Hoplophilia 2: Mark and Jez: For the Love of Gunny

Yeah, sure. You've got sarcasm, but I've got a big gun. 

Now pass me the Doritos ...

 

 

I. 

 

To reiterate: you don't have to own a gun or be a member of the shooting fraternity to acknowledge the fetishistic appeal of firearms; guns are stylish, guns are cool, and guns are deadly. In short, guns are sexy and they excite many different types of people. 

 

Some, like Melanie Blanchard, whose case we examined in part one [click here], have an erotico-philosophical fascination for guns along with other dangerous objects that might facilitate exiting this boring world. Such people are keen to investigate the profound complicity between love and death.   

 

Others, like the socially and sexually awkward loan manager Mark Corrigan and his best friend Jeremy (played by David Mitchell and Robert Webb in the Channel 4 series Peep Show), have a more comic - although, arguably, just as kinky - fascination for firearms ...

 

 

II. 

 

Following the death of Jeremy's great-aunt, he and Mark (with the assistance of Super Hans, played by Matt King) are clearing out her house. Quite unexpectedly, Jeremy comes across a gun - or an illegal firearm as Mark calls it - hidden in an old box. 

 

Excited by his new toy, Jeremy takes Gunny home and leaves it in a drawer in his bedside table. Although Mark pretends otherwise, he's also turned on by the thought of the weapon and so, later, when he thinks Jez isn't around, he sneaks into the latter's bedroom in order to admire and fondle Gunny.   

 

The following scene, written by Simon Blackwell, is much loved by hoplophiles everywhere:

 

 

Mark: (Right, everyone's out. Might sneak a little peek at the gun. It's fine to be fascinated by the gun. It's fascinating. Everything that can kill a man is fascinating. Guns, electric chairs, paracetamol, lead piping.)

 

Jeremy: Hello Mark. 

 

Mark: Oh, hi Jez. I was just, you know, making sure it was safe. Gunny, the gun. 

 

Jeremy: You like it Mark. That's fine, you like the gun. Guns are great. Design classics like the Routemaster bus or ... those chairs. 

 

Mark: It's fine to like it as an object, isn't it? I might carry it around the flat for a bit. Would that be OK? 

 

Jeremy: Sure, man. Enjoy. 

 

Mark: (Oh, this is good, this feels so good.) [1]

 

What's interesting is how - just like Melanie in Death and the Maiden - Mark also finds the thought of deadly weapons and potentially lethal objects fascinating and how, like Melanie, it (sexually) excites him to hold the beautiful-looking gun.     

 

The episode ends with Jeremy disappointed to discover that Gunny has been deactivated: "It's like he's told me my cock doesn't work." This understanding of the gun in phallic terms is, of course, a psycho-cultural cliché - and you don't have to be a Freudian (or a James Bond fan) to see it [2]. 

 

Melanie Blanchard, if I may refer to her case once more, is happily reminded of a former lover's sex organ - "which had given her so much pleasure for so many weeks" [3] - by the gun she steals. And, when, in 1975, looking for a term to describe the group of sexy young assassins he had assembled and agreed to manage, it's no coincidence that Malcolm McLaren decided upon the term Pistols.  

 

Notes 

 

[1] 'Jeremy's Mummy' is the fourth episode of the fifth series of the British sitcom Peep Show (and the twenty-eighth episode overall). Directed by Becky Martin, it first aired on 23 May, 2008. The full script of this and other episodes of Peep Show can be found online: click here. To watch this and related scenes featuring Gunny, click here.

 

[2] Readers interested in the topic of phallic weapons as a cultural trope can learn more on TV Tropes: click here.

 

[3] Michel Tournier, 'Death and the Maiden', in The Fetishist, trans. Barbara Wright, (Minerva, 1992), p. 122.  

 

 

Hoplophilia 1: Melanie Blanchard and the Practice of Joy before Death

 

 Dave Seeley: Woman with Gun (aka San Diego Girl) 

Oil on Gesso panel (15" x 20") 

daveseeley.com

 

I. 

 

You don't have to own a gun or be a member of the shooting fraternity to acknowledge the fetishistic appeal of firearms; guns are stylish, guns are cool, and guns are deadly. 

 

In short, guns are sexy and excite many different types of people, from Melanie Blanchard, the morbidly curious young female protagonist in Michel Tournier's Death and the Maiden, to the socially and sexually awkward loan manager Mark Corrigan, played by David Mitchell, in the Channel 4 sitcom Peep Show.

 

I will discuss the latter case in part two of this post [click here]. Here, I wish to speak of Melanie Blanchard and her practice of joy before death ...

 

II. 

 

Ah, the lovely lemon-eating, death-obsessed figure of Mlle. Blanchard ... Her face "the picture of innocence, its thinness and pallor accentuated by the heavy mass of her black hair" [109] - surely one of the most intriguing figures in 20th-century French literature. 

 

I understand perfectly her metaphysical dread of boredom and that great grey wave of blandness which threatens not only to submerge her, but drown the entire world. And, like Melanie, I prefer to eat "everthing acid, sour, or highly spiced" [112] rather than stuff on cakes full of jam and covered in buttercreak icing; the childish food that people were always offering her and which "foreshadowed and provoked the advancing tide of greyness, the engulfment of life in a dense, viscid slime" [112]. 

 

And like Melanie, I believe the practice of joy before death is of vital importance; that one should constantly think about how best to construct a beautiful, stylish - some might even say chic - death and keep at hand the instruments that might facilitate such - ropes, razors, pills, and - if possible - a pistol ...

 

When she thought about [her friend's] fiancé, who was training to become a police officer, it was "always the image of the bulging holster containing his pistol that first entered her mind" [118]. She arranges to meet the young man at a café and when he leaves his cap, truncheon, and bulging holster on the counter in order to go and make a phone call, she yielded to temptation and slipped the latter into her handbag, then made a quick getaway before he returned. 

In several magnificent paragraphs, Tournier writes: 

 

"The pistol [...] was a source of great comfort. Every day, at a certain hour - she always trembled with impatience and anticipated joy as she awaited it - she brought out the magnificent, dangerous object. [...] Placed on the table, naked, the pistol seemed to radiate an energy that enveloped Melanie in voluptuous warmth. The compact, rigorous brevity of its contours, its matt and almost sacerdotal blackness, the facility with which her hand embraced and grasped its form - everything about this weapon contributed to giving her an irresistable force of conviction. How good it would be to die by means of this pistol!" [119]

 

"The pistol was not loaded, but the holster contained a magazine and six bullets, and Melanie soon found the orifice in the butt where it should be inserted. A click apprised her that the magazine was in place. Then the day came when she felt she could no longer wait to try it out. 

      She went off very early in the morning into the forest. When she came to a clearing, a long way from any path, she took the pistol out of her bag, and, holding it with both hands, as far away from her as possible, she pulled the trigger with all her might. Nothing happened. There must be a safety catch. For a moment she ran her fingers over the butt, the barrel, and the trigger. Finally a kind of protuberance slid towards the barrel, leaving a red spot exposed. That must be it. She tried again. The trigger yielded under her fingers and the weapon, as if seized by a sudden fit of madness, kicked in her hands. 

      The explosion had seemed tremendous [...] Trembling all over, Melanie put the pistol back in her bag and resumed her walk. Her legs felt weak, but she didn't know whether this was the result of fear or pleasure. She now had a new instrument of liberation at her disposal, and how much more modern and practical this one was than the rope and the chair! She had never been so free. The key to her cage was there, in her bag, next to her make-up remover, her purse, and her sunglasses." [119-20]   

 

It's not that the gun - or any other instrument of death - is particularly fascinating in itself; it's more the fatal significance of the object that counts for one who knows the sinister happiness of preparing their own exit from this life and thus putting an end to the boredom of existence. The immanence of death - made manifest in the pistol, for example - "conferred an incomparable destiny" [117] on Melanie's life.       

See: Michel Tournier, 'Death and the Maiden', in The Fetishist, trans. Barbara Wright, (Minerva, 1992). All page numbers given in the text refer to this edition. 

La Jeune Fille et la mort

A Bat and a Songbird from Nick Brandt's The Calcified (2013)

 nickbrandt.com

 

 

Lemon-eating Melanie Blanchard was an unusual girl. Docile, intelligent, and hardworking, it was impossible not to consider her a star pupil: "And yet she drew attention to herself [...] by ridiculous inventions and strange behaviour." [1] 

 

Her joyful curiosity about suicide, torture, and execution went far deeper and was far more complex than a simple fascination with horror. Like many children of her age, she was enchanted by the mystery of death, which, in her experience, had two opposing aspects:

 

"The animal corpses she had seen were usually swollen and decomposed, and exuded sanious secretions. Such beings, reduced to their last extremities, crudely avowed their basically putrid nature. Whereas dead insects became lighter, spiritual, and spontaneously attained the pure, delicate eternity of mummies. And this did not only apply to insects for, ferreting around in the attic, Melanie had found a mouse and a little bird that were equally desiccated, purified, reduced to their own distinctive essence." [2]

I couldn't help recalling this passage from Michel Tournier's short story 'Death and the Maiden' when viewing images from Nick Brandt's haunting collection of photographs entitled The Calcified (2013); a collection in which the petrified bodies of animals that have drowned in the ultra-salty waters of Lake Natron, Tanzania, are displayed for our morbid delight [3].     

 

Melanie would have loved these pictures - and would doubtless describe the fate of the animals so perfectly preserved as a good death.  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Michel Tournier, 'Death and the Maiden', in The Fetishist, trans. Barbara Wright, (Minerva, 1992), p. 109.

 

[2]  Ibid., pp. 112-113. 

 

[3] For an interesting feature on Brandt's work see Joseph Stromberg, 'This Alkaline African Lake Turns Animals into Stone', in the Smithsonain Magazine (Oct 2, 2013): click here to read online. 

 

 

I am grateful to the artist Heide Hatry for bringing these photos by Brandt to my attention via her Icons in Ash Instagram account: click here. 

Hey Look, It's Me!

Do you see yourself on the T.V. screen?

  

D. H. Lawrence has a real problem with self-seeking in the negative sense identified by St. Paul. He particularly despises those men and women who stare into the eyes of their lovers only for the opportunity to see themselves reflected and who degrade sex (a flow of feeling) into sexuality (a will to sensation):

 

"The true self, in sex, would seek a meeting, would seek to meet the other. [...] But today, [...] sex does not exist, there is only sexuality. And sexuality is merely a greedy, blind self-seeking. Self-seeking is the real motive of sexuality. And therefore, since the thing sought is the same, the self, the mode of seeking is not very important. Heterosexual, homosexual, narcistic [sic], normal or incest, it is all the same thing. It is just sexuality, not sex. It is one of the universal forms of self-seeking. Every man, every woman just seeks his own self, her own self, in the sexual experience." [1]

 

To be honest, this doesn't bother me as much as it does Mr. Lawrence. For unlike the latter, I don't subscribe to the metaphysical notion of sex as some sort of ontological anchorage point residing deep within us and possessing its own intrinsic properties etc. I'm just a bit too Foucauldian for that [2]. 

 

And whilst there may be an element of self-seeking in the various forms of sexual expression, so too are there many other elements. For love is not just one-sided or always rejoicing with truth; sometimes, it does involve falsehood, impatience, cruelty, envy, pride, rudeness, anger, and resentment; sometimes it does delight in evil and is a means of destruction; sometimes, sadly, love fails [3].          

 

What does irritate me, however, is when people self-seek within works of art; i.e., when they look or listen out for themselves in every image, song, or text, identifying either with the subject or the author of the work. It's very depressing. And, surprisingly, even some readers of Lawrence fall into this trap, despite his explicit warnings about the dangers of self-idolatry. 

 

I know people who only really enjoy his works based in or around the East Midlands so that they might better locate themselves and feel an intense sense of belonging. They thrill to imagine characters speaking with accents like their own and walking down streets they themselves have walked along. They turn Sons and Lovers, for example, into a giant mirror reflecting their own history and childhood memories. 

 

It's not so much parochialism, as a mix of narcissism and nostalgia. Either way, the result is the same; artworks which are intended to facilitate a radical becoming-other and deterritorialization, are made self-reassuring and all-too-familiar. If only people bristled like cats when they saw themselves reflected!     

 

    

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'Review of The Social Basis of Consciousness, by Trigant Burrow', in Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 335-36.   

[2] See the post entitled 'Lady Chatterley's Postmodern Lover' (9 Sept 2013) where I discuss Lawrence contra Foucault: click here. 

 

[3] In giving this more negative - yet more rounded and more honest - portrait of love, I am suggesting the opposite of what St. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 13. Of course, it should be noted that the latter, writing in Greek, used the word agape [ἀγάπη] and that he was not referring to sexual love or érōs [ἔρως].     

 

 

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.