La Chronique Scandaleuse 2: The Case of Denise Poncher and Her Vision of Death

Denise Poncher before a Vision of Death

 Illumination from The Poncher Hours (c. 1500)

by the Master of the Chronique scandaleuse

(Tempera colours, ink and gold on parchment) [1]

 

I. 

 

As Bataille once said: Nothing is more scandalous than death ... 

 

So it's not so surprising that the anonymous artist known as le Maître de la Chronique scandaleuse should contribute a terrifying vision of death to an illuminated manuscript called The Poncher Hours that he collaborated on with several other artists in or around 1500. 

 

 

II. 

 

Born some date after 1487, Denise Poncher was a member of an elite French family; her father served as a treasurer for the crown and her uncle was the bishop of Paris. Like many young women of her class, she desired her own personalised prayer book (or book of hours); items which were very much in vogue during the late Middle Ages, particularly in the French capital which was famous throughout Europe for producing the most exquisite works.  

 

Probably commissioned as a wedding gift - there are numerous references to marriage and motherhood in the text - The Poncher Hours is written in French and Latin and contains some astonishing illuminations, beginning with a full-page vision of the Virgin enframed by a mandorla and flanked by St. Barbara and St. Catherine.   

 

But the most striking and, as I have said, most scandalous image, is the vision of death showing a fashionably dressed Mlle. Poncher kneeling, prayer book in hand, before a skeleton with bits of rotting flesh still hanging from the bones and - in full grim reaper mode - holding several scythes. 

 

Just to complete the nightmare scenario, three persons whom Death has already claimed lie on the ground nearby, "covered with bloody wounds and staring with wide, sightless eyes" [2].

 

Doubtless the picture was intended to serve as a stark reminder of human mortality and of the importance of saying one's prayers in order to ensure the soul's salvation. But, to a modern mind, it's of highly questionable taste and not the sort of thing a young woman on her wedding night should have to worry about. 

 

Unless that is, like Bataille, you happen to believe that death and sex are intimately entwined and that eroticism is a saying yes to life conceived as merely a very rare and unusal way of being dead ...

 

 

Notes 

 

[1] The Poncher Hours was acquired by the J. Paul Getty Museum in 2011: click here to visit the Getty website from which I gleaned much of the information used in the writing of this post.    

[2] Elizabeth Morrison, 'Marriage, Death, and the Power of Prayer: The Hours of Denise Poncher', in The Getty Research Journal, Vol. 6, (University of Chicago Press, 2014), pp. 143-50. Click here to access via JSTOR. Morrison is senior curator of manuscripts at the J. Paul Getty Museum.   

 

To read part one of this post - on the case of Claude Le Petit - click here.  

 

This post is for the artist Heide Hatry; a woman with her own distinctive vision de la mort.   

La Chronique Scandaleuse 1: The Case of Claude Le Petit

 

 

The French phrase chronique scandaleuse was one that captured my youthful imagination back in the Blind Cupid days and whilst plans for a little magazine with that title came to nothing, I did once incorporate it as a slogan into a hand-painted shirt design. 

 

I seem to recall that I picked up the phrase from Claude Le Petit; a debauched and free-thinking libertine poet and lawyer who, in 1661, published a satirical work entitled Le Bordel des Muses which included a collection of verse called La Chronique scandaleuse, ou Paris ridicule. The work not only maliciously mocked the rich and powerful, but blasphemed against the Virgin Mary whilst honouring a notorious sodomite (Jacques Chausson) for his strength of character. 

 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this did not go down well: Le Petit was arrested, tried, and condemned to death for gravely insulting God and the French State. He was burned at the stake, in Paris, on the 1st of September 1662, aged 23, having first had the offending hand with which he wrote the text cut off by the public executioner. 

 

Although his work had been seized from the printers and destroyed, a copy survived and his writings were republished posthumously. It was a good while, however, before they became widely available; for as a result of this affair, all works regarded as being of an obscene, immoral, and politically subversive nature were suppressed in France until well into the 19th-century.  

 

It was said by those who sat in judgement upon him that his was a fine but wasted talent - and who knows, perhaps they were right. Though what else is there to do with talent - with life - but to waste it? As Bataille says: "Our only real pleasure is to squander our resources to no purpose, just as if a wound were bleeding away inside us ..."*

 

Anyway, here's one of Le Petit's poems - Sonnet Foutatif - which anticipates not only Sade and Bataille, but Serge Gainsbourg ...

 

 

Foutre du cul, foutre du con, 

Foutre du Ciel et de la Terre, 

Foutre du diable et du tonnerre, 

Et du Louvre et de Montfaucon. 

 

Foutre du temple et du balcon, 

Foutre de la paix et de la guerre, 

Foutre du feu, foutre du verre, 

Et de l'eau et de l'Hélicon. 

 

Foutre des valets et des maistres, 

Foutre des moines et des prestres, 

Foutre du foutre et du fouteur.

 

Foutre de tout le monde ensemble, 

Foutre du livre et du lecteur, 

Foutre du sonnet, que t'en semble?

 

 

I'm not even going to try to translate the above. But readers who feel tempted to do so are welcome to give it a go ...  

* Georges Bataille, Eroticism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood, (City Lights, 1986), p. 170. 

 

To read the second entry in this short history of scandal - on Denise Poncher and her vision of Death - click here.  

Iconography is Never Innocent

Dorothy Brett (1883-1977): 

Portratit of D. H. Lawrence with Halo (1925)

Oil on canvas (78 x 48 cm)

 

'The narrowed, slightly stylised eyes ... gaze with pain ... at the state of the world and at his own fate. 

His halo is formed by a moon in near-total eclipse; soon he will be left in darkness, 

save for the star that burns ...'   

 

 

I. 

 

The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts (2020) is a big, heavy hardback book - over 440 pages divided between 28 essays, written by 27 different authors - so pretty much impossible to read from start to finish. 

 

Thus, once having read the Introduction, one begins to cruise the text, searching out those authors and those essays most likely to give pleasure ... Authors such as Catherine Brown, for example, and her essay: 'D. H. Lawrence: Icon' [1] ...

 

 

II.

 

As the title of the essay indicates, Brown is interested in the manner in which the English poet, novelist, and painter, Mr D. H. Lawrence, has been subordinated to an image [2].   

 

This public image was partly of Lawrence's own making and partly due to the (loving) characterisations and (sometimes spiteful) caricatures produced by friends, followers, critics, and opponents [3]; some of whom portray him as a visionary Christ-like figure, some of whom depict him as a smiling Pan-like figure with devilish horns and hooves, and some of whom - like the Hon. Dorothy Brett - can't quite decide or imagine Lawrence as a combination of both; part-saint, part-satyr [4].

 

Either way, this iconisation of Lawrence as Christ or Pan is not only a bit lame, but, as Brown points out, all too bleeding obvious, as numerous Lawrentian features - not least of all the beard - "suggested contemporary understandings of each or both gods" [5] to many of his circle and, indeed, many of his most ardent (but unimaginative) readers even today. 

 

Brown spends some considerable time discussing Lawrence as Christ and Lawrence as Pan with reference to some of the more famous photographs of Lawrence and I pretty much agree with her analysis; except for her remarks on the 1915 studio portrait of Lawrence in a hat - an image used in 2017 for the 14th International D. H. Lawrence Conference [click here] - which I don't think should be read in religious terms at all. 

 

The image - certainly as featured on the Conference poster - is more punk than Pan and invites viewers to consider Lawrence as a figure within popular culture, rather than Romantic paganism or Ancient Greek mythology. I think you really have to stretch things to insist on Pan as a revolutionary (and/or déclassé) outsider, as Brown does (not once, but twice) - just as you have to subscribe to a false etymology to think that the god Pan lends his name to pantheism [6].          

 

Moving on, we come to the subject of iconoclasm ... As Brown notes: 

 

"One consequence of Lawrence's deification has been that many of the attacks on him have addressed deified versions of him. [...] Such attacks tend to fall into two categories - those which accuse him of resembling Christ or Pan, and those which accuse him of failing to resemble them, thus respectively condemning him by negative association with, and critiquing his alleged pretensions in relation to, these gods." [7]

I have to say, this seems fair enough: those who live by the image, die by the image - and Lawrence lived by the image at least as much as other modernist writers. He may have satirised the desire for literary fame and personal recognition, but, as Brown points out, he certainly contributed to his own celebrity (or notoriety) and was acutely conscious of his public persona. 

 

Thus, whilst most would struggle to remember what James Joyce or Ezra Pound looked like, there are probably still quite a few people who would recognise red-bearded D. H. Lawrence (if only as drawn by Hunt Emerson, comic book style [8]), even though his popularity and iconic status has been waning for the past forty or fifty years.      

 

 

III. 

In conclusion ... Whilst Catherine ends on a relatively upbeat note, calling for "passionate and joyful admiration" of Lawrence, rather than "misdirected deification, or irrelevant iconoclasm" [9], I think I'd like to emphasise the following: Iconography is never innocent ...

 

That is to say, it plays a complicit role in what Baudrillard terms the perfect crime and by which he refers to the extermination of singular being via technological and social processes bent on replacing real things and real people with a series of images and empty signs [10]. 

 

When this happens, we pass beyond representation (or, in the case of the dead, commemoration) towards obscenity; a state wherein everything and everyone is made visible and the image no longer reflects, masks, or perverts a basic reality, but bears no relation to any reality whatsoever (i.e., it becomes a simulacrum).

 

Whilst I don't subscribe to aniconism, I do think that all image making is ideally and idealistically reductive and that we - Lawrence scholars included - need to theorise the play and proliferation of images carefully and critically. For it's arguable that philosophical questions of representation and reality, truth and appearance, have never been as crucial as today in an age of social media and deepfake software; a world in which everyone comes to presence on a myriad screens (close-up, in high-definition, and full transparency).     

 

 

Notes 

 

[1] A pre-edited version of this essay can be read on Catherine Brown's website: click here. 

 

[2] As readers will doubtless know, the word icon, from the Ancient Greek εἰκών, simply means image or likeness. As Catherine Brown reminds us, however: "'Icon' expanded its meaning from a visual depiction (especially of a divinity) to 'A person or thing regarded as a representative symbol' or one 'considered worthy of admiration or respect' in the early 1950s (OED draft addition 2001)." See 'D. H. Lawrence: Icon', in The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts, ed. Catherine Brown and Susan Reid, (Edinburgh University Press, 2020),p. 428. 

 

[3] For details of how Lawrence has been seen by other artists, see the fascinating essay by Lee M. Jenkins, 'Lawrence in Biofiction', in The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts, pp. 385-397. 

 

[4] To be fair, Brett produced a very lovely work which reveals Lawrence's dual nature. Entitled Portrait of D. H. Lawrence as Pan and Christ, the picture (produced in 1926 and re-painted in 1963 after she destroyed the original canvas due to the mockery and unfair criticism it received), crucially doesn't try to reconcile the twin selves. Rather, it maintains what Deleuze and Guattari describe as a relation of non-relation. In other words, Brett's picture illustrates a disjunctive synthesis between divergent forces that somehow manage to communicate by virtue of a difference that passes between them like a spark (or what Lawrence would probably term the Holy Ghost). If she'd only been thinking with her Nietzsche head on Brett might have called it Pan versus the Crucified. 

      Whilst Catherine Brown doesn't use the above philosophical terminology, she clearly understands that Pan and Christ are (as she says) mutually antagonistic, despite certain similarities between them, and that "each god has his own, separate validity; each has his own flowers", although she clearly longs for a more balanced (less hostile) relationship between the two. See her essay 'D. H. Lawrence: Icon', in The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts, pp. 427 and 428. Brett's painting is reproduced in this book as Plate 36, on p. 302.      

 

[5] Catherine Brown, ibid., p. 427.  

[6] It's a mistaken piece of folk etymology to equate Pan's name (Πάν) with the Greek word for 'all' (πᾶν). The former is probably contracted from the earlier term Παων, which is in turn derived from a root word meaning to guard (it wil be recalled that Pan is a pastoral deity who looks over shepherds). Lawrence cheerfully exploits this false etymology; thus his talk of the Pan mystery and being "within the allness of Pan". See 'Pan in America', in Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays, ed. Virginia Crosswhite Hyde, (Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 158. The line is quoted by Catherine Brown in 'D. H. Lawrence: Icon', The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts, on p. 434.   

[7] Catherine Brown, ibid.

[8] See 'D. H. Lawrence - Zombie Hunter', by Hunt Emerson and Kevin Jackson, in Dawn of the Unread (Issue #7, 2016): click here. Or see Plate 38 in The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts, p. 304.  

[9] Catherine Brown, op. cit., p. 439.

 

[10] See Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, trans. Chris Turner, (Verso, 1996). 

 

 

For a follow up post to this on the figures of Pan and and Christ in the art of Dorothy Brett, click here.

D. H. Lawrence: The Reluctant Fashion Beast

 D. H. Lawrence in 1915 modelling his Edwardian 

hipster look complete with velveteen jacket

 National Portrait Gallery, London 

(NPG x140423)

 

I.

 

The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts (2020) is a big, heavy hardback book - over 440 pages divided between 28 essays, written by 27 different authors - so pretty much impossible to read from start to finish. 

 

Thus, once having read the Introduction, one begins to cruise the text, searching out those essays and those authors most likely to give pleasure. Let's begin with Judith Ruderman's essay on the importance in Lawrence's work of clothing and jewellery (though note that I'll not be discussing the latter here) ...

 

 

II.

 

Ruderman says that Lawrence's views on fashion are complex (sometimes contradictory) and often need to be discussed in relation to his other concerns to do with art, sex, and society. That's certainly true. In fact, it could be argued that the Lawrentian call for a revaluation of all values is founded upon a revolt into style: "Start with externals, and proceed to internals" [1], as he puts it. 

 

Unfortunately, however, this statement merely reveals Lawrence's metaphysical naivety. For there are no internals to which we might proceed and outer form or appearance is not expressive of inner essence or substance; things have no concealed reality. The secret of life revealed by dandyism - conceived by Foucault as a critical ontology and philosophical ethos beyond the dualism of inside/outside - is that it has no secret.

 

Thus, what's ironic - Ruderman's word - is not that "an author infamous for having his characters shed their clothes actually paid a great deal of close attention to what they are wearing" [2], but that an author who cared so much about fashion seems not to have grasped its deconstructive  logic. 

 

Strolling along the Strand in brave feathers - which for Lawrence means wearing "tight scarlet trousers fitting the leg, gay little orange-brown jackets and bright green hats" [3] - isn't simply to defy dreary social convention and sartorial dullness, it's to declare that one is Greek in the Nietzschean sense - i.e.,  superficial out of profundity [4].

 

Another thing that Ruderman highlights is Lawrence's fascination for strikingly colourful clothing. And it's true, he did favour fabulous - some might say garish - colour combinations in his battle against the drabness of those he calls the grey ones. And whilst I'd probably feel a little uncomfortable in some of the gay outfits Lawrence proposes, they would certainly have delighted Oscar Wilde, who wrote:

 

"There would be more joy in life if we could accustom ourselves to use all the beautiful colours we can fashioning our own clothes. The dress of the future, I think, will [...] abound with joyous colour.” [5]

 

Maybe, Oscar, maybe ... Though as all fashionistas and "naturally exquisite people" [6] - from Mrs Morel to Coco Chanel - know, ultimately, there's nowhere to go but back to black, which paradoxically, is the negation of all colour whilst also the most vital of colours. Sometimes, even Lawrence comes close to admitting this, when, for example, he talks of dark gods and the invisible black sun. 

 

But, push comes to shove, when it comes to clothes, Lawrence prefers sensible blues and browns and home-knit socks. What's more, he often sneers at truly fashionable people (who frighten and repulse him), openly disparaging haute couture. As Ruderman reminds us, although like other modernist writers he was happy to have his pieces published in Vogue, "being 'smart' in the Vogue sense was anathema to him" [7] - full of what he described as the vanity of the ego.      

 

That's why, despite his fetishistic fascination with clothes - particularly stockings - I think we can characterise Lawrence as a reluctant fashion beast or closeted dandy; one who is slightly ashamed of his own love for and knowledge of clothes and who regards those who always dress to impress as affected and a bit show-offy [8]. 

 

Ruderman concludes: 

"Fashion for Lawrence is best adopted as a hallmark of transformation and revitalisation: not for the sake of impressing others, but, rather, for expressing the self at any given moment in time. [...] As a 'rare bird' among men [...] Lawrence appreciated fashion, but with caveats and contradictions. That Lawrence's attitudes towards this subject are complex and evocative only highlights how they are intricately woven into the fabric of the life and art of a very complicated man." [9]

I agree with that and would only add that Lawrence's appreciation of fashion isn't all that rare amongst male writers; indeed, some of the most insightful meditations on clothes have come from our poets, novelists, and philosophers - from Baudelaire to Roland Barthes. Even Kant, when mocked for wearing silver-buckled shoes, replied: Better to be a fool in fashion, than a fool out of fashion ...  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'Red Trousers', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 138.  

[2] Judith Ruderman, 'Clothes and Jewellery', The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence, ed. Catherine Brown and Susan Reid, (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), p. 371.

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'Red Trousers', Late Essays and Articles, p. 138. 

[4] See section 4 of the preface to the second edition of Nietzsche's The Gay Science. For Nietzsche, living courageously in the Greek manner requires remaining at the surface at the level of folds, adoring appearance, believing in forms, etc.

      Of course, the desire to become-Greek isn't the only logic of fashion; it is also motivated by the desire to become new (to constantly change one's look). To his great credit, Kant realised that fashion has nothing to do with aesthetic criteria (i.e. that it's not a striving after beauty); in this respect his writings on fashion are rather more modern than those of Baudelaire.

      The key point is that fashion seeks to make an object superfluous as quickly as possible. It does not seek to improve an object, which is why there is no ideal of progress within the world of fashion; a short skirt is not an advance on a long one. As Norwegian philosopher Lars Svendsen writes: "Fashion does not have any telos, any final purpose, in the sense of striving for a state of perfection [...] The aim of fashion is rather to be potentially endless, that is it creates new forms and constellations ad infinitum." See Fashion: A Philosophy, trans. John Irons, (Reaktion Books, 2006), p. 29.  

[5] Oscar Wilde, 'The House Beautiful', in the Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, (Harper Collins, 1994), p. 923. 

[6] D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers, ed. Helen Baron and Carl Baron, (Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 151. Quoted by Judith Ruderman, op. cit., p. 371.

 

[7] Judith Ruderman, op. cit., 377.

 

[8] As Ruderman reminds us, in 'Education of the People' Lawrence sneers at the modern woman who follows fashion and "wants to look ultra-smart and chic beyond words", creating an effect on those around her. See D. H. Lawrence, 'Education of the People', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 152. Quoted by Ruderman, op. cit., p. 381. 

 

[9] Judith Ruderman, op. cit., pp. 381-82.  

Lobster Variations (I - IV)

Nobuyuki Shimamura: Fantasy Lobster (2013)

Hoki Museum Collection, Chiba, Japan 

 

I.

 

Such is my fascination with lobsters at the moment that I'm beginning to think that, like Prufrock, "I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas" [1].

 

Though of course, literary scholars are divided about the nature of the marine creature that is immortalised by Eliot in these lines: is it a lobster, is it a crab, or is it some other (perhaps entirely imaginary) denizen of the deep? 

 

Whilst I understand the arguments put forward by those who favour the crab reading - for example, it's true that the word scuttling is more suggestive of the quick movements made by crabs than the slow crawling walk of the lobster - nevertheless I opt for the lobster interpretation, as I think lobsters have a richer (and more perverse) symbolic history. 

 

Ultimately, however, we can never know and, of course, Eliot's poetic language doesn't really operate by referring us to some actual sea creature outside of the text, so this question is largely moot.            

 

 

II. 

 

Lawrence's poem 'Demiurge' [2] is one of a series of late verses that share a common objective; namely, to expose the absurdity of Plato's theory that only ideas encapsulate the true and essential nature of things, rather than physical forms existing in the material world.     

 

It's also a poem which features a rather lovely description of a lobster ...

 

They say that reality exists only in the spirit

that corporal existence is a kind of death

that pure being is bodiless

that the idea of the form precedes the form substantial.

 

But what nonsense it is!

as if any Mind could have imagined a lobster

dozing in the under-deeps, then reaching out a savage and iron claw!

 

Even the mind of God can only imagine 

those things that have become themselves:

bodies and presences, here and now, creatures with a foothold in creation

even if it is only a lobster on tip-toe.

 

 

III. 

 

More Pricks Than Kicks is a collection of ten interlocking short stories, set in Dublin, by Samuel Beckett [3]. It was first published in 1934, just a couple of years after Lawrence's Last Poems. 

 

The opening story - 'Dante and the Lobster' - concerns the reaction of the tale's protagonist (Belacqua) discovering to his horror that the lobster he has purchased for dinner with his aunt must be prepared in a particularly unpleasant manner:

 

"In the depths of the sea it had crept into the cruel pot. For hours, in the midst of its enemies, it had breathed secretly. [...] Now it was going alive into scalding water." 

 

His attempt to console himself (and us) with the fantasy that the creature's death will be a relatively quick and painless one is undermined by the narrator of the tale declaring with grim assurance: It is not.      

 

 

IV.  

 

And this brings us, finally, to David Foster Wallace's famous essay 'Consider the Lobster' [4] ...

 

Disguised as a review of the 2003 Maine Lobster Festival and originally published in the August 2004 edition of the food and wine magazine Gourmet, it's a wilful provocation which irritated many readers by primarily concerning itself with the ethics of boiling a highly intelligent and sensitive creature alive in order to enhance the consumer's (sadistic) pleasure. 

 

Keen to dispell the myth that lobsters have such simple brains that they don't really experence pain as we understand it, Wallace even includes a handy discussion of lobster neurobiology. Though, as he points out, deciding whether a living creature has the capacity to suffer isn't just determined by the complexity of their sensory hardware; we must also examine whether the animal displays behavior associated with pain. 

 

And of course, as anyone who has ever watched a lobster thrashing about in a pan of boiling water for up to 45 seconds and desperately trying to escape will tell you, it requires an impressive display of intellectual gymnastics not to view this as pain-behaviour.  

 

Arguably, however, in even raising the possibility that we might compare the treatment of lobsters at the 56th annual Maine Lobster Festival to the fate of the Jews transported to Nazi extermination camps, Wallace oversteps the mark (i.e., he's walking the lobster, as they say in 1990s urban slang) [5]. 

 

Indeed, Wallace himself nervously backs away from this line of thought, but not before wondering if the reason why such an argument seems so outrageously extreme is precisely because we still largely believe animals to have significantly less moral value than human beings.

Wallace concludes his essay by asking his readers (as fellow meat-eaters and seafood lovers) two key questions:

 

"Do you think much about the (possible) moral status and (probable) suffering of the animals involved? If you do, what ethical convictions have you worked out that permit you not just to eat but to savor and enjoy flesh-based viands (since of course refined enjoyment, rather than mere ingestion, is the whole point of gastronomy)?"

 

And to those who show no desire to worry about such things or dismiss the question of animal welfare out of hand, he asks:

 

"Is your refusal to think about any of this the product of actual thought, or is it just that you don't want to think about it? And if the latter, then why not? Do you ever think, even idly, about the possible reasons for your reluctance to think about it?" 

 

Ultimately, Wallace is right to argue that we all need to be a bit more thoughtful about what we eat and how our food is produced; all need to be a bit more attentive to the suffering not just of our fellow mammals, but birds, fish, and, indeed, crustaceans like the lobster.   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] T. S. Eliot, 'The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock', (1915): click here to read on the Poetry Foundation website.

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'Demiurge', The Poems, Vol. I., ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 603.  

[3] Samuel Beckett, 'Dante and the Lobster', in More Pricks Than Kicks, (Chatto and Windus, 1934). A more recent edition, ed. with an extensive Preface by Cassandra Nelson, was published by Faber and Faber in 2010. The story can also be read online as originally published in the literary magazine Evergreen Review, Vol. 1, No. 1, (1957): click here. 

[4] David Foster Wallace, 'Consider the Lobster', in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays, (Little, Brown and Co., 2005). To read this essay online (in an annotated version), click here. Or, to listen to the author read his essay (audiobook style) on YouTube, click here.   

[5] It might be noted that several writers, including Jewish Nobel Prize laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer and the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, have drawn a comparison between the treatment of animals within the industrialised food industry and the Holocaust. Animal rights groups, including PETA, also have no problem with making such a metaphysical equivalence, though there are many who find the idea that meat is murder morally obtuse and highly offensive. 

      Without wishing to get too off-topic, it might also be noted that the Nazis were greatly concerned with animal welfare; for example, they outlawed vivisection, regulated animal slaughter, gave the wolf protected status, and prohibited the boiling alive of lobsters. 

 

 

I would like to acknowledge my debt for (some of) the ideas pursued here to an article by Jonathan Greenberg; 'A Lobster Is Being Eaten' (19 May, 2019), in the Journal of the Modernist Studies Association Modernism/modernity. Click here to read online.    

Lobsterfuck: Notes on Marine Biology and Art Porn

 Video still from Masshole Love (2013)

dir. by and starring Rebecca Goyette as Lobsta Blue

rebeccagoyette.com

 

 

I.

 

Marine biologist Marah J. Hardt has a particular fascination with the wet and wild sex lives of sea creatures, including lobsters, which, apparently, are more promiscuous than prawns and far kinkier even than crabs ...*

 

For example, in order to seduce a larger male lobster - which is an aggressive and territorial loner by nature - a female lobster will first moult her shell, releasing pheromones into the water as she does so, and indicating by her display of naked vulnerability that she represents no threat, but is only looking for a good time. 

 

As the male comes closer to get a better look, the female lobster will then piss in his face, her urine acting as a potent aphrodisiac. 

 

After playing this erotic game over a period of several days, the male lobster is completely smitten and the female lobster's scent has a transformative effect on his behaviour, turning him into an amenable lover desperate to get her back to his place - usually just a hole in the sand - so that they might mate in oceanic bliss. 

 

During coition, the male lobster turns the soft-bodied female over, mounts her, and inserts a modified first pair of pleopods (known as gonopods) into the receptaculum seminalis of the lucky lady. Having double-dicked the object of his affection, the male then uses a hardened structure located on a second pair of pleopods to help push gelatinous globs of sperm into her semen-storing structure. 

 

The male then deposits an additional gooey material to the outside of the female's receptacle which hardens within a few hours and effectively forms a plug, thereby ensuring no sperm will dribble out (this spunk plug falls off after several days).  

 

Once the deed is done, the female flips her tail out from under the male and he releases her from his tender embrace.       

 

 

II.

 

Inspired by the reproductive activities of our deep sea friends, New York based interdisciplinary artist Rebecca Goyette (aka Lobsta Girl) has produced an interesting body of work that she terms Lobsta Porn and which explores human sexual fantasy (and sexual violence) in light of the love lives of lobsters and from a feminist perspective.   

 

In Masshole Love (2013), for example, a short film shot primarily in Provincetown (MA) - a favourite coastal destination of artists and members of the LGBT+ community - Goyette plays the role of Lobsta Blue, a woman who confronts a past history of sexual abuse by dedicating her life to erotic performance art whilst dressed in a bright blue lobster costume. 

 

In this work, as in others, Goyette offers a magical mix of burlesque, street theatre, psycho-sexual therapy and lobstasexcitation, in order to encourage audience members to discover their own marine sexual identities within the deep blue sea (the latter imagined as a polymorphously perverse space or queer universe).

 

 

III.

 

Unfortunately, I have the same kind of concerns, philosophically speaking, with Goyette's lobsta porn as I have with the ecosexual project devised by Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle: click here and here, where I express these concerns in some detail.

 

In short, I fear that her sex radicalism, like theirs, is ultimately just another form of moral idealism and remains - no matter how you dress it up, be it with flowers or lobster claws - human, all too human ...

 

Having said that, if it makes Ms Goyette happy to produce and exhibit this faux-transgressive work and other people pleased to view and to buy it - and if no actual lobsters are harmed - then what do I really care? 

 

I would like to know, however, what she plans on doing after the aquatic orgy ...?    

 

 

* See: Marah J. Hardt, Sex in the Sea, (St. Martin's Press, 2016). Readers interested in listening to her 2019 TED talk on this topic can do so by clicking here. 

 

 

Walking the Lobster

A young female fan of French poetry in the 

1950s paying hommage to her hero Nerval

 

In urban slang, apparently, walking the lobster means to take a risk; to cross the line; to go too far ...

 

And, arguably, that's exactly what French Romantic poet and eccentric 19th-century dandy Gérard de Nerval did when he literally took his pet lobster, called Thibault, for a stroll round the Jardin du Palais-Royal on a leash made of bright blue ribbon.

 

Or at least that's what his friend and fellow poet Théophile Gautier would have us believe - and, who knows, perhaps it's true: I think I'd like it to be true ...

 

Though even if the author of Les Filles du feu (1854) - who would later have a significant influence on André Breton and the Surrealists - didn't in fact walk his lobster, he was nevertheless prepared to defend his choice of pet and right to exercise the creature:

 

'Why should a lobster be any more ridiculous than a dog? Or a cat, or a gazelle, or a lion, or any other animal that one chooses to take for a walk? I have a liking for lobsters. They are peaceful, serious creatures. They know the secrets of the sea, they don’t bark, and they don’t gobble up your monadic privacy like dogs do.' [1]  

 

It's a perfectly reasonable defence and I'm surprised that more people haven't opted to keep crustaceans rather than canines on the basis of this. 

 

In recent times, however, the only person I can recall having a pet lobster and taking him for a walk is Homer Simpson who, unfortunately, ends up having to tearfully eat poor Pinchy after accidently cooking him in a hot bath [2]. 

 

Pass the butter ...

 

 

Homer and Marge walking Pinchy 

the lobster on the beach

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Quoted by Théophile Gautier, in Portraits et Souvenirs Littéraires (1875).

 

[2] The Simpsons, 'Lisa Gets an "A"', S10/E7, (dir. Bob Anderson). First broadcast in November 1998. To watch the (distressing yet hilarious) scene described above, click here.

 

 

Thanks to David Brock for reminding me of Nerval and his lobster - and also for reminding me of the terrible suffering experienced by these intelligent, fascinating creatures when they are captured, traded, cooked, and consumed as part of the global food industry. Readers interested in knowing more about this and perhaps getting involved in the fight to afford lobsters (as well as crabs, prawns and crayfish) greater protection, should visit the Crustacean Compassion website: click here.

 

 

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

Artwork for The Atonement of Lesley Ann (2020) 

reworked by Stephen Alexander (2021)

 

I say unto you, that likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, 

more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance. - Luke 15:7

 

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; particularly the use of the religious term atonment in its title ...

 

One wonders what Solomon has in mind by his use of this concept and why, for example, he didn't simply call his play the killing of Lesley Ann? 

 

For in what way is Lesley Ann atoned? And for what does she need to be atoned? Is Solomon suggesting that she is in some manner complicit in her own abduction and murder (that no one is innocent after all)? 

 

That would certainly be a provocative and unsettling suggestion. But then the whole idea of atonement via a sacrificial offering - be it Christ on the Cross or a child on the Moors - is deeply disturbing, is it not? 

 

Because we know who it is who is washed clean by the spilt blood and forgiven their sins - who it is taking a step on the path towards redemption and, ultimately, not just fellowship but reunification with God [1] - and it isn't the victim; it is, rather, the one who wields the knife ... 

 

 

II. 

 

In other words, it's Ian Brady and Myra Hindley who, via a terrible act of faith, are atoned by the sacrifice of poor Lesley Ann [2].    

 

Again, it's quite shocking to be reminded that the road to salvation can begin in an act of violence and even the practice of evil. But then, of course, the inventor of this whole mad system is a cruel and vengeful God who not only demands sacrifice be made unto him, but is prepared to see even his own son scourged and crucified. 

 

Ultimately, Solomon isn't attempting to exonerate Brady and Hindley, nor excuse their appalling crimes. By incorporating a transcript of the recording made of ten-year-old Downey begging for her young life into the play he reminds us of the facts of the case in all their horror. 

 

What he is doing, rather, is exploring the scandalous logic of Christian morality which offers the possibility of redemption to even the most depraved of individuals.

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Atonement means unity or reconciliation between man and God; a coming back into ontotheological wholness (literally at-one-ment). We might note also that the word atonement is often the English translation given for the Hebrew term kaphar [כָּפַר], which means to cover - thus atonement might also be defined as the covering over of sin, or, indeed, the covering up of crime; a form of concealment with which God himself is complicit.     

[2] Unless they have committed what is known within theological circles as the eternal or unpardonable sin and can thus never make amends or receive forgiveness. However, that isn't something - as far as I remember - indicated in Solomon's play.  

 

 

To read the first in what is now a trilogy of posts on Síomón Solomon's The Atonement of Lesley Ann (2020) - on things that go bump in the theatrical night - click here. 

 

And to read the second post in the series, in which I offer some additional thoughts on the play, click here. 

 

 

Sartre's Lobster (l'existentialisme est une peur des crustacés)

 

Sartre and the Lobsters by Dan Meth

tumblr.com

 

 

I. 

 

Usually, when one thinks of the lobster and its role within the cultural imagination, one immediately recalls Salvador Dalí and his surrealist telephone (and also, of course, his Dream of Venus exhibition in which semi-nude female models wore fresh seafood costumes, including lobsters covering their sexual organs). 

And one remembers also the 1978 single by the B-52s, Rock Lobster, which quickly became their signature tune: click here to view an amusing performance of the track on the popular music show Countdown in 1980.  

 

What I didn't know about until very recently, however, was the story of French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and his (drug-induced) relationship with an imaginary lobster and a cast of crabs ...

 

 

II.

Many people are familiar with the fact that Sartre liked to smoke a pipe. And, being French, it can be taken as a given that he also puffed his way through a fair few packs of fags in his time and liked to knock back the red wine and black coffee. 

 

But not so many people know that he also consumed an impressive quantity of illicit drugs, including amphetamines and the naturally occurring psychedelic compound mescaline; the latter known for its hallucinogenic properties and the drug of choice for many artists and intellectuals (including Aldous Huxley, who famously described his experiences in the 1954 work The Doors of Perception). 

 

Sartre took mescaline shortly before publication of his first book, L'imagination in 1936.* Unfortunately, he had what might be characterised as a bad trip and for many months afterwards imagined he was being stalked by crustaceans (mostly crabs). 

 

Even when the effects of the drug must surely have worn off, Sartre remained convinced when feeling low that he was being followed by a giant lobster, always just hidden out of sight, and consulted Jacques Lacan in the hope that he might free himself of his invisible marine companion (whether this helped, I don't know; Lacan concluded that the philosopher simply had a fear of loneliness).  

 

 

Notes

 

* It should be noted that Sartre didn't go off, like Artaud, to the Mexican desert in order to experiment with mescaline; he had it injected under controlled conditions and observation at the Sainte-Anne hospital in Paris, at the invite of his old school chum, the physician and psychoanalyst, Dr. Daniel Lagache.  

 

For an interesting essay on how Sartre's crustacean obsessions influenced his work, see Peter Royle, 'Crabs', in Philosophy Now, Issue 67, (May/June 2008): click here.

 

For a related post on Elsa Schiaparelli's lobster dress (and Kosmo Kramer's lobster shirt), click here. 

Thanks to Tim Pendry for kindly suggesting this post.

Existentialism is a Disappointment

 

 

I. 

 

We all know Heidegger's magnificent response to Sartre's post-War declaration that l'existentialisme est un humanisme; let's just say he wasn't impressed [a]. But rather less well known is the effect it had on a generation of young French intellectuals who had previously adored the author of L'Être et le néant (1943). 

 

This generation includes Michel Tournier, whose recollection of this time is worth sharing at length as it perfectly illustrates the intense punk rock seriousness with which philosophy was then taken and how sexy and scandalous Sartre's phenomenological ontology appeared to be - before he sold out to humanism ...

 

 

II.  

 

"In the darkest days of the War, some of us, depressed by the oppressive restrictions, formed a small group united by a common idea of philosophy - a narrow, even fanatical idea that might well have gone in hand with tumbrils and the guillotine. I was foolishly about to write that Deleuze had been the 'soul' of this group when suddenly I had a vivid image of the brickbats and howls with which that hated word would have been greeted by the adolescents we were then. [...] In any case, Deleuze did set the tone of the group, and it was he who sustained our ardour." [b]

 

"One day in the autumn of 1943 a meteor of a book fell on to our desks: Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness. After a moment's stupor there was a long mulling over [...] the book exuded irresistible power; it was full of exquisite subtleties, encyclopedic, proudly technical, with an intuition of diamondlike simplicity running through it from start to finish. Already the clamour of the anti-philosophical rabble could be heard rising in opposition in the press. [...] We were exultant. Like Socrates's disciples in fourth-century Athens or Hegel's students at Jena in 1805, we had the extraordinary good fortune of seeing a philosophy born before our very eyes." [131]  

 

"On October 28, 1945, Sartre called us together. It was a mob scene. An enormous crowd pressed against the walls of the tiny venue. The exits were blocked by those who had not managed to gain entry [...] and women who fainted had to be piled on a convenient grand piano. The wildly acclaimed lecturer was lifted bodily over the crowd and on to the podium. Such popularity should have alerted us. Already the suspect tag 'existentialism' had been attached to the new system. [...] So what was existentialism? We were soon to find out. Sartre's message could be stated in six words: existentialism is a form of humanism. [...] We were devastated. Our master had retrieved that exhausted old figure of Man, still stinking with sweat and 'inner life', from the rubbish heap where we had left him [...] And everyone applauded." [132]

 

"That night we gathered in a café to mourn our loss. One of us thought he had found the key to what went wrong in a novel that Sartre had published in 1938 called Nausea. [...] Suddenly it was all too clear [...] Sartre had [... become] the Autodidact. Around the table we were unanimous in our forecasts of disaster [...] And the future seemed to bear us out [...]" [132-33]

 

It should be noted that, looking back over thirty years later, Tournier is prepared to admit that the reaction experienced by himself and his philosophical comrades was probably a bit harsh:

 

"This reaction to Sartre should be taken for what it was: a liquidation of the father by overgrown adolescents afflicted with the awareness that they owed him everything. With hindsight I can see all the juvenile excess in our condemnation." [133]

 

However, Tournier then importantly qualifies this:

 

"Yet I cannot help thinking that it contained a grain of truth. Sartre seems always to have suffered from an excess of moral scruple. Acute fear [...] undeniably diminished his powers and his creative potential. I am convinced that one cannot live a full and healthy life without a minimum of indifference to the woes of others. [...] Sartre's misfortune was that [...] he was a Marxist who was never able to give up the secret ambition of becoming a saint." [133]

 

And with that Tournier sticks the boot into Sartre in an even more brutal manner than Heidegger ... 

 

 

Notes

 

[a] For those who don't know ... L'existentialisme est un humanisme (1946) is a text by Jean-Paul Sartre, based on a lecture of the same title given in Paris on 29 October 1945. 

      Invited by Jean Beaufret in November 1946 to comment on Sartre's work and the development of existentialism in France, Martin Heidegger composed a response known in English as the Letter on Humanism (revised for publication in 1947). In this text, Heidegger distanced himself from Sartre and dismissed his thought as merely a reversed form of metaphysics which is oblivious to the truth of Being. 

      Those who wish to read a transcript of Sartre's lecture for themselves can do so by clicking here. Heidegger's response is also available as a pdf online or can be found in his Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (Routledge, 2010). My reading of Heidegger's Letter on Humanism can be found here.

 

[b] Michel Tournier, The Wind Spirit, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, (Collins, 1989), p. 128. Future page references to this work will be given directly in the post. 

      Note that I have very slightly modified the translation by Goldhammer in places. The original French text was published as Le Vent Paraclet (Gallimard, 1977) and readers who (rightly) worry about issues of translation are free to consult this if they wish.