The Plumed Serpent

The Plumed Serpent (1926) was the third novel in Lawrence's so-called power trilogy (Aaron's Rod and Kangaroo being the other two works grouped in this manner). 

It's the story of an attempted neo-pagan revolution in modern Mexico, based upon the contentious premise that only a god can save us. Lawrence mixes Aztec mythology, theosophy, and his own brand of fascism into a potent but poisonous combination that allows us to momentarily step out of the categories and conventions of the present as shaped by rationalism, liberalism, and moral humanism.

The middle-aged Irishwoman at the heart of the novel, Kate Leslie, is initially skeptical about the attempt by Ramon and his generals to introduce the gods back into history and rediscover the grandeur of their own being via an awakening of racial mysteries. She experiences the same weariness in regard to religion that many of us share and tells Ramon that his quest to reconnect with the divine is sentimental and reactionary; a creeping back into empty shells.

Ramon - who is not stupid, even if he is clearly insane - concedes that Kate may have a point. But he continues to insist that only religion can serve to bring about fundamental change and argues that even if he cannot resurrect a dead god, he can nevertheless locate what is god-given within himself and on the basis of this fulfill his destiny (or manhood). 

It might be suggested at this point that Ramon suffers from what Nietzsche terms a psychology of error; a form of delusion in which a leader mistakes their heightened sense of power to be the result of divine inspiration, rather than acknowledging that their belief in the supernatural is itself an effect of their elevated well-being. But it's difficult to tell with Ramon; for on other occasions he appears to be more of a political shyster than a genuine holy fool. 

So it is that for all the apparent sincerity of his belief, Ramon is nevertheless prepared to admit when pressed (and in private) that his talk of the gods is simply intended for popular consumption. In other words, he cynically utilizes religious imagery and language in order to garner support amongst a people prone to superstition. Like all cult leaders, Ramon has no doubt about his absolute right to tell lies and to make use of whatever methods work in order to achieve his aims. Thus Ramon acts with good faith as he sets about dissolving politics into a religion that is in turn to be inscribed into the daily fabric of civil society. 

The problem that he eventually has to face is this: faith and authority are no longer fully possible in a modern world in which the lie of religion has been repeatedly exposed as such. And so there is always a need for tyranny and military muscle. Ramon can't accomplish his plumed serpent revolution on a wing and a prayer; he also requires manipulative controls and coercive regulations exercised over all those who might otherwise resist or evade his rule. 

Thus, just as all totalitarian states require an ever-greater number of secret police and an ever-more extensive system of prison camps, so too does Ramon's dreamed of utopia rest ultimately on violence and an element of horror. And whilst Ramon's concerns are largely religious and his affinities artistic, his practical alliances are from necessity with the army.

To his credit, Lawrence recognizes this and eventually acknowledges that even his own attempt within a fictional space to mix politics with religion into a revolutionary form of racial-nationalism, ends in bloodshed and terror. And so, whilst many critics label The Plumed Serpent a failure, it remains an immensely important and instructive failure I think. If only more people prone to idolatry were to read this work and learn from it, then they might be better able to resist the temptation to surrender to those archaic and malevolent forces that are prone to infiltrate our thoughts and feelings.

Those who invoke the gods and dream of unleashing religious mania into the world in order to give men back their pride and sense of self-importance, invariably succeed only in empowering ayatollahs, war-mongers, and political psychopaths. And surely we're all sick of this by now ...

The Gospel of Cool Hand Luke

Cool Hand Luke (1967), directed by Stuart Rosenberg and starring Paul Newman, has been widely embraced by a Christian audience keen to equate the character of Lucas Jackson with Jesus. And they are certainly helped in this by the fact that the filmmakers were neither shy nor subtle in their use of overtly Christian themes, songs and imagery.  

However, we mustn't forget the storm scene wherein Luke explicitly identifies God as merely a mythological authority: he laughs at Dragline and his fellow prisoners for still believing in that "big-bearded Boss up there". And, after God fails to give any sign of his existence and power - despite Luke's daring him to do so - the latter looks round with a smile and declares: "That's what I figured; I'm just standin' in the rain, talkin' to myself."

This, for me at least, is the crucial line of the film: a brave man's honest resignation to the fact that he's alone in the world with no Heavenly Father either to look after him, or judge him; that it's not simply a failure to communicate.

This, of course - what we might refer to as the truth of the void - is precisely what Christians cannot and will not accept. They stare with horror and fear at the prospect of a world without supernatural significance or the hope of salvation and a life which, for them, is therefore without value or meaning and is just a kind of empty nothingness.

But as Luke also pointed out: Sometimes nothin' is a real cool hand.

Story of the Eye

Illustration by Jules Julien: julesjulientumblr.com 

The small whitish eyeball that has been gauged from its bloody socket remains in all its soft luminosity one of the most fascinating and disturbing of all objects. And when Simone playfully inserts such into her vagina and invites us to look between her thighs, she knows exactly what she's doing.

(Stare long enough into the abyss, says Nietzsche, and it will eventually stare into you ...)

Floratopia

To stare unblinking into the face of the sun, 

like a daisy, will require a new unfolding in 

human evolution.

Only when we become perfectly soulless

will we become perfectly beautiful and 

perfectly free.

Sandals

Young girls in strappy Greco-Roman style sandals: what excites the most; the bareness of the feet, or the tightness of the binding?

Or perhaps it's the fantasy of owning slaves. For desire can quickly negate liberalism and every erection makes despotic.  

On the Death and Attempted Resurrection of the Author

The School of Postmodernism by Vittorio Pelosi (2009)

The conflict between traditional forms of literary criticism and postmodern approaches to the text is best captured in a work by Roland Barthes entitled Critique et Vérité (1966). In this short but brilliant book, Barthes responds with style to an aggressive and vulgar attack upon his reading of Racine by the classical literary scholar Raymond Picard. 

For Picard and his supporters, it was crucial to uphold not only their own interpretation of the 17th century dramatist, but to defend the wider truth and glory of French culture from a perceived philosophical assault by a number of new critics of whom Barthes was the best known. Contrary to Barthes, Picard argued that there are objective truths about an author and indisputable facts about a work of art on which everyone who has attained a certain level of education can manage to agree: thanks to the inherent certainties of language, critical consensus is both possible and desirable. To deny this and to contest the author's consciously exercised control over their own work (thereby dissolving the issue of intent), is to threaten this consensus of meaning.

Further, it brings into question the subject's ability to understand themselves and their world with any real confidence or certainty: things are simply no longer as clear cut as they used to be. And for traditionalists and positivists like Picard who value clarity above all else, this cannot be: not only should language strive for transparency, but sentences should be as concise and precise as possible; free from any difficult or unnecessary jargon. In this way, language reflects and furthers common sense - i.e. a form of knowledge that its adherents claim to be perfectly neutral and perfectly natural; free from all prejudice or ideology.  

Obviously, Barthes finds all this absurd. He points out how bourgeois ideology is characterized by its refusal to accept itself as an ideology and by its claims that its values and truths are universal (even whilst conveniently coinciding not only with common sense, but also a traditional middle-class model of good taste). For Barthes, those critics who believe that certain things can pass unquestioned (or go without saying) are simply upholding the status quo and the orthodox certainties not of language, but of the Academy.

Ultimately, such critics read badly because they fail to think either in a material manner (in terms of objects) or in an abstract and symbolic manner (in terms of ideas). Thus they are unable to comprehend how language might move beyond being merely communicative in a narrow, functional manner and become a medium in which people can construct new thoughts and images. Picard and friends, who devote themselves to defending the self-evidently Good, True and Beautiful - not to mention what they term the specificity of literature - succeed only in condemning life to an empty, sterile silence and reducing art to sheer banality.

Still, you might be thinking, this is all a long time ago and the new critics eventually won the day. Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, et al all had their work fully assimilated into intellectual culture and the death of the author was widely celebrated across the critical landscape - so why go over all this again?

Well, unfortunately, there are those working today to resurrect the author, or at least dig up and dress up the corpse. Vittorio Pelosi and his fellow Intentists have decided in the name of a new idealism and a new humanism that the reader's interpretation must again give way to authorial intention; that this is what determines the genuine value and meaning of a work. Thus it is that the war against stupidity continues and although Pelosi's poorly executed canvas entitled The School of Postmodernism (2009) reproduced above is "intended" to ridicule and belittle the figures depicted (including Barthes), it only makes me love them (and dislike him) more.      
    

A Deleuzean Approach to Literature

Portrait of Deleuze by Nicolas Cours-Barracq
www.behance.net

According to Deleuze, literature is not as an attempt to express the inexpressible, or impose a coherent and conventional linguistic form on lived experience. 

Rather, to write in a literary manner - be it poetry or prose - is to move in the direction of the ill-formed or incomplete; to learn how to unexpress the expressible and to problematize everyday language which all-too-easily and all-too-often becomes sticky with familiar usage.  

Above all, Deleuze wishes to stress that literature should not become a form of personal overcoding; it is not an opportunity for an author to give the world a white face that somehow resembles their own. This is why any form of writing that is reliant upon the recounting of childhood memories, foreign holidays, lost loves, or sexual fantasies, is not only frequently bad writing - but dead writing; for literature dies from an excess of emotion, imagination, and autobiography, just as it does from an overdose of reality.

Literature, at its best - which is to say most inhuman - transports us from Oedipal structures and instigates a process of becoming; helping us locate zones of indiscernibility wherein we can lose ourselves and become-Other (think of Ahab's becoming-whale in Melville's Moby Dick, for example; or Gregor's becoming-insect in Kafka's Metamorphosis). 

And just as crucially, as I have indicated above, literature carries language away from itself and opens up a kind of foreign language within the writer's native tongue. It does this not by simply inventing neologisms, but by forcing a dominant and well-known language out of its usual syntactic conventions and thereby making it  stutter or scream and travel to its own external limits (limits which are not outside language, but are the outside of language).

And when a language is so unsettled and pushed to its limit, then ultimately it is obliged to confront a profound silence that doesn't signify there is nothing left to say, but, on the contrary, that there is still everything left to say. 

Return to Plato's Pharmacy

Say what you like about Socrates, but at least he didn't take any shit from poets.

This - of all things - was recently said to me - of all people (and in all seriousness) - by someone who really should have known better before offering not only a highly dubious defense of the spoken word, but what has become after Derrida a philosophically untenable privileging of the latter over the written text.

Who would have imagined that phonocentrism would still be making its voice heard in the digital age?

But, unfortunately, it is. And so we must return to ancient Greece once more and re-examine the Socratic prejudice against writing, which is conceived as a pharmakon - i.e., as a type of drug that has both beneficial and potentially lethal aspects.

According to Socrates, the gift of writing was one of many given by the Egyptian inventor-deity Theuth to the god-king Thamus. Theuth informs the latter that writing is useful as a powerful aide-memoire, but Thamus protests that its effect is likely to be quite the opposite; that whilst it might superficially remind people of the truth, it will not help them to genuinely remember and to know the truth as it essentially resides within the soul. In other words, writing creates the appearance or illusion of wisdom, but not the reality. The gift is thus returned and determined to be a grave danger rather than a great blessing (a poison, rather than a pleasure).

Developing this theme, Socrates tells his young companion, Phaedrus, that a written text is not to be trusted because, unlike an actual speaker, it lacks living, breathing presence and cannot answer questions or defend itself. A true lover of wisdom will always wish to address an audience in person and have his words heard directly by the ears of his listeners, rather than make use of the external marks of writing to be seen by the eyes of unknown (and perhaps unworthy) readers in private. Or, if a philosopher does succumb to the temptation to inscribe his thoughts, he will nevertheless be ready and willing to defend them in discussion with others; affirming his paternity or authorship of the text whilst at the same time having the decency to concede that his writings are derivative and of little value in comparison to his spoken words.

Derrida would have none of this Ideal nonsense and he rejects the myth of presence and the privileging of the voice and ear over the hand and eye. His reading of the Phaedrus is exemplary I think - despite predictable objections coming from some quarters. Without either agreeing or disagreeing with the arguments put forward by Socrates, Derrida exposes their gaps and instabilities, deconstructing the very logic upon which the Socratic method is founded. In other words, Derrida shows how Plato's attempt to casually insert writing into a system of metaphysical dualism fails because writing's status as a pharmakon means it cannot be fixed or stabilized; rather, it remains a play of possibilities that moves in, out, and across all oppositions slowly but surely infecting or polluting the entire system.

In the end, suggests Derrida, if you wish to understand language, then you need to acknowledge that it rests upon a model of arche-writing - and not the spoken word. This is not to advance an empirical assertion to the effect that writing emerged chronologically earlier than speech. That would be silly and factually incorrect. But writing is not secondary nor some kind of parasitic supplement to speech.

And the poet is not simply a poor relation to the philosopher ... 

On the Joy of Text

Picasso: Two Girls Reading (1934)

Since I feel in a generously pedantic and somewhat indulgent mood today, let me try to clarify for a friend who seems puzzled by the concept how the term text is used by writers such as Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes.

Firstly - and crucially - it does not simply refer to words on a page containing some fixed and authoritative truth. In other words, the text is not simply a piece of writing that has been signed and sealed and which can be explained by a literary critic schooled in the art of hermeneutics. A book can be held in hand; but a text can only ever be held in language and experienced as a signifying practice which takes language to its paradoxical limit. 

Or, to put it another way, the text is a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original and drawn from innumerable sources, promiscuously and pleasurably come together not to express an extra-linguistic reality or give birth to meaning, but, rather, to ensure the constant deferral and systematic exemption of the latter.

In the text, everything is to be disentangled and nothing deciphered. As a reader, one cruises the surface without ever imagining that one might delve beneath it, or step beyond it. For there is nothing beneath the text, nothing behind the text, and nothing outside of the text: signs point only to other signs and never towards a transcendental signified. To presuppose the category 'world' as existing prior to and as the origin of the text, is simply to fall back into onto-theology. 

Having said that, there are small holes (aporia) in the fabric of the text, no matter how tightly or carefully it has been woven together and, like Alice, we can conveniently disappear down these. The fact that the text is a tissue of lies and stereographic plurality is precisely what offends those who believe that in the beginning was the Word and the Word was God, etc.

Finally, as I have already hinted, the text allows for an erotics of reading that is linked to jouissance rather than the dull pleasure of consumption. We don't discover ourselves in the text, we lose ourselves and find that our cultural and psychological assumptions are unsettled; i.e., the subjective consistency of our tastes, values, and memories is brought to a crisis of some kind.  

And so - as confessed in a recent post - I'm happy to declare myself a homotextual. That is to say, someone who affirms difference, contradiction, and ambiguity; but who sees no need for divine judgement and makes no demand for conformity with a categorical imperative determining universal good taste. 

Those who oppose the text and call for its foreclosure, either in the name of morality or rationalism, have effectively placed themselves outside of desire. And this not only means they lack a sense of intellectual playfulness, but that they're physically a bit dead and sexless too: you wouldn't want to think like them and you wouldn't want to sleep with them.  

Let Them Eat Mussels

Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, estimated personal fortune of £150 million, has been speaking of his struggle to understand poverty in the UK and the liking for ready-meals and wide-screen TVs amongst those on low-incomes.

Without wishing to be judgemental, he encourages the poor in this country to learn from Sicilian street-cleaners how to live happily and eat healthily on a diet of shell-fish, pasta and cherry tomatoes. 

In doing so, he becomes not only front-runner for this years' Marie Antoinette Award, but places himself firmly in a long tradition of self-loathing Brits who drool over all things Italian and wish that England could be a land of lemon gardens, olive groves, and smiling peasants working the soil beneath eternal blue skies. 

Lawrence too would sometimes unfavourably contrast his homeland and his compatriots with the ancient Mediterranean world and the peoples thereof. But, just before he toppled over into romantic idealism, he would pull back and offer solidarity with his native land and the working-class to which, at some fundamental level, he still belonged: 

"I feel I hardly know any more the people I come from ... They are changed, and I suppose I am changed. I find it so much easier to live in Italy. ... At the same time ... They are the only people  who move me strongly, and with whom I feel myself connected in deeper destiny. It is they who are, in some peculiar way 'home' to me."

- D. H. Lawrence, [Return to Bestwood], in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (CUP, 2004), p. 22.

Lawrence might often become exasperated with his own people and rage against their apparent resignation to how things are ordered politically and socially, but he never insults or patronises them. And he would never in a million years dare to say let them eat mussels ...!