Illustration from De Materia Medica (1460)
by Greek physician and botanist Pedanius Dioscorides
As we discovered in part one of this post, a bite from a red-spotted spider is enough to put any man off placing his penis inside a mossy hole in a tree, no matter how inviting the prospect is: click here.
However, this painful experience didn't stop Michel Tournier's reimagined Robinson Crusoe [a] from further experimenting with what is now known as ecosexuality; i.e., an eroticised form of nature worship [b]. In fact, following this incident Crusoe learns how to love his island as a whole and to conceive of the Earth as a living entity [c].
Awaking one day from an al fresco nap, he feels full of a queer new tenderness for Speranza:
"He felt as never before that he was lying on Speranza as though on a living being, that the island's body was beneath him. Never before had he felt this with so much intensity, even when he walked barefoot along the shore that was teeming with so much life. The almost carnal pressure of the island against his flesh warmed and excited him. She was naked, this earth that enveloped him, and he stripped off his own clothes. Lying with arms outstreched, his loins in turmoil, he embraced that great body scorched all day by the sun, which now exuded a musky sweat in the cooler air of the evening. He buried his face in the grass roots, breathing open-mouthed a long, hot breath. And the earth responded, filling his nostrils with the heavy scent of dead grass and the ripening seed, and of sap rising in new shoots. How closely and how wisely were life and death intermingled at this elemental level! His sex burrowed like a plowshare into the earth, and overflowed in immense compassion for all created things. A strange wedlock, consummated in the vast solitude of the Pacific! He lay exhausted, the man who had married the earth, and it seemed to him, clinging timorously like a small frog to the skin of the terrestrial globe, that he was swinging vertiginously with her through infinite space." [119-120]
That's a lovely piece of writing, reminiscent of D. H. Lawrence; one thinks of Birkin's marriage to the vegetation in Women in Love [click here].
Later, Crusoe discovers a "gently rolling meadow broken by folds and slopes and dressed in a covering of round-stemmed, pink-tinted grass" [120] that excites his interest and in which he deposits his sperm, thereby accomplishing a further stage in the metamorphosis he is undergoing.
Now, according to the Freudian definition of the term, Crusoe - as one who deviates with respect to aims - is a sexual pervert. But Crusoe, however, sees things a little differently. Writing in his journal, he decides that were it not for a social mechanism directing a man's sex exclusively to the vagina of a woman, he would naturally allow it to return to its original source - Mother Earth.
And to those who might protest that nothing can be born of such an incestuous union ...
Nearly a year later, Crusoe "perceived that his love was bringing about a change in the vegetation of the pink coomb" [128]. At first, he had taken no notice of this, but then his attention was caught by the growth of a new plant that he hadn't seen anywhere else on the island:
"The plant had large, lace-edged leaves which grew in clusters at the level of the earth on a very short stalk. It bore white, sharp-scented blossoms with pointed petals and brown, ample berries which largely overflowed their calyxes.
Robinson observed them with curiosity, but thought no more about them until the day when it became unmistakably apparent that they appeared within a few weeks at the precise place where he had sown his seed. Thereafter he ceaselessly pondered the mystery. He sowed his seed in the earth near the cave, but to no avail. It seemed that these plants could grow nowhere but in the pink coomb. Their strangeness restrained him from plucking them and dissecting and tasting them, as he might otherwise have done." [129]
It's at this point in the text that ecosexuality gives way to Jewish mysticism concerning the mandrake, as Crusoe recalls a verse from the Song of Songs: The mandrakes give a smell, and at our gates are all manner of pleasant
fruits, new and old, which I have laid up for thee, O my beloved. [d]
"Could it be that Speranza was keeping that bibical promise? He had heard of the miracle of the plants, such as nightshade, which grow at the foot of gibbets, where the hanged have let fall their last drops of semen, and which are held to be the fruit of the crossing of man with earth. On the day when this thought occurred to him, he ran to the pink coomb and, kneeling beside one of the plants, very gently lifted it out of the ground, digging round the root with his hands. It was true! His love-making with Speranza was not sterile. The white, fleshy, curiously forked root bore an undeniable resemblance of the body of a woman-child. Trembling with delight and tenderness, he put the mandrake back, and pressed the earth around it as one puts a child to bed. Then he walked away on tiptoe, taking great care not to crush any of the other plants.
Thenceforward, blessed by the Bible, a stronger and more intimate bond united him with Speranza. [...] That this closer union represented a further step in the shedding of his human self was something of which he was certainly aware, but he did not measure its extent until he perceived, when he awoke one morning, that his beard, growing in the night, had begun to take root in the earth." [129-130]
I can't imagine what Daniel Defoe - author of an asexual Crusoe - would make of all this. And I don't really care. For me, Tournier has produced an astonishing novel in which, as Deleuze notes, the isle of Speranza is as central to the story as Crusoe himself [e].
However, as we shall see in part three of this post, Crusoe's relationship with the island is not the end of his story and strange-becoming. How could it be? For as he himself recognises, his "love affair with Speranza was still largely human in its nature" [212]; he inseminated her body as though he were still lying with a woman.
There has to be more than this; one has to be able to go still further; one has to discover at last that beyond all forms of terrestrial sexuality - forever subject to the spirit of gravity - lies solar sexuality ...
Notes
[a] Michel Tournier, Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique (Éditions
Gallimard,1967). The text I'm using here is the English translation,
simply entitled Friday, trans. Norman Denny, (John Hopkins University
Press, 1997). All page numbers given in the post refer to this edition.
[b] I have written elsewhere on Torpedo the Ark about ecosexuality: click here and here, for example. I think it's fair to say I mostly regard it as a morally conventional, all-too-human form of hippie idealism masquerading as queer ecology. Ultimately, I prefer my own model of floraphilia as a form of perverse materialism. That said, since it's Christmas week, lots of love and best wishes to Beth and Annie.
[c] This idea is, of course, a very old one and in Crusoe's time even
respectable scientists still believed the Earth to be alive or some kind of superorganism.
This view eventually fell from favour, however, and, as a Nietzschean, I'm highly suspicious of attempts to revive it. For whilst it's true that Nietzsche champions the sovereignty and sanctity of the Earth, I would refer those who would absorb his philosophy into their own system of environmental ethics or eco-vitalism to The Gay Science, III. 109, in which he instructs us to
always remain on our guard against thinking that the world (and/or the
universe) is a living being.
[d] I'm quoting from the King James Version of the Bible, Song of Songs 7:13.
It should be noted that it wasn't just the ancient Jews who were fascinated by the mandrake. Because its roots have hallucinogenic properties and often resemble a human figure, they have been
associated with a variety of superstitious practices and beliefs throughout history and are still regarded as sacred plants within contemporary pagan circles.
[e] See Gilles Deleuze, 'Michel Tournier and the World Without Others', in The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, (The Athlone Press, 1990), Appendix II, section 4, pp. 301-321. A brilliant reading of Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique as one would expect.
The third and final part of this post on the sex life of Robinson Crusoe - sun-fucked - can be read by clicking here.
