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[proximoception]

The metaphors are violent and frequent, or anyway their frequency makes for a kind of violent effect, or maybe a thrown-about one is putting it better, since safety is assured: we keep coming back to the same situation. The metaphors change nothing, they just map out the buzz of electrons and possibilities in place, the essential movement inherent in this charged tableau. Something going nowhere in a hurry (one plausible description of the sex act).

It is very silly. Time and again she grabs him and the two fall down. A gentle, erotic kind of slapstick. It wouldn't be gentle if the man were doing the grabbing, it wouldn't be humorous if the woman were grabbing a man who wanted to be grabbed. By reversing gender stereotypes Shakespeare amuses in an exhcnaging-hats kind of way, but also permits a thwarted salaciousness that's quite funny too--consummation cannot happen, neither can crime, so we are hovering in frustrated relation to sex for an indefinite amount of time without being either offended or sated. Shakespeare is proving how much energy can be released by sex by holding us up to it, but with a wall between. We feel the electricity. We learn how this can power narrative for enormous lengths of time, can hold our interest fo renormous lengths of time, even if nothing is actually happening. We learn this might be what we're seeking in narrative, or that this is what, on some level, narrative seeks to continuously keep us drawn along by. A natural magnetism is employed on us. This learns us what we be. Natural, magnetized. We are magnets of the fucking variety.

Her speeches are comically long, his nonexistent or comically short--until that gets a little old, and he speaks at slightly greater length. Though Shakespeare's joke is how long he can go on and have us follow, he needs to ring changes, milk different aspects of the central conceit so that we feel the maximum amount of surprised at how bored we aren't, as it were. Some concealed art is involved in making us feel that no art is involved, that a basic repetition is serving to create interest--that there is one repetition, one absolutely untangled suspense we will tolerate, that of sexual expectation.

The contrast of red and white is constant: the contrast of red lips against pale skin, a sonneteer's beauty ideal (lilies/roses), becomes his spilt blood set off against his blood-drained flesh in death. A counterpoise of perfections becomes a stark opposition, which Venus bequeaths to all lovers after her--that of their desires and their circumstances. One unlucky event (she forgives the boar, he's just an animal) leads to a permanent disjointedness between love and life; though in a sense this disjointedness travels back in time and afflicts Venus herself, who Adonis never gives in to, except in passive contempt of rape so that she'll get tired and leave him be.

Shakespeare gets value out of the thwartedness of love making it more interesting, though. If it had worked, who would care? The threshold of it not quite working, the possibility of it being crossed by force, these ar eplayed with continuously, and make the poem readable despite its own teasing admissions that this should be tedious--Venus is parodized ad a bad sonneteer during the night, but her endless rhetoric has alread been exposed to us.

The potential endlessness of rhetoric is highlighted throughout. The poem blows up a short episode into 1200 lines, 30-40 pages.

The rhetoric is absolutist: the red/white contrast is probably slightly less common than the life/death one. Natural processes and elements and astronomical bodies and phenomena are brought in in rapid succession to figure the bodies and feelings and situations of the lovers. Total separation vs. total melting together are at stake here. Hence the creation of so much energy: All and Nothing are creating all lesser things in a thin rainbow of shifting, contingent existence between them.

The boar is death, but innocent. He cannot be appeased, but neither can he be angered: he has already done his work without her, in a sort of blindness--she says he was looking down, or would have loved Adonis too. Or perhaps wanted to kiss him, but was blind to the fact it could only kiss him by simultaneously killing. But death is blind, and if it loves us--runs at us with irresistible passion--it does so only in the sense of being an irresistible force. This connects love with nature as much as it connects death, something emphasized by "Love's" being herself at the mercy of it. Even that which causes love is cause dby love, as it were--it's a pandora released from a box.

The gender role reversal is deeply amusing, and helps take the edge off the rape elements, which presumably would have been destructive to the humor for Elizabethans as much as for us. Adnois being squeezed, helpless, by a greater force for hours doesn't feel like litigable kidnapping because the sense is that she ultimately ahs to give up: the sex act requires his consent. She's annoying him, that's all.

Sitcoms like to play with teh same role reversals. When they do, we simultaneously feel freedom and have the contingency of our roles confirmed: we feel the extent to which females do pursue, or might wish to, and the extent males might resist, or might wish they could, but also feel that this is silly, or unlikely, or a lie. It is a holiday that takes the sting out of our prisons, which are hypothetically voluntary: surely all we have to do to say no is say no, as males, and surely all a female has to do to say yes before being asked is to say it.

At times they are interchangeable--both have the same red and white, they meet in one another's eyes, their faces grow to one another when he agrees to a kiss, etc. Adonis' unwillingness is attributed by both to his age: at some later point, he might have mirrored every aspect of her desire. The total clash of some metaphors itself clashes with the self-identity offered by others. Love is an all or nothing affair, and somehow the clashing of all with nothing creates vacuums and distortions. It also speeds things up: the rapid supplantation of one metaphor by another, throughout, plays up both how desperate all this is but also how light. These are changesof the mind, and essentially comical, safe. What isn't safe is death, which walks in and fucks everything up. It provides a time limit. Though Adonis mocks Venus' 'give me a baby' arguments, it does seem to be what she ultimately wants (!) and it does prove to be a mistake on his part to not reproduce as quickly as possible. All he leaves behind him is a flower, the flower of a love that might have worked, of a world where this kind of thing might not have happened, where his beauty might have been passed on in morelasting form. A token, a memory, a lesson. Perhaps it relates to his bare, ambiguous beginning of yieldingness, in her arms. He doesn't say he'll never see her again, just that he wants to hunt tomorrow.

Shakespeare presumably takes many hints from Marlowe. He innovates though: 1. there is no consummation per se, though the kiss0-givings perhaps stand in for one, keeping tension alive, 2. couplets are replaced by stanzas--ottava rima is famously fast, though with no carry overs after stanzas, and the six line stanza is, as it were, the short version of fast. Also, by not carrying thoughts over between them, or breaking thoughts up within stanzas very often, Shakespeare speeds things up further, since the reader's mind is fed identical lengfths of material. This is a pleasing ordering principle, and puts steadiness in the rapid pace, so there's no tripping or reeling, as it were. 3. the Neptune passages of Hero and Leander are essentially blown up into a whole narrative, here--while the human story is taken up in Romeo and Juliet, perhaps.

Satire on sonnet writers: there is self-satire here, as a lot of bits and pieces of these Shakespearean sestets look like they were lopped from the Shakespeare's Sonnets cutting room floor--but these conceits, mostly about the beloved engaging in sexual activity so as to put more of their beauty into the world and time by breeding, actually gets answered here by the annoyed recipient of this advice. The lust, rather than family-mindedness (at least as a primary impulse) of the bessecher is also prominently on display. Adonis is a captive audience, mora than anything else, since Venus can't seem to effectively sexually harass him without the threat of penetration--with him we get the spectacle of how the Beloved Other of a sonnet sequence might be handling the constant rhetoric of the incoming sonnet-bombs--while in the night sequence we get the boredom and then exiting of all less involved hearers.

Shakespeare designed to please, I imagine, and this poem is very pleasant. People attest to its popularity by citing the number of editions it went through. Things are kept silly, but silly proves to be always at one remove from seriousness--as perhaps it has to be to be listened to for any length of time. The changes rung on seriousness include mocking it (the sonnet silliness of Venus), blocking it (the lack of threatening penis), and talking it to death (rhetorical evasions of Venus or the author stop sex from quite happening, prevent the death from quite being seen, prevent death from seeming entirely final through the device of the flower). Calvino's notion of lightness is well-exemplified here: the penetration of sex and of death are skirted, not shown. Their gravity is used to pick up speed, as it were, but they're never approached closely. What we see of his death is that she sees it, and even there what we see is her inability to see it. Physical descriptions are abstracted, both of death and of the beauty of the lover's body, both toward red and white, though also toward processes of nature and bodies of living things---snow, flowers etc.

The birds and the bees come in in the form of two horses, which counterpoint the audience's expectation of how gender roles usually play out, but also interpose bodies, hence the bodiness of how sex normally goes, as compared to the resisting human will of Adonis and blah blah blah human rhetoric of Venus. Humans think and talk and decide and are therefore different, but this only puts us at certain qualified removes from animality..

What's going on with the hare passage though? One is led to be very sympathetic of the poor, doomed rabbit. I suppose Venus' desire to talk him into hunting something easy gets hijacked by her vivid fears of how easily he might be hunted down by an angry boar. By death, which gets us all if we don't breed.

What's unknowable is what relation this bears to whatever relationship might have been behind the first subsequence in Shakespeare's Sonnets. But we can guess Shakespeare didn't think he was a virtually irresistible sex goddess. The melancholy of refusal might be behind all this, but if so it's pretty damn sublimated. We feel for Venus despite ourselves, but don't feel the pain of her rejection because of how impolite, Quixotic, abrupt, randy her attachment to Adonis seems. THe pain we only share when she starts to fear for his life, then when she sees him losing it. Shakespeare tries to make all this touching, and it is, but in a strange way, since he's made her so cartoonish previously. Injectionof reality into silliness might be a way you can get away with injecting heavier doses of reality into willing readers than you otherwise might--a way of telling it slant, bringing out the pieta behind any piefight. Not that Shakespeare's up to a lot here, necessarily, but he is pretty much saying beauty is sexual, ephemeral, animal, and can only be kept alive by reproduction. And maybe also that that sexual, ephemeral, animal beauty (in youth) is the only point of being alive anyway, is the only sweet thing we'll find. This is paganism and can get you killed if you don't keep it light in every sense. If you don't sneak the heaviness of death, real death, not Christian test-death in in a cloud of confectioner's flourishes.

But Love's being in love with you is also a metaphor for puberty--Venus doesn't have sex with people, she puts sex in people. This he resists too long and dies without an heir. The conflation of Venus' two roles, allegorical and literal, is also amusing, maybe in a way poking fun at Spenser, though I suspect Spenser poked plenty of fun at himself in that mode. It also overdetermines the point: by having Love's (that she's called Love--strictly, the role of her son--paganly conflates Lust and Love, probably pointedly), ahem, by having Love's siege of Adonis' psyche be identical with her siege, as a lover, of his body, the point's driven home that love-lust is ridiculously, ubiquitously, abruptly powerful and will make you drop every other errand to pursue it, even the errand of planting it allegorically rather than directly, even if you invented love-lust or ARE love-lust.

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[grashupfer.livejournal.com]

Please please post the final version when you're done.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Cutting out the lengthy middle, which is just quotation and comparison:

Memento mortis and the Hare: A Close Reading of Venus and Adonis, 679-708

Venus, apparently advertising to Adonis the validity and excitement of hunting a hare instead of a boar, slyly evokes the initially blithe hare’s gradually dawning realization that he is doomed. By this she hopes that Adonis will recognize the reality of his own peril, should he not drop the project of hunting the boar, in the hare’s. Beyond his strength, Venus fears Adonis’ prey will turn predator, a role reversal he shrugs off when she first predicts it—hence her cunning rhetorical attempt to make him feel as a sympathetic auditor of the hare’s story what his pride or ignorance refuses to face in his own case. The power of narrative effects a role reversal of hunter and hunted, causing Adonis to share the mindset of the hare he hypothetically hunts, and Venus borrows Shakespeare’s dramatic and verbal resourcefulness to sneakily dovetail that predator/prey reversal into the one he refuses to imagine. Ironically, the passage also anticipates Venus’ own behavior on finding out that Adonis has been killed, however, linking love and death as equally harsh and fateful facts of nature.

***

The hare dies off camera, as it were, and Venus flies out of the narrative at the end of the poem, but it is understood that each has suffered a fate as final as that of Adonis. Adonis fails to heed Venus’ warning, but the warning’s applicability is universal, as is perhaps its ultimate uselessness, befitting the repeated identification of the boar with death itself. While Venus herself cannot be killed, her love, as much beyond her control as Adonis’ death is beyond his own, proves also to be as dark a fate. Being doomed to love a boy determined not to love her back, a miserably contingent position, is replaced by the still greater misery of being forever parted from him by his death. Because of what she has suffered, the unstrung Venus pronounces her curse on all future lovers: as it had for her, love will seem a blissful release but prove a horrible trap. As she is allegorically elided into “love” at various points in the poem—which should be her son’s role, strictly—this etiology of star-crossed romance in a sense goes back in time to trap even her: she’s love, but since she loves, the curse love put on love afflicts love too, which affliction is why she curses future loves. The adversarial relationship to fact which is characteristic of the emotional attachment she allegorically represents is something Venus both deliberately puts into effect at the end of the poem and participates in, from its very beginning, as a lover. Before love was love, love seems to have been pretty much the love we know—or at least the one Shakespeare presents as normative. This is both an entertainingly silly and an artistically profound short circuit. It implies that things could never have been any other way; the curse on love was in effect even before it was pronounced, so it is presumably integral to how reality is constituted. It also points up the fundamental, wildly overflowing power and irrationality of love: even the person alleged to be in charge of it, even the person who is it, is unable to control it, unable even to stop it from taking charge of herself. The slow dawning of the realization that one has become trapped in an environment one had previously had the run of is vividly depicted in Venus’ hare story, but not only does it fail to persuade Adonis to switch targets the next day, her story also turns out to be her story. As befits the daydream of a god, it proves prophetic—in this case redundantly so, as it is the story not only of Adonis’ star-crossed love of hunting and of love’s for him, but of any love.