Names Have No Inborn Fitness — Xunzi, “Rectifying Names”#

After Haruki and Setsuna begin dating in WHITE ALBUM 2, Kazusa tells Setsuna that this is the conclusion Kitahara and Ogiso have reached together. She acknowledges her two friends’ agreement and will wish them well. Then she corrects how they address each other: stop calling her Touma; call her Kazusa, and she will call the other girl Setsuna.⁴

The lovers have been named. The friend remains. One name closes a door; another calls her closer.

These forms of address do not sort their feelings into tidy compartments. Setsuna asks what Kazusa thinks of her and is not satisfied with being told that other people’s opinions do not matter. Kazusa is not just other people. Kazusa calls Setsuna cute and interesting; their closeness cannot all be credited to Haruki. Setsuna also says that, if Kazusa were a boy, she would probably fall in love with two people at once. Feelings beyond romance press through the language of romance, while the relationship both have acknowledged gives these words a weight that cannot be lightly brushed aside.⁵

Counting how many people stand there would miscount the relationship. Haruki is absent; his agreement with Setsuna is present. Kazusa is present; her relationship with Setsuna is not exhausted by being the excluded person. A third person is a living individual. The “other woman” is a position a particular arrangement gives someone. A living person can change the arrangement and struggle between several positions. No one position amounts to her whole being.

The relationships also persist through conditions they draw on together. How do the two recognize each other, what do they expect, and on what grounds can either say, “You cannot do that”? Names such as friend, lover and spouse, previous promises and conventions that people around them already follow can all enter the answer. This essay calls these conditions, when they actually organize a relationship, the third term between two people. It must work through concrete people and actions: a word is repeated, an agreement invoked, a transgression reproached. Something merely present in the background of a scene does not yet qualify.

Nor is the third term entirely negotiated face to face. In saying “Let’s go out,” someone borrows a name for a relationship they did not invent from scratch. They may give it new substance, but cannot ensure that a listener hears only this occasion’s explanation. “We are married” brings expectations of shared knowledge that may never have been agreed. Many conventions arrange how people ought to assent before waiting for their assent.

The same form of address falls into a concrete relationship each time it is spoken. Repetition sustains a relationship; a new use may change its direction. “Kazusa” is closer than “Touma” because both women understand the former distance and have tried out a new one together. Words are not labels people can simply attach. After attachment, people still have to live within others’ understanding of them.

At the beginning of Seminar XVII, Lacan says that relations of discourse can persist without actual speech, while remaining constituted through language.⁶ Haruki need not be constantly present for the position of a lover to enter the two girls’ conversation. An agreement thereby acquires a duration beyond present feeling. Today need not prove everything again; yesterday’s assent can still ground tomorrow’s expectation. That same durability allows an uncorrected account to make many decisions for someone absent.

A Grievous Thick Barrier — Lu Xun, “My Old Home”#

In Lu Xun’s “My Old Home,” the narrator calls out to “Brother Runtu.” Runtu moves his lips, but the word he finally produces is “Master.” The narrator’s mother urges him to keep their old brotherly address and call him Brother Xun. Runtu says they were children then and knew no better. What sort of manners would that be now?⁷

If shared norms were limited to what both sides freely agreed, this “Master” would have nowhere to go. The narrator does not want it, and his mother urges a change. Yet it changes the encounter. Childhood affection supports the old address; another way of living supports the adult one. Explaining which words have more force requires more than asking which are more sincerely meant.

Runtu’s hands are rough and cracked. He says that even with the children helping, there is not enough to eat; the harvest is bad, and selling goods requires further payments. The narrator and his mother also lament famine, crushing taxes, soldiers, bandits, officials and gentry.⁸ These circumstances give etiquette its weight. Runtu did not first sign a contract accepting hierarchy and then speak according to its clauses. Labor, hardship and learned conventions have already helped shape how a sentence should be spoken. Neither speaker nor listener can cancel that life with “Don’t stand on ceremony.”

In the “Family” chapter of From the Soil, Fei Xiaotong rejects head count as a sufficient measure of a family’s complexity. A household with many children need not have a more complex relational structure than a small unit containing parents-in-law and a daughter-in-law. We need to ask what tasks the unit carries, along which relationships power is arranged, and why its members must remain together over time. Reproduction and childrearing, managing property and other social affairs cannot all be explained by “We are family.”⁹

This adds a layer to the question of two people in love. If a household simultaneously organizes subsistence, property and authority between generations, marital affection is not its entire operating principle. Even without ill will between spouses, a settled division of work may allow one to issue orders while the other can only prove that duties have been fulfilled. The family name brings things together. Analysis must open the relations gathered inside it. How marriage, property, legal powers and dependency connect in a concrete history still requires further questions; listing their facets does not finish the explanation.

Fei’s chapter on distinctions between men and women turns toward the experience of living together. Emotional excitement and the ease of long familiarity are different experiences. Quiet shared life need not be impoverished, and love’s continuing discovery of another person’s strangeness has a creativity of its own. Measuring all intimacy by productive efficiency makes romance seem troublesome. Measuring all shared life by intensity makes familiarity seem dead. The essay borrows his way of distinguishing experiences; his generalizations about China, the West and gender remain part of a historical argument, not laws for every family.¹⁰

At least three questions therefore need to be separated. Whether a convention actually constrains conduct concerns its force. Who can demand compliance, and on what basis, concerns authority. Whether the demand has sufficient reasons, and whether those affected can question it, concerns legitimacy. Fear, habit and dependency can sustain force without establishing legitimacy. Conversely, showing a rule to be unreasonable does not make it immediately cease to operate.

This distinction keeps criticism from failing in two directions. In one, it supplies reasons for powerful conventions: if everyone complies, there must be good reason. In the other, it pronounces unreasonable conventions dead: since we have seen through them, we are free. Runtu is still standing there. His inability to change his address does not arise from having heard too little about equality.

Let Words Attend to Deeds, and Deeds to Words — Book of Rites, “The Mean”#

WHITE ALBUM 2’s light music club gradually takes shape through exchanges among people with purposes of their own.

Setsuna catches up with Kazusa by herself, invites her to talk and tries inviting her into the club. Kazusa says she has no interest. Setsuna retains her own intention. She says Haruki needs Kazusa and that she herself wants to know her. When Haruki later hears Setsuna’s account of the afternoon, he readily interprets their approach as an effort on his behalf. Setsuna, however, has someone she cares about in her own right.¹¹

Before a relationship is settled, a few words can carry tentative approach, request and pressure together. Setsuna persists in coming closer, but Kazusa’s refusals do not all become void. She declines karaoke, and they do not go. For joining the club, Kazusa gives a clear condition: if Setsuna persuades her parents, she can join too. Setsuna later argues with her father deep into the night until her voice is hoarse. Her return becomes possible, and Kazusa decides to join.¹²

The agreement makes the future a little more predictable. Setsuna has more than a vague hope, while Kazusa links her next action to Setsuna’s effort. They may still misunderstand each other, yet they accomplish something that might not have happened this way without the agreement. A promise does more than constrain action. It can gather previously separate actions and make someone work toward cooperation that has not arrived. Paternal approval remains a condition they must face. Their success does not also establish that paternal authority is justified in every matter.

“We” still has limits. After leaving Setsuna’s house, Kazusa passes on Setsuna’s apology. Haruki thinks she need not worry. Kazusa says she has already told her that, but it was only her own opinion. Haruki must give his part of the answer himself tomorrow.¹³

Kazusa separates conveying a message from answering for someone: my reassurance has reached her; yours is still owed. She is willing to help while preserving a place for Haruki to speak to Setsuna himself.

Confirming a romance brings another constraint. When Setsuna confesses, she says Haruki can pull away. He does not. He asks whether she is really sure about him. Later he actively kisses her, and inwardly acknowledges what happens as his choice and its result.¹⁴ His hesitation does not cancel his action. His attachment to the three-person relationship does not make his acceptance of romance a mishearing. If something changes afterward, the assent already given still requires an answer.

In The Plague of Fantasies, Žižek examines a peculiar freedom. Someone is formally allowed to choose, yet everyone already knows the answer expected to sustain the relationship. One person politely offers a gift, another politely returns it. After the object has made its round, both may indeed have gained trust. An “empty” gesture can accomplish something real. The difficulty appears if another answer is actually given: does the freedom originally declared still count?¹⁵

Haruki gives an affirmative answer in the confession scene. The scene does not show whether Setsuna could accommodate another answer. Kazusa refuses karaoke and the itinerary changes; the condition for joining the club is later fulfilled. These differences make unwritten demands distinguishable. To judge whether an answer has room, we need to see what happens when it enters the relationship. Assuming in advance that every gentle word is a trap would also hide what these exchanges accomplish.

Still less can the frequent presence of implication turn an explicit refusal into permission. Then “I know better than you what you mean” replaces the other person’s words, and interpretation becomes a convenient way of deciding for them.

To Withhold Words from One You Could Speak With Is to Lose That Person — Analects, “Wei Ling Gong”#

K tells Sensei that he has fallen in love with the young woman living under the same roof. Sensei subsequently asks her mother for marriage while concealing K’s confession. The young woman becomes his wife.¹⁶ By the time Sensei writes his long letter to the younger man, he plans to kill himself. His wife’s aunt is gravely ill and needs care. He uses that need to encourage his wife to go, and writes secretly while she is away. He is willing to offer his past for others to learn from, with one exception: his wife. The final request is clear. As long as she lives, she must not be told.¹⁷

This is no shared agreement among everyone involved. His wife does not know, much less assent. Yet if the young man complies, the demand for secrecy will continue to constrain what she can know. The letter does not expressly forbid her to ask. It arranges that, after asking, she will still receive no crucial answer.

Sensei supplies a reason: he does not want her memory to lose its unblemished whiteness. In the letter he imagines confessing to her and receiving forgiveness, then chooses concealment. Forgiveness is his imagined possibility; whiteness is the image he wishes to preserve. What she repeatedly requested was an explanation.¹⁸

Sensei writes concealment as love’s protection. He admits his wrongdoing while continuing to decide the limits of someone else’s knowledge. His punishment of himself and consideration for her appear in the same final arrangement. The inward judgment is severe. The distribution of power has not changed with it.

Calling this the dead K still “occupying a place” in the marriage only names a result. K cannot command monthly visits to his grave or choose the young man as a recipient. Sensei keeps visiting the cemetery, maintains silence at home and determines what may be said to whom. Through these acts, the past enters the present in this particular way. The dead continue to act through the actions of the living. Serving a dead person’s memory does not release the living from responsibility for their own conduct.

When the young man receives the letter, he is attending his sick father. He turns to the end and sees Sensei’s statement that he should already be dead. Suddenly all he wants to know is whether Sensei still lives. His father is still conscious and even thanks him. The young man seeks the doctor to ask whether his father can last another two or three days. The doctor is absent. Without obtaining an answer, he hurries to the station and entrusts the carriage driver with a short note to his mother and brother. Only on the train does he read the long letter in full.¹⁹

He first leaves in response to a dying person’s call, then acquires the past it conveys. The document has changed action before its contents are fully read. Choosing this young man does more than add an informed person. The recipient’s position draws him from one bedside toward someone else and hands him a demand for secrecy. The novel does not go on to tell us what happens to his father, whether he arrives or whether he later obeys the secrecy instruction. We can see an arrangement beginning to take effect without supplying its complete execution.

A letter can try to tell the truth while trying equally hard to keep one person from hearing it. Sincerity concerns the speaker’s relation to his own account. Shared life also asks through whom the words pass, to whom they are given and who thereby gains a chance to change their circumstances. Sincerity cannot perform that second task alone.

Hear Widely for Clarity; Trust One Side and Remain in the Dark — Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Government, Volume 192#

Kokoro does not even make the confession an unbroken record of final judgment.

In the first part, the young man learns from Sensei’s wife that Sensei visits a grave in Zōshigaya each month, and goes there himself. Sensei first checks whether his wife has disclosed the dead person’s name. Later, when the young man asks to accompany him, Sensei says he has never even taken his wife.²⁰

The long letter, however, recounts a visit together after their marriage. His wife proposes that they go to see K. At the cemetery she offers flowers and incense, Sensei pours water, and both bow in worship. She says K ought to be pleased that they have come together. Sensei inwardly asks forgiveness and afterward decides never to bring her again.²¹

Never having gone together and having gone together once cannot both be literally true. Sensei may have lied on the earlier occasion, or memory or narration may have changed. The novel calls no other witness to decide for us. The two statements serve different purposes. The first makes the cemetery intensely private and limits the young man’s entry. The second opens the past to him while continuing, at the letter’s end, to limit the wife’s knowledge. The account has a crack; the person controlling it still sets thresholds for different audiences.

The letter records that the wife did enter the cemetery. She proposed the visit, went and offered flowers. She also urged Sensei to stop drinking and repeatedly asked why he was suffering. Her body and voice participated in the marriage. Those actions make what she did not receive more sharply visible: the explanation connecting her husband’s guilt, K’s death and her own marriage.²²

The young man initially knows no more than she does, but is chosen as someone allowed to know. Sensei later gives him the past he would not give his wife. One person’s profundity thereby requires a listener to inherit it and another person, sharing his life, not to understand. Profundity has acquired different terms of admission.

Names show their force through these different treatments too. The young man has always called him “Sensei”—teacher—and keeps the habit in his recollections.²³ The wife has the status of spouse; the young man occupies the position of pupil and trusted recipient. Names alone cannot rank their closeness. The more revealing question is what each kind of closeness permits: one person is entrusted with a secret, another is assigned a life without knowing it.

Sensei’s death cannot finally guarantee this distribution. Willingness to answer for wrongdoing with one’s life does not confer the right to decide forever for someone else. There is no proportional rule converting how much one pays into how much one may decide for another.

People Can Enlarge the Way; the Way Does Not Enlarge People — Analects, “Wei Ling Gong”#

Lacan’s statement that there is no Other of the Other helps take the question further. The names and authorities on which relationships draw have no final guarantor outside language who can never be wrong. A person’s claim to embody that guarantee does not make their demands naturally legitimate. In the same passage, Lacan distinguishes this from saying that law itself is all imposture or that everyone acting under law is a fraud.²⁴

A gap in the guarantee therefore does not imply that every promise is false. If only love that could never cause injury or misunderstanding were worth accepting, every actual assent would have to wait for an impossible guarantee. A promise matters precisely because someone who cannot fully account for their future self has already enabled another person to form expectations, making later changes something that must be explained to them.

Kazusa’s acknowledgment of Haruki and Setsuna’s agreement does not require her henceforth to approve of everything they do, nor require her feelings to disappear. When Haruki and Kazusa later acknowledge their love by telephone, Setsuna does not hear it. Their agreement has not automatically dissolved. Haruki intends to call Setsuna when Kazusa’s incoming call interrupts him. Kazusa says she did not put those bad things in the letter she left for Setsuna. Haruki knows he is continuing to betray her, and still turns toward Kazusa.²⁵

Two people declaring love now does not mean that the absent person has received an answer. Relationships can change, but earlier promises must be addressed through the actions that change them. Otherwise, yesterday a name reassured someone; today, because someone else is closer, it is declared never to have counted. The name becomes a tool acknowledged only when convenient. Fidelity to present sincerity can thus leave the consequences to others.

Shared relationships can also acquire new substance in small places. In “My Old Home,” the narrator’s mother cannot change Runtu’s address, but has Hong’er take Shuisheng outside. Hong’er calls to him and Shuisheng follows at ease. Later, on the boat leaving home, Hong’er wants to return: Shuisheng has invited him to visit his house.²⁶

The children have not changed their fathers’ livelihoods or hierarchy. They have already gone somewhere together and made an invitation still unfulfilled. The old relationship’s force is real; this small new relationship is real too. Recognizing only the former decides every future for the children. Recognizing only the latter makes too light of the days they still have to face. A new “we” needs to grow through continuing contact, without adults announcing its success in advance.

“Sharing one robe” comes from a poem of warfare. Shared clothing, repaired spears and halberds, rising and marching together belong to common action. The king’s raising of an army is also there: the collective voice stands within relations of power.²⁷ Borrowed for love, the line should carry its question with it. When we say “we,” who sets out, who gives orders, and who has not yet been asked?

Being affected by a relationship does not confer the power to decide whom another person loves. But when one’s promise has led another person to arrange her life, an explanation of its change is owed. A wife has reason to ask about the past whose effects leave her living with estrangement; that does not give spouses mutual rights to search every corner of one another’s minds. Shared consequences give a question its grounds. The question also needs a concrete object.

“We” can give people something to rely on and can turn one person’s wishes into everyone’s decision. How much it can bear depends less on the sincerity of the voice than on what people subsequently do: whether promises are kept, whether refusal can alter the next step, and whether those affected can offer an answer not already written for them. The legitimacy of shared life must continue to find reasons in these answers.

The next essay, “Could This Feeling Wait for Recollection: How Memory Changes the People We Are Now,” asks what happens when these words are written down, preserved and repeatedly told. Who can decide what they finally count as in a shared past?