Walter Wadas: Walter Wadas lives in Melrose, MA. He was formerly Assistant Director of the Chrysler Museum of Art. This review was originally published in White Crane Journal (#44). It is republished with permission from www.whitecranejournal.com online.
When we are children, growing-up seems a feat of great accomplishment. High emotion about daily miracles accompanies every experience. Daniel Mendelsohn looked at a child and in “The Elusive Embrace, Desire and the Riddle of Identity,” he tells about it. Mendelsohn held his infant godson Nicholas sprawled in his arms. “The baby had a weirdly grown-up expression,” Mendelsohn coos. “I thought he was contemplating me…¦ I stared back at him, wondering what he was thinking.”
Mendelsohn ruminates, “To be a lover, to be a desirer, a collector is to be self-obsessed, for desire is ultimately about yourself. But to be a parent is, ultimately, to efface yourself your self.” Then Mendelsohn pronounces himself a “great desirer.”
As a great desirer, Mendelsohn spreads himself thinly. About his tricks, Mendelsohn brags: “I have had sex with many men. Most of them look a certain way. They are medium in height and tend to prettiness. They will probably have blue eyes. They seem, from across the street, or across the room, a bit solemn. When I hold them, it is like falling through a rejection back into my desire, into the thing that defines me; my self.” Mendelsohn chases his phantasm: “Desire is movement rather than place. But even more, the memory of that long and haphazard pursuit speaks of a certain kind of relation to the rest of the world: experience rejected in favor of remembrance, the center rejected in favor of the margin. A sense of the beautiful hovering just beyond reach, to be rejected upon and considered. The rejection becomes, in its own way, another kind of possessing.”
The use of rejected upon and rejection evokes Narcissus transfixed in the water-mirror. Like Narcissus, Mendelsohn is seduced by the false other, false depth. He admits that vanity is a family trait, his maternal lineage. Together, Mendelsohn and his mother often looked at photographs of, she said, her beautiful relatives. There Mendelsohn, who has blue eyes, found his jaw and the shape of his head in a picture of his mother's dead uncle. Mendelsohn looks for himself; and when he is satisfied with what he finds when he has refracted a self from surfaces he is, like Narcissus, transfixed. Even gazing at baby Nicholas, Mendelsohn created his opportunity for self-obsession.
A mirror's embrace is not elusive; it is illusory. As a scholar of Greek, Daniel Mendelsohn is well read in ancient literature and knowledgeable about myths. He knows about Narcissus, about Antigone and Oedipus. Narcissus-like, Mendelsohn halts at every rejecting pool. He desires to believe that high tragedy and beautiful narratives lurk in his personal history. Preening, self-absorbed, he searches every mirror's false depths for them. Unlike a mirror, a memoir is the most self-indulgent of embraces.
In a literal sense, we each make our image as we look in a mirror because until we are opposite a mirror, our visage is not in it. We make a mirror be a mirror, be our mirror. Although we can look for and make mirrors everywhere, to do so is potentially hazardous because self-made mirrors seem especially likely to be untruthful, to be wish fulfilling. Unlike mirrors, portraits usually have an intervening agent, a painter or photographer as filter or interpreter. Self-portraits are possible, and they can be more observed, more sympathetic. But, perhaps ineluctably, self-portraits are self-theology. Wish-fulfilling.
The Elusive Embrace is beautifully written and elaborately devised. What it is about is self creation. Beholding such a profound enterprise, you cannot help but wonder how much is self-revelation and how much self-delusion. That is always the dilemma.
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