The Lady and the Chimp

Star-crossed lovers: 

Adie Timmermans and Chita the Chimp

 

 

A story that caught my eye earlier this week concerns a woman in Belgium who has been banned by a zoo in Antwerp from visiting the ape enclosure, due to the fact that she was conducting an affair with one of the residents; a chimpanzee named Chita.   

 

For the past four years, Adie Timmermans has visited Chita - who has been held captive at the zoo for thirty years - on a weekly basis and developed a close bond with him, waving and exchanging kisses through the glass (and across the species divide) that separates them. 

 

But now the zoo have stepped in, expressing concern that what they regard as an illicit relationship is negatively impacting upon Chita's natural affinity with members of his own kind; other chimps - perhaps jealous of his rapport with a human - have allegedly begun to exclude him from group activities. 

 

And so, rather cruelly I think, the zoo has banned 38-year-old Ms. Timmermans from making any further contact with Chita, breaking his heart and hers; for parting isn't such sweet sorrow when you don't know if you will ever see one another again.  

 

Keepers have been instructed to help Chita interact more with his fellow chimps. But surely they could have made alternative arrangements; building a private space, for example, in which Chita and Adie could have lived happily ever after in zoosexual bliss ...   

 

 

Reflections on Lady Chatterley's Daughter (Part II: Chapters 12-22)

 

Cover of the first US edition 

(Ace Books, 1962) [a]

 

 

V. Chapters 12-14

Chapter twelve picks up where chapter eleven left off, with Clare still musing on her encounter with a kindly lesbian, called Jo. Receiving a note from the latter, Clare tears it up; "she felt no sympathy for Jo [and] certanly did not intend to see her" [139], despite feeling desperately lonely and unhappy:

 

"She began to be morbid. She might die in a raid - die never having found the true perfect love that the poets wrote about. She found herself praying with a kind of despair that she would meet the right man soon and that all her present bitterness and doubt would be swept aside." [139]

 

Then along comes Jacques ... A piano playing Frenchman with a penchant for redheads. Oh how she enjoys dancing with him at the Savoy and accepting his kisses at the end of the evening:

"She felt a new person - full of the joy of life [...] He was so masculine and so right after the episode with Jo Albiss which had left an unpleasant taste in her mouth." [145]

And so, one night, Clare agrees to return to the house in Chelsea that Jacques is staying in, so she might listen to him play Chopin and Debussy, whilst lying stretched out on the sofa with her eyes closed. Soon, the conversation turns to sex. Clare confesses her lack of feeling, but Jacques refuses to accept the possibility of asexuality: "'I do not believe that there lives or breathes a man or woman who is quite sexless'" [147]. 

 

Well Jacques, mon ami, I suggest you click here ... Although, maybe he's right; for suddenly, Clare decides she wants him to fuck her: "Her whole mind suddenly demanded surrender. It would be such a blessed relief to know that she was not neurotic or cold or abnormal in some way like Jo." [147]

 

Jacque lets down Clare's hair and even manages to quickly and skilfully remove her dress. But then he makes the fatal error of leaving the room for a few moments. For when he returns, wearing only his silk dressing gown: "She looked up at him and in an instant the old horror gripped her, completely smothering all desire." [149]

 

To be fair, Jacques doesn't rage or make a scene. In fact, he comforts Clare and draws from her the following confession ... When she was 13 - thus a year younger than when she discovered she was born out of wedlock - she came across a young couple fucking behind a haystack and this so upset her that she ran off and hid in a hedge until dark, crying her eyes out. 

When she tells her mother, the latter calls her a silly goose for getting upset, and explains that such things are (a) perfectly natural and (b) even beautiful. To make matters worse, Clare later discovers her parents at it, after entering their bedroom to look for a hair-slide. 

 

Jacques, for all his knowledge of l'amour, doesn't quite know what to say: "He had a kindly heart and he knew that something was very wrong with this young girl's outlook." [153] So he tells her to get dressed, then drives her home. 

 

Shortly afterwards, Clare has a nervous breakdown and ends up in hospital for a month:

 

"She felt nothing, and nothing mattered - not Robin or Jacques or Jo - nor her parents, the past, present or future. Just nothing. She lay in a corner of the busy ward, sometimes sleeping, sometimes watching drowsily the activities in the long brightly-painted ward, but always remote, withdrawn, as though in a secret uncaring world of her own.

      She wished she could remain in this void for ever. It was wonderful not to mind - not to feel. [...]

      She was not, however, allowed to remain in this apathy too long." [156-57] 

The psychiatrist assigned to her case tells her to pull herself together and to trust that one day she'll find the right man and all will be well: "'You must wait, Clare, quietly, patiently, until it happens to you. Love will come quite suddenly, and out of the blue, I promise you, but wait for it.'" [160]

 

Funnily enough, this little talk results in a strange new peace coming over Clare and her health begins to rapidly improve: "She was able to smile again." [160] (Who needs Freud?)

Post-recovery, Clare heads off to see her parents once more, down on the farm. Her father drives to the station to pick her up - yes, that's right! Oliver Mellors who, at one time, would rage about how "mechanised greed, sparkling with lights and [...] roaring with traffic" [b] would lead to the destruction of the natural world, is now happy to motor around in a car! 

According to Robins, even whilst driving Mellors was "able to distract his thoughts [...] and lose himself in an ecstatic acceptance of the beauties of nature" [163], but I think we all know that's bullshit; much the same kind of thing that is said by those eco-hypocrites today who express their concern about the environment and global warming, but still drive their gas-guzzling 4x4s to the supermarket to do the weekly shop, or take their precious darlings to football practice. 

 

Whilst alone with her mother, Clare reveals her plan to complete her convalescence with her friend Liz at the latter's home, Long Endon, five miles from Wragby. She also says with sudden complete frankness that she intends to call upon Sir Clifford. Connie thinks this is an act of peculiar disloyalty: 

 

"Why, why did her daughter want to resuscitate the past like this? What strange malicious fascination drew her towards Cliffird Chatterley?" [171]

 

 

VI. Chapters 15-17      

 

Whatever her motivation, Clare visists Wragby Hall: "She felt her cheeks colour. Also her heart beat in a curiously quick, uneven fashion." [172] Her friend Liz (and her parents), didn't know she was the love-child of Constance Chatterley. And Clare still wasn't sure whether she would reveal her maternal origin to Sir Clifford.  

 

Now a mature gentleman with beautifully-brushed white hair, Clifford still looked the part, handsome and well-dressed as always; some might even call him a silver fox. Clare is immediately very fond of him; Clifford seemed suave and sophisticated, yet also rather vulnerable and sensitive. Despite it feeling a bit strange to be drinking tea with her mother's first husband, she was excited to be with him.

 

And Clifford, of course, is smitten by Clare:

 

"This was a very beautiful girl, he thought. His interest in her was purely aesthetic. He admired her fine bones, her long slim figure, her narrow aristocratic ankles. [...] He could see that she had taste. He admired her very simply, well-cut, grey linen dress with its white collar and bolero-coat to match. He always liked a well-tailored woman." [176] (Who doesn't?)

 

Clare reminds Clifford of Connie (though she was slimmer and more graceful than the latter). And Clare could have sat listening to Clifford talk for ever: "It was utter bliss to [...] converse with a man like this who had so much to teach her - to give to a woman, mentally." [178] 

 

She realises that she has to tell him who she is; that it would be unfair to go on accepting his kindness and hospitality without doing so. And so the big reveal: she tells him who her parents are and apologises for visiting under false pretences: 

 

"'I suppose I should have told you at once. It was awful of me. [...] But I wanted so much to meet you. My mother has so often spoken of you, and Wragby [...] I felt I must see you. It wasn't just idle curiosity. It was a sort of compulsion ...'" [180]

 

Clifford receives this revelation in silence, like a figure made of stone. 

 

Finally, he is able to speak and express his astonishment. Obviously, he has mixed feelings about the situation he has been placed in and the young woman before him. Nevertheless, he behaves with perfect decency and, rather than throw her out, as might have been expected, he allows her to stay and even invites Clare to visit him again the following day.

She leaves Wragby strangely elated: 

 

"It was as though with this elderly paralysed man who had once been her mother's husband, she found a deep bond ... a more spiritual and intelligent understanding ... than she had received from any of the younger men. [...]

     She had no wish to be disloyal to her parents, but she had to admit she found Sir Clifford a fascinating character, His concise brain - his interest in learning - in all the things of the mind, had given her an exact answer to her desire to ignore the physical and live on a more intelligent plane." [186]

 

To which we can only ask: what would her parents think - and what would Lawrence make of this? I suspect that the latter would be spinning in his grave, if Frieda hadn't had his corpse exhumed and cremated. Because this is a real turn up for the books - and, if I were Robins, I would have Connie marry Clifford and thus square the love triangle that existed between him and her parents. (Spoiler: this isn't going to happen.)  

For Clare, Wragby has everything that her parents home - Swanningdean - lacks:

"There, her mother and father lived in the little snug farmhouse more or less in each other's arms, oblivious to anything that went on around them; not caring particularly what had been done in the past and what might happen in the future. Only the present mattered to them, within the narrow confines of their egotistical passion." [188]

 

Wragby has grandeur and a rich history and belonged to no one individual, but to generations past and generations to come: 

"At Wragby [Clare] found the strength, the vision and above all the restraint which appealed to everything fundamental in her. [...]

      Here, at Wragby, she could feel her own views vindicated. Passion played no part in Sir Clifford's life and yet his mind was free to roam at will over every aspect of living - enriched by past generations, by beauty, art, and an intellect far beyond her own." [188]

 

Of course, this is Clare's take on things: it would never be Connie's. For her mother is one of those women who believes in love über alles and that, for a woman, biology is a destiny: "that aesthetic pleasures could not bring complete fulfilment to a woman; nature did not fashion a woman's body for procreation, nor endow her with the desire to love and be loved to no purpose" [188-89].

Ultimately, for Connie (and I suspect for Robins): "No matter how Clare might try to run away from this basic truth, she would realize it in the end [...]" [189]

 

God save us all from basic truths ...!

 

Clare agrees to sit for Liz's brother, Francis, who fancies himself as a portrait artist. Of course he falls in love with her and even asks for her hand in marriage. She turns him down [c]. Which was just as well, for shortly afterwards he develops leukaemia and dies (see chapter 18, pp. 216-17). 

 

Clare spends more time with Clifford, talking about English architecture and the beauty of fireplaces. On the last night but one, they dine together and then watch a film; Henry V, starring and directed by Laurence Olivier (1944) [d]. 

 

When the time comes to say goodbye, Clifford extracts a promise from Clare that she'll return one day (a promise he'd also once extracted from her mother of course): "She had brought him great joy in a fashion which he found hard to explain to himsef." [201]      

 

Annoyingly, even Clifford can't resist saying something stupid at the end:

 

"'Your mother wasn't altogether wrong, you know - about the need of men and women for love. Few people can live altogether on an intellectual plane. There can be no survival for life without the attraction of male and female and vice versa.'" [201-02]    

Clare - like the rest of us - was deeply shaken by this: "Here was Sir Clifford, of all people, advocating her mother's way of life [...]" [202] and seemingly ignorant of the fact that life would continue just fine without 'the attraction of male and female'; that asexual reproduction is the primary form of reproduction for single-celled organisms and that many eukaryotic organisms (including plants, animals, and fungi) can also reproduce asexually.

Anyway, after leaving Wragby, Clare heads off to visit her parents. She finds Connie in the kitchen "making a bacon and cheese pie for her husband's supper" [203] - what a life! It turns out Gloria has done a bunk and abandoned her baby boy, even though he had "a profound, primeval wisdom in his round blue eyes" - or maybe because he had "a profound, primeval wisdom in his round blue eyes" [210].  

 

As Clare sits feeding the baby - whom Connie and Mellors plan to raise as their own - she ponders again on Clifford's final words to her.

 

 

VII. Chapters 18-22 

   

We pick up the tale on January 4th - three days after Clare's twenty-first birthday ... 

 

Apart from the odd date, Clare has managed to avoid getting entangled in any new love affairs, though has become caught up in the lives of Colin Talbot (a former patient) and his wife, Evelyn. Colin has been injured again in the war, this time suffering terrible facial wounds, much to Evelyn's horror: "Try as she might, she could not stop trembling when she was anywhere near him." [219]

 

Of course, Clare isn't very understanding of the young wife; she found Evelyn's physical revulsion pathetic and thought that "when a woman loved a man, facial disfigurement or any other kind of disablement could not possibly alter her feelings towards him" [219]. 

 

In private, however, Clare too "felt depressed [...] when she saw Colin's once delightful face so fearfully altered and scarred" [219]. Who wouldn't? For as he himself acknowledges, he resembles a gargoyle and it's not a sign of superficiality or lack of character to find such monstrousness problematic. 

 

That is to say, there's a reason why healthy people feel repulsed by sickness or injury; why disfigurement and disability disconcerts. And the reason is one that Nietzsche reminds us of in Twilight of the Idols: "Physiologically, everything ugly weakens and oppresses human beings. It reminds them of decay, danger, powerlessness; it actually makes them lose strength." [e] 

 

Clare's judgement of Evelyn - that she is of a shallow nature and therefore "incapable of strong enduring love" [226] - simply displays her own lack of depth and sound instinct. 

 

Clare's moralistic nastiness is arguably reflected in the author's decision to pass a death sentence on Evelyn - although perhaps this was just a fast and convenient method to advance the plot and clear the way for Clare and Colin to finally recognise their feelings for one another ... (As we will see later, a second fatality will prove even more advantageous to the couple.)   

 

Anyway, poor Evelyn dies - aboard a ship headed for Malta which is torpedoed by a German U-boat. Clare tries to make Colin forget that his wife is lying in a cold sea grave and look on the bright side. After all, he's still alive and "should be glad" [229]. On the train home she congratulates herself on her caring nature: "It's funny [...] that I should do people good [...] and can give them so much more of myself." [229]

Months pass, and Colin eventually stops talking about Evelyn and concentrates on his own recovery. Via extensive plastic surgery, he slowly has his face rebuilt and although still badly scarred, he no longer looks monstrous. Clare is pleased to see him doing so well: "Not for the first time she felt that it was a good thing Fate had removed Evelyn from his life. She might have found even this new face difficult to accept without a tremor of distaste." [231]. 

In the summer of 1945, the war in Europe ends. Clare is still visiting Colin regularly in the hospital. When he is given permission to leave for a weekend, Clare takes him to meet her parents. Mellors likes him and Connie adores him: "'I think he's so nice, so sweet. It doesn't seem to matter at all about his poor face'" [234],  she said, indicating that, actually, it is an issue for her. 

She and Mellors thinks Colin is in love with their daughter and advise her to marry him. So too does Clifford Chatterley, with whom Clare has continued to correspond. Eventually, Clare comes to the same conclusion: that it's Colin she loves; not his appearance, but the fact that he so reminds her of herself. She tells him:

"'Colin, it is no sacrifice for me to be with you. You're everything I've ever wanted in a companion. We think the same way about life, enjoy the same kind of entertainments, read the same books. When I'm with you it's almost like being with my twin.'" [236]

Lawrence, of course, would point out that having the same tastes and interests is an excellent basis for friendship, but disastrous grounds on which to marry [f]. I don't think narcissism much helps matters either.

 

Anyway, Colin decides that the love between him and Evelyn hadn't been the real thing after all; merely an attraction of the senses. Besides, she's dead. And so he and Clare agree to marry. But she feels she has to warn him about her little problem, i.e., her coitophobia. Colin realises that "it was essential for him to deal with all her complexities with the utmost tact" [242] - and so immediately asks her if she's seen a shrink.  

 

They decide not to worry - that it'll be alright on the wedding night. In fact, Clare feels so grateful that Colin is so understanding that she decides she wants to fuck him there and then on the sunlit South Downs: 

 

"Clare found herself able to surrender almost completely to the call of the blood that now moved hotly through her veins. [...] She believed in that moment that she would find nothing but joy in their ultimate union.

      Now, at last, she felt she understood the power of the love that had made her mother leave everything for the man she loved." [246]

 

Colin, however, the perfect getleman, decides not to take advantage of the moment, but to display perfect self-control. And so, instead of fucking, they sit up and enjoy a non-postcoital cigarette, before returning to the farm to inform her parents of their decision to wed.

Unfortunately, things, initially, do not go well ... Clare remains stupidly afraid on the first night of her honeymoon: "Lying in the big double bed, waiting for him to join her, she had felt her whole body cold with fear [...]" [245]

But she needn't have worried. For when Colin comes to bed he yawns and says: "'I'm tired - aren't you poppet? Weddings are frightful affairs. It's always the poor bride and bridegroom who come out of 'em exhausted.'" [246] Then he goes to sleep. 

 

This amazes - and relaxes - Clare: "He was so sweet and understanding [...]" [246] But when after several nights of lying like two children beside each other all through the night - "secure in each other's intimate presence" [247], yet passionless - she begins to worry; maybe he didn't want her? She began to wonder just how long they could go on living with a "strange, unnatural, unmentioned barrier between them" [248].   

Her mother advises her that she must totally surrender herself to Colin: "Perfect fulfilment can never be attained without this complete giving." [250] And this seems to do the trick; for apparently, this was what he had indeed been waiting for all along. And so, finally, Colin does the deed and Clare was lifted "into a new world, a new deeper understanding, a new life" [252]. 

But as happy as this makes her, I suspect it doesn't come close to the joy she feels when she learns of Sir Clifford's sudden death and the fact that he has left his entire estate, including Wragby Hall, to her. She and Colin immediately put their mews cottage up for sale and make plans to move in to the above as soon as possible (with the intention, apparently, of turning it into the Glyndebourne of the North). 

 

This news makes Connie shake with laughter: '"Oh, Clare, Clare, we must go and tell your father,' she said, gasping, 'he'll be so amused!'" [256]

 

And on that note ends the story of Lady Chatterley's daughter - surely one of the most objectionable figures in English fiction ...    

 

 

Notes

 

[a] The edition I'm reading is the original UK edition, published by Consul Books, 1961. Page references given in the post above are to this edition - not the first US edition published by Ace Books (1962).

[b] D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 119. 

[c] Shortly afterwards, poor Francis develops leukaemia and dies: 

      "Clare had cried quite unashamedly over this. It seemed awful that Francis had to die without even the glory of being killed in defence of his country. And it made her feel almost guilty because she hadn't been able to love him as he had loved her." [216] 

      She really is a stupid girl and as self-absorbed as her mother.

 

[d] Unless Clifford had managed to get hold of a pre-release print of the film, there is no way he and Clare could have watched Henry V in the summer of 1944; it was released in British cinemas on 22 November of that year. Robins's claim that this movie was an old favourite of Clifford's and that Clare had also seen it before, when much younger, is simply careless on her part.

 

[e] Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. 'Skirmishes of an Untimely Man', §20. 

[f] See D. H. Lawrence, A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', in Lady Chatterley's Lover and A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 325-26, where he writes:

"Modern people are just personalities, and modern marriage takes place when two people are 'thrilled' by each other's personality: when they have the same tastes in furniture or books or sport or amusement, when they love 'talking' to one another, when they admire one another's 'minds'. Now this, this affinity of mind and personality is an excellent basis of friendship between the sexes, but a disastrous basis for marriage. Because marriage inevitably starts the sex activity, and the sex activity is, and always was and will be in some way hostile to the mental, personal relationship between man and woman. It is almost an axiom, that the marriage of two personalities will end in a startling physical hatred. People who are personally devoted to one another at first end by hating one another with a hate which they cannot account for [...]"

 

To read the first part of this post - on chapters 1-11 of Lady Chatterley's Daughter - click here. 

Reflections on Lady Chatterley's Daughter (Part I: Chapters 1-11)

Front cover of Lady Chatterley's Daughter 

by Patricia Robins (Consul Books, 1961) [a]

 

 

I.

 

D. H. Lawrence's final and most notorious novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), has been a gift that keeps on giving to parodists and pornographers, as well as more earnest filmmakers and writers of popular romantic fiction, such as Patricia Robins, author of over 80 novels between 1934 and 2016, including, in 1961, a sequel (of sorts) to Lawrence's banned book.

 

Readers familiar with Lawrence's novel will know that it ends (a little droopingly) with the lovers separated; Connie goes with her sister, Hilda, to their parental home in Scotland and Mellors gets a job on a farm in the Amber Valley district of Derbyshire. 

 

It's agreed that they'll remain apart for six months, so that he can get his divorce (regardless of whether Connie obtains hers from Clifford or not), then reunite in the late spring and buy a small place of their own. By then, their baby will have been born - assuming Connie doesn't miscarry, or decide to have an abortion and forget all about a man who regards their child as a side issue. 

 

The point is, that not only does Robins presuppose that Connie and Mellors do, in fact, reunite, but that the baby is born - and is female. Lawrence gives us the hope of such a happy-ever-after ending, but does not provide such and I think it important to note this before we begin. 

 

 

II. Chapters 1-3      

 

Set twenty years after Lawrence's novel, in wartime London, Lady Chatterley's Daughter is the tale of a nurse, Clare Mellors, and the guilty secret which held her on the edge of a surging passion. 

 

Clare is engaged to a young officer called Robin. Whilst he's fighting with Monty and the boys in Tripoli, Clare is living with her aunt Hilda (and cousin Pip) in a flat near Sloane Square. She's a friendly and attractive young woman: "Her figure was perfect and her colouring - the red hair, milk-white skin and very large blue eyes - made her very striking." [7] 

 

But she is withdrawn, even, we might say, a little cold; "there was always an invisible barrier between herself and the opposite sex" [8]. Luckily, her fiancé "seemed to understand and appreciate the quality of reserve in her" [8]. Indeed, he respected her modesty so much that he hadn't attempted to initiate pre-marital sexual relations - which she considered improper - with any real determination.

 

Clare, then, is the very opposite of her mother, Connie, who had indulged in love affairs both before and after her marriage to Clifford without any sense of shame or wrongdoing, as discussed in a recent post: click here. 

 

Indeed, Clare is somewhat estranged from both her parents: 

 

"There weren't often rows [...] but undercurrents of dissension and misunderstanding which were turning Clare against her parents and making her less inclined to go home [...] Aunt Hilda seemed to understand her much better than her mother did." [8]

 

That, I think, is a nice touch by Robins, who appreciates that a couple such as Connie and Mellors, who only ever think of their own fulfilment, would probably have had little time for poor Clare. And I rather like the fact that their daughter is determined to lead a morally conventional lifestyle, upholding traditional ideas to do with sex and marriage and wearing warm and sensible pyjamas to bed.   

 

One day, Robin arrives on leave. It turns out her fiancé is rather like Clifford; fair-haired, good-looking, well-mannered, full of charm and always smartly dressed: "One never associated him with untidy clothes - or untidy principles." [16]           

 

Unfortunately for Clare, war can change a man: as can too much champagne. And after dancing the night away at the Savoy, they return to the flat in Chelsea, where he attempts to seduce her, much to her chagrin: 

 

"She thought she would die of disappointment. She had counted on his integrity and understanding of her feelings. [...] Now, suddenly, Robin was not only completely disregarding the conventions he approved of but was showing a side of his nature she had never seen before." [25]

 

She asks him to stop and return to his bedroom. But he doesn't: "He was no longer the chivalrous and noble Robin but a stranger who disgusted her." [26] In a frenzy, she finally manages to fight off her fiancé-turned-would-be-rapist. Whilst Clare is understandably upset, Robin is indignant and tells her that if she is so repulsed by sex then she should inform him now: "'I don't want a frigid wife who gives her body as a duty [...]'" [26]  

 

Clare calls him an animal - and hands back her engagement ring. Robin leaves, "nursing his frustrated passions" [28] - which I take to be a euphemism for epididymal hypertension - and ends up in a basement night club in Knightsbridge, where he bumps into an old pal from Nottingham to whom he blurts out his troubles and expresses disbelief that the daughter of the scandalous Lady Chatterley could be so sexually unresponsive.   

 

 

III. Chapter 4-7

 

Clare decides to go home for a week; to the beautiful old Sussex farmhouse, just outside Brighton, where her parents had settled and raised her. 

 

Her mother, who is now a plump figure in her forties, had made the house "warm, homely, and comfortable" [33] with thick carpets and curtains; she had even installed central heating (one can't imagine Mellors approving of this, but I suspect he spent most of his time outdoors with his prize herd of cattle).        

 

Clare tells her mother what happened between her and Robin ...

 

On the one hand, Connie is pleased that the latter is out of the picture, as she and Mellors had never considered him a real man: "Oh, so charming, and English, and well-bred, but too conventional for words" [37]. But, on the other hand, she thinks Clare is being terribly unreasonable and ought to "'forgive the poor boy'" [40]. 

 

And with that, Connie returns to stuffing a chicken; proud of her own moral unconventionality. Unfortunately, Clare's father isn't any more understanding: 

 

"Queer that a child of his shouldn't feel the body's urge. Pity if some chap couldn't wake her up. [...] A woman without love and loving must be miserable [...] half-fulfilled, ever-seeking to solve the unknown mysteries of life." [44]

 

It's depressing to discover that - twenty years on - Mellors is still subscribing to the same cod philosophy. But, alas, all too believable. Rather less believable is the fact that two days after breaking things off with Robin, Clare is canoodling with a tall, slim-hipped, dark-haired American airman from Virginia called Hamilton Craig: "Perhaps Ham would help to lay Robin's ghost completely." [52] 

 

And so she let's him cop a feel of her "rounded little breasts" [53], beneath her pale green woolly jumper. I mean, a gal's got to move on, but this seems a bit hasty and out of character. That said, the minute he tries to raise the stakes, she's playing the virgin card once again and that's the end of their brief romance. 

 

Next up, is Bill Roberts; a handsome naval officer. They have fun together, but in a purely platonic manner. For Bill is engaged to another and so "did not attempt to become either serious or intimate" [69], much to Clare's relief; "it was good to know that she could actually enjoy this sort of thing and feel light-hearted and wthout the old burden of fears and repressions" [70]. 

 

This last line makes one wonder if, actually, there is something wrong with Clare; had she had some terrible childhood trauma involving sexual abuse? Or was it the shame she felt at having been born out of wedlock? 

 

If I'd written the novel, I would've opted for the former explanation and revealed Oliver Mellors as an incestuous paedophile à la Eric Gill [b]. But it seems that Robins prefers the latter, telling us how, aged fourteen, Clare was horrified when she discovered her illegitimacy and "the facts about her mother's sensational love-affair with her father" [71]. 

 

Rightly or wrongly, Clare felt herself the product of sin - and this is why she has been reluctant to love. And this is why she decided to devote herself to nursing in an attempt to atone for her parents adultery. Again, rightly or wrongly, the shame had stayed with her ever since: 

 

"Even now in the middle of the war, when she was an adult and a nurse, and such things as illegitimacy seemed less terrible, her abhorrence of the whole situation remained." [76]

IV. Chapters 8-11

On another visit to her parents, Clare finally gets to meet her half-sister (i.e., the daughter born to Mellors and his first wife, Bertha), about whom she has almost no knowledge or memory:

 

"She had a rather curious figure, short, dumpy, with a shabby duffle-coat stretched around a large stomach. She was hatless, with short, lanky hair falling in crimped waves on either side of a long, narrow face. Definitely an unhealthy and unattractive looking person, Clare thought, judging her to be in her early thirties." [82]

 

Having said that, the woman had a queer wild attraction and brilliant blue eyes. And, it became clear, she wasn't fat, but heavily pregnant. She has come to see Mr. Mellors; so Clare invites her in to await his return. 

 

As the stranger sits drinking a drop of brandy, Clare takes the opportunity to pass further silent judgement upon her; noticing the ladders in her cheap silk stockings, for example, and the awful earrings that make her look like a poorly educated gipsy. Apparently, such snobbery laced with racism was acceptable at the time, but it doesn't help contemporary readers to much like Miss Mellors.

 

It turns out she - Oliver's eldest daughter (now going by the name Gloria) - had become involved with an American serviceman, who had been "generous with the dollars, nylons, chocolates and cigarettes" [85]. Generous too with his affections, leaving her knocked up, before getting himself posted elsewhere.           

Eventually, the woman reveals her identity: "Clare stood perfectly still. It was as though she had been struck by lightning. She went deadly pale." [86] Strangely enough, when Mellors gets home and is confronted by his first child, he too turns pale (maybe it's a family thing). 

 

As for Connie, she reacts rather like Clare at the sight of the wretched figure sat on her sofa, i.e., with cruel judgement and class hatred: "This girl with her dissipated face and dirty nails repelled Connie. [...] She even felt unclean because of the contact with 'Gloria' [...]" [92]

 

Nevertheless, she abides by her husband's decision to help (and house) the girl in a nearby cottage. And soon enough, she's warming to Gloria and trying to convince Clare not to be so hard on her - an accusation that causes the latter to erupt: "'Why is it that if somebody wants to live decently and stick to their ideals, they are called 'hard'?" [98]

Connie sighs, and decides that her daughter is not only intolerant, but inhuman; whereas Gloria, for all her faults, weaknesses, and vices - in fact, because of these things - is at least human. This doesn't stop Connie walking her daughter to the bus stop, however, when the latter leaves to go back to London. 

 

But Clare, having been called inhuman and an intolerant snob by her mother, is in no mood to reconcile and tells of the great discomfort she felt as a child when her parents paraded naked around the house "preaching the 'Beauties of Nature' [and] giving each other let's-go-to-bed looks'" [101]. 

 

In a powerful and moving indictment of her proto-hippie parents, Clare continues: 

 

"'You never have asked yourself what I thought or felt. For instance - if you'd had the smallest understanding, the least you and Father could have done was to reserve exhibiting your great passion for each other until you were in your own bedroom. [...] I suppose you couldn't help it. I've read in books some women are made that way but I think you might have tried a little harder to control yourself in front of me. As for Father, well, the only excuse for him is that he's never known how decent people behave.'" [101-02]

 

"'If I am a snob, you made me that way. You sent me to the 'best' schools which meant I made friends amongst the 'best' people. How do you think I felt comparing Father with the father of that girl Cynthia who used to be my best friend at school? [...] He was erudite and appreciative of art and music; he could talk about opera, science, history - so many things. How could I ask Cynthia back to our house with you and Father mooning over each other and no other topic of conversation but the birds and the bees.'" [102]        

 

Obviously, this reduces Connie to tears. When she gets home she tells her husband what happened. Mellors tells her to stop fretting and have some tea; his answer - along with fucking - to everything. Strangely, despite feeling heart-sick with a sense of maternal failure, a nice cuppa does the trick: 

 

"Dear Oliver, thought Connie. He was always so kind. This man who had been able to lead her to the ultimate rapture of loving could soothe her just as miraculously." [104]  

Thus soothed, Connie learns nothing.

Back at the hospital, it turns out Clare has a friend, Elizabeth Peverel, who "came from a very wealthy family with a big estate up in Derbyshire" [110], only five miles away from Wragby. Liz has even met Sir Clifford, once or twice, whom she describes as a friend of her father's and "'an attractive man in a queer sort of way'" [111].     

This serves to further kindle Clare's interest in Sir Clifford, about whom she has been thinking a great deal recently. Chapter ten ends, however, on a rather nasty note: Clare is pestered by phone and letter, before being finally accosted in person, by a former patient who is erotically obsessed with her. 

 

Luckily, before things turn very nasty, she is saved by a passing member of an ambulance crew - a woman with "strong brown attractive hands and  [...] rather handsome in a boyish way" [117], called Jo, who invites Clare back to her place for a drink ...

 

Clare finds Jo to be extremely pleasing company. Despite her masculine appearance "she had a distinctly feminine understanding of what another woman needed" [121] and it was a huge relief for Claire "not to have to be on her guard as was inevitable with a man" [121]. Jo was without doubt a "most unusual, charming woman" [121].

 

The two women enjoy fish for dinner - served with "one of Jo's wonderful sauces" [125] and a bottle of white wine. Afterwards, Jo made some excellent coffee. Then the sirens sound, announcing another German air raid. Jo insists Clare simply must stay the night at her flat, as the bombs fall all around them. 

 

To her credit, Jo refuses to let the Luftwaffe spoil her evening; she puts on another record and makes some more strong coffee. The two women talk and laugh until long past midnight:

 

"Clare allowed herself to be completely organized by Jo. She had to admit that Jo seemed to know exactly what she most needed. A hot bath - even a big hot towel, warmed by Jo in front of the fire and tossed to her when she was ready for it. Perfumed essence to make the water especially tempting and fragrant [...] She had put fresh linen on the bed in her little room and in spite of Clare's protests finally tucked her up there. [...]

      Clare was a little bewildered by all this attention but grateful. She had never known anybody look after her as well as Jo did." [130]

As she drifts off to sleep, Jo stands looking down at her, admiring her beauty ...

 

The next morning, Jo leaves for work whilst the objet de son désir makes herself some coffee. Unfortunately, it's at this point that Monica - Jo's ex-girlfriend - turns up and there's a scene. She tells Clare: "'I think you're a bitch, to stay here with Jo, knowing just what she means to me and how things are between her and myself.'" [133]

 

Still the sexually naive Clare doesn't click what's going on. It's only after Monica screams: "'I loved Jo. And I know she loves me. I won't let you take my place here!'" [134] before collapsing on the sofa in tears that - finally! - the penny drops. 

 

And once the penny has dropped, Clare responds with the same level of hateful prejudice and homophobia that her father displays in a famous rant in Lady Chatterley's Lover (see chapter XIV or click here for my discussion of this in a post from June 2013):

 

"At last she realized what this was all about. She knew what Jo was. One of those. Her attention, the wonderful way she had cherished Clare ... all that thoughtful care, sprang not from the normal desire for friendship but from perversion. [...]

       Now that Clare remembered the look in Jo's eyes and the way those long nervous fingers had grasped hers, she shivered [...] She, who had had sex flung at her in its natural form all her life, had never come up against this sort of thing before. It did not hold out a vestige of attraction for her. [...] The very thought of facing Jo again horrified Clare. Better Cas Binelli [ - the former patient from whose clutches Jo had rescued her -] than that." [134-35]

 

That, for me, is the final straw: having overlooked her ascetic idealism, her judgemental snobbery and casual racism, I cannot simply turn a blind eye to her lesbophobia. 

 

Clare Chatterley may be a good nurse. And she may be very beautiful. But she's a nasty-minded woman; one whom would rather be raped in a back alley by a straight man, than treated with loving kindness by a queer woman. The only positive thing that can be said is that, unlike her father, at least she doesn't think lesbians should be killed.

 

That is the end of Part One of Robins's novel. My hope is that in Part Two Clare will learn to see things differently ...      

 

Notes

 

[a] All page references given in the post refer this edition of the text. 

 

[b] Eric Gill (1882-1940) was an English sculptor, designer, and printmaker, associated with the Arts and Crafts movement. He is perhaps best known today however, as an incestuous paedophile, who not only had illicit sexual relations with his sisters and daughters, but also with his dog: click here for further details.

      Interestingly, in chapter XVII of Lady Chatterley's Lover, Clifford interviews his gamekeeper about the local scandal surrounding him and at one point the ever-impertinent Mellors says: "'Surely you might ma'e a scandal out o' me an' my bitch Flossie. You've missed summat there.'" Which is a strange thing to say and suggests that Mellors must himself at some point have entertained such a zoosexual fantasy. 

      See D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 268-69. 

 

To read part two of this post on Lady Chatterley's Daughter, click here.

 

 

All Change: Notes on Chapter 5 of Metamorphoses by Emanuele Coccia

 

Throughout this post, and at this very moment, 

I am thinking in you ...

 

 

I. 

 

Although Emanuele Coccia thinks every living being is already biodiverse, he favours extending this inner diversity outwards and amplifying the metamorphic force that animates us. He also supports creating spaces of metamorphic conspiracy, so that forms can combine and become-other, etc. 

 

And I'm with him in this, although I'd sooner slit my wrists than speak of imparting "a more intense and richer life" [a] to Gaia. The more animals and plants there are, the better as far as I'm concerned.

In fact, I wouldn't even object to large predators prowling the streets and gobbling up a few fat children; for what is this ultimately but an exchange of solar energy; "every act of feeding is nothing other than a secret and invisible exchange of extra-terrestrial light" [149].

 

Tyger tyger, burning bright / In the cities of the night ... [b]

 

 

II.

 

Coccia's argument in this fifth and final chapter is, simply, we need one another. That is to say, all beings - be they plant, animal, or human - fundamentally rely on (and live off the lives of) other beings in an interspecies community. Interdependence is the name of the game and this interdependence is, for Coccia, primarily "of a cognitive and speculative order" [157]. 

 

Intellect - or mind - is not a property of the individual; it's a relation between species. Thus, the intelligence of the wolf, for example, has developed due to (and within) the relationship large predators have with those animals they prey upon. And in some cases, the intellect of one species is actually embodied in another:

 

"With the flower, the plant [...] entrusts another species belonging to another kingdom with the task of making a decision on the genetic and biological destiny of its own species. It entrusts them with the task of directing the metamorphosis of its species. In a certain sense, the flower transfers the plant's species-mind into the body of the bee." [158]

 

Coccia continues: 

 

"It is not simply a collaboration, it is the constitution of a cognitive and speculative interspecific organ. This means not only that all evolutionary development is co-evolution [...] but also that [...] co-evolution is what we normally call agriculture or husbandry. Each species decides, in its own way, the evolutionary fate of others. What we call evolution is nothing more than a kind of generalized interspecies agriculture, a cosmic crossbreeding - which is not necessarily designed for the benefit of one or the other. The world as a whole thus becomes a kind of purely relational reality [...]" [158]         

 

As a reader of Lawrence, one would be tempted to call this a democracy of touch ... [c]

 

 

III.

For Coccia, the form taken by each species is neither a destiny nor something that has necessarily arisen through chance or the mechanism of natural selection obliging them to adapt to their environment. 

 

For Coccia, there is a will of some kind at work:

 

"The shapes of living bodies - their colours, decorative patterns, etc. - are not only expressions of the individual's adaptation to the world around them. They are also and above all the expression of a taste, of a sort of artistic will that drives the individual of a species to prefer one form over the other." [162]

 

Darwin described this in terms of sexual selection, but I suspect Coccia has also been influenced in his thinking here by Nietzsche, who wrote of art as an organic function of the the will to power and as the "great means of making life possible, the great seduction to life, the greatest stimulant of life" [d]. 

 

And this is true in both man and animal, between whom there is no cardinal distinction. 

 

Indeed, art, says Nietzsche, is ultimately a form of animal vigour; "an excess and overflow of blooming physicality into the world of images and desires" [e]. We see this for ourselves each spring, when animals produce "new weapons, pigments, colours, and forms; above all, new movements, new rhythms, new love calls and seductions" [f]. 

 

Ultimately, for Coccia, species are "nothing more than expressions of  a 'biotic art', a sort of aesthetic performance conducted on an anatomical level" [163], and ecology should reinvent itself in terms of art rather than good housekeeping, accepting that nothing is natural and there are no areas of wilderness to conserve; that all is cultivated and artificial. 

 

Anthropologists and ethnologists long ago stopped talking about primitive peoples and noble savages. Now, ecologists and environmentalists should stop pretending there are primitive species and savage beasts, who are somehow more authentic - more natural - than us. As Coccia writes: 

 

"Everything that constitutes us derives from the non-human and has the same nature, but the reverse is also true: everything that defines humanity, beginning with error, art, artifice, and moral arbitration, also defines the totality of living species." [167]    

 

 

IV.

 

In the final section of Chapter 5, Coccia continues to make some striking claims, including for example, that evolution should be considered as "the production of [...] contemporary nature" [168]. Fortunately, he explains what he means by this:

 

"From the beginning of the twentieth century, when art established itself as avant-garde, it ceased to fulfil an aesthetic function. It freed itself from the task of producing beauty, or decorating what already exists and bringing it into harmony. In claiming to be contemporary [...] art became a collective practice of the divination of the future [...] an attempt [by society] to reproduce itself differently from what it is [...] Art embodies a society's desire for and project of metamorphosis." [168-69]     

 

Thus evolution - as Coccia understands it - is the mode of life "that corresponds to what contemporary art is for culture" [169]. He continues:

"Nature is not only the immemorial prehistory of culture, but its unrealized future; its surrealistic anticipation. Contemporary nature is the scene where life enters into the avant-garde of its future. It is life as natural avant-garde. It is the surrealistic reproduction of forms of life." [169]

Thus, cities shouldn't just become eco-friendly and sustainable, but contemporary nature galleries in which the future is reimagined and engineered: 

 

"Bringing together artists, scientists, designers, architects, and farmers, it will be a matter of building multispecies associations somewhere between city, garden, plantation, and stable, where each living being produces works for others and for themselves." [170] [g]

 

To be honest, I don't know how seriously to take this virtuous exercise of the imagination - or whether I find it appealing or appalling. 

 

It's certainly a more sophisticated proposal than my suggestion made earlier to simply release the wolves, but it's also - like all utopian fantasies of the ideal society - inherently fascistic. It's as if Coccia wishes to build a multispecies labour camp overseen by (presumably human) artists and scientists who will, as it were, attempt to take control of evolution. 

 

It seems an odd note on which to finish - one that essentially defeats the whole point and purpose (and central argument) of the book: that metamorphosis is the essential, unstoppable, and inhuman law of life; one that is unfolding all of the time and everwhere, including in our cities, without any need for human direction (as if it were even possible for man to stand outside, as it were, and control events).

 

I know that Coccia knows this: knows that the future cannot be determined, because it's "the pure force of metamorphosis" [180]; knows that life is not something that belongs to any of us, "either as individuals, as a nation, or as a species" [180] - so I don't know quite why he ends his work where and how he does. 

 

Maybe he's been hanging around with artists for too long ...   

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Emanuele Coccia, Metamorphoses, trans. Robin MacKay, (Polity Press, 2021), p. 147. Future page references to this book will be given directly in the main text. 

 

[b] This is not quite Coccia's hope for cities of the future; for his far-grander and more utopian vision see pp. 169-70 of Metamorphoses (which I discuss in section IV of this post).

 

[c] I very much regret the fact that Coccia chooses to conclude his work on interspecies relationship in terms of a cosmic mind produced by "an infinite series of arbitrary and rational encounters and decisions taken by different species at different times, according to the strangest of intentions" [161]. 

      For me, what's crucial about this relationship is that the encounters are libidinal rather than rational, involving a politics of desire: "The touch of the feet on the earth, the touch of the fingers on a tree, on a creature, the touch of hands and breasts, the touch of the whole body to body, and the interpenetration of passionate love: it is life itself, and in the touch, we are all alive."

      See D. H. Lawrence, The First and Second Lady Chatterley Novels, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, (Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 323. This line is from the second version of the novel.

      I have written several posts on Lawrence's notion of a democracy of touch here on Torpedo the Ark and readers who are interested can go to labels and click on the term. 

 

[d] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, (Vintage Books, 1968), note 853 (II), p. 452. 

      I would encourage readers to familiarise themselves with all of Nietzsche's notes on the will to power as art; see Book III, Part IV, notes 794-853, pp. 419-453. And for a fascinating philosophical discussion of Nietzsche's thinking on animality, art, and will to power (in relation to Darwin), see Keith Ansell-Pearson's essay, 'Nietzsche contra Darwin', in Viroid Life, (Routledge 1997), pp. 85-122.      

[e] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, note 802, p. 422. 

[f] Ibid., note 808, p. 426. 

[g] Apparently, this vision of a museum for contemporary nature is inspired by Stefano Boeri's Vertical Forest project (2007-14), in Milan. Visit Boeri's website for more information on this and on his latest work involving trees: click here. 

 

 

To read my notes on the Introduction and first chapter of Emanuele Coccia's Metamorphoses, click here. 

 

To read notes on chapter two ... click here. 

 

To read notes on chapter three ... click here. 

 

To read notes on chapter four ... click here.

Tie Me to a Tree: Notes on Chapter 4 of Metamorphoses by Emanuele Coccia

Lee Marvin as Ben Rumson in Paint Your Wagon (1969)

 

 

I. 

 

The ancient Greeks thought of planets as objects characterised by their irregular movement. Indeed, the modern English word planet derives from the term ἀστήρ πλανήτης (astēr planētēs), which, translated, means wandering star. 

 

Emanuele Coccia reminds us of this fascinating fact in the fourth chapter of his book Metamorphoses (2021) [a], arguing that the earth, first and formost, is a kind of migrant (although it's not true to say that it's wandering aimlessly through space, obliged as it has been to maintain a relatively stable orbit about the sun for the last 4.5 billion years) [b].

 

For Coccia, wandering is a key word in his philosophical lexicon. Like Heraclitus, he insists that everything is constantly moving and everything is constantly changing: all is flux. Not because all is fire, but because of the planetary nature of existence:

 

"Look at everything around you, regardless of its texture, shape, age, or consistency. The birds, the wind, the rivers, but also the buildings, the smells, the colours: everything moves, everything changes. Everything changes places, even if we do not perceive it. Everything changes form even if this transformation remains invisible to our eyes. The world as a planetary reality is a wandering body and, inversely, wandering is the primary attribute of all bodies in this universe, terrestrial and celestial alike." [116]

 

It's important to note, however, that just as nomadism in the Deleuzean sense refers to a trip in intensity, rather than just moving from one place to another, so too does wandering, for Coccia, mean more than spatial movement: "It is a far more intimate, corporeal movement that is at work at all levels of the life of every earthly being." [116] 

 

Eating, loving, and dying are all forms of metamorphosis and all expressions of this movement. Wandering is simply the cosmic name for metamorphosis; metamorphosis in its "most original, elementary, mineral form" [117]. 

 

I have to say, I do like this line of thought. It might be nonsense to some to construct a cosmology in terms of a metaphysics of wandering, but I find it seductive and like the idea that we are all drifters, hobos, nomads, or migrants; all born, like Ben Rumson, beneath a wand'rin' star [c]. 

 

Amusingly, even those who would stay put and cherish the notion of a home built upon fixed foundations - who find the thought of terra firma psychologically reassuring - are obliged to be constantly on the move, just as everything that surrounds them is transforming. In sum: there is no firm ground; even the continents are drifting, making a mockery of geographers and cartographers alike. 

 

We're all at sea, drifting about on an endless voyage ... 

 

 

II. 

 

In a neo-Platonic section which develops a theory based on the ancient Greek notion of ochema [ὄχημα] - a term meaning vehicle, that is often used in esoteric circles concerned with the transportation of souls - Coccia suggests that because "everything is the planet for something else", it means that "everything is a vehicle for something else" [121]. 

 

Continuing with this line of thought, he explains:      

"To be in the world is to bear something other than oneself and to be borne, transported, by others. So that the metaphysics of wandering is also a metaphysics of vehicularity." [121]

 

From this, Coccia then makes the astonishing claim that being-in-the-world can best be thought of not as the formal existential expression for the being of Dasein, but in terms of Noah's Ark: "Life has made each living being an ark for an infinite number of living and non-living beings." [126]  

 

This, essentially, is how Coccia also understands evolution; one species is borne into the world by another species, for which it will in turn serve as an ark: "Thus, we humans were introduced to Gaia by way of the ark of the great apes: the primates were our ark, and we are now theirs." [126]

And this, essentially, is how Coccia also conceives the universe:

"These arks traverse the history of the planet and the cosmos, not just their geographies: they traverse the totality of apparent boundaries - those that seem to separate the living from the non-living, those that we suspect to exist between matter and spirit or between individuals, species, places, and times." [126-27]

 

III. 

 

I have to admit, even as someone whose primary instinct is to torpedo the ark, Coccia makes me nostalgic for a time when I was equally keen to dissolve boundaries and distinctions. And, like Emanuele, I still remain suspicious of the notion of an ideal home; a neat, clean, orderly space of one's own. 

 

In an important paragraph - which reminds me of something Ray Brassier says in Nihil Unbound [d] - Coccia writes:

 

"This obsession with home is much more profound than it seems. Not only does it structure our political experience [... and] our experience of things [...] It also, above all defines, the way in which we continue to think about the relationship between living beings, and between living beings and the space that surrounds them. Indeed, it is on this idea that all ecology is based [...] For not all reflections on the living, it seems, have managed to free themselves from a childish nostalgia for the idea of nature as an immense, natural, welcoming, benevolent home [...] Ecology as a whole testifies to a will to [...] reproduce everywhere the form of the house - the opposite of the vehicle. The very term 'ecology' already confesses this predilection for the domestic." [130]

 

Ultimately, home, green home is as objectionable as the fantasy of home, sweet home: it's a form of limitation that turns the chaotic splendour of that which lies outside the gate [e] into just another economy; i.e., "a system within which everything and everyone must have a meaning and a function" [132]. 

 

Ecology betrays the natural world; even the most ferocious of beasts and alien of creatures are tamed and made familiar; even the most exotic plants growing in the most remote areas are, as it were, placed in a pot:

 

"In its attempt to question the relationship between living beings, ecology ended up projecting out of the cities - into the spaces of the so-called 'wild' - a very bourgeois, very nineteenth-century order of life. [...] In trying to safeguard the non-human, ecology has ended up as one of the world's greatest agencies for the anthropomorphizing and humanization of the non-human. Thanks to ecology, the world is like an immense allotment garden where all life forms [are expected to] politely respect the boundaries." [132-33]  

 

Take that, Ernst Haeckel! Well, I say that, but it's a little unfair to blame the great German zoologist, naturalist, eugenicist, philosopher, physician, professor, marine biologist, and artist.  

 

For although Haeckel coined the term ecology (in a work of 1866), it was, as Coccia points out, just a variation on the older term natural economics and it was not modern ecology that "first imposed upon living beings the metaphor of a strictly indoors relationship to life forms and the territory they occupy" [134]. 

 

Another discipline, of which ecology is a descendant (or unconscious reincarnation if you prefer), is responsible for this: the economy of nature, which can be traced back to Linnaeus. The economy of nature is basically a form of Christian theology, investigating the relationship between God and His Creation: "Or rather, the relationship that all living beings entertain with one another and with the material world on the basis of a sovereign decision made by the Creator." [134-35]      

 

According to this proto-ecological doctrine, "every being has its own place in the great household of the world, a place granted to it  by the head of the family, God" [134].

 

One of the great ironies of this is that although many of today's environmental activists pride themselves on being anti-capitalist, their thinking of nature in terms of oikos is not only rooted in Christian moral culture, but shares a "common epistemological framework and language" [137] with capitalism - take that Greta Thunberg!   

 

What's more - and perhaps worse - it perpetuates ideas of native and alien species (with the latter often thought to threaten the former):

 

"Whenever ecology persists in talking about 'invasive' species [...] it obliges us to impose upon the plant world the mores and conventions of a geographically and historically minute part of human culture (namely, nineteenth-century British legal culture)." [143]

What Coccia is attempting to do, then, via his philosophy of metamorphosis, is liberate living beings from their captivity within old ideas and norms which attempt "in various ways, to force onto non-humans social forms typical of [...] states with closed borders" [143]. 

 

In other words, Coccia wants all things to wander like stars ... 

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Emanuele Coccia, Metamorphosis, trans, Robin Mackay, (Polity Press, 2021). All page references to this work will be given directly in the main text. 

[b] It should be noted, however, that the possibility exists for this to be thrown into chaos and that the earth, like all other planets in the solar system, is actually drifting away from the sun (due to the decreasing mass and thus weakened gravitational pull of the latter), at an annual rate of 1.5 cm.

 

[c] Wand'rin' Star is a song written by Alan J. Lerner and Frederick Loewe, for the stage musical Paint Your Wagon (1951). Click here to see it beautifully performed by Lee Marvin, as Ben Rumson, in the 1969 film adaptation, dir. Joshua Logan. 

 

[d] In the preface to Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), Brassier writes: 

      "Nature is not our or anyone's 'home', nor a particularly beneficent progenitor. Philosophers would do well to desist from issuing any further injunctions about the need to re-establish the meaningfulness of existence, the purposefulness of life, or mend the shattered concord between man and nature." [xi]   

[e] I'm aware of the fact that Coccia would find this phrase outside the gate problematic. In chapter 5 of his book - which I will discuss in more detail in a separate post - he argues that the opposition between what is within and without of city walls is a political myth that is both illusory and dangerous. See pp. 148-49. 

      Coccia has largely been influenced in his thinking on this question by William Cronon's important essay 'The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature', in William Cronon (ed.), Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, (W. W. Norton, 1995), pp. 69-90. 

      In my defence, I'm not simply referring to the natural world when I use the concept of the Outside, as the first section of this post published in June 2020 on Torpedo the Ark hopefully makes clear. Readers who wish to know more about my thinking on this might also like to see a post I wrote for James Walker's blog, The Digital Pilgrimage: click here.

 

To read my notes on the Introduction and first chapter of Emanuele Coccia's Metamorphoses, click here. 

 

To read notes on chapter two ... click here.

To read notes on chapter three ... click here. 

 

To read notes on chapter five ... click here.