THE LUCKY 85% RULE, INVISIBILITY AND MANON

[Eric]

THE LUCKY 85% RULE, INVISIBILITY AND MANON

A recent conversation about Manon in Arnold Weinstein's Fiction of Relationship class puts me in mind of a late night conversation in the St John's College Middle Common Room building I participated in more than a decade ago. It was had by a group of somewhat inebriated and increasingly drowsy postgraduates, including myself, pursing a variety of unrelated disciplines.

In exchange for a quantity of alcoholic beverages, we had all recently participated in a study of human sexual attractiveness. This employed manifold kernel regression, diffeomorphic registration, and the Frechet mean; it brought together questions of aesthetics, emotion, biology, and computational analysis. The purpose was to tell us what we really already knew: some people are more attractive than others, and with some minor variations, populations strongly agreed on their most and least attractive members. We almost never confuse members of the two groups for each other. (You may perhaps be familiar with the larger online study made by OK Trends a few years later.)

Between these two groups, the very attractive and the very unattractive, was a vast middle group. Here there was quite a lot of variation, more confusion, and much less agreement. It was quite difficult to tell if a member of this middle group would be held to be attractive by any other specific member of the study. Viewed rationally and statistically, to be a member of the vast middle was to enter into an erotic pot-luck full of uncertainties and possibilities denied the other two groups.

In the course of our discussion, our group of ten or so mixed-gendered multi-cultural students came to express a strongly held, shared belief. This was that the vast middle of the population was in fact more fortunate, in one very important respect at least, than either the group of the least or the most sexually attractive persons. All of us in the M.C.R. that evening felt strongly that, erotically speaking, we--unlike them--could be "seen for who we are."

Most of us want to be loved for who we believe (perhaps naively) "we truly are." We wish to be seen and known and appreciated for the combination of attributes peculiar to ourselves that our chosen other, the lover, finds uniquely delightful. We wish to be desired, but not only for how we look. We wish to be desired also for something essential within us that makes us distinct from other people.

While the love of friendship and familial love do not seem to depend on physical attraction, the kind of love we call romantic absolutely does. As Woody Allen says, "Relationships based on mutual attraction do not last. Relationships based on anything else never happen at all." He was, of course, excluding the kind of "relationship" Manon--and millions like her---have been willing to barter themselves in for across millennia.

For two groups---about the 5% or so at the top of the attractiveness scale and perhaps the 10% or so at the bottom, such a sexual relationship, where the uniqueness of the self is seen and appreciated by the other, is particularly difficult--perhaps even impossible--to find.

For the most attractive men and women, much of life's usually pleasant past-time of socialising can require an aggressively defensive posture. The seemingly "fortunate" few are often faced with a seemingly endless stream of persons whose enchantment with beauty can lead them to act in strange and even frightening ways. Faced with great beauty, people often find themselves unable to control or contain their desires. Des Grieux is merely an extreme case of something beauty does to a great many persons, all the time. In thrall to beauty, the object of desire is, in some sense, not seen at all, even as they are pursued. Rather, a strong projection of the object of desire is projected upon their countenance. The project is interpreted instead of the person while they become quite invisible. This is how beauty of such a strong variety can make the uniqueness of the individual who posses it invisible to others, even as it turns them as the object of desire into the centre of attention. This is, of course, what happens to Manon over and over. (The question of the degree Des Grieux truly can “know” Manon, rahter than his projection of her beauty is an interesting one, and one which I believe the book leaves us considerable room to ponder.)

For the least attractive men and women, those who suffer from extreme obesity, deformity, decrepitude or illness, or simply an extremely unfortunate combination of bodily attributes, a similar invisibility occurs. Ugliness seems to have a powerful attraction/repulsion for the viewer, much as an accident scene can have for the motorist passing a car wreck on the motorway. (J.G. Ballard has described this very well, both in "Crash", and in other works.) However, considered specifically as a potential love interest, ugliness renders its victims completely invisible, indeed utterly under erotic erasure, for all but the rarest souls. While the individual may possess many fine or even unique and attractive qualities, their undesired physical presence means that theoretically plausible sexual partners encountering them may not even correctly remember their gender a week later. Stephen Moffet's BAFTA-award winning episode of "Coupling", detailing the same party as remembered by three different persons, hinged on precisely this erasure of gender memory.

Considered from this point of view, the old, fat rich men who pay for beautiful young women such as Manon, are their erotic doubles. Neither can be seen for whom they are as individuals. Neither can be entertained as potential life partners for who they uniquely are. Manon's beauty erases her individuality even as it allows her to commodify herself for sale in the sexual marketplace. The old fat men are equally under erasure. While their money attracts, their physical form repulses. Indeed, having to resort to such a commodity exchange is, in itself, a profoundly deadening admission of the deeper and more lasting defeat. A man who needs to pay for a mistress, or a wealthy woman who needs to pay for a handsome young man does so because he is utterly without coin of the realm in the marketplace which matters most---the human heart, the space of desire.

What one can I think rightly suggest is that in Paris, Des Grieux's desire for Manon is not lessoned but intensified by the knowledge that others desire her. With regard to Manon, Des Grieux seems to vacillate between the will to see and the will to self-blind. Those who have read Ulysses know about Bloom's wilful self-blinding when it comes to Molly. There are moments in this text where Des Grieux seems to have dodged reality almost as effectively as Leopold does in the streets of Dublin 200 years later. It is only when Manon is for a time removed from the marketplace, when she spends ten months living alone with Des Grieux, that we can truly imagine the lovers to perhaps be fully known to each other. They seem to reach an understanding that might hold. Can we doubt, however that some great degree of illusion persists, even until the last dying breath of Manon?

How about the rest of us? How likely are we to be able to be seen for who we are by those we love? Perhaps this is an illusion, too. After all, what is it that we want? Is there not a paradox at the heart of that, too?

Do we wish to be seen clearly by the loved one? Yes, but if we are honest with ourselves, perhaps not too soon. At the beginning of love, we really want not to be seen as most of us really are, somewhere in the middle of a peer-reviewed study's scale of human sexual attractiveness. Rather we wish our lover to see us as uniquely and even overpoweringly beautiful, as Manon is to Des Grieux. Perhaps we are truly mad, looking for the odd person who sees our external beauty as it really is not. Even as we wish our partner to see us as we are not on the outside, we wish them to see us as we truly are--or perhaps as we truly wish to be---on the inside. We wish for our lovers to accept our narrative account of ourselves, much perhaps as Des Grieux wishes the hearer of his tale to take him at his unreliable word. Gradually, we want our lovers to learn everything about us, and to see our inside as we truly believe it to be. But most lovers eventually learn to know us better than the simplified narratives we sometimes fool ourselves with. They learn our narratives too well to trust them completely.

All those years ago in Oxford, we were not being honest enough with ourselves; reading and reflecting on this novel and on my life has helped me to see that. Perhaps the story of love most of us want needs to begin in illusion, only gradually move towards clear-sighted knowing. Sometimes, to appease the lover's heart, we may need to slip back into illusion. As TS Eliot said, "humankind can not bear very much reality." Yet part of our dream of love is to find the clear-eyed lover who can help us know ourselves better, see ourselves more clearly, and thus help us grow. Can such a thing be done without significant diminution of passion? Is such a thing even possible either way? If so, can such a story of love as happy disillusionment be told? Perhaps. However, it clearly can not be told by Des Grieux, whose passion is unchanging, and mostly of one note. Such a complex, evolving love as most of us would wish to experience over a long life would require a much more symphonic narration.

ERIC ALAN WEINSTEIN

[Maura]

Perhaps I missed this point in your dissertation, but there's one literary technique that separated Manon Lescaut from any other literary work.

While every other character in that novel is described in great detail, the ONLY description we have of Manon is her perceived beauty through the eyes of her lover. We've no idea WHAT she looks like, only that she's considered beautiful.

It seems to miss a lot of people, enraptured as they are in Des Grieux' fascination and obsession.

Having studied la litterature francaise in Paris, I was captivated by this little literary sleight of hand by Abbe Prevost. In turn, I used the same in my first novel, "Five-Star FLEECING" and joked to people that only students of 18th Century French Literature would understand the correlation.

I wasn't too far off.

Maura Stone

Five-Star Fleecing

[Eric]

Yes, Maura, Prevost leaves it entirely up to the readers imagination. To me, it seems a wise choice. Once we start to describe one kind of "beauty" or another, we can easily slip into the realm of banal. What appeal most to one reader might appeal less to another. By leaving her physical description blank, Prevost allows the reader to fill in her or his blank, to the degree we think that wise to do so at all.

[Teresa]

Thank you both for those stimulating insights...they've opened me up to a whole other level of reflection on this piece. Cheers!