O Sun, deliver me from the pull of gravity!
Is my transformation not sufficiently in the manner of your own radiance?
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Everything starts and finishes with the sun [a].
No surprises then that Michel Tournier's Robinson Crusoe [b] should eventually abandon all terrestrial forms of love, weighed down as they ultimately are by the spirit of gravity, and seek to discover the solar sexuality that lies beyond; learning to walk, as Lawrence would say, in his own sun-glory with bright legs and uncringing buttocks [c].
In a sense, Crusoe effects a becoming-minoritarian [d]. Dissatisfed with his own sombre and melancholy white face, he prays to his new god:
"O Sun, cause me to resemble Friday. Give me Friday's smiling countenance, his face shaped for laughter. [...] The eyes in which there is always a hint of derision, a touch of mockery [...] The curved, avid, animal mouth with its uptilted corners." [202-03]
At other times, he observes his negro companion with crazed intensity, marvelling at his physical presence and otherness:
"I watch Friday as he walks toward me with his untroubled, steady pace over the shining sand of the lagoon [...]
Shall I ever learn to walk like him with his natural majesty? Do I sound absurd if I say that he seems clothed by his nakedness? He carries his body like a sovereign affirmation, he bears himself like a monstrance of flesh. His animal beauty proclaims itself, seeming to create a nothingness around it." [205-06]
Friday has grace, as well as rippling muscles and strong knees. He is one of those solar aristocrats that Lawrence dreams of, drawing his nobility and his strength directly from the sun. Watching Friday emerge one day from the ocean, Crusoe admires the "gleam of wet, firm flesh" [210] which brings to mind thoughts of Venus rising from the waves. He is quick to note in his Journal, however, "that at no time has Friday inspired me with sodomite desire" [211].
I don't know if that's true. But Crusoe makes an interesting case to support his denial of homosexual feelings:
"For one thing, he came too late, when my sexuality had already become elemental and was directed toward Speranza. But above all, Venus, or Aphrodite, did not emerge from the waves and tread my shores in order to seduce me, but to drive me into the realm of her father, Uranus, the 'sky crowned with stars' [...] It was not a matter of turning me back to human loves but, while leaving me still an elemental, of causing me to change my element. This has now happened. My love affair with Speranza was still largely human in its nature; I fecundated her soil as though I were lying with a wife. It was Friday who brought about the deeper change. The harsh stab of desire that pierces the loins of the lover has been transformed for me into a soft jubilation which exalts and pervades me from head to foot, so long as the sun-god bathes me in his rays. There is no longer that loss of substance which leaves the animal, post coitum, sad. My sky-love floods me with vital energy which endows me with strength during an entire day and night. If this is to be translated into human language, I must consider myself feminine and the bride of the sky. But that kind of anthropomorphism is meaningless. The truth is that at the height to which Friday and I have soared, difference of sex is left behind. Friday may be identified with Venus, just as I may be said, in human terms, to open my body to the embrace of the sun." [211-12]
Whatever you may think of this passage, dear reader, I think you'll admit it's an interesting one - not least of all because it offers us a model of sex that is solar in origin and "so much more than phallic, and so much deeper than functional desire" [e]. It's a model that feminises Crusoe and gives him a tantric experience of sex involving semen retention and non-localised orgasm, allowing solar-sexual energy to radiate throughout his entire body.
I think it's Deleuze who best understands what it is Tournier is attempting to do in his novel and where Crusoe's process of dehumanization leads; namely, "the discovery of a cosmic energy or of a great elemental Health" [f].
Anyway, shortly after this, a ship arrives at the island of Speranza and, after twenty-eight years, it seems that Crusoe might finally be rescued ... But, of course, having become a sun-man or solar-aristocrat, there's no going back and he finds the company of the ship's captain and crew nauseating:
"What principally repelled him was not so much the coarse brutality, the greed and animosity that emerged so clearly [...] It was easy to imagine encountering men of a different stamp, mild-mannered, benevolent, and generous. For Robinson the evil went deeper, and he defined it to himself as the incurable pettiness of the ends to which all men feverishly devoted their lives." [224]
These men had no conception of or reationship with the sun; for them, it was just a bright light in the sky or a big ball of flame. How could they know of the sun "as possessing a spirit that could irridiate with eternity those who had learned to open their hearts to it?" [224]
One might paraphrase Lawrence at this point:
"With [his] knowledge of the sun, and [his] conviction that the sun was gradually penetrating [him] to know [him], in the cosmic carnal sense of the word, came over [him] a feeling of detachment from people, and a certain contemptuous tolerance for human beings altogether. They were so un-elemental, so un-sunned. They were so like graveyard worms." [g]
That's almost exactly how Crusoe felt. So no surprise then that he chooses to stay on his island (although Friday, moving in the opposite direction, decides to leave aboard the ship):
"The truth was that he was younger today than the pious and self-seeking young man who had set sail in the Virginia, not young with a biological youth, corruptible and harbouring the seeds of its decrepitude, but with a mineral youth, solar and divine. Every day was for him a first beginning [...] Beneath the rays of the sun-god, Speranza trembled in an eternal present, without past or future. |He could not forsake that eternal instant, poised at the needle point of ecstasy, to sink back into a world of usury, dust, and decay." [226]
And so Crusoe returns to Speranza and enjoys a new sunrise:
"Drawn up to his full height, he was confronting the solar ecstasy with a joy that was almost painful, while the bright splendour in which he bathed washed him clean of the grime of the past day and nigt. A blade of fire seemed to penetrate his flesh, causing his whole being to tremble. Speranza was shedding her veil of mist, to emerge unsullied and intact. Indeed, it was as though the agony and the nightmare had never taken place. Eternity, reasserting its hold on him, had effaced that ugly but trivial interlude. He drew a deep breath, filled with a sense of utter contentment, and his chest swelled like a breastplate of brass." [234]
Notes
[a] I think I first said this in a Treadwell's paper entitled 'Sun-Fucked: On the Question of Solar Sexuality and Speculative Realism in D. H. Lawrence' (2012). An extract from this essay can be found in a post on Torpedo the Ark: click here. Or you can find a revised and edited version of the text published in full on James Walker's Digital Pilgrimage by clicking here. This being the case, I'll not attempt to summarise the essay or incorporate ideas from it here, though it should be noted that I express a much less golden-rosy view of solar sexuality than either Tournier or Lawrence.
[b] 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.
[c] D. H. Lawrence, 'Sun-men', in The Poems, Vol. I., ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 456. This is one of a series of related poems; see also 'Sun-women', 'Democracy, 'Aristocracy of the sun', 'Conscience', and Immorality', ibid., pp. 456-58.
[d] Becoming-minoritarian is a philosophical concept developed by Deleuze and Guattari. In a molecular nutshell, it's an attempt to abandon molar configurations of identity (i.e., escape the face) and resist the predominant norms enforced by a majoritarian state machine. It can involve a becoming-woman, becoming-animal, or, indeed, as in this case, a becoming-negro. Each of these affective becomings involves deterritorialization and a constant process of change; they do not involve pretence, posing, or imitation. It's important to understand that Crusoe is not simply an 18th-century wigger attempting to emulate Friday and steal his style. Nor is he erotically fetishising Friday's blackness - although, at times, it might seem that way - and has no desire to either fuck or be fucked by the latter.
[e] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Novel', Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 189.
[f] 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, p. 303.
This notion of die große Gesundheit is, of course, taken from Nietzsche, who writes of "a new health, stronger, more seasoned, tougher, more audacious, and gayer than any previous health". See The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, (Vintage Books, 1974), Section 382.
[g] D. H. Lawrence, 'Sun', in The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, (Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 23-24.
To read part one of this post - on Crusoe's dendrophilia - click here.
To read part two of this post - on Crusoe's ecosexuality - click here.
