Cheirophilia: the Hands of Rachel Ashley

Philip Ashley inspecting the delicate white hands 

of his cousin Rachel by candlelight [a] 

 

'There are some women [...] who through no fault of their own impel disaster. 

Whatever they touch, somehow turns to tragedy.' - Nick Kendall [b]

 

 

I. 

 

Jean Baudrillard insists that the slender and lively hands of women are of greater symbolic and seductive beauty than their eyes or hidden sexual organs, and I suspect that Philip Ashley - the naive and inexperienced (possibly unreliable) narrator of Daphne du Maurier's Gothic novel My Cousin Rachel (1951) - may very well agree with this assertion. 

 

For he certainly seems to be partial, shall we say, to the delicate white hands of his older, twice-widowed, half-Italian, very alluring cousin Rachel ... 

 

 

II.

 

From the first time he meets her, with, at that time, hate in his heart for the woman he believes responsible for the death of his beloved guardian, Ambrose, Philip notices her hands clasped in her lap: 

 

"I had never seen hands so small before on an adult person. They were very slender, very narrow, like the hands of someone in a portrait painted by an old master and left unfinished." [80]

 

When Rachel finishes drinking her tea and places her cup and saucer back on the tray, he is once again "aware of her hands, narrow and small and very white" [85], noticing also that she has "two rings, fine stones both of them, on her fingers" [85].

 

So, whilst I'm not saying Philip is a cheirophile or hand fetishist, it's certainly true that when talking to Rachel he finds it hard to retain eye contact and that his gaze does not wander from her face towards her breasts or feet, for example, but almost exclusively to her hands: 

 

"I shifted my gaze from her eyes down to her hands. They were clasped in front of her, small and very still. It was easier to speak somehow if I did not look directly at her, but at her hands." [99]

 

It's true also that he is fascinated by the manner in which the fingers on her right hand would touch and play with the ring on her left hand: "I watched them tighten upon it" [99] and then gradually relax their hold. 

 

No doubt Philip is hoping that Rachel will one day hold something of his own in her hands - and I don't mean his heart. At one point, whilst watching her hands, he imagines himself sitting naked in his chair before her; exposed and all his fantasies revealed unto her. 

 

His childhood friend Louise is not mistaken to say to him: "'How simple it must be for a woman of the world, like Mrs Ashley, to twist a young man like yourself around her finger'" [133].

 

III.

When not clasping her hands in front of her, or playing with her rings, or stroking the head of the dog, Rachel sometimes cups her chin in her hands or puts them to her face in a defensive gesture; at other times she gives Philip a hand to hold or kiss. And, like a true Italian, when she grows animated in conversation she gestures somewhat excessively with her hands.

 

It is sometime before Philip finally gets to hold her hands in his own, or to remove her gloves so as to passionately kiss her hands. But his joy in so doing doesn't last long. For after Rachel makes it perfectly clear that she has no intention of ever marrying him, Philip reflects how her hands lose their warmth and, when he does attempt to hold them, "the fingers struggled for release, and the rings scratched, cutting at my palm" [270].

 

During his prolonged period of illness, Philip is nursed by Rachel. But the feel of her hand upon his fevered brow and neck isn't soothing; it is, rather, hard and gripping like ice. When finally he begins to recover his senses and his strength, however, he is content to lie in bed holding her hand in silence:

 

"I ran my thumb along the pale blue veins that showed always on the back of hers, and turned the rings. I continued thus for quite a time, and did not talk." [289]

 

 

IV.

Finally, the questions that all readers must address arise: Are Rachel's the hands of a murderess? Does she stir ground laburnum seeds into his tisana? 

 

By the end of the book, Philip certainly has his suspicions and after noticing how Rachel stirs the tisana with a spoon in her left hand [c], he comes to the following fatal conclusion:

 

"I had held [her hand] many times, in love, before. Felt the small size of it, turned the rings upon the fingers, seen the blue veins upon the back, touched the small close-filed nails. Now, as it rested in my hand, I saw it, for the first time, put to another purpose. I saw it take the laburnum pods, in deft fashion, and empty out the seeds; then crush the seeds, and rub them in her palm. I remembered once I had told her that her hands were beautiful, and she had answered, with a laugh, that I was the first to tell her so." [321]

 

Finally, Rachel has the accident that kills her (one that Philip is complicit in, if not criminally responsible for). Climbing down to where she lay "amongst the timber and the stones" [335], he takes her hands in his for the last time and, despite being cold, he "went on holding her hands until she died" [335].  

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Screenshot from My Cousin Rachel (dir. Roger Michell, 2017), starring Rachel Weisz as Rachel Ashley and Sam Claflin as Philip Ashley. 

 

[b] This is the warning Philip's godfather, Nick Kendall, gives him on the eve of his 25th birthday, with reference to his beloved cousin Rachel. See Daphne du Maurier, My Cousin Rachel (Virago Press, 2017), p. 246. All future page references to this edition of the novel will be given directly in the post.

 

[c] Whilst I'm sure most readers will accept that being left-handed is perfectly natural and not a sign of evil, the fact remains that left-handedness has long been associated with negative qualities and malevolent activity; the word sinister derives from the Latin word for left.

 

 

A Sprig of Holly: Notes on Gibbeting (with Reference to the Case of Tom Jenkyn)

Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827): A Gibbet (detail) 

Undated watercolor and ink on paper (36 x 27.5 cm)

Yale Center for British Art

 

 

I've discussed the topic of capital punishment in a previous post and mentioned that I live close to a notorious junction known as Gallows Corner, where they used to hang men in the old days [a]. 

 

I believe it was also the preferred practice to leave the bodies of those executed hanging in chains or fastened into an iron frame. And so that the public display might be prolonged, bodies were sometimes coated in tar and left until almost completely decomposed, after which the bones would be scattered. 

 

Known as gibbeting, this common law punishment was designed as a piece of violent theatre and a final humiliation intended to provide an additional deterrence measure, just in case the threat of hanging wasn't enough to prevent the heinous crime of murder. 

 

An ancient practice, gibbeting wasn't enshrined within English law until the Murder Act of 1751; an act which also included the provision that execution would take place two days after sentencing, unless the third day was a Sunday, in which case the condemned - and those who looked forward to seeing him swing - would have to wait until Monday morning [b].

 

The act also gave the judge passing sentence the power to turn the body of the condemned over to the medical profession for dissection and anatomical study, rather than hung in chains, which, I suppose, one might find a less shameful fate (although I suspect that, if given a choice, a hardened highwayman or pirate would reply like James Bond who when asked by a barman following a heavy loss at the poker table whether he wants his martini shaken or stirred says: Do I look like I give a damn? [c]  

 

 

II.

As a sensitive child, I was upset for days if I saw even a dead hedgehog by the roadside. 

 

So I'm fairly certain that the sight of a rotting human corpse on a gibbet might have been similarly distressing. Although, having said that, the reactions of children to scenes of horror can be complex - as Daphen du Maurier illustrates at the opening of her Gothic novel My Cousin Rachel (1951) ...

Reflecting on the time when, as a seven-year-old, he is taken by his much older cousin (and guardian), Ambrose, to view some poor wretch left hanging in chains where the four roads meet, Philip Ashley recalls:

"His face and body were blackened with tar for preservation. He hung there for five weeks before they cut him down, and it was the fourth week that I saw him. 

      He swung between earth and sky upon his gibbet, or, as my cousin Ambrose told me, betwixt heaven and hell. [...] Ambrose prodded at the body with his stick. I can see it now, moving with the wind like a weather-vane on a rusty pivot, a poor scarecrow of what had been a man. The rain had rotted his breeches, if not his body, and strips of worsted drooped from his swollen limbs like pulpy paper." [d]

 

Philip continues: 

 

"It was winter, and some passing joker had placed a sprig of holly in the torn vest for celebration. Somehow, at seven years old, that seemed to me the final outrage, but I said nothing." [1] [e]

Having walked round the gibbet so as to observe the horror from all sides, with Ambrose playfully poking and prodding the corpse with his stick, as if it were a funfair attraction provided for his amusement, Philip's cousin eventually attempts to put things into a philosophical context and provide a moral lesson:

 

"'There you are, Philip,' he said, 'it's what we all come to in the end. Some upon a battlefield, some in bed, others according to their destiny. There's no escape. You can't learn the lesson too young. But this is how a felon dies. A warning to you and me to lead the sober life.'" [2] 

Stopping short of condoning femicide, but cheerfully parading his sexism, Ambrose continues:

 

"'See what a moment of passion can bring upon a fellow [...] Here is Tom Jenkyn, honest and dull, except when he drank too much. It's true his wife was a scold, but that was no excuse to kill her. If we killed women for their tongues all men would be murderers.'" [2] 

Philip is disturbed to discover the dead man's identity and to realise that, in fact, he knew him. He wished Ambrose had not named him:

"Up to that moment the body had been a dead thing, without identity. It would come into my dreams, lifeless and horrible, I knew that very well from the first instant I had set my eyes upon the gibbet. Now it would have connection with reality, and with the man with watery eyes who sold lobsters on the town quay." [2]

When asked by Ambrose what he thinks, Philip attempts to disguise the fact that he felt "sick at heart, and terrified" [2]. And so he answers in an amusing and remarkably precocious manner for a child: "'Tom had a brighter face when I last saw him. [...] Now he isn't fresh enough to become bait for his own lobsters.'" [2] [f]

However, despite such witty bravado, Philip's actual squeamishness causes him to vomit before leaving the scene at Four Turnings: "I felt better afterwards, though my teeth chattered and I was very cold." [3] 

 

Perhaps in anger, Philip throws a stone at the lifeless body of Tom Jenkyn; though, as he ran off in search of Ambrose who had walked ahead, he felt ashamed of his action. So much so, that, eighteen years later, he is planning to seek out poor Tom in the afterlife in order to apologise. 

 

Until then, however, he asks the ghost of Tom Jenkyn to disturb him no more: "Go back into your shadows, Tom, and leave me some measure of peace. That gibbet has long since gone [g] and you with it. I threw a stone at you in ignorance. Forgive me." [3]

 

I don't know about Tom, the lobster salesman and wife killer, but I suspect most readers will almost certainly forgive such a childish indiscretion. 

 

Though whether they will be equally forgiving of Philip's treatment of Rachel - and there is no proof that she was guilty of anything, as Philip finds no concrete evidence to show she had a hand in the death of Ambrose, or that she was slowly poisoning him - is debatable ... [h]

 

 

Notes

 

[a] See the post dated 20 March 2019: click here.

 

[b] The act of 1751 also stipulated that under no circumstances should the body of a murderer be afforded a decent burial. The act was formally repealed in 1834, by which date the use of gibbeting was very much out of favour with both the public and the authorities; the last two men to be gibbeted in England had been executed two years prior. The socio-cultural reason for this move away from such violent and spectacular forms of punishment in favour of more subtle - more humanitarian - techniques is famously examined by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish (1975).

 

[c] I'm referring to a scene in Casino Royale (dir. Martin Campbell, 2006), starring Daniel Craig in his debut as James Bond. The joke, of course, is that usually Bond is very particular about how he likes his martini served (shaken, not stirred).  

 

[d] Daphne du Maurier, My Cousin Rachel (Virago Press, 2017), p. 1. Future page references to this edition will be given directly in the post.

      Interestingly, with adult hindsight, Philip has decided that Ambrose must have taken him to witness this horrific scene as a test of his character; "to see if I would  run away, or laugh, or cry" (p. 1). 

 

[e] It's arguable that the sprig of holly was not placed in mockery by some passing joker, but, rather, in a spirit of Christian charity and forgiveness; for holly is a sign of the eternal life that is promised to those who repent their sins and accept the love of Christ. 

 

[f] As a matter of fact, although lobsters are scavengers that feed on dead animals, live fish, small molluscs and other marine invertebrates, they are not known for eating human flesh.  

 

[g] Du Maurier doesn't reveal the year in which her novel unfolds, but if, as Philip informs us, the gibbet has long since gone and those accused of murder are now given a fair trial and, if subsequently convicted and sentenced to death, a decent burial, then it would certainly be set after 1834 (see note b above). 

      Roger Michell, the director and screenwriter of the 2017 cinematic adaptation of My Cousin Rachel starring Rachel Weisz and Sam Claflin, situates his film "somewhere in the 1840s (between Austen and Dickens: between canals and railways)", as he writes in an introduction to the 2017 Virago edition of du Maurier's book (p. vii).  

[h] Du Maurier is a mistress of ambiguity who loves supplying her books with narrators whose defining characteristic is their unreliability. And so we can never know for certain who's guilty of what and who's the real victim. At one time, I would've found that irritating: Not any more, though.  

Just Do It: Notes on Incitement with Reference to the Case of Danvers Vs de Winter

Joan Fontaine as Mrs de Winter and Judith Anderson 

as Mrs Danvers in Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940) [a]

 

 

I. 

 

As a provocateur, I'm naturally interested in the concept of incitement, which is usually seen negatively and in contradistinction to the more seductive-sounding idea of enticement. 

 

Those with a background in the law will be quick to point out that to incite is, in legal terms, to actively encourage another person to commit a criminal act, whether or not that person carries such out. 

 

Interestingly, incitement now seems to be taken more seriously - to be seen as more sinful - than the deed itself [b]. In other words, it's as if thinking and communicating evil thoughts were more grievous than actually doing bad things. After all, sticks and stones may break our bones, but it's hurty words that cause emotional damage.

 

Such moral logic explains the current obsession with so-called hate speech and why some people are now investigated by the police for non-crime hate incidents when actual criminals are being let out of jail early or not being prosecuted at all. 

 

The rationale seems to be if the police intervene before a criminal act has taken place and actual harm caused, then that has to be a good thing. But if in practice that means curtailing free speech and locking people us for what they post online, that's highly debatable.

 

Having said that, speech is a type of action, of course, and I'm not denying that incitement can be malevolent and trolls who encourage others - particularly individuals in a vulnerable state - to serious self-harm or suicide probably deserve to have their speech curtailed (if not to be branked, indeed). 

And that includes Mrs Danvers, the head housekeeper at Manderley and a woman morbidly devoted to the memory of her adored mistress Rebecca ...

 

 

II. 

 

Arguably, the most disturbing scene in Daphne de Maurier's brilliant novel Rebecca comes in chapter eighteen on the morning after the costume ball, when Mrs de Winter decides to confront Mrs Danvers. 

 

At first, the former, having overcome her fear of the latter, has the advantage. But that soon changes, as the angry colour returns to the dead white face of Mrs Danvers and she begins to rant and rave like a mad woman; "her long fingers twisting and tearing the black stuff of her long dress" [c]. 

 

There's nothing Mrs de Winter can do but watch with fascinated horror; the sight of Mrs Danvers dry sobbing with mouth open making her shudder and feel physically ill. Growing increasingly insane, the latter advances towards the former, backing her towards the open window, and gripping her arm. 

 

"'It's you that ought to be lying there in the church crypt [...] It's you who ought to be dead [...]'", she hisses. [276]

 

The young Mrs de Winter recalls and narrates the scene of incitement for us:

 

"She pushed me  towards the open window. I could see the terrace below me grey and indistinct in the white wall of fog. 'Look down there,' she said. 'It's easy, isn't it? Why don't you jump? It wouldn't hurt, not to break your neck. It's a quick, kind way. It's not like drowning. Why don't you try it? Why don't you go?'

      The fog filled the open windows, damp and clammy, it stung my eyes, it clung to my nostrils. I held on to the window-sill with my hands.

      'Don't be afraid,' said Mrs Danvers. 'I won't push you. I won't stand by you. You can jump of your own accord. What's the use of your staying here at Manderley? You're not happy. Mr de Winter doesn't love you. There's not much for you to live for, is there? Why don't you jump now and have done with it? Then you won't be unhappy any more.'" [276]  

       

 

III,

 

That's certainly incitement to suicide; cleverly expressed as a series of rhetorical questions. Fortunately, however, Mrs de Winter doesn't jump (she's not so much saved by the bell as by a flare or rocket sent up by a ship in distress). 

 

And interestingly, not only does she not want to get the rozzers involved and wish to press legal charges against Mrs Danvers, she doesn't even ask her husband to sack her, having decided that the latter has lost her power over her: "Whatever she said or did now it could not matter to me or hurt me. I knew she was my enemy and I did not mind." [327] 

 

I'm not sure if that's Christian forgiveness born of a spirit of love, or if this refusal to take her enemy seriously and not only forgive but forget wrongs done to her is a sign of a more aristocratic nature [d]. Either way, it's admirable and I wish more people were like this in a world in which there is a growing tendency to criminalise conduct in the name of legal moralism. 

 

 

Notes

 

[a] To watch this scene on YouTube, click here.

 

[b] Incitement falls into that category of crimes known as inchoate; i.e., ones that prepare the way for, further, or encourage a crime. Just as one can be convicted of conspiracy, so too can one be convicted of incitement (for example, using words and images to stir up hatred against others that may lead to violence against them). 

      In the UK, incitement was abolished as an offence under the common law of England in 2008, but was replaced with three new statutory offences of encouraging or assisting crime under the Serious Crime Act (2007).

 

[c] Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca (Virago Press, 2003), p. 271. Future page references given in the post are to this edition of the novel. 

 

[d] In the first essay (§10) of his Genealogy of Morals (1887), Nietzsche writes that to be incapable of taking one's enemies seriously for very long is the sign of strong, full natures in whom there is an excess of the power to forget. 

 

 

Memories of Manderley 2: On Pyrexia and Obsessive Love Disorder

Mrs Danvers (Judith Anderson) displays the see-through nature 

of Rebecca's nightdress to the new Mrs de Winter (Joan Fontaine) 

in Rebecca (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1940)  

 

 

I. 

 

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley ... [a], whereas, as a matter of fact, I had simply rewatched Hitchcock's Academy Award winning adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca on TV [b]. 

 

Anyway, it was enough to make me want to return to the original novel and offer not so much a commentary or critical review, but a series of reflections on those inhuman and sometimes monstrous aspects that particularly interest ...

 

 

II.

 

Love, our idealists might argue, is the least monstrous and most human of all things; a unique feature of our evolutionary history. Other creatures may experience empathy and sexual attraction, but there is little evidence of love in anything resembling the spiritual sense as we know it. 

 

But of course, as the second Mrs de Winter comes to recognise, love is also a kind of fever; something that causes us to act queerly; i.e., in a confused and frenzied, often violent manner behind the palm trees. Sometimes, it may even result in a crime of passion - just ask Maxim de Winter. 

 

Not that he likes to speak about about such things or recall past events: "All memories are bitter, and I prefer to ignore them." [42] But, despite claiming to have never loved Rebecca, it's obvious she was the one who got him hot under the collar and who, when she put her arms around him, gave him a fever that was so hard to bear (in the mornin' and all through the night) [c].

 

 

III. 

 

Rebecca: she was dead, of course, "and one must not have thoughts about the dead" [63]. 

 

And yet, how can one not say something about the ghostly Rebecca, with her enduring beauty and unforgettable smile ... So brilliant in every way! It would be impossible to cut her name out of this series of posts, no matter how sharp a pair of scissors one possessed. And the past - even if reduced to ash - can never just be blown away.

Rebecca is present by her absence throughout the novel and at the end of the book, her corpse itself manages to intrude back into world of the living, determining events and threatening to have an objects revenge upon Maxim de Winter.  

 

Je Reviens is not merely the name on a boat - or a French-speaking terminator's catchphrase - it's Rebecca's posthumous promise. 

 

But if she was the "most beautiful creature" [151] that Frank Crawley [d] ever saw in his life, one doubts Rebecca would still look so lovely after all those months beneath the waves (although I've heard it said that there's nothing more ravishing than a corpse) [e].

IV. 

And if one must speak of Rebecca, one must also speak of her devoted representative on earth: the malevolent Mrs Danvers; "someone tall and gaunt, dressed in deep black, whose prominent cheek-bones and great, hollow eyes gave her a skull's face, parchment-white, set on a skeleton's frame" [74].

It's often said that cold hands are a sign of a warm heart. But not in the case of Mrs Danvers; she was cold of heart as well as hand, and cold too of voice and manner. Her dark eyes "had no light, no flicker of sympathy" [81].

 

The only time she becomes animated is when she recalls the first Mrs de Winter - particularly of course if she happens to be (fetishistically) admiring her dead mistress's handmade underwear [f] or the delicate sheer nightdress, that was so soft and light to the touch [g].     

 

 

Notes

 

[a] This is the famous opening line of Daphne du Maurier's, bestselling 1938 gothic novel Rebecca, which tells the story of an unnamed young woman who (somewhat impetuously) marries a wealthy widower (Maxim de Winter) whom she meets on a trip to Monte Carlo. All seems to be going swimmingly until they return to his estate in Cornwall and she realises that both Maxim and his household at Manderley are haunted by the memory and ghostly presence of his late wife (Rebecca). 

      It's a fantastic novel which has been adapted numerous times for stage and screen. Here, I am reading the Virago Press edition of 2015 and all page numbers given in the text refer to this edition. 

 

[b] Rebecca (1940), directed by Alfred Hitchcock, starred Laurence Olivier as Maxim de Winter and Joan Fontaine as the anonymous young woman who becomes his second wife. It was Hitchcock's first American project and was a critical and commercial success, nominated for eleven Oscars - more than any other film that year - it picked up two, including Best Picture. 

      Despite certain changes made to keep the censors happy, it was a fairly faithful adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's novel and she was happy with the result. To watch a 1940 trailer for the movie on YouTube, click here.

 

[c] I'm paraphrasing lines here from the song 'Fever', written by Otis Blackwell (under the name John Davenport) and Eddie Cooley. It was originally recorded by American R&B singer Little Willie John for his debut album - also entitled Fever (1956) - and released as a single in April of that year. However, Peggy Lee's 1958 version - with rewritten lyrics and a new arrangement - became the best known version (and her signature song): click here to play on YouTube. 

      Interestingly, the second Mrs de Winter also confesses to a "fever of fear" [135] - a stab of sickness in her heart; a sweat of uncertainty, whenever she worried about saying the wrong thing to her husband, or reflected on those things that disturbed her, such as spiderwebs, rat holes, and the clamour of the sea. This is not the kind of fever born of erotomania that Peggy Lee sings about, although lovers too might display similar signs and symptoms of hypersensitivity, neurosis, and abnormality. 

[d] Frank Crawley is the manager of the Manderley estate; loyal to Maxim and trusted by the second Mrs de Winter. 

 

[e] The corpse of a loved one, inasmuch as it has startling physical presence, unleashes mixed feelings; of fear, of repulsion, but also - as evidenced for example in Wuthering Heights (1847) - of desire. It both seizes and seduces and is in that (quite literal) sense ravishing. 

      Bataille explored this in his work, although the phrase - 'She made a ravishing corpse' - is one taken from a 1926 novel by Ronald Firbank; Concerning the Eccenticities of Cardinal Pirelli (see chapter VIII).   

 

[f] In contrast, the second Mrs de Winter's underclothes were, by her own admission, nothing special: "As long as they were clean and neat I had not thought the material or the existence of the lace mattered." [152]

 

[g] The full perviness of this is picturized in Hitchcock's film, despite the censors doing their best to ensure that Rebecca adhered to the Motion Picture Production Code that strictly enforced the morality of US films made between 1934 and 1968. 

      Joseph Breen may have been a censor-moron (and a vile antisemite), but he wasn't mistaken to recognise the queer nature of Danny's fascination with Rebecca's physical attributes and her clothing (particularly her see-through nightie), insisting that such obsessive love disorder be toned down in the final cut. 

      The astonishing (and disturbing) scene between the second Mrs de Winter (played by Joan Fontaine) and Mrs Danvers (played by Judith Anderson) in  Rebecca's bedroom can be watched on YouTube: click here.        

 

 

Those who wish to read part one of this post on natural chaos and Maxim de Winter's floraphilia, can do so by clicking here. 

 

 

Memories of Manderley 1: On Natural Chaos and Maxim de Winter's Floraphilia

Top: Manderley in ruins (chaos reigns)

Bottom: Maxim de Winter (uxoricide and floraphile)

 

 

I. 

 

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley ... [a], whereas, as a matter of fact, I had simply rewatched Hitchcock's Academy Award winning adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca on TV [b].  

 

Anyway, it was enough to make me want to return to the original novel and offer not so much a commentary or critical review, but a series of reflections on those inhuman and sometimes monstrous aspects that particularly interest ...

 

 

II. 

 

"The pyramids will not last a moment, compared with the daisy", says D. H. Lawrence [c]. And neither will Manderley - despite the second Mrs de Winter's claim that time "could not wreck the perfect symmetry" [2] of its grey stone walls.

 

In chapter one of Rebecca, we are given a memorable description of the way that nature reaffirms itself and vegetation triumphs over the iron and concrete world of man when given the opportunity to do so. Trees, "along with monster shrubs and plants" [1], had "thrust themselves out of the quiet earth" [1].     

 

The well-ordered paths and drive way were now "choked with grass and moss" [2] and once highly cultivated plants prized for their floral splendour had, with no human hand to tend them or impede their growth, gone wild; "rearing to monster height without a bloom, black and ugly as the nameless parasites that grew beside them" [2].

 

The rhododendrons, for example, "stood fifty feet high, twisted and entwined with bracken, and they had entered into an alien marriage with a host of nameless shrubs, poor, bastard things that clung about their roots as though conscious of their spurious origin" [2-3] [d]. 

 

Nettles were everywhere: "They choked the terrace, they sprawled about the paths, they leant, vulgar and lanky, against the very windows of the house" [3]. 

 

Chaos reigns, as Von Trier's shamanic fox would say [e].   

 

 

III. 

 

There are, of course, worse things than chaotic nature; the fat-fingered vulgarity of Mrs Van Hopper, for example; the cold, superior smile of Mrs Danvers; and the "despondency and introspection" [26] that so bedevil poor Maxim de Winter following the death of his wife. 

 

Nobody likes a snob. Nobody likes a bitter and obsessive woman. And nobody likes a man "hemmed in by shadows" [26] and weighed down by guilt and fear.

 

Indeed, one almost wonders why the unnamed young heroine of Rebecca falls for de Winter, especially as she senses almost immediately that perhaps "he was not normal, not altogether sane" [31]; that he was one of those men who had trances and obeyed the strange laws and "tangled orders of their own subconscious minds" [31].

  

Still, at least de Winter is something of a floraphile. He may never have loved Rebecca, but he loves the spring flowers at Manderley; the daffodils "stirring in the evening breeze, golden heads upon lean stalks" [32] and the many-coloured crocuses - golden, pink, and mauve - that so quickly droop and fade. 

 

But most of all he loves the bluebells that "with their colour made a challenge to the sky" [33]. But these he would never have in the house:

 

"Thrust into vases they became dank and listless, and to see them at their best you must walk in the woods in the morning, about twelve o'clock, when the sun was overhead. They had a smoky, rather bitter smell, as though a wild sap ran in their stalks, pungent and juicy. People who plucked bluebells from the woods were vandals; he had forbidden it at Manderley." [33]

 

But if he hated to see wild flowers stuck in vases or stuffed into jam-jars on windowsills, he didn't mind having specially cultivated blooms for the house; roses, for example, which he said looked better picked than growing:

 

"A bowl of roses in a drawing-room had a depth of colour and scent they had not possessed in the open. There was something rather blowzy about roses in full bloom, something shallow and raucous, like a woman with untidy hair. In the house they became mysterious and subtle. He had roses in the house at Manderley for eight months in the year." [33]   

  

His sister, who, like mine, "was a hard, rather practical person" [33], used to complain about the smell of so many flowers. But Maxim didn't care: "It was the only form of intoxication that appealed to him." [33]  

 

One can forgive a man many crimes - maybe even murder - if he gives himself so completely to the heady world of flowers. 

 

 

Notes

 

[a] This is the famous opening line of Daphne du Maurier's, bestselling 1938 gothic novel Rebecca, which tells the story of an unnamed young woman who (somewhat impetuously) marries a wealthy widower (Maxim de Winter) whom she meets on a trip to Monte Carlo. 

      All seems to be going swimmingly until they return to his estate in Cornwall and she realises that both Maxim and his household at Manderley are haunted by the memory and ghostly presence of his late wife (Rebecca). It's a fantastic novel which has been adapted numerous times for stage and screen. 

      Here, I am reading the Virago Press edition of 2015 and all page numbers given in the text refer to this edition.   

 

[b] Rebecca (1940), directed by Alfred Hitchcock, starred Laurence Olivier as Maxim de Winter and Joan Fontaine as the anonymous young woman who becomes his second wife. 

      It was Hitchcock's first American project and was a critical and commercial success, nominated for eleven Oscars - more than any other film that year - it picked up two, including Best Picture. Despite certain changes made to keep the censors happy, it was a fairly faithful adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's novel and she was happy with the result. To watch a 1940 trailer for the movie on YouTube, click here.    

 

[c] D. H. Lawrence, Sketches of Etruscan Places, in Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays, ed. Simonetta de Filippis (Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 36.

[d] The narrator - i.e., the second Mrs de Winter, could of course be describing herself her.

 

[e] I'm referring here of course to the famous talking fox in Lars von Trier's 2009 film Antichrist - about which I have written here.  

 

 

Those interested in part two of this post on pyrexia and obsessive love disorder, should click here.  

Bad Penny

Penny Slinger: Exorcism: Inside Out

Richard Saltoun Gallery (London)

 

I. 

 

Sometimes, we need an artist to turn up like the proverbial bad penny in order to reintroduce a little magic, a little eroticism, and even a little horror into our otherwise safe, sexless, and disenchanted world. 

 

And so, step forward out of the shadows of the past Penny Slinger; a provocative London-born artist whose combination of surrealism and feminism into a queer gothic practice no longer shocks as it once did, but which nevertheless still excites, often amuses, and occasionally gives one the creeps. 

 

 

II. 

 

Her solo exhibition at the Richard Saltoun Gallery (London) - Exorcism: Inside Out - is composed of a number of photographic collages set against the backdrop of a spooky mansion house. The dark fairy tale elements remind one of Angela Carter, with a touch of Daphne du Maurier thrown in (all those birds and animal-headed people) [1]. 

 

We are informed that Slinger is attempting to integrate her own body into an archetypal landscape and  'engaging in a cultural exorcism that explores themes of fetishism and sexploitation from a feminist perspective'. 

 

And that's far enough, although, ideas of empowerment, self-actualisation, and sexual liberation now seem a little naive and old-fashioned and the art itself creaks with more clichés - or what her supporters would call timeless and universal symbols - than you can shake a broomstick at. 

 

Some might believe Slinger's images to be just as daring and challenging now as when they were first conceived, but, unfortunately, that's not the case. And, ultimately, what we are left with here are memories of exhilarating sixties radicalism inspired by Max Ernst; a sincere attempt to transform the outer world through inner dream and the politics of desire ... [2]

 

Notes

 

[1] The exhibition coincides with publication of Slinger's book An Exorcism: A Photo Romance (Fulgur Press, 2024); an extended version of her 1977 book An Exorcism, which has been withheld from UK publication for all these years after another work, Mountain Ecstasy (1978), was seized and destroyed by the British customs having been deemed to be pornographic.  

[2] For an alternative take on Slinger's exhibition, see Young Kim's review in A Rabbit's Foot (30 August 2024): click here.    

What Was I Thinking? (28 December)

 

Torpedo the Ark: images from posts published on 

28 December (2013-2021)

 

Sometimes, it's interesting to look back and see what one was thinking on the same date in years gone by - and sometimes it's simply embarrassing ...

 

Our God is Woman: Our Mission is Protest! 

On this date in 2013, for example, I was keen to express my support for a twenty-year old philosophy student and Femen activist, Josephine Witt, who staged a one-woman protest at St. Peter's Cathedral in Cologne, briefly disrupting a televised Christmas mass by getting her tits out and declaring herself to be God, before half-a-dozen horrified clerics wearing an assortment of robes pulled her from the altar, bundled her out of the building, and handed her over to the secular forces of law and order. 

 

I'm not sure I would now be quite so sympathetic to such an action. 

 

 

In Praise of an Unnatural Death 

 

Skip forward three years and on this date in 2016 I was keen to challenge the judgement of God by refusing to accept what medical professionals describe as death by natural causes; i.e., the all-too-predictable kind of death that results from illness, old age, or an internal malfunction of the body and its organs. 

 

As a philosopher, I argued, one should always desire and seek out the opposite of this; i.e., the joy of an unnatural death, be it by accident, misadventure, homicide, suicide, or that mysterious non-category that is undetermined and which, for those enigmatic individuals who pride themselves on their ambiguity, must surely be the way to go.

 

I then confessed my own preference to be executed, like William Palmer, the notorious nineteenth-century murderer known as the Prince of Poisoners, who is said to have climbed the gallows and placed a foot tentatively on the trapdoor before enquiring of the hangman: Is it safe? 

 

I would like, in other words, to go to my death with the cool courage and stoicism of the dandy and a ready quip on my lips that might cause even my executioner to smile (and serve also to annoy the po-faced authorities who demand seriousness and expect contrition in such circumstances).

 

 

To See More Clearly Than Ever Before 

 

In December 2018, meanwhile, I was entering my Daphne Du Maurier phase - a phase that never really passed and became a long-lasting love for the author and her astonishing body of work. On the 28th of this month I wrote a series of notes on one of her near-perfect short stories - suggested to me by the poet Simon Solomon - 'The Blue Lenses' (1959).

 

The premise of the post and story was the same: what if everyone were to suddenly lose their human features and be seen with the head of the creature that best expresses their inhuman qualities; not so much their true nature, as what might be termed their molecular animality - would we still find this gently amusing? I suspect not: in all likelihood, initial astonishment would quickly give way to horror. 

 

However we choose to describe it, du Maurier's tale is not simply an imaginative fantasy and she, like D. H. Lawrence, is "another of the writers who leave us troubled and filled with admiration" precisely because she was able to tie her work to "real and unheard of becomings". Hers is a genuinely black art, as Deleuze and Guattari would say.   

 

Judenstern

 

Making particular reference to the case of Serge Gainsbourg, back on 28 December, 2019 I was concerned with the history of the badge that Jews were often obliged to wear for purposes of public identification (i.e., in order to clearly mark them as religious and ethnic outsiders). 

 

Although we tend to think of this practice in the context of Hitler's Germany, the Nazis were actually drawing upon an extensive (anti-Semitic) history when they revived the practice of forcing Jews to wear a distinctive sign upon their clothing, including, most famously, the yellow Star of David with the word Jude inscribed in letters meant to resemble Hebrew script.  

 

Gainsbourg was required to wear such as a young boy in wartime Paris; an experience he made bearable by pretending that it was a sherrif's badge, or a prize that he'd been awarded, and which he eventually wrote a song about: click here. 

 

 

Piquerism and Notes on Knife Play

 

On 28 December of the following year, 2020, I expressed my fascination with piquerism; i.e., the practice of penetrating the skin of another person with sharp objects, including pins, razors, and knives - something that I traced back to young childhood and the time I placed a drawing pin on a fat girl's chair in order to see if she would explode like a balloon with a loud bang.

 

Following this, I then explored episodes of knife play in the work of D. H. Lawrence, of which there are several, including the notorious scene in chapter XXIII of The Plumed Serpent (1926) in which Cipriano publicly executes a group of stripped and blindfolded prisoners with a bright, thin dagger, plunging the latter into their chests with swift, heavy stabs. 

 

I think even at the time I was uncomfortable with this and not able to dismiss it with the same ease as Kate Leslie who, if shocked and appalled at first by the killings, eventually concludes that her new husband's penchant for a little ritualised murder is fine if carried out in good conscience.

 

 

Jane Ciracylides: the Girl with Insect Eyes

 

If over the Xmas period in 2018 I was reading Daphne du Maurier, in 2021 I was enjoying the work of J. G. Ballard, including a short story entitled 'Prima Belladonna' which was included in the collection Vermilion Sands (1971) - a collection which celebrates the neglected virtues of the lurid and bizarre within a surreal sci-fi setting described by Ballard as the visionary present or inner space; the former referring to the future already contained within the present and the latter referring to the place where unconscious dreams, fears, and fantasies meet external reality. 

 

The alien female figure of Jane Ciracylides, with her rich patina-golden skin and insects for eyes, has continued to fascinate me to this day. Who knows, perhaps I'll get to play i-Go with her one day (even if she always cheats).  

 

It's Creepy and It's Kooky, Mysterious and Spooky: Notes on Mark Fisher's The Weird and the Eerie (Part 2)

Mark Fisher (1968-2017) author of 

The Weird and the Eerie (2016)

 

 

I. 

Fisher's opening discussion of the eerie is perhaps my favourite section of his book and deserves to be quoted at some length:

"As with the weird, the eerie is worth reckoning with in its own right as a particular kind of aesthetic experience. Although this experience is certainly triggered by particular cultural forms, it does not originate in them. You could say rather that certain tales, certain novels, certain films, evoke the feeling of the eerie, but this sensation is not a literary or filmic invention. As with the weird, we can and often do encounter the sensation of the eerie [...] without the need for specific forms of cultural meditation. For instance, there is no doubt that the sensation of the eerie clings to certain kinds of physical spaces and landscapes." [a] 

 

But the feeling of the eerie is very different from that of the weird: "The simplest way to get this difference is by thinking about the [...] opposition [...] between presence and absence." [61]

 

The weird is the presence of that which does not belong; "the eerie, by contrast, is constituted by a failure of absence or by a failure of presence" [61]. That's a nice definition. It means that the sensation of the eerir occurs "either when there is something present where there should be nothing, or there is nothing present when there should be something" [61]. 

 

The only way to dispell this sensation is with knowledge; for the eerie concerns the unknown (although that doesn't mean that all mysteries generate the eerie).

 

Finally, Fisher returns to a point made in the introduction to his book. Behind all the manifestations of the eerie lies the question of agency: 

 

 "In the case of the failure of absence, the question concerns the existence of agency as such. [...] In the case of the failure of presence, the question concerns the particular nature of the agent at work." [63]

 

The key point is: "Since the eerie turns crucially on the problem of agency, it is about the [often invisible and/or unconscious] forces that govern our lives and the world." [64]

 

 

II. 

 

It makes me happy that Fisher discusses the work of Daphne du Maurier, as I'm a devotee of her work. 

 

(On the other hand, it makes me feel ashamed of my ignorance when he discusses the work of Christopher Priest about whom I know nothing at all.)  

 

'The Birds' (1952) is a tale I wrote about on Torpedo the Ark back in Feb 2019: click here. 

 

Funny enough, I don't remember describing it as eerie - I think I stressed its malevolence, ambiguity, and inhuman brilliance - but that's not to say Fisher isn't right to use this term. Maybe the fact that the birds seem to possess an unnatural degree of agency is eerie.       

 

Fisher also discusses 'Don't Look Now' (1971), another tale I have twice referred to on this blog: click here and here. Whilst on neither occasion did I use the word eerie, again, I understand why Fisher does; because there is definitely something eerie about fate as a form of obscured agency [b].    

 

And as for the unconscious - if it exists - of course it's eerie, full as it is of absences, gaps, and other negativities. 

 

 

III.

 

Mightn't it be that there's a subjective element in what constitutes an eerie landscape? That eeriness, like beauty or any other aesthetic phenomena, is in the eye of the beholder? 

 

Probably. 

 

Though that's not to deny that a landscape - as an object in its own right - will often demand "to be engaged with on its own terms" [76] and if it happens to be "desolate, atmospheric, solitary" [77] well then it's eerie, no matter who happens to perceive it.

 

Insensitivity to the mood of an environment - be it moorland or an inner city wasteland - is a failure of the individual and can be a dangerous failing too. For we underestimate the powerful agency of a terrain at our own peril. 

 

We might, after Lawrence, call this mood-cum-agency the spirit of place and think in terms of "different vital effluence, different vibration, different chemical exhalation, different polarity" [c]. This sounds a bit like pseudo-science, but the spirit of place is, insists Lawrence, a great reality, however we choose to describe it.

 

Of course, the spirit of place needn't always be malevolent and openness to it might lead one into an ecstatic encounter with otherness that is "pulsing beyond the confines of the mundane" [81] and is "achingly alluring even as it is disconcertingly alien" [81] [d]. 

 

In other words, sometimes wandering outside the gate brings joy and can help restore a sense of primordial wonder (which is precisely why Nietzsche encourages philosophers to do their thinking in unexplored realms of knowledge).   

 

 

IV.  

 

As someone who has been researching in the field of thanatology for the best part of two decades, a section entitled 'Eerie Thanatos' is bound to attract my interest ...

 

By this term, Fisher refers to "a transpersonal (and transtemporal) death drive, in which the 'psychological' emerges as the product of forces from the outside" [82]. The theme is beautifully explored, says Fisher, in the work of Nigel Kneale, an author best known for writing Quatermass and the Pit [e].

 

For Kneale - as presumably for Fisher (and for me) - "the material world in which we live is more profoundly alien and strange" [83] than most people care to imagine. And rather than "insisting upon the pre-eminence of the human subject who is alleged to be the privileged bearer of reason, Kneale shows that an enquiry into the nature of what the world is like is also inevitably an unraveling of what human beings had taken themselves to be" [83]. 

 

To quote from Fisher at length once more if I may:

 

"At the heart of Kneale's work is the question of agency and intent. According to some philosophers, it is the capacity for intentionality which definitively separates human beings from the natural world. Intentionality includes intent as we ordinarily understand it, but really refers to the capacity to feel a cerain way about things. Rivers may possess agency - they affect changes - but the do not care about what they do; they do not have any sort of attitude towards the world. Kneale's most famous creation, the scientist Bernard Quatermass, could be said to belong to a trajectory of Radical Enlightenment thinking which is troubled  by this distinction. Radical Enlightenment thinkers such as Spinoza, Darwin, and Freud continually pose the question: to what extent can the concept of intentionality be applied to human beings, never mind to the natural world? The question is posed in part because of the thoroughgoing naturalisation that Radical Enlightenment thought had insisted upon: if human beings fully belong to the so-called natural world, then on what grounds can a special case be made for them? The conclusions that Radical Enlightenment thinking draws are the exact opposite of the claims for which so-called new materialists such as Jane Bennett [f] have argued. New materialists such as Bennett accept that the distinction between human beings and the natural world is no longer tenable, but they construe this to mean that many of the features previously ascribed only to human beings are actually distributed throughout nature. Radical Enlightenment goes in the opposite direction, by questioning whether there is any such thing as intentionality at all; and if there is, could human beings be said to possess it?" [83-84] 

 

That's the direction I head in too: a direction that leads to the Nietzschean conclusion that life is only a very rare and unusual way of being dead. A conclusion which Freud, following Nietzsche, also (reluctantly) arrived at in his work on Thanatos and the death drive:

 

"By striking contrast with the new materialist idea of 'vibrant matter', which suggests that all matter is to some extent alive, the conjecture implied Freud's positioning of Thanatos is that nothing is alive: life is a region of death. [...] What is called organic life is actually a kind of folding of the inorganic." [84]

 

But ...

 

"But the inorganic is not the passive, inert counterpart to an allegedly self-propelling life; on the contrary, it possesses its own agency. There is a death drive, which in its most radical formulation is not a drive towards death, but a drive of death." [84-85] 

 

Thus ...

 

"The inorganic is the impersonal pilot of everything, including that which seems to be personal and organic. Seen from the perspective of Thanatos, we ourselves become an exemplary case of the eerie: there is an agency at work in us (the unconscious, the death drive), but it is not where or what we expected it to be." [85] 

 

This argument - which I believe to be correct - is surely the most important in Fisher's book. I'm less convinced, however, by his (somewhat hopeful) suggestion that science - as an equally impersonal process - offers us a way beyond. To paraphrase Quatermass himself: Maybe death is as good as it gets. Perhaps it's a cosmic law.  

 

 

V.

 

Fisher provides an excellent reading of Margaret Atwood's novel Surfacing (1972) as a book which, in some respects, "belongs to the same moment as such texts as Luce Irigaray's Speculum of the Other Woman, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's Anti-Oedipus" [101]. 

 

That is to say, works which "attempt to rise to the challenge of treating discontent, abjection and psychopathology as traces of an as yet unimaginable outside rather than as symptoms of maladjustment" [101]. 

 

Having said that, Fisher thinks that the novel's unnamed narrator at the point of schiophrenic break-rapture is actually more in tune with Ben Woodard's dark vitalism [g], which is an interesting idea, but not one I wish to discuss here, as frankly, I can't quite see how the latter relates to the eerie. This might be shortsightedness, or a sign of my own intellectual limitations; or it could be that Fisher is now hallucinating visions of the eerie and seeing it in places where it really doesn't exist. 

 

So far, I've enjoyed and been impressed by the manner in which Fisher has taken a rather hackneyed idea - the eerie - and given it an original twist as well as a strong degree of conceptual rigour. But I think he should have wrapped things up with the notion of eerie thanatos, having already offered us his central insight; i.e., that the eerie is ultimately the trace of an inhuman (and inorganic) drive. 

For the first time, after a hundred odd pages, I'm starting to get just a wee bit bored and to feel that Fisher is now simply namechecking a few more of his favourite things à la Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music (1965) and flexing his muscles like an intellectual version of Tony Holland [h].

 

Having said that, I don't like to abandon a book before the end once I've begun to read it. And so, let's continue, fast-forwarding past Jonathan Glazer's 2013 film Under the Skin [i] and arriving at the final couple of chapters, 'Alien Traces' and ''The Eeriness Remains' ...

VI.

 

Any consideration of outer space, says Fisher in the first of these chapters, "quickly engenders a sense of the eerie" [110]: is there anybody (anything) out there? Again, I suppose that's true - so obviously true, in fact, that it could have fallen from the mouth of Sybil Fawlty [j].  

 

Fisher also claims that Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is a "major contribution to the cinema of the eerie" [112]. 

 

But it's also one of the most boring films I have ever had to sit through and I'm not sure I'd agree with this judgement; I mean, I can see that of Kubrick's The Shining (1980) - and enjoyed Fisher's analysis of the latter - but 2001 ... I'm unconvinced.  

 

Let's just say that when it comes to eeriness, ghostly twins always trump aliens ... and if anyone thinks I'm going to discuss the "possibility of an eerie love" [121], well, they've got another think coming; I'm afraid that I do find this suggestion sentimental "as well as emotionally and conceptually excessive" [121]. 

 

VII.

 

I mentioned in section III of this post how the eerie needn't always be malevolent and openness to it might lead one into an ecstatic encounter with otherness; that wandering outside the gate may even bring joy and help restore a sense of primordial wonder.

 

Well, Fisher clearly agrees with this and that is why he closes his study with a discussion of Joan Lindsay's brilliant novel Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967):   

 

"Not only because Picnic at Hanging Rock is practically a textbook example of an eerie novel - it includes disappearances, amnesia, a geological anomaly, an intensely atmspheric terrain - but also because Lindsay's rendition of the eerie has a positivity, a languorous and delirious allure, that is absent or suppressed in so many other eerie texts." [122]

 

Whereas the outside is usually seen as dangerous and deadly, Picnic at Hanging Rock invokes an outside which involves "a passage beyond the petty repressions and mean confines of common experience into a heightened atmosphere of oneiric lucidity" [122]. 

 

Fisher concludes: "The novel seems to justify the idea that a sense of the eerie is created and sustained simply by withholding information." [126][k]  

 

I could elucidate, but the above note seems to encourage one to recognise that sometimes it's best to say no more ...   

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, (Repeater Books, 2016), p. 61. Future page references to this work will be given in the main text.   

[b] Etymologically speaking, it's weird - rather than eerie - that suggests fate; the Old English term wyrd meant having the power to shape the latter and thus control one's destiny. Readers will probably recall that the witches in Shakespeare's Macbeth, often known as the Weird Sisters, have this ability.     

 

[c] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Spirit of Place', Studies in Classic America Literature (Final Version, 1923), ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambride University Press, 2003), p. 17.  

 

[d] Edward Hunter and Simon Solomon seem to understand this in their short film Room (2010) set on the North Yorkshire Moors. Unfortunately, I can provide no further details of this work or give any links at this time.   

 

[e] Quatermass and the Pit is an influential British science-fiction serial transmitted live by BBC Television in December 1958 and January 1959. A Hammer Films adaptation was released with the same title in 1967, directed by Roy Ward Baker and scripted by Kneale.

      Fisher also discusses the fantasy novel Red Shift (Collins, 1973) by Alan Garner in his chapter on eerie thanatos in relation to the question of human free will, but this is another book and author about which and about whom I again know nothing and so prefer to pass over in silence here (with no disrespect to Garner).       

 

[f] I discussed Jane Bennett's Vibrant Matter (Duke University Press, 2010) in a post published on 10 April 2015, in which I express my dislike of her material vitalism: click here. 

 

[g] See Woodard's Slime Dynamics: Generation, Mutation and the Creep of Life (Zero Boks, 2012). 

 

[h] Tony Holland is a British bodybuilder known for his musical muscle man act. He achieved national fame in the UK after appearing on Opportunity Knocks in 1964 - which, unbelievably, he won six times. 

      Click here to watch him perform (joined by Kenny Lynch) to what became his cha-cha theme tune; 'Wheels', originally recorded (and released as a single which reached number 8 in the UK charts) by the String-A-Longs in 1960. As a very young child, I always found it weirdly disturbing when Holland came on TV and hearing this tune today still makes my skin crawl.     

 

[i] I intend to (i) watch this film and (ii) write a future post on it - and that's why I don't discuss it here. 

      I don't know why I haven't already seen this film; I'm beginning to think I sometimes have blackouts like Rip Van Winkle and when I wake up the world has moved on and certain cultural productions have simply passed me by. The fact that I have been denied an opportunity of seeing Scarlett Johnasson on screen playing an alien young woman stalking human males really irritates.

 

[j] I'm referring here to a famous exchange between Basil and Sybil in the final episode of Fawlty Towers [S2/E6] entitled 'Basil the Rat' (dir. Bob Spiers, written by John Cleese and Connie Booth, 1979): click here. 

 

[k] As Fisher reminds us: 

      "In the case of Picnic at Hanging Rock, this literally happened: the form in which the novel was published was the result of an act of excision. In her original manuscript, Lindsay provided a solution of sorts to the enigma [at the heart of the novel], in a concluding chapter that her publishers [wisely] encouraged her to remove [...] This 'Chapter Eighteen' was published separately, as The Secret of Hanging Rock [1987]." [126] 

 

 

To read the first part of this post - on Fisher's notion of the weird - click here.