On Miracles and Absolute Contingency in the Work of Daphne du Maurier and Quentin Meillassoux

I.

The opening tale of Daphne du Maurier's astonishing and disturbing collection of short stories entitled The Breaking Point (1959), is not so much a whodunnit as a who did what and reveals what she describes as "the lovely duplicity of a secret life" [22] and it's potential for tragedy.

But, whilst the latter is a fascinating notion - explored at length by Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray - what really caught my interest is the moment of revelation at the very beginning of the story when James Fenton realises that miracles can happen at any moment and dramatically mark the end of one's old life. This liberating thought had never come to him before:

"It was as though something had clicked in his brain [...] time had ceased [...] everything had changed [...] he had stepped out of bondage into a new dimension." [2-3]

What's more, Fenton feels himself strangely empowered, as if he had become a miracle-worker himself; i.e., an instrument of fate capable of altering the lives of strangers with a single gesture, be it a random act of kindness, or one of sadistic cruelty.


II.

In some ways, it's nice to know that miracles, far from being rare or unusual, are actually the natural unfolding of things and events and can not only happen at any time, but are, in fact, happening all of the time. For one thing, it releases us from the grip of absolute necessity or what's known within philosophical circles as the principle of sufficient reason (i.e., the metaphysical insistence that the world is at is with good cause and could only be as it is).  

To think in terms of miracles, the unfolding of fate, and what Quentin Meillassoux terms unreason, is to enter a world of absolute contingency in which there is no reason for anything to be as it is or to remain so; everything - including the laws that govern the world - could be otherwise:

"Everything could actually collapse: from trees to stars, from stars to laws, from physical laws to logical laws; and this not by virtue of some superior law whereby everything is destined to perish, but by virtue of the absence of any superior law capable of preserving anything, no matter what, from perishing." [53]

For Meillassoux, this is the only absolute: a kind of hyper-chaos that du Maurier, at the point of breakdown - when reality must be faced - discovered for herself. Thus, when her protagonists suddenly step outside the gate, what they encounter is:

"a rather menacing power - something insensible, and capable of destroying both things and worlds, of bringing forth monstrous absurdities, yet also of never doing anything, of realizing every dream, but also every nightmare, of engendering random and frenetic transformations, or conversely, of producing a universe that remains motionless down to its ultimate recesses [...] a power with neither goodness nor wisdom, ill-disposed to reassure thought about the veracity of its distinct ideas." [64]

Further, whilst conventional time ceases, they observe something akin to it - an uncanny form of time that is:

"inconceivable for physics, since it is capable of destroying without cause or reason, every physical law, just as it is inconceivable for metaphysics, since it is capable of destroying every determinate entity [...] even God. This is not a Heraclitean time, since it is not the eternal law of becoming, but rather the eternal and lawless possible becoming of every law. It is a time capable of destroying even becoming itself by bringing forth, perhaps forever, fixity, stasis, and death.” [64]

Notes

Daphne du Maurier, 'The Alibi', in The Breaking Point, (Virago Press, 2009).

Quentin Meillassoux, After Infinity, trans. Ray Brassier, (Continuum, 2009).

For a semi-related post to this one on miracles understood from a Deleuzean perspective in terms of the fold, click here.

In Memory of Joris-Karl Huysmans (and His Bejewelled Tortoise)

Caricature of J-K Huysmans (1885)

To be honest, I increasingly find that I have to be in a very particular frame of mind to read 19th-century French authors such as Joris-Karl Huysmans who are a little too Symbolist, too Decadent and too Catholic for my tastes. One really has no wish to end up at the foot of the Cross, be it inverted or upright and I find elements of his philosophy - much influenced by Schopenhauer - highly suspect; suggestive as they are of weakness, rather than a more Nietzschean pessimism of strength. 

However, as Huysmans and I share the same star sign making us astrological kin - and as today happens to be the 170th anniversary of his birth - I thought I might say something in memory of this idiosyncratic writer, notorious for writing against the grain and against nature ...

The first thing that needs to be said is that Huysmans was clever - very clever. And I'm with Eliot on this question: the essential requirement of all good writing - be it prose or poetry - is intelligence. An inspired idiot is unfortunately still an idiot and inspiration won't compensate for (or disguise) a lack of learning and quick-wittedness for long. L'éternelle bêtise de l'humanité was not surprisingly one of Huysmans's pet peeves. 

His first major publication was a collection of prose poems, Le drageoir aux épices (1874), strongly influenced by Baudelaire. This was followed by a novel, Marthe, Histoire d'une fille (1876), which brought him to the attention of Émile Zola. His next works were similar in style: realistic and rather grim depictions of life in Paris.

Again, to be honest, you'd have to have a great passion for French literature or a scholarly interest like the middle-aged protagonist of Houellebecq's Submission (2015), to bother with these books. But on the other hand, his scandalous novel of 1884, À rebours, is a must read - if only for the bejewelled tortoise in chapter four. 

And that's particularly so for lovers of Oscar Wilde; for this poisonous tale of the aristocratic aesthete Jean des Esseintes - a man who rejects both the natural order and bourgeois society and attempts to live exclusively in a perversely sensual yet highly artificial world of his own invention - greatly influenced The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890).

Amusingly - though not for poor Constance - Wilde first read À rebours whilst on honeymoon in Paris and it immediately became for him what it was also for Paul Valéry and, many years later, the punk singer Richard Hell - a bible and bedside favourite.       

See:

Michel Houellebecq, Submission, trans. Lorin Stein, (William Heinemann, 2015). 

Joris-Karl Huysmans, trans. Robert Baldick, (Penguin Books, 2003).

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, (Penguin Books, 2003).

To read an excellent essay by Adam Leith Gollner on 'What Houellebecq Learned from Huysmans', in The New Yorker (12 November, 2015), click here. 

For an interesting note on À rebours and its influence on Oscar Wilde, visit the British Library website: click here. 

For a related post to this one that reflects more closely on the bejewelled tortoise, click here.

Thanks to Thom Bonneville for suggesting this post.

The Picture of Douglas Murray

Douglas Murray: Photo by Martin Pope

The writer and commentator Douglas Murray may not be made out of ivory and rose-leaves, but he certainly embodies several of the virtues that make beautiful and make manly, including courage, for example; courage in the face of often violent opposition and the courage to speak his mind with an openness lacking in most other public figures and politicians.

I might not always agree with what he says, but I can't help admiring him and, after first seeing Douglas on YouTube, I was conscious of the curious effect that he exerted: I knew that I was watching someone whose personality is so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would threaten to absorb my whole nature and whose neoconservative ideas are so dangerously seductive that, if not careful, they might infect my own thinking on the issues that face us today.

I do not know if we are destined to meet and to know each other. But I suspect, sadly, that we could never be friends. Indeed, I would find it difficult to even stay in the same room as this wonderfully handsome young man, with his finely-curved scarlet lips and frank blue-eyes full of candour and passionate purity; for how could one not feel inferior in the presence of someone so palpably better-read, better-travelled, and better-looking?

My one hope is that Douglas finds time to write more works of literary biography - like his brilliant study of Bosie, written when he was still an undergraduate - and that he doesn't squander all his time and talent listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless, or fighting against the ignorant, the base, and the fanatic.

On Dorian Gray and Models of Illicit Masculinity

 River Hawkins as Dorian Gray

Deleuze writes that one of the pleasures of doing philosophy is buggering the thinkers that one admires in order to produce monstrous offspring. This is an openly perverse and promiscuous love of wisdom in which texts are ravished and authors fucked from behind and below; a non-consensual methodology that suggests violence and Vaseline, rather than fidelity and faithfulness. 

This model of intertextual rape and illicit insemination is one that works particularly well with Oscar Wilde’s novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray - a work wherein elements of camp and gothic queerness helped not only to set the terms for a specifically gay identity founded upon secrecy, narcissism, and fabulousness, but also shaped models of outlaw masculinity open to all men which contested the bourgeois norm of conventional manhood forever oscillating between the poles of an ideal husband and doting father.

Throughout Dorian Gray Lord Henry openly ridicules married life, suggesting that men only enter into it due to fatigue and women from curiosity: both are disappointed. As for the idea of outlaw masculinity, it is worth noting at the outset that Dorian is a violent criminal; not only does he commit murder and blackmail, but he’s complicit in at least three suicides. This notion of the rebellious deviant or ‘anti-hero’ who provides a non-domesticated model of manhood, was popular throughout the twentieth century – not least within the gay community – and continues to this day (thus our eroticised fascination with pirates, gangsters, and psychopaths). 

But arguably, however, there is nothing very queer about what might be regarded as a romantic quest for macho or phallic authenticity. Often it simply endorses the Classical ideal of masculinity as powerful and active and serves to divide men into those who like to love young boys (pederasts), those who like to fuck other men (sodomites), and those who like to play a feminized, passive role and be fucked by men (inverts). It is the latter who, predictably, call forth the greatest level of scorn and vitriol, even from others who share a same-sex attraction. Nothing seems to disturb more than those that William Burroughs denigrates as limp-wristed cock-suckers. For, as Leo Bersani memorably puts it: to be penetrated is to abdicate power. In this way, the invert offers a double refusal – either to dominate or be dominated – and there’s nothing as queer as that!

Anyway, the point is that during the final years of the nineteenth century masculinity was increasingly problematized and strange new models of manhood were springing up as traditional forms of male identity became increasingly unattractive: their power and authority severely eroded and compromised by modernity itself. And when a man to whom phallocratic authority really matters no longer feels king of his own castle, then he looks for something beyond the domestic space and, indeed, beyond Woman. This can result in all kinds of curious thing: from the formation of all-male clubs and secret societies, to criminal gangs and even fascism. All of these homosocial phenomena are, in part at least, a reaction to female emancipation and the increased visibility of women in the public sphere. With the rise of Selfridges and the Suffragettes, London, for example, becomes an increasingly female-friendly urban space in which to shop and do lunch, rather than a masculine metropolis in which to drink, gamble, and whore.         

What I am suggesting, then, is that elements of gothic queerness not only circulate freely within The Picture of Dorian Gray, but are ever-present within modern society. Wilde’s thinking on questions to do with art, ethics, and the nature of the soul exposed not only the radical instability of masculine identity during the period in which he wrote, but also exemplified how that gendered self was increasingly being pathologized.    

Further, Wilde’s use of ‘paradox in the sphere of thought’ and ‘perversity in the sphere of passion’ has significantly served to unsettle any lazy categorization of ideas or people and exposed many of the so-called ‘facts of life’ for the limited and limiting abstractions they are. By encouraging us to think beyond metaphysical dualism, Wilde taught us to resist the urge to identify ourselves as either this or that and accept that deep down there is no deep down. In other words, he has eviscerated and evaginated ideas of sex, substance and soul; not by direct repudiation, but with mockery and masquerade, making depth, as it were, retreat to the surface.

In this way Wilde, like Nietzsche, becomes Greek: superficial out of profundity, transforming questions of being into questions of style and inciting us to abandon our obsession with desiring subjects in favour of the seductiveness of objects.