I am thinking lately of the word possession1: in the sense of ownership, yes, or of being possessive—that is, acting jealously in relation to other objects and people—but also of the word’s transportive (or worse—demonic2) meaning, the chance that an event, a thought, a passion, or an otherworldly presence might seize and requisition the mind, body, and emotional life of the subject. One might even say the swarm of involuntary memories summoned by the madeleine indicate an episode of possession: remembrance is for Proust a profoundly synesthetic and somatic process, one that displaces the subject from their present tense. Like other bodily dislodgements in the novel so far—bouts of insomnia, attacks of asthmatic breathing, the throes of desire—memory is an occupying force.
If you’re reading along in Swann it likely won’t surprise you that I’m taken by this theme at this particular juncture of the novel: we’re deep in the thorny thick of Swann’s perfectly-crystallized interior novel(la), “Swann in Love,” a sequence in which we are diverted from the story of the novel’s narrator and into the past, carried back to witness the origin of Swann’s passion for Odette de Crécy, the woman who would eventually become his wife. As is ever the case with this little project, of course—which is sort of about Proust and is mostly a thinking through this process of writing from life—my beguilement with the term possession has exceeded the bounds of the novel’s narrative, bleeding into my other reading, my other writing, into my very dreams.
Over the last few days, I found myself rereading Annie Ernaux’s violently slim 2002 text The Possession3, a book that, as far as I can tell, gets little critical attention but was, in point of fact, the first of her works to seduce me. In the aftermath of an affair Ernaux herself had broken off, she writes of discovering that her former lover “was going to be living with a woman,” and that now “there would be rules” about their contact, for this other woman had come successfully to supplant Ernaux in his life. The Possession seems to me well-companioned to Ernaux’s earlier Simple Passion, an account of an affair with a married Soviet diplomat in the late eighties, which is, in turn, a text that refashions the two years documented by her journals of that period collected as Getting Lost, which was published by Seven Stories in the fall, and which I wrote about here, for The Baffler.
Where the obsession dissected in Simple Passion and Getting Lost mainly concerns the diplomat-lover himself, in The Possession, Ernaux’s eye slips away from this man she had left and loops around and tightens on the woman who’s succeeded her, this other woman who now sits atop the throne Ernaux retroactively views as rightfully her own. Though Ernaux no longer wanted this man, though she’d exiled him “out of boredom” as well as “from an inability to give up my freedom,” the identity of this new woman nevertheless becomes an escalating fixation: Ernaux becomes obliteratively absorbed by the woman’s imagined “omnipresence.” Her preoccupation with this woman is a kind of possession that takes hold of her, she writes, it sits in “my head, my chest, my gut.” She is flung into a “constant, feverish activity,” but this unmoored condition also
kept my daily troubles and cares at bay. In a way it placed me outside the grip of life’s usual mediocrity […] nothing in the world from the summer of 2000 left behind a memory. There was suffering, on the one hand; and on the other, a mind incapable of applying itself to anything but the testimony and analysis of that suffering.
She begins laboriously ferreting out the sort of details that seem to us like the woolly padding of a person’s life after we’ve come to know them—the woman’s age, profession, how many children she has, her address. Ernaux has a need, in investigating the blank, anonymous silhouette of this woman, to “extract a physical and social type from the undifferentiated mass of womankind.” What was it about her that rendered her so singular? How had she come to function in the former lover’s life as a sort of a double or doppelganger to Ernaux herself? The very suggestion of this woman’s existence comes to seem a threat to the coherency of Ernaux’s own identity, and in her obsession, Ernaux, too, erases her self, renders her own personhood permeable, smudges the borders of where she ends and this new woman begins.
This other woman occupies Ernaux’s imaginary less as a sexual being—because erotic gestures “happened all the time and without consequence on the beach, in the corner of an office, in rooms rented by the hour”—and more as an habitualism, a dailiness in her former lover’s life, as the “sedimentation” of the domestic in their shared world. It was this process of sedimentation that Ernaux so feared in her own relationship with him, a terror of permanence: as in the way she sets herself riotously apart from S’s dull potato of a wife in Getting Lost, here Ernaux recoils from the sort of women who “placed the man they wanted to keep into their furniture.” The domesticating woman, in Ernaux’s corpus, is a sort of colonizer: she dispossesses men of their virility and masculinity, she freezes the electric charge of sex in amber, she builds a home mainly in service to its eventual haunting.
As far as I recall, Proust does not make an appearance in The Possession, although there seems a kind of connective tissue between it and his grand novel, as well as between those texts and Ernaux’s Simple Passion and Getting Lost, the latter of which is positively scattered with references to Proust and his novel. Ernaux reminds herself at the beginning of her affair with the Soviet diplomat (known only as S.) to “Never say anything, never show too much love: Proust’s law of desire.” Later, she suggests that S. may be her own Albertine: she recognizes a kind of “Slave mentality—I’ve got it in me too.” I am reminded, in Ernaux’s sense of this desiring “law,” of the narrator’s uncle Adolphe, who “advised Swann not to see Odette for some days, after which she would love him all the more, and advised Odette to let Swann meet her whenever and as often as he pleased.”
This of course is a plan that backfires, as Odette goes to Swann after Adolphe’s approach to allege that he’d attempted to “take her by force.” The actual scene of possible assault remains unrecorded in the passage, which is to say, we are left to trust Proust’s narrator’s version of the events, in a novel which is arguably rather unsympathetic to Odette, painting her as an unintelligent coquette, not to mention a chronic liar. (Which, I should say, it’s entirely possible she is!) This rupture between Swann and Adolphe seems a fascinating mirror to the narrator’s avuncular exile from Adolphe, which occurs after the narrator’s confessed to his parents in minute detail the fact of his uncle’s enjoyment, in the narrator’s presence, of the company of “actresses” and, god forbid, courtesans.4 The advice, is any case, is to install a kind of temporal distance inside their love, because love—like writing, like death—stretches, shortens, exhausts, and collapses time. The enforcement of a kind of alienation within it is a way of recentering oneself in the seat of power, of orchestrating control.
The origin story of Odette and Swann is stuttering, indebted, I think, less to intimacy than aesthetics, or wider-ranging sociality—to the waltzing ridiculousness of the French salon. He isn’t interested in her until he worries he can’t have her; he situates art objects like a kind of discursive screen between them, viewing her, early on, as a kind of manifestation of various tableaux: here, a general “Florentine painting”; there, Botticelli’s Zipporah.5 The thrill of their romance becomes materially legible through musical overlays—Vintueil’s “little phrase” is their particular, although not their sole, theme—and among the dead adornments of flowers: Odette’s chrysanthemums engross Swann, and (more crucially) her cattleyas are the pregnant signifiers for his eager gropings of her in the dark of his carriage. She feels a longing for and beholdenness to him until the point at which he’s in her thrall. Is this not the monkey’s paw of desire?—it may bloom and sustain itself in perpetual deferral but is pathetically extinguished at the moment of its satiation. (In her diaries, Ernaux dreams of a desire that is not “exhausted but continually renewed.”)
The love between Swann and Odette thrives not through a mutual and genuine regard for the other but in its mediation through a social field. They have their little privacies, yes, but the electricity of their entanglement is inextricable from the interconnected arrangement of their set, that site of comic abundance found among the Verdurins’ “faithful.” Swann’s passion is most charged when he fears Odette is entertaining the company of other men: Adolphe, Forcheville. (I haven’t read Eve Sedgwick’s writings on Proust yet, but I’d guess she had a field day.) In a particularly funny scene, Swann races to her apartment to see if she is indisposed and finds a lighted window there. He panics, he spies, finally, he knocks—only to find he’s at the wrong damn window. Swann attempts to regain control of Odette by way of payment: as Ernaux likewise concedes, “I understand this desire to shower gifts on a person we love to demonstrate possession.” But to confect your lover in gowns, baubles, to grant her trips to the opera, or to pay her board cannot—and in the case of Odette, quite patently does not—keep her in your dominion, nor does it invigorate a desire that has already begun searching for other objects to glom to.
Desire, writes Lauren Berlant, is a “state of attachment” that is “generated by the gap between an object’s specificity and the needs and promises projected onto it.”6 Desire is an affective and erotic provocation, an endlessly recalibrating tension, a feeling, finally, that cannot bear a condition of fixity, but must dance in the apertures of the imagination. If the gap between projection and actuality should collapse, desire deflates; the fantasy falters. While drafting this essay I couldn't help but think of Mad Men's Jaguar campaign copy: “At last, something beautiful you can truly own.” As Don conjures his usual magic for a presentation on the E-type—he's driving past a little boy, whose eyes follow the car, as if “he’d just seen something he would want for the rest of his life”—the scene is intercut with another meeting which is, it's implied, happening concurrently7: Joan Harris’s rendez-vous with a Jaguar exec who’d demanded her sexual company in exchange for his support behind the agency’s campaign.
“Deep beauty,” Don insists, “creates desire because it is unattainable.” We are taught, he goes on, to value and prioritize an object’s function, yet function sits in opposition to true beauty: function provides the inroad through which we instrumentalize an object; functionality demonstrates the path by which we may master it. Our abiding longing to “own” the deeply beautiful thing, by contrast, persists because beauty elides mastery: its autonomy hovers in a sort of a crevasse over which we are unable to cross. Is Joan the unreachable, beautiful thing of Don’s copy? While she unhooks the clasp and tugs down the zipper of her dress in reply to Herb demanding to “see them” (Joan’s breasts), Don, in voiceover, invokes a man “of some means, reading Playboy or Esquire, flipping past the flesh to the shiny, painted curves of this car.” That Don's speechifying operates as the soundtrack to her encounter with Herb seems to lead us towards such a conclusion, but I think Joan’s decision, her characterization throughout the series, and the tensions drawn out in the particular scene are peskier, less immediately legible.
Don’s scene-painting alludes to a crucial detail: though the boy was witness to Don’s “something beautiful,” the desire undergirding this notion of ownership here remains ephemeral, it defers itself in order to live on. Whether acquisition lies in the boy’s future is irrelevant: the ineliminable fact is that the boy will be left wanting “for the rest of his life.” You can own a Jaguar, yes, but desire is forever. The truly beautiful thing is beyond reach. Even Don admits that “if they weren’t” unattainable, “would we love them like we do?” Odette is, as Swann believes, “in no way a remarkable woman,” but that she is rendered desirable in a wider field of possible longing—and that Swann is, finally, unable to contain her—wraps Odette in a kind of glimmering shawl.
It's possible I'm remembering incorrectly, but I recall this episode ("The Other Woman") being critically and culturally controversial when it aired: certainly I know the friends I was watching it with at the time were astounded by the fact that Joan had bartered erotic labor for a full partnership in the agency. The show, some said then, had rendered her reducible to her body in a way that piggish men throughout the series had tried to. (Not to mention the ways many fans and the media had 'made sense' of Christina Hendricks herself.) Had Joan's slantwise foray into sex work signaled a concession to those insults and debasements she'd always managed, before now, to resist, parry, or sidestep entirely?8
Part of such a reading relies on the rather puritanical notion that transactional sex is exceptional among other erotic encounters in its capacity to desubjectify the person being paid for it. (I've done sex work, and while this isn't a moment I'm interested in writing about it, anecdotally I'll say that this take is utter horseshit.) It's also a fundamentally misogynist one in its insidious insinuation that, as women, we become alienated from our roles as active agents when we are fucked: we become boiled down to function, and this function is no more than that of a hole. Thereby, if Joan is fucked by Herb, she's somehow become his possession—he's found a way to own her.9 But the fact of it is: Joan too treated the liaison transactionally, and, kind of amazingly, purchased her own liberation, or something like it, from the drudgery of the position she'd been stuck in the entire series.10 It seems to me an important distinction to bear in mind: that our being penetrated by men who desire us shouldn't be mapped onto the cultural imaginary as a relinquishment of our ontological and economic integrity, or our autonomy. Many critics have evolved their thinking on sex work: I wonder whether the episode would seem so shocking today. (It's also urgent to remember that Joan's dignity as a character never relied on her being a saint. As I write this, I am reminded, too, of M. Verdurin's comment on Odette: “does it matter so very much whether she’s virtuous or not? She might be a great deal less charming if she were.”)
In the notes I took for this essay in March I’d written little fragments about never having dated a possessive man: historically, my trouble was always the opposite—the incurable absentees, the commitment-phobes, the cheaters and liars, the emotionally remote bad boys. I kept becoming embroiled with men who liked to be seen with women and to fuck but who gazed upon any possibility of meaningful intimacy as if it were a Medusa’s glare. My dating history was as if plucked from a Lana del Rey record. I suspect now my tendency toward wayward and incurably nomadic strays was defensive in nature: I remained convinced, in approaching each relationship, that my being utterly broken by the end of it was unavoidable, and so sought a familiar patternwork of possible disappointment and betrayal. I had a self-destructive need to know how these men would hurt me before they’d had a chance to do it, which of course doesn’t absolve their eventual and callous behavior, but that my approach, too, was a method of control.
But I realized, as April blossomed, that this accounting—this notion that I’d never dated a possessive man—wasn’t, in the end, entirely true. I had banished a certain history to the borderlands of my mind. Over the last two weeks of this past month I was racing a grant deadline. I wrote 20k words towards my next book in perhaps nine or ten days, spending the remaining ones rewriting, revising, getting feedback from Harron, and from Charlotte, and then revising and writing and rewriting again. I was, in a quite different sense of things, a Woman Possessed: on every day I wasn’t bartending I sat before my laptop from morning to night, scrambling about in my strange fervor, researching, rereading foundational texts, fact-checking with the aid of my old diaries, taking notes for other future sections, writing, writing, writing.
Through the haze, I began remembering a man I’d had an affair with in graduate school, a professor, and remembering it was his possessiveness I’d recoiled from, his need to bind me to him, which was on his end so relentless, and on mine, simultaneously exhausting and infuriating. I don’t recall now how we met, because he taught at a different university, and lived all the way across town, but we did, and for two years I saw him every month, or, on the rare occasion, twice in a month, and spent the night with him. For me it wasn’t love: this was crucial. On each visitation, he demanded a posture of devotion I refused flat-out to grant him. I’d been clear at the outset that this could only be a fling, and there was no future in it, because I had my work and only a little time in which to do it. What’s more, I didn’t want to be just some professor’s formerly-intellectual girlfriend. (It’s funny now to think of this disavowal I was so adamant on, considering for how many years after I left the academy that I would have killed to be just somebody’s girlfriend—or, better, wife.)
There was something of course of the romance novel about it all. I was congenitally attracted to older men, daddy types, and affairs between professors and graduate students seemed to me the stuff of novels. (I would have been 22 when I met him, which isn’t to say I had no choice or was coerced in the matter, but looking back, I think: my god, how young this was!) I wanted my life, which had been so miserable to me, and for so long, to feel like living in a novel for once. Not one of the sad, dense ones I usually read—I wanted a thrill, I wanted to be bathed in glamorous light. I don’t know that our encounters were ever especially glamorous. When I finally told a friend about him, I watched her face stiffen and fall. I was living inside a cliche. I’d allowed myself to be possessed by an ultimately unremarkable story. Yet the need to transform and perfect it persisted. As Ernaux writes of her affair with the Soviet diplomat: “I wanted to make this passion a work of art in my life, or rather, this affair became a passion because I wanted it to be a work of art.”
Finally I broke things off. I felt we’d hit a wall. He refused to accept the terms we’d agreed on at the outset, and I had no interest in becoming his pet. I wanted my work to stand on its own: I wanted there to be no stain on my professional reputation, no whisperings about how I’d gotten to where I was. It was about this time that that episode of Mad Men first aired, not long before I fled the city I was living in and moved to New York. I looked the Professor up last year and found awful news about him: he wasn’t dead, it was something else, something I’m reckoning with in my book and can’t talk about here. But I began to wonder, in light of this news, whether the reason I’d shut him from my mind completely afterwards was because I’d come so close to losing control in that situation, had brushed up against my own relational dispossession—a concession that would have been by my own hand. And perhaps it’s that I’m writing about him now—in a book so preoccupied with writing as a meticulous instrument for regaining control—to make that story assimilable to my history, to tidy the excesses of him and my affair with him, to smoothen what seemed so unwieldy to me at the time.
As in Simple Passion and Getting Lost, Ernaux reckons in The Possession with the ways writing had become for her a punitive or disciplinary mode: she writes that, now, she is capable of sympathy for the girl her lover had left to be with her, with Ernaux. She finds kinship with this girl who had shrieked at the lover: “‘I will stick you with needles!’” In the aftermath of her own breakup with him, that mirroring of the earlier severance, Ernaux, too, imagines pricking a dough-doll effigy of her former lover. She wonders if this book, The Possession, has come to stand in for her fury and obsession, if she traces in the outline of her words her own strange occult doll: “The act of writing, here, is perhaps not so different from that of sticking needles.” I find I am learning how to sharpen mine.
What else is on the docket:
I had the great pleasure of interviewing the poet and writer Eileen Myles for Buffalo Zine. We talked about, well, sort of everything. You can preorder your copy here.
I’m also reading for Eileen’s Pathetic Happening at Poetry Project on May 28th :)
My reading schedule has been sorely lacking—I applied for two pretty significant grants in April, which sucked up most of the month. I devoured Simone de Beauvoir’s A Very Easy Death, a slim, brutal account of her mother’s dying, as well as Edouard Leve’s Suicide, and I continued making my way through Ferrante’s non-Neapolitan Novels corpus: The Lost Daughter is my favorite of the bunch; Troubling Love I couldn’t get into. If you’re in need of poetry, Gillian Conoley’s Notes from the Passenger is brilliant, and out from Nightboat on May 2nd.
À bientôt!
The Latin, possidere, was originally a legal term used in connection with real estate; in 1500, the meaning had come in English to concern the holding of property; by the 1530s, it had come to signify, also, a theological question of possession by evil spirits and demons.
For a fantastic recent essay on demonology and exorcism, see Grace Byron’s “Repossessed,” in The Baffler.
Translated from the French by Anna Moschovakis, whose novel Eleanor: or, the Rejection of the Progress of Love is fabulous, in 2008 for Seven Stories.
We’d do well to remember that the narrator’s family views Odette as reputationally tarnished, “almost a prostitute.”
We might recall, too, the narrator’s earlier mediation of the pregnant servant girl through Giotto’s Padua frescoes: she’s not her own selfsame person, but a vision of Charity in his Virtues & Vices.
From Desire/Love (2012)
What we later discover is that the episode’s temporality has been fudged: that by the time of the meeting, the deed has been done, despite Don’s attempt to put a stop to it before going in to the presentation.
Strangely, few contemporaneous reviews mention Joan’s earlier sexual assault at the hands of her fiancée, Greg—a scene this one seems to me quite obviously to call back to, particularly in the close-up on Joan’s blank stare just to the side of the viewer’s gaze as Herb removes her gown.
Looking back, I find myself even more perturbed than I was then by how anti-sex work this channel of reading was: indeed, in an otherwise rigorous review I’ll leave uncredited here (we don’t need a pile-on today), the critic refers to Joan as having been “prostituted,” a dogwhistle for swerfs if I’ve ever heard one. I can only hope that critic’s thinking on sex work has also evolved…
As Heather Berg asks in Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism: “How should we talk about consent when there is rent to pay?” (Quoted in Sophia Giovannitti’s brilliant Working Girl, which is out from Verso on May 30.)