codependency
the dance of ego and eros
I first read Henry James’ novella The Beast in the Jungle in college, and its tragic intensity has stayed with me. It’s a hard story to forget, although nothing happens. And that’s precisely the point. (Not sure a story published before anyone alive was born warrants a spoiler alert, but consider yourself warned.)
It’s the story of John Marcher who believes that his life will be marked by some momentous fate, which awaits him like a crouching “beast in the jungle.” He won’t marry because he has to face this unknown (possibly wonderful, possibly catastrophic) fate alone. He reveals his secret to just one person, May Bartram, who becomes his best friend and confidante. She falls in love with him, but he fails to see this, choosing not to get romantically serious with anyone. She dies, and his fate is ironically revealed to him.
From Byung-Chul Han’s The Agony of Eros:
The world appears only as adumbrations of the narcissist’s self, which is incapable of recognizing the Other in his or her otherness—much less acknowledging this otherness for what it is. Meaning can exist for the narcissistic self only when it somehow catches sight of itself. It wallows in its own shadow everywhere until it drowns—in itself.
John Marcher is the quintessential narcissist. He lives out his life as a bachelor, obsessively waiting for this spectacular thing to happen to him. He’s constantly looking to May Bartram to validate his fate and help him understand it. He imbues her with a prophetic power that she (of course) doesn’t have. When she’s ill and dying, she makes one final attempt to get him to see her as she is: a woman who loves him, someone to be loved and desired in return, but her effort is completely lost on him. The scene is heartbreaking.
[May Bartram:] “Don’t you know—now?”
“‘Now’—?” She had spoken as if some difference had been made within the moment. But her maid, quickly obedient to her bell, was already with them. “I know nothing.” And he was afterwards to say to himself that he must have spoken with odious impatience, such an impatience as to show that, supremely disconcerted, he washed his hands of the whole question.
“Oh!” said May Bartram.
“Are you in pain?” he asked as the woman went to her.
“No,” said May Bartram.
Her maid, who had put an arm round her as if to take her to her room, fixed on him eyes that appealingly contradicted her; in spite of which, however, he showed once more his mystification.
God, men are so oblivious was my first thought when I read this. Even the maid is trying to clue him in, but he just doesn’t get it. He’s willfully blind to her emotional needs, treating her instead as a mystical, sphinx-like figure who has the keys to his fate. (Ironically, she does, but not in the way he thinks.)
After she dies, he misses her terribly and visits her tomb. At first, he thinks that the beast in the jungle—his fate—is to lose her, and he laments that it should be a “common doom” rather than “rare and distinguished.” But on a subsequent visit, he looks across the graveyard and sees a man who’s visiting another tomb. They make passing eye contact, and the expression on this man’s face shakes him to the core:
The stranger passed, but the raw glare of his grief remained, making our friend wonder in pity what wrong, what wound it expressed, what injury not to be healed. What had the man had, to make him by the loss of it so bleed and yet live?
He sees in this man’s face a suffering that he’s never endured, and by contrast, he realizes he’s never loved anyone the way this man has. The full force of his fate comes crashing down on him with this final understanding.
She had lived—who could say now with what passion?—since she had loved him for himself; whereas he had never thought of her (ah how it hugely glared at him!) but in the chill of his egotism and the light of her use. Her spoken words came back to him—the chain stretched and stretched. The Beast had lurked indeed, and the Beast, at its hour, had sprung . . .
When I first read this story, the takeaway was obvious: Don’t be John Marcher. Loneliness kills. A life without love is not a life lived at all. In waiting for an extraordinary event to happen to him, Marcher rejects emotional intimacy, and in the end, suffers the regret of not having truly lived. A modern day Marcher (and there are plenty of them out there) might be so focused on his career that he postpones dating and relationships until he feels like he’s become somebody, a milestone so elusive that he’ll spend his whole life chasing it.
But in reflecting on this story ten years later, I’m more interested in May Bartram. In some ways, she’s just a device to tell Marcher’s story. While he’s waiting for some spectacular fate to befall him, we’re made to believe she’s waiting for him to fall in love with her. You could just as easily criticize her passivity as his (why doesn’t she just walk away, live her own life?), but when you’re truly in love with someone, it’s hard to leave them, flawed as they are—in fact, especially if they’re flawed.
Eros, in contrast, makes possible experience of the Other’s otherness, which leads the One out of a narcissistic inferno. It sets into motion freely willed self-renunciation, freely willed self-evacuation. A singular process of weakening lays hold of the subject of love—which, however, is accompanied by a feeling of strength.
— Byung-chul Han, The Agony of Eros
You could say that May Bartram experiences Eros. She subsumes herself in Marcher’s predicament and lives a life of passion. She suffers for it, for there can be no passion without suffering. Her illness is never revealed, but it’s implicitly linked to a deficit of love. One imagines her like a plant—she’s described as pale, wearing a “faded green scarf”—giving away all her vitality to a man who can’t reciprocate her passion. She wilts away from this lack of nourishment. She’s weakened by Eros, but she also feels strength in the power he imbues her as a prophetess, a witness to his fate.
Modern psychologists would describe Marcher’s and Bartram’s relationship as a classic case of codependency. In a typical codependent relationship, both people need each other, but their needs exist on different planes. The codependent person is high-functioning, taking care of the person who has some addiction/flaw, but in doing so, overcompensates for them and enables their self-destructive behavior.
John Marcher needs May Bartram to reinforce his narcissistic worldview. By affirming his fate, she gives it legitimacy, and although she wants more from him (emotional and physical intimacy), she’s rewarded with his confidence, which fulfills her codependent need to feel needed. So she sticks around. She’s the Echo to his Narcissus (the original codependent pair). She literally repeats his words back to him, validating his obsessive belief in his fate.
Contemporary society has become what Han calls an “inferno of the same.” Our selfie-loving, social media-bingeing culture perpetuates a certain ideal of love and beauty. Anything that falls outside of this ideal is rejected. This culture of sameness is pervasive in dating. Everyone posts the same types of photos on their profiles. There’s a formula to getting more swipes and likes, and the apps will happily give you pointers. Like Narcissus, we’re consumed by our own image and seek positive reinforcement everywhere (the echo chamber).
Today, love is being positivized into a formula for enjoyment. Above all, love is supposed to generate pleasant feelings. It no longer represents plot, narration, or drama—only inconsequential emotion and arousal. It is free from the negativity of injury, assault, or crashing.
— Byung-chul Han, The Agony of Eros
Han argues that true love should “invade and wound us.” But given the primacy of the ego in today’s society, we have commoditized love, turning it into an entirely positive good for consumption. As a result, we’re unable to embrace “otherness,” to experience true erotic desire with all its necessary pain and suffering.
Ego and Eros, narcissism and the Other, sameness and difference: we are not meant to pick one polarity over the other in choosing how to live and love. The Beast in the Jungle is not just about a guy named John Marcher who’s an idiot for not loving a good woman. It’s about two people trapped in a codependent system in which both parties are complicit in reinforcing the essential flaw of the other. A more useful takeaway is to be conscious of this dynamic in our relationships, romantic or otherwise.