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.
