Additional Thoughts on Síomón Solomon's 'The Atonement of Lesley Ann'

Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego 

by Simeon Solomon (1863)

 

 

I.

 

Síomón Solomon's The Atonement of Lesley Ann (2020) - a theatrical ghost-cum-love story (based on actual events) - continues to haunt my imagination ... [1]

 

After reading and re-reading the script (kindly given to me by the author) over the Christmas and New Year period, it has suddenly triggered thoughts of Stockhausen's seminal work Gesang der Jünglinge (1955-56) [2], which, like Solomon's play, features the voice of a child which it seamlessly integrates with electronic sounds, creating a new (and rather terrifying) listening experience.  

It's possible that Solomon was hoping to create something similar with his use of music and audio effects including police sirens, radio static, and the howling wind of Saddleworth Moor. However, without attending a performance of the work one cannot say how successful he is in this. 

 

 

II.      

 

Gesang der Jünglinge is based on mytho-biblical events described in the Book of Daniel [3], wherein the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar throws three young Jews - Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego [4] - into a super-heated furnace after they refuse to bow down to a giant golden statue made in his image. 

 

Miraculously, they are unharmed and are heard singing praises to God who has sent an angel to protect them from the flames, transforming their intense heat into a cool dawn breeze [5]. Naturally astounded by what he has witnessed, Nebuchadnezzar commands his people to henceforth worship Yahweh, God of the Jews, and he appoints the three holy youths to high office. 

 

 

III.

 

According to Michel Tournier, it was Gesang der Jünglinge that he repeatedly listened to whilst writing Le Roi des aulnes (1970) [6] - not Schubert's Erlkönig (1815) as many might imagine - and he explains that his novel and Stockhausen's composition share a similar terrible logic that requires the sacrifice (or murder) of small children and the presence of an ogre ...

 

If you listen to Gesang der Jünglinge, says Tournier, what is most striking is that only pre-pubescent voices can be heard and that the joyful and triumphant end of the Bible story is of no interest whatsoever to Stockhausen:  

 

"He keeps only the sound of crystalline voices rising out of the torture of the flames. Bodies tortured in the fire are represented by voices tortured in a thousand ways by sophisticated electronic devices. Voices? In fact there is only one voice, electronically multiplied by repeated recording overdubbed upon itself; the child sings in chorus with himself. Children, torture from which there is no escape, a single voice overdubbed upon itself - in all these ways Stockhausen's piece resembles The Erl-King." [7]   

 

And in these ways also both the above works feel strangely present in The Atonement of Lesley Ann ...

 

Notes

 

[1] For an earlier post written on this work by Síomón Solomon, please click here. And for further thoughts, click here.

 

[2] Karlheinz Stockhausen's Gesang der Jünglinge ('Song of the Youths') brought together the two (previously opposing) worlds of German elektronische Musik and the French musique concrète. Those who wish to listen to the astonishing result, can click here.  

 

[3] See the Book of Daniel, 3: click here for the King James Version of the story or here for the New International Version. 

 

It is generally accepted amongst modern scholars that the Book of Daniel originated as a collection of stories among the Jewish community in Babylon and Mesopotamia in the Persian and early Hellenistic periods (5th to 3rd centuries BCE), expanded by the visions of chapters 7-12 in the Maccabean era (mid-2nd century). It is also agreed that Daniel is a legendary rather than a purely historical figure.   

 

[4] These are the Babylonian (or Chaldean) names that the three Jewish children were given; their original Hebrew names were Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah. 

 

[5] In Christian interpretations of this story, the angel is in fact Jesus and he is depicted in icongraphy with a cross upon his halo. The story thus has great significance for members of the Christian faith.

 

[6] Michel Tournier, Le Roi des aulnes (Éditions Gallimard, 1970). Translated into English as The Erl-King, by Barbara Bray, (Atlantic Books, 2014).   

 

[7] Michel Tournier, The Wind Spirit, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, (Collins, 1989), pp. 104-05. Note, I have slightly modified the translation from the original French text, Le vent Paraclet, (Éditions Gallimard, 1977). 

Suffer the Little Children: D. H. Lawrence on Child Sexuality, Puberty, and Savage Initiation Rites

Portrait of Lawrence as a young boy

 

 

D. H. Lawrence despised false notions of childhood purity and innocence, as if children were entirely ignorant of their own bodies and pleasures; "even in a child of three, rudimentary sex throws strange shadows on the wall".*

 

Having said that, he insists that the sexuality of pre-pubescent children is distinct from that of adults and that if the latter should intervene at all in the sexual behaviour of the former it is only as guarantors of this specificity. 

 

Thus, in an interesting passage in Fantasia whilst he writes in favour of allowing children to witness the passions of adult life (and animals fucking), he strongly opposes formal sex education: 

 

"It is ten times criminal to tell young children facts about sex, or to implicate them in adult relationships. A child has a strong evanescent sex consciousness. It instinctively writes impossible words on back walls. But this is not a fully conscious mental act. It is a kind of dream act - quite natural. The child's curious, shadowy, indecent sex-knowledge is quite in the course of nature. And does nobody any harm at all. Adults had far better not notice it. But if a child sees a cockerel tread a hen, or two dogs coupling, well and good. It should see these things. Only, without comment. Let nothing be exaggeratedly hidden. By instinct, let us preserve the decent privacies. But if a child occasionally sees its parent nude, taking a bath, all the better. Or even sitting in the W. C. Exaggerated secrecy is bad. But indecent exposure is also very bad. But worst of all is dragging in the mental consciousness of these shadowy dynamic realities." [125-26] 

 

For Lawrence, puberty - which he explains in pollyanalytic terms of dynamic consciousness and the biological psyche - is an absolute and crucial dividing line: before it, sex is "submerged, nascent, incipient only" [134]; after it, sex is not quite the be-all and end-all, but a hugely important factor nevertheless and "an element of sex enters into all human activity" [66]. 

 

So vital is puberty for Lawrence, that he strongly advocates that it is marked by some form of initiation, for both sexes, although his primary interest seems to be the process of turning boys into men: 

 

"Boys should be taken away from their mother and sisters [...] at adolescence. They should be given into some real manly charge. And there should be some actual initiation into sex life. Perhaps like the savages, who make the boy [...] suffer and endure terrible hardships, to make a great dynamic effect on the consciousness, a terrible dynamic sense of change in the very being. In short, a long, violent initiation, from which the lad emerges [...] cut off forever from childhood [...] [139] 

 

I don't quite know what Lawrence has in mind here, or to whom he is referring when he speaks of savages. I do know, however, that he read various anthropological accounts of initiation ceremonies, so perhaps he was thinking of those tribal peoples who practice circumcision on adolescent boys, or engage in acts of ritualised homosexuality, including semen ingestion via the fellating of elders.  

 

For the cruel truth is that in societies which do practice such rites, the transtion from the biological state of childhood into the socio-sexual status of adulthood is never completed without tears and bloodshed ...

 

 

Notes

 

* D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 138. Future page references to this work will be given directly in the post.

 

Pédophilie (with Reference to the Cases of Michel Foucault and Gabriel Matzneff)

 Suffer the little children to come unto us ...

 

Whatever some people choose to believe, children are not angels and even pre-pubescent youngsters possess an immature form of sexuality that they will often seek to playfully explore as a natural part of their development. That, we might say, is simply an established (biological and psychological) fact.  

 

The problem, however, is that this fact of child sexuality is subject to an ever-shifting socio-cultural interpretation by adults, some of whom wish to safeguard the innocence of those deemed to be incapable of giving consent and some of whom wish to share in or exploit the affections of children whom they argue are perfectly capable of expressing their feelings and know very well what they do and do not want to do.         

 

This latter position was pretty much that of everyone who located themselves on the radical wing of French politics in the 1960s and '70s, including, for example, Michel Foucault ... 

 

In 1977, having previously added his name to an open letter published by Le Monde [1] defending three individuals who had been charged over sexual activity with minors (or what is known outside of France as statutory rape), Foucault signed a petition addressed to the French parliament calling for the decriminalisation of all consensual relations between adults and minors under the age of fifteen [2]. He also later took part in a radio discussion of this topic with Guy Hocquenghem and Jean Danet [3].

 

Amongst other things, they expressed their shared concern that the penal system was not merely punishing acts deemed criminal, but in the process of constructing a new type of bogeyman - the paedophile - who was being held up as a danger to society in much the same way that the figure of the homosexual had previously been used.         

 

For Foucault, the suggestion that children - particularly over the age of twelve - were unable to consent to sexual relations (either with one another or with adults) was itself an unacceptable form of abuse, restricting their right to freedom and decision making via the use of contractual law introduced into the amorous realm. Children, he said, should be fully empowered to find pleasure in any way they liked.

 

What this argument ultimately hinges upon is whether one considers child sexuality as fundamentally different from adult sexual behavior and, as such, something that should be preserved as a form of virgin territory "with its own geography that the adult must not enter" [4] under any circumstances or for any reason. 

 

Clearly, Foucault isn't prepared to buy into this idea of children's sexuality as a specific sexuality "with its own forms, its own periods of maturation, its own highpoints, its specific drives, and its own latency periods" [5]. Nor does he think that children are a particularly vulnerable population who need protecting from adults or, indeed, from their own desires.

 

It's precisely this kind of thinking that, over forty years later, has finally landed Gabriel Matzneff in hot water ... [6]

 

Notes

 

[1] Foucault was not the only well-known French intellectual to sign this; his name was just one of over sixty attached to the letter - written by Gabriel Matzneff (see footnote 6 below) - that appeared in Le Monde on 26 January, 1977. For an English translation of the letter and a list of the signatories, click here.

 

[2] Again, it should be noted that the petition was also signed by many other prominent intellectuals, including Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, and even dear old Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. As I say in the post, pretty much everyone on the radical left at this time was pro-sexual freedom, the extension of civil rights, and the breaking of all taboos (if only to outrage the bourgeoisie). For an interesting article by John Henley writing in The Guardian (24 Feb 2001) on how the call to legalise sex with children rebounded on some of the luminaries of May '68, click here.    

 

[3] The radio discussion was produced by Roger Pillaudin and broadcast by France Culture on 4 April, 1978. A transcript was later published as La Loi de la pudeur in Recherches 37, April 1979. The first full translation in English, by Alan Sheridan, appeared under the title 'Sexual Morality and the Law' in Michel Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman, (Routledge, 1988). This was republished as 'The Danger of Child Sexuality', in Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961-1984, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, (Semiotext(e), 1996).   

 

[4] and [5] Michel Foucault, 'The Danger of Child Sexuality', in Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961-1984, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Lysa Hochroth and John Johnston, (Semiotext(e), 1996), p. 267.

 

[6] Gabriel Matzneff is a French writer who had long boasted of his penchant for sex with children and openly detailed his activities in his books. Despite this, he escaped criminal prosecution for many decades and enjoyed the support of the French literary establishment. However, at the end of 2019 Vanessa Springora published Le Consentement, describing her illicit relationship with Matzneff in the mid-1980s when she was fourteen and he was fifty. The book ignited a controversy in France and led to prosecutors opening a rape inquiry. Matzneff is also due to appear in court in September of this year charged with being an apologiste for paedophilia in a case brought by the Blue Angel Association.    

On Initiating Youth into the Democracy of Touch

Some youths playing football as imagined by D. H. Lawrence 

in a water colour entitled Spring (1929)

 

 

When D. H. Lawrence writes of the inspiration of touch, he is clearly thinking of how desire invests the lives of adult men and women, involving as it does, amongst other things, "the touch of hands and breasts, the touch of the whole body to body, and the interpenetration of passionate love" [1].

 

Nevertheless, this former school teacher was vitally interested in the education of the young and would doubtless have wanted to see children and adolescents initiated (or groomed) into his phallic-utopian new order, so that from an early age they too might learn to substantiate the mystery of touch and form a direct relationship with all things. 

 

The fact that children and adolescents are often denied intimacy with one another is something that also concerned the French author Michel Tournier. Like Lawrence, he argued that youngsters should be allowed (and, indeed, encouraged to experience) physical contact with the bodies of others and that our primary human need is for touch. 

 

Before eyebrows could be raised, however, and accusations begin to fly, Tournier quickly added:

 

"When I speak of physical contact, I mean of course something far more vast and more primitive than erotic games and sexual relations, which are merely a special case." [2]

 

Tournier was also keen to counter those who think that by giving children toys or pet animals to play with we can conveniently sublimate their desire for the forming of close physical and emotional bonds:

 

"Everyone likes to say that young children like to play with dolls and teddy bears, and sometimes they are permitted to play with small animals. It is also commonly said, however, that dogs like bones. The truth is that dogs gnaw on bones when they have nothing else, but you can take my word for it, they would prefer a good cut of steak or a nice veal cutlet. As for children, it is quite simply a dreadful thing that we toss them dolls and animals in order to assuage their need for a warm, living body. Of course sailors on long voyages sometimes avail themselves of inflatable rubber females, and lonely shepherds in the mountains have been known to mount a lamb or goat. But children are neither sailors nor shepherds and do not lack for human company. Their distress is the invention of a fiercely anti-physical society, of a mutilating, castrating culture, and there is no question that many character disorders, violent outbursts, and cases of juvenile drug addiction are consequences of the physical desert into which the child and adolescent are customarily banished in our society." [3]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, Version 2 of Lady Chatterley's Lover, in The First and Second Lady Chatterley Novels, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, (Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 323. 

 

[2] Michel Tournier, The Wind Spirit, trans. Albert Goldhammer, (Collins, 1989), p. 15.

[3] Ibid., pp. 16-17. 

 

 

Michel Tournier on Education 2: Erotic Religiosity

It is not enough to love the young; 

they must know that they are loved - St. Don Bosco

 

 

I. 

 

I closed part one of this post [click here] mourning the fact that only rarely in an age of remote learning do teachers and their students form those close bonds that were common when education was about initiation in the old aristocratic sense of the term (i.e. becoming a good human being and member of society), rather than instruction in the modern bourgeois sense (i.e., becoming someone with the skills and knowledge valued by employers).

 

Perhaps, I tentatively suggested, we need to radically rethink the question of education and reintroduce an element of erotic religiosity back into the classroom; whether this be modelled on classical Greek lines, Loyola's order of Jesuits, or even upon Lawrentian lines in terms of the democracy of touch, is something that would obviously have to be discussed carefully and at length [a].

 

 

II.

 

The French writer Michel Tournier seems to favour the Catholic model, if only because this is the one with which he is most familiar. 

 

In his autobiography [b], he tells us that the two schools that occupy a special place in his memory among the dozen or so he attended in the course of a "chaotic scholastic career" [47], were both religious institutions; Saint Erembert's in Saint-Germain-en-Laye and Saint Francis's School in Alençon. Each were far more successful than their secular counterparts "in preserving the initiatory aspects of education" [47].

 

Tournier explains what it was about Catholicism that particularly appealed to his youthful self and how this inclined him in later years towards the study of philosophy:

 

"The Catholic religion, with its rituals, holy days, theology, and mythology, served as a marvelous emotional counterweight to mathematics and the natural sciences, a counterweight without which the child or adolescent is afflicted by a sense of dryness and aridity. In any case, I cannot separate my memory of the theology [...] from the sumptuousness of ritual. Dunce that I was, I found in religious history and catechism an anticipation of what I later discovered in metaphysics: concrete speculation inextricably intertwined with powerful and brilliant imagery. For metaphysics is nothing other than the rigour of mathematics wedded to the richness of poetry." [47]   

Not that Tournier was smitten with other aspects of Catholicism: "I had little use for the bludgeon of dogma or for the zombie-like obedience and faith of the humble." [47] This is probably why he became a novelist and not a priest. He appreciated the fact that the Church initiated the child into a world that was both spiritual and sensual; a world that granted access to all - not just members of the nobility - to poetry, music, painting, sculpture, and architecture.

Alas, the institutionalised clergy also has another face, hideous, hypocritical, and hateful ...

"Having lost its temporal power, the Church signed on as handmaiden to the most constricted, conservative element of the bourgeoisie, whose interests and ideas it ardently adopted as its own. It continued to draw its teachings from the Gospel, but from the words of the Pharisees rather than those of Jesus. In other words, it began to preach respect for social hierarchies, money, and power as well as hatred of sexuality." [48-49] 

For Tournier, it's simple: in teaching a false morality (conservative and anti-erotic), the Church cannot possibly initiate the young into the good life. In a manner similar to D. H. Lawrence, he dreams of a Jesus fully resurrected in the flesh:

 

"Fear of the flesh has made the crucifix - a corpse nailed to two pieces of wood - the centre of Catholic worship in preference to all other Christian symbols [...] The Church has resolutely set its face against the dogma of resurrection in the flesh and attempts to ignore the fact that whenever Jesus encountered sexuality - even in the antisocial forms of prostitution and adultery - he defended it against the wrath of the Pharisees. [...] Prudes are ugly and impute their own ugliness to love, but when they spit on it, they spit on themselves. Loved and celebrated in those we love, the flesh is as radiant as that of Jesus on Mount Tabor." [49-50] [c]

 

Tournier continues:

 

"Sumptuous, subtle, and erotic - such is the initiatory Church of which I dream when I think back on how my childhood might have been. I thank my stars that the Church that actually raised me only partially betrayed that ideal." [50]

 

Sadly, those days are now remote - Tournier was born almost a hundred years ago (in 1924) - and secular education has pretty much triumphed:

 

"The revolution begun by the men of the Enlightenment is now complete. Emotional bonds, personal and possibly erotic relationships, pose no further danger of polluting the aseptic atmosphere of the classroom. Education, cleansed of every last vestige of initiation, has been reduced to nothing more than a dispenser of useful and saleable knowledge. Already computers are taking the place of teachers [...]" [50]     

But still the heart beats and the flesh quivers ... And tomorrow is another day ...

 

Notes

 

[a] I am aware of the danger that initiation can collapse into indoctrination and that models of pedagogy that flirt with ideals of pederasty can often serve as an apologetics for the sexual abuse of minors. In replacing modern teachers with tutors and mentors who care about more than exam results, we don't want to end up appointing orgres to the classroom (or even dangerous women like Miss Brodie). 

      On the other hand, if you banish the warm and magical aspect of education entirely from the official curriculum and prohibit all forms of amorous relations in the classroom, then you can be certain they will develop elsewhere and often in guises you wouldn't anticipate.    

         

[b] Michel Tournier, The Wind Spirit, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, (Collins, 1989). All page references given in the post refer to this work. 

 

[c] As Deleuze notes: "A certain number of 'visionaries' have opposed Christ as an amorous person to Christianity as a mortuary enterprise." See 'Nietzsche and St. Paul, Lawrence and John of Patmos', in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, (Verso, 1998), p. 37.  

Michel Tournier on Education 1: Initiation contra Instruction

Ivor Fox: The Initiation (c. 1950) 

Oil on board 

 

 

I've asked it before and I'll ask it again: What is education all about? 

 

I don't think government ministers or even those working in the teaching profession can answer this question with any real confidence. Thus it is that we have to turn to our philosophers and writers to find an answer ...

 

D. H. Lawrence, for example, made a bold attempt to address this question in a long essay entitled 'Education of the People' (1920); an important text that I have discussed elsewhere on Torpedo the Ark [a]. 

 

More recently, the French author Michel Tournier had a crack in his intellectual autobiography, Le Vent Paraclet (1977), arguing that education can be thought either in terms of initiation or instruction:

"Education in the broad sense of the word prepares a child to enter society and to occupy his place in it. In all times and places it appears to come in two forms, one moral, emotional, indeed magical, the other purely intellectual and rational. The first is called initiation, the second instruction. [...]

      Of course these two components of education assume many guises, and their importance varies. My view is quite simply that, historically, the relative importance of initiation has been diminishing compared with that of instruction and that for some time now this has passed the point of being harmful." [b]

 

Beginning in the eighteenth century, says Tournier, there was a bourgeois-Romantic attack launched upon the classical, aristocratic model of education "dispensed primarily by the Jesuit schools" [44]. Such a model was said to lack relevance in the age of commerce, industry, science and technology. What's the point of a man knowing about Ancient Athens and Rome, if he is incapable of earning his living in the modern world?    

"Behind these indictments (echoes of which can still be heard today in strictures against the teaching of Latin and Greek) lies a lack of understanding that comes close to bad faith. The critics pretend that the Jesuits' instruction was intended to equip the child with the knowledge needed to become a merchant, manufacturer, sailor, or government official. Had that been its purpose, it would have indeed fallen far short of its goal! But to begin with, the Jesuits were educating young aristocrats, who did not need to become scholars in order to succeed. High birth was enough. But they were also supposed to be human beings, and the education they were offered was supposed to help them toward that end. Here we touch on the crux of the misunderstanding that arose in this period between the 'ancients' and the 'moderns'. For the aristocrat, the child was not a full-fledged human being. He was a little animal, dirty, vicious, and stupid, on the whole rather contemptible. Education was supposed to make him presentable. The Jesuits were concerned not with enriching the child's mind and preparing him for a career but with shaping his moral being. Toward that end they caused him to live in a wholly unreal world in which people spoke only Latin [...] In other words, initiation was much more important than instruction in this version of education. But the moderns had no notion what this initiation was all about, and they actively opposed it. For them, the child was not wicked but simply uninformed. His mind was a blank page upon which knowledge had to be inscribed. Whereas the only ambition of earlier educators was to conduct the child from an animal state to a human one, the moderns wished to enrich his mind with science and technology, tools with which to make his fortune ..." [45-46]  

I don't know if this is true or not, but I find this passage fascinating. As I do the one which follows: 

"This crisis, which began in the eighteenth century, appears to have been a turning point in the history of education, as moral initiation gradually lost out to practical instruction. Since that time, the initiatory function of education has steadily diminished, and we are now witnessing the elimination of the few vestiges that remain. First to go was corporal punishment, which established a sadomasochistic bond between teachers and pupils, followed by religious instruction and confession, which established a similar bond at a spiritual level. More recently, Greek, Latin, philosophy, and literature have been stricken from the curriculum as obviously superfluous nonsense. All traces of humanity must be eliminated from the classroom so that the 'heartless teacher' [...] can inoculate his students exclusively with knowledge deemed to be of practical use." [46-47]

This final line is particularly resonant in an age in which schools are repeatedly (and now almost routinely) closed on the pretext of a virus presently doing the rounds, and more and more teaching is done remotely via a screen - or online, as we like to say. 

 

"Only rarely and with a feeling of illicitness" [47], says Tournier, do students and teachers now form close relations and, in some cases, life-long bonds of friendship. 

 

Perhaps, therefore, we need to radically rethink the question of education and - dare one say it - introduce an erotico-religious (or initiatory) element back into the classroom ... An idea I will develop in part two of this post: click here.   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'Education of the People', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambrdge University Press, 1988), pp.85-166. 

      

Recent posts on Torpedo the Ark that discuss this essay include 'Back to School in the Age of Coronavirus' and 'Education, Education, Education à la D. H. Lawrence'.

 

[2] Michel Tournier, Le Vent Paraclet, (Éditions Gallimard, 1977). I am quoting here, obviously, from the English edition, translated as The Wind Spirit by Arthur Goldhammer, (Collins, 1989), p. 43. Following page references to this text will be given directly in the post.     

New Year's Eve 2020: Fireworks, Propaganda, and an Avian Mortality Event

 

Picture credits: BBC News / IOPA Facebook

 

 

I have already expressed my reservations regarding New Year's Eve fireworks in a post entitled Panem et Pyrotechnics - namely, that they make North Koreans of us all. 

 

This opinion was reinforced a few days ago, when that idiotic little weasel posing as the Mayor of London, Mr. Sadiq Khan, decided to light up the night sky above the Millennium Dome with a clenched fist symbol in support of Black Lives Matter. 

 

The locked down masses prohibited from attending the event in person - because of the virus - were, thanks to a complicit state broadcaster, able to enjoy the £1.5 million spectacle (described by some as a virtue signalling political stunt) live on TV and social media.    

 

Other highlights of the show included the turning of London's bridges blue and yellow with lasers on the eve that the Brexit transition period ended and the UK finally left the EU, and 300 drones forming the shape of a giant turtle with a map of Africa on its shell to express concern about the so-called climate crisis. 

 

As provocative and divisive as this was, it didn't have the heartbreaking horror of events in Rome, where a New Year's Eve firework display resulted in the deaths of hundreds of birds, mostly starlings, that were roosting nearby. 

 

Footage filmed from outside the city's main train station, showed the bodies of the birds littering the streets, as some reports insensitively described the scene, as if they were just feathered pieces of trash waiting to be swept away and their lives didn't matter.

 

A spokesperson for the Italian branch of the International Organisation for the Protection of Animals claimed that the poor things were essentially scared to death by the fireworks and although the RSPB claims that there is little evidence to suggest that fireworks present a grave danger to wild birds, I do not believe them and would challenge their record of protecting birds over the last 50 years when avian numbers have (in some cases dramatically) declined.

 

 

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.