Disillusionment: Part I
We might understand the emotional texture of disillusionment as an emptiness: to feel disillusioned is to exist within the void where our illusions used to live. The word implies that we are experiencing a newly empty relationship to the structures and institutions in which we live and work. This new relationship is much like the loss articulated by Matthew Arnold in “Dover Beach,” when he speaks of the “Sea of Faith” which was once “at the full,” but which now retreats, like pebbles caught in the undertow, with a “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,” exposing the nakedness underneath. Disillusionment is a stripped-away feeling that names the end of a process of mourning, or perhaps, if we’re more melancholic, one of many low points in a series of extreme positions in relation to the various pressures, beliefs, and material realities that govern our lives and that we can no longer, for the moment, recuperate.
When I talk with friends about my disillusionment, it doesn’t sound good. It seems that both I, and the world I once believed in, have rendered each other useless.
According to Spinoza’s metric for measuring affects, developed in the second book of the Ethics, disillusionment would likely be classed as a passion, in other words, a feeling that makes it more difficult to move our bodies and that is therefore contradictory to our survival. Bad feelings disable us with their uncontrollable strength, placing us in a kind of bondage. Disability and enslavement are two fraught terms in Spinoza that I need to return to before I’ve finished thinking through this.
What would it mean to think about disillusionment in very simple terms, as the shedding of illusions? And isn’t this stripping-down precisely the work of feminist politics? If disillusionment is allowed to be a process of awakening, revelation, learning, breaking with, then we may allow it to be something both affectively variegated and politically meaningful.
When Sara Ahmed talks about the feminist snap, she refers to a moment when the strain of living under heteropatriarchal systems brings us to a breaking point. This is, precisely, the moment we become feminists. Feminism, radicalism, is a process that happens through a series of awakenings. These awakenings do not always happen as a positive value, as moments that we can count toward our accumulation of experience or of knowledge, a groping toward the light from within the maw: rather, they happen when we are cut down, worn out, gradually and irrevocably frayed. Feminism is, in bell hooks’ parlance, a grown up word: it always shows up after the fact, after we’ve accumulated the experiences that prove its meaningfulness. It verbalizes and instantiates the position we take in order to explain the ways we have been rendered wordless, how we have been repeatedly silenced in a way we have not yet been able to name. Years later, feminism steps in to fill that particular void, the one that used to hold other dreams. We wake up and learn to speak our nightmares.
The snap is not a onetime event. It may be something that happens again, or something that we learn to make happen. During one of Marsha P. Johnson’s court dates, the judge asked her what the middle initial, “P,” stood for. As the story goes, she snapped her fingers and told him, “Pay it no Mind.” The feminist snap opens up the realm of the Snap! Queen: the queer femme of color who snaps her finger repeatedly, an abrupt, performative rejection of the legal and medical institutions that attempt to interpellate and therefore to break her. In Johnson’s weaponization of the feminist Snap!, “Pay it no mind” becomes both a name and a rejection of a name. “Pay it no mind” is a brush-off: it denotes breezy mutability and also impenetrability, cooly inviting the law to please just disregard her; it is an articulation of a feminist position against the state, but, unlike Antigone’s claim, not in direct contradiction to it. With the snap, Johnson invites the state to not recognize her at all. The snap across the empty courtroom echoes with liberatory potential.
What is the time-scale of the snap? Disillusionment may happen in a single moment in time, or as the repeated gesture of the snap-back, but that breakage is the effect of a long term wearing-out, an accumulation of scrapes and tears. This might look or feel many different ways; it may feel liberating, empty, frightening, delicious. For David, the protagonist of James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, disillusionment happens as a moment of sexual awakening, in which he realizes his own capacity for desire.
“I wished, nevertheless, standing there at the bar, that I had been able to find in myself the force to turn and walk out–to have gone over to Montparnasse perhaps and picked up a girl. Any girl. I could not do it. I told myself all sorts of lies, standing there at the bar, but I could not move. And this was partly because I knew that it did not really matter anymore; it did not even matter if I never spoke to Giovanni again; for they had become visible, as visible as the wafers on the shirt of the flaming princess, they stormed all over me, my awakening, my insistent possibilities.”
The possibilities appear at the end of a long phrase that describes their action in pronomial clauses before it names what they actually are: “they” had become visible, “they” stormed all over me. The phrasing, like a realization, moves from the vaguely animate, gnattish swarm of pronouns to the more concrete and no less pressing “insistent possibilities.” The possibilities disillusion him by clarifying what is now impossible. David’s inability to move his body toward the interchangeable “any girl” of heterosexuality comes from what is now “visible” to him, and how this visible reality–articulated aesthetically, as real as a bad print on fabric–renders the whole question of movement one that “(does) not really matter anymore.” It does not matter, because his desire is something that, once sensed, will continue to exist regardless of Giovanni’s presence. Experienced as a Spinozan passion, David’s desire and his awakeness to it bind him in place; the inevitability of this feeling is not transcendent or beautiful but nihilistic (it “does not really matter anymore”) and so material as to render it ugly.
Agency in this moment, and throughout Giovanni’s Room, looks like a struggle to stay above the water. Although Giovanni triggers David’s awakening, it is not Giovanni who controls his actions, nor is it David himself. His desire, likened later to a “beast which Giovanni (has) awakened” that will “never go to sleep again,” is something of which he is terrified, and over which he has no control except insofar as he can narrate it. David, the first-person narrator, controls only the story he tells himself about himself; his most crucial action, sex with Giovanni, is erased from that story, but also constitutes its shadowed center. This sex, unlike David’s painful and painstakingly-detailed encounter with Sue, is perhaps more meaningful for not being described. His silence might be a two-sided coin, motivated on one side by gay shame and on the other by a sense of the sacred.
At their edges, novels tend to hum with the ghosts of potential plots, the events that that cluster around the single story which actually takes place.
David’s awakening rests in speculative time: it places him in a relationship to his own future where the many choke out the one, where multiple possibilities divert and rearrange his sense of a single possiblity. Here, the writer and narrator imagine heterosexual conquest as a motion that becomes less and less possible as the queer counterplots replace it, the story careening forward and becoming, like the dark room of the book’s title, claustrophobic in its cluttered potentiality. There is a movement of replacement in this disillusionment: the one illusion, heterosexuality, becomes replaced with the realities of its many specific yet unspeakable alternatives.
An envoy from the other side of married life, the young wife Dorothea of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, offers a moment of realization about one’s life that, like David’s, cannot be named, when she experiences a slowly dawning awareness of her marital unhappiness as an inarticulate yet acutely felt replacement of illusion with reality:
Dorothea was crying, and if she had been required to state the cause,
she could only have done so in some such general words as I have
already used: to have been driven to be more particular would have
been like trying to give a history of the lights and shadows, for that
new real future which was replacing the imaginary drew its material
from the endless minutiae by which her view of Mr. Casaubon and
her wifely relation, now that she was married to him, was gradually
changing with the secret motion of a watch-hand from what it had
been in her maiden dream.
Summer Star writes of this replacement of an “imaginary” future with a “new real future” as a crucial component of the realist genre. For Star, reality occurs in the novel in moments of crisis, as a “changeling in place of the theory, delusion, or hope one held the night before” (839). Dorothea’s snap is not a sudden revelation, but the cumulative effect of an accrual of “endless minutiae” that have “gradually chan(ged)” her sense of things. As David puts it in Giovanni’s Room, describing his loss of desire for his girl, Hella, “it seemed to happen all at once–I suppose that only means that it had been happening for a long time.” The indescribability of the cause of Dorothea’s tears is not so much because it the situation is overwhelming as because it is subtle. The explanation of her mute sadness is a “history of light and shadows,” a phenomenon that exists both on a much broader scale than Dorothea’s own life, and also on the scale of the minute, in the infinitesimal play of shifting differences, overlaps, and gradients that occurs between light and shadows over the course of its moment. Eliot’s other image of the subtle, that of the watch-hand, is about the accrual of smallscale time. The snap is the effect of a series of shifts both analogous to and an effect of the watch-hand’s “secret motion.” The secretness of this movement is in its smallness of scale. As a result of this series of adjustments, Dorothea has found herself standing somewhere else in space, with a different “view” of her husband and her relation to him.
