William Blake: Nebuchadnezzar (c. 1795-1805)
I. The Case of King Nebuchadnezzar
Most people are probably vaguely familiar with the figure of King Nebuchadnezzar who, if the Bible is to be believed, was deprived of his mind by God and forced to
live like an animal as punishment for excessive pride or hubris. The fact that he destroyed Solomon's Temple and held God's chosen people captive probably didn't go down well either [1].
William Blake famously produced a large colour print depicting this Babylonian monarch reduced to the status of a mad beast. As can be seen, he looked pretty rough during this seven year period; almost like some sort of werewolf. Alexander Gilchrist writes that the picture shows Nebuchadnezzar:
"crawling like a hunted beast into a den among the rocks; his tangled
golden beard sweeping the ground, his nails like vultures' talons, and
his wild eyes full of sullen terror. The powerful frame is losing
semblance of humanity, and is bestial in its rough growth of hair,
reptile in the toad-like markings and spottings of the skin, which takes
on unnatural hues of green, blue, and russet." [2]
Happily for Nebuchadnezzar, at the end of the septennium he is restored to sanity and full human status - indeed, he even gets his kingdom back, having learned his lesson, so all's well that ends well in his case ...
II. The Case of Robinson Crusoe
Despite what naturists may choose to believe, I'm not convinced there's anything positive to be gained from the experience of nudity; I certainly don't think that running about with your kit off in the woods or on the beach, makes you essentially healthier, happier, or more vital.
Having stripped off his clothes in a heavy shower of rain, Robinson Crusoe later muses on this question of nakedness and the importance of garments:
"It was true that neither the temperature nor any consideration of modesty required him to go about dressed in a civilized manner. Sheer habit had caused him to do so, but now in his despair he began to appreciate the value of that armour of wool and linen with which human society had hitherto protected him. Nakedness is a luxury in which a man may indulge himself without danger only when he is warmly surrounded by his fellow man. For Robinson [...] it was a trial of desperate temerity. Stripped of its threadbare garments - worn, tattered, and sullied, but the fruit of civilized millennia, and impreganted with human associations - his vulnerable body was at the mercy of every hostile element. The wind, the thorned shrubs, the rocks, and the pitiless light assailed and tormented their defenceless prey." [3]
Clothes serve many important functions. But offering a degree of physical protection in a hard, sharp and dangerous world is by no means the least of these. However, as time passes on the island, Crusoe succumbs to the devastating effects of isolation and eventually finds himself as naked - and as bestial - as Nebuchadnezzar in Blake's famous print:
"Robinson could not have said how long it was since he had left his last shred of clothing on some thornbush. In any case, the thought of sunburn no longer troubled him, since his back, flanks, and thighs were now protected by a thick coating of dried mud. His hair and beard had grown so long that his face was almost invisible beneathy their tangled mass. His hands had become mere forepaws used for walking, since it made him giddy to stand upright. His state of physical weakness [...] but above all the breaking of some little spring in his soul, had led him to move only on his hands and knees. He knew now that man [...] can only stay upright while the crowd packed densely around him continues to prop him up. Exiled from the mass of his fellows, who had sustained him as part of humanity without his realizing it, he felt he no longer had the strength to stand on his own feet. He lived on unmentionable foods, gnawing them with his face to the ground. He relieved himself where he lay, and rarely failed to roll in the damp warmth of his own excrement. He moved less and less, and his brief excursions always ended in his return to the mire. Here, in its warm coverlet of slime, his body lost all weight, while the toxic emanations from the stagnant water drugged his mind. Only his eyes, nose, and mouth were active, alert for edible weed and toad spawn drifting on the surface." [4]
III. Lou Carrington's Contrasting Vision of the Pure Animal Man
Crusoe's experience of becoming-animal doesn't sound so great a life - and certainly puts being in a Covid lockdown into perspective. It obliges one also to reconsider D. H. Lawrence's fetishisation of the animal man, articulated, for example, in St. Mawr by Lou Carrington who informs her (somewhat sceptical) mother that she is tired of nice, clean men with minds and wants instead men full of their own animal mystery, burning with life:
"'A pure animal man would be as lovely as a deer or a leopard, burning like a flame fed straight from underneath. And he'd be part of the unseen, like a mouse is, even. And he'd never cease to wonder, he'd breathe silence and unseen wonder, as the partridges do, running in the stubble. He'd be all the animals in turn, instead of one, fixed, automatic thing, which he is now, grinding on the nerves.'" [5]
It's a lovely vision - in stark opposition to the image of Crusoe - but one worries that just as the latter is the product of a fear of animality and the loss of humanity defined in moral-rational terms and related to the covering of one's nakedness, so Lawrence's fantasy is the product of his own romanticism and a longing for a natural paradise of some kind, in which man can dispense with clothing and his animal nature will no longer be corrupted and domesticated by civilisation.
Notes
[1] Readers interested in the story of Nebuchadnezzar will find it in the Old Testament Book of Daniel, a collection of legendary tales and apocalyptic visions dating from the 2nd century BC. The consensus among scholars is that the work should obviously be read as historical fiction, rather than historical fact.
[2] Alexander Gilchrist, The Life of William Blake, (Dover Publications, 1998), p. 408-09.
[3] Michel Tournier, Friday, trans. Norman Denny, (John Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 33.
[4] Ibid., p. 40.
[5] D. H. Lawrence, 'St. Mawr', in St. Mawr and Other Stories, ed. Brian Finney, (Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 62.
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