On the Sex Life of the Incredible Shrinking Man 3: Agalmatophilia

You're looking swell, Dolly ... 

 

 

I. Hello, Dolly!

 

One of my favourite - because one of the most touching - scenes in Richard Matheson's The Shrinking Man [a], is in chapter fourteen, when Scott Carey moves into the doll's house and briefly strikes up a relationship with a toy woman even smaller in size than Clarice, the sideshow dwarf with whom he has an equally brief, but arguably more intense and meaningful affair - if we consider the latter in amorously conventional and all too human terms - earlier in the novel.

Readers of this blog - or those familiar with my work beyond the confines of Torpedo the Ark - will know that I have written fairly extensively on the subject of agalmatophilia; i.e., the sexual attraction to statues, dolls, mannequins, or other similar figurative objects (what some aficianados refer to as the Pygmalion syndrome). 

 

As erotic fantasy practices go, this one - with its roots in Classical mythology - seems fairly harmless and rather charming. I can't think of any legitimate grounds upon which one might base a serious objection to the love of an artificial being. Those who protest that a doll, for example, isn't a living, breathing actual woman are not wrong - but they've missed the point. The idea that there is an authentic or more natural form of love - one rooted in truth and tied exclusively to personhood or human being - is something that we should always interrogate. 

 

Anyway, let's now take a look at Scott Carey's life in the dollhouse - we can return to this discussion afterwards ...

 

 

II. Chapter Fourteen

 

One day, when Scott has shrunk to under a foot in size, his wife Louise comes home with a large and luxurious doll's house, thinking that he might like to move in - for safety and convenience - away from the cat, who might decide to eat him, and away from Beth, his young daughter, who might accidently step on him. 

 

"He walked over to it  and went up on the porch. It gave him an odd feeling to stand there, his hand on the tiny wrought-iron railing; the feeling he'd had the night he'd stood on the steps of Clarice's trailer. 

      Pushing open the front door, he went into the house and closed the door behind him. He was standing in the large living room. Except for fluffy white curtains, it was unfurnished. There was a fireplace of false bricks, hardwood floors and a window seat, candle brackets. It was an attractive room, except for one thing: One of its walls was missing." [163-64]

 

Once it's fully furnished, it's a real palace; fit for a king! Well, sort of ... In truth, "doll furniture was not designed for comfort" [164] and life in the doll's house was basically a charade, without plumbing or electric fittings:

 

"He might have felt inclined to fiddle on the keyboard of the glossy grand piano, but the keys were painted on and the insides were hollow. He might wander into the kitchen and yank at the refrigerator door in search of a snack, but the refrigerator was all in one piece. The knobs on the stove moved, but that was all. It would take eternity to heat a pot of water on it. He could twist the tiny sink faucets until his hands fell off, but not the smallest drop of water would ever appear. He could put clothes in the little washer, but they would remain dirty and dry. He could put wood scraps in the fireplace, but if he lit them, he'd only smoke himself out of the house because there was no chimney." [164-65]

 

That doesn't sound great, but at least Lou had pushed the house up against the wall "so he could have the privacy as well as the protection of four walls" [164] and one day daughter Beth kindly left him a doll for company: 

 

"She'd put it on his porch and left it there. He'd ignored it all day; but now, on an impulse, he went downstairs and got the doll, which was sitting on the top step in a blue sun suit. 

      'Cold?' he asked her as he picked her up. She had nothing to say. 

      He carried her upstairs and put her down on the bed. Her eyes fell shut. 

      'No, don't go to sleep,' he said. He sat her up by bending her at the joining of her body and her long, hard, inflexible legs. 'There,' he said. She sat looking at him with stark, jewel-like eyes that never blinked. 

      'That's a nice sun suit,' he said. He reached out and brushed back her flaxen hair. 'Who does your hair?' he asked. She sat there stiffly, legs spread apart, arms half raised, as though she contemplated a possible embrace. 

      He poked her in her hard little chest. Her halter fell off. 'What do you wear a halter for? he asked, justifiably. She stared at him glassily, withdrawn. 'Your eyelashes are celluloid,' he said tactlessly. 'You have no ears,' he said. She stared. 'You're flat chested,' he told her. 

      Then he apologized to her for being so rude, and he followed that by telling her the story of his life. She sat patiently in the half-lit bedroom, staring at him with blue, crystalline eyes that did not blink and a little red cupid's bow mouth that stayed perpetually half-puckered, as if anticipating a kiss that never came. 

      Later on, he laid her down on the bed and stretched out beside her. She was asleep instantly. He turned her on her side and her blue eyes clicked open and stared at him. He turned her on her back again and they clicked shut. 

      'Go to sleep,' he said. He put his arm around her and snuggled close to her cool plaster leg. Her hip stuck into him. He turned her on her other side, so she was looking away from him. Then he pressed close to her and slipped his arm around her body. 

      In the middle of the night, he woke up with a start and stared dazedly at the smooth, naked back beside him, the yellow hair tied with a red ribbon. His heartbeats thundered. 

      'Who are you?' he whispered. 

      Then he touched her hard, cool flesh and remembered. A sob broke in his chest. 'Why aren't you real?' he asked her, but she wouldn't tell him. He pressed his face into her soft flaxen hair and held her tight, and after a while he went to sleep again." [165-66] 

 

 

III.  Analysis / Commentary

 

I have to say, the ending of this scene disappoints: Scott's desperate desire for a real woman with ears and large breasts, rather than an earless, flat-chested doll tells us that his major concern is reciprocation; i.e., more than wanting something to love, he wants someone to return his affection and whisper the words I love you into his shell-like.

 

Although he does eventually snuggle up to her in the bed and press her body close to his, one suspects that Scott, like D. H. Lawrence, finds a doll's nudity uninteresting and cut off from erotic allure [b]. One wonders if his (albeit mild) pediophobia is symptomatic of a much wider philosohical contempt for objects as things that are external to us and to human access. 

 

For me, it would have been interesting if Matheson had developed the relationship with the nameless doll towards a wonderfully perverse object-oriented materialism; allowing Scott to learn to love the doll as a doll and not merely as a substitute woman. Rae Langton and other Kantian-inspired humanists might dismiss such love as sexual solipsism [c] and think it morally problematic, but I don't.     

 

And even if loving a doll is solipsistic, mightn't that be a more fulfilling or, at the very least, happier experience than an authentic relationship with a human being? 

 

Langton would give a categorical No! in reply to this question and insist that human beings deserve to be treated in a manner that is essentially different to how we might treat objects, including life-like sex dolls and intelligent machines. Why? Because, she asserts, people can experience pain and this creates a unique obligation to treat them with a level of care.

 

This is, I suppose, true at a certain banal level. But as Nietzsche pointed out, pain is not an argument  [d] and recognising that others exist and experience pain doesn't necessarily make us love them; it might, indeed, serve as an enticement to sadism. Ultimately, Langton simply can't bring herself to admit that some men - extremely small in number - prefer to love dolls and that there's nothing reactive, immoral, or even solipsistic about this.

 

But, as we saw, Scott Carey is not one such man; he'd still rather hold a flesh and blood lover in his arms than a plastic doll. Which is fair enough - that's his preference. But I still maintain that an artificial lover (or an animal companion) can allow us to unlock the prison of the self (as Langton puts it) and nourish our virtues, etc. Either that, or perhaps Proust is right to scorn the idea that love - whatever form it takes - magically allows for communication and an escape from the self [e]. 

 

  

Notes

 

[a] Richard Matheson, The Shrinking Man, (Gold Medal Books, 1956). The edition I'm using here was first published by Gollancz, in 2014, in their SF Masterworks series and page numbers refer to this text. 

[b] See D. H. Lawrence's essay '...... Love Was Once a Little Boy', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 329-346. According to Lawrence: "In or out of her chemise, however, doesn't make much of a difference to the modern woman. She's a finished-off ego, an assertive conscious entity, cut off like a doll from any mystery. And her nudity is about as interesting as a doll's." [346] 

[c] See Rae Langton, Sexual Solipsism: Philosophical Essays on Pornography and Objectification, (Oxford University Press, 2009). 

[d] See Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book IV, 318. 

 

[e] For Proust, we are always and forever isolate and courage exists not in pretending to care and share, but in daring to admit that those who choose to kiss people instead of dolls are no less alone. Reciprocity is an illusion and the objects of our affection, whatever their ontological status, simply allow for the projection of our own ideas, fantasies and feelings. In other words, love is an experience that, like all other experiences, comes from within. It might require some external object, but it hasn’t the slightest connection with it. Thus, we don't need someone to help us realise ourselves, merely something to provide us with sensation, whatever size we are and however we identify sexually.

 

 

To read part one of this post on The Shrinking Man and pictophilia, click here. 

To read part two of this post on The Shrinking Man and paedophilia, click here. 

On Travel/Writing (with a Deleuzian Punchline)

 Have monogrammed trunk will travel 

 

To consider travel writing is one thing: but to conceive of literature as travel is something else; something a bit more philosophically interesting, a bit more Deleuzean ...

 

For Deleuze understood that penser c'est voyager and that the true nomad doesn't need to traipse around the world or migrate here and there; that they move even when standing still and that the most vital trips are in intensity, not space. 

 

Deleuze hinged his theory of travel upon observations from several writers, including: 

 

(i) Fitzgerald, who insisted that travelling - even to remote islands or the darkest jungles - never amounts to a real break if one takes along one's old beliefs, memories, and habits of thought ... 

 

(ii) Beckett, who described it as dumb to travel simply for the pleasure of travelling itself; there had to be a destination of some kind ...

 

(iii) Proust, who said that upon waking the true dreamer has to go and check things out in the world; i.e., what motivates their desire to travel is not to discover new lands, but to confirm the reality of their own nightmares and visions. [1]     

 

Deleuze was also a serious reader of D. H. Lawrence - and Lawrence was both a great traveller and a great writer, frequently overtaken by the necessity to move, although, amusingly, his own savage pilgrimage ultimately brought him to the conclusion that travel is a splendid lesson in disillusion. [2]

 

Of course, that hasn't stopped Lawrence scholars packing their suitcases and floating from international conference to conference, in order to endlessly discuss Lawrence's world tour and talk about his uncanny ability to connect with the so-called spirit of place. 

 

For as Deleuze once joked, that's how academics travel - by generating a lot of hot air ...   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Gilles Deleuze: 'Letter to Serge Daney: Optimism, Pessimism, and Travel', Negotiations 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 77-78.  

 

[2] Readers interested in knowing more about Lawrence's thoughts on travel can click here for a related post to this one.  

This post is for Adam Peter Lang.

 

 

D. H. Lawrence and the Novel (Part 1)

Henry Rayner: Portrait of D. H. Lawrence (1929)

D. H. Lawrence was acutely concerned with the (moral) question of the novel: its conventional limitations and its future possibilities. No surprise, therefore, that he wrote several short essays on the subject ...

I. The Future of the Novel

Is the novel still in its infancy as an art form - or is it on its death-bed? 

It was a question in 1923 and it's still a question now, almost 100 years later; albeit no longer a question that many people care about (which perhaps says more about us rather than the contemporary novel).

The answer, for Lawrence, is that the "pale-faced, high-browed, earnest novel which you have to take seriously" [151] is senile precocious. That is to say, it's childishly self-absorbed: I am this, I am that, I am the other.    

One assumes that Lawrence is not referring to his own works here, though heaven knows his novels can be so sincere and intense at times, that one might fairly describe them as earnest and overwrought. Lawrence, though, is taking a pop at the novels by writers such as James Joyce and Marcel Proust; authors who "tear themselves to pieces, strip their smallest emotions to the finest threads" [152]. 

He doesn't think much of the smirking popular novel either; just as self-conscious and also written by those who think it funny to drag their adolescence into middle age and even old age.

The novel, declares Lawrence, has got to grow up: by which he means stop with the played out emotional and self-analytical stunts and find the "underlying impulse that will provide the motive-power for a new state of things" [154].

Interestingly, this requires that fiction and philosophy come together again: reuniting into a new form of myth and a new way of understanding. The novel has got a future, concludes Lawrence, providing it has the courage to "tackle new propositions without using abstractions [and ...] present us with new, really new feelings [...] which will get us out of the old emotional rut [155].    

II. Morality and the Novel

What is the business of art?

"The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his circumambient universe, at the living moment." [171]

That's a succinct and interesting definition: one that might be said to anticipate actor-network theory, even whilst remaining anthropocentric in that it posits man as the centre of a universe about whom all things revolve. 

And morality?

"Morality is that delicate, forever trembling and changing balance between me and my circumambient universe, which precedes and accompanies a true relatedness." [172]

That's another concise definition: one that allows us to understand why it is Lawrence values the novel above all else. For whilst works of philosophy, religion, or science are all of them busy trying to nail things down with laws and fixed ideals in order to establish stability, the novel insists on difference and becoming.

Lawrence writes:  

"The novel is the highest complex of subtle interrelatedness that man has discovered. Everything is true in its own time, place, circumstance, and untrue outside of its own place, time, circumstance. If you try to nail anything down, in the novel, either it kills the novel, or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail." [172]

And immorality?

Immorality is the attempt by an author, for example, to impose themselves upon a text and tip the balance one way or the other, thus bringing to an end the tembling instability upon which everything in the social and natural world - including the world of fiction - depends. They might not even intend to do this; often the immorality of the novel is due to the novelist's unconscious bias or predilection.  

For an artist to remain moral, he or she must affirm a general economy of the whole in which all things, all ideas, and all feelings are admitted and none are thought to be supreme or exclusively worth living for:

"Because no emotion is supreme, or exclusively worth living for. All emotions go to the achieving of a living relationship between a human being and the other human being or creature or thing he becomes purely related to.
      All emotions, including love and hate, and rage and tenderness, go to the adjusting of the oscillating, unestablished balance between two [actants ...] If the novelist puts his thumb in the pan, for love, for tenderness, sweetness, peace, then he commits an immoral act: he prevents the possibility of a pure relationship [...] and he makes inevitable the horrible reaction, when he lets his thumb go, towards hate and brutality, cruelty and destruction." [173]

This helps explain why Lawrence often brands seemingly pure and innocent works false and obscene and why he famously advises readers to always, always trust the tale, not the teller.

If the novel reveals or helps establish vivid relationships that gleam with a fourth dimensional quality, then it is a moral work, no matter how the relationships may be judged from the perspective of conventional morality. And if these relationships also happen to be new and displace old connections, then even better - no matter how much pain they cause, or what offence they may give:

"Obviously, to read a really new novel will always hurt, to some extent. There will always be resistance. The same with new pictures, new music" [175] - but who wants art that only makes comfortable and complacent?  

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Future of the Novel' and 'Morality and the Novel', in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 149-155 and 169-176. 

See also the first version of 'Morality and the Novel' which is published as an appendix in the above, pp. 239-245. It ends with the following two lines that essentially summarise Lawrence's thinking on the novel: "The novel is the one perfect medium for revealing to us the changing glimmer of our living relationships. The novel can help us live as no other utterance can help us. It can also pervert us as no other can." [245] I have to admit - as a perverse materialist - the latter notion intrigues and I wish Lawrence had said more about it. 

Readers interested in part two of this post on Lawrence's essays 'Why the Novel Matters' and 'The Novel and the Feelings', should click here. 

Too Much Water-Jelly

Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard is best-known for a six-volume autobiographical novel given the Hitlerean title Min Kamp (2009-11): a series of books in which he exposes in intimate and intricate detail not only every aspect of his own life, but that of his friends and family too.

Several critics refer to him as a Scandinavian Proust. And so it's surely not coincidental that when asked for my opinion of Knausgaard's work, I immediately thought of Lawrence's criticism of the French writer, to whom he had a life-long aversion.     

For Lawrence, Proust was too much water-jelly. I don't quite know what that means, but I don't suppose it's a good thing. He was also guilty - like Knausgaard - of being "absorbedly, childishly interested in phenomenon" - not least of all in his own experience of such:

"'Did I feel a twinge in my little toe, or didn't I?' asks every character in [...] Monsieur Proust: 'Is the odour of my perspiration a blend of frankincense and orange pekoe and boot-blacking, or is it myrrh and bacon-fat and Shetland tweed?'"  

Such writing, spun out for hundreds - if not thousands - of pages, displays an almost insane degree of self-consciousness: Mssrs. Proust and Knausgaard "tear themselves to pieces, strip their smallest emotions to the finest threads" and for Lawrence this is unacceptable:

"One has to be self-conscious at seventeen: still a little self-conscious at twenty-seven; but if we are going it strong at thirty-seven, then it's a sign of arrested development, nothing else. And if it is still continuing at forty-seven, it is obvious senile precocity."

The funny thing is, whilst I agree with Lawrence that infantile and narcissitic self-absorption doesn't necessarily make for great literature, it does give rise to TV comedy gold; for what is Seinfeld other than a brilliant exercise in supersmart postmodern irony and the microphysics of everyday experience?

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'The Future of the Novel', Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 151, 152. 

Note: Lawrence makes his water-jelly remark in a letter to Aldous Huxley written in July 1927. See The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VI, ed. James T. Boulton and Maragaret Boulton, with Gerald M. Lacy, (Cambridge University Press, 1991), letter 4065.  

This post is for Simon Solomon.

The Most Beautiful Streets of Paris (Notes on Surrealist Mannequin Fetish)

André Masson: Mannequin (1938)

Photo by Raoul Ubac (gelatin silver print)

The Cleveland Museum of Art

 

If you love Love, you'll love Surrealism ...

Unfortunately, however, I don't love Love - certainly not as some kind of moral absolute - and so have never really much cared for Surrealism as conceived by André Breton, whom, despite his admirable anti-theism ("Everything that is doddering, squint-eyed, vile, polluted and grotesque is summoned up for me in that one word: God!") remained an idealist and a dogmatist at heart.

However, there are some aspects - the darker, pervier aspects - of Surrealism that do excite my interest. And one of these aspects is the erotic fetishization of mannequins; agalmatophilia being a major component of the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme, held in Paris at the beginning of 1938.

The exhibition, organised by Breton and the poet Paul Éluard, pretty much involved everyone who was anyone in the world of Surrealism at the time, including Duchamp, Dalí, Max Ernst, and Man Ray. It was staged in two main sections and a lobby area, displaying paintings and objects as well as unusually decorated rooms which had been redesigned so as to create what would today be called an immersive environment or experience.

It was the first section - Les plus belles rues de Paris - in which a parade of surrealist mannequins was located, including, most dramatically, the one by André Masson pictured above.

The mannequin, or lay figure, has a long if relatively humble history within the world of art; as a tool it's pretty much on a par with an easel, a brush, or a palette knife, even though it served several purposes; from helping fix perspective and understand the fall of light and shadow, to acting as a support for drapery and costume.

Perhaps, in their loneliest moments, some artists looked affectionately - even longingly - at their mannequins as silent companions. But it was only from the 19th century, however, that the latter became the subject of the painting and, ultimately, an objet d'art in its own right. For the Surrealists, however, the mannequin became something else too: a sex object.

Upon entering the most beautiful streets of Paris, visitors encountered sixteen artificial female figures provocatively designed, dressed and posed by Masson and friends. These kinky mannequins were deliberately intended to disturb and to arouse strange (often illicit) desires.

Duchamp, for example, dressed the upper-half of his model in male clothing, but left the lower-half naked, thereby playing with notions of androgyny and obscene exposure. Max Ernst, meanwhile, had intended to place a glowing red light bulb in the underwear of his 'Black Widow' mannequin (revealed by looking up her conveniently raised skirt), but - ever the prude and policeman - André Breton prevented this. 

It was, as indicated, Masson's mannequin that attracted the greatest attention, however,  with its pretty head squeezed into a bird cage covered with red celluloid fish. The mannequin was gagged with a velvet ribbon and had a pansy placed in its mouth.

What this all means, I'm not entirely certain. But it surely isn't just about female objectification and misogyny masquerading as art, or the pornographic violence inherent in male sexuality. Those critics and commentators who exclusively discuss these works in such reductive terms are mistaken and being intellectually lazy, I think. 

This isn't to say that these things aren't realities or worthy of serious discussion. But simply that there are other considerations here; for example, the way in which objects became central within consumer culture - the mannequin in particular being the very embodiment of urban modernity, as Hans Richter pointed out. Or the manner in which fetishization can elevate an object from base utility, transforming it into something magical and seductive, with its own strange allure.         

For me, as a perverse materialist, mannequins, statues and sex-dolls need to be considered as things in themselves and not as mere substitutes for real women. And the men who choose to erotically privilege such over biological entities are deserving neither of ridicule nor condemnation.

The adult imperative to grow-up, stop touching yourself and get a steady girlfriend (i.e. one who is actual, rather than imaginary; human, rather than synthetic; alive, rather than dead) is one that at least some of the Surrealists dared to challenge and for that I admire and respect them.  

Besides, maybe Proust is right to argue that we are all forever isolate at some level; that reciprocity is an illusion and the objects of our affection - whatever their ontological status - simply allow for the projection of our own ideas, fantasies and feelings ... 


Note: those interested in knowing more about the role and rise of the mannequin in Western art should see Jane Munro, Silent Partners: Artist and Mannequin from Function to Fetish, (Yale University Press, 2014). 

D. H. Lawrence and the Grand Perverts

Drawing of D. H. Lawrence by David Levine (1968)

According to D. H. Lawrence, in a letter written to Aldous Huxley, behind all of those whom he identifies as grand perverts, lies "ineffable conceit" and boundless ego.

Figures including St. Francis, Michelangelo, Goethe, Kant, Rousseau, Byron, Baudelaire, Wilde and Marcel Proust, are all guilty of the same thing; namely, "attempting to intellectualise and so utterly falsify the phallic consciousness", says Lawrence.

By this, he seems to mean they get their sex in their heads and barter away the sheer intensity of lived experience for mere representation. In other words, they fall into idealism, into narcissism and into solipsism; "the utter incapacity for any development of contact with any other human being".

But, in as much as phallic consciousness is also "the basic consciousness, and the thing we mean, in the best sense, by common sense", I suppose he's also taking a dig at all those who dare to think differently from those who subscribe to the morality of custom and popular prejudice, or what Lawrence mistakes for an instinctive-intuitive form of folk wisdom. 

 
And this, when you think about it, is not only surprising, but bitterly disappointing. That Lawrence - of all people - should end up defending doxa (that form of truth and goodness which goes without saying and from which we should never deviate) and condemning a host of other writers, artists, and thinkers as perverts (a term used in an admittedly idiosyncratic manner, but still in an essentially negative and pejorative sense), is, if nothing else, an outrageous example of the pot calling the kettle - and every other kitchen utensil - black.   


See: D. H. Lawrence, Letter 4358, to Aldous Huxley, 27 March 1928, in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VI, ed. James. T. Boulton and Margaret H. Boulton, with Gerald M. Lacy, (Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 342.  

In Praise of Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction

Pulp Fiction, written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, is twenty years old this month having premiered in Cannes, May 1994. 

It's a fabulous film: a cinematic desiring-machine in which everything magically comes together and functions perfectly at the same time, despite being cut across a trio of stories and a non-chronological assemblage of scenes that involve violence, humour, romance, and plenty of what Mia might describe as mindless, boring, getting-to-know-you chit-chat which dazzles and delights in its very banality.

The critic who said, rather sneeringly, that whilst it has several great scenes, it's not a great movie simply fails to understand that whilst Tarantino is concerned with creating a singular work of art, he is not attempting to bring its various elements together so as to form a Whole; the kind of unified work which cries out to have 'The End' stamped upon it and is consummated by this.  

For Tarantino belongs to a super-smart and super-literate generation of film-makers who understand that breaks in the flow of action or even moments in which the narrative stalls leaving viewers confused and bored, are in and of themselves productive and vital processes of becoming and eternal return.

In this respect, Tarantino is the Marcel Proust of Hollywood; one who knows that we live today in the age of partial objects and multiple scenes in which the artist's task is not to produce a finished masterpiece in which heterogeneous bits have their rough edges rounded off so that they might all fit together smoothly. Rather, the task is to think fragmentation, difference, and multiplicity. 

     

Believe in the ruins ...!