Steve_Bamlett_blog

On Not Being His Echo: When one person’s love for another ends what occurs feels like abandonment to the other. Understanding can be slow to follow for that other person until a means of comprehending arises from the process of remembering, repeating and working through the stories that accompanied the lead-up to, duration and end of the relationship once labelled love has turned out to be strictly one-sided. The old story of Narcissus and Echo is adaptable and its sex and gender characteristics flexible. Such stories help if other more appropriate help (such as talking it out face-to-face) are denied. whe

This piece should be treated like a short story with a yearning to analysis. The characters imagined may never have existed or, if they did, be entirely different to the way they are imagined here. It illustrates more a dynamic, culled from the stories of friends and related to affective material (feelings) that I seek to understand. No one should imagine themselves pictured here. Fortunately, I think, it is unlikely a narcissist ever would.

Narcissism has a chequered history in both psychology and psychoanalysis. Jung treats it as fundamental to the psycho-genesis of addictive behaviours, others (not always psychologists) have attached it to explanations of the love between persons of the same sex/gender, though it seems particularly inappropriate here. It does however often chime with classical stories where a heterosexual union, once abandoned seems never reproducible as except in serial homosexual ones, as in the case of the poet Orpheus, after his loss of Eurydice. I think such uses of the story common and referred to them in attempting to analyse a poorly known Baroque painting that fascinated me: Francois B. Perrier’s (1594-1649) Narcissus & Echo. The following words on Perrier’s painting are adapted, but often just merely quoted from a blog of mine you will find at this link, should you be so inclined to compare.

Thought to be near contemporary to The Triumph of Pan by Poussin, Perrier’s Narcissus & Echo was used in a touring exhibition of the Poussin alone (that had been organised by The National Gallery In London) when it appeared in the Trevor Gallery at Auckland Castle, Bishop Auckland, where I saw this picture in the flesh (as they say – the link is to my blog on the term). The Perrier painting was used there to provide a contrastive illustration of seventeenth century uses of mythological narratives or scenarios that illuminate Poussin’s context. For me, the chief virtue of seeing both is their common use of a moralised landscape to illustrate the allegorical and/or symbolic narrative scenario. And I start with that because I think I need to explain how I use the reference to Echo in that story, as the voice of one abandoned to the lover’s Narcissism, or as I imagine it in this scenario (more fictional than real but meant to be helpful).

In the mise en scène of this painting ( use the term from film and drama because the painting both tells a story and does show using theatrical motifs and the proxemics of character positioning) the composition is segmented, the bottom third representing the central scene in which Narcissus catches with joy a first sight of himself. The reflection of Narcissus himself though obviously seen by him is hidden from us by an obtrusive rock jutting up from the picture frame, although further back in the pool another rock does enjoy its own reflection within the viewer’s sight. Narcissus is surprised presumably during a hunt, as declared by his spear, now in relaxed state, and the hunting dog, who has gone to sleep. The other dog however looks up, his ears caught by sound. Her doggy gaze goes up towards Echo, who languishes in another segment of the composition. The latter segment fills the top two thirds of the left of the picture. It, like the last section, is rocky and full of shadows cast by them.

Most shadows fall in a dark halo around and behind Narcissus, morally pointing to the darkness (in terms of both morality and secreted meaning) he here plays with. In the Echo segment, shadows are less dark and emphasise form in a way that sensualises it. Echo is the neglected female, as neglected by Narcissus as the hunt he has abandoned. My untrained suspicion here then is that Narcissus is critiqued for the folly of self-obsession and capture by male, rather than female, beauty.

Francois B. Perrier(Also known as Le Bourguignon (1594-1649)) Narcissus & Echo

The sensualised rocks around Echo clearly mimic the echo chamber of the ear (fairly important orifices in terms of the iconography of sound) but may also (I would say definitely) symbolise the vagina and reproduction. They certainly betoken DEPTH, both because they confuse the vanishing point of the perspective on the background landscape and because they move us imaginatively into and down beyond the imagined scene. Narcissus stays on the surface, unlike Orpheus who followed his Eurydice to the Underground. The rock is surrounded by young vegetation, even above the head of Narcissus, who does not look at it. It is the source of the running water, in the temporary stillness of which a pool is formed in which Narcissus finds his beloved image, regardless that the water continues to flow through it and into the cleft at the bottom picture frame. The female brown spotted dog knows that and looks to the sound caused by the echoing cave rather than sadly to the bewitched Narcissus. Irrespective of either, the final, top-right segment is open and full of light, backgrounding more life, even that which comes surprisingly from a stunted tree, although more fully by the arch of a growing one. The scene is dissected by diagonal lines that emphasise moral elements.

The central darkness of the scene is contrasted with the rightwards-leaning growing tree. The left (the sinister side of the picture) contains sources of mythologised darkness and obstruction, which echo too from the hole of the cave and point away from surface meanings. I would say it a painting both made up from allegorical potentials that vary and look for meaningful interpretation. That which is heteronormative in this picture is pushed away and intriguingly held back by the beauty of the main scene, which may more enchant the viewer (homed to gorgeous appearances) who does not listen to the sound of the echoing darkly hidden moral. Chiaroscuro is inclined to moral interpretation where the notional lines I draw above on the picture intersect.

Now let’s go back to the role of Echo in this picture. When I wrote the piece from which the above is adapted, I was convinced that the allegory was directed at young males, urging them to abandon the pleasures of the male body (their own or another’s) for that of a female one. I think this is still the case, but I think this is to oversimplify the binaries of sex/gender, which rarely are that simple (in art at least, though perhaps possibly in the addled brains of the gender-critical movement). Narcissus is a much more complex person than we might think, for I think his exclusive interest in the visual stimulus is what is chiefly under attack – a notion of a surface beauty that can be seen but is difficult to touch, smell (except as the residue of one’s own body) or hear, and whose beauty is thus partial.

What is ‘female’ often slips into the demonstration of the inward pulling dynamic of the other senses, one that requires that we see it from the advantage of our own embodiment, within our own body, rather than outside that body like a superficial trace. Now this is not attempting to wrest the concept of femininity away from those to whom it is claimed it belongs but to point out that femininity is a constructed sign system – one that colludes in trapping women in subjection, as it empowers men for women’s domination by them. That Narcissists stay on the surface (are superficial in brief) in short, is not my meaning; though this is sometimes what is concluded. Narcissists are haunted by the depths, interiors and obscurities that their surface passions hide from them. Their aim then is to hide themselves away from contact with depths, interiors and things that are dark (including those hard to undestand) – things which betoken the empathic life which is sometimes thought to be exclusively feminine’. It is the latter false cognition that is a source of oppression to people however they identify their own sex/gender. But these binaries also make everyday living sometimes over-scripted ideologically; more difficult than they need to be. Stories militate against an even more lethal boundary – that between public behaviour and private emotion, for there is no need that these should be polarised. In a brilliant book that I am reading now, and will blog upon later, Lauren Elkin talks about the consequences of women being associated with imaginative (often equated with imaginary feeling) in public in comparison with an assumption of male integrity to the truth in public that is considered to be more objective:

At the 1612 trial of a man who raped her, Artemisia Gentileschi was tortured to be sure she was telling the truth. … I thought about Gentileschi, and the spectacle of female storytelling. For our stories to be believed – and not just believed, but no longer irritating, or sentimental – we have to remain coherent, give absolutely no hint of being ‘hysterical’, strike precisely the right note, neither insensitive nor sentimental, neither sharp nor flat (Elkin’s italics).[1]

What is at stake in the abandonment of Echo is the abandonment of what is surplus, interior, anterior and superior to the attraction of the love object to our eyes alone – a realm of feeling and sometimes darker chaos; the thing Narcissus MUST turn his back upon lest he be mistook for a woman (or, worse, a feminised man). He is the man without the inner echo of his possible vulnerability, whose only recourse to avoiding even the thought of vulnerability is to pretend it does not exist – that the lake he stares into has no depth, only a lovely surface; a surface like unto himself.

Loving a Narcissist should not be mistaken for loving someone then who seems satisfied with himself. He will be wracked by guilt – not responsibility for his actions just guilt, because guilt requires only self-reflection not action. How will he seem? Obsessed by his own image, he dare not leave it be or look around for he fears it will change to what it fears it might be – something vulnerable to external forces in time and space. He will dream up strategies that often involve self-harm and self-deprivation, or deprivation of others who express a care for him he dare not understand, lest he fall into it and be lost.

In making relationships he will prefer those that have guarantors of possible distance – perhaps online – and usually with people already paired with others. The latter is important because he needs the pairing to compete with an obvious inferior, as he sees it, to himself. In engaging a person with love, he will convince them that they have heretofore not been loved or loved inadequately (sometimes if the loved object is a woman he will invoke a kind of proto-feminism – this man is oppressive etc.). A other times, the point of comparison is sexual satisfaction for he knows that he only needs to stimulate himself – be seen as simulating – in order to stimulate in turn someone who he convinces has never had effective stimulation. This is easy online because of the ease with which sexting accommodates playful fictions but also lies and pretended satisfactions. But it is easy too if the sexual contact is made to be that akin to a holiday romance or ‘affair’. It is a tricky game because it is necessary to keep the other in the pair on board – for that other is another guarantor that the narcissist need never be fully engaged; will always have an escape route that looks to himself a kind of nobility and self-resignation. If the relationship with the pair becomes open to all of them, there are further dangers.

The biggest danger to the narcissist is responsibility. In some relationships, it is possible to work beyond the operations in the narcissist of guilt at supposed constructions of their own behaviour as abnormal or immoral. Where guilt is unnecessary this is sometimes because no-one will get hurt anyway in an openly acknowledged love involving all the wide network or web of love connections. Committed action is possible in such circumstances to ameliorate or sustain a relationship and cannot be made to seem impossible as a way out. For the desire is NOT to sustain or mend but to make an end where the narcissist themselves feels the end to be called for – where the loved one no longer acts as a mirror for how he wants to see himself but as a repository of potentially negative images of how the narcissist acts. This is complicated further when addictions are involved – but they so often are – because they engender caring rather than merely admiring responses.

Now when the narcissist leaves – to find another pool upon which to gaze and reap admiration – the abandoned can feel like Echo: forever irritatingly repeating the same phrases about how empty the space around them is and making that space resound with that noise. They may court the label of being neurotic and perhaps even deserve it. They may even succumb to psychosis and delusion – so deep is the cave into which their plaints are whispered. This too occurs in bereavement as Freud shows in On Mourning and Melancholia.

I entitled this piece ‘On Not Being His Echo’ and I believe now that this may be a determination that is a possible one for me. For as much as the narcissist hates responsibility, he hates even more analysis that goes deeper than surface appearance (for that is a more fearful responsibility – a responsibility to oneself to embrace change). He prefers analysis to remain at the level of the compositional design of flat surfaces. Analysis asks him to stop short, and not just reflect but dig into the images he prefers to spin out from a web. But Analysis is Echo’s friend. Echo embraces it, in their role of echoing the past. Remember the stories, repeat them in diverse ways. You will, if the person is a narcissist, find a serial pattern of other relationships before one’s own of relationships entered into with love or lust (either can serve the turn) where the narcissist allows the other to survive only as long as they, the narcissist, are in control.

I hope it works for you. If it ever really happens to me, I hope it works for me too.

Much love

Steve

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[1] Lauren Elkin (2023: 28f.) Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art London, Chatto & Windus.