A Brief Note on the Black Beethoven Controversy

Terry Adkins: still image taken from the video Synapse (2004)

Part of the Black Beethoven series of works

 

 

Chris Tomlinson at Breitbart is getting his knickers in a twist due to the fact that the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels has chosen to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Beethoven's birth by posting a portrait of the composer as imagined by the American artist Terry Adkins [1].

 

Readers are expected to be outraged at this woke attempt to blackwash European cultural history, but, really, this (supposed) controversy about Beethoven's racial origin or ethnicity is old news [2] and even the video by Adkins from which the still is taken was made sixteen years ago. So, unless one subscribes to some kind of sinister anti-white conspiracy theory, it's hard to get too worked up about this ... 

 

What's more, I quite like the image and whilst I don't know how seriously Adkins took the myth of Beethoven's blackness, I can see why it would intrigue and amuse him and suspect he just wanted to have some fun with it - not least of all in order to piss off overly-sensitive white folk, like Chris Tomlinson [3]. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Chris Tomlinson, 'Woke Art Centre Celebrates Beethoven Birthday with Portrait of Composer as a Black Man', Breitbart (18 December, 2020): click here. 

 

[2] As Alexander Carpenter notes: "Beethoven being of African descent is not a new idea: the notion of the great composer's secret ethnicity has circulated at the fringes of the media and scholarship for more than a century." See his excellent article 'Was Beethoven Black? A Twitter meme reveals more about race and music than the composer’s origins', on The Conversation website (30 July, 2020): click here. 

 

[3] It's important to also note - as Kanitra Fletcher reminds us - that Adkins often re-examined the lives of historical figures in his work - not just white German composers - in order to uncover neglected details and question the processes by which people are celebrated, remembered negatively, or simply forgotten about. Thus he wasn't just trying to be playful and provocative with his Black Beethoven series. And ultimately, of far more interest to Adkins than this myth of Beethoven's blackness, was the triumph of the composer in overcoming his deafness to create some of the world's most powerful music. See Fletcher's article on Adkins on the Landmarks website: click here.

 

Crawling on All Fours in Shaggy Inhumanity ...

William Blake: Nebuchadnezzar (c. 1795-1805)

tate.org.uk

 

 

I. The Case of King Nebuchadnezzar

 

Most people are probably vaguely familiar with the figure of King Nebuchadnezzar who, if the Bible is to be believed, was deprived of his mind by God and forced to live like an animal as punishment for excessive pride or hubris. The fact that he destroyed Solomon's Temple and held God's chosen people captive probably didn't go down well either [1]. 

 

William Blake famously produced a large colour print depicting this Babylonian monarch reduced to the status of a mad beast. As can be seen, he looked pretty rough during this seven year period; almost like some sort of werewolf. Alexander Gilchrist writes that the picture shows Nebuchadnezzar: 

 

"crawling like a hunted beast into a den among the rocks; his tangled golden beard sweeping the ground, his nails like vultures' talons, and his wild eyes full of sullen terror. The powerful frame is losing semblance of humanity, and is bestial in its rough growth of hair, reptile in the toad-like markings and spottings of the skin, which takes on unnatural hues of green, blue, and russet." [2]

 

Happily for Nebuchadnezzar, at the end of the septennium he is restored to sanity and full human status - indeed, he even gets his kingdom back, having learned his lesson, so all's well that ends well in his case ...     

 

 

II. The Case of Robinson Crusoe

 

Despite what naturists may choose to believe, I'm not convinced there's anything positive to be gained from the experience of nudity; I certainly don't think that running about with your kit off in the woods or on the beach, makes you essentially healthier, happier, or more vital. 

 

Having stripped off his clothes in a heavy shower of rain, Robinson Crusoe later muses on this question of nakedness and the importance of garments: 

 

"It was true that neither the temperature nor any consideration of modesty required him to go about dressed in a civilized manner. Sheer habit had caused him to do so, but now in his despair he began to appreciate the value of that armour of wool and linen with which human society had hitherto protected him. Nakedness is a luxury in which a man may indulge himself without danger only when he is warmly surrounded by his fellow man. For Robinson [...] it was a trial of desperate temerity. Stripped of its threadbare garments - worn, tattered, and sullied, but the fruit of civilized millennia, and impreganted with human associations - his vulnerable body was at the mercy of every hostile element. The wind, the thorned shrubs, the rocks, and the pitiless light assailed and tormented their defenceless prey." [3] 

 

Clothes serve many important functions. But offering a degree of physical protection in a hard, sharp and dangerous world is by no means the least of these. However, as time passes on the island, Crusoe succumbs to the devastating effects of isolation and eventually finds himself as naked - and as bestial - as Nebuchadnezzar in Blake's famous print: 

 

"Robinson could not have said how long it was since he had left his last shred of clothing on some thornbush. In any case, the thought of sunburn no longer troubled him, since his back, flanks, and thighs were now protected by a thick coating of dried mud. His hair and beard had grown so long that his face was almost invisible beneathy their tangled mass. His hands had become mere forepaws used for walking, since it made him giddy to stand upright. His state of physical weakness [...] but above all the breaking of some little spring in his soul, had led him to move only on his hands and knees. He knew now that man [...] can only stay upright while the crowd packed densely around him continues to prop him up. Exiled from the mass of his fellows, who had sustained him as part of humanity without his realizing it, he felt he no longer had the strength to stand on his own feet. He lived on unmentionable foods, gnawing them with his face to the ground. He relieved himself where he lay, and rarely failed to roll in the damp warmth of his own excrement. He moved less and less, and his brief excursions always ended in his return to the mire. Here, in its warm coverlet of slime, his body lost all weight, while the toxic emanations from the stagnant water drugged his mind. Only his eyes, nose, and mouth were active, alert for edible weed and toad spawn drifting on the surface." [4] 

 

III. Lou Carrington's Contrasting Vision of the Pure Animal Man

 

Crusoe's experience of becoming-animal doesn't sound so great a life - and certainly puts being in a Covid lockdown into perspective. It obliges one also to reconsider D. H. Lawrence's fetishisation of the animal man, articulated, for example, in St. Mawr by Lou Carrington who informs her (somewhat sceptical) mother that she is tired of nice, clean men with minds and wants instead men full of their own animal mystery, burning with life:

 

"'A pure animal man would be as lovely as a deer or a leopard, burning like a flame fed straight from underneath. And he'd be part of the unseen, like a mouse is, even. And he'd never cease to wonder, he'd breathe silence and unseen wonder, as the partridges do, running in the stubble. He'd be all the animals in turn, instead of one, fixed, automatic thing, which he is now, grinding on the nerves.'" [5]   

 

It's a lovely vision - in stark opposition to the image of Crusoe -  but one worries that just as the latter is the product of a fear of animality and the loss of humanity defined in moral-rational terms and related to the covering of one's nakedness, so Lawrence's fantasy is the product of his own romanticism and a longing for a natural paradise of some kind, in which man can dispense with clothing and his animal nature will no longer be corrupted and domesticated by civilisation.    

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Readers interested in the story of Nebuchadnezzar will find it in the Old Testament Book of Daniel, a collection of legendary tales and apocalyptic visions dating from the 2nd century BC. The consensus among scholars is that the work should obviously be read as historical fiction, rather than historical fact.   

 

[2] Alexander Gilchrist, The Life of William Blake, (Dover Publications, 1998), p. 408-09. 

 

[3] Michel Tournier, Friday, trans. Norman Denny, (John Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 33.  

 

[4] Ibid., p. 40.

 

[5] D. H. Lawrence, 'St. Mawr', in St. Mawr and Other Stories, ed. Brian Finney, (Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 62.       

Notes on The Fetishist (and Other Stories) by Michel Tournier

(Minerva Press, 1992)

 

 

I. 

 

This collection of short stories by Michel Tournier - originally published as Le Coq de Bruyère (1978) - is a queer and often disconcerting mix of the sordid supernatural (to borrow the author's own description). 

 

Such a mix will, of course, not be to everybody's liking; one anonymous reviewer dismissed the tales as curiosities at best and sneered that Tournier was "no more than a cerebral Joyce Carol Oates, lazily toying with dark urges and forbidden pleasures" [a].   

 

Other readers - myself included - who enjoy philosophically-informed fiction that explores the porno-mythic imagination and accelerates what Jonathan Dollimore termed the perverse dynamic, will, however, like this book - and like it a lot. 

 

To be perfectly frank, I don't care if Tournier is a didactic writer, or if his characters "often seem more like prototypes, moving with the momentum of the ideas they embody, than like real people" [b]. The last thing I wish to encounter in works of art are real people. I meet real people every day in the real world and I'm sick to death of them.

 

Perhaps that's why I was so excited by the concept of photogenesis in 'Veronica's Shrouds', one of the stand-out stories in The Fetishist, which "implies the possibility of producing photos that go beyond the real object" [c]. Such photos do not merely capture a model's likeness or reveal a hidden aspect; they create something new and allow for a becoming-photogenic (even if this process can prove fatal, as it does here, to poor Hector).      

 

Other tales that I absolutely loved include 'The Red Dwarf' and 'Death and the Maiden' - both of which inspired posts on Torpedo the Ark: click here and here, for example. The young female protagonist of the latter, Melanie Blanchard, is, for me, one of the most memorable figures within 20th-century French literature; a character that might have been given us by the great Belgian writer Amélie Nothomb. 

 

As for the story which, in the English translation, lends its title to the collection and which I was particularly looking forward to read, well, I have to admit, it's a bit disappointing. I don't know why that is, but suspect it's because I don't quite share the protagonist's passion for slips, stockings, panties, and bras, etc. Nevertheless, it's a story worth commenting upon at more length ...

 

 

II.

 

'The Fetishist' is a mildly amusing story of sexual obsession; the monologue of an erotomaniac, Martin, who has briefly escaped from the asylum where he has been confined for many years after attempting to steal a garter belt from a woman on the Paris Metro. An extremely harsh and unjust punishment for a man who, whilst he may have kinky tastes and be very highly-strung, isn't mad even in the assessment of the asylum's medical director.              

 

As something of a philosopher on the catwalk, I share Martin's love of clothes and his contempt for nudity: 

 

"They say that the tailor makes the man. How true! A naked man is a worm without dignity, without a function - he has no place in society. I've always had a horror of nudity. Nudity is worse than indecent - it's bestial. Clothes are the human soul. And even more than clothes - shoes." [d] 

 

This is true too, of course, for women - perhaps more so, inasmuch as womanhood and the question of style are inextricably linked (and may, in fact, even be one and the same). And Martin's fate is to be consumed with desire for women and their clothing; not just their underwear, but also their hats and dresses and even handkerchiefs. 

 

Again, what he can't stand is female nudity - not even that of his wife, Antoinette, on their wedding night:

 

"When I went back into the room [...] Antoinette was lying on the troika. Stark naked! And she was looking at me smiling, a little red in the face even so. But I didn't recognize her. Oh yes, there was her face, with its smile that I loved, but that big white body displayed there in front of my eyes like ... like ... Like something in the butchers window! And I was ashamed for her, for myself, for us both." [203]

What saves the situation for Martin is spotting the chair on which his new wife has discarded her clothes:

 

"It was like a little island of solid ground in the middle of a swamp. So I went over to the chair [...] and, well, I went down on my knees and buried my face in the pile of clothes. A warm, soft pile, which smelled good, like new-mown hay in the summer sun. I stayed there a long time like that, on my knees, my face hidden. [...] Next I picked up the clothes and held them in a bundle against my face, and stood up, keeping them there so as not to see anything. I walked over to the bed and scattered them over Antoinette's body. And I said: 'Get dressed!' Then I rushed out like a maniac." [203-04]

Readers will doubtless be pleased to know that Martin does eventually consummate the marriage; but only when Antoinette consents to be fucked fully-dressed. Afterwards, they establish an agreed set of rules governing their lovemaking: "To start with we had agreed that she would never appear naked in front of me." [205] Antoinette quickly grows to like this arrangement, as it secures her a fashionable wardrobe and a wide range of expensive and sophisticated lingerie. 

 

Unfortunately, Martin's fetish develops in a new direction - one that leads him along a crooked path; first stealing an "adorable  little bra in mauve satin trimmed with lace" [210] from a cashier working at the local cinema, and then ... well, then came the regrettable incident on the Metro: "That was what wrecked everything. I must have been mad!" [212] 

Enflamed after a shopping expedition to buy still more fancy lingerie for Antoinette, Martin notices a pretty girl push pass him as he enters the Parisian subway system. That might have been the end of it, only there was a sudden gust of wind:

 

"A ferocious draught was rushing through the half-opened gates. It hoisted up the girl's miniskirt and held it there for a moment, even though she quickly clamped both hands down on her thighs. But in that split second I had seen a suspender belt, and what a suspender belt, it burned me, it pierced me, it practically killed me [...] In black nylon, gathered wide, the white skin of her thighs contrasting sharply with the long, very long, suspenders which started at the belt and travelled down to collect her stockings in their little chromium-plated clips." [212-13]  

 

Of course, he has to have it. And so the story goes from being a Benny Hill-like fantasy, into an unsavoury tale of sexual assault:

 

"I chased after the girl. I caught her up, and wedged her into a corner. Luckily we were alone. I stammered: 'Your suspender belt, your suspender belt, quick, quick!' At first she didn't understand. Then, without hesitating, I pulled up her skirt. She screamed. I repeated: 'Quick, your suspender belt, and I'll go away.' Finally, she obeyed. In the twinkling of an eye, it was done. I had my trophy [...] I was radiant. I brandished my suspender belt like a Red Indian flaunting his Paleface's scalp." [213]

 

When Antoinette discovers what he has done, she leaves him and Martin's life pretty much collapses. He starts stealing from the hoisery section of his local department store, but his heart is no longer in it. Secretly, he longs for the day he is finally caught: "I'd had enough. I wanted to make an end of it." [214]

 

Eventually, he is caught and is sent to prison. Then is interviewed by a psychiatrist and sent to the asylum. But soon he is gripped once more by his fetish for women's underwear. The fact is that whilst some men stand to attention before the flag of their nation, for illicit lovers like Martin it's frilly black knickers and pink nightslips that make them stiff with respect and desire. 

 

And, whilst I don't condone the incident on the Metro, neither do I condemn fetishists for their peccadilloes.     

 

Notes

 

[a] From a review of The Fetishist in Kirkus Reviews (15 August, 1984): click here to read online. 

 

[b] Bob Halliday, 'The Sexual Imagination of Michel Turner', The Washington Post, (28 October, 1984): click here to read online. 

 

[c] Michel Tournier, 'Veronica's Shrouds', The Fetishist, trans. Barbara Wright, (Minerva, 1992), p. 96.  

[d] Michel Tournier, 'The Fetishist', ibid., p. 199. Future page references to this story will be given directly in the text.

 

 

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.