D. H. Lawrence's Daimonic Dendrophilia

Wallace Smith: Illustration for 

Fantazius Mallare (1922)

I have discussed D. H. Lawrence's dendrophilia elsewhere on Torpedo the Ark [click here] and readers will surely recall the scene in Women in Love in which Birkin enters into a state of erotic delirium whilst surrounded by various plants, bushes, and young trees: 

 

"The soft sharp boughs beat upon him, as he moved in keen pangs against them, threw little cold showers of drops on his belly, and beat his loins with their clusters of soft-sharp needles [...] and then to sting one's thigh against the living dark bristles of the fir-boughs; and then to feel the light whip of the hazel on one's shoulders, stinging, and then to clasp the silvery birch-trunk against one's breast, its smoothness, its hardness, its vital knots and ridges - this was good, this was all very good, very satisfying. [...] He knew now where he belonged. He knew where to plant himself, his seed: – along with the trees, in the folds of the delicious fresh growing leaves. This was his place, his marriage place." [1]

 

So one might imagined that Lawrence would have loved the above image by the American artist Wallace Smith for Ben Hecht's controversial novel Fantazius Mallare: A Mysterious Oath (1922) [2], showing a man having sex with a tree. 

 

Only you would be mistaken: Lawrence hated the novel and hated the illustrations by Smith. In a letter-cum-review of the work written shortly after publication - having had a copy of the book sent to him by a friend - Lawrence says this:

 

"Many thanks for sending me the Ben Hecht book. I read it through. But I'm sorry, it didn't thrill me a bit, neither the pictures nor the text. It all seems to me so would-be. Think of the malice, the sheer malice of a Beardsley drawing, the wit, and the venom of the mockery. These drawings are so completely without irony, so crass, so strained, and so would-be. It isn't that they've got anything to reveal at all. That man's coition with a tree, for example. There's nothing in it but the author's attempt to be startling. Whereas if he wanted to be really wicked he'd see that even a tree has its own daimon, and a man might lie with the daimon of a tree. Beardsley saw these things. But it takes imagination." [3]   

 

That, I think, is very interesting - particularly the part about the daimonic aspect of a tree and the possibility of a human being forming an erotic relationship with such, thereby adding an occult element to Lawrence's dendrophilia. 

 

I think Lawrence is right to suggest that a sexual encounter between any two objects involves a "contact between two alien natures" [4] and is always therefore as much a violent struggle as it is a sensual delight. And, personally, I dislike Smith's drawing because it anthropomorphises the tree; by having it take on a distinctly all-too-human female form he produces a heteronormative rather than truly transgressive artwork. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 107-08. 

[2] Those interested in reading Hecht's novel and taking a look at Smith's illustrations can do so thanks to Project Gutenberg: click here.

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'Review of Fantazius Mallare: A Mysterious Oath, by Ben Hecht', in Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 215 

 

[4] Ibid.,  p. 216. 

On the Question of Racial Aesthetics with Reference to D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love

Yoruba carved wooden figure

I.

As everyone knows, many European artists at the beginning of the twentieth-century were inspired by the aesthetics of traditional African sculpture and, without understanding anything of the original symbolism and function of the works, they cheerfully appropriated numerous elements into their own projects in an attempt to move beyond the naturalism that had defined (and limited) Western art since the Renaissance.

Soon, anyone and everyone who wanted to be thought of as avant-garde, began to purchase African figures and masks and to rave about the aesthetic and spiritual value to be found in primitivism. So, it's not surprising that when Birkin and Gerald stay with Julius Halliday and his bohemian friends at a flat in Soho there were "several negro statues, wood-carvings from West Africa" [74] on display.

Gerald finds the pieces strange and disturbing; particularly the figure of a woman sitting naked in a contorted posture (possibly giving birth), which he describes as obscene. The next morning, still troubled by the work, he asks his friend Rupert for his views on it:

"Birkin, white and strangely present, went over to the carved figure of the negro woman in labour. Her nude, protuberant body crouched in a strange, clutching posture, her hands gripping the ends of the band, above her breast.

      'It is art,' said Birkin." [78]
     
Gerald re-examines the figure. But somehow - and for some reason - it made his heart contract:

"He saw vividly, with his spirit, the grey, forward-stretching face of the negro woman, African and tense, abstracted in utter physical stress, It was a terrible face, void, peaked, abstracted almost into meaningless by the weight of sensation beneath. [...]

      'Why is it art?' Gerald asked, shocked, resentful. 

      'It conveys a complete truth,' said Birkin. 'It contains the whole truth of that state, whatever you feel about it.'

      'But you can't call it high art,' said Gerald. 

      'High! There are centuries and hundreds of centuries of development [...] behind that carving; it is an awful pitch of culture, of a definite sort.'

      'What culture?' Gerald asked, in opposition. He hated the sheer African thing. 

      'Pure culture in sensation, culture in the physical consciousness, really ultimate physical consciousness, mindless, utterly sensual. It is so sensual as to be final, supreme.

      But Gerald resented it. He wanted to keep certain illusions, certain ideas like clothing. 

      'You like the wrong things, Rupert,' he said, 'things against yourself.'" 

      'Oh, I know, this isn't everything,'" Birkin replied, moving away. [79]

Although he doesn't let on here, Birkin is perhaps even more perturbed by the female figure than Gerald. Thus it is that, twelve chapters later in the novel, when suddenly recalling the African fetishes he had encountered at Halliday's flat:

"There came back to him one, a statuette about two feet high, a tall, slim, elegant figure from West Africa, in dark wood, glossy and suave. It was a woman, with hair dressed high, like a melon-shaped dome. He remembered her vividly: she was one of his soul's intimates. Her body was long and elegant, her face was crushed tiny like a beetle's, she had rows of round heavy collars, like a column of quoits, on her neck. He remembered her: her astonishing cultured elegance, her diminished beetle face, the astounding long elegant body, on short, ugly legs, with such protuberant buttocks, so weighty and unexpected below her slim long loins. She knew what he himself did not know. She had thousands of years of purely sensual, purely unspiritual knowledge behind her." [253]

This passage - along with the earlier exchange between Birkin and Gerald - can only be understood in relation to the question of racial (and racialised) aesthetics ...

II.

We can, I suppose, take it as a given that there is a dynamic between race and aesthetics and that one of the privileges of having a white skin is that you get to determine what is (and is not) objectively beautiful and that on the basis of this determination white people can also justify the denigration of black art and culture - and, indeed, black people - as ugly and inherently inferior.

But the paradoxical thing, of course, is that white people also find blackness threatening and sexually provocative (something keenly exploited by pornographers). They might not wish to accept people of colour as their social, political, and cultural equals, but they are happy to indulge in exoticism and attribute extraordinary qualities to other races - often by virtue of their physical features - which makes them alluring.    

I think we can find aspects of all these things - the normative component of (white) aesthetics and the attempt to imbue beauty with racial meaning, the overt racism and often unconscious bias of white people unaware of their own privilege, the sexual stereotyping and objectification of black bodies, etc. - in the passages quoted above from Women in Love.

Gerald is shocked to hear Birkin describe the African statuette as a work of art and point out that it has thousands of years of culture behind it. He cannot accept this: for him, art - certainly high art - and culture (which he associates with clothing and illusion) belongs exclusively to the white world. Gerald hates the pure African thing and seems to regard Birkin as something of a race traitor for liking the wrong things - things that are non-white and non-Western. 

 
Almost, one is tempted to describe Gerald as a negrophobe; i.e., someone gripped by a fear and/or hatred for black people and black culture - a condition that if not rooted in the ideology of white aesthetics, is certainly reinforced by it. For Gerald, whiteness and blackness transcend mere skin tones or even aesthetic qualites; they have moral and metaphysical significance.* 

But then the same is also true of Birkin. Indeed, Birkin has an entire philosophy worked out in terms of race and two contrasting forms of abstraction (which seems to be his word for a fatal form of racial consummation):

"The white races, having the arctic north behind them, the vast abstraction of ice and snow, would fulfil a mystery of ice-destructive knowledge, snow-abstract annihilation. Whereas the West Africans, controlled by the burning death-abstraction of the Sahara, had been fulfilled in sun-destruction, the putresecent mystery of sun-rays." [254]

This is the kind of thing one only finds in Lawrence - and Nazi occultism. But Birkin's main interest in the African statuette, however, is more erotic than esoteric; he finds the female figure extremely elegant and utterly sensual and when he remembers her he does so vividly: she was, we are told, one of his soul's intimates. Does that mean Birkin has a black soul? Or does it mean, rather, that he fetishises black female beauty? Probably the latter, I would suggest.

In other words, rather than stigmatise the racial features of African women as deviating from the accepted standard of white beauty, he indulges in a little racial exoticism and pervs on their hair styles, their faces, and their bodies, particularly the protuberant buttocks and slim long loins.

Now, some people might suggest that's better than Gerald's overt negrophobia - but really it's just the other side of the same coin and it's worth noting that whilst Birkin may seceretly lust after black women, he marries snow white Ursula Brangwen and continues to move in all white circles. One suspects that, push comes to shove, he might even share the view expressed by Oliver Mellors; i.e., black women are sensual and orgasmic creatures alright, but, well, he's a white man: and they're a bit like mud.**    

What would be good, would be learning to see members of different races as people in their own right without viewing them only in relation to a white ideal of beauty. Of course, that's never going to happen - particularly in an age increasingly characterised by identity politics. And besides, perhaps it's an innately human thing (and not just a white thing at all) for people to judge others in relation to themselves ...  

See: D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987). All page numbers given in the text refer to this edition.

See also John M. Kang, 'Deconstructing the Ideology of White Aesthetics', Michigan Journal of Race and Law, Vol. 2, (1997), pp. 283-359, an essay which I found extremely helpful whilst writing this post.

* The term negrophobia was popularised in the mid-twentieth century by the political philosopher Frantz Fanon in works such as Peaux noires masques blancs (1952), trans. into English as Black Skin, White Masks, (1967), and Les Damnés de la Terre, (1961) trans. into English as The Wretched of the Earth (1963). 

** I'm referring here to an infamous exchange between Connie and Mellors, in which the latter reveals just what a misogynistic, homophobic, and racist character he is. See D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 204. For a full character analysis of Mellors, click here.

Carbon Footprints and Diamond Geezers: On the Allotropic Love Affair Between Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich

Alan Bates as Rupert Birkin and Oliver Reed as Gerald Crich 

getting all allotropic in Ken Russell's Women in Love (1969)

In a famous letter, Lawrence advised that, when it came to understanding the characters in his fiction, readers shouldn't look for the old stable ego or concern themselves with personal traits.

Instead, they should attune themselves to "another ego, according to whose action the individual is unrecognisable, and passes through, as it were, allotropic states which [...] are states of the same single radically-unchanged element".*

It's a nice - rather Futurist-sounding - notion and one that Lawrence scholars have often referred to over the years. But I don't know if anyone loves the word allotrope and its derivatives more than Thalia Trigoni, who theorises Lawrence's radical dualism on the basis of a concept first conceived by the Swedish chemist Jöns Jakob Berzelius, in 1841.

She also offers an interesting reading of the gladitorial scene in Women in Love fought between Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich, in which the former is equated with a lump of coal who is proud of his carbon footprint, whilst the latter is characterised as a real diamond geezer - all sparkle and no soot.** 

Whilst the essential point is that both are men of carbon, we all know which of these two characters the miner’s son and former schoolteacher privileges and with whom his sympathies lie - and it isn't the playboy industrialist. By refusing to acknowledge his own carbon nature, Gerald the diamond empties himself of real being. He dazzles, but he's ontologically void; lacking any inner life, any soul.
 

Birkin, on the other hand, is keen to immerse himself in the darkness of his own carbon-self:

"He is the primary representative of the unconscious and the instinctual […] the advocate of ‘the great dark knowledge you can’t have in your head - the dark involuntary being’ (WL, 43)." [143].

But again, it's crucial to remember that Birkin and Gerald "represent two forms of the same mode of being" [143], each seeing himself reflected in the other. The naked wrestling scene is as close as they ever get to merging in a peculiar oneness and establishing an intimate and instinctive form of Blutsbrüderschaft.

It is, therefore, so much more than merely an episode of disguised homoeroticism, as many commentators have suggested: "The 'Gladiatorial' is an externalised psychomachia wherein the constituent elements of human nature merge into oneness at the same time that they are striving to break free." [145]

Of course, as we know, it doesn’t quite work out and things end badly for poor Gerald:

"Gerald experiences a death of the body, he becomes a mental machine-like being driven purely by mental reason. His physical intelligence freezes in a state that triggers a process of disintegration that will finally lead to his death in the Alps. […] A stubborn intellectualist who embodies the spirit of mechanical industrialization and rationalization, Gerald is unable to introduce his experience with Birkin into the symbolic order of understanding." [145]

That might be true. But, arguably, over-heated attempts to become-carbon and seek out dark gods also lead to self-destruction and acts of atrocity. And besides, isn’t it better to be a diamond with a fatal flaw than a lump of coal without?

Notes

* D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Volume II, ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1981), letter number 732, to Edward Garnet, 5 June 1914, pp. 182-84. Lines quoted are on p. 183. 

** Thalia Trigoni, 'Lawrence’s Allotropic “Gladiatorial”: Resisting the Mechanization of the Human in Women in Love', in D. H. Lawrence, Technology, and Modernity, ed. Indrek Männiste, (Bloomsbury, 2019), pp. 137-47. See also her essay 'Lawrence's Radical Dualism: The Bodily Unconscious', English Studies, 95: 3 (2014), 302-21.  

This post is a revised extract from a longer review of D. H. Lawrence, Technology, and Modernity that will appear in The Lawrentian, ed. David Brock, (Autumn Edition, 2020).  

It's Failure to Live That Makes Us Sick (D. H. Lawrence in the Age of Coronavirus)

Alan Bates as Birkin and Jennie Linden as Ursula

Women in Love (dir. Ken Russell, 1969)

In Chapter XI of Women in Love, there's a brief but interesting discussion between Ursula Brangwen and Rupert Birkin on the subject of illness which I thought might be interesting to examine as we all sit cooped up at home trying not to touch our faces and hoping not to manifest symptoms of coronavirus (the disease that is not only pandemic but also emblematic of this new socio-cultural era of confinement and isolation in which we suddenly find ourselves).  

"Ursula looked at him closely. He was very thin and hollow, with a ghastly look in his face.

      'You have been ill, haven't you?' she asked, rather repulsed. 

      'Yes,' he replied coldly. 

      'Has it made you frightened?' she asked.

      'What of?' he asked, turning his eyes to look at her. Something in him, inhuman and unmitigated, disturbed her, and shook her out of her ordinary self.

      'It is frightening to be very ill, isn't it? she said.

      'It isn't pleasant,' he said. 'Whether one is really afraid of death, or not, I have never decided. In one mood, not a bit, in another, very much.'

      'But doesn't it make you feel ashamed? I think it makes one so ashamed, to be ill - illness is so terribly humiliating, don't you think?'

      He considered for some minutes. 

      'Maybe,' he said. 'Though one knows all the time one's life isn't really right, at the source. That's the humiliation. I don't see that the illness counts so much, after that. One is ill because one doesn't live properly - can't. It's the failure to live that makes one ill, and humiliates one.'" [124-25]

The precise nature of Birkin's illness isn't, I believe, made clear in the novel. But the fact is he's often sick and laid up in bed, for his sins (and his sensitivity) - a bit like Lawrence himself, who had pneumonia at least twice and was dogged by both pulmonary tuberculosis and chronic bronchitis during his last years.

His description - very thin and hollow, with a ghastly look in his face - makes one think of the man who died after having left the tomb, filled with the sickness of unspeakable disillusion and with a deathly pallor. No wonder Ursula finds Birkin - or, rather, the ravages of disease upon him - repulsive.

For whilst decadents may see beauty in physical decay and find signs of mortal corruption terribly romantic, Ursula is Nietzschean enough to appreciate that the weak and diseased present a terrible danger to the strong and healthy; not because they might pass on their medical condition, but because they invariably make miserable and undermine the natural gaiety that's in life. Repulsion is thus a noble defensive reaction; a vital somatic response to the threat of contamination.     

Having said that, Nietzsche also acknowledged that whilst strength preserves, it is only sickness which ultimately advances man. And so Birkin "liked sometimes to be ill enough to take to his bed", for then, during a period of convalescence, "he got better very quickly, and things came to him clear and sure" [201].    

Arguably, it's this convalescent conviction sparkling in his eyes that Ursula finds disturbing. Ordinarily, human beings always have a little fear and uncertainty in their eyes and Ursula seeks reassurance that Birkin, does, in fact, still know what it is to be frightened; of illness and of the possibility of dying.

However, whilst Birkin concedes that being critically ill and brought to death's door isn't very pleasant, he remains ambivalent about whether he is really afraid of death or not; sometimes no, sometimes yes. As for Lawrence, he was much clearer on this point: one must ultimately lose the fear and learn to affirm death in the same manner (and for the same reason) that one affirms life; for without the song of death, the song of life becomes pointless and absurd.  

Finally, we come to the question of illness and humiliation ...

Ursula finds sickness terribly humiliating and even the thought of being ill shameful. Birkin doesn't deny this, but seems to regard it as missing the real issue. For Birkin, it's not being ill that prevents us from living, but being unable to live - which for Lawrence means blossoming into full being like a flower - that makes us ill. It's this ontological failure - exacerbated by the conditions of modern existence - that, for Birkin, brings shame upon us.*

I don't know if that's true, but it's certainly something worth thinking about in the present time ...

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen (Cambridge University Press, 1987). Note that I have slightly edited the discussion between Ursula and Birkin, removing a couple of lines.

* Lawrence reaffirms this idea in a poem found in his Nettles Notebook called 'Healing', which opens with the following lines:

I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections.
And it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly, that I am ill.
I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self ..."

See The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 534.

Readers who liked this post might also find the following essay by Judith Ruderman of interest: 'D. H. Lawrence's Dis-Ease: Examining the Symptoms of "Illness as Metaphor''', D. H. Lawrence Review, Vol. 36, No. 2, (Autumn, 2011). 

Birkin's Cat (Notes on Sexual Politics and Feline Philosophy in Women in Love)

Portrait Gray Tabby Cat

Photograph by Maika 777

fineartamerica.com

I.

I wasn't surprised to discover that Rupert Birkin owned a grey tabby cat. Is there anything more noble, after all, than a young male cat with long legs and a slim back?

What was surprising, however, was to discover that Birkin based his sexual politics and philosophical thinking on star equilibrium as much upon observations of Mino the cat as upon his (mis)reading of Nietzsche.

Thus, when watching Mino amorously interact with a stray she-cat that has wandered into the garden from the woods, Birkin can't help metaphysically musing on gender relations and the need for superfine stability, even if this requires cruelty and, ultimately, the submission of the female to the male ... 


II.  

"The young cat trotted lordly down the path, waving his tail. He was an ordinary tabby with white paws, a slender young gentleman. A crouching, fluffy, brownish-grey cat was stealing up the side of the fence. The Mino walked statelily up to her, with manly nonchalance. She crouched before him and pressed herself on the ground in humility, a fluffy soft outcast, looking up at him with wild eyes that were green and lovely as great jewels. He looked casually down on her. So she crept a few inches further, proceeding on her way to the back door, crouching in a wonderful soft, self-obliterating manner, and moving like a shadow.
      He, going statlily on his slim legs, walked after her, then suddenly, for pure excess, he gave her a light cuff with his paw on the side of the face. She ran off a few steps, like a blown leaf along the ground, then crouched unobtrusively, in submissive, wild patience. The Mino pretended to take no notice of her. He blinked his eyes superbly at the landscape. In a minute she drew herself together and moved softly, a fleecy brown-grey shadow, a few paces forward. She began to quicken her pace, in a moment she would be gone like a dream, when the young grey lord sprang before her, and gave her a light handsome cuff. She subsided at once, submissively."    

"The eyes of the stray cat flared round for a moment, like great green fires staring at Birkin. Then she had rushed in a soft swift rush, half way down the garden. There she paused to look round. The Mino turned his face in pure superiority to his master, and slowly closed his eyes, standing in statuesque young perfection. The wild cat's round, green, wondering eyes were staring all the while like uncanny fires. Then again, like a shadow, she slid towards the kitchen.
      In a lovely springing leap, like a wind, the Mino was upon her, and had boxed her twice, very definitely, with a white, delicate fist. She sank and slid back, unquestioning. He walked after her, and cuffed her once or twice, leisurely, with sudden little blows of his magic white paws."

- D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love

III.

Ursula, who happens to be watching this alongside Birkin, is angry and upset at the male cat's use of violence to bully the female, as she perceives it. Birkin, amused by her indignation, tries to explain that this is a normal part of feline intimacy and, it's true of course, that feline sexual behaviour does involve a certain amount of unpleasantness (spraying, fighting, biting, etc.).*

Ursula, however, is unconvinced and continues to insist that Mino is a bully - like all males. This clearly irritates Birkin, who replies:

"'He is not a bully. He is only insisting to the poor stray that she shall acknowledge him as a sort of fate, her own fate: because you can see she is fluffy and promiscuous as the wind. I am with him entirely. He wants superfine stability."  

Which, I suppose, is one way of putting it and one possible explanation. Though it could just be that Mino wants to penetrate the she-cat and that his male dignity and higher understanding are but fanciful notions belonging to Birkin. That's certainly what Ursula thinks: "'Oh it makes me so cross, this assumption of male superiority! And it is such a lie! One wouldn't mind if there were any justification for it.'"

Clearly, Birkin thinks there is some justification for it - and that it is neither a sadistic lust for cruelty nor a naked will to power, describing the latter as base and petty, even though, clearly, his reading of Nietzsche - like Lawrence's own - is a poor and selective one at best.

For Birkin, Mino's behaviour - and, presumably, male sexual behaviour in general - can best be thought of as a desire to impose upon female chaos masculine order and thus bring about a state of "transcendent and abiding rapport" between the sexes that benefits them both. Paradise is a state of pure equilibrium in which each party is a star balanced in conjunction.

And that, for Birkin, is what love is all about - fulfilment, not individual or personal freedom: "'Love is a direction which excludes all other directions. It's a freedom together, if you like." Ideal love and ideal freedom, he says, ultimately result in chaos and nihilism.

But, again, Ursula isn't having any of it: "'I don't trust you when you drag the stars in,' she said."

Notes

* Things probably aren't helped - speaking from the female cat's point of view - by the fact that the male has a barbed penis and that penetration therefore causes a certain amount of discomfort (although I'm not sure it's fair to describe the male cat's penis as a horrifying engine of pain, as one feminist commentator described it). Upon withdrawl, these keratinised penile spines rake the walls of the she-cats vagina, removing the semen of love rivals and helping to trigger ovulation. 

See: D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), Ch. XIII, pp. 148-152.

On Blaming the Victim

Cain and Abel as depicted in the  

Speculum Humanae Salvationis (c. 1360)

Whilst I'm aware of the dangers of victim blaming and of how it can be used to justify, mitigate, or excuse certain forms of discriminatory or criminal behaviour often perpetrated by those who are in a position of power or privilege, I'm afraid I do subscribe to ideas of contributory negligence and unconscious provocation and do think that the victim of a crime is always, in some sense and to some degree, complicit or partially responsible for what happens to them - even when it's a loved one who has just had her i-Phone and purse stolen from her handbag by some charming urban youth from the idyllic borough of Haringey ...

Indeed, I even find the following passage from Women in Love persuasive, if troubling in what it logically entails: 

"'No man,' said Birkin, 'cuts another man's throat unless he wants to cut it, and unless the other man wants it cutting. This is a complete truth. It takes two people to make a murder: a murderer and a murderee. And a murderee is a man who is murderable. And a man who is murderable is a man who in a profound if hidden lust desires to be murdered.'" [33]

Gerald dismisses this as pure nonsense - as, I suspect, would the majority of readers keen to secure a clear distinction between guilt and innocence and who regard all victims from Abel onwards - with the exception perhaps of many rape victims and those who lead unconventional or high risk lifestyles - as beyond reproach (whilst, on the other hand, considering the ideal perpetrator of a crime as an entirely unsympathetic character, lacking in virtue, perhaps even a little monstrous or inhuman, carrying as they do the mark of Cain).

There are also - as indicated - political and philosophical reasons for rejecting what Birkin says here. Adorno, for example, identified the phenomenon of victim blaming as one of the most sinister features of the fascist mindset; i.e., the so-called authoritarian personality that holds any sign of weakness as contemptible. Ask any Nazi even now who's to blame for Auschwitz and they'll answer without hesitation: the Jews (The Jews made us racist! The Jews were asking for it!)

See: D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, John Worthen ad Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 33. 

See also: T. W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality, (Harper and Bros., 1950). 

Irezumi: Notes on D. H. Lawrence's Fascination with Japanese Male Bodies

入れ墨 
Getting ink done Japanese style

Children born with congenital abnormalities are relatively few in number and the mortality rate amongst such infants is very high. It's for this reason that most sideshow freaks are in fact individuals who have gone to great lengths to place themselves outside of the norm and make themselves exceptional.

This includes those who have enhanced their appearance with extensive tattooing, such as John Rutherford, for example, who became the first professional tattooed Englishman after returning home in 1828 from New Zealand, where he'd had his body covered with Maori designs. Rutherford would regale his audience with tall tales of having been shipwrecked and then abducted by native peoples, who only accepted him once his flesh was decorated like their own.        

Or like the Albanian Greek known as Captain George Constentenus, a 19th-century circus performer and famous travelling attraction, who claimed to have been kidnapped by Chinese Tartars and tattooed from top to toe - including hands, neck and face - against his will. His almost 400 tattoos included many animal designs and Constentenus became the most popular (and wealthiest) of all the tattooed exhibit-performers.     

Or, finally, like the anonymous Japanese character in D. H. Lawrence's little-read novel The Lost Girl (1920), whom Alvina Houghton takes something of a shine to, along with other circus types:

"Alvina was more fascinated by the odd fish: like the lady who did marvellous things with six ferrets, or the Jap who was tattooed all over, and had the most amazing strong wrists [...] Queer cuts these! - but just a little bit beyond her. She watched them rather from a distance.
      She wished she could jump across the distance. Particularly with the Jap, who was almost quite naked, but clothed with the most exquisite tattooing. Never would she forget the eagle that flew with terrible spread wings between his shoulders, or the strange mazy pattern that netted the roundness of his buttocks. He was not very large, but nicely shaped, and with no hair on his smooth, tattooed body. He was almost blue in colour - that is, his tattooing was blue, with pickings of brilliant vermillion: as for instance round the nipples, and in a strange red serpent's jaws over the navel. A serpent went round his loins and haunches. - He told her how many times he had had blood-poisoning, during the process of his tattooing. He was a queer, black-eyed creature, with a look of silence and toad-like lewdness. He frightened her." 

There are two things I'd like to comment on in relation to this astonishing passage - neither of which, surprisingly, are picked up on in the explanatory notes provided by the editor of the Cambridge edition of the text, John Worthen. 

Firstly, it's interesting that Lawrence seems to have some knowledge of (and fascination with) irezumi, i.e., the traditional Japanese art of tattooing with a distinct style evolved over many centuries.

Indeed, tattooing for spiritual as well as aesthetic purposes in Japan can be traced back to the Paleolithic era, though it only assumed the advanced decorative form we know today during the Edo period (1603-1868), thanks in part to a popular Chinese novel illustrated with colourful woodblock prints showing heroic figures decorated with flowers, tigers, and mythical creatures. 

Amusingly, scholars are divided over who first wore these elaborate tattoos; some argue that it was the lower classes who defiantly flaunted such designs; others claim that the fashion for irezumi originated with wealthy members of the merchant class, who, prohibited by law from displaying their weath, secretly wore their expensive tattoos beneath their clothing.  

Either way, the fact remains that irezumi is a slow, painful and expensive method of tattooing, that uses metal needles attached with silk thread to wooden handles and a special ink, called Nara ink, that famously turns blue-green under the skin. Irezumi is performed by a small number of specialists (known as Hori-shi) who are revered figures within the skin-inking community.

Usually, a person skilled in the art of Japanese tattooing will have trained for many years under a master; observing, practicing (on their own skin), making the tools, mixing the inks, etc. Only when they have mastered all the skills required and learnt to copy their master's technique in every detail, will they be allowed to tattoo clients.

Finally, it's worth noting that during the Meiji period (1868-1912) the Japanese government outlawed tattooing and irezumi was forced underground, becoming associated with criminality; yakuzi gangsters have always had a penchant for traditional all-over body designs - just like Alvina Houghton.  

Indeed - and this is my second point - Lawrence, who, as a writer, often indulges in racial fetishism, also seems to have a thing for the flesh of Japanese men, whether tattooed or untattooed, as we learn from the famous wrestling scene in Women in Love (1920) ...  

Gerald suggests to Birkin that they might indulge in a round or two of boxing. The latter, however, isn't so keen on the idea of being punched in the face by his physically bigger and much stronger friend and suggests, alternatively, that they might do some Japanese wrestling (by which he seems to mean jiu-jitsu).

He explains to Gerald that he once shared a house with a Jap in Heidelberg who taught him a few martial art moves. Gerald is excited by the idea and immediately agrees to it, suggesting - with a queer smile on his face - that they strip naked in order to be able to properly get to grip with one another, man-to-man.    

Of course, Birkin doesn't take much convincing of the need for this; quickly conceding that you can't wrestle in a starched shirt. Besides, he sometimes fought with his Japanese opponent naked, so it was no big deal.

This piece of information piques Gerald's bi-curiosity and he asks Birkin for details. The latter explains that the man was "'very quick and slippery and full of electric fire'", before adding: "'It is a remarkable thing, what a curious sort of fluid force they seem to have in them, those people - not like a human grip - like a polyp.'"

Gerald nods, as if he understands perfectly what Birkin means: "'I should imagine so,' he said, 'to look at them. They repel me, rather.'"

To which, Birkin replies: "'Repel and attract both. They are very repulsive when they are cold, and they look grey. But when they are hot and roused, there is a definite attraction - a curious kind of full electric fluid - like eels.'"

Again, to me, this is an astonishing exchange in which there is so much to unpack in terms of racial and sexual politics, that it's quite laughable that the editors of the Cambridge edition only think to inform us in an explanatory note that electric eels, whilst certainly capable of giving a shock, do not, in fact, contain 'fluid'.

I mean, I'm as interested in the biology of the Gymnotus as the next man, but, as a reader of Lawrence, I'm rather more interested to know whether Birkin's vital being interpenetrated his Japanese opponent in the same way it interpenetrated Gerald's; "as if his fine, sublimated energy entered into the flesh of the [other] man, like some potency".

Did Birkin entwine his body with the body of his Japanese opponent with a "strange, octopus-like knotting and flashing of limbs" until the two bodies were clinched into oneness?

Did Alvina ever jump across the pathos of distance that lay between her and the tattooed Oriental  who looked so shabby dressed in cheap, ill-fitting European clothes, but so beautiful naked: "Who could have imagined the terrible eagle of his shoulders, the serpent of his loins, his supple, magic skin?"

I think we should be told ...

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, The Lost Girl, ed. John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 119, 120.

D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, John Worthen and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 268-69, 270.

Psychrophilia: Or Love (and Death) in a Cold Climate

Portrait by Tamara de Lempika (1929)

The white races, having the arctic north behind them, the vast abstraction of ice and snow, 

would fulfil a mystery of ice-destructive knowledge, snow-abstract annihilation.

Opening Remarks

Psychrophilia is another form of sexual fetishism encountered in the work of Mr. D. H. Lawrence - although often disguised beneath a pronounced fear and loathing of snow and ice - and I thought it might be interesting to examine his subzero-eroticism here, with reference to the doomed love affair between Gudrun and Gerald in Women in Love.

What amuses me is how Lawrence takes a relatively simple pleasure - in this case, one in which a person gains arousal via contact with cold objects or by exposing others to low temperatures - and incorporates it into his own perverse aesthetico-philosophical project.

Most psychrophiles are happy to simply rub an ice cube on their partners nipples, or play with a dildo that has spent the night in the freezer. But Lawrence is compelled to explore psychrophilia in relation to what Nietzsche terms the crisis of modern European nihilism. In other words, for Lawrence, psychrophilia becomes a question of racial-cultural destiny more than merely a sexy form of brain freeze.           

I. Snow

The two couples - Ursula and Birkin and Gudrun and Gerald - decide to head off to the mountains for a winter holiday in the Alps. Unsuprisingly, there is snow everywhere: and whilst they all find the sheer whiteness and perfect silence of this alien world exhilarating at first, so too do they find it terrifying.

Only Gudrun feels truly at home surrounded by the "terrible waste of whiteness". It fills her, writes Lawrence, with a strange sense of rapture: "At last she had arrived, she had reached her place. Here at last she folded her venture and settled down like a crystal in the navel of snow, and was gone."

But Gerald also loves being high up amidst the snow-covered mountains: "A fierce, electric energy seemed to flow over all his limbs" and he felt himself superhumanly strong. When he fucks Gudrun for the first time in this frozen environment he feels his heart ignite like a flame of ice.

She, however, remains frigid in every sense of the term; dead to love and, ultimately, dead to life. For whilst she can see that the peaks of snow looked beautiful in the blue of evening - "glistening like transcendent, radiant spikes of blossom in the heavenly upper-world, so lovely and beyond" - she can't feel part of it: "She was divorced, debarred, a soul shut out."

Ursula and Birkin, meanwhile, aren't great fans of the snow and the frighteningly cold air. Underneath the glamour and the wonder of it all, Ursula detected something malevolent and murderous. And Birkin is forced to admit that he couldn't bear to be there were she not by his side, protecting him with her warmth from the snow-stillness and frozen eternality.

By the very next day, Ursula has had enough of it; "the dazzling whiteness seemed to beat upon her till it hurt her, she felt the cold was slowly strangling her soul. Her head felt dazed and numb." Suddenly, she decides she wants to go away - that she must escape from the world of snow and ice and return to the world of dark earth in which oranges and olives grew.*

And so Ursula and Birkin take their leave ...


II. Snowed Up**

As soon as Ursula and Birkin have left, the relationship between Gudrun and Gerald becomes increasingly frosty. His heart turns to ice at the sound of her voice; her flesh chills whenever he physically comes close. Even for psychrophiles, this is not a good sign. As Gudrun rightly concludes, their attempt to find love has been a total failure.

And so, here they are nowhere with nowhere left to go. Full of a cold passion of anger, Gerald imagines killing his mistress. And Gudrun is increasingly afraid that he'll do so. Only she doesn't intend to be killed: "A fine thread still united her to him. It should not be her death which broke it." 

With Gerald feeling ever more snow-estranged, Gudrun begins to openly flirt with an artist called Loerke. One day, she goes for a sleigh ride with him. When Gerald arrives on the scene, he punches Loerke to the ground and then proceeds to strangle Gudrun. The scene is described in sexually charged language that must surely delight sadists with a penchant for erotic asphyxiation.

Although she has the life squeezed out of her, Gudrun isn't killed. At the last moment, Gerald, full of self-disgust, releases his grip and then drifts off, unconsciously, into the snow, where he lies down to sleep and to die (perchance to dream).

III. Exeunt

"When they brought the body home, the next morning, Gudrun was shut up in her room. [...] What should she say? What should she feel? What did they expect of her? She was coldly at a loss."

Ursula and Birkin return and the latter goes to view the corpse of his friend:

"He had loved him. And yet he felt chiefly disgust at the inert body lying there. It was so inert, so coldly dead, a carcase, Birkin's bowels seemed to turn to ice. He had to stand and look at the frozen dead body that had been Gerald. [...] He reached and touched the dead face. And the sharp, heavy bruise of ice bruised his living bowels. He wondered if he himself were freezing too, freezing from the inside."

Birkin also touches "the sharp, almost glittering fair hair of the frozen body" and as his heart begins to freeze so too does the blood in his veins turns to ice-water: "So cold, so cold, a heavy, bruising cold pressing on his arms from outside, and a heavier cold congealing within him, in his heart and in his bowels."

What can he do at last but turn away and cease to care. His friend was no more - just a strange icy lump lying there and Birkin doubtless came to the same conclusion that he had reached once before when considering the case of Gerald Crich:

"He was one of these strange white wonderful demons from the north, fulfilled in the destructive frost-mystery. And [...] fated to pass away in this knowledge, death by perfect cold [...] an omen of the universal dissolution into whiteness and snow."

Still, who knows, perhaps that's why the fires of hell are so necessary - to warm us up again, in death, so that we may be reborn. Perhaps all is not lost ...

Notes

* It's interesting to note that Loerke, like Ursula, is also a psychrophobe, rather than a psychrophile; his nightmare vision is of a world gone cold, where snow fell everywhere "and only white creatures, polar-bears, white foxes, and men like awful white snow-birds, persisted in ice cruelty". This is probably the only thing the two characters have in common. 

** Readers might be interested in a sister post to this one in which I develop this section in relation to the question of erotic asphyxiation: click here.  

D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, John Worthen and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 1987). All lines quoted are from Chapters XXX-XXII, pp. 398-481, with the exception of the quotation prior to the opening remarks and the final quotation in section III, which are both taken from Chapter XIX, p. 254.

Asphyxiophilia: Reflections on the Case of Gerald and Gudrun

Oliver Reed as Gerald and Glenda Jackson as Gudrun in 
Women in Love (dir. Ken Russell, 1969)

I. Asphyxiophilia

As someone who has always had trouble swallowing and breathing, I've no practical interest in the subject of erotic asphyxiation (or asphyxiophilia as it's also known). That anyone should wish to strangle the object of their affection, or intentionally restrict their own supply of oxygen - even for the purposes of sexual stimulation - is a disconcerting thought. 

However, it seems that a lot of people are aroused (or at least intrigued) by the prospect of gasping or making gasp; they long to induce and/or experience the delirious, semi-hallucinogenic state known as hypoxia (a state that intensifies orgasm). This can be achieved via various methods, including hanging, suffocation, or strangulation.

Obviously, the practice can be dangerous and there have been a number of well-documented fatalities resulting from erotic asphyxiation (particularly when engaged in as a solosexual activity). Thus, as in so many other things, caution is highly recommended (one of the key words in Deleuze and Guattari's lexicon that is often overlooked); living dangerously doesn't mean dying stupidly.       


II. Strangulation

Strangulation accounts for a small but significant number of murders. It can involve the use of a ligature, such as a rope or an electric cord, or it can be accomplished manually for a more intimate and truly hands on experience.   

Research on homicidal strangulation suggests that most of the victims are female and that in the majority of cases the perpetrator and the victim are known to one another, often having a family relationship. Studies also show that men who strangle women frequently do so in order to facilitate rape or to express violent sexual emotions such as jealousy.


III. The Case of Gerald and Gudrun

As a murderous motif, we might say that strangulation is the perfect coming together of sex and violence. No wonder then that it attracted the attention of D. H. Lawrence whose erotic vision is often tied closely to his thanatological musings (i.e., shot through with death). This is well illustrated in what I believe to be his finest novel, Women in Love (1920).   

Gudrun and Gerald have travelled to the Alps in order to meet their fate: only one of them will leave the mountains alive. Initially, they are accompanied by Ursula and Birkin, but this latter couple soon leave, finding the malevolent whiteness and silence of the snow unbearable.

The relationship between Gudrun and Gerald becomes increasingly frosty, to say the least. His heart turns to ice at the sound of her voice; she chills whenever he physically comes close. Even for psychrophiles, this is not a good sign. As Gudrun says, their attempt to be lovers has been a failure.

It's not long before Gerald's cold passion of anger induces murderous thoughts and Gudrun is rightly afraid that he will kill her: "But she did not intend to be killed. A fine thread still united her to him. It should not be her death which broke it."

Gerald's snow-estrangement continues until, finally, he snaps and Lawrence writes a disturbing scene that must surely delight readers with a penchant for erotic asphyxiation:

"He took the throat of Gudrun between his hands, that were hard and indomitably powerful. And her throat was beautifully, so beautifully soft. Save that, within, he could feel the slippery chords of her life. And this he crushed, this he could crush. What bliss! Oh what bliss, at last, what satisfaction, at last! The pure zest of satisfaction filled his soul. He was watching the unconsciousness come into her swollen face, watching her eyes roll back. How ugly she was! What a fulfilment, what a satisfaction! How good this was, oh how good it was, what a god-given gratification, at last! He was unconscious of her fighting and struggling. That struggling was her reciprocal lustful passion in this embrace, the more violent it became, the greater the frenzy of delight, till the zenith was reached, the crisis, the struggle was overborne, her movement became softer, appeased."

Gudrun, however, isn't dead. At the last moment, full of self-disgust, Gerald releases his grip and then drifts off, unconsciously, into the snow, where he lies down to sleep and to die (perchance to dream).

The next day, Gudrun is pale-faced and impassive: unwilling to speak; unable to shed a tear ...

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, John Worthen and Lindeth Vasey (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 452, 471-72.

Helinä Häkkänen, 'Murder by Manual and Ligature Strangulation', Ch. 4 of Criminal Profiling: International Theory, Research, and Practice, ed. R. N. Kocsis (Humana Press Inc., 2006). Click here to read as an online pdf. 

For a related post on psychrophilia, out of which this one emerged, click here. 

Surprise musical bonus (a classic slice of late '70s punk): click here. 

Surprise comedy bonus (a darkly hilarious clip from an '80s TV classic): click here.

Slippery When Wet: Reflections on D. H. Lawrence's Aquaphilia

Image via derpibooru.org

Aquaphilia is yet another form of sexual fetishism that we often come across in the work of Mr. D. H. Lawrence and I thought it might be interesting to examine several instances of his water-based eroticism here ...

I: The White Peacock

There's a very lovely scene in Lawrence's first novel in which Cyril and his friend George frolic naked in a pond ...

"The water was icily cold, and for a moment deprived me of my senses. When I began to swim, soon the water was buoyant, and I was sensible of nothing but the vigorous poetry of action. I saw George swimming on his back laughing at me, and in an instant I had flung myself like an impulse after him. The laughing face vanished as he swung over and fled, and I pursued the dark head and the ruddy neck. [...] As I came up to him and caught him, with my hand on his shoulder [...] George was floating just beside me, looking up and laughing."

This is already a fairly explicit piece of homoerotic and aquaphilic writing, but it's interesting to note the words deleted from the original MS at this point: "and his white breasts and his belly emerged like cool buds of a firm fleshed water flower" - a line that could only have come from Lawrence's pen.  

Afterwards, having returned to the land, Cyril and George "stood and looked at each other as [they] rubbed [themselves] dry".


II: The Trespasser

What's interesting about the case of Siegmund, the protagonist of Lawrence's second novel, The Trespasser, is how his aquaphilia takes on an autoerotic character and moves towards a becoming-fish ...

"He chose his bathing place [...] threw his clothes on a high rock [...] ran laughing over the sand to the sea, where he waded in, thrusting his legs noisily through the heavy green water.
      It was cold, and he shrank. For a moment he found himself thigh-deep [...] afraid to plunge. Laughing, he went under the clear green water.
      He was a poor swimmer. Sometimes a choppy wave swamped him, and he rose gasping, wringing the water from his eyes and nostrils, while he heaved and sank with the rocking of the waves that clasped his breast. Then he stooped again to resume his game with the sea. It is splendid to play, even at middle age, and the sea is a fine partner."

Now, I'm not saying for certain that he jerked off in the sea. But Lawrence writes in such a queerly erotic manner that this is certainly implied: "He offered his body to the morning, glowing with the sea's passion ... the sunshine came on his shoulders like warm breath. He delighted in himself."

And if he did, in fact, choose to ejaculate his sperm upon the naked waters, mightn't this be said to mark his becoming one with his aquatic environment, just like a wave-thrilled fish?    


III: The Rainbow

Suddenly, in her penultimate term, Ursula Brangwen discovers that a "queer awareness existed between herself and her class-mistress, Miss Inger [...] a rather beautiful woman of twenty eight" who also happens to be the school's swimming instructress:

"Ursula trembled and was dazed with passion. Her hopes were soon to be realised. She would see Miss Inger in her bathing dress.
      [...] In the great bath the water was glimmering pale emerald-green, a lovely, glimmering mass of colour within the whitish, marble-like confines. Overhead the light fell softly and the great green body of pure water moved under it as someone dived from the side.
      Ursula, trembling, hardly able to contain herself, pulled off her clothes, put on her tight bathing suit, and opened the door of her cabin. Two girls were in the water. The mistress had not appeared. She waited. A door opened, Miss Inger came out, dressed in a red-tunic like a Greek girl's, tied round the waist, and a red silk handkerchief round her head. How lovely she looked. Her knees were so white and strong and proud, she was firm-bodied as Diana. She walked simply to the side of the bath, and with a negligent movement, flung herself in. For a moment Ursula watched the white, smooth, strong shoulders and the easy arms swimming. Then she too dived into the water.
      Now, ah now she was swimming in the same water with her dear mistress. The girl moved her limbs voluptuously, and swam by herself, deliciously, yet with a craving of unsatisfaction. She wanted to touch the other, to touch her, to feel her."

Miss Inger invites Ursula to race her: and so the latter sets off in chase; just as Cyril chased George in The White Peacock:

"The mistress was just ahead, swimming with easy strokes. Ursula could see the head put back, the water flickering upon the white shoulders, the strong legs kicking shadowily. And she swam blinded with passion. Ah, the beauty of the firm, white, cool flesh! Ah, the wonderful firm limbs. If she could but hold them, hug them, press them between her own small breasts!"

Lawrence concludes this hydrosapphic fantasy:

"They neared the end of the bath - the deep end. Miss Inger touched the pipe, swung herself round, and caught Ursula round the waist, in the water, and held her for a moment against herself. The bodies of the two women touched, heaved against each other for a moment, then were separate."  

Lawrence, however, can't resist giving us a further scene of aquatic lesbianism later in the same chapter ...

Miss Inger has invited Ursula to stay with her for the weekend at a country cottage and suggests a midnight swim. They undress in the bungalow, Ursula a little nervously. And then they venture outdoors, naked, feeling the "soft air of night upon their skins". Because Ursula is uncertain of the path, Miss Inger holds her close, and gives her a reassuring kiss.

Then, she picks up her student and volunteers to carry her into the water: "Ursula lay still in her mistress's arms, her forehead against the beloved, maddening breast." Before they can enter the water, however, a heavy shower of ice-cold rain begins to fall on their "flushed, hot limbs" and brings their aquaphilic adventure to a premature close.    


IV: Women in Love

Finally, I would like to draw attention to a scene in Chapter IV of my favourite novel by Lawrence, Women in Love, in which Gerald delights (solipsistically) in his own movement through water - and arouses the desire and envy of Gudrun in the process ...

"Suddenly, from the boat-house, a white figure ran out [...] It launched in a white arc through the air, there was a bursting of the water, and among the smooth ripples a swimmer was making out to space, in a centre of faintly heaving motion. The whole otherworld, wet and remote, he had to himself. He could move into the pure translucency of the grey, uncreated water.
      Gudrun stood by the stone wall [...] watching the motion on the bosom of the water, as if fascinated. [...]
      And she stood motionless gazing over the water at the face which washed up and down on the flood, as he swam steadily. From his separate element he saw [her], and he exulted to himself because of his own advantage, his possession of a world to himself. He was immune and perfect. He loved his own vigorous, thrusting motion, and the violent impulse of the very cold water against his limbs, buoying him up."

Lawrence continues:

"Gerald suddenly turned, and was swimming away swiftly, with a side stroke. He was alone now, alone and immune in the middle of the waters, which he had all to himself. He exulted in his isolation in the new element, unquestioned and unconditioned. He was happy, thrusting with his legs and all his body, without bond or connection anywhere, just himself in the watery world.
      Gudrun envied him almost painfully. Even this momentary possession of pure isolation and fluidity seemed to her so terribly desirable, that she felt herself as if damned, out there on the [dry land]."

Gudrun's aquaphilia, in other words, expresses itself not as a desire to fuck under water, but to shed her humanity and become-mermaid in her own weird, underwater world ... 

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, The White Peacock, ed. Andrew Robertson, (Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 222-23, and see the editorial note on p. 386. 

D. H. Lawrence. The Trespasser, ed. Elizabeth Mansfield, (Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 73.

I am also paraphrasing a line from Lawrence's magnificent poem 'Fish' in this section of the text, which can be found in Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923). See The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Vol. I, pp. 289-94. 

D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 311,  313-16. 

D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, John Worthn and Lindeth Vasey (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 46-7. 


This post is dedcated to Brenda Sumner, Secretary of the D. H. Lawrence Society, for all her kind help and support over the years.

Chris D. Thomas: Inheritors of the Earth - Six Key Ideas (Part 1: Sections I - III)

I. Extinction isn't the End of the World and Change is the Only Constant

Professor Chris D. Thomas is an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of York who has written a book that lends scientific support to Rupert Birkin's vision in Women in Love of a far-off future in which biological diversity is even greater than it is now and unimaginable new species of life will have unfolded. Of course, Thomas doesn't share Birkin's misanthropy and long for a world free of humanity, but he does affirm that evolution never ends and that there is thus an infinite array of lovely things still to come (after - but also out of - the Anthropocene period).

Thomas begins by setting out a familiar tale of woe concerning the negative effect that mankind is said to have had on the Earth. Whilst conceding the importance of recognising ways in which human activity threatens the existence of life, he quickly counters this doom-laden narrative of eco-apocalypse and suggests we take a broader view, considering all the evidence and not just those facts that reinforce the moral and political concerns of those who subscribe to a green philosophy based on a desire to save the planet.     

Essentially, Thomas is arguing that short-term ecological upheaval and species extinction pales into insignificance when seen from the perspective of evolution. Ultimately, no matter how great the losses, there will be winners; that is to say, species that will not only survive, but thrive; not only thrive, but diversify into an unimaginable variety of new species. Periods when the levels of extinction are high - as they are presently - obviously present setbacks; "but in the end they have provided new opportunities for enterprising creatures that have been able to exploit the new conditions" [7]. Come back in a million years, says Thomas, and you're likely to be astonished at what you'll find.  

We might not like it, but never-ending change is the only constant; the world is in a state of permanent flux. Futile attempts to conserve the world as it is - or, even more vainly, to restore it to some earlier, more pristine, more natural state - are not only untenable, but "implicitly dismiss as undesirable the continuing biological gains of the human epoch" [8]. Further, the logic of such a way of thinking can have ugly consequences, such as the call to eradicate alien arrivals and exterminate impure hybrids. Rather than "swim against the tide of ecological and evolutionary change" [9], writes Thomas, we should go with the flow and joyfully facilitate and accelerate biological processes.


II. The Future Walks Among Us

Just to be clear: Thomas isn't arguing that we shouldn't, for example, try to prevent unsustainable fishing and the dumping of plastic into the oceans. But, we need to open our eyes to the evolutionary reality of the world and acknowledge biological gains made. It can also be strangely comforting to realise that we can glimpse the future within the present; that the "inheritors of the future Earth are already among us today" [43], just as birds and mammals were coexistent with the dinosaurs for millions of years and did not "suddenly appear after the asteroid hit" [41] (an idea that greater knowledge of the fossil record plus revolutionary advances in molecular biology has shown to be false).

These inheritors, as Thomas calls them, might not be the wild and charismatic megafauna that most people worry about (tigers, gorillas, pandas, polar bears, etc.), but we should probably get over our sentimental privileging of such beasts and recognise that domestic animals and household pets - as well as cereal crops - have all been incredibly successful by taking advantage of "a gullible primate" [45] in order to ensure their survival and global proliferation.

It's a Lawrentian nightmare, but there are now about 1.5 billion cattle, 1.2 billion sheep, 1 billion pigs and an astonishing 22 billion chickens in the world, all being fed and cared for in addition to the 1 billion cats and dogs, by 7 billion human beings. In other words, "the present is not a dip in the total numbers or combined weight [biomass] of large animals ... it is a substantial increase" [47] and the Anthropocene remains "just as much an age of mammals and birds as it ever was" [47].

Thomas concludes that "it's time to stop yearning for a pristine, wild world ... [as] there is no longer any such thing as human-free nature" [53] and we cannot reverse time. Besides, many species of large non-domestic animal are recovering in number and returning to their former lands; bears, bison, wolves, deer, boar, etc. Such recoveries seem likely to become more widespread (albeit within human-managed spaces) and the chances are "there will be considerably more large wild mammals in existence one hundred years from now than there are today" [51].


III. On Accelerated Evolution

Ecological transformation is one thing; evolutionary change is something else - something, in the long run, far more fundamental. Evolution, as Thomas says, is how life on Earth responds to and recovers from natural disasters, including periods of mass extinction.

People often parrot the phrase sixth extinction and like to blame humanity for it. But perhaps we should also consider whether this will in turn trigger a new flourishing of life. Thomas certainly seems to think so. Further, he argues that new species are already "coming into existence with immodest haste, adapting to new conditions" [118] - such as the Italian sparrow.

In a crucial passage, he continues:

"Remarkable as it might seem, new plant species may be coming into existence faster today than at any time in the history of our planet. A new era has arrived in which we see an acceleration of evolutionary change and the genesis of new life-forms. Given that many of them would not exist but for humans, they challenge us to contemplate the relationship between humanity and nature." [118]

We should abandon our human (all too human) guilt about our place in the world and our influence upon it. We should abandon also our privileging of old species over new and the mad desire to save everything. Life doesn't need saving, it needs accelerating and diversifying and the rapid evolution taking place not just in plants, but in animals, fungi and microbes, is something to marvel at.

"Great replacements have frequently been at the heart of large-scale and long-term evolutionary change ..." [140] and rather than always try to conserve things and weeping over the creatures that disappear into the void, we might seek to "build new biological communities composed of compatible species so that future ecosystems are more robust than those that currently exist" [126].


See: Chris D. Thomas, Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature is Thriving in an Age of Extinction (Allen Lane, 2017). 

To read Part 2 of this post (Sections IV-VI) click here. 

Reflections on the Death of a Rhinoceros

Sudan the rhino (1973 - 2018) 

Sudan, the last male northern white rhinoceros, is dead [insert sad face emoji here].

The 45-year-old beast, who had lived almost his entire life in captivity, was euthanised by his keepers yesterday after suffering from a number of age-related complications.

Now there are just two females left alive; Najin and Fatu, both his offspring and which, like Sudan, live at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya, under 24-hour armed guard in order to protect them from poachers. 

It's pretty much the end of the line, then, for this subspecies of rhino.

Having said that, there are ongoing attempts to bring them back from the very brink of extinction using the latest IVF techniques; i.e. harvesting eggs from Najin and Fatu and fertilizing them with supplies of Sudan's frozen semen. The resulting blastocysts would then be implanted in the wombs of female southern white rhinos.   

One might wonder, however, if there's any real point in the scientific resurrection of a species if the animals are simply going to be studied as specimens and displayed as living fossils ...?

I genuinely wish there were tens of thousands of these magnificent creatures still charging about in the wild. But, sadly, that's no longer a possibility in the world today. And so maybe the next best thing is to let them die with dignity and then rest in peace in the great void of non-being. 

For even if the rhino vanishes forever, the earth will keep on turning. For the rhino is, like man, but one expression of the incomprehensible, as Birkin would say. There will be further utterances and life will continue to evolve in magnificent new ways when they've gone - and when we've gone - just as it did after the death of the dinosaurs.

Perhaps the rhino, like the ichthyosaurus and the dodo, was one of the mistakes of creation - or, rather, let us say, an interesting but ultimately flawed experiment; lacking in the fourth dimensional perfection of the bluebell and the butterfly.

And so, to paraphrase the immortal words of Ogden Nash:

Farewell, farewell, you old rhinoceros,

I'll hope for something less prepoceros.

See: D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987). Birkin discusses his thoughts on the evolution of life with Gerald in Chapter V and, later, with Ursula in Chapter XI. 

It All Comes Down to Artifice in the End (Notes Towards a Decadent Floraphilia)

A rebours by Ink-Yami (2017-18)

deviantart.com 

I.

For me, Rupert Birkin is literature's greatest floraphile: a man who loves plants with a vital and perverse passion; a man for whom nothing satisfies like the subtle and responsive touch of cool vegetation upon his naked flesh - not even the love of a good woman. For whilst Birkin reluctantly returned to the human world and married Ursula, he always knew where he truly belonged and where he most wanted to deposit his sperm - in the folds of the delicious fresh growing leaves.

Click here for further details ...

II.

Just as perverse is the floraphilia of the aristocratic anti-hero of À Rebours: "Des Esseintes had always been excessively fond of flowers", writes Huysmans. However, unlike Birkin, he doesn't put his fondness into ecosexual practice and go rolling around wet hillsides, masturbating amidst a clump of young fir trees. Rather, Des Esseintes expresses his love of plants in a far more sophisticated and refined manner.

Des Esseintes is also discriminating amongst plants and doesn't embrace all flowers "without distinction of species or genus". In fact, he despises the "common, everyday varieties" that blossom in pots for sale at the local florist; "poor, vulgar slum-flowers [...] that are really at home only on the window-sill of a garret, with their roots squeezed into milk-cans or old earthenware pots".

Des Esseintes isn't too keen either on what he calls stupid flowers, such as the convential rose; flowers "whose proper place is in pots concealed inside porcelain vases painted by nice young ladies". In fact, whilst he can't help feeling "a certain pity for the lower-class flowers, wilting in the slums under the foul breath of sewers and sinks", he loathed the bourgeois blooms that one finds in "cream-and-gold drawing-rooms". Ultimately, Des Esseintes kept his admiration exclusively for the "rare and aristocratic plants from distant lands, kept alive with cunning attention in artificial tropics created by carefully regulated stoves".

But, best of all to his mind, are artificial hothouse flowers made from rubber, paper, or synthetic material: "As a result, he possessed a wonderful collection of tropical plants, fashioned by the hands of true artists ..." But of course, a Decadent is easily bored. And so, whilst enthralled by the admirable artistry displayed in his collection of künstliche Blumen, Des Esseintes begins to dream of another kind of flora: "tired of artificial flowers aping real ones, he wanted some natural flowers that would look like fakes."

This comically perverse acceleration of Decadent philosophy's anti-natural aesthetic all the way to its absurd conclusion - thereby reversing, as Patrick McGuinness points out, the relationship between nature and artifice, copy and original - is one of the most admirable aspects of À Rebours.       

Having soon assembled his astonishing collection of real fake flowers, including some remarkably sinister looking specimens that suggested disease and deformity rather than health and vital beauty, Des Esseintes is beside himself with joy:

"Yes, his object had been achieved: not one of them looked real; it was as if cloth, paper, porcelain and metal had been lent by man to Nature to enable her to create these monstrosities. Where she had not found it possible  to imitate the work of human hands, she been reduced to copying the membranes of animals' organs, to borrowing the vivid tints of their rotting flesh, the hideous splendours of their gangrened skin."

Fatigued by his horticultural handiwork and hothouse philosophizing, Des Esseintes goes to lie down on his bed. He soon falls asleep, but, alas, his sleep is disturbed "by the sombre fantasies of a nightmare", which concludes with an erotic encounter with an ashen-faced plant-woman, "naked but for a pair of green silk stockings". Her eyes gleamed ecstatically. Her lips had the crimson colour of an anthurium. And her nipples "shone as brightly as two red peppers".

As the dream intensifies, the plant-woman enfolds Des Esseintes in her tendril-like arms:

"He made a superhuman effort to free himself from her embrace, but with an irresistible movement she clutched him and held him, and pale with horror, he saw the savage Nidularium blossoming between her uplifted thighs, with its sword-blades gaping open to expose the bloody depths.
      His body almost touching the hideous flesh-wound of this plant, he felt life ebbing away from him - and awoke with a start, choking, frozen, crazy with fear."

I suspect that Birkin, in contrast to Des Esseintes with his eurotophobia and castration anxiety, would have been far more receptive to such a dream and would have awoken with blissful joy rather than a cold sweat.     

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 106-07.

Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature (À Rebours), trans. Robert Baldick, introduction and notes by Patrick McGuinness, (Penguin Books, 2003), Ch. 8, pp. 82-92. 

For a related post to this one on Des Esseintes (and his bejewelled tortoise), click here.