And one hardly needs to be a Lacanian to see that its narrative is a search
for himself, for wholeness, an attempt to locate himself in time and space,
above all perhaps—and notwithstanding the text’s humour—an attempt to
come to terms with loss, absence and incompleteness.^17 Now beyond this
point our reading must be conjectural if we are to pass through to the
deeper significances that may lie beneath the surface meaning. But it must
be apparent to every reader of Constant’s story about his tutor that the
passage is charged with a talismanic value for its author that will forever
remain tantalizingly beyond our grasp unless we do take a few judicious
risks.
What, at the level of mere common sense and intuition, hides on the underside of this
incident? One of the keys to the mystery is the young Constant’s unexplained complicity
with Ströhlin. The obvious—though not necessarily correct or complete—answer is a
need for companionship and physical affection, a need so great that it is even worth
enduring the repeated torment of beating to satisfy it. This interpretation has the virtue of
being entirely in keeping with the facts of Constant’s early childhood and his relationship
with his father as far as they can be reconstructed. Sir Harold Nicolson’s biography
rightly emphasizes the absence of love from Constant’s childhood world:
[It is not] right to underestimate or to ignore the effect upon his
character of the tremendous disaster of his mother’s death. It
removed the discerning watchfulness which might have enabled
him to develop gradually, rather than by fits and starts; it gave him
in childhood the disconcerting feeling that he did not belong to
anybody, absolutely, anywhere; it rendered him ignorant of
gentleness; it induced him throughout his life to confuse love with
passion; it denied him maternal control, which alone could have
curbed his wayward precocity; and above all perhaps it left him
completely at the mercy of his capricious father.^18According to this theory, therefore, Benjamin Constant would willingly
submit to Ströhlin’s violence for an indefinite period in order to benefit
from physical contact with him and to enjoy his all too brief show of
mothering. It is an unbearably poignant explanation: Constant turned to a
perhaps paedophile sadist to find the love he was denied everywhere else.
The hypothesis is plausible, perhaps more so than the other possibility that
it was the sheer intellectual delight of learning Greek that made Constant
remain silent about Ströhlin’s conduct. True, Constant himself almost
suggests that this was the reason, but he stops short of actually saying so
and the lack of direct explanation on his part leaves other possibilities
open. In any case, according to the alternative explanation of Constant’s
Benjamin constant 16