The Scar is the Eye of the Violet: On Stigmatophilia and Sexual Healing

Illustration attributed to Jean Le Noir from 

The Prayer Book of Bonne de Luxembourg (c. 1345)

showing Christ's side wound in detail

 

 

I. Long Live the New Flesh

 

In his beautiful erotico-blasphemous short novel The Escaped Cock [a], D. H. Lawrence has an almost fetishistic interest in the wounds and scars left on the body of the man who died, following his crucifixion and resurrection [b]. 

 

The climax of the tale sees the man stripping naked before a priestess of Isis and submitting to her touch, in order that he may be healed and released from past pain and old suffering:

"'Let me annoint you!' the woman said to him softly, 'let me annoint the scars! Show me, and let me annoint them!'

      He forgot his nakedness in the re-evoked old pain. He sat on the edge of the couch, and she poured a little ointment into the palm of his hand. And as she chafed his hand, it all came back, the nails, the holes, the cruelty, the unjust cruelty against him who had offered only kindness. The agony of injustice and cruelty came over him again, as in his death-hour. But she chafed the palm, murmuring: 'What was torn becomes a new flesh, what was a wound is full of fresh life, the scar is the eye of the violet.'" [157]

 

This is an astonishing piece of writing - particularly the last line, which is one that David Cronenberg would have been proud of. 

 

Next, the woman of Isis chafes the man's feet with oil and tender healing, before directing him towards her goddess: "And as he stood there dazed and naked as an unborn thing" [158], the woman stooped in order to examine the scar "in the soft flesh of the socket of his side" [158]; a scar which resembled  "an eye sore with endless weeping" [158]. 

 

It was from this deep wound just above his hip, that the man who died had lost his life ...

 

"The woman, silent now, but quivering, laid oil in her hand and put her palm over over the wound in his right side. He winced, and the wound absorbed his life again [...] And in the dark, wild pain and panic of consciousness rang only one cry: Oh, how can she take this death out of me? [...]

      In silence she softly, rhythmically chafed the scar with oil [...] while the vitals of the man howled in panic. But as she gradually gathered power [...] gradually warmth began to take the place of cold terror, and he felt: I am going to be flushed warm again, I am going to be whole!" [158] 

 

Lawrence continues:

 

"Having chafed all his lower body with oil, his belly, his buttocks, even the slain penis and the sad stones, having worked with her slow intensity of a priestess, so that the sound of his wounds grew dimmer and dimmer, suddenly she put her breast against the wound in his left side, and her arms round him, folding over the wound in his right side, and she pressed him to her, in a power of living warmth [...] And the wailing died out altogether, and there was stillness and darkness in his soul, unbroken dark stilless, wholeness." [159] 

 

At the same time, the man who died experiences a new sun dawning within the perfect inner darkness of his body. Not only that, but he feels the blaze of his manhood rise up. So he unfastens the woman's linen tunic and slips the garment down, exposing her white-gold breasts. Pulling her to him "with a passion of tenderness and consuming desire" [160], they fuck - not once but twice.

 

"Afterwards, with a dim wonder, she touched the great scars in his side with her finger-tips, and said:

      'But they no longer hurt?'

      'They are suns!' he said. 'They shine from your touch. They are my atonement with you.'" [160] 

 

 

II. The World Was Beginning to Flower into Wounds 

 

Of course, Lawrence isn't the only author to explore the eroticism of wounds as sites of perverse bliss and to imagine what Foucault would later term a new economy of bodies and their pleasures ... 

 

In his novel Crash J. G. Ballard provides the following tender (but disquieting) scene between the narrator of the tale - also named Ballard - and a severely crippled young woman, Gabrielle, in the back of her small, specially adapted car: 

 

"As I explored her body, feeling my way among the braces and straps of her underwear, the unfamiliar planes of her hips and legs steered me into unique culs-de-sac, strange declensions of skin and musculature. Each of her deformities became a potent metaphor for the excitements of a new violence. Her body, with its angular contours, its unexpected junctions of mucous membrane and hairline, detrusor muscle and erectile tissue, was a ripening anthology of perverse possibilities. [...] Our sexual acts were exploratory ordeals." [c] 

 

Ballard continues, in the uniquely erotico-clinical language that characterises the novel and which, almost impossible to paraphrase, can only be quoted at length:

 

"In the inner surface of her thigh the straps formed marked depressions, troughs of reddened skin hollowed out in the forms of buckles and clasps. As I unshackled the left leg brace and ran my fingers along the deep buckle groove, the corrugated skin felt hot and tender, more exciting than the membrane of a vagina. This depraved orifice, the imagination of a sexual organ still in the embryonic stages of its evolution, reminded me of the small wounds on my own body [...] I felt this depression on her thigh, the groove worn below her breast under her right armpit by the spinal brace, the red marking on the inside of her right upper arm - these were the templates for new genital organs, the moulds of sexual possibilities yet to be created [...] As she sat passively in my arms [...] I realised this bored and crippled young woman found that the nominal junction points of the sexual act - breast and penis, anus and vulva, nipple and clitoris - failed to provide any excitement for us."

 

"Gabrielle placed a drop of spit on my right nipple and stroked it mechanically, keeping up the small pretence of this nominal sexual link. In return, I stroked her pubis, feeling for the inert nub of her clitoris. [...] Gabrielle's hand moved across my chest. Her fingers found the small scars below my left collar bone [...] As she began to explore this circular crevice with her lips I for the first time felt my penis thickening. She took it from my trousers, then began to explore the other wound-scars on my chest and abdomen, running the tip of her tongue into each one. In turn, one by one, she endorsed each of these signatures [...]  As she stroked my penis I moved my hand from her pubis to the scars on her thighs, feeling the tender causeways driven through her flesh by the handbrake of the car in which she had crashed. My right arm held her shoulders, feeling the impress of the contoured leather, the meeting points of hemispherical and rectilinear geometries. I explored the scars on her thighs and arms, feeling for the wound areas under her left breast, as she in turn explored mine, deciphering together these codes of a sexuality made possible by our two car-crashes.

      My first orgasm, within the deep wound on her thigh, jolted my semen along this channel, irrigating its corrugated ditch. Holding the semen in her hand, she wiped it against the silver controls of the clutch treadle. 

      My mouth was fastened on the scar below her left breast, exploring its sickle-shaped trough. Gabrielle turned in her seat, revolving her body around me, so that I could explore the wounds of her right hip. For the first time I felt no trace of pity for this crippled woman, but celebrated with her the excitements of these abstract vents let into her body by sections of her own automobile. 

      During the next few days my orgasms took place within the scars below her breast and within her left armpit, in the wounds on her neck and shoulder, in these sexual apertures formed by fragmenting windshield louvres and dashboard dials in a high-speed impact, marrying through my own penis the car in which I had crashed and the car in which Gabrielle had met her near-death."

 

Like the man who died and the priestess of Isis, it might be argued that Ballard and Gabrielle were implicated with each other in sacred mysteries - albeit within an age shaped by technology - though whether inseminating wounds with sperm might trigger the evolution of new sex organs, is, I suspect, rather fanciful ...  

   

 

Notes

 

[a] Lawrence's The Escaped Cock was originally published by the Black Sun Press (Paris, 1929). I am referring to the version of the tale published in The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories, ed. Michael Herbert, Bethan Jones and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 123-163.    

[b] I'm aware that this same fetishistic adoration of holy wounds was a significant aspect of medieval Christian worship (as the illustration to this post shows) and I also know that this has since become of great interest to those wishing to queer the gospels and feminise the body of Christ. I will develop this theme at length in a post to be published shortly entitled Lord, Open Thou My Lips ...

 

[c] J. G. Ballard, Crash, (Jonathan Cape, 1973). Unfortunately, I can't give page references as don't have my copy of the novel to hand. I'm relying here on a pdf made available on booksvooks.com: click here. All the material quoted is found in chapter 19. 

 

For an earlier post on Ballard's novel Crash, please click here.

 

    

Becoming-Insect 2: The Case of Seth Brundle

Jeff Goldblum as Seth Brundle / Brundlefly

in The Fly (dir. David Cronenberg, 1986)

There is more than a grain of truth in the following statement by Richard Mabey:

"I think we may be lucky that insects are too small and remote ever to have entered our understanding in the way that birds and flowers have. If we saw their lives for what they really are I think it might be too much for us to bear."

- The Unofficial Countryside (1973)

And yet, sometimes, one can't help looking at the bees, bugs and beetles with a mixture of admiration and envy and thoughts of becoming-insect; i.e., of entering an alien life free from all compassion and compromise, but with its own inhuman beauty. Not that this ever ends well, as the cases of Gregor Samsa and Seth Brundle demonstrate ...

2: The Case of Seth Brundle

If frustrated salesman Gregor Samsa remains concerned about the welfare of others following his metamorphosis, the same cannot be said of eccentric scientist Seth Brundle who, following an experiment, slowly mutates into a human-insect hybrid - the so-called Brundlefly - a creature monstrous of face, monstrous of soul.

That is to say, a devil harbouring within himself all the vices and base appetites of one whose very ugliness is the expression of a development that has been thwarted by crossing (as Nietzsche says of Socrates).

In short, the Brundlefly is a creature of instinctual malice, cf. the Samsabeetle who was one of kindness and sensitivity despite his appearance. On the plus side, in the early stages of his transformation before he sheds his humanity and all the trappings of such (including teeth, hair and skin), Brundle does enjoy increased strength, stamina, and sexual potency.

Later, he's able to climb the walls and crawl across the ceiling - something that Gregor also enjoys doing. And if no longer able to eat solid food, Brundle gains the astonishing - if repulsive - ability to dissolve his meals by vomiting digestive enzymes onto them (an ability which, as we see later in the film, can also serve as a corrosive form of self-defence).         

Ultimately, if the case of Gregor Samsa makes us sympathetic and sorrowful at his demise, the case of Seth Brundle only makes us afraid. Very afraid.  But what is it exactly we fear? The answer, says Cronenberg, is the disease and old age that threaten all of us with a becoming-monstrous; the mortal corruption within rapidly deforming the flesh and destroying our reason. 

Just thinking about it is enough to make one weep ninety-six tears ...


Notes

To read part one of this post on becoming-insect, the case of Gregor Samsa, click here. 

To listen to a uniquely brilliant take on this question by The Cramps, click here.   

When D. H. Lawrence Met G. I. Jane

I wouldn't say that American action movie G. I. Jane (1997) is a great film, even though in Ridley Scott it undoubtedly has a great director. A box office success, it wasn't quite as much of a blockbuster as hoped for by the producers who had stumped up a $50,000,000 budget.  

Nor would I say that the star of the film, Demi Moore, is a great actress. Nevertheless, she's a better actress than many people wish to believe and undeserving of the Golden Raspberry Award for her performance as Lieutenant Jordan O'Neil.

What I would say, however, is that her G. I. Jane co-star Viggo Mortensen is not only a very fine actor, but also one of the most interesting figures in Hollywood. A poet, publisher, musician, photographer and painter - as well as a charismatic screen presence - Mortensen has given some excellent performances, particularly under the direction of David Cronenberg.

But what I really like about him is the fact that he was the one who suggested to Ridley Scott that his enigmatic and violent character, Command Master Chief John James Urgayle, would be made more interesting to an audience were his brutality offset by a love of literature - particularly D. H. Lawrence's poetry!

Thus it was that Urgayle recites the following lines to his new recruits:

I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.

At the end of the film, by which time O'Neil has proved she's not a lesbian, survived her training ordeal, and displayed real courage and ability under fire as a Navy SEAL, we see her leafing through a Penguin edition of Lawrence's Selected Poems that has been left in her locker. O' Neil reads the above verse with tears in her eyes, whilst Urgayle looks on affectionately. 

Her copy of the text, already annotated and well-thumbed, is doubtless Urgayle's own. But the book itself belonged to Mortensen and was not merely a prop bought for the scene. And that, for a Lawrentian, is pleasing to discover. 

Notes

Lawrence's verse, entitled 'Self-Pity', can be found in The Complete Poems, ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto and F. Warren Roberts, (Penguin Books, 1977), p. 467, or in Volume I of the Cambridge Edition of Lawrence's Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (CUP, 2013), p. 405.

To view on YouTube the recital of Lawrence's poem by Master Chief Urgayle (as played by Viggo Mortensen) click here. To see the touching final scene of G. I. Jane click here.