Memories of Killing Joke (1984 - 1987)

Killing Joke in their mid-80s splendour

(L-R: Geordie Walker / Paul Raven / Jaz Coleman / Paul Ferguson) 

 

A correspondent writes: 

I got the impression from a recent post [1] that you were something of a Killing Joke fan back in the mid-1980s and I was hoping you might expand on this - did you, for example, ever see them live in this period, when, in my view, they were at their very best? 

 

Well, as a matter of fact, I did see them live on at least three occasions; as attested to by the following entries in the Von Hell Diaries (1980-89) ...

   

 

Sunday 1 Jan 1984

Hammersmith Palais: felt a bit like a hippie event with people sitting on the floor. Having said that, there were some fantastic looking individuals amongst the assembled freaks and morons. The support band were the March Violets: who were shit. An inferior Sisters of Mercy (who are also shit, by the way). Is there something in the water in Leeds?

      There was also a young male stripper prior to Killing Joke making their entrance on to the stage. All the punks began to pogo as if on cue (to the latter, not the former). To be honest, the set got a bit dull half-way through; I suspect that all gigs are at their best in the first ten minutes with the initial release of energy. 

      Mostly, the group played old songs and I was a bit miffed that they didn't play any of my favourite tracks from Fire Dances (although they did do a rousing version of 'The Gathering' as an encore). Jaz Coleman [2] is a captivating performer. The rest of the band are essentially just solid musicians (albeit ones who look the part and know how to create a magnificent noise). 

 

 

Sunday 3 February 1985

 

Off with Andy [3] to see Killing Joke at the Hammersmith Palais once again ...

      Lots of punks out and about on the streets of West London - and lots of police to keep 'em in line. Felt like a mug having to queue up for tickets. Met Kirk [4] inside as arranged, though he fucked off to watch the show from the balcony with some video director friend of his. A couple of support bands: Heist and Pale Fountains; neither of whom were much cop. Killing Joke came on to all the usual fanfare - and Gary Glitter's 'Leader of the Gang'. 

      The set was made up of tracks from the new album - Night Time - and the first two albums (nothing from Revelations or Fire Dances). Became separated from Andy and made my way to the front. Got so hot that I seriously thought I was going to spontaneously combust (though probably sweating too much for that). Brilliant night: almost tempted to describe it as a (neo-pagan) religious experience - song, dance, and Dionysian frenzy. Even Andy enjoyed it (I think).   

 

 

Sunday 28 September 1986

 

Back to the Hammersmith Palais for what seems to be becoming an annual event in the company of Killing Joke. Not a bad show, but nowhere near as good as last year. It also felt like a much shorter set; one which opened with 'Twilight of the Mortal' and closed with 'Wardance'.  

      Most - if not all - of the songs were from the first, fifth and (yet to be released) sixth album. The new tracks sounded great - and Jazz looked amusingly grotesque as he blew kisses to his brothers and sisters - but the performance never really took off. And so, I went home feeling a little disappointed.      

 

 

Finally, it might also interest my correspondent (and other readers) to know that I once met Jaz Coleman, at Abbey Road Studios:

 

 

Friday 7 August 1987

 

Lee Ellen [5] rang this morning: she said if I got over to Virgin by 1 o'clock, then she'd take me with her to the studio where Killing Joke were recording and introduce me to Jaz Coleman (having reassured him that I wasn't some lunatic fan). 

      Jaz was much smaller in person than expected and had strangely feminine hands, with long, slim fingers. He also dressed in a disconcertingly conventional manner. Geordie, the good-looking guitarist, was there, but the rest of the band, apparently, had been fired.

      Jaz played tapes of the new material (just the music - no vocals); sounded good (quasi-symphonic). He said the new album would be called Outside the Gate - which is a great title [6] - and that it would bring the Killing Joke project to perfection. After completing it, he planned to emigrate to New Zealand. 

      Mr. Coleman also took great pride in showing me parts of a book he'd been working on for eight years and we talked, very briefly, about D. H. Lawrence's Apocalypse (which he liked) and Yeats's Vision (which he didn't like). 

      Before leaving, Jaz expressed his desire to converse at greater length one day and I very much look forward to that (should such a day ever in fact arrive) [7].   

 

Notes

 

[1] I'm guessing the post referred to was 'Musical Memories' (30 Aug 2023): click here - although I do mention Jaz Coleman and Killing Joke in several other posts on Torpedo the Ark. 

 

[2] Jaz Coleman; lead singer with post-punk British band Killing Joke.

 

[3] Andy Greenfield; friend and, at this time, a Ph.D student at St Mary's Hospital, Paddington.

 

[4] Kirk Field; friend and, at this time, lead singer and lyricist with the band Delicious Poison. 

 

[5] Lee Ellen Newman; friend and, at this time, Deputy Head of Press at Virgin.  

 

[6] In fact, I thought this was such a great title that I later borrowed it for my Ph.D - although the phrase outside the gate can be found in Nietzsche and D. H. Lawrence, and is also often used in occult circles.

 

[7] It hasn't so far. 

 

 

Although there were bootleg audio recordings made of all three gigs discussed above and these are now available on YouTube, they are of such poor quality that they don't give a fair representation of just how good a live band Killing Joke were (and to diehard fans still are). Readers are therefore invited to click here to watch a performance recorded live in Munich, at the Alalabamahalle, on 25 March 1985, for broadcast on German TV.     

 

Let's Go Outside: Notes on The Horla

Cover of the 1908 edition 

of Guy de Maupassant's Le Horla 

I.

The concept of the Outside is as important to me now as it was twenty-five years ago when I decided to entitle my doctoral project on the work of Nietzsche and Lawrence Outside the Gate, referencing not only one of the little rhyming preludes to The Gay Science, but also the Killing Joke album of that title from 1988. [1]  

I suppose my understanding of the concept has remained fairly consistent over the years; mostly shaped by the occult musings of Richard Somers in Kangaroo (1923) about dark gods and invisible strangers in the night, tapping at the doors of human perception in order to gain admission into our world which we have illuminated with electric light in order to banish the darkness and create the illusion of safety, even though we remain standing on the edge of an invisible abyss. [2] 

That's Foucault I'm paraphrasing and his attempt to think the thought from outside has also been an important influence on my work; a type of thought that stands in contrast to the interiority of most philosophical reflection and the positivity of our scientific knowledge; a type of thought that we find not in mysticism, but in literature - such as in the work of Sade and Hölderlin:

"Can it be said without stretching things that Sade and Hölderlin simultaneously introduced into our thinking, for the coming century, but in some way cryptically, the experience of the outside - the former by laying desire bare in the infinite murmur of discourse, the latter by discovering that the gods had wandered off through a rift in language as it was in the process of losing its bearings?" [3]

I think it probably can - and I think we can say also that Guy de Maupassant is another writer who gives us an experience of the outside in his unsettling short story Le Horla (1886/87) ...

II.

The word Horla is, of course, a neologism coined by Maupassant; an amalgam of the French words hors and là.

Thus, the Horla is literally the one who is out there - always waiting for a chance to enter so that it can steal your milk and water and drive you out of your fucking mind; an alien entity that threatens to overwhelm (and possibly supersede) humanity. Who said the Übermensch couldn't have an extra-terrestrial origin - or come, like a virus, from out of the jungle or Brazilian rainforest?

The 42-year-old victim of the tale has not only been mentally unhinged by his experiences, which started with a strange malaise and a kind of nervous anxiety, but reduced to a pitiful physical state:

"He was extremely thin, cadaverous even, as some madmen look when they are consumed by an obsession. Their bodies seem ravaged by one sick thought which devours them faster than any disease or consumption." [4]

His doctor prescribed cold showers and sedatives and the latter at least helped the man to sleep; unfortunately, sleep turned out to be even more intolerable than the insomnia. He explains why:

"'As soon as my head hit the pillow, my eyes closed and I was out. I mean out completely. I fell into absolute nothingness, a void, a total blank. My self became completely dead until I was suddenly, horribly awoken by the most appalling sensation. An unbearable weight was lying on my chest and another mouth was sucking the life out of me through my own.'" [237]

Obviously, that's not very pleasant and no one would want to experience such a thing. Nor, I suppose, would most people - there are doubtless exceptions - want to see their roses plucked by an invisible hand and sniffed by an invisible nose belonging to an invisible being. I mean, greenfly can be a problem enough as it is.

And to have anyone reading over your shoulder - or absorb your own reflection - is always profoundly irritating, is it not?

The poor man eventually admits himself into the care of an eminent psychiatrist, Dr. Marrande, who overcomes his own professional scepticism and concludes that his patient's experiences with the Horla may well have been all-too-real. He informs his colleagues: "'I cannot tell if this man is mad or whether we both are ... or whether ... man's successor is already in our midst ...'" [244]    

This last idea is one that the man has already developed very eloquently:

"'What is this being, gentlemen?  I believe it is what the earth is waiting for, to supersede humanity, to usurp our throne, to overwhelm and perhaps feed on us as we feed now on cattle and wild boar. We have sensed and dreaded it for centuries. We have heard its approach with terror. Our forefathers have been haunted by the Invisible.
      It has come.'" [243]

Notes

[1] See Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 'Joke, Cunning, and Revenge: A Prelude in Rhymes', number 57. The original German verse, entitled Wählerischer Geschmack, [Fastidious Taste] reads:   

Wenn man frei mich wählen liesse,
Wählt' ich gern ein Plätzchen mir
Mitten drin im Paradiese:
Gerner noch - vor seiner Tür!

Which we might translate as: When given a free choice, / I'd choose myself a place / in the centre of paradise: / Better still - outside the gates!

To play the title track from the Killing Joke album - digitally remastered in 2007 and provided to YouTube by Universal Music Group in 2015 - click here. 

[2] See D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 285:

"The Lord thy God is the invisible stranger at the gate in the night, knocking. He is the mysterious life-suggestion, tapping for admission. And the wondrous Victorian Age managed to fasten the door so tight, and light up the compound so brilliantly with electric light, there was no outside, it was all in. The Unknown became a joke: is still a joke.
      Yet there it is, outside the gate, getting angry."

[3] Michel Foucault, Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside, trans. Brian Massumi, (Zone Books, 1987), p. 17.

[4] Guy de Maupassant, 'The Horla', in A Parisian Affair and Other Stories, trans. Siân Miles, (Penguin Books, 2004), p. 236. Following page references are given directly in the text. Note that this is the first version of the tale, published in 1886, and not the longer, more developed version of 1887. 

Loving the Alien: Reflections on Otherness, Difference and the Joy of Kinship

It's important to note that otherness is not merely an extreme form of difference.

In fact, as Baudrillard makes clear, the latter, difference, is the insidious simulation of otherness and its regulation within Western culture. In other words, we generate difference in order to mask our extermination of otherness and the subordination of its singular principle to the law of the Same via knowledge and representation:

"Our society is entirely dedicated to neutralising otherness, to destroying the other as a natural point of reference within a vast flood of asceptic communication and interaction, of illusory exchange and contact."

Otherness, reduced to mere difference, is made both tolerable and useful; it can be packaged and it can be traded (often under the brand name of diversity).

However, Baudrillard also insists on the indestructability of otherness, which, as the fundamental dynamic of the world, is ultimately greater than reason, morality, or universal humanism. Otherness - like evil - will always return when we least expect it and extract its revenge.   

Now, whilst I still pretty much agree with this analysis - despite the fact it lends itself to romantic primitivism and seems designed to induce guilt - I have to admit I'm no longer as excited by the thought of radical altérité as I once was.

Indeed, at the risk of sounding insular and narcissistic or like a sudden convert to identity politics, it's become something of a relief (and a pleasure) to occasionaly meet a kindred spirit with similar interests and shared values, tastes and experiences; loving the alien is such hard work (the rewards uncertain, the consequences often fatal). 


See: Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil, trans. James Benedict, (Verso Books, 1993). The line quoted is on p. 121.

Pan Comes to Hampstead: Reflections on D. H. Lawrence's 'The Last Laugh'

Pan - by Thalia Took on deviantart.com

Written in 1924, 'The Last Laugh' imagines an appearance of the goat-footed Greek god Pan in Hampstead on a snowy winter's night and the tragic consequences of this. I'm not quite sure what genre it belongs to, but we might best describe it as an example of sardonic paganism; a mocking and malevolent form of queer gothic fiction directed towards a dark god who is always coming, but who never quite arrives or reveals himself.

By setting the story in a leafy north London suburb, Lawrence relates his onto-theological vision to everyday experience, whilst, at the same time, demonstrating how the latter unfolds within a wider, inhuman context that is resistant to any kind of moral-rational codification. He thereby attempts to loosen the aura of necessity surrounding categories of the present and restore a little primordial wonder to NW3.

How successful he is in achieving this, I'll leave for readers to decide; the following is essentially just a summary of the nightmarish and at times surreal tale for those who are unfamiliar with it, rather than a detailed critical analysis (although there is some degree of commentary) ...

Never one to pass up the chance to exploit cliché - if, as here, for comic rather than dramatic effect - Lawrence opens his tale at midnight, the church clock having just struck the magical hour when, for a short period, there's an opening between our electrically-luminous civilization and the world that lies outside the gate; that unexplored realm of dangerous knowledge where things go bump in the night.  

Three figures emerge from a handsome Georgian house: "A girl in a dark blue coat and fur turban, very erect: a fellow with a little dispatch-case, slouching: a thin man with a red beard, bareheaded, peering out of the gateway down the hill that swung in a curve downwards towards London."

The light covering of snow on the ground has created the impression of a new world; but it takes more than a few flakes to really change things, as we'll discover. The man with the beard, Lorenzo, says goodnight to the couple and goes back inside. Now the slouching man in a bowler hat, Mr. Marchbanks, and the erect, sharp girl who was somewhat deaf, Miss James, were all alone in the street; "save for the policeman at the corner."

She looks at her companion: with his "thick black brows sardonically arched, and his rather hooked nose" he seemed to her "like a satanic young priest" - or a "sort of faun on the Cross, with all the malice of the complication". As they walk together, past the trees and the loneliness of the Heath, toward the local Tube station, he hears somebody laughing. Turning on her Marconi made listening machine, Miss James lifts her "deaf nymph's face", but hears nothing until, that is, he suddenly "gave the weirdest, slightly neighing laugh, uncovering his strong, spaced teeth, and arching his black brows, and watching her with queer, gleaming, goat-like eyes".

Marchbanks is - seemingly without his knowing it - possessed by the Pan-spirit. Looking at the girl in an almost diabolical manner, his face gleaming and "wreathed with a startling, peculiar smile", he again gave "the most extraordinary laugh ... like an animal laughing".

This attracts the attention of the tall, clean-shaven young policeman who comes over to see what's occurring. The Pan-possessed man glared at the bobby and asked if he could hear the laughter that came out of him but didn't belong to him. At the sound of this diabolical laughter, "something roused in the blood of the girl and of the policeman" and they edged closer to one another, their bodies touching:

"Having held herself all her life intensely aloof from physical contact, and never having let any man touch her, she now, with a certain nymph-like voluptuousness, allowed the large hand of the young policeman to support her ... And she could feel the presence of the young policeman, through all the thickness of his dark-blue uniform, as something young and alert and bright."

Was that his truncheon, or was he equally happy to be pressing up against her ...?

The religious mania spreads: Miss James thinks she can see someone hiding among the holly bushes. This makes the Pan-possessed man in the bowler hat get even more excited and, "with curious delight", he broke into laughter again, stamping his feet on the snow covered ground, dancing, before running off like a madman.

When he finally comes to a halt, Marchbanks finds himself at the house of a beautiful Jewish woman whom Lawrence encourages us to believe is a prostitute. She has dark hair and large dark eyes. She is standing in her open doorway, believing that somebody knocked (as a working girl, she is, of course, always anticipating a knock at her door).

Asked if it was he who knocked, Marchbanks says no. But then he admits that perhaps it was him after all - but without his knowing it. He asks her if can come in and she agrees. So he enters the house, trailing after the woman "like a hound" that follows a bitch on heat, tail wagging and tongue lolling.

Meanwhile, Miss James and the policeman had arrived on the scene, just in time to see the man in the bowler hat enter the house with the woman in high heels. The girl decides there's no point waiting about and so sets off back down the hill, burning with thoughts of murder and strange superhuman power:

"Her feet felt lighter, her legs felt long and strong. She glanced over her shoulder again. The young policeman was following her, and she laughed to herself. Her limbs felt so lithe and so strong, if she wished she could easily run faster than he. If she wished she could easily kill him, even with her hands.
      So it seemed to her. But why kill him? He was a decent young fellow. She had in front of her eyes the dark face among the holly bushes, with the brilliant, mocking eyes. Her breast felt full of power, and her legs felt long and strong and wild. She was surprised herself at the strong, bright, throbbing sensation beneath her breasts, a sensation of triumph and rosy anger. Her hands felt keen on her wrists. She who had always declared she had not a muscle in her body! Even now, it was not muscle, it was a sort of flame."

It's precisely this kind of writing that Lawrence's critics object to, finding it fatuous and bombastic; a dubious mix of lurid sexual fantasy and sulphurous theology. But for those of us who love him, it's his idiosyncratic narrative style which most appeals. Of course it risks becoming ludicrous, or sometimes losing its way in a semantic fog; for it's not easy to articulate unconscious thoughts and feelings, or describe those things which lie outside conventional language. But that's why speculative and experimental writers and thinkers, like Lawrence, who attempt this should, I think, be praised for their courage.

Anyway, let us return to the story ...

It begins to snow heavily and, despite her deafness, Miss James hears voices all around her. She knows that he's come back, although the god who has returned remains nameless in the tale. The snowstorm intensifies; there are flashes of lightning and she laughs at the young policeman whose state of nervous panic made him look "like a frightened dog that sees something uncanny".

They come to a church with its doors flung wide open, allowing the wind and the voices to enter and whirl about, howling and calling. Now, for the first time, she too hears the "strange, naked sound" of laughter. The policeman was silent and fearful. He stood cowed, "with his tail between his legs, listening to the strange noises in the church".

The demonic forces that have been set loose wreck the interior of the church and amidst all the chaos of snow, wind, and laughter, there is the gay sound of pipes playing and the marvellous scent of almond blossom, like that of a Mediterranean spring.

Finally, the girl and the policeman arrive at her house. He is frightened and cold, so asks if he may come in and warm himself. She agrees, telling him he may make up a fire in the sitting-room, but to kindly not disturb her in her bedroom.

Upon waking the next morning, Miss James, an artist, inspects her own paintings and laughs at their absurd, almost grotesque character. Miraculously, she can now hear the birds singing without the need of her mechanical hearing-device. But the poor policeman, however, is distraught, having become mysteriously lame overnight. Not that the girl seems overly concerned with his condition, preferring to sit down before her window, in the sun, and to reflect on the fact that the world had now been genuinely transformed:

"Suddenly the world had become quite different: as if some skin or integument had broken, as if the old, mouldering London sky had crackled and rolled back, like an old skin, shrivelled, leaving an absolutely new blue heaven."

She also reflects, as Lawrentian heroines are wont to do, on love and sex and decides that she doesn't want either. For modern men, she decides - at least those of her acquaintance - are all a bit doggy and infra dig; either messing around with prostitutes, like Marchbanks, or incapable of acting with any real courage and authority - despite wearing a policeman's uniform - when confronted by life (and proud womanhood) in all its savage splendour.

She vaguely wishes that the laughing god had ravished her as he had ravaged the church, so that she might have emerged "new and tender out of the old, hard skin". But at least she had her hearing restored, so she couldn't complain.

At this point, Marchbanks arrives, as it was his habit "to come and take breakfast with her each morning." He asks her about the young policeman and she interrogates him about the Jewish-looking woman. They are friends, not lovers, she and he, but clearly intimate and concerned with one another's affairs.

When they eventually, decide to check on the young policeman downstairs they find him understandably upset because of his sudden lameness. Slowly pulling off his sock, he reveals "his white left foot curiously clubbed, like the weird paw of some animal". Looking at it makes him cry: "And as he sobbed, the girl heard again the low, exulting laughter."

As if the situation weren't already disturbing enough, Marchbanks now lets out a strange, yelping cry, like a wounded animal: "His white face was drawn, distorted in a curious grin, that was chiefly agony but partly [the] wild recognition ... of a man who realises he had made a final, and this time fatal, fool of himself."

And then, "with a queer shuddering laugh he pitched forward on the carpet and lay writhing for a moment on the floor", before lying completely still "in a weird, distorted position, like a man struck by lightening." Miss James stares at the body in a somewhat nonplussed manner and enquires of the policeman if her friend Mr. Marchbanks is dead. The officer, however, was trembling with such terror and his teeth chattering so violently, that it took him some moments to finally stammer that it certainly looked that way.

A faint smell of almond blossom once more filled the air - sweeter, certainly, than the foul stench of sulphur, but just as infernal in nature it seems ...


See: D. H. Lawrence, 'The Last Laugh', in The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, (Cambridge University Press, 1995). 

Note: thanks to the University of Adelaide, the story can also be read online: click here.

This post is dedicated to Catherine Brown: may she always have the last laugh ...

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What are Poets for ...?

Hölderlin's question - which became Heidegger's question also - wozu Dichter in dürftiger Zeit? remains, for those of us who are interested in such things, a matter of some urgency. 

For in a time of fake news and a general poverty of thinking - these things characterizing our own destitution - clearly we need to acknowledge the importance of those who have the ability to attend closely and carefully to language and its limits (poets) and those who might theorize such a method of thinking in relation to the world we live in today (philosophers).     

Of course, this doesn't mean we need poets to simply set the facts straight, nor signal their moral and political idealism by speaking truth to power - a cant phrase coined by Quakers in the 1950s and adopted ever since by would-be warriors of social justice and so-called activists. If I want to hear opinionated idiots express their beliefs, then I can follow them on Twitter.

Poets must never assert anything as all-knowing subjects. And poetry must free itself of any conceited humanism, becoming Machiavellian in its objective purity; sans mélange, cru, vert, dans toute sa force, dans toute son âpreté, as Nietzsche would say. We don't speak such poetry; it speaks us. And, more, it transforms the world; not through noisy direct action, but through silent deferral that opens up the possibility of Newness.

In other words, poets are not there to serve as commentators on world events - verse is not a type of flowery journalism. Their task, rather, is to provide the preliminary conditions necessary for a demonic Event: something that unfolds in time, but which is nevertheless Unzeitgemäße and Unheimlich in the sense that it comes from Outside; something which radially changes our understanding of reality and allows us to scrape off the viscous covering of doxa protecting categories of the present.

Poets, then, still have a profoundly important role to play in this era of despots and crackpots. But, alas, I sometimes think the real question we should be asking is: Wo sind die heuter Dichter?              

The Becoming-Mellors of Oliver Parkin (Lady Chatterley's Lover)

Richard Madden as Oliver Mellors in the BBC TV adaptation of 

Lady Chatterley's Lover, dir. Jed Mercurio (2015)

Lawrence famously completed three versions of Lady Chatterley's Lover and there are significant differences between the gamekeeper, Parkin, who appears in the first and second versions of the novel, and the gamekeeper Mellors who emerges with swift menace from out of the woods to fuck Connie in the third. 

Indeed, there are also significant variations in character between Parkin the first and Parkin the second (whom I'll refer to here as P1 and P2) and I shall touch on some of these as I trace out the becoming-Mellors of Oliver Parkin in terms of a becoming-woman and becoming-hors classe of the working man. 

There were two major problems presented by the stubborn, semi-literate, and class-bound P1: firstly, he doesn't make a very convincing lover for a woman like Connie; secondly, he doesn't make a very convincing advocate for a writer like Lawrence. Ultimately, both Connie and Lawrence seem frustrated and disappointed with P1, who ends the novel employed in a Sheffield steel mill and as secretary of the local communist party, having deteriorated into someone dreary and political.

And so P1 is replaced by the superior model, P2. Or, at any rate, a less angry and resentful figure; someone more concerned with preserving his own virile integrity, rather than promoting world revolution and killing the upper-classes. P2 wants to put his hands around the body of a woman, not round the throats of the rich. In other words, he's more of a lover than a militant and Lawrence repeatedly emphasizes his sensitivity and difference from other men. 

For her part, Connie actively encourages P2 to develop his touchy-feely side and produce a molecular woman within his molar male subjectivity. It's not that she wants to feminize or emasculate her lover, but she wants him to explore and experience otherness. P2 concedes the importance of this, but he nevertheless speaks of his becoming-woman with intense bitterness on occasion and admits to finding the process terribly humiliating. For, unfortunately, he equates becoming-woman with a loss of manliness. This greatly angers and disappoints Connie - and so, just like P1, he has to go.

His replacement, Oliver Mellors, is an altogether different kettle of fish. Not quite a gentleman, but far more cultured and better educated than either P1 or P2, Mellors is able to move fairly freely through society and, indeed, move outside of class altogether. For Mellors shares Lawrence's view that ultimately it makes no sense to think or act in terms of class when the whole of mankind has today become robot. That is to say, a vast homogeneous body of slaves all integrated into the same system of capital. 

If there remains any theoretical opposition, it is no longer between classes as such, but between the robot mass of humanity and those very rare few who, miraculously, remain on the outside and might potentially sabotage the Machine; outlaws and outcasts such as Mellors who do not fit in (and who do not want to fit in); singular men and women who are not so much déclassé as hors-classe. 

If Mellors remains quite consciously afraid of the Machine that sparkles with malevolence and electric lights, he is nevertheless free from all sense of shame when it comes to sex. Lawrence tells us that Mellors had "No sense of wrong or sin: he was troubled by no conscience in that respect." He accepts that his affair with Connie will bring trouble his way - that the fatality of love invariably involves a new cycle of pain - but any post-coital anxiety is quickly replaced by a defiant joy and the desire to make the world anew, or, at the very least, protect the tenderness of life.  

This, ultimately, is all Mellors can hope to do; keep his peace of soul and abide by the little forked flame fucked into being between himself and Connie, whilst dreaming of a democracy to come in which people sing, dance, and walk naked and light along the Open Road. 

In Mellors, Connie finally finds a man whose child she is happy to bear. That said, she's not prepared to marry him in any hurry having just got rid of one husband ... 

See: D. H. Lawrence, The First and Second Lady Chatterley Novels, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, (Cambridge University Press, 1999) and Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1983).   

See also: Stephen Alexander, Outside the Gate, (Blind Cupid Press, 2010), Part 4, chapter 12, from where the material for this post has been taken in an edited and revised form.