Mourning Post: with Reference to Roland Barthes's Journal de Deuil

A favourite photo of my mother

(taken in 1947, aged 21)

 

 

"Does being able to live without someone you loved 

mean you loved her less than you thought ...?" 

 

 

I.

 

There are some books we love immediately upon first reading; and there are other books which it takes time (and several readings) to fall in love with. 

 

Then there are books like Roland Barthes's Journal de deuil (2009) [a] which one only begins to appreciate once one has lived through a similar experience as the author - in this case, the death of a mother.

 

 

II.

 

The day after his mother's death, in October 1977, Barthes began assembling notes written on quartered slips of paper in which he reflected on his sadness, sense of loss, and the fact that modern society seems to leave no time or space in which to express one's grief; as soon as someone dies, there's a frenzied attempt to move on and the bereaved are encouraged to get over it, as if they have a minor illness [b]. 

 

During the following two years, Barthes wrote over 300 of these notes, the contents of which eventually being published in the form of a mourning diary. 

 

I do not here wish to present an overview of these fragments of text, but simply comment on those ideas which most resonate with me at this time and express my agreement with Barthes that the individual should insist on their right to mourn; for it is also the right to "the loving relation it implies" [55]. 

 

In a nutshell, dear reader, don't let your suffering be stolen from you ... [c]

 

Note: the titles supplied below are mine.

 

 

III.

 

On the Corpse Bride

 

There was, I would suggest, something of the same high degree of intimacy between Roland Barthes and his mother as between D. H. Lawrence and his. 

 

Thus, for example, the opening note of the former's Mourning Diary which suggests that the first night grieving for one's mother is comparable in terms of its passion and emotional intensity to a wedding night, reminds me of the opening verse from one of the latter's early poems:

"My love looks like a girl tonight,

      But she is old.

The plaits that lie along her pillow

      Are not gold,

But threaded with filigree silver,

      And uncanny cold."

 

The same poem concludes: 

"Nay, but she sleeps like a bride, and dreams her dreams 

      Of perfect things.

She lies at last, the darling, in the shape of her dream,

      And her dead mouth sings ..." [d]

 

 

On the Maternal Body

 

This first note is followed by one written the next day in which Barthes, who was homosexual, counters the accusation that he has never known a woman's body: "I have known the body of my mother, sick and then dying." [4]    

 

Me too: and it's only now that I stop to think of the strangeness of this fact; that one was fated to care for the body one was born of when that body approached its end and that from out of the death of this maternal body one is somehow issued anew. 

 

To quote from Lawrence once more: "My little love, my dearest / Twice you have issued me / Once from your womb, sweet mother / Once from your soul ..." [e]

 

 

On Posthumous Desire

 

The fifth fragment dated 29 October is one of the most astonishing: it exactly summarises my position and how I feel. No commentary is required, it just needs quoting in full:

"The desires I had before her death (while she was sick) can no longer be fulfilled, for that would mean it is her death that allows me to fulfill them - her death might be a liberation in some sense with regard to my desires. But her death has changed me, I no longer desire what I used to desire. I must wait - supposing that such a thing could happen - for a new desire to form, a desire following her death." [18] [f]

 

 

On Turning Life (and Death) into Literature 

 

I understand why Barthes didn't want to discuss his mother's life, let alone write about her death, for fear of "making literature out of it" [22]. 

 

However, as a writer, he just couldn't help himself - and neither can I. 

 

For like Barthes, I recognise that literature originates with a death - the death of a porcupine, for example, or perhaps even the death of the author - and that Walter Benjamin was right to say that what we ultimately seek in art is the knowledge of an event that is denied to us in reality. [g]   

 

 

On Last Words

 

Many people about to die do so in silence, particularly if, like my mother, Alzheimer's robbed them of their ability to communicate years earlier. 

 

And I'm not sure there's anything further to say to the dying beyond a certain point; kind gestures - such as a smile, a kiss, a squeeze of the hand - seem to matter more at the very end. 

 

Having said that, the romantic notion of last words - one which "falsely promises a final burst of lucidity and meaning before a person passes" [h] remains ingrained within our culture and even Barthes finds himself often thinking of his mother's words spoken "in the breath of her agony" [40].

 

Similarly, I find the final two words spoken to me by my mother constantly recurring; the first a word of greeting and the second one of recognition: Hello Stephen. The memory of these words will, I trust, always move me. [i]    

 

 

On Courage

 

Barthes is right: mourning doesn't require courage; the time for courage is when your mother is sick and requires care; when you witness her suffering, her sadness, her confusion and have to conceal your tears (or, as in my case, control your anger and frustration). 

 

 

On Absence [I]

 

Barthes is struck by the painful nature of absence; that it is not so much a lack, as a wound. And struck also by the fact that, with his mother gone, he no longer has anyone to announce his arrival to (or greet him) when he gets home. 

 

Again, I understand this perfectly. But, luckily, I have Cat for company and whilst cats may or may not understand what it is to mourn, they certainly know when we are sad, depressed, or anxious and act accordingly (i.e., attempt to comfort us).   

 

 

On Absence [II] 

 

Everytime I go upstairs and look into my mother's room, "there unexpectedly rises within me, like a bursting bubble: the realisation that she no longer exists, she no longer exists ..." [78] 

 

And I realise also that the dead are all equally dead and gone; it doesn't matter if they died two months ago, like my mother, 36 years ago like Barthes's maman, or two millennia ago like that Siberian princess preserved in ice. 

 

Death is a flat and timeless ontological plane upon which nothing matters and nothing changes and to know this - to know that the dead are eternally and absolutely dead - is also to know that we too "will die forever and completely" [119] [j].    

 

 

On the Truth of Mourning

 

The fragment dated 28 May, 1978, is another that is worth quoting in full:   

 

"The truth about mourning is quite simple: now that  maman is dead, I am faced with death (nothing any longer separates me from it except time)."

Unfortunately, being 60 - the same age as Barthes when he wrote this - there's not even a great deal of time any longer separating me from death (although, hopefully, I'll not be hit by a laundry van in the near future) [k].  

 

But this tragic realisation enables one to understand why it was Nietzsche taught his readers not to pray, but to bless ...

 

 

On Some Sunny Day

 

In a very brief hand-scribbled note left for me and my sister, my mother expressed her hope that, one day, we'd meet again. I don't think that's very likely (or even very desirable; the thought of personal immortality is one I find laughable and abhorrent) [l].

 

But, like Marcel Proust, Barthes is devastated by the fact his mother has died and echoes the author of À la recherche du temps perdu when he writes: "If I were sure of meeting Maman again, I'd die right away." [157]

 

 

On Acedia

 

As we know, the ancient Greeks had a word for everything, including that state of listless indifference in which the heart slowly contracts and hardens: ἀκηδία - or, as we write in Latinised modern English, acedia (or accidie). 

 

It's a concept that Christian theologians borrowed and developed in moral terms; and it's a concept that many writers in the 20th century seemed to have a penchant for, though tending to discuss it as a psychological (or existential) phenomenon. Aldous Huxley, for example, wrote an essay on the subject and concluded that it was one of the main afflictions of the modern age [m].

 

Walter Benjamin also gave acedia an important place within his literary criticism, describing it as an indolence of the heart [n]; whilst Barthes, writing in his Mourning Diary, notes that whilst he believed that following his mother's death there would be a liberation in kindness, what has actually happened is he finds himself "unable to invest lovingly in any other being" [118].

 

In a later fragment, he defines acedia as a form of desolating egoism and writes:

 

"Horrible figure of mourning: acedia, hard-heartedness: irritability, impotence to love. Anguished because I don't know how to restore generosity to my life - or love." [178]            

 

Again, it pains to me say, but I know exactly what he means ...  

Maintaining the Quotidian

 

When my mother died, I thought I'd want to flee the house; to get out as often as possible and meet as many people as possible; to get back into the world. 

 

But, two months on, I've been nowhere and seen no one and I think Barthes provides a clue as to why this is; one tries to continue living - for a while at least - as if she were still here and according not so much to her values, but her needs. 

 

By maintaining the household order (or what Barthes terms the domestic quotidian) - cooking, cleaning, shopping, etc. - one shares in the activities that shaped her life and it's a way of remembering and silently conversing with her [o].

Anti-Mourning

 

Q: What is "the furthest from, the most antipathetic to" [196] mourning in gentle silence? 

 

A: Reading Le Monde, "in its acid and well-informed tactics" [196], says Barthes, writing in 1978; checking social media, in its malevolent toxicity, say I, here in 2023.   

 

In Memory / Filial Piety

 

Like Sade, Barthes has no concern for posterity; no desire to be read and remembered after he's dead; no wish for a monument. He is, he says, perfectly content to vanish completely [p].

 

However, Barthes cannot accept that this should be the case for his mother; "perhaps because she has not written and her memory depends entirely on me" [234]. 

That's why I'm writing this post (and those related to it); I would also like my mother's kindness and modesty to be recorded. As I said at her funeral [q], if I don't speak up for her, no one will (certainly not my sister). 

 

But as Barthes's translator Richard Howard notes, perhaps the ultimate task of every son is neither to bury nor sing the praises his mother, but to show a little gratitude; "to exalt her exceptional contribution to his own happiness" [260].   

 

 

Notes

 

[a] The English edition of this work by Barthes was translated by Richard Howard as Mourning Diary and published by Hill and Wang in 2010. All page numbers in the post refer to this edition. 

      Arguably, it might have been better to have come up with an alternative title. For in a note of November 30, 1977, Barthes instructs: "Don't say mourning. It's too psychoanalytic. I'm not mourning. I'm suffering." For Barthes, this Proustian notion of suffering is that which remains (ever present) when emotivity passes. See pp. 73 and 103-04.   

 

[b] Barthes writes in the note dated 20 July, 1978, on p. 163, that he finds the idea of taking an anti-depressant drug to help him overcome his grief shameful; as if suffering were a disease, rather than something essential. 

 

[c] In a fragment on p. 71 of the Mourning Diary, dated 29 November, 1977, Barthes writes: "I can't endure seeing my suffering being reduced - being generalized - (à la Kierkegaard): it's as if it were being stolen from me." 

      However, he later realises the importance of transforming suffering from a static stage to a fluid state. See the fragment dated 13 June, 1978, on p. 142.

 

[d] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Bride', in The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 65-66.  

[e] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Virgin Mother', in The Poems, pp. 66.

 

[f] See also the fragment dated 16 November, 1977 on p. 53: "Sometimes roused by desires [...] but they're desires of before - somehow anachronistic; they come from another shore, another country, the country of before."

 

[g] Later in his Mourning Diary, Barthes will admit that writing is his salvation and that depression is when "in the depths of despair, I cannot manage to save myself by my attachment to writing". 

      See the fragments dated 21 November, 1977 on pp. 59 and 62. See also the fragment on p. 105 dated 23 March 1978 in which Barthes speaks of integrating his suffering with his writing in his book on photography (Camera Lucida). And finally, see the notes dated 17 and 18 of January, 1979, on pp. 224-225, in which Barthes admits that since his mother's death he has no desire to construct anything new except in writing.    

 

[h] Michael Erard, 'What People Actually Say Before They Die', The Atlantic (16 Jan 2019): click here.

[i] Having said that, Barthes acknowledges (with horror) the possibility that the memory of a mother's last words will one day fail to move (make cry or make smile). See the fragment dated 19 November, 1977 on p. 57. 

[j] Having said that, in a thanatological fragment published back in September 2014, I wrote:

      "We shouldn't reify death, nor confuse the fact of our own individual death with non-being. At most, death might be seen as a temporary pause or refreshment before the inevitable return to what Nick Land describes as the compulsive dissipation of life." 

      

[k] On 25 February 1980, Barthes was knocked down by the driver of a laundry van while walking home through the streets of Paris. He died from his injuries one month later, aged 64. 

 

[l] I'm a little more sympathetic to the idea of metempsychosis (i.e., the transmigration of souls) and like the idea of atoms being endlessly recycled and assembled into new bodies and objects of all kinds. Seeing the swallows flying "through the summer evening air" whilst on holiday in Morocco, Barthes tells himself: "how barbarous not to believe in souls - in the immortality of souls!" See the fragment dated 13 July, 1978 on p. 159. 

 

[m] See Huxley's essay 'Accidie' in On the Margin (George H. Doran Company, 1923), pp. 25-31. Readers can also click here to read the essay online in the Project Gutenberg ebook.   

[n] See Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne, (Verso, 2003).

 

[o] See the fragments dated 18 August, 1978 on pp. 190 and 192. 

[p] In his will, the Marquis de Sade expressed the wish that his grave be strewn with acorns, so that it would be eventually covered with oak trees. In this way, "any trace of my grave will disappear from the face of the earth, just as I trust the memory of me will fade from the minds of everyone, save for the few who in their goodness have loved me to the last". 

      See the English translation (from which I quote) by R. J. Dent in Philosophy Now, Issue 143 (April/May 2021): click here to read online. 

[q] See the post entitled 'From a Baby in a Basket ...' (27 Feb 2023) which reproduces in full the few lines spoken at my mother's funeral: click here. 

"And so, my love, my mother,

I shall always be true to you."

On Child Sexual Abuse Accommodation Syndrome (With Reference to the Case of Norman Douglas and Eric Wolton)

Norman Douglas by unknown photographer (1949) 

Photographs Collection NPG 

 

 

I.

 

I have to admit, that whilst familiar with the idea of Stockholm syndrome - i.e., the (contested) condition in which hostages are said to develop a psychological bond with their captors during captivity [1] - it is only recently that I learnt of something similar said to occur within the world of illicit intergenerational relationships: child sexual abuse accommodation syndrome (or CSAAS as it is known in the literature).

 

Of course, as with Stockholm syndrome, CSAAS is not an officially recognised diagnostic term and many have challenged an idea which is used by some to explain the uncomfortable truth that not only do young people who have had sexual encounters with adults frequently fail to report incidents or later withdraw complaints of abuse - making prosecution of offenders difficult - but that many claim to have actively enjoyed their experiences and benefitted from the attachements formed with people often much older than themselves.   

 

In other words, rather than just accept what the children tell them, some social scientists working in the area of child sexual exploitation have developed a concept that allows them to morally condemn and legally prosecute the adult without blaming the child for their misperception and misunderstanding of events; their false consciousness, it is argued, is simply another aspect of their victimhood; a form of coping mechanism [2].

 

Now, as I don't have any real knowledge or experience in this field, I don't know what to think. On the one hand, I don't wish to defend the sexual abuse of minors. But, on the other hand, as a philosopher, I'm fully aware that different peoples in different times have understood intergenerational sex in radically different ways from us; the ancient Greeks providing a very obvious example. 

 

In other words, how cultures think about loving children is shaped by a wide range of beliefs, values, and social norms. Plato and friends regarded pederasty as a perfectly legitimate relationship between an adult male (the erastes) and an adolescent male (the eromenos) and it was characteristic of the Classical period in Greece [3].         

 

And, even in modern Europe until relatively recently, it was silently accepted that certain sophisticated older gentlemen - particularly of an artistic persuasion - often had a penchant for young boys and girls [4]. By way of example, let us consider the case of the now mostly forgotten British author Norman Douglas ...

 

 

II. 

 

Douglas was born in 1868. He died in 1952 of a drug overdose. 

 

In his day, he was highly respected and much loved as a popular novelist and writer of travel books. He was also widely known to be a pederast and accused on numerous occasions of what we would now term child sexual abuse. 

 

In November 1916, for example, British prosecutors charged Douglas with indecent assault on two boys; one aged twelve, the other only ten. Given bail, he fled the country and exiled himself in Italy. However, in May 1937, he was forced to flee Florence, fearing he was about to be arrested for raping a ten-year-old girl. 

 

Although reports of these cases appeared in the British press, Douglas's reputation remained relatively untarnished and, if anything, his outrageous behavior and outlaw status only increased his popularity with the public.    

 

His circle of friends and acquaintances - which included Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence [5], Aldous Huxley, Graham Greene, and Oscar Levy (the German-Jewish intellectual who famously oversaw the first English translation of Nietzsche's work) - also turned a blind eye on his activity with children of both sexes, just as they seemingly accepted the sexual subculture that enabled a man like Douglas to indulge his tastes whilst always remaining one jump ahead of the law. 

 

Indeed, it was Levy who provided Douglas with refuge in Monte Carlo after he fled Florence and told him that not only was he unconcerned by the allegations against him, but that, in his view, the Italians ought - in recognition of his genius - to have provided him with an annual supply of virgins in the same way the Athenians once supplied the Minotaur [6].  

 

It was only after his death that criticism of Douglas's behaviour began to grow, although even in in 1952 Greene was prepared to publicly defend his friend and try to secure his posthumous reputation [7]. Today, as one commentator on the Douglas case writes, "it's impossible to imagine how such a notorious paedophile could be admired by so many people despite his sexual behaviour" [8].    

 

But this same commentator - the historian Rachel Hope Cleves - doesn't just leave things there; she explores the Douglas case at length and in depth, demonstrating how it can not only tell us much about sexuality in the late-19th and early-20th century, but perhaps also help us understand "present-day willingness to turn a blind eye to blatant sexual abusers, such as the American financier Jeffrey Epstein and the French writer Gabriel Matzneff" [9], though that's not really my point of concern here, as the first part of this post makes clear. 

 

What most interests me is this: what the case of Douglas and one young object of his affection, Eric Wolton, tells us about the phenomenon of CSAAS ...

 

 

III. 

Eric Wolton was a young Londoner whom Douglas first picked up in Crystal Palace, in 1910, when the former was twelve. Douglas took the boy - with parental consent - to Italy and, on their travels together, he tutored Wolton, helping him improve his reading and writing abilities, as was "in keeping with the pederastic model" [10]. 

 

Of course, in between lessons, Douglas expected sexual favours from the boy in return ... But what is perhaps most shocking, however, is that like many of the other children who had sexual relations with Douglas, Wolton later expressed nostalgia for their time together and gratitude for all that Douglas did for him as an educator and mentor. 

 

Indeed, as he got older these feelings only intensified and Wolton not only claimed that Douglas had saved him from a life of crime and set him on the path to personal and professional success, but, in the early 1950s, Wolton took his own children to visit Douglas shortly before the latter died: 

 

"His loyalty and affection for the writer were fairly typical of Douglas's past connections. Many of Douglas's boys remained on friendly terms with him throughout their adult lives, inviting the writer into their homes and introducing him to their wives and children." [11]

 

Is this evidence of child sexual abuse accommodation syndrome? 

 

Or is it that these men had genuinely positive feelings and happy memories about their relationships with Douglas? I don't know: as I said earlier, I'm not qualified to give an opinion on this either way. The fact is, however, there's "almost no evidence of children speaking out against Douglas either during their connections or afterwards, as adults" [12].

 

Ultimately, all we can say is that the past is a very (very) different world to the one we live in now ... In Douglas's day, as Cleves wryly notes, sex with children was seen as questionable but commonplace (and all too human); now, it's seen as terrible but exceptional (something that only monsters engage in).     

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Stockholm syndrome is a contested condition due to doubts about its legitimacy; it has never been included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders due to the lack of a consistent body of academic research. If it does exist, then the syndrome is rare; according to data from the FBI, only about 5% of hostages show any signs of positive feeling or sympathy for their captors. The term was first used by the media in 1973 when four peope were held hostage during a bank robbery in Stockholm, Sweden. Not only did they defend their captors after being released, but they refused to testify against them in court.

 

[2] In a dialogue with Guy Hocquenghem and Jean Danet, Michel Foucault argued that when a child speaks of his "sexual relations, his affections, his tender feelings, or his contacts", we should learn to trust him and accept what he says. In other words, even if a child cannot legally give consent, they can be believed when articulating their own desires and they are perfectly capable of talking about themselves and their relations (particularly on the question of whether there was violence or coercion involved): "And to assume that a child is incapable of explaining what happened and incapable of giving his consent are two abuses that are intolerable, quite unacceptable."

      See: 'The Danger of Child Sexuality', trans. Alan Sheridan, in Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961-1984, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, (Semiotext(e), 1996), pp. 264-274. Lines quoted are on pp. 272-273. 

      For an earlier post that discusses Foucault's views on the question of paedophilia (with reference to the case of Gabriel Matzneff), click here.   

 

[3] For a post in which I discuss the Ancent Greek love of boys and the benefits that a revival of pederasty as an institution might bring, click here.

 

[4] As one commentator writes: 

 

"It might feel natural to presume that the moral injunction against sex between adults and children is timeless. But today's extreme antipathy to paedophilia dates only to the 1980s, when contests over masculinity and homosexuality inspired an outburst of panic about child abuse. [...] Before the 1980s, attitudes towards sexual encounters between adults and children or youths - boys and girls - were far more ambiguous."

      - Rachel Hope Cleves, 'The Case of Norman Douglas', Aeon (9 April 2021): click here.  

 

[5] D. H. Lawrence had a long and complex (love-hate) relationship with Norman Douglas, whom he satirised in his novel Aaron's Rod (1922) and again in his Memoir of Maurice Magnus (1924). Interestingly, despite his loathing of the grand perverts as he called them, Lawrence doesn't mention Douglas's pederasty and seemed happy to enjoy his company in Italy, even if at some level the two men were natural enemies. See the section entitled 'Purgatory: Italy, 1919-1922', in Frances Wilson's new biography of Lawrence, Burning Man: The Ascent of D. H Lawrence, (Bloomsbury, 2021), pp. 147-275. She provides a fascinating account of the queer threesome formed by Lawrence, Douglas and Magnus and how it ultimately ended in acrimony, suicide, and an astonishing piece of writing.

 

[6] The fact is, pederasty had long had its defenders. To quote once more from the above essay by Cleves: 

 

"In the mid-19th century, a neo-Hellenist intellectual movement swept German and British universities. Scholars such as Karl Otfried Müller, Walter Pater and John Addington Symonds embraced ancient Greek history and philosophy as models for modern liberal politics and society. These neo-Hellenists placed pederasty at the centre of the Greek model, defining the pederastic relation as one 'by which an older man, moved to love by the visible beauty of a younger man, and desirous of winning immortality through that love, undertakes the younger man’s education in virtue and wisdom.' In this lofty vision, pederasty didn't entail a sexual relationship, but took place on a higher spiritual plane. In point of fact, both Pater and Symonds were sexually attracted to male youths. Their writings influenced Douglas and other pederasts who came of age in the late 19th century."

 

[7] Ultimatey, Greene and others failed in this attempt to secure the reputation and literary status of their friend Douglas. Cleves notes:

 

"If Douglas escaped condemnation during his lifetime, he couldn't escape the assault on his reputation following the intensification of anti-paedophilic sentiment after his death. The shift in public mores during the 1980s towards viewing paedophiles as monsters made it impossible to defend Douglas. He disappeared from literary memory, except as an example of historical villainy [...]" 

 

[8-12] Rachel Hope Cleves, op. cit. 

 

As well as the above essay, I would highly recommend the excellent book-length study by Cleves of Norman Douglas and his exploitation of children: Unspeakable: A Life Beyond Sexual Morality, (Chicago University Press, 2020).

Sartre's Lobster (l'existentialisme est une peur des crustacés)

 

Sartre and the Lobsters by Dan Meth

tumblr.com

 

 

I. 

 

Usually, when one thinks of the lobster and its role within the cultural imagination, one immediately recalls Salvador Dalí and his surrealist telephone (and also, of course, his Dream of Venus exhibition in which semi-nude female models wore fresh seafood costumes, including lobsters covering their sexual organs). 

And one remembers also the 1978 single by the B-52s, Rock Lobster, which quickly became their signature tune: click here to view an amusing performance of the track on the popular music show Countdown in 1980.  

 

What I didn't know about until very recently, however, was the story of French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and his (drug-induced) relationship with an imaginary lobster and a cast of crabs ...

 

 

II.

Many people are familiar with the fact that Sartre liked to smoke a pipe. And, being French, it can be taken as a given that he also puffed his way through a fair few packs of fags in his time and liked to knock back the red wine and black coffee. 

 

But not so many people know that he also consumed an impressive quantity of illicit drugs, including amphetamines and the naturally occurring psychedelic compound mescaline; the latter known for its hallucinogenic properties and the drug of choice for many artists and intellectuals (including Aldous Huxley, who famously described his experiences in the 1954 work The Doors of Perception). 

 

Sartre took mescaline shortly before publication of his first book, L'imagination in 1936.* Unfortunately, he had what might be characterised as a bad trip and for many months afterwards imagined he was being stalked by crustaceans (mostly crabs). 

 

Even when the effects of the drug must surely have worn off, Sartre remained convinced when feeling low that he was being followed by a giant lobster, always just hidden out of sight, and consulted Jacques Lacan in the hope that he might free himself of his invisible marine companion (whether this helped, I don't know; Lacan concluded that the philosopher simply had a fear of loneliness).  

 

 

Notes

 

* It should be noted that Sartre didn't go off, like Artaud, to the Mexican desert in order to experiment with mescaline; he had it injected under controlled conditions and observation at the Sainte-Anne hospital in Paris, at the invite of his old school chum, the physician and psychoanalyst, Dr. Daniel Lagache.  

 

For an interesting essay on how Sartre's crustacean obsessions influenced his work, see Peter Royle, 'Crabs', in Philosophy Now, Issue 67, (May/June 2008): click here.

 

For a related post on Elsa Schiaparelli's lobster dress (and Kosmo Kramer's lobster shirt), click here. 

Thanks to Tim Pendry for kindly suggesting this post.

What Becomes of the Broken Hearted?

But don't tell my heart / My achy breaky heart

I just don't think he'd understand

As Nietzsche was fond of pointing out, in so far as antithetical values exist, then things often originate in their opposite.

Thus, it's not surprising that the modern American success story is one rooted in the terrible failure of the original pioneers in conflict with the inhuman conditions of the continent itself. They eventually tamed the American wilderness, but at an appalling cost to themselves and it was later generations who reaped the reward of their efforts.    

D. H. Lawrence, who has a unique insight into American history and literature, identifies this cost, arguing that in order to break the back of the country, the early Americans had to sacrifice something essential within themselves: "the softness, the floweriness, the natural tenderness" [119].  

In other words, America was conquered and subdued, but only once the pioneers were heart broken.

This broken heartedness had two main consequences: firstly, the people became creatures of pure will; secondly, they (unconsciously) became physically repulsive to one another. With regard to the first of these consequences, Lawrence writes:

"The heart was broken. But the will, the determination to conquer the land and make it submit to productivity, this was not broken. The will-to-success and the will-to-produce became clean and indomitable once the sympathetic heart was broken." [120] 

Having repeatedly come up against the malevolent spirit of the American continent and been defeated by it, the early settlers lost their instinctive belief in the inherent kindness of other people and the essential goodness of the universe itself (a belief which, according to Lawrence, lies at the core of the human heart).

When this happens, the result is either "despair, bitterness, and cynicism" [120], or people make their hearts hard - hard enough to eventually shatter - and exercise a new (individual) will; a will-to-succeed if possible, but, ultimately, to persist no matter what and in the face of everything:

"It is not animality - far from it. [...] They have a strange, stony will-to-persist, that is all. [...] It is a minimum lower than the savage [...] Because it is a willed minimum, sustained from inside by resistance, brute resistance against any flow of consciousness except that of the barest, most brutal egoistic self-interest."[123]

Of course, they continue to worship a benevolent God and subscribe to a moral world order - continue to be good neighbours and upstanding citizens, etc. - but their faith and behaviour no longer comes from the heart and they are no longer genuinely connected by a shared warmth of fellow-feeling. They fall out of touch into wilfulness and idealism. And this leads to the second consequence:

"While the old sympathetic flow continues, there are violent hostilities between people, but they are not secretly repugnant to one another. Once the heart is broken, people become repulsive to one another [...] They smell in each other's nostrils. [...] Once the blood-sympathy breaks, and only the nerve-sympathy is left, human beings become secretly intensely repulsive to one another, physically, and sympathetic only mentally and spiritually." [121]

I don't know if there's any truth in this great psychic and physical transformation, but, amusingly, it helps Lawrence explain the American twin obsessions with plumbing and personal hygiene:

"The secret physical repulsion between people is responsible for the perfection of American 'plumbing', American sanitation, and American kitchens, utterly white-enamelled and anti-septic. It is revealed in the awful advertisements such as those about 'halitosis', or bad breath. It is responsible for the American nausea at coughing, spitting, or any of those things. The American townships don't mind hideous litter of tin cans and paper and broken rubbish. But they go crazy at the sight of human excrement." [121] 
 
As Lawrence goes on to note, this repulsion for the physicality of others - and, indeed, our own bodies - has spread from America to Europe and the rest of the modern world, as our literature reveals:

"There it is, in James Joyce, in Aldous Huxley, in André Gide [...] in all the very modern novels, the dominant note is the repulsiveness, intimate physical repulsiveness of human flesh. It is the expression of absolutely genuine experience." [122]

Of course, Lawrence wrote this ninety years ago, so doubtless things have changed since then; though whether they have changed for the better or for the worse is debatable. Perhaps the inward revulsion for any kind of physical contact with other people has only intensified and extended - thus the triumph of social media.

For whilst there may be various forms of online abuse and trolling to contend with, at least friends don't smell on Facebook ...

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to Bottom Dogs, by Edward Dahlberg', Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 117-24. All page refs. given in the post are to this work.   

It's worth noting that despite what Lawrence says here about the dangers of a broken heart, he had himself expressed a poetic preference for such: "For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken. / It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack." See 'Pomegranate', in Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923): click here to read online. It can also be found in The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), on p. 231. 

The image used for this post is the Broken Heart Emoji on Apple iOS 11.2: see emojipedia.org for details.

The lyric quoted underneath is from 'Achy Breaky Heart', a country song written by Donald L. Von Tress and most famously recorded by Billy Ray Cyrus for the album Some Gave All (Mercury Records, 1992). The track was also released as a single on 23 March 1992. The lyrics are © Universal Music Publishing Group.

D. H. Lawrence and the Grand Perverts

Drawing of D. H. Lawrence by David Levine (1968)

According to D. H. Lawrence, in a letter written to Aldous Huxley, behind all of those whom he identifies as grand perverts, lies "ineffable conceit" and boundless ego.

Figures including St. Francis, Michelangelo, Goethe, Kant, Rousseau, Byron, Baudelaire, Wilde and Marcel Proust, are all guilty of the same thing; namely, "attempting to intellectualise and so utterly falsify the phallic consciousness", says Lawrence.

By this, he seems to mean they get their sex in their heads and barter away the sheer intensity of lived experience for mere representation. In other words, they fall into idealism, into narcissism and into solipsism; "the utter incapacity for any development of contact with any other human being".

But, in as much as phallic consciousness is also "the basic consciousness, and the thing we mean, in the best sense, by common sense", I suppose he's also taking a dig at all those who dare to think differently from those who subscribe to the morality of custom and popular prejudice, or what Lawrence mistakes for an instinctive-intuitive form of folk wisdom. 

 
And this, when you think about it, is not only surprising, but bitterly disappointing. That Lawrence - of all people - should end up defending doxa (that form of truth and goodness which goes without saying and from which we should never deviate) and condemning a host of other writers, artists, and thinkers as perverts (a term used in an admittedly idiosyncratic manner, but still in an essentially negative and pejorative sense), is, if nothing else, an outrageous example of the pot calling the kettle - and every other kitchen utensil - black.   


See: D. H. Lawrence, Letter 4358, to Aldous Huxley, 27 March 1928, in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VI, ed. James. T. Boulton and Margaret H. Boulton, with Gerald M. Lacy, (Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 342.  

Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence

December 1929: Lawrence and Frieda are staying at the Villa Beau-Soleil in the South of France; nothing too grand, just a little house with six rooms and a bath, but with central-heating and overlooking the sea. 

It will be Lawrence's last Christmas. His sisters have kindly sent a plum pudding, a cake, and some mincemeat, but he's not in the festive spirit: "Why make merry when one doesn't feel merry?"

Besides, the cat has attacked the goldfish and the madness of the world is "worse than ever".  

By the 23rd, the weather is "grey and sulky" following a great storm and Lawrence has taken to his sick bed. His bronchials have been "behaving very badly" all winter making him tired and irritable. 

Although Frieda is determined to enjoy "a certain amount of Christmas fun", Lawrence insists he wants nothing to do with it. In fact, he wishes the baby Jesus had been born a turnip and eaten by one of the animals standing by the manager. 

Besides, "there is nothing new in the world", so what's to celebrate. 

In one letter, written just before this, his final Christmas, Lawrence sadly informs Aldous Huxley that the cat has now killed and eaten the goldfish, leaving nothing but a few scales floating in the bowl. It is, says Lawrence, "nothing less than a tragedy".

On that note, all that remains for me to do is send warm seasonal greetings to Catherine Brown and David Brock. And, despite all his mock-tragic humbuggery, I'd also like to say ... Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence!

Note: Quotations are from The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. VII, edited by Keith Sagar and James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 1993).