From: Rich Puchalsky Subject: Re: The Bridge: spoil-o-thon Date: Sunday, May 06, 2001 9:45 PM Fourteenth post Metamorpheus: Four (part 2 of 3) One last mention of the barbarian dream: at its beginning, the barbarian mentions how magic has grown much more common, but that people will still need non-magicians to do ordinary things like building houses or planting seeds. He figures that magic can't be all it's cracked up to be, or that everything would be wonderful and all the folk would live in harmony, and they wouldn't need people like him (plus it'd be boring). This is basically another Culture reference. It also reinforces that the barbarian represents the lower class, and hints again at his death later. Orr wakes up and looks outside "It was early spring when I was washed up here; now the summer is almost over." Yes, it is, as we'll find out by the end of the chapter. He looks for the library again and can't find it. I think that not being able to find the library is a clearer representation of what may be actually organic damage causing the narrator to lose his memory; having a disaster occur as the library was about to be found always struck me more as an expression of the narrator not wanting to find it. Orr finds a man hitting golf balls near the top of the bridge, and doesn't recognize what the game is, so perhaps the narrator's memory really is damaged to some extent. Orr sleeps again and has a quick run-through of his recent dream images: being chased by trains into tunnels, being chained to the wall of the Greek Underworld as the barbarian lopes by, running on the revolving iron bridge. Arrol comes by again; Orr asks where she disappeared to yesterday, but she's unconcerned. She's been at a party. She quickly takes steps to seduce Orr; getting wine, showing off her dress, starting a fire, etc. Her lipstick is smudged and he uses the handkerchief that she had monogrammed to wipe it. That precipitates them kissing each other. After a bit of feeling each other, she tells Orr that she didn't think he would be so passionate; a remark that doesn't seem intended to be ironic, but which is, from someone who has initiated each stage of contact. They have sex. She's still wearing stockings, a corset, gloves, all sorts of strapped and ribbed silk things. He thinks of the barbarian's tower, where some of the mutilated women were wearing similar things. The straps form lots of X's, which remind him of the structure of The Bridge. She's on top. They both climax, but his is almost negligible, a "brief beat", and his first self-description afterwards is "I ache. I am exhausted." This is hardly great fantasy sex, it seems to me, it sounds more like he's had to get more in contact with the true state of his body. He says that he feels like he's just had sex with the bridge, and in a way it's true; no-one else is involved except part of his fantasy world. They have sex again, and again though everything seems to ostensibly go well, the narrator feels horrible. A few sentences: "Its climax chills me though; something makes it worse than joyless, makes it frightening, terrifying." "My orgasm is nothing, a detail from the glands [...]" Orr feels a gripping, a pressure, as though he's the body to be dressed, strapped, enfolded, etc. It sends a memory crashing through him: "Ancient and fresh, livid and rotten at once; the hope and fear of release and capture, of animal and machine and meshing structures; a start and an end. Trapped. Crushed. Little death, and that release. The girl holds me, like a cage." OK, we already know that the narrator does not exactly have a happy sexual life. But what's all this? Well, first, the narrator is flashing back to the car crash. In the description of the car crash in the first chapter, he describes how he's squeezed inside the crushed metal, trapped in a definite meshing of animal and machine. Second, his sexual fantasy just isn't working, his real body is just too trashed. Third, there's the interesting reversal of his clothes/bondage fetish from his partner to himself -- after all he really is the one who needs to be dressed and strapped to things in the hospital. But mostly you get the feeling that this is part of what he feels about sex all the time. He really seems to fear sex because he feels that it will give his partner control over him. If you want my opinion -- and you do, I would guess, because you've read this far -- one of the reasons he's messed up is because his leftist ideology tells him that jealousy is a result of his cultural programming, and one that he should reject. From Triassic: "he was appalled to find himself jealous when Andrea slept with somebody else, and cursed the upbringing that had told and retold him that a man should be jealous, and a woman had no right to screw around but a man did." Well, he's right about different standards for men and women being wrong. But jealousy is a lot older than our culture. It's like blaming capitalism for the existence of anger, or patriarchy for the existence of sorrow. Jealousy is actually a highly functional emotion. Who you sleep with generally has a pretty good correlation with who you spend time with and who you spend resources on. Relationships tend to hold together longer when the people involved are jealous, and don't want to hurt the other person by doing something that would give them good reason to be jealous. Let's even ignore all the economic/sociobiological stuff and imagine a relationship in the Culture. What is the most precious thing to a 200 year old resident of the Culture (male, let's say)? He has no possessions or need of any. No health problems, no mortality problems, no need to work or accomplish anything. In fact the most valuable thing that he has is his 100 year relationship with someone else. Shared experience is the one thing that can't be replaced. Sure, his partner may leave for months at a time, may sleep with other people, but what if they get interested enough in someone else so that they don't spend real time with him? You bet there will be jealousy, blazing jealousy, because the other person is doing things that are threatening what could be the only real value in the first person's life. The narrator in this book is in the same position as our imaginary person in the Culture. He's found a woman (Andrea) who is intelligent, beautiful, uninhibited, etc, and he really likes her. Well, if she leaves, he can't just find someone else, like a replaceable part. You bet he should be jealous. The more she "screws around" as he puts it, the greater the chance that he will be merely one of a number of replaceable people to her. She *is* "holding him, like a cage" because he needs her and she seemingly doesn't need him. So he has power fantasies where he is in complete control, and victimization fantasies where she is a witch with evil power over him. So. One last thing, "the hope and fear of release and capture". Ostensibly this is just about sex. But remember the end of his dream where he's running on the rotating iron bridge. He decides to run to death, and the witches who have been sexually tormenting him are crying, he is free, they are trapped. We have started to get the idea that maybe that's why he had the car crash, to force her to give him affection again. I'm sure he didn't plan for this to happen, but he's been "released" -- he's free to wander around in a dream world where in theory he can do or be anything -- while she's hopefully been "captured" by guilt.