Krampusnacht

He sees you when you're sleeping 

And he knows when you're awake ... [1]

 

 

One of the more amusing festive trends of late has been the rise in popularity (in the US rather than the UK) of a horned figure born within Central European folklore known as Krampus. He is, if you like, the anti-Santa, who punishes children who misbehave during the run up to Christmas, in contrast to St. Nicholas who rewards the well-behaved with toys and other gifts. 

 

Speaking personally, I would've loved as a child to have had a visit from Krampus with his long pointed tongue hanging out, rather than some faux-jolly fat man with a beard ho-ho-ho-ing down my chimney, even at the risk of being eaten or kidnapped and carried off to Hell. Similarly, I would have much preferred to find a lump of beautiful black shiny coal in my stocking than an orange.  

 

Hated by all the usual suspects - the clerical fascists of the Vaterländische Front prohibited the Krampus tradition in Austria during the 1930s - there has been a popular resurgence of activities in recent decades, not just in Austria, but also Bavaria and other alpine regions. 

 

The fact is, no matter how hard you attempt to shut the Devil out, he always finds a way to creep back in and enthrone himself. Just as Christ had to have a Judas among his disciples, so does there have to be a hairy-bodied demon in the Yuletide celebrations. "Why? Because the nature of man demands it, and will always demand it." [2] 

 

Papa Noël, the baby Jesus, and Bing Crosby only appeal so far ...        

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Lyrics from Santa Claus is Comin' to Town, written by J. Fred Coots and Haven Gillespie (1934).

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins, (Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 67.  

Thanks to Thomas Bonneville for suggesting this post.

On Eric Gill's Illustrations for Lady Chatterley's Lover

Eric Gill: Lady C. (1931) 

Early version of a wood engraving intended for 

D. H. Lawrence's novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover

 

  

I. 

 

A recent post on the D. H. Lawrence Society blog features an amusing exchange between Kate Foster and John Worthen on the merits (or otherwise) of a pair of drawings by Eric Gill originally intended as illustrations for Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928): click here.

 

Having previously written on the Lawrence-Gill connection - click here and here, for example - and being a fully paid-up member of the DHL Society, I figured neither of the above would object if I added my tuppence ha'penny worth to the discussion ...     

 

II. 

 

The piece opens by declaring that Gill's sexual inclinations - which included incest, paedophilia, and bestiality - shouldn't affect our appreciation of his work. He may have been a monster of perversity, but hey, his drawings were rather lovely and, we are assured, they are "not in the least pornographic".

This last claim made me smile: such is the continued horror of smut amongst followers of Lawrence, that they can't bear the thought that works that they happen to find beautiful might be anything other than the innocent laughter of genius, free from any "intention to titilate". 

    

I also smiled when, having gone to the trouble to separate the work from the man, the post backtracks and decides that maybe we cannot exclude the figure of the artist from the drawings after all, as they belong to a single history and the latter are, in a sense, portraits of Gill. 

 

To be fair, I understand this ambivalence and it certainly doesn't trouble me in the same way as the earlier refusal to consider the possibility that art and pornography are not always mutually exclusive. However, push comes to shove and for the record, I think it perfectly reasonable to judge a work without any reference to (or interest in) the biography of the artist.        

 

Moving on, we arrive at the $64,000 question: Would Lawrence have liked the drawings? First to answer is John Worthen and he seems in little doubt that the pictures are un-Lawrentian:

 

"I suspect he would have found them pornographic, in the way he spelled out in his essay 'Pornography and Obscenity', where he noted that 'In sexual intercourse, there is give and take.' In the drawings, it is all take (on the man's side), give on the woman's."

 

I have to confess, I have problems with this. For one thing, I cannot see how Worthen can possibly tell who is giving or taking what to or from whom in Gill's pictures. 

 

And, although Lawrence does indeed talk about give and take in the essay mentioned [1], he's not referring to some kind of conscious or consensual exchange between lovers. The reciprocity is, rather, inherent to the act of coition itself, be it between a man and a woman, two men, or one man and his dog; it's a flash of interchange between two blood streams and the question of who is active or passive, giving or receiving, is irrelevant (as well as a little tedious). 

 

We might also note that this is why Worthen's liberal concern that one party in an act of coition may serve in a purely functional and objectified manner as a machine à plaisir is also not really the issue here. For according to the logic of Lawrence's own position, any act of sexual intercourse is radically different from an act of masturbation (his real bête noire); even an act of violent rape results in a new stimulus entering as the old surcharge departs and only masturbation causes deadening. 

 

Just to be clear on this: Lawrence does object (vehemently) to pornography - and he may well have found Gill's drawings pornographic - but not on the grounds Worthen suggests above. 

 

Perhaps realising he needs an additional (more tenable) argument, Worthen now shifts ground slightly and implies that the pictures are the product of an obsessive (and presumably oppressive) male gaze and illustrate what is meant by the Lawrentian phrase sex in the head:        

 

"The drawings are, perhaps, examples of almost exactly what Lawrence was trying not to do in his novel: make the sex something to be looked at. He wanted it to be something felt. Gill is deeply, deeply fascinated by looking, I would say, and his gaze is obsessed; and that (oddly enough) is his limitation as an artist." 

 

This may or may not be true, but it's worth pointing out that Lawrence himself says the purpose of Lady C. was not to stimulate sexual feeling or incite illicit sexual activity, but, rather, help men and women think sex: "fully, completely, honestly, and cleanly" [2]. Surely this conscious realisation requires us to keep our eyes open ...? 

 

Other criticisms of the drawings made by Worthen just seem a little strange. For example, the fact that the female bottom is made the focus of the pictures. As Kate Foster asks, "isn't Gill just trying to capture what Mellors wouldn't shut up about: 'Tha's got the nicest arse of anybody. It's the nicest, nicest woman's arse as is!'"    

 

I agree with Foster that one of the interesting things about the drawings is that the woman is positioned on top of the man and that "she appears strong and healthy, it's the male figure who looks thin and rather weak" and in need of support. Her body is not simply put on passive display for an appreciative male spectator and, again as Foster points out, there's a real tenderness about these images; the couple do appear to be cradling one another, despite Worthen's denials of this. 

 

Ultimately, there's a delicious irony here in a man explaining to a woman why the pictures are sexist and phallocentric (and trying to do so from a Lawrentian perspective).   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'Pornography and Obscenity', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 233-253. The section relevant to our discussion here is on p. 245, lines 26-36. 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'A Propos of "Lady Chatterley's Lover"', in Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 308. 

On the Use of Dialect as an Erotico-Elementary Language in D. H. Lawrence

An aged priest of love sharing terms 

from his phallic vocabulary 

Image by Realitees on teepublic.com

 

 

I. 

 

It has been suggested that the use of dialect in Lady Chatterley's Lover - liberally interspersed with expletives - is an attempt by D. H. Lawrence to construct an erotico-elementary language that is expressive of what he terms phallic tenderness. An attempt, in other words, to translate feeling and desire more directly - more authentically - into words; to speak straight from the heart rather than the head. 

 

Readers of the novel can decide for themselves how successful he is in this; whether, for example, it's a real advance in the poetics of courtship and amorous discourse for Mellors to tell Connie that she's "'the best bit o' cunt on earth'" and how pleasing it is to him that she shits an' pisses [1]. 

 

But I would like to make the following points, if I may ... 

 

 

II.

 

Firstly, I quite admire the refusal by Mellors to speak standard English - the language of his class enemies - at all times and in all circumstances, even though he is perfectly capable of so-doing. If his lapsing into the vernacular and use of profanity is partly a defensive mechanism, so too is it oppositional and defiant. Perhaps he even has a duty to try and articulate his thoughts and feelings in his own words as far as is possible - as do all those who pride themselves on their singularity.   

 

Having said that, I'm not sure how far we can (or should) take this. I don't, for example, like the idea of individuals or small groups of people - tribes - retreating into semi-private languages in order to uphold some narrow identity and exclude others. I'm not arguing for a universal language which would somehow absorb all others and allow only a single vision to be expressed in but one tongue, but I do like the idea of being able to communicate.        

 

Secondly, I'm dubious when Lawrence suggests that a mixture of East Midlands dialect and a sprinkling of obscenities allows Mellors to articulate desire and display a proper reverence for sex and the body's strange experiences. He can't, of course, provide any evidence for this; it's ultimately just a personal preference for the language of his childhood based upon an intuitive understanding of physical consciousness. 

 

I'm inclined to agree with Richard Rorty's dismissal of this type of fantasy as, at best, lacking in irony, or, at worst, politically reactionary:

 

"What is described as such a consciousness is simply a disposition to use the language of our ancestors, to worship the corpses of their metaphors. Unless we suffer from what Derrida calls 'Heideggerian nostalgia,' we shall not think of our 'intuitions' as more than platitudes, more than the habitual use of a certain repertoire of terms, more than old tools which as yet have no replacements." [2]      

 

The problem is, Lawrence does - on occasion - suffer from something pretty similar to this form of philosophical sickness. He trusts his intuitions and, more, he believes his phallic vocabulary does a huge amount of work; i.e., that words such as tenderness, touch, desire, and fuck can be employed to bring about a revolutionary change in society; that such terms have almost a magical power and that they are closer to some vital primal reality and constitute what he terms blood-knowledge (a kind of instinctive common sense).  

 

Heidegger designated such terms as elementary - although, obviously, he privileged very different ones from Lawrence - and in Being and Time he claims that the "ultimate business of philosophy is to preserve the force of the most elementary words in which Dasein expresses itself" [3]. 

 

Now, as I confessed in an earlier post [click here], there was a time when I found this kind of thing seductive if never entirely convincing: I wanted to believe that there was an occult litany of words, letters, and phonemes that might somehow tear up the foundations of the soul and shatter eardrums and law tables alike; a kind of Adamic language, if you like.  

 

But now I fear this is precisely the kind of linguistic mysticism that Heidegger paradoxically practised whilst also warning against - not least of all because it's open to ridicule. 

 

Indeed, whenever Mellors shouts out arse! cunt! balls! like an erotomaniac with Tourette's, he reminds one of Father Jack Hackett, the foul-mouthed, lecherous old priest played by Frank Kelly in the Channel 4 sitcom Father Ted. His attempted display of authenticity is, ultimately, full of transcendental pretension and, as such, is laughable; Connie's sister, Hilda, is right to find him (and his use of dialect) affected. 

 

 

III. 

 

In sum: Lady Chatterley's Lover is an attempt by Lawrence to bring together the personal and the political, by showing us how sexual self-discovery and social revolution could be united in one project articulated via a phallic narrative spoken by Oliver Mellors.

 

Like Heidegger, Lawrence "thought he knew some words which had, or should have had, resonance for everybody" [4]; words which were relevant not just to the fate of people who happened to share his concerns and obsessions, but to the public fate of the modern world. He was unable to believe that the words which meant so much to him - words rooted in the body - don't necessarily excite the same interest or call forth the same response in others (not even from amongst his most sympathetic readers).

 

As Rorty concludes: "There is no such list of elementary words, no universal litany. The elementariness of elementary words [...] is a private and idiosyncratic matter" and the democracy of touch is simply a beautiful attempt by a poet and novelist to "fend off thoughts of mortality with thoughts of affiliation and incarnation" [5].

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 177 and 223. 

[2] Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 21-22. 

[3] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Blackwell, 2001), p. 262. 

[4] Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 118. 

[5] Ibid., p. 119. 

 

 

This is a follow up to an earlier post on the use of dialect in D. H. Lawrence as a form of defensive communication: click here.  

On the Use of Dialect as Defensive Communication in D. H. Lawrence

J. C. Green: D. H. Lawrence Portrait

(Pencil, pen, and acrylic on paper)
behance.net

 

 

Whilst it's debatable to what degree Lawrence might be considered a sophisticated dialectician, he was, according to James Walker, a master of dialect and his use of pit talk delivered in a broad East Midlands accent "frightened the life out of middle class Edwardian critics" [1]. 

 

Walker suggests that Lawrence primarily used dialect and "multiple variations of speech patterns" in order to help readers understand a character's social background, education, and intelligence. And I don't disagree with that. 

 

However, I also think Lawrence used dialect as an aggressive form of defensive communication, that is to say, verbally reactive behaviour adopted by individuals feeling anxious and self-conscious in a social context that differs from ones with which they are familiar and in which they feel more at ease. 

 

Freud was one of the first to research defensive communication from the perspective of his psychodynamic theory. But you don't need to be a qualified therapist to recognise that no one likes to feel insecure, inferior, or judged. Unfortunately, defensiveness doesn't help matters and often serves to further impede interaction. 

 

We see this, for example, when Oliver Mellors meets Connie's sister, Hilda, and doesn't quite know what to say or how best to behave and so gets defensive, slipping in and out of his expletive-laden vernacular in a manner that is almost a little insane and which comes across as affected and a form of play acting [2].  

 

Ultimately, it could be argued that his passive aggressive technique of using dialect in order to confuse and intimidate, is as ill-mannered as someone from a highly privileged background - such as Clifford - casually slipping in and out of Latin or ancient Greek when talking to someone who didn't have the good fortune to study classics at Cambridge [3].     

 

 

Notes

 

[1] James Walker, 'Tongue and Talk: Dialect poetry featuring D. H. Lawrence', a blog post on D. H. Lawrence: A Digital Pilgrimage (14 May 2018): click here. Although Walker doesn't tell us why it's a good thing to terrify people, he clearly approves and seems to personally resent the fact that these critics found Lawrence's use of dialect ugly and dismissed his plays set in the mining community from which he came as sordid representations of lower class life.   

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterey's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), chapter XVI. 

 

[3] Of course, there is a difference; the former being defensive behaviour by someone socially disadvantaged and the latter being offensive behaviour by someone in a socially superior position. Nevertheless, both types of behaviour involve an element of bullying and if the latter is snobbish, the former is, arguably, only an inverted snobbery. Being able to slip into a regional dialect or cant slang doesn't necessarily make you a better - more authentic - human being than someone who prefers to speak the Queen's English; the vernacular is not some sort of elementary language enabling a uniquely powerful expression of Dasein. 

 

 

For a follow up post to this one on the use of dialect in D. H. Lawrence as an erotico-elementary language, click here.      

A Brief Note on Achondroplasiaphobia (With Reference to the Case of Lucien Gagnero)

Velázquez: The Buffoon El Primo (c. 1644) [1]

Museo del Prado

 

 

Following a recent post in which I discussed Michel Tournier's short story Le nain rouge [click here], I received an email from a reader expressing disappointment that I didn't address the tale's overt anchondroplasiaphobia and malicious stereotyping of little people as monstrous and malevolent.

 

That's true and is, I suppose, a legitimate concern: maybe I should have said something about how the figure of the dwarf functions within the mytho-cultural imagination and maybe challenged some of the language used by Tournier to describe Lucien Gagnero.  

Having said that, it would be tricky to portray the latter in a positive or sympathetic light. Not because of his dwarfism, but because he strangles and rapes a woman; cruelly humiliates and sodomises her husband; displays a worrying desire to surround himself with children under twelve; and fantasises about being the kommandant of a Nazi concentration camp. 

 

In brief, Lucien is a depraved and sadistic psychopath - although, that of course, is precisely the negative stereotype identified on TV Tropes [click here]. 

 

Still, isn't it preferable to inspire fear and be despised as inhuman, than to be seen merely as a pint-sized figure of fun ...? 

 

 

Notes

 

 

[1] Formerly believed to be a portrait of Sebastián de Morra, a dwarf-jester at the court of Philip IV of Spain, it is now - thanks to recently discovered documentary evidence - thought to be another buffoon known as El Primo. The red robe that the figure wears reminds one of the huge crimson bathrobe that Lucien Gagnero drapes around himself and which helps trigger his metamorphosis from a little person into an imperial dwarf, full of the courage of his own monstrosity. 

 

See: Michel Tournier, 'The Red Dwarf', in The Fetishist, trans. Barbara Wright, (Minerva, 1992), pp. 61-74.       

 

 

Never Trust a Dwarf Dressed in Red

Adelina Poerio as the anonymous dwarf in Don't Look Now (1973) 

and Jean-Yves Tual as Lucien in Le nain rouge (1998)

 

 

I. 

 

One of the most terrifying figures in cinematic history is the homocidal dwarf played by Adelina Poerio in Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now (1973); a brilliant film adaptation of a short story by Daphne du Maurier published two years earlier.

In the tale, du Maurier describes the final scene when the doomed protagonist, John, finally confronts his fate:

"The child struggled to her feet and stood before him, the pixie-hood falling from her head on to the floor. He stared at her, incredulity turning to horror, to fear. It was not a child at all but a thick-set woman dwarf, about three feet high, with a great square adult head too big for her body, grey locks hanging shoulder-length, and she wasn't sobbing any more, she was grinning at him, nodding her head up and down.

      [...] The creature fumbled in her sleeve, drawing a knife, and she threw it at him with hideous strength, piercing his throat, he stumbled and fell, the sticky mess covering his protecting hands." [a] 

 

II. 

 

Lucien Gagnero, the small-bodied protagonist of Michel Tournier's short story Le nain rouge (1978) [b], also has a penchant for wearing red and committing vile deeds, including murder, and it's his tale I'd like to share with you here ...

  

Despite being a successful divorce lawyer who "applied himself with avenging ardour to the task of destroying the marriages of other people" [61], Lucien didn't find it easy being of reduced stature; it was something he had resentfully resigned himself to:

 

"When [he] reached the age of twenty-five he had to give up, with a broken heart, all hope of ever becoming any taller than the four feet one he had already reached eight years before. All he could do now was resort to special shoes whose platform soles gave him the extra four inches that elevated him from dwarf status to that of small man. As the years went by, his vanishing adolescence and youth left him exposed as a stunted adult who inspired mockery and scorn in the worst moments, pity in the less bad ones, but never respect or fear [...]" [61]

 

When a wealthy former opera singer named Edith Watson comes to see him to discuss dissolving her marriage to Bob, a young, good-looking lifeguard from Nice, Lucien is keen to take the case; scenting as he does "secrets and humiliations that more than interested him" [61]. 

 

One day, Lucien goes to visit his new client in her luxurious apartment. He is rather taken aback to find her on the terrace lying "practically naked on a chaise longue, surrounded by refreshments" [62]. The radiance of her big, golden body, "with its violent odour of woman and suntan lotion, intoxicated Lucien" and it was not merely the stifling heat of the day that made him sweat profusely. 

 

Needing to urinate, Lucien asks to use the bathroom: all black marble, spotlights, and mirrors, with a sunken tub and a shower which sprayed water from all angles (not only from above, but from behind and below as well). For some reason, this shower fascinates Lucien and he cannot resist removing his clothes and trying it, making liberal use of the toiletries at hand: "He was enjoying himself. For the first time he saw his body as something other than a shameful, repulsive object." [63] 

 

When Lucien leaves the shower, however, he sees himself reflected in the labyrinth of mirrors. Although he discerns an impressive nobility in his facial features, he can't find much to admire in his disproportionately long neck, round torso, and short, bandy legs. Even his enormous penis, which hangs down to his knees, seems more comical than anything else.   

 

It's at this point that something miraculous happens: rather than putting on his own clothes, Lucien notices a huge crimson bathrobe hanging from a chrome peg:

 

"He took it down, draped it around him until he was completely hidden within its folds [...] He wondered whether he would put his shoes on. This was a crucial question, for if he relinquished the four inches of his platform soles he would be confessing, and even proclaiming, to Edith Watson that he was a dwarf and not merely a small man. The discovery of an elegant pair of Turkish slippers under a stool decided him. When he made his entrance on to the terrace, the long train formed by the outsize bathrobe gave him an imperial air.

      [...] The notary's clerk had disappeared and given place to a comical, disquieting creature of overwhelming, bewitching ugliness - to a fabulous monster, whose comic aspect added a negative, acid, destructive component." [63]       

 

By affirming his achondroplasia, Lucien has become who he is. Just like the hunchback understands that in his deformity lies his very essence, so Lucien has had to realise that his grandeur lies within his dwarfism and is not reliant upon a pair of built-up shoes. Such a revelation is transformative and has instant results; for not only does Lucien become who he is, he also finds love. Edith was "enchanted to discover that such a small, misshapen body should be so fantastically equipped, and so delightfully efficacious" [64]. 

 

The narrator continues:

 

"This was the beginning of a liaison whose passion was entirely physical and to which Lucien's infirmity added a slightly shameful, sophisticated piquancy, for her, and a pathetic tension mixed with anguish for him. [...]

      From then on, Lucien led a double life. Outwardly he was still a small man, dressed in dark clothes and built-up shoes [...] but at certain irregular, capricious hours [...] he [...] metamorphosed into an imperial dwarf, wilful, swaggering, desirous and desired [...]" [64]

He fucks Edith, subjecting the large-bodied blonde to the law of pleasure and sending her into ecstasies that always culminated in obscene abuse for her human plaything and living dildo. Lucien didn't care what she thought of him, only he was terrified of losing her ... And when he discovers she has secretly reconciled with Bob he was "overwhelmed with murderous hatred" [65].

 

And so he kills her. Hiding in her splendid bathroom, he leaps on Edith when she enters and strangles her: "While she was in her death throes Lucien possessed her for the last time." [66] Then he sets about framing poor Bob, the young colossus with a sweet, naive face, for the rape and murder. 

 

At first Lucien returns to his old life, taking up his disguise as a little person whom people mocked or pitied. But the memory of the superhuman monster that he now knew himself to be haunted him day and night:

 

"Because he had finally had the courage of his own monstrosity, he had seduced a woman [...] killed her, and his rival, the husband [...] was everywhere being hunted by the police! His life was a masterpiece, and there were moments when he was overwhelmed with breathtaking joy at the thought that he only had to take his shoes off to become immediately what he really was, a man apart, superior to the gigantic riffraff, an irresistible seducer and infallible killer! All the misery of the past years was due to his having refused the fearsome choice that was his destiny. In cowardly fashion he had shrunk from crossing the Rubicon into dwarfism [...] But he had finally dared to take the step. The slight quantitative difference that he had accepted in deciding to reject his platform shoes [...] had brought about a radical qualitative metamorphosis. The horrible quality of dwarfism had infiltrated him and turned him into a fabulous monster. In the greyness of the lawyer's office where he spent his days he was haunted by dreams of despotism [...] and on several occasions the typists were surprised to hear him let out a roar." [66-7] 

 

 

III.

  

I think if I'd been the author of this tale I would have ended it here. Readers should note, however, that Tournier continues the story of Lucien Gagnero, taking it in a surprising direction ... 

 

First, Lucien becomes notorious in the bars and nightclubs of Paris that he parades around, whilst wearing a dark red leotard that shows off his muscles and genitals. Men soon learned to fear him and women "submitted to the obscure fascination" [68] that he exerted. Lucien then finds fame as a circus performer; his giant hand act proving to be a sensation. 

 

"But Lucien was still not completely satisfied by his fame" [69]: he wants - and takes - further cruel revenge upon Bob, who, still on the run for a crime he didn't commit, comes to him for help one day when the circus pitched its tents in Nice. 

 

Incorporating Bob into his act, Lucien publicly humiliates him over and over again, whilst, in private, he makes him into his bitch: "it happened one night, then every night, that he climbed into the side-berth in which his former rival slept, and possessed him like a female" [72]. 

 

Lucien's real love, however, is neither for rich women nor beautiful young men: it is, rather for those of his own size; i.e. children under the age of twelve. For he had noticed that whilst the adulation of the adults in the audience did nothing to soften the "ball of hatred that weighed hard and heavy in his breast" [72], the innocent love and laughter of children "cleansed him of his bitterness" [74] at last. 

 

I suppose we might call this the redeeming power of paedophilia ...

Notes

 

[a] Daphne du Maurier, 'Don't Look Now', in Don't Look Now and Other Stories, (Penguin Books, 2006), p. 55.  

[b] Michel Tournier, 'The Red Dwarf', in The Fetishist, trans. Barbara Wright, (Minerva, 1992). All page numbers following in the post refer to this edition.

 

For a follow up post to this one - on achondroplasiaphobia - please click here.

Sinister Writings 4: Purity is the Malign Inversion of Innocence

From the film poster for The Ogre, (1996) 

dir. Volker Schlöndorff and starring John Malkovich

 

 

Michel Tournier's enthralling novel The Erl-King (1970) contains many philosophically important ideas; none more so than the following apology for perversion, which is expressed so powerfully that it requires no commentary [1]:

 

"Purity is the malign inversion of innocence. Innocence is love of being, smiling acceptance of both celestial and earthly sustenance, ignorance of the infernal antithesis between purity and impurity. Satan has turned this spontaneous and as it were native saintliness into a caricature which resembles him and is the converse of its original. Purity is horror of life, hatred of man, morbid passion for the void. A chemically pure body has undergone barbaric treatment in order to arrive at that state, which is absolutey against nature. A man hag-ridden by the demon of purity sows ruin and death around him. Religious purification, political purges, preservation of racial purity - there are numerous variations on this atrocious theme, but all issue with monotonous regularity in countless crimes whose favourite instrument is fire, symbol of purity and symbol of hell." [2]    

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Having said that, there will doubtless be those who would like a commentary on the above; such persons may care to read Ursula Fabijancic's, 'Purity/Innocence: A Defense of Perversion in Michel Tournier's Le Roi Des Aulnes', in Dalhousie French Studies, vol. 72, (2005), pp. 71-86. It can be accessed via JSTOR: click here.

 

As Fabijancic rightly notes, the key notions of purity and innocence should not be taken as binary opposites; their inherent instability (and reversability) precludes attaching absolute fixed moral values to them. Also, there exists an ambiguous zone in Tournier's fictional universe where all apparent opposites meet and converge with one another. Ultimately, as readers of the novel will know, Tournier uses the term innocence in a similar manner to Nietzsche and the book's ogre-like protagonist is innocent in a way that many non-Nietzscheans will find problematic; particularly given the nature of his perverse tendencies. For Abel Tiffauges, only true outsiders - social misfits, sexual deviants, immature philosophers et al - share that same quality of innocence and forgetfulness that we find in young children. Finally, we might note in closing that Fabijancic finds Tournier's inventive defence of perversion unpersuasive from an ethical standpoint; mainly because it rests upon a highly idiosyncratic definition of the term innocence and lacks intellectual rigour and consistency. These things don't overly bother me, however. 

 

[2] Michel Tournier, The Erl-King, trans. Barbara Bray, (Atlantic Books, 2014), p. 66.      

 

 

Sinister Writings 3: I Never Knew a Man Falling Was Such a Wonderful Thing

Richard Drew/AP (2001)

 

 

I. 

 

Richard Drew's photograph of a man falling from the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001, is an image that retains a deep fascination. But the nature of that fascination, however, is ambiguous ...

 

For if most people view it empathetically, with hands pressed over their mouth and nose in a gesture combining shock, horror and shame, there are undoubtedly others who take a macabre and even perverse pleasure in it. Ultimately, we are all ethically obliged to examine our own reasons for finding it almost impossible to look away from the image ...*

 

 

II.

 

Hands up if you know of the baron des Adrets ... It's okay if you don't; I didn't either until I read an account of his life given in the sinister writings of Abel Tiffauges ...**

"'His name was François de Beaumont, and he had a château at La Frette in the Dauphiné. He lived in the sixteenth century, when the wars of religion bespattered the country with blood and strong men could work their will with impunity.

      One day, out hunting, Adrets and his officers brought a bear to bay, and its retreat was cut off by a precipice. The bear charged one of the men, who fired, hit it, and was soon rolling with it in the snow. The baron, who had seen what had happened, sprang forward to help the man but suddenly stopped, transfixed by an unutterable pleasure. He had noticed that the man and the bear, intertwined as they were, were gradually slipping towards the abyss, and the baron stood frozen and hypnotized by this fall in slow motion. Then the black bulk toppled over into the void, the only stain left on the whiteness was a grey streak, and Adrets groaned with joy.

      A few hours later the officer reappeared, wounded and bleeding, but safe - the bear had broken his fall. He expressed respectful astonishment at the baron's slowness in coming to his assistance. The baron, smiling dreamily as at some delightful recollection, replied in a mysterious sentence heavy with threat: "I never knew a man falling was such a wonderful thing."

      After that, he gave free reign to his new passion. Taking advantage of the religious wars, he imprisoned Catholics in Protestant regions and Protestants in Catholic ones, and arranged for them all to 'fall'. He worked out a subtle ritual. His prisoners were blindfolded and forced to dance to the music of a viol on top of a tower without a parapet. And the baron, breathless with pleasure, would watch them draw near, move away from, and draw near again to the void, until suddenly one of them lost his footing and fell shrieking through the air, to be impaled on a bank of lances stuck in the ground at the foot of the tower.'" [41-2] 

 

I don't know how historically accurate this account is, but François de Beaumont was certainly a genuine figure who switched sides during the religious wars of the French Reformation and became known not only for his military genius and bravery, but also for his appalling cruelty. And he is recorded as having forced eighteen prisoners to throw themselves from the top of a castle keep - so the account is probably pretty accurate. 

 

Anyway, what does it matter? There are truths which infinitely supass the truth of that which is factually correct. The crucial thing is that Adrets had chanced upon a form of cadent euphoria and that there's "probably nothing more moving in a man's life than the accidental discovery of his own perversion" [42]. 

 

Thus, the question that one hardly dares to ask is this: How many people watching the terrible events of 9/11 unfold before their eyes, also made a similar discovery to Adrets: that there is nothing more wonderful than to watch a man falling to his death ...           

 

 

Notes  

 

* The photo used here is one of a series of twelve taken by Drew. It appeared in papers around the world, often arousing angry criticism over its use. The unidentified subject of the picture was trapped on the upper floors of the North Tower and either fell whilst searching for safety or jumped to escape the fire and smoke. Of the 2,606 people who died in the attack on the WTC, it is estimated that as many as 200 fell or jumped to their deaths. For an excellent meditation on the photo, see Tom Junod's 'The Falling Man: An unforgettable story', Esquire (Sep 9, 2016): click here to read online.    

 

** Michel Tournier, The Erl-King, trans. Barbara Bray, (Atlantic Books, 2014), page references given in the text refer to this edition.  

 

For sinister writings on angelic oppression, click here. 

 

For sinister writings on the sexual politics of Adam and Eve, click here. 

Sinister Writings 2: On the Sexual Politics of Adam and Eve

Theodor Harmsen: Hermaphrodites (2017) 

The Book of Adam and Eve 

theodorharmsen.com

 

 

What do you call the layer of excess fat surrounding the vagina? 

Woman.  

 

If ever there was a joke written to offend feminists concerned with the sexual objectification of women - particularly their reduction to a body part - it's this one. 

 

And yet, if certain midrashic interpretations of God's creation of man in terms of what we would now call intersexuality are to be believed, then we might well ask what is woman if not merely a monstrous personification of cunt given an autonomous life of her own once separated off from the body of Adam.

This is not a question that escapes the attention of Abel Tiffauges:

"Reading the beginning of the Book of Genesis, one is pulled up short by a flagrant inconsistency that sticks out like a sore thumb in the venerable text. 'So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them ...' This sudden transition from the singular to the plural is downright unintelligible, especially as the creation of the woman out of Adam's rib does not occur till much later, in the second chapter of Genesis. But all is clear if one retains the singular throughout ... 'So God created man in his own image, that is, at once male and female ... And God said to him, be fruitful, multiply ...' etc. Later he sees that the solitude implied by hermaphroditism is undesirable, so he puts Adam to sleep and takes from him not a rib but his ... womb, i.e. his feminine sexual parts, and makes these into an independent being." [14-15]

 

That's interesting: for not only does it mean that Adam was originally created as an intersexed being, but - made as he was in God's own image - that God too is therefore both male and female (or, if you prefer, neither male nor female). 

 

Exactly how Adam was physically constituted is something that rabbis and Christian theologians who have bought into this idea have long debated; was he a true hermaphrodite or simply one half of a conjoined male-female twin assemblage (i.e., a single bi-sexed body)?   

 

Fascinating as it is to think of the Old Adam "armed with all his reproductive apparatus, [...] a constant prey to amorous transports of unimaginable perfection, in which he is both possessor and possessed, except - who knows? - during the periods when he was pregnant by himself" [15], this is not my main point of interest. Nor am I concerned here with the (potentially liberating) implication of this myth for those who identify as trans, queer, intersex, or non-binary. 

 

Rather, my concern is for the daughters of Eve and how this myth enables the kind of sexism contained in the joke with which I opened this post, by encouraging men to think of woman as not only a walking, talking sex organ, but a sex organ which originally belonged to Adam before God decided that the hermaphroditic model was not quite working and tore the sexes asunder.

 

If, technically speaking, woman has no sexual parts of her own - but is herself merely a sexual part of the original man "deposited outside himself [...] and taken up when needed" [15] - then why, for example, should a man worry about the ethical issue of female objectification, or wish to ensure female pleasure and fulfilment; particularly when he is "naturally out of step with woman's slow, vegetative ripenings" [8] ...?   

 

See: Michel Tournier, The Erl-King, trans. Barbara Bray, (Atlantic Books, 2014). All page references in the text refer to this edition. 

 

For sinister writings on angelic oppression, click here. 

 

For sinister writings on cadent euphoria, click here. 

Sinister Writings 1: Angelic Oppression

Cameron: Holy Guardian Angel 

According to Aleister Crowley (1966)

 

 

I. 

 

In the winter of 2017 - and as if anticipating the coronavirus - I developed a continuous dry ticklish cough, which stayed for several weeks and left me with respiratory problems. My GP sent me for a chest X-ray, but this didn't reveal anything. So he decided I had developed an asthmatic reaction and issued me with an inhaler. He also prescribed Montelukast, a medication deisigned to make breathing easier by helping to prevent airways from constricting. 

 

Two-and-a-half years later and still often breathless, I was finally given an asthma test, but this also came back negative. Having long since abandoned the steroid inhaler, I was advised to also stop taking the Montelukast tablets; in fact, the nurse who administered the test said I should never have been put on them - and then left on them for 30 months - in the first place.

 

And whilst my breathing has, thankfully, been better of late, I sense there's still an underlying issue and that, sooner or later, some sort of allergen will trigger things again. My doctor doesn't think I should be overly concerned, but I would like to know what caused the problem, will it return, and is it likely to get worse. 

 

I'm also tempted to no longer conceive of the problem in strictly medical or scientific terms, but to understand it symbolically as one best explained within angelology ...

 

 

II.

 

As far as I'm aware, unlike Abel Tiffauges, I've never done anything to antagonise my Holy Guardian Angel. But, just like demons, angels are hypersensitive and easily offended, so perhaps back in the winter of 2017 I did do or say something which called forth punishment from my HGA and that my subsequent respiratory distress wasn't merely the result of having picked up a virus, but, rather, from having been given an angel's punch ...

 

For although such is dealt with a fist that is "harder and heavier than marble" [60] and can leave one gasping for breath for a longtime afterwards, it isn't, of course, a purely material blow and so is often unfelt at first. The fist of bronze, we might say, is "enveloped in the white feathers of the spirit" and this magically softens and disguises the blow. 

 

Now, being neither a Catholic nor a Thelemite, it's difficult for me to think seriously in terms of spiritual entities existing independently of man. But still the fact remains that "sometimes I have difficulty in breathing, and then it is as if the brazen fist is [...] bearing down still with all its weight upon my chest" [60].

 

My GP, of course, whilst unable to find anything physically wrong and thus at a loss to explain my condition, had little time for such ideas; even though he identifies as a Muslim and thus presumably accepts the existence of malaikah ...   

 

Still, regardless of what he or anyone else might believe, I like to think that the angelic has charged my respiratory life with supernatural significance:

 

"Thanks to it, my lungs have made the transition from glandular darkness to visceral dawn  - even in extreme instances, to the broad daylight of consciousness. These extreme cases include the great dyspnoeic distress that makes me lie on the ground and struggle against a muderous though invisible grip; but also the profound and happy inspiration in which the whole sky, full of the flight of swallows and the sound of harps, plunges its forked root directly into my lungs." [61] 

 

 

See: Michel Tournier, The Erl-King, trans. Barbara Bray, (Atlantic Books, 2014). All page references given in the text refer to this edition. 

 

For sinister writings on the sexual politics of Adam and Eve, click here. 

 

For sinister writings on cadent euphoria, click here.