Beauty

If beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, then who decides whether a woman's beauty or body belongs to her?

Sasja

You may have reached the conclusion already (based on the comments thread at http://www.arnongrunberg.com/blog/1172-you-must-love-me) that I believe that the platitude that beauty is in the eye of the beholder is mostly nonsense.

It appears the maker of the movie understands the implications of the words of mr. Coetzee much better than the writer himself.

Arnon

Is beauty objective and constant?

Sasja

We too easily dismiss the idea that beauty can be absolute. Just to avoid difficult and painful questions. Baudelaire wrote: “Beauty is made of an eternal, invariable element, whose extent is extremely difficult to determine, and another that is relative, circumstantial, which will comprise, one might say, by turns or together, the era, the style, morality and passion.”

Arnon

Baudelaire''s idea of beauty or how beauty should be conceived
is closely connected to his famous defenition of modernity or the modern experience: ''Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable. ''
By saying that the beauty of the girl does not only belong to her, David Lurie might be taking up the position of a modern flaneur.

A girl and a boy are on a gaunt island.
The girl is extremely beautiful the boy is quite ugly.
Who is the most Lucky one ? Or are they evenly (un)Lucky ?

Sasja

Maybe Michelangelo's David will become even more beautiful if it is put inside an inaccessible black box.
It is impossible to separate beauty from desire. So you'd need a person to do the desiring.

desire

you always can think something wrong of beauty but that is so mediocre, the best feeling is to let desire stance in your soul,. When you cross the line like David Lurie in the film did desire will be gone for a long time, he will have a desire for the crime on the beauty he committed for a long time.

Sander, Arnon

So, the beauty is in the eyes of the desirer? I have a tough time imagining absolute beauty.

Sasja

I'm not sure if beauty cannot exist without desire.
If you want to know more about beauty start reading instead of guessing.

Bram

What is a "modern flaneur"?

Oh, doctor Grunberg!

What would I do without your guidance?!

Arnon

Actually, Arnon, the scene in the movie is precisely as described in the book.

"He takes her back to his house. On the living-room floor, to the sound of rain pattering against the windows, he makes love to her. Her body is clear, simple, in its way perfect; though she is passive throughout, he finds the act pleasurable, so pleasurable that from its climax he tumbles into blank oblivion."

There is also a certain symmetry in the book between the way Lurie treats women (and Melanie Isaacs in particular) and the rape of his daughter. Although the two acts are on different level of course.

Also the great weight of South African race relations rests upon the book. It is no accident that Melanie Isaacs is "non-white".

Carlos

I would say that the symmetry in the movie is more explicit.
Although Coetzee writes about Lurie and Melanie "Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core," there is some playfulness between L and M in the book that was utterly absent in the movie.

Arnon

I ment the modernist position of a flaneur

arnon

I missed that playfulness between Lurie and Melanie
in the movie. It was not clear why she came to him.

Bram

Your answer is a tautology. My question remains unanswered.

The sensation of beauty is a feeling of helplessness before something that is nevertheless non-threatening. Can beautiful things be "owned" (overpowered) ? Does the object in acquiring it lose the quality beautiful?