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MARY Mc:CARTHY
we forget ourselves; we are "taken out of ourselves"; in the
same way, we forget ourselves in the dentist's chair. We are not
conscious of our personality. In sensatjon, we are all more or
less alike. Heat, cold, hunger, thirst, pain are experienced by
man, not men. And sensibility
is
only a refinement of sensation;
the sense of blue or green made on our retina is more finely
discriminated in an art critic than it is in the ,average man or
the color-blind person, but no useful division, humanly speak–
ing, could be made between those, say, who saw turquoise
as
green and those who saw it as blue. The retina is not the seat
of character. Nor are the sexual organs, even though they
differ from person to person. Making love, we are all more alike
than we are when we are talking or acting. In the climax of
the sexual act, moreover, we forget ourselves; that
is
commonly
felt to be one of its recommendations. Sex annihilates identity,
and the space given to sex in contemporary novels is an avowal
of the absence of character. There are no "people" in
Lady
Chatterley's Lover,
unless possibly the husband, who is impotent.
To cite the laundromat king again, the moment of orgasm would
not be the best moment for the novelist to seize upon to show
his salient traits; on the other hand, to show him in an orgone
box (i.e., in the frame of an idea) would be a splendid notion.
Similarly, the perambulating sensibility of Mrs. Dalloway, her
quivering film of perception, cannot fix for us Mrs. Dalloway
as a person; she remains a palpitant organ, like the heroine of
a pornographic novel. The character I remember best from
Virginia Woolf is Mr. Ramsay in
To the Lighthouse,
a man who
lacks the fine perceptions of the others; i:e., from the point of
view of sensibility he
is
impotent, without erectile aesthetic
tissue.
Sensation and sensibility are at their height in the child;
its thin, tender membrane of perception
is
constantly being
stabbed by objects, words, and events that it does not under–
stand. In lieu of understanding, the child "notices." Think of
the
first sections of
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
and
of
