Double Cain

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Spring 1996 by Forter, Gregory

A woman was standing there. I had never seen her before. She was maybe thirty-one or -two, with a sweet face, light blue eyes, and dusty blonde hair. She was small, and had on a suit of blue house pajamas. She had a washed-out look. (Double 8-9)

Let's not be taken in by the centrality of vision in these examples ("Then I saw her," "I had never seen her before"), as we'll see in a moment that this is merely a favorite of Cain's tricks, the lure of a libidinal normality. For now, what's crucial is the absolute and almost metaphysical sense of necessity conveyed by the repetition of such an encounter. The Cainian hero, like it or not, cannot not love; despite the measured offhandedness of the tone, despite a casualness that makes it all seem-for the hero, at least-fortuitous, the sheer numerical insurgency of these moments indicates that for Cain there's no imaginable alternative to an originary love-bond that quite literally makes his world "go round." The other abrupts-the hero invests himself-the narrative world unfolds. Such a sequence is primal, foundational, structurally and ontologically indispensable. Everything follows from it-nothing, strictly speaking, precedes it-because the entire point of the encounter with the other is to banish all that comes "before" into the murky depths of novelistic prehistory while liberating the hero from a loveless "past" into a present completely saturated with (object-)love. Prior to that liberation-prior, in short, to object-love-there's only the splendid and unthinkable squalor of narcissism. "I was in the Tupinamba," "Then I saw her," "I had never seen her before": in the repressed beginning before these beginnings, the "I" exists alone, unbonded, in a "relation" to "itself" and a non-relation to others which requires that the subject be freed into love in order to save it from the state of war. For what, after all, can this narcissism be except that condition we noted earlier, where ego and object mutually annihilate each other in an identificatory amassment that knows no bounds? "[I]n the last resort," writes Freud, narcissism must be sacrificed and "we must begin to love in order that we may not fall ill" ("Narcissism" 66). The openings of Cain's books enact just this sacrifice, and Cain knows full well that the name of the sickness that narcissism threatens is violence, everlasting warfare-an identificatory belligerence that respects no difference and that only the bonds of love can cure." And yet, try as he might, Cain seems unable to speak this name. No sooner does he begin to utter it-no sooner does he begin retrospectively to imagine a moment "before" object-love-than he instead ends up saying something very much like "love" after all. "You have been with a man" says Juana to John Sharp in a crucial scene of Serenade;Iz "I speak of man you love." "Oh, I'm a fairy, is that it?" "Yes.fl

"Well thanks, I didn't know that." (141) The truth, of course, is that he did know it, that "Every man has got five percent of that in him, if he meets the one person that'll bring it out" (144), and that Sharp has, before the novel's "present," met just that person in Winston Hawes. The "illness" the novel sets out to cure would thus seem quite manifestly a "libidinal" one. Cain's opera-singer hero has made an unacceptable (because) homosexual object choice, which is utterly originary at the level of histoire-the "actual" sequence of events-even if it's revealed in the discours-the order in which the events are narrated-only when Hawes uncannily resurfaces more than half-way through the novel. At that point, when Sharp lifts up the telephone receiver to find Winston on the other end, "homosexuality" would seem to become the retroactive name for all that ails him. We now discover that his "unhealthy" attachment to Winston had led to a fantastic debilitation of masculine prowess whose primary sign is the ruined voice with which we find the hero at the book's beginning. "Hoaney," Juana continues,