Cat and Mauss (Reflections on the Notion of the Gift)

SA: The Gift (2019)

The Cat - not my cat, as, contrary to what she seems to think (and despite the amount of time she spends sitting in the garden or walking freely about the house), I'm not her owner or ultimately responsible for her wellbeing - has finally discovered her hunting instinct and got into the habit of bringing me the fruits of her deadly pursuits; i.e. the sorry-looking corpses of little birds and small mammals (the picture above is this morning's offering). 

This feline form of gifting reminds one of the work of the French sociologist Marcel Mauss ... 

II.

Mauss was, at one time, the go-to-guy for those interested in a socio-anthropological perspective on questions to do with magic, sacrifice, and symbolic exchange in different cultures around the world. His short 1925 text entitled The Gift* was influential for many other thinkers, including Lévi-Strauss, Bataille, Baudrillard, and Derrida, who were all interested in notions of reciprocity in one form or another.** 

Whilst Mauss's essay focuses on how the exchange of objects between individuals and groups helps build relationships within human society, I think at least some of his arguments can be applied to what is happening with me and the Cat. I give her shelter and tins of Purina Gourmet Gold and she reciprocates with scratches, bites, fleas, the occasional friendly gesture, and now dead rodents deposited and displayed on the lawn.   

I don't know if she's genuinely sharing her kills with me as an act of kindness, or simply trying to tell me something about her tastes - is it, for example, a demand for greater freshness? Whatever it's meaning, it suddenly seems very important to her and even if rather inconvenient for me, I like the idea of an interspecies exchange across that gulf of being that divides us.

That said, I'm not entirely sure I see this ritualistic game in wholly positive terms; there seems to be at least an element of challenge or provocation on her part - something a bit potlatchy.

Further, I'm not sure we can simply turn a blind eye to the fact that her gifts have in fact been tortured and killed, which is ethically problematic to say the least. But then on the other hand (or paw), all culture is founded on cruelty and it would be foolish to expect a moggie to subscribe to moral humanism.  

Notes

* Mauss's original text was entitled Essai sur le don. Forme et raison de l'échange dans les sociétés archaïques and was published in L'Année Sociologique in 1925. The essay was later republished in French in 1950 and first translated into English in 1954 by Ian Cunnison (this translation is now in the public domain so can be found online: click here).  

A more recent translation, by W. D. Halls, was published by Routledge in 1990 and an expanded edition of The Gift, trans. Jane I. Guyer was published by HAU Books (and distributed by the University of Chicago Press) in 2016: click here for more details.

** See, for example, the following works by the authors mentioned here:

Claude Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, trans. Felicity Baker, (Routledge, 1987).

Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, trans. Robert Hurley, (Zone Books, 1988).

Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant, (Sage Publications, 1993).

Jacques Derrida, Given Time 1: Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf, (University of Chicago Press, 1992).

Straw Dogs

Yulin Dog Meat Festival 

Image: Reuters / Kim Kyung-Hoon

I. Heaven and Earth are heartless / treating creatures like straw dogs.

Until recently, if you said the words straw dogs to me I would think initially of the violent and disturbing 1971 film directed by Sam Peckinpah, starring Dustin Hoffman and Susan George; secondly, I would think of the single by Irish punk band Stiff Little Fingers, released in September 1979; and thirdly, of John Gray's critically acclaimed book of 2003, in which he attacks philosophical humanism. 

But having discovered that the origin of the phrase lies in the Tao Te Ching and refers to a ceremonial figure that is casually discarded after use, I tend to think firstly of the actual object and, secondly, of the Chinese indifference to the suffering of live animals, including the large number of dogs that are slaughtered for consumption each year at the Yulin Dog Meat Festival ...       

II. 玉林荔枝狗肉节 

The Yulin Dog Meat Festival is an annual celebration in which local residents and festival goers eat lychees and, more controversially, the flesh of thousands of unfortunate canines that are paraded in wooden crates and metal cages, before being skinned, cooked and eaten.

Whilst the practice of eating dog meat is an ancient one in China, the festival itself is a contemporary phenomenon, only beginning in 2009. Organisers insist that the animals are killed humanely and that eating dogs is no different to rearing other animals for food in terms of cruelty. Practitioners of traditional medicine, meanwhile, insist that chowing down on a pooch offers protection from the hot summer sun.   

Foreign animal rights activists are unconvinced by these arguments and each year they attempt to rescue as many dogs from the wok as possible. And, to be fair, millions of Chinese also support a total ban on the dog meat trade.

The Chinese government, however, whilst denying any official involvement in the festival, describes it as a local custom observed only by a very small number of citizens. They also point out that whilst westerners regard dogs as man's best friend, the Chinese legal system doesn't accord them specially protected status and they ask that their culinary preferences be respected.

No one ever said that cultural diversity was ever going to be easy to stomach ... 

Two Novels by Yukio Mishima 2: Forbidden Colours (Reviewed by Tim Pendry)

Perfect purity is possible if you turn your life into 

a line of poetry written with a splash of blood.

Yukio Mishima: Forbidden Colours - Reviewed by Tim Pendry 

An early Mishima novel that shows him at his most paradoxical. The style is mannered at times, realist at others. It is highly referential to a specific post-war Japanese culture, half-way between defeat and economic miracle, and yet looks back to European decadent and classical literature.

There are two barriers to understanding here. First, we wonder whether the translator (Alfred Marks) has always been able to communicate the subtle behaviourial codes of an upper class that hovers between traditionalism and business.

Second, Mishima's partly satirical posturing on art and beauty through the cynical, bored and rather unpleasant novelist Shinsuke, will result in some small moments of dreariness. Few of us in the twenty-first century can get truly excited by debates on lost aesthetics.

But these are relatively minor concerns because Mishima brilliantly portrays the homosexual underworld of post-war Tokyo in a culture that disapproves of it but more as a social weakness than as a moral failing. It is unnatural but not evil.

The mood is thus turn of the century Europe, rather than offering us the visceral horror of the deviant to be found in the then-contemporary West and still to be found amongst many religious troglodytes in the Americas and Africa.

A sub-culture is here denied entry into the wider culture on equal terms but it is allowed its dark space. In that space, homosexuals seem to live a vacant and sad but tolerated life, albeit with more than a hint of desperation.

Mishima (when he is not posturing as the superior Japanese traditionalist able to be more modern than the moderns) writes as brilliantly here as elsewhere. He also has the ability to dissect formal heterosexual relationships as he does homosexual within a culture of shame rather than guilt.

The character of Yuichi (Yuchan to his homosexual associates), often taken to be Mishima himself, remains a cypher throughout - a cool and self-regarding person with a limited emotional range.

What is more interesting is the way he impacts on others, giving us the paradox of the cool Mishima being able to define quite precisely the emotional responses of a range of figures: his wife, his mother, a high-born female, a shallow female and all grades of male lover.

As a non-procreative male, the extent of Mishima's imaginative genius can be found not only in his portrayal of women but in his unsentimental portrayal of a new-born baby while giving a good account of the way that Yuichi (as a man) can love both wife and baby as a father.

The book is about the complexity, lack of fixedness, of love. Yuichi is detached but no psychopath. He can feel but his position as the object of projected desires means that he is often not allowed to by circumstances. If he weakens, he may be denied access to his true nature for ever.

This is the fascination of the book - to see how a pure beauty without apparent moral content creates a range of desires and needs in others within a society that is layered with codes on what is acceptable or is not acceptable, wholly unlike our own in the West.

It is no accident that the sophisticated novelist with a broad education brings cruelties and small evils into the world of Yuichi, whereas Yuichi merely acts, like an animal, according to his rather limited range of needs.

Shunsuke's desire for a vicious revenge on women shows a person who has ceased to function as a human being and has no place on the planet as a vindictive, desiccated old man who has lost his creative spark.

His agent (Yuichi) is so detached that it becomes clear that the novelist is only half directing events. The women he wants to humiliate are all humiliated through Yuichi but they retain their power and dignity and Shunsuke is left with nothing.

Yuichi blithely sails through the events of the novel, somehow always landing on his feet like a cat, never feeling the pain he inflicts. The book is an essay both in the injustice of life and on the Nietzschean position of a general object of desire in the world.

As a result, although the actual sexual content is limited, the book gives off an aura of eroticism even when the reader (like myself) is very dominantly heterosexual.

What Mishima does, which is remarkable, is suggest to the male heterosexual reader what parts of himself as a male would re-emerge intact within a homosexual male - in other words, what it is about being a male that exists as essential whether one is gay or not.

To make a heterosexual male empathetic to the world of the homosexual would be no mean feat today - in the early 1950s, it would have been startling.

But the book is not so much about homosexuality as about desire itself and the way that desire has a life that is far more significant than any actual meaning to be placed in the desired object - because, in the end, Yuichi is always simply an object who finds it reasonable to be an object.

There are few occasions when Yuichi/Yuchan expresses genuine unhappiness so long as he is following his true nature. His cruelty is casual, the flow of the river through the easiest channel. Shunsuke is malicious, as are others, but Yuchan is as disinterested in malice as in kindness.

This a-morality (not immorality) is perhaps what will shock most readers - especially in one particularly nasty incident where a somewhat shallow bimbo who had hurt the novelist is seduced by the two conspirators' trickery into being, in effect, raped by the novelist in the dark.

The women are treated like objects in a very different sense but there is a sense that the novelist has seduced Yuichi into treating women as things through being directed into the realisation that everyone treats him as a thing (even if he does not care overly).

And, disturbingly, we have none of the hysterical self-traumatizing of Western women but only a determined dignity where the impression is left that these women have come to terms with their position with far more dignity than the ultimate loser in the game - the manipulative novelist.

The book brings us, the Westerner (from a culture with a serious problem in managing desire), into a medium (Japanese traditional culture) that is alienating to the degree that desire is clearly given form and that this form is then articulated in almost ritualistic ways.

By the end of the book, we are left wondering whether it would be better or worse to give desire its outlet through rigid codes and appropriate forms than (as our culture did at that time) deny it any role in formal society at all.

Homosexuality was illegal in the UK at the time the book appeared but, being Japanese, nothing is illegal here, merely shameful.

Any English homosexual reading the translation at the time must have had mixed feelings about its message - an acceptance and management of shame through combinations of secrecy, hypocrisy and denial but the vice being permitted nevertheless. He might have lived with that.

Note: this review by Tim Pendry originally appeared on Goodreads (Dec 28, 2011): click here.  It is reproduced with the author's kind permission. To visit Tim Pendry's user page on Goodreads, click here.

See: Yukio Mishima, Forbidden Colours, trans. Alfred H. Marks, (Penguin Books, 2008).

For the first part of this post, featuring Tim Pendry's review of Mishima's Confessions of a Mask, click here. 

Two Novels by Yukio Mishima 1: Confessions of a Mask (Reviewed by Tim Pendry)

Pain might well prove to be the sole proof of the persistence of consciousness within the flesh, 
the sole physical expression of consciousness. As my body acquired muscle, and in turn strength, 
there was gradually born within me a tendency towards the positive acceptance of pain, 
and my interest in physical suffering deepened.

Still daydreaming as I am about the bodies of Japanese men, thoughts naturally turn to Yukio Mishima - an author with whose work I am shamefully unfamiliar. Fortunately, in Tim Pendry I have a friend who is far better read than I and who has written excellent reviews of two early novels by Mishima: Confessions of a Mask (1949) and Forbidden Colours (1951).

Tim has kindly agreed that I might re-publish these reviews - which originally appeared on the Amazon-owned website Goodreads - here on Torpedo the Ark, beginning with a very recent review of the earlier text and continuing in part two of this post with a review written in 2011 of Forbidden Colours.       

Yukio Mishima: Confessions of a Mask - Reviewed by Tim Pendry 

This is a book written by a man in his mid-twenties looking back on adolescence. To read it as an adolescent without experience (as I did first) is very different from reading it as an experienced adult nearly two decades older than the age at the author's death (as I have just done).

At the age of 19, it had a powerful effect on me for its apparent sexual honesty - a high art Japanese Portnoy's Complaint perhaps. Today, the claim of honesty looks less secure. Is it a fictionalised memoir or a fiction deluding us into thinking it is a memoir?

Mishima refers in passing to Augustine and the comparison with the author of the fourth century Confessions is deliberate. He is writing as a Japanese but paradoxically so since it is equally clear that the Japan of his youth had already been highly Westernised.

His girlfriend is Christian and refers to Jesus. Western clothes, even if militarised, are general. A young German boy rides by on a bicycle without it being anything other than normal. The literary references are essentially Western at every turn, notably to Saint Sebastian.

Although there are references to traditional attitudes, the girlfriend Sonoko and her family may be conservative but they are quite Westernised too. One enlightening aspect of this is that MacArthur's occupation was perhaps not such a break with the recent past as we might believe.

Unlike Germany in the last months of its war, the ordinary Japanese in 1945 were already mentally preparing for defeat while also preparing for sudden death at any time. Even Hiroshima seems less of a shock after the Tokyo fire bombings which are part of the background of the central section.

Whereas Germany in 1945 seems to have been imbued with an atmosphere of terror, Japan in the same period seems to have inclined to fatalism. Whereas the German State brutalised its people, the Japanese State appeared to be giving up the ghost long before it surrendered.

The book starts in the 1930s and moves into the immediate occupation period but the central section is very much that of a teenager not yet old enough to fight and yet too old not to be militarised and be integrated into the war effort albeit in a desultory way.

The book gives us a picture of a country which was suffering shortages and death from the sky but which was also conducting itself (as far as most people were concerned) with an air of normality without the full-on totalitarian systems of the West. The edge had gone off Japanese militarism.

The death instinct of Mishima (if the book is reliable as to his own mentality) preceded the war and cannot be assigned to it but his young hero has a dialectic in relation to war that reconciles the constant possibility of radical loss with a very human desire to keep death theoretical and romantic.

Mishima in 1948/9 is a highly educated young man conscious that he is writing literature, referential literature, and not history and his confessions must be seen in that light - as an ambiguous account of Mishima's own sexual ambiguity in which history is just the back drop.

The core of the book plays out the young man's true nature as a sado-masochistic homosexual in terms of desire for gratification and his undoubted capability, despite his doubts, for the sort of non-sexual love for a girl that most heterosexual men of any sensitivity would recognise.

His true nature is clearly both aspects but the first is not permitted in society (at least overtly) and the second is defined by cultural expectations. The book is the working out of the balance between the two, the acceptance of the first as fact and the containment of the second as secondary.

Mishima's young hero (alter-Mishima) allows himself to become what he is in terms of his sexuality in stages, another dialectical process, so that the final scene, a rather sad scene in many ways, provides a form of resolution where the two sides of him are permitted a shared reality.

His homosexuality is actually not central to the argument - this is not a gay coming out story - and the fact that it is hidden sexuality rather than a specific sexuality would have been the appeal to this reader in his earlier 19-year old incarnation.

This is a book about any sexuality that is not spoken of or made available in polite society set against conventional sexuality as it appears to the young male of a certain type who wants both to be free without feelings and to feel without being obliged to follow through as society expects.

In that struggle, in this book, the social (while being respected as reality) loses out in the scaling of values. What happens next to Mishima is clearer in his third novel, Forbidden Colours, which we have reviewed elsewhere: click here.  

One might think that a later fetishisation of Japanese traditionalism (a little odd in relation to his debt to Western culture) is an attempt to try to contain the local social in order to limit its emotional claims on him where quasi-Western mores might be intrusive on his true nature.

Male Samurai mysticism might also later have given him cover for the expression of that true nature. If so, he is involved in a lifelong appropriation of his own culture (often to the puzzlement of other Japanese) to meet personal goals that owe far more to Western decadence than Japan.

The genius of the book lies in his clever use of apparent honesty to cover up what may lie beneath. The social environment is not romanticised but played straight. It is an ordinary life and he does not even try to be extraordinary either in his behaviour or even in his assessment of himself.

It is his hero's desires that are extraordinary. The mask of the title is a mask of being ordinary because, well, he is actually very ordinary other than his psycho-sexual torment and periodic or incipient unrecognised depression and fully recognised alienation.

As to the book itself, remembering the young age of the writer, it is an odd mix of extremely evocative realist writing based on locale and incident interspersed with quasi-philosophical bouts of self-reflective torment.

The first is remarkable, undoubted descriptive genius. There is no flummery. What happens is described so precisely that the incident is pictured with exquisite clarity - most famously in his first masturbation experience over a Renaissance picture of St. Sebastian.

The second is more problematic. He is struggling to get across feelings and complexities that are not easy to describe. I suspect that translators struggle to deal with the connotative aspects of Japanese when dealing with local emotional colour.

As a result, there are lines and passages that are close to incomprehensible and sometimes contradictory in a way that does not look as if it was intended. This aspect of the book is less successful - the attempt to make feeling literary and not always succeeding.

All in all, a classic first novel by a genius who is never to be analysed simply. His dishonest authorial voice still shows someone whose most central attribute is a refusal to lie about himself or his motivations and yet to try to push shame aside in order to become what he is.

This shame aspect is also interesting because we see no Western guilt but only an awareness of being driven to inappropriate shameful action or feelings without intending harm. Even his vicious fantasies are fantastic, works of imagination, and not the actual intent of the sadistic killer.

It is as if he simply wants another reality where all reality can be concentrated into a moment of death that wipes out the pain of living and where sexual excitation is a fantastic outgrowth of that sentiment.

There is no torturing of animals or deliberate cruelty to persons, just a fear of emotional engagement and a psychology of detachment which becomes more evident in the psychological cruelties of Forbidden Colours. The young hero is depressed far more than he shows anxiety.

Note: this review by Tim Pendry originally appeared on Goodreads (June 16, 2019): click here. It is reproduced with the author's kind permission. To visit Tim Pendry's user page on Goodreads, click here.  

See: Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask, (Penguin Books, 2017). 

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.

Betty Boop Versus the Censor-Morons

Betty Boop: before and after introducion of the Hays Code

I.

The Motion Picture Production Code was a set of moral guidelines applied to US films released by major studios from 1930 to 1968. Often known as the Hays Code, after William Hays, president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (1922-1945), it clearly set out what was and was not acceptable content for movies produced for the American public.

Whilst it obviously restricted filmmaking, it coincidently overlapped with the Golden Age of Hollywood, demonstrating that explicit sex and graphic violence are not essential elements of great movies.

Just to be clear: I'm not advocating censorship. As a Lawrentian, I'm instinctively hostile to the censor-morons who heavy-handedly enforce the letter of the law and I believe that ultimately censorship helps nobody and harms many; arresting and circumscribing the development of vital human consciousness.*

All I'm doing, rather, is reminding readers that whilst numerous aspects of the Code now seem ridiculous and reprehensible, many great directors made many great films whilst working within its framework. (Of course, it could be argued that these films were made in spite of the Code and that there are at least an equal number of films weakened by cuts insisted upon by the censors.)  

One star whose career was certainly impacted negatively by the Code, was animated favourite Betty Boop ...

II.

Created by Max Fleischer, Betty Boop made her first appearance in the six-minute adventure Dizzy Dishes (1930). At this stage, she appeared as a neotenous-looking half-woman, half-poodle, though still with her distinctive features including a large round baby face, big eyes, and a carefully styled coiffure - and still dressed like a Jazz Age flapper, with a short skirt and stockings.

Within a year, Betty became fully human and her floppy ears were replaced with signature hoop earrings. She soon dumped her original canine boyfriend - the tubby black-and-white dog known as Bimbo - and began to flirt with human love interests, including Popeye the sailor.**

In 1932, thanks to her popularity amongst adult audiences as a two-dimensional sex symbol, she was given her own series and crowned queen of the animated screen. However, after 1934, when the Hays Code began to be more rigorously enforced and the Catholic Legion of Decency also jumped on her case, Betty's overt sexuality became problematic. 

Joseph Breen - the head film censor appointed by Hays - ordered the removal of the saucy openings to Betty's short films, deeming her winks and wiggles suggestive of immorality. Her animators were also obliged to provide her with a more demure appearance.

Personally, I prefer this new look. But most critics seem to agree that Betty's best days were already behind her by 1935. No longer the carefree adolescent boop-oop-a-dooping her way through one risqué adventure after another, Betty was reinvented as a housewife or a career girl. No more garter on display; no more gold bracelets or hoop earrings; even the curls in her hair gradually softened and decreased as the years passed.

Betty was now a little more mature and a little more responsible: in a word, boring. And her films, now aimed at a much younger audience, were disappointingly tame compared to her earlier adventures; their self-conscious wholesomeness contributing to the waning of her star. 

Further, by 1938 the Jazz Age was well and truly over, having been superseded by the era of swing and the big band sound. Desperate attempts to have Betty move with the times were doomed to failure. However, eighty years on, and Miss Boop has retained her iconic status within popular culture and the pornographic imagination (second only to Jessica Rabbit as the sexiest cartoon character of all time).

Notes

* See Lawrence's letter to Morris Ernest of 10 November 1928, in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VI (1927-28), ed. James and Margaret Boulton with Gerald M. Lacy, (Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 613. 

** Amusingly, there is even supposed to exist a pornographic short featuring Betty and Popeye. According to Jim Hill, in 1938 Max Fleischer wished to thank animators who had moved from New York to a new studio in Florida by throwing a party at which he screened a one-reel film in which Popeye requires his spinach in order to satisfy a sexually insatiable Betty. It's unknown what became of the film (if in fact it ever existed). See Jim Hill, Why For? (10 April 2003): click here.   

See also an interesting article by Heather Hendershot, 'Secretary, Homemaker, and 'White' Woman: Industrial Censorship and Betty Boop's Shifting Design', in the Journal of Design History, Vol. 8, No. 2 (Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 117-130. Click here for a link via which the essay can be purchased and downloaded.

Carry On Caligula

Caligula (12-41 CE): 
Roman Emperor (37-41 CE) 

I have existed from the dawn of the world and I shall exist until the last star falls from the night sky. 

Although I have taken the form of a man, I am no man and every man and therefore a god.

I. Ecce Homo  

Although as a rule I'm not interested in sadistic megalomaniacs, I'm prepared to make an exception in the case of the Roman Emperor Gaius Julius Caesar - or, as he is more commonly known, Caligula (a childhood nickname meaning little boots that, not unreasonably, he came to hate).

For not only was he young, good looking and charismatic, but he also had a sense of humour that revealed a profound sense of the Absurd and it's this, arguably, along with his showmanship, that makes him feel more of a contemporary than his illustrious forebears, or even his nephew Nero.  

There are very few surviving firsthand accounts about Caligula's short period of rule - which, if we are to believe a recent documentary, consisted of 1400 Days of Terror* - so we don't really know if he was the cruel tyrant and sexually perverse sociopath he's portrayed in the 1934 novel I, Claudius, written by Robert Graves. 

But even if he was, I don't believe he was a madman, so much as a nihilist and ironist (though maybe not of the kind compatible with liberalism that Richard Rorty favours). The above quotation - which could've very easily come from Nietzsche's late work - is a good example of this. I don't think Caligula meant this to be taken literally; that he was self-creating and, indeed, self-mocking, rather than self-delusional.**         


II. Camus's Caligula  

It was undoubtedly the absurdist aspect of his reign and his character that attracted the French philosopher and writer Albert Camus to Caligula and, in 1944, he published a four-act play about him in which, following the death of his beloved sister Drusilla, the young emperor attempts to bring the impossible into the realm of the likely and thereby shatter the complacency of Roman life.

For Caligula - as imagined by Camus - the only point or pleasure of having power is to transgress all rational limits that would restrict its exercise and make the heavens themselves up for grabs (the play opens with Caligula desiring to take possession of the moon).   

The play was part of what Camus called his Cycle of the Absurd, which also included the novel L’Étranger (1942) and the long essay Le Mythe de Sisyphe (1942). All three works expand upon the idea that man's existence is meaningless because his life lacks external justification. In other words, the Absurd invariably manifests itself when humanity confronts the unreasonable silence of the void.

Discussing his play in 1957, Camus provided a fascinating outline of its theme:

"Caligula, a relatively kind prince so far, realizes on the death of Drusilla, his sister and his mistress, that 'men die and they are not happy.' Therefore, obsessed by the quest for the Absolute and poisoned by contempt and horror, he tries to exercise, through murder and systematic perversion of all values, a freedom which he discovers in the end is no good. He rejects friendship and love, simple human solidarity, good and evil. He takes the word of those around him, he forces them to logic, he levels all around him by force of his refusal and by the rage of destruction which drives his passion for life.

      But if his truth is to rebel against fate, his error is to deny men. One cannot destroy without destroying oneself. This is why Caligula depopulates the world around him and, true to his logic, makes arrangements to arm those who will eventually kill him. Caligula is the story of a superior suicide. It is the story of the most human and the most tragic of errors. Unfaithful to man, loyal to himself, Caligula consents to die for having understood that no one can save himself all alone and that one cannot be free in opposition to other men."

Reading this reminds one of why Sartre was right to suggest that existentialism - at least in the French understanding of this term - is a humanism ...

Notes

* Caligula: 1400 Days of Terror (2012), written and directed by Bruce Kennedy: click here to watch in full on YouTube

** In other words, whilst it's true that Caligula liked to refer to himself as a living god and insist his senators acknowledge (and worship) him as such, even this was done with atheistic delight and simply provided him with the opportunity to dress up in public as Apollo, Mercury, and, amusingly, Venus. 

See: Albert Camus, Caligula and Other Plays, (Penguin Books, 1984).

Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair: Notes on the Vinok

A Ukranian beauty wearing traditional clothes

and a spectacular floral headdress

The penchant for wearing flowers in one's hair was not, of course, something that originated in San Francisco during the Summer of Love; peoples all around the world have been adorning themselves in this fashion for millennia. However, I'm particularly fascinated (at the moment) by the Ukranian floral headdress known in English as the vinok.

Traditionally worn by girls and unmarried women, the vinok has its origins in fertility rites that pre-date Christianity. Signifying virginity, the vinok was also believed to offer protection against evil spirits and followers of Slavic neopaganism - known as Rodnovery - continue to attach magical significance to the vinok.

Whilst mostly worn on festive occasions and holy days, since the 2014 Ukranian revolution the vinok has been increasingly worn in daily life as an expression of national pride and völkisch identity. This might cause concern amongst those suspicious of reactionary populism in Europe. However, it might be noted that the vinok is also often worn by the topless activists of Femen, for whom it signifies a new, insubordinate and heroic model of femininity.*

It might also be noted, finally, that the vinok has influenced the world of fashion and featured in several recent catwalk collections, including the Comme des Garçons Homme Plus Spring 2016 menswear collection, where models wore botanical crowns in a show entitled Armour of Peace:

* Note: it's not coincidental, of course, that although now based in Paris, Femen was founded in the Ukraine and is still led by a Ukranian woman, Inna Shevchenko. Readers might like to know that the Femen Flower Crown - handmade by activists - is available to buy for €35.00 on the Femen website: click here.

Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom: On the Genealogy of Hippie Morals

Pippa McManus: Crazy Daisy Dreams (2017)

Flower Child Group Exhibition (12 Aug - 2 Sept 2017)

Modern Eden Gallery (San Francisco)

I. Summers of Love and Hate

As a punk rocker, the symbolism of the zip and safety pin means more to me than that of the groovy floral designs so beloved of the hippie generation. However, as the Summer of Hate is now as much part of ancient cultural history as the Summer of Love, it's easier to view both events with critical perspective and concede that wearing flowers in one's hair is probably preferable to having to remove spittle.

And, of course, as a floraphile, I very much approve of intimate relationships between plants and people and can see how one might wish to develop a green neo-pagan politics upon a love of flora - although, personally, I've no desire for universal peace and love and refuse to accept that flowers can only symbolise such benevolent (and naive) idealism.    


II. If You're Going to San Francisco ...

Back in '67, San Francisco was the epicentre of the hippie counterculture, a movement mostly composed of privileged white youths who temporarily dropped out and experimented with drugs, sex, and alternative lifestyles, before moderating their views and dropping back in again as corporate yuppies in the 1980s à la Jerry Rubin.           

Thanks to a strong economy, the hippies were able to spend their time getting stoned, listening to psychedelic music, reading Allen Ginsberg,* protesting against the Man, dreaming of revolution and generally indulging their narcissism. Some formed communes and attempted to live as far outside mainstream society as possible. It's easy to mock and tempting to despise these idealists with flowers in their hair, but they have had (for better or for worse) a wide and lasting impact and many of their ideas and values are now part of the liberal orthodoxy.

Interestingly, the American author Robert Anton Wilson suggests that the hippies can be characterised as unearthly angels whose psychology manifests friendly weakness. Such people are kind, passive, generous and trusting. But they are also easily led and secretly in search of authority (which might explain the obsession with gurus and, indeed, why Charles Manson was able to wield such control over his extended Family of followers).  


III. On the Genealogy of Hippie Morals

I say their values, but, as the sociologist Bennett Berger pointed out at the time, there's nothing very new or uniquely hippie about the morality of the flower children. Their movement was merely another expression of the 19th-century bohemianism that the literary critic Malcolm Cowley had reduced to a relatively formal doctrine with several key ideas, some of which we might (briefly) summarise as follows:

(i) Only a Child Can Save Us

This first point, found in Christianity and Romanticism as well as flower power philosophy, continues to resonate today; thus the astonishing rise to global fame of Greta Thunberg, for example. The idea is that the innocent child is born with special potentialities which are systematically repressed by society. If they could only be left to blossom naturally and develop their personalities, then the world might yet be saved and humanity redeemed. 

(ii) Express Yourself (Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey)

When hippies claim the right to do their own thing, they are, of course, simply reviving the idea that the moral duty of each person is to express themselves and realise their full potential as individuals via some form of creative activity. Or smoking weed. Madonna was still churning out such bullshit twenty years after the Summer of Love.       

(iii) Paganism Good / Christianity Bad

The idea that paganism is a happy, innocent worship of the natural world that regards the body as a temple in which there is nothing unclean, whilst Christianity, in contrast, is a morally repressive and anti-sexual religion is one that I used to subscribe to myself. But then I read Michel Foucault on power, pleasure, and Christian ascesis and realised that things aren't so simple; that the difference between Graeco-Roman (i.e. pagan) and early Christian forms of self-disciplining cannot be established in terms of a fundamental distinction or dialectic. Ultimately, even the Nietzschean binary of Dionysus versus the Crucified has to be deconstructed.    

(iv) Seize the Day, Man

The idea of living spontaneously and for the moment is crucial to hippie philosophy; the immediacy of the present or the nowness of the Now is where it's at; the past and future are just abstractions and what D. H. Lawrence calls the quick of time is contained only in the instant. We have the Roman poet Horace to thank for this: carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero ...  But whether it's ever very wise listening to a poet (or Robin Williams) is debatable; doesn't it all just end in the sanctioned hedonism of consumer society and a Nike slogan?

(v) Free Love

Ah, the so-called sexual revolution of the sixties ... Again, part of a long tradition carried on by individuals who objected to the state having any say over matters such as marriage, contraception, sexual orientation, etc. What an individual chose to do with his or her body was, they argued, entirely up to them. The great hope was that sexual liberation would lead to greater freedom in all spheres of life and bring about profound social, political, and cultural change. Again, I used to subscribe to this, but then I read Foucault and realised that the politics of desire involves a naive and mistaken understanding of sex, power, and subjectivity thanks to our unquestioning belief in what he terms the repressive hypothesis.   

(vi) Romantic Primitivism and Exotic Otherness 

Finally, the hippies were of course anti-Western and believed that spiritual enlightenment either lay in Asia (and involved transcendental meditation and taking lots of drugs), or with native Americans who combined tribal wisdom with noble savagery. Embarrassingly, I also used to buy into this in my Kings of the Wild Frontier/Nostalgia of Mud period. But now, I'm wise to the culture cult and refuse the tyranny of guilt identified by Pascal Buckner.

Indeed, now, not only would I never trust a hippie, I'd never trust a punk, pagan, or poet either (even though I used to self-identify as a combination of all three during the 1980s).

* Note: In an essay written in 1965, Ginsberg advocated that anti-war rallies should become non-violent spectacles and that hippie protesters should be provided with masses of flowers to be handed out to political opponents, police, press, and members of the public. Thanks to activists like Abbie Hoffman, this idea of flower power quickly spread and became an important expression of hippie ideology. It also led to some iconic images, as flower-wielding protesters were confronted by armed force.

See: 

Bennett M. Berger, 'Hippie morality - more old than new', Society, Vol. 5, Issue 2 (December, 1967), pp. 19-27. Note that Society was entitled Transaction at this time.

Malcolm Cowley, Exiles Return, (W. W. Norton, 1934). The Penguin edition (1994), ed. Donald W. Faulkner, is perhaps more readily available.

Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus Rising, (Falcon Press, 1983), p. 55. 

Play: San Francisco, sung by Scott McKenzie, written by John Phillips, (Ode Records, May 1967), the unofficial anthem of the flower power generation: click here. It's a pleasant enough tune, but like Sid Vicious I was busy playing with my Action Man whilst all this was going on.

    

On Essex Girls and Eyelashes

Image via whisper.sh

I.

Essex is home to many things, including a huge number of beauty salons offering eyelash extensions; there's at least a dozen such venues in Romford alone. It's hardly surprising, therefore, to see numerous young women walking around with cosmetically-enhanced lashes that make me open my own eyes wide with astonishment.    

The funny thing is, after prolonged exposure to these and other essential elements of an Essex girl's look - spray tans, sculpted brows, big hair - one starts to appreciate the defiantly artificial, high maintenance and rather exotic aesthetic. 

In fact, it becomes increasingly difficult to imagine (or remember) other looks and I fear that if my exile continues for much longer I'll succumb to the belief that the only way is Essex. For the look is not only exaggerated in a porno-cartoonish manner, it's compelling in its flawlessness. Some people like to sneer at Essex girls and deride the look, but this is mostly a mixture of snobbery and envy.      

II.

Having expressed my concern that I'm potentially at risk of becoming enamoured with Essex girls, the truth is I'm probably immune because I don't tie my understanding of beauty to an idea that bigger is always better when it comes to breasts, lips, or, indeed, eyelashes.

Ultimately, I prefer the idea of queering or perverting beauty rather than simply enhancing or augmenting it. Thus, for example, I prefer those women - few in number and not often encountered on the 174 - who do a bit more with their lashes than simply lengthen and thicken them.

For example: women who choose to wear mink eyelashes encrusted with diamonds; or women who wear paper eyelashes inspired by the art of Chinese paper-cutting; or women who wear eyelashes made from colourful bird feathers or flower petals; or women, finally, who would dare to wear the flylashes (below) made by British artist Jessica Harrison from the legs of dead flies.*
  

* For details and images of these plus several other designs see: '10 Strangest Eyelash Extensions', posted by Ruth on Oddee (12 Feb 2011): click here.