Boys Flying Like Bees: Guy Davenport's Fetish of Precision continued
If we find that we need to ask "Why? Why does Davenport dedicate so much precision to boys in their underwear masturbating and reading books, to bees in their hives?" we can easily find an answer, one tied in to Davenport's view of "a fetish." In a letter to James Laughlin, Davenport wrote,
Jacques Lacan was, as far as I can tell, quite mad, but he has the only true theory
about fetishes. They are "le petit autre," true signifiers of the beloved. Freud, who had
no compassion, saw them as Perverse. . . . He would have taken candy from a child.
Clearly, Davenport was no great fan of Freud, but he did appropriate for a title one of Freud's phrases, "Wo Es War, Soll Ich Werden," one he found again at the intersection of Freud and Lacan. Davenport observed that "Freud's phrase, in which Jacques Lacan heard pre-Socratic eloquence . . . is a bone of contention among interpreters and translators." Literally, "Where it was, shall I be," is most often taken to mean that consciousness will be made to replace unconscious urges. But I believe Davenport was doing something wider with these words. The "it" is anything in the world his characters, acting from within their honeycomb of love and intellect, want to know about, want to experience - they put themselves "there," become as close as possible to one with everything. What can be learned, for example, from becoming where a wasp was? Not so much the Disney default of industriousness, but something related to their cells in their combs and hives.
If a fetish is indeed a "petit autre", a miniature of the (desired) other, in becoming that other we can live inside the dark stars of our own fetishes. Which is, whatever definition of "feitsh" we might ourselves embrace, where we all wish we could fly.
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[1] Guy Davenport. "Wo Es War, Soll Ich Werden," The Drummer of the Eleventh North Devonshire Fusiliers (San Francisco: North Point, 1990), 70.
[2] Guy Davenport. "Apples and Pears," Apples and Pears and Other Stories (S. F.: North Point, 1984), 203.
[3] Guy Davenport. The Jules Verne Steam Balloon (S. F.: North Point, 1987), 50-97.
[4] There are pedophiles in "Apples and Pears." But what they're after lacks the pole star of precision that Davenport's characters steer by, and, not surprisingly, while these aspire to being highly organized, they are not very successful-tellingly, their language is clumsy-and they achieve little more than a kind of rumpled voyeurism and their relationships have a puppeteer-with-docile-puppet woodenness. Our band of friends does not endorse their group.
[5] Guy Davenport. "The Bicycle Rider," The Jules Verne Steam Balloon (S. F.: North Point, 1987), 74-75.
[6] Guy Davenport. Every Force Evolves a Form (S. F.: North Point, 1987), 116.
[7] "The Richard Nixon Freischűrz Rag," Da Vinci's Bicycle (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins, 1979), 4.
[8] "Apples and Pears," 175.
[9] Davenport 1987, 112.
[10[ Guy Davenport. "Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier," Da Vinci's Bicycle (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins, 1979), 64.
[11] Ibid., 80.
[12] Ibid., 94.
[13] Jennifer Wigert. "The Sagacity of Circles: A History of the Isoperimetric Problem," posted at http://mathdl.maa.org/mathDL. Viewed 11-16-08.
[14] "Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier," 90.
[15] Ibid., 96.
[16] Guy Davenport (Highlands, N. C.: Jargon Society, 1966), 39.
[17] W. C. Bamberger (ed.). Guy Davenport and James Laughlin: Selected Letters (N. Y.: W. W. Norton, 2007), 101.
[18] Davenport, 1990, copyright page.