Homo Irrealis by André Aciman

Author:André Aciman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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In the makeshift “boudoir” of Maud’s bedroom, Jean-Louis and Maud are analytical in a situation that is unbearably intimate and in which most people would much rather wish their senses might take over. But analysis is not allowed to slip into hasty sensuality. Here the mild gêne and the occasional lapses into total silence between the two are so intense and so disarming—one is tempted to say denuding—that they, more, even, than the bed itself, keep prodding at the hovering sensuality of the moment.

The senses cannot deflect analysis; they become analytical. Passion in this instance, as is more often the case than people admit, is not really the end, but the cover, the way out, the pretext; physical contact often buries the tension between two individuals who cannot stand either tacit ambiguity or the rising awkwardness between them. In some cases, it is speech that is spontaneous, not passion; speech undresses us; passion can be a cloaking device. This reversal, which would become the hallmark of so many of Rohmer’s films, is not just using talk to deflect or defer sex. It is, rather, a desire to find the sort of intimacy that sex, allegedly the most intimate act between two individuals, hastily cheats us of by sidestepping intimacy altogether. In Rohmer’s world, passion is nothing more than a desired blindfold that allows us to work around the unbearable moment when we are forced to disclose who and what we really are.

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