Cultures of Fetishism (21 page)

She leaves Hong Kong and returns to her childhood home in Japan, where she plants three pillow books under a blossoming bonsai in a beautiful ceramic pot; most probably her own pillowbook, the pillowbook of the long ago Nagiko, and BOOK OF THE LOVER, written on Jerome’s skin.

Soon afterward, on her twenty-eighth birthday, exactly one thousand years after the writing of the first pillow book, Nagiko gives birth to the child she and Jerome created. The last scene is of Nagiko holding her baby in her arms and writing on its face, “eye,” “nose,” “mouth,” and “sex.” The expression on the baby’s face indicates that he
/
she is absorbing the words of love written on its skin a wondrously tender image that has the bizarre effect of erasing the violent and traumatic events preceding the birth of Nagiko’s baby.

In my earlier discussions of writing on the skin—the social inscriptions made by the tribal elders, delicate and coarse self-cutting, tattooing—I detected the fourth and fifth principles of the fetishism strategy. Now, as
The Pillow Book
concludes, we must question, Which principles of the fetishism strategy have been revealed? We have already interpreted that Nagiko’s father

(unconsciously) used his calligraphy pen on his daughter’s skin to control her wayward impulses and impress on her the importance of tradition and obedi- ence. Certainly, though, by smudging her mouth with the word Sex, he is simultaneously conveying an opposite message. Writing on the skin is often composed of an amalgam of erotic expression and an attempt to tame and subdue it.

We must question further. When a film ends with a resolution that focuses on a mother-infant couple, what is the trauma that is being disguised and disavowed? When a woman’s body dominates the foreground of a film, what is being pushed into the background? As we came to understand in the chapter “The Body of a Woman,” if we look past the glittering spectacle of a woman’s body placed prominently in the foreground of a film, we can gain access to the images of loss and trauma that lurk in the background.

A full understanding requires that we explore the dynamic relationship between both sets of images—foreground and background. The crucial fac- tor that must be detected is the discordance between a foreground image and those images that have been cast into the margins, shadows, and background. A film that concludes with an image or reference to the redeemer mother, the holy mother-infant couple, or the face of Mother Nature herself in a tree, a waterfall, a desert landscape, is an expression of the fetishism strategy. As I warned in the last chapter, “Always watch out for the return to the embrace of Mother Nature—a device of the fetishism strategy designed to deny the traumas implicitly and explicitly expressed in the film.” In most films that employ this device, a world destruction fantasy is countered by a fantasy of rebirth. The destruction-rebirth theme signals an apocalyptic narrative. I stressed that, “Most people have no trouble thinking of a world destruction fantasy as apocalyptic. It is usually more difficult to think of the fantasy of a return to Mother Nature as apocalyptic.” However, in an apocalyptic narrative both fantasies are working in tandem.

Applying these thoughts to
The Pillow Book
, we ask: What are the traumas that are being disguised and pushed into the background? Where is the apoc- alyptic narrative? My discussions of apocalyptic narratives such as
Niagara, The Misfits, Thelma and Louise, Eyes Wide Shut
illustrated one way that these two fantasies might be expressed. When a violent and corrupt sexuality and disturbing issues of sexuality and genital difference are foregrounded in the first half, they are depicted as obstacles to the journey back to the paradise that once was, in the second half.

Greenaway’s narrative structure is more convoluted and difficult to decipher. Like a delirious Mobius strip that staggers capriciously from inside to outside, from past to present, from one skin layer to another, Greenaway’s redemption theme interweaves with world destruction fantasies of various sorts.
The Pillow Book
is an extravaganza of naked bodies. All of them, save for Nagiko’s, are the bodies of men. Jerome’s beautiful body is followed by a parade of nude men of assorted shapes and sizes. A devastating trauma is unfolding but the continual stream of naked male bodies keeps distracting the viewer from realizing what is going on in the margins and shadows. The

primary aim of the fetishism strategy is to tame and subdue those human vitalities, which otherwise might overturn and destroy the universe. In most of the examples I have used, the feared and dangerous vitalities have to do with human sexuality and human creativity. But, the fetishism strategy can also be evoked to give expression to a male’s feminine erotic longings. Or it may be evoked to give destructive impulses just enough of an erotic tint to contain the wish for total annihilation. Only when the fetishism strategy can no longer sufficiently disguise or regulate the underlying shameful, frighten- ing, forbidden, and dangerously unpredictable impulses, fantasies, and wishes does outright madness, rampage, violence, rape, body mutilation, incest, and murder result.
The Pillow Book
expresses several principles of the fetishism strategy. But there is one I haven’t mentioned in this context. The eternal writing on the skin in
The Pillow Book
is also an effort to contain and regulate aggression, violence, and destruction. We are usually so preoccupied with the destructive and dehumanizing aspects of the fetishism strategy that we might overlook how it can also be a mediator between erotic and destructive impulses.

However, in
The Pillow Book
, the fetishism strategy has failed. Destruction runs amok. To compound matters, this total annihilation of the universe is disavowed by the closing image of the mother-infant couple.

The film begins in a time of innocence, a time when the world, a world of writing on the skin and pillow books, was seen by Nagiko as protective and loving. It is also a time of illusions about her parents and an innocence about her father’s sexuality. Hints of the destruction of that world are briefly revealed through the open shoji screen. When Nagiko’s ceremonial wedding limousine takes her to the home she will share with her callous and unfeeling husband, we can see written on her pouting, disappointed face the beginnings of the destruction of her childhood illusions.

We can interpret the rest of the film as Nagiko’s attempts to restore the presence of her father, a presence that represented the childhood innocence she once believed in and then lost. When Jerome dies by committing suicide, or accidentally from an overdose of sleeping pills, Nagiko enacts the second world destruction by setting fire to all her books and clothing and shoes and jewelry and furniture. After recovering the skin of Jerome, imprinted for all eternity on the pillow book designed by her father’s humiliator, Nagiko once again returns to her childhood home, where she embodies her father by writing on the face of her child.

Greenaway’s swiveling, apocalyptic journey that goes from one world destruction to yet a second one, ends abruptly in an eccentric twist of plot simplicity. First there is the “planting” of the three pillow books under the blossoming bonsai, as if Jerome’s dead body might somehow be resur- rected and blossom again. Then finally there is the closing scene of the mother-infant couple. When so many human lives have been laid to waste, so many bodies corrupted and violated, to conclude a film with a reunion with Mother Nature is a disavowal of the vast human dilemmas the film has been presenting.

At one point, just after the first world destruction and just before she embarks on her quest for a calligrapher lover, Nagiko says, “Writing is an ordinary thing but how precious. If writing did not exist what terrible depressions we would have.” She is suggesting that writing can be a form of therapy that protects the writer from succumbing to the fevers of depression. Writing a biography, the topic of the next chapter, is different from writing on the skin. It may, and often does, simultaneously express contrasting aspects of the fetishism strategy. It can be a precious thing that resonates with the creative vitalities of the human spirit and thereby oppose and undermine the fetishism strategy. Or, the biographer might surrender to the fever that is inherent in the task of writing about human lives. In the process of writing a biography, some biographers succumb to archive fever and thereby unknow-

ingly give voice and expression to the fetishism strategy.

S
i x

A
rchive
F
ever

W
riting
L
ives

L
ong before fetishism was named as a perversion of the sexual life, religious pundits, anthropologists, philosophers, poets, and economists employed the concept of fetishism to illuminate a vast assortment of cultural activities. A recurring theme in all these disparate ventures into the frailties and vagaries of humanity has been the duplicity inherent in fetishism. This duplicity is expressed most clearly in the fetish object, whose concrete substantiality is mistaken as a sign that the object embodies some living substance or spiri- tual essence, when, in fact, that very materiality and tangibility represents decay, de-vitalization, and morbidity. In speaking of the deceptions of com- modity fetishism, for example, Karl Marx would warn, “All our inventions and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life and stultifying human life with a material force.”
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Writing a biography is an enterprise fraught with the dangerous duplicities of the fetishism strategy. There is a susceptibility in the biographical impulse that makes it one of the more telling illustrations of the insidious manner in which material force may be employed to stultify human life. Desiring only to bring to life the flesh-and-blood essence of another human being, the biog- rapher unknowingly stands at the abyss between Life and Death, always haunted by the prospect of drowning in the fathoms of facts she amasses, always verging on crushing her subject under the weight of the archival detritus she has marshaled in her earnest efforts to be true to life.

In his monograph
En Mal d’Archive
, translated in English as
Archive Fever
, Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher, plays around with the differences between the original French and the English translation, thereby capturing the double edge that accrues to archives. “
En Mal d
’ ” refers to lacking something which you need and must have, but the translation, “Fever,” gives voice to the burning desire or yearning for something that verges on a sickness.

As Derrida describes that fever:

It is to burn with a passion. It is to never rest, interminably, from searching for the archive right where it slips away. It is to run after the archive, even if there’s

too much of it, right where something in it anarchives itself. It is to have a compulsive, repetitive and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement. No desire, no passion, no drive, no compulsion, indeed no repetition compulsion, no “
mal-de
” can arise for a person who is not already, in one way or another,
en mal d’archive
.
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Before beginning to write, the biographer must locate, recover, and collect data relating to an already dead or still living subject. These acts of retrieval are supposed to bring to life what might have remained silent, unseen, unknown, unfelt, and, for all intents, therefore, dead. On the one hand archives are in the service of life. On the other, archive fever is an expression of the death drive. The problem or dilemma of archives is that the yearning for more and more data leads to a burning up, a veritable consumption and destruction of the psychic vitalities of the subject. The act of storage and accumulation is thus inherently a kind of essential destructiveness.

Lytton Strachey had a sure-fire remedy for archive fever. He said that the biographer, if he wishes to avoid drowning in data and facts, must “row out over that great ocean of material and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up into the light of day some characteristic specimen from those far depths, to be examined with a careful curiosity.”
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Referring to the traditional overstuffed biography, Strachey said: Those two fat volumes, with which it is our custom to commemorate the dead— who does not know them, with their ill-digested masses of material, their slipshod style, their tone of tedious panegyric, their lamentable lack of selec- tion, of detachment, of design? They are as familiar as the
cortege
of the undertaker, and wear the same air of slow, funereal barbarism.
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Virginia Woolf echoed Strachey’s funereal theme. She mockingly proclaimed that the first duty of a biographer “is to plod without looking to right or left, in the indelible footprints of truth; unenticed by flowers; regard- less of shade, on and on methodically till we fall plump into the grave and finis on the tombstone above our head.”
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