Eco-Apocalypse: It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

One of three images for the Destroying nature is destroying life campaign 

by the environmental group Robin Wood (2016)

I.

Someone writes to tell me that I should spend less time writing about trivial matters such as fashion and focus instead on the unfolding eco-apocalypse - the latter being something caused by human activity and which has, apparently, been confirmed by numerous scientific studies. 

I have to admit, I'm a bit sceptical about this green-tinged end of the world narrative and tend to share the view expressed by Phil Hammond and Hugh Ortega Breton that it's best understood "neither as a near-timeless feature of human culture nor as a reasoned response to objective environmental problems. Rather, it is driven by unconscious fantasy; the symbolic expression of an alienation from political subjectivity, characteristic of a historically specific period in the life of post-Cold War societies."

If it's true that some environmental activists find apocalyptic language not only appropriate but sexy, many regard such alarmist rhetoric as problematic and often counter-productive - not least of all because, actually, the science doesn't support such quasi-religious mania, even whilst confirming there are important issues we need to address as a species.

II.

Having said that, I must confess that there was a period, in the late 1980s, when I wilfully bought into this fantasy of eco-apocalypse: I even joined the Green Party! I was soon expelled, however, for holding extreme views that threatened to bring the party into disrepute.

(This was fair enough: but I smiled when, shortly afterwards, party spokesman David Icke revealed on primetime TV that he was the Son of God and gleefully predicted the world was about to be devestated by a series of natural catastrophes.) 

Thankfully, by the time that James Lovelock was issuing his final warning and Al Gore was telling anyone who would listen his inconvenient truth, I was no longer convinced (nor secretly thrilled) by such climate porn and doom-laden prophecy concerning the collapse of civilisation and extinction of all life on earth.

Indeed, I had spent a good deal of time in the 1990s deconstructing my own eco-romanticism influenced by such figures as D. H. Lawrence, Martin Heidegger, and Jaz Coleman and although my Ph.D was meant to be an examination of Nietzsche's cultural pessimism and political philosophy, it was basically an opportunity for me to confront the elements in my own thought that had led towards the black hole of fascism.      

So, I understand perfectly where my critic is speaking from; for I used to occupy much the same space and share many of his concerns. The difference is, whereas he stood his ground and allowed his views to become fixed beliefs, I kept moving and kept questioning things - particularly those social anxieties that function as truths within contemporary culture.

In a sense, that's what torpedo the ark means: refuse all dogma and interrogate everything; including radical environmentalism which mixes ascetic idealism and crusading mythology into a potent brew designed to intoxicate the young and provide a sense of revolutionary mission - for a little child shall lead them ...             

See: Philip Hammond and Hugh Ortega Breton, 'Eco-Apocalypse: Environmentalism, Political Alienation and Therapeutic Agency', Ch. 8 of The Apocalypse in Film: Dystopias, Disasters, and Other Visions about the End of the World, ed. Karen A. Ritzenhoff and Angela Rewani, (Rowman and Littlefield, 2015). Click here to read online. 

Play: REM: 'It's the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)', single from the album Document (I.R.S. Records, 1987): click here. Note: the video was directed by James Herbert and features a young skateboarder called Noah Ray.

And They Dance by the Light of the Moon ...

A Buffalo Gal as imagined by Mclaren and Westwood

 in their Nostalgia of Mud collection (1982/83) 

I.

Buffalo Gals is a popular 19th-century American folk song, written and published by the blackface minstrel John Hodges (aka Cool White) in 1844, although earlier versions are likely to have existed.

Contrary to what many people believe, the song doesn't refer to a particularly tough breed of cowgirl who hunted bison on the Great Plains. Rather, it refers to the dancing girls who performed in the many bars, concert halls, and brothels in the notorious Canal district of Buffalo, New York. 

However, the song continues to incite many imaginative interpretations. For example, some insist that it takes its inspiration from an old legend that tells of how the spirits of wild animals sometimes take the form of attractive young women, in order to seduce innocent cowboys sleeping beneath the stars.


II.

Unsurprisingly, when I hear the words Buffalo Gals, I also think of the 1982 single by Malcolm McLaren and the World's Famous Supreme Team, produced by Trevor Horn, that combines scratching with square dancing in a fabulously eccentric hip-hop manner - much to the horror of the record company bosses who were initially reluctant to release the track.        

In many ways, this song was more groundbreaking than Anarchy in the UK, helping as it did introduce hip-hop culture to a wider (whiter) audience; the video for the song not only featured breakdancing - courtesy of the Rock Steady Crew - but also showed rappers and graffiti artists in action.

Oh, and of course, it also featured models wearing McLaren and Westwood's latest fashions from their brilliant Nostalgia of Mud collection; a collection which attempted to show how haute couture and other aspects of Western culture retained primitive roots; or how even modernity essentially lives off the traditions it insists it has left behind.

Further, as Yvonne Gold, the make-up artist who worked on the McLaren-Westwood fashion shows, points out, the soft, unstructured tailoring with exposed seams that characterised the above collection was the antithesis of the yuppie power suit:   

"Buffalo girls wore hip-slung dirndl skirts over padded petticoats, with baby-sling-bags across their backs and hoodies topped with Buffalo hats, or T-shirt Grecian toga dresses with conical vintage satin bras worn over the top."

She continues: 

"The legacy of raw-edged, reversed-seamed sheepskin coats lives on as a classic, and wearing a hoodie under a tailored jacket or a bra as outerwear has become standard. The conceptual black painted strip mask is still seen on catwalks in infinite variations. Three and a half decades later, the iconic Buffalo hat has been revitalized by [musician] Pharrell, and you can find entire ensembles in the collections of international museums and individual collectors [...] keeping the Buffalo legacy alive."

It's such a pity, therefore, that the McLaren-Westwood design collaboration ended soon afterwards. We can only dream of what might have been, for whilst, obviously, we know how Westwood's career in fashion developed post-Malcolm, we don't know what sartorial innovations the latter would have produced had he continued working in the rag trade.*

* Having said that, see the astonishing post by Paul Gorman on McLaren's 'lost collection' intended to accompany his album Fans (1984): click here.

See: Yvonne Gold, 'Vivienne Westwood's Radically Chic Nostalgia of Mud', Another Magazine (15 March, 2016): click here to read online.

Play: Malcolm McLaren and the World's Famous Supreme Team, 'Buffalo Gals' (1982), single from the album Duck Rock (Charisma Records, 1983): click here. 

Pretty in Pink (Notes on the Engendering of Baby Mia)

Baby Mia in a salmon pink cardigan

I.

Now that baby Mia is recognisably human - though still outside language - she is being colour-encoded by her parents within a traditional gender stereotype. In other words, she's being assigned a romantic and floral model of femininity (sweet-natured, sensitive, girly) and taught how to look, to act, and to think of herself as pretty in pink.   

However, like everything, the colour pink as sign and symbol is itself subject to changing cultural interpretation and reinterpretation; it has no essential character and can just as easily be tied to a model of masculinity should it become desirable or fashionable to do so. Indeed, young boys in the 19th century often wore pink, whilst their sisters were dressed in blue and white.

It wasn't until the early-mid-20th century that the colour became almost exclusively associated with girls and ladylike women - Mamie Eisenhower's decision to wear a pink dress at her husband's inauguration as US President in 1953 being a crucial factor in this latter association.

It also replaced lavender as the colour associated with male homosexuality and effeminacy; the Nazis obliging queer inmates of concentration camps to wear outfits embroidered with a pink triangle (though sadly not with matching accessories).      

Meanwhile, the Italian fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli had created a bold and assertive new variety of the colour in 1931 - so-called Shocking Pink - made by mixing magenta with a small amount of white; a shade much loved by Surrealists at the time and by punk rockers in the 1970s looking to turn the world day-glo.

Sadly, many parents of baby girls still prefer to opt for a more muted princess pink that is more Barbara Cartland than Poly Styrene ...    

II.

Interestingly, the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), in New York, recently had an exhibition entitled Pink: The History of a Punk, Pretty, Powerful Color (2018-19), which emphasised the provocative potential of pink (not least its ability to sharply divide opinion).  

Organised by the Museum's director and chief curator Valerie Steele, the show featured approximately 80 outfits dating from the 1700s to the present, including work by Schiaparelli and a fabulous piece from the 2016 Comme des Garçons fall collection entitled 18th Century Punk.

I've no idea what kind of young woman baby Mia will grow up to be, but I do hope she'll dress like this: 

See: Valerie Steele (ed.), Pink: The History of a Punk, Pretty, Powerful Color, (Thames and Hudson, 2018).

Click here to visit the Museum at FIT website which provides full details of the Pink exhibition and a short audio tour with Valerie Steele. 

And for a (predictable) musical bonus from the Psychedelic Furs (original 1981 version): click here.

In Praise of the Fatwa Boys 2: Larry David's Finest Hour

The Fatwa Boys: Salman Rushdie and Larry David 
in a scene from Curb Your Enthusiasm [S9/E3]

In the long-awaited ninth season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry incurs a death sentence from the Supreme Leader of Iran after satirizing the Ayatollah on Jimmy Kimmel Live! in promotion of his latest project - a musical comedy called Fatwa! - based on The Satanic Verses controversy in which a similar religious ruling was passed against the novelist Salman Rushdie in 1989 [see part one of this post]. 

This, I think, is a brave thing to do - arguably far more daring than his usual schtick of breaching social conventions and examining the micropolitics of every day life in obsessive detail. Brave too, I might add, of HBO to agree to this; for these days there aren't many producers willing to be involved in a project that might offend the religious sensibilities of Islam (they might claim their reticence is a sign of respect, but I think we all know it's a sign of fear).      

Post-The Satanic Verses controversy, post-the murder of Theo van Gogh, post-the Danish cartoon crisis, and post-the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the West has learned to appease Islam and limit its own right to freedom of expression. In other words, fear of deadly reprisals has succeeded in bringing about cultural self-censorship. So again, hats off to Larry David!

And hats off too to Salman Rushdie for not only agreeing to make fun of what was, for many years, a truly horrible situation, but also to take part in an episode of the show, where - to brilliant comic effect - he instructs Larry on all the advantages of living under a fatwa (including fatwa sex, which, according to Rushdie, is the best sex there is). 

As one commentator on this episode pointed out, the reason such jokes constitute one of the most effective weapons against Islamic fundamentalism is precisely because - as Khomeini once said - there's nothing funny about Islam.

The ninth season of Curb met with mixed reviews and audience figures were, I believe, much lower than for season 8. Critics said the world had moved on in the six years between the two seasons and that the show belonged to another time.

Maybe that's true: but, ultimately, what matters is the fact that Larry David, in collaboration with Rushdie, demonstrated how best to respond to those fanatics who would have us all submit to their religious mania: with courage and with humour.      


Click here to watch a scene with Larry David and Salman Rushdie (the self-styled Fatwa Boys) from 'A Disturbance in the Kitchen', episode 3 / season 9 of Curb Your Enthusiasm, dir. Jeff Schaffer (HBO, 2017). 

In Praise of the Fatwa Boys 1: Remembering the Rushdie Affair

The Fatwa Boys: Salman Rushdie and Larry David 
Image credit: John P. Johnson / HBO

On Valentine's Day, 1989, when the rest of us were sending flowers to loved ones, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran - Ayatollah Khomeini - decided to issue a fatwa against the British writer Salman Rushdie: a religious decree that urged Muslims around the world to kill the author (and publishers) of The Satanic Verses (1988); for it was a novel that was said to offend the sacred values of Islam.   

This grey-bearded cleric, aged 89, and with only months left to live, added that any good Muslim who was killed trying to carry out the death sentence should be considered a martyr, i.e., one whose place in paradise was guaranteed. Just in case that wasn't a strong enough motivating factor, a $2.8 million bounty was also placed on Rushdie's head.    

The writer was immediately granted police protection by the British government, though many seemed to resent the fact (and the cost to the public purse). Rushdie then spent many years moving between safe houses and living a life in which everyday activities - like kicking a football in the park with his son - became either impossible or subject to tight security measures.

Many Muslim countries around the world banned the import and sale of the book and encouraged violent protests against the West. In Bradford, a mob publicly burned copies of the work and echoed the call for Rushdie's execution. Whilst some authors, including Susan Sontag and Tom Wolfe were vocal in their support, others - who shall remain nameless - were noticeably silent on the issue (some even implied that Rushdie got what he deserved for insulting a great religion).   

It was only in the 1990s that Rushdie was able to gradually recover something approaching a normal life once more, eventually moving to New York. But the threat to his life remained; Khomeini’s successor, Ayatollah Khamenei, stated in 2005 that as Rushdie was still an apostate his killing was authorised within Islam and he again stressed the irrevocable nature of the fatwa in 2015.

Thirty years on, not only does Rushdie remain a figure of hate for Islamists across the Muslim world, but the issue of blasphemy - in 2019! - remains an incendiary one; people are still being killed or threatened with death for any perceived insult to God or his prophet Muhammad (the case of Asia Bibi is just the latest grotesque example).   

The problem, of course, is that laws designed to protect religious sensibilities ultimately stifle intellectual debate and artistic expression. Indeed, as Christopher Hitchens notes, the fatwa issued against his friend Rushdie was essentially the opening shot in a war on cultural freedom: after The Satanic Verses controversy came the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh in 2004; followed a year later by the Danish cartoon crisis; and then the Charlie Hebdo massacre in 2015 ...

Happily, three decades on, Rushdie is alive and well and - as we'll see in the second part of this post - able to laugh at his own nightmarish experience. Even if, again to quote Hitchens, "the culture that sustains him, and that he helps sustain, has twisted itself into a posture of prior restraint and self-censorship in which the grim, mad edict of a dead theocrat still exerts its chilling force".


See: Christopher Hitchens, 'Assassins of the Mind', Vanity Fair (February 2009): click here to read online.

To read part two of this post, click here. 

Rushdie with a copy of his offending text (London, 1989)

Photo credit: PA Photos / Landov 

Marxism Today

Ash Sarkar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: fresh of face - but stale of idea ...

I.

Would you Adam and Eve it? Communism has been given a 21st-century makeover!

Out with the bearded old men calling for armed revolution and in with the fresh faced young women, such as Ash Sarkar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, soft-pedaling their programme of democratic socialism - i.e., an anti-capitalist fusion of feminism, environmentalism, and identity politics.

It sounds fun and sexy. And I'm pleased that both the above claim to be anti-authoritarian. But, unfortunately, there's still something troubling about the fact that they seem so assured of their own ideological positions, their own righteousness, their own woke-utopian visions of society.     

It's troubling too that these intelligent, well-educated women seem so ignorant of - or wilfully blind to - the history of communism in practice: a history not only of abject economic failure, but also of terror, atrocity, and genocide, often carried out in the name of the highest idealism and the promise of a bright new day to come.    

II.

In a sense, when it comes to the question of socialism, I agree with Lawrence; "like most things, [it] has various sides to it", but can ultimately be regarded as the expression of two great desires:

Firstly, there is the "generous desire that all [people] shall eat well and sleep well and fare well all their lives". This we might call the socialism of Love; one that sincerely longs for justice and equality.

Secondly, however, there's the desire to smash everything and return the world to Year Zero. This is what we might term the socialism of Hate; i.e. that which Nietzsche characterised as anarcho-nihilism motivated by ressentiment and the will to revenge.

Lawrence says that a generous model of loving socialism in theory provides the "best form of government". Unfortunately, however, when we examine the historical experience of the last 100 years, we discover that it's the latter - the socialism of malice and misery - that triumphs everytime.    

It's for this reason that we cannot help preferring Trump's America, for all its faults, to any of the totalitarian regimes that still wave the red flag today. As Suzanne Moore says, communism may be hip again amongst certain sections of the population, but until it guarantees individual freedom and the right to dance, then count me out, comrade.  

See: 

D. H. Lawrence, 'Epilogue' to Movements in European History, ed. Philip Crumpton, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 261-62.

Suzanne Moore, 'Communism is hip again - but until it means liberty, count me out, comrade', The Guardian (24 July 2018): click here to read online.

On Learning to Laugh at Everything with Larry David, Georges Bataille and D. H. Lawrence

Credit: durantelallera/Shutterstock

I. Everything's Funny

As I said in a recent post, one of the things that the phrase torpedo the ark means to me is having the freedom to criticise everything under the sun - even if that risks offending others. Nothing is sacrosanct or off limits; everything can be targeted and everything can be ridiculed, mocked, or poked fun at because, as Larry David rightly informs his friend Richard Lewis, everything's funny - even the death of a beloved parakeet.*

Here, I'd like to expand on this idea with reference to the work of Georges Bataille and D. H. Lawrence ...

II. A Philosophy of Laughter

Bataille discovered the importance of laughter very early on in his career as a writer.

It wasn't, however, until a lecture made many years later, in 1953, that he was able to admit with a smile that, insofar as he'd been engaged in serious philosophical work at all, he'd been constructing a philosophy founded upon (and exclusively concerned with) the experience of laughter as that which escapes reason and understanding.    

In other words, it's not just the unknown or unknowable that causes us to laugh; laughter is itself inexplicable and we often have no idea why we laugh when we do - joy bubbles over or bursts forth unexpectedly and as a form of excess (or what Bataille terms unproductive expenditure).

And - crucially, from the perspective of ethics - laughter is often infectious; when we laugh, others laugh too. Indeed, whilst it's perfectly possible to weep alone, I'm not sure one can ever really laugh in isolation (without being a madman). It's laughter - not sorrow (or mourning) - that is the social practice par excellence.     

But what, for Bataille, is there to laugh at?

The answer, as for Larry David, is everything: Bataille encourages us to laugh not just at the world and the things that are in it, but at being itself and, ultimately, at that which all being is a being towards: death. This is clear in his short poem entitled 'Laughter' [Rire]:

Laugh and laugh
at the sun
at the nettles
at the stones
at the ducks

at the rain
at the pee-pee of the pope
at mummy
at a coffin full of shit

Commenting on the above verse, Nick Land writes:

"It is because life is pure surplus that the child of Rire - standing by the side of his quietly weeping mother and transfixed by the stinking ruins of his father - is gripped by convulsions of horror that explode into peals of mirth, as uncompromising as orgasm. [...] Laughter is a communion with the dead, since death is not the object of laughter: it is death itself that finds a voice when we laugh. Laughter is that which is lost to discourse, the haemorrhaging of pragmatics into excitation and filth."

Ba-dum-tsh!

III. Curb Your Enthusiasm

D. H. Lawrence is another writer who makes an important contribution to the philosophy of laughter - perhaps surprisingly so, as this self-styled priest of love is thought by many to be utterly humourless, though often unintentionally comic or absurd.   

However, as Judith Ruderman points out, the mistaken idea that Lawrence had no sense of humour is an opinion held for the most part by those who are misled (or disconcereted) by his intensity. He is often over-earnest and can sometimes be a bore. But Lawrence also values (and utilises) humour in his work, often deliberately undermining his own seriousness and tendency to preach.    

Ruderman also reminds us of this crucial passage written by Lawrence in his essay on Edgar Allan Poe (a passage that LD would surely approve of): 

"The Holy Ghost bids us never to be too deadly in our earnestness, always to laugh in time, at ourselves and at everything. Particularly at our sublimities. Everything has its hour of ridicule - everything."

The Holy Ghost, according to Lawrence, also helps us to keep it real; "not to push our cravings too far, not to submit to stunts and high falutin, above all not to be too egoistic and willful [...] to leave off when it bids us leave off".

In other words, the Holy Ghost helps us curb our enthusiasm and recognise that the latter - particularly when tied to moral and ideological fundamentalism - is what threatens us today.

Notes

*I refer here to a scene in the first episode of the ninth season of Curb Your Enthusiasm entitled 'Foisted!', dir. Jeff Schaffer, written by Larry David and Jeff Schaffer (2017): click here.

Bataille, 'Nonknowledge, Laughter, and Tears', in The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, ed. Stuart Kendall, trans. Michelle Kendall and Stuart Kendall, (University of Minnesota, 2001). 

Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism, (Routledge 1992), p. xvii. The translation of the poem is also found here. 

Judith Ruderman, 'D. H. Lawrence on Trial Yet Again: The Charge? It's Ridiculous!', Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies, ed. Susan Reid, Vol. 5, Number 1, (2018), pp. 59-82.

D. H. Lawrence, 'Edgar Allan Poe', Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 73. 

The Man Who Slept: Notes on an Autobiographical Fantasy by D. H. Lawrence

I. Opening Remarks

We are extremely grateful to Professor Hiroshi Muto of Keio University for providing us with a new and more accurate version of Lawrence's unfinished and untitled 'Autobiographical Fragment' - a queer mix of fiction and essay often known as 'A Dream of Life' - in which he corrects the multiple errors of transcription that had crept into the (supposedly authoritative) Cambridge Edition of the text published in Late Essays and Articles and edited - somewhat carelessly it would seem - by James T. Boulton.    

Admittedly, some of these fifty errors are minor. But even minor errors can result in ungrammatical sentences, or, indeed, sentences which are both grammatically and semantically compromised. Thus, as Lawrence's eagle-eyed Japanese translator says, a new version of the work - using the holograph manuscript (i.e. Lawrence's notebook) as the base text - was necessary.   

The 'Autobiographical Fragment' was written by Lawrence in October 1927. What begins as an essay about returning home to the East Midlands, mutates halfway through into a bizarre and at times ludicrous tale set a thousand years in the future, in which the narrator-protagonist discovers the coal-mining village of Newthorpe has become a kind of heaven on earth or New Jerusalem.

Whilst I admire most of Lawrence's writing, I have always disliked this piece - and still dislike it now, even after the many corrections made by Hiroshi Muto. I've no problem with the autobiographical material, it's what follows that irritates and nothing depresses me more than Lawrence in full utopian mode ... 

II. A Dream of Life: Synopsis

Having fallen asleep in a quarry cave, or, more precisely, "a little crystalline cavity in the rock [...] a little pocket or womb of quartz, among the common stone", the narrator is disturbed from his (almost deathly) deep sleep by a strange motion and reborn into the world in a manner reminiscent of the man who died. Like the latter, he has to fight his way back into consciousness, into life:       

"There were some dizzy moments, when my I, my consciousness wheeled and swooped like an eagle that is going to wheel away into the sky and be gone. Yet I felt her, my I, my life, wheeling closer, closer, my consciousness. And suddenly she closed with me, and I knew, I came awake."

The man who slept is acutely aware of his own physicality; of the fact that he has a face, a throat, and "a body that ended abruptly in feet and hands" and wasn't merely a disembodied, free-floating consciousness. He can hear the words of a stranger speaking to him and feel the warm hands of men, who laugh, as they bathe his flesh:  

"So as they washed me, I came to myself. I even sat up. And I saw earth and rock, and a sky I knew was afternoon. And I was stark naked, and there were two men washing me, and they too were stark naked."

He is helped up and dressed by these strangers with their healing hands, soft voices and "formal, peaceful faces and trimmed beards, like old Egyptians". They accompany him to the town and he notices that all signs of industrial civilization - the colliery, the railway, the enclosed fields - had all gone. A cart, drawn by oxen, slowly passes in the distance, led by a man who is also entirely naked.

The town itself - now called Nethrupp - had "something at once soft and majestical about it, with its soft yet powerful curves, and no sharp angles or edges, the whole substance seeming soft and golden [...] as in the hymns we sang in the Congregational Chapel". 

Then three men on horseback canter up from behind:

"They were men in soft, yellow sleeveless tunics, with the same still, formal Egyptian faces and trimmed beards [...] Their arms and legs were bare, and they rode without stirrups. But they had curious hats of beech-leaves on their heads. They glanced at us sharply, and my companions saluted respectfully." 

As the man who slept and his companions approach the town, more and more people are to be seen; mostly men "wearing the sleeveless woolen shirt of grey and red", but there are women too, "in blue or lilac smocks", although some of the younger ones "were quite naked, save for a little girdle of white and green and purple cord-fringe that hung round their hips and swung as they walked".

He can't help admiring their "slender, rosy-tanned bodies" and the fact they were as "comely as berries on a bush". In fact, that was the quality of both sexes: "an inner stillness and ease, like plants that come to flower and fruit". 

The man who slept is introduced to a figure of authority, reclining on a dark-yellow couch and guarded by men in green. He had the beauty of a flower rather than a berry. This chieftain of some kind gives him permission to stay in the town and he is supplied with clothes of his own: "a blue-and-white striped tunic, and white stockings, and blue cloth shoes" and housed in a small, sparsely furnished room, containing a bed, a lamp, and a cupboard - but no chairs.

At sunset, the town square erupts to the "queer squeal of bagpipes". The men start to stamp their feet, like bulls, while the women "were softly swaying, and softly clapping their hands" and making a series of strange sounds. Everyone dances "with the most extraordinary incalculable unison", but according to the man who slept, there was no external choreography:

"The thing happened by instinct, like the wheeling and flashing of a shoal of fish or of a flock of birds dipping and spreading in the sky.  [...] It was as once terrifying and magnificent, I wanted to die, so as not to see it, and I wanted to rush down, to be one of them. To be a drop in that wave of life."

Almost as quickly as it started, the dance ends: the townspeople disperse in silence. Even the man who slept recognises that this is odd and disconcerting behaviour: "I was afraid: afraid for myself. These people, it seemed to me, were not people, not human beings in my sense of the word. They had the stillness and the completeness of plants."  

Next, the man who slept is shown a communal washing area and toilets. Then taken to the communal dining room, where the men sat naked on the floor round a blazing wood fire, enjoying an evening meal of porridge and milk "with liquid butter, fresh lettuce, and apples". Everyone helps themselves to what they want and everyone washes their own utensils, each hanging his own spoon and plate in his own little rack. This greatly impresses the man who slept: "There was an instinctive cleanliness and decency everywhere, in every movement, in every act."

Deciding to join in, the man who slept takes some porridge and watches as more men arrive, slipping out of their clothes at the first opportunity, softly talking and laughing, and playing board games. Then he's taken to meet the supreme spiritual leader, who wears a deep red-coloured tunic: 

"He had brown hair and a stiff, reddish-brown beard, and an extraordinary glimmering kind of beauty. Instead of the Egyptian calmness and fruited impassivity of the ordinary people, or the steady, flower-like radiance of the chieftain in yellow [...] this man had a quavering glimmer like light coming through water."

He informs the man who slept that he fell asleep in "one of the earth's little chrysalis wombs" and after a thousand years woke up "like a butterfly". That whilst he may not live for much longer, he shouldn't be afraid; just take off his clothes and let the firelight fall on him.


III. A Dream of Life: Analysis

I know that many readers of Lawrence - including Hiroshi Muto - find this tale beautiful; a poignant attempt by Lawrence late on in his life to provide a glimpse of the kind of society that he dreamed of. But when one examines this utopia of touch it reveals a number of troubling aspects. Here are ten points of concern:

1. It's a phallocratic order based on an eroticised fantasy of male homosociality. And ultimately, that's just another way of perpetuating traditional gender stereotypes and reaffirming patriarchal authority. Mellors might find himself very much at home, but I wonder what Connie would think ... 

2. Life in this utopia seems to involve an awful amount of stripping off - so much so, that one could imagine such a fantasy going down well with militant naturists who insist that truth loves to go naked and that it's more healthy and vital to go around without clothes: only it doesn't and it isn't. Rather oddly, if there's one thing that Lawrence fetishises more than nudity, it's clothing (as will be clear to readers of this and other works).    

3. If militant nudity is simply crackpot, then the utopian politics of post-industrial agrarianism is all a bit Pol Pot: I really don't fancy returning to Year Zero and nor do I desire to see naked peasants working the fields with oxen in order to earn a bowl of rice a day. There are times when reading this work that one imagines heads skewered on stakes.

4. Lawrence may write of a democracy of touch, but that doesn't mean there are no class divisions in his New Jerusalem. We note, for example, there are men on horseback whom ordinary citizens must salute respectfully. And just like the gender divisions, these class divisions are colour-coded and sartorially inscribed. For someone who was so sensitive to the issue of class, it's surprising that Lawrence doesn't seem to appreciate how his own perfect society would invariably be prone to tensions and conflict arising from its hierarchical structure.      

5. I'm quite happy living in a room that is sparsely furnished. But Lawrence takes his ascetic idealism too far when he doesn't even allow people to have a chair to sit on. Just as I don't want to salute some prick on a horse or walk around the streets naked, nor do I wish to sit on the floor like a dog, thank you very much.

6. The people play bagpipes. 

7. Communal dancing: despite what the man who slept says, this is obviously compulsory and strictly choreographed in a manner that would make even Kim Jong-un smile. As for pagan sun-worship, that's all very lovely until it goes a bit Aztec or Wicker Man and ends with human sacrifice. Many readers of Lawrence like to believe he put such fantasies behind him after The Plumed Serpent but, as a matter of fact, that's not quite the case as this text shows (though, to be fair, even the narrator of the tale is disconcerted by the inhuman nature of individuals dissolved in a mass).

8. Communal showers and toilets: again, no thanks. It looks like it could be fun in Carry on Camping, but surely no one really wants to have a cold shower with strangers, or shit in a field.

9. Communal dining areas: and on the menu - let us remind ourselves - porridge and milk, with liquid butter, fresh lettuce, and apples. I would quite literally prefer to starve to death than have to comply with this invalid's diet. 

10. Not only is Nethrupp a totalitarian society, it's a theocracy - ruled over by a Lord Summerisle figure with a red-beard, a bit like Lawrence's own. All in all, it's very disappointing. Lawrence repeatedly claims to value men and women, but surely then he should acknowledge that they are not plants, or birds, or fish. Or even butterflies. That their beauty and unique potential as a species lies in the very complexity that he would strip them of.     

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, ['Autobiographical Fragment'], Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 49-68.

Hiroshi Muto, 'A New Edition of D. H. Lawrence's [Autobiographical Fragment (A Dream of Life)], Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies, ed. Susan Reid, Vol. 5, Number 1 (2018), pp. 11-57. All lines quoted above are from this new and corrected version of the text. 

Hiroshi Muto, 'D. H. Lawrence's Forgotten Dream: The Significance of "A Dream of Life" in His Late Works', The English Society of Japan (July 1990): click here to read online courtesy of the National Diet Library, Japan.

In this essay Professor Muto shows how 'A Dream of Life' closely relates not only to The Escaped Cock, but also to Lawrence's Etruscan writings and Lady Chatterley's Lover, providing a unique insight into these works. Thus I agree with him that it deserves serious critical attention within the world of Lawrence studies.

Notes on 'The Birds' by Daphne du Maurier

Cover to the Virago 2004 edition

Illustration by Jamie Keenan

For many people 'The Birds' (1952) is Daphne du Maurier's greatest short story.

Whilst I'm not sure I'd agree with this critical assessment, it would be foolish to deny its genius, or its appeal for those of us who like the idea of humanity's vulnerability in the face of a malevolent natural world in which - if we did but realise it - even our feathered friends hate us and dream of revenge.

As Patrick McGrath rightly points out, whilst some suggestion is made that freak weather conditions are possibly to blame for the sudden violent behaviour of the birds, the real power of the story resides "in the reader's suspicion that there exist other, less narrowly scientific explanations, rooted perhaps in cosmic punishment for humanity's sins".

In other words, it's the ambiguity of the story - particularly concerning the avian aggression - that makes it so disturbing; the horror of people pecked to death by a thousand tiny beaks is never described in detail by du Maurier. (In fact, she tells us more of the little corpses of robins, finches, wrens, sparrows, and blue tits than she does of farmer Trigg and his wife, Jim the cowman, or the village postman, who all fall victim to the birds.) 

This ambiguity is continued to the very end of the tale: Nat Hocken, sheltering with his wife and children in the kitchen of his little cottage, eating soup with bread and dripping, decides to smoke his last cigarette, like a condemned man who is reconciled to his fate: "He reached for it, switched on the silent wireless. He threw the empty packet on the fire, and watched it burn."

But as he listened to the sound of the birds relentlessly pecking at the windows and doors, he also, rather philosophically, wondered "how many million years of memory were stored in those little brains, behind the stabbing beaks, the piercing eyes, now giving them the instinct to destroy mankind with all the deft precision of machines".

That's a lovely way to end a tale; revealing yet again du Maurier's dark, inhuman brilliance. No wonder Hitchcock loved her so ...*

Notes

Daphne du Maurier, 'The Birds', in The Birds and Other Stories, (Virago Press, 2004).

Patrick McGrath, 'Mistress of menace', The Guardian (5 May 2007): click here to read online.  

* Interestingly, du Maurier didn't like Hitchcock's 1963 adaptation of 'The Birds'. To be fair, the latter did abandon everything in the original story except the title and the central idea of birds inexplicably attacking human beings. But as he once said, his job was to create cinema, not remain faithful to every detail on the written page of a book.    

Let Them Eat Bananas

Image credit: Dan Murrell / New Statesman (20 May 2018)

I.

Let them eat cake is the standard (slightly inaccurate) English translation of the French phrase Qu'ils mangent de la brioche.

A phrase, according to Rousseau, spoken by a great princess upon learning that the peasants had no bread and thereby displaying either her callous contempt of the people, or her inability to comprehend the grinding, desperate reality of poverty.

Commonly attributed to Marie Antoinette, there's no record of her having said it. And so it could just as easily have come from the lips of some other overly-privileged royal cunt; Maria Theresa of Spain, for example, or, indeed, the retired Hollywood actress-cum-Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle ... 
 

II.

I don't know why the latter decided to pay an impromptu visit to the One25 charity in Bristol last Friday - an organisation that helps women who used to be called prostitutes, but who have now been rebranded as sex workers - nor, indeed, do I know why she would drag poor Prince Harry along with her.  

One assumes the royal couple went along to meet volunteers and demonstrate their support by helping to assemble parcels of food, warm clothing and condoms for the women on the streets; something which is not quite pandering, but is arguably enabling a lifestyle of vice and (unofficially) giving the royal seal of approval to such.    

And the fact that Meghan - entirely off her own bat - decided to inscribe the bananas that were being handed out with inspirational messages only lends weight to this argument. But it is also peculiarly offensive to tell vulnerable women leading dangerous, often desperate but otherwise depressingly ordinary lives, that they are strong and special. 

American schoolchildren might find such patronising bullshit empowering, but surely the whores of England aren't such snowflakes as to be taken in by this ...? Indeed, one might hope that the next time the lovely Meghan decides to slum it in a red light district they tell her exactly what she can do with her bananas.

Note: for those interested in seeing filmed footage of the Duchess personally signing pieces of fruit, click here.