Like a Face Drawn in Sand: Anti-Humanism in D. H. Lawrence and Michel Foucault

Detail from the front cover of Foucault Now, 

ed. James D. Faubion, (Polity Press, 2014)

I.

According to Andrew Keese, a faculty member of the English Dept. at Texas Tech University: "Lawrence worried about anything which might force humans to be something other than they were actually born to be." [1]

But this is laughably mistaken in its natal essentialism. For Lawrence, the self was a product of external forces: "I am myself, and I remain myself only by the grace of the powers that enter me, from the unseen, and make me forever newly myself." [2]

He vehemently rejected the idea of an individual as a fixed entity with a predetermined fate and, like Foucault, Lawrence was happy to welcome the incoming tide that would mark the death of man. Not because he was anti-human, but because he was anti-humanist and keen to challenge all forms of anthropocentric thinking, including the conceited idea that man is the necessary end or highpoint of evolution.


II.

For readers unfamiliar with Foucault's notorious (but very beautiful) concluding paragraphs from The Order of Things, here they are in full: 

"One thing in any case is certain: man is neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has been posed for human knowledge. Taking a relatively short chronological sample within a restricted geographical area - European culture since the sixteenth century - one can be certain that man is a recent invention within it. It is not around him and his secrets that knowledge prowled for so long in the darkness. In fact, among all the mutations that have affected the knowledge of things and their order, the knowledge of identities, differences, characters, equivalences, words - in short, in the midst of all the episodes of that profound history of the Same –-only one, that which began a century and a half ago and is now perhaps drawing to a close, has made it possible for the figure of man to appear. And that appearance was not the liberation of an old anxiety, the transition into luminous consciousness of an age-old concern, the entry into objectivity of something that had long remained trapped within beliefs and philosophies: it was the effect of a change in the fundamental arrangements of knowledge. As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.

      If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility –-without knowing either what its form will be or what it promises - were to cause them to crumble, as the ground of Classical thought did, at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea." [3]

Foucault's argument is actually very straightforward: he is using the term man to refer to a cultural and historical formation - not a biological organism or zoological species. In other words, man is a specific (but contingent) mode of being that has arisen at a particular time due to circumstances that will sooner or later change.

Understanding man in this way allows us to also think about the play of forces (social, economic, technological, etc.) peculiar to each epoch and how these interact with each other and with the forces within the human animal to produce new forms and ways of being. Unlike Rupert Birkin in Women in Love, Foucault is not fantasising about a world without humans, but thinking rather of a future in which the convenient fiction of humanity as presently conceived is no longer tenable.

Further, Foucault is interested in the extent to which man as a conceptual category can be understood as a bourgeois compromise (or as a bridge between ape and Übermensch, as Nietzsche would say) and to what degree man is merely something that obstructs and inhibits vital forces and flows.       

To be honest, the idea is so simple and - I would have thought - uncontroversial, that I cannot see why some people (including those who should know better) have problems understanding or accepting it ... 

Notes

[1] Andrew Keese, 'Engineering Away Humanity: Lawrence on Technology and Mental Consciousness in Lady Chatterley's Lover and Pansies', in D. H. Lawrence, Technology, and Modernity, ed. Indrek Männiste, (Bloomsbury, 2019), pp. 127-135. The line quoted is on p. 134. 

I'm afraid that Keese misunderstands both Lawrence and Michel Foucault in this essay; particularly on the subject of power, which neither saw as corrupting (that would be Lord Acton), nor as something merely repressive. Nor is it correct to say that, like Lawrence, Foucault regards humans as being "out of balance between their instinctual and mental selves" [129]. That's more a Freudian schema than Foucauldian and, as far as I recall, Foucault doesn't uphold the Cartesian mind-body division in his corporeal ontology.     

[2] D. H. Lawrence, '...... Love Was Once a Little Boy', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 344.

[3] Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, (Routledge, 1989), pp. 421-22.

All Aboard! On D. H. Lawrence and Trains

Ian McKellen as D. H. Lawrence and Janet Suzman 
as Frieda Lawrence aboard a train in Priest of Love 
(dir. Christopher Miles, 1981)

I.

To be honest, I would probably associate trains more with the cinema than with literature; I'm thinking of Hitchcock's films for starters and, of course, the Lumière brothers' L'arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat (1895).

Having said that, I can recall several novels featuring trains and/or railway stations as a prominent motif: Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (1878) would be one example; as would Zola's psychological thriller La Bête humaine (1890). Then there's Graham Greene's Stamboul Train (1932) and, of course, Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express (1934) ...

But one author whom I wouldn't immediately think of in relation to trains, is D. H. Lawrence. And yet, as two recent essays by Lawrence scholars have shown, trains are actually quite a crucial and recurrent feature of his work ...


II.

According to Indrek Männiste, "one of the most idiosyncratic ways in which Lawrence realizes the cantus technicus in counterpoint is his frequent use of the train trope” [183].

He explains:

"While the more sensationalist drama of Victorian times focused mainly on the dangers of rail travel and its shock elements, Lawrence uses trains synecdochally as the ambassadors of modernity, and plays them out, as always, as threatening on a more metaphysical plane. Trains are described habitually as intruders on nature and as estranging to certain characters." [183]

Indeed, trains – along with cars and buses and other motor vehicles – force the countryside itself to retreat into its own isolation, making it evermore mysteriously inaccessible. As Lawrence notes in a late essay: "People have more 'joy-rides and outings [...] but they never seem to touch the reality of the country-side' (LEA, 15-16)." [185]

And yet – to deploy my own adversative conjunction if I may – trains play a positive role in Lawrence’s fiction too ...

Helen Baron demonstrates how they "occur frequently in his novels, stories, and poems" [191], often advancing the plot, heightening the drama, or helping him reveal things about his characters. She also explores "the variety of ways that Lawrence subtly focused on trains […] to coerce – overtly or subliminally – the reader’s feelings and responses” [191].

So, for all his siderodromophobia, it's possible that Lawrence was a secret locomotive lover after all and one thinks of his poem 'Kisses in the Train', in which, as Baron notes, the erotic element is intensified by being set on a speeding train. The opening two stanzas of the poem read:

I saw the Midlands
      Revolve through her hair;
The fields of autumn
      Stretching bare,
And sheep on pasture
      Tossed back in scare.

And still as ever
      The world went round,
My mouth on her pulsing
      Throat was found,
And my breast to her beating
      Breast was bound.  

Notes

Indrek Männiste, 'Poetics of Technology: D. H. Lawrence and the Well-Tempered Counterpoint', in D. H. Lawrence, Technology, and Modernity, ed. Indrek Männiste, (Bloomsbury, 2019), pp. 175-189.

Helen Baron, 'Trains in D. H. Lawrence's Creative Writing', in D. H. Lawrence, Technology, and Modernity, ibid. pp. 191-202.

D. H. Lawrence, 'Kisses in the Train', Poems Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 83-4. 

For my review of D. H. Lawrence, Technology, and Modernity, see The Lawrentian, ed. David Brock, (Autumn Edition, 2020). For a revised extract from this review in the form of a post on Torpedo the Ark, click here.   

Taking a Trip Through The Beauty Jungle

Press ad for The Beauty Jungle (1964)

The most colourful and exciting film of the year

The good people at Talking Pictures TV have found another absolute gem of a movie: The Beauty Jungle (dir. Val Guest, 1964), starring (60s and 70s stalwart) Ian Hendry as local journalist Don MacKenzie and (lovely Lancashire lass) Janette Scott as the typist-turned-beauty contestant Shirley Freeman.

Also putting in appearances are Tommy Trinder, Sid James, and a 21-year-old Maggie Nolan as just one of the mulitude of leggy-lovelies gracing the screen, so obviously a film with instant appeal for viewers like me (although it's interesting to note that promotion for the film was aimed primarily at a female audience in the belief that it was the sort of film women will want to see; the sort of picture women will want to talk about).   

Essentially a moral tale - or, rather, a sexploitation movie masquerading as a moral tale - it purports to expose the sordid and corrupt world of beauty pageants. MacKenzie, acting as a manager and image consultant to Shirley, is desperate to also become her lover. Unfortunately for him, having left her home, her job, and her boyfriend and transformed from a happy young brunette into a glamorous and ambitious blonde, greedy for ever-greater fame and success, she isn't interested and spurns his advances.         

Of far more interest to Shirley are playboy filmstar Rex Carrick (played by Edmund Purdom) and sauve international beauty pageant promoter Armand (played by the French actor Jean Claudio). She tries to seduce the former, only to discover he's either gay or asexual; and she (mistakenly) agrees to sleep with the latter in the (vain) hope of becoming Miss Globe (a title that goes to Miss Peru, played by a former Miss Israel, Aliza Gur). 

Having failed to make it to the top, Shirley is reduced to working as a celebrity judge back on the local beauty contest circuit - until, that is, she sees her younger sister paraded before her (and under the management of MacKenzie). This forces her to walk away from the industry for good and presumably back into a life of obscurity and nine-to-five normality; just another victim of the beauty jungle and its brutal, primitive law (though one who was happy to be complicit so long as she was winning). 

What feminist critics or members of the #MeToo generation would make of such a film heaven only knows; one imagines they'd be triggered (perhaps rightly) by the unabashed sexual objectification and abuse of young women by powerful and unscrupulous older men.

But the film has such quirky British charm - not only, as I said earlier, do Tommy Trinder and Sid James appear, but Lionel (Give Us a Clue) Blair and cheeky chappie Joe Brown also pop up on screen - that such sleazy behaviour is normalised, humanised, and made entertaining. Maybe that's the thing with vice and immorality - we find it so damn seductive (and excusable) if it's carried out by people with a twinkle in their eye!

And, what's more, I fully appreciate why girls like Shirley Freeman set out on the path to fame and riches, prepared to do whatever it takes in order to escape being little Miss No One from nowhere - for who wants to peel potatoes and scrub floors when you can drink champagne and travel the world in style?


Notes

To watch a trailer for The Beauty Jungle (dir. Val Guest, 1964): click here.

To see the astonishing press kit released to help promote the film visit the William K. Everson Archive (NYU): click here.

I Am Elektro: My Brain Is Bigger Than Yours

1: Elektro sneaks a fag (and cops a feel) backstage before a show (1954)

 2: Elektro and Sparko go through their repertoire of tricks for a 
female admirer at the New York World's Fair (1939-40).

An American correspondent writes (with reference to a recent post):

"You Brits may have built the first robot, Eric, but in Elektro we had the biggest, the best, and most bad-ass." 

And, whilst my fondness for Eric - the man without a soul - remains undiminished, I have to admit that Elektro was pretty impressive: seven feet tall and weighing in at 265 lbs, his steel frame was covered with an aluminium skin.

He could not only walk, talk, and respond to simple voice commands, but blow up balloons and smoke cigarettes like a trooper. Further, as can be seen from the above photos, Elektro also had an eye for the ladies and owned a robotic dog, Sparko, that was trained to bark at humans.  

Manufactured by the Westinghouse Electric Corporation in Mansfield, Ohio, in 1938, Elektro made his debut appearance the following year at the New York World's Fair. He then made a career in the 1950s working in a promotional capacity for the company, touring all over the US and helping to sell their fridges, washing machines, and other electrical goods.  

Alas, people are fickle and times change; Elektro's popularity eventually waned ...

Finding himself out of work, he accepted the role of Thinko, in the sexploitation comedy Sex Kittens Go to College (dir. Albert Zugsmith, 1960), appearing alongside Mamie Van Doren, Tuesday Weld, and Mijanou Bardot. The version released in adult theatres included an additional nine minute dream sequence featuring Thinko with some erotic dancers.   

Unfortunately, the film was neither a great critical nor a commercial success and, having failed to make a name for himself in Hollywood, Elektro ended his days as a minor attraction at an amusement park in California before slipping into almost complete cultural obscurity. 

However, I'm delighted to inform readers that Elektro managed to avoid the scrapyard and now has pride of place at the Mansfield Memorial Museum, where he is billed as the oldest surviving American robot in the world.

Notes

Photo credits: 1: Bettmann / Getty Images. 2: Westinghouse Electric Corporation

For a wonderful short colour film featuring Elektro in action at the 1939 World's Fair in New York, click here.

Musical bonus: Meat Beat Manifesto, Original Control (Version 2), (1992), ft. Elektro: click here.

This post is for Zena, a long term lover of robots. 

Carbon Footprints and Diamond Geezers: On the Allotropic Love Affair Between Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich

Alan Bates as Rupert Birkin and Oliver Reed as Gerald Crich 

getting all allotropic in Ken Russell's Women in Love (1969)

In a famous letter, Lawrence advised that, when it came to understanding the characters in his fiction, readers shouldn't look for the old stable ego or concern themselves with personal traits.

Instead, they should attune themselves to "another ego, according to whose action the individual is unrecognisable, and passes through, as it were, allotropic states which [...] are states of the same single radically-unchanged element".*

It's a nice - rather Futurist-sounding - notion and one that Lawrence scholars have often referred to over the years. But I don't know if anyone loves the word allotrope and its derivatives more than Thalia Trigoni, who theorises Lawrence's radical dualism on the basis of a concept first conceived by the Swedish chemist Jöns Jakob Berzelius, in 1841.

She also offers an interesting reading of the gladitorial scene in Women in Love fought between Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich, in which the former is equated with a lump of coal who is proud of his carbon footprint, whilst the latter is characterised as a real diamond geezer - all sparkle and no soot.** 

Whilst the essential point is that both are men of carbon, we all know which of these two characters the miner’s son and former schoolteacher privileges and with whom his sympathies lie - and it isn't the playboy industrialist. By refusing to acknowledge his own carbon nature, Gerald the diamond empties himself of real being. He dazzles, but he's ontologically void; lacking any inner life, any soul.
 

Birkin, on the other hand, is keen to immerse himself in the darkness of his own carbon-self:

"He is the primary representative of the unconscious and the instinctual […] the advocate of ‘the great dark knowledge you can’t have in your head - the dark involuntary being’ (WL, 43)." [143].

But again, it's crucial to remember that Birkin and Gerald "represent two forms of the same mode of being" [143], each seeing himself reflected in the other. The naked wrestling scene is as close as they ever get to merging in a peculiar oneness and establishing an intimate and instinctive form of Blutsbrüderschaft.

It is, therefore, so much more than merely an episode of disguised homoeroticism, as many commentators have suggested: "The 'Gladiatorial' is an externalised psychomachia wherein the constituent elements of human nature merge into oneness at the same time that they are striving to break free." [145]

Of course, as we know, it doesn’t quite work out and things end badly for poor Gerald:

"Gerald experiences a death of the body, he becomes a mental machine-like being driven purely by mental reason. His physical intelligence freezes in a state that triggers a process of disintegration that will finally lead to his death in the Alps. […] A stubborn intellectualist who embodies the spirit of mechanical industrialization and rationalization, Gerald is unable to introduce his experience with Birkin into the symbolic order of understanding." [145]

That might be true. But, arguably, over-heated attempts to become-carbon and seek out dark gods also lead to self-destruction and acts of atrocity. And besides, isn’t it better to be a diamond with a fatal flaw than a lump of coal without?

Notes

* D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Volume II, ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1981), letter number 732, to Edward Garnet, 5 June 1914, pp. 182-84. Lines quoted are on p. 183. 

** Thalia Trigoni, 'Lawrence’s Allotropic “Gladiatorial”: Resisting the Mechanization of the Human in Women in Love', in D. H. Lawrence, Technology, and Modernity, ed. Indrek Männiste, (Bloomsbury, 2019), pp. 137-47. See also her essay 'Lawrence's Radical Dualism: The Bodily Unconscious', English Studies, 95: 3 (2014), 302-21.  

This post is a revised extract from a longer review of D. H. Lawrence, Technology, and Modernity that will appear in The Lawrentian, ed. David Brock, (Autumn Edition, 2020).  

If He Only Had a Soul: Notes on Eric the Robot

Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images

When a man's an empty kettle / He should be on his mettle ...

Probably because my childhood memories and cultural imagination have been very much shaped by American TV and cinema, I always thought that Robby the Robot was the real deal and the first of his metallic kind.

So imagine my surprise when I recently read of Eric; the first functioning electric-powered robot, made in England by former First World War pilot Capt. William Richards, and aircraft engineer Alan Reffell ...

Following his first public appearance - at London's Royal Horticultural Hall in 1928 (opening the Exhibition of the Society of Model Engineers) - Eric and his two operators set off on a US tour, where he cheerfully introduced himself to audiences as the man without a soul.  

I think my favourite description of him comes from an essay by Tina Ferris:   

"Eric was designed to stand, bow […] and to dazzle the audience by answering simple questions. […] Motorized pulleys moved his arms and head while 35,000 volts of electricity generated glowing eyes and sparks that shot from his mouth when [he] spoke. Eric's six-foot-tall aluminium body resembled a knight in shining armour […] A big breastplate was emblazoned with the letters RUR across [his] chest leaving little doubt about [his] inspiration."

Ferris concludes, however, on a somewhat sour note, that Eric's performance ultimately amounted to no more than "exotic theatrical showboating that at once seemed to trivialize robots and also to magnify their threat" [1].

Mysteriously, however, Eric disappeared soon afterwards: some think he self-destructed; others that he was cannibalised for spare parts. Personally, I like to think that he eloped with Maria the Maschinenmensch and star of Fritz Lang's Metropolis (or at least an identical replica of everybody's favourite fembot).


Afterword

In 2016, the Science Museum raised funds through a Kickstarter campaign to rebuild Eric. Working from archive material including photographs and film clips, the artist-roboticist Giles Walker brought him back to life (so to speak) and Eric was added to the museum's permanent collection, appearing as part of the 2017 Robots exhibition. For more details, click here.

Notes

[1] Tina Ferris, 'D. H. Lawrence and "The Machine Incarnate": Robots Among the "Nettles"', in D. H. Lawrence, Technology, and Modernity, ed. Indrek Männiste, (Bloomsbury, 2019), pp. 51-71. Lines quoted are on p. 55.

[2] Ibid. 

Musical bonus: Jack Haley as the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz (dir. Victor Fleming, 1939), performing 'If I Only Had a Heart' by Harold Arlen (music) and Yip Harburg (lyrics): Click here. 

For a follow-up post to this one, featuring the bad boy of robots, Elektro, click here.

A Brief Note on The Scapegoat (1957) by Daphne du Maurier

Virago (2004)

I'm sorry to say, but Daphne du Maurier's eleventh novel, The Scapegoat (1957), isn't one I'll be adding to my list of favourite books (not even my list of favourite books by her).

For whilst Lisa Appignanesi writes in her Introduction to the work that it has "terse economy of style [and] great literary sophistication" [v], I'm afraid I found it rather tedious at times and - despite the great promise of its premise to do with the performance of identity and the struggle to consciously maintain a lie - philosophically disappointing.

Just to be clear: I loved the first couple of chapters: I loved the final three chapters. It was the twenty-odd chapters in between that I had problems with ...

And one of the main problems was the feeble and depressing protagonist-narrator; a character in stark contrast to his fascinating French double.* One wishes the novel had been more about the latter and less about the former's attempt to live (and redeem) Jean's de Gué's life.

In addition, the other characters in the book - particularly the family members - are also extremely unsympathetic. The English imposter might learn to love them, but I'm afraid Monsieur le Comte is right:

(i) His mother, an obese morphine addict, is the most egotistical, the most rapacious, and the most monstrous of old women ...

(ii) His younger brother, Paul, is a painfully inferior and provincial oaf with a "thoroughly disagreeable personality" [355]...

(iii) His sister-in-law (and lover), Renée, might have an enchanting body, but possesses "a mind like an empty box" [355] ...

(iv) His sister, Blanche, is "so twisted with repressed sex and frustrated passion" [355] that she has become fanatically pious as well as resentful ...

(v) And, finally, his daughter, Marie-Noel, is an affected and manipulative little brat who puts on an act of sweetness and innocence, whilst really just wanting to be the centre of attention.         

Of course, there's Béla, who seems a good sort (cooks like an angel; fucks like a beast) and she performs an interesting role in the novel. As understanding and compassionate as she is, however, I suspect that even she was glad to see the back of a self-harming substitute with suicidal fantasies, and keenly awaited the return of the man who had been her lover for three years.

He may lack tendresse, but at least Jean de Gué knows who he is, what he wants, and how to whistle for his dog.    

Notes

*I'm assuming that there are two actual characters - English John and Jean de Gué - and not two distinct personalities belonging to the same schizophrenic subject, although, in many ways, this would be more believable and more interesting and I rather wish du Maurier had openly explored what is now referrred to as dissociative identity disorder. She might even have given us a dramatic Fight Club moment when it's revealed that the Narrator is Tyler Durden and that it takes a Marla Singer - or, in this case, a Béla - to enable John to know the true from the false and realise that he's Dr Jekyll and Mr Jackass, i.e., somebody with deep seated problems for which he should seek professional help. See Fight Club (1999), dir. David Fincher, starring Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, and Helena Bonham Carter, based on the 1996 novel of the same title by Chuck Palahniuk.   

Daphne du Maurier, The Scapegoat, with an Introduction by Lisa Appignanesi, (Virago Press, 2004). The page numbers given in the post refer to this edition. 

For another post on The Scapegoat, click here. 

Bonus: to watch the trailer for the 1959 film adaptation dir. Robert Hamer, starring Alec Guiness, click here. 

Lady Chatterley's Lover: What Kind of Man Was Oliver Mellors?

Oliver Mellors as imagined on 

Comic Vine

Oliver Mellors was an ex-soldier turned gamekeeper; so it's not so strange that he carries a gun. One suspects, however, that the sense of menace he conveys is unrelated to the fact that he's armed. At any rate, Connie Chatterley's first reaction is one of fear, not desire. Upon seeing him, she felt threatened as he emerged from the woods in his "dark green velveteens and gaiters [...] with a red face and red moustache" [46].

The narrator tells us Mellors was "going quickly downhill" [46] and it's uncertain whether this refers to his direction of travel, or to a state of spiritual and physical decline due to his isolation and ill health (Connie soon notices his frailty and the fact he has a troublesome chest; a recent bout of pneumonia having left him with a cough and breathing difficulties).

Mellors has a thick head of fair hair and blue all-seeing eyes that sparkle with mockery, yet have also a certain warmth. In terms of build, he was "moderately tall, and lean" [46] and Lawrence writes admiringly of his slender loins and slender white arms. When Connie first spies him semi-naked, she finds it a visionary experience. It's not that he's conventionally good-looking or sturdy of physique - in fact he's rather weedy and looks older than his 38 years - but he has something strangely attractive about him: "the warm white flame of a single life revealing itself" [66] in his body.

Later, when she gazes with wonder as he stands before her fully-naked, Connie decides that her lover is piercingly beautiful:

"Save for his hands and wrists and face and neck he was white as milk, with fine slender muscular flesh. [...] The back was white and fine, the small buttocks beautiful with exquisite, delicate manliness, the back of the neck ruddy and delicate and yet strong. There was an inward, not an outward strength in the delicate fine body." [209]

Mostly, however, Connie is fascinated with his erect penis, one of the most famous members in literature; "rising darkish and hot-looking from the cloud of vivid gold-red hair" [209]. We also discover that Mellors likes to refer to his big, thick, hard and overweening dick by the popular slang term John Thomas.

Of course, Mellors is more than a walking penis: he has a mind and likes to read books of all kind, including works about contemporary political history and modern science. He even has a few novels on his book shelf (though, unfortunately, Lawrence doesn't reveal what they are).

Mellors also has the ability - increasingly rare amongst modern people - to act in silence with soft, swift movements, as if slightly withdrawn or invisible; like an object. In other words, he has presence, but he wasn't quite all there in a fully human sense; he lacked what might be termed personality.

At the same time, he stares with a fearless impersonal look into Connie's eyes, as if trying to know her as an animal might know its prey. This naturally intensifies her sense of unease and she decides he's a "curious, quick, separate fellow, alone but sure of himself" [47].

In other words, Mellors is a cocky little so-and-so, aloof with his own sense of superiority, despite his lowly social status and the fact he walks with a stoop. Little wonder that Clifford finds him impertinent and something of an upstart: '"He thinks too much of himself, that man.'" [92] Similarly, Connie's sister, Hilda, isn't keen on Mr Mellors, finding his use of dialect affected (which it is - though he mostly deploys it as a defence mechanism in times of social anxiety, so it's really a sign of his own insecurity).

Perhaps his defining characteristic, however, is rage: Mellors is angry with everyone pretty much all of the time. He's angry with the bosses; he's angry with the workers; he's angry with men; he's angry with women - he's even angry with his own small daughter for crying when he shoots a cat in front of her: '"Ah, shut it up, tha, false little bitch!'" [58] No wonder the poor child is frightened of him and that even his own mother admits he has funny ways. When Connie asks him why he has such a bad temper, he replies: "'I don't quite digest my bile.'" [168]

Perhaps this helps to explain why he just wants to keep himself to himself: "He had reached the point where all he wanted on earth was to be alone." [88] He even resents the company of his dog, Flossie (too tame and clinging). For Mellors, solitude equates with freedom. And contact with others - particularly women - only results in heartache. Mellors is not so much a social discontent as a man on the recoil from the outer world (and from love).    

Unfortunately, all it takes is a single tear falling from Connie's eye for "the old flame" [115] to leap up again in his loins ... Before he knows where he is or what he's doing, he's fucking her Ladyship on an old army blanket spread carefully on the floor of his hut. For Mellors is a man of desire - and also a man prepared to submit to his fate (no matter how grim).

He's not a man, however, greatly concerned with pleasuring his partner: "The activity, the orgasm was his, all his ..." [116] Afterwards, having caught his breath and lain for a while in mysterious stillness, he buttons up his breeches and exits the hut to ponder what it means for his soul to be broken open again. He rather regrets that her ladyship has cost him his privacy and brought down upon him a "new cycle of pain and doom" [119].

Having escorted Connie home - and inwardly raged against the industrial world with its evil electric lights - Mellors returns home "with his gun and his dog [...] and ate his supper of bread and cheese, young onions and beer" [119]. If it's true that you are what you eat, then this makes Mellor's an extremely simple soul; simple, and rather innocent in the Nietzschean sense of not being troubled by guilt or a sense of sin: "He knew that conscience was chiefly fear of society: or fear of oneself." [120]

(Later, however, Mellors admits to Connie that he is afraid: "'I am. I'm afraid. I'm afraid. I'm afraid o' things'" [124] - things being people and consequences.)     

Having finished his supper, he returns to the darkness of the woods, gun in hand, and with his penis stirring restlessly as he thought of Connie. The turgidity of his desire is something he greatly enjoys, as it makes him feel rich. What he doesn't much care for, however, is French kissing - as Connie finds out to her chagrin when she mistakenly offers him her mouth with parted lips one time and asks for a post-coital kiss goodbye.

He speaks of tenderness, but Mellors is much more a wam, bam, thank you ma'am, kinda guy. Thus one day, he bumps into Connie in the woods and forces himself upon her, despite her words of protest and gestures of resistance:

"He stepped up to her, and put his arm round her. She felt the front of his body terribly near to her, and alive.
      'Oh, not now! Not now!' she cried, trying to push him away." [132]

Ignoring this, Mellors forces her to lie down - like an animal - and is in such a hurry to fuck her that he literally snaps her knicker elastic: "for she did not help him, only lay inert" [133].

I wouldn't go so far as to characterise this as a rape scene, but some readers might and, at the very least, it demonstrates that Mellors has scant concern for notions of consent.

Indeed, rather than worry about the finer points of sexual politics and etiquette, he prefers to reminisce about his childhood (he was a clever boy); his estranged wife Bertha (she was brutal); his life in the army (he loved his commanding officer); his own poor health (weak heart and lungs); or the lack of any real difference between the classes (all are now slaves to money and machinery - or tin people, as he calls them).

These things certainly troubled him and kept him awake at night. But when engaged in conversation with Connie one evening, he reveals that the real source of his resentment and bitterness is his failure to form a satisfactory sexual relationship. His first girlfriend, he says, was sexless - and his second also "'loved everything about love, except the sex'" [201].

Then came Bertha Coutts - whom he marries - and she loves to fuck. So, for a while, he's happy: "'I was as pleased as punch. That was what I'd wanted: a woman who wanted me to fuck her. So I fucked her like a good un.'" [201] But then the arguments start - and the domestic violence: "'She flung a cup at me and I took her by the scruff of the neck and squeezed the life out of her. That sort of thing!'" [201]       

Even worse, according to Mellors' account, is the fact that Bertha preferred to grind her own coffee:

"'She'd never come off when I did. Never! She'd just wait. If I kept back for half an hour, she'd keep back longer. And when I'd come and really finished, then she'd start on her own account, and I had to stop inside her till she brought herself off, wriggling and shouting.'" [201-02]  

Mellors hates women like this; just as he hates those women who encourage non-vaginal ejaculation - '"the only place you should be, when you go off'" [203] - or women who insist he withdraw prior to ejaculation and then '"go on writhing their loins till they bring themselves off'" against his thighs [203].

Women like this, he tells Connie, are mostly all lesbian - consciously or unconsciously - and this triggers his violent homophobia: '"When I'm with a woman who's really lesbian, I fairly howl in my soul, wanting to kill her.'" [203]

Now, I don't know what Connie thinks of all this - although she nervously protests some of what he says - but such overt misogyny and reactionary sexual stupidity is pretty shocking and shameful to many readers today and does make it hard to find Oliver Mellors a likeable figure. And the casual racism only makes things worse: '"I thought there was no real sex left: never a woman who'd really 'come' naturally with a man: except black women - and somehow - well, we're white men: and they're a bit like mud.'" [204]

As I said earlier, Mellors talks a lot about tenderness and the need for warm-heartedness, but there's a nastiness in him - and more than a touch of madness, as he fantasises, for example, about the end of mankind: '"Quite nice! To contemplate the extermination of the human species [...] it calms you more than anything else.'" [218]

Again, to her credit, Connie isn't quite convinced by this. And she knows that Mellors still hopes that the human race might find a way into a new revealing - if only the men might learn to wear bright red trousers and short white jackets:

'"Why, if men had red, fine legs, that alone would change them in a month. They'd begin to be men again, to be men! An' the women could dress as they liked. Because if once the men walked with legs close bright scarlet, and buttocks nice and showing scarlet under a little white jacket, then the women 'ud begin to be women.'" [219]

This longed for revolt into style - and desire for gender authenticity where men are men and women are women - is at the heart of Mellors's völkisch utopian vision, along with neo-paganism and certain eugenic proposals, such as severely restricting the number of births; '"because the world is overcrowded'" [220]. That might be true, but it's probably not the kindest thing to tell the woman carrying your unborn child.

In sum: whilst Mellors might have natural distinction, he lacks discretion and seems to go out of his way to upset people - even those who, like Duncan Forbes, are trying to help him and Connie. He tells Duncan, an artist, that he finds his work sentimental and stupid and that it "murders all the bowels of compassion in a man'" [286], and so succeeds in gaining himself one more enemy in the world. 

Ever alert to the slightest hint of insult, Mellors is thus outrageously rude to other people - many of whom, including Clifford and Bertha, he wants to have shot. When Connie points out that's not being very tender towards them, he says:

"'Yea, even the tenderest thing you could do for them, perhaps, would be to give them death. They can't live! They only frustrate life. Their souls are awful inside them. Death ought to be sweet to them. And I ought to be allowed to shoot them.'" [280]         
 
Connie tries to convince herself that he isn't being serious when he says such things. But Mellors is quick to put her right: he'd shoot them soon enough, '"and with less qualms than I shoot a weasal" [280].

Does this make him a bumptious lout and a miserabe cad, as Clifford says? Or "more monstrous and shocking than a murderer like Crippen" [267] as the local people think?

Maybe, maybe not ...

But Oliver Mellors is certainly no angel and shouldn't be thought an heroic figure. He might write a fine letter and he might have a good cod on him (as Connie's father likes to assume), but this Lawrentian bad boy is a bad son, a bad husband, a bad father, a bad employee, a bad citizen, and - unless one likes it rough and Greek style - a bad lover ...

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993). All page numbers given in the post refer to this edition of the novel.

Ghost Variations: Notes on the Madness of Robert Schumann

Robert Schumann (1810-1856) 

German Romantic composer, critic, and madman

In the season two episode of Seinfeld entitled 'The Jacket' [1], George has a catchy tune from Les Misérables stuck in his head which he can't stop singing: Master of the house, doling out the charm / Ready with a handshake and an open palm ...

Jerry warns him that the ninteenth century composer Robert Schumann went mad after just a single note earwormed its way into his mind and he involuntarily heard it playing over and over again. Obviously, George doesn't find this story very reassuring - Oh that I really needed to hear! - but is it true?

The short answer is yes: Schumann did go insane and have to be institutionalised; and he did hear a persistent A-note at the end of his life as well as other increasingly disturbing auditory hallucinations.

Thus it was, for example, that on one cold winter's night in February 1854, the composer leapt from his bed and began feverishly attempting to set down a melody that he believed at first was being dictated by the very angels of heaven. By morning, however, he was convinced that what he actually heard were the hideous cries of demonic beasts.

Whatever the true source of his inspiration [2], the melody became the basis of the six piano variations - known today as the Geistervariationen - that were the last thing he wrote before his final crack-up. They thus occupy a unique (and somewhat disturbing) place in his body of work - as, indeed, in the history of classical music. 

On 27 February, Schumann attempted suicide by throwing himself from a bridge into the Rhine. Rescued by a passing boat and taken home, he requested that he be admitted to an asylum for the insane. Here he remained until his death, aged 46, in the summer of 1856. During his confinement, although his friend Brahms had permission to visit, Schumann wasn't allowed to see his wife, Clara, until two days before his death.

The cause of his death - just like the cause of his madness [3] - is something that has been endlessly discussed ever since; was he schizophrenic or syphilitic? Did he have a bipolar disorder or were his neurological problems the result of a brain tumour of some kind? Was it pneumonia or mercury poisoning - mercury being a common treatment for syphilis at the time - which finally did him in?   

I suppose we'll never really know. But what we might do - and should do - is resist the urge of some commentators to regurgitate the romantic vomit and tired narratives regarding the genius and madness of artists ...

The view that creativity is rooted in or fatefully tied to madness is such bullshit. Artists may well think differently from most other people - that is to say, they may be neurologically divergent and able to experience the world from a wide array of queer perspectives (to delight in paradox, inconsistency, and even chaos), - but it's banal (and mistaken) to reduce this (or their heightened sensitivity) to mental illness.       

Ultimately, I return to Michel Foucault's conclusion in Madness and Civilization: the onset of madness marks the point at which creative work ends; a moment of abolition that dissolves the truth of the work of art [4].  

Notes

[1] Seinfeld, 'The Jacket' [S2/E3], dir. Tom Cherones, written by Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld, (first broadcast 6 February 1991). Click here to watch a clip from the episode on YouTube.

[2] Sadly, Schumann's mind had deteriorated to such a degree by this point, that he was unable to recognise that - far from being the work of angels, ghosts, or demons - the melody was in fact one of his own, written several months earlier.

[3] I'm taking Schumann's mental health issues - evident from a young age - as a given here, but, interestingly, there are critics such as John Worthen who vigorously challenge this idea. For Worthen the composer's tragic deterioration was rooted in a physical condition (syphilis) and was not a form of madness per se. See: Schumann: Life and Death of a Musician (Yale University Press, 2007).

[4] Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization trans. Richard Howard, (Vintage Books, 1988), p. 287.

Sweet Death (In Memory of Steve Priest)

Sweet in 1973: Steve, Mick, Andy and Brian
Photo: Jorgen Angel

Back in my pre-punk, glam-rocking, teeny-bopping days the band by whom I was most bedazzled were The Sweet (also known simply as Sweet).

They had hits before 1973 - Wig Wam Bam (1972) - and they had hits after 1973 - Teenage Rampage (1974) - but the three big hit singles I bought and played over and over and over again until I knew every word and every note, were all released in that golden year of British pop 1973: Block Buster, Hell Raiser, and Ballroom Blitz.

Even now, almost 50 years later, I still think they're brilliant tunes and that the band perfectly capture the non-essential essence of glam; an outrageously camp image and performance coupled with a stomping drum beat and heavy guitar riffs. Of course it was contrived, but, as Sebastian Horsley would say, it was an authentic contrivance; i.e., Sweet were fakes, but they were real fakes (like him).

Thus, I was sorry to hear the news that bassist Steve Priest died last month, aged 72, leaving guitarist Andy Scott as the last surviving member of the original group (singer Brian Connolly having died in 1997 and drummer Mick Tucker in 2002).

So, that's another childhood hero gone ... Soon, of course, they'll all be dead (and so will we).

To watch Sweet perform 'Block Buster' on Top of the Pops (25 Jan 1973): click here.

To watch them perform 'Hell Raiser' (Disco 26 June 1973), click here.

And, finally, to watch them perform 'The Ballroom Blitz', click here.