D. H. Lawrence and the Arts: An Initial Reaction Written Under the Influence of Sour Grapes and Baudrillard

Edinburgh University Press, (2020)

 

 

This new collection of essays on D. H. Lawrence, edited by Catherine Brown and Susan Reid, probably didn't feature on many people's Christmas wish-list. 

 

But for those who feel obliged to keep up with recent developments in Lawrence scholarship, it's obviously required reading. Indeed, one feels duty-bound to break bread with the authors who have contributed to this Companion, even if the bread that is offered is, occasionally, just a bit stale round the edges and showing signs of mould.      

 

Why should that be? Why can't we have an entire loaf of freshly baked bread? 

 

Well, that's difficult when you commision all the usual suspects to write about art primarily in terms of aesthetics and discuss Lawrence's work with more references to philosophical and cultural trends rooted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, than to ways of thinking that have emerged in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries [1]. 

 

So it is that whilst the editors of this volume clearly understand the need for a "re-evaluation of existing critical positions" [2], they at no time pause to consider if the very idea of art as a distinct sphere of activity in an era of transaesthetics [3] hasn't - like sex - become merely a nostalgic fantasy.

 

Art, in other words, has lost its specificity and is now indistinguishable from everyday life. It no longer represents anything - no longer means anything - and art no longer possesses the aesthetic power to transfigure or transcend the world; we have realised our own utopia and illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible [4]. 

 

And, unfortunately, not even D. H. Lawrence can save us ...

 

Notes

[1] You will find more references in the index to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts to Friedrich Schiller, for example, than to Jean Baudrillard. In fact, there are no references to the latter, despite his being one of the most important (and provocative) cultural theorists of the last forty years.

 

[2] Catherine Brown and Susan Reid, 'Introduction' to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts, ed. Catherine Brown and Susan Reid, (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), p. 1.

 

[3] See Jean Baudrillard, 'Transaesthetics', in The Transparency of Evil, trans. James Benedict, (Verso, 1993), pp. 14-19. Readers who are interested in this idea should also see also Baudrillard's The Conspiracy of Art, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Ames Hodges, (Semiotext(e), 2005).

 

[4] Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Phil Beitchman, Paul Foss and Paul Patton, (Semiotext(e), 1983), p. 38.

 

 

I Don't Care if Monday's Blue ...

(John Hopkins University Press, 1997)

 

I.

 

Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique (1967) is a novel by French writer Michel Tournier [a]. A philosophically-informed retelling of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719), it subverts the original narrative and, according to Deleuze, "traces a genesis of perversion" [b]. 

 

Crusoe's attempt to transform his little island into a regular, well-organised home-from-home - "like one of those great tidy cupboards" [8] full of lavender-scented linen - fails when he discovers, thanks to his relationship with Friday, that there are other ways of living than those valued within white European society. 

 

Whether these ways are more natural, more authentic, or more vital, is, of course, open to debate. Personally, I'm not sure I buy into this anti-civilisation line any longer and doubt that there's all that much to learn from primitive peoples. And besides, I cannot gather at the drum any longer in good faith [c] and have no wish to wallow in the mire, roll in the damp warmth of my own excrement, or engage in savage acts of ritual atrocity. I'm not even interested in skinning a goat and making a wind harp from its dried entrails. 

 

For just as you don't reach the body without organs and its plane of consistency by wildly destratifying, sometimes it's preferable to exercise caution and remain all too human, than become-other or become-animal just for the fun of it. As Deleuze and Guattari were always at pains to point out, staying organized, signified, subjected so that you may still respond to the dominant reality, is not the worst thing in the world [d].      

 

Certain anarchists think we can do away with rules and regulations - just as certain gymnosophists think we can dispense with clothes. But as Crusoe discovers, keeping up appearances and forming habits of behaviour, are "sovereign remedies against the demoralizing effects of solitude" [76] - although later he abandons his old ways for a kind of solar pantheism. 

 

 

II.

 

Friday appears about half-way through the novel and Crusoe's first instinct is to shoot him as he flees his Araucanian captors before they make a sacrifice of him, by chopping up his body and burning it. 

 

Pursued by two men, Friday is running directly towards the spot in which Crusoe has been hiding and observing events on the beach, presenting the latter with a moral problem:

 

"If he shot down one of the pursuers he might rouse the whole tribe against him. On the other hand, if he shot the sacrificial victim it might be interpreted as a supernatural act, the intervention of an outraged divinity. He had to take one side or the other, being indifferent to both, and prudence counseled that he should support the stronger. He aimed at the breast of the fugitive, who was now very close ... [135].

 

Unfortunately, Tenn the dog decides to leap up and divert Crusoe's aim. And so Friday is saved and it was "the first of the pursuers who staggered and fell to the ground. The man behind him stopped, bent over the dying body, stared blankly for a moment at the trees, and finally turned and fled wildly back to his companions." [135]

 

And so, purely by accident, Crusoe ends up with a "naked and panic-stricken black man" [135] pressing his forehead to the ground and placing the foot of a "bearded and armed white man, clad in goatskin and a bonet of fur, accoutered with the trappings of three thousand years of Western civilization" [135] on his neck.     

 

Now, no one in their right mind wants a slave: the responsibility of being a master is exhausting and quickly makes one ill-tempered and often cruel. It's bad enough having any kind of dependent - a child, an elderly parent, a pet cat, but a slave offering total submission is just too much trouble. And so, Crusoe makes a big mistake taking on Friday. 

 

His second big mistake is trying to reform Friday and teach him all the white man's tricks; how to plough and sow, milk goats, make cheese, soft-boil eggs, trap vermin, dig ditches, wear clothes, etc. For Friday, with the slave's natural insolence, simply laughs at his his sober-minded mentor and undermines his authority on every occasion.      

 

Ultimately, he ruins everything that it had taken Crusoe years to build - literally stopping the clocks and blowing everything sky-high with gunpowder. And it was all so predictable. Friday causes Crusoe grave concern from the off: "Not merely did he fail to fit harmoniously into the system, but, an alien presence, he even threatened to destroy it." [156] 

 

But Crusoe simply can't bring himself to do what he needs to do in order to preserve the fragile victory of order over chaos that he had accomplised - not even after Friday fucks Speranza and produces mandrakes of his own from this illicit union. In fact, it's following this that Crusoe has a moment of biblical-inspired revelation:

 

"For the first time I asked myself if I had not sinned gravely against Charity in seeking by every means to compel Friday to submit to the laws of the cultivated island, since in doing so I proclaimed my preference, over my coloured brother, for the earth shaped by my own hands." [160] 

 

It's this kind of Christian moral stupidity that undermines all mastery. Crusoe forces himself to conceal his vexation, swallow his pride, and henceforth learn to love Friday, forgiving him his ways even when they are profoundly shocking (such as his cruel indifference to the suffering of animals): "For the first time he questioned his white man's sensibilities" [163] and values.  

 

Of course, there are moments when Crusoe pulls himself together and he feels nothing but rage and hatred as he thinks of "the ravages caused by Friday in the smooth functioning of the island, the ruined crops, the wasted stores, and scattered herds; the vermin that multiplied and prospered, the tools that were broken or mislaid" [164]. Friday even steals his tobacco. 

 

Sometimes, Crusoe dreams of Friday's death; be it the result of natural causes, accident, or foul play. But at other times, the new Robinson adores Friday's physical beauty and delights in his nakedness; he observed with a passionate interest "Friday's every act and their effect upon himself, which seemed to lead toward an astonishing metamorphosis" [182]. 

 

Crusoe lets his hair grow into long tangled locks and, encouraged by Friday, he goes naked in the sun until his flesh takes on a deep, golden-copper colour. He has effectively gone native - or become-minoritarian as some might say [e]. 

 

That's certainly a goal for those who want it and Crusoe is clearly proud of the great change he has undergone via his relationship with Friday - "Under his influence [...] I have travelled the road of a long and painful metamorphosis" [210] - but, for me, it holds no appeal: I don't care if Monday's blue, I have no wish to become-Friday ...

  

III. 

 

The irony, of course, is that Friday jumps at the first opportunity to get off the island and abandon Crusoe; he does everything he can to ingratiate himself with the crew of the Whitebird so that he is taken aboard and transported to England. 

 

In other words, he knows where his best interests lie; in the very civilisation that Crusoe rejects. Having said that, Tournier will later make it clear that he thinks this a grave mistake on Friday's part; a decision that will mark his downfall. 

 

For, according to Tournier, unsmiling Europeans live in "glass cages of reserve, coldness, and self-containment" [f] and have an obsessive distrust of the flesh. Thus, a happy-go-lucky aeolian spirit like Friday will never find a home amongst such people ...     

 

 

Notes

 

[a] The English edition of this work which I'll be referring to and quoting from throughout this post is simply entitled Friday, trans. Norman Denny, (John Hopkins University Press, 1997).    

[b] Gilles Deleuze, letter to Jean Piel (27 August, 1966), in Letters and Other Texts, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges, (Semiotext(e), 2020), p. 31. Deleuze will later describe Tournier's work as a great novel - a view shared by l'Académie française which awarded it the Grand Prix du roman in 1967.

 

[c] Despite his fascination (and, indeed, identification) with primitive cultures, D. H. Lawrence came precisely to this conclusion. In the essay 'Indians and an Englishman', he writes: 

 

"The voice out of the far-off time was not for my ears. It's language was unknown to me. And I did not wish to know. [...] It was not for me, and I knew it. Nor had I any curiosity to understand. The soul is as old as the oldest day, and has its own hushed echoes, its own far-off tribal understandings sunk and incorporated. We do not need to live the past over again. Our darkest tissues are twisted in this old tribal experience, our warmest blood came out of the old tribal fire. And they vibrate still in answer, our blood, our tissue. But me, the conscious me, I have gone a long road since then. [...]

      I don't want to live again the tribal mysteries my blood has lived long since. I don't want to know as I have known, in the tribal exclusiveness. [...] I know my derivation. I was born of no virgin, of no Holy Ghost. Ah no, these old men telling the tribal tale were my fathers. [...]  But I stand on the far edge of their fire light [...] My way is my own, old red father; I can't cluster at the drum any more." 

 

See Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays, ed. Virginia Crosswhite Hyde, (Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 119-120. Critics will doubtless point out that this model of human cultural evolution subscribed to by Lawrence - advancing from dark-skinned tribal society to white-skinned modernity - is certainly questionable (if not inherently racist).    

 

[d] See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (The Athlone Press, 1996), pp. 160-61.  

[e] I have written about Crusoe's becoming-minoritarian via his relationship with Friday in an earlier post. See 'On the Sex Life of Robinson Crusoe 3: Becoming the Perverted Sun Angel' [click here]. 

[f] Michel Tournier, The Wind Spirit, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, (Collins, 1989), p. 185.

      Later, in this same work, Tournier reveals that he had wanted to dedicate his novel "to all of France's immigrant workers, to those silent masses of Fridays shipped to Europe from the third world [...] on whom our society depends". And, just in case his political sympathies (and self-loathing) weren't already clear enough, he adds: "Our affluent society relies on these people; it has set its fat white buttocks down on their brown bodies and reduced them to absolute silence [...] They are a muzzled but vital population, a barely tolerated yet totally indispensable part of our society, and the only genuine proletariat that exists ..." Ibid., p. 197

      For a counterview to this way of thinking, see Pascal Bruckner's The Tears of the White Man, trans. William R. Beer, (Free Press/Macmillan, 1986) and/or The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism, trans. Steven Rendell, (Princeton University Press, 2010). For my take on the latter text, click here.  

I'll Put a Knife Right In You: Notes on the Case of Sid and Nancy

Sid and Nancy indulge in a little knife play for the camera
Photos by Pierre Benain (1978) 

snapgalleries.com

 

 

Sex Pistol Sid Vicious had a fetishistic fascination with knives: he loved to play with knives: he loved to pose with knives. And, if The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle is to be be believed, he was happy to threaten the good citizens of Paris with a knife if they got in his way whilst he was out cruising the boulevards and arcades looking for trouble.

 

Sid also liked to cut himself, both on and off stage. And his penchant for self-harm and violence was something he shared with his American girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, who was a troubled (some might even say wayward) young woman. 

 

Diagnosed with schizophrena at fifteen, Nancy left home two years later and worked as a stripper and prostitute in New York, before moving to London in 1977, where she met Vicious, with whom she began an eighteen-month relationship. The star-crossed lovers were as devoted to one another as they were addicted to drugs and self-destructive behaviour.        

 

None of these facts, however, means that Sid murdered Nancy on that fateful night in October 1978. And it certainly doesn't mean that an unfairly vilified twenty-year old girl deserved such a horrible fate; lying semi-naked and bleeding to death on a cold bathroom floor, having received a single stab wound to the abdomen.*

 

The established facts of the case are well-documented. But we'll probably never know the truth of what actually happened; was it unintentional homocide ... was there another party involved ...?

 

Vicious was charged with second-degree murder, but died of a heroin overdose whilst out on bail and just days before he was due to go into a studio with Paul Cook and Steve Jones to record an album of popular standards in order to raise funds for his legal defence, including, at Malcolm McLaren's (amusing if tasteless) suggestion, Mack the Knife ...

 

 

* Note: According to the police report, Miss Spungen was stabbed with a Jaguar Wilderness K-11 folding knife and not a 007 flick knife as is often claimed. 

 

Musical bonus: The Misfits, Horror Business (Plan 9 Records, 1979): click here. 

      This classic punk single was inspired by the murder of Nancy Spungen and Hitchcock's Psycho (Marion Crane, as fans of the film will know, also meets her bloody end in a bathroom). 

      It's interesting to note that Jerry Only - bassist with the Misfits - was one of the small group of friends with Sid at his new girlfriend's apartment on the night he took his fatal overdose (1 Feb 1979) and that there was talk of the band backing Vicious on a proposed solo album.  

 

For an earlier post on piquerism and knife play, please click here.       

Piquerism and Notes on Knife Play

The Ballard of Jazz the Knife 

(c. 1992)

 

 

I. Opening Remarks 

 

Piquerism - for those of you unfamiliar with the practice - is a perverse sexual interest in penetrating the skin of another person with sharp objects, including pins, razors, and knives. 

 

Most often, the targeted areas of the body are the breasts, buttocks, and genitals and whilst for many lovers it's a form of edge play or risk-aware consensual kink, for the true sadist - who laughs at the idea of obtaining permission or that libertinism should conform to a code of health and safety - piquerism only becomes interesting when it results in extreme suffering and death or is performed post-mortem.   

 

 

II. Biofictional Remarks

 

As a young child, I might be said to have had something of a piqueresque liking for sharp objects myself. I far preferred, for example, pricking balloons with a needle, than inflating them. And once, at school, I placed a drawing pin on a fat girl's chair in order to see if she too would explode with a bang [1].  

 

And whilst I had an extensive range of toy guns, my favourite thing to play with was a plastic dagger with a retractable blade with which I could create the illusion of having stabbed myself through the heart (or knifed a friend in the back).    

 

 

III. Literary Remarks

 

I don't know how D. H. Lawrence felt about this subject, but the following scenes are worth noting:

 

(i) Women in Love (Ch. VI) [2]

 

Pussum has confessed that she's not afraid of anything except black-beetles. She's certainly not afraid of blood ... 

 

So when a man with a pale, jeering face laughs at her, she suddenly jabs a knife across his hand, causing him to leap up, cursing. He glares at her with sardonic contempt as the blood begins to flow from the wound inflicted by this feline young woman. 

 

Birkin looked on with obvious displeasure, but Gerald is aroused by the girl's action. Later, in the taxi home, she sits close to him and grasps his hand in hers; "rapid vibrations ran through his blood and over his brain [...] and all his nerves were on fire, as with a subtle friction of electricity".     

 

(ii) The Plumed Serpent (Ch. XXIII) [3] 

Cipriano strips and publicly executes a group of prisoners with a bright, thin dagger ...

"'The Lords of Life are Masters of Death,' he said in a loud, clear voice. 

      And swift as lightning he stabbed the blindfolded men to the heart, with three swift, heavy stabs. Then he lifted the red dagger and threw it down.

      'The Lords of Life are Masters of Death,' he repeated." 

Later, Cipriano and his fellow revolutionaries indulge in a little fetishistic blood play, dipping their hands into blood collected from the bodies of the executed men in a stone bowl and raising wet, red fists. They then sprinkle some of the blood on a fire in a neo-pagan religious ritual.   

(iii) The Woman Who Rode Away [4]

 

A bored, middle-class white woman goes in search of adventure and to give her heart to the god of the Chilchui Indians ... 

 

Two men grip her arms whilst two others "with curious skill slit her boots down with keen knives, and drew them off, and slit her clothing so that it came away from her". 

 

They also remove the pins from her hair and touch her on the breasts and back. Then they drug her and groom her over the course of several weeks into the role of sacrificial victim. Her captors, the Indians, are superficially kind to her; gentle and considerate. Yet she sensed their cruelty underneath and when the time comes for her to die, they show no hesitation in killing her:

 

"When she was fumigated, they laid her on a large flat stone, the four powerful men holding her by the outstretched arms and legs. Behind stood the aged man [...] holding a knife and transfixedly watching the sun; and behind him again was another naked priest, with a knife."

 

They are waiting for the right moment, when the red sun is about to sink: Then the old man will strike with his flint blade and accomplish the sacrifice ...

 

 

Notes

 

[1] She didn't. And rather than encouraging my scientific curiosty, the teacher, Mrs. Horncastle, gave me a telling off in front of the class and made me apologise to poor, red-faced Mandy Howard.    

[2] D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987). Lines quoted are on p. 73. 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, ed. L. D. Clark, (Cambridge University Press, 1987). Lines quoted are on p. 380.

 

[4] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Woman Who Rode Away', in The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, (Cambridge University Press, 1995). Lines quoted are on pp. 55 and 70. 

 

For another post involving knife play (and with reference to the case of Sid and Nancy), click here.

Towards a Synthetic Nativity

 

O come, all ye cyborgs, joyful and triumphant 

O come ye, o come ye to Bethlehem 

 

 

Whilst looking at a piss-poor picture of the Nativity printed on the front of a crappy Christmas card, it occurred to me that whilst she certainly had problems of her own to deal with, one thing that the Blessed Virgin Mary didn't have to worry about was the presence of microplastics in her placenta. 

 

But that's now a very real issue for pregnant women presently awaiting (like the Blessed Virgin Zena) to give birth ...

 

For scientists have discovered a range of synthetic materials in tissue samples taken from new mothers in Italy and described this as a matter of great concern (even though at this stage the effect that the tiny particles may have is unknown and the women who took part in the study had no complications during pregnancy or with the births of their bei bambani) [1].

 

The fear is that chemicals found in the microplastics - which are small enough to be transported in the bloodstream - could damage the immune system of a developing foetus; or that we'll end up inadvertently creating a race of cyborg babies composed of human cells and inorganic elements. 

 

The research team, led by Dr. Antonio Ragusa, found microplastic fragments in two-thirds of the placentas sampled - and the fact that they only sampled 3% of the donated tissue suggests it's not just microplastic ocean pollution that should trouble us [2] ... 

 

 

Notes 

 

[1] The research is published in the scientific journal Environment International, Vol. 146 (Jan. 2021). The article, entitled 'Plasticenta: First evidence of microplastics in human placenta', by Antonio Ragusa et al, can be read online by clicking here.  

 

[2] Last year, over 320 million tons of plastic was manufactured and over 40% of this was used in single-use packaging.

 

On the Sex Life of Robinson Crusoe 3: Becoming the Perverted Sun Angel

Edvard Munch: The Sun (1910-11)
Photo © Munchmuseet

 

O Sun, deliver me from the pull of gravity! 

Is my transformation not sufficiently in the manner of your own radiance?

 

 

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Everything starts and finishes with the sun [a]. 

 

No surprises then that Michel Tournier's Robinson Crusoe [b] should eventually abandon all terrestrial forms of love, weighed down as they ultimately are by the spirit of gravity, and seek to discover the solar sexuality that lies beyond; learning to walk, as Lawrence would say, in his own sun-glory with bright legs and uncringing buttocks [c].     

 

In a sense, Crusoe effects a becoming-minoritarian [d]. Dissatisfed with his own sombre and melancholy white face, he prays to his new god:

 

"O Sun, cause me to resemble Friday. Give me Friday's smiling countenance, his face shaped for laughter. [...] The eyes in which there is always a hint of derision, a touch of mockery [...] The curved, avid, animal mouth with its uptilted corners." [202-03]

 

At other times, he observes his negro companion with crazed intensity, marvelling at his physical presence and otherness:

 

"I watch Friday as he walks toward me with his untroubled, steady pace over the shining sand of the lagoon [...] 

      Shall I ever learn to walk like him with his natural majesty? Do I sound absurd if I say that he seems clothed by his nakedness? He carries his body like a sovereign affirmation, he bears himself like a monstrance of flesh. His animal beauty proclaims itself, seeming to create a nothingness around it." [205-06]      

 

Friday has grace, as well as rippling muscles and strong knees. He is one of those solar aristocrats that Lawrence dreams of, drawing his nobility and his strength directly from the sun. Watching Friday emerge one day from the ocean, Crusoe admires the "gleam of  wet, firm flesh" [210] which brings to mind thoughts of Venus rising from the waves. He is quick to note in his Journal, however, "that at no time has Friday inspired me with sodomite desire" [211].

I don't know if that's true. But Crusoe makes an interesting case to support his denial of homosexual feelings:

"For one thing, he came too late, when my sexuality had already become elemental and was directed toward Speranza. But above all, Venus, or Aphrodite, did not emerge from the waves and tread my shores in order to seduce me, but to drive me into the realm of her father, Uranus, the 'sky crowned with stars' [...] It was not a matter of turning me back to human loves but, while leaving me still an elemental, of causing me to change my element. This has now happened. My love affair with Speranza was still largely human in its nature; I fecundated her soil as though I were lying with a wife. It was Friday who brought about the deeper change. The harsh stab of desire that pierces the loins of the lover has been transformed for me into a soft jubilation which exalts and pervades me from head to foot, so long as the sun-god bathes me in his rays. There is no longer that loss of substance which leaves the animal, post coitum, sad. My sky-love floods me with vital energy which endows me with strength during an entire day and night. If this is to be translated into human language, I must consider myself feminine and the bride of the sky. But that kind of anthropomorphism is meaningless. The truth is that at the height to which Friday and I have soared, difference of sex is left behind. Friday may be identified with Venus, just as I may be said, in human terms, to open my body to the embrace of the sun." [211-12]

 

Whatever you may think of this passage, dear reader, I think you'll admit it's an interesting one - not least of all because it offers us a model of sex that is solar in origin and "so much more than phallic, and so much deeper than functional desire" [e]. It's a model that feminises Crusoe and gives him a tantric experience of sex involving semen retention and non-localised orgasm, allowing solar-sexual energy to radiate throughout his entire body.   

 

I think it's Deleuze who best understands what it is Tournier is attempting to do in his novel and where Crusoe's process of dehumanization leads; namely, "the discovery of a cosmic energy or of a great elemental Health" [f]. 

 

Anyway, shortly after this, a ship arrives at the island of Speranza and, after twenty-eight years, it seems that Crusoe might finally be rescued ... But, of course, having become a sun-man or solar-aristocrat, there's no going back and he finds the company of the ship's captain and crew nauseating:

 

"What principally repelled him was not so much the coarse brutality, the greed and animosity that emerged so clearly [...] It was easy to imagine encountering men of a different stamp, mild-mannered, benevolent, and generous. For Robinson the evil went deeper, and he defined it to himself as the incurable pettiness of the ends to which all men feverishly devoted their lives." [224]  

 

These men had no conception of or reationship with the sun; for them, it was just a bright light in the sky or a big ball of flame. How could they know of the sun "as possessing a spirit that could irridiate with eternity those who had learned to open their hearts to it?" [224] 

 

One might paraphrase Lawrence at this point: 

 

"With [his] knowledge of the sun, and [his] conviction that the sun was gradually penetrating [him] to know [him], in the cosmic carnal sense of the word, came over [him] a feeling of detachment from people, and a certain contemptuous tolerance for human beings altogether. They were so un-elemental, so un-sunned. They were so like graveyard worms." [g]

 

That's almost exactly how Crusoe felt. So no surprise then that he chooses to stay on his island (although Friday, moving in the opposite direction, decides to leave aboard the ship):

"The truth was that he was younger today than the pious and self-seeking young man who had set sail in the Virginia, not young with a biological youth, corruptible and harbouring the seeds of its decrepitude, but with a mineral youth, solar and divine. Every day was for him a first beginning [...] Beneath the rays of the sun-god, Speranza trembled in an eternal present, without past or future. |He could not forsake that eternal instant, poised at the needle point of ecstasy, to sink back into a world of usury, dust, and decay." [226]

 

And so Crusoe returns to Speranza and enjoys a new sunrise:

 

"Drawn up to his full height, he was confronting the solar ecstasy with a joy that was almost painful, while the bright splendour in which he bathed washed him clean of the grime of the past day and nigt. A blade of fire seemed to penetrate his flesh, causing his whole being to tremble. Speranza was shedding her veil of mist, to emerge unsullied and intact. Indeed, it was as though the agony and the nightmare had never taken place. Eternity, reasserting its hold on him, had effaced that ugly but trivial interlude. He drew a deep breath, filled with a sense of utter contentment, and his chest swelled like a breastplate of brass." [234]   

 

 

Notes

 

[a] I think I first said this in a Treadwell's paper entitled 'Sun-Fucked: On the Question of Solar Sexuality and Speculative Realism in D. H. Lawrence' (2012). An extract from this essay can be found in a post on Torpedo the Ark: click here. Or you can find a revised and edited version of the text published in full on James Walker's Digital Pilgrimage by clicking here. This being the case, I'll not attempt to summarise the essay or incorporate ideas from it here, though it should be noted that I express a much less golden-rosy view of solar sexuality than either Tournier or Lawrence.   

 

[b] Michel Tournier, Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique (Éditions Gallimard,1967). The text I'm using here is the English translation, simply entitled Friday, trans. Norman Denny, (John Hopkins University Press, 1997). All page numbers given in the post refer to this edition.

 

[c] D. H. Lawrence, 'Sun-men', in The Poems, Vol. I., ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 456. This is one of a series of related poems; see also 'Sun-women', 'Democracy, 'Aristocracy of the sun', 'Conscience', and Immorality', ibid., pp. 456-58.    

[d] Becoming-minoritarian is a philosophical concept developed by Deleuze and Guattari. In a molecular nutshell, it's an attempt to abandon molar configurations of identity (i.e., escape the face) and resist the predominant norms enforced by a majoritarian state machine. It can involve a becoming-woman, becoming-animal, or, indeed, as in this case, a becoming-negro. Each of these affective becomings involves deterritorialization and a constant process of change; they do not involve pretence, posing, or imitation. It's important to understand that Crusoe is not simply an 18th-century wigger attempting to emulate Friday and steal his style. Nor is he erotically fetishising Friday's blackness - although, at times, it might seem that way - and has no desire to either fuck or be fucked by the latter.

 

[e] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Novel', Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 189.  

 

[f] Gilles Deleuze, 'Michel Tournier and the World Without Others', in The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, (The Athlone Press, 1990), Appendix II, section 4, p. 303.  

      This notion of die große Gesundheit is, of course, taken from Nietzsche, who writes of "a new health, stronger, more seasoned, tougher, more audacious, and gayer than any previous health". See The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, (Vintage Books, 1974), Section 382.  

[g] D. H. Lawrence, 'Sun', in The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, (Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 23-24.     

 

To read part one of this post - on Crusoe's dendrophilia - click here. 

 

To read part two of this post - on Crusoe's ecosexuality - click here. 

 

 

On the Sex Life of Robinson Crusoe 2: The Man Who Married the Earth (and Sired Mandrakes)

Illustration from De Materia Medica (1460)

by Greek physician and botanist Pedanius Dioscorides

 

As we discovered in part one of this post, a bite from a red-spotted spider is enough to put any man off placing his penis inside a mossy hole in a tree, no matter how inviting the prospect is: click here.

 

However, this painful experience didn't stop Michel Tournier's reimagined Robinson Crusoe [a] from further experimenting with what is now known as ecosexuality; i.e., an eroticised form of nature worship [b]. In fact, following this incident Crusoe learns how to love his island as a whole and to conceive of the Earth as a living entity [c]. 

 

Awaking one day from an al fresco nap, he feels full of a queer new tenderness for Speranza:

 

"He felt as never before that he was lying on Speranza as though on a living being, that the island's body was beneath him. Never before had he felt this with so much intensity, even when he walked barefoot along the shore that was teeming with so much life. The almost carnal pressure of the island against his flesh warmed and excited him. She was naked, this earth that enveloped him, and he stripped off his own clothes. Lying with arms outstreched, his loins in turmoil, he embraced that great body scorched all day by the sun, which now exuded a musky sweat in the cooler air of the evening. He buried his face in the grass roots, breathing open-mouthed a long, hot breath. And the earth responded, filling his nostrils with the heavy scent of dead grass and the ripening seed, and of sap rising in new shoots. How closely and how wisely were life and death intermingled at this elemental level! His sex burrowed like a plowshare into the earth, and overflowed in immense compassion for all created things. A strange wedlock, consummated in the vast solitude of the Pacific! He lay exhausted, the man who had married the earth, and it seemed to him, clinging timorously like a small frog to the skin of the terrestrial globe, that he was swinging vertiginously with her through infinite space." [119-120]

 

That's a lovely piece of writing, reminiscent of D. H. Lawrence; one thinks of Birkin's marriage to the vegetation in Women in Love [click here]. 

 

Later, Crusoe discovers a "gently rolling meadow broken by folds and slopes and dressed in a covering of round-stemmed, pink-tinted grass" [120] that excites his interest and in which he deposits his sperm, thereby accomplishing a further stage in the metamorphosis he is undergoing. 

 

Now, according to the Freudian definition of the term, Crusoe - as one who deviates with respect to aims - is a sexual pervert. But Crusoe, however, sees things a little differently. Writing in his journal, he decides that were it not for a social mechanism directing a man's sex exclusively to the vagina of a woman, he would naturally allow it to return to its original source - Mother Earth.      

 

And to those who might protest that nothing can be born of such an incestuous union ... 

 

Nearly a year later, Crusoe "perceived that his love was bringing about a change in the vegetation of the pink coomb" [128]. At first, he had taken no notice of this, but then his attention was caught by the growth of a new plant that he hadn't seen anywhere else on the island:

 

"The plant had large, lace-edged leaves which grew in clusters at the level of the earth on a very short stalk. It bore white, sharp-scented blossoms with pointed petals and brown, ample berries which largely overflowed their calyxes.

      Robinson observed them with curiosity, but thought no more about them until the day when it became unmistakably apparent that they appeared within a few weeks at the precise place where he had sown his seed. Thereafter he ceaselessly pondered the mystery. He sowed his seed in the earth near the cave, but to no avail. It seemed that these plants could grow nowhere but in the pink coomb. Their strangeness restrained him from plucking them and dissecting and tasting them, as he might otherwise have done." [129]   

 

It's at this point in the text that ecosexuality gives way to Jewish mysticism concerning the mandrake, as Crusoe recalls a verse from the Song of Songs: The mandrakes give a smell, and at our gates are all manner of pleasant fruits, new and old, which I have laid up for thee, O my beloved. [d]    

 

"Could it be that Speranza was keeping that bibical promise? He had heard of the miracle of the plants, such as nightshade, which grow at the foot of gibbets, where the hanged have let fall their last drops of semen, and which are held to be the fruit of the crossing of man with earth. On the day when this thought occurred to him, he ran to the pink coomb and, kneeling beside one of the plants, very gently lifted it out of the ground, digging round the root with his hands. It was true! His love-making with Speranza was not sterile. The white, fleshy, curiously forked root bore an undeniable resemblance of the body of a woman-child. Trembling with delight and tenderness, he put the mandrake back, and pressed the earth around it as one puts a child to bed. Then he walked away on tiptoe, taking great care not to crush any of the other plants. 

      Thenceforward, blessed by the Bible, a stronger and more intimate bond united him with Speranza. [...] That this closer union represented a further step in the shedding of his human self was something of which he was certainly aware, but he did not measure its extent until he perceived, when he awoke one morning, that his beard, growing in the night, had begun to take root in the earth." [129-130]  

 

I can't imagine what Daniel Defoe - author of an asexual Crusoe - would make of all this. And I don't really care. For me, Tournier has produced an astonishing novel in which, as Deleuze notes, the isle of Speranza is as central to the story as Crusoe himself [e]. 

 

However, as we shall see in part three of this post, Crusoe's relationship with the island is not the end of his story and strange-becoming. How could it be? For as he himself recognises, his "love affair with Speranza was still largely human in its nature" [212]; he inseminated her body as though he were still lying with a woman. 

 

There has to be more than this; one has to be able to go still further; one has to discover at last that beyond all forms of terrestrial sexuality - forever subject to the spirit of gravity - lies solar sexuality ...    

 

Notes

 

[a] Michel Tournier, Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique (Éditions Gallimard,1967). The text I'm using here is the English translation, simply entitled Friday, trans. Norman Denny, (John Hopkins University Press, 1997). All page numbers given in the post refer to this edition.   

 

[b] I have written elsewhere on Torpedo the Ark about ecosexuality: click here and here, for example. I think it's fair to say I mostly regard it as a morally conventional, all-too-human form of hippie idealism masquerading as queer ecology. Ultimately, I prefer my own model of floraphilia as a form of perverse materialism. That said, since it's Christmas week, lots of love and best wishes to Beth and Annie.      

 

[c] This idea is, of course, a very old one and in Crusoe's time even respectable scientists still believed the Earth to be alive or some kind of superorganism. This view eventually fell from favour, however, and, as a Nietzschean, I'm highly suspicious of attempts to revive it. For whilst it's true that Nietzsche champions the sovereignty and sanctity of the Earth, I would refer those who would absorb his philosophy into their own system of environmental ethics or eco-vitalism to The Gay Science, III. 109, in which he instructs us to always remain on our guard against thinking that the world (and/or the universe) is a living being. 

 

[d] I'm quoting from the King James Version of the Bible, Song of Songs 7:13. 

      It should be noted that it wasn't just the ancient Jews who were fascinated by the mandrake. Because its roots have hallucinogenic properties and often resemble a human figure, they have been associated with a variety of superstitious practices and beliefs throughout history and are still regarded as sacred plants within contemporary pagan circles.       

 

[e] See Gilles Deleuze, 'Michel Tournier and the World Without Others', in The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, (The Athlone Press, 1990), Appendix II, section 4, pp. 301-321. A brilliant reading of Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique as one would expect. 

 

 

The third and final part of this post on the sex life of Robinson Crusoe - sun-fucked - can be read by clicking here.

 

 

On the Sex Life of Robinson Crusoe 1: Getting Jiggy with a Soap Bark Tree

Even a tree has its own daimon. 

And a man might lie with the daimon of a tree. 

- D. H. Lawrence 

 

 

I. 

 

As regular readers will know, dendrophilia has featured in several posts on Torpedo the Ark, including, most recently, one in which I discuss an illustration by Wallace Smith for Ben Hecht's controversial novel Fantazius Mallare (1922): click here. 

 

However, as you can never have too much of a wood thing, I thought I might share details of the happy liaison between Michel Tournier's reimagined Robinson Crusoe [a] and a fallen soap bark tree (Quillaja saponaria) ...    

 

 

II.

 

With time on his hands, Crusoe develops many new interests. Among these, is an interest in the "marital rites of the creatures surrounding him" [113]. Not the mammals and birds, "whose couplings seemed to him a repulsive caricature of human love" [113], but the insects. 

 

He was particularly fascinated by the role the latter play in pollination, a process that seemed to him "both moving and supremely elegant" [113] and he spent many long hours observing the queer relationship that existed between a wasp and an orchid [b]. 

 

This "wonderful mingling of subterfuge and ingenuity" [115], makes him not only reconsider his religious beliefs - "had the natural world been contrived by an infinitely wise and majestic God, or by a baroque Demiurge driven to the wildest whimsicalities by his love of the bizarre?" [115] - but also wonder whether there were trees on the island which "might be disposed to make use of himself" [115] in a similar manner that the orchid exploits the wasp ...

 

Suddenly, "the branches of the trees were transformed in his mind into voluptuous and scented women whose rounded bodies were waiting to receive him" [115]. And so Crusoe sets off to find a suitable lover:     

"Searching the island from end to end, he finally discovered a quillai tree, which had been blown over by the wind but not wholly uprooted. The trunk, which lay on the ground, ended in a fork of two main branches rising a little into the air. The bark was smooth and warm, even downy at the point of the fork, where there was a small aperture lined with silky moss.

      Robinson hesitated for some days on the threshold of what he later called his 'vegetable way'. He hung about the quillai with sidelong glances, discovering in the two branches thrusting out of the grass a resemblance to huge, black, parted thighs. Finally he lay naked on the tree, clasping the trunk with his arms while his erect penis thrust its way into that mossy crevice. A happy torpor engulfed him. He lay dreaming with half-closed eyes of banks of creamy-petaled flowers shedding rich and heady perfumes from their bowed corollas. With damp lips parted they seemed to await the gift to be conferred on them by a heaven filled with the lazy drone of insects. Was he the last member of the human race to be summoned to return to the vegetative sources of life? The blossom is the sex of the plant. Innocently the plant offers its sex to all as its most rare and beautiful possession. Robinson lay dreaming of a new human species which would proudly wear its male and female attributes on its head - huge, luminous, scented." [115-116]

 

Alas, this blissful life is fated not to last beyond several happy months. First the rains come. Then a spider ruins everything: for one day, as he lay spread upon the wooden body of his beloved soapbark, "a searing pain in his gland brought him sharply to his feet" [116] and he spotted a large red spider running along the trunk of the tree before vanishing into the grass. "It was some hours before the pain abated, and his afflicted member looked like a tangerine." [116] 

 

Ouch! Perhaps not surprisingly, this incident puts Crusoe off dendrophilia: 

 

"Robinson had suffered many misadventures during his years of solitude amid the flora and fauna of a world enfevered by the tropical sun. But the moral significance of this episode was unavoidable. Although it had been caused by the sting of a spider, could his malady be regarded as anything other than a venereal disease [...]? He saw in this a sign that the 'vegetable way' might be no more than a blind alley." [116] 

 

That's a shame - and I think this an absurd reading of what happened. However, it has the significant effect of transforming Crusoe from a dendrophile into a full-blown ecosexual, as we will see in part two of this post ... [click here].    

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Michel Tournier, Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique (Éditions Gallimard,1967). The text I'm using here is the English translation, simply entitled Friday, trans. Norman Denny, (John Hopkins University Press, 1997). All page numbers given in the post refer to this edition.

      The subject of Crusoe's sexual life whilst on his island has intrigued many authors. Diana Souhami, for example, wrote an award-winning study of Alexander Selkirk, the real-life castaway whose story inspired Daniel Defoe, in which she cheerfully speculated on his masturbatory habits and erotic preferences, ranging from buggery to bestiality. What she doesn't suggest, however, is that Selkirk/Crusoe may also have been a tree-hugger, in the carnal sense. If you want to know about that, you have to read Tournier's novel.

      See Diana Souhami, Selkirk’s Island, (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2001). Best-known for her unconventional biographies of famous lesbians, this book was perhaps a bit of a surprise for Souhami's readership. Combining elements of fiction and fantasy with fact, it is difficult to categorise as a work. It should probably be noted, however, that Selkirk's own memoirs contain no hint of impropriety with goats.  

[b] Gilles Deleuze, who praised Tournier's novel - suggesting that it traced a genesis of perversion - would later, in collaboration with Félix Guattari, use this double figure of the wasp and orchid to illustrate the concepts of rhizome, becoming, and deterritorialization. Like Crusoe, Deleuze and Guattari were fascinated by the manner in which certain orchids display the physical and sensory characteristics of female wasps in order to entice male wasps into unnatural relations and co-opt them into their own reproductive cycle. 

      See Deleuze and Guattari, Mille plateaux (1980), trans. into English as A Thousand Plateaus by Brian Massumi, (University of Minnesota Press, 1987). The material I refer to is in the Introduction: Rhizome. As far as I am aware, Tournier has never received the credit he is due for initiating this line of thinking; indeed, there is but a single reference to Tournier in A Thousand Plateaus (p. 261) and this quotes from his later novel Les Météores (1975), not Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique. 

      However, Deleuze did write a lengthy essay on the latter, which was published as 'Michel Tournier and the World Without Others' in an appendix to The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, (The Athlone Press, 1990), pp. 301-321. 

 

 

The third and final part of this post on the sex life of Robinson Crusoe - sun-fucked - can be read by clicking here.  

 

 

On Things That Go Bump in the Theatrical Night

Misha Fitzgibbon in The Atonement of Lesley Ann 

by Síomón Solomon
Photo by Anna McLoughlin

 

 

Ghosts have been an integral part of drama since ancient Greece and, arguably, the theatre itself is an inherently uncanny space; one that evokes all kinds of feelings, memories, and spirits, etc. 

 

So I was pleased to see that Irish playwright Síomón Solomon made a spectral figure central to his work The Atonement of Lesley Ann, which premiered on February 15th at the Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin, as part of the Scene and Heard Festival (2020), directed by Larissa Brigatti and starring the young actress Misha Fitzgibbon [1].      

 

Of course, there are critics and theatregoers who roll their eyes whenever a ghost appears on stage and feel that supernatural elements detract from the seriousness and realism of a work. Indeed, for such people, there is the danger also that otherworldly apparitions unintentionally give rise to comedy and cause sniggering rather than induce terror.       

Others just find ghosts on stage old-fashioned; it reminds them too much of Victorian theatre which developed much of the technical trickery still used to scare us, such as the phantasmagoria, for example; "a spooky magic lantern show in which images of the dead, projected onto smoke, loomed menacingly over the spectators. To make the effect even more chilling, the audience sat in the dark for the first time ever in the British theatre, the spectres floating out of the black towards them." [2]

 

But, as I say, I was glad to see Solomon - whose interest in and knowledge of all things that go bump in the night is extensive - have the courage to write the work he wanted to write and ignore those who told him to reconsider (i.e. abandon) the more occult elements and root the play firmly in the real world. 

 

Such critical advice may be well-intentioned - it may even be very sensible - but, in my view, it entirely misses the point of what Solomon is attempting to do in this genre-defying and daringly experimental work. Sure, he could exorcise the ghost and remove the poetry and, yes, that would simplify things; but sometimes less is not more, it is simply less (as in less imaginative, less, intelligent, and less interesting).

       

My hope is that The Atonement of Lesley Ann will one day receive the full-production, wide audience, and critical acclaim that it deserves.

 

 

Notes  

 

[1] It might be noted that, although young, Miss Fitzgibbon was - against the author's own wishes - significantly older than the murdered ten-year-old whose terrible case the work is based on. Whilst I understand there are issues surrounding the casting of minors in works that deal with adult themes, by not using a child in the lead it's undeniable that some of the shock value and horror of the story is lessened. 

 

[2] Sophie Nield, 'Theatre of screams: on ghosts and drama', The Guardian (1 Nov 2010), click here. 

 

 

For additional thoughts on The Atonement of Lesley Ann, click here. And for still further thoughts, click here. 

 

   

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.