But as soon as there is any departure from simplicity, and attempt at
halfness, or good for me that is not good for him, my neighbor feels the wrong; he shrinks from me as far as I have shrunk from him; his eyes no longer seek mine; there is war between us; there is hate in him and fear in me.
Part 2 then explores Aurora's and Marian Earle's
halfness to illustrate that the divided sense of self that women experience from sexual assault, gendered discourse, and marriage need not be a resolution or an ending--it can instead be the beginning of a new way of social counting.
To bring face to face the drawn out self' before an other' is the Coleridgean desire to engage in a dialogue that would transform the
halfness' of the soul into completeness,' which is more or less an ambivalence in the paradoxes of the opposites leading to a nearly legible meaning of the self (Macovski 81).
In Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), it is Groddeck's rather than Freud's definition of "the It" that Lawrence seems to invoke, "IT being the deepest whole self of man, the self in its wholeness, not idealistic
halfness" (18).
The essence of all jokes, of all comedy, seems to be an honest or well intended
halfness; a non performance of that which is pretended to be performed, at the same time that one is giving loud pledges of performance.
This "
halfness" is believed to make one kamzor (weak) physically and sexually and make childbearing difficult for women.
Be that as it may, the stories of the Sirani or half-caste are inevitably those of liminal identities and fissured selves stigmatized by their
halfness or mixed extraction and its resultant connotations of racial and cultural contamination.
Emerson talks of comic "
halfness", which obtains over "a non-performance of what is pretended to be performed", especially if accompanied by "loud pledges of performance"; furthermore, in any specific context, when you separate a particular bodily man from the connection of things at large and contemplate him alone he appears instantaneously comic and nothing can rescue him in the longer run from the ludicrous (Emerson 1885:115-116).
In the text's most delirious moment, Irving finds himself literally carried away by this spirit of '
halfness': 'It was with a sensation half serious half comic that I found myself thus afloat, on the skin of a buffalo, in the midst of a wild river, surrounded by wilderness, and towed along by a half savage whooping and yelling like a devil incarnate' (pp.
"Your
halfness is the result of the disobedience of your tondi (double- soul)," answered God.