Genki: Reflections on the Work of Daikichi Amano

Photo from Human Nature (2012) by Daikichi Amano

daikichiamano.com

Torpedophiles with a good memory might recall that I have previously written about a form of pornography known as tentacle erotica which originated with a famous design by Hokusai called The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife (1814): click here. 

Two-centuries on and this dream has been obscenely realised in the work of the photographer and video artist Daikichi Amano - described wittily (if not entirely accurately) by Marilyn Manson as a combination of Jean Cocteau and Jacques Cousteau. 

Other fans of Amano's imagery include the recently appointed chief creative officer at Burberry, Riccardo Tisci, who previously spent a dozen years at Givenchy, unfolding his sensual, romantic, sometimes rather gothic vision, and, perhaps less surprisingly, the filmmaker Gaspar Noé, whose work is often associated with the New French Extremity and analysed in terms of a particularly visceral and sexually violent cinéma du corps.

It might be noted that Michel Houellebecq also refers to Amano in his latest novel, Serotonin (2019). However, as the narrator-protagonist, Labrouste, describes one video of a Japanese girl holding the tentacles of an octopus coming out of a toilet bowl with her teeth as the most disgusting thing he's ever seen, it's uncertain as to whether Houellebecq's a fan of naked girls covered in eels, worms, and insects, or fucking the denizens of the deep. 

Personally, I'm more than happy for Amano to explore his own dark fears and fantasies, fusing the human body with the natural world and finding new grotesque forms of beauty rooted in the mythology of traditional Japanese culture and the iconography of contemporary Japanese eroticism.

The problem is, thanks to I'm a Celebrity ... I find it difficult to take the work very seriously (the thought of Ant and Dec sniggering in the background is fatal to one's amorous interest).  

Michel Houellebecq: Serotonin

Front cover of the English hardback edition

William Heinemann (2019)

In the end, even your favourite writers let you down. And so Michel Houellebecq and his new novel Serotonin ...

Maybe he's tired of producing fiction; maybe success makes lazy. Or maybe his porno-nihilistic schtick is prone to some kind of law of diminishing returns. I don't know. But I do know this is a pretty feeble addition to what remains an impressive body of work and whilst the narrator-protagonist, Labrouste, needed his small, white anti-depressant pills to prevent him from dying of sadness, I felt in need of something to stop me from drifting off with boredom at times as a reader.

Ultimately, the problem with creating unsympathetic characters is that they're, well, unsympathetic - so they had better have something interesting to tell us and I'm really not sure that Labrouste does; unless, that is, one is interested in the commercial availability of hummus in French supermarkets (pretty good); the fate of French dairy farming in a globalised economy (pretty dire); the condition of his cock (mostly flaccid, which is unfortunate as this seems to be the core of his being).     

Having said that, there are plenty of things to enjoy in the novel. For example, I like the casual references to Heidegger, Bataille, and Blanchot, as if everyone will be familiar with these names dropped as easily as the names of high-end fashion brands and types of French cheese. 

I also like the fact that the Japanese photograper and video artist Daikichi Amano is given a mention and can imagine many readers quickly googling the name to see if he's real or just a fictional character made up by Houellebecq (in the context of the novel, of course, he's both). Considering Yuzu's fascination with Amano's work, it's surprising that her zoosexual adventures were confined to canines.

Fascinating too the central conceit of one day just walking away from one's old life; of severing all connections with family and friends and voluntarily going missing. A transgressive act - but not a criminal one (in either France or the UK) and Houellebecq / Labrouste is right to register his surprise:

"It was startling that, in a country where individual liberties had tended to shrink, legislation was preserving this one, which was fundamental - in my eyes even more fundamental, and philosopically more troubling, than suicide." [47]

If only for sentences like this, Serotonin is worth reading and it's always nice to be reminded that in less than a day one can erase or reconfigure one's entire life. Nice, too, to discover that two people can be buried in the same coffin.  
 

As for Labrouste's observations on love and sexual politics as played out between men and women, these didn't much interest - despite being placed within a Platonic-Kantian context to do with human perfection via the loving fusion of two into one and the attainment of mutual respect. That said, this passage is one that caught my attention as a xenophile:

"I had carnal knowledge of girls from different countries, and had come to the conclusion that love can only develop on the basis of a certain difference, that like never falls in love with like, and in practice many  differences may come into play: an extreme difference in age, as we know, can give rise to unimaginably violent passions; racial difference remains effective; and even mere national and linguistic difference should not be scorned." [81-2] 

This is true, I think, and is a truth long recognised and exploited within the pornographic imagination. I'm not sure that the lines that follow are also true, but they are certainly worthy of consideration:

"It is bad for those who love each other to speak the same language, it is bad for them to truly understand one another, to be able to communicate through words, because the vocation of the word is not to create love but to engender division and hatred, the word separates as it produces, while a semi-formless, semi-linguistic babble [...] creates the basis for unconditional and enduring love." [82]

When not reminiscing about lost loves and slowly coming to the realisation that it's the past and not the future that engulfs and eventually kills us, Labrouste likes to express his affection for cows and spy with binoculars on a German paedophile; "basically I think I would have liked to be a cop, insinuating myself into people's lives, penetrating their secrets" [184] ... A cop, or a novelist.  

He also tries (unsuccessfully) to counsel an old college friend, Aymeric, a farmer who, like many others, has fallen on hard times and is angry about it to the point of taking up arms. It's at this point in the novel that Houellebecq once again shows his uncanny ability to tap into the spirit of the times; anticipating the gilets jaunes movement and its rage against free trade, liberal elitism, and their own feelings of impotence and loss.

Suddenly, as James Lasdun notes in his review, "the book's seemingly haphazard elements begin working together" and Houellebecq no longer disappoints ...

He could (perhaps should) have ended the novel with Aymeric's violent suicide and the fatal confrontation between farmers and the security police (CRS). But Houellebecq writes on for another 75 pages or so, as Labrouste stalks an old girlfriend (Camille) in the hope that he and she might get back together and find the happiness they deserve.

First, however, he plans to murder her four-year-old son: "the first action of a male mammal when he conquers a female is to destroy all her previous offspring to ensure the pre-eminence of his genotype" [265]. Of course, not being a stag or a Brazillian macaque - or even an early human - Labrouste can't go through with it; instead, he collapses into terminal sorrow and self-pity (though, to be fair, his cortisol levels are as high as his testosterone levels are low).           

In the end, there's nothing for him to do but get fat and watch TV: "I was now at the stage where the ageing animal, wounded and aware of being fatally injured, seeks a den in which to end its life." [291]

What worries me - after 1,285 days in Essex exile and already being ten years older than Labrouste - is the thought that I'm also at this stage; will I too suddenly have a desire to read The Magic Mountain and reach the Proustian conclusion that what matters most in this life is not social or cultural activity, nor intellectual stimulation, but young wet pussies?
 

Notes

Michel Houellebecq, Serotonin, trans. Shaun Whiteside, (William Heinemann, 2019).

James Lasdun, 'Serotonin by Michel Houellebecq review - a vision of degraded masculinity', The Guardian (20 Sept 2019): click here to read online.

Pansies: Brief Notes on D. H. Lawrence's Excremental Aesthetic

Georgia O'Keeffe: Detail from  

Black Pansy and Forget-Me-Nots (1926)

brooklynmuseum.org

'The fairest thing in nature, a flower, still has its roots in earth and manure; and in the perfume there hovers still the faint strange scent of earth, the under-earth in all its heavy humidity and darkness. Certainly it is so in pansy-scent, and in violet-scent; mingled with the blue of the morning the black of corrosive humus. Else the scent would be just sickly sweet.'

- D. H. Lawrence

Pansies were one of Lawrence's favourite flowers and I can understand why; they're lovely little things, that turn their faces to the sun and backs to the wind.

And their name, of course, is the anglicised version of the French term pensées, meaning thoughts; particularly gay little thoughts, that bloom and fade without care or system.

An excellent name then, as Lawrence realised, for a collection of poems that fill the page "like so many separate creatures, each with a small head and a tail of its own, trotting its own little way".

But thoughts, like flowers, only stay fresh, if they keep their roots "in good moist humus and the dung that roots love". This is true also of objects made by hand, such as a Greek vase:

"If you can smell the dung of earthly sensual life from the potter who made [it], you can still see the vase as a dark, pansily-winking pansy, very much alive. But if you can only see an 'urn' or a 'still unravished bride of quietness', you are just assisting at the beautiful funeral [...] of all pansies."

Alas, many modern people want cut and dried forms of beauty. But a pansy that has been carefully plucked and pressed, which has no faint scent of shit and can no longer make you sneeze, is but a corpse-blossom.

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'Draft Introduction to Pansies', The Poems, Vol. 1, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Appendix 4, pp. 657-58. The opening quotation below the image is from Appendix 6, 'Introduction to Pansies', pp. 663-64.

In using the title Pansies for his 1929 collection of verse, Lawrence was, of course, displaying his own Romantic roots as a poet; Wordsworth references them in his work, for example, and Nathaniel Hawthorne's last published work was an unfinished piece entitled Pansie, a Fragment (1864). 

RoadKill

In the UK, there are over 38 million vehicles, mostly cars, driving along an extensive road network that stretches for about 246,700 miles (i.e., all the way to the moon and a bit beyond).

It's unsurprising, therefore, that each year an estimated one million wild mammals, including badgers, deer, foxes, hedgehogs, rabbits, and squirrels, are slaughtered on UK roads, with many millions more suffering fatal injuries, but managing to leave the scene of the accident and thus evade capture within the official statistics.

As well as the above, as many as ten million birds are also annually sacrificed on the roads; mostly pheasants, but also increasingly rare and endangered species, such as barn owls. Even domestic animals, including beloved pets, aren't safe; around 230,000 cats, for example are killed by cars each year. Sadly, I doubt that anyone even bothers to keep numbers for reptiles and amphibians, as if frogs, newts, and slow worms aren't even worth counting.  

As for human beings - and we too, of course, are not immune to becoming roadkill - there were 1,782 fatalities on UK roads last year and 25,484 serious injuries; numbers that admittedly pale into insignificance when compared to the previous figures given and it's hard to feel much sympathy for car owners who are complicit with the destruction not only of wildlife and the rural landscape, but who have also turned many urban areas into virtual no go zones for pedestrians and severely restricted the outdoor play of children. 

Hopefully, we'll one day reach the conclusion two legs good, four wheels bad and learn how to journey naked and light along the open road, exposed to full contact on two slow feet, as D. H. Lawrence would say.*  


Notes 

* I'm aware Lawrence is speaking figuratively here - about the condition of souls, etc. - but he was obviously no fan of the car, writing elsewhere of the mocking triumph of the motor engine and of traffic flowing through rigid grey city streets in terms of a sinister underworld.

Despite the name being in extremely poor taste, readers might be interested in Project Splatter, coordinated by researchers at Cardiff University, that attempts to quantify and map wildlife roadkill across the UK: click here for details.  

Reflections on a Crane Fly

Tipulidae

I.

There's a higher than usual number of crane flies coming into the house this autumn.

But that's ok with me, because, after dragonflies and butterflies, daddy longlegs are my favourite flies; even though, in reminding me of my childhood, these harmless creatures remind me also of the acts of wanton cruelty carried out against their number of which I'm now a little ashamed. 

Who knows, perhaps in some future hell, demons will pull my limbs off and throw me into a giant web for some enormous spider to devour.

II.

There are over 15,000 different species of crane flies, making them the largest family of all flies. Amazingly, the majority of these were identified by just one man - Charles P. Alexander (no relation).

Clearly, here was someone in love with these long-legged, slender-bodied insects which seem to have such trouble navigating when in flight and often just bump along as if a bit tipsy. 

To describe these alien beings - as one poet describes them - as tiny non-sentient biological automatons, is profoundly objectionable; one might have hoped that this anthropocentrically conceited notion of the bête machine (famously found in Descartes) was long discredited.  

French Knickers

Grammatically speaking, I'm not sure if the word French, as used within English, is a modifier, qualifier, or both. Either way, it often also serves as an erotic intensifier, as illustrated by the term French knickers, for example ...

Until the end of the 18th century, women didn't usually wear knickers - which is why the young man hiding in the bushes and spying on an elegant young woman on a swing in Fragonard's famous painting of 1767, gets more of an eyeful as he peeps up her skirt than a modern audience might appreciate.

Now, of course, knickers - or panties as Americans and pornographers like to call them - are a universal item of female undergarment and come in a wide variety of styles, colours, and fabrics.

However, in my view, the loveliest of all are French knickers, preferably ivory-coloured silk and with buttons at the side, but sans lace trimming or any other decorative element; the sort of knickers that Lady Chatterley might have worn in the 1920s and which her lover, Mellors, is keen to remove so that he might penetrate her quiescent body:

"She quivered as she felt his hand groping softly, yet with queer thwarted clumsiness, among her clothing [...] He drew down the thin silk [knickers], slowly, carefully, right down and over her feet."       
Although French knickers have never quite disappeared - and enjoyed something of a fashion revival in the 1970s and '80s, thanks to the designs of Janet Reger - most women today seem to prefer wearing snug-fitting cotton briefs, or hideous thongs.

This is unfortunate, because less material means more explosed flesh and more exposed flesh means diminished sexual excitement. In other words, Bernard Shaw was right - clothes arouse desire and lack of clothes tends to be fatal to our ardour. Passion not only ends in fashion, it begins with it too, as any philosopher on the catwalk can tell you, or as any young woman who wears vintage lingerie will also vouch.   

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover and A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 116. Attentive readers might recall that in his introductory essay to the novel written some months later, Lawrence condemns "brilliant young people" to whom sex means "lady's underclothing, and the fumbling therewith" [314-15]. This, he says, is a perverse form of savagery. But it's clearly one that Mellors isn't unacquainted with and later in the novel he will ask to keep Connie's flimsy silk nightie as an object with which to masturbate: "'I can put it atween my legs at night, for company.'" [249].  

There are two sister posts to this one that readers might find of interest: one on French kissing [click here] and one on French maids [click here]. 

French Maid

F. H. Clough: The French Maid (1950s)

Grammatically speaking, I'm not sure if the word French, as used within English, is a modifier, qualifier, or both. Either way, it often also serves as an erotic intensifier, as illustrated by the term French maid, for example ...

I.

Maids - including comely barmaids - have a long-established position within the pornographic imagination for complex reasons involving power and pleasure on the one hand, fantasy and fetish on the other. Indeed, I've written on the psychosexual aspects of this topic in an earlier post and readers who are interested can click here.

In this post, however, I'm specifically interested in the figure of the French maid as trope, stereotype, and soubrette; i.e., as an attractive young woman wearing a skimpy stylised outfit based on the typical uniforms worn in 19th century France. 

This costume - which is instantly recognisable - usually consists of a black dress with white trim and a full skirt cut well above the knee; a frilly white half-apron; a white lace headpiece; sheer black or fishnet stockings (preferably seamed); and high-heeled shoes. Optional accessories include a garter, a choker necklace, and a feather duster.   

Of course, maids - even in France - have never attempted to keep house dressed like this, but that's so beside the point that anyone who stops to raise this as an issue is an idiot. The pornographic imagination is not overly concerned with historical accuracy and the coquettish French maid ooh-la-la-ing her way through life belongs more to the world of burlesque and Benny Hill than domestic service. 

II.

Having said that, the French maid is not simply found in comedy and can sometimes move from sauciness to sadomasochism - as in Jean Genet's play Les Bonnes (1947), loosely based on the shocking story of sisters Christine and Léa Papin, who brutally murdered their employer and her daughter in Le Mans, in 1933.*

In the play, the two French maids - Solange et Claire - construct elaborate sadomasochistic rituals when their mistress (Madame) is away. Their dark role-playing games always involve the murder of the latter. However, their concern with process rather than goal, means they always fail to ceremoniously kill Madame, thereby forever postponing the climax of their fantasy and delaying their own ultimate pleasure. 

The play was performed in London at the Greenwich Theatre in 1973, with Vivien Merchant as Madame, Glenda Jackson as Solange and Susannah York as Claire. This production was filmed in 1974, directed by Christopher Miles, who implemented many of Genet's theatrical devices for the movie.**

Promo photo of Susannah York and 

Glenda Jackson in The Maids (1975)

Notes

* This murder exerted a strange fascination over French intellectuals - including Genet, Sartre and Lacan - many of whom sought to analyse it as a symbolic form of class struggle. The case has since inspired many artworks and further critical studies. 

** The film, made for the American Film Theatre, was released in the US in April 1975, and shown at Cannes the following month (although not entered in the main competition). To watch the trailer, click here.

For a sister post to this one on French kissing, click here. 

For a sister post on French knickers, click here. 

French Kiss

Grammatically speaking, I'm not sure if the word French, as used within English, is a modifier, qualifier, or both. Either way, it often also serves as an erotic intensifier, as illustrated by the term French kiss, for example ...

A kiss, as lovers of Casablanca will know, is just a kiss.

But a French kiss, of course, is something else entirely. And whilst some may protest that sticking your tongue into a young woman's mouth isn't the same as sticking your tongue into the holiest of holies, a French kiss is nevertheless in the same ballpark; i.e., it's an act of oral sex, albeit one that doesn't involve direct genital stimulation.

That's why Freud was right to identify amorous kissing as a form of perversion; one that is practiced by even those who would regard themselves as normal, healthy individuals. Put simply, there's nothing natural about oral erotogenic activity in which the the lips, tongue and teeth are diverted from their usual function and turned into secondary sex organs.

And although it may be pleasurable to exchange saliva and play tonsil tennis with a loved one, there's a good reason why the English term this French kissing and that's because they're secretly aware of just how queer it is to use your mouth in such an abberant fashion.       

Note: it's ironic that, until recently, the French didn't have a specific term for un baiser amoureux; they described it (rather unromantically) as un baiser avec la langue. It was only in 2014 that the slang term se galocher was accorded official dictionary status.

Surprise musical bonus: click here. 

To read a sister post to this one on French maids, click here.

For a sister post on French knickers, click here.

On the Politics of Resistance and Refusal

Picking up on a footnote to a recent post in which I indicated that I'm more attracted to a strategy of refusal than offering a form of resistance, someone writes suggesting I'm being a bit pedantic:

"Whether D. H. Lawrence adopted various literary devices in order to refuse or resist the tragic reception of the times in which he wrote, doesn't really matter. The important fact is that he was not a tragedean in the conventional sense of the term. And besides, the difference between these two verbs is often fuzzy; a refusal of something often involves resisting its effects."   

I suppose that's true: though I'm not sure expressing a concern for semantic precision necessarily makes one a pedant. And, even if it does, there are worse things to be. So let me try to explain the distinction between resistance and refusal in a bit more detail ... 

Baudrillard has shown how the idea of resistance in a transpolitical era characterised by the techno-social immersion of the individual rather than their alienation, has become problematic and even a little passé. Absorbed within a global network, from where might one find a point of resistance? Or, to put it another way, in a virtual world, where all that is solid has been dissolved, how does one stand one's ground?  

We might, perhaps, internalise resistance and thus retain it as a kind of ethical component in our own lives (resisting, for example, the temptation to surrender to the molecular forms of fascism that haunt our dreams and fool us into thinking we might find easy or final solutions to complex problems).

Alternatively, we are obliged to do one of two things: either accelerate the process we might otherwise have resisted, pushing it beyond its own internal limits to the point of completion and collapse; or we can become like Bartleby and turn away from the things we find distasteful, refusing the game we are invited to play (a game in which the illusion of resistance is merely a complementary form of opposition).

The latter is the strategy of he or she who refuses to take tragically an essentially tragic age; who reacts with irony, indifference, or insouciance in the face of falling skies etc. Such a strategy may lack the optimistic possibility of political coherence, but, on the other hand, it might trigger a chain reaction of (rapid, violent, unexpected) events (destructive of what Lawrence terms the Umbrella).   

Refusal, then, is a form of nihilism and what Baudrillard terms abreaction, rather than a progressive politics of resistance and reaction:

"We have to make a clear distinction between reacting, which is to arm oneself against - and try to destabilize - the system, and abreacting. Abreaction consists merely in expelling something: you just don't accept it, but you don't fight it either, and you harbour no illusions about possibility of overcoming it. It’s simply unacceptable."

Arguably, Lawrence anticipated this line of thought in his late work, realising that even a desperate fictional analysis of the times written among the ruins and which ends a little droopingly, is preferable to writing another novel like The Plumed Serpent which fantasises about armed resistance and revolution.

Mellors would love to "'wipe the machines off the face of the earth [...] and end the industrial epoch absolutely, like a black mistake.'" But he knows that's impossible. So, all he can do is hold his peace and try to live his own life as far as possible without compromising his manhood, as a kind of outlaw and refusenik.

Notes

Jean Baudrillard, Fragments, trans. Chris Turner, (Routledge, 2004), p. 72. In this same interview with François L'Yvonnet, Baudrillard says:

"I'm a bit resistant to the idea of resistance, since it belongs to the world of critical, rebellious, subversive thought, and that is all rather outdated. If you have a conception of integral reality, of a reality that's absorbed all negativity, the idea of resisting it, of disputing its validity, of setting one value against another and countering one system with another, seems pious and illusory. So there doesn't seen to be anything that can come into play except a singularity, which doesn't resist, but constitutes itself as another universe with another set of rules, which may conceivably get exterminated, but which, at a particular moment, represents an insuperable obstacle for the system itself. But this isn't head-on resistance. That doesn't seem possible any more." [71]

This nicely summarises his position, which is also pretty much my position. Readers who are interested should see my essay 'Jean Baudrillard: Thinking the Transpolitical', in Visions of Excess and Other Essays, (Blind Cupid Press, 2009), pp. 147-68.

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 220.

Ours Is Essentially a Tragic Age: Notes on the Opening of a Novel

Two female readers of the Penguin edition of 
D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover (1960)

showing little interest in the opening lines

Lady Chatterley's Lover opens with the following paragraph:

"Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen."

I think it's an opening that deserves to be looked at a little more closely ...


One immediately notes the use by Lawrence of an omniscient third person narrator; one who sees and knows all things in a god-like manner, even the private thoughts and feelings of the characters. As one Nietzschean little girl informed her mother, there's something indecent about this.

One suspects that Lawrence would seek to justify his narrative technique in terms of perfect empathy rather than epistemological transparency, but I still find it questionable that although in this opening paragraph the narrator describes Connie's position in a rather matter-of-fact manner, thereby ironically distancing himself from her, he will later describe things from Connie's perspective in a far more lyrical fashion, as if even her most intimate experiences were also his own and ours as readers.

Thus, whilst we get to see the workings of Clifford's mind, we get to share Connie's orgasm and made fully complicit in her sexual shenanigans. That's what happens when free indirect discourse meets the pornographic imagination - interiority is taken to a perversely material conclusion.   

What I'd like to suggest is that whenever a narrator says ours is we should be on our guard; we certainly shouldn't be lulled into false consensus or made an accessory after the fact. His - and maybe Connie's - may be an essentially tragic age, but it's not compulsory for any reader to subscribe to this belief.

And what does this claim mean anyway, for those of us living in an essentially inessential age that lacks any intrinsic character or indispensable quality? Lawrence would doubtless say that's the nature of our (postmodern) tragedy; that we have no soul or substance and live accidental lives of random contingency. But Lawrence is more of a metaphysician than he often pretends and still clings to the verb to be in all seriousness. 

Essential or otherwise, it seems that the narrator employs the idea of tragedy in a conventional sense; i.e. this is a post-cataclysmic period of great suffering, destruction, downfall etc. But it's important to note that Lawrence is not a tragic writer and, in fact, hates tragedy as usually conceived; thus his refusal to take it tragically.

This saying no to the tragic reception of tragedy is part of Lawrence's admirable attempt to take a great kick at misery and his refusal to wallow in his or anyone else's misfortune. Lawrence despises those who, in his words, are in love with their own defeat; he would be the last person on earth to subscribe to the contemporary cult of victimhood. 

But what is the terrible deluge that is supposed to have happened? Obviously, it's a reference to the Great War. But, as a Nietzschean, I also conceive of this cataclysmic event as the death of God - a tragic but also joyous event that changes everything and creates opportunities to build new little habitats and opens new spaces for thought in which we might also allow ourselves to dream again and form new little hopes.  

Nietzsche famously (and cheerfully) writes of this event in The Gay Science and the rejuvinating effect it has upon free spirits who feel themselves "irradiated as by a new dawn" by the news that God is dead:

"Our hearts overflow with gratitude, astonishment, presentiment and expectation. At last the horizon seems open once more, granting even that it is not bright; our ships can at last put out to sea in face of every danger; every hazard is again permitted to the discerner; the sea, our sea, again lies open before us; perhaps never before did such an 'open sea' exist."

Thus, to be among the ruins needn't be thought negatively; needn't oblige one to give in before one starts. Indeed, whilst Lawrence doesn't quite go so far as the Situationists and believe in the ruins, I think he understands their appeal and the fun to be had with fragments - or bits as he calls them in Kangaroo. Indeed, one could read the cataclysm as the collapse of grand narratives and understand the building of new little habitats as the attempt to find more localised, more provisional, more relative truths that aren't coordinated by an ideal of Wholeness or swept up into an Absolute.

Almost one is tempted to suggest that in the following paragraph from Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari are rewriting Lawrence's opening to Lady C. and theoretically expanding upon his thinking on plurality and multiplicities: 

"We live today in the age of partial objects, bricks that have been shattered to bits, and leftovers. We no longer believe in the myth of the existence of fragments that, like pieces of an antique statue, are merely waiting for the last one to be turned up, so that they may all be glued back together to create a unity that is precisely the same as the original unity. We no longer believe in a primordial totality that once existed, or in a final totality that awaits us at some future date. We no longer believe in the dull gray outlines of a dreary, colorless dialectic of evolution, aimed at forming a harmonious whole out of heterogeneous bits by rounding off their rough edges. We believe only in totalities that are peripheral. And if we discover such a totality alongside various separate parts, it is a whole of these particular parts but does not totalize them; it is a unity of all of these particular parts but does not unify them; rather, it is added to them as a new part fabricated separately." 

Finally, we come to the last line: We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen. I suppose that's true - even if it's factually not the case. For we could, of course, choose to die; as Gerald chooses to die at the end of Women in Love, rather than accept being broken open once more like Mellors, or voluntarily leave the tomb like the man who died.

And learning how and when to die at the right time is as much an art, requiring just as much courage, as living on regardless of the circumstances and becoming one of those unhappy souls; individuals like Clifford who are afraid to die and fall silent, determined to continue asserting themselves even when they have fallen out of touch with others. 

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 5.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane, (University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 42.

Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, (Vintage Press, 1974), V. 343, p. 280. 

See also: Catherine Brown, 'Resisting Tragedy: A Report on the International D. H. Lawrence Conference, Paris, 2018', in the D. H. Lawrence Society Newsletter (Winter 2018/19), or click here to read in a pre-edited version on her website.

Interestingly, Dr. Brown argues that Lawrence adopts various literary means and devices in order to resist tragedy, whereas the narrator calls for a refusal - something that those researching this topic might like to consider. As a nihilist, I'm more attracted to a strategy of active negation (refusal) than offering a dialectical form of (often complementary) opposition (resistance): click here for an explanation why.