Towards an Ethic of Love

Cal’s riveting tale of transformation in Books III and IV of Middlesex is hardly contained to his imagined person. This transformation that Eugenides so deftly splices onto the page reverberates up through his fingertips into the the author himself, through the rods and cones of the reader as she deduces meaning, pattern, and emotion through the figurings of dark ink on the off-white sheet, out into the 3-dimensional world of modern America, that great ship playing militarist jingles as the world burns, and back in time to the shaking, shuddering desires of two siblings on the side of a mountain in Asia Minor.

When I first opened the book, I—like most readers, I imagine—carried along a presumption that it would be a sordid tale of a family’s malfeasance, leading, inevitably to the traumatic life of our 5-alpha reductase hero. And for much of the book’s earlier portion, as Cal stands off stage ‘in the green room’ of life, that vision can be maintained. But seeping through the silken cloth of shame is an understanding that will not flower in Cal’s mind till ze has turned the soil of his family’s past and exposed it to the sky: that life is unpredictable, and genes even more so. The one thing that we can control is our own capacity to love in spite of everything. Everybody, everybody, everybody makes mistakes, and while some keep whistling others face the music, divining a trans-human moral source that can forgive or begrudge good fortune to any person or family.

And from the beginning Callie has that power. Trained and enabled by the feminine coding that she receives from family and society, her empathy takes root from an early age: towards the disenfranchised mavros who share the block with her father’s restaurant; for her silent grandfather (/great uncle) and burdened grandmother; for the strange and dangerous house on Middlesex Drive, and, later, for her deluded father and wounded mother; her new set of possibilities as a man; from spritely and stark Julie Kikuchi. Cal’s transition has left hir (and gender-neutral pronoun coined in the decade since Middlesex’s release, it seems) with psychic and physical scars, there is no better balm than empathy.

Taboos are not broken by confrontation, nor are they negated by ignoring their presence. It is only through integration that what was once shrouded in darkness comes into the social fold. In Middlesex, we see all of the mechanisms through which society attempts to marginalize the Other (be it blacks, Greeks, women, or herms), and we see an inventory of strategies formulated in response (flight, fight, creation of new moral cosmologies like the Nation of Islam). As Foucault would be quick to point out, none of these binary tactics can do anything but shift the flow of power in its preset relation. By creating an archeology, genealogy, odyssey and mythology of hir existence, Cal creates a means for embrace of hir condition, and an acceptance of hir lot. Suddenly, Cal’s condition has a meaning, and a purpose, and a place. The broader the territory for love that we learn, the more that we can explore. As it was for the Greek heroes before us, a journey of transformation awaits.

Tags: Genealogy, Hir, Justification, love, Middlesex, Myth

This entry was posted on Friday, May 10th, 2013 at 6:58 pm and is filed under Deploying Sexuality, May 7, Sam Barnes, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.