To say that addiction is a way of relieving loneliness is to give the wrong impression. What it relieves is the sensory deprivation attendant on solitary confinement. And solitary confinement, as I have been suggesting, does not require four walls, a locked door and a jailor; it merely requires that we lose our sense of natural reciprocity with the world and are so painfully aware of that loss that we try to make it good in any way we can. When William Burroughs questions himself as to why he ever became a heroin addict he has to admit that boredom had a lot to do with it. None of the options of bourgeois life open to him held out any interest for him and what he saw of those who ‘got on’, who made what the world considered a success of their lives, positively nauseated him. Becoming a junkie was a way of escaping from this, and he brings out powerfully how much of an effort of will is actually involved in that, how long it takes to get really and truly hooked.
Unfortunately addiction cannot fully satisfy our desires either and thus leaves us in the state which all those in Dante's Hell experience: the state of being in perpetual hopeless longing — ‘sanza speme vivemo in disio’.
Stanley Cavell, in his thoughtful book on film to which I have already referred, comes close to making the same point about film but shies away from the identification of film and addiction. But his perceptive remarks cut across the banalities of most film theory and help us to understand what is at issue. ‘To say that we wish to view the world itself’, he argues,
is to say that we are wishing for the condition of viewing as such. That is our way of establishing our connection with the world: through viewing, or having views of it. Our condition has become one in which our natural mode of perception is to view, feeling unseen. We do not so much look at the world as look out at it, from behind the self. It is our fantasies, now all but completely thwarted and out of hand, which are unseen and must be kept unseen. As if we could no longer hope that anyone might share them — at just the moment that they are pouring into the streets, less private than ever. So we are less than ever in a position to marry them to the world. Viewing a movie makes this condition automatic, takes the responsibility for it out of our hands. Hence movies seem more natural than reality. Not because they are escapes into fantasy, but because they are reliefs from private fantasy and its responsibilities; from the fact that the world is already drawn by fantasy. And not because they are dreams, but because they permit the self to be wakened, so that we may stop withdrawing our longings further into ourselves.
Despite a number of obscurities, which the rest of Cavell's book do not wholly clear up, the central assertion here seems both profound and important. Movies seem more natural than reality ‘not because they are escapes into fantasy, but because they are reliefs from private fantasy and its responsibilities’. What all the people in Dante's Hell have chosen, what Marcel so longs for when once he discovers that his mother may at any time withdraw and leave him, is the relief from private fantasy and its responsibilities. And movies, like sexual passion and masturbation, seem to free us, while we experience them, from our daily confusions, self-doubts and fantasies; they seem to put us in touch with a reality which is fully natural and which asks simply that we give ourselves up to it.
This way of looking at film also helps to make clear something Cavell touches on frequently in the course of his book but does not, it seems to me, ever quite bring into focus: the fact that for him (as for me, though I am a little younger than he is) the great age of movies was also the age of adolescence. (That our adolescence coincided with the great unselfconscious era of the Hollywood movie is of course pure chance, but it does suggest that we and all those born between 1920 and 1945 will always have a different sense of film from those born before or after.) Cavell, at any rate, spends a good deal of time wondering why the films he recalls with such pleasure are the middle-brow films produced with such confidence and in such quantities by the Hollywood machine, and why, now that movies seem to have caught up with the other arts, so to speak, and are dividing more and more clearly into high and middlebrow, there may be great films produced but it is impossible to view them with precisely the kind of delight with which we viewed them as teenagers.
Certainly my own memories of the excitement of movies, the excitement of the whole business of meeting up with my friends, going into town, buying my ticket, entering the vast palace, waiting for the music to stop and the lights to dim, then plunging totally into the world of the film, to emerge, three hours later, into the light of day, still lost in what I had seen — all this seems to have more to do with a particular moment in my life than with the quality of the films themselves. I am reminded of Graham Greene's comments on his childhood reading:
Of course I should be interested to hear that a new novel by Mr. E. M. Forster was going to appear this spring, but I could never compare that mild expectation of civilized pleasure with the missed heartbeat, the appalled glee I felt when I found on a library shelf a novel by Rider Haggard, Percy Westerman, Captain Brereton or Stanley Weyman which I had not read before.
I suspect that childhood and adolescence, being a time of waiting and expectation, is also the time when the reading of such books and the viewing of films is natural and totally, uncritically pleasurable. Normally we grow out of Rider Haggard and of the missed heartbeat and appalled glee with which we used to watch whatever film we were allowed to watch. When we do not we can say that we have become addicted. Then we go to the cinema by ourselves and if the adventures of Robin Hood or Captain Hornblower fail to do the trick we may in time graduate to more and more violent and pornographic fare.
Addiction, then, in the full sense of the word, is an adult condition, though its seeds are sown in childhood. And so it may well be that it is far too solemn, far too censorious, to describe film as having all the ingredients of addiction, as I did earlier; it may simply be that film is a form that belongs, with the novels of Rider Haggard (and with François le champi), to a moment in our life when we are struggling to make the transition from child to adult, and that high-flown theories of the nature of film and the greatness of individual examples quite miss the point.
The people in ante-Hell blow neither hot nor cold and so are spewed out of both Hell and Heaven. Those in Hell are those who feel their condition as a lack, who desperately need to be relieved of private fantasy its anxieties and its responsibilities, but who have lost or have never acquired a purposive sense of how this may be done in a way that will not leave them more miserable than before. Paolo and Francesca fall into each other's arms while reading the story of Lancelot and Guinevere because the passion of those story-book lovers seems to transcend and obliterate the destruction it leaves in its wake. That option too is open to us, even when we have left adolescence behind, though we more often prefer the less dangerous ones of smoking or drinking, or slinking off to the cinema by ourselves. It's no cure, of course, but, while it lasts, we are at least free of the burden of ourselves.
7 Transgression
And it was then that something utterly unheard of, though, on the other hand something that in a certain sense was only to be expected, took place. The old man suddenly felt that instead of whispering some interesting secret to him, Nicholas all of a sudden seized the upper part of his ear between his teeth and bit it hard. He trembled all over and his breath failed him.
This is only the latest little joke Nicholas Stavrogin indulges in in the little town where he has grown up. But no one is in any doubt that more than a practical joke is at issue here. The whole of Dostoevsky's The Devils is an exploration of what becomes of boundaries when long-held beliefs about religion and civilised behaviour start to erode. The point Dostoevsky brings out so strikingly, both here and throughout the rest of his mature work, though, is how such actions, which advance no one and can only rebound on the doer, are an endemic part of modern life, where people feel they can only discover who they are by crossing the boundaries of decorum and even of the most profound moral taboos. Dostoevsky brings out in a remarkably clear way both the horror and the pathos of such transgression: horror because if anyone can do anything, from biting the ear inclined towards him to violating a child, then how can society function any longer, how can we respectable citizens go about our daily tasks in peace of mind? Pathos because such acts are born out of despair, out of a sense that the world is no longer returning my gaze and I must provoke it to do so in any way I can or my life is simply not worth living. But such provocation will always fail, since it is instigated by me; indeed, crimes committed in this spirit require for their fulfilment that they be punished, for then at least the criminal will actually feel at last that the world is paying him some attention — a point made by the examining magistrate Porfiry to Raskolnikov half-way through Crime and Punishment.