by The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories (retail) (epub)
And we can see this process at work in our myth. The original ritual impels the couple through a solemn public space and towards the marriage-bed; the counter-ritual starts in that same bed, now a trap for the sinner and not a nest, and expels the guilty party towards a public space purged of all solemnity. The husband drugged in the marriage-bed is already paying the price for his transgression; having preferred excitement to security, he must abide by his choice, and forfeits safety absolutely. But there is more in store for him.
His wife’s selection, for her symbolic inverse of a church, of a hospital, is a masterstroke on the part of the collective unconscious. They are respectively the homes of a mystery resistant to analysis and an analysis resistant to mystery; a suggestive darkness, and an inescapable light.
We may add in passing that only structural anthropology increases mystery in the process of explaining it. Here at last science and religion marry and settle down.
And there is a further excellence to the patterning, in that a man who has spurned his chosen bed and sought sex elsewhere, is immobilized in a bed he hasn’t chosen; a bed in which the body is examined and treated clinically, without a moment’s consideration for the sensual component he has rated so highly. He occupies an asexual bed, then, lying there in limbo, defined by no relationships, and sharing the premises with other transients who at least have the prospect of returning to their interrupted lives. He, however, has sought to combine freedom of action with the security of the hearth, and has been brusquely deprived of both.
5. COMEDY/TRAGEDY
In our study of structural elements we have so far considered the glue, the sleeping-pills, the bed, and the hospital. There remain the hand and the penis. By her sarcastic conjunction of these two organs the wife insists on the comic rather than the tragic aspects of her predicament; she makes the dissolution of her marriage a matter for public laughter rather than private heartbreak. She represents her husband as caught in the act, but the act itself is ironically diminished; his posture convicts him not of adultery but self-abuse. The enforced junction of hand and penis yokes man’s highest ambitions and his betraying weakness.
(It is obviously his dominant hand that she so mockingly cements in place; impossible to imagine her spoiling the symbolism by insulting the left hand of a right-hander. That would be quite foreign to the exhaustive brilliance of a mind that doesn’t even know it is operating!)
She juxtaposes the opposable thumb, which was such an achievement of evolution, with the third leg – those guilty tissues which threaten to slide Man back into the swamp of undifferentiation. The woman declares the marital atrocity simply waste, the crime against herself mere self-indulgence.
In her construction of a counter-ritual the woman has developed a persona whose trademark is the ironic fulfilment of wishes; she has metamorphosed from one folk-tale character into another, from Captive Maiden into Witch. Her husband wants to be stiff elsewhere than in her bed? She can arrange it. He wants an adventure? She will see what she can do.
With her glue she ensures their separation, with the hardness she contrives for him she parodies his virility. But her final coup is her magical ability to use others to work her revenge; there is a superficial mercy to her actions with the tube of glue, but the surgeons must exercise their skills unstintingly. The way in which these members of the community seem to carry out the betrayed woman’s commands gives the punishment an air of impersonality; the woman herself refrains from the knife, but hands him over to her agents for surgery. They collaborate in his humiliation.
The knife is in fact being used to repair damage, but this is not apparent to the victim, except at that lowermost level where words mean two opposite things (compare Freud on the binary meanings of basic words). The patient’s hand cleaves to his penis, the doctors must cleave them apart again.
But the women in the hospital are essentially more important than the men. The surgeons are predominantly male, the nurses by and large female, and it is the nurses who make up the hospital community as perceived by the patient. The doctors pay visits, but the nurses seem to live on the wards. And so the final phase of the adulterer’s punishment is accomplished. With her woman’s laughter his wife hands him over to the laughter of women who re-enact the transformation of the female from subservient employee to ambiguous manipulator: women who touch him without tenderness, who are intimate with him but not interested, who tend without establishing a relationship with the man in their care; who confirm his exile from a world where the female can be taken for granted, and who may even be laughing behind their hands.
What remains of our original story? Certainly nothing of the sordid or trivial; these elements have been absorbed into their opposites. And simplicity too has yielded the complex, without losing its shape. For just below the surface of story, like the succulent separate threads beneath the skin of a perfectly cooked vegetable-spaghetti, lies the tangled richness of myth.
