Showing posts with label fantazius mallare. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fantazius mallare. Show all posts

22 Dec 2020

On the Sex Life of Robinson Crusoe 1: Getting Jiggy with a Soap Bark Tree

Even a tree has its own daimon. 
And a man might lie with the daimon of a tree. 
- D. H. Lawrence 
 
 
I. 
 
As regular readers will know, dendrophilia has featured in several posts on Torpedo the Ark, including, most recently, one in which I discuss an illustration by Wallace Smith for Ben Hecht's controversial novel Fantazius Mallare (1922): click here
 
However, as you can never have too much of a wood thing, I thought I might share details of the happy liaison between Michel Tournier's reimagined Robinson Crusoe [a] and a fallen soap bark tree (Quillaja saponaria) ...    
 
 
II.
 
With time on his hands, Crusoe develops many new interests. Among these, is an interest in the "marital rites of the creatures surrounding him" [113]. Not the mammals and birds, "whose couplings seemed to him a repulsive caricature of human love" [113], but the insects. 
 
He was particularly fascinated by the role the latter play in pollination, a process that seemed to him "both moving and supremely elegant" [113] and he spent many long hours observing the queer relationship that existed between a wasp and an orchid [b]
 
This "wonderful mingling of subterfuge and ingenuity" [115], makes him not only reconsider his religious beliefs - "had the natural world been contrived by an infinitely wise and majestic God, or by a baroque Demiurge driven to the wildest whimsicalities by his love of the bizarre?" [115] - but also wonder whether there were trees on the island which "might be disposed to make use of himself" [115] in a similar manner that the orchid exploits the wasp ...
 
Suddenly, "the branches of the trees were transformed in his mind into voluptuous and scented women whose rounded bodies were waiting to receive him" [115]. And so Crusoe sets off to find a suitable lover:     

"Searching the island from end to end, he finally discovered a quillai tree, which had been blown over by the wind but not wholly uprooted. The trunk, which lay on the ground, ended in a fork of two main branches rising a little into the air. The bark was smooth and warm, even downy at the point of the fork, where there was a small aperture lined with silky moss.
      Robinson hesitated for some days on the threshold of what he later called his 'vegetable way'. He hung about the quillai with sidelong glances, discovering in the two branches thrusting out of the grass a resemblance to huge, black, parted thighs. Finally he lay naked on the tree, clasping the trunk with his arms while his erect penis thrust its way into that mossy crevice. A happy torpor engulfed him. He lay dreaming with half-closed eyes of banks of creamy-petaled flowers shedding rich and heady perfumes from their bowed corollas. With damp lips parted they seemed to await the gift to be conferred on them by a heaven filled with the lazy drone of insects. Was he the last member of the human race to be summoned to return to the vegetative sources of life? The blossom is the sex of the plant. Innocently the plant offers its sex to all as its most rare and beautiful possession. Robinson lay dreaming of a new human species which would proudly wear its male and female attributes on its head - huge, luminous, scented." [115-116]
 
Alas, this blissful life is fated not to last beyond several happy months. First the rains come. Then a spider ruins everything: for one day, as he lay spread upon the wooden body of his beloved soapbark, "a searing pain in his gland brought him sharply to his feet" [116] and he spotted a large red spider running along the trunk of the tree before vanishing into the grass. "It was some hours before the pain abated, and his afflicted member looked like a tangerine." [116] 
 
Ouch! Perhaps not surprisingly, this incident puts Crusoe off dendrophilia: 
 
"Robinson had suffered many misadventures during his years of solitude amid the flora and fauna of a world enfevered by the tropical sun. But the moral significance of this episode was unavoidable. Although it had been caused by the sting of a spider, could his malady be regarded as anything other than a venereal disease [...]? He saw in this a sign that the 'vegetable way' might be no more than a blind alley." [116] 
 
That's a shame - and I think this an absurd reading of what happened. However, it has the significant effect of transforming Crusoe from a dendrophile into a full-blown ecosexual, as we will see in part two of this post ... [click here].    
 
 
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.
      The subject of Crusoe's sexual life whilst on his island has intrigued many authors. Diana Souhami, for example, wrote an award-winning study of Alexander Selkirk, the real-life castaway whose story inspired Daniel Defoe, in which she cheerfully speculated on his masturbatory habits and erotic preferences, ranging from buggery to bestiality. What she doesn't suggest, however, is that Selkirk/Crusoe may also have been a tree-hugger, in the carnal sense. If you want to know about that, you have to read Tournier's novel.
      See Diana Souhami, Selkirk’s Island, (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2001). Best-known for her unconventional biographies of famous lesbians, this book was perhaps a bit of a surprise for Souhami's readership. Combining elements of fiction and fantasy with fact, it is difficult to categorise as a work. It should probably be noted, however, that Selkirk's own memoirs contain no hint of impropriety with goats.  

[b] Gilles Deleuze, who praised Tournier's novel - suggesting that it traced a genesis of perversion - would later, in collaboration with Félix Guattari, use this double figure of the wasp and orchid to illustrate the concepts of rhizome, becoming, and deterritorialization. Like Crusoe, Deleuze and Guattari were fascinated by the manner in which certain orchids display the physical and sensory characteristics of female wasps in order to entice male wasps into unnatural relations and co-opt them into their own reproductive cycle. 
      See Deleuze and Guattari, Mille plateaux (1980), trans. into English as A Thousand Plateaus by Brian Massumi, (University of Minnesota Press, 1987). The material I refer to is in the Introduction: Rhizome. As far as I am aware, Tournier has never received the credit he is due for initiating this line of thinking; indeed, there is but a single reference to Tournier in A Thousand Plateaus (p. 261) and this quotes from his later novel Les Météores (1975), not Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique
      However, Deleuze did write a lengthy essay on the latter, which was published as 'Michel Tournier and the World Without Others' in an appendix to The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, (The Athlone Press, 1990), pp. 301-321. 
 
 
The third and final part of this post on the sex life of Robinson Crusoe - sun-fucked - can be read by clicking here.  
 
 

3 Oct 2020

D. H. Lawrence's Daimonic Dendrophilia

Wallace Smith: Illustration for 
Fantazius Mallare (1922)


I have discussed D. H. Lawrence's dendrophilia elsewhere on Torpedo the Ark [click here] and readers will surely recall the scene in Women in Love in which Birkin enters into a state of erotic delirium whilst surrounded by various plants, bushes, and young trees: 
 
"The soft sharp boughs beat upon him, as he moved in keen pangs against them, threw little cold showers of drops on his belly, and beat his loins with their clusters of soft-sharp needles [...] and then to sting one's thigh against the living dark bristles of the fir-boughs; and then to feel the light whip of the hazel on one's shoulders, stinging, and then to clasp the silvery birch-trunk against one's breast, its smoothness, its hardness, its vital knots and ridges - this was good, this was all very good, very satisfying. [...] He knew now where he belonged. He knew where to plant himself, his seed: – along with the trees, in the folds of the delicious fresh growing leaves. This was his place, his marriage place." [1]
 
So one might imagined that Lawrence would have loved the above image by the American artist Wallace Smith for Ben Hecht's controversial novel Fantazius Mallare: A Mysterious Oath (1922) [2], showing a man having sex with a tree. 
 
Only you would be mistaken: Lawrence hated the novel and hated the illustrations by Smith. In a letter-cum-review of the work written shortly after publication - having had a copy of the book sent to him by a friend - Lawrence says this:
 
"Many thanks for sending me the Ben Hecht book. I read it through. But I'm sorry, it didn't thrill me a bit, neither the pictures nor the text. It all seems to me so would-be. Think of the malice, the sheer malice of a Beardsley drawing, the wit, and the venom of the mockery. These drawings are so completely without irony, so crass, so strained, and so would-be. It isn't that they've got anything to reveal at all. That man's coition with a tree, for example. There's nothing in it but the author's attempt to be startling. Whereas if he wanted to be really wicked he'd see that even a tree has its own daimon, and a man might lie with the daimon of a tree. Beardsley saw these things. But it takes imagination." [3]   
 
That, I think, is very interesting - particularly the part about the daimonic aspect of a tree and the possibility of a human being forming an erotic relationship with such, thereby adding an occult element to Lawrence's dendrophilia. 
 
I think Lawrence is right to suggest that a sexual encounter between any two objects involves a "contact between two alien natures" [4] and is always therefore as much a violent struggle as it is a sensual delight. And, personally, I dislike Smith's drawing because it anthropomorphises the tree; by having it take on a distinctly all-too-human female form he produces a heteronormative rather than truly transgressive artwork. 
 
 
Notes
 
[1] D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 107-08. 

[2] Those interested in reading Hecht's novel and taking a look at Smith's illustrations can do so thanks to Project Gutenberg: click here.

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'Review of Fantazius Mallare: A Mysterious Oath, by Ben Hecht', in Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 215 
 
[4] Ibid.,  p. 216.