Don't Let D. H. Lawrence Rub You Up the Wrong Way

D. H. Lawrence beach towel by Asok Mukhopadhyay

fineartamerica.com

If there is one modern author guaranteed to rub a lot of readers up the wrong way, it's Mr. D. H. Lawrence; the man who puts the friction in fiction. But, amusingly, he also takes every opportunity to do the same with his own characters as well, as illustrated in the following three scenes, drawn from  across the body of his work ...


I. Cyril and George in The White Peacock

In this, Lawrence's first novel, there's a famous pond swimming scene involving Cyril Beardsall and his friend George Saxton. The latter, who is already half-undressed by the water's edge, invites Cyril to fetch a towel and to join him. Eager to comply, Cyril does as he was instructed and then quickly strips off.

They plunge into the icy water and enjoy the "vigorous poetry of action" [222], Cyril pursuing George and eventually catching hold of him. Having being caught, George surrenders and floats on his back besides his friend, looking up and laughing, "and his white breasts and belly emerged like cool buds of a firm fleshed water flower" [see note 222:19 on p. 386].   

When they exit the pond, the two young men admire one another's nakedness and indulge in a bit of frottage:

"We stood and looked at each other as we rubbed ourselves dry. He was well proportioned, and naturally of handsome physique, heavily limbed. [...]
      As I watched him, he stood in white relief against the mass of green. He polished his arm, holding it out straight and solid; he rubbed his hair into curls, while I watched the deep muscles of his shoulders, and the bands stand out in his neck as he held it firm. [...]
      He saw I had forgotten to continue my rubbing, and laughing he took hold of me and began to rub me briskly, as if I were a child, or rather, a woman he loved and did not fear. I left myself quite limply in his hands, and, to get a better grip of me, he put his arm round me and pressed me aainst him, and the sweetness of the touch of our naked bodies one against the other was superb. It satisfied in some measure the vague, indecipherable yearning of my soul; and it was the same with him. When he had rubbed me all warm, he let me go, and we looked at each other with eyes of still laughter, and our love was perfect for a moment, more perfect than any love I have known since, either for man or woman." [222-23]


II. Jack and Mabel in The Horse-Dealer's Daughter

Our second scene is taken from one of Lawrence's best-known short stories and also involves a natural pond, two wet bodies, lots of rubbing, and the fetishistic presence of a towel ...

Mabel Pervin is a disturbed (and disturbing) 27-year-old woman with the face of a bulldog and a profound desire to join her dead mother. One afternoon, as dusk was beginning to fall and having attended her mother's grave, Mabel walks to a nearby pond. Unbeknown to her, however, she is being watched by a young doctor, named Jack Fergusson:

"There she stood on the bank for a moment. She never raised her head. Then she waded slowly into the water.
      He stood motionless as the small black figure walked slowly and deliberately towards the centre of the pond, gradually moving deeper into the motionless water, and still moving forward as the water got up to her breast. Then he could see her no more in the dusk of the dead afternoon." [145]

Instinctively, Jack runs to help; that is, to fish her out, not to gently hold Mabel under and thereby assist with the suicide. Rather bravely, considering he couldn't swim and already had a bad cold, he ventures slowly into the pond: "The cold water rose over his thighs, over his loins, upon his abdomen. The lower part of his body was all sunk in the hideous cold element." [145]

After one horrible moment when Jack loses his balance and goes under the water himself, he is able to grasp hold of Mabel's clothing and pull her out of the clutches of the pond. She is close to death, but he manages to resuscitate her. Then, wiping her face, he wraps her in his overoat and carries her home, laying her down on the hearthrug in front of the fire. She was breathing and semi-conscious, but not yet fully in the world.

Fetching some blankets from upstairs, Jack warms them before the fire: "Then he removed her saturated, earthy-smelling clothing, rubbed her dry with a towel, and wrapped her naked in the blankets." [146] It's at this point that the tale takes a typically queer Lawrentian turn. For Mabel takes his actions as a sign that he loves her:

"She shuffled forward on her knees, and put her arms round him, round his legs, as he stood there, pressing her breasts against his knees and thighs, clutching him with strange, convulsive certainty, pressing his thighs against her, drawing him to her face, her throat, as she looked up at him with flaring, humble eyes of transfiguration, triumphant in first possession.
      'You love me,' she murmured, in strange transport, yearning and triumphant and confident. 'You love me. I know you love me, I know.'
      And she was passionately kissing his knees, through the wet clothing, passionately and indiscriminately kissing his knees, his legs, as if unaware of everything." [148]

Readers who are interested in knowing how this tale concludes can click here. The point is: be careful whom you choose to save and rub dry as such acts of intimacy can sometimes be misinterpreted (however innocent your intentions and even if you're a doctor upholding the Hippocratic Oath). 


III. Joe and Yvette in The Virgin and the Gipsy

Finally, we come to our third scene: a terrible flood at the vicarage that drowns the repulsive figure of Granny, but merely soaks to the skin the virginal Yvette and her saviour, the gipsy Joe Boswell ...

"The first wave was washing her feet from under her [...] She was barely conscious: as if the flood was in her soul. [...] Yvette felt herself gone in an agonising mill-race of icy water, whirled, with only the fearful grip of the gipsy's hand on her wrist." [69-70]

Somehow, miraculously, they get from the garden to the house; the water still heaving around their legs. Yvette manages to climb the stairs; "like a wet, shuddering cat" [70] and only when on the relative safety of the landing does she become aware once more of the sodden gipsy coughing his guts out.

They seek additional safety from the rising waters in one of the bedrooms. Worried that she'll die of the cold he orders her to take her clothes off and get into the bed. Yvette is clearly unconvinced of the necessity of this and says she prefers to stay sitting on one of the chairs. But the gipsy is insistent: "'No!' he cried. 'No! Take your things off and I rub you with this towel.'" [72]

(As readers will have gathered by now, in the Lawrentian universe there's always plenty of dry towels at hand.)

Then the gipsy decides to strip and rub himself dry also:

"Coughing, shuddering violently, he pulled up his jersey hem and wrestled with all his shuddering, cold-racked might, to get off his wet, tight jersey.
      'Help me!' he cried, his face muffled.
      She seized the edge of the jersey, obediently, and pulled with all her might. The garment cam over his head, and he stood in his braces.
      'Take your things off! Rub with this towel!' he commanded ferociously [...]
      And like a thing obsessed, he pushed himself out of his trousers, and got out of his wet, clinging shirt, emerging slim and livid, shuddering in every fibre with cold and shock.
      He seized a towel, and began quickly to rub his body [...] Yvette dimly saw it was wise. She tried to get out of her dress. He pulled the horrible wet death-grippin thing off her [...]
      Yvette, naked, shuddering so much that she was sick, was trying to wipe herself dry. [...]
      With his towel he began to rub her, himself shaking all over, but holding her gripped by the shoulder, and slowly, numbedly rubbing her tender body, even trying to rub up into some dryness the pitiful hair of her small head.
      Suddenly he left off.
      'Better lie in bed,' he commanded, 'I want to rub myself.'" [72-3]
      
  By now, his towel is wet and bloody, so he borrows hers. Then, at her request - "'Warm me!' she moaned, with chattering teeth" [74] - he climbs into bed with her and holds her naked body tight against his own: "The vice-like grip of his arms round her seemed to her the only stable point in her consciousness." [74] This, eventually, calms them both down "and gradually the sickening violence of the shuddering, caused by shock, abated, in his body first, then in hers, and the warmth revived between them" [74].

Do they have sexual intercourse? Who can say: though they do both pass away into what might very well be a post-coital sleep (or what Lady Chatterley's lover, Oliver Mellors, describes as the peace that comes of fucking).

When she wakes up, he has gone, leaving behind him nothing but a filthy blood-stained towel and "a great sodden place on the carpet" [76] where his wet clothes had been lying. She's a little disappointed at first, but wise enough to realise it was for the best.  


Afterword

Frottage - for readers who don't know - is not some kind of fancy French cheese (though it is derived from a French verb, frotter).

It is, rather, a term used within the fetishistic world of paraphilia to describe the act of rubbing any part of the body against the body parts of another and may be performed either naked or clothed, wet or dry. Individuals may engage in frottage either as foreplay in anticipation of penetrative sex, or as a form of sensual pleasure in and of itself. When frottage involves direct genital stimulation, it is sometimes referred to as GG rubbing.

Readers should also note that non-consensual rubbing up against strangers (such as on a crowded tube train) is frowned upon within the frottage community and they use the term frotteurism to distinguish this illicit pleasure from their own erotic activities.   

Finally, towel fetish is a genuine fetish, though not very common. In the above scenes, towels clearly play a significant role in the action and it wouldn't be outrageous to suggest that the self-confessed priest of love had a thing for absorbent fabrics used to dry naked wet bodies.     

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, The White Peacock, ed. Andrew Robertson, (Cambridge University Press, 1983).

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Horse-Dealer's Daughter', in England, My England and Other Stories, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1990).

D. H. Lawrence, The Virgin and the Gipsy, in The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories, ed. Michael Herbert, Bethan Jones and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 2005).

All page references given in the post refer to these editions.

She Was Only a Horse-Dealer's Daughter

Girl on horseback by Israeli artist Taly Levi 

tal-stoobik.com

Sullen-looking and bulldog-faced Mabel Pervin, 27, would have been good-looking were it not for the impassive fixity of her features - which is as backhanded a compliment as you could ever wish to hear. Still, it's not a narrator's job to flatter those of whom he speaks, nor to mislead readers, and even her brother, Fred Henry, describes her as "'The sulkiest bitch that ever trod!'" [141] 

He, along with his sister and two brothers, have been evicted from their home. Which isn't very nice. But that's what happens when you allow things to go to the dogs and nothing remains but huge debts and the threat of repossession.

But whereas the Pervin brothers have decided pretty much what they'll do and where they'll go, Mabel refuses to reveal her intentions. Indeed, when asked to disclose her plans, her face merely darkens and she retreats ever-further into silence like an immutable object. This, understandably, exasperates Fred Henry.

Prior to the reversal of fortunes following the death of their father, the Pervin household had been full of servants and the stables full of horses. Mabel had run things efficiently for ten years and no matter how brutal and coarse the circumstances, she always had the financial means to do so and this had given her confidence:   

"The men might be foul-mouthed, the women in the kitchen might have bad reputations, her brothers might have illegitimate children. But so long as there was money, the girl felt herself established, and brutally proud, reserved." [142]

She had no female friends or company after her sister left: but Mabel didn't mind. All was tolerable until her father died. Only then did the shit hit the fan and she had suffered badly during the prolonged period of poverty, attempting in vain to keep the home together for her useless, lazy brothers.

"Now, for Mabel, the end had come. Still she would not cast about her. She would follow her own way just the same. She would always hold the keys of her own situation. Mindless and persistent, she endured from day to day. Why should she think? Why should she answer anybody? [...] She thought of nobody, not even herself. Mindless and persistent, she seemed in a sort of ecstasy to be coming nearer to her fulfilment, her own glorification, approaching her dead mother [...]" [143] and making a festive return to the actual (i.e., the inanimate world of matter).     

In preparaton for this, she goes to the churchyard in order to attend to her mother's grave:

"Carefully she clipped the grass from the grave, and arranged the pink-white, small chrysanthemums in the tin cross. When this was done, she took an empty jar from a neighbouring grave, brought water, and carefully, most scrupulously sponged the marble headstone and the coping-stone.
      It gave her sincere satisfaction to do this. She felt in immediate contact with the world of her mother. She took minute pain, went through the work in a state bordering on pure happiness, as if in performing this task she came into a subtle, intimate connection with her mother. For the life she followed here in the world was far less real than the world of death she inherited from her mother." [143]

I think that's a rather lovely passage; one with a great truth to it. For some people, death is more real than the epiphenomenal dream of life and they really only come into their own (or blossom into being, as Lawence might say) posthumously. To try to dissuade such persons from suicide as a practice of joy, is not only futile, but cruel. Everything should be done to make their passage into death as smooth and as stylish as possible.

I don't know if the young doctor Jack Fergusson understood this, but he did find Mabel's physical intensity and remoteness fascinating: "Some mystical element was touched in him." [144] For Jack, her boat is less canine and more portentous: "It was portentous, her face. It seemed to mesmerise him. There was a heavy power in her eyes which laid hold of his whole being [...]" [144] 

Later that afternoon, as dusk was beginning to fall, Jack sees Mabel walking to the pond nearby her house:

"There she stood on the bank for a moment. She never raised her head. Then she waded slowly into the water.
      He stood motionless as the small black figure walked slowly and deliberately towards the centre of the pond, gradually moving deeper into the motionless water, and still moving forward as the water got up to her breast. Then he could see her no more in the dusk of the dead afternoon." [145]

Instinctively, Jack runs to help; that is, to fish her out, not to gently hold Mabel under and thereby assist with the suicide. Rather bravely, considering he couldn't swim and already had a bad cold, he ventures slowly into the pond: "The cold water rose over his thighs, over his loins, upon his abdomen. The lower part of his body was all sunk in the hideous cold element." [145]

In four simple but beautifully written passages, Lawrence describes the rescue of Mabel Pervin:

"He crouched a little, spreading his hands under the water and moving them round, trying to feel for her. The dead cold pond swayed upon his chest. He moved again, a little deeper, and again, with his hands underneath, he felt all around under the water. And he touched her clothing. But it evaded his fingers. He made a desperate effort to grasp it.
      And so doing he lost his balance and went under, horribly, suffocating in the foul earthy water, struggling madly for a few moments. At last, after what seemed an eternity, he got his footing, rose again into the air and looked around. He gasped, and knew he was in the world. Then he looked at the water. She had risen near him. He grasped her clothing, and drawing her nearer, turned to take his way to land again.
      He went very slowly, carefully, absorbed in the slow progress. He rose higher, climbing out of the pond. The water was now only about his legs; he was thankful, full of relief to be out of the clutches of the pond. He lifted her and staggered on to the bank, out of the horror of wet, grey clay.
      He laid her down on the bank. She was quite unconscious and running with water. He made the water come from her mouth, he worked to restore her. He did not have to work very long before he could feel the breathing begin again in her, she was breathing naturally. He worked a little longer. He could feel her live beneath his hands, she was coming back. He wiped her face, wrapped her in his overcoat, looked round into the dim, dark-grey world, then lifted her and staggered down the bank and across the fields." [146]

Jack carries Mabel home and lays her down on the hearthrug, in front of the fire burning in the grate. She was breathing and semi-conscious, but not yet fully in the world. Fetching some blankets from upstairs, Jack warms them before the fire: "Then he removed her saturated, earthy-smelling clothing, rubbed her dry with a towel, and wrapped her naked in the blankets." [146]

Regaining her senses, Mabel asks the young doctor what she did - and if it signifies she has gone out of her mind. He tells her what happened and reassures her it was but a moment of folly and not a sign of incipient insanity. All the time he is a little afraid of her and the strange power she seems to possess (over him).

It's here that the tale takes a typically queer Lawrentian turn. For when Mabel realises that she is naked beneath the blankets and that he undressed her, she takes this as a sign that he loves her:    

"She shuffled forward on her knees, and put her arms round him, round his legs, as he stood there, pressing her breasts against his knees and thighs, clutching him with strange, convulsive certainty, pressing his thighs against her, drawing him to her face, her throat, as she looked up at him with flaring, humble eyes of transfiguration, triumphant in first possession.
      'You love me,' she murmured, in strange transport, yearning and triumphant and confident. 'You love me. I know you love me, I know.'
      And she was passionately kissing his knees, through the wet clothing, passionately and indiscriminately kissing his knees, his legs, as if unaware of everything." [148]

The problem is, Jack isn't sure about this at all:

"He looked down at the tangled wet hair, the wild, bare, animal shoulders. He was amazed, bewildered, and afraid. He had never thought of loving her. He had never wanted to love her. When he rescued her and restored her, he was a doctor, and she was a patient. He had had no single personal thought of her. Nay, this introduction of the personal element was very distasteful to him, a violation of his professional honour. It was horrible to have her there embracing his knees. It was horrible. He revolted from it, violently. And yet - and yet - he had not the power to break away." [148]

In other words, it's all a bit awkward. One begins to think maybe Mabel is a little crazy and one wonders whether some part of him secretly wishes he'd left her to drown ... 

"She looked at him again, with the same supplication of powerful love, and that same transcendent, frightening light of triumph. In view of the delicate flame which seemed to come from her face like a light, he was powerless. And yet he had never intended to love her. He had never intended. And something stubborn in him could not give way." [148-49]

Of course, we all know as readers where this is going and what will happen: that Jack will give way and yield to her love, whatever his intentions and whether this fills him with a certain dread or not.

Almost, one is tempted to imagine that rather than having saved her, she has succeeded in pulling him beneath the water - as Diana Crich succeeded in killing young Dr. Brindell, her arms held choking tight round his neck - and this entire scene is the fantasy of a drowning man: "Her hands were drawing him, drawing him down to her. He was afraid, even a little horrified." [149]

However, as textually there is little reason to think this, let us assume, rather, that Mabel is simply some kind of witch, whose bare arms, small breasts, and soft white feet exert a powerful erotic spell that renders poor Jack as helpless (and as enchanted) as a moth before a candle: "A flame seemed to burn the hand that grasped her soft shoulder [...][149]

Eventually, with an inward groan, he accepts his fate: and her eyes fill with tears of joy (and triumph):

"He could not bear to look at her any more. He dropped on his knees and caught her head with his arm and pressed her face against his throat. She was very still. His heart, which seemed to have broken, was burning with a kind of agony in his breast. And he felt her slow, hot tears wetting his throat." [149]

Paralysed by his own desire, Jack is made to confess his love for her in a soft, low, vibrating voice that didn't seem to belong to him: the terrible intonation of his desire frightening her "almost more than her horror lest he should not want her" [152].  

That, in a nutshell, is the tale of the horse-dealer's daughter and of the young doctor who wanted to save her life. Although he had never intended to love her: "He had crossed over the gulf to her, and all that he had left behind [of his old self and old life] had shrivelled and become void." [150]

So, in a sense, Jack did die after all ...

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'The Horse-Dealer's Daughter', England, My England and Other Stories, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 137-152. All page references given refer to this edition. The story can also be read online by clicking here, courtesy of Project Gutenberg.  

Note: the other drowning scene to which I refer, involving Diana Crich and a young doctor attempting to save her, is in chapter XIV (Water-Party) of D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love. 

Musical bonus: Ute Lemper, 'Little Water Song', from the album Punishing Kiss, (Decca Records, 2000), written by Nick Cave and Bruno Pisek. Click here. 

This post is dedicated to meine zwei liebsten deutschen frauen. 

Tell Me Sweet Little Lies

Jamie Reid: Lies

As our recent study of three great liars - Nietzsche, Twain, and Wilde - demonstrated, lying is an art essential to the functioning of society and, indeed, necessary for the preservation of human life in a violently chaotic and inhuman world.

But just as liars come in various guises, so too does lying come in different shades; although most people tend to think here as elsewhere in terms of black and white. Whilst both types of lie are intended to mislead or deceive, there are, of course, important differences between them. 

White lies are an attempt to induce pleasure or, at the very least, protect from unpleasantness; they are a form of affiliative falsehood, often motivated by kindness. Black lies, on the other hand, are an attempt to manipulate and/or exploit the other in order to gain a personal advantage or benefit, regardless of the cost to the one deceived. At best they have a selfish motive; at worst, a malicious intent.

To the truth fanatic, however, who believes honesty is a matter of policy, even white lies - no matter how small or innocuous in nature - are morally wrong and cause harm in the long run (to others and to the soul of the liar himself). These truth fanatics include all the usual suspects, from St. Augustine to Kant, and they seem to regard lying not only as a sign of moral corruption, but as a perversion of the natural faculty of speech, which is to truthfully reveal the authentic thoughts of the speaker. There are, therefore, no circumstances in which it is right (or harmless) to lie.   

Rather surprisingly, even everybody's favourite neuroscientist-cum-philosopher, Sam Harris, seems to adopt this hardline stance in his work on the subject. Harris argues that we not only radically simplify our own lives but greatly improve society - by deepening bonds of trust - simply by telling the truth at all times. For Harris, even white lies deny others access to reality and many forms of private vice and public evil often begin with a willingness to suspend the truth.
  

Obviously, as a reader of Nietzsche and Oscar Wilde, I don't share this view and find it naive as well as too uncompromising for my tastes. Harris is right, however, to admit that lying, like all arts, is a difficult thing to do well and requires a sophisticated intelligence and imagination. That's precisely why most people stick to the truth most of the time; i.e., honest behaviour is often born of laziness and limited intellectual capacity.

  

Notes

See: Sam Harris, Lying, (Four Elephants Press, 2013).

Musical Bonus: Sex Pistols, 'Liar', from the album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols, (Virgin Records, 1977): click here ... Your chance to listen to Johnny Rotten getting on his moral high horse and complain about being lied to (by Malcolm and the World). You didn't really expect Fleetwood Mac, did you?

Three Great Liars 3: Oscar Wilde

Portrait photo of Oscar Wilde 

by W. and D. Downey (1889)

I.

Ultimately, all studies of lying and great liars lead to Wilde and his observational essay published in Intentions (1891): 'The Decay of Lying' - a work many years ahead of its time ...

The essay is structured in the form of a Socratic dialogue between Vivian and Cyril and serves to promote Wilde's view that Aestheticism is superior to Realism. Vivian informs Cyril of an article he is writing which defends the former and blames the decline of modern literature upon the triumph of the latter, with the subsequent decay of lying as an art, a science, and a social pleasure.

According to Vivian, if the monstrous worship of facts is allowed to continue unabated, then all art is done for - and without art, life will have nothing to imitate. It is vital, therefore, that lying - defined as the telling of beautiful untrue things (and the proper aim of art) - be revived as soon as possible.   



II.

The dialogue opens with Cyril attempting to convince Vivian to leave his library and sit outside in order to enjoy the lovely afternoon. The latter is less than enthusiastic however and reveals himself to be the very opposite of a nature lover. For not only is nature imperfect in its design - "her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition" - but it's also uncomfortable: "Grass is hard and dumpy and damp, and full of dreadful black insects."  

That's amusing, but the merits and disadvantages of nature are not my concern here: I'm interested, rather, in the fine lie as spoken by the true liar; i.e., a statement that requires no proof of any kind but is its own evidence. Such lies transcend the level of misrepresentation and are more than the base falsehoods and half-truths offered by politicians, lawyers, and journalists. Such lies belong to art - particularly to poetry, which, as Plato recognised, is not unconnected to lying:     

"'As one knows the poet by his fine music, so one can recognize the liar by his rich rhythmic utterance, and in neither case will the casual inspiration of the moment suffice. Here, as elsewhere, practice must precede perfection. But in modern days while the fashion of writing poetry has become far too common, and should, if possible, be discouraged, the fashion of lying has almost fallen into disrepute."

Today, continues Vivian, the young man who would have once developed into a gifted liar (and perhaps a magnificent novelist), now often falls into careless habits of accuracy or develops "a morbid and unhealthy faculty of truthtelling". Literature requires distinction, charm, beauty, and imaginative power; in other words, it rests upon the ability to tell stories; in a word, to lie.

The modern novel - realistic in form and subject matter - is all too horribly true; true to life and true to nature - but false to art and ultimately such works become not only vulgar, but boring. It was not always thus. But, today, facts are not merely dominant within history, but are "usurping the domain of Fancy, and have invaded the kingdom of Romance".

Fortunately, says Vivian, poets - with the exception of Wordsworth - have remained faithful to their high mission and are still "universally recognized as being absolutely unreliable". But, in every other domain and genre, the obsession with truth is dominant. If things are bad enough within European life and letters, they are even worse in the United States:

"The crude commercialism of America, its materialising spirit, its indifference to the poetical side of things, and its lack of imagination and of high unattainable ideals, are entirely due to that country having adopted for its national hero a man, who according to his own confession, was incapable of telling a lie, and it is not too much to say that the story of George Washington and the cherry tree has done more harm, and in a shorter space of time, than any other moral tale in the whole of literature."

Vivian, however, is far from despondent. In fact, he is extremely hopeful for the future and, in a crucial passage that ends with a profoundly Nietzschean remark (that I have italicised for emphasis), he says:

"That some change will take place before this century has drawn to its close we have no doubt whatsoever. Bored by the tedious and improving conversation of those who have neither the wit to exaggerate nor the genius to romance, tired of the intelligent person whose reminiscences are always based upon memory, whose statements are invariably limited by probability, and who is at any time liable to be corroborated by the merest Philistine who happens to be present, Society sooner or later must return to its lost leader, the cultured and fascinating liar. [...] Whatever was his name or race, he certainly was the true founder of social intercourse. For the aim of the liar is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure. He is the very basis of civilized society, and without him a dinner party [...] is as dull as a lecture at the Royal Society [...] Nor will he be welcomed by society alone. Art, breaking from the prisonhouse of realism, will run to greet him, and will kiss his false, beautiful lips, knowing that he alone is in possession of the great secret of all her manifestations, the secret that Truth is entirely and absolutely a matter of style [...]" 

Notes

Oscar Wilde, 'The Decay of Lying', Intentions, (1891). Click here to read online, courtesy of Project Gutenberg. This essay was a much revised version of an article that first appeared in a literary periodical in January 1889.

To read the first entry in this series of posts - on Nietzsche - click here.

To read the second entry, on Mark Twain, click here.

Three Great Liars 2: Mark Twain

Portrait photo of Mark Twain 

by José Maria Mora (1882)

Before Wilde, there was Twain ...

Or, at any rate, before Wilde's essay 'The Decay of Lying' (1891), there was Twain's short paper 'On the Decay of the Art of Lying' (1882), in which he makes a humorous appeal for the men and women of America's Gilded Age to lie in a more considered (and considerate) manner, insisting that the ability to construct and deploy falsehoods is one of mankind's greatest gifts and highest virtues. 

For Twain, nothing is more distressing for a man of right feeling than to witness the noble (and necessary) art of lying so impoverished (and prostituted) as it is within the modern world and he suggests that it should be taught in schools; for no art or virtue can bloom without careful and diligent cultivation.

Wise and intelligent lying is what the world needs in the face of ignorant and uneducated falsehood (and what we today term fake news). It might even be preferable, suggests Twain, not to lie at all, than to lie injudiciously or without imagination.   

Not that he advocates subscribing slavishly to the accepted truth (doxa) like a naive child, an unsophisticated fool, or a religious fanatic. Those who insist on truth at all times and in all circumstances are at best asocial and at worst inhuman. It is impossible to live with (or alongside) such habitual truth-tellers; but, fortunately, such people are extremely rare.

Indeed, according to Twain, such individuals do not, in fact, exist and have never existed:

"Of course there are people who think they never lie, but it is not so [...] Everybody lies - every day; every hour; awake; asleep; in his dreams; in his joy; in his mourning; if he keeps his tongue still, his hands, his feet, his eyes, his attitude, will convey deception - and purposely."

I don't know if that's true; but it's amusing to consider the possibility that it might be true - and the philosophical implications of its being true. That society - and, indeed, our very humanity - might be founded not upon Truth, but falsehood makes Satanists of us all (for Satan is not only the Prince of Darkness, but the Father of Lies).

And that's no bad thing; for whilst God may have truth on his side, he remains a jealous, vindictive, and bloodthirsty deity who demands sacrifice and enjoys punishing mankind; the Devil, on the other hand, is a gentleman with impeccable manners who recognises that lying more often than not is a form of courtesy.   

Of course, Twain wasn't a Satanist. In fact, he remained an irreverent Christian throughout his life; often highly critical, but, ultimately, still a believer in Almighty God.

Little surprise, therefore, that he concludes his essay striking a conventional moral tone and condemning black lies. We should always lie, he says, with a good object; "healingly, charitably, humanely, not cruelly, hurtfully, maliciously", i.e., lie gracefully in order to benefit others, not merely to gain a personal advantage.  

To which a Nietzschean (or Sadist) might ask: Where's the fun in that?


See: Mark Twain, 'On the Decay of the Art of Lying', in Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, and Essays, 1852-1890, ed. Louis J. Budd (Library of America, 1992). 

Note: The above essay was originally written for presentation in 1880 and first published in The Stolen White Elephant Etc. (1882). It can be read as an ebook on Project Gutenberg: click here. 

To read the first in this series on great liars - on Nietzsche - click here. 

To read the third entry, on Oscar Wilde, click here.

Three Great Liars 1: Nietzsche

Portrait photo of Nietzsche 
by Friedrich Hartmann (c.1872)

Nietzsche's essay of 1873 - Über Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne [1] - is not quite as sexy as it sounds, even when you say it in the original German. It is, in fact, quite a sober work dealing with epistemological questions to do with the nature of truth, language and the formation of concepts, rather than simply an affirmation of the right to lie. 

For Nietzsche, inasmuch as concepts are metaphors, then they do not correspond directly with reality and so can never be strictly true; they are, in fact, a form of convenient fiction, or a type of vital lie that makes human life possible by facilitating communication and enabling us to make sense of the world.    

In a famous passage - much loved by postmodern theorists - Nietzsche writes that truth should thus be considered as:

"A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms - in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins."

Man is the clever animal who invented knowing; which is to say, he discovered a convincing method of falsification and self-deception. And it's this - mistakenly named the truth - upon which we pride ourselves. And, mistakenly named or not, this art of lying is something we should be proud of; for it helps preserve us as a species.

For whilst the great beasts have sharp teeth and horns with which to defend themselves, we possess the power of dissimulation. It's not the will to truth that has so far saved our skin, but the fact that we know how to deceive, flatter, lie, delude, talk behind backs, put up false fronts, wear masks, play roles, live in borrowed splendour and hide behind ideas, etc. Man employs his intelligence mainly in devising these strategies of survival.

Indeed, we are so deeply immersed in illusions and dream-images, says Nietzsche, that we hardly even stop to consider the real world that exists independently of us. Our senses glide over the surface of things as things and the mind remains aloof even from the body in its materiality.

Ultimately, however, man wants more than to merely survive in his own individual dreamworld; "from boredom and necessity, man wishes to exist socially". He needs, therefore, to find common ground with others and come to some agreement as to how the world is; needs, in other words, a shared conception of the truth; i.e., a "uniformly valid and binding designation" for things.

Thus, whilst lies sustain the individual; truth allows for the development of society. And a society founded upon this will to truth will have little time for the liar who misuses these designations in order to confuse a newly agreed upon reality: "If he does this in a selfish and moreover harmful manner, society will cease to trust him and will thereby exclude him."

For social man now wants the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth - so long as it brings him pleasant advantages; that is to say, so long as the truth is also tied to the Good and the Beautiful. He doesn't want ugly, evil truths and if faced with these he'll happily fall back on orthodox illusions, such as the lies of priests, for example.      
   

So, to reiterate: to be truthful means to employ socially agreed metaphors. Or, to express this in moral terms, there is a duty to lie "according to a fixed convention [...] and in a manner binding upon everyone". Over time, however, man forgets that the game he is playing is a game and lying in a socially approved manner becomes for him a second nature.

Thus, it is from out of forgetfulness that man's sense of truth is born. To paraphrase George Costanza, it's not a lie ... if you believe it - and cease to recall its origin in falsehood.  

Man, concludes Nietzsche, is a genius of construction who builds up an entire world from conceptual material manufactured from within himself. Lying is a brilliant means of anthropomorphising reality; of making the world correspond with his own fantasies and ideals. He should be admired for this. But we shouldn't praise him as an honest animal. For it's the "drive toward the formation of metaphors" which is the fundamental human trait, not the will to truth.

And perhaps that's for the best: for the latter, if pushed to its extreme, becomes a fatal form of nihilism that makes human life dispensable, if not impossible [2].

Notes

[1] Nietzsche, 'On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense'. This essay can be found in Philosophy and Truth, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale, (Humanities Press International, 1993), as well as in various versions online. 

[2] It could be, of course, that Ray Brassier is right in maintaining that philosophy should do more than simply further human conceit and deceitfulness. That its duty - and, indeed, its destiny - is to become the organon of extinction and acknowledge that thinking ultimately has interests that do not coincide with those of mankind or, indeed, life. See Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).  

To read the second post in this series - on Mark Twain - click here.  

To read the third, on Oscar Wilde, click here.

Never Give a Doppelgänger the Keys to Your Car ...

Roger Moore in The Man Who Haunted Himself (1970)

There is always a part of ourselves by which we are haunted; 

an avenging apparition which stands between us and our own lives, 

thwarting our attempt to remain whole.

I.

What is it with doppelgängers [i] and their urge to drive recklessly? I ask this having just read the opening chapters of Daphne du Maurier's 1957 novel The Scapegoat [ii] ...

In the book, a dull (and depressed) historian with no real connections to the present, dreams of belonging and acting directly in the world and of establishing human relations; he's sick of living in the past and of merely recording events; tired of being alone. He wants another, more meaningful life; a life shared and experienced with friends and family.

Then, by chance, he comes face to face with his double in a busy station buffet:

"Someone jolted my elbow as I drank and said, 'je vous demande pardon,' and as I moved to give him space he turned and stared at me and I at him, and I realized, with a strange sense of shock and fear and nausea all combined, that his face and voice were known to me too well.
      I was looking at myself." [9]

The narrator continues:

"We did not speak: we went on staring at one another. I had heard of these things happening [...] and the idea is amusing, or perhaps fraught with tragedy [...]
      This was not funny: nor was it tragic. The resemblance made me slightly sick, reminding me of moments when, passing a shop window, I had suddenly seen my own reflection, and the man in the mirror had been a grotesque caricature of what, conceitedly, I had believed myself to be. Such incidents left me chastened, sore, with ego deflated, but they never gave me a chill down the spine, as this encounter did, nor the desire to turn and run." [10]

The man doesn't run, however. Rather, he accepts the double's invitation to have a drink and tells him of his life in London. And he allows him to drive his car, that he had left parked outside a nearby cathedral.

"He settled himself with assurance behind the wheel and I climbed in besdide him. As he turned the car away from the cathedral [...] he continued to enthuse in schoolboy fashion, murmuring, 'Magnificent, excellent!' under his breath, obviously enjoying every moment of what soon turned out to be, from my own rather cautious standard, a hair-raising ride. When he had jumped one set of lights, and sent an old man leaping for his life, and forced a large Buick driven by an infuriated American into the side of the street, he proceeded to circle the town in order, so he explained, to try the car's pace. 'You know,' he said, 'it amuses me enormously to use other people's possessions. It is one of life's greatest pleasures.' I closed my eyes as we took a corner like a bob-sleigh." [16]

This is doubtless intended to be humorous, but, strangely, it reminded me of a far more sinister scene involving a dull man, his car, and a reckless driving doppelgänger ...  


II.

What I have in mind is the opening scene of spooky psychological thriller, The Man Who Haunted Himself (1970), in which Roger Moore puts in a superb performance as staid business executive Harold Pelham [iii] ...

When driving home from work one day, Pelham appears to suffer - quite literally - a splitting of his personality and begins to drive recklessly and at speed, as if no longer himself and no longer behind the wheel of his Rover saloon, but seated, rather, in a silver sports car (a Lamborghini Islero, to be precise).

Following the inevitable crash, Pelham is shown on the operating table where he experiences clinical death. Fortunately, the surgical team manage to restore his vital functions. However, they notice that, for a moment, there appear to be two heartbeats on the monitor - his alter-ego or shadow self having become fully manifest.

This figure of both identity and non-identity challenges both epistemological certainties and ontological securities. Further, he is intent on making the original Pelham's existence his own (with a little added spice and an attractive mistress played by Olga Georges-Picot). Ultimately, as there is only room in the world for one Harold Pelham, things are destined to turn out badly for at least one of the two men.

I suspect that will be the case also for either John or Jean de Gué (having only read the first fifty-five pages of The Scapegoat, I don't know this for sure). The moral has to be this: Never give a doppelgänger the keys to your car ... because they'll drive off with your life! [iv]

Notes

[i] From earliest times, human beings have felt themselves to be accompanied by a double; be it a spirit, a shadow, a reflection, or what in more recent times the Germans termed a doppelgänger - a sinister figure which became a familiar trope in Gothic and Romantic literature, as well as in the modern thriller. For Freud, the doppelgänger constituted the definitive manifestation of the unheimlich (i.e., the strangely familiar realm that in English is known as the uncanny).

[ii] Daphne du Maurier, The Scapegoat, (Virago Press, 2004). Page numbers given in the text refer to this edition.

[iii] To watch the trailer to The Man Who Haunted Himself, (written and dir. Basil Dearden, 1970): click here. The film was an adaptation of Anthony Armstrong's, The Strange Case of Mr. Pelham, which appeared first as a short story in 1940, before being developed and published as a novel in 1957.
 
[iv] Jean Baudrillard, who was a big fan of demonic doubles and evil twins, also insists that an individual cannot survive an encounter with their doppelgänger. But, interestingly, he also argues that neither can the latter survive in the age of the clone.  
 

Let's Go Outside: Notes on The Horla

Cover of the 1908 edition 

of Guy de Maupassant's Le Horla 

I.

The concept of the Outside is as important to me now as it was twenty-five years ago when I decided to entitle my doctoral project on the work of Nietzsche and Lawrence Outside the Gate, referencing not only one of the little rhyming preludes to The Gay Science, but also the Killing Joke album of that title from 1988. [1]  

I suppose my understanding of the concept has remained fairly consistent over the years; mostly shaped by the occult musings of Richard Somers in Kangaroo (1923) about dark gods and invisible strangers in the night, tapping at the doors of human perception in order to gain admission into our world which we have illuminated with electric light in order to banish the darkness and create the illusion of safety, even though we remain standing on the edge of an invisible abyss. [2] 

That's Foucault I'm paraphrasing and his attempt to think the thought from outside has also been an important influence on my work; a type of thought that stands in contrast to the interiority of most philosophical reflection and the positivity of our scientific knowledge; a type of thought that we find not in mysticism, but in literature - such as in the work of Sade and Hölderlin:

"Can it be said without stretching things that Sade and Hölderlin simultaneously introduced into our thinking, for the coming century, but in some way cryptically, the experience of the outside - the former by laying desire bare in the infinite murmur of discourse, the latter by discovering that the gods had wandered off through a rift in language as it was in the process of losing its bearings?" [3]

I think it probably can - and I think we can say also that Guy de Maupassant is another writer who gives us an experience of the outside in his unsettling short story Le Horla (1886/87) ...

II.

The word Horla is, of course, a neologism coined by Maupassant; an amalgam of the French words hors and là.

Thus, the Horla is literally the one who is out there - always waiting for a chance to enter so that it can steal your milk and water and drive you out of your fucking mind; an alien entity that threatens to overwhelm (and possibly supersede) humanity. Who said the Übermensch couldn't have an extra-terrestrial origin - or come, like a virus, from out of the jungle or Brazilian rainforest?

The 42-year-old victim of the tale has not only been mentally unhinged by his experiences, which started with a strange malaise and a kind of nervous anxiety, but reduced to a pitiful physical state:

"He was extremely thin, cadaverous even, as some madmen look when they are consumed by an obsession. Their bodies seem ravaged by one sick thought which devours them faster than any disease or consumption." [4]

His doctor prescribed cold showers and sedatives and the latter at least helped the man to sleep; unfortunately, sleep turned out to be even more intolerable than the insomnia. He explains why:

"'As soon as my head hit the pillow, my eyes closed and I was out. I mean out completely. I fell into absolute nothingness, a void, a total blank. My self became completely dead until I was suddenly, horribly awoken by the most appalling sensation. An unbearable weight was lying on my chest and another mouth was sucking the life out of me through my own.'" [237]

Obviously, that's not very pleasant and no one would want to experience such a thing. Nor, I suppose, would most people - there are doubtless exceptions - want to see their roses plucked by an invisible hand and sniffed by an invisible nose belonging to an invisible being. I mean, greenfly can be a problem enough as it is.

And to have anyone reading over your shoulder - or absorb your own reflection - is always profoundly irritating, is it not?

The poor man eventually admits himself into the care of an eminent psychiatrist, Dr. Marrande, who overcomes his own professional scepticism and concludes that his patient's experiences with the Horla may well have been all-too-real. He informs his colleagues: "'I cannot tell if this man is mad or whether we both are ... or whether ... man's successor is already in our midst ...'" [244]    

This last idea is one that the man has already developed very eloquently:

"'What is this being, gentlemen?  I believe it is what the earth is waiting for, to supersede humanity, to usurp our throne, to overwhelm and perhaps feed on us as we feed now on cattle and wild boar. We have sensed and dreaded it for centuries. We have heard its approach with terror. Our forefathers have been haunted by the Invisible.
      It has come.'" [243]

Notes

[1] See Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 'Joke, Cunning, and Revenge: A Prelude in Rhymes', number 57. The original German verse, entitled Wählerischer Geschmack, [Fastidious Taste] reads:   

Wenn man frei mich wählen liesse,
Wählt' ich gern ein Plätzchen mir
Mitten drin im Paradiese:
Gerner noch - vor seiner Tür!

Which we might translate as: When given a free choice, / I'd choose myself a place / in the centre of paradise: / Better still - outside the gates!

To play the title track from the Killing Joke album - digitally remastered in 2007 and provided to YouTube by Universal Music Group in 2015 - click here. 

[2] See D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 285:

"The Lord thy God is the invisible stranger at the gate in the night, knocking. He is the mysterious life-suggestion, tapping for admission. And the wondrous Victorian Age managed to fasten the door so tight, and light up the compound so brilliantly with electric light, there was no outside, it was all in. The Unknown became a joke: is still a joke.
      Yet there it is, outside the gate, getting angry."

[3] Michel Foucault, Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside, trans. Brian Massumi, (Zone Books, 1987), p. 17.

[4] Guy de Maupassant, 'The Horla', in A Parisian Affair and Other Stories, trans. Siân Miles, (Penguin Books, 2004), p. 236. Following page references are given directly in the text. Note that this is the first version of the tale, published in 1886, and not the longer, more developed version of 1887. 

You Say You Want a Revolution ...?

I.

Initially, Black Lives Matter was a civil rights movement for a younger, angrier, more woke generation of activists and campaigners concerned about issues to do with racial justice and equality. But it seems to now be in the vanguard of a broader movement demanding a full-scale cultural revolution and an end to what they perceive to be a violently oppressive and institutionally racist old order.

Of course, we've seen this call for a total transformation of everyday life (and the subsequent humiliation or destruction of one's enemies) before: in Hitler's Germany in the 1930s, for example; and, more recently, in Mao's China in the 1960s.

It wasn't pleasant then and it isn't pleasant now. Nor do I think it's going to end any happier. Restrictions on freedom of speech and the insistence that everyone toe the politically correct line or face the consequences, never do. Nor do attempts to sanitise the past and purge society of undesirable elements. 

To protest and to rebel may be justified; and, doubtless, there are many old habits, customs, and ideas that need to be challenged. But to destroy works of art and historical artefacts in the name of an ideology that believes itself to be infallible and morally superior is something we should be extremely wary of.

For I think the poet Heinrich Heine was right in 1820 and he's still right now, two hundred years later: Where they burn books, they will also ultimately burn people. To their credit, even The Beatles understood this; as their counter-revolutionary track 'Revolution' demonstrates ...


II.

Inspired by anti-war protests and student uprisings, John Lennon's lyrics express sympathy with the need for radical social change, but serious reservations over the violent tactics adopted by some on the so-called New Left. The song concludes that there's no need for direct action as everything's gonna be alright (that is to say, ideals of peace and love will triumph in the end). It also explicitly dismisses the cult of personality surrounding Chairman Mao.

Of course, countercultural comrades and hardline communists of every variety immediately branded Lennon a traitor and collaborator. They were shocked not only by his Transcendental fatalism, but by his humour and expressed need to see details (or a plan) for how a revolution might work. The New Left Review dismissed the song as a 'lamentable petty bourgeois cry of fear' and even the French film director Jean-Luc Godard denounced the Beatle for his apoliticism and suggested that he and other band members had been corrupted by money.

Duly chastened by the criticism he received, Lennon subsequently declared himself to be a revolutionary after all. However, in an interview shortly before his death in 1980, he again voiced his rejection of political violence and terror and reaffirmed the more pacifist sentiments expressed in 'Revolution': 'Don't expect me on the barricades unless it's with flowers.'           

To be honest, I don't have much affection for Lennon. But I admire the stand he took here and his scorn for the militant asceticism and extremer than thou snobbery of those on the far left openly motivated by resentment and hatred. And I think that those who call naively for revolution today and pose with clenched fists held aloft, should stop to consider that they ain't going to make it with anyone anyhow ...

Play: The Beatles, 'Revolution', B-side to the single release 'Hey Jude', (Apple, 26 August 1968): click here.

Note: the above promo film, dir. Michael Lindsay-Hogg, was first broadcast on Top of the Pops (BBC One) on 19 September, 1968. 

See: Daniel Chirot, You Say You Want a Revolution?, (Princeton University Press, 2020). In this new study, Chirot - a Professor of Russian and Eurasian studies at the University of Washington - examines why most modern revolutions have ended in bloodshed and failure and what lessons they hold for today's world of growing extremism. The image above is from the front cover to this text.

On Atrocious Aspects of African History

Slaves awaiting sacrifice 

The History of Dahomy (1793)

Whisper it quietly, unless you want a torrent of vile abuse, but slavery was not an invention of evil white devils in the 16th century ...

In fact, slavery, in various forms, was widespread in Africa as an indigenous cultural practice long before the British, Portuguese, French, Dutch, and Spanish ever set foot on the Dark Continent - and it still continues today in countries including Chad, Ethiopia, Mali, Niger, and Sudan (although this is rarely mentioned by those who like to take hammers to statues). 

Thus, when the Atlantic slave trade began, it was able to draw upon the extensive knowledge and experience of pre-existing systems and local slave traders were keen to supply the new external markets with men, women and children; some historians estimate that around 90% of those sold to European traders for export to the New World were initially captured and enslaved by their fellow Africans.

In 2010, the hugely respected literary critic and scholar Henry Louis Gates argued in a controversial opinion piece for The New York Times that "without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders [...] the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred" [1].

It might also be noted that when the Atlantic slave trade ceased in the 19th century - thanks in no small part to the efforts of abolitionists in the UK such as William Wilberforce - many African states reoriented their economies towards legitimate commerce whilst continuing to exploit slave labour.

I suppose for many BLM activists and their allies who wish to oppose racism and make amends for historical evils as they perceive them, this is something of an inconvenient truth. And, equally inconvenient, is the fact that, in addition to slavery, the unsavoury practice of human sacrifice was also common - particularly in West Africa - well into the 19th century.

Thus it is, for example, that in the Kingdom of Dahomey, a large annual festival was held during which enslaved prisoners, who had either been captured on the battlefield or abducted during organised raids, were ceremoniously slaughtered. Usually, around 500 prisoners died each year in this way, but in 1727 it was reported that as many as 4000 were beheaded in order to venerate the spirits of ancestors (decapitation being the traditional method of execution).

The point - as recognised by Gates - is this: we need to dissolve the binary that allows a morally naive and simplistic reading of the past in terms of wicked white perpetrators and innocent black victims.
     

Notes

[1] Henry Louis Gates Jr., 'Ending the Slavery Blame-Game', The New York Times (22 April, 2010): click here to read online.
     
This post was written in response to an iconoclastic supporter of Black Lives Matter, who asserted that my silence on this blog concerning recent events in Minneapolis made me complicit with racism and suggested that I educate myself on black history.