in regards to the limiting space of the window. What unknown could possibly lie beyond? How would it feel to experience the body in a new, bewildering place again? Charon writes, “To talk about appetites and desires puts a physical slant on the actions of reading. I mean to do so, for these desires are experienced with the full body and mind of the reader” (125). While using my laptop is still a corporeal experience, it feels distinctly more divorced than my pre-pandemic embodiment. I am still trying to understand how desire can operate within these constraints. However, while I wish to evade them, I can’t shake the fear of readjusting to a fundamental sensory and directional expansion of experience. What happens when my body emerges from this hiatus and the world regains its three dimensionality? In this way, disease manipulates us and our relationship to our bodies even as we evade direct infection. 

  Just as Richard accepts in the passage’s closing line, I do desire to be in a sense “devoured” by the material world again. I am struck by the phrase “entered into every fiber of my being” to denote Richard’s full realization of his love. The sense of oneness - not two distinct individuals but rather a conglomeration with unascertainable boundaries - expressed in this language represents a desire that must be severed (at least on a physical plane) by the pandemic. In contagion’s starkly visible rendering of our permeable, interconnected reality, it necessitates an isolating distance. We lack the physical touch of bodies, surfaces, materials. Ewer’s use of the material metaphor, fiber, immediately evokes this yearning for experiences of touch. The desire extends so far as to lead Richard to press his lips against the cold glass of his window pane - to touch a material object in an unusually intimate fashion. The dissonance of this removed act, constituted by the inherent satisfaction achieved through any available physical expression of desire, contains within it the workings of a multitude of desires during the covid pandemic. 
  
  
  image sources:
  my own screenshot
  ken roginski, the truth about old windows, 2014