Narcissistic Love II: Call Me By Your Name
Narcissistic love almost always involves an element of androgyny. Like Narcissus, who spurned all romantic advances before falling for his own reflection, narcissists project their image onto whoever they fall for. This means that, in heterosexual love, a narcissistic man will fall for a woman with masculine attributes — or project them onto her — and vice versa. This is the case, as we saw in Narcissistic Love Part I: Wuthering Heights, with Catherine and Heathcliff. But this begs the question: wouldn’t a true narcissist be a person who falls for someone of the same sex? Someone more symmetrical to them? This would fit well with Freud’s theory of sexual development, which sees homosexuality as a form of narcissitic stasis. According to Freud, sexual development begins with undifferentiated auto-erotism and ends, in most cases, with object-love (i.e. love directed at another person). According to this theory, there is an intermediate stage — the narcissistic stage — in which the individual moves from auto-erotic activities in an attempt to obtain a love-object: ‘he begins by taking himself, his own body, as his love-object, and only subsequently proceeds from this to the choice of some person other than himself as his object’. Homosexuality, Freud argues, is the next stage:
The line of development then leads on to the choice of an external object with similar genitals — that is, to homosexual object-choice — and thence to heterosexuality. People who are manifest homosexuals in later life have, it may be presumed, never emancipated themselves from the binding condition that the object of their choice must possess genitals like their own’
The connection between homosexuality and narcissism might seem parochial, but it is central to one of the great homoerotic love stories of our time: André Aciman’s novel (and also Luca Guadagnino’s film) Call Me By Your Name. The story centres on Oliver, a 24-year-old graduate student, and Elio, the 17-year-old son of Oliver’s academic adviser. The two develop feelings for eachother during Oliver’s stay at Elio’s home.
In the moment that gives the story its title, Oliver turns to Elio, postcoitus, and tells him to ‘Call me by your name and I’ll call you by mine’. This is the modern, ‘I am Heathcliff’. It initiates complete intimacy between them, which occurs only when there is complete identification. The act transports Elio to an alternative realm: ‘as soon as I said my own name as though it were his, [it] took me to a realm I never shared with anyone in my life before, or since’. This is the solipsistic realm that entranced Narcissus. It is what keeps people locked in narcissistic stasis — unable to escape their self-objectifying object-choice.
As in the case of Catherine and Heathcliff, the narcissistic love between Elio and Oliver is sustained, not through parity, but through a triptych relation of equality, superiority and inferiority. But unlike the Wuthering Heights example, which was centred on the poles of gender and socialisation, Call Me By Your Name pivots to the issue of age and experience in implicit reference to Ancient Greek pederasty and the roles of the erastês (the lover) and the erômenos (the beloved); i.e. the older, active male lover and the younger, more passive boy. As Plato explains in the Phaedrus, the exchange between the erastês and erômenos is only secondarily a carnal exchange; it is primarily an educational one. In his introduction to the Phaedrus, Robin Waterfield writes that:
While a boy was in bloom (around the age of 13 or 14, say), several older men, in their twenties or thirties, would pursue him. They were the ones feeling passion, while the boy would most likely feel little or nothing beyond sexual arousal (Plato’s scenario at 255b–256a of our dialogue is deliberately unusual). The boy was expected to be merely passive, to let the successful suitor have his way — to ‘gratify’ the lover, as the Greeks tended rather delicately to put it. This inequality is reflected in the relevant Greek terms: ‘lover’ translates erastēs, literally ‘a man feeling erōs’, while the boy is the erōmenos, just the object of the lover’s erōs. What the boy got out of the affair — and this is why it was an upper-class phenomenon — was a form of patronage. In return for granting his sexual favours, he would expect the older man to act as an extra guardian in public life, to introduce him into the best social circles, and later, perhaps many years after the sexual side of the affair was over, to help him gain a foothold in the political life of the city, in which all upper-class Athenian men were naturally involved. Moreover, the older man was expected to cultivate the boy’s mind — to be an intellectual companion
The dynamic between Elio and Oliver is that of erômenos and erastês. At first, Elio is put off by what he perceives as Oliver’s arrogance. But as they grow closer, they discover a mutual admiration: Elio admires Oliver’s confidence and carefree demeanour, while Oliver admires Elio’s talent and precocity. They both admire each other’s intelligence, but the gap in age and experience keeps Elio feeling inferior.
In another defining moment of the story, after Oliver has returned to America, Elio discusses his feelings towards Oliver in a somewhat coded conversation with his father. In this conversation, Elio calls Oliver intelligent, then hesitates, and Elio’s father says:
‘Intelligent? He was more than intelligent. What you two had had everything and nothing to do with intelligence. He was good, and you were both lucky to have found each other, because you too are good.’
‘I think he was better than me, papa.’
‘I am sure he’d say the same about you, which flatters the two of you.’
It is around this passage that Aciman makes explicit reference to Emily Brontë’s: ‘he’s more myself than I am’; and also ‘Montaigne’s all-encompassing explanation for his friendship with Etienne de la Boetie’: ‘Parce que c’etait lui, parce que c’etait moi’.
It is not parity — in the sense of physical sameness — that underlies narcissistic love. It is, instead, a way of relating to someone that resembles the way we relate to ourselves. Elio looks at Oliver and sees what he would like to be and thus projects himself onto Oliver (by calling him Elio). Oliver does the same thing, except that he sees what he would have liked to be, including also the youth and innocence he desires in the present.
It is well-known that narcissists are, despite their self-obsession, incredibly insecure. It would make sense then that they would seek out individuals who simultaneously confirm each of these contradictory self-perceptions. The outcome, in Wuthering Heights and Call Me By Your Name, is growth. Both couples improved themselves through their mutual identifications. Oliver loves Elio, flaws and all, because he sees and accepts in Elio the younger version of himself. The same could be said of Catherine and Heathcliff. At their best, both couples were whole; i.e. indivisible and complete. Picture Narcissus making contact with the surface of his reflection; the two are, momentarily, one.
What comes next? Nothing can. After visiting the solipsistic realm, all else is oblivion. Narcissus drowns. Catherine dies. Oliver leaves. Grand opening, grand closing.
