I was struck by an eery sense of familiarity when reading Deborah Levy’s reminiscence of an afternoon in a greasy spoon cafe, as a teenager who had recently moved to London from South Africa. From Things I Don’t Want To Know pg 124-125
It was very very urgent that I got out of my life.
Inside the greasy spoon’s steamed up windows and haze of cigarette smoke, this sense of urgency accelerated. I had so little time. Time for what? I didn’t know but I was convinced there was another sort of life waiting for me and I had to work out what it was before I cleaned the oven.
It’s a quintessential experience of what Margaret Archer calls the rejector in The Reflexive Imperative. The nascent reflexivity of the adolescent who does not know what they want but does know that they don’t want this. They cannot commit to what they are presented with in their given context, so they feel a need to look beyond it. What Levy conveys is the sense of urgency that can accompany this, the claustrophobia of imminence, when traumatic experience accompanies this rejection. It’s not just that something better might be out there, it’s that what is out there is in some fundamental sense intolerable.
There’s a very different version of the experience conveyed in Ian McEwan’s Lessons where the narrator was haunted by a childhood experience of social order being interrupted. He subsequently carried it round with him as an experience that precluded commitment to the life he was leading:
The episode, a taste of unreal freedom, had lasted eight days. It sustained him at boarding school, it shaped his restlessness and unfocussed ambitions in his twenties and strengthened his resistance to a regular job. It became a hindrance – whatever he was doing, he was pursued by an idea of a greater freedom elsewhere, some emancipated life just beyond reach, one that would be denied him if he made unbreakable commitments. He missed many chances that way and submitted to periods of prolonged boredom. He was waiting for existence to part like a curtain, for a hand to extend and help him step through into a paradise regained. There his purpose, his delight in friendship and community and the thrill of the unexpected would be bound and resolved. Because he failed to understand or define these expectations until after they had faded in later life, he was vulnerable to their appeal. He did not know what – in the real world – he was waiting for.
He did not know what he was waiting for. In one of my favourite songs from my 20s Brian Fallon sings that “We were always waiting for something to happen“. Is this what Ian McEwan’s (clearly somewhat autobiographical) narrator was waiting for? Is this what the teenage Levy was on some level waiting for?
It's funny how the night moves
Humming a song from 1962
We were always waiting . . . always waiting
We were always waiting for something to happen
In the latter case I suspect not because Levy’s ‘living autobiography’* is about the agency discovered through writing. As she writes on the final page, “I did not know how to get the work, my writing, into the world”. “If this was to be my reality, I did not know what to do with it” (pg 160-161). As I read this, the doing came to be the writing, which is something I identify with deeply. Rather than waiting for something to happen, one describes the happenings such that the waiting becomes an object of curiosity rather than an internal state subordinated to an (expected) external reality. It means as one might say in a different register, enjoying your symptom.
In her frustratingly impenetrable New Maladies of the Soul, Julia Kristeva remarks that adolescent writing “constitute[s] a desire to name, to bring to light a wavering meaning that lies upon the boundaries of words and drives” (loc 2,577). It can be a discovery which gives “adolescents the impression that they are employing—after a long wait and for the first time in their lives—a living discourse that is not empty, not an ‘as-if.’” (loc 2,320). In other words writing, particularly adolescent writing, facilitates an encounter with the Real. The words I use begin to overflow with something deeper. The manner in which I string them together carries an energy which now seems glaringly absent in my previous experience. I am in touch with something through the words I use, even if I do not know what it is I am touching.
This brings us to the terrain of the transformational object. I realised recently that I’d been slightly misreading this concept from Christopher Bollas. His point is not just that it is a psychic object which generates the feeling of change within us. It is rather that it promises change without agency because it carries the primordial experience of the caregiver who could cater to our internal states without any requirement for action on our part. We search for the other who can change us, carrying the memory of this earliest object relation in which changes in self states depended on the agency of another. The misreading I think was aspirational, in the sense that I would like to read this as an orthodox transformational object, the sense in which it is carried around as latent pre-oedipal baggage in the psyche. In contrast to the unorthodox transformational object which promises change through agency.
This is what writing does I think. When it flows, the experience of pure generativity, the connections which make themselves available pre-consciously, carries the promise of transformation. I can be other than I am. Things can be other than they are. The reason for this is that my words can come into being, as if animated by their own independent spirit. They are mine, yet not mine. They express my thoughts, they extend beyond them. There is something I think profoundly psychologically liberating in writing in which drive energies find a calming but containing expression. I agree with Mari Ruti there clearly is jouissance here. From Mari Ruti’s The Creative Self: Beyond Individualism, loc 1781:
Its intensity is such that I cannot exactly call it pleasurable. The sheer volume of sentences pouring out, and the rapidity with which they form, can feel overwhelming. This is an experience of jouissance in as pure a form as I am able to experience it, which is why it is the kind of pleasure that borders on pain. I know that others experience it differently, sometimes even as an erotic event.118 But for me it is mostly agonizing. Fortunately, things shift when I reach the editorial stage which, by comparison, is calm and calming. That is when the process slows down and writing becomes a more straightforward pleasure.
I worry that if we remain content with labelling this jouissance, we miss something deeper. I’m not sure I’ve managed to label it here because my experience of real writing is that it always leaves me with more questions than answers. But there’s something in the psychodynamics of writing which stops us waiting for something to happen. There’s something in it which connects us with our own capacity to make things happen. This is how we avoid a transformational object as something which acts on us and, in a sense, create our own transformational object.
The key I think lies in the receptiveness to the connections which are emerging. This is still a form of waiting, just in a very different key. These enable something to emerge within us which then extends beyond us before, in turn, acting back upon us. We create something proto-other from our own psyche, in relation to which we are then moved. It a transformational object but on a very different trajectory. It is a way in which we can participate in our transformation rather than waiting for it. It is also not the only way.
*This phrase frustrates me and I struggle to articulate why.
Mark Carrigan 