H.H., You Slut!
“I must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words.”
- Hamlet, Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2
In a recent issue of The New Yorker there’s an article on John Banville and his alter-ego Benjamin Black. Banville is a rather well known, high-brow, “artsy” novelist who, for reasons all his own, but perhaps of an inner necessity, created a nom de plume — Benjamin Black. Banville writes complex and “literary” novels. Black writes popular detective stories. According to Banville, the way this came about was, “I sat down at nine o’clock on a Monday morning, and by lunchtime I had written more than fifteen hundred words. It was a scandal! I thought, John Banville, you slut.” Some are word-smiths, others are word-sluts. Banville is the former. He says that “as Banville” it is an accomplishment if he can write up to 200 words a day. But “as Balck” he can write up to 2.5 thousand words a day!
Believe me, I know how he feels. This little stroll through Slutville has already resulted in over 80 thousand words (and counting), whereas my other writings require intense concentration and construction. But, as Carmela Ciuraru says (quoted in the article), “The authorial persona is a construct, never wholly authentic.” When “the author” says “I,” who or what is that? Does it refer to a fictional character? Does it refer to the writer or scriptor? Who is that writer, scriptor, author? Does he even know himself? Does she hold any more authority over the text than you? Is there even an author who creates? Or are “we” not just merely points in the fabric of text (like the intersecting threads of a web) where various weaves converge and other weaves emerge according to hidden and mysterious principles? Some intersections are “hot spots” and other not-so-hot. Is not all writing to some extent (and some more than others) autographica (automatic writing, as some call it)? Is not the act of writing (and perhaps even more so fiction or “creative writing”) an act of kenosis such that there is no self to be the referent of the authorial “I”? The shortest way of summing up all these ponderous questions is to say that the “I” of the text is as much a construct as the “author” who wrote it and that “author” is as much a construct as the “I” who takes on the persona of the author. And what “constructs” “us”? The text, of course!
Every narrator is an unreliable narrator. No. Scratch that. A narrator can be reliable, but should not be identified with the author. The author is unreliable. Trust me.
Melville had his Ishmael. Ishmael had his Captain Ahab and Ahab had his Moby Dick. I have H.H. H.H. has the monomaniacal Lo and Lo has her dick. Yes, I just compared this to the greatest novel of the American canon.
Nick Carraway had his Gatsby and Gatsby had his Daisy. I have my Lo and Lo has her ladies.
Never since Melville discoursed on white has there been a passage in the English language that expounds in such poetically puissant tones the multivalent meanings of a color until Fitzgerald’s passage on Gatsby’s green light.
Nabokov had his Humbert Humbert. Humbert Humbert had his Lolita and Lolita had her Humbert Humbert. I have my H.H. and H.H. has his Lo and Lo has herself.
What Lo is to Lo has been hinted; what, at times, Lo is to me has remained yet unsaid.
All the horror and evil of the White Whale was conveyed in its whiteness. All the goodness, promise, and fertility of Daisy beamed across the sound from the green beacon upon which Gatsby doted night after night.
All the pent-up heat, heartbeat, and seductive sweets of Lo are expressed in one color as well: red. The red of her lips parted with a red tongue tip touching the white of her teeth tell the tale of love and lust, longing and life lived fully. A lush life filled with libidinous conquests. The red of her areolae upon her perky breasts, pinched and almost panting for attention and pleasure, pulled and protruding like little buoys beckoning to the passing sailors as they lift and heave upon the bosom of the undulating sea. The glossy red of her pained fingernails pulling at her red nipples, licked by her red tongue, lightly separating her red labia. Her pink pussy lips parted and revealing the lush red lining of her luscious labia minora. The fire engine red of her pedicured toes curling with tense expectation of love’s consummation. Lying there on the sheen of her red satin sheets, in her sheer red silk negligée, swaddled in the sea of red blankets, she brings herself to a shrieking climax. Like a siren singing from the darkness, her voice reverberates with pleasure up and down the octaves as her convulsing body rhythmically dances to the command of her virtuosic finger on her clit.
Red, the symbol of the forbidden district. Red, the enticing sign of danger and vitality. Red, the fruit’s color of poison and fertility. Red, the color of flame. Red, the color of caution and calling. Red is the apple tossed to Paris. Red is the sea — wet and parted to receive the host. Red is the sky in the night and morn. Red is the blood when the finger is pricked by the red rose’s thorn. Red is my Lo’s mind filled with diabolical thoughts. Red is the devil whose brimming brow spouts thorns. Red is life when it is born. Red is the cheek when it is warm. Red is my heart when for Lo it longs. Red are all things forbidden — from knowledge’s treats to vulgar porn. Red is the color of this song.
Lo, look at how you entrance me! How you bewitch me! How you have me in your spell! I have gone mad! I write my book of love and inscribe each page with your refulgent image. I sing your praises to Heaven’s foundations that the angels might find respite from their constant bliss and repent their having not been remiss.
[From Match, Cinder & Spark]
