Steven Schneider's Blog: The Unreadable Book Blog - Posts Tagged "leave-it-to-beaver"

DOBIE AND PROUST

Beware, anyone who obsesses this much about literature and love, like Proust and Dobie, won't actually get a girl.


In his book We, Jungian analyst Robert A. Johnson brings the power of myth to the human experience of romantic love. In the West, the story of Tristan and Isuelt the Fair is modeled in the common experience of projecting impossible expectations on the target of our love. We demand untouchable, unrequited and romantic love at the expense of the true earthly love we can actually possess. The subject and object of this projection is actually within, from our own subconscious. If our ideal is reconciled within, then the obtainable earthly love of an imperfect creature is our well-deserved reward. Much can be said about this process of individuation

In the old TV series, The Many Loves of Dobie Gilles, the myth is right on the surface. Every girl Dobie meets is a goddess, irresistible and unobtainable (for very long anyway). He gives unconditioned love to each one as an end in itself. Each one soon falls from the heavens and is sullied by the earth. Dobie cannot be satisfied by anything other than perfection.

He also realizes however, that there is no solution for him in this life. Like Tristan, he decides the only way out is to end the possibility of the fall. Tristan chooses death. He chooses death even though he has been given the real love of an earthly wife, Isuelt of the White Hands. Dobie is more complex but reaches the same conclusion, albeit with less dramatic results.

Dobie decides he must get married because then he will be insulated from the siren call of heavenly perfection. He knows one girl, Zelda, who idolizes him. Zelda’s unconditional love will protect him from his own unrequited love. Because he has himself experienced unrequited love, he knows that Zelda (of the White Hands) will marry him. He believes he will grow to love her with a practical earthly love. He reasons that then he will no longer be a slave to the potion of love that chains him to an ideal.

Zelda says yes, of course, but soon realizes that she has no conception of what happens when she gets what she dreams of. Dobie is in the same position. In fact, all of his goddesses find him ever so much more attractive now that he is engaged. They see him as a man now, not a boy. They start to project on him.

Since this must be resolved in a half hour, something’s got to give. Maynard, at the altar, speaks the truth, that Dobie and Zelda cannot yet solve their obsessions. They must be turned loose to continue the quest for the grail, to individuate in the future.

Proust, in Remembrance of Things Past, approaches this problem consistsantly.

For a man who spent his last years in a cork lined room with the curtains drawn, Marcel Proust has written some of the most beautiful and complete descriptions of the life of the human mind and its experiences. As a child and young man in the late 19th century, Proust describes his own awakening to the nature of women spontaneously in a manner that rings It starts like this:

"Sometimes the exhilaration I felt at being alone was joined by another kind that I was not able to separate distinctly from it, and that came from my desire to see a peasant girl appear in front of me whom I could clasp in my arms. "

(Like Adam, he moves from innocence to desire with a wish for something just a little bit more than that which arises naturally from Eden)

"Born suddenly, and without my having had time to identify exactly what had caused it, from very different thoughts, the pleasure which accompanied it seemed to me only one degree higher than that which those other thoughts had given me. Everything that was in my mind at that moment acquired an even greater value, the pink reflection of the tile roof, the wild grass, the village of Roussainville to which I had been wanting to go for so long, the trees of its woods, the steeple of its church, as a result of this new emotion which made them appear more desirable only because I thought it was they that had provoked it, and which seemed only to wish to carry me toward them more rapidly when it filled my sail with a powerful, mysterious, and propitious wind. "

(The boy Adam, through inexperience, can only imagine the woman arising by a mere increase in the intensity of the natural world that is not her.)

"But if, for me, this desire that a woman should appear added something more exhilarating to the charms of nature, in return, it broadened what would have been too narrow in the woman’s charm. It seemed to me that the beauty of the trees was also hers and that the soul of those horizons, of the village of Roussainville, of the books I was reading that year, would be given to me by her kiss; and as my imagination drew strength from contact with my sensuality, as my sensuality spread through all the domain of my imagination, my desire grew boundless. And, too – just as during those moments of reverie in the midst of nature when, the effect of habit being suspended, and our abstract notion of things being set aside, we believe with a profound faith in the originality, in the individual life of the place in which we happen to be—the passing woman summoned by my desire seemed to be, not an ordinary exemplar of that general type—woman—but a necessary and natural product of this particular soil."

(Eve, arising from the rib of Adam, also necessarily arises from the soil of Eden, as did Adam.)

"For at that time everything which was not I, the earth and other people, appeared to me more precious, more important, endowed with more real existence then they appear to grown men. And I did not separate the earth and the people. I desired a peasant girl From Méséglise or Roussainville, a fisherwoman from Balbec, just as I desired Méséglise and Balbec. The pleasure they might give me would have appeared less real to me, I no longer would have believed in it, if I had modified its conditions as I pleased. To meet a fisherwoman from Balbec or a countrywoman from Méséglise in Paris would have been like receiving a seashell I could not have seen on the beach, a fern I could not have found in the woods, it would have subtracted from the pleasure which the woman would give me all those pleasures in which my imagination had enveloped her. "

(Clearly, she is not a ‘real’ independent woman. She does not exist apart from her origin. She is, in fact, the only key to the experience of that from which she arises.)

"But to wander through the woods of Roussainville without a peasant girl to hold in my arms was to see these woods and yet know nothing of their hidden treasures, their profound beauty. For me that girl, whom I could only envision dappled with leaves, was herself like a local plant, merely of a higher species than the rest and whose structure enabled one to approach more closely than one could in the others the essential flavor of the country. "

(Eve cannot be separated from the ground of her arising, Adam. The eternal feminine is the internal feminine. This is what is projected upon the true other, the earthly feminine.)

"I could believe this all the more readily (and also that the caresses by which she would allow me to reach that flavor would themselves be of a special kind, whose pleasure I would not have been able to experience through anyone else but her) because I was, and for a long time to come continued to be, at an age when one has not yet abstracted this pleasure from the possession of the different women with whom one has tasted it, when one has not reduced it to a general notion that makes one regard them from then on as the interchangeable instruments of a pleasure that was always the same."

(He was perpetually at such an age and each woman was a unique emanation. Each time, both innocently channeled his expectations.)


"This pleasure does not even exist, isolated, distinct and formulated in the mind, as the aim we are pursuing when we approach a woman, as the cause of the previous disturbance that we feel. We scarcely even contemplate it as a pleasure which we will enjoy; rather, we call it her charm; for we do not think of ourselves, we think only of leaving ourselves. Obscurely awaited, immanent and hidden, it merely rouses to such a paroxysm, at the moment of its realization, the other pleasures we find in the soft gazes, the kisses of the woman close to us, that it seems to us, more than anything else, a sort of transport of our gratitude for our companion’s goodness of heart and for her touching predilection for us, which we measure by the blessings, by the beatitude she showers upon us."

(Here we have the problem described. The immanent and hidden quality arises from the experience of the transcendent in our natural existence. The incremental desire for the Other that calls her into existence from the natural world creates our perception of extraordinary grace being bestowed upon us by her, from the “not I”, in the form of her kisses, caresses, and sheer affection toward us.)


From within his cork lined room in the 1920's, Proust is in a time, and remembers a time, without the constant bombardment of explicit sexual imagery that defines love and desire in the West today. He observes the love of a woman arising spontaneously from the experience of being alone in nature. This is not lust. This needs no justification or apology. He feels, stirring from the sensual, meaning sensory not only sexual, something that is unknown yet immediately recognizable.

I remember this experience in junior high. I had been initiated into the world of Playboy and liked it a lot, not just for the articles. One day in class, looking at the back of the girl in front of me, someone close enough to daydream about conveniently, I realized something profound. All of these girls have the same body parts as the centerfolds. The have them, they guard them, they are the gatekeepers of all that I desired and they act like they are nothing special; diabolical!

At that point I was precisely in the position of Dobie Gilles, the Thinker.

As Proust observes, Nature has spontaneously shown them both the face of god in the profoundly Other only one heartbeat away, arising out of a boy’s innocent reveries. If God is closer than your jugular vein, then a woman is not much further away. She is Adam’s own rib presented to him as a gift from God.

Proust is describing love as the commitment to a loss of self, to a fundamental change in perspective, as something outside of, yet within ourselves arises. We know of this subconsciously in the face of our mother appearing from the shapeless void of light in the first opening of our eyes.

It helps to see al later loves, and love itself, through this lens Proust has created. But he is not the only one, of course.

Watch the first season of Leave it to Beaver. Beaver falls in love with his teacher, Miss Canfield, just as Dobie does with his goddesses. It is innocent but palpably something other than playing at being an adult. In the end all is resolved because “My mom says I’m too young to get married.” Miss Canfield will just have to wait.

Wally finds new interest at dancing class as Penny, “the prettiest girl at dancing school” entrances him. He sees only the goddess and no faults. But when she comes between Wally and his brother, to her “a grubby infant”, the spell is broken. Wally tells her she has a face like a flounder. “No girl is going to tell me what to do!” Not until the next one Wally.

So, all have found a way, to at least capture a moment that can explain the transcendence he feels and the unique value of every crush he continues to indulge. It is a simple message. The divine is found within and outside ourselves but is immediately recognizable in what we are sure is not ourselves but assumed to be like ourselves, the object of our love, the intimate other. The divine itself is the ultimate expression of the intimate other. God is love as Isuelt and Penny are love.


Yow! Did I just write that?!