Sungazing (With Reference to the Case of Juliet, the Lawrentian Sun-Woman)

Sungazing (SA/2022)

 

"And as she lay, she looked up through her fingers at the central sun

whose outer edges streamed brilliance." 

 

I. 

 

Juliet, the protagonist at the centre of D. H. Lawrence's solar-erotic tale entitled 'Sun', is an embryonic Lady Chatterley; rich, bored, and sexually frustrated. However, instead of taking a conventional lover, she establishes a perverse relationship with the sun, that strangest of strange attractors. 

 

One morning, as Juliet lay masturbating in her bed and gazing intently as the sun "lifted himself molten and sparkling, naked over the sea's rim" [1], she realised that her body belonged to the star around which the earth and all the other planets revolve and that her relationship with the sun mattered far more to her than being a wife and mother [2].

 

Of course, such a relationship - as a form of edgeplay [3] - is dangerous as well as pleasurable. For whilst the sun may kiss us into life, it cares nothing for the personal, the egoic, or the human. In fact, as Juliet discovers, it incinerates these things and if the sun helps her overcome her depression, so also does it burn out her pale-faced American idealism and threaten her status as a modern independent woman.

 

 

II. 

 

Of course, Juliet is not the first person to gaze lovingly at the sun and lie naked before him.

 

Indeed, some proponents of New Age philosophies - apparently drawing upon ancient esoteric teachings - explicitly advocate staring at the rising or setting sun for unusually prolonged periods, in order to gain physical and spiritual well-being. 

 

The fact that looking directly at the sun, even for a short time, can cause solar retinopathy and lead to permanent damage or blindness, is not something that seems to cause adherents of sungazing any real concern. They don’t deny such risks, but they do play them down and many assert that, if done with due diligence, sun-gazing can actually improve eyesight [4]. 

 

Indeed, some sun-gazers claim that not only does the practice make you feel happier and healthier, but it can directly increase your energy levels and thus radically reduce the need for food: that one can, as it were, meet one's nutritional requirements directly from sunlight, just like a plant. 

 

Again, the fact that people don't possess chlorophyll and so cannot photosynthesise is discreetly overlooked and, as with other forms of inedia, there is no credible scientific evidence to support this amusingly bonkers claim [5].

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'Sun', in The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, (Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 20. 

 

[2] Cf. Lawrence's poem 'Sun-women' where he writes of women who belong neither to men nor their children - nor even to themselves - but to the sun. The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 456. 

      Admittedly, Lawrence doesn't  explicitly say tha Juliet is masturbating in bed before the sun. However, the following lines undeniably suggest a state of heightened sexual arousal:

      

"It was as if she had never seen the sun rise before. She had never seen the naked sun stand up pure upon the sea-line, shaking the night off himself, like wetness. And he was full and naked. And she wanted to come to him. 

      So the desire sprang secretly in her, to be naked to the sun. She chesished her desire like a secret. She wanted to come together with the sun." 

 

[3] Edgeplay is a term derived from the kinky world of BDSM and refers to any form of sexual activity that involves the risk of physical harm to participants. Sun-fucking, at the very least, might result in a bad case of sunburn (which in turn could lead to skin cancer) and sungazing very obviously risks blindness, although, for Juliet, her (temporary) sun-blindness is like a richness to her.   

 

[4] I’m thinking here of the so-called Bates Method, a form of alternative eye-care developed by William Bates (1860-1931), who counted the visually-impaired Aldous Huxley amongst his famous followers.

[5] As the editors of the page devoted to sungazing on RationalWiki point out, the best that the sun can do when it comes to providing nourishment is stimulate production of vitamin D. However, as this happens in the skin - the sun's ultraviolet rays interacting with a protein known as 7-DHC - you still don't need to purposely stare at the sun.  

 

 

This post is a revised extract from an essay entitled 'Sun-Fucked: On the Question of Solar Sexuality and Speculative Realism in D. H. Lawrence' (2012), which was published as 'Sun-Struck' on James Walker's Digital Pilgrimage blog in January 2019: click here. 

Readers can find another extract from the above essay posted on Torpedo the Ark by clicking here. 

Notes on an Essay by Stéphane Sitayeb: 'Sexualized Objects in D. H. Lawrence’s Short Fiction: Eros and Thanatos'

Fragment of stained glass (19th century)

7.2 x 3.2 cm (whole object) 

Royal Collection Trust

 

 

I. 

 

Stéphane Sitayeb's essay on sexualised objects in D. H. Lawrence's short fiction [1] is a fascinating read if, like me, you are interested in such things. 

 

However, I'm not sure I share his insistence on giving material items an all-too-human symbolic interpretation. Sometimes, a white stocking is a white stocking and that's precisely wherein its allure resides for the fetishist and object-oriented philosopher, if not, perhaps, for the literary scholar keen to open a "new figurative level of reading".  

 

And his claim that Lawrence resolved to "awaken his readers' spirituality by inducing a shock therapy paradoxically based on physicality, with explicit references to sexualized items and licentious tendencies", is not one I agree with either. In fact, I don't think Lawrence gave a fig for his readers' spirituality. 

 

And, again, just because an object stands upright, that doesn't always mean it has phallic significance; even Freud recognised that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and doesn't represent anything, or always express unconscious human desire. Thus, when Sitayeb says that "Lacanian readings of Lawrence have fathomed the hidden meaning of phallic objects in his fiction", I want to beat him about the head with a large dildo [2].

     

 

II. 

 

Moving on, we discover that Sitayeb wishes to discuss objects in terms of Eros and Thanatos; i.e., as objects that lead to fulfilment on the one hand, and as objects that lead to self-destruction on the other. He rightly points out, however, that Lawrence's work demonstrates a complex connection between Love and Death and thus his fictitious objects "stimulate at once procreation and destruction, creativity and annihilation". 

 

The result is that death becomes sexy and sex becomes decadent and perverse; not so much tied to an ideal of love, as to numerous paraphlias, often involving objects or the objectification of body parts. Sitayeb mentions several of these, but by no means exhausts the number of kinky elements in Lawrence's work (elements which I have discussed elsewhere on Torpedo the Ark: see here, for example). 

 

 

III.

 

Sitayeb's reading of 'The Captain's Doll' in terms of agalmatophilia and pygmalionism is good. Perhaps not as good as mine in terms of dollification - click here - but good nonetheless. He certainly makes some interesting points, such as this one: "The interchangeability between subject and object is conveyed by an inversion of the invariable principles governing mechanic and organic matter." 

 

Similarly, his reading of 'Sun' is good, but not as good as mine: click here. Sitayeb still thinks Juliet's story simply involves an anthropomorphic type of sexuality and Lawrence's "conception of Nature as a macrocosm incorporating man", but it's far more important philosophically than that.   

 

As for 'The Thimble' - a short story that formed the basis of the 1922 novella The Ladybird - the ornate object in question is not first and foremost a symbol of unfulfilled sexual desire and Mrs. Hepburn's fiddling with it is not a form of symbolic masturbation. This lazy and old-fashioned psychosexual reading just bores the pants off me and I really can't fathom why Sitayeb bothers to refer to it.   

 

 

IV. 

 

Sometimes, Sitayeb says things that I do not understand: "Lawrence studied the escalation of desire for both objects and subjects in the presence of imitation and rivalry patterns." But that's probably due to my ignorance of theories to do with mimesis on the one hand (I've certainly never read a word of René Girard) and my suspicion of the concept on the other (I have read a fair deal of Derrida and Deleuze). Nevertheless, I enjoyed Sitayeb's reading of the love triangle in The Fox [3]. 

 

I also enjoyed his excellent reading of 'The White Stocking' - another story involving a love triangle, but this time one "not only composed of human objects of desire", but also including a material item "sexualized to express an unsatisfied ambition such as an impossible sexual act" (i.e., the white stocking). Sitayeb says that this is more precisely termed a split-object triangle and I'll take his word for that. 

 

Sitayeb also notes:    

 

"In the absence of Elsie’s secret lover [...] the eponymous object acts as a reminder of a passionate adulterous dance and a catalyst reactivating the ecstasy of forbidden desire. In the presence of the object, Elsie is invested with a sexual energy, even away from her lover." 

 

And that's true, although I'm not sure I think Elsie vain and superficial simply because she likes silk stockings and jewellery; I mean, who doesn't? But then, having said that, I did call her a 'pricktease with pearl earrings' in a case study published on Torpedo the Ark four years ago: click here.

 

 

V.

 

Ultimately, what Sitayeb wants to suggest is that within consumer society, objects - be they directly or indirectly eroticised - become dangerous shape-shifting agents, as commodity culture becomes increasingly death-driven. And he thinks that's what Lawrence illustrates in 'Things', a tale which tells of the syllomania of an American couple addicted to collecting beautiful objects:

 

"Through their syllomania - the pathological need to acquire and hoard objects [...] - the couple [...] indirectly socializes and sexualizes the various objects that they have purchased to decorate their home by replacing their usual libido sexualis with a libido oeconomicus, thus linking Eros to Thanatos."

 

Sitayeb continues:

 

"Owning or consuming objects procures an immediate and transient feeling of satisfaction verging on ecstasy [...] which is nonetheless quickly replaced by an impression of void when their desire for objects becomes insatiable."      

 

Again, that's an insightful take on Lawrence's work and I was intrigued to see how Sitayeb related this to Baudrillard's thinking on the collusion between subjects and objects, the latter being an author of special interest to me, as torpedophiles will be aware:

 

"Baudrillard's main three arguments to account for men's attraction to trinkets are staged in Lawrence's short story. Both philosopher and author highlighted 1) the escapist function of objects of desire, since they represent a spatial and temporal vehicle transporting their owners into the past of various regions and cultures; 2) the feeling of conquest through the act of collecting, as the collector becomes conqueror; and 3) the access to higher social classes, a pose that D. H. Lawrence evokes with satirical overtones through the detached heterodiegetic narrator of 'Things'."

 

Expanding on this, Sitayeb writes:

 

"Far from attractive to the reader, the couple's bric-à-brac is presented as an overload of useless items due to an accumulation where all the objects are juxtaposed in a concatenation of long compound substantives preceded by adjectives evoking several national origins with little coherence. Just as every decorative item is deprived of real functionality, the words to name them also consist of mere signifiers for the reader, which confirms Baudrillard's idea that the difference between simple objects and objects of desire lies in "'the object's detachment from its functional, experienced reality'." [4]

 

Sitayeb concludes:

 

"Although Lawrence's ideology in 'Things' is comparable to Baudrillard's, the former interpreted the phenomenon as collective, not personal, warning his contemporary readers against the loss of identity resulting from the vain desire for objects, which he perceived as a post-traumatic stigma of a World War One."

 

 

VI.

 

The problem, ultimately, that I have with Sitayeb's reading of Lawrence is that he seems to subscribe to a notion of what Meillassoux termed correlationism - i.e., the idea that "we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other" [5].

Why do I say that - and why does it matter? 

Well, I say it because Sitayeb posits a two-way process wherein the desiring human mind shapes the material universe or world of objects, whilst the latter either fulfil or destroy us, and this permanent and privileged relationship is a form of correlationism, is it not? 

 

And this matters because it serves to make reality mind-dependent and I find such anthropocentrism not only untenable but objectionable - be it in Lawrence's work, or readings of Lawrence's work.     

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Stéphane Sitayeb, 'Sexualized Objects in D. H. Lawrence’s Short Fiction: Eros and Thanatos', Journal of the Short Story in English, No. 71, (Autumn 2018), pp. 133-147. Click here to read on openedition.org. All lines quoted are from the online version of the essay.

 

[2] It should also be noted that the phallus is not the same as an erect penis; a confusion that we can trace all the way back at least as far as Kate Millett, who claims in her Sexual Politics (1970), that Lawrence is guilty of transforming  his own model of masculinity into a misogynistic mystery religion founded upon the homoerotic worship of the penis. That's unfair and mistaken, as Lawrence himself emphasises that when he writes of the phallus, he is not simply referring to a mere member belonging to a male body and male agent. For Lawrence, the phallus is a genuine symbol of relatedness which forms a bridge not only between lovers, but to the future. Thus fear of the phallus - and frenzied efforts to nullify it in the name of a castrated spirituality, not least by confusing it with the penis - betray a great horror of being in touch. 

      Writing fifty years after Millett, one might have hoped Sitayeb would've not made this same error. I would suggest he see my Outside the Gate (Blind Cupid Press, 2010), where I discuss all this in relation to the case of Lady Chatterley, pp. 233-246. 

 

[3] My recent take on this novella by Lawrence can be found by clicking here. 

 

[4] Sitayeb is quoting from Baudrillard's Le Système des objets (1968), trans. James Benedict as The System of Objects, (Verso, 1996). 

      For me, Baudrillard's later work on objects (in relation, for example, to his theory of seduction) is far more interesting; here, he is still too much influenced by Marxist ideas and basically offers a political critique of consumer capitalism - as if, somehow, the subject might still differentiate themselves from the world of things and resist the evil genuis of the object.

 

[5] Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude,  trans. Ray Brassier, (Continuum, 2008), p. 5.

Sex on the Beach

Many people seem to be excited by the thought of sex on the beach, despite the gritty reality of sand. But considerably fewer people desire to have sex with the beach.

And yet, the latter seems infinitely more pleasurable and full of possibility than having to penetrate another human body with all the usual built-in features: the same limbs, the same organs, the same expectations and responses. How dreary even love becomes when it never flickers or wavers or changes and becomes a mechanical exercise in pure repetition: in-out, in-out and shake it all about. If that's what sex is all about then, frankly, it's hardly worth the effort.

But, of course, sex needn't be so limited and repetitive: so human, all-too-human. It can become bestial, or object-oriented, elemental or even cosmic in character. I know of a woman, for example, who took the sun as a lover. And in The Trespasser, Lawrence describes with all his usual perverse brilliance the inhuman and purifying erotics of sun, sea, and sand.

Although ostensibly on a short holiday on the Isle of Wight with his young mistress in order that they might spend some time together and momentarily forget about his domestic entanglements, Siegmund seems to get more satisfaction from the beach than he does from the body of Helena. One day, whilst the latter frolics in the waves, Siegmund swims off to explore a tiny hidden bay, inaccessible from the land:

"He waded out of the green, cold water  ... Throwing himself down on the sand ... he lay glistening wet ... The sand was warm to his breast and and his belly and his arms. It was like a great body he cleaved to. Almost, he fancied, he felt it heaving under him in its breathing. Then he turned his face to the sun, and laughed. All the while, he hugged the warm body of the sea-bay beneath him. He spread his hands upon the sand: he took it in handfuls, and let it run smooth, warm, delightful, through his fingers.
      ... And he laid his hands again on the warm body of the shore, let them wander, discovering, gathering all the warmth, the softness, the strange wonder of smooth, warm pebbles, then shrinking from the deep weight of cold his hand encountered as he burrowed under the surface, wrist-deep. In the end, he found the cold mystery of the deep sand also thrilling. He pushed in his hands again and deeper, enjoying the almost hurt of the dark, heavy coldness. For the sun and the white flower of the bay were breathing and kissing him dry ... holding him in their warm concave, like a bee in a flower ...
      Siegmund lay and clasped the sand and tossed it in handfuls till over him he was all hot and cloyed. Then he rose and looked at himself and laughed ... and began to rub himself free of the clogging sand. He found himself strangely dry and smooth. He tossed more dry sand, and more, over himself ... Soon his body was dry and warm and smooth ... his body was full of delight and his hands glad with the touch of himself. He wanted himself clean. ... He went painfully over the pebbles till he found himself on the smooth rock bottom. Then he soused himself, and shook his head in the water, and washed and splashed and rubbed himself with his hands assiduously. ... It was the purification. ... He felt as if all the dirt of misery were soaked out of him ... So white and sweet and tissue-clean he felt, full of lightness and grace."

- D. H. Lawrence, The Trespasser, ed. Elizabeth Mansfield, (CUP, 1981), pp. 88-89.

When was the last time you felt like that after a quick fuck on the beach with some local picked up in a bar?