Introduction: Georges Duroy and Lily Bart - Bel Ami and House of MIrth

Agnes Martin

Georges Duroy (Bel Ami) has been widowed. His lovely young wife Suzanne has died in childbirth. His very young son is now the heir to the great Walter fortune. Duroy has come to New York City because he has heard of the beautiful and incomparable Lily Bart (House of Mirth). He wishes to marry her, return with her to Paris, have her preside over his extravagant lifestyle and sensitively guide the raising and education of his son. He expects no hindrance in his plans. He is offering a fortune and a way out for her.

Georges Duroy in Bel Ami and Lily Bart in House of Mirth are both caught in the Foucauldian grid, web, at the end of the 19th century. They are caught in Foucault's power/knowledge/capital nexus, but one rarely knows they are in it until ...well until they study Foucault. People know they are trapped, but usually in a local way where the system keeps throwing obstacles at them, and they blame themselves for a long while until they fully know, if ever, that that's the way it is set up. Their existential, situationalist choice then is to give in or resist, and how best to resist when inside the Foucauldian paradigm. Baudrillard since 9-11 has suggested otherwise. Just leap out of it. Risk it all. DeLillo's solution is in narrative transcendence, but Baudrillard reading through Foucault does not believe in transcendence so it is not an option with either one of them.

Duroy is not a bastard, not a horrible person. He is just making choices inside his wiggle room and it is pretty confining. To dump judgement on him as a character doesn't make much sense. The PC feminist introduction in my edition of House of Mirth by an esteemed Harvard professor, blames Lily for being shallow and seeing herself only through the eyes of everyone around her. Of being an object of conspicuous consumption for some man she traps. This is simplistic psychological swampy interpretation. She is securely caught in the web. She has some wiggle room, just enough to know that she is caught in a place and time that is boring but comfortable, until it isn't anymore.

Georges can only improve his situation in life by marrying up. The same is true of Lily, only her situation is worse. A young woman cannot do anything if she isn't married. And she must not, must remain spotless, until she snags someone who can afford to keep her in the style to which she has become accustomed. Lily and Georges could never have had each other as they are in the books, when unmarried, if they had met and been attracted to each other. Both are caught in the awful hypocrisy of the social structure they are wedged in, and neither sees anyway out but up or sink and drown.

So to condemn them with ideas from our own times is just precession and only a silly game of speculation. If you see them in the time they are in and the grid of power/knowledge/capital of that time, you may have a chance to see your own place now in that same grid, as it plays out today.

This is the grid DeLillo has Eric Packer in on that last day of his life in Cosmopolis. It is start stop. Moving in quarter inches as Torval says. As House of Mirth unfolds Lily Bart begins to feel the tightening threads as Georges Duroy feels them in the beginning of Bel Ami. Duroy is on his way up and Lily is on her way down, which she can always so far, stop, but always only at great personal loss of her sensibilities and integrity. And in House of Mirth, she sees the dead end sign at the end of the road.

This fanfic is an imagined meeting of the widowed Duroy, after his marriage to Suzanne, and Lily who live in the same time warp, are close in age, move in a similar social class, and what might have been possible for them.

Irresistible Destiny:Chapter 16 - Waiting

Books » 310 series » Twilight: Impossible Destiny

Author: seymourblogger 1. Chapter 1:Kairos2. Chapter 2: Kairos3. Chapter 3: Mine4. Chapter 4 : Mine5. Chapter 5 : Alterity6. Chapter 6: Alterity7. Chapter 78. Chapter 8 B9. Chapter 9E10. Chapter 10B: Death11. Chapter 11: Death12. Chapter 12 : Dreaming13. Chapter 13E Dreaming14. Chapter 14 : Bella's Dreams15. Chapter 15 :Imagining Bella16. Chapter 16: Waiting17. Chapter 17: Waiting18. Chapter 18:Mine

Rated: M - English - Fantasy/Romance - Published: 08-31-11 - Updated: 09-09-11 id:7342016

Twilight: Irresistible Destiny

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"Don't you see yourself in every picture you love? You feel a radiance wash through you. It's something you can't analyze or speak about clearly. What are you doing at that moment? You're looking at a picture on a wall. That's all. But it makes you feel alive in the world. It tells you yes, you're here. And yes, you have a range of being that's deeper and sweeter than you knew."




He watched her. He didn't think he wanted to be surprised, even by a woman, this woman, who'd taught him how to look, how to feel enchantment damp on his face, the melt of pleasure inside a brushstroke or band of color. (Cosmopolis 30)

Resnick

Resnick in those years as "The Elephant in the Room," with its only geometry a thick hide of dark oils. And the closer one looks, the murkier and more colorful it becomes. 

Resnick makes the determination of Piet Mondrian or Ad Reinhardt and their asceticism look like child's play. He has worked each canvas hard, until it has no sense left of color or form, much as Josef Albers worked over spatial relationships until they stopped moving or Cy Twombly worked the trace of his hand until trace itself becomes something out of a myth. Resnick keeps everything about a generation except a world beyond ideas.

I found this by surprise

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BPOV


We are in the Biennale and walking to see Edward's paintings. I only see one. "Where is the other one you said was here?"




"Around the corner. It's very different but also the same."




I look at it from far away as I walk towards it. I stop to look at it from a distance, before I sit down on the bench in front of it to look.




Edward waits on the bench farther back and is very quiet and still.




It is ten feet across and 6 feet down; really huge, not for just anyone to buy and put in a room in their house. It would require an extraordinary house to frame it properly. Or a corporate lobby.




It is very dark and mysterious. Blacks, deep blues, greens, browns, each stroke of color just slightly different in shade. I wonder if each deep blue has been slightly changed to make it qualitatively different from every other area of deep blue.

Louise Nevelson - Night Image

I would bet money on it.




Diagonally from the left is an infinitesimal slash of subtly curving light, a razor thin sliver, cutting across, off center, to the far right corner, which it doesn't reach. It might have been lightening striking if it were a landscape, but it is not.




Perhaps it could be seen as an abstract landscape. On either side of the bright illuminating, but so thin slice of bright cut of light, I can see more detail. It is as if the cut allowed more of something hidden to be observed for an instant. But it is unclear whether this is a sudden flash, partly or wholly permanent. And it arouses disturbing feelings in me. I feel very apart from Edward right now, maybe separated is the word.




The title plate says: Foucault's Transgression




I feel solitary and alone looking at it. Apprehensive, and a little afraid. I get up and walk closer, then closer still. It is not meant to be seen up this close. But that's the way I want to see it. It is composed of thousands of tiny fragments, like tiny mirrors of darkness, slivers, with each one containing a world in it and I shiver. Pieces that look as if they compose a whole, but do not. The edges of each are sharp, and I feel I could slice my finger on them. But the brush strokes inside are sometimes soft, liquid, runny, curving, gloppy, and razor sharp. I shiver again.






Softness and vulnerability contained by edges, but the fragments are so small that they are not noticeable unless you are observing very carefully. Along the light slash there is a low illumination and there the fragments have softer edges. The paradox of hard edges in darkness and softer edges in low light is also disturbing. Now why would that be?




I continue to sit and breathe, feeling strangely isolated. I imagine Edward painting it. The almost finicky detail of the fragments, and the endless concentration and focus to do each one so perfectly. The very thin cut of light crossing the canvas, pulling the eye across and curving down on the diagonal, forcing the viewer to see it the way he wants you to see it, moving your eye the way he has decided you will move it.




Controlling your vision.




He is slicing the world, killing it, and loving it at the same moment. The brightness offers a respite, an abandonment of pure brushstrokes, sensuous and unashamed. Brushstrokes of an almost illumination reflecting from the bright line of light across this world.




So if I were seeing this, and I didn't know him, I would be afraid of knowing him, I think. Complex and paradoxical, a slicing killer inside and the softness and vulnerability of a child. But which layer is predominant? Will he kill you first and then feel remorse? Or will he seduce you with his sensuality and then knife you, slice you, kill you.




I think of his painting it, the incredible detail, the focus and concentration eating and devouring time. Then I know he is simply waiting. Waiting alone, for what he does not know.




And then I know the bright light is me. And around me it is a little clearer, a little lighter, although not a great deal. The fragments, however, have soft edges and inside they are quivering and vulnerable, sensitively touched with the barest pressure of fingertips. I have felt his violence. I have felt his complete vulnerability in me. And he has felt all this in me. We are each other's match.




I catch my breath and turn to him. He is looking at me and waiting.




His eyes are not cold, not impersonal, but not lustful either. He is just waiting.




I decide to go with the truth.