‘Two Grinning Puppets Jigging Away in Nothingness :” Symbolism and the Community of Lovers in Katherine Mansfield’s Short Fiction

Abstract

As the present volume testifies, the word “community” still bears re-definition. The present chapter aims to develop a specific communitarian type—the community of lovers—seldom theorized¹ and yet deserving closer attention due to its disruptive potential. Maurice Blanchot considers the community of lovers as an “antisocial society or association” since its ultimate goal is “the destruction of society” (33, 48). Jean-Luc Nancy, in turn, acknowledges this community as a liminal space where lovers are on the limit, both outside and inside, trapped in the opposition of the “private” and the “public,” and ultimately effect the unworking of community (Inoperative 36, 40).² The community of lovers cannot be understood without a reference to the individual, conceived as a residue of ontological certainty and, therefore, as “another, and symmetrical, figure of immanence: the absolutely detached for-itself taken as origin and certainty” (3). For Nancy, immanence implies a thoroughly fulfilled existence within the boundaries of the ego, with no need to open up to alterity.³ In his words, a community cannot be an assemblage of individuals or “simple atoms;” instead, a “clinamen” is needed, that is, “an inclination or an inclining from one toward the other” (3). Thus, the relation (or community) undoes the autarchy of absolute immanence and being comes to be defined as relational. Indeed, individualities are replaced with singularities and the relational aspect is materialized in communication rather than communion; in other words, the result is an “exposure,” or “exposing-sharing”—”laceration” in Bataille’s words—which leads to a “mutual interpellation of singularities” (Inoperative 29).⁴