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Desiring Brotherhood
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being ‘beside oneself’” (Silverman, 1992: 263). In the novel,
Penderton’s masochistic ecstasy enacts a transgression of
individuality, brings about a grotesque transformation of the self,
and catapults the body to reach that level at which the divine might
be glimpsed.
Moreover, Penderton’s masochism concludes with his sadistic
treatment of Firebird. Upon finally bringing Firebird to a halt and
dismounting, he “broke off a long switch, and with the last of his
spent strength he began to beat the horse savagely. . . . The
Captain kept on beating him. Then at last the horse stood
motionless and gave a broken sigh” (McCullers, 2001c: 355). This
sadistic frenzy is set against an affective amalgam of shame,
frustration, agony, loneliness, alienation, powerlessness,
unworthiness, and abjection. After abusing the horse, Penderton
“sank down on the ground and . . . looked like a broken doll that
has been thrown away” (355). Sobbing aloud, he remembers his
lonely boyhood; brought up by five old-maid aunts, he “had never
known real love” (355). Descending from the antebellum southern
aristocracy, Penderton’s family members were planters in Georgia
before the Civil War. However, the family had fallen on hard times:
“Behind him was a history of barbarous splendor, ruined poverty,
and family hauteur” (355). Besieged by an avalanche of ignoble
feelings, Penderton abuses the horse and experiences vicarious pain
and vulnerability from the act. As Bersani has noted, sadism is
defined in Freud’s “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes” as a
“masochistic identification with the suffering object” (Bersani,
1986: 41). In other words, rather than enacting an expansion or
mastery of the “I,” Penderton’s sadism is the result of an
identification with his suffering victim and a desire for self-
shattering experience that tears down ego-boundaries and releases
the individual into a kind of bliss, or masochistic
jouissance
.
12
12
For the reversibility of roles in S/M and the permeability of the boundaries
separating the two, see Bersani’s essay “Shame on You” (2011) and his book
Homos
(1995, especially 77-112 in his provocative and fascinating study of