Skip to main content

Differences concerning Silk's "love" of Hyacinth

Patrick McEvoy-Halston Marc Aramini I don't buy that Silk isn't fiercely fixated on Hyacinth proper, only I'm not sure that it is really love for another person. In psychoanalytic, object-relations theory, there's explorations of people who relate to those they "love" as "object" to "self," rather than "self" to "other." That is, the other person fundamentally represents a youthful version of their own selves, that they, serving as a parent they would have wished for in their own lives... someone who is dutiful, loyal and loving, "love," thereby providing them with once-denied/lacking nourishment. Hyacinth... is of a young, naïve, girl's mind, who is pathetic but also absolutely adorable in her trying to tease Silk in her sincerely meant letter to him... she's to be kept and held forever in this pet form. Silk in "loving" her is in fact giving love to a much younger version of himself, that we've barely had chance to see in the text but represents the early vulnerability of us all, and especially those who've felt a strong feeling of distance from their own mothers. He can't extricate himself from this need, even as part of him has grown beyond it... to recognize the greater adult compatability that is him and Kypris. As Musk is to Blood... a fetish of "perfection," startling obvious and clumsy but resolutely adorable and courageous Hyacinth is to the knowing Silk. No one who is like this represents resolute goodness, as he's possessed of a very unfortunate perversion no one is around to help him escape. The suicidal impulse owes... ultimately to the Outsider, I suppose, in giving him a kind of childhood that would give him sight of mature love, but make difficult to impossible the path to it. This is really too bad... for the reader, because a mature relationship between Kypris and Silk would have been sublimely interesting to explore and encounter, as one would have been between Barnes and Serpentina in "Free, Live Free," as they folded into superior selves. Silk chasing after Hyacinth at the end of "Exodus" is one of the most pathetic things in sight... who'd want to exert much effort to reclaim that doomed soul. A great, great tragedy. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Discussion over the fate of Jolenta, at the Gene Wolfe facebook appreciation site

Patrick McEvoy-Halston November 28 at 10:36 AM Why does Severian make almost no effort to develop sustained empathy for Jolenta -- no interest in her roots, what made her who she was -- even as she features so much in the first part of the narrative? Her fate at the end is one sustained gross happenstance after another... Severian has repeated sex with her while she lay half drugged, an act he argues later he imagines she wanted -- even as he admits it could appear to some, bald "rape" -- but which certainly followed his  discussion of her as someone whom he could hate so much it invited his desire to destroy her; Severian abandons her to Dr. Talus, who had threatened to kill her if she insisted on clinging to him; Baldanders robs her of her money; she's sucked at by blood bats, and, finally, left at death revealed discombobulated of all beauty... a hunk of junk, like that the Saltus citizens keep heaped away from their village for it ruining their preferred sense ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Salon discussion of "Almost Famous" gang-rape scene

Patrick McEvoy-Halston: The "Almost Famous'" gang-rape scene? Isn't this the film that features the deflowering of a virgin -- out of boredom -- by a pack of predator-vixons, who otherwise thought so little of him they were quite willing to pee in his near vicinity? Maybe we'll come to conclude that "[t]he scene only works because people were stupid about [boy by girl] [. . .] rape at the time" (Amy Benfer). Sawmonkey: Lucky boy Pull that stick a few more inches out of your chute, Patrick. This was one of the best flicks of the decade. (sawmonkey, response to post, “Films of the decade: ‘Amost Famous’, R.J. Culter, Salon, 13 Dec. 2009) Patrick McEvoy-Halston: @sawmonkey It made an impression on me too. Great charm. Great friends. But it is one of the things you (or at least I) notice on the review, there is the SUGGESTION, with him being so (rightly) upset with the girls feeling so free to pee right before him, that sex with him is just further presump...
3 comments
Read more

The Conjuring

The Conjuring 
I don't know if contemporary filmmakers are aware of it, but if they decide to set their films in the '70s, some of the affordments of that time are going to make them have to work harder to simply get a good scare from us. Who would you expect to have a more tenacious hold on that house, for example? The ghosts from Salem, or us from 2013, who've just been shown a New England home just a notch or two downscaled from being a Jeffersonian estate, that a single-income truck driver with some savings can afford? Seriously, though it's easy to credit that the father — Roger Perron—would get his family out of that house as fast as he could when trouble really stirs, we'd be more apt to still be wagering our losses—one dead dog, a wife accumulating bruises, some good scares to our kids—against what we might yet have full claim to. The losses will get their nursing—even the heavy traumas, maybe—if out of this we've still got a house—really,...
2 comments
Read more