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 9 - Abyss

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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Rothko's change, his passage almost without transition, to an immediate, definitive form. It is there all at once, perfectly mastered, end of story. And it is light-years away from what he was doing up to that point. (Cool Memories IV 84-85)




This is something entirely different from an evolution - even a creative evolution. It is an almost genetic impulse by which he separates himself miraculously from the artist he still was, with his place in the history of art, to be nothing but the sovereign medium of an extremely simple form, which no longer has anything to do with expressionism or abstraction." (Cool Memories IV 84-85)

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Chapter 8 E
EPOV

Rothko

My god, who is she? She is so completely Other. I am in awe of her, amazed, and desperate to take her now right in the gondola and go to the bottom of the canal with her and drown. I have turned into a madman in my mind to even think like this. I touch her helping her out of the boat, and I can't take my hands off her, so I don't.




This is new to me.


We go inside and I am still processing what she has told me. She's an accessory to a $30,000,000 heist! Of priceless artworks! As if she is talking about baking gingerbread cookies!I can't let her do this. I have to protect her. She can't put herself in jeopardy like this. I couldn't live through it.




We wander and I don't take her to my paintings. There are two of them here as the curator couldn't decide which one to show. We do the usual talk talk about art as we look, but neither of us is really paying attention. I can't focus while I am feeling her next to me like this. This is our first date for crissakes. I'm concentrating all my energy on not throwing her down on the floor. I want to do it. What the fuck is the matter with me.




Then we turn a corner and she stops dead.




"That's yours, isn't it.  I know it is. I've seen your work before. I was supposed to be at your opening in New York, in Chelsea last fall. I was there ready to go in because Alice said I must see it, and I must meet you. When she met me at the door she said it was mobbed. Everyone was trying to talk with you, and it was knee deep in admiring women. She said it was really the wrong time to meet you, the wrong time to be able to contemplate your work, and that we would come back in the daytime when it was not so crowded. We went out to dinner and Jasper, that's her husband, got drunk at dinner because he made so much money from your sales. Oh my god, I don't believe this. Jasper is your agent and Alice is my best friend. She collects and she has a lot of your work. Naturally I've seen all hers. I went back and saw your show when I was alone and I spent three hours looking at it. What if we had met that night! I can't even imagine it!"




And she began to laugh and laugh.




How had I been missing her! All that lost time. But at any of the other meetings, it wouldn't have been the same. I could hardly have taken her at Mary Boone Gallery.




How would I have stopped myself? What would I have said? Something ordinary? And then we might not have known all that we know now. How long would it have taken us to figure this out? Would we ever have figured it out? No, we have met at exactly the right time and in the right way for us. The perfect time. The only time.




I sit on a bench, pull her onto my lap, and hold her tight, so tight. "Oh Bella," I breathe, just "oh Bella," over and over again. I feel her trembling in my arms, and she can't stop either. She is smiling and laughing and then she cries and sobs, then laughs through her tears again. We have been so close, so close all this time. Then we meet as strangers and I grab her and rip her clothes off and violate her. Who could have dreamed this up!




"There's a hotel near here. Let's go check in. We can come back tomorrow and look at my paintings and talk then. I can't focus now. I can't talk about them now the way I wanted to talk with you about them. I wanted to listen to what you see, listen to how you tell me what you see, tell you what I am trying to do with them. But that's all over now. I don't need to continue painting that way anymore. It was all for you, all to find you, and now that I have, I don't need to paint like that anymore. I don't know where I will go next, but it will be something totally new for me. A complete change, like the one Rothko made. No transition, no working my way through something.




"Just a jump over the abyss into the unknown."

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Irresistible Destiny - Chapter 6 - Alterity

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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"If she had not had too many beers. If she had been listening to a different radio station. If he had not been on the road in the wrong place at the wrong time. The fatal crash was the sum of an infinite series of "ifs," tracing back to if life had never evolved on Earth in the first place. In our lives, we surf the wave of chance."

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Chapter 6: Alterity
BPOV 6
I talk to him knowing that I am his for eternity, so I am not concerned or distracted by his aggressive obsession, his obsessive aggression. He will realize soon enough what I already intuitively know. We are here for each other in this lifetime, and for forever. It has already been decided long long ago and nothing we can do will change that. I cannot leave him and he cannot lose me. We are joined.

"I saw a movie just before I left. Another Earth written and acted and directed and edited by two people whom I suspect are in love. Shoestring production and it just won at Sundance, the jury prize and the Sloan prize with no fanfare at all when it arrived."

I continue. "A girl has just won a prestigious chance to study astrophysics at MIT and she is wildly celebrating, drinking too much.

"She drives home and on the car radio hears that Another Earth has appeared in the sky. She leans out the car window to see and glimpses it, running a red light, crashing into another car, and killing a woman and child.

"Getting out of prison four years later the man in the car, the husband, has recently come out of his long coma. He was a musician, a professor of music and now is a recluse. She is tortured by guilt and we see that no prison term or societal punishment has any effect except perhaps to give the person a long time to think, when they are not protecting themselves from the aggression in the prison.

"She feels drawn to the man, searches him out, and offers to clean for him. He is living in white trash squalor, drinking himself into an oval oblivion.

"The reviewer Ebert says this. Listen because I memorize too without knowing why":
If she had not had too many beers. If she had been listening to a different radio station. If he had not been on the road in the wrong place at the wrong time. The fatal crash was the sum of an infinite series of 'ifs,' tracing back to if life had never evolved on Earth in the first place. In our lives, we surf the wave of chance.


"And she offers to clean for him. She has a job cleaning at the local school after hours. I guess the psychologists would say she was debasing herself, punishing herself by working a menial job. I see it differently. There is no amount of cleaning that will ever clean her soul for what she did in her carelessness.

"She begins to clean for him. She orders his house. He stops boozing; she becomes lighter, and almost happy sometimes. He begins to play music again. But all the time she knows who she is and knows he does not know who she is. She enters a contest to be the first to visit this other earth.

"She tells him a story of the first cosmonaut who is on the space station. He hears a sound of dripping, but it's not liquid. It is more metallic but regular and relentless like a drop of water. The way they do it to torture you and drive you mad. Those stories. He searches all over the space capsule but he cannot find it, he cannot stop it. He knows he has 47 more days to listen to it and he knows he will go mad long before that. And then he knows how to escape madness.

"He needs to fall in love with the sound.


"He falls in love with the sound, listens to it intently, it turns to music and he listens to the music in rapture for the rest of his time up there in the capsule.

"And we see the musician later giving her a solitary concert in an auditorium where he plays a saw. A real musician really does this, by the way, and the filmmakers had the musician in the film really learn. A while ago he had seen her cleaning, saw her pick up the saw and bend it and listen to it.

"Do you know there are ants that take caterpillars into their nest?"

Edward raises one eyebrow in disbelief at me. I continue.

"They have liquor on their fur, and the ants drink it and get drunk. But why must they take the insects into their nest? And then someone thought to record with boosted intensity inside the nest. As the caterpillars were stroked for the liquor, they made music. It was the music the ants craved to keep with them.

"Isn't that beautiful. I know because once when I was high, I did something like that. It was night and summer and there were mosquitoes in my cabin near the woods. Pesky creatures that drive you crazy. But this night I felt one at my ear buzzing and instead of swatting it I waited - as I have been waiting for you – to see what it would do. It crawled down in my ear and I let it."

He is listening quietly to me.

"And then you can't imagine! A million violins were in my ear and the music was like no symphony I have ever heard!

"And I don't remember how long I listened. Or fell asleep, or whether I passed out or what.

"Back to Rhoda and the story. She has won the contest. He begs her not to go. He cannot bear to lose her. So she tells him a story about a girl. She is the girl.

"He begins to realize who she is and as she tells him she has made him happy but he has made her happy too, he leaps up and begins to strangle her. They have already violently kissed and made love before this. Not unlike us. But now he wants to kill her for ruining his life. So she runs out and escapes and he lets her.

"And this other earth is our mirror. There are Borges mirror people living there, and they are us. They are our doubles.

"Just as who I was before tonight is drifting away now and my Double has emerged with you. She wants to see her Double. The woman she would be if she hadn't killed her lover's family.

"And the last scene is: she sees herself dressed in a nice coat with high leather boots with heels looking back at her in her bunchy made for practicality coat, hat, gloves. And they just stare at each other.

"Why am I saying this to you. That's not a question. Why am I telling you this story. Destiny arranged all of it. The party, her drinking, the crash, the death of his wife and child, his coma while she is in prison, her seeking him out, his permitting her into his life, their passionate embrace, and her journey to Another Earth.

"All of it planned to the tiniest detail."

"Why are you here in Venice?"

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Irresistible Destiny:Chapter 5 - Alterity

Twilight: Irresistible Destiny

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Suzanne - Leonard Cohen

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Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river

You can hear the boats go by

You can spend the night beside her

And you know that she's half crazy

But that's why you want to be there

And she feeds you tea and oranges

That come all the way from China

And just when you mean to tell her

That you have no love to give her

Then she gets you on her wavelength

And she lets the river answer

That you've always been her lover

And you want to travel with her

And you want to travel blind

And you know that she will trust you

For you've touched her perfect body with your mind.

.

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Chapter 5: Alterity

____________________________________________________________________________________

We can recall moments in the past when we had equal chances of living or dying - in a car crash, for example... Every time someone finds himself at a crossroads of this kind, he has two worlds before him... It is the same with each decisive moment, both with birth and with death. Just as the virtual dead man that I am continues on his way on the other side, carries on with his existence which runs just beneath the surface of mine, birth is that dividing line where on the one side I exist as myself, but on the other I begin, at the same moment to exist as other Such is the form of alterity...(Baudrillard Impossible Exchange 82)

EPOV 5

Anna Akhmatova - Modigliani

I listened to her as I looked into her eyes and I felt I had known her forever. And the words she was telling me were saying just what I was thinking and feeling. Yes I knew she was right. I knew her right away. There wasn't even time for me to say hello, would you like to go to dinner with me. Or take a walk with her through the alleys of Venice. No, there was no time at all. I had to make her mine immediately.

"I read a novel once and I kept reading one part over and over until I could never forget it. And I didn't know why I had to do that, I just did. And now I know. So I can tell it to you right now. It was written by Marguerite Duras.

"In the novel the captain of a yacht and his wife sail from port to port, stopping only briefly at places they have been before. They have been very much in love, but she keeps a secret from him about another man she only spent one hour with. A man who read her poetry and loved it. And in that one hour that she speaks with him, she falls in love with him. And says this to him":

" 'I wanted to tell you what I think, which is that … one always ought to keep oneself a ... place, yes, that's the word, a private place, where one can be alone and love. To love one knows not what, nor whom, nor how, nor for how long. To love... now all the words are suddenly coming back... To set aside a place inside oneself to wait, you never know, to wait for a love, perhaps for a love without a person attached to it yet, but for that and only that. For love. I wanted to tell you you were what I had waited for. You alone became the outer surface of my life, the side I never see, and you will be that, the unknown part of me, until I die.' " (Duras - Emily L: 98-99)

"And that is what I want you to know right now. That I have been waiting for you, waiting it seems like forever. I knew I would never stop waiting. And as soon as I gazed at you, I knew I had to have you. And that I could not wait another second, no matter what the consequences. 

It felt like madness but I couldn't have stopped if the building were burning down on us. If it had happened when the Twin Towers were hit, it would have been the same. That's the level of madness I felt when I saw you.

"So yes, I believe what you say. I have no idea what to do about it, but right now I don't care. I just need to have you again and this time I am going to savor you. For a very long time."

And I began to kiss her softly, then more urgently, then insistently, cruelly because I couldn't get enough of her. I couldn't stop and I would have gone on all night but her hands reminded me I had other parts of me besides my lips and mouth and they began to demand my attention.

I strained against her, then touched her everywhere and then after I had finished with her mouth, her breasts, her thighs, her hot center, I began the journey all over again.

My mouth was on her body and moved of its own accord, drinking her, devouring her, demanding her, never stopping, my hands between her legs, my body crushing her beneath me, then lifting up and pulling her over and I couldn't get enough of all this touching and eating her skin, hair, ears, hands, feet, breasts, and I knew if I began eating her folds and entrance I would never stop so I began tasting her, sucking her, smelling her until I was driven mad again and couldn't be tender any longer.

I was starving for her, hungry as I had never been for food, desperate for her, to be in her and I groaned and entered her again, slowly at first then harder, until I was frantic with desire, unable to stop and I slammed into her again and again until she screamed my name over and over.

And she tensed, held her breath, tried to stop but couldn't and began to tremble and convulse against me and I pounded into her harder and harder until I gave up and let everything go into her moaning and crying out and holding her so hard I thought I might break all her bones.

"You're mine now. You're mine. You're mine and no one else's. And I will kill you too if I see you, hear you, imagine you ever touching anyone else again the way you touch me. You're mine!" I grabbed her throat and knifed her eyes and threatened her with murder if she ever even thought of anyone else. "

My god what is going on with me. She laughed about this, but I cannot even smile about it. I am dead serious. She's mine, mine and no one else's.

Irresistible Destiny:Chapter 4:Alterity

Twilight: Irresistible Destiny

Each individual life unfolds on two levels, in two dimensions – history and destiny – which coincide only exceptionally. Each life has its history, the history of its successive events, its twists and turns – but elsewhere, in another dimension, there is only one form, that of the absolute becoming of the same situation, which occurs for everyone in the form of an Eternal Return.(Baudrillard The Intelligence of Evil: 79)

...destiny, is divided, like thought which comes to us from the other, each is the

destiny of the other, there is no individual destiny,(Baudrillard  Impossible Exchange:84)

Chapter 4: Mine

BPOV

I’ve gone mad. I heard what I just said to him. He will think I am insane. Well, I am. But how sane can he really be to take me like that. We cannot be new to each other. We must go a long way back into time. Who were we before? Where in history did we know each other before? We have always been lovers. How many hundreds of years have we been longing for each other? With that violence just now it has been way too long for either one of us.

“You knew me right away,” I said.

 “I know now that I knew you just as suddenly. It could have been Egypt, or Asia, or Atlantis, Greece. You have always been my lover just as I have always been yours. Through the centuries. And through the future because now is not just now for us. We think we are meeting for the first time now, but we aren’t. And somewhere in the future our lives are mingling, Destiny is arranging for us to meet again. We have never been without each other. 

And all the between times we are always just waiting for the Other, just waiting, doing whatever it is we do in the time and place, but always just waiting for the Other. Because when we meet all else stops. Whoever we were before we meet just goes on and diverges away from who we are when we are together. We become Other as soon as Destiny arranges our meeting. And when we sit and talk to each other about this we will know how Destiny has been guiding the world so we can at last come together.

“I know all this because I have been obsessed, because I have been trying to find you but I didn’t know I was looking, searching. I have been preparing myself to know you immediately, because it is so important that we know instantly so we do not chance missing each other, so we don’t waste any more time in this life now. What we are supposed to do I do not know. We will be given signs to tell us. Like the pigeons just now. That was telling us in a startling way that we could not ignore or deny.

“Please say something. Please tell me you know this. Please reassure me I’m not alone in feeling this right now. Please.”

I’m begging him to know this. I will beg all the rest of the night in as many ways as I can imagine until I know he knows this. I will beg forever.