Asymmetry II – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Continues to Mull Lisa Halliday’s Ode to the Power of Love

I just wrote a post about Asymmetry, and then I reread the book – this is a book that deserves rereading – and on the reread I have a second take on it.  Yes, it is the same book.  No, I am not taking down the first post (here).  I believe it stands as written.  But a good book, and a great book even more, means different things at different moments, just as we ourselves do; as Amar Jafaari, the protagonist in the second part notes while looking in a mirror, “...that like all mirrors… gave back startlingly little of the worlds within worlds a single consciousness comprises, too dull and static a human surface to convey the incessant kaleidoscope within.” 

Hegel revised our Platonic notion of unchanging truth when he radically proposed that our efforts to understand something actually changes it – we are in a dialectical relationship with truth.  It is not a thing that is unchanging, but truth is a thesis, waiting for an antithesis that will result in a synthesis – something that is new and informed by both positions.  I think this radical revisioning of the world of ideas was a precursor to the modernism that Freud helped usher in – the idea that the subjective is as important as the objective.  We have since devolved into a postmodern world where intention is called into question – intention on the part of the author and the capacity of the reader while reading to engage in something that is shared.

At its worst, this would suggest that all news is fake news and we are able to make up new truths as we move along – truths that are untethered to the world.  The fake news position is, however, indefensible.  We live in a world of flesh and blood, of bone and failing hearts – a world that we are all too briefly given access too.  And this book articulates the opening to that world that love affords.  The subject of this book is the author.  She makes it so when she intentionally reveals in interviews that the first part is a version of her secret affair with Philip Roth.  And it is about an author who is not present in that first part.  She is written about in the third person by a narrator who has access to some of her thoughts, but she is ultimately a stranger to the narrator – which is doubly strange because the narrator is none other than she herself.

The woman in the first part – titled folly – does not know herself.  She is naïve and seemingly prematurely exposed to someone who is full of self-knowledge.  This is a central Asymmetry of the book.  But the man’s self-knowledge – and his capacity to closely observe the world and this woman – to love her as an object – to groom her – with all of the weird connotations that go with that – includes grooming her to be able to observe – to hear and read authors closely – but more essentially to hear and read herself more closely so that, over time, she, through love, becomes more clearly herself.  More able to articulate herself.

She also, as a result of this process, becomes unlike herself.  In the beginning, she is sitting in the park not reading a book – it doesn’t hold her attention – in part because it contains no quotations marks.  How can a book be interesting that doesn’t contain quotation marks?  She demonstrates how that can be the case when she writes the second section of the book – she takes on aspects of the book by the author that bored her.  But she does this in a way that holds our attention.

The self that she chooses to articulate in the second section of this book – madness – could not, on the surface, be much more different than who she appears to be on a surface level as a person.  A Muslim man who is a citizen of both Iraq and the US, Amar Jafaari, she writes his story not in the third person, but in the first.  To do this, she has to write, not as her particular self, but as his particular self, but she also has to connect on a deeper level with what it means for him to be human – and whether she succeeds in this endeavor is both the promise but also the danger of this book – by writing about someone so different from herself, she is walking a high wire without a net.

All that said, as Ezra – the thinly veiled Philip Roth who bedded her and taught her about writing in the first part – notes in the brief coda at the end, this is ultimately a book about her – it cannot not be – she is the person who is being expressed through Amar Jafaari – the man who is a person without a country in the second book – the man who is caught in Britain with an American and an Iraqi passport and who thus does not have the protection of the British government, even though he had lived there and volunteered to care for children there 10 years earlier.  But this is small potatoes compared to having the country that his family is from be destroyed by the country that he went to as their child to find a better life – and he is called back into peril by his older brother’s greater connection to their country of origin than the destination country.  In the metaphor – the author is drawn into the country of writing – one that is not her native soil – by a native writer – and there feels imperiled.

This book then is about the transience of identity – about how the author becomes someone she is not – she is transformed by some form of love.  In the interview, Ezra maintains that he treats his lovers like children – like the children he never had.  And she has been loved, incestuously if you will, by a man from a different generation.  A man who opened her mind to things that were not of her own generation – and we have profited from that.  We have been moved by the woman she has become to appreciate a world that was largely made by Ezra – the world that the two of them inhabited – but then she took what she learned in his world and created an entirely different world – one that is her own creation.  Ezra approves of this world in the coda – he saw this world and decided it was good – but it is one that is foreign to him as a person and as a writer.  The author has gone there in part, I think, to be on her own.

She anticipates Ezra’s articulation of her writing about Amar as self-revelation when, in the section quoted above about the mirror that Amar is looking into, Amar goes on to opine that, “…even someone who imagines for a living is bound by the ultimate constraint: she can hold her mirror up to whatever subject she chooses, at whatever angle she likes – she can even hold it such that she herself remains outside its frame, the better to de-narcissize the view- but there’s no getting around the fact that she is holding the mirror.  And just because you can’t see yourself in the reflection doesn’t mean no one can.”  This would be about her even without the seemingly PC based other-gender specific language that Amar, a graduate of a US Ivy League School, dutifully is using.
    

But it is also the case that she arrives there and is still herself – including the part of her that predates her relationship with Ezra – but more importantly – it is the part that is part and parcel of the relationship with Ezra and one that was, in fact, partly formed by him.  Would that she could shed this part – I think the writing of something (quite literally) so foreign is an attempt to do that.  But the reflection in the mirror won’t let her get away from him and their relationship together nor will it let her get away from herself.  She states (as Amar), again in the section about the mirror, “… like the embodiment of a line I would later read – something about the metaphysical claustrophobia and bleak fate of always being one person.”

This past weekend I went with the reluctant son to a family reunion near the Salvador Dali museum in St. Petersburg, Florida.  I understand the museum has been rebuilt and reorganized since I was there fifteen years ago.  I hope that the arc of Dali’s life has been preserved – though the agenda at the reunion interfered with finding that out.  Dali was a tremendous but very troubled artist who painted amazing but disturbed works early in his career.  He intentionally painted disturbing elements from his dreams as a means of trying to do Freudian self-analysis.  It may have been quite successful as his later works are integrated masterpieces – works of a mature artist (though with a bit of madness around the edges).  Did the analysis work?  Maybe – but he also fell in love – and it could be that it was the relationship that led to the changes that let him use his talents to express more than his madness – to express beauty.

Lisa Halliday’s relationship with Philip Roth – a relationship that started by chance – but that also felt fated – a theme that Amar Jafaari plays with as a Muslim and as a person – what is determined by God and what do we have control over? – becomes an integral part of who she is as an author.  Roth is the God who has determined her – just as all of us have been determined by the powerful formative relationships in our extended childhood – certainly with our parents – but also as my father was formed in part by his relationship with his older brother whose 90^th birthday was the excuse for our reunion.  So the return to the family becomes an exploration of who we were, but also who we are – and we regress to who it was that we were when we interact with those who knew us when.  Those who connected with something unformed, primitive, but essential to who we are – and we are forever working – on some level - to show them that what we have done is partly their product, but also something that is wholly our own.

Halliday brings us into her familial attempt to articulate her developmental arc in the solar glow and the shadow of one of the great writers of the twentieth century.  And we get to share in that tremendously intimate self-portrait – one that is so specific and so well-articulated that it becomes a universal expression of something true about the process of learning through the vehicle of love from someone we respect and admire – and hate and disdain – and ultimately work to use as a launching pad into the world of possibilities that we will carve for ourselves.

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