Masochism Finally Gets Even
By SARAH BOXER
Masochism means never having to say "Stop! Stop! Enough!"
At the Modern Language Association's annual meeting last month, three hours were devoted to masochism. And that isn't counting the lectures and seminars on the cruelty of theory and the uses of perversity.
You may think that sadism and masochism are equals. But among scholars they are not. As the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze wrote in his work on masochism, "Coldness and Cruelty," sadism has been widely studied by literary critics and psychoanalysts, but masochism "has suffered from unfair neglect."
But masochism is getting even, if the last Modern Language Association meeting is any indication. Now masochism has feminist interpreters and gay interpreters. It has even become a matter of national pride. The Ukrainians and Russians are fighting over which country is the true home of masochism.
The term masochist first appeared in the 1886 book "Psychopathia Sexualis" by the German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing, who used it to describe people who enjoy being abused or humiliated. He named the condition after Leopold von Sacher- Masoch, who wrote "Venus im Pelz" or "Venus in Furs" (1869), a novella (probably based on Sacher-Masoch's life) about the adventures and fantasies of Severin, a man who loved being whipped.
According to Vitaly A. Chernetsky, an assistant professor of Slavic languages at Columbia University, both Russia and Ukraine are now claiming to be masochism's homeland. In Ukraine, there is a movement to name a street after Sacher-Masoch. Meanwhile the Russians, Professor Chernetsky said, are trying to prove that they are "the original masochists."
Ukraine apparently has the better claim. Sacher-Masoch, as Mr. Chernetsky said, may be Galicia's best- known native son. He was born in Lemberg, in eastern Galicia, which is now in Ukraine. At the time that he wrote, Galicia was ruled by Austria. He wrote in German. And, as Mr. Chernetsky said, "he considered himself a Galician Ukrainian in terms of identity and recalled with fondness his Ukrainian wet nurse."
But now, Mr. Chernetsky said, Russia wants to claim masochism. Sacher-Masoch's works, which were banned in that region of Eastern Europe for much of the century, began to be published in Russian after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Then, in 1995, Aleksandr Etkind, the author of a well-known history of Russian psychoanalysis, published "a historical sociology of Sacher-Masoch and his Russian readers." There Mr. Etkind suggested that the name Severin has Russian roots and that "Sacher-Masoch may have learned the pleasures of flagellation from the Russian sect of khlysty," or flagellants. In other words, Mr. Chernetsky said, Mr. Etkind was arguing that "the Russians are the original masochists."
Part of the confusion may stem from the fact that some Galicians, including Sacher-Masoch, called themselves "Little Russians" or "Ruthenians" (both of which are sometimes translated as "Russian"), but Mr. Chernetsky suggested that something more bizarre was at work. He called the Russian impulse to take credit for masochism a "tortured, post-imperialist, melancholic" fantasy.
While Russia and Ukraine are fighting over masochism's provenance, American scholars are arguing over Sacher-Masoch's message. "Venus in Furs" begins with the narrator (not Severin) dreaming of a statue of Venus. As he dreams, the hand of Venus is transformed into the hand of a Cossack servant shaking him awake. He gets up and visits Severin, a man who gives him a manuscript titled "Confessions of a Suprasensual Man."
The manuscript is Severin's account of his slavish relationship with a woman who wears a fur jacket and whips him. Her name is Wanda. Severin signs a contract to become Wanda's slave, and they travel abroad. In the penultimate scene, Wanda's lover, known as the Greek, whips Severin, too, and the couple leave him a bloody mess. Severin smiles and says: "The therapy was cruel but radical. The main thing is: I am healed." The end....
[The full article is at <http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/27/arts/27MASO.html?pagewanted=all>.] *****
The penultimate scene serves as a fitting allegory for "shock therapy" administered by the Progress of the Empire. The periphery "signs a contract" to become a slave to Wanda (who, together with Venus, symbolically stands for a dream of conspicuous consumption in the imperial style; conspicuous consumption is naturally figured as "feminine" & "feminizing" in sexist literary imagination), whose lover (= the IMF with its racially integrated "experts" to serve capital, guarded by racially integrated "peace-keepers" when necessary) leaves it "a bloody mess." The periphery is supposed to smile & say, "The therapy was cruel but radical. The main thing is: I am healed."
While Sade (1740-1814) inspired generations of modernists on the (_very_ broadly defined) Left (Georges Bataille, Adorno & Horkheimer, Luis Buñuel, Simone de Beauvoir, Roland Barthes, Pier Paolo Pasolini, etc.) to imagine the radical & democratic limits of the Enlightenment (both its attractive promise & appalling underside), Sacher-Masoch (1836-1895) allows late modernists (or post-modernists) in the age of Shock Therapy to wallow in the seeming impotence of the masses who are reduced to debt servitude by a contract signed by Severin (= the comprador elite on the periphery).
The book comes to an end, but history doesn't -- and the masses are not smiling, unlike Severin (who is proficient in the language of the Empire).
Maybe I'll put this in my diss or at least present it at the next MLA convention. ;)
Yoshie