{"id":60477,"date":"2013-09-24T15:31:46","date_gmt":"2013-09-24T19:31:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=60477"},"modified":"2013-09-25T13:07:42","modified_gmt":"2013-09-25T17:07:42","slug":"empty-vessals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2013\/09\/24\/empty-vessals\/","title":{"rendered":"Empty Vessels"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"8439975864_ccf92a2b84_z\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019ve got a lot to learn,\u201d a man she meets on an airplane says to Lise, the protagonist of Muriel Spark\u2019s 1970 novella The Driver\u2019s Seat<\/i>. \u201cRice, unpolished rice is the basis of macrobiotics\u2026 It is a cleansing diet. Physically, mentally and spiritually.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI hate rice,\u201d Lise says.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo, you only think you do,\u201d he replies.<\/p>\n

This character, the overconfident, pushy bore bent on convincing people they do<\/i> care about things they aren\u2019t interested in, is so familiar that if we laugh in recognition, it\u2019s only to keep from crying. We can all at least be thankful that in the past five years the problem of men explaining things to women has not only come to public attention, but been packaged, meme-ified, and widely distributed\u2014it\u2019s a thing<\/i>, a concept with which to view power dynamics and discourse, and avoiding mansplaining is maybe becoming a cultural value.<\/p>\n

In her November 2012 article \u201cA Cultural History of Mansplaining\u201d for the Atlantic Monthly<\/i>, Lily Rothman defines mansplaining as \u201cexplaining without regard to the fact that the explainee knows more than the explainer, often done by a man to a woman.\u201d This is a phenomenon that people have found instantly recognizable and endlessly applicable to cultural situations and to their own experience. Take for instance this, from Twitter user @PedestrianError: \u201cI don’t normally unfriend people on Facebook, but there\u2019s on perpetual mansplainer that I think is gonna have to go.\u201d Or @abrahamjoseph on the New York Democratic Mayoral Primary debate: \u201cde Blasio using his mansplaining voice on this slush fund question #nyc2013.\u201d It is so useful a concept\u2014and so consistent a pattern, to take The Driver\u2019s Seat<\/i> as only one example\u2014that it\u2019s strange that no one attempted to articulate it before Rebecca Solnit\u2019s seminal 2008 essay \u201cMen Explain Things to Me.\u201d <\/p>\n

Solnit begins \u201cMen Explain Things to Me\u201d by describing the many obnoxious men who have attempted to educate her on subjects that, as a historian and author of significant acclaim, she has researched and written about. Over the course of the essay, as Solnit points out with some wonder in an introduction she wrote for it in 2012, she explores how \u201cwhat starts out as minor social misery can expand into violent silencing and even death.\u201d This is because male explaining, arrogance, and condescension is a way that women are robbed of their voices, their ability to testify with authority about their experience and their knowledge.<\/p>\n

This issue is intimately connected to the origins of the Women\u2019s Movement, as \u201cat the heart of the struggle of feminism to give rape, date rape, marital rape, domestic violence, and workplace sexual harassment legal standing as crimes has been the necessity of making women credible and audible.\u201d In feminist politics this interplay of witness and silence is more straightforward than in feminist art. In literature and cinema, female characters\u2019 reticence can be an act of refusal—a choice to step away from the table and leave the game, to guard what is private. If, in Solnit\u2019s words, men\u2019s condescension \u201ccrushes young women into silence by indicating … that this is not their world,\u201d female silence can throw the lies, delusions, contradictions, and cruelties of this male world into stark relief.<\/p>\n

Dame Muriel Spark was the most slight and sly of the great twentieth-century novelists. All of her books, including The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie<\/i> most famously, but also The Girls of Slender Means<\/i>, Memento Mori<\/i>, The Ballad of Peckham Rye<\/i>, and more than a dozen others, are immaculately off-kilter, with plots that feel carefully controlled and at the same time subject to any whim that might take the author\u2014because Spark\u2019s authorship is never invisible in her novels. She inhabits any character\u2019s subjectivity that she wants, whenever she wants, and moves liberally forward and backward in time. In The Comforters<\/i>, her first novel, published in 1957, she takes this self-consciousness to the extreme, when one of the main characters, a critic who is writing a history of the novel-as-art form, begins to hear the disembodied voice of the author narrating The Comforters<\/i> as she lives it. The presence of a writer so skilled and daring and strange is what makes Spark\u2019s novels so delightful, and also what edges them in something sharp, something that might be danger.<\/p>\n

Hidden in Spark\u2019s very weird and unsettling oeuvre is The Driver\u2019s Seat<\/i>, which might be her weirdest and most unsettling book of all. It follows Lise, a thirty-four-year-old Danish office worker, as she travels to Italy for vacation. The third of the book\u2019s short chapters begins: \u201cShe will be found tomorrow morning dead from multiple stab-wounds, her wrists bound with a silk scarf and her ankles bound with a man\u2019s necktie.\u201d With this alarming revelation, we are aware that for the rest of the book we will be working back to the moment of Lise\u2019s murder, discovering whodunit and why.<\/p>\n

At first we might assume that we are reading a standard thriller, and that Lise\u2019s death will have a standard thriller explanation. It is clear that Lise is deliberate\u2014the novella\u2019s first scenes show her searching for the perfect garish traveling outfit. She is loud and obnoxious in the ticketing line at the airport, and after, she is seemingly pleased with her performance. \u201cIt is almost as if, satisfied that she has successfully registered the fact of her presence at the airport among the July thousands there,\u201d Spark writes, \u201cshe has fulfilled a small item of greater purpose.\u201d Lise cultivates her conspicuousness.<\/p>\n

For a while it seems plausible that Lise is a spy or international criminal, with her meticulous, puzzling behavior and horrifying death all connected to some mysterious mission. When she follows a businessman on to the plane purposefully and sits next to him, and he looks at her with fright and recognition and scrambles to change his seat, it seems plausible that she is seeking a figure from her past, maybe a former lover, maybe for purposes of revenge\u2014and that the unspeakable past they share leads to Lise\u2019s death. But we flash forward to the businessman\u2019s interrogation by police after he has murdered Lise, and he tells them \u201cquite truthfully,\u201d according to the narrator, that he never saw her before that day at the airport. Lise\u2019s actions and her death cannot be explained by motivations common to the thriller genre; there are more disturbing sexual and psychological forces at play.<\/p>\n

But, like a standard thriller, The Driver\u2019s Seat<\/i> is scattered with clues that only register with the audience in retrospect, particularly about Lise and the businessman\u2019s pasts. The businessman, it turns out, is the nephew of an old woman from Lise\u2019s hotel, Mrs. Fiedke, who she spends the day shopping with. At first Mrs. Fiedke only says that her nephew has been sick, but she hints at something more sinister\u2014she speaks of putting her nephew in a clinic and comments, \u201cIt was either that or the other, they gave us no choice.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Lise finally finds the businessman again in the lobby of her hotel late at night, she drives him to the park where she will force him to kill her. She accurately describes the mental institution he has been in and diagnoses him with something she calls the \u201cmadhouse tremble.\u201d \u201cYou\u2019re a sex maniac,\u201d she says, and correctly guesses that he raped and stabbed a woman. There is a quick allusion at the beginning of the novel to \u201cmonths of illness\u201d in Lise\u2019s life, and her actions call her mental state into question. We might assume that the businessman is a type that she can identify from her own time in a mental hospital, and that this type of man is the only one she imagines is suitable to commit her murder.<\/p>\n

Identifying Lise\u2019s \u201ctype\u201d is a recurring thread\u2014she is constantly commenting that a man she sees or encounters is not her type; she says to random strangers, \u201cYou\u2019re not my type.\u201d She gets the phrase from Bill, the man she meets on the plane, who is an \u201cEnlightenment Leader\u201d in the macrobiotic movement, and who takes a shine to Lise immediately. \u201cForget him,\u201d Bill tells Lise when the businessman changes seats on the plane. \u201cHe wasn\u2019t your type.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bill is a total blowhard, preaching about the macrobiotic diet, Yin and Yang, and his spiritual need to have one orgasm a day. One can picture him, as Solnit describes, with \u201cthat smug look\u2026 [of] a man holding forth, eyes fixed on the fuzzy far horizon of his own authority.\u201d Bill feels free to attempt to control Lise\u2019s life from the time that he meets her. \u201cYou\u2019ll soon change your eating habits,\u201d he tells her on the plane, \u201cnow that we\u2019ve got to know each other.\u201d When they get off the plane, Lise cries, disappointed that another man on her plane was not her type. \u201cI can give you what you want,\u201d Bill says. \u201cWait and see.\u201d He is sure of this because he doesn\u2019t think she could possibly know what she wants, so he has taken on the authority to dictate her desires.<\/p>\n

It should not be a surprise, then, when toward the end of the book Bill forces Lise to the ground and attempts to date rape her. \u201cViolence,\u201d Solnit writes, \u201cis one way to silence people, to deny their voice and their credibility, to assert your right to control over their right to exist.\u201d \u201cI\u2019m your type,\u201d Bill insists, not asserting any intuition about Lise\u2019s psyche, but more asserting that she is empty of thoughts, convictions, and intentions, able to be filled with an identity of Bill\u2019s choosing. As Solnit writes, \u201cexplaining men still assume I am\u2026 an empty vessel to be filled with their wisdom and knowledge.\u201d Solnit acknowledges that the \u201cempty vessel\u201d image is one that evokes both an educational and sexual authority that men assume over women.<\/p>\n

But Lise also seems to view herself as an empty vessel\u2014or at least as a blank canvas where she can project a variety of fluctuating identities. We are told repeatedly that Lise is \u201cneither good-looking nor bad-looking,\u201d and, at thirty-four, she is neither old nor very young. Compounding Lise\u2019s generic appearance is her lack of interiority\u2014contrary to Spark\u2019s inclination to enter the subjectivities of all of her characters, the characters in The Driver\u2019s Seat<\/i> are opaque, with Lise\u2019s thoughts seeming to evade the narrator. Because of this, there is a constant emphasis on Lise\u2019s expression, as if the narrator is trying to guess at what is going on in her mind: \u201cLise looks, for an instant, slightly senile, as if she felt, in addition to bewilderment, a sense of defeat or physical incapacity.\u201d The narrator acknowledges the futility of this close observation. \u201cWho knows her thoughts?\u201d the narrator asks. \u201cWho can tell?\u201d<\/p>\n

All we know about Lise are external things she may have affected: her gaudy wardrobe, her rude and erratic behavior. She repeats to everyone she meets that she can speak four languages, a practice that indicates a kind of childish arrogance, but also underlies the indeterminacy of her identity. And she readily invents different backgrounds for herself. She takes refuge in a mechanics\u2019 garage when the police fill the streets with teargas during a student protest. \u201cI\u2019m only a tourist, a teacher from Iowa, New Jersey,\u201d she tells Carlo, the owner of the garage. \u201cI\u2019m a widow,\u201d she continues later, \u201cand an intellectual\u2026 My late husband was an intellectual. We had no children. He was killed in a motor accident. He was a bad driver, anyway. He was a hypochondriac, which means that he imagined that he had every illness under the sun.\u201d<\/p>\n

All Lise\u2019s eccentricity may reveal more cunning than instability. \u201cSo she lays the trail,\u201d Spark writes of Lise\u2019s movements, \u201cpresently to be followed by Interpol and elaborated upon with due art by the journalists of Europe for the few days it takes for her identity to be established.\u201d The ultimate purpose behind the identity Lise has constructed for herself may be achieve perfect victim-ness\u2014both anonymous and conspicuous, fitting one expected profile for a victim, the woman traveling alone on vacation; she makes herself memorable to those she encounters but is careful to reveal no details of her current life or her past, so that the coverage of her murder in the media is protracted and sensational.<\/p>\n

At the end of the book, the businessman accuses Lise of being afraid of sex. \u201cIt\u2019s all right at the time, and it\u2019s all right before,\u201d she says, \u201cbut the problem is afterwards. That is, if you aren\u2019t just an animal. Most of the time, afterwards is pretty sad.\u201d This revelation of Lise\u2019s extreme loneliness and isolation and sexual ambivalence provides insight as to why she would want to seek such a gruesome death\u2014she wants a moment of rapture where she would experience no \u201cafterwards,\u201d where during what afterwards there was she would be the center of attention, where the man who had given her that rapture would be brutally punished.<\/p>\n

Lise\u2019s quest for sexual control suffuses the most important recurring image of the novel: that of the driver\u2019s seat. Two times in the book, Lise is almost raped\u2014once by Bill, and the other by Carlo, the mechanic, after he has offered to give her a ride back to her hotel. Both times, Lise manages to get away and steals the man\u2019s car in the process. When the businessman is being interrogated, the police bring up his previous crimes, saying, \u201cThe last time you lost control of yourself didn\u2019t you take the woman for a drive in the country?\u201d \u201cBut this one took me,\u201d he replies. \u201cShe made me go. She was driving.\u201d<\/p>\n

It might seem counterintuitive that despite Lise\u2019s desire to sit in the driver\u2019s seat, she still ultimately takes the passive role; she wants to receive violence, not inflict it. In this, Lise\u2019s imagined death seems related to more benign sadomasochist sex practices. BDSM is, after all, often called \u201csex play,\u201d and it is about assigned roles and exchanges of power. The person who appears to be being dominated may in fact have control of the way that the fantasy plays out. This uneasy intertwining of a subversive but safe fantasy that exaggerates traditional gender dynamics and the horrifying realities of female victimization is one thing that makes The Driver\u2019s Seat<\/i> a truly frightening book.<\/p>\n

It is clear in The Driver\u2019s Seat<\/i> that a man who is Lise\u2019s type will not act like a predator\u2014when she first encounters Bill he is described as \u201cthe hungrier man.\u201d \u201cYou look like Red Riding-Hood\u2019s grandmother,\u201d Lise says to him. \u201cDo you want to eat me up?\u201d Lise thinks that a sickly looking man she sees on the plane might be her type, until she hears him discussing going on safari. \u201cHe wasn\u2019t my type anyway,\u201d she says. \u201cShooting animals.\u201d<\/p>\n

The man Lise is looking for will display something else: fear. When the police interrogate the businessman about his encounter with Lise on the plane, he says, \u201cI was afraid.\u201d \u201cAfraid?\u201d the police respond. \u201cYes, frightened. I moved to another seat, away from her.\u201d \u201cWhy is everyone afraid of me?\u201d Lise asks Bill on the plane. We must note that the performance of predation is also evidence of fear\u2014most exaggerated exercises of male strength and power are suffused in resentment, a response to a perceived threat to that power, especially from women. For men who are sick, \u201csex maniacs,\u201d this fear is not hidden; it looms closer to the surface. The inability to mask their fear is what ultimately makes them unhealthy, not what they are capable of\u2014Bill and Carlo, both seemingly functional, prove themselves prone to terrible violence. Fear is pathologized; violence against women is not.<\/p>\n

This cuts close to what might be the book\u2019s truest meaning. The last line of The Driver\u2019s Seat<\/i> discusses the procedures and accessories of the criminal justice system, \u201call those trappings,\u201d Spark describes, \u201cdevised to protect them from the indecent exposure of fear and pity, pity and fear.\u201d Predation, machismo, violence\u2014these are all \u201ctrappings\u201d protecting men from fear. These trappings point to more fundamental ones, the lies on which advanced societies are built. This is a book about a vacation, and Lise spends much of her time shopping. She lingers in a large department store, where she absently buys clothing and a food blender, things she knows she will never use. But political disturbances are constantly threatening to disrupt these scenes of leisure and consumption.<\/p>\n

There are the student demonstrations that cause the incident with the teargas; Lise hears on television about a coup in a Middle Eastern country and later sees the Sheikh of that country with his entourage exiting from a hotel. Bill tells her that he plans to inaugurate the cultural center he is opening in Naples with a presentation hilariously titled \u201cThe World\u2014Where Is It Going?\u201d and we are conscious that supposed political or spiritual awareness can be just another trapping, a distraction, a conceit. There is a commotion when a \u201chippy\u201d is asked to leave the department store, and in this scene we see the trappings of consumerism and entertainment instantly at work, distracting from the political tensions underlying civil society. \u201cThe quarrel melts behind them,\u201d Spark describes, \u201cas they come to the television sets.\u201d<\/p>\n

Political intrusion in leisure society was a common artistic theme in the 1960s and 1970s\u2014we might think of Agn\u00e8s Varda\u2019s film Cleo from 5 to 7<\/i>, which obliquely comments on how the Algerian War haunted 1960s Paris, or director Luis Bu\u00f1uel\u2019s political farces The Phantom of Liberty<\/i> and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie<\/i>. This was a time both of rapidly expanding consumption and political uncertainty, with the third and second worlds asserting a destabilizing presence in the first world through the rise of modern terrorism. What is so powerful and perverse about Lise\u2019s death is that it rejects or dissolves the trappings that project safety, comfort, and wealth in contemporary western society. She insists on being killed by a man who cannot perform masculine strength or aggression, who kills only out of fear. She refuses any \u201csex play\u201d that might separate her fantasy from reality. And the image of her, stabbed and bound in a public park in a tourist city, threatens any connotation of escape that \u201cvacation\u201d might hold. <\/p>\n

One of the most powerful images in The Driver\u2019s Seat<\/i> is of Lise\u2019s modern, modular apartment, where \u201cspace is used as a pattern in itself,\u201d all the pinewood furniture hinging and folding so it is out of view when it is not in use. The apartment seems to represent Lise, with her internal life so carefully hidden by her external qualities; in her mind as in her home, \u201cnothing need be seen, nothing need be left laying about.\u201d But it is also an image for society, with external trappings hiding the danger and ugliness that is everywhere.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe swaying tall pines among the litter of cones on the forest floor,\u201d Spark writes of Lise\u2019s apartment, \u201chave been subdued into silence and into obedient bulks.\u201d The apartment becomes a figure for the order that civilization imposes over nature, human or otherwise. This is a lie too, of course, a superficial order masking a more primal disorder; in The Driver\u2019s Seat<\/i> any power attained is temporary, fraudulent. Before he kills her, Lise gives the businessman the keys to Bill\u2019s car. \u201cYou\u2019ll be caught,\u201d she says, \u201cbut at least you\u2019ll have the illusion of the chance to get away.\u201d Maybe that is all the driver\u2019s seat provides, the illusion of control, the illusion that one can escape the inescapable: death, and the world\u2019s raw core of fear.<\/p>\n

Alice Bolin is a writer living in California. Follow her on Twitter at @alicebolin<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cYou\u2019ve got a lot to learn,\u201d a man she meets on an airplane says to Lise, the protagonist of Muriel Spark\u2019s 1970 novella The Driver\u2019s Seat. \u201cRice, unpolished rice is the basis of macrobiotics\u2026 It is a cleansing diet. Physically, mentally and spiritually.\u201d \u201cI hate rice,\u201d Lise says. \u201cNo, you only think you do,\u201d he […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":344,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[11912,11911,11910,119,7501],"class_list":["post-60477","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-agnes-varda","tag-lily-rothman","tag-mansplaining","tag-muriel-spark","tag-rebecca-solnit"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nEmpty Vessels by Alice Bolin<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"September 24, 2013 \u2013 \u201cYou\u2019ve got a lot to learn,\u201d a man she meets on an airplane says to Lise, the protagonist of Muriel Spark\u2019s 1970 novella The Driver\u2019s Seat. \u201cRice,\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, 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