A Brief Note on the Queer Gothic, etc.

Margarita Dadykina: Cathy's Ghost (2019) 

Sculpted figure (58 x 20 cm)

I. 

 

Sometimes, a literary genre and a theoretical framework can become so inextricably entwined that it is difficult to discuss the one without reference to the other. Thus it is, for example, that next month sees the publication of a new collection of essays exploring the gothic from a queer perspective [1].   

 

This notion of the queer gothic was one that I dipped in-and-out of over ten years ago, producing three papers presented at Treadwell's Bookshop; the first on Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891); the second on Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850); and the third on Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847) [2]. 

 

Anyway, in anticipation of the Edinburgh Companion, here are some remarks I made back in 2014 in an attempt to (loosely) define what I understood by gothic queerness (as well as related terms, including the uncanny and the perverse) ... 

 

II. 

 

My concern with the gothic relates to a form of fiction that emerges during the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. I'm not concerned with Germanic tribes migrating about early Europe causing trouble for the Romans, or spiky-forms of medieval architecture (even if the ruins of the latter often provide a setting for many a gothic tale). 

 

Primarily, then, it's to a bizarre, yet, in some ways, rather conventional literary genre I refer when I use the term gothic, whilst happily acknowledging that elements of this have infected many other cultural forms and fields of inquiry, including queer studies. Indeed, such is the level of intimacy between queer studies and gothic studies that many scholars promiscuously drift back and forth from discussing the politics of desire, gender and sexual nonconformity to issues within hauntology and demonology. 

 

Obviously, this is facilitated by the fact that not only do gothic fictions and queer theories have common obsessions, but they often rely on a shared language of transgression to explore ideas. It has even been suggested that the gothic imaginatively enables queer and provides an important historical model of queer politics and thinking [3].

 

We can certainly never overestimate the role that gothic fiction played in the unfolding history of sexuality. For not only does it anticipate the later codification and deployment of sexualities, but it also participates in what Foucault terms the perverse implantation of these new forms of subjectivity [4]. 

 

If it is generally accepted that Horace Walpole's Castle of Ortanto is the first gothic novel - published in 1764 - it is also usually agreed that by the publication of Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer in 1820, the popular craze for gothic fiction had already peaked. 

 

Nevertheless, the genre continued to flourish and mutate at the margins of more respectable literature in the decades that followed. Indeed, many of the works now most commonly associated with it were written in the late-Victorian period: this includes Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). 

 

However, whilst slowly changing in form, content, and setting over the years, many things remained the same within the gothic text to the point of cliché; not least of all the continued narrative fascination for perverse sexual practices and abnormal individuals. In this, it is similar to pornography. Both types of writing share a compulsive and "seemingly inexhaustible ability to return again and again to common tropes and similar situations" [5]. 

 

Indeed, some critics argue that, like pornography, gothic fiction might ultimately serve a conservative function in that it perpetuates stereotypes and thus ultimately re-inscribes the status quo. And it's true that gothic tales often conclude with the moral order restored and reason triumphant (though rarely with a happy ending). However, at the same time, gothic horror seems to possess an uncanny ability to pass "beyond the limits of its own structural 'meaning'" and in this manner transform "the structure of meaning itself" [6]. 

 

And so, whilst gothic literature might often be predictable, it's never boring. It constantly opens up new worlds of knowledge and provides an opportunity to explore the pleasures of socio-erotic transgression; incest, rape, and same-sex desire are all familiar themes within the genre, not to mention paedophilia, necrophilia, and spectrophilia. 

 

Arguably, Sade takes things furthest in his One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom (written in 1785, but not published until 1904), his masterpiece of torture-porn often described as a gothic novel, even though the Divine Marquis himself rejected the term on the grounds that there was nothing supernatural about the horror and sexual violence in his books [7]. 

 

So, to conclude this briefest of brief introductions to the gothic, let me make clear that what excites about the genre is not that it simply causes gender trouble or allows for things to go bump in the night. More than this, it challenges (and in some cases overturns) many of our ideas about what it is to be human - and, indeed, of how to be human. This gives it broader philosophical importance than those who sneer at ghosts and ghouls might appreciate. 

 

And if, at times, gothic fiction fails as art due to its overreliance on sensational and supernatural elements, it nevertheless more often than not succeeds as a form of resistance to conventional thinking and the heteronormative status quo. And it is this, as indicated, which qualifies it as queer [8]. 

 

And what do I mean by queer?  

 

Well, let me stress that I'm certainly not using the term queer or the concept of queerness as synonymous with either homosexuality or gayness [9]. Indeed, I vigorously object to those who conflate ideas in this manner and use queer as an overarching and unifying label for what are distinct forms of practice, behaviour and identity (often with nothing queer about them). 

 

For me, the appeal of queerness is twofold: 

 

Firstly, it is not a positivity or subject position. It's a transpositional negativity - i.e., a mobile and ambiguous concept that resists any fixed categorical definition and remains permanently at odds with all forms of legitimacy and identity. Queer, ultimately, doesn't refer to anyone or anything; it's a form of non-being "utterly inimical to [...] authentic existence, ontological or natural" [10]. 

 

Secondly, it subsumes and dissolves all forms of dualism; not only sexual and gender oppositions, but also that model of thinking which would keep life and death as absolutely distinct and separate categories. Ultimately, it's this thanatological project that I most wish to further, even if that involves unfolding it within a spooky sexual context. This project, which is both morbid and material, picks up on Nietzsche's contention that life isn't categorically different from or opposed to death; that being alive is, in fact, simply a rare and unusually complex way of being dead [11].

 

Death, we might say, is the material kingdom of the actual and vital signs, although real, are but an epiphenomenal effect of matter. Or, to put it another way, life is a momentary stabilization of solar energy that upon death is released from its molar entrapment back into unformed chaos and an infinite process of molecular disintegration [12]. This becomes important when arguing that there can't really be any serious philosophical objections to romancing corpses or getting it on with ghosts - even whilst there may well be legitimate moral, social, and cultural reservations. 

 

Moving on, we must of course mention the perverse ... 

 

The perverse might be thought of as a more aggressive and transgressive form of queerness; one that takes us to the very heart of a game involving desire, deviation, and damnation. Historically, perversion is tied to political insurrection and involves straying or being diverted from a path, destiny, or objective which is understood as natural or right. To those who live their whole lives on the straight and narrow it is obviously an abhorrent concept. But, personally, I think it’s a good thing to stray off the path; just as it's preferable to fall into sin, rather than fall into line [13]. 

 

Figures like Heathcliff or Dorian Gray are irresistibly drawn towards the perverse. Which is to say they are intellectually predisposed towards evil and that which is unnatural or anti-natural. The former, for example, knowingly engages in practices such as necrophilia and spectrophilia. And there's the rub; Heathcliff is fully aware of what he's doing and what he wants to do. It's the perversion of free will that leads to transgression, says Augustine. And it is transgression that brings death into the world. 

 

But it is also that which brings understanding and gives pleasure and we should never forget or underestimate the pleasure of perversion. As Freud was led to conclude, it's the perversions alone that ultimately make happy [14].

 

Finally, there's one more term which we simply must mention; one made famous by Freud in his 1919 essay Das Unheimliche ...

 

The uncanny is, arguably, also a form of queerness. But in designating the sinister, gruesome, and lugubrious it moves beyond sexual strangeness and gender troubling. The uncanny is more likely to give us the creeps than excite our desire. Wuthering Heights is, for me at least, the greatest of all uncanny novels; familiar, yet alien, seductive, yet repulsive; a book in which even the mortal status of the lovers is never fixed.  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Queer Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, ed. Ardel Haefele-Thomas, (Edinburgh University Press, 2023). 

      There seems to be some interesting material in this 368 page book divided into three main sections - Queer Times, Queer Monsters, and Queer Forms - although, having said that, it does seem slightly old hat (though maybe I'm just miffed that I wasn't invited to contribute to the book). 

 

[2] 'Elements of Gothic Queerness in The Picture of Dorian Gray' was presented at Treadwell's on 18 May, 2011. This was followed by 'The Scarlet Letter: An Earthly Story with a Hellish Meaning' on 4 July, 2013 (advertised as 'A Slice of American Gothic for American Independence Day'). 

      As for the paper entitled 'Spectrophilia and Other Queer Goings On in the Tale of Wuthering Heights', this was due to be presented at Treadwell's on 7 October, 2014, but unfortunately had to be cancelled due to unforeseen (and unrecalled) circumstances. 

      Together, these essays formed part of a wider project to do with perverse materialism.

 

[3] See George E. Haggerty, Queer Gothic, (University of Illinois Press, 2006).

 

[4] See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: 1: The Will to Knowledge, trans. Robert Hurley, (Penguin Books, 1998). 

 

[5] George E. Haggerty, Queer Gothic, p. 9. 

 

[6] Ibid., p. 10. 

 

[7] Sade did admire at least one gothic novel, namely Matthew Gregory’s The Monk: A Romance (1796), a work in which every attempt was made to outrage readers in as many explicit, violent, and perverse ways as possible. 

 

[8] I don't want to overstate the case or make too wide a claim here. Haggerty is right to carefully resist the temptation to uncritically celebrate the gothic and its literary-cultural significance. As he points out, the genre was always somewhat marginal and semi-legitimate and never succeeded in challenging the dominant mainstream fiction of the age, which remained rigidly straight and heteronormative. 

      Also, if it provided alternative (queerer) ways to think through the politics of desire, it was ultimately powerless to prevent the "imposition of sexological thinking at the end of the nineteenth century". At best, the gothic continued to cast a shadow across the bright new world of scientia sexualis. See Queer Gothic, p. 19. 

 

[9] Elisa Glick is a Marxist critic guilty of this; see p. 11 of her book Materializing Queer Desire (SUNY Press, 2009), where she rather weakly explains her reasons for wanting to employ (and I would say misuse) the term queer synonymously with gay, lesbian, and homosexual. 

 

[10] Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence, (Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 140. 

      I’m tempted, in fact, to drop the term queer altogether here and use instead a notion of the uncanny, which is closely related but without the sexual overtones. 

 

[11] See Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, (Vintage Books, 1974), III. 109, p. 168. 

 

[12] Those who attended Treadwell's regularly in 2006 will perhaps remember my six week course on thanatology in which these ideas were discussed in detail and at length. The work can be found in The Treadwell’s Papers, Vol. II, (Blind Cupid Press, 2010). 

 

[13] Even such a trite and common expression as the straight and narrow - thought of as the one true path into the future - reveals something crucial about Western metaphysical thinking; note the linkage of truth with linearity and teleology. People think they are strolling along this path naturally or by choice, but in fact they march along it by arrangement and coercion. 

 

[14] Freud made the attainment of (non-functional, non-reproductive) pleasure central to his theory of perversion and stressed that it is the perversions that make happy; their repression which causes suffering and neuroses. Freud also understands that this is why many normal individuals strongly dislike queers who dare to manifest and flaunt their perversity; not only do they find them monstrous and threatening, but also seductive and this places them in the uncomfortable position of having to overcome a secret envy of those who enjoy illicit pleasures. 

      Note too how Freud compares the perversions to the grotesque demons used to illustrate the temptation of the saints. This is precisely how such images and descriptions continue to function within gothic literature; i.e. as uncanny manifestations and queer embodiments of the perverse; a threatening excess of difference and deformity. See his Three Essays on the Theory of Human Sexuality, (1905). 

 

A Bastille Day Post (2023)

Man Ray: Portrait imaginaire de D.A.F. de Sade (1938) 

Oil on canvas with painted wood panel (61.6 × 46.7 cm) 

 

It's grey, wet and windy here in London this 14 juillet - La fête nationale française, or Bastille Day, as it is more commonly known in the English-speaking world where it is sometimes marked, but not particularly celebrated. 

For me, the storming of the Bastille on this date in 1789 - a key event of the French Revolution - primarily interests because that is the state prison where the libertine philosopher Sade wrote his most notorious work, Les 120 Journées de Sodome (1785), having being confined there the previous year for crimes of a sexual and blasphemous nature (despite never having been convicted of such crimes in a court of law).   

 

Famously, Sade wrote the manuscript in a miniscule hand on a long roll of paper that he kept hidden in a cell wall. Unfortunately, he was unable to finish his magnum opus before being transferred - against his will and naked as a worm - to the insane asylum at Charenton. 

 

This was on 4 July 1789; forty-eight hours after he reportedly incited unrest outside the prison by shouting to the crowds gathered there: They are murdering the prisoners! and ten days before the Bastille was stormed by the revolutionary mob looking for stores of gunpowder [1].

 

To his despair, Sade (mistakenly) believed that his manuscript was destroyed during the events of July 14; it had actually been discovered and preserved two days earlier. 

 

After his release from Charenton in 1790, Sade served in the new revolutionary government, although this was probably more from expediency rather than conviction and he was despised by many of his more radical (and bloodthirsty) new cohorts, not merely because of his aristocratic background, but due (ironically) to his modération [2]. 

 

Anyway, may I take this opportunity to wish all French readers - and all Sadeans - Joyeux quatorze juillet!

 

Notes

 

[1] It might be noted that by this date the Bastille was nearly empty, housing only seven prisoners. It was mostly kept open - despite the high financial cost of maintaining a garrisoned medieval fortress - to serve as a symbol of royal power.

 

[2] Readers interested in Sade's role in the French Revolution and the question of his politics might like to listen to a paper by the Michigan State University history professor Ronen Steinberg entitled 'Sex and the Bastille: the Marquis de Sade and the French Revolution' (2016): click here. 

 

 

   

Mourning Post: with Reference to Roland Barthes's Journal de Deuil

A favourite photo of my mother

(taken in 1947, aged 21)

 

 

"Does being able to live without someone you loved 

mean you loved her less than you thought ...?" 

 

 

I.

 

There are some books we love immediately upon first reading; and there are other books which it takes time (and several readings) to fall in love with. 

 

Then there are books like Roland Barthes's Journal de deuil (2009) [a] which one only begins to appreciate once one has lived through a similar experience as the author - in this case, the death of a mother.

 

 

II.

 

The day after his mother's death, in October 1977, Barthes began assembling notes written on quartered slips of paper in which he reflected on his sadness, sense of loss, and the fact that modern society seems to leave no time or space in which to express one's grief; as soon as someone dies, there's a frenzied attempt to move on and the bereaved are encouraged to get over it, as if they have a minor illness [b]. 

 

During the following two years, Barthes wrote over 300 of these notes, the contents of which eventually being published in the form of a mourning diary. 

 

I do not here wish to present an overview of these fragments of text, but simply comment on those ideas which most resonate with me at this time and express my agreement with Barthes that the individual should insist on their right to mourn; for it is also the right to "the loving relation it implies" [55]. 

 

In a nutshell, dear reader, don't let your suffering be stolen from you ... [c]

 

Note: the titles supplied below are mine.

 

 

III.

 

On the Corpse Bride

 

There was, I would suggest, something of the same high degree of intimacy between Roland Barthes and his mother as between D. H. Lawrence and his. 

 

Thus, for example, the opening note of the former's Mourning Diary which suggests that the first night grieving for one's mother is comparable in terms of its passion and emotional intensity to a wedding night, reminds me of the opening verse from one of the latter's early poems:

"My love looks like a girl tonight,

      But she is old.

The plaits that lie along her pillow

      Are not gold,

But threaded with filigree silver,

      And uncanny cold."

 

The same poem concludes: 

"Nay, but she sleeps like a bride, and dreams her dreams 

      Of perfect things.

She lies at last, the darling, in the shape of her dream,

      And her dead mouth sings ..." [d]

 

 

On the Maternal Body

 

This first note is followed by one written the next day in which Barthes, who was homosexual, counters the accusation that he has never known a woman's body: "I have known the body of my mother, sick and then dying." [4]    

 

Me too: and it's only now that I stop to think of the strangeness of this fact; that one was fated to care for the body one was born of when that body approached its end and that from out of the death of this maternal body one is somehow issued anew. 

 

To quote from Lawrence once more: "My little love, my dearest / Twice you have issued me / Once from your womb, sweet mother / Once from your soul ..." [e]

 

 

On Posthumous Desire

 

The fifth fragment dated 29 October is one of the most astonishing: it exactly summarises my position and how I feel. No commentary is required, it just needs quoting in full:

"The desires I had before her death (while she was sick) can no longer be fulfilled, for that would mean it is her death that allows me to fulfill them - her death might be a liberation in some sense with regard to my desires. But her death has changed me, I no longer desire what I used to desire. I must wait - supposing that such a thing could happen - for a new desire to form, a desire following her death." [18] [f]

 

 

On Turning Life (and Death) into Literature 

 

I understand why Barthes didn't want to discuss his mother's life, let alone write about her death, for fear of "making literature out of it" [22]. 

 

However, as a writer, he just couldn't help himself - and neither can I. 

 

For like Barthes, I recognise that literature originates with a death - the death of a porcupine, for example, or perhaps even the death of the author - and that Walter Benjamin was right to say that what we ultimately seek in art is the knowledge of an event that is denied to us in reality. [g]   

 

 

On Last Words

 

Many people about to die do so in silence, particularly if, like my mother, Alzheimer's robbed them of their ability to communicate years earlier. 

 

And I'm not sure there's anything further to say to the dying beyond a certain point; kind gestures - such as a smile, a kiss, a squeeze of the hand - seem to matter more at the very end. 

 

Having said that, the romantic notion of last words - one which "falsely promises a final burst of lucidity and meaning before a person passes" [h] remains ingrained within our culture and even Barthes finds himself often thinking of his mother's words spoken "in the breath of her agony" [40].

 

Similarly, I find the final two words spoken to me by my mother constantly recurring; the first a word of greeting and the second one of recognition: Hello Stephen. The memory of these words will, I trust, always move me. [i]    

 

 

On Courage

 

Barthes is right: mourning doesn't require courage; the time for courage is when your mother is sick and requires care; when you witness her suffering, her sadness, her confusion and have to conceal your tears (or, as in my case, control your anger and frustration). 

 

 

On Absence [I]

 

Barthes is struck by the painful nature of absence; that it is not so much a lack, as a wound. And struck also by the fact that, with his mother gone, he no longer has anyone to announce his arrival to (or greet him) when he gets home. 

 

Again, I understand this perfectly. But, luckily, I have Cat for company and whilst cats may or may not understand what it is to mourn, they certainly know when we are sad, depressed, or anxious and act accordingly (i.e., attempt to comfort us).   

 

 

On Absence [II] 

 

Everytime I go upstairs and look into my mother's room, "there unexpectedly rises within me, like a bursting bubble: the realisation that she no longer exists, she no longer exists ..." [78] 

 

And I realise also that the dead are all equally dead and gone; it doesn't matter if they died two months ago, like my mother, 36 years ago like Barthes's maman, or two millennia ago like that Siberian princess preserved in ice. 

 

Death is a flat and timeless ontological plane upon which nothing matters and nothing changes and to know this - to know that the dead are eternally and absolutely dead - is also to know that we too "will die forever and completely" [119] [j].    

 

 

On the Truth of Mourning

 

The fragment dated 28 May, 1978, is another that is worth quoting in full:   

 

"The truth about mourning is quite simple: now that  maman is dead, I am faced with death (nothing any longer separates me from it except time)."

Unfortunately, being 60 - the same age as Barthes when he wrote this - there's not even a great deal of time any longer separating me from death (although, hopefully, I'll not be hit by a laundry van in the near future) [k].  

 

But this tragic realisation enables one to understand why it was Nietzsche taught his readers not to pray, but to bless ...

 

 

On Some Sunny Day

 

In a very brief hand-scribbled note left for me and my sister, my mother expressed her hope that, one day, we'd meet again. I don't think that's very likely (or even very desirable; the thought of personal immortality is one I find laughable and abhorrent) [l].

 

But, like Marcel Proust, Barthes is devastated by the fact his mother has died and echoes the author of À la recherche du temps perdu when he writes: "If I were sure of meeting Maman again, I'd die right away." [157]

 

 

On Acedia

 

As we know, the ancient Greeks had a word for everything, including that state of listless indifference in which the heart slowly contracts and hardens: ἀκηδία - or, as we write in Latinised modern English, acedia (or accidie). 

 

It's a concept that Christian theologians borrowed and developed in moral terms; and it's a concept that many writers in the 20th century seemed to have a penchant for, though tending to discuss it as a psychological (or existential) phenomenon. Aldous Huxley, for example, wrote an essay on the subject and concluded that it was one of the main afflictions of the modern age [m].

 

Walter Benjamin also gave acedia an important place within his literary criticism, describing it as an indolence of the heart [n]; whilst Barthes, writing in his Mourning Diary, notes that whilst he believed that following his mother's death there would be a liberation in kindness, what has actually happened is he finds himself "unable to invest lovingly in any other being" [118].

 

In a later fragment, he defines acedia as a form of desolating egoism and writes:

 

"Horrible figure of mourning: acedia, hard-heartedness: irritability, impotence to love. Anguished because I don't know how to restore generosity to my life - or love." [178]            

 

Again, it pains to me say, but I know exactly what he means ...  

Maintaining the Quotidian

 

When my mother died, I thought I'd want to flee the house; to get out as often as possible and meet as many people as possible; to get back into the world. 

 

But, two months on, I've been nowhere and seen no one and I think Barthes provides a clue as to why this is; one tries to continue living - for a while at least - as if she were still here and according not so much to her values, but her needs. 

 

By maintaining the household order (or what Barthes terms the domestic quotidian) - cooking, cleaning, shopping, etc. - one shares in the activities that shaped her life and it's a way of remembering and silently conversing with her [o].

Anti-Mourning

 

Q: What is "the furthest from, the most antipathetic to" [196] mourning in gentle silence? 

 

A: Reading Le Monde, "in its acid and well-informed tactics" [196], says Barthes, writing in 1978; checking social media, in its malevolent toxicity, say I, here in 2023.   

 

In Memory / Filial Piety

 

Like Sade, Barthes has no concern for posterity; no desire to be read and remembered after he's dead; no wish for a monument. He is, he says, perfectly content to vanish completely [p].

 

However, Barthes cannot accept that this should be the case for his mother; "perhaps because she has not written and her memory depends entirely on me" [234]. 

That's why I'm writing this post (and those related to it); I would also like my mother's kindness and modesty to be recorded. As I said at her funeral [q], if I don't speak up for her, no one will (certainly not my sister). 

 

But as Barthes's translator Richard Howard notes, perhaps the ultimate task of every son is neither to bury nor sing the praises his mother, but to show a little gratitude; "to exalt her exceptional contribution to his own happiness" [260].   

 

 

Notes

 

[a] The English edition of this work by Barthes was translated by Richard Howard as Mourning Diary and published by Hill and Wang in 2010. All page numbers in the post refer to this edition. 

      Arguably, it might have been better to have come up with an alternative title. For in a note of November 30, 1977, Barthes instructs: "Don't say mourning. It's too psychoanalytic. I'm not mourning. I'm suffering." For Barthes, this Proustian notion of suffering is that which remains (ever present) when emotivity passes. See pp. 73 and 103-04.   

 

[b] Barthes writes in the note dated 20 July, 1978, on p. 163, that he finds the idea of taking an anti-depressant drug to help him overcome his grief shameful; as if suffering were a disease, rather than something essential. 

 

[c] In a fragment on p. 71 of the Mourning Diary, dated 29 November, 1977, Barthes writes: "I can't endure seeing my suffering being reduced - being generalized - (à la Kierkegaard): it's as if it were being stolen from me." 

      However, he later realises the importance of transforming suffering from a static stage to a fluid state. See the fragment dated 13 June, 1978, on p. 142.

 

[d] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Bride', in The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 65-66.  

[e] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Virgin Mother', in The Poems, pp. 66.

 

[f] See also the fragment dated 16 November, 1977 on p. 53: "Sometimes roused by desires [...] but they're desires of before - somehow anachronistic; they come from another shore, another country, the country of before."

 

[g] Later in his Mourning Diary, Barthes will admit that writing is his salvation and that depression is when "in the depths of despair, I cannot manage to save myself by my attachment to writing". 

      See the fragments dated 21 November, 1977 on pp. 59 and 62. See also the fragment on p. 105 dated 23 March 1978 in which Barthes speaks of integrating his suffering with his writing in his book on photography (Camera Lucida). And finally, see the notes dated 17 and 18 of January, 1979, on pp. 224-225, in which Barthes admits that since his mother's death he has no desire to construct anything new except in writing.    

 

[h] Michael Erard, 'What People Actually Say Before They Die', The Atlantic (16 Jan 2019): click here.

[i] Having said that, Barthes acknowledges (with horror) the possibility that the memory of a mother's last words will one day fail to move (make cry or make smile). See the fragment dated 19 November, 1977 on p. 57. 

[j] Having said that, in a thanatological fragment published back in September 2014, I wrote:

      "We shouldn't reify death, nor confuse the fact of our own individual death with non-being. At most, death might be seen as a temporary pause or refreshment before the inevitable return to what Nick Land describes as the compulsive dissipation of life." 

      

[k] On 25 February 1980, Barthes was knocked down by the driver of a laundry van while walking home through the streets of Paris. He died from his injuries one month later, aged 64. 

 

[l] I'm a little more sympathetic to the idea of metempsychosis (i.e., the transmigration of souls) and like the idea of atoms being endlessly recycled and assembled into new bodies and objects of all kinds. Seeing the swallows flying "through the summer evening air" whilst on holiday in Morocco, Barthes tells himself: "how barbarous not to believe in souls - in the immortality of souls!" See the fragment dated 13 July, 1978 on p. 159. 

 

[m] See Huxley's essay 'Accidie' in On the Margin (George H. Doran Company, 1923), pp. 25-31. Readers can also click here to read the essay online in the Project Gutenberg ebook.   

[n] See Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne, (Verso, 2003).

 

[o] See the fragments dated 18 August, 1978 on pp. 190 and 192. 

[p] In his will, the Marquis de Sade expressed the wish that his grave be strewn with acorns, so that it would be eventually covered with oak trees. In this way, "any trace of my grave will disappear from the face of the earth, just as I trust the memory of me will fade from the minds of everyone, save for the few who in their goodness have loved me to the last". 

      See the English translation (from which I quote) by R. J. Dent in Philosophy Now, Issue 143 (April/May 2021): click here to read online. 

[q] See the post entitled 'From a Baby in a Basket ...' (27 Feb 2023) which reproduces in full the few lines spoken at my mother's funeral: click here. 

"And so, my love, my mother,

I shall always be true to you."

No Hugging, No Learning (Torpedo the Ark 10th Anniversary Post)

 

 

I. 

 

This post - post number 1977 - marks the 10th anniversary of Torpedo the Ark [1] and, fear not, there's no Elvis, Beatles or Rolling Stones putting in an appearance here [2]. Instead, I'd like to offer a few remarks on one of Larry David's guiding principles: No hugging, no learning ...

 

Over the past decade, this motto - pinned to the wall above my desk - is something I've always endeavoured to live up to whilst assembling posts for Torpedo the Ark: for if no hugging, no learning worked for Seinfeld during 180 episodes spread over nine seasons, why shouldn't it also help ensure that this blog maintains an edge ...?

 

 

II. 

 

To me, the first half of this phrase means avoiding the fall into lazy and cynical sentimentality in which one attempts to manipulate the stereotyped set of ideas and feelings which make us monstrous rather than human - or, rather, monstrously all too human [3].

 

Like D. H. Lawrence, I suspect that most expressions of emotion are counterfeit and more often than not betray our social conditioning and idealism, rather than arising spontaneously from the body:

 

"Today, many people live and die without having had any real feelings - though they have had a 'rich emotional life' apparently, having showed strong mental feeling. But it is all counterfeit." [4]

 

Today, when someone starts twittering on about their feelings or the importance of emotional growth, you should tell them to shut the fuck up. 

 

Likewise, when some idiot comes in for a hug - never a good idea, as this scene from Curb Your Enthusiasm makes clear [5] - best to push them away or, at the very least, step back and politely decline their embrace.     

 

 

III.

 

As for the second part of the Davidian phrase - no learning - I don't think this means stay stupid; rather, just as the first part of the phrase challenges the idea of emotional growth, this challenges the idea of moral progress; i.e., the belief that man is advancing as a species; becoming ever more enlightened and ever closer to reaching the Promised Land. 

 

At any rate, Torpedo the Ark has never attempted to give moral lessons, pass judgements, or improve its readership. There's plenty to think about and, hopefully, amuse on the blog - and lots of little images to look at - but, to paraphrase something Malcolm McLaren once told an infuriated tutor at art school: There's nothing to learn! [6]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Torpedo the Ark was set up by Maria Thanassa, who has continued to oversee the technical aspects and daily management of the blog. The first post - Reflections on the Loss of UR6 - was published on 24 November 2012. 

      I am sometimes accused of being an anti-dentite on the basis of this poem, but, actually, that couldn't be further from the truth. If anything, having an attractive young female dentist veers one in the direction of odontophilia (a fetish that includes a surprisingly wide-range of passions).

      And so, whilst my tastes are not as singular as those of Sadean libertine Boniface, I cannot deny a certain frisson of excitement everytime one is in the chair, mouth wide open, and submitting to an intimate oral examination or violent surgical procedure. Hopefully, I expressed an element of this perverse eroticism in this post, based on an actual incident, but inspired by a reading of Georges Bataille.       

[2] Punk rockers will know that I'm alluding to the track '1977' by the Clash, which featured as the B-side to their first single, 'White Riot', released on CBS Records in March 1977. Click here to play.  

 

[3] Punk rockers will also know I'm thinking here of the Dead Kennedys track 'Your Emotions', found on their debut studio album, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, (Cherry Red Records, 1980). Click here to play and listen out for the marvellous line: "Your scars only show when someone talks to you."

 

[4] See D. H. Lawrence's late essay, A Propos of "Lady Chatterley's Lover", which can be found in Lady Chatterley's Lover and A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 311.

 

[5] This is a scene from the second episode of season four of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Entitled 'Vehicular Fellatio', it first aired on HBO in September 2009 and was written by Larry David, dir. by Alec Berg. The irritating character of Dean Weinstock is played by Wayne Federman. There are, as one might imagine, several other scenes in Curb that concern the consequences of inappropriate hugging; see, for example, this scene in episode 8 of season 6 ('The N-Word') and this scene in episode 10 of season 11 ('The Mormon Advantage'). 

 

[6] According to fellow art student Fred Vermorel, when a tutor snapped at Malcolm: 'You think you know everything', he was left speechless when the latter replied: 'There's nothing to know!' Arguably, this is going further even than Socrates. See Paul Gorman, The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren, (Constable, 2020), p. 53, where I read of this incident.  

      

On the Politics of Disgust

Disgust makes her revulsion clear in Disney Pixar's 

Inside Out (dir. Pete Docter, 2015)

 

'Nothing is more important than for us to recognise that we are bound

and sworn to what provokes our most intense disgust.' - Georges Bataille

 

 

I. 

 

Arguably, disgust - as an expression of taste - betrays a high level of sensitivity and culture; an African dung beetle, for example, may be able to navigate by the stars, but it knows nothing of disgust. 

 

But then neither does a Sadean libertine, who has vanquished all emotional responses that might be regarded as all too human and all forms of pleasure rooted in the senses over which they lack control. Sade terms this form of asceticism or Stoic indifference to the natural passions, apathy and it is central to his philosophy in the bedroom. 

 

However, most of us are not Sadean libertines and do not posit apathy as an erotic ideal, nor strive to overcome our disgust for shit-eating (coprophagy) and corpse-fucking (necrophilia), for example, as signs of our superiority. We might even view apathy, in the end, as the way in which a madman seeks to justify his lack of remorse or compassion for others.    

 

 

II. 

 

Disgust, as Tina Kendall rightly says, "has long been a subject of anxious speculation" [1]. 

 

And as she also reminds us: 

 

"Recently, there has been a revitalisation of debates pertaining to disgust from across a range of disciplines, as witnessed by publications in the fields of philosophical aesthetics, phenomenology, cognitive and moral psychology, literary theory, and feminist and queer theory." [2] 

 

Continuing: 

 

"What unites much of this interdisciplinary work on disgust is a shared concern with thinking through the relations between bodily sensation, emotion, and cognition [...] and with probing the political, moral, and ethical implications that arise from those particular conditions of embodiment." [3]

 

That's true, I think, though I also agree with Martha Nussbaum, who suggests that what is most interesting about disgust is that it often acts as an intensifier of other negative emotions, such as anger or hatred. 

 

But what is the origin of disgust: is it rooted in evolutionary biology, or is it primarily an emotional phenomenon - with an added moral dimension - that is determined culturally?

 

Darwin famously wrote on the subject and seemed to believe that disgust is an evolved response to potential dangers, such as rotten meat, or body products that can spread disease (such as excrement). This identifies disgust - mostly associated with our sense of smell and taste - as an important defensive mechanism, protecting us from pathogens, etc. It's not, therefore, the wholly irrational reaction that some people imagine.   

 

But, of course, we can experience disgust for things we don't like the look or feel of too - and some people with particularly sensitive ears can even find certain noises disgusting (readers can provide their own examples, many of which will doubtless involve bodily functions).

 

There's extensive research evidence that women experience greater levels of disgust - including self-disgust and sexual disgust - than men. Again, there may well be physiological reasons for this, but it's surely something that has been socially reinforced.

There's also evidence that forms of visceral prejudice, such as racism and homophobia, are rooted in disgust and not just in ignorance, as many idealists like to believe - which is why education isn't the solution they hope it will be. In some cases, disgust for others is so overwhelming that it prevents individuals from self-examination or ever learning to love their neighbour. 

 

Ultimately, the greater one's level of disgust, the greater one's level of hate for those who inspire such and the greater one's desire to do away with them; we recall once more the case of Gregor Samsa. Fascism is the collective political expression of disgust which denies not only the rights of other citizens, but their humanity, and this results (ironically) in the most disgusting acts and scenes imaginable. 

 

And yet, disgust may also be the strong vital sensation that Kant said it was; one that prevents us from committing acts of atrocity or vile crimes. 

 

Besides, as Walter Benjamin concluded, no one is ever completely free from disgust; not even the Sadean libertine, who never really overcomes their instinct of revulsion, merely redirects it, so that, for example, they feel disgust for conventional forms of love and moral behaviour. 

 

In sum, and to quote Tina Kendall once more, disgust's complex and "distinctly polymorphic nature" [4] as both a visceral reflex and a leared emotional response, makes it a "uniquely privileged concept" [5] and critical tool for thinking through a number of important issues. 

 

The philosopher, therefore, can never just say eww! and look away from that which (rightly perhaps) revolts the non-philosopher living in Tunbridge Wells.    

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Tina Kendall, 'Tarrying with Disgust', an Introduction to Volume 15, Issue 2 of the journal Film-Philosophy, ed. Tina Kendall, (Edinburgh University Press, Oct 2011), p. 1. 

      Click here to read Kendall's Introduction; or click here to read the entire issue on academia.edu 

[2] Ibid.  

[3-5] Ibid., p. 2. 

The Obscene Beyond: It is So Lovely Within the Crack

I love you delicious rottenness ...

 

I. 

 

As might be imagined, the concept of the obscene within philosophy is rather more complex than that found within the moral and legal debates surrounding pornography and censorship which simply define the obscene as that which offends or outrages public decency, often involving the graphic representation of sexual acts or bodily organs.   

 

For me, the obscene is more interestingly thought of as the violent intrusion of the material world into an ideal culture which likes to keep hidden or deny all that it cannot assimilate into its all too human system of transcendental meaning based upon the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. 

 

This might include what is commonly thought of as inappropriate content, but, ultimately, I would suggest, there is nothing more obscene than death and it's knowledge of death - not sex - that makes moralists and idealists of all stripes turn away in horror and disgust, even if - as in Sade and Bataille, for example - death is eroticised (and love morbidified). 

 

This notion of the obscene as that which is sooner or later exposed like the inside of a bursten fig, is magnificently illustrated in the poetry of D. H. Lawrence ...

 

 

II.

 

In the first of his fruit series - 'Pomegranate' - Lawrence insists on the importance of the fissure. 

 

For it is via the painful looking split in the skin of the pomegranate that we catch a glimpse of what he terms the obscene beyond - a troubling ontological notion underlying his philosophy which shapes his ideas about the reality of love, life, death, and how we might know and represent these things. 

 

Of course, many people prefer to look at the smooth unbroken skin of the fruit and are disturbed by the fissure and all that lies rosy and glittering within: 

 

Do you mean to tell me there should be no fissure?

No glittering, compact drops of dawn? 

Do you mean it is wrong, the gold-filmed skin, integument, shown ruptured?

For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken.

It is so lovely, dawn-kaeidoscope within the crack. [1]

 

 

In the poem 'Fig', meanwhile, the narrator explicitly - some would say obscenely - relates this scarlet fissure in the skin of a ripe piece of fruit to the female sex organ, to which one might put their mouth and enjoy the moistness and strange smelling sap that curdles milk.    

But what might start out as an ode to cunnilingus, quickly becomes a warning:

That's how the fig dies, showing her crimson through the purple slit

Like a wound, the exposure of her secret, on the open day.

Like a prostitute, the bursten fig, making a show of her secret.

That's how women die too. [2]

In other words, the ideal fantasy of womanhood is dispelled once their obscenity or delicious rottenness bursts forth and we realise - as Bataille wrote - that the vagina is synonymous with a freshly dug grave. 

 

That's a hellish thing to recognise. But it's also a liberating thought, providing one can find the courage to think it through and accept that "wonderful are the hellish experiences" [3]. 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'Pomegranate', in The Poems, Vol. I., ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 231. 

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'Fig', in The Poems, Vol. I., pp. 232-35. Lines quoted are on p. 234.

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'Medlars and Sorb-Apples', in The Poems, Vol. I., pp. 235-37. Line quoted is on p. 234.      

La Chronique Scandaleuse 1: The Case of Claude Le Petit

 

 

The French phrase chronique scandaleuse was one that captured my youthful imagination back in the Blind Cupid days and whilst plans for a little magazine with that title came to nothing, I did once incorporate it as a slogan into a hand-painted shirt design. 

 

I seem to recall that I picked up the phrase from Claude Le Petit; a debauched and free-thinking libertine poet and lawyer who, in 1661, published a satirical work entitled Le Bordel des Muses which included a collection of verse called La Chronique scandaleuse, ou Paris ridicule. The work not only maliciously mocked the rich and powerful, but blasphemed against the Virgin Mary whilst honouring a notorious sodomite (Jacques Chausson) for his strength of character. 

 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this did not go down well: Le Petit was arrested, tried, and condemned to death for gravely insulting God and the French State. He was burned at the stake, in Paris, on the 1st of September 1662, aged 23, having first had the offending hand with which he wrote the text cut off by the public executioner. 

 

Although his work had been seized from the printers and destroyed, a copy survived and his writings were republished posthumously. It was a good while, however, before they became widely available; for as a result of this affair, all works regarded as being of an obscene, immoral, and politically subversive nature were suppressed in France until well into the 19th-century.  

 

It was said by those who sat in judgement upon him that his was a fine but wasted talent - and who knows, perhaps they were right. Though what else is there to do with talent - with life - but to waste it? As Bataille says: "Our only real pleasure is to squander our resources to no purpose, just as if a wound were bleeding away inside us ..."*

 

Anyway, here's one of Le Petit's poems - Sonnet Foutatif - which anticipates not only Sade and Bataille, but Serge Gainsbourg ...

 

 

Foutre du cul, foutre du con, 

Foutre du Ciel et de la Terre, 

Foutre du diable et du tonnerre, 

Et du Louvre et de Montfaucon. 

 

Foutre du temple et du balcon, 

Foutre de la paix et de la guerre, 

Foutre du feu, foutre du verre, 

Et de l'eau et de l'Hélicon. 

 

Foutre des valets et des maistres, 

Foutre des moines et des prestres, 

Foutre du foutre et du fouteur.

 

Foutre de tout le monde ensemble, 

Foutre du livre et du lecteur, 

Foutre du sonnet, que t'en semble?

 

 

I'm not even going to try to translate the above. But readers who feel tempted to do so are welcome to give it a go ...  

* Georges Bataille, Eroticism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood, (City Lights, 1986), p. 170. 

 

To read the second entry in this short history of scandal - on Denise Poncher and her vision of Death - click here.  

Fowl, Strange, and Unnatural: The Case of Rehan and Haleema Baig

 

 

The recently reported case of Rehan Baig - a 37 year-old man from Bradford, West Yorkshire, involving the filmed sexual assault of some pet chickens - has, rightly, provoked many outraged (though often punning) headlines; for despite the perversely comic nature of the act, there's nothing very funny about animal cruelty and the zoosadistic pleasure that it provides.    

 

Having said that, there's nothing particularly novel either about a man having penetrative sex with a chicken; avisodomy is long established and widely practiced within human culture, not least of all because of the unique opportunity afforded to enjoy a post-coital roast dinner [1].

 

And I'm not just referring to ancient cultures where many people farmed the land and lived in close proximity with animals; several Parisian brothels in the modern period would offer clients the use of a chicken or turkey as a kind of erotic appetiser or feathered fluffer. The trick was to ring the bird's neck, or cut its throat, just prior to ejaculation, so that the spasms of the dying fowl intensified one's own orgasm [2]. 

 

Anyway, returning to the case of Mr Baig ... 

 

Having been found guilty of unspeakable acts of cruelty and sexual depravity, he was sentenced to three years in prison and banned from owning any animals in the future. His wife, Haleema, who pleaded guilty to three counts of aiding and abetting, avoided prison - receiving a six-month suspended sentence - because the judge believed she may have acted under coercion (though he noted she appeared to gain some pleasure from the acts recorded on video involving not only the brown and white chickens, but an unidentified dog).  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Due to the anatomical disparity between man and fowl, the latter will invariably be killed during intercourse, whereas larger animals with compatible sex organs - such as sheep and goats - can be penetrated without too great a risk of injury or death. It's somewhat surprising, therefore, that in many ancient cultures acts of bestiality committed with poultry were regarded as less serious than those carried out with mammals (presumably because birds rank lower in the order of life).

 

[2] I seem to remember that Sade describes the procedure in loving detail somewhere or other in his writings. And American pornographer Larry Flynt confesses in his autobiography to having sex with one of his grandmother's hens, aged nine, before wringing its neck and throwing the body into the local creek. Many years later, he would build a three-foot replica of the bird with whom he lost his virginity in memorial. See An Unseemly Man, (Bloomsbury Publishing, 1997).  

 

   

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.