Notes on Socrates and the Ethics of Sobriety (A 6/20 Paper by Maria Thanassa)

Curbing their enthusiasm: Socrates, Maria Thanassa & Larry David 

 

 

I. 

 

According to Maria Thanassa [1], notions of sobriety and intoxication are central to Plato's Symposium and Socrates is shown to be a man of self-restraint above all else; he drinks, but never gets drunk; he loves, but never succumbs to erotic ecstasy (even remaining somewhat indifferent to the charms of Alcibiades).

 

Socrates, in other words, is a man who, like Larry David, knows how to curb his enthusiasm [2] and keep his wits about him. It's not so much that he lacks passion, but he prefers to master his desires. For Socrates, sobriety guarantees the integrity of his nature.

 

But, as becomes clear later in her presentation, Dr Thanassa is not only concerned with the doings of ancient Greek philosphers. She is interested also in how the idea of sobriety can be reactivated within a contemporary culture she thinks of as intoxicated (and infantilised) by a form of liberal Dionysianism that promotes the freedom of the individual and self-expression.           

 

In other words, a bit like the Greek lyric poet Theognis, Dr Thanassa wants people to exercise a degree of control and not act in a shameless or foolish manner (enslaved by their own base instincts); to behave in an ethical and stylised manner, carefully cultivating the self [3]. 

 

II. 

 

This might make Dr Thanassa sound like a bit of a killjoy or a member of the morality police; i.e., one who wishes to enforce a code of conduct and is concerned when people transgress certain social rules. Fortunately, however, she is saved from becoming a battle-axe like Granny Hatchet [4] by that which Socrates and Larry David are both masters of: irony. 

 

Maria ironically tempers her own enthusiasm for telling others to curb their enthusiasm before it tips over into zealotry. Like Socrates - and Larry David - she seems at times to try out and test philosophical positions without ever allowing them to become points of principle or dogma. 

 

That doesn't mean we shouldn't take what Dr Thanassa says seriously - just not that seriously. And it certainly shouldn't stop us from enjoying the wine served at the end of the paper, for as Alcibiades might remind us, the 6/20 is, like the symposium, a drinking party as much as a forum of debate.

 

Having said that, food and wine is served at the 6/20 to help facilitate conversation between those in attendance, not to induce drunken excess and vomiting on the way home [5] - something that the host, Mr Christian Michel, would almost certainly not approve of.          

 

III.

I think the part of Dr Thanassa's paper I enjoyed the most was the section in which she (following Martha Nussbaum) discussed Socrates as someone who, in his strangeness, stands apart from other men - and indeed, the human condition itself. 

 

As already mentioned, Plato depicts Socrates as someone who is absent when he should be present; who drinks but does not get drunk; who is impervious to cold and hunger; who values beauty but remains unaffected by its physical manifestations; and who feels erotic desire but does not fully succumb to the pleasures of the flesh.

That certainly makes him sound like a queer fish and, according to Dr Thanassa, the oddity of his character when combined with his satyr-like ugliness makes him not only different, but genuinely other - inaccessible, impenetrable, and impossible to shut-up, even when sentenced to death.  

 

I can see why so many of his fellow Athenians hated him, just as so many of Larry David's friends and neighbours seem to find him impossible at times. But the above traits only increase my admiration for Socrates; he may lack empathy, but at least he recognises that even the most tragic events (such as the death of a pet parrot) have a comic aspect and that the philosopher must be free to ridicule, mock, or criticise everything under the sun - even if this risks offending others [6]. 

 

As the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius wrote: Socrates could abstain from those things that most are too weak to abstain from and enjoy in moderation those things that many indulge in excessively to their shame. His strength, his ability to endure, and his sobriety marked him out as a man of perfect and invincible spirit [7].  

In sum - and I think this was Dr Thanassa's closing line (borrowed from Baudelaire) - Keep smiling with Spartan serenity [8] and remember that curbing your enthusiasm means choosing not to burst into flame even though, as a philosopher, you will burn with a very special type of passion.

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Dr Maria Thanassa presented a short paper entitled 'Curb Your Enthusiasm: On Socrates and the Ethics of Sobriety' at Christian Michel's 6/20 Club (London) on 20 Feb 2023. This post is based on my recollection of what was said and I apologise to Dr Thanassa should I misrepresent her ideas in any manner. 

 

[2] The Socrates / Larry David connection and comparison has been made before; see, for example, Daniel Coffeen's excellent post on the philosophy of Curb Your Enthusiasm on his blog An Emphatic Umph: click here. 

      Coffeen rightly argues that both Socrates and Larry are characters who interact with the world in a fundamentally different way from most other people, refusing as they do inherited terms and questioning beliefs and norms of behaviour at every opportunity: "But whereas Socrates is really only concerned with big ideas about truth, morality, language, politics, Larry takes on the micro interactions of the social." 

      I was rather disappointed, considering the title of her paper, that Dr Thanassa didn't make more of the relationship between Socrates and Larry David. 

[3] This is suggestive of Foucault's later work and I was pleased to hear Dr Thanassa refer to such later in her paper, as well as to Nietzsche's idea of what constitutes the most needful thing - the constraint of a single taste - if an individual is to give style to their lives. 

[4] Granny Hatchet (Caroline Nation) was a member of the American temperance movement in the late-19th century and early-20th century, who famously smashed up liquor joints with a handheld axe. See the recent post written on her life and times: click here.   

[5] See the poem by Theognis in Greek Elegiac Poetry: From the Seventh to the Fifth Centuries BC, ed. and trans. Douglas E. Gerber (Loeb Classical Library / Harvard University Press, 1999), lines 477-496, quoted by Dr Thanassa on the night. 

[6] See my post of 14 Nov 2017 - 'Torpedo the Ark Means Everything's Funny' - click here. 

[7] I'm paraphrasing here from Meditations 1.16 - a passage quoted by Dr Thanassa in her paper. 

[8] See Baudelaire, 'The Painter of Modern Life', in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays (Phaidon Press, 1995), p. 29. 

      What I say here of the philosopher is, of course, what Baudelaire says of the modern dandy - another figure who understands, style, sobriety, and self-restraint.

 

I would like to express my gratitude once more to Maria for producing a fascinating paper and to Christian Michel for hosting another very enjoyable evening. This post is dedicated to them both and I hope it brings them some pleasure. 

Notes on 'The Crisis of Narration' by Byung-Chul Han (Part 3)

Byung-Chul Han pictured with the Spanish language

edition of Die Krise der Narration (2023) [a]

I. 

 

Byung-Chul Han is very good at coming up with memorable phrases and titles for his books. Arguably, indeed, that's his greatest talent and I understand why a friend of mine characterised (and dismissed) his work as merely a mix of soundbite and slogan distilled from the work of other much greater thinkers. 

That's a bit harsh, but I know what she means (even if I wouldn't wish to criticise Han for this). 

 

Anyway, on we move to section six of The Crisis of Narration [b] - 'From Shocks to Likes' ...

 

Reading Benjamin (who is in turn reading Baudelaire and Freud), Han argues that external reality impacts upon the subject as a form of shock and that consciouness is a way of registering and protecting us from stimuli that would otherwise be too much to handle: "The more readily consciousness registers these shocks, the less likely they are to have a traumatic effect." [44]  

 

Having dreams and forming memories are thus delayed ways of coming to terms with things that might otherwise overwhelm us. And the modern world is profoundly shocking; "the shock aspect of individual impressions has become so intensified that our consciousness is forced to be permanently active as a shield against stimuli" [45].  

 

But that isn't good; for it means we register less and less reality and have weaker and weaker experiences (our dreams become less disturbing and our memories less vivid). We need some degree of shock in order to feel and to think and to create. 

 

Unfortunately, we don't just now act as living organisms to protect ourselves from stimuli - we employ digital technology to (literally) screen off reality. Han writes:

 

"Etymologically, a screen [Schirm] is a protective barrier. A screen bans reality, which becomes an image, thus screening us from it. We perceive reality almost exclusively via digital screens. [...] On a smartphone screen, reality is so attenuated that it can no longer create any shock experiences. Shocks give way to likes." [46] 

 

That's what we want today: a non-threatening, non-disturbing, non-shocking world that we can like. Not a world of otherness that we can gaze at and which gazes into us, but a familiar, friendly, flat, sealed-off and smoothed-off world that is pleasing to the eye and satisfies our need for safety and smartness. 

 

Nietzsche would not approve. Lawrence would not approve. Heidegger would not approve. Baudrillard would not approve. In fact, anyone who loves objects and otherness and wishes to live dangerously in a world in which dreams, memories, and disturbing artworks are still possible would not approve.  

 

For Han, this world cowardly new world is typified by Netflix and Jeff Koons:

 

"In the age of Netflix, no one speaks of having shock experiences in connection with films. A Netflix series is nothing like a piece of art that corresponds to a pronounced danger to life and limb. Rather, it typically leads to binge watching. Viewers are fattened like consumer cattle. Binge watching is a paradigm for the general mode of perception in digital late modernity." [47] 

 

"The type of artist represented by Baudelaire, someone who inadvertently causes fright, would today  seem not only antiquated but almost grotesque. The artist who typifies our age is Jeff Koons. He appears smart. His works reflect the smooth consumer world that is the opposite of the world of shocks. [...] His art is intentionally relaxed and disarming. What he wants above all is to be liked." [48][c]

 

 

II. 

 

I do agree with Han: big data does not explain anything and the numbers never speak for themselves. 

 

Having said that, if we know the how, what, where and when, perhaps it becomes a bit easier to answer the metaphysical question of why and I don't see why theory shouldn't be based upon data. 

 

Similarly, I agree that whilst AI can compute and count it doesn't really think, but that doesn't mean it can't help us conceptualise and comprehend and continue to produce narratives (be they philosophical, psychoanalytic, or artistic in character) if that's our wont. 

 

Because Han tends to think in quite stark (and oppositional) terms - narrative community contra information society, for example - his work can unfortunately become trapped in its own binaries.         

 

III.

 

I have to admit, I'm a bit dubious about the healing power of narrative, even if I quite like the idea of the philosopher as cultural physician practicing the art of critique et clinique, and even if I have in the past promoted an idea of rescripting the self. 

Obviously, Han sees himself very much as one who has come to heal (even save) mankind by helping us to come to terms with the many ills and woes of contemporary culture by embedding them in a meaningful context; if not, indeed, in what comes close to being a religious narrative that "provides consolation or hope and thus carries us through the crisis" [57]. 

 

Jesus! This reminds me of that pompous egg-headed philosopher Alain de Botton, who, thankfully, seems to be keeping a lower media profile of late. He also treated his readers like small children in need of the consoling voice or gentle touch of a loving parent when they felt bad. 

At best, it's patronising and at worst, it's philosophical mollycoddling. 

 

 

IV.

  

As a Lawrentian, I often refer to the inspiration of touch and/or the democracy of touch: click here or here, for example. 

 

Touch is one of the key terms in Lawrence's phallic vocabulary [d] and so I'm pleased that Byung-Chul Han also recognises the importance of touch: "Like storytelling, touching also creates closeness and primordial trust." [58] 

 

That's true, but I suppose it depends on who's doing the touching and in what context.        

Han goes on to suggest that we now live in a society "in which there is no touching" [59] and that this has negative consequences:

 

"The retreat of touch is making us ill. Lacking touch, we remain hopelessly entrapped in our ego. Touch in the proper sense pulls us out of our ego. Poverty in touch ultimately means poverty in world. It makes us depressive, lonely and fearful." [59-60]   

And, paradoxically, the rise of digital connectivity and social media only makes things worse. 

Again, I think that's probably true, but I understand why some would dismiss this as a series of groundless assertions, made as they are without any supporting evidence. In the end, when you read an author like Han, you simply have to take a lot on trust (those who love his work will believe every word; those who don't will adopt a more sceptical position).  

 

V. 

I mentioned above Han's notion of a narrative community. But other than being something in contradistinction to the information society, what is a narrative community? 

 

It seems to refer to a small village (with or without an ancient tree at its centre), where the villagers sit around and swap stories that reinforce values and norms and thereby ensure unity (i.e., produce a we). There's no competitive individualism in the narrative community; just solidarity and empathy.

 

But Han doesn't want his readers to mistake the narrative community for some kind of Volksgemeinschaft as conceived by the Nazis and rooted in ethno-nationalism (or blood and soil). 

 

He wants, rather, that we conceive of the narrative community as a dynamic society allowing for change and otherness and do not "cling to a particular identity" [63], embracing instead a model of universal humanism informed by Kantian philosophy [e] and the poetry of Novalis [f].  

     

Well, I'm sorry, but where Han leads I will not follow ...

 

Push comes to shove, I think I prefer even the hell of the present to a future utopia promised by Idealist philosophers and Romantic poets! And Han's optimistic political vision, based on his concept of a narrative community which "provides meaning and orientation" [68] and opens up a new order, is not one I share.      

Notes

 

[a] This image is borrowed from a review of Byung-Chul Han's La crisis de la narración, by Marco Nicolini entitled 'El regreso del storytelling' (20 Oct 2023) and published on the Arzeta website: click here (or here for the English translation).

 

[b] Byung-Chul Han, The Crisis of Narration, trans. Daniel Steuer, (Polity Press, 2024). The work was originally published as Die Krise der Narration, (Matthes & Seitz Berlin, 2023). Page numbers given in the above post refer to the English edition. 

 

[c] Han really hates Jeff Koons. I have written on this (and in defence of the latter and his artwork) previously on TTA. See for example the post dated 16 Feb 2022: click here.  

[d] I explore this phallic vocabulary on James Walker's Memory Theatre (a digital pilgrimage based on the works of D. H. Lawrence): click here.

[e] Han refers to and quotes from Kant's 'Perpetual Peace', a philosophical sketch from 1795 in which the latter dreams of a global community in which all human beings are united and there can be no refugees: "Every human being enjoys unlimited hospitalty. Everyone is a cosmopolitan." [Han, The Crisis of Narration, p. 63.]

      Kant's essay can be found in Political Writings, ed. H. S. Reiss, (Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 93-130.  

 

[f] Han writes: "Novalis is another thinker who argues for radical universalism. He imagines a 'world family' beyond nation or identity. He takes poetry to be the medium of reconciliation and love. Poetry unites people and things in the most intimate community." [63] 

      That Han should simply take us back to moral idealism and Romantic fantasy is disappointing to say the least. However, those readers who wish to know what Novalis has to say about the world family all living as one in a beautiful society, should see his Philosophical Writings, trans. and ed. Margaret Mahony Stoljar, (State University of New York Press, 1997).   

 

 

Part 1 of this post can be read by clicking here. 

 

Part 2 of this post can be read by clicking here.  

B is for ... Baudelaire, Bataille, Barthes, and Baudrillard

B is for ... 

Baudelaire, Bataille, Barthes, and Baudrillard

 

 

There are many French things that I love beginning with the letter B - from a big bowl of bouillabaisse served with crusty baguette slices, to Brigitte Bardot on the beach in her bikini [1]. 

 

Even four of my favourite French writers have surnames beginning with the letter B - Messrs. Baudelaire, Bataille, Barthes and Baudrillard - and this perhaps explains why it is that I can never think of one without also thinking of the others [2].  

Obviously, as a 19th century poet and critic, Baudelaire knew nothing of those who came a century after him. But it might be interesting to briefly recall what Bataille, Barthes, and Baudrillard said about the author of Les Fleurs du mal ... 

 

 

Bataille on Baudelaire (Désirer l'impossible) 

 

In his essay on Baudelaire in La Littérature et la Mal (1957), Bataille says that the former desired the impossible as a response to the utilitarian demand that we be reasonable as well as make ourselves useful. It is in this desire for the impossible and a useless expenditure of energy, that man discovers his authenticity and poetry locates its task. 

 

This, of course, is a Romantic vision; but it is one that Bataille in his own quest for the impossible - i.e., a simultaneity of contrary experiences - continues and yet exceeds. 

 

 

Barthes on Baudelaire (La Vérité emphatique du geste)

 

Whilst it's true that he only produced one sustained piece of writing on Baudelaire - and this on a relatively marginal aspect of the latter's work, namely, his failed theatrical projects - Baudelaire nevertheless remains a point of reference throughout Barthes's oeuvre. 

 

Indeed, as one commentator has recently pointed out, the phrase quoted from Baudelaire's Exposition Universelle (1855) concerning 'the emphatic truth of the gesture in the important moments of life' is one that "punctuates Barthes's published work throughout, from one of his earliest essays to his very last book on photography, and is closely associated with another persistently recurring motif: the concept of numen, a term used to designate a static gesture expressing divine authority" [3]. 

 

Baudrillard on Baudelaire (L'Objectivation absolue de l'art)

 

By his own admission, Baudrillard's relationship with the world of art has always been one marked by a certain ambivalence: "I come from a moralist, metaphysical tradition, a political and ideological tradition that has always been wary of art and culture in general [...]" [4]

Nevertheless, he is obviously interested in how art from Baudelaire to Warhol has been involved in staging its own disappearance and meeting the challenge posed to it not only by an age of mechanical reproduction, but by consumer capitalism which turns everything into merchandise (i.e., objectifying everything in terms of market value).

 

It was Baudelaire, says Baudrillard, who first came up with a radical solution to this problem. Instead of offering a defence of the traditional status of the work of art based on aesthetic value and seeking art's salvation in and on its own terms - art for art's sake - Baudelaire calls for an acceleration of the processes unfolding within modernity and for art's absolue objectification:

 

"Since aes­thetic value risks alienation from commodity, instead of avoiding alienation, art had to go farther in alienation and fight commodity with its own weapons. Art had to follow the inescapable paths of commodity indifference and equivalence to make the work of art an absolute commodity." [5]

      

This, says Baudrillard, is what a work of art should be; "it should take on the characteristics of shock, strangeness, surprise, anxiety, liquidity and even self-destruction, instantaneity and unreality that are found in commodities" [6]. 

 

The reason Baudelaire still interests and seems so relevant today is not because of his poetry, but because via his ironic logic the work of art was able to sparkle in its own venality and become "a pure object of marvellous commutability" [7].   

 

 

Notes

[1] Readers may recall that I wrote about the history and politics of the bikini in a post published in August 2016, which was illustrated with a photo of 19-year-old Bardot wearing her two-piece swimsuit on the beach at Cannes in 1953: click here.

[2] Of course, there are other reasons apart from an onomatological coincidence as to why these four writers are closely related and it would make for an interesting philosophical and literary study to trace out their shared ideas and concerns.   

 

[3] Douglas Smith, '"La Vérité emphatique du geste dans les grandes circonstances de la vie": Baudelaire, Barthes and the Hysterical Gesture', Irish Journal of French Studies, Vol. 21 (2021), pp. 99-121.  

      In this essay, Smith examines the significance of Baudelaire for Barthes and attempts to answer the question of what that might tell us in turn about the former. He does this by tracing out the manner in which Barthes deploys the quotation from Exposition Universelle and by paying particular attention "on the value to be attributed to exaggeration or excess in the communication of meaning through gesture and language, a phenomenon that both Barthes and Baudelaire associate with hysteria, as either something to be ironically assumed (Baudelaire) or ambivalently exorcized (Barthes)". 

 

[4-6] Jean Baudrillard, 'Simulation and Transaesthetics: Towards the Vanishing Point of Art', International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 5, Number 2 (July, 2008): click here to read online. 

      This paper was given as a lecture at the Whitney Museum (New York) in 1987. It also appears in Jean Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art: Manifestos, Interviews, Essays, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, (Semiotext(e) / MIT Press, 2005), pp. 98-110.

 

Into the Valley of the Giants with Gilbert Noon

 

Georgia O'Keeffe: Black Hills with Cedar (1941)

Oil on canvas (16 x 30 in.)

 

 

Let us beware of thinking that the world is a living being, says Nietzsche [1]. And let us be doubly cautious about assigning it with a gender and speaking as if the body of the earth and the body of woman were one and the same thing. 

 

Having said that, I was guilty of doing precisely this in my misspent pagan youth. But now I don't much care for anthropomorphic metaphors of Mother Earth which stress her life-giving and nurturing aspects, particularly when tied to a spiritual ecofeminism and/or left-leaning green politics. 

 

I'm also no longer so keen on those attempts by ecosexuals and nature fetishists to think of the earth in erotic terms - as something one shouldn't merely worship and revere, but fuck [2]. Perhaps that's why the following paragraph from D. H. Lawrence's unfinished novel Mr Noon (1984) struck a chord:

 

"The valley began to depress him. The great slopes shelving upwards, far overhead: the sudden dark, hairy ravines in which he was trapped: all made him feel he was caught, shut in down below there. He felt tiny, like a dwarf among the great thighs and ravines of the mountains. There is a Baudelaire poem which tells of Nature, like a vast woman lying spread, and man, a tiny insect, creeping between her knees and under her thighs, fascinated. Gilbert felt a powerful revulsion against the great slopes and particularly against the tree-dark hairy ravines in which he was caught." [3] 

 

Some critics see this passage as evidence of Lawrence's misogyny, although I would argue that Gilbert Noon's reaction might better be described as gynophobic, rather than misogynistic; i.e., an irrational fear of (being engulfed within) the female body, rather than a learned dislike for and contempt of women per se.   

 

What it does tell us for sure is that, whatever other kinks Mr Noon may have, he's not a macrophile and doesn't - unlike Baudelaire - entertain sexual fantasies involving a giantess [4]; or, if unconsciously he does harbour such thoughts, then these clearly disturb him and he does what he can to repress them.     

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book III, §109.  

[2] See: 'On Ecosexuality' (6 Nov 2016): click here.

[3] D. H. Lawrence, Mr Noon, ed. Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 251. 

      Gilbert Noon isn't the only Lawrence protagonist to resent being belittled by landscape; see my post on the case of Alexander Hepburn and his orophobia from Nov 2017: click here.

[4] I discuss macrophilia in a post dated 23 July 2019, entitled 'Bigging Up the Gibson Girl': click here. 

      The poem by Charles Baudelaire referred to is 'La Géante', in Les Fleurs du Mal (1857): click here.       

      Interestingly, although Baudelaire fantasises about living at the feet of a giantess, crawling on her enormous knees, enjoying her curves, and sleeping in the shade cast by her breasts, he doesn't actually speak of creeping between her knees and thighs - and so towards the hairy ravine of her cunt - as Lawrence (perhaps tellingly) misremembers. 

      However, it could be - as Lindeth Vasey suggests - that Lawrence is thinking of Tolstoi's description of a landowner's dream, involving a landscape that is transformed into the body of a giant woman: 'The old man dreamt that he was standing between the woman's legs, in front of him a deep, dark ravine, which sucked him in ...' See the explanatory note 251:37 on p. 328 of Mr Noon (CUP, 1984).       

 

Vampiric Lesbianism 1: Carmilla (How Beautiful She Looked in the Moonlight!)

Illustration by David Henry Friston 

for Le Fanu's Carmilla (1872)

I. 

19th-century Irish writer Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu may not today be a household name, but the fact remains his ghost stories and horror books were central to the development of queer gothic fiction in the Victorian era and he is rightly celebrated within lesbian circles for his novella Carmilla (1872); a romantic tale of the relationship between the title character, the alluring Countess Karnstein - who happens to be a vampire - and the young female narrator, Laura:

"Sometimes after an hour of apathy, my strange and beautiful companion would take my hand and hold it with a fond pressure, renewed again and again; blushing softly, gazing in my face with languid and burning eyes, and breathing so fast that her dress rose and fell with the tumultuous respiration. It was like the ardour of a lover; it embarrassed me; it was hateful and yet overpowering; and with gloating eyes she drew me to her, and her hot lips travelled along my cheek in kisses; and she would whisper, almost in sobs, 'You are mine, you shall be mine, and you and I are one for ever'."  [1]

It's not exactly D. H. Lawrence, but, like many others who grew up watching Hammer horror films, I can't resist a bit of fantasy lesbianism of this kind; i.e., what might be described as sapphism with added bite and often involving the seduction of (presumably) heterosexual young women by predatory lesbian vampires.    

II.

Carmilla, it is interesting to note, pre-dates Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) by a quarter of a century and the latter admitted his indebtedness to Le Fanu - as have many later writers, though, of course, Le Fanu himself drew upon several earlier works, thereby demonstrating the intertextual nature of literature in which ideas, like vampires, feed off other ideas, in a perverse and unholy orgy of inspiration and bloodsucking.  

Having said that, I think we can concede that the character of Carmilla is the prototype for a legion of vampiric lesbians; she selects exclusively young and pretty female victims and isn't adverse to becoming emotionally (and, if given half-a-chance, sexually) involved with those she puts the bite on; she has a powerful physical presence that many find irresistable; she is able to change human form into that of an animal (in her case, a large black cat); she sleeps in a coffin; she can only be killed with a stake through the heart, etc.   

Whether this work - and others like it - help or hinder the rights of lesbians living in the real world who don't happen to have the charms, fangs, and supernatural powers of Carmilla, is debatable. But I can cerainly understand why many women have embraced the latter and bought into the darkly romantic ideas of vampirism and satanism that flourished in the late 19th-century Decadent movement - there is something strangely empowering in the aesthetics of evil and in openly declaring oneself against nature.   

However, there's also a downside to reactivating all the old stereotypes to do with both femininity and homosexuality. It's certainly worth remembering that the perverse lesbian given to us by poets such as Baudelaire and Swinburne and belonging to the (male) pornographic imagination, is shaped by desire but marked by misogyny and homophobia. 

In other words, I'm not entirely convinced that the fictional figure of Carmilla the vampire - or even the utopian politics of Renée Vivien embodied within her Sapphic verse - is enough to counter the profound fear and loathing for otherness that characterises morally and sexually straight society.  

Notes

[1] Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla, (1875), chapter IV.

The above work is available to read as an ebook thanks to Project Gutenberg: click here.

To read part two of this post - on Dracula's cinematic daughters - click here.

Ailurophilia: On Baudelaire's Erotic Fascination with Cats

Théophile Steinlen's 1896 design for the famous 
Parisian nightspot Le Chat Noir

Poets, like witches and philosophers, love cats and many have written odes to their mysterious companions, including Rilke, who imagines himself suspended like a prehistoric fly in the golden amber of his cat's eyeball.* However, it's Baudelaire who is perhaps most famous for his obsessive love of cats.**

And it's Baudelaire who best understands not only their Satanic-nocturnal nature, but also their undeniable eroticism, equating the feline with the feminine (and vice versa) until it becomes impossible to know at times if he's writing about his favourite pet or his favourite mistress.

Either way, both seem to promise those things he valued most: poetic truth and sensual pleasure; the former being something that develops out of the fleshy materiality of the latter, rather than pre-existing as some kind of disembodied ideal.      

Here's one of Baudelaire's cat poems that hopefully illustrates what I've been attempting to say, followed by my own attempt at a translation into English that invariably loses something in the process, but which, hopefully, adds something that isn't found in other translations ...

Le Chat

Viens, mon beau chat, sur mon coeur amoureux;
Retiens les griffes de ta patte,
Et laisse-moi plonger dans tes beaux yeux,
Mêlés de métal et d'agate.

Lorsque mes doigts caressent à loisir
Ta tête et ton dos élastique,
Et que ma main s'enivre du plaisir
De palper ton corps électrique,

Je vois ma femme en esprit. Son regard,
Comme le tien, aimable bête
Profond et froid, coupe et fend comme un dard,

Et, des pieds jusques à la tête,
Un air subtil, un dangereux parfum
Nagent autour de son corps brun.


The Cat

Come not with claws, beautiful cat,
As you leap into my affection;
Allow me to plunge into your eyes
Of metallic crystal.

When my fingers gently stroke along
Your head and supple spine,
My hand thrills with the pleasure
Of touching your body electric.

I sense the same spirit as in Her: her gaze
Like yours, dear creature, is one of cold
Intensity, piercing like a banderilla.

And, from head to toe,
A subtle yet dangerous perfume,
Envelops her dark skin.


Notes

* See Rilke, 'Black Cat' in Duino Elegies (1923): click here to read online. 

** If memory serves me correctly, Baudelaire devoted no fewer than three poems to cats in Les Fleurs du mal (1857) and they make appearances in many of his other poems too. As might be expected, therefore, the theme of Baudelaire's cats has proved a popular - and fertile - one amongst literary critics and theorists (Roman Jakobson and Claude Lévi-Strauss famously co-authoring a structuralist reading in 1960, for example).

To read an online edition of Les Fleurs du mal provided by Project Gutenberg, click here. 

Alternatively, visit fleursdumal.org - a site dedicated to Baudelaire and his work that not only contains every poem of each edition of Les Fleurs du mal, but a selection of English translations (for those, like me, whose French isn't very good). 

For another post on the love of cats, click here.  

Melt: On the Transubstantiation of Love

Cover art for the single 'Melt!' by

Siouxsie and the Banshees 

(Polydor, 1982) 

"Are you familiar with the frightening sensation of melting", asks Cioran; "the feeling of dissolving into a flowing river, in which the self is annulled by organic liquidization?" 

Well, as a matter of fact, thanks to the British post-punk band Siouxsie and the Banshees, I am ... 

The lovely song 'Melt!', released as a single from their fifth studio album, A Kiss in the Dreamhouse, gave an interesting - some might say psychedelic - insight into the phenomenon way back in 1982.

The lyrics betray a decadent and delirious fascination with sex and death and some of the images have fetishistic overtones; the melting lover is handcuffed in lace, blood and sperm, before eventually being beheaded.        

Whilst it's tempting and certainly wouldn't be mistaken to discuss the song in relation to Baudelaire and Masoch - or the sleeve art with reference to Klimt - I think it just as legitimate (and in some ways more interesting) to refer to Cioran's astonishing first book, On the Heights of Despair (1934).

(Don't get me wrong: I love Flowers of Evil and Venus in Furs as much as the next man, but so much has already been written about these texts, that it's hard to offer any further insight. Cioran's work, on the other hand, is shamefully underdiscussed and undervalued. Indeed, much of it is hardly known in the English-speaking world, even by people who thrill to similar authors, such as Bataille and Blanchot, for example.)    

Like the Banshees, Cioran eroticises the notion of melting, or what Barthes would describe as the body's liquid expansion and include crying as well as ejaculating. For love, writes Cioran, "is a form of intimate communion and nothing expresses it better than the subjective impression of melting, the falling away of all barriers of individuation".   

Although he seems to regard sex as marginal to the irrationality of love, Cioran concedes that you cannot conceive of the latter without the former and insists that there's no spiritual love between the sexes; "only a transfiguration of the flesh" via which lovers identify themselves so intensely with one another that they create an illusion of spirituality.

Only at this point does the sensation of melting occur: "the flesh trembles in a supreme spasm, ceases resistance, burning with inner fires, melting and flowing, unstoppable lava". In other words, it's a form of suicide in sex, as Siouxsie sings.

Notes

See: E. M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair, trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston, (The University of Chicago Press, 1992). I'm quoting from sections entitled 'Weariness and Agony' and 'On the Transubstantiation of Love', pp. 16-17 and 84. 

Play: Siouxsie and the Banshees, 'Melt!', from the album A Kiss in the Dreamhouse (Polydor, 1982): click here.

This post is in (mostly) fond memory of Gillian Hall.

Reflections on the Death of a Jewel-Encrusted Tortoise

The decadent aristocrat Des Esseintes, whose retreat into an increasingly perverse and artificial inner life is depicted with such brilliance by J-K Huysmans in the 1884 novel À rebours (a title usually translated into English as either Against the Grain or Against Nature), is - as Patrick McGuinness points out - a fictional character, but he is not pure invention:

"Among the specific models for Des Esseintes was the eccentric King Ludwig II of Bavaria, who designed an artificial forest with mechanical animals, but there were also Baudelaire himself, Edmond de Goncourt and a variety of fictional characters [...] The most obvious model, however, was Count Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac, an aesthete and eccentric who provided the model for Proust's Baron Charlus in A la recherche du temps perdu ..."

Not only were many of the decorative elements of Des Esseintes's home based on details of Montesquiou's own, but the implausible figure of a jewel-encrusted tortoise creeping about Huysmans's novel was, outrageously, based on fact: "Montesquiou had the poor creature customized to his tastes, and when it died wrote a poem in its memory ..."

This certainly makes one read chapter four of Against Nature with a renewed fascination - and a greater sympathy - for the slow-moving beast:

"The tortoise was the result of a fancy which had occurred to him shortly before leaving Paris. Looking one day at an Oriental carpet aglow with iridescent colours [...] he had thought what a good idea it would be to place on this carpet something that would move about and be dark enough to set off these gleaming tints."  

Unfortunately, having purchased the tortoise and had it delivered to his home - and once it had been deposited on the carpet - it soon became apparent that "the negro-brown tint, the raw Sienna hue of the shell, dimmed the sheen of the carpet instead of bringing out its colours; the predominating gleams of silver had now lost nearly all their sparkle and matched the cold tones [...] along the edges of this hard, lustreless carapace".

Des Esseintes decides the only thing to do is to jazz the tortoise up a bit; to make it into a brilliant object (and artwork) in its own right; glazed in gold and encrusted with precious stones. But not just the familiar stones that vulgar people wear on their fingers; he wanted "startling and unusual gems " - both real and artificial - that, in combination, would "result in a fascinating and disconcerting harmony".

Job done - the tortoise suitably bejewelled - Des Esseintes felt perfectly happy and sat gazing at the splendid reptile as it lay "huddled in a corner of the dining room, glittering brightly in the half-light". Alas, his happiness doesn't last long as the tortoise dies: "Accustomed no doubt to a sedentary life, a modest existence spent in the shelter of its humble carapace, it had not been able to bear the dazzling luxury imposed upon it ..."

And people complain about the crushing effects of poverty!

Interestingly, there are faint echoes of this scene in Brideshead Revisited (1945), when Rex Mottram presents his fiancée Julia Flyte with a small tortoise that has her initials set in diamonds in the living shell. Unlike Des Esseintes, however, the narrator of Waugh's novel (Charles Ryder) can see that the bejewelled tortoise is slightly obscene and in poor taste.

In even poorer taste, however, is what children of my generation used to paint on the backs of pet tortoises; believing their shells to resemble the steel helmets of German soldiers, we would cheerfully decorate them with Iron Crosses and swastikas. And if there's anything more depressing than a dandified, decadent tortoise, it's a Nazified tortoise ...       

Notes

Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. Robert Baldick, (Penguin Books, 2003). Lines quoted are from Chapter 4, pp. 40-49. 

Patrick McGuinness, 'Introduction' to Against Nature, ibid., pp. xxvii-xxviii.  

Eveleyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, (Penguin Books, 2000). The tortoise scene is in Chapter 6. 

For a related post to this one written in memory of J-K Huysmans (and his jewel-encrusted tortoise), click here. 

In Memory of Joris-Karl Huysmans (and His Bejewelled Tortoise)

Caricature of J-K Huysmans (1885)

To be honest, I increasingly find that I have to be in a very particular frame of mind to read 19th-century French authors such as Joris-Karl Huysmans who are a little too Symbolist, too Decadent and too Catholic for my tastes. One really has no wish to end up at the foot of the Cross, be it inverted or upright and I find elements of his philosophy - much influenced by Schopenhauer - highly suspect; suggestive as they are of weakness, rather than a more Nietzschean pessimism of strength. 

However, as Huysmans and I share the same star sign making us astrological kin - and as today happens to be the 170th anniversary of his birth - I thought I might say something in memory of this idiosyncratic writer, notorious for writing against the grain and against nature ...

The first thing that needs to be said is that Huysmans was clever - very clever. And I'm with Eliot on this question: the essential requirement of all good writing - be it prose or poetry - is intelligence. An inspired idiot is unfortunately still an idiot and inspiration won't compensate for (or disguise) a lack of learning and quick-wittedness for long. L'éternelle bêtise de l'humanité was not surprisingly one of Huysmans's pet peeves. 

His first major publication was a collection of prose poems, Le drageoir aux épices (1874), strongly influenced by Baudelaire. This was followed by a novel, Marthe, Histoire d'une fille (1876), which brought him to the attention of Émile Zola. His next works were similar in style: realistic and rather grim depictions of life in Paris.

Again, to be honest, you'd have to have a great passion for French literature or a scholarly interest like the middle-aged protagonist of Houellebecq's Submission (2015), to bother with these books. But on the other hand, his scandalous novel of 1884, À rebours, is a must read - if only for the bejewelled tortoise in chapter four. 

And that's particularly so for lovers of Oscar Wilde; for this poisonous tale of the aristocratic aesthete Jean des Esseintes - a man who rejects both the natural order and bourgeois society and attempts to live exclusively in a perversely sensual yet highly artificial world of his own invention - greatly influenced The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890).

Amusingly - though not for poor Constance - Wilde first read À rebours whilst on honeymoon in Paris and it immediately became for him what it was also for Paul Valéry and, many years later, the punk singer Richard Hell - a bible and bedside favourite.       

See:

Michel Houellebecq, Submission, trans. Lorin Stein, (William Heinemann, 2015). 

Joris-Karl Huysmans, trans. Robert Baldick, (Penguin Books, 2003).

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, (Penguin Books, 2003).

To read an excellent essay by Adam Leith Gollner on 'What Houellebecq Learned from Huysmans', in The New Yorker (12 November, 2015), click here. 

For an interesting note on À rebours and its influence on Oscar Wilde, visit the British Library website: click here. 

For a related post to this one that reflects more closely on the bejewelled tortoise, click here.

Thanks to Thom Bonneville for suggesting this post.

When I Play With My Cat ... (Notes Towards a Feline Philosophy)

Come, beautiful puss, press close to my loving heart;

Retract your claws,  

Let me gaze into your crystal-metallic eyes.

Philosophers - particularly French philosophers - have always loved cats. And so it's not surprising to discover that Derrida had a feline companion named Logos; or that the only pussy Foucault enjoyed petting was an all black cat called Insanity.

Rather more surprising is that Deleuze has also been pictured with a moggie on his lap (name unknown). Because although Deleuze wrote extensively about becoming-animal he was not a big pet lover. Indeed, he once said that anyone displaying affection towards a four-legged friend is a fool.

Perhaps it was his daughter, Émilie, who persuaded him to get  a cat, thus enabling her father to discover that, despite having been domesticated for thousands of years, cats are not as oedipalised as he feared; that, unlike dogs, they fully retain their sovereignty and otherness (you can never really know a cat - the idea of familiarity is a piece of human conceit). 

David Wood writes: "Each cat is a singular being - a pulsing centre of the universe - with this colour eyes, this length and density of fur, this palate of preferences, habits and dispositions." They might let you stroke them, but you can never really touch them; they might let you look into their eyes, but they remain creatures who escape our gaze.

As Montaigne famously mused, when it comes to the question of people and cats, who is ultimately playing with whom?

In other words, cats have the ability to make us doubt our own superiority and to question the privileged position in the world we have accorded ourselves as a species. Dogs make men feel like kings, but cats expose our nakedness and vulnerability - as Derrida discovered when his cat wandered into the bathroom one morning.      

Perhaps this is why so many people fear and hate cats, believing like the famous 18th-century French naturalist and ailurophobe Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon that they possess an innate malice and a perverse disposition. I'm not saying this is mistaken; rather, I'm saying this - in addition to their uncanniness and supple beauty - is precisely what makes cats so fascinating and admirable.     

See: David Wood, 'If a cat could talk', essay in the digital magazine Aeon (24 July 2013): click here. 

Readers interested in Derrida's naked encounter with his cat should see: The Animal That Therefore I Am, (Fordham University Press, 2008).  

Note: the lines beneath the photos of Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault with their cats are translated from Baudelaire's poem Le chat. Click here to read the original verse in full online.

   

Lipstick Traces: Lessons for Lucia

Lucia Pica photographed by Daniel Jackson 

Vogue (Sept 2015)

Like many people, when I heard a couple of years ago that Italian-born, London-based Lucia Pica had been appointed creative director at Chanel cosmetics, I was very happy for her and very hopeful of what we might expect; for she is undoubtedly a makeup artist with a bold and brilliant understanding of colour and unafraid of taking risks.

Expectations were further raised when it was revealed that her first collection for the label would in part be inspired by the work of Jean Baudrillard; that we could finally delight in nail polish and lipstick that pops with hyperreal playfulness.  

Unfortunately, however, if you take time to read interviews with Ms Pica, you discover that she subscribes to a disappointing model of aesthetic idealism, in which beauty is something essential and makeup merely a method of enhancement that should never be allowed to mask the natural character of a face, so that the real woman can shine through.

In other words, the ultimate personal expression is that of your own true self.   

Having resisted the urge to vomit, I'd like - at the risk of repeating what I've said elsewhere on this blog - to provide some lessons for Lucia on artifice and nature (and the nature of artifice), in relation to the question of Woman conceived in terms of style and seduction ...  

1. Woman is a myth activated through a system of signs encoded, for example, in art and fashion.

2. Those things which serve to construct her femininity, such as her shoes, her makeup and her lingerie, matter more than her biology. For whilst the latter determines her as a female belonging to a species of domestic animal, it does not determine her as a woman. In other words, her being is not naturally given; she is not born a woman, as Simone de Beauvoir put it, but becomes such via culture.

3. Because of this, woman fully understands the need for illusion and defends the right to lie. She uses cosmetics not because she wishes to conceal an essence or a hidden reality beneath appearance, but because she has no inner self and only wants to make us think she does. To mistake the exceeding of nature for a crude camouflaging of the truth, is to commit a cardinal error. Makeup isn't false - it's the falser than false and so recuperates a kind of superior innocence.       

4. Further, via a confident and sophisticated use of clothes and cosmetics, a woman can strike a blow against the puritanical drabness of the world with its neutral tones and sensible footwear, rediscovering the power of witchcraft known as glamour. As Baudelaire writes:

"Woman is quite within her rights, indeed she is even accomplishing a kind of duty, when she devotes herself to appearing magical and supernatural; she has to astonish and charm us; as an idol, she is obliged to adorn herself in order to be adored. [...] It matters but little that [her] artifice and trickery are known to all, so long as their success is assured and their effect always irresistible."

5. If this means that woman risks surrendering to emptiness and reification on the one hand, whilst becoming commodified and fetishized on the other, this need not necessarily be such a bad thing; models, actresses and prostitutes, for example, have all cleverly turned their object status and vacancy into an art, exploiting what Walter Benjamin termed the sex appeal of the inorganic (i.e. that pale power of seduction and stillness founded upon the ecstasy of a blank gaze and a Pan Am smile).   

6. Finally, Lucia, you might like to consider how it is only at the symbolic level of appearances that systems become fragile and only via enchantment that the power and meaning of these systems becomes vulnerable. In other words, the idiosyncratic feminism of Coco Chanel - in which you profess an interest - needs to be understood as a politics of style that is all about a light manipulation of appearances, rather than a politics of desire and identity that still concerns itself with libidinal and psychological depths.

Why become fixated on true feelings and ontological foundations, when you can just add more lipstick and attack?

See:

Stephen Alexander, Philosophy on the Catwalk (Blind Cupid Press, 2011).

Charles Baudelaire, 'The Painter of Modern Life' in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, ed. and trans. Jonathan Mayne, (Phaidon Press, 2006).

Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, trans. Brian Singer, (St. Martin's Press, 1990).

Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles, trans. Barbara Harlow, (University of Chicago Press, 1979).

Lipstick Traces (with Reference to the Case of Cleopatra)

Zabrena: Historically Accurate: Ancient Egypt / Cleopatra Makeup Tutorial

YouTube (8 Oct 2014): click here. 

One of the questions I find endlessly fascinating is that of nature and artifice and the nature of artifice in relation to femininity.

It's a question that invariably takes us back to Baudelaire who suggests that without makeup Woman - as a figment of the pornographic imagination and not merely as a lump of flesh with distinct reproductive organs from the male - not only fails to excite or interest, but is less than human. It is only as a cultural-cosmetic effect that she elevates herself above her animal biology and captures the hearts and minds of men who would otherwise happily make do with other pleasures.      

For as Baudelaire admits, woman is not an animal whose component parts - even when pleasingly assembled and proportioned - provide a perfect example of harmony; "she is not even that type of pure beauty which the sculptor can mentally evoke in the course of his sternest meditations". In order to cast her complex spell of enchantment, she needs to adorn and thus enhance her physical attributes. 

Take the mouth, for example: who in their right mind would ever have dreamt of kissing the lips of a mucous-lined orifice with two rows of sharp teeth - and, indeed, exploring such with their own tongue or virile member - were those lips not first painted in an irresistible shade?

For whilst a smile, betraying as it does a certain vulnerability, may attract the attention of a man, I doubt that alone would be enough to persuade to perversion. And, let's be clear about this, oral sex - which includes French kissing - is an obvious abberation, involving as it does a form of what Freud terms anatomical transgression.

Cleopatra, Queen of the Nile, Isis Reborn, and a skilled fellatrix, knew exactly what she was doing when she applied crushed beetle juice in a beeswax base to her lips in order to stain them deep carmine red.

As Adam Ant once put it: She was a wide-mouthed girl ...    

See: 

Charles Baudelaire, 'The Painter of Modern Life' in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. and ed. by Jonathan Mayne, (Phaidon Press, 1995): click here to read online. 

Sigmund Freud, 'The Sexual Aberrations', in Three Contributions to the Sexual Theory, trans. A. A. Brill (NY, 1910): click here to read online.

Play:

Adam and the Ants, 'Cleopatra', Dirk Wears White Sox, (Do It Records, 1979): click here to listen on YouTube.

Notes on Shakespeare's Dark Lady

Jasmin Savoy-Brown cast as Emilia Bassano, 

believed by some to be Shakespeare's Dark Lady 
Photo: John Willy (2016)

I have written elsewhere on this blog about Baudelaire and his bi-racial mistress and muse, Jeanne Duval, whom he fondly (if rather predictably) termed his Vénus noire [click here]. The 19th century French poet and critic was not, however, the first European male to have a taste for brown sugar. Nor should the fetishization of non-white womanhood be seen as a trope that originated within the Decadent movement.

There are many instances of such to be found within Elizabethan and Baroque literature, including, for example, Edward Herbert's poem La Gialletta Gallante, or the Sun-burn'd Exotic Beauty and Giambattista Marino's Bella schiava ('Beautiful Slave-Girl').

And, of course, mention must also be made of Shakespeare's notorious Dark Lady, the subject of the openly erotic sonnets 127-52 and of ongoing speculation concerning her identity and whether her darkness should be understood literally or metaphorically (i.e., does it refer to her colouring and complexion, or to her character and the fact she's wrapped in mystery). Either way, we can assume she wasn't a typical English rose, or born on a Monday.

The majority of scholars believe she was more likely to have been from a Mediterranean background, rather than of black African descent. But the truth is we don't know; there is simply not enough evidence, either textual or biographical in nature. Amongst possible candidates for the role of the Dark Lady, three stand out:

(i) Emilia Lanier (née Bassano)  

In 1973, Shakespearean scholar A. L. Rowse claimed to have solved the mystery surrounding the identity of the Dark Lady, confidently asserting that it was Emilia Lanier - an attractive, independent-minded woman of Italian (and possibly Jewish) background who came from a famous musical family (the Bassanos).

Not only was she the mistress of Lord Hunsdon, the Queen's Lord Chamberlain, but she was also the first woman to publish a full collection of original poetry under her own name in English - Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611). As talented as she was, she probably didn't look like the lovely American actress Jasmin Savoy-Brown who plays her on TV in the TNT series Will (2017) ...

(ii) Aline Florio

Meanwhile, Dr. Aubrey Burl, a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, piecing together whatever clues there are about the Dark Lady's identity in his own inimitable manner, insists that she is Aline Florio, wife of Italian translator, John Florio. She certainly had dark hair. And, like Shakespeare's heroine, was said to be self-centred  and sex-obsessed. And ... er, that's about it! (Though it might be noted that distinguished Shakespearean, Jonathan Bate, also came to the same conclusion as Burl - indeed, he arrived at it fifteen years earlier ...)

(iii) Black Luce (or Lucy Negro)

In August 2012, the Independent reported that it was possible that the Dark Lady was in fact a notorious London prostitute and madam called Black Luce or Lucy Negro. According to Dr. Duncan Salkeld - author of Shakespeare Among the Courtesans (2012) - not only did the Bard have associates and, perhaps, family in the Clerkenwell area where Lucy ran her brothel, but she was mentioned in the diary of Philip Henslowe, the theatre owner who built the Rose and one of Shakespeare's great contemporaries.

It seems highly likely, therefore, that she would have been known to Will and given her sexual reputation and charms - she was described by those who knew her as an arrant whore and bawde catering to men of all types - it's not unreasonable to assume she would have been the object of his interest and desire ... But, again, who knows?

Who knows - and, indeed, who really cares?

For it seems to me needless and naive to read a work of art in this manner; to reduce literature to a form of biographical confession; i.e., to regard Shakespeare's sonnets as an account of real events and real people. As Howard Jacobson rightly says, enough's enough already:

"Let the Dark Lady be whoever the Dark Lady was. It is not our affair personally, given that Shakespeare chose it not to be, and it is not our affair aesthetically ..."

He continues:

"Of the misconceptions that continue to bedevil literature, this is among the most obdurate: that it is a record, straightforward or otherwise, of something that actually happened. Even the most sophisticated readers will forget all they know of the difference between literature and life when biography perchance shows its slip."

Shakespeare, as an artist, creatively transforms the latter, life, into literature; poetry is a magical reality that exists in the unique space opened up by experience and imagination. When we forget this and read the sonnets merely as a form of lyrical reportage, says Jacobson, "we diminish thought, we diminish imagination, and we diminish art".


See:

Duncan Salkeld, Shakespeare Among the Courtesans, (Routledge, 2012).

Werner Sollors (ed.), An Anthology of Interracial Literature, (NYU Press, 2004).

Note: the Howard Jacobson article in the Independent (11 Jan 2013) that I quote from, can be read by clicking here.