The Darcy Satire Criticized

When Harriet, in Rex Bellamy’s memoir-novel The Darcy Satire (2^nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1987) asks why Darcy, after an adolescence of parting his hair on the left, suddenly begins parting it on the right, Darcy tells her it is nothing more than an accident that stuck. “I picked up the comb in the other hand, and I liked the results,” he tells her. “A little reversal can be good sometimes. Not everything I do signals some great catastrophe. A change is a change is a change, that’s all.” While Darcy contends the “reversal” is strictly arbitrary, it may be part of a greater system of “reversals” happening in his young life at this moment.

Professor Brooklyn Arbiter, in his famous essay on the novel, “The Darcy Mirror: Reflections, Reversals, and Refraction in Bellamy” (Oedipus Rex: Critical Essays on Bellamy. Ed. R. U. Bellamy. Buena, NJ: Darcy Press, 1994.), argues the climax, Darcy’s simultaneous acceptance into Harvard and the death of Felix, is a sort of reversal of fortune that functions in an economy of good and bad luck. “Nothing comes for free in Bellamy’s work,” Arbiter writes:

Every advance in one direction is a regress in another. Darcy’s sexual discovery comes at the expense of his virginity and all the anxiety of that loss; Nokotomon’s extraordinary state championship win over Buena, the high school’s first football title in its history, incites the student riots that cast a shadow over the middle of the novel, causing the teacher strikes and threatening the near dissolution of the school. For Darcy to be admitted at Harvard, the best friend had to succumb to his illness. Were Felix to go on living, Darcy would remain suspended in his youth. Bellamy’s is a particularly bleak karma (108-109).

Arbiter goes on to argue that the hair-part “reversal” may signal the moment when Darcy becomes aware of the zero-sum luck economy of the novel, and thus the fictional world he inhabits. The change in hair style, an utterly banal thing, may be the only act Darcy can perform without incurring a punishment. Indeed, in a self-reflexive moment for the text, Darcy seems almost to challenge Bellamy, the god of this fiction world, to punish him:

“…A change is a change is a change, that’s all.”

Defeated Darcy’s gaze moved from Harriet’s feet, where it had been fixed, though unseeingly, for the last fifteen minutes, up the length of her stringbean body, her narrow hips, her too-small breasts, her pronounced clavicle and unfeminine bump of an adam’s apple, past her freckled face against which, the week before, he’d measured his cock to uplifting results, to the wisps of hair sticking out from her bun and backlit by the moonlight. There was a face in the moon, the reflection of some pasty Irish godking with a mathematical mind, round-faced, sunken-eyed, sullen, prematurely balding and only thirty. Though he didn’t recognize that face, Darcy knew it belonged to some forbearer of his, some descendant of peeteaters whose only recourse for correcting the ills that had been done for centuries to him and his people was to ascend to a position of dubious authority and reign terror on others. This forbearer was sending his young life out of control. He had killed Felix. He had killed Mr. Boony. But he had also swayed the mind of the admissions committee at Harvard. He had also brought Harriet into his life. Now Darcy was parting his hair on the right and it was only a matter of time before this author – for that was how he came to think of him – unleashed whatever he had in store.

“Fuck you!” Darcy shouted at the moon. “Why do you do this you wretch?”

“Why do I do what?” Harriet asked. And there she was. Still standing over him, still too thin. And as soon as she came back into focus, the face in the moon disappeared. And Darcy never knew if the unraveling that followed to his tongue was his own doing or that of the moon man:

“Why do you change you hair every week?” he asked, turning on Harriet. “What do you gain from your systematic rotation of hairdos? You didn’t think I would notice you have a system? It’s a bun this week, next week it’s a loose ponytail, and exactly two months from now it will be a beehive. It’s true, you know it! I started keeping track two years ago, and now I’m a real almanac. Hah! An almanac of Harriet’s hairstyles.”

“I didn’t mean to anger you, Serge,” Harriet said, sitting down on the sand beside him, but taking a moment too to touch her head self-consciously. She was unsure whether to feel embarrassed at her exposed vanity, or to be angry with Darcy for seeking and finding the machinations of her beauty. And what else had he discovered about her in these years of secret observation? Surely, he hadn’t stopped at the hair. Which of her other patterns had he found? Even worse, had he found patterns where she thought she was being spontaneous? In an obsessive personality, a need for organization and structure runs deep into the subconscious. Was she obsessive, and oh god was she then predictable?

She imagined Darcy with his Harriet almanac, preempting her every move with an empirical clairvoyance like Sherlock Holmes, meeting her at the supermarket, answering questions on her behalf, in ten years knowing exactly which chapel in which state she would be married. Knowing the names she would give her children long before she ever considered it. Suddenly her face was hot and something monumental, either a blush or a tantrum, came from her stomach to creep up her throat. She swallowed frantically, and when that didn’t work, she stood up, dusted the sand from her skirt, and made as if to leave.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m still worked up about Felix. Please, you understand.”

As she passed him, she pushed his hair over and it fell with surprising ease back into the position it had, until this day, occupied its whole existence.

“Jesus Christ!” he shrieked and a flock of seagulls down the shore took flight in panic. With a good deal of spit, he coaxed the black strands out of their natural rightward bent. “Can’t you let me have this one innocent pleasure?”

Harriet smiled as she walked back up to the boardwalk, shoes tucked in the elastic of her skirt. He didn’t see that one coming. Or had he? (643-45)

Darcy’s paradoxical phrase “innocent pleasure” reflects the persisting disquiet over the earlier episode of his and Harriet’s defloration pact: he blames Harriet for robbing him of simpler, pre-sexual joys, i.e. advancements without regressions. Now sexually enlightened or disabused, the closest he can come to “innocent pleasure” is non-pleasure, the banality of combing one’s hair. To make matters worse, Darcy’s natural part is on the left, rendering even this terribly dull wish into an impossible task. Thus, while combing his hair may feel free of external reactions imposed by the author, the way it torments him may itself be an opposite reaction to previous, un-repaid positive events, as it were.

While I believe Arbiter’s theory merits consideration, I also want to argue against it. I recently obtained a copy of an open letter from Bellamy to Arbiter, published in a Parisian newspaper in 1995, where the author was living at the time. In the letter, entitled “Brooklyn Dodger”, Bellamy says the professor’s tragic reading of the novel purposefully ignores the work’s satiric elements. Following is a reprint of the last paragraph:

Brooklyn, you reveal a mind made narrow by classicism. If only the world did work on models of tragedy, comedy, or heroism. It would be so much easier! Alas, in portraying the world as it is, I have had to show all of its irrational complexities, the relative justices and injustices. This is the satiric. I would take Darcy at his word when he says the hair part signals nothing. How do we not know he will shave his head his first day at university? And I will only touch on your ridiculous theorizing of the lost virginity. Serge Darcy is a pubescent boy in the year 1983, not a shepherdess. Has the academic concubine purged your memory, Professor, of the chaos of youthful lust?

Yours,

RRB

Bellamy says his fiction has no rhyme or reason beyond realism and from this the satire arises. The last passage of The Darcy Satire, though grim, is also rendered comically, and thus resisting any kind of morality or outcome, effectively shatters the luck economy:

“I only found one bullet,” Darcy said, unwrapping his grandfather’s revolver from the towel in which it had been kept. He presented it to Harriet like a newborn, but she didn’t want to touch it.

“One bullet? We can find a way to make it work, right?” she said.

“Yes, if we put our heads together.”

“Oh, Serge. It will be better like this.”

They lay side by side on the bed gripped with terror and excitement, as they had many times before. But Darcy did not reach for his cigarettes. He reached for the gun, pressed it against his temple, and before he could think twice, pulled the trigger. It failed to go off. And yet they died all the same, and lay on the bed perfectly still, like bodies (711).

In this paper I will try…

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