Object of desire

The Object of Desire names a recurring but unstable element in Jacopo Belbo’s understanding of both manuscripts and memory: desire appears even in works on Byzantine law, but its object is never reliably what an observer thinks it is. Belbo’s story of a childhood trumpet makes that instability tangible. The desired instrument becomes entangled with poverty, a child’s learned manners, an adult’s reconstruction of the past, and the possibility that getting what one wants would only redirect desire elsewhere.

Recurrence in the Manuscripts

Belbo introduces the concept while discussing three manuscripts he has encountered in a single week: one on Byzantine law, one on the Finis Austriae, and one on the poems of the Earl of Rochester. Their subjects seem radically different, but, he says, each contains Desire and the Object of Desire somewhere along the way. He considers this a trend, and jokes that desire is understandable in Rochester but harder to account for in Byzantine law. The recurrence unsettles the boundary between a topic’s declared subject and the interpretive pattern that keeps appearing within it.

The Object of Desire is not simply an identifiable thing hidden in a text. Belbo argues that even if Byzantine law contained an object of desire, it would not be what the manuscript’s author claimed it was. When Casaubon presses him, Belbo clarifies the broader point: the object is never what someone thinks it is. His wording turns the concept into a warning against treating a stated want as a transparent explanation of desire.

The Dream and the Material Want

Belbo traces the idea to a childhood dream, when he was five or six. In it he possessed a gold trumpet, and the happiness of the dream was so powerful that waking to find the trumpet absent made him cry for the entire day. He dates the episode to before the war, probably 1938, and remembers it against a background of poverty. The trumpet was a toy, but the intensity of its imagined possession outlasted waking: it was the difference between a desired object experienced as complete in a dream and the limited material world that met him afterward.

His parents’ household had firm rules about scarcity and appetite. Belbo recalls that when he said cabbage soup made him sick, his parents did not let him skip it and eat only the meat. The family still served a first course, a main course, and fruit; the expectation was that a child ate what was on the table. His grandmother sometimes removed the stringy cabbage piece by piece, but even that concession displeased his father. The remembered meal helps explain the setting in which a request for a trumpet could become more than a simple transaction: spending money was serious, and a child was taught that wanting something did not mean he could have it.

The Substitute and the Unfinished Choice

Belbo’s uncle and aunt, who had no children and regarded him as their favorite nephew, arrived that evening and promised to take him to a department store the next day. He could choose a trumpet from a counter of toys. He barely slept and could hardly sit still the next morning. At the store, several instruments complicated the choice: an army bugle, a slide trombone, and a gold trumpet fitted with a real trumpet mouthpiece but saxophone keys. To the child, even these probably tin instruments seemed magnificent, and he could not decide among them.

While Belbo hesitated, his uncle and aunt looked at the price tags. They were not stingy, but a Bakelite clarinet with silver keys cost much less than the trumpet. They suggested it instead. Belbo tried it, made a reasonable honk, and told himself that it was beautiful, while recognizing that he was rationalizing because he understood the price difference. His learned etiquette complicated the choice further: a well-bred child, as he understood it, should refuse a gift until the giver insists, rather than accept eagerly. He said the clarinet might be all right if that was what they wanted, while hoping they would press him to take the trumpet. They did not.

The object’s substitution does not settle what Belbo wanted. He had been taught to refuse, was aware of the cost, and wanted his relatives to insist; his outward willingness to accept the clarinet thus coexisted with a hope that they would override it. The remembered scene gives no simple distinction between choosing freely and yielding to the expectations of others. Desire is expressed through hesitation and polite refusal as much as through the trumpet itself.

Belbo, Casaubon, and the Question of Satisfaction

When Belbo looks at Casaubon from the corner of his eye, Casaubon asks what the Object of Desire was. Belbo replies that Casaubon is obsessed with the concept too, then refuses a definitive answer. Instead, he asks whether accepting the trumpet would really have made him happy. Casaubon suggests that Belbo would then have dreamed about the clarinet. The exchange shifts the emphasis from the lost trumpet to the instability of satisfaction: acquiring one object might not end desire, but transfer it to another.

Belbo concludes sharply that he got the clarinet but never played it. The concrete ending does not reveal what would have happened had he received the trumpet, nor does it prove that the clarinet itself was worthless to him. It preserves the gap between the gift he accepted, the instrument he had wanted, and the imagined happiness that neither the memory nor the conversation can verify. In that gap, the Object of Desire functions less as a final answer than as a moving target: the name attached to a want cannot guarantee what would satisfy it.

Desire as an Editorial and Authorial Problem

The concept also informs Belbo’s reflections on how manuscripts are shaped. He considers whether he is encouraging a writer to insert an unconventional hypothesis as an act of freedom, or using that writer to write his own book. He describes intervening in other people’s work with a word here and a word there, likening himself to a Demiurge tapping hardened clay or a statue someone else has already carved. The contrast is with taking soft clay and shaping something of his own. His question makes desire relevant not only to what characters or writers want, but to the power to determine what another person’s work will become.

That editorial reflection echoes the problem staged by the trumpet story. In both cases, the apparent object—an instrument, or a manuscript’s scholarly subject—does not exhaust what is at stake. A gift can carry the pressure of family economy and manners; a proposed idea can carry the editor’s desire to make another person’s book serve his own project. Belbo’s recurring Object of Desire thus connects private longing with interpretation and authorship, while his recollections leave the central uncertainty intact: whether the desired thing is truly the thing wanted, or only the available form through which desire speaks.