6 Comments
User's avatar
⭠ Return to thread
Secret Squirrel's avatar

It isn't just success, Akari is successful in a bastardized artistic vocation but Xavier is a real artist. He actually gave Mariko the most meaningful experiences of her life (prior to motherhood). Part of his vampire-ishness comes from the fact that he knows Mariko better than she knows herself: he knows to stop sleeping with her, knows to stop offering her roles when she is with Dan, and then knows he can briefly step back in because he knows better than she does that her relationship is kaputt.

I also wouldn't describe him as porn-brained. Xavier is extremely analog! He doesn't want sex with just anybody, but with women from his past who make him feel alive. A sort of Yeatsian dying lion type. What he can't do is treat her as a romantic equal (nobody can do that in the novel) or give her children. There's something funereal and disturbing about their sexual encounter, but he doesn't try to make her stay with him and push the wheelchair. (Although he briefly fantasizes about casting her in a last play.) (*Their encounter reminds me of the disturbing but somehow beautiful scene where Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello gives a handjob to the dying amateur painter Mr. Phillips, although the dynamic is different because Xavier requests it.)

Expand full comment
Mary Jane Eyre's avatar

You're right: "porn-brained" doesn't capture what I was referring to - perhaps "Freud-brained" is better. He is definitely presented in a more flattering light than the rest of the characters, his real artistry counts for something, but for how much?

I have in mind the following passage:

"In the days following his diagnosis, fucking was all he could think about: thousands of fucks between the ages of sixteen and fifty-seven split between hundreds of lovers (ninety percent of which were women)—futureless, mindless, animal rutting. There were other things, too, that he cared about—friendships, family, his many projects—but his anxiety, his grief, concerned the imminence of the loss of touch, the death of the sensual subject. The libido died last: the evolutionary logic was obvious. He couldn’t really comprehend that this decades long phenomenological thread—him, his decades of touching, breathing, desiring—this refined, self-organizing aesthetic sensibility, this catalogue of existence, would be destroyed."

His erotic desires are more sophisticated than any women will do, but in the end he is still using his superior powers of understanding for the pleasure of seducing Mariko for old times' sake, rather than actually listening to her and trying to help her in any meaningful way. It's hard to trust Mariko's perspective, of course, but the picture she paints is not one of benevolence (it's also not clear to me that the offer to cast her in his last play is not just empty flattery):

“I don’t think I like this,” Mariko admitted, picking at her cuticles.

“What is ‘this’?”

“I think there’s a reason I stopped working with you . . .”

“What’s that, Mariko?” Xavier said, feeling nothing, wanting nothing, barely evening listening.

“The way you break people down . . .”

“Did I break you down?”

“Many times.”

Expand full comment
Secret Squirrel's avatar

Well, by the time the book takes place Xavier is the one who needs help. And he is if anything unpleasantly honest:

“It’s not very flattering to be invited to fuck you just because you’re

going to become medically impotent soon.”

“I never said it was flattering.”

“It’s actually remarkably crass.”

“I understand that,” he said calmly.

and:

“Now I’m turned on,” she said in a throaty voice, while brushing her

dress back down to just above her knees. “That wasn’t fair or nice.”

“I wasn’t trying to be either of those things,” he responded dryly.

But you're right that the book questions the value of art (and for that matter of sex) in the face of death. Xavier not the book's beau ideal and would not have been right for Mariko because he can't give her a family and never wanted to, although that is what *she* wants in her heart of hearts. I'm really struck by how both Sleepers and Major Arcana end with a baby.

Expand full comment
Mary Jane Eyre's avatar

I'm not convinced that anyone can give Mariko the family she wants - she reminded me of Edith from John William's Stoner. From John's review: "I admire the novel’s avoidance of facile pro-natalism in its conclusion, which concedes that reproduction is as likely to reproduce the problem as anything else." The question I'm left with is why we have stopped being able to imagine Sisyphus happy.

Expand full comment
Secret Squirrel's avatar

The conclusion isn’t pro-natal in a didactic way above all because the husband is out of frame. But Mariko is sort of like the characters who escape on foot to Switzerland at the end of Grand Illusion or The Siren of the Mississippi: after catastrophe she suddenly has a chance to live.

Expand full comment
Mary Jane Eyre's avatar

That it’s a bit of a Rorschach test is one of the of the novel’s strengths, I think. I don’t agree with reviewers who called the narrator “neutral”, but there is enough ambivalence and ambiguity that my appreciation deepened on rereading certain parts. I have more to say in a forthcoming piece!

Expand full comment
ErrorError