And Then This: More Random Thoughts on Samuel Beckett

Stephen Alexander: God Save Samuel Beckett (2024) 

(à la Jamie Reid) [1]

 

 

There are many reasons other than his dark humour and finely crafted words to admire the esteemed Irish writer Samuel Beckett; not least of all the fact that he was stylish, courageous, and free from the spirit of revenge ... 

 

 

Samuel Beckett: Style Icon 

 

With the possible exception of Albert Camus, Sam Beckett was the best-looking of all those twentieth-century intellectuals troubled by questions of nihilism, absurdism, and existentialism. 

 

Already as a sports mad teen, he'd adopted the classic sharp haircut that he was to favour for the rest of his life. I'm not quite sure whether we should refer to his Barnet as coiffed or quiffed, but, either way, it's inspired generations of stylish young men ever since (although as one commentator notes, a thick head of hair is a prerequisite if you really want to achieve the look) [2].  

 

And then there are the glasses: once Beckett found a small, round, steel-rimmed pair of specs that perfectly suited his face and signalled his fierce intelligence, he again stuck with them for life.

 

As for his clothes, Beckett initially liked to wear suits that appeared just a little too tight and ill-fitting, but he eventually settled for a look featuring a simple pair of slacks worn with a turtleneck sweater and a sports jacket. Beckett also had a penchant for raincoats, French berets, and soft suede shoes: "In fact, such was the staying power of this particular ensemble that to this day Beckett continues to be cited as a paragon of uniform dressing." [3]        

 

Ultimately, despite claiming he had no interest in fashion, Beckett was something of a dandy who understood the importance of style and who blurred the line between smart casual and shabby chic. He may have picked up some pieces from the local charity shop, but he matched them with expensive silk scarves and famously liked to be seen carrying a Gucci shoulder bag in the 1970s. 

 

 

Samuel Becket: Hero of the Resistance

 

Unlike that cowardly toad Jean-Paul Sartre - who basically sat out the German Occupation of France during the Second World War and whose role in La Résistance was, at best, what might be described as modest rather than fully engaged - Beckett, a resident of Paris for most of his adult life, was an active member of the Resistance (working as a courier) and he was awarded the Croix de Guerre in March 1945 by General Charles de Gaulle [4]. 

 

It has to be remembered that, as an Irishman, Beckett could have easily returned to Dublin from Paris when the Germans invaded in 1941. But he didn't. He stayed. And he joined the Resistance, frequently risking arrest by the Gestapo. After his unit was betrayed in August 1942, Beckett was forced to flee to the South of France, seeking refuge in the small village of Rousillion. Here, he worked on a farm, but still took part in operations against the German forces when called upon to do so.

 

After the Germans were defeated and France was liberated, Beckett returned to Paris. After the War, he rarely spoke of his experiences and would often downplay his role in the Resistance (again, cf. Sartre), describing his activities as no more than boy scout stuff. 

 

Samuel Beckett: Overcoming the Spirit of Revenge

 

In January 1938, Beckett was almost fatally stabbed when he refused the services of a notorious Parisian pimp who went by the (slightly ironic) name of Prudent. 

 

After recovering in a private hospital room - generously paid for by his former mentor James Joyce - Beckett attended a preliminary court hearing at which he asked his assailant why he had not only pulled a knife on him, but plunged the blade into his chest. 

 

Prudent replied: Je ne sais pas, Monsieur. Je m'excuse. 

 

Taken aback somewhat by Prudent's honesty in admitting that he lacked any explanation for his actions (i.e., any logical motive) - coupled to his well-mannered request for forgiveness - Beckett decided he no longer wished to press charges and the case was dropped. 

This story is open to a very obvious Christian interpretation. Only Beckett, of course, was not a Christian. In fact, according to one commentator: "Christianity is Samuel Beckett's fundamental antagonist: his thought, his aesthetics and his writing cannot be fully understood in isolation from his lifelong struggle with it." [5]

 

Beckett was thus a writer working within the shadow of self-proclaimed anti-Christ Friedrich Nietzsche, rather than the shadow of the Cross (although I'm sure that there are significant differences to be drawn between the two authors) [6].

 

And so I think the tale of Beckett and Prudent the Pimp might best be understood with reference to Nietzsche; a philosopher who wishes to have done with judgement and conceives of revenge as something that should only be found in the souls of venomous spiders, not men. Only a human tarantula who lives in a cave of lies and deals in hidden revengefulness mistakes the latter for justice. 

"'That man may be freed from the bonds of revenge: that is the bridge to my highest hope,'" says Zarathustra [7]. 

 

And it seems that Beckett shares his arachnophobia and mistrusts all in whom the urge to punish is strong.   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] This portrait - done in the style of Jamie Reid's 'God Save ...' series of posters for The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (dir. Julien Temple and starring the Sex Pistols, 1980), features a teenaged Sam Beckett in 1920, looking like a punky link between Arthur Rimbaud and Shane MacGowan.

 

[2] See Jane Hardy, 'Stand aside, David Beckham - now Samuel Beckett is turning heads', in the Belfast Telegraph (6 July, 2012): click here. 

 

[3] Theo Coetzer, 'Bibliophile Style: Samuel Beckett', on the menswear blog Habilitate (17 April, 2023): click here. 

      As Coetzer rightly goes on to point out: "The ostensible disregard for appearance implied by wearing the same thing day after day can arguably be rooted in precisely the opposite impulse - a careful consideration, in other words, of what one looks like and the desire to control the messaging of one's clothing."

 

[4] The Croix de Guerre is a French military decoration, created in 1915, and commonly awarded to  foreign fighters allied to France who distinguish themselves by acts of heroism. Like Beckett, the American-born singer, dancer, and actress Josephine Baker was also awarded this medal for her wartime efforts with the Resistance - not something that Simone de Beauvoir could ever boast of. 

      Baker and Beckett were also both awared the Médaille de la Résistance by the French government for their efforts in fighting the German occupation. 

 

[5] Erik Tonning, 'Samuel Beckett, Modernism and Christianity', chapter in Modernism and Christianity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 104-123. Lines quoted are on p. 104. 

 

[6] Richard Marshall explores the complexity of the Nietzsche-Beckett relationship in his essay 'Beckett the Nietzschean Hedonist' in 3:AM Magazine (21 April 2013): click here to read online. 

 

[7] Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin Books, 1969), p. 123.    

 

Click here to read what is effectively part one of this post: And Then What: Random Thoughts on Samuel Beckett (09 October 2024).  

Reflections on Vita Contemplativa by Byung-Chul Han (Part One)

(Polity Press, 2024)

 

 

I. 

 

The subtitle of Byung-Chul Han's new little book is In Praise of Inactivity [a]. But it's important to understand at the outset that he uses this term in a positive philosophical sense. That is to say, he conceives of inactivity as a negative potentiality; the ability to do nothing.

 

But Han is not merely encouraging us to be idle in the laid-back and whimsical manner of Tom Hodgkinson - although, to be fair to the latter, I feel I was perhaps a little harsh on him back in 2012 [b]. Nor is he encouraging his readers to learn the art of immaculate perception so they can look at life without desire [c].     

 

He wants us, rather, to engage in a form of deep attentiveness that is central to the vita contemplativa [d]. To perform less: to consume less: to be still and silent a little more, so as to radiate in our own starry singularity and not merely keep rolling on and on like a stone subject to mechanical laws.    

 

 

II. 

 

In a line that would delight the witches of Treadwell's, Han writes: "Inactivity has a logic of its own, its own language, temporality, architecture, magnificence - even its own magic." [1] 

 

Inactivity, he goes on to say, is an intensity - an unseen power that is crucial to Dasein's existence (not a weakness, an absence, a lack, or a defect). And philosophical reflection - or thought in the Lawrentian sense of the term [e] - is born of this intensity. 

 

Only machines don't know how to rest or reflect; artificial intelligence is born of activity, not inactivity. They - the machines - may be very good at organising and coordinating chaos, but they don't know how to give style, which is why they may drive society forward, but they'll never give birth to culture:

 

"History and culture are not congruent. Culture is formed by diversion, excess and detour; it is not produced by following the path that leads straight to the goal. The essence at the core of culture is ornamentation. Culture sits beyond functionality and usefulness. The ornamental dimension, emancipated from any goal or use, is how life insists that it is more than survival. Life receives its divine radiance from that absolute decoration that does not adorn anything." [3]   

 

 

III.

 

Han is basically reviving an old set of terms and values, such as festivity and luxury, whilst rejecting those terms and values that define our present (utilitarian) world order: efficiency and functionality. Freedom from purpose and usefulness, he says, is "the essential core of inactivity" [5] and the key to human happiness. 

 

Which is fine - this remains an important teaching - but it's nothing new. And one can't help wondering if Han doesn't spend far more of his time endlessly re-reading those authors whom he privileges rather than contemplating life (and the natural world) directly. 

 

For whilst there are plenty of DWEMs in his book, there are very few live animals; even the hesitant wing of the butterfly is a reference to an elegy by Schiller (via Walter Benjamin) rather than to an actual insect and I miss the sound of bees buzzing and birds calling in his writing. 

 

Unfortunately, when you enter the space of thinking opened up by Han, it feels like one is entering a magnificent library or a cathedral rather than an "unexplored realm of dangerous knowledge" [f], or a jungle with "tigers and palm trees and rattle snakes" [g] and all the other wonders hatched by a hot sun. 

 

I think it was Sartre who once said of Bataille: 'He tells us to laugh, but he does not make us laugh.' And I kind of feel the same about Han: he tells us to dance and to play, but he fails to make us feel either lightfooted or lighthearted. Likewise, when he gathers us round the camp fire - a medium of inactivity - we are not warmed.   

 

 

IV.

 

I suppose the problem I have is that Han is just a bit too much of an ascetic philosopher. 

 

Thus, whilst he wants to revive the notion of the festival, he insists nevertheless that festivals must be "free from the needs of mere life" [7] and tries to convince us that it's better to fast than to feast; that the former is noble in character and helps initiate us into the secrets of food.  

 

What is inactivity, he suggests, other than ultimately a form of spiritual fasting. 

 

I have to admit, I don't like this idea of going to bed hungry and going to bed early; nor, for that matter, do I want to go to bed cold, as I've done that too often in the past and it doesn't make life any more vital or radiant. 

 

Nor does it make it easier to sleep - the latter being  a medium of truth for Han (as for Proust and Freud): "Sleep reveals a true internal world that lies behind the things of the external world, which are mere semblance. The dreamer delves into the deeper layers of being." [9] [h]

 

Again, that's not the kind of idea - or language - that I'm comfortable with. I simply do not believe that sleep and dreams are "privileged places for truth" [9] - even though I love a good nap as much as anyone.    

 

However, I'm a bit more sympathetic to the idea that boredom - as that state of inactivity which allows for mental relaxation - is something we should cherish (even whilst coming from a punk background in which being bored was just about the worst thing that could befall one). 

 

I understand now that boredom isn't half as boring as the distractions invented to relieve us from boredom and that the less able we are to endure boredom, so our ability to enjoy life's real pleasures or do great things decreases. As Han says: 

 

"The seed of the new is not the determination to act but the unconscious event. When we lose the capacity to experience boredom, we also lose access to the activities that rest on it." [17]

 

And so it is that now I admire those who, like David Puddy, can just patiently sit still during a flight without having to flick through a magazine, watch a film, or start a conversation [i].    

 

 

V. 

 

Blanchot, Han reminds us, places inactivity in close relation to death: as the utmost intensification of the latter. 

 

And so too does he suggest that art also requires an "intensive relation to death" [12]. It is death, for example - not the will to knowledge or self-expression - that opens up the space of literature and writers can only write thanks to their inactivity and their proximity to death.

 

And the best writers, as Roland Barthes recognised, are those who dare to be idle and do not continually affirm their authorship of a text, or constantly promote themselves: "They give up their names and become no one. Nameless and intentionless, they succumb to what happens." [15] 

 

In an interview for Le Monde in 1979, Barthes marvelled at the simplicity of a Zen poem which perfectly expresses what it is he dreams about:

 

Sitting peacefully doing nothing

Springtime is coming

and the grass grows all by itself [j]   

 

It's a nice thought that inactivity has a "de-subjectifying, de-individualizing, even disarming effect" [15]. That, in other words, it allows us to disappear and leave nothing behind us but a smile like the Cheshire Cat ...

 

 

John Tenniel's illustration of the Cheshire Cat beginning to 

vanish in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland (1865)

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Byung-Chul Han, Vita Contemplativa: In Praise of Inactivity, trans. Daniel Steuer, (Polity Press, 2024). The book was originally published as Vita Contemplativa: Oder von der Untatigkeit (Ullstein Verlag, 2022). All page numbers given in the post refer to the English edition. 

 

[b] See the post entitled 'How to be an Idle Cunt' (29 Dec 2012): click here. 

 

[c] See the post entitled 'The Voyeur' (29 April 2013): click here. 

 

[d] This Latin phrase - popular with Augustine and the scholastics - comes from the ancient Greek concept of βίος θεωρητικός formulated by Aristotle and later developed by the Stoics. In English it is usually translated simply as contemplative life.   

 

[e] "Thought is the welling up of unknown life into consciousness [...] a man in his wholeness wholly attending" and not the "jiggling and twisting of already existent ideas". See D. H. Lawrence, 'Thought', The Poems, Vol. 1, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 580-81. 

      I discuss Lawrence's philosophy of mind with reference to this poem in a post published on 4 Dec 2015: click here.  

 

[f] Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Penguin Books, 1990), p. 53.

 

[g] Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Penguin Books, 1969), p. 165.  

 

[h] Click here for a post on sleep and dreams published on 6 Feb 2015. 

 

[i] David Puddy is a fictional character on the situation comedy Seinfeld, played by Patrick Warburton. He is the on-and-off boyfriend of the character Elaine Benes. Click here to watch the scene I'm thinking of in the season 9 episode 'The Butter Shave' (dir. Andy Ackerman, 1997).  

 

[j] See Roland Barthes, 'Dare to Be Lazy', in The Grain of the Voice, trans. Linda Coverdale, (University of California Press, 1991), p. 341. Han quotes this haiku on p. 15 of Vita Contemplativa.  

 

 

Further reflections on Byung-Chul Han's Vita Contemplativa can be found in part two of this post - click here and part three: click here.   

The Rich Can Buy Soap: Why I Find Shepard Fairey's Hope Poster Problematic

Shepard Fairey in front of his portrait of Barack Obama before its installation 

at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. in 2009

Photograph: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images

 

 

I. 

 

Someone has emailed:

 

'I was intrigued - and, if I'm honest, slightly irritated - by the fact that after praising Shepard Fairey's Hope poster as a work of art and defending his right to have transformed the original photo by Mannie Garcia on the grounds of fair use, you couldn't resist adding a line in a footnote to the effect that, actually, you didn't much care for the piece after all; branding it as an all-too-blatant example of political propaganda. Would you care to elaborate on this remark?' [1]

Well, although I hadn't planned on saying anything further about Fairey's work, I've decided to take this opportunity to do so, since I was asked in a such a sincere spirit of both intrigue and irritation ...

 

 

II. 

 

Just to be clear from the outset: I'm not suggesting that art should (or could) be pure in some manner or untainted by politics. And lots of great works are explicitly political; Picasso's Guernica (1937) would be an obvious example of such.

 

But I do feel a little uncomfortable when an artist produces a work that is endorsed by a presidential campaign team and which is, in effect, a piece of political advertising that doesn't only promote Barack Obama's candidacy, but attempts to fob us off with the untenable - and treacherous - ideal of hope.

 

One is reminded of something that D. H. Lawrence wrote about advertisements; no matter how clever, how beautiful, or how seductive their use of language and imagery, one can never quite forget they disguise a sharp hook with which to catch the consumer [2]. 

 

I'm not denying, therefore, that Fairey's Obama portrait is a genuine work of art that brings forth a number of powerful reactions, but I don't like feeling that I'm having my reactions pre-determined and manipulated - particularly when Fairey is doing so in a manner that suggests he is attempting to spiritualise politics and sell us not only his version of the American Dream, but inspire mankind with a promise of redemption.  

 

My main problem is not with the instantly iconic image of Barack Obama, heavily stylised by Fairey and displaying many features that belong to his distinctive aesthetic, it's with the slogan HOPE plastered across the bottom in capital letters [3]. 

 

As a pessimistic philosopher, I obviously have problems with this sentimental and morally optimistic ideal of hope. I never expect (nor particularly desire) positive outcomes; I certainly don't pray for such. 

 

Like Schopenhauer, I regard hope as a pernicious delusion or a folly of the heart that undermines the individual's appreciation of probability; like Nietzsche, I suspect the gods enjoy the spectacle of human suffering and so provide hope as a way of prolonging such (it is arguably, therefore, the most evil of all evils). 

I'm glad to see that, by 2015, Shepard Fairey was expressing his disappointment with President Obama and his administration, having lost a good deal of hope as evidence of increased military drone use and domestic surveillance came to light [4].

 

But one wonders just what Fairey - a self-confessed sex pistol - was thinking of back in 2008 by pledging his support of Obama so openly and promoting a theological virtue; had he forgotten the great slogan of punk: No Future ...? [5] 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The writer is referring to a post of 4 Feb 2022 entitled 'Notes on Fair Use With Reference to the Case of Shepard Fairey and the Obama Hope Poster' - click here.

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'Pornography and Obscenity', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 238. I comment further on the poetry and politics of modern advertising with reference to this essay by Lawrence (as well as Roland Barthes's take on the subject in Mythologies) in a post that can be accessed by clicking here. 

[3] Originally, the poster featured the word progress, but the Obama campaign team expressed concerns about the connotations of this idea and advised that the key terms that they were promoting were hope and change.  

[4] See the interview with Fairey by Matt Patches in Esquire (May 28, 2015): click here. 

 

[5] No Future was the original title of 'God Save the Queen', by the Sex Pistols, and the phrase is repeated throughout the song. One might also remind Fairey of something that Sartre once said: 'Voting is not a political act. It's an act of resignation.' Thus one should never vote for anyone or anything, only against.   

Notes on the Youthful Writings of Gilles Deleuze 1: Description of Women

 Young man, there's no need to feel down

 

 

I.

 

The first text that French philosopher Gilles Deleuze ever published, in the autumn of 1945, when still a 20-year old student, was a contribution towards a gendered philosophy of the other entitled 'Description of Women'.

 

Although he later renounced the piece - as he did other writings prior to 1953 - it has now been re-published with the agreement of his wife and daughter, in order to counter the unauthorised (and sometimes error-strewn) versions already in circulation. An English translation, by Ames Hodges, can be found in Letters and Other Texts, the third and final volume of posthumous pieces, edited by David Lapoujade, (Semiotext(e), 2020). Page numbers given below refer to this edition.            

 

 

II.

 

This amusing (sometimes confusing) work opens in agreement with Sartre that Heidegger was mistaken to conceive of Dasein in asexual terms; a philosophical insufficiency that makes the youthful Deleuze uneasy. Why that should be, I don't know. But one imagines that Deleuze, like many young Frenchmen, found it difficult not to view everything through the prism of sex, including human reality or being, and would naturally, therefore, think it utterly monstrous to conceive of an asexual world. 

 

Deleuze wants gender to be marked in both the lover and the beloved and for it to be essentially distinct in each; not for the sexual identity of the latter to merely be a pale reflection of that of the former: "Phenomenology must be of the loved one" [254], which I think means that the loved one should not be thought of as merely another type of subject, but philosophically acknowledged in their otherness as those who express the possibility of an entirely different and external world.         

 

And how does this relate to the question of women? Well, according to Deleuze, "the description of women cannot be made without reference to the male-Other" [255]. But this male-Other is absolutely not to be confused with that seductive being who wears makeup and torments tender young men, such as himself: 

 

"You could search in vain for the expression of an absent external world on the face of this woman. In her, all is presence. The woman expresses no possible world; or rather the possible that she expresses is not an external world, it is herself." [255]

 

At best, this self-expressive woman acts as an intermediary beween "the pure object that expresses nothing and the male-Other, who expresses something other than himself, an external world" [255].     

 

I'm not sure if I entirely understand what Deleuze is saying here - and, to be honest, I kind of like the sound of the woman with her enormous presence who possibilizes herself in the "overflowing triumph of flesh" [256]. I think she secretly thrills Deleuze as well; why else would he quote from Jean Giono's Le Chant du monde about the blood-tingling appeal of a female body? 

 

Deleuze might pretend that what really turns him on is the paradoxical fact that "the more she plunges into materiality" [256], the more this woman becomes immaterial and is returned to the being she is and its possibility of expression, but I suspect he's still thinking of her softness of belly and what Giono describes as her two big headlights when lying in bed at night. Such a woman may have no external world to offer, but she's desirable and provides a "compressed internalized world" [257] to find pleasure within. 

 

Unlike the young Deleuze, I don't see it as particularly dangerous or unspeakably painful for a woman to lose her being and become "no more than a belly, an overflowing materiality" [257]. For if, on the one hand, becoming-object allows for the "prodigious sexual success of women" [257], on the other, it allows them to gain their revenge upon the male subject (with whom friendship remains impossible).  

 

 

III.

 

So far, then, Deleuze has establised an opposition between woman and the male-Other. Only the latter  expresses a possible external world; to try and force the former into such a role compromises her internal life, with the latter understood as a union of contraries  - material and immaterial aspects - that combine together mysteriously to give woman her essential identity. 

 

Only a sadist would take pleasure in threatening this living interiority; the sort of man who imposes a mask of suffering on the woman, or who tells her: "Sit down and crease your forehead" [259].* 

 

Or the sort of man, perhaps, who would deny a girl her makeup kit (Deleuze is adamant that the supernatural art of cosmetics is crucial in the formation of a woman's essence); or her expensive shoes (Deleuze describes the ankles as an important site of womanly consciousness and so naturally favours high-heels).   

 

At this point, I'm sure there will be readers who will think I'm making this up - but I'm not; I'm doing my best to stick closely to the text. Deleuze really does, for example, write of eyeliner, lipstick, and nail varnish; he also discusses the problem of eyebrows (to pluck or not to pluck), beauty spots (of which we should be wary), and his penchant for freckles (a symbol of the interior): 

 

"I do not understand at all why women are ashamed of [...] freckles and combat them with makeup [...] It can only be explained by women being mistaken as to their own essence." [261]

 

This last line is, I would imagine, for many women - not just those who identify as feminists - particularly galling, coming as it does from a precocious young philosopher who concludes that secretive, lying women - whose place "is not outside, it is in the house" [259] - basically need a man to reveal their truth - and a lover to caress them:

 

"And if the lover can approach the essence of woman through the caress as act, it is because the woman herself is being as caress [...] The woman therefore needs a lover. A lover who caresses her, and that is all. [...] Her being only exists in the form of an act performed by another." [264-65]  

 

One wonders what Simone made of this if she read it ...?   

 

 

Notes

 

*I feel that some explanation is needed for this otherwise cryptic line: according to Deleuze, a wrinkle on the forehead of the male-Other is a good thing. For the forehead of the male-Other is made for long, well-defined lines, signifying the attempt to see and understand better. But a wrinkle on a woman's forehead - "Oh! [...] one could cry, it is ridiculous and touching" [259]. 

 

Part 2 of this series on Deleuze's youthful writings - From Christ to the Bourgeoisie - can be read by clicking here.

 

  

French Maid

F. H. Clough: The French Maid (1950s)

Grammatically speaking, I'm not sure if the word French, as used within English, is a modifier, qualifier, or both. Either way, it often also serves as an erotic intensifier, as illustrated by the term French maid, for example ...

I.

Maids - including comely barmaids - have a long-established position within the pornographic imagination for complex reasons involving power and pleasure on the one hand, fantasy and fetish on the other. Indeed, I've written on the psychosexual aspects of this topic in an earlier post and readers who are interested can click here.

In this post, however, I'm specifically interested in the figure of the French maid as trope, stereotype, and soubrette; i.e., as an attractive young woman wearing a skimpy stylised outfit based on the typical uniforms worn in 19th century France. 

This costume - which is instantly recognisable - usually consists of a black dress with white trim and a full skirt cut well above the knee; a frilly white half-apron; a white lace headpiece; sheer black or fishnet stockings (preferably seamed); and high-heeled shoes. Optional accessories include a garter, a choker necklace, and a feather duster.   

Of course, maids - even in France - have never attempted to keep house dressed like this, but that's so beside the point that anyone who stops to raise this as an issue is an idiot. The pornographic imagination is not overly concerned with historical accuracy and the coquettish French maid ooh-la-la-ing her way through life belongs more to the world of burlesque and Benny Hill than domestic service. 

II.

Having said that, the French maid is not simply found in comedy and can sometimes move from sauciness to sadomasochism - as in Jean Genet's play Les Bonnes (1947), loosely based on the shocking story of sisters Christine and Léa Papin, who brutally murdered their employer and her daughter in Le Mans, in 1933.*

In the play, the two French maids - Solange et Claire - construct elaborate sadomasochistic rituals when their mistress (Madame) is away. Their dark role-playing games always involve the murder of the latter. However, their concern with process rather than goal, means they always fail to ceremoniously kill Madame, thereby forever postponing the climax of their fantasy and delaying their own ultimate pleasure. 

The play was performed in London at the Greenwich Theatre in 1973, with Vivien Merchant as Madame, Glenda Jackson as Solange and Susannah York as Claire. This production was filmed in 1974, directed by Christopher Miles, who implemented many of Genet's theatrical devices for the movie.**

Promo photo of Susannah York and 

Glenda Jackson in The Maids (1975)

Notes

* This murder exerted a strange fascination over French intellectuals - including Genet, Sartre and Lacan - many of whom sought to analyse it as a symbolic form of class struggle. The case has since inspired many artworks and further critical studies. 

** The film, made for the American Film Theatre, was released in the US in April 1975, and shown at Cannes the following month (although not entered in the main competition). To watch the trailer, click here.

For a sister post to this one on French kissing, click here. 

For a sister post on French knickers, click here. 

Carry On Caligula

Caligula (12-41 CE): 
Roman Emperor (37-41 CE) 

I have existed from the dawn of the world and I shall exist until the last star falls from the night sky. 

Although I have taken the form of a man, I am no man and every man and therefore a god.

I. Ecce Homo  

Although as a rule I'm not interested in sadistic megalomaniacs, I'm prepared to make an exception in the case of the Roman Emperor Gaius Julius Caesar - or, as he is more commonly known, Caligula (a childhood nickname meaning little boots that, not unreasonably, he came to hate).

For not only was he young, good looking and charismatic, but he also had a sense of humour that revealed a profound sense of the Absurd and it's this, arguably, along with his showmanship, that makes him feel more of a contemporary than his illustrious forebears, or even his nephew Nero.  

There are very few surviving firsthand accounts about Caligula's short period of rule - which, if we are to believe a recent documentary, consisted of 1400 Days of Terror* - so we don't really know if he was the cruel tyrant and sexually perverse sociopath he's portrayed in the 1934 novel I, Claudius, written by Robert Graves. 

But even if he was, I don't believe he was a madman, so much as a nihilist and ironist (though maybe not of the kind compatible with liberalism that Richard Rorty favours). The above quotation - which could've very easily come from Nietzsche's late work - is a good example of this. I don't think Caligula meant this to be taken literally; that he was self-creating and, indeed, self-mocking, rather than self-delusional.**         


II. Camus's Caligula  

It was undoubtedly the absurdist aspect of his reign and his character that attracted the French philosopher and writer Albert Camus to Caligula and, in 1944, he published a four-act play about him in which, following the death of his beloved sister Drusilla, the young emperor attempts to bring the impossible into the realm of the likely and thereby shatter the complacency of Roman life.

For Caligula - as imagined by Camus - the only point or pleasure of having power is to transgress all rational limits that would restrict its exercise and make the heavens themselves up for grabs (the play opens with Caligula desiring to take possession of the moon).   

The play was part of what Camus called his Cycle of the Absurd, which also included the novel L’Étranger (1942) and the long essay Le Mythe de Sisyphe (1942). All three works expand upon the idea that man's existence is meaningless because his life lacks external justification. In other words, the Absurd invariably manifests itself when humanity confronts the unreasonable silence of the void.

Discussing his play in 1957, Camus provided a fascinating outline of its theme:

"Caligula, a relatively kind prince so far, realizes on the death of Drusilla, his sister and his mistress, that 'men die and they are not happy.' Therefore, obsessed by the quest for the Absolute and poisoned by contempt and horror, he tries to exercise, through murder and systematic perversion of all values, a freedom which he discovers in the end is no good. He rejects friendship and love, simple human solidarity, good and evil. He takes the word of those around him, he forces them to logic, he levels all around him by force of his refusal and by the rage of destruction which drives his passion for life.

      But if his truth is to rebel against fate, his error is to deny men. One cannot destroy without destroying oneself. This is why Caligula depopulates the world around him and, true to his logic, makes arrangements to arm those who will eventually kill him. Caligula is the story of a superior suicide. It is the story of the most human and the most tragic of errors. Unfaithful to man, loyal to himself, Caligula consents to die for having understood that no one can save himself all alone and that one cannot be free in opposition to other men."

Reading this reminds one of why Sartre was right to suggest that existentialism - at least in the French understanding of this term - is a humanism ...

Notes

* Caligula: 1400 Days of Terror (2012), written and directed by Bruce Kennedy: click here to watch in full on YouTube

** In other words, whilst it's true that Caligula liked to refer to himself as a living god and insist his senators acknowledge (and worship) him as such, even this was done with atheistic delight and simply provided him with the opportunity to dress up in public as Apollo, Mercury, and, amusingly, Venus. 

See: Albert Camus, Caligula and Other Plays, (Penguin Books, 1984).

No Man is a Hypocrite in His Pleasures: The Crazy Love Life of Albert Camus

Simone                                                 Maria                                                    Francine

Football-loving, sun-worshipping, French philosopher and novelist Albert Camus, was an absurdly stylish and good-looking man who always had an eye for the ladies ...

In 1934, whilst still a student at the University of Algiers and working odd jobs to make some money, he tied the knot with Simone Hié, daughter of a wealthy eye doctor. Sadly, things didn't turn out for the best. Mutual infidelity and an increasingly serious drug habit on her side meant that the marriage failed within just a couple of years.

Camus then married the very talented and very striking pianist and mathematician Francine Faure, in 1940. She bore him twins five years later and the marriage lasted until his fatal car crash in 1960, despite Camus's numerous affairs, including - most significantly - his obsessive, on-off relationship with the distinguished stage and screen actress Maria Casares.       

The Fall (1956), described by Sartre as perhaps the most beautiful and least understood of Camus's works, is the confession of a successful and celebrated man brought to a point of emotional and intellectual crisis when he fails to come to the aid of a drowning woman. If the former is a self-portrait, then the latter is poor Francine, who overlooked her husband's constant womanising and allowed him his erotic freedom for many years until, finally, this gentle, kind-hearted woman cracked and suffered a severe mental breakdown.

Not only was Francine hospitalised and subjected to electroshock therapy, but she also attempted suicide. Her depression grew so severe that she would withdraw from the world for prolonged periods, staring straight ahead whilst endlessly repeating the name Maria Casares. Doubtless, her mental fragility had several causes, but the pain and humiliation she experienced due to Camus's open infidelity can't have helped.    

In a letter written shortly after he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature (1957), Camus claimed that he had never stopped loving Francine - albeit in his own admittedly shitty manner. He also claimed that she had forgiven him. I don't know if that's true, but, after her death in 1979, Francine was buried with her husband in Lourmarin - where they had spent an idyllic last summer together twenty years earlier - in a tomb surrounded by flowers. 

Not that Camus had changed his libidinous ways following Francine's breakdown. Indeed, in the last days of his life he was still sending passionate love letters to at least four mistresses, including Maria Casares, who, arguably, was the only woman Camus truly respected as an equal and to whom he felt tied by the bonds of the earth, by intelligence, by heart and flesh.


Afternote 

The daughter of a wealthy Spanish Republican, Maria Casares was an extraordinary woman, fully capable as one commentator has written of playing Don Juana to Camus's Don Juan, though often resentful of the fact that he refused to leave his wife and children for her. Casares discussed her often stormy sixteen-year relationship with Camus in her 1980 autobiography Résidente privilégiée. 

Readers may also be interested to know that 860 of the letters exchanged between Camus and Casares (his petite mouette) have recently been published in a lengthy volume entitled Correspondance, ed. Béatrice Vaillant (Editions Gallimard, 2017). In her introduction to the book, Catherine Camus writes that these letters not only make the world a bigger and brighter place, but demonstrate that beyond absurdity and revolt ... lies love.   

Fragments from a Dark History of Black Fashion (V-VII)

V.

The colour is black ... the seduction is beauty ... the aim is ecstasy ... the fantasy is death - or how fascism exerted its sartorial fascination ...

Initially, Mussolini seemed to have a better eye for fashion than Hitler; for clearly black shirts look so much better than brown! But the paramilitary thugs of the Sturmabteilung only wore brown shirts because a large number were available on the cheap following the end of the First World War and the fledgling Nazi Party had to watch the pfennigs. However, once in government and receiving the backing of big business - and once Röhm had been dealt with and the SA superseded by the SS - the Führer ensured that his Nazi elite were dressed to kill in a close-fitting, all-black uniform designed to make its wearer not only feel superior, but look supremely stylish.

Manufactured by Hugo Boss, the uniform was tailored to project malevolent authority and perpetuate the fascist aesthetization and eroticization of power. If many people felt sick with fear when they saw it, a significant number felt sexually aroused and the SS uniform has secured its place not only within the annals of terror, but the pornographic imagination.


VI.

In the post-War world of 50s youth culture, however, black - particularly the black leather jacket - became a symbol of individuality and rebellion; the colour of beatniks and bikers who didn't accept the established norms and values of society. In Paris, meanwhile, it was worn by Left-Bank intellectuals; painters, philosophers, writers, and über-cool performers such as Juliette Gréco, muse to Jean-Paul Sartre and lover of genius jazz musician Miles Davis.

The hippies who followed in the 1960s, with their love of psychedelic colours, tie-dyed clothing, paisley prints and floral patterns, subscribed to an almost anti-black rainbow aesthetic - one of the reasons that Malcolm McLaren despised them. But those within the punk movement of the mid-late 70s, shaped by McLaren in his own image, would again make black an emblematic colour. Finally, mention must be made of the post-punk goths and devotees of kink within the world of fetish fashion taking black outfits to a whole new level of perverse dark beauty.

VII.

According to Coco Chanel, a woman only needs three things to look elegant - and one of these three things is what has become known as the little black dress, a vision of which she published in Vogue in October 1926, radically changing women's fashion forever. After this date, a full-length gown might still be required for formal occasions, but, apart from these ceremonial social events, the LBD could be worn anywhere, anytime with the assurance that one would not be committing a faux pas and never not looking anything but chic, stylish, and sophisticated.

As Karl Lagerfeld has explained, black is the colour that goes with everything; if you're wearing black, you can't go wrong. Ultimately, black is fashion and fashion is black. And all those designers who suggest other colours upon which to build a wardrobe by declaring them to be the new black are basically fraudsters looking to push the latest trend and sell a few more frocks while they can. Hemlines rise and fall, accessories come and go, but the LBD is the essential must have item.           


Notes 

The image of the good-looking SS officer is by CainIsNotMyEnemy and can be found on Deviant Art by clicking here.

The photo of Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly is a publicity shot for Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961); she is wearing a sheath little black dress, designed by Givenchy in Italian satin. 

Those interested in reading fragments I-IV of this dark history of black fashion should click here.