Sally Rooney's Intermezzo

Sally Rooney’s new novel is possibly her best yet. It’s hard for me to judge, since it’s so relevant to topics I have a special interest in, which makes it appeal to me in ways it might not to others.

I take Intermezzo to be primarily about what to do concerning sex (and religion) in this age that might seem to lie between the age of Anscombe’s Catholic Christianity (at least in Rooney’s Ireland) and whatever is to come. It could also be read as a consideration of the differences between Anscombe’s traditional views on sex and religion and Wittgenstein’s still demanding but much less traditional views. He believed in God in some sense and was a Christian, at least in his own mind, in some sense, but he was nowhere near as orthodox or clear in his views as she was, and he considered Anscombe to be narrow-minded. He was somewhere in the LGBTQIA+ realm, especially the G, B, and A parts of that ballpark. 

Why call the novel Intermezzo if that is what it is about? One of the main characters in the book, Ivan Koubek, is a chess-player.  Ryan Ruby points out that intermezzo has a chess-related meaning in his review here.

Wikipedia explains this meaning as follows:

The zwischenzug is a chess tactic in which a player, instead of playing the expected move (commonly a recapture), first interposes another move posing an immediate threat that the opponent must answer, and only then plays the expected move. It is a move that has a high degree of "initiative". Ideally, the zwischenzug changes the situation to the player's advantage, such as by gaining material or avoiding what would otherwise be a strong continuation for the opponent.

 

This kind of move is also called an intermezzo or an in-between move. More commonly, ‘intermezzo’ means a short dramatic composition or piece of music that comes between two other, longer pieces. It sounds to me as though it could refer simply to something that comes between two other things or, in chess, to the messy period in dialectical progress that comes before what will later be evident progress.

So what does this have to do with Anscombe? I have mentioned Ivan Koubek already. His brother Peter and his ex/girlfriend Sylvia Larkin are two more major characters. Peter’s and Sylvia’s relationship is complicated, originally because of an accident she suffered a few years earlier. An overheard conversation between doctors includes this information:

 

History of chronic refractory pain following traumatic injury. Road traffic accident. […] The old life of pleasure gone and never returning. (p. 14)

 

The “old life of pleasure” that has gone includes her sex life.

Compare this with the ending of Anscombe’s paper “You Can have Sex without Children: Christianity and the New Offer” (in her Collected Papers Volume III, pp. 82-96). Speaking of sexual intercourse with the intention not of performing “a generative type of act” but for one or both of the people involved to achieve orgasm, she asks:  

 

if it is indeed all right to do this for good ends, then it is excessively difficult to see why after all the act need closely resemble a normal complete act of copulation; supposing that to have been made very difficult, say by a crippling accident to the wife, why should the couple not achieve sexual climax by mutual stimulation, rather than hold themselves obliged to a heroic degree of continence?  

 

A large part of what Intermezzo is about is what Peter and Sylvia, or any couple in this situation, should do. Since they are not already married, my understanding is, the Catholic view is that they should not get married.

 

Code of Canon Law in section 1084:

 §1. Antecedent and perpetual impotence to have intercourse, whether on the part of the man or the woman, whether absolute or relative, nullifies marriage by its very nature. (Quoted from https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/why-the-church-cannot-marry-the-impotent)

 

They should either stay single, holding themselves to what might be considered a heroic degree of continence, or Peter should find someone else to marry.

This is roughly the position taken by Sylvia. Her relationship with Peter will not work, she believes, so he should find someone else. She says this not on religious grounds, although those might be lurking in the background, and not really sincerely. In reality, they both still love each other and want to be together, although their lives get even more complicated when Peter falls in love with one of the other women he dates. What to do about this (kind of) situation is another big question that the novel raises without really answering.

Philip Larkin is quoted in the novel early on, and Sylvia’s sharing his last name is probably not just a coincidence. The quotation is from “Church Going,” a poem about an atheist’s feeling the pull of religion, or at least a church. Here’s how it ends, including the bit that Rooney quotes:

 

[…] though I've no idea

What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,

It pleases me to stand in silence here;

 

A serious house on serious earth it is,

In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,

Are recognised, and robed as destinies.

And that much never can be obsolete,

Since someone will forever be surprising

A hunger in himself to be more serious,

And gravitating with it to this ground,

Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,

If only that so many dead lie round.

 

Ruby writes:

 

Rooney’s engagement with Christianity in her fiction is less-often remarked on, but far more prevalent [than Marxism in her fiction]. Sylvia has a ‘sincere and transcendent love of Christ’, which is sometimes also a ‘terrifyingly real and serious fear of Christ’. Margaret ‘seems to feel obscurely that the day she met Ivan, they brought into existence a new relationship’, and that, ‘in the eyes of God’, her loyalty to this new ‘way of being’ may demand sacrifices of her, including ‘her pride, her dignity, her life itself’. When she asks Ivan if he believes in God, Ivan articulates a theory of divinity as a kind of aesthetic principle.

 

Beauty, or at least beauty of a certain kind, Ivan explains, makes him think there is a meaning behind everything. He connects this with belief in God.

Near the end of the novel Peter and Ivan each describe themselves as trying to believe in God.

Ruby also quotes a character (it’s Sylvia as registered in Peter’s consciousness, I think) referring to the “Sense that nothing can mean anything anymore, aesthetically.” Anscombe says something very similar. I have in mind especially things she says in an unpublished document which I don’t have permission to quote here, but also her claim in a 1972 letter to The Human World that, according to contemporary literature, “we are all crawling around in shit, that all is hopeless and absurd.” Sylvia is a bit like Anscombe, but not exactly like her. She doesn’t believe what Anscombe believes, and is at least somewhat open to possibilities that Anscombe rejects.

Rooney does not preach, but she does suggest some options to consider. One of these is that we do not yet have the concepts we need to think very well about all this. Perhaps our ideas of God will do, but our ideas about love and sex might need some revision. Here Rooney sounds a bit like Paulina Sliwa. Sliwa introduces the notion of what she calls hermeneutical inquiry, which she characterizes as making sense of the situation one is in. (See Paulina Sliwa “Making Sense of Things: Moral Inquiry as Hermeneutical Inquiry” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 2023, pp. 1-21.) For instance, a woman who has been raped (the example Sliwa focuses on) might take some time to realize this. Partly this could be because one is reluctant to acknowledge such a repellent truth, but it might also be because one associates certain ideas with rape (a stranger in an alley or overt threats of violence, for instance) and one’s own case might not match these stereotypes.

 

This is not simply a matter of working out “how to conceptualise one’s experience” though, Sliwa argues. Rather, it is a matter of trying to find a perspective on one’s experience:

 

A perspective is a complex set of interconnected cognitive, affective, and motivational dispositions: dispositions to find salient, to be moved by, to see as explanatorily or morally significant, to see a situation as similar to or different from another. A perspective is thus a way of making sense of a situation. (p. 2)

 

The confused rape victim does not lack the word or concept ‘rape’. Nor is it that she suffers from “uncertainty about which option from a menu is the correct one” (p. 5). Rather, she is confused and needs to find “a different way of looking and feeling about the subject matter at hand” (p. 5). The idea that what has happened to her is rape might not occur to her until some way into her attempt to make sense of things. And when that idea does occur to her, it might well not be immediately obvious that ‘rape’ is the right word to use. So she isn’t simply at a loss for words. She is engaged in an intellectual process that will, if successful, result in her learning something about her situation.

What she needs is to find the right, most apt, perspective, Sliwa says. Perspectives are not just words or concepts, but they are expressed by words. For instance, one perspective on what has happened is expressed by the words “dealing with an asshole” (p. 12). Another is expressed by “rape.” I think this point might be expressible in terms of conceptualization, but, if so, Sliwa is surely right that this is not a simple matter of hitting on the right word.

 

Rooney has a similar idea about choosing a name for something from a given assortment of options. She talks about what Peter and Sylvia are as:

 

A philosophical problem. When they go out together, to be mistaken for what they aren’t. Or rather: to be mistaken for what they are. And how is that possible. To see a man and a woman walking together: to name in the mind their relationship to one another, as it were automatically. Which is to select from the assortment of existing names the one that seems appropriate to the particular case. To say to oneself that in relation to the man, this particular woman must be a friend, or else a girlfriend, or a wife, or sister. An act of naming which stands open to correction, but correction only in the form of replacement: that is, the replacement of one existing name for another. If you are mistaken in thinking this woman my friend, that means merely that you have chosen the wrong term from the assortment, and therefore that I can correct you by supplying the appropriate one in its place. The decisive movement in the conjuring trick has been made, says Wittgenstein, and it was the very one that we thought quite innocent. Because the name you give to a presumed relation between a man and woman may be both correct and incorrect at once. Each name including within itself a complex of assumptions. (p. 400)

 

Rooney quotes Wittgenstein here, but she might equally have quoted Iris Murdoch (who, like Anscombe, was also born in Ireland). Murdoch writes:

 

if we consider what the work of attention is like, how continuously it goes on, and how imperceptibly it builds up structures of value round about us, we shall not be surprised that at crucial moments of choice most of the business of choosing is already over. (“The Idea of Perfection” in Existentialists and Mystics, p. 329.)

 

Contemporary sexual ethics seems to be a bit of a mess, in the sense that a lot of people seem to be unhappy about what is expected or what actually happens or both. Women continue to be treated badly. There is a lot of involuntary celibacy. More people seem to want to get married than actually manage to do so. Dating is often said to be an unpleasant or disappointing experience. Whether we would do best to go back to traditional values or press on with the current ones or find something new seems to be a live question.

What we need might be new names or new complexes of assumptions. Which, as Rooney (or Peter) notes, is a social as well as a philosophical problem. And for that we would need to pay attention, thinking both carefully and imaginatively. In the meantime, in this intermission between the moral world that Anscombe (and most of Ireland) lived in and some possible new one that might be to come, we have to struggle to make sense of how we live and ought to live, including what to call things. (Assuming, that is, that we don’t simply agree with Anscombe. But Rooney seems to take this for granted.) Rooney’s contribution to the struggle is bringing up the apparent need for it, and getting us started on exploring some options, drawing the attention that is needed to at least some of the places where it needs to go.