Showing posts with label gabrielle. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gabrielle. Show all posts

4 Jul 2021

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.