Believe in the Ruins: Reflections of a Gargoyle on the Great Fire of Notre-Dame de Paris

croire aux ruines ...

I.

It's a shame that the fire at Notre-Dame only destroyed the roof and spire, leaving the towers and most of the building still standing. It would have been better for the people of France - better for all of us - if the whole thing had been razed to the ground.

I say this not as some kind of cultural barbarian or iconoclast, nor simply to be provocative; but, rather, as someone in agreement with D. H. Lawrence, who writes in one of his Etruscan sketches:

"We have reached the stage where we are weary of huge stone erections, and we begin to realise that it is  better to keep life fluid and changing, than try to hold it fast down in heavy monuments. Burdens on the face of the earth, are man's ponderous erections."

Like Lawrence, I love to see small wooden temples, that are unimposing and evanescent as flowers. Buildings - particularly religious buildings - should aim to be modest and charming rather than grand and impressive, preserving the natural humour of life: "And that is a task surely more worthy, and even much more difficult in the long run, than conquering the world or sacrificing the self or saving the immortal soul."   

Lawrence continues:

"Why has mankind such a craving to be imposed upon! Why this lust after imposing creeds, imposing deeds, imposing buildings, imposing language, imposing works of art? The thing becomes an imposition and a weariness at last. Give us things that are alive and flexible, which won't last too long and become an obstruction and a weariness."

Even Notre-Dame, if we're honest, standing in Paris for centuries on end, had become a colossal dead weight - stuffed full of priceless treasures and cultural artefacts, but dead treasures and dead artefacts, belonging to another time, another people.

And one suspects that those who claim to revere the past and seek to preserve it - along with those billionaires and politicians who are now pledging obscene sums of cash to rebuild the cathedral (whilst continuing to ignore the deprivation in many parts of the city and its suburbs) - do so simply because they are unable ultimately to face up to the challenge of modernity to make it new.   

II.

Lawrence, of course, was ambiguous (at best) on the question of cathedrals - from Lincoln to Milan - long before his trip to see the Etruscan tombs in 1927.

In The Rainbow, for example, his novel of 1915, Lawrence stages an amusing conflict between Anna Brangwen and her husband Will, in which she destroys his passion for Lincoln Cathedral with her own gargoyle philosophy ...

Will is physically excited by the cathedral and willingly allows himself to be transported by it to another world. But to Anna, it's merely a thing of the past and she rather resented his ecstasy, wishing he might curb his enthusiasm.

Lawrence writes:

"The cathedral roused her too. But she would never consent to the knitting of all the leaping stone in a great roof that closed her in [...] it was the ultimate confine [...] She claimed the right to freedom above her, higher than the roof. [...]
      So that she caught at little things, which saved her from being swept forward headlong in the tide of passion that leaps on into the Infinite [...] the wicked, odd little faces carved in stone, and she stood before them arrested.
      These sly little faces peeped out of the grand tide of the cathedral like something that knew better. They knew quite well, these little imps that retorted on man's own illusion, that the cathedral was not absolute. They winked and leered, giving suggestion of the many things that had been left out of the great concept of the church."

Understandably, Will is unimpressed with such thinking and has little or no time for the carved faces; his wife was "spoiling his passionate intercourse with the cathedral" and this made him bitterly angry:

"Strive as he would, he could not keep the cathedral wonderful to him. He was disillusioned. That which had been his absolute, containing all heaven and earth, was become to him as to her, a shapely heap of dead matter [...]
     His mouth was full of ash, his soul was furious. He hated her for having destroyed another of his vital illusions."

Anna's nihilism, however, inasmuch as it's a counter-idealism, is an active negation of the negative and of nothingness. Thus, despite Will's initial anger and despair, gradually he became more responsive to the call of the gargoyles than to the perfect surge of the cathedral itself, realising that outside the cathedral "were many flying spirits" that could never be contained within the holy gloom.

"He listened to the thrushes in the garden, and heard a note which the cathedrals did not include: something free and careless and joyous. He crossed a field that was all yellow with dandelions [...] and the bath of yellow glowing was something at once so sumptuous and so fresh, that he was glad he was away from his shadowy cathedral.
      There was life outside the church. There was much that the church did not include. [...] He thought of the ruins of the Grecian worship, and it seemed, a temple was never perfectly a temple, till it was ruined and mixed up with the winds and the sky and the herbs."

And so, my advice to the good people of Paris is this: either finish the job and demolish the rest of Notre-Dame, or leave it as a lovely ruin, roofless, and at the mercy of the elements.

See:

D. H. Lawrence, 'Sketches of Etruscan Places', in Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays, ed. Simonetta de Filippis, (Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 32-33.

D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 188-89, 190, 191. 

Jamie Reid archive 

vam.ac.uk 

On Dirty Dancing and the Virtue of Female Narcissism 2: The Case of Anna Brangwen

Drawing by Alice Stanley of a pregnant Anna Brangwen 

dancing in the firelight, whilst her husband Will 

watches from the shadows 

As I said at the end of part one of this post, Connie's pagan rain dance in which she affirms her shameless love of self as a vital sexual being, is something we've encountered before in Lawrence's fiction, when a heavily pregnant Anna Brangwen dances naked in her bedroom, lifting her hands and body to an unseen deity:

"She would not have had anyone know. She danced in secret, and her soul rose in bliss ... she took off her clothes and danced in the pride of her bigness."

Arguably, this incident in chapter 6 of The Rainbow is more provocatively ambiguous than the one in chapter 15 of Lady Chatterley's Lover, but then the earlier novel is far more complex and challenging than the later work in almost every regard. There's certainly nothing joyous about Anna's dance and she's not doing it to entice and arouse a lover - quite the opposite in fact.

One late Saturday afternoon, following the first incident, Anna again "took off her things and danced". But this time she danced before her husband, Will. Only she danced in a manner that was not only beyond his comprehension, but as if choreographed to nullify him in his manhood. With firelight on her feet and ankles, but otherwise naked in the twilight, like a witch, she lifted her hands and began to make slow, strange movements:

"He stood away near the door in blackness of shadow, watching, transfixed. And with slow, heavy movements she swayed backwards and forwards, like a full ear of corn, pale in the dusky afternoon, threading before the firelight, dancing his non-existence, dancing herself  ... to exultation.
      He watched, and his soul burned in him. He turned aside, he could not look, it hurt his eyes. Her fine limbs lifted and lifted, her hair was sticking out all fierce, and her belly, big, strange, terrifying ... Her face was rapt and beautiful, she danced exulting ... and knew no man.
      It hurt him as he watched as if he were at the stake. He felt he was being burned alive. The strangeness, the power of her in her dancing consumed him, he was burned, he could not grasp, he could not understand. He waited obliterated."

Eventually, finding his voice with which to speak, Will demands to know what on earth she thinks she's doing. Anna tells him to go away and let her dance by herself. He sneers that what she's doing isn't dancing. But, nevertheless, this vision of her as a woman caught up in narcissistic ecstasy "tormented him all the days of his life".

What, then, is this queer and disturbing scene all about?

Lawrence seems to be exploring something of a pregnancy fetish whilst, at the same time, betraying elements of maiesiophobia; Anna's belly is significantly described not only as big and strange, but terrifying. And, to be honest, I can understand his - and Will's - male discomfort and sense of disconcertedness when confronted by the obscene sight of a woman in an advanced stage of pregnancy.

For no matter how hard Demi Moore and other female celebrities have tried to make pregnancy seem a glamorous, sexy lifestyle choice, there's something monstrous about a woman becoming part-goddess, part prisoner - trapped, as Camille Paglia writes, in the "bulging mass of her own fecund body ... turgid with primal force, swollen with great expectations  ... weighed down by her inflated mounds of breast, belly, and buttock".

Having said that, I'm also fatally fascinated - like Lawrence, like Will - by Anna's dancing and admire her shameless self-affirmation. She knows that she - as Woman - is the great be-all and end-all; "the womb-tomb of mother nature", to quote Paglia once more.


Notes

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1983), ch. 15.

D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), ch. 6.

Camille Paglia, 'The Venus of Willendorf', in Free Women, Free Men, (Pantheon Books, 2017), pp. 38-41. 

To read part one of this post - The Case of Lady Chatterley - click here. 

For an interesting essay that explores some of the themes in this post in much greater depth and detail, see Marina Ragachewskaya, 'No Dancing Matter: The Language of Dance and Sublimation in D. H. Lawrence', Études Lawrenciennes, 44, (2013), pp. 187-204. This work can be read online by clicking here. 

Ephebophilia (with Reference to the Cases of Adam Johnson and Will Brangwen)

Adam Johnson at Bradford Crown Court / Christopher Gable as 
Will Brangwen in The Rainbow (dir. Ken Russell, 1989)

The case of footballer Adam Johnson, 28, who has just been convicted of grooming and touching up a 15-year-old girl - and who is now facing what the judge warns will be a substantial prison sentence - is an interesting example of how times have changed.

For whilst his actions may have raised a few eyebrows in the not-too-distant past, I very much doubt he would have been prosecuted, let alone found guilty of a serious crime and portrayed by the media as some kind of monster of depravity.  

Obviously, as the law stands, the girl is a minor and cannot give consent to sexual activity. Johnson knew this. But does sending her inappropriate texts, kissing her in the back of his car and putting his hand down her pants, really deserve to be punished with a minimum of five years jail time? Johnson was undoubtedly devious, arrogant, and stupid. But he didn't violently assault the young woman; her claim that he forced her to perform fellatio on him was rejected by the jury. 

Interestingly, the case makes one think back to an incident in The Rainbow involving Will Brangwen, also aged 28 at the time, and a young girl he meets at a variety theatre on a Saturday night out in Nottingham away from his wife, Anna, from whom he feels increasingly estranged. Lawrence writes:

"In the Empire one evening he sat next to two girls. He was aware of the one beside him. She was rather small, common, with a fresh complexion and an upper lip that lifted from her teeth, so that, when she was not conscious, her mouth was slightly open and her lips pressed outwards in a kind of blind appeal. ...
      A gleam lit up in him: should he begin with her? Should he begin with her to live the other, the unadmitted life of his desire? Why not? He had always been so good. Save for his wife, he was a virgin. And why, when all women were different? Why, when he would only live once? He wanted the other life. His own life was barren, not enough. He wanted the other.
      Her open mouth, showing the small, irregular, white teeth, appealed to him. It was open and ready. It was so vulnerable. Why should he not go in and enjoy what was there? The slim arm that went down so still and motionless to the lap, it was pretty. She would be small, he would be able almost to hold her in his two hands. She would be small, almost like a child, and pretty. Her childishness whetted him keenly. She would he helpless between his hands."

Clearly, from this pervy-pornographic description, the nameless girl is young - perhaps she too might only be fifteen, who knows?

Brangwen strikes up conversation, making her blush even as she flashes a smile at him with her eyes. Her nervousness and vulnerability "pricked him with a pleasant sensation ... she was so young and palpitating". He is determined to press home his advantage and exert his power as an older man. After the show, Brangwen convinces the girl to abandon her friend and come with him for a coffee. Lawrence writes:

"The friend was gone into the darkness. He turned with his girl to the tea-shop. They talked all the time. He made his sentences in sheer, almost muscular pleasure of exercising himself with her. He was looking at her all the time, perceiving her, appreciating her, finding her out, gratifying himself with her. He could see distinct attractions in her; her eyebrows, with their particular curve, gave him keen aesthetic pleasure. Later on he would see her bright, pellucid eyes, like shallow water, and know those. And there remained the open, exposed mouth, red and vulnerable. That he reserved as yet. And all the while his eyes were on the girl, estimating and handling with pleasure her young softness. About the girl herself, who or what she was, he cared nothing, he was quite unaware that she was anybody. She was just the sensual object of his attention."

Again, this description makes more than a little uncomfortable; Lawrence stresses the calculating and coercive aspects of seduction. Brangwen sounds predatory. It is not inconceivable that he might attempt to rape the girl if he doesn't get his way with a combination of small-talk and sweet-talk:

"He was alert in every sense and fibre, and yet quite sure and steady, and lit up, as if transfused. He had a free sensation of walking in his own darkness, not in anybody else’s world at all. He was purely a world to himself, he had nothing to do with any general consciousness. Just his own senses were supreme. All the rest was external, insignificant, leaving him alone with this girl whom he wanted to absorb, whose properties he wanted to absorb into his own senses. He did not care about her, except that he wanted to overcome her resistance, to have her in his power, fully and exhaustively to enjoy her."

Brangwen puts his arm around the girl and pulls her close. He leads her along darkened streets and into the park, where he begins to grope her. She doesn't consent to this, but neither does she protest. Rather, she stays silent and inscrutable; obediently doing what he asks of her. Brangwen is happy with her silence and passivity. He doesn't want to know her personally; "he only wanted to discover her. And through her clothing, what absolute beauty he touched ... his hands ... so subtly, so seekingly, so finely and desirously searching her out".

The girl acquiesces and seems also to be enjoying the experience: "In utter sensual delight she clenched her knees, her thighs, her loins together." She accepts his kisses and her mouth becomes bold and assured, rather than helpless and unguarded. But as Brangwen becomes ever more forceful, with a "sudden horrible movement she ruptured the state that contained them both", pushing him away and telling him to stop with a frightened cry. Lawrence eventually brings this long scene to a climax:

"She came back to him, but trembling, reservedly this time.
      Her cry had given him gratification. But he knew he had been too sudden for her. He was now careful. For a while he merely sheltered her. ... He wanted to persist, to begin again, to lead up to the point where he had let himself go on her, and then manage more carefully, successfully. ...
      He sheltered her, and soothed her, and caressed her, and kissed her, and again began to come nearer, nearer. He gathered himself together. Even if he did not take her, he would make her relax, he would fuse away her resistance. So softly, softly, with infinite caressiveness he kissed her, and the whole of his being seemed to fondle her. Till, at the verge, swooning at the breaking point, there came from her a beaten, inarticulate, moaning cry:
      'Don’t - oh, don’t!'
      His veins fused with extreme voluptuousness. For a moment he almost lost control of himself, and continued automatically. But there was a moment of inaction, of cold suspension. He was not going to take her. He drew her to him and soothed her, and caressed her. But the pure zest had gone. She struggled to herself and realised he was not going to take her. And then, at the very last moment, when his fondling had come near again, his hot living desire despising her, against his cold sensual desire, she broke violently away from him.
      'Don’t,' she cried, harsh now with hatred, and she flung her hand across and hit him violently."

Brangwen reacts to this with suave irony and gives her a cruel smile. The girl had escaped, says Lawrence - adding with a rapist's logic: "But she hated him for her escape more than for her danger."

Afterwards, Will Brangwen "caught a train and went home", back to his wife and children, just as if nothing had happened. Indifferent and happy to lie. Just like Adam Johnson.

   
See: D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 210-17. 

See also Howard J. Booth's essay "'At Last to Newness': D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow and the Dream of a Better World", in the Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies, Vol. 4, Number 1 (2015), pp. 19-44. Booth's suggestion in a footnote that Will Brangwen has a sexual fascination with childhood directly inspired this post.  

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