Samir Dayal
English Department
Bentley College
sdayal@bentley.edu
Introduction: What Does the Woman Want?
The release of Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993) was almost an epochal event. It arrived to mark the zenith of a phase of extraordinary creativity in Australian cinema in the 1970s and 1980s with films such as Picnic at Hanging Rock, My Brilliant Career, The Lighthorsemen, Breaker Morant, and Gallipoli. In the following decade, close on the heels of Strictly Ballroom, Romper Stomper, and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Campion’s film won the Palm D’Or at Cannes and three Academy Awards (see Orr 151, Coombs and Gemmell, “Preface” vii). Highly successful at the box office, the film elicited praise and stirred much passionate debate among critics and ordinary filmgoers. Neither were audiences oblivious to its sheer ambition in cinematic technique.1 That ambition foregrounds itself here in virtuoso camera movement, as when the camera seems to enter a character’s pocket, and there in an homage to a grand auteur, as when a close-up of Ada McGrath’s (Holly Hunter’s) hair tied in a tight spiral knot, in evoking an ocular vertigo, invites comparison to an emblematic shot in Hitchcock’s Vertigo and with equal point, for in this gesture the camera in each case indexes the female object of its fascinated gaze.2 Inviting attention to its own gaze, the camera elevates the piano to the level almost of a character in the film, even a gendered character, as Felicity Coombs argues (85). And if the music “made” by the piano is in some ways the real voice of the speechless protagonist, her voiceover also functions as a kind of spectral extradiegetic intrusion, particularly in a crucial scene when Ada becomes the victim of savage violence at the hands of Stewart, her husband. Ada’s haunting voice-over, however, is not just a trick: it functions at the ideological level as a counter to the customary “othering” of the feminine voice in cinema, and at the representational level to problematize the real versus the symbolic. The visual language of the film is frequently as telling. In one scene, for instance, an important and mischievous point about Ada’s second husband’s twisted libido is made by the camera. Stewart is voyeuristically spying on his wife and her lover, whose face is buried in her skirts. As he watches, her lover’s pet dog, possibly this man’s only (or best) friend, licks Stewart’s open palm.
Above all, the film was, and remains, thought provoking. It became the focus of intense debates about the postcolonial critique of New Zealand’s–and Australia’s–colonial past (and, by implication, their neocolonial present and their multicultural future); about feminine desire and its institutional containment within marriage; and about the psychological perplexities of human relationships, particularly love, that are the film’s main subject. These debates raise issues that remain vital in contemporary cultural studies–the inarticulacy of what enables women’s agency, the possibility of alternative forms of desire and human intercourse, the quandaries of aspirations to a meaningful postcolonial or ethnic citizenship that does not slip into the quagmire of racial and identity politics. However, when reviewing these central debates focused on feminine agency in the film, one has a strange sense of irresolution, as though some of the major issues were being abandoned without being fully developed, let alone resolved. The crux of these debates has to do with this question: what does Ada want? In this essay I offer a contribution to the debate that seeks to reinterpret this as a question not only about what Ada wants from love, but as a question about what drives her beyond love–a question about the structure of that drive.
Love, after all, is the telos of melodrama, which is itself the focus of one important trend in the film’s reception. The nineteenth century saw the rise of melodrama in an age where traditional anchors of society in organized religion and hierarchical authority were on the wane. Into the vacuum came the private individual as the locus of meaning. This individual, however, was defined primarily by his or her role within the nuclear family (Vasudevan 310), and needless to say, the role assigned to the woman within the bourgeois family was particularly narrow, restricting the orbit of her desire and imagination. Indeed, where the modernist work of art in the West was coded as an autonomous, “masculine,” form (see Huyssen), the mass cultural form of melodrama was itself coded as “feminine” and addressed to women as those who were subjugated or even rendered voiceless by that masculinist discourse. This view is in line with Peter Brooks’s The Melodramatic Imagination (1976), which provides an important formal schematization of the silencing that is constitutive of melodrama, although since the publication of Brooks’s work, melodrama has come to be regarded as having as much claim to facilitating the democratic revolution as realism (Prasad 56).3 If Brooks offered a formal account of melodrama, then an important feminist advance in theorizing melodrama was achieved by Mary Ann Doane, who is credited with the most widely cited claim about the way in which classical women’s melodrama portrays the suppression of women’s agency by patriarchal structures of society (The Desire to Desire).
As melodrama came more and more to be addressed to women it gave rise in the Hollywood of the 1950s to a “women’s melodrama.” In the age of classical Hollywood cinema, as Neil Robinson notes, women’s melodrama “tells the story of a woman who attempts to resolve the tensions between her own subjectivity and erotic desire, and the patriarchal world in which she lives” and in doing so the melodrama seeks to “[re]define the contours of… community” (19). The Piano is, in these terms, a women’s film (see Barcan and Fogarty). But what is often missed in such a claim about this film is precisely that The Piano‘s spin on melodrama is not to posit the goal of reintegration into community as in traditional melodrama. It is not even a “critique [of] the false either/or choices which patriarchy offers to both women and men” as Robinson puts it (20), for that too implies a desire to be reintegrated into a regenerated community. Doane was criticized for being too pessimistic to recognize melodrama’s potential for enabling feminine agency: “the woman’s film,” she concluded, “does not provide us with an access to a pure and authentic female subjectivity, much as we might like it to do so” (4). Whatever the merits of this criticism, perhaps we should not make of melodrama a Procrustean bed, simply in order to cut Campion’s film down to size so that it will fit the structure of melodrama, as Robinson does when he writes that “Patriarchy is a nightmare from which Ada is trying to awake, and her near death [near the end of the film] demonstrates that only by the narrowest of margins does she escape its prohibitions against female desire” (37). Similarly, Bridget Orr, an otherwise astute reader of the film, can only conclude that “it seems curious that Ada’s resistance… [at the end of the film] should be rewarded by her establishment in white picket contentment” (158). If we read The Piano as merely one more women’s melodrama, even what Richard Allen describes as a “gothic melodrama” (44-45), we might fail to see something crucial about the ending. I argue below that it is structured around a darker intensity, a jouissance that constitutes a deformation of melodrama and betrays no wish to be so reintegrated. This deformation involves a kind of radical exceptionalism and implies an erotics that is better described, as I argue at the acknowledged risk of overinterpreting the film, in terms of courtly love as a negation of romantic love.
Campion does offer, in this “women’s film,” an oppositional structure of desire, or at least of a woman’s desire, that counters both the tepid agency that is freed up for women in women’s melodrama and the more realist script of restrictive bourgeois domesticity with an alternative erotic structure. This is a structure that Bruce Fink specifices as a “feminine structure,” namely a “position or stance with respect to (an experience of) jouissance” (Lacanian Subject 117). That oppositional structure of desire is homologous, I suggest, to the structure of courtly love in that it respects both the erotic attachment familiar to anyone who has been in love or has desired another body and the “impossibility” of the sexual relation, as Jacques Lacan has insistently theorized it. The sexual relation is “impossible” because sexual difference is enigmatic, because it is as though feminine desire and masculine desire were not speaking the same tongue. But beyond this always failing love is something else that we can trace, an inhuman love.
The Structure of the Essay
In the light of what has been said above, the essay is structured in three sections of unequal length:
Section I:
In the first section, the shortest because it treats themes given relatively lower prominence by the film, I discuss the colonial context of the film, describing the significance of its setting in New Zealand and developing its critique of colonialism. It is as easy to offer a reductive reading of such a film as to claim too great a sophistication for it. Still, I suggest that the film is informed by the insights of postcolonialism and is sensitive to postcolonialism’s own reinscription of the advances of poststructuralist discourse.
Section II:
In the second section I discuss Campion’s exploration of feminine desire, or at least of Ada’s irregular desire within the context of her relationship to Baines–and therefore to romantic love. This is a way not only of critiquing received ideas about love but of revisiting related issues: choice of sexual object, desire as a support of subjectivity, and femininity as an epistemological category. It is equally a way of asking about masculine desire, when it exceeds the bounds of normative sexuality. Just as Campion critiques the structuring of (colonial) racial minorities and women, she is also sensitive to the class differentiations among women as a group, and she is committed to the destabilization of pieties about sexual relations and social institutions. This section of course is intimately linked to the first and the third, and in this section I discuss what I see as the surface of the film: its narrative of a woman’s struggle to connect with her “dark talent.”
Section III:
In the final and necessarily densest section, I come to Ada’s radical, psychoanalytically suggestive, and intriguing psychic structure. I employ here a Lacanian terminology of desire and drive because I believe Campion is interested in exploring a particular psychic structure that captures Ada’s desire, a desire that transgresses the melodrama of bourgeois domesticity and is outside the ken of patriarchal discourse.4 While I invoke a Lacanian paradigm in order to highlight this transgressive excess, I am not unaware of the accusation (leveled by Judith Butler in Antigone’s Claim, for instance) that Lacanian psychoanalysis lends itself to a support of a patriarchal status quo. Insensitivity to this accusation would be especially egregious in my generally appreciative reading of Campion’s film, a reading that is aligned with feminist approaches. I am not appealing to the Lacan who has been construed as ultimately tethered to a defence of a patriarchal, phallic order, in which a woman of course has no real agency, no real voice. But neither do I preoccupy myself here with an exposé of Lacan’s patriarchal blind spots by way of noticing how woman’s voice is indeed suppressed. It would be a real disservice to Campion to turn her exquisitely complex portrayal of Ada into merely a representation of this muteness. I turn instead to another Lacan who, even if his oeuvre betrays him as a man of his era and a creature of a patriarchal worldview, offers a useful vocabulary that moves beyond pat, dismissive accounts of his theoretical advances.
A couple of further clarifications seem in order at this juncture. First, many contemporary critics (particularly feminists) have rightly discredited the thesis of the autonomy of the aesthetic, removed from the political, the linguistic, the cultural, or the psychoanalytic. Therefore it is appropriate to present a “cultural studies” approach to the film, not only to read the film as aesthetic object but to see it as presenting a politicized representation of a psychic problematic. Second, my suggestion is that Lacan offers a particularly useful vocabulary of drive, of courtly love, of the “real” body, of “das Ding,” of the partial object, of desubjectivation or acephalous subjectivity. As I develop my argument, the significance of this difficult terminology will, I hope, become evident. I don’t want to detain the reader by a long excursus on definitions. But let me say here that one of the most important features of Ada’s structure as it is represented in filmic language is a kind of excess. I propose that the secret to her desire is this excess, and my essay furthermore tracks the relationship between her and George Baines (Harvey Keitel) as anchored to their mutual, but differently inflected, gendered orientation to excess.
Ada’s excess is synecdochically, if ironically, represented by her darkly eloquent, voluntary muteness. If the Lacanian paradigm of subject formation is customarily understood in film studies to propose that the advent of the subject is coeval with the moment of entry into the symbolic, we should note that Ada’s elective muteness may not contradict this mechanically reproduced truism of that conventional application of Lacanian theory to film studies. But neither does it lend itself unproblematically to the kind of recuperative utopian narrative of a Tania Modleski, whose “project,” in the words of Ruth Barcan and Madeleine Fogarty, is “to save the possibility of referential language for a feminist future when the traditionally mute body, the mother, will be given the same access to the names–language and speech–that men have enjoyed” (5). It marks instead an inverse trajectory whereby Ada’s silence signals her withdrawal from a conventional individualization within the bourgeois patriarchal narratives into which she has been interpellated, first as the daughter of a father who practically sells her into marriage, and then as the wife of a man whom she has not chosen, never met, and can never love. The film projects her straining to move beyond the straitjacket of the identity positions sanctioned for her within the patriarchal symbolic. Yet, and this is a diacritic of my approach, many readings of Ada-as-subject limit themselves to a narrow interpretation of “symbolic” identity. Lacanian discourse, in elaborating the beyond of the symbolic (in other words, the realm of the “real” associated with the drive), better approximates Ada’s–and Baines’s–psychic structures.
For the purposes of structural contrast between normative heterosexual coupling and the odd (even strange) couple of Ada and Baines, I have recourse late in the essay to the structure of “courtly love.” Beyond the banalized “symbolic” interpretation of subject-formation that has bedeviled some readings of the film, Lacan’s elaboration of the structure of courtly love helps explain the excess of Woman, what Lacan terms the “not All,” over and above romantic love and the sexual relation. I maintain that this ostensibly archaic structure, as it is reappropriated by Lacan (and glossed by Slavoj Zizek and Renata Salecl), helps us appreciate Ada’s relinquishment of romantic love and what I call her instrumentalization of sexuality. The Lacanian reading of courtly love as a psychic structure also permits a perspectivization of the strange arrangement, or structure, of her relationship with her lover, George Baines, and of Baines’s own equally irregular desire. In spelling out what I have called their mutual orientation to excess of enjoyment, I refer to the vocabulary of the “subject of drive” oriented to jouissance, as opposed to the subject of (the Other’s) desire. As I understand it–and this understanding is substantiated by the fastidious exegeses of Bruce Fink–desire and drive are ultimately along the same continuum, but desire belongs to the realm of the symbolic, while drive circulates in the (Lacanian) real (see A Clinical Introduction). The real, and this is a fundamental distinction in Lacan, is distinguished from quotidian reality. And jouissance, which is itself associated with drive, not desire, is as much about pain as it is about pure pleasure. Jouissance indeed also indexes what must be protected against, if the subject is to be maintained: falling into jouissance entails desubjectivation.
The alternative structure of courtly love is of course to be read in terms of a filmic code in this instance, rather than as “straight” psychoanalysis. It is in the interaction of the visual, narrative, and sound elements of the film that Ada’s desire is represented, and here Lacanian psychoanalysis functions as no more than an aid in understanding the workings of Ada’s desire and drive–it helps us understand the representation of Ada as a subject constituted by conscious desire and unconscious drive.
Section I:
Nature Denaturalized; Or, Postcolonial Critique in The Piano
Ada has been married off by her father and sent to join her new and as yet unseen husband, Stewart, in New Zealand in the 1850s. Accompanying Ada on this journey from a satellite of the former imperial center, Scotland, to New Zealand is Flora (Anna Paquin), her daughter from an earlier marriage. Stewart is a pakeha pioneer (neither truly “European” nor accepted as one of the local Maori natives). Sam Neill describes Stewart as rendered vulnerable by his unrequitable love/lust for a woman who happens to be his wife but remains truly strange to him: he is “a man who has lost all his skin” (qtd. in Bilborough 147). Campion takes great pains to portray Stewart’s utterly benighted attitude to the land, which he can only see as property. He wants to buy Maori land, which they don’t “use” but hold sacred, and he asks Baines, “What do they want it for?” and “How do they even know it’s theirs?” In fact the land has always been sacred to Maori, and more recently has been a major bone of contention between Maori and the Pakeha. Stewart is marooned within the colony as a pakeha and within heteronormative conventionality as an unfulfilled man in desperate need of a wife–he is so uptight about his sexuality that Maori call him “Old dry balls.” Ada rejects him in all but name as husband. But Ada is a misfit too. An elective mute from age six, she relies mainly on Flora for communication. To the spectator she speaks in voiceover–in her “mind’s voice,” as she says. A newcomer to the settler postcolony, she is no less a border figure than Stewart.
The film’s postcolonialist representation of colonial New Zealand raises the question of the significance of the lush colonial setting. Is this only an aesthetic convention? Richard Allen rightly suggests that the setting is not arbitrary: he observes that Campion has filmed the bush as “a muddy, glutinous, fecund landscape, a kind of primal swamp that is filmed in a luminous aquamarine. In Campion’s naturalist vision, the bush is a feminine landscape, boldly celebrated as an antidote to the denaturing of the land enacted by a patriarchal colonialism” (46-47).
The film’s treatment of landscape, in other words, is construed as informed by a progressive politics. I would argue that it is more, and it is less. It is more than a critique of the “colonial narrative of origin… as the appropriation and enclosure of landscape as the first and only expression of civilisation” (Coombs and Gemmell, “Preface” ix). It is “a liminal zone,” as Laurence Simmons observes, “of beaches of encounter and boundary fences between self and savagery”–the topos of a landscape of liminality is crucial to the film (132), but I argue here that landscape, particularly the ocean itself, is also a liminal zone in that it metaphorically suggests a porous border between the realms of the symbolic and the real. Campion herself has intimated the psychic allegory subtended by the film’s re-presentation of the natural: “The bush has got an enchanted, complex, even frightening quality to it, unlike anything that you see anywhere else…. I was after the vivid, subconscious imagery of the bush, its dark, inner world” (qtd. in Bilborough 139). It is the “dark continent,” the psychic landscape of unconscious desire and (death) drive modulated as opposition to the life force represented in the physical landscape, that the film seeks to fathom. Precisely because an examination or problematization of subject construction within a colonial context is a central project of the film, the “beautiful” as a category of audience reception is problematized by making this beautiful setting the context for the territorial violence of the colonial expropriation of Maori land, as well as for sexual violence.
The film presents a strange love story, but a love story set in a specific location, and in a specific historical, socio-political, and discursive context; moreover it is a love story that undoes itself. Ostensibly, Ada’s struggle is to achieve agency–faithfulness to her own desire–in a social and physical environment that hinders it. Noting some of the complicating subtexts of this struggle, Bridget Orr observes that “arguably, The Piano‘s feminocentric narrative seeks to recentre its female protagonist by writing her out of history into romance; to absolve her from settler guilt by linking her through an erotic economy to Maori” (149).
There is evidently much contemporary appeal in this emancipatory narrative of gender as tied to the representation of nature. However, in articulating the natural environment and the national romance, Campion ironically invites the question whether her representation of the relationships among landscape and racial hierarchy and material conditions is not somewhat unreconstructed. In this sense, the film’s treatment of landscape is less than politically progressive. Anna Neill has rightly noted that “despite, or more precisely, because of the way the film’s luscious footage of remote bush trades in the exotic, it brings New Zealand right into the global economic arena, offering its hardly touched landscape up to the tourist’s (or foreign investor’s) eye” (137). However, Campion is aware that nature, as the “first” world of Maori culture, cannot be simply counterposed to pakeha or colonial civilization.
Whether representing social arrangements such as marriage or expressions of the body such as desire, the film refuses to participate in the simple opposition of nature and culture. Thus the life force represented by the lush natural environment is contrasted not only with the deadening conformity of a dislocated European culture, but also with Ada’s “dark talent” for self-annihilation, which her father had presciently identified as fundamental to her being. This opposition of the death drive and life force is repeated in the mother-daughter pairing of the austere and “driven” Ada with the aptly named Flora, as a young girl full of life and as much at home in the landscape as Maori children.
Denaturalization, I would suggest, is an overdetermined figure for the film: the denaturalization of identitarian and libidinal, as well as ontological, social, or epistemological objects. If landscape has often functioned to territorialize the imagined national identity, this denaturalization has a critical function. The liminal space of the colony is an appropriate context in which to dramatize the destabilizations of subject-position: Campion’s film works to destabilize identities or subject positions with regard to race and gender or sexual position in order to interrogate the relations between pakehas and Maoris, and to suggest that a colonial structure depends on the subordination and “feminization” or queering of Maoris, as well as on the subordination of women in a hierarchical structure. Colonialism is about racial and sexual oppression. The postcolonial setting of The Piano emphasizes that Stewart is a placeholder for bourgeois postcolonial white masculinity in New Zealand, an identity that is specifically in crisis.
The political and economic inflections of this crisis are muted in the film, but it is clear that the location is not incidental. Linda Dyson has argued that the film “re-presents the story of colonization in New Zealand as a narrative of reconciliation.” Here in the periphery of the former empire, argues Dyson, “the film addresses the concerns of the dominant white majority… providing a textual palliative for postcolonial anxieties generated by the contemporary struggles over the nation’s past” (267). Dyson remarks that “the critical acclaim surrounding the film constructed The Piano as a feminist exploration of nineteenth-century sexuality and tended to ignore the way in which ‘race’ is embedded in the text” (267). The film rehearses a familiar Orientalist trope: Maoris are once again on the wrong side of the nature/culture, primitive/modern divide. They are “on the margins of the film as the repositories of an authentic, unchanging and simple way of life”–a paradise or “New Jerusalem” which could become the site for the self-regenerative project of the whites “energized by the utopian fantasy of building a society free of the political and economic divisions and inequalities of Europe” (268). The British Crown in 1840 actually signed the Treaty of Waitangi with five hundred Maori tribal leaders acquiring land from Maori, who in return could see this moment as marking their achievement of sovereign national status. The Crown did not honor the treaty, and Maori have frequently had to fight over the issue of land acquisition. The treaty has become a rallying point for a bicultural Maori Renaissance, but today, despite the worldwide recognition of Maori claims, they remain a peripheral people in political and social terms (269-70).
Near the film’s conclusion, the relocation of Ada and Baines to a house in Nelson, because it is a landscape of apparent contentment, has misled some critics to conclude, reading the film’s own narrative too literally, that Ada has chosen “life” at the end of the film. Felicity Coombs and Suzanne Gemmell, the editors of what they themselves describe as “an authoritative collection” of criticism on the film (x), venture the editorial generalization that the film “establish[es]” a “colonial narrative” only to “disrupt” it “via the narrative machinations of romance, whereby desire transcends the unequal relations of power and, albeit violently, the colony releases the heroine to pursue her fortunes with her lover. Such an ending is a testament to the problematic terrain that the film must negotiate in order to resolve the converging post-colonial themes it employs en route” (viii-ix). Even critics who do not, against the evidence of the film’s ending, endorse a sentimental narrative of the integration of Ada within a completely fulfilling marriage to Baines in Nelson–and Dyson is a good example–undertheorize the film’s conclusion with regard to Ada herself. Dyson fails to underscore what I would argue is crucial–the imbrication of the sexual with the sociopolitical and postcolonial registers. I don’t wish to single out Dyson but to point up a blockage in the body of criticism of the film: that it inadequately conceptualizes the interlinkages even when it takes the trouble to mention them. The result is a substantial underinterpretation or a partial understanding. This essay demonstrates that such readings miss an important dimenson of irresolution: the crucial trajectory of the drive that retains, at least as fantasy, Ada’s passages to jouissance against the semblance of happy matrimony.
Section II:
A Beautiful Relationship or a Perverse Couple?
In this section I discuss the film’s representation of Ada as desiring subject, a subject that also seeks access to the freedom to pursue an “other” satisfaction than the one she is officially granted within the family romance. My intention is to raise the question of why Ada seeks something beyond the limits of what looks like the best human love can offer: a relationship that grows into a non-exploitative, mutually respectful, and erotically complete arrangement, one that culminates in an apparently happy marriage with room for growth. This, as I indicated at the outset, is an issue around which the most vigorous debates about the film have raged: What does Ada want? What other satisfaction does she seek if she rejects marriage? Could marital bliss with a man who comes to love her be really all that she desires–and does the film’s power not lie in its unmasking of the power relations undergirding the institution of conventional marriage? Why does Ada consent to the “bargain” Baines proposes, which as he himself observes as the relationship develops, makes a “whore” out of her, if she is a figure on whom so many viewers have projected (cathected?) a passionate resistance to patriarchal relations? I will discuss these important issues. But first I want to re-emphasize here that ultimately it is the relationship with Baines that allows us to recognize Ada’s access to that satisfaction, so a consideration of Baines must be a part of any analysis of Ada’s dark talent, her drive toward satisfaction.
The film received a great deal of attention as a riveting and profoundly disturbing portrait of a woman’s self-assertion. It has less frequently been discussed as an equally powerful representation of the remaking of masculinity in the postcolony. Many critics, while offering illuminating, complex, and even confessedly ambivalent and multiple readings of Ada (Barcan and Fogarty, for instance), underestimate the role of Ada’s partner, Baines, as though his desire were beneath serious consideration. Dyson, in an essay that is in many ways solid and helpful, focuses almost exclusively on Ada, missing a crucial dimension of the film by underestimating the significance of Baines’s borderline subjectivity and unorthodox libidinal impulses–although admittedly Campion herself cannot sustain the oddity of Baines’s “love” and too quickly contains it in a more conventional, tranquil domesticity, as if he had suddenly relinquished his journey toward going native and had become a respectable burgher in colonial garb, embracing a new domesticity in Nelson with Ada. Many other persuasive readings, such as Bridget Orr’s, that purport to be attentive to the “speaking subjectivity” and “accession to agency” of Ada as a resistant and “desiring subject,” underestimate the importance of Baines’s desiring subjectivity. Orr’s interpretation cannot go beyond noticing the film’s “final wish-fulfilling retreat from the ‘frontier,’ the back-blocks site of pioneer endeavour, to the gentility of Nelson, [which] concludes a process by which Baines is transformed into the sentimental hero of female desire, while Stewart is left alone in the bush” (149). The film in such accounts appears little more than a narrative, albeit an admittedly complex one, of a white man saved from going native by a process of something like embourgeoisement–a return to the settler colonial fold and a return to domesticity.
I want to redirect exclusive attention from Ada onto her relationship with Baines, the perplexities of which are precisely the source of the puzzlement of even friendly feminist spectators with whom I align myself.5 I propose that a signal contribution of The Piano lies in its representation of the erotic attachment and detachment that constitute this relationship. The film is certainly gripping, but it is also unusual (and this is insufficiently emphasized in the critical reception of the film) in that here in the settler postcolony it is the white male subject (whiteness being the presumptively invisible marker of race)–represented by Stewart–who is represented as being in crisis. It is the white man in the film who, emerging from the nightmare of colonialism, seems in need of therapeutic transformation, not the distressed colonial black- or brown-skinned subject. But Baines too is a subject in crisis–except that he is in transition toward going native, as indicated by the unfinished moko on his face. So in a sense he is in a quite different psychosocial place from Stewart.
There is a noticeable effort on the part of the filmmaker to point the way to the redemption of the white male colonial subject in the case of Baines. As the third element in the love triangle with Ada and Stewart, Baines is a pivotal figure whom Ada first resists as an “oaf” but gradually warms to when he turns out to have unsounded depths. In addition to transgressing the border of sexual identification, he also crosses cultural barriers, as Harvey Keitel states: “Baines has given up his culture–he’s not a pakeha and he’s not a Maori. He’s nowhere, looking for a place to be” (qtd. in Bilborough 143). If Baines is culturally borderline he is, even more intriguingly, sexually liminal. This is visually indicated in an early scene in which both a Maori woman and a young man “dressed as a woman” (Campion 53) make sexual overtures to him: clearly he appeals to both men and women, and this already introduces a degree of doubt about his desire, a doubt that is encouraged by the fact that he is living apart from his wife, who never appears in the film. But this visual index of his ambiguous sexuality does scant justice to the radically “border” status of Baines’s eroticized body in the film, and in some ways is really a red herring if it suggests a latent homosexuality: I argue that in his own way Baines wants “something else” too, like Ada.
The need to complicate the structure of what Baines really wants as a subject is indicated in the screenplay of the film where Campion repeatedly describes Baines as a kind of radically innocent or culturally naive voluptuary, who desires neither an ordinary relationship of the kind consecrated in marriage nor a kind of crude sexual encounter, however sustained. Baines, I would argue, wants in some way to “suffer”–and to enjoy through the suffering, which is precisely the meaning of jouissance–the body of the other in this subjective sense. In her own screenplay directions, Campion repeatedly emphasizes Baines’s “odd sensual pleasure-taking” (Campion 61). When he has secured his “bargain” with Ada, we see an indication of what he really wants: “Twice he closes his eyes and breathes deeply. BAINES is experiencing an unpractised sense of appreciation and lust” (Campion 56; emphasis added). The discordant yoking together of “appreciation and lust” is an index of Campion’s struggle to demarcate the psychic territory of drive that she is trying to map–the territory one might say of a kind of “perverse couple.”6 She is entirely uninterested in either the hydraulics of sex or the soap operas of romance.
Contrary to what some commentators insist, even the infamous “bargain” for the piano is something more or less than sexual harassment; and it is not simply rape (see Barcan and Fogarty 7). One reviewer, Kerryn Goldsworthy, even suggests the compact is of a kind that “doesn’t really have a name” (qtd. in Barcan and Fogarty 10). For one thing, Ada herself is actively bartering for her piano from the very beginning of the film, even before Baines says that he wants to “touch” her as she plays. Certainly it is Ada who approaches Baines to arrange for the piano to be retrieved from the beach, so that one could say that it is she who endows the piano with its commodity character (exchange value) as well as its symbolic value for her. Yet it is Stewart who, at the suggestion of Baines, barters piano lessons from Ada in exchange for land–and Baines approaches Stewart first with his proposal. At this initial phase Ada has little say in the bargain. Stewart has a key role, and he and Baines both treat her at least initially as a tradeable commodity–woman as a means of exchange between men. This homosociality complicates the bargain Ada and Baines strike together for the piano itself. Ada does not or cannot refuse the lessons, but neither does she communicate, even in writing to Stewart, how Baines queers the barter.
A crucial turning point in the relationship is marked by the moment when she comes to find the mere fulfilling of the bargain without the erotic component unsatisfactory to her. By this time Baines has practically given the piano to her to his own disadvantage, so for Ada it is no longer just about winning back the piano, at least in the later stages of the game. As Neil Robinson correctly notices, Baines gives her the piano because he too has come to feel that the body cannot be enjoyed unless affect is also invested in it (31). Yet this is not to say that it is simply a matter of Ada and Baines growing fonder (in the sense of romantic love) of each other despite the “ugliness” of the barter–nothing makes this point more indisputable than the actual ending of the film, and this ending is emphatically not the scene of happy matrimony as so many have suggested. It is the frankly erotic nature of the terms that fuels their “love.” I would add that the apparent domestication, or taming, of Baines’s specific libidinal drive suggests a failure of energy or nerve on the part of the filmmaker–Campion’s interest in sustaining the symmetry of Baines’s drive appears to flag in comparison with her pointed concern to retain Ada’s exorbitant drive, which courses well beyond the boundary of bourgeois domesticity, as I argue below. Surely we have here a relationship that is more than the enforced prostitution of a desperate woman without choices by a sexually predatory male, even though there are elements of both prostitution and predation in play?
I suggest that what is “more” is precisely the excess that I am trying to trace, particularly in Section III of the essay. It has to be acknowledged that the relationship grows as the story develops, but there is something about the ending of the film that suggests that ordinary bourgeois domesticity, no matter how emancipated the partners, does not speak the language of the drive, which is so crucial in fathoming Ada’s continuing urge to tarry with the negative even when she has available to her the sunny positive of married life in Nelson. It is an excess of the drive speaking through the body–the real body, and not just the fleshly. Explicitly and self-consciously, Campion plumbs the unconscious or extraconscious intelligence of the body:
My exploration can be a lot more sexual [than if she had been writing in the nineteenth century], a lot more investigative of the power of eroticism, which can add another dimension. Because then you get involved in the actual bodyscape of it as well, because the body has certain effects, like a drug almost, certain desires for erotic satisfaction which are very strong forces too. (qtd. in Bilborough 140)
Campion’s epigraph to the screenplay unwittingly captures something of this excess, although she elects a banal vocabulary: “the romantic impulse is in all of us,” she writes, “but it’s not part of a sensible way of living. It’s a heroic path and it generally ends dangerously. I treasure it in the sense that I believe it’s a path of great courage. It can also be the path of the foolhardy and the compulsive” (7). Campion’s monitory tone echoes Lacan’s account of the attraction of transgression. But the “romantic impulse” as conceived within the bourgeois ideal of happiness is a lure; for Lacan, love requires moving beyond a limit. Whatever Campion says, the film itself has complex resonances for a reader of Lacan.
It would be perverse to suggest that Baines, and masculine sexuality, are more important in the film than the issue of feminine sexuality, or to focus on his desire to the exclusion of female desire in the film. And of course there are other women in the film besides Ada, and a discussion of the sexual economy in this colonial context cannot ignore the structural position of those other women within it. They help us to see Ada’s desire more clearly, if only by contrast. But they also complicate our understanding of Ada’s structural positioning in settler colonial society. Many of the other white women in the film are presented in rather complex hierarchies of race and class. One of the white women, Nessie, who has designs on Baines as in effect a bachelor (he is separated from his wife), is presented as infantile and a creature of petty jealousies and dreams. But even the white matriarch, Aunt Morag, is presented as gullible and controlling, hardly an attractive figure. Her gullibility is only redoubled when one recognizes to what extent she has incorporated settler colonial ideology. The native women have a natural vitality, but they and their men remain even more gullible than Morag and Nessie (as when the Maori in the audience are taken in by the shadow play performance of Bluebeard wielding an ax, in a foreshadowing of Stewart’s own act of chopping off Ada’s finger; the whites in the audience do not have the same reaction). In effect, Maori remain relegated to the natural world, outside of “culture,” that is to say opposed to the “civilized” world of the colonial white man. Under the colonial regime, natives and whites cannot occupy the same cultural space except as divided from each other. Baines straddles the border between the races, at least in the first half of the film, but ultimately he cannot bring it down, even in himself, which perhaps is why our final view of him is of him dressed again in white settler clothes. There is, in short, much that is troubling about the way Maori are presented in the film, although one does not have to go as far as a 1993 newsletter of the Coalition against Sexual Violence, which reviewed The Piano as a racist and even sexist film (Barcan and Fogarty 7).
Campion is not entirely insensitive to race and class concerns. At some level the film also makes the white female colonial subject exorbitant to the colonial economy, since the film’s theme is resistance and agency. Ada and her daughter are able in the worst circumstances to carve out a zone of intensely private fulfillment and therefore an empowerment; this empowerment is not commensurate with the empowerment that would be available in the public sphere to women. The film also subtly ironizes the claims of Western modernity and civilization, suggesting that the white male postcolonial subject may redeem himself not by a return to the former metropolitan center but by way of a self-deconstruction. The film’s double project, then, is to trace the unmaking of postcolonial subjectivity and to imagine a radical reconceptualization of love–between subjects that are no longer merely subjects of desire. The film does give fresh meaning to the cliché that love requires the dissolution of the self by provocatively exploring the contours of an “inhuman” love as a constitutive contradiction of ordinary romantic love. Perhaps no film could fully succeed in such a project.
The film works hard to save Baines from heteronormative conventionality as a subject. Unlike Stewart, whose desire for Ada is conventional and desperate, Baines’s desire for Ada appears tepid to a casual viewer. But if his desire seems attenuated, he is psychically driven by a lust for an “other satisfaction” that also drives Ada. Campion herself emphasizes the word “satisfaction” in this connection (qtd. in Bilborough 140) and explicitly indicates her interest in something like the drive as associated with satisfaction: “We grow up with so many expectations around [sex], that it’s almost like the pure sexual erotic impulse is lost to us” (qtd. in Bilborough 138). The film also eroticizes Baines’s body. In one charged scene, the nude Baines caresses Ada’s piano, while Campion’s camera’s gaze in turn “caresses” his buttocks, at eye level. Sue Gillett’s observation here is that “jealously [Baines] wishes to be the piano, to be the receiver of such rapturous touching,… to have such haunting music evoked in and through his own body, to tremble under the powerful cadences of [Ada’s] transcendence” (278-9). Yet Gillett says little about the nature of Ada’s transcendence or Baines’s wish to “be the piano.” The “other satisfaction,” according to Lacan’s formulae of sexuation, is available only to Woman. But Baines’s desire to “tremble,” the transcendence Baines “really wants,” is to enjoy and be enjoyed as Woman.
Campion’s own notation is suggestive of Baines’s unusual orientation to jouissance: in the direction to a scene when Ada is playing contrary to Baines’s wishes, she writes, “Ada starts playing again; Baines feels powerless. He no longer admires her absorption with the piano, he is jealous of it” (67). In the notes to the scene in which Baines caresses the piano Campion hints at Baines’s aspiration to a kind of ec-stasy, or transcendence of the body: “As he wipes the smooth wood he becomes aware of his nakedness. His movements become slower until he is no longer cleaning, but caressing the piano” (49). And the film’s transgressive momentum lies in its ability to tease us into a beyond where even an inhuman love could be conceived as affording an other satisfaction, where “being played like the piano” might function as a figure for the play of the drive through the real body enjoying jouissance beyond the reach of “speaking being.” My attempt is to resituate that inhuman love at the heart of the film.
The trajectory of Campion’s project involves a deconstruction and reconstruction of masculinity, as well as the deformation and retexturing of racialized postcolonial subjectivity. If the film has a purpose in refashioning postcolonial masculinity, it is precisely to offer an alternative to the violence (epistemological, existential, sexual, emotional), not only of colonialism but of conventional love. In his relations with Ada, the film seems to present Baines as being redeemed as a “sensitive” (“non-masculine”) man, a fool for love, in short the regenerate man of women’s melodrama. But this is an inadequate description. It turns out that his “hysterical” desire is not so much to love or have sex with Ada as to be loved. In Gillett’s words, “contravening the Oedipal logic of desire, Baines comes to the realization that his desire, crucially, has the passive aim ‘normally’ allotted to woman. His desire is for her desire” (282). His passivized–one might even call it masochistic–masculinity is a major theme of the film, in stark contrast to the violent and stereotypical phallic masculinity of Stewart. He rises out of the confines of his raced and gendered body, as well as beyond the confines of the Oedipal structure. I had earlier quoted a comment by Harvey Keitel to the effect that Baines is “looking for a place to be, and he finds it through his ability to suffer” (qtd in Bilborough 143). I want to read Baines’s desire to suffer as a desire to enjoy the body of the other through suffering–which is precisely the meaning of jouissance.
Stewart’s entrapment in the melodramatic orthodoxy of bourgeois love, within the parameters of which he is condemned to being uncomplicatedly masculine, is understandable in terms of the arc of desire. But Baines’s fantasmatic ambition is clearly of another order, and the film fascinatingly makes us distinguish between Stewart’s and Baines’s dispositions to desire, by first soliciting the viewer’s identification with Stewart, followed by a disidentification, and therefore a return of the look to Baines’s strange positioning as a subject.7 The difference between these two pakeha men is also clear in that Stewart is much more anxious to retain some anchor for his endangered postcolonial masculinity, much more anxious not to open himself to feminization than is Baines. Stewart is defensive about all the markers of European superiority in matters of society and sexuality. By contrast, Baines is presented in the position of eroticized object, part of the film’s tactic (noted by Barcan and Fogarty) of offering female viewers opportunities for erotic identification that are rare in contemporary mainstream cinema (7). Stewart is anerotic; Baines becomes an erotic object not only for Ada but for the (female) viewer. But my point is not so much to dwell on the contrast between the two men, to condemn one and praise the other, as to mark the subtle way the film explores an alternative to the melodrama of love.
More than being increasingly drawn to Baines (which is partly true), Ada finds herself increasingly drawn by Baines’s desire to be loved by her: “I want you to love me, but you can’t,” he says. This is in proportion to the degree to which she is repulsed by Stewart’s desperate and violent desire to possess her. Stewart’s desperation (metonymic of the pakeha‘s desperate confrontation with the fact of his own impotent interstitiality in the postcolony) is not lost on the Maori. Baines offers her the promise of a love that an ordinary (violent) man could never offer her. It is this promise, the film seems to suggest, that draws the elective mute out of her silence and her death wish–for it is clear that the typical heterosexual domesticity, marriage, or love she had previously been offered were among the aspects of a woman’s fate Ada was declining through her exorbitant silence.
But it is precisely here that many astute observers and commentators, such as Gillett and Gordon, tend to turn the film into an exploration of issues of consent, rape, and Ada’s progression toward a sentimental love, even a love contained within the paradigm of bourgeois domesticity (see Gordon 197). But such interpretations, I have argued, make the film seem a rather simpler artifact than it is, set the viewer up for “disappointment” and, worse, obliterate a crucial “remainder” or “excess,” a conatus of negativity to which Ada cleaves and to which cleaves the sentimental narrative. The excess seems to be minimized even by those who, like Dyson, register Ada’s resistant performative. Dyson focuses on the presumed choice of “life” that Ada makes, ultimately undertheorizing both the excess as well as the issue of postcolonial masculinity that she also recognizes is at the heart of the film: “At the end of the film, Ada chooses ‘life’ after jumping overboard with her piano. She leaves the instrument (the symbol of European bourgeois culture) at the bottom of the ocean, thus severing her connection with the imperial centre and begins her life anew with her man who has already ‘gone native’” (268).
On the contrary, I would suggest that if she renounces one instrument she also takes up another–that Baines becomes Ada’s instrument and Ada his. This is why Ada can ultimately renounce the piano, and not because Baines has given her marital bliss and love. This brings us closer to understanding why Ada, who has taken such a significant step in renouncing ordinary love and sexual relationships as having elected to go mute, should consent so readily to the strange compact with Baines. Even some critics such as Barcan and Fogarty, who find the category of romantic love apposite to describing Ada and Baines’s relationship, admit that it fails to capture something important about the “affective economy” of the relationship, and it is not just that this economy is “subtended by an economic one” (12). My sense is that Ada’s “surrender” has in the final analysis less to do with loving that particular man and more to do with finding, or at least seeking, a kind of pleasure–not love but a kind of jouissance. Nor is it Baines’s “actual lived body”–to use Donald Lowe’s phrase–that she wants to “enjoy” in jouissance.
If the film disappoints, it is in losing track of Baines’s transgressive drive, his aspirations to jouissance, while Ada is permitted to remain complex and mysterious. The film also seems to leave underdeveloped the ethics of Baines’s transgressive performative, which is really a crucial foil to Ada’s performative.8 In the final moments of the film, her memory of jouissance persists as her subversive secret, interrupting the trajectory and temporality of melodrama and refusing the idyll of bourgeois domesticity. Yet Campion allows Baines to turn back into a frog, into a happily married white burgher, after having gone so far to save him from erotic and racialized conventionality. In part, this essay’s project is an anamnesis, or re-membering of Baines’s lost enjoyment. If we do not attend to Baines’s orientation to an other jouissance, we risk reading only his desire and misconstruing his relationship with Ada, just as we would if we read only Ada’s desire in her consenting to a “deal” to regain her piano and to a marriage with Baines.
Readings that focus on desire are too reductive to account for the refractions of love that the film presents to us. After Stewart discovers what Ada has been doing instead of giving Baines piano lessons, he first tries to assault her, but since she coldly rejects him, he boards her up in the house with her daughter. Alone in her bed, she is seen kissing her own reflection in a hand mirror: this is neither narcissism nor an example of a woman newly in love. It is a portrait of a woman re-discovering a pleasure that exceeds its object or makes an accident of its object. At night, in bed with her daughter, she first lasciviously caresses the little girl and then, in a scene rarely commented on, approaches Stewart, running her hands over his chest and then between his buttocks. This is the first time she makes a sexual advance to Stewart, whom she has always rejected with phobic energy. But when Stewart reacts with relief admixed with panic, she turns away, and he finds himself unable to grasp the opportunity that has been his obsession: he is “unmanned” by this advance, as Campion tells us (92). Ada’s is not a gesture of rapprochement; she still denies him. Shortly afterwards, in a fit of jealous rage, Stewart chops off Ada’s index finger in a symbolic castration for which Baines will later try to compensate with a prosthesis of his own fashioning.9 But where is Ada’s jouissance? What does the woman want?
Certainly phallic jouissance. But Ada seeks something else through Baines than what “Old dry balls” Stewart could offer. Were Ada simply “in love” with Baines, it would be strange for her to transfer desire onto her daughter and then, without missing a beat, onto Stewart. It is more productive to recognize in this strange recathexis an anamorphic emblem of the circuit of the drive as it seeks an other satisfaction in keeping with Lacan’s dictum that “all the needs of speaking beings are contaminated by the fact of being involved in an other satisfaction” (Four Fundamental 51). Clearly, it is not Stewart she wants, but erotic fulfillment; nor is he a stand-in for Baines, for sex with Baines is evidently quite as satisfying as one could expect it to be. Rather, we are witnessing here a token of the instrumentalization of love in the service of an other satisfaction, and Campion’s notation confirms that “Ada seems removed from Stewart as if she has a separate curiosity of her own” (Campion 90). Ada wants to be a subject not wholly defined by the Other’s desire–to be what Fink calls a “subject [that is] someThing else” (“Desire” 37).
If we take Baines’s own pleasure as seriously as Ada’s drive toward satisfaction, it is hard to ignore the fact that while there is clearly some sympathy and affection that Baines feels for Ada, there is also, from the beginning, something radically narcissistic in Baines’s desire to be looked at with the gaze of love, to “be the piano.”10 In truth, from his perspective too this is a non-reciprocal relationship, not constrained within the paradigm of melodrama. Baines does not want only romantic love, any more than Ada thinks good sex or good companionship negates her misgivings about sexual relationships within patriarchy or about marriage and its social meaning within the Oedipal paradigm. A description of the forms of their jouissance requires a different structure.
Section III:
Not Courtship But Courtly Love
If I have returned to this film that has already been discussed at such length, it is in part because of a dissatisfaction with the discussion I have already described, but also because of the lessons to be gleaned from Campion’s suggestive exploration of the psychic economy of love. Some of these lessons are anticipated by the Lacanian distinction between romantic courtship and courtly love. Sam Neill, who plays Stewart, observes that “this film explores both the desperate and the wonderful things that happen between men and women in a way that’s not often done in films. And these things make for moments of sublime ecstasy and moments of the most terrible fear, of terror. It’s been pretty scary territory to be acting in–it helps to have had a little life experience” (qtd. in Bilborough 147). Life experience provides, if nothing else, a recognition that we never find a total, blissful love. We contrast this actually experienced imperfection of human love with what one might call the myth (myths being something other than mere falsehoods) of a perfect, and therefore inhuman, love.
A useful framework for understanding the irregular dispositions of the two main characters toward pleasure or jouissance is Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic adaptation of “courtly love.” While courtly love may appear to be an outmoded discursive paradigm, it can help us to grasp something of the real power of the film’s representation of Ada’s strange relationship with Baines.11 What’s more, the admittedly extreme artificiality of courtly love today is precisely its strongest recommendation because it defamiliarizes the category of bourgeois sexual relationship afresh and reperspectivizes the overdetermination of Baines’s cultural and sexual liminality as well.
Within the optics of courtly love’s categories adapted to a psychoanalytic understanding, we need no longer agonize over whether Baines and Ada are involved in a romance or a rape, or whether they really find domestic bliss in Nelson. Ada’s strange compact with Baines comes into sharper focus as neither simply the quid pro quo of desire, nor a reciprocation of exactly contrapuntal trajectories of desire. It is rather a mutual a-relational groping after jouissance that is nevertheless supported by the scaffolding of a relationship. How else might we explain the fact that images of Ada’s near-drowning intrude immediately after the scenes of her new, happily married life with Baines? Why does Ada not choose between these two “endings”? What is this trace of trauma that is nurtured by Ada in the midst or embrace of married bliss?
Ada’s settling into married life with Baines is certainly shocking in its bathos and tameness.12 “Feminist friends,” Gillett writes, “have criticized the film for offering [an] apparent return [at the end of the film] to sexual conventionality” (280); but as Gillett observes, this is not really the “end” of the film:
The seeming closure offered by the domestic ending is only temporary. It is immediately undercut by another vision: Ada’s body is floating underwater above her piano, Victorian dress ballooning around her. The return to this second image, coming so soon after Ada’s rescue from drowning, unsettles the happily-ever-after of the couple, not in that it forebodes an end to this happiness but in its recognition of the insistent presence of another territory and mode of experience. (281; emphasis added)
In part agreeing here with Gillett, I argue that this “other territory” is the territory of the Lacanian real (distinguished from the symbolic and the imaginary). The image of a delicious death is not merely “consign[ed]… to fantasy” (Bruzzi 266; emphasis added); it irrupts into the idyll of the actual, disappointing Gillett’s “feminist friends,” perhaps, but redeeming the melodramatic bourgeois idyll of love through the anamorphotic ideal of courtly love in the real. Apparently some viewers–like Gillett–have the experience of being “affected… very deeply” by the film, “entranced, moved, dazed” (Gillett 286). But if those feminist viewers were often nonplussed or felt betrayed first by Ada’s participation in the not very feminist “bargain” and then by her apparent scuttling of the narrative of feminine resistance by acquiescing to a conventional and conventionally happy marriage to Baines, could it not have been because they had the experience but missed the meaning? That they underestimated the tour de force of Ada’s displacement, her anamorphosis, of “love” from the actual to the real, even if they acknowledged that, like Gillett herself, they felt that they had visited “another territory,” and therefore felt “reluctant to re-enter the everyday world after the film had finished” (286; emphasis added)?
The last moments of the film do seem a letdown. But as I have already suggested, it is not so much because Ada settles into a conventional settler marriage, “a sensible way of living,” in Campion’s equally sensible phrasing. In some minor respects the film is bathetic because, even if Ada retains at least the memory of jouissance as a subversive secret splitting the temporality of the film, the film loses track of Baines‘s jouissance. Baines has a crucial role in enabling Ada’s passage to jouissance and her safe passage back from what otherwise could be annihilation for her. Like the knight of courtly love, his service to his lady is to enable her access to “enjoyment,” jouissance–an “other” satisfaction. They are partners in supporting each other, “renouncing” romantic love as well as taking satisfaction through each other.13
Lacan’s formulae of sexuation suggest that an other satisfaction is theoretically available to the position “Woman,” even if no actual women experience it. “Woman” is a category under erasure. The Woman is an empty category. But that is what makes possible the fantasy of occupying that position. As fantasy, it can be indulged equally by anatomical men and anatomical women. In theorizing the problem to which courtly love offers an alternative, Lacan says that there is no sexual relation: “the only basis of analytic discourse is the statement that there is no–that it is impossible to pose–sexual relation” (qtd. in Heath 53). In the Lacanian misprision of the paradigm of courtly love, the Woman is coded as the Lady, the obscure object of the courtly lover who must renounce sexual relations (not the same thing as “the sexual relation”) with her. To “have” her he must forgo her. But in what sense does the courtly lover forgo her?
The Anamorphosis of Anamorphosis
Everybody “falls in love” sometime, as the song goes; people fall in and out of love, experience its successes and its failures, and sex has its place. How is courtly love different? If Lacan’s disillusioned perspective (that there is no sexual relation) is meaningful, what does the distance between everyday or ordinary notions of love and Lacan’s technically evacuated category of love and the sexual relation signify? In the first place, as Charles Shepherdson puts it, “sexuality” is not completed–does not achieve satisfaction–in sexual intercourse. Rather, if we remember the Lacanian distinction between the object of need and the object of demand, “the first being necessary to biological life, the second designating an object that belongs to the field of the Other,” sexuality “emerges in the difference between need and demand, and… its object and its modes of satisfaction, are distinct from the satisfaction of biological need,” although sexuality may find expression as the bodily inscription of demand (139). Sexuality is “not all” contained in the symbolic register, but exceeds the law. The excess can be enjoyed only by God or Woman, both of which are structural positions and not people. Since ordinarily women never experience this excessive jouissance, and since the structural position “Woman” is under erasure, Woman’s completion occurs in the real where the sexed Other obtains. Courtly love formulates this (phantasmatic) perfected love as anamorphosis. If the inamorata, the Lady of courtly love, is allowed access to a real jouissance with the real sexed God, then the courtly lover, or knight, might also be imagined as wishing for a real jouissance and completion according to the Lacanian formula “There is some One.”
But I want to disfigure even this anamorphotic figure of courtly love, and to suggest that the courtly lover’s goal may be not the Lady (even as sublimated) but her real jouissance: her experience that “There is some One” (‘Y a de l’un). The Piano points obliquely to this insight by making Baines an instantiation of the anamorphic courtly lover. What the sexually liminal Baines “really wants” (unconsciously fantasizes) is to enjoy the jouissance of Woman, as though he occupied the empty position. The film represents this anamorphically in the attenuation of his desire. Baines seems to recognize the impossibility of love (“I want you to love me but you can’t,” he tells her, more truly than even he understands) and the inevitable failure covered over in love by what we usually call the “consummation” of love, namely the coming together, in sexual union, of the lovers. He “chooses” to renounce that always imperfect love, his act of abnegation mirroring the much more obvious election of silence on Ada’s part, for a higher, more ritualized and purer love–in short, an anamorphosis of ordinary love. It is in this sense that the courtly lover, here represented by Baines, forgoes romantic love with the lady–but one “forgoes” only in the hope of attaining some higher goal.
Ordinary romantic love is circumscribed in the ambit of desire, converging there with, at best, what Lacan would call “phallic” jouissance, which can be experienced by women as well as men, in sex. By contrast, courtly love, precisely because it is a formal, ritual sacrament that displaces God in the realm of jouissance, affords a satisfaction that love could never promise. (This ability finally to enjoy enjoyment [Fink, “Desire and the Drives” 41] is something even a thinker of the order of Marx could miss in the admittedly odd arrangement called courtly love.)14 Desire and satisfaction are really at odds in romantic love and ordinary sex; Lacan notes that most adults never want to wake up–“when something happens in their dreams that threatens to cross over into the real, it distresses them so much that they immediately awaken… they go on dreaming” (Seminar XX 53). Fink observes that the later Lacan of The Four Fundamental Concepts does not argue that the subject who has traversed his most basic fantasy in order to live out the drive [vivre la pulsion] “becomes a kind of non-stop pleasure-seeking machine, but rather that desire stops inhibiting the subject from obtaining satisfaction” (41). Desire is also “a defense against satisfaction” (43). You can have your cake and eat it.
Courtly love, as an anamorphosis of ordinary love, obviates the premises of romantic love and the usual laments of “sublunary” lovers. It shows how for Baines Ada is something more, or less, than a woman he falls for and seduces, just as it shows that Ada is after something that is not “in” Baines. The principle of courtly love is a kind of abnegation of ordinary completion or consummation, a denial from the outset of what ordinary lovers are said to pine for. Then why do they have sex? How, to return to one of the key questions I posed above, should we read the sexual relationship of the couple, which has caused such flutter even among the film’s more sophisticated commentators?
I would argue that as mere mortals Baines and Ada can hardly help seeking satisfaction through sex and romantic love–but that is not where satisfaction obtains, and they “know” this without perhaps understanding it. As Lacan writes in Seminar XX, “all the needs of speaking beings are contaminated by the fact of being involved in an other satisfaction… that those needs may not live up to” (51).15 That men and women couple or marry does not mean that they have contradicted the Lacanian nostrum that there is no sexual relation. The failure of the sexual relation is inevitable because, as Lacan’s formulae of sexuation suggest, it is only God as a sexed Other who perfects the sexual relation and the jouissance of the Woman. This sexed God is not the Christian God but is “unsignifiable” in speech, beyond language, in Serge André’s terms (91). “The sexual act of coitus,” André goes on to say,
takes on then the figure of an eternal missed act where repeatedly the absence of the sexual relation, the failure to reunite the subject with the Other to form one body, is verified. The resulting satisfaction can only be defined as the failure of the jouissance of the body and the return to the jouissance of the organ. Lacan gives to it a pretty name: jouissance of the idiot–‘idiot’ should be understood according to its Greek root–that is to say, jouissance that can do without the Other” (98).
The sexual act of coitus remains the “figure of an eternal missed act,” writes André (91), represented in courtly love’s eternal deferral of union between lover and Lady. In this 
(missed act), satisfaction “can only be defined as the failure of the jouissance of the body and the return to the jouissance of the organ”–but this obtains only if the Other can be killed off, and castration refused. The is an anamorphosis of the inhuman love in which the drive would find an other satisfaction, and in which the Woman would find her real partner, not just the Other’s desire with whom all castrated beings must deal. In the film, the anamorphosis of love reveals-and-conceals that what binds the lovers is that they are each after “someThing else” (Fink, “Desire and Drive” 37): this pursuit of “someThing else” is operative at the level of fantasmatic drive.
The fact that Baines and Ada actually have sex is thus merely the predictable human attempt to achieve an ideal, or it represents a conscious or unconscious covering-over or endless deferral (tuxn) of the recognition of the ideal’s unachievabliity. Men and women want to sleep together because “in fact, they want ‘encore,’ to unite with the real Other, even if they are supposed to know that the latter is out of reach,” André writes (97). And furthermore:
“Post coitum omne animal triste,” the saying goes. But it should be corrected in the sense that only the speaking being has a fundamental reason to experience some sadness. In fact, only for him alone can aiming toward the Other and failing to reach it make any sense. Language, in short, does not keep its promises: it makes us believe in the Other and by the same token takes it away from us; it evokes the horizon of a jouissance of the body, but makes it inaccessible to us. Sexual jouissance can only connote dissatisfaction. (98)
The sadness of the speaking being is the inevitable end(point) of the sexual relation, which as Lacan insists “does not take place” (Lacan, Feminine Sexuality 138). The other jouissance is by definition beyond. The heuristic frame of courtly love psychoanalytically interpreted allows us to negotiate the question of satisfaction, jouissance, in connection with the status and signification of the body.
My emphasis on Ada’s jouissance and drive is not intended to suggest that her desire is inoperative–precisely the contrary. Ada’s desire, however, points beyond itself. Playing Ada, Holly Hunter was conscious that Campion “was very brave in holding out for a more original kind of sexuality and sensuous quality in Ada” (qtd. in Bilborough 149). And in her analysis of the film, Gordon herself acknowledges that there is indeed a “something else“–not just desire–that circulates in the film, although her gloss on it is somewhat different from the one I have given it above:
On first reading “The Piano debate,” I was struck by the curious sense that something else had gone missing, in addition to… [the] loss of a referent for the negativity that the film entertains in its account of female desire. Something both more and less than the brutal violence (attempted rape, “castration”) depicted onscreen: “more” because the film stages a potentially unlimited replay of that violence as an affect [sic] of cinematic spectatorship; and “less” because the final violation of the woman’s body is rehearsed at repeated moments of spectatorship within the film. (193-94)
It turns out that while she draws upon Freud and Lacan, all Gordon means by negativity is “the mechanism by which destructiveness can exert a threat on, and provide the means for, the subject” (194). Her interest is to suggest that “to the extent that [the film] provides a commentary on the negativity of female desire and female spectatorship… this negativity is inextricable from the sexually differentiated dynamics of cinematic looking” (197).
Ada’s renunciation of speech (a “negativity” that permits self-assertion for Ada) represents something like an intuitive grasp of André’s point that
the fact of being caught in language implies a loss for the human being at the level of the body–as much of his body as of the body of the Other. This loss appears as a loss of being whose tongue carries its trace: one does not say of man that he is a body, but rather that he has a body. By the fact that he speaks, the human being is no longer a body: a disjunction is introduced between the subject and his body, the latter becoming an external entity from whom the subject feels more or less separated. The subject that the effect of language brings into existence is as such distinct from the body. What remains for him is to inhabit it or to reach that of the Other. But he can only do so by way of the signifier, since it is the signifier that, to start with, tells us that we have a body, indeed, induces in us the illusion of a primordial body, of a being-body prior to language. Language intervenes between subject and body. This intervention constitutes at the same time an access and a barrier: access to the body insofar as it is symbolized, and a barrier to the body insofar as it is real. [André 94; emphasis added]
This account better approximates Ada’s experience of the disjunction between body and speech. The disjunction is absolutely central to her character. Ada has renounced speech. And as Campion herself has stated, the conceit of making Ada an elective mute is at one level not some grand feminist statement but merely the result of a formal decision about how to make the piano figure as a larger presence in the film: “I felt that if [Ada] couldn’t speak, the piano would mean so much more to her” (qtd. in Barcan and Fogarty 8). Nevertheless, to say that she “communicates through her piano, and that is why she does not need to speak” is to make only the most banal observation about her uncanny ability to divorce body and speech, and fails to address the enormous power of the film to speak, at least to women, of a specifically gendered muting. Campion also says that Ada’s muteness makes her “sexier”; this has been interpreted “both as fashionably feminist, for example, by Neil Jillett, and as alarmingly conservative” (Barcan and Fogarty 8).
In any case, it is inaccurate to say that the piano says in music what Ada cannot say in speech. It would be more accurate to say that the function of the piano represents the insight that art, as Julia Kristeva puts it, enables the “flow of jouissance into language” and that music in particular connects us “directly to the otherwise silent place of its subject” (167). But even this optimistic and harmonious metaphor does not capture Ada’s access to jouissance, which occupies another place from the place occupied by music in her life, as I trust my analysis will show. The piano is not just her way of communicating. The music is, for one thing, not Ada’s own, although Michael Nyman, who based his compositions on Scottish folk and popular songs, also intended the pieces to be received as Ada’s repertoire “as if she had been the composer” (qtd. in Coombs 92). As Kirsten Thompson has demonstrated in her fine essay on the film, the progression of Ada’s complicated relationship with Baines, and as I would argue the progression of erotic complications of her libidinal investments, “is charted through the narrative structuring of six piano lessons, the final one of which ends with the two making love. The subtle transformations are marked in this relationship by the shift in the music played by Ada, beginning with scales (first visit), Silver Fling (the first lesson), Big My Secret (the second lesson), and The Attraction of the Pedaling Ankle (the third lesson)” (71). Other key moments are also marked by music, again mostly that of Michael Nyman. As I noted at the outset of this essay, in crucial scenes the music has an extradiegetic presence. The thawing of Ada’s resistance to Baines, her choice to open herself to him, is signaled by “A Bed of Ferns,” a nondiegetic melody (75) accompanying a dolly shot that focuses on Ada, who is facing away from the camera. This allows the camera’s “eye” to enter the whirlpool of her coiled hair in a Hitchcockian reference, indicating the intensification of her erotic energies. That she now wants Baines’s attention is signaled by yet another brief melody, “Little Impulse,” when she looks around to see if Baines is watching her, and stops because he is not. Perhaps the most stirring accompaniment occurs in the sequence when Stewart takes one of Ada’s playing fingers with his ax, to the score of the again appropriately titled “The Sacrifice,” played very loudly. Other important musical accompaniments include Chopin’s “Prelude in E,” as Allen reminds us (54), and the especially apposite title “The Heart Asks Pleasure First.” Again, the piano does not simply “stand in” for Ada’s lost voice in a simple compensatory relationship, for that would imply that the melodic strains of the piano adequately contain Ada’s “big secret.” On the contrary, as I argue, Ada’s drive toward “pleasure” is in excess of such harmonious equations.
Not only does Ada’s daughter translate for her, but more importantly with Ada it is almost as if her body, not just her piano, “speaks.” She tells Flora that with Flora’s father, her teacher, “I didn’t need to speak, I could lay thoughts out in his mind like they were a sheet.” Ada’s relinquishment of the speech of the physical body is a metonymy for her choice of jouissance over language as support of subjectivity. But the choice cannot be final: only an inhuman being could dwell in or with jouissance. There is something homologous in her dilemma and in the “lethal factor” that characterizes the Lacanian “alienating vel” between Being and Meaning. Lacan suggests that the concept of the vel, derived from Hegel, describes a (non-)choice framed as “Your money or your life” or “Your freedom or your life” or “freedom or death”–choosing one the subject loses the other; there is no good choice (Four Fundamental 211-13).
Ada is a being for death much the way Lacan’s Ethics seminar (number VII) situates Antigone between two deaths, at the limit or 
16 She arrives and stays at this limit at the film’s conclusion as a result of her calculated traversal (which implies both formal denial and “crossing through”) of the choice between acquiescing completely to the bourgeois and sentimental idyll of marital bliss with Baines, and surrendering completely to the other, darker bliss she has already tasted in the depths of the ocean. It is this traversal that many critical approaches miss. Understanding Ada’s jouissance is facilitated by the Lacanian (dis)articulation of desire and drive because we find ourselves continually having to discriminate between Ada’s absence of diegetic speech and her extradiegetic speech that is saturated with negative passion (and for Stewart with palpable force); we are similarly confronted repeatedly by the contrast between the stunted or restricted desire of Ada’s physical body and the excessive and transgressive drive of her real body, and by the division between the real body and the fleshly body.
The Heart Asks Pleasure First
What would it mean for a human being to aspire to or to approximate a perfect bliss–to respond to the demand encapsulated in the title of one of The Piano‘s signature musical pieces by Nyman, “The Heart Asks Pleasure First”? If the “heart” asks pleasure first, what is the nature of its demand? Do we not see here the demand of the drive, rather than some sentimental notion of romantic love? Wouldn’t “pleasure” construed in the radical sense of jouissance, a sense that is apposite in the film, be at once total ecstasy and terror–like the experience of trauma?
When we mention trauma, we are already in the realm of the unconscious. To pursue this question I consider here the role of the body in Ada’s erotic investments. There is also the matter of the subject, however, a linguistic effect. That (always divided) subject is the subject of desire, $<>a. But at the structural level of drive there is no identification as desiring subject. A freeing of drive entails desubjectivation of the signified subject. Parallel to the distinction between desire and the drive is that between the “actual lived body” that experiences the failed sexual relation and the real body that could enjoy an other jouissance. Jouissance obliterates being: for where there is jouissance there is only a real body.
The split between the ontic body and the real body appears most clearly when Stewart has an uncanny experience with this voiceless “speech.” As she is recuperating from having her finger chopped off by Stewart, he tries to rape her. But he is stopped in his tracks by her black stare and her disembodied voice, which seems to strike him on his forehead. “I am frightened of my will,” she says, “Let Baines try to save me.” What is this disembodied voice but a “real” body’s language, a body for which the will (or drive) has a kind of suprasubjective status? This traumatic moment of physical mutilation is tied to the equally traumatic event of near-drowning; in both she is situated at a limit, between will and aphanisis. In the latter scene, following her will (or her drive), which her father had already diagnosed as her “dark talent,” she allows herself to be dragged off a boat by her own piano. As Campion details the moment, the force of the drive is neatly emblematized as a “fatal curiosity”: “As the piano splashes into the sea, the loose ropes speed their way after it. Ada watches them snake past her feet and then, out of a fatal curiosity, odd and undisciplined, she steps into a loop” (Campion 120-21). Slipping into the ocean depths she enjoys a kind of jouissance until she kicks away the rope and allows herself to be saved from the completion of the death drive’s circuit–or should we say that the symbolized body reasserts itself against the real body’s jouissance. Back on the boat of life she “says” in her spectral voiceover, “What a death! What a chance! What a surprise!” (Campion 121; see also Campion and Pullinger 214).
One could call Ada a masochist. Baines, too, has corresponding masochistic traits.17 The masochist’s question is, in André’s words, about “knowing what is experienced by the body that the other enjoys through whiplashes or signifiers” (100)–or actually enjoying what the other enjoys. Lacan observes that “Man cannot reach Woman without finding himself run aground on the field of perversion” (qtd. in André 100); André explains, “the masochistic man manifests something on the order of a feminine position…. The masochist is woman or tries hard to be one” (101). A masochistic courtly lover, Baines sublimates the Lady at one level, and at another desublimates her in order to occupy her place as desubjectivated subject of drive. He recognizes that the enjoyment he seeks is not sexual relation. Baines, too, wants to enjoy as Woman. Thus Baines’s subjectivity is, like Ada’s, constituted not so much in terms of desire as in terms of drive. And he understands very clearly that enjoyment is only for a “body” that is not simply the biological organism. As we have seen, only the Woman under erasure can enjoy such enjoyment. From Baines’s point of view, Ada as a woman merely embodies the metaphor of the Other, something made clear in André’s theorization: “If a woman can incarnate the body that the subject tries in vain to unite with, it is because woman, or the body of woman, has the value of the metaphor of the Other to which there is no signifiable relation: like the Other, the woman is discompleted, not-all subjected to the signifying law” (97).18 Baines does not want so much to seduce Ada or even to love her as to be loved, to be in the gaze, in psychoanalytic terms. Now it becomes clear that even though he can say in the film that “I want you to care for me, but you can’t” he is in love, as they say, with love. He does not merely desire–and now it becomes clear why Gillett is less than precise when she writes that “His desire is for her desire” (282). Gillett herself recognizes that things are more complex:
Baines calls the bargain [between Ada and himself] to end, realizing that he cannot buy, and Ada cannot sell, the personal connection, the experience of love, which he desires. Her desire, which he desires, does not exist in market terms: “I am giving the piano back to you. I’ve had enough. The arrangement is making you a whore and me wretched.”
Irigaray writes: “The economy of desire–of exchange–is man’s business.” Baines experiences the poverty of this economy. He yields to this knowledge, allowing it to make him sick…. Baines’s experience of his own femininity does not lead to a usurping of the feminine for the bolstering of a threatened masculinity at the expense of the woman herself. It is effected through both an imaginative inquiry into Ada’s experience and an acceptance of his own lack of power with regard to the otherness presented by her, and leads him to turn away from the appropriative aims of a phallicly defined masculinity. (282-83; emphases added)
But Gillett does not pursue (or fully grasp?) the implications of her own observations. What, for instance, are the parameters of Baines’s “imaginative inquiry” into Ada’s experience? To what extent is he himself able to enter a non-phallic, feminine “experience”? I would submit that the model of courtly love offers the best answer. Baines does idealize Ada, but this idealization is what enables Baines to enjoy the experience of love. He does not merely desire Ada’s sexual body. If the Lacanian Woman-under-erasure enjoys jouissance, she also knows that the sexual relation is impossible. It is because Baines knows this too, at some level, that he idealizes Ada. What motivates Baines, even if he does not recognize this, is the drive–he embodies the Lacanian understanding, perhaps not entirely consciously or self-reflexively, that “it is not heterosexual genital reproductive sexuality that is sought by the drives, but a partial object that provides jouissance” (Fink 41). This is a central issue in the eroticization of Baines’s colonial male body. His orientation to love evokes the paradoxical questions posed by André: “Why does Achilles pursue the tortoise, why does a man relentlessly seek Woman, why does the subject drive himself crazy to rejoin his body?” (96). Baines’s wish to enjoy as Woman is tellingly evoked when he crawls under the piano as Ada plays. He asks her to hike up her Victorian skirt higher and higher and closes his eyes rapturously–Campion in her directions uses the word “enthralled” (57)–and inserts his finger through a hole in her black stocking, under which lies the blankness of her skin. It is as if this were the black hole through which the impossible Thing could be accessed, but also kept at bay.
Narcissism and Renunciation: Self-Reflexivity and Self-Silencing
Baines wants to “enjoy” a jouissance, a state of being in the gaze, a gaze here instantiated as the gaze of a woman he has idealized as the Lady of courtly love, Ada. But what is the nature of this idealization? Zizek reminds us that the Lady of courtly love is idealized in the sense of becoming an “inhuman partner,” as she is raised to the status of das Ding.19 Furthermore, there is a certain sublime narcissism about Baines’s sublimation of Ada that is frequently missed. Lacan glosses the narcissistic dimension of the sublimation of the Lady as das Ding:
The object in front of us, our anamorphosis, will also enable us to be precise about something that remains a little vague in the perspective adopted, namely, the narcissistic function…. The element of idealizing exaltation that is expressly sought out in the ideology of courtly love has certainly been demonstrated; it is fundamentally narcissistic in character. (Seminar VII 151)
If Woman is the limit of courtly love, das Ding, the courtly lover attempts to place himself at that limit, which means going beyond the Lady. It is by a kind of anamorphosis that the courtly lover’s position coincides with that of the Woman of the sexuation graph–not that of the Lady of courtly love. (Lacan defines anamorphosis as that which “geometral researches into perspective allow to escape from vision” [Four Fundamental 87].) There is something essentially unself-reflexive about this narcissistic becoming Woman in jouissance, something exemplified by St. Theresa:
As for Saint Theresa–you only have to go and look at Bernini’s statue in Rome to understand immediately that she’s coming, there is no doubt about it. And what is her jouissance, her coming from? It is clear that the essential testimony of the mystics is that they are experiencing it but know nothing about it. (Lacan, Feminine Sexuality 147)
This theme of unself-consciousness is crucial–one cannot have jouissanceas well as self-reflexivity about knowledge. Lacan writes,
There is a jouissance proper to her, to this “her” which does not exist and which signifies nothing. There is a jouissance proper to her and of which she herself may know nothing, except that she experiences it–that much she does know…. The woman can love in the man only the way in which he faces the knowledge he souls for. But as for the knowledge by which he is, we can only ask this question if we grant that there is something, jouissance, which makes it impossible to tell whether the woman can say anything about it–whether she can say what she knows of it. (Feminine Sexuality 144-45, 159)
I bring up this point about unself-reflexivity to suggest why the filmmaker instinctively insists on Baines’s illiteracy, his “oafishness”–to employ the terms of Ada’s initial reaction to him. It is precisely because he makes no pretense to knowledge, mastery, control, understanding, and power, because he does not question Ada’s own deliberate self-silencing and self-disempowerment, that Ada finds the route to her own jouissance through him, and he through her. Through the operation of das Ding, they both “[come] to desire death” as Lacan puts it (Seminar VII 83). Ada, too, renounces knowledge in favor of the delicious surrender to the possibility of jouissance (most explicitly when faced with the prospect of drowning). Ada and Baines are thus linked in their renunciation of self-reflexivity: their “non-knowledge or even… anti-knowledge” is in fact an epistemological vel, just as there is a vel between meaning and being.20 It could be argued that both Ada and Baines choose “being” over “meaning,” just as they seek jouissance over desire. But the point about non-knowledge must not be precipitated into a question merely of feminist resistance.
For Mary Ann Doane, ultimately, “the question is why the woman must always carry the burden of the philosophical demonstration, why she must be the one to figure truth, dissimulation, jouissance, untruth, the abyss, etc., why she is the support of these tropological systems–even and especially anti-metaphysical or anti-humanistic systems” (Femmes Fatales 74). Thus for Doane, but not for me, the issue is a matter of a return of the look:
Usually, the placement of a veil over a woman’s face works to localize and hence contain dissimulation, to keep it from contaminating the male subject. But how can we imagine, conceive her look back? Everything would become woven, narrativized, dissimulation. Derrida envies that look [and, as Doane suggests, Lacan as well: c.f. Lacan’s “invidia“]…. It would be preferable to disentangle the woman and the veil, to tell another story. As soon as the dichotomy between the visible as guarantee and the visible as inherently destabilized, between truth and appearance, is mapped onto sexual difference, the woman is idealized, whether as undecidability or jouissance. The necessary incompletion or failure of the attempt to leave behind the terms of such a problematic is revealed in the symptomatic role of the woman, who takes up the slack and becomes the object of a desire which reflects the lack that haunts theory. (75; emphasis added)
Placing the emphasis elsewhere, I suggest that at least in courtly love, which I am treating without evaluative prejudice as a rarefied and “purified” form of love as such, the idealization of the woman as Lady is not the real issue. Certainly the Lady in courtly love is idealized, elevated to sublimity as das Ding. But the “completion” of love occurs in the real, at the level of jouissance, for it is impossible in the actual.
The Sublimated Lady and the Acephalous Subject
Zizek cautions that it is not enough to rehearse commonplaces about the differences between the Lady of courtly love and actual women, and that it will not do to say merely that the Lady in courtly love “stands for the man’s narcissistic projection which involves the mortification of the actual, flesh-and-blood woman.” Instead, he says, we must address the larger question about narcissism: “where does that empty surface come from, that cold, neutral screen which opens up the space for possible projections? That is to say, if we are to project onto the mirror our narcissistic ideal, the mute mirror-surface must already be there. This surface functions as a kind of ‘black hole’ in reality, as a limit whose Beyond is inaccessible” (97).
The Lady of courtly love is idealized; indeed she is idealized away, beyond the point of sexual consummation. She functions as das Ding that covers the hole in the real. But in the real she allows the courtly lover, the chevalier or knight, a kind of jouissance that is beyond phallic jouissance. But it is available only to an acephalous subject, or a subject who is not construed as a desiring subject. Perhaps it would be useful to specify further the nature of that idealization and that acephalousness. As Fink writes:
What Lacan comes to see in the later stage of his work is that the unconscious desire is not the radical, revolutionary force he once believed it to be. Desire is subservient to the law! What the law prohibits, desire seeks. It seeks only transgression, and that makes desire entirely dependent on the law (that is, the Other) that brings it into being… we can say that desire remains inscribed… within the Other, while the subject is someThing else [sic]. (“Desire and the Drives” 37)
What is that “someThing else”? How can it escape the ambit of the Other, the law? Fink traces the shift in Lacan’s thinking from conceiving the subject as/of Demand to the subject as/of desire to, in the late stage, the subject as/of drive. The significance of this is that the desiring subject, not to speak of the subject of Demand, is blocked from enjoyment or jouissance precisely by that desire, which is always the desire of the Other (38, 39). When the subject is conceptualized as drive, there opens up, in this almost utopian move, the theoretical possibility of the pursuit of satisfaction: “Subjugated first by the Other’s demands and then by the Other’s desire, the drive is finally freed to pursue object a” (39). This subject, constituted after the traversal of fantasy, is the subject in the real, the acephalous subject as drive. I am suggesting that Baines, though admittedly he may be no great prize, embodies (if that’s the word) such a subjectivity. He is motivated not to seek the aim of his desire, but to pursue his enjoyment, or jouissance. First, however, he must go beyond the petty narcissism of the subject as desiring.
Lacan speaks of a “something that in its subsistence appears as possessing the character of a beyond of the sacred–something that we are precisely trying to identify in its most general form by the term, the Thing. I would say it is primitive subsistence viewed from the perspective of the Thing” (Seminar VII 140). This is what Baines is after. It is a something else, something not violent but violence’s contradiction in him, that Ada recognizes as basic to his being, and it is that something else which she finds it possible to respond to, to yield to. Is there not a certain receptivity in Baines that allows her to make nearly arbitrary demands on him, like the Lady of courtly love, and does not Baines on occasion ostentatiously present himself as submitting to these (unspoken?) demands quite readily? This helps explain also the nature of the compact Ada enters into with Baines. But why bother with getting married if bourgeois marriage is not really the source of the deepest satisfaction for either of them? Why construct a barrier to the real satisfaction?
The Construction of Obstacles to Love as Aids to the Metaphor of Love
For Lacan, courtly love is “an altogether refined way of making up for the absence of sexual relation by pretending that it is we who put an obstacle to it. It is truly the most staggering thing that has ever been tried. But how can we expose its fraud?” (Feminine 141). We might emend this to, what is at stake for us in not exposing the fraud of what Lacan, following Aristotle, calls “Entasis” or obstacle (141)? The construction of the obstacle is self-protective on the part of the subject. Renata Salecl writes: “One of the greatest illusions of love is that prohibition and social codes prevent its realization. The illusionary character of this proposition is unveiled in every ‘self-help’ manual: the advice persons desperately in love usually get is to establish artificial barriers, prohibitions, and make themselves temporarily inaccessible in order to provoke their love object to return love” (179). The difference in The Piano is that the prohibitions and social codes preventing realization do double duty; in their case a prohibition is also constructed barring them from jouissance. As Zizek writes, to have power we must limit our access to power; “the impediment that prevents the full realization of love is internal” (“There Is No” 209). Baines demonstrates a degree of renunciation: to have ordinary love, the lovers must renounce complete love, must renounce jouissance, for as Zizek suggests through a pithy quotation from Edith Wharton, “I can’t love you unless I give you up” (qtd. in Zizek, 209). The reward Baines seeks is not the seduction of Ada, but access to jouissance through her, along the lines of courtly love. One could as well say that Baines engages in a certain psychic detour: as Lacan puts it, “The techniques involved in courtly love… are techniques of holding back, of suspension, of amor interruptus” (152).21
Courtly love, at least, is not a wholesale seduction by the lure of love. It is emancipated, for instance, from the belief in complete reciprocity between lover and beloved. This is what Lacan means when he says in “God and the Jouissance of The Woman” that “in the case of the speaking being the relation between the sexes does not take place” (Feminine Sexuality 138). Similarly, the knight in courtly love is not a figure representing a delusion about the delusion we commonly call “love.” The knight seeks no cheap solace in keeping alive a hope that the Lady will actually enable him to achieve the sexual relation, which is already marked as impossible. The metaphor captured by the technically obsolete and limited social formation that goes by that name is a figure for the willed suspension of disbelief, and therefore a canny self-seduction into the uncanny: canny because it requires a recognition that those who presume to be non-duped about love do err, a recognition that the sexual relation is impossible, except in the real, but also that love does not have to be reciprocal precisely because it is not wholly within the ambit of desire.
While Lacan says that there is no sexual relation and that love is a lure, Zizek reminds us that love is available as a metaphor. But what are the contours of this metaphor? In the first place if there is a reciprocity, it is a reciprocity within an asymmetry. In the first instance, the beloved (eromenos) turns, and in the turning becomes the loving one, the lover (erastes). But the complementary moment is that the subject himself (now) attains the status of “an answer of the real” (qtd. in Zizek, “Courtly Love” 105). The subject himself becomes the beloved of the beloved: but this reciprocity is not the real thing called love. It is a reciprocity within a more general asymmetry, for love remains unattainable: “the other sees something in me and wants something from me, but I cannot give him what I do not possess–or, as Lacan puts it, there is no relationship between what the loved one possesses and what the loving one lacks” (106). But the significance of this reversal is not to be obscured. Zizek observes that “although we have now two loving subjects instead of the initial duality of the loving one and the loved one, the asymmetry persists, since it was the object itself which as it were confessed to its lack by way of its subjectivization. There is something deeply embarrassing and truly scandalous in this reversal by means of which the mysterious, fascinating, elusive object of love discloses its deadlock and thus acquires the status of another subject” (106). But how do we understand this in the heuristic frame of courtly love?
Again, Zizek explains that “in courtly love… the long-awaited moment of the highest fulfilment, called Gnade, mercy (rendered by the Lady to her servant), is neither the Lady’s surrender, her consent to the sexual act, nor some mysterious rite of initiation, but simply a sign of love from the side of the Lady, the ‘miracle’ of the fact that the Object answered, stretched its hand back to the supplicant” (“Courtly Love” 106). I would emphasize that it is only a sign, not a performative act of love, and it may well be a fantasy projected by the knight. It is not a reciprocal act of love; there is no sexual relation, except “in the real.” It is in this nonreciprocity that Baines’s love is most pure, and the relationship between Ada and Baines is by the same token least compelling when it degenerates into mere “reciprocal” domesticity. In his purest moments, furthermore, Baines wants not so much to love Ada as to be loved, to be looked at. Baines, as I have said, seeks in fact to take the place of the Woman under erasure, not merely to admire and love the Lady. Reciprocity indeed has little to do with it.
Salecl notes that in Plato’s Symposium, Socrates deliberately declines Alcibiades’ “courting” (203) and denies his own elevation as the loved one because, as Lacan points out in Le transfert, for Socrates, “there is nothing in himself worthy of love. His essence was that ouden, emptiness, hollowness” (qtd. in Salecl 203). If I follow Salecl’s line of reasoning, Socrates’ declining of the elevation to the status of the loved one is a denial of “agalma”–the “something” precious that Alcibiades asks for “without knowing what it is” (Lacan, Four Fundamental 255) or even presumably without knowing that he is asking for it.22 Salecl writes that “Socrates’s denial is a denial too of the discourse of the Master in preference for the discourse of the Analyst. It is in courtly love that this agalma, this “someThing else” exists, the thing that Baines and Ada seek without knowing what it is. As Holly Hunter, who plays Ada, recognized from the outset, the script had “one ingredient that almost every script I read does not have: a vast dimension of things being unexplained to the audience or even to the characters themselves–and that’s just a real haunting part of the story, very, very haunting” (qtd. in Bilborough 149). Salecl adds helpfully,
One can ask whether Socrates does not act in a similar way to the lady in courtly love when she also constantly refuses to return love. It can be said that both Socrates and the lady occupy the same place–both are objects of unfulfilled love. However, the function that they perform at this place is different. The lady is the master who constantly imposes on her admirer new duties and keeps him on a string by hinting that sometime in the future she might show him some mercy. Socrates, on the other hand, refuses the position of master. With his refusal Socrates points to the emptiness of the object of love, while the lady believes that there is in herself something worthy of love. That is why she puts herself in the position of the Master (S1), from which she capriciously gives orders. Socrates opposes this attitude altogether and does not want to encourage false hope. (203, n. 53)
In a subsequent note, Salecl continues this thread:
Socrates’s position is similar to that of the analyst, since both of them occupy the position of the object a and try to “keep that nothingness,” emptiness, the traumatic and horrifying nature of the object. Putting oneself in the position of the object accounts for the fact that the subject is not represented by any signifier–what we have here, is therefore the subject as pure emptiness. The analyst is not a Master whom the analysand would identify with and who would impose duties on the subject. By occupying the place of the object, the analyst enables the subject to find the truth about his or her desire. (207, n. 55)
I agree with Salecl that in courtly love the Lady’s discourse is the discourse of the Master and Socrates’ that of the analyst. But my disagreement with Salecl is on the following grounds: I would suggest that the courtly lover–André’s knight–enters the “contract” of courtly love in the full recognition that the Lady’s “mercy” is always already deferred; the object is always already suffused with différance. That is, as I have argued, precisely the essence of courtly love. The knight knows that the Lady is elevated precisely because she is inaccessible. She is not the object of a lovelorn romantic lover. Furthermore, I believe we must also emend Salecl’s argument that “With his refusal Socrates points to the emptiness of the object of love, while the lady believes that there is in herself something worthy of love. That is why she puts herself in the position of the Master (S1), from which she capriciously gives orders” (203). In fact, even if the lady does “believe” anything, her belief is irrelevant; the lady who “believes” is in some sense not the Lady who is elevated to the level of the Real, to the level at which God has jouissance. Woman as mystic does not “know,” as Lacan himself recognizes.
Conclusion
The Anamorphic Inamorata is sublimated, therefore, in the following manner. In the first place, the Object is elevated to the status of das Ding but remains only a “stand-in” for the Thing. Second, it is both spatially and temporally anamorphotic: it can only be viewed from an oblique perspective, although it transforms the experience of the whole; and it is susceptible to a perpetual deferral–as Zizek writes, “the Object is attainable only by way of an incessant postponement, as its absent point-of-reference” (“Courtly” 101). As Zizek himself says, “‘sublimation’ occurs when an object, part of everyday reality, finds itself at the place of the impossible Thing. Therein consists the function of artificial obstacles which all of a sudden hinder our access to some ordinary object: they elevate the object into a stand-in for the Thing” (101). Similarly, Salecl writes that “what love as a demand targets in the other is… the object in him or herself, the Real, the nonsymbolizable kernel around which the subject organizes his or her desire. What gives to the beloved his or her dignity, what leads the loving subject to the survalorization of the beloved, is the presence of the object in him or her” (192). The object is what plugs the lack in the Other, and it is in these terms, Salecl tells us, that we can differentiate the two relations of the subject to this object. Used as a plug or stopper, the object “renders invisible” the lack in the Other–this is the function of the object in romantic love. But in sublimationwe encounter
a circulation around the object that never touches its core. Sublimation is not a form of romantic love kept alive by the endless striving for the inaccessible love object. In sublimation, the subject confronts the horrifying dimension of the object, the object as das Ding, the traumatic foreign body in the symbolic structure. Sublimation circles around the object, it is driven by the fact that the object can never be reached because of its impossible, horrifying nature. Whereas romantic love strives to enjoy the Whole of the Other, of the partner, the true sublime love renounces, since it is well aware that we can [as Lacan puts it in Seminar XX] “only enjoy a part of the body of the Other…. That is why we are limited in this to a little contact, to touch only the forearm or whatever else–ouch!” (Salecl 193)
Salecl notes that such a sublimation is “well exemplified” in The Piano. But where is the true renunciation in The Piano? My argument about The Piano is rather different from Salecl’s. First, we need to be clear about the vectors of renunciation, which indeed doesplay an important role in courtly love. Here Baines’s “sublimation” of Ada is not a spiritualizing, chaste adoration; nor is it a matter of desiring sex with the “ideal mate.” As Zizek observes, the sublimated Lady “is in no way a warm, compassionate, understanding fellow-creature” (95).
Sublimation as renunciation can take two trajectories: the first is an Aristotelian renunciation: Aristotle says in the Nicomachean Ethics that “most people seem… to wish to be loved rather than to love” (482). And loving someone means in fact wishing the loved one well, rather than merely desiring that the look of love is returned by the loved person, or that, as Zizek puts it, the hand of love is extended by the loved one to the loving one. The Aristotelian renunciation is the renunciation of the wish to be loved as object of romantic affection, which is, in one sense, no more than a fetish covering over the “someThing else.” The second renunciation is the willed suspension of reciprocity: here the loving one is like the knight or the mystic, or indeed Woman–there may not be a noble love here, but there is a one-way jouissance that is precisely not constrained by phallic jouissance. It does not require a response from the loved one, indeed the loved one (God) is reduced to an idiotic (to exploit the etymological connection with idios, meaning private, own, peculiar to one’s own universe) construct, an “as if.”
The model of the courtly lover’s elevation of the Lady and of his accompanying self-abnegation is only half the story–it only marks once again the failure of mortal love. The interest of courtly love is that there is an excess, a jouissance, which theoretically the knight or courtly lover could access. What Baines wants is the gaze as jouissance, an intense form of auto-erotism, defined as the turning away of sexuality “from its natural object” and its “find[ing] itself delivered over to phantasy” (Laplanche and Pontalis 46); it is not just a question of Baines’s “desire… for her desire,” as Gillett formulates it (282). For Gillett, the iconic moment is the one in which Ada kisses her own mirrored reflection as a rejection of her husband and a preference for auto-eroticism. But Gillett fails to clarify that there are two trajectories of auto-eroticism–Baines’s as well as Ada’s. In a similar undertheorization, Gordon, following Bruzzi, reads Baines as a “masochistic male” subject whose “desire” merely “mirrors” Ada’s and “is constituted in the staging of the non-reciprocity of desire” (199). Thus,
Masochistic male desire… is also part of a logic of recuperation where the impossibility of desire’s absent object can be substituted. Here, it is the woman’s desire that stands in for the return on the man’s. The question of the woman’s desire, then, continually shifts from the proximity of the object to its absolute alienation. Indeed, auto-erotism similarly teeters on the brink of masochism proper, and ultimately suicide. The scene of the lips that kiss themselves, then, circumscribes precisely the mutual association of danger and enablement that complicates, and makes especially apposite, the relation of auto-erotism to The Piano. (199)
This analysis is too simple. Baines is like the courtly lover whose aim may be the Lady, but whose goal really is the jouissance of the Woman under erasure. It is not the flesh of the Lady/Ada that is desired, but the “body” of the Woman under erasure–this is the focus of Baines’s masochism, as again André makes plain: “The man who lets himself be humiliated, insulted, whipped by his associate seeks in reality to take the place of the woman” (99)–the woman being analogous to the Woman under erasure, not the Lady of courtly love in this instance, and the masochism being largely a matter of discursive enunciation or emotional disposition.23 As masochist, Baines is not simply interested in loving Ada, but in discovering the conditions of his own enjoyment, in a nonreciprocal way, beyond sexual intercourse. The masochist’s question is about an enjoyment beyond. Thus, André continues, “The question that the masochist puts to the test through his practice is that of knowing what is experienced by the body that the other enjoys through whiplashes or signifiers: does this body enjoy as well? and does it enjoy beyond what is provided by the instrument that marks him?” (100). As Lacan himself writes in Television, “a woman only encounters Man (l’homme) in psychosis…. She is a party to the perversion which is, I maintain, Man’s” (40).
Furthermore, there is a way in which the masochistic man “manifests something on the order of a feminine position: it is his position as subject that is feminine…. The sense of the expression ‘feminine masochism’ is… not that woman is masochistic, but really that the masochist is woman or tries hard to be one” (André 101; emphasis added). Finally, we can see why Baines’s feminization, his crossover sexuality, and his hybridized postcolonial interpellation as subject are the key to his eroticization–he is Woman under erasure, but he also displaces whiteness as a postcolonial subject. His relationship with Ada conforms to a model of courtly love. It is only courtly love’s anamorphosis that enables Baines and Ada to say to each other, “I love in you something more than you.”
One could therefore propose that the usefulness of the category of courtly love is that it allows us to see the relationship in terms of the psychoanalytic model of Lacan’s formulae of sexuation, which more fully addresses the unconscious or phantasmatic motivations of Baines and Ada. It is in this connection that an ambiguity in André’s argument about the meaning of wanting to enjoy as Woman emerges. God is the sexed real Other because in the real there is a sexual relation, whereas in the case of the divided subject of desire there is not. One possible outcome of the constellation of positions presented in Lacan’s formulae of sexuation is that it is possible that the knight’s Lady is analogous to the Woman under erasure, in that they are both idealized (and the Woman is under erasure because she is–in Lacanian terms–not the ordinary, divided subject). I think the more likely analogy is that the knight himself is, to some extent, similar to the Woman under erasure, for his fantasmatic relation to the Lady is like that of the Woman who has a fantasmatic relation to God. The knight and the Woman (the reference of course is not to any actual biological female) are isomorphically disposed toward das Ding and God the Other in the real. Das Ding, the Thing, is that absent or “excluded” center around which “the subjective world of the unconscious [is] organized in a series of signifying relations” (Lacan, Seminar VII 71). Appropriating the language of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, Lacan implies that the Thing is that which the Law forbids and makes desirable to the point of self-annihilation: “the Thing finds a way by producing in me all kinds of covetousness thanks to the commandment, for without the Law the Thing is dead. But even without the Law, I was once alive. But when the commandment appeared, the Thing flared up, returned once again, I met my death…. Through it I came to desire death” (83).
I contend therefore that the knight in courtly love can be installed in the place of the Woman under erasure. The knight is thus also beyond phallic jouissance,24 and since the knight elevates the Lady to the place of das Ding, the jouissance of speech displaces phallic jouissance, although as we have seen, the jouissance of speech fails relative to the jouissance of being (André 89). In courtly love, the knight is disposed to the Lady in a relationship where he enjoys a sexual relation that is unavailable in ordinary sex. The knight, prototype for Baines, seeks the enjoyment enjoyed by the Woman in the real. This Woman under erasure enjoys jouissance with God in the real (this God is “sexed” so that a “real sexual relation” is “completed” again in the real as it could never be in sex). Finally, there is an analogous relation in the real between “the subject” and “the body” (which in André’s phrase has a real sexed consistency), but the relation between subject and body is cleaved by language, since the subject is only the subject of a signifier. The film approximates this schema in that Baines elevates (“sublimates”) Ada to the position of the Lady of courtly love, while he himself is structurally in the discursive site, the place of the Woman under erasure. I maintain that Baines and Ada seek the experience of sexuality as satisfaction of the drive, beyond the “actual lived body,” but this point requires some clarification.
For the later Lacan, Fink reminds us, in the subject who has traversed his fundamental fantasy to live out the drive, “desire stops inhibiting the subject from obtaining satisfaction,” although desire is also a needed defence against jouissance (“Desire and the Drives” 41, 43). This subject has evolved from a relation to demand to a relation to a partial object of the drive–ultimately the death drive. No longer identified with unconscious desire but with satisfaction, he becomes an acephalous subject with head enough to heed “symbolic constraints” in order to manage jouissance (to have protection and pleasure, and protection of pleasure) (Fink, Clinical 208). Ada and Baines, like courtly lovers, manage their inhuman love by acquiescing to bourgeois domesticity as symbolic constraint but simultaneously preserve perversion, as if to say with Lacan that they seek “something in you more than you.” This acquiescence is a kind of complicated masquerade: Baines masquerades as a man, while Ada masquerades femininity, although in fact she (and Baines to some extent) are really seeking to be in the place of Woman.25
Ada manages her approach to the impossible Thing not by the process of sublimation described by Zizek as the erection of artificial obstacles that “hinder our access to some ordinary object: they elevate the object into a stand-in” for das Ding (101). For Ada, the Thing is not sublimated but sublated by the ordinary stand-in of the edifice of heteronormativity itself. The film stages this in cutting from the scene of their new domestic bliss to Ada’s re-memoration, as Toni Morrison might put it, of the encounter with das Ding: “At night I think of my piano in its ocean grave and sometimes myself floating above it. Down there everything is so still and silent it lulls me to sleep. It is a weird lullaby. And so it is. It is mine.” Ada eroticizes the negative, das Ding. And Campion’s final image of Ada is of the perfection of a kind of inhuman love, or jouissance: “Ada’s piano on the sea bed… Above floats Ada, her hair and arms stretched out in a gesture of surrender, her body slowly turning on the end of the rope. The seaweed’s rust-coloured fronds reach out to touch her” (Campion 122). Ada’s unusual satisfaction approximates Lacan’s idea, in Four Fundamental Concepts, phrased as a rhetorical question: “Is there no satisfaction in being under the gaze?” (75). In the gaze, the subject experiences an extreme pleasure (jouissance) precisely through an aphanisis or desubjectivation, when the subject’s pleasure comes from filling a lack in the Other. Baines functions merely as a stand-in for the Other, for whom Ada is also an object. Ada takes some erotic satisfaction, of course, from Baines’s erotic satisfaction; but her jouissance lies elsewhere, in her own desubjectivation.
This is the secret of this perverse couple’s ec-static relationship: something other than human love, and it is thus that Ada and Baines hold the Thing at bay, recognizing that humankind cannot bear very much Lacanian “reality,” and that the other satisfaction each seeks is agalma if kept at a ritualized distance but turns monstrous if approached too closely. The Piano, then, is an exemplary if not fully self-conscious staging of the dialectic between erotic attachment and de-tachment, sublimation and sublation, desubjectivation and subjectification–a dialectic that must remain unresolved.
Notes
1. The ambition is evident even in the sequences that appear close to the beginning of the film, such as when Ada McGrath, the protagonist, plays on the beach in New Zealand–sequences which Campion edits, as Kirsten Thompson notes,
with alternating close ups of Ada, medium shots of [her lover-to-be] Baines, and full shots of her daughter [Flora]. The dominant impression is one of movement, accentuated by Campion’s constant use of camera movement within shots, mimicked through the visual arc Baines paces around Ada, and echoed in the lyrical movements of her daughter’s ballet…. The final shot of this central sequence is a crane shot showing the three in long shot, mother and daughter walking off together, with Baines slowly joining the two ahead. Their footprints in the sand form a triangle, counterpointed by the spiral swirls of Flora’s seahorse sculpture. This graphic patterning allegorically foreshadows the future narrative formation of this particular family. (69)
2. And this is not a purely gratuitous homage, for as in Hitchcock’s film, the close-up of the hair functions as a visual metaphor for the vertigo of the core mystery the film wants to plumb: what Ada wants.
3. Brooks, as Prasad points out, theorized not only the characteristically hyperbolic gesture of melodrama and its signature melody (melos), but also the muting or suppression of the protagonist.
4. I consistently speak of desire and drive as being discrete but also as part of the same dynamic circuit. This reading of the continuity of desire and drive is, I believe, faithful to Lacan. Bruce Fink makes this continuity clear.
5. It need hardly be said that my approach in no way disparages a viable feminist approach or denies the importance of the film’s representation (Darstellung) of dissident femininity. Nor do I wish to deprecate the fascination of the (albeit negative) expression of feminine agency in the film. I would, however, like to consider briefly one example of how a reading that almost exclusively privileges a critical focus on the feminine can prove inadequate in the case of this film. Indeed, it is significant that not only are women’s spaces separated from and valorized above masculine spaces (the male sphere of action), but there are also differentiations among the women in the film, even differentiations among the white women in terms of class and age, not to mention differentiations between white women and Maori women in terms of culture versus nature. But such a reading leads Dyson, for instance, to the misleadingly underdetermined conclusion that “While never relinquishing his whiteness, [Baines] is able to arouse Ada’s passions because he is closer to nature than Stewart” (271). The misled viewer/reader, if she or he follows this line of reasoning, is then drawn into an extremely narrow understanding of the erotic dimensions of the film (which are in themselves admittedly crucial here). We are told that although Baines is a “member of the lower orders–in an early scene Ada describes him as an ‘oaf’ because he is illiterate”–Baines’s “baseness is constructed through the eroticization of his body” (271), as if Baines’s own erotic imagination were never an issue. My reading seeks in part to restore precisely this issue to its rightful importance, at least so that we can better understand what makes the relationship between the two principals so undeniably riveting–and I do so precisely by complicating the eroticization of Baines’s “body,” something which is inadequately articulated by Dyson and other critics even when they notice or thematize that body. Even a feminist analysis of the film, I would also insist, ought to do justice to the complex and subtle relay of the sexual and the sociopolitical vectors that define Baines’s place between pakeha and Maori positionalities: especially, it ought not to ignore the problematization of colonial masculinity.
6. Zizek, as well as scholars such as Jean Clavreul, emphasize the conceptual importance of the perverse couple. He writes, “history has to be read retroactively: the anatomy of man offers the key to the anatomy of ape, as Marx puts it. It is only the emergence of masochism, of the masochistic couple, towards the end of the last century, which enables us to grasp the libidinal economy of courtly love” (“Courtly Love” 95).
7. Pace Stella Bruzzi’s too-sweeping assertion that “our look is most emphatically not aligned with Stewart’s” as we watch Baines and Ada making love (262), I would argue that we are congruently situated with Stewart. That is, we are almost caught, at least for a moment, in the position of identification with Stewart, although of course the audience must subsequently reject any identification with this voyeuristic or fetishistic position. In the scene where Stewart discovers what Ada has been doing instead of giving Baines piano lessons, the director goes to extreme lengths to portray him in a degrading act of voyeurism. As he watches Baines kneel before Ada, his face buried under her skirt, he doesn’t notice that Baines’s dog is licking his palm. Stewart then crawls under the floorboards, positioning himself the better to experience their lovemaking vicariously.
Could this be seen as the film’s way of juxtaposing and contrasting ordinary heterosexual desire with an other economy of love? The effectiveness of the mise en scène is precisely that first there must be an identification before there can be this element of renunciation of the male voyeur position in which the audience shares, an experience of a renunciation analogous to Baines’s performative: a relinquishment of unambivalent masculinity, of pure whiteness, of the former colonizer’s presumed superiority. Stewart “watches” Baines and Ada making love because he himself wants to be where Baines is; he is condemned forever to watching Ada as a husband who cannot himself enjoy her but must fantasize such a scene with someone in his (Stewart’s) “rightful” place. Thus one can conclude that ultimately the point of the audience’s initial, momentary structural identification with Stewart, followed immediately by a rejection of emotional identification, is to defamiliarize the masculine or phallic position. Such a defamiliarization is consistent with the defamiliarization of colonial masculinity effected by Baines. In saying this, I acknowledge the possibility that the very feminization could be yet another masculinist turn. But it is precisely because the renunciation of an unambivalent masculinity has a fundamental and fantasmatic dimension–it is not just an act–that this possibility seems remote.
8. The “ethical” here is Lacan’s almost catachrestic conception of ethics, which has very little of the Kantian “ought.” He speaks rather of the knotting of moral questions with the fatal attraction of transgression (Seminar VII 2), tied to the death instinct. Glossing Freud, Lacan explains that “that ‘I’ which is supposed to come to be where ‘it’ was… is nothing more than that whose root we already found in the ‘I’ which asks itself what it wants” (7). The transgressive subject is finally able to ask the question of its deepest satisfaction, when the drive functions according to the classic formula, “Wo es war soll Ich werden.”
In other words, subjectivation beyond divided subjectivity is made possible by a freeing of the drive, a transgression enabling the subject to enjoy an “other jouissance” than phallic jouissance. The distinction between two kinds of jouissance maps onto the crucial (dis)articulation of drive and desire. It is desire that, according to the Lacanian ethical credo, the subject must not cede. Since drive is anterior to the advent of the divided subject, the drive is also amoral, exorbitant to the ethical. To privilege a subjectivation beyond divided subjectivity (as the subject of the drive able to enjoy the other jouissance) is therefore a post-ethical position.
The post-ethical imperative confronts the subject who would enjoy the other jouissance with two alternatives. The first is death. The second is transgression, the attraction of which is that it promises an other jouissance, but which requires a certain brinkmanship or management of jouissance. This is encapsulated in the Lacanian misprision of the paradigm of courtly love. While it implies an irresolvable dialectic, the attraction of transgression need not be forsaken, as I argue in this rereading of Campion’s film.
9. “The Piano literalizes the woman’s castration,” as Suzy Gordon notes, in presenting Ada’s chopped finger as “a prosthetic substitute and an actual bodily lack (‘visible’ because invisible)”–a lack that constitutes the subject (Gordon calls it “identity,” wrongly, in my opinion). But “it does so simultaneously with an insistence on the trauma of male subjectivity, the impotency of which serves to conceal the violence of the colonial encounter” (201). This is too linear a reading of colonial masculinity, in my view, rendering Campion’s impulse to put masculinity in question too flatly, as though the only interest one ought to take in this problematizing of masculinity were to critique and then dispose of the category of masculinity, presumably to focus on the really important issue of femininity. The film certainly does not “conceal the violence of the colonial encounter,” but rather emphasizes it and articulates it as an element of the overdetermined problematization of postcolonial masculinity in the film.
10. The only place in The Four Fundamental Concepts where Lacan presents himself explicitly in the mode of desiring to be looked at is in the episode of the sardine can that looks at him. This is a moment of a curious loss of energy, a near dissolution. Lacan’s rhetoric is more “feminine” here than anywhere else. My contention is that in The Piano this wished “looked at-ness” is Baines’s essential position.
11. With Slavoj Zizek, I would argue that the paradigm of courtly love remains a powerful one for understanding the continuing, even increasing, charisma of and public attraction to icons such as Marilyn Monroe, the Kennedys, Lady Diana, and even Ronald Reagan, not to mention Bill Clinton. This is in spite of and to some extent because of their peccadilloes and failings as ordinary mortals. The metaphor of love encapsulated in the formulae of courtly love helps to explain how these figures maintain their charisma precisely because they are unlike the people with whom we ordinarily find ourselves able to conceive a reciprocal romantic attachment. They are not sexual objects for us even though the scaffolding of our relationships to these public figures may involve the structure of our erotic projection or libidinal investment in them. While “courtly love has remained an enigma,” as Lacan writes,
Instead of wavering over the paradox that courtly love appeared in the age of feudalism, the materialists should see this as a magnificent opportunity for showing how, on the contrary, it is rooted in the discourse of fealty, of fidelity to the person. In the last resort, the person is always the discourse of the master. For the man, whose lady was entirely, in the most servile sense of the term, his female subject, courtly love is the only way of coming off elegantly from the absence of sexual relation. (Feminine Sexuality 156, 141)
We should perhaps insist that there is more at stake for the man than for the woman. Lacan also writes that “what it is all about is the fact that love is impossible, and that the sexual relation founders in non-sense, not that this should in any way diminish the interest we feel for the Other” (Feminine 158). “Ultimately,” he says, “the question is to know, in whatever it is that constitutes feminine jouissance where it is not all taken up by the man–and I would even say that feminine jouissance as such is not taken up by him at all–the question is to know where her knowledge is at” (158).
Lacan asks the question of what purpose is served by the jouissance of the body if there is in fact no sexual relation (Feminine 143). His answer is that “short of castration, that is, short of something which says no to the phallic function, man has no chance of enjoying the body of the woman, in other words, of making love”:
Contrary to what Freud argues, it is the man–by which I mean he who finds himself male without knowing what to do about it, for all that he is a speaking being–who takes on the woman, or who can believe he takes her on…. Except that what he takes on is the cause of his desire, the cause I have designated as the objet a. That is the act of love. To make love, as the term indicates, is poetry. Only there is a world between poetry and the act. The act of love is the polymorphous perversion of the male, in the case of the speaking being. (143)
12. See Suzy Gordon, Stella Bruzzi, Sue Gillett, and Lynda Dyson.
13. One could say then that the film poses an ethics of relinquishment as the radical alternative to these positions of privilege and power through the figure of Baines as well. Of course, this ethics of relinquishment is explicit in the case of Ada, who has relinquished speaking as a kind of ethical withdrawal. One could also suggest that Ada enacts a renunciation in accord with Lacan’s suggestion, in Television, that women are to be credited with an even more quotidian renunciation or accommodation, “to the point where there is no limit to the concessions made by any woman for a man: of her body, her soul, her possessions” (44). Women renounce Man so that their man “remains a man” (André 103). This is why Lacan can say that “some ingrates” cease to recognize her ethical position, even her generosity (Television 44). But one could also argue that both Ada and Baines also aim to relinquish “speaking being” in favor of the Other jouissance, in Lacanian terms.
14. Marx writes,
Although monogamy was the only known form of the family out of which modern sex love could develop, it does not follow that this love developed within it exclusively, or even predominantly, as the mutual love of man and wife. The whole nature of strict monogamian marriage under male domination ruled this out. Among all historically active classes, that is, among all ruling classes, matrimony remained what it had been since pairing marriage–a matter of convenience arranged by the parents. And the first form of sex love that historically emerges as a passion, and as a passion in which any person (at least of the ruling classes) has a right to indulge, as the highest form of the sexual impulse–which is precisely its specific feature–this, its first form, the chivalrous love of the Middle Ages, was by no means conjugal love. On the contrary, in its classical form, among the Provencals, it steers under full sail towards adultery, the praises of which are sung by their poets. (233)
15. Lacan notes that here he is returning to the notion of “the jouissance on which that other satisfaction depends, the one that is based on language” (Seminar XX 51).
16. See also Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts (273).
17. Harvey Keitel conceives of the character he plays in the film as a masochist in Freud’s sense; masochist fanstasies “place the subject in a characteristically female situation” (Freud 124). André cites a passage from Pierre Klossowski’s Sade My Neighbor to the effect that the pervert (masochist) seeks to enjoy the body of the victim of his sadistic torturer “in the subjective sense of the expression rather than in the objective sense”–by putting himself in the victim’s body and seeing his own body as foreign. André deduces from this that “the sadistic act, from this point of view, is supported by a masochistic fantasm” (99).
18. The “tension between Woman and the Other,” André says,
can be analyzed… as that of the relation of the subject to the body. The apprehension of the body by the subject reveals, in fact, the same polarities that we have identified regarding the Other: the place where the signifier is inscribed and as such exists and is identifiable as a being of signifiance, and on the other hand, as a real sexed consistency that is unnameable as such. This disjunction between the Other of desire, which exists, and the Other of jouissance, which does not exist, is thus reproduced at the level of the body. (93)
19. As Zizek writes in “Courtly Love,”
The Lady is… as far as possible from any kind of purified spirituality; she functions as an inhuman partner [and Lacan uses this very word] in the precise sense of a radical Otherness which is wholly incommensurable with our needs and desires; as such, she is simultaneously a kind of automaton, a machine which randomly utters meaningless demands. This coincidence of absolute, inscrutable Otherness and pure machine is what confers on the Lady her uncanny, monstrous character–the lady is the Other which is not our “fellow creature,” i.e., with whom no relationship of empathy is possible. This traumatic Otherness is what Lacan designates by the Freudian term das Ding, the Thing. The idealization of the Lady, her elevation to a spiritual, ethereal Ideal, is therefore to be conceived as a strictly secondary phenomenon, a narcissistic projection whose function is to render invisible her traumatic, intolerable dimension…. Deprived of every real substance, the Lady functions as a mirror onto which the subject projects his narcissistic ideal. (“Courtly” 96)
20. Here it is not a question of a Nietzschean anti-hermeneutics of truth, as Mary Ann Doane describes it, where “woman” is veiled because she knows that there is no truth behind the veil of femininity (Femmes 57). While Luce Irigaray criticizes Nietzsche for contructing femininity as “the living support of all the staging/production of the world” and thus of masculinity, Jacques Derrida approves of Nietzsche’s anti-essentialist account, as Doane observes, quoting Derrida:
There is no such thing as the essence of woman because woman averts, she is averted of herself…. And the philosophical discourse, blinded, founders on these shoals and is hurled down these depthless depths to its ruin. There is no such thing as the truth of woman, but it is because of that abyssal divergence of the truth, because that untruth is “truth.” Woman is but one name for that untruth of truth. (qtd. in Doane 58)
Doane points out that Nietzsche’s woman induces in herself a state of innocence, of non-subjectivity. As Doane puts it, “The philosopher-voyeur sees quite well that the woman ‘closes her eyes to herself’ [Nietzsche’s phrase]. She does not know that she is deceiving or plan to deceive; conscious deception would be repellent to the man and quite dangerous. Rather, she intuits or ‘divines’ what the man needs–a belief in her innocence–and she becomes innocent. Closing her eyes to herself she becomes the pure construct of a philosophical gaze” (59). And “a woman is granted knowledge when she is old enough to become a man–which is to say, old enough to lose her dissembling appearance, her seductive power. And even then, it is a kind of ‘old wives[‘]’ knowledge, not, properly speaking, philosophical” (59). But as I understand it, if the woman is naive, the man is not so much sentimental as duped. The courtly lover is not a dupe in that sense. It is he who “becomes innocent” in courtly love. Neither is he just a lover of appearances. On the contrary, we see again how he comes, in his peculiar devotion, to occupy not the place of (old) women, or of women no longer invested in lending themselves to the uses of masculinity, but the place of the “jouissant” Woman. He can therefore afford to yield to the arbitrary whims of the Lady, for he is not just a man whose masculinity depends on the willed innocence of women, nor on a woman, on the other hand, whose very being depends on an illusion.
21. Lacan tells us that the reward in the tradition of courtly love is the “strange rite, namely, reward, clemency, grace or Gnade, felicity” (146). The detour to jouissance is described in terms of asceticism as an “ethical function of eroticism”:
It is an artificial and cunning organization of the signifier that lays down at a given moment the lines of a certain asceticism, and… the meaning we must attribute to the negotiation of the detour in the psychic economy. The detour in the psyche isn’t always designed to regulate the commerce between whatever is organized in the domain of the pleasure principle and whatever presents itself as the structure of reality. There are also detours and obstacles which are organized so as to make the domain of the vacuole stand out as such. What gets to be projected as such is a certain transgression of desire.
And it is here that the ethical function of eroticism enters into play. Freudianism is in brief nothing but a perpetual allusion to the fecundity of eroticism in ethics, but it doesn’t formulate it as such. (152)
22. This is presumably different from what Aristotle speaks about as the “attribute” (325) called “happiness,” that is to say, “something final and self sufficient, and… the end of action” (317); this “attribute” of happiness “belong[s] to the happy man” (322; see also 323-24, 529, 531). Rather, Alcibiades seeks something that answers the drive. This is to go beyond both the deontological and the teleolgical as Aristotle conceives them: what Alcibiades “seeks” is both a good in itself, for him, as well as a good that always defers its own ends. At the same time the demand of Alcibiades, insofar as its fantasmatic goal is a partial object ultimately responsive to the partial drive, cannot be reduced to mere selfishness. (Aristotle asks, “Do men love… the good, or what is good for them?” [472].) Nor for that matter can Alcibiades’s goal in loving be judged as a shortfall within a rationalistic calculus, what Aristotle points to as definitive of Man when he speaks of “an active life of the element that has a rational principle” (318; see also 315, 317).
23. André usefully asks, “what distinction should be made between the two forms of cleavage that are implied by the perverse position and the feminine position?” This important question receives the following answer:
In both cases, the subject sees itself divided between two sides: one where castration is recognized and subjectified, the other where it is neither recognized nor subjectified. In what does the nonrecognition (the denial) of castration by the pervert differ from a woman’s nonsubjectification (the not-all)? This question is equivalent to asking what logical distinction separates the two parts of the Lacanian table of sexuation. This table shows us indeed that on one side a cleavage is made between subjection to castration (
.
) and the negation of castration (
.~), while on the other side, the cleavage operates between the affirmation of a partial nonsubjection (.~) and the negation of the negation of castration (~.~). The masochistic position, whatever it may have in common with the feminine position regarding its aim, thus remains distinct from it: it is only a caricature of it. This difference becomes more apparent if we note that the pervert himself believes in the Other, in the subjective jouissance of the Other, while a woman does not have to believe it–she simply finds herself in the place of where the question of the Other is formulated. For the masochist, the bar is never really inscribed on the Other and must, consequently, replay incessantly the scenario in which the Other receives this mark from his partner, while what woman attests to is actually the irremovable character of this bar–that is to say, the impossible subjectification of the body as Other. The pervert appears able to slide into the skin of this Other body like a hand into a glove; women themselves repeatedly say that this body does not fit them like a glove, that it is Other to them as well, and that the jouissance that can be produced here is foreign to them and is not subjectifiable. (101-2)
24. We must acknowledge, as André cautions, that “Phallic jouissance should not be confused with what happens in the lovers’ bed–in any case it cannot be restricted to it. One of the fundamental revelations of the analytic experience consists in this recentering of the jouissance called sexual: its space is less the bed [lit] than the said [dit]. This is the reason why jouissance is repressed and unrecognized by the subject: jouissance does not even fulfill the requirement that the subject properly meet its partner in bed!” (90-91).
25. See Joan Rivière’s “Womanliness as a Masquerade” and Mary Ann Doane’s “Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator.”
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