Freedom? There Ain't No Fucking Freedom!

 

What the tabloids like to call Freedom Day - June 21st - the day when the UK is due to abandon the last of its lockdown restrictions and allow citizens to finally throw off their face masks and socially interact, is increasingly likely to be postponed amid mounting concern among scientists and government advisors about the rapid spread of the so-called Delta variant (i.e. the mutant version of Covid-19 that was first recorded in India and is thought to be much more transmissable). 

 

Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, is absolutely open to the idea of a delay and one suspects that a significant number of the Great British Public would rather like the lockdown to continue indefinitely, so scared witless have they become over the last 16 months and so happy to have the authorities micromanage their every activity in the name of health and safety (i.e., the greater good as conceived within an era of biopolitics). 

To be honest, I think the cynically-named Freedom Day is a sham and that talk of the world post-pandemic is mostly in vain. Things will never return to normal; our liberty has been fatally compromised and the Great Reset is in motion. We are all now just NHS numbers.

 

To paraphrase D. H. Lawrence writing after the Great War:

We thought the old times were coming back. They can never come back. Each one of us has had something injected into them. So we have to adjust ourselves to a new world. [1]

 

Sadly, in Boris Johnson and Matt Hancock, we have got the leaders we deserve. To quote Lawrence speaking of Lloyd George and Horatio Bottomley, but with Johnson and Hancock in mind:

 

"These two spoke the Voice of the People [...] They said what the vast majority were choking to say. They said it all enormously, endlessly, and with complete success." [2]

 

My hope is that one day we'll remember these two gentlemen with shame:

 

"Why? - Because they said things that were not true, and because they urged us to actions that were meaner, smaller, baser, crueler than our own deep feelings." [3]    

 

  

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, Movements in European History, ed. Philip Crumpton, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 260. The original passage reads: "We thought the old times were coming back. They can never come. We know now that each one of us had something shot out of him. So we have to adjust ourselves to a new world."

 

[2] Ibid., p. 259. 

 

[3] Ibid.  

Further Reflections on Frances Wilson's 'Burning Man'

(Bloomsbury, 2021)

 

 

I.

 

What does it mean when a biographer of D. H. Lawrence declares that she is "unable to distinguish between Lawrence's art and Lawrence's life"?*

 

It means that she fails to understand that literature is more than merely the expression of lived experience and that the artist is engaged in a creative enterprise of thought; not merely recalling past events and providing (sometimes amusing, often malicious) portraits of persons known to them, but playing with percepts  and affects.** 

 

And so (once more) to the case of Frances Wilson ...

 

 

II.

 

The problem with failing to understand how and in what way writing exceeds life, is that once a biographer has successfully mapped the fiction on to a reality that is external to the text and checked for accuracy of representation, there's not much more for them to do or say. The vol-au-vent is stuffed and it's stuffed with chicken.

 

This partly explains why, in a study of over 400 pages, Wilson has very little to tell us about several of the major works produced by Lawrence in the period that is her main focus of interest (1915-1925). What it doesn't explain, however, is why a self-professed Lawrence loyalist is so dismissive of his novels.

 

Women in Love (1920), for example, is described by Wilson as a work lacking in the atmospheric grandeur of The Rainbow and judged to be a failed literary experiment when compared to Virginia Woolf's The Waves. It can only be considered the prophetic masterpiece that Lawrence believed it to be, she says, if readers are prepared to agree with the views of Rupert Birkin: "and the only people who agree with Birkin are teenagers" [113].***

 

The Lost Girl (1920), meanwhile, is described by Wilson as a book that is both mad and bad: "Its badness is because Lawrence had lost interest in human psychology [...] And its madness is the result of his tearing along like a dustball without having the faintest idea of what's coming next." [223] 

 

Aaron's Rod (1922), on the other hand, "is not a mad book in the sense of engagingly bonkers" like The Lost Girl, but is neverthess barely sane and yet another good book gone bad: "Lawrence allowed his anger to spoil his beautiful story [...] shouting and yelling and ranting about love and power and how women must submit to men ..." [256-257]  

 

As for The Plumed Serpent (1926), well this is simply a sour-flavoured version of the superior Quetzalcoatl: "Writing with his usual rapidity, he doubled its length and spoiled its beauty" [398], says Wilson. She goes on to add: "The Plumed Serpent is alien and alienating, hard to forgive and hard to forget. It is also boring, at times brutally so." [399]    

 

One can only conclude that with friends like Frances, Lawrence hardly needs enemies ...

 

 

Notes

 

* Frances Wilson Burning Man: The Ascent of D. H. Lawrence, (Bloomsbury, 2021), p. 3. Future page references will be given directly in the text.   

** These terms, used by Deleuze and Guattari to discuss literary practice as distinct from philosophy, have a very precise and important meaning. Percepts are not merely perceptions; they are independent of the subject who experiences them. Similarly, affects are not merely feelings or affections; they pass beyond those who undergo them. Together, percepts and affects form a bloc of sensations, or what is usually referred to as a work of art existing in itself and not forever tied to a dead author. If one must talk about literature as life, then it's important to conceive the latter in a complex onto-ethical manner as a non-organic power (i.e., as something singular, impersonal, and beyond good and evil). The task of literature is to free life from what imprisons it - not capture it in words.  

      See Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchill, (Verso, 1994), Part. 2, Chapter 7.  

      See also Daniel W. Smith's excellent Introduction to Deleuze's Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, (Verso, 1996), pp. xi-liii. As Smith crucially notes: "For Deleuze, writing is never a personal matter. It is never simply a matter of our lived experiences [...] Novels are not created with our dreams and fantasies, nor our sufferings and griefs, our opinions and ideas, our memories and travels, nor 'with the interesting characters we have met [...]'" [xv].

      Unfortunately, Wilson doesn't appear to be much interested in any of this; she just wants to talk about autofiction in the most personal sense. She writes on literature not as a philosopher or even a serious critic, but as a biographer concerned with human lives, telling tales, and passing the word along.

 

*** To read my original reflections on Frances Wilson's Burning Man, click here. And to read my response to this attack on Women in Love and the teenage mentality, click here. 

Reflections on Frances Wilson's 'Burning Man'

(Bloomsbury, 2021)

 

 

Anyone setting out to write a new biography of D. H. Lawrence has two initial problems:

 

Firstly, they have to find something to say that wasn't said in the three-volumed Cambridge Biography (1991-1998), written by professors Worthen, Kinkead-Weekes, and Ellis. These three wise men managed to stretch Lawrence's short life out over two thousand pages, which doesn't leave much room, one would have thought, to manoeuvre.

 

Secondly - and perhaps even more problematically - Lawrence himself provided an account of his own life in his essays, articles, travel writings, poems, and - not least of all - in his thousands of letters. What's more, he also gives us an autofictional version of events in his novels, plays, and short stories. 

 

In an attempt to try and get round these inconvenient facts, Frances Wilson does two things:

 

Firstly, she follows Lawrence's footsteps through the pages of his lesser known work and gives greater roles to those who usually are considered of minor import in his life. Thus, we get to hear a lot about Maurice Magnus, for example, and an in-depth analysis of Lawrence's Memoir of the latter. As someone who likes shadowy figures and random events and is obsessed with marginalia, footnotes, early drafts, unpublished or obscure texts, this is fine by me.

 

Secondly, Wilson reads Lawrence's astonishingly productive mid-period in relation to (or in terms of) Dante's Divine Comedy, dividing her study into three main sections: Inferno (England, 1915-1919); Purgatory (Italy, 1919-1922); and Paradise (America, 1922-1925), with each section divided into three parts. 

 

Wilson's book thus has a nice neat structure, provided by a novel literary device - or, what might better be described as a cloaking device; i.e., one designed to disguise the fact that, actually, there's really very little new to say about the life of D. H. Lawrence: those who know the facts, faces, places, dates, and key events know these things already and those who don't probably aren't all that interested. 

 

The real problem I have, however, is that, ultimately, it's the work - not the life - that matters (although Wilson claims she is unable to distinguish between life and art). And we still await the readers that Lawrence deserves; i.e., readers who will do for him what a number of great French thinkers (such as Foucault and Deleuze) did for Nietzsche; violating his texts from behind and below, in order to produce monstrous new ideas and unleash strange new forces and flows.

 

Wilson, sadly, is not such a reader. Like Geoff Dyer, she seems to think Lawrence needs rehabilitating rather than sodomising and, in order to achieve this, she is prepared to concede all his faults and failings and dismiss some of his major works as mad and bad, including The Lost Girl, Aaron's Rod, and even Women in Love, which, in my view, is the greatest novel of the 20th-century (but then I have the mentality of a teenager: click here). 

 

Having said that, her book is well written and (for the most part) fun to read; she clearly still cares for Lawrence a great deal, even if a little embarrassed about her youthful devotion and too readily apologetic when confronted with those issues, such as racism, that drive modern readers into a moral frenzy.

 

Again, for me, it's preferable that Lawence remain a countercultural hate-figure regarded with hostility and contempt, than become a ludicrous figure of fun or remade to suit the prejudices of a contemporary readership. As Malcolm McLaren repeatedly said: It is better to be hated than loved - and better to be a malevolent failure than any kind of benign success. 

 

The greatness of Lawrence resides in the fact that, like Nietzsche, he would rather be a satyr than a saint and that his writing expresses an acute form of evil, with the latter understood as a sovereign value that demands a kind of Übermorality (i.e., beyond conventional understandings of good and evil). 

 

Wilson doesn't seem remotely interested in any of this; she's far more concerned with the minutiae of Lawrence's everyday life than metaphysics; with telling tales and passing the word along, rather than critically evaluating ideas. 

 

Of course, to be fair, she doesn't claim to be writing an intellectual biography and I rather suspect that, like Ottoline Morell, Wilson regards Lawrence's philosophical writings as deplorable tosh - the ravings of whom she calls Self Two; i.e., the Hulk-like Lawrence she finds tiresome and whose reactionary hysteria often "smashed the genius of Self One to smithereens". 

 

The thing is - if we must indulge the untenable fantasy of a dual nature - it's the green-skinned alter-ego rampaging around the world out of sheer rage that often produces the most astonishing work, rather than the pale-faced Priest of Love indulging in Romantic soul-twaddle. As even Wilson acknowledges towards the end of her book: "Good haters are better company than [...] lovers [...]". 

 

 

See: Frances Wilson, Burning Man: The Ascent of D. H. Lawrence, (Bloomsbury, 2021). Lines quoted are on pp. 302 and 386. 

 

For further reflections on the above book, please click here. 

 

 

In Defence of Women in Love and the Teenage Mentality (A Response to Frances Wilson)

Photo of Frances Wilson by Jonathan Ring

 

 

I. 

 

Once, in 1983, when I was twenty-years-old, I was riding in a car with a producer from the BBC's Community Programme Unit, on the way to Derby to film a piece of CND propaganda masquerading as investigative journalism, entitled 'Doctors Against the Bomb'. 

 

Heading as we were to the East Midlands, it was perhaps inevitable that the name D. H. Lawrence entered the conversation: I said I loved Lawrence and his writing; he - the producer - told me with a patronising tone and superior little smile: "Everybody does when they're young. But, don't worry, you'll grow out of it."

 

It's something I've never forgotten: and I determined at that moment to never abandon Lawrence or repudiate his influence on my thinking (and, indeed, my life).  

 

 

II. 

 

I was reminded of this incident when I read the following crass sentence in Frances Wilson's new biography of Lawrence, Burning Man (2021):         

 

"Only if we agree with Birkin on all counts does [Women in Love] become the prophetic event that Lawrence wanted it to be, and the only people who agree with Birkin are teenagers." [1]

 

What this reveals, I'm sorry to say, is that Wilson is one of those high-brow readers who, whilst posing as a Lawrentian loyalist, sneers from her privileged position at his immaturity and despises a character like Rupert Birkin for displaying the uncompromising intensity of youth.  

 

She writes:

 

"There are wonderful things in Women in Love, but it is not the flawless masterpiece that Lawrence believed he had written. It is an experiment in the art of fiction [...] but we only have to compare the result with Virginia Woolf's The Waves to see that Lawrence has failed." [2] 

 

Did Lawrence ever claim to have written a flawless masterpiece? I don't think so. He wasn't interested in literary perfection - nor, for that matter, in comparative success. Besides, doesn't all great art ultimately fail? Its tragic beauty rests upon this fact.   

 

At the beginning of her study, Wilson says that, as an adolescent, she found Lawrence incomparable as an author and loved his fierce certainties:

 

"I liked the fact his women were physically alive and emotionally complex while his men were either megaphones or homoerotic fantasies, that he cared so much about the sickness of the world, that he saw in himself the whole of mankind; I liked his solidarity with the instincts, his willingness to cause offence, his rants, his earnestness, his identification with animals and birds, his forensic analyses of sexual jealousy, the rapidity of his thought, the heat of his sentences, and his enjoyment of brightly coloured stockings." [3] 

 

Alas, returning to Lawrence as a middle-aged biographer, she now finds that things have changed: 

 

"Where once I found insight, I now find bewildering levels of naivety; for all his claims to prophetic vision, Lawrence had little idea what was going on in the room let alone in the world." [4] 

 

Rather than consider that this disenchantment shows a loss of her own vitality, however, Wilson makes her snide little remark about Lawrence's fiction appealing only to teenagers. But, as Lawrence himself says, perhaps the mentality of a teenager is preferable to that of a jaded intellectual who now chooses to sit safely in judgement rather than risk falling in love.

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Frances Wilson, Burning Man: The Ascent of D. H. Lawrence, (Bloomsbury, 2021), p. 113. For a series of reflections on this book, click here and here.

[2] Ibid., pp. 112-113. 

[3] Ibid., pp. 2-3.

[4] Ibid., p. 3. This is a sentence that could have been written by Geoff Dyer; another author who claims to love Lawrence and has in part built his own career as a professional writer upon Lawrence, but then dismisses much of his work and transforms him from a figure of hate into a figure of ridicule, as if that's performing him a service.     

Little Hell Flames: On D. H. Lawrence's Poppy Philosophy

Bright Red Poppy (SA/2021)

 

 

This morning, a large bright red poppy has burst into flame at the top of my garden and it naturally triggers thoughts of Sylvia Plath's famous short verse* and, of course, D. H. Lawrence's philosophical remarks on the flower in his Study of Thomas Hardy** ...

 

Whilst for Plath the red poppy is a symbol both of pain and the release from pain (of sleep, of death), for Lawrence, the poppy reminds us that there is more to life than the will to self-preservation; that man - like flower - achieves his consummation or fourth-dimensional splendour by wasting himself, with no thought of the morrow.   

Even an old man, afraid of the coming winter, who warns the young against behaving like a "reckless, shameless scarlet flower" [8], can't resist watching as the poppy unfolds into being. For he knows in his innermost heart, where there is no fear, that the poppy's blaze of colour is what matters most; that even "the latent seeds were secondary" [8] and that without its outrageous redness, it is just another herbaceous plant growing wild by the roadside.  

 

And it is better that we too blossom like the poppy, rather than "linger into inactivity at the vegetable, self-preserving stage [...] like the regulation cabbage, hide-bound, a bunch of leaves that may not go any farther for fear of losing market value" [12]. For if we cannot flower into being, then we will thrash destruction about ourselves until we are rotten at heart. 

Lawrence concludes:

"The final aim of every living thing, creature, or being is the full achievement of itself. This accomplished, it will produce what it will produce, it will bear the fruit of its nature. Not the fruit, however, but the flower is the culmination and climax [...] 

      And I know that the common wild poppy has achieved so far its complete poppy-self, unquestionable. It has uncovered its red. Its light, its self, has risen and shone out, has run on the winds for a moment. It is splendid. The world is a world because of the poppy's red. Otherwise it would be a lump of clay. [...] I tremble at the inchoate infinity of life when I think of that which the poppy has to reveal, and has not as yet had time to bring forth." [12-13]  

 

 

Notes

 

* I'm referring here to 'Poppies in July', rather than 'Poppies in October'. But both poems can be found in Ariel (Faber and Faber, 1965), Plath's second book of verse, published two years after her death and edited (somewhat controversially) by Ted Hughes. (In 2004, a new edition of Ariel was published which for the first time restored Plath's own selection and arrangement of the poems.)  

 

** D. H. Lawrence, 'Study of Thomas Hardy', in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press,1985), pp. 1-128. Page numbers given in the text refer to this edition. Note that although I only quote from chapter I, Lawrence it still singing the praises of the red poppy coming into bloom in chapter II: 

 

"His fire breaks out of him, and he lifts his head, slowly, subtly, tense in an ecstasy of fear overwhelmed by joy, submits to the issuing of his flame and his fire, and there it hangs at the brink of the void, scarlet and radiant for a little while, imminent on the unknown, a signal, an out-post, an advance-guard, a forlorn, splendid flag, quivering from the brink of the unfathomed void, into which it flutters silently [...]" [18]    

Healthy Body, Healthy Mind: Notes on NHS Values

A touching expression of ontological gratitude ... 

or a sinister form of zen fascism?

 

 

I. 

 

Anyone who has recently visited a UK hospital will doubtless be as astonished as I was by the amount of time, effort, and money that is put into the promotion of so-called NHS values, which, essentially, reduce to three key terms: respect, equality, and compassion. 

All fair enough, you might think. But at Queen's Hospital, in Romford, Essex [1] - which happens to be my local hospital - they have really gone to town and decided to expand upon the NHS vision, wildly proliferating values in what might almost be described as a metastatic manner. 

 

This is illustrated by the above poster, designed by a team determined to list as many moral adjectives as they can think of, in order to thank patients, visitors, and staff for being (amongst other things) human, obliging one to wonder who or what they feared they might encounter stalking the wards. 

 

Personally - and for the record - I've no objection to being treated by a robot, an alien, or a highly trained chimp, provided they are competent and go about their business with the minimum of fuss. 

 

And not only do I not care if they lack the (all too) human touch, but I don't expect them to be fun either; there are far too many idiots in far too many professional roles - doctors, teachers, trendy vicars and tubby office managers - posing as chilled out entertainers.    

 

 

II. 

 

But who is responsible for this zen fascist propaganda - or The Pride Way [2] - in our hospitals?

 

Well, in my region - Barking, Havering and Redbridge - the team responsible for teaching, coaching and empowering staff in The Pride Way is called the Kaizen Promotion Office. Based at Queen's Hospital, but working across all Trust sites, the KPO are dedicated to excellence and have adopted their methodology from the Virginia Mason Institute (part of the Virginia Mason Medical Centre in Seattle):

 

"Our KPO Team of specialists have been trained and mentored in The Pride Way tools and methodologies, and these tools have in turn been taught to others in the Trust through the many training and support opportunities provided by the Team, through both formal and informal training, coaching, Rapid Process Improvements Workshops (RPIW) and Kaizen events." [3]     

 

This way of speaking, thinking, and working could, of course, only have roots in the United States. And so now everything begins to make sense ...

 

The irony is that the British people pride themselves on the (supposedly) unique nature of their health care system and fear it being sold off to the Americans. But the latter - over-paid, over-earnest, and over-keen on woke corporate bullshit - are already over here ...    

 

 

Notes 

[1] Along with King George Hospital, in Goodmayes, Queen's Hospital is part the of Barking, Havering and Redbridge NHS University Hospitals Trust which also operates a number of clinics at sites in the surrounding areas. 

[2] PRIDE is an acronym for the values and behaviours which staff at BHR hospitals are expected to embody: Passion, Responsibility, Innovation, Drive, and Empowerment. To learn more about how these terms are being used, visit https://www.bhrhospitals.nhs.uk/our-vision-and-values/ 

 

[3] I'm quoting from https://www.bhrhospitals.nhs.uk/the-pride-way/

 

 

On Being an Odonto-Medical Wonder

Stephen Alexander:  

The Colour of Pain (2021)

 

 

I. 

 

The first post published on Torpedo the Ark was entitled Reflections on the Loss of UR6; a poem in which I considered the violent act of tooth extraction and the subsequent sense of trauma as your tongue probes the empty space where once a molar had been. 

 

What the post didn't mention, however, was that the verse was based on an actual incident. Nor does it inform readers that the tooth extracted - UR6 - possessed such an unusually deep and powerful root that my dentist had real problems removing it (much to her professional embarrassment). 

 

Indeed, the root was of such an unusual length and size that it and the tooth were featured in a dental journal.

 

 

II. 

 

I was reminded of this latter fact recently whilst sitting having my lower right leg photographed and filmed with professional equipment in the Emergency Department at Queen's Hospital, for possible use in a medical journal and/or as teaching material for medical students. 

 

Not that there's anything particularly interesting or aesthetically pleasing about my leg as a limb in itself. But the swelling, deep bruising, and inflammation, is, apparently, of a highly unusual and perplexing nature; it could be superficial thrombophlebitis; it might simply be an infection of some kind or a ruptured vein; or it may betray a DVT - even though the position is all wrong. 

 

(No one wanted to mention the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine, though this remained an unspoken subtext.)

 

Whatever the cause, I signed a consent form agreeing that images of the discoloured leg could be used in a case study and I find that my discomfort is lessened by the knowledge that my unidentified limb - just like my anonymous tooth - serves the cause of medical science in some small way. 

 

Now pass those pre-filled syringes so I can inject an anticoagulant into my stomach ...  

 

 

Eurotophobia and the Case of Yulia Tsvetkova

Yulia Tsvetkova: 'Living Women Have Body Hair - And It's Normal!' 

Drawing from the series A Woman is Not a Doll (2018) 

 

I. 

 

I closed a recent post discussing the case of Caterina Sforza and her provocative act of vulvic defiance in the face of her male enemies by suggesting that the latter is not something that would work today in a porno-epilated culture; i.e., a culture in which the cunt has been rendered null and void, having lost its monstrous beauty and magical power.  

 

For whilst today, there may still be some men with an aversion to or dislike of female genitalia - perhaps on aesthetic grounds, for example - there is no real horror or fear of the cunt in the old sense. Even Freudians have largely abandoned their anxieties around castration and the old folk idea of vagina dentata has become laughable; the contemporary cunt, alas, has lost its teeth as well as hair.    

Having said this ... It seems that I was being somewhat Eurocentric and had failed to consider what the case of Yulia Tsvetkova tells us about eurotophobia in Vladimir Putin's Russia ...

II.

 

Yulia Tsvetkova is a 27-year-old artist and LGBTQ+ activist, currently under house arrest and facing criminal prosecution for creating and circulating homosexual propaganda and pornography; the latter consisting of no more than simple drawings of the female body posted on a feminist website in order to counter unrealistic and stereotypical images of women (an example of which can be seen above).

 

Well, that's not quite true; even the Russian authorities have conceded that these drawings do not in fact constitute pornography. Thus the charges against Tsvetkova relate, rather, to her role as the administrator of an online community who upload explicit (if often abstract) depictions of female genitalia to a page named after Eve Ensler's 1996 play, The Vagina Monologues. 

 

This, it seems, is too much: images of vaginas worked in elaborate embroidery or painted in delicate watercolour, trigger an ancient disturbance in the Russian male psyche; a primitive fear and hatred not so much for the cunt-as-organ, but for the cunt-as-symbol - one which obliges them to consider that most dreadful of suppositions: Supposing truth to be a woman ... [1]

 

It's a supposition that subverts the entire phallocratic order and its values; one that invites us to reconsider the world from a gynocentric perspective in which truth is not something that can be clearly identified and fixed, but something hidden, ever-changing, and prone to leakage. 

 

Ultimately, in thinking truth as woman - and in terms of the cunt - is to think truth not as presence, but, rather, as absence. Thus male anxiety before the gaping vagina is essentially a terror of staring into the void; a site of sheer loss in which everything becomes zero and Man struggles to maintain his hard-on. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] It was Nietzsche, of course, who first raised this supposition concerning the nature of truth; see his Preface to Beyond Good and Evil. See also chapter 3, Vol. 1, of The Treadwell's Papers, by Stephen Alexander, (Blind Cupid Press, 2010), pp. 55-80, wherein I discuss this remark at length, developing a sexual politics of what D. H. Lawrence terms cunt-awareness. 

 

For more information on the case of Yulia Tsvetkova, visit freetsvet.net. 

 

Or to send an email to the Russian authorities demanding that charges against Tsvetkova are dropped, visit her Amnesty International page by clicking here. 

  

Notes on the Case of Caterina Sforza

Lorenzo di Credi: Portrait of Caterina Sforza 

 (c. 1481-83)

 
Se io potessi scrivere tutto, farei stupire il mondo!

 

 

I. 

 

Nietzsche's critique of nineteenth-century feminism is a simple one: it marks a loss of style and a surrender of intelligence:

 

"There is stupidity in this movement, an almost masculine stupidity, of which a real woman - who is always a clever woman - would have to be ashamed from the very heart." [1]  

 

Often mistakenly thought of as a misogynist, Nietzsche seemed to have a thing for strong, smart, stylish, women who do not aspire to become more like men or demand equality, but affirm themselves as singular beings in their own right. 

 

Women, for example, like Lou Andreas-Salomé, who not only charmed Nietzsche to the extent that he asked for her hand in marriage, but also captivated Rilke and Freud. And women like Caterina Sforza, about whom I wish to speak here, with particular reference to an astonishing incident mentioned by commentators including Machiavelli and Valentine de Saint-Point ...

 

 

II. 

 

Caterina Sforza (1463-1509) was an Italian noblewoman, raised in the refined Milanese court who, from an early age, was noted for her bold and impetuous nature. For whilst, like her siblings, she received a classical education from her tutors, her grandmother encouraged Caterina to also take inspiration from the notorious condottierri from whom she was descended. 

 

A skilled huntress, Caterina also loved to dance, conduct experiments in alchemy, and involve herself in the complicated - and violent - politics of her day. Invariably, this brought the independent-minded and free-spirited woman into conflict with some powerful men, including Cesare Borgia, who at one time had her imprisoned.     

 

Following her marriage to Girolamo Riario, Catarina went to live in Rome with her husband, who served his uncle, the Pope. Upon her arrival, in May 1477, the fourteen-year-old Caterina found the city buzzing with cultural fervour and political intrigue; a city in which material interests and the desire for power far exceeeded spiritual matters.

 

Although Caterina's husband told her not meddle in affairs of state, thanks to her extroverted and sociable character she quickly integrated into aristocratic Roman society, becoming much admired for her beauty and highly respected for her intelligence. Before long, this young woman became an influential intermediary between Rome and other Italian courts, particularly Milan.   

 

Unfortunately, following the death of Sixtus IV, in 1484, the lives of Caterina and her husband were thrown into turmoil ... Riots and rebellions spread throughout Rome and their home, the Palazzo Orsini, was looted and almost destroyed. 

 

Then, worse, in 1488, Girolamo was killed and Caterina found herself at the mercy of her enemies, which leads us to the incident that I wanted to discuss in particular ...

III.

 

According to legend, Caterina was besieged inside a fortress and when her enemies threatened the lives of her children whom they held captive, she stood on the walls, exposed her lower body and, pointing to her cunt, cried: Do it! Kill them in front of me if you want to! I have what's needed to make more! 

 

Now, true or not, this is an astonishing act not only of defiance, but of what Baudrillard terms seduction. 

 

For the effect of this genital display was to render her enemies uncertain of how to respond. Not knowing how to reply, or what to do, they backed down and backed away, sparing her children. Caterina had effectively stripped them of their power and agency, reducing them to impotence. Baudrillard also describes this as the revenge of the object. 

 

Caterina was one of the few women discussed at length by Machiavelli in his writings: if he only briefly mentioned this act of genital defiance in The Prince, he recounted the story at some length and with a certain vulgar relish, in both his Discourses on Livy and Florentine Histories.   

 

And, four centuries later, Valentine de Saint-Point also recalls the story in her Manifesto della Donna futurista (1912) [2]. 

Arguably, what this demonstrates is that prior to our epilated culture of feminism, digital pornography, and labiaplasty, when a woman lifted up her skirt and displayed her cunt, it invoked profound horror in male onlookers. Indeed, even gods, demons and insects were disconcerted by this apotropaic act of magical indecency.

      

Sadly, however, the cunt has now been rendered null and void having lost much of its monstrous beauty and magical capacity. Women have been fatally exposed in the name of sexual emancipation and and close-up images of their exposure are today endlessly circulated via the media; an act of violent and systematic exorcism [3]. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Penguin Books, 1990), Pt. VII, §239.       

      Nietzsche continues in this important section for an understnding of his sexual politics: "That in woman which inspires respect and fundamentally fear is her nature, which is more 'natural' than that of the man, her genuine cunning, her beast-of-prey suppleness, the tiger's claws beneath the glove [...]." I don't know if Nietzsche was thinking of any woman in particular here, but it's interesting to note that Caterina Sforza was nicknamed La Tigre.   

 

[2] See the recent post on Valentine de Saint-Point and her two Futurist manifestos: click here.

 

[3] I'm self-plagiarising here from an earlier post on Torpedo the Ark, entitled Anasyrma: Upskirt Politics and Vulva Activism (15 Nov 2013): click here. 

 

Readers interested in knowing more about the heroic women of the Renaissance - rulers, philosophers, artists, saints, consorts, courtesans, etc. - might like the following site on Tumblr: Fuck Yeah, Renaissance Women! Several posts on Caterina Sforza can be found here.

 

For a (kind of) follow up post re: vulva activism and the case of Yulia Tsvetkova, click here. 

 

D. H. Lawrence and a Postcard from Paris

Erotic French postcard featuring a photo of 

Alice Prin (aka Kiki de Montparnasse) 

by Julian Mandel (c. 1920)

 

 

D. H. Lawrence opens his essay 'Pornography and Obscenity' with a liberal acknowledgement that "what is pornography to one man is the laughter of genius to another" [1]. It's a fine definition. 

 

However, it isn't long before he puts his reactionary hat back on and calls for the rigorous censorship of what he terms genuine pornography. Genuine pornography - which Lawrence distinguishes from the erotic aspect of art - is secretive in nature and almost always underworld. Secondly, it is an affront to sex and the human spirit:

 

"Pornography is the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it. This is unpardonable. Take the very lowest instances, the picture post-cards sold underhand, by the underworld, in most cities. What I have seen of them have been of an ugliness to make you cry. The insult to the human body, the insult to a vital human relationship! Ugly and cheap they make the human nudity, ugly and degraded they make the sexual act, trivial and cheap and nasty." [2]         

 

Blimey! It makes you wonder what kind of cards Lawrence had been shown; as well as where, when, and by whom ...? As he'd been in Paris for a month shortly before writing his essay, it's possible that he was shown some saucy postcards by one of the bouquinistes plying their trade along the banks of the Seine. 

 

The amusing thing is that - just a few lines later - Lawrence feels obliged to acknowledge that "the human nudity of a great many modern people is just ugly and degraded, and the sexual act between modern people is too often the same, merely ugly and degrading". This would suggest that genuine pornography is actually a truthful representation of bodies and acts; a form of graphic realism that does away with the ideal fantasy of sex as something pure and pristine.   

 

There's a further irony in the fact that later in the same year - 1929 - thirteen of Lawrence's paintings would be seized by the police from the Warren Gallery in London and described by an octogenarian magistrate in pretty similar terms - gross, coarse, hideous, unlovely and obscene.

 

Now, if we think Frederick Mead's reaction unfair and slightly hysterical, then mayn't we also challenge Lawrence's view of French postcards ...?   

 

 

II.

The pornographic postcards with which Lawrence confesses at least a vague familiarity, have, for us, a kind of sepia-toned charm that makes one nostalgic for a time gone by. And, whether Lawrence wants to admit it or not, such images have a long, complex, and intimate relationship with the history of art and photography in which the human figure is so central. 

 

By the 1860s and '70s, nude photos were all the rage in Paris, though the authorities still had a degree of control over their production and circulation. However, thanks to a relaxation of censorship laws and new methods of photographic reproduction, the trade in (increasingly risqué) images in the form of carte postales grew dramatically during the following decades, both in the domestic market and internationally. 

 

Not only did street vendors offer such, but they were sold by wine merchants, café owners, tobacconists, barbers, and, of course, the second-hand booksellers who lined the Seine. As one commentator notes: "It is entirely possible that some two to four million nude photographs were in circulation by the end of the nineteenth century, many of them graphically pornographic ..." [3] 

 

Some cards featured anonymous prostitutes or working-class girls looking to make a little extra cash; others featured well-known models and performers, happy to pose au naturel or take part in a little faux lesbianism for the camera. Often sold in sets of up to a dozen, the cards were avidly collected (though, for obvious reasons, rarely posted in the mail). 

 

By the time of Lawrence's death in 1930, the heyday of the French postcard had pretty much come and gone and the 1940s and 50s saw the rise of the pin-up magazine, which, one suspects, Lawrence would not have approved of either.

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'Pornography and Obscenity', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 236.   

[2] Ibid., p. 241. 

       

[3] Raisa Rexer, 'The Naked Truth About French Postcards', on the Wonders and Marvels website, click here.

 

Readers interested in this topic might like to see Nigel Sadler's book Erotic Postcards of the Early Twentieth Century, (Amberley Publishing, 2015), in which he explores the changes in social attitudes, fashions, and technology through the medium of erotic postcards.