Reading Boyishly: Roland Barthes, J. M. Barrie, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Marcel Proust, and D. W. Winnicott - Softcover

Mavor, Carol

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822339625 ISBN 13: 9780822339625

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2008

Synopsis

An intricate text filled to the brim with connotations of desire, home, and childhood—nests, food, beds, birds, fairies, bits of string, ribbon, goodnight kisses, appetites sated and denied—Reading Boyishly is a story of mothers and sons, loss and longing, writing and photography. In this homage to four boyish men and one boy—J. M. Barrie, Roland Barthes, Marcel Proust, D. W. Winnicott, and the young photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue—Carol Mavor embraces what some have anxiously labeled an over-attachment to the mother. Here, the maternal is a cord (unsevered) to the night-light of boyish reading.

To “read boyishly” is to covet the mother’s body as a home both lost and never lost, to desire her as only a son can, as only a body that longs for, but will never become Mother, can. Nostalgia (from the Greek nostos = return to native land, and algos = suffering or grief) is at the heart of the labor of boyish reading, which suffers in its love affair with the mother. The writers and the photographer that Mavor lovingly considers are boyish readers par excellence: Barrie, creator of Peter Pan, the boy who refused to grow up; Barthes, the “professor of desire” who lived with or near his mother until her death; Proust, the modernist master of nostalgia; Winnicott, therapist to “good enough” mothers; and Lartigue, the child photographer whose images invoke ghostlike memories of a past that is at once comforting and painful.

Drawing attention to the interplay between writing and vision, Reading Boyishly is stuffed full with more than 200 images. At once delicate and powerful, the book is a meditation on the threads that unite mothers and sons and on the writers and artists who create from those threads art that captures an irretrievable past.

About this title

About the Author

Carol Mavor is Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Manchester. She is the author of Becoming: The Photographs of Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden and Pleasures Taken: Performances of Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs, both also published by Duke University Press.

From the Back Cover

""Reading Boyishly" is as complete and mesmerizing a work of reflection on art, time, gender, and family (mothers anyhow) as I have ever seen. It is a remarkable and rare invitation to find ways to extend our nostalgia into a positive mode of being that does not close off the future at all but relocates it within desire."--James R. Kincaid, author of "Erotic Innocence"

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

READING BOYISHLY

ROLAND BARTHES, J. M. BARRIE, JACQUES HENRI LARTIGUE, MARCEL PROUST, and D. W. WINNICOTT By CAROL MAVOR

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2007 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-3962-5

Contents

Acknowledgments..............................................................................................................................ixintroduction. Anorectic Hedonism: A Reader's Guide to Reading Boyishly; Novel or a Philosophical Study? Am I a Novelist?.....................1one. My Book Has a Disease...................................................................................................................23two. Winnicott's ABCs and String Boy.........................................................................................................57three. Splitting: The Unmaking of Childhood and Home.........................................................................................77four. Pulling Ribbons from Mouths: Roland Barthes's Umbilical Referent.......................................................................129five. Nesting: The Boyish Labor of J. M. Barrie..............................................................................................163six. Childhood Swallows: Lartigue, Proust, and a Little Wilde................................................................................253seven. Mouth Wide Open for Proust: "A Sort of Puberty of Sorrow".............................................................................315eight. Soufflé/Souffle..................................................................................................................349nine. Kissing Time...........................................................................................................................367ten. Beautiful, Boring, and Blue: The Fullness of Proust's Search and Akerman's Jeanne Dielman...............................................397conclusion. Boys: "To Think a Part of One's Body"............................................................................................433Illustrations................................................................................................................................441Notes........................................................................................................................................455Index........................................................................................................................................519

Chapter One

MY BOOK HAS A DISEASE

Our gaze can fall, not without perversity, upon certain old and lovely things, whose signified is abstract, out of date. It is a moment of gentle apocalypse, a historical moment of the greatest pleasure [jouissance].

* Roland Barthes, "Inaugural Lecture"

The subject of nostalgia comes into the picture: it belongs to the precarious hold that a person may have on the inner representation of a lost object.

* D. W. Winnicott, "Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena"

* READING BOYISHLY is a labor of love for four boyish men and one boy. The men are J. M. Barrie (1860–1937), Roland Barthes (1915–1980), Marcel Proust (1871–1922), and D. W. Winnicott (1896–1971). The boy is the boy photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue (1894–1986), who did grow up and continued to snap pictures for his entire life (but I will focus on the keepsakes that he made when still in knee pants and during his adolescence). Between the covers of their books, journals, and photograph albums, childhood is a place prolonged through (what some have anxiously labeled as) an overattachment to the mother.

All five of "my boys" are privileged to read boyishly, largely as a result of class privilege. Lartigue was the son of wealth French banker; he lived long and fully with a lifetime of toys, cameras, dogs, kites, homemade flying machines, go-carts, paints, and sunshine, without any serious financial worries. Proust's bourgeois days, always with servants, spent reading in the garden as a child ("under the chestnut tree, in a hooded chair of wicker and canvas in the depths of which I used to sit and feel that I was hidden from the eyes of anyone who might be coming to call upon the family" [I, 115; I, 82–83]) and later reading in his brass bed as an adult, sounding his bell for the prompt delivery of his whims-turned-needs, are stories of infamous cushiness, despite being plagued by lifelong asthma. Winnicott's father was a British businessman, specializing in corsetry, an occupation that provided his son with a thorough upper middle-class life, including boarding school. However, Barthes and, especially, Barrie were weighed down as boys with the heft of monetary uncertainties. Barrie waxes it nostalgically. Barthes gives it a bitter taste.

For Barrie, growing up as a son of a weaver in his tiny house in the even tinier town of Kirriemuir, Scotland, was the fairy-tale, rags-to-riches story. But it seems that it was the reading that pampered him. And he caught the reading bug from his mum, a great reader. In Barrie's own words:

We read many books together when I was a boy, Robinson Crusoe, being the first (and the second), and the Arabian Nights should have been the next, for we got it out of the library (a penny for three days), but on discovering that they were nights when we had paid for knights we sent that volume packing, and I have curled my lips at it ever since.... Besides reading every book we could hire or borrow, I also bought one now and again, and while buying (it was the occupation of weeks) I read standing at the counter, most of the other books in the shop, which is perhaps the most exquisite way of reading.

Barthes's background is "bourgeois," although his maternal grandmother was a "wealthy" member of the "constellation." Barthes was not even a year old when his father died in combat in the North Sea, and there seems to be no mourning for him. After his father's death, Barthes and his war-widow mother, Henriette, moved to Bayonne, in the southwest of France, to live with his father's family. (Apparently Henriette was never close to her own mother.) Barthes describes his grandmother's home in Bayonne, with its lovely gardens, as an "ecological wonder." The house is the stuff of fairy tales: "With the modesty of a chalet, yet there was one door after another, and French windows, and outside staircases, like a castle in a story." "His mother, his aunt, and his grandmother all kept a careful watch on the young Roland, and he was surrounded by female affection." However, a "transgression" brought the happy times to a halt. When Roland was eleven, his mother gave birth to his half-brother Michel, out of wedlock. This "transgression," Barthes claims, cost his mother financially and emotionally. Barthes has memories of financial misery:

Simply this, that my childhood and adolescence were spent in poverty. That there was often no food in the home. That we had to go and buy a bit of paté or a few potatoes at a little grocery store on the rue de Seine, and this would be all we'd have to eat. Life was actually lived to the rhythm of the first of the month, when the rent was due. And I had before me the daily spectacle of my mother working hard at bookbinding, a job for which she was absolutely unsuited.... I remember for example, the small crisis at the start of each school year. I didn't have the proper clothes. No money for school supplies. No money to pay for schoolbooks. It's the small things, you see, that mark you for a long time, that make you extravagant later on.

Barrie, Barthes, Lartigue, Proust, and Winnicott all were able to be extravagant enough later on, if not in their knickerbockers or school pants, then in their grown-up, if always boyish, trousers.

* ACCORDING TO THE Oxford English Dictionary, "boyishly" is a real word, an adverb related to "boyish": "1. Of pertaining to boys or boyhood. 2. Boy-like; puerile." It is the "boy-like" and the "puerile" that interest me. The OED gives three examples of "boyish": the first two are colored by shame, the third is couched in feminine vanity. From the Renaissance English poet Fulke Greville, we get the following bit of boyish shamefulness: "This is such a boyish sophisme as I am ashamed to aunswere it" (1579). From Abraham Cowley, who began writing at age ten, the boy poet of Poeticall blossomes, who was inspired by The Faerie Queene, we get a response to his own early verse, touched by shame: "The beginning of it is Boyish, but of this part ... I should hardly now be ashamed" (1663). And last, from Britain's Thomas Macaulay (not that other eternally boyish Macaulay Culkin, mind you), who began his poems at age eight (a precociousness that beats Cowley), but turned away from such boyishness, in favor of the law and his History of England, we reach ultimate clarity: "Boyish vanities, and no part of the real business of life." In sum: "boyishly" holds shame and vanity with a stroke of the puerile.

"Puerile" according to the OED is boyish not girlish: its Latin root puerilis means boyish, childish. In its feminine form puer is also a boy, a child. Most commonly, according to the OED, "puerile" is a depreciative term meaning of "merely boyish or childish, juvenile; immature, trivial."

It is worth noting that the word "girlishly," as opposed to "boyishly," is not, or at least, not yet in the Oxford English Dictionary (although it has crept into other dictionaries, including Merriam-Webster). Not that I adhere to rules. I am a quick study of Alices (both the Wonderland and Looking Glass varieties) and I learned from her what she learned from the White Queen, that there is "no day" for rules:

"The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday—but never jam today."

"It must come sometimes to 'jam to-day,'" Alice objected.

"No, it can't," said the Queen. "It's jam every other day: to-day isn't any other day, you know."

In fact, it was through Alice and Carroll's Alicious texts that I first found my own place to revel, not in "reading boyishly" but, in "reading girlishly." For me that was a place to begin. That was a place to play "out" those girl-things disavowed by the culture that I call home: from dress-up, to a love for girls, to motherhood itself. Indeed, a girlish read enabled me to write two books which took serious pleasure in girl-children, girls' teendom, and the mothers who bore them: Pleasures Taken and Becoming.

Pleasures Taken took blissful delight in the Victorian photographs I love: Carroll's girldom ("girldom" like "boydom" is a "real" word); Julia Margaret Cameron's loving pictures of her maid Mary Hillier as an erotically charged beautiful Madonna, often coupled by the wispy water-baby children that lived with the two of them on the utopian Isle of Wight; and, Hannah Cullwick's Cindy Shermanesque masquerades, way before Cindy. And, of course, there were the Alice books: stories far more darling to girls, not boys, although Carroll is championed by philosophers and Surrealists alike.

Becoming "listened carefully" to Clementina Hawarden's homoerotic photographs of her gorgeous daughters. There, I was taken by what I imagined as beneath the surface of the photographs, beneath the whispering of petticoats, linen, water-marked silk, suppressed giggles, coiled hair, weary sighs: the unfamiliar sound (at least in my personal experience) of a mother's voice filled with passion for the adolescent, and very sexual, beauty of her daughters, often in pairs, often provocatively, if subtlety, touching one another. Hawarden speaking softly in paper, glass, collodion, and emulsion, whispers: "I adore you." I wondered how it felt to be her most-photographed daughter (also named Clementina), to be kissed all over by the natural light streaming through the home's gauze-curtained giant windows (the very radiance which made her mother's pictures possible) and to be kissed all over by the cherishing gaze of her artful mother.

Let it suffice to say that the "string-tied" (one of this book's richest metaphors for speaking to that continually linked, if imaginatively so, umbilicus between my boyish men and their mothers) and "aesthetically productive" work of Barrie, Barthes, Lartigue, Proust, and Winnicott is not specific to boys: it is also the work, if differently so, of mothers and their daughters. Becoming, especially, attests to such related umbilical ribbons through its jump ropes, stitching, shutter cords, and other string-tied (re)productions. But this time around, to read boyishly is to embrace effeminophobia (when it comes to the bodies of the boy, the boy-man, and even the man) and to boldly, if quietly, articulate the effeminizing relation between a boy and his mother as a specific and beautiful production. But here I am sounding too steady, when I am laboring to shake things about.

* READING BOYISHLY TRAVAILS: it shakes things about, like mothers and sons and boys and men; it labors, with maternity and femininity; it travels, from the beginning of the twentieth century to its end, from home to the skies. Travail can mean many things, including the hard work of bodily or mental toil, the straining movement of a vessel in rough seas, a finished work of art or piece of literature, the work and pains of childbirth. Travail is journeying (to travel). And travel we will, "like paragraphs of wind" in the breaths of then and now, of over there and over here, as momentarily held in a gust, a rising, a lift, a wave, a breath.

Barrie, Barthes, and Proust are notably queer in their affairs with Mother. Winnicott reveres Mother in his writing, but seems effeminophobic in his efforts to disassociate himself with the queerness of "the string boy" (whom we shall meet soon enough). While Lartigue was surely close to his mother (Maman snapped the famous picture of our impish boy in the bathtub) and his boyhood journals are filled with pleasant descriptions of days attached to Mami—running errands, paying visits, going to the Eiffel Tower, checking out the fashionable of Paris—Lartigue's attachment to Mother is certainly without the obsession of Barrie, Proust, and Barthes. Nevertheless the maternal looms in his own refusal to never grow up. In sum, the body of Mother wrinkles the smooth childhood sheets of Barrie's Peter Pan, of Proust's In Search of Lost Time, of Barthes's Camera Lucida, of Winnicott's Playing and Reality, of Lartigue's childhood gaze. (In the technical jargon of sewing, as Peter Stallybrass has noted, wrinkles are called "memory.") Each respective boyish call of "Mama" hails her large: as food for all thought, as having your cake and eating it too (Proust); or as cure for all that ails (Winnicott); or as the ultimate lover (Barthes); or as a mixture of intense sentimental devotion, resentment, and calloused distance (Barrie); or as childhood itself (Lartigue). For Barrie, Proust, Winnicott, Lartigue, and Barthes, the maternal is a cord (unsevered) to the night-light of boyish reading. To read boyishly, as stated in this book's introduction, is to covet the mother's body as a home both lost and never lost, to desire her as only a son can, as only a body that longs for her, but will never become Mother, can.

Reading boyishly (as opposed to girlishly) is differentiated through its maintenance of a reproductiveness that never looks forward to the realm of motherhood that the girl may or may not choose, may or may not be able to attain (even if she so chooses), but that girls are nevertheless culturally subjected to. Boyish labor (which is always nostalgically centered) is exhausting: it never severs the umbilical cord through which travels the passionate blood between mother and son; rather, it refuels the long cord with hormones and food and oxygen; circulatory and never ending, it also carries away waste-laden blood. Long enough to allow boyish dancing within the watery environment (a tender and irreverent play of words tapping and probing and kicking and sailing and floating through the bellies of the fantastical mothers), the cord allows the boyish read to fly like a kite on a string, connected yet separate, but the cord can also become a noose, a crisis, a halting of life. Nevertheless, boyish labor never lets go of its labyrinthine thread. It lassoes Mother: not as Other, not exactly as the same, but certainly as united, at times indistinguishable. The French historian Jules Michelet (1798–1874), a favorite of Barthes's (little wonder, given the fact that his many-volumed Histoire de France is not only history but also a masterpiece of French literature due to its style and emotional strength), also had a passion for the mother. Michelet's love of Mother runs the gamut from his own mother to our earth as Mother, the latter manifesting itself in his predilection for mud baths, a reunitation of himself with terra mater: "I felt her very clearly, caressing and comforting, warming her wounded child.... I no longer distinguished myself from her."

While Freud felt that girls could never successfully go through the Oedipal phase (how could they hate what they were destined to become: the giving, reproducing mother?)—he failed to acknowledge those boys who chose to stay behind with mother, making a couple, not unlike Michelet's merging of himself with Mother Earth (a "mud couple") cultivating another kind of reproductiveness: a transubstantiated twinning.

Nostalgia is at the heart of the labor of travailing boyishly, which is queer in its love affair with the mother. Reading boyishly swishes like Mamma's skirt as she comes up the stairs to kiss her Marcel-boy goodnight: "I heard her climb the stairs, and then caught the sound of her garden dress of blue muslin, from which hung little tassels of plaited straw" (I, 15; I, 13).

I am now old enough, and Roland Barthes is now dead enough—not only did he physically die in 1980, but his writing is considered old-fashioned and out of date—for his labor to have achieved the patina of nostalgia. When a colleague recently asked me what I was working on and I cheerfully and proudly said "Barthes," I received a dismissive reply, "O-o-o-h, how retro." Yet, my colleague's comment resonated with me in a helpful way. "Retro" is from the Latin adverb meaning backward and hails retrospection or meditation on the past. To look at the past—whether it be by my initiation as a student into French post-structuralist theory, or by childhood itself, or by Barthes's focus on "certain old and lovely things, whose signified is abstract, out of date"—is nostalgic. Nostalgia, at the center of Barthes's discourse and my book is, I hope to show, an approach that is useful and not simply backward.

As a graduate student, I was initially drawn to Barthes (not only because he was then in fashion) but also because of his writerly emphasis on desire and pleasure. More recently I have become more literate in the nuances of his queer sensibility. And even more recently, I owned up to the fact that what drew me to Barthes and continues to draw me is not only his tender and beautiful writing, his hedonism, his brevity, his strangeness, coupled with my own nostalgia for "the good old days" of graduate school and critical theory and tiny houses and too much coffee and generous teachers and startlingly smart fellow graduate students, but the fact that Barthes himself is nostalgic. Barthes is claimed by what Susan Stewart refers to as "the social disease of nostalgia."

While nostalgia is in the wings of Winnicott, Barrie, Proust, and Lartigue—for the purpose of this first chapter, nostalgia will flutter most readily, if delicately, out of Barthes, occasionally settling on the attractive boxes of Joseph Cornell (1903–1972), like a butterfly panting on clover. With his intense love for childhood, a long life with mother, a fear of losing the past, Cornell, America's most nostalgic artist, boyish through and through (he eternally loved kid food such as Kool-Aid and jelly doughnuts), is easily boxed into this book, like a daguerreotype framed, like a treasured swallowtail butterfly behind glass, like a treasure kept in an oval Shaker box. Insurmountably, the shy American eccentric, Cornell remained (for most of his life) nestled on Long Island in a small house with Mother and Brother, bowered by their home's endlessly astonishing fairy-tale address of 3708 Utopia Parkway.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from READING BOYISHLYby CAROL MAVOR Copyright © 2007 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822339625
• ISBN 13: 9780822339625
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 536