Death's Work

On Rosalind Belben’s The Limit

“Birth was the death of him.” – Samuel Beckett

No relationship is perfect. It is impossible for there to be a perfect relationship because love is disjunctive. The disjunction is not between the lovers but between their love and reality. Reality demands our death. Love demands infinity, and we can never live up to this demand.

Perhaps this sounds romantic. Fine. Love is also grotesque. We have, by and large, overcome the state of nature. Nasty, brutish, short? Pleasant, boring, long. The remaining source of our suffering: love. They fuck you up your mom and your dad, they don’t mean to but they do. Follow Phillip Larkin to the end, beyond his being verse, and you’ll find another conclusion: don’t love. And making love? Equally grotesque. The inner sanctum of our hearts, where disgust becomes fetish.

Between these two truisms, one romantic, the other cynical, lies the entirety of Rosalind Belben’s forgotten and beautiful novel The Limit, recently republished in the NYRB classics series.

The Limit is the novel of Anna (dying, dead) and Ilario( Italian, alive). They are married. The prose – strange, asyndeton, syntax garbled – jumps between at least three viewpoints: Anna, Ilario, and an omnipresent narrator. Beginning from Anna’s deathbed we jump backwards and forwards. Anna and Ilario’s relationship is displayed in all its critical moments, as well as snippets of Ilario’s life after her passing. The narrative is polyphonic and non-linear. The chapters repeat titles with increased numbering, centered around definitions from the Hamlyn Encyclopedic World Dictionary. They are: Transmigration (“the passage of a soul at death into another body”, chapters 1, 15 and 19), Rapture (“the carrying of a person to another place or sphere of existence”, chapters 2, 4, 9 and 17), Grief  (“a cause or occasion of keen distress or sorrow”, chapters 3, 8 and 13), Sea Change (“a change brought about by the sea”, chapters 5, 12, and 14), Childhood (“the state of time of being a child”, chapters 6, 11 and 16) and Future (“time that is to be or come here after”, chapters 7, 10 and 18).

 The text, we can say, is difficult. Here’s a passage, chosen at random:

I was eleven when. I was eleven when he: set out for a walk , to the other side of the woods , at two precisely in the afternoon. And in this wood of ours wild anemones still grow. He passed brimble bushes, primroses, beneath sweet chestnuts he prodded the soft peat with his cane. Or was it a stout walking stick. He strode through gorse, bracken, heather. Ling heather. At a time, simply at a time, the moment never to be established, he arrived. The river was at full spring flood: that we know full well. Full, everything: replete, satiated.

Belben’s prose is difficult in all her works. In The Limit, however, we might suppose a justification. Anna is dying, Ilario watches her, comes to care for her at the hospital. In this moment where consciousness lapses, where one goes from materiality to memory, a dense prose littered with shifting perspective is justified. Many books about death, or at moments of depicting death, utilize difficult prose. I will refrain from citing Paul Bowles as I am wont to do – “reach out, pierce the fine fabric of the sheltering sky, take repose” etc, etc. – but the examples are plethora.

The Limit is not a novel about death. It bills itself as one, certainly. It is about love. And to be a novel about love and not romance, it must also be a novel about all the most grotesque moments of love. Watching your partner die might, for example, be one of these grotesque moments.

Another grotesque moment of love? Your parents; “protect me from my mother. Make my father beloved come alive.” This chapter, the first Childhood chapter, pushes along two separate points. One, Anna’s horrible mother. Two, her beloved dog, killing a cat. Perhaps these are not scenes of love. Anna declares: “I hate my mother. As I have not hated any human being then or now, or shall hate as much again.” The betrayal of a cruel mother, the betrayal of the family pet reverting to its animal instincts. The difficulties are the same. In the second Childhood chapter we learn that the father beloved has squandered the family fortune before drowning in a river. His death is either suicide, snake bite or both. This too is betrayal. But betrayal is born of trust, the deepest ones born of love. In its presence or absence its horrors are the same.

Describing love as grotesque? Justifiable. But love making? Surely puritan. Wavering, Ilario and Anna struggle to make love on their honeymoon. She is “forty, a virgin, and too narrow.” The attempts produce distress: “Anna glued her face to the sheet. Mentally she separated me from my cock.” Not just Anna, however:

And then, when she’d grown accustomed to the sight of naked me, she ogled my body. Convulsed in raucous laughter. A crescendo of embarrassment. I felt menaced by so many conflicting emotions. Sheer anger made me sweat: although the weather outside continued cold, racked upon the bed our skins stuck together, issuing crude sucking noises. Yes, the sweat was mine: your skin, I remember, remained dry. Unattractive.

Eventually they copulate; “the degree of his regret seemed out of all proportion to the event.” Do not take these difficulties for distaste or distance, however. The next chapter Belben will tell us of, not show us, their love, describing Illario as sitting “besides a person whom he loves – very much”. This is to assuage our doubts. What the novel shows us, ultimately, is the depth of their love, the depth of love in general.

All the grotesquery of Ilario and Anna’s consummation comes to signal affection. In the first Future chapter, Ilario is on a ship. He has a met a woman. They get (it) on. She reminds him of Anna. They fuck too. But it is destined, which means mechanical: “a love making later could only be the outcome of tortured intense discussion.” Ilario is haunted by images of Anna, yet their intercourse is perfect: “Slowly, quietly, gently. The passenger peers at such a brown man, physically perfect, many years older than herself, with whom she is copulating, with great pleasure.” Emotionless and frictionless and in completed contrast to the last scene of love making. The difficulty of Anna and Illario’s first encounter enters it full force in this contrast. What’s perfection without emotion?

Gillian Rose’s memoir Love’s Work takes as its watch word the difficulty of not just love but life. The book’s epigraph, “Keep your mind in hell, and despair not”, is taken from the sayings of the Eastern Orthodox Russian monk Staretz Silouan. Silouan was apparently told this phrase in a dialogue he had with none other than Jesus Christ himself. “Keep your mind in hell, and despair not” sets the tone for Rose’s recounting of a life of difficulties. We might object: Rose’s sufferings were not extreme, nothing beyond the experiences of a middle-class life. This only underlies the point. To love and live will be to suffer, to put one’s mind in hell. A difficult childhood – dyslexia and divorce – lead onto other moments of difficulty for Rose. She falls for a priest, an impossible situation. This leads Rose to clear-eyed reflections; “love-making is never simple pleasure.” Indeed, there is another word for such activity. Or: “To spend the whole night with someone is agapē: it is ethical.” But the ethical is no easy thing to achieve, not a state of rest but of striving.

Structurally, Love’s Work is the opposite of The Limit. This is pure chance, there is no evidence Rose read Belben. However, The Limit is a book ostensibly about death that is really about love. Love’s work is the opposite. A book ostensibly about love that is really about death. For the unsuspecting reader – one that skips the blurb and Michael Wood’s introduction and has perhaps also been living under a rock – will find Rose reveal her cancer diagnosis halfway through the book. She is somewhat coy about this, knows that this is in some sense a cheap literary trick. Yet it heightens the thematic tensions of the book and Rose’s dictum, “keep your mind in hell, and despair not” now gains a certain solidity. Death is something else that must be confronted, and confronting it is just as impossible as love. The circle is complete.

Rose’s worldview comes together in her critique of new age spirituality. Such nonsense erases the grotesquery of love and of life. The advice to be exceptional, to love all, the see yourself as some cosmic intertwined being and to simply not worry about it are all acts which will destroy you. There are no happy hippies. As Rose argues: “It burdens the individual soul with an inner predestination: you have eternal life only if you dissolve the difficulty of living, of love, of self and other, of the other in the self, if you are translucid, without inner or outer boundaries.” That would be no life at all, however. Furthermore, it would make love in impossible:

exceptional, edgeless love effaces the risk of relation: that mix of exposure and reserve, of revelation and reticence…it denies there is no lover without power; that we are at the mercy of others and that we have others in our mercy. Existence is robbed of its weight, its gravity, when it is deprived of its agon.

The difficulty of love turns out to be the difficulty of dying.

Love is grotesque. That is what makes it love. Towards the end of The Limit Illario is watching over his ill wife. He notices she has soiled herself. He shrinks from the situation at first, but there is no nurse around. He cleans his wife himself. He does not relish this task – “A trifle pale, my gills.” – but he does it nonetheless. Up against the vulgarities of the body you must decide what is stronger, your devotion or your disgust. Love affirms itself in this overcoming, to be loved is to the subject to this feat. Later you will need to be forgiven for your trepidation, and they will need forgiveness for their weakness. Rose: “to live, to love, is to be failed, to forgive, to have failed, to be forgiven, for ever and ever.”

Rose’s cancer spreads from her ovaries to her bowels. She requires a colostomy and a colostomy bag. “I want to talk about shit.” Rose knows this will make her readers squeamish. She plies us with details: “deep brown, burnished shit is extruded from the bright, proud infoliation in a steady paste-like stream in front of you.” This is neither erotic nor shocking. It simply is. Rose overcomes her disgust, invites us to as well, as a mode of continuing on, of continuing to live and of continuing to love.

I said earlier that Belben’s novel is beautiful. It is beautiful because of its difficult prose, and it is difficult because it fashions us a love we can recognise. There is love and there is tragedy. But in between, nestled inside of love itself is difficulty. Distance, disgust, and death.  This is the power, the mercy and the violence Rose sees as inseparable from love. And it is a true and human picture of love and life. In going through the moments of such intensity, in staging her novel as a series of moments of distance, disgust and death, Belben portrays a truer and more detailed picture of love in under one hundred pages than many authors achieve in several hundred. The difficulty of style turns out to be the difficulty of life which is the difficulty of love. Life and love are there then, conjoined and made intelligible under another sign: that of death. Love’s work, for Rose, is that she is bound to get love all wrong without ever giving up on it. Death’s work is to bring this process to a close. At the limit love’s work becomes intelligible in all its glory.