Gillian
Rose - Love's Work
The memoirist seeks to allow
free converse between memory and desire, between mere happenings and
the inner carnivalesque. Less circumstantial than self-exculpatory,
such writing can seem wilful and freighted with occult significance
that the reader is obliged to decode. Straight autobiography tells
it as it happened – with the usual elisions and contractions and
skatings-over-the-truth. The memoir shares more with the prose poem,
formally and substantively: it can possess a beautiful perversity, a
lyric finesse, that might not compromise its truth-claims too
fatally.
Gillian Rose died in 1995 of
ovarian cancer. A specialist in German metaphysics (with a twist of
Adorno), her work explored the possibility of an erotics of the
ethical. The ferocity of her intellect can seem self-consuming, and,
in Love's Work, it is put in service of articulating the agon
– her own stark term – that provided the motive force for all her
activities. Candour and obscurantism are tightly inwoven in this
book. We're compelled to make (perhaps unwarranted) inferences from
certain of the lines Rose pursues with her customary intensity. The
book is populated by a number of individuals brought to the fore and
utilised emblematically, almost. Rose asserts their importance to
her without strictly illustrating it. The first we meet, Edna, a
nonagenarian whose life-gourmandise is undiminished (cancer had
destroyed her face, and she wore, without vanity, a prosthetic jaw
and nose), she is Rose's 'Intelligent Angel' – an exemplar of one
who'd found an ideal orientation towards life and death. “She has
not been exceptional,” Rose concludes. “She has not loved
herself or others unconditionally. She has been able to go on
getting it all more or less wrong, more or less all the time, all the
nine and a half decades of the present century plus three years of
the century before.” Rose bids to identify her peculiar glamour
– in the etymological root of the word: “..the kind of magic
which Edna believes in: the quiet and undramatic transmutation that
can come out of plainness, ordinary hurt, mundane maladies and
disappointments.”
But Edna doesn't seem quite so
'unexceptional' to me. Nor does Rose isolate the quiddity of the
woman so attractive, so enabling to her. The personae who by turns
haunt and vitalise the book remain somehow radically enigmatic – or
Rose's language renders them so. This may simply be a matter of tact
– the memoirist is duty-bound to spare the feelings and preserve
the privacy of those she describes, chiefly because this form of
discourse trades on a powerfully amplified exposition of feelings
often contrary and disreputable. The honesty topos determines the
reevaluated bounds of the sayable. When Rose mentions in passing
that another of her friends, Jim, '..had been asked to leave
Bennington on the charge of corruption of students..”, the
circumstances of this expulsion are left unstated (although Rose
makes the predictable association with the fate of Socrates). When
discussing Yvette – a woman d'un certain àge
whom Rose befriended during her tenure at the University of Sussex –
her erotic idiosyncrasies are admiringly set forth (instancing that
naked vitalism that Rose, facing death herself, cleaves to), but Rose
displays an odd coyness over the question of whether certain of this
woman's instincts (her blitheness with regard to childhood sexuality,
for example) mightn't be subject to a more critical scrutiny. This
votary of the 'universal and sacred spirit of lust' could, viewed
from another perspective, come across rather more as a reckless
sexual raptor – whose instincts shade into the pathological –
than the ardent maquis of love – a kind of post-feminist Jacobin -
that her portrayal connives in.
Love's
Work is peopled with
such human trouvailles,
such outliers of eros. Rose places herself among them as a kindly
anthropologist, forgiving them, absolving them by the lights of her
own secular covenant. Their courage in the face of bodily
dissolution draws from her a guarded admiration. But we're to take
them as somehow exemplary, for the boldness of their negotiations
with death.
The
poet Geoffrey Hill, in a pained, exasperated elegy for Rose, hints at
her intransigence, at her absolutism: “You/do, of course
[understand him], since I am using your three primers...”:
Mourning
Becomes the Law,
Love's Work,
Paradiso:
a
good legacy which you should be proud of
except
that pride is forever irrelevant
where
you are now. So it continues,
the
work, lurching on broken springs
or
having to be dug out or jump-started
or
welded together out of two wrecks
or
donated to a good cause, like to the homeless
in
the city that is not just, has never
known
justice, except sporadically:
Solon,
Phocion – and they gave him hemlock
and
burned his body in an unhallowed place.
And
his ashes were taken up and smuggled
into
his own home, and buried beneath the hearth.
['In Memoriam: Gillian Rose', A Treatise on Civil Power]
Rose's
thought pivots on the axis of Love/Law; yet, in contention here are
not simply abstract données
that yield their own measure of intellectual marrow. “I find
love's work,” Hill goes on, “a bleak ontology/to have to
contemplate; it may be all we have.” For Rose, it is only when we
admit our primal wounding that the 'work' can begin.
The
book represents among other things a fleshing-forth of these concepts
– a companion-piece on praxis to set beside the theory of her
academic work. Rose has set herself to tutor us in our physical
vulnerability, and nowhere does she do it more magnificently and
terrifyingly than in the chapter detailing her cancer treatment: “My
interest is in the uncharted; my difficulty that I will inevitably
enlist, by connotation and implication, the power and grace of the
symbol. I need to invent colostomy ethnography.” Incarnation
is the severe central armature of the book. Rose botanizes her
cancer. She sweeps aside the iatrogenic niceties of the medical
profession, searching instead for a thematic hook on which she can
hang her experience – something novel, an idiolect new-minted;
something distinct, on the one hand, from the complacencies of the
'screwtape spiritualism' she deplores, and, on the other, the
language of systematic depersonalisation made use of by Medicine and
its functionaries: 'the esoteric but fatal language of clinical
control'.