Fragmented Remarks on Mark Fisher's Ghosts of My Life - Part 1: Lost Futures

Zero Books (second edition, 2022)

 

 

For some reason, the spectral figure of Mark Fisher continues to haunt my imagination [a]. 

 

And, what's more, his name continues to crop up in conversation. Just the other night, for example, a young woman asked me if I had read his 2014 essay collection Ghosts of My Life and I had to rather shamefully admit I hadn't. 

 

So, at Mariam's insistence that I really should do so - and despite certain reservations [b] - here goes. 

 

But, note at the outset, what follows is not an attempt at a review (still less an overview). 

 

Think of this more as an attempt to occupy the space of thinking that Fisher opens up and to engage with some of the ideas encountered, moving from text-to-text but not stopping where the material is outside my field of knowledge or experience, or simply void of any interest. I won't, for example, be saying much - if anything - about the various genres of dance music, such as Jungle, that seem to so excite Fisher's imagination [c].    

 

Note that all page references to (the second edition) of Fisher's book are given directly in the text.

 

 

I.

 

Many people talk about the cancellation of the future, but I admire Fisher for being the one who (like the Italian Marxist Franco Beradi) emphasises the slowness of this process. 

 

It's something that (gradually but relentlessly) creeps up on us (like old age): one day everything seems fine and there's plenty to look forward to, the next ... Suddenly, all we are left with is the past - or more precisely, our memory of the past and even this dims over time. 

 

Luckily, we have photographs and videos and thanks to YouTube it seems that everything we ever watched or listened to is made available: "In conditions of digital recall, loss is itself lost." [2]

 

 

II.

 

It's clever how Fisher (retrospectively) reads Sapphire & Steel in relation to the work of Harold Pinter and John Le Carré. But I remember how, at the time - the series ran from 1979 to 1982 - my friend and I would often laugh at it's absurdity and pretension. 

 

Now, however, I'd view this pair of interdimensional operatives whose job it is to repair breaks in time so as to ensure temporal continuity with a good deal of philosophical hostility. For what are they if not defenders of the myth of progress (i.e., linear development) and ideals of smoothness, purity, and temporal good order ...?

 

Personally, I quite like anachronisms and chronological inconsistencies. It's not these things which lead to stasis - on the contrary, things which puncture equilibrium also keep things moving. 

 

Without wishing to completely destabilise the Western concept of time, I'm happy to celebrate its periodic disturbance; to allow for a certain chaos (or openness); for untimely events that produce divergent becomings; for lines of flight which produce wild disruptions.

 

I say this as a reader of Deleuze, but also as a reader of Lawrence who writes in Apocalypse: "Our idea of time as a continuity, as an eternal straight line has crippled our consciousness cruelly" [d].

 

Hopefully I've not misunderstood what Fisher is arguing, but I get the impression that, like Sapphire and Steel, he wants to straighten everything out and prevent cultural time folding back on itself, so that we might once again be able to make a clear distinction between past and present (and we'll all know what's what and when and where we are).

 

 

III.

 

Fisher likes to use a term borrowed from his pal Simon Reynolds - dyschronia - to describe the "current crisis of cultural temporality" [14] as he experiences it. 

 

And, to be fair, it's a nice term - one that can be added to all those other dys- terms which people seem to like using today (from dyslexia and dysmorphia to dysphoria and dystopia). I even referred to the concept myself in a recent post on the Beatles [click here].        

 

But I can't quite get as worked up about it as Mr Fisher, who at one point cries out: "Where is the 21st-century equivalent of Kraftwerk?" [9] A passionate cri de coeur no doubt, but one that made me almost spit my tea. For this may be a question concerning the time in which we live, but it's hardly a question for the ages. 

 

Although, having said that, perhaps Fisher has a point when he asserts that the fate that has befallen popular music is "in many ways paradigmatic of the fate of [wider] culture under post-Fordist capitalism" [16].

 

 

IV.

Despite appropriating his term hauntology, Fisher claims to find Derrida a "frustrating thinker" [16] and he makes clear his hostility to deconstruction: 

 

"As soon as it was established in certain areas of the academy, deconstruction, the philosophical project which Derrida founded, installed itself as a pious cult of indeterminacy, which [...] made a lawyerly virtue of avoiding any definitive claim. Deconstruction was a kind of pathology of scepticism, which induced hedging, infirmity of purpose and compulsory doubt in its followers. It elevated particular modes of academic practice - Heidegger's priestly opacity, literary theory's emphasis on the ultimate instability of any interpretation - into quasi-theological imperatives." [16-17]  

 

So what's not to love? 

 

Well, to be fair, I share some of Fisher's frustration when it comes to Derrida and I've never read his work with the same kind of pleasure or excitement as that of his contemporaries, such as Deleuze. 

 

Over the years, however, my appreciation of Derrida and Derridean concepts, such as différance and hauntology, has increased and I think his main point that nothing enjoys a purely positive existence - that presence requires absence; that being rests on non-being - is absolutely crucial. 

 

And I'm pretty certain that Fisher - indebted as he is to Derrida - would be more generous to him were it not for the fact that the latter's not quite lycanthropic enough for those influenced by Nick Land [e]. 

Anyway, Fisher asks the question that many readers have probably asked themselves: "Is hauntology, then, some attempt to revive the supernatural, or is just a figure of speech?" [18]

 

He answers by saying: 

 

"The way out of this unhelpful opposition is to think of hauntology as the agency of the virtual, with the spectre understood not as anything supernatural, but as that which acts without (physically) existing." [18]

 

That's a nice (easily understood) definition and I agree with Fisher that many of the great thinkers of modernity - not least of all Marx and Freud - "discovered different modes of this spectral causality" [19]. 

 

As did Nietzsche, of course, when he spoke of posthumous individuals ...

 

The key thing is that we can distinguish in hauntology between the no longer and the not yet:

 

"The first refers to that which is (in actuality) no longer, but which remains effective as a virtuality (the traumatic 'compulsion to repeat', a fatal pattern). The second sense of hauntology refers to that which (in actuality) has not yet happened, but which is already effective in the virtual (an attractor, an anticipation shaping current behaviour)." [19]

 

 

V.

 

Nodding to both Freud and Derrida, Fisher also provides an excellent definition of (and distinction between) mourning and melancholia:

 

"In Freud's terms, both mourning and melancholia are about loss. But whereas mourning is the slow, painful withdrawl of libido from the lost object, in melancholia, libido remains attached to what has disappeared. For mourning to properly begin, Derrida says in Spectres of Marx, the dead must be conjured away [...]" [22]

 

I think that's true: which is why the dead must bury the dead and the living must live; remembering their loved ones, but also letting them go. The dead can't rest in peace if we won't allow them to do so: and haunting, then, "can be construed as a failed mourning" [22] - a refusal to give up the ghost (and thus the ghost's refusal to be quiet). 

 

For Fisher, what's at stake in 21st-century hauntology is not the loss of a loved one or the disappearance of a particular object, but the vanishing of a certain trajectory that he names popular modernism and which produced such things as public service broadcasting, Penguin paperbacks, and postpunk ... 

 

In a passage that makes clear the aim of his book, Fisher writes:

 

"In popular modernism, the elitist project of modernism was retrospectively vindicated. At the same time, popular culture definitively established that it did not have to be populist. Particular modernist techniques were not only disseminated but collectively reworked and extended, just as the modernist task of producing forms which were adequate to the preset moment was taken up and renewed. Which is to say that [...] the culture which shaped most of my early expectations was essentially popular modernist, and the writing that has been collected in Ghosts of My Life is about coming to terms with the disappearance of the conditions which allowed it to exist." [22-23]  

 

Perhaps, in a sense, that's also one of the aims of Torpedo the Ark. 

 

Ultimately, it comes down to a refusal to give up; "a refusal to adjust to what current conditions call 'reality' - even if the cost of that refusal is that you feel like an outcast in your own time ..." [24]

 

Of course, as Fisher recognises, this raises the question of nostalgia once more: "is hauntology, as many of its critics have maintained, simply a [new] name for nostalgia?" [25]

 

Clearly, Fisher doesn't think so and I agree with him that "comparing the present unfavourably with the past is not automatically nostalgic in any culpable way" [25]. The fact is, the 1970s was a more creative decade - and people were happier - than today; this isn't falsely overestimating (or falsely remembering) the past and readers who weren't alive to experience the '70s will just have to take my word for it [f].  

 

The popular modern culture that was unfolding back then "was by no means a completed project" [26] and it was, admittedly, a time of "casual racism, sexism and homophobia" [26] - not to mention football hooliganism, strikes, blackouts, and flared jeans. But, nevertheless, the decade was, in many respects, "better than neoliberalism wants us to remember it" [25]. 

 

What is being longed for in Fisher's work (and perhaps also in mine) is not the return to a certain period, but the resumption of an abandoned project (which he calls popular modernism) and the summoning of a lost spirit, although Fisher and I obviously disagree as to the political guise of this spirit - I'm not an acid communist.  

Still, acid communist or not, I can agree with Fisher that the key thing is ultimately about dismantling identities which are for the most part poor fictions: "Culture, and the analysis of culture, is valuable insofar as it allows an escape from ourselves." [28]

 

 

Notes

 

[a] I have written recently about Mark Fisher and his work in several posts on Torpedo the Ark; see here and here, for example. 

 

[b] I am always a little wary of writers like Fisher who, via unrestrained enthusiasm for certain ideas (often brilliantly expressed) attract a cult following amongst readers who, like Fox Mulder, so want to believe in the existence of truth lying out there (beneath the falsifications of capitalist realism).    

 

[c] This isn't to say that Fisher's analysis of, for example, Rufige Kru's Ghosts of My Life EP (1993) isn't excellent, it's just that I know more (and care more) about the actress Goldie Hawn than I do about Goldie the music producer and DJ. 

 

[d] D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins, (Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 97. 

      Lawrence continues: "The pagan conception of time as moving in cycles is much freer, it allows movement upwards and downwards, and allows for a complete change of the state of mind at any moment. One cycle finished, we can drop or rise to another level, and be in a new world at once. But by our time-continuum method, we have to trail wearily on over another ridge."  

[e] I'm referring here to Nick Land's essay 'Spirit and Teeth', in Of Derrida, Heidegger, and Sprit, ed. David Woods, (Northwestern University Press, 1993), pp. 41-55.

     The essay can also be found in Nick Land's Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007, ed. Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier, (Urbanomic, 2011), pp. 175-201.

 

[f] Readers don't have to take my word for how shit things are in the 21st-century in comparison to the 1970s. Consider this statement from Fisher: "It's clear to me now that the period from roughly 2003 to the present will be recognised - not in the far distant future, but very soon - as the worst period for (popular) culture since the 1950s." [Ghosts, 29] 

      Arguably, things have only got worse - much worse - in the ten years since this was written. 

 

 

Part 2 of this post - The Return of the 70s - can be read by clicking here.

 

Part 3 of this post - on hauntology - can be read by clicking here.   

Political Reflections on November 9th

 

 

I. 

 

I'm sure there are reasons why November 9th might resonate within the British memory and cultural imagination; events that took place on this date include, for example, the birth of Edward VII (1841) and the murder of Mary Keller at the hands of Jack the Ripper (1888). The Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, also died on this date, in 1953. 

 

However, November 9th means far more for the Germans than it does for us Brits. For November 9th was the date of two fatally significant events in modern German history: the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923 and Kristallnacht in 1938 ...

 

 

II. 

 

The Beer Hall Putsch was a failed coup d'état led by Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler (in collaboration with the famous German general and War hero Erich Ludendorff).

 

Inspired by the Fascist March on Rome the year before, around 2000 Nazis marched on the Feldherrnhalle, in Munich city centre. Here they were confronted by an armed police cordon, which resulted in the deaths of sixteen Nazis, four police officers, and one bystander.

 

Hitler escaped and hid out in the countryside for a couple of days before being arrested and charged with treason. Although things had not gone to plan, the putsch brought Hitler to the attention of the entire German nation for the first time and generated front-page headlines in newspapers around the world. 

 

His subsequent trial, which lasted for over three weeks, was also widely publicised and gave him an opportunity to promote his National Socialist ideology. Found guilty of treason, Hitler was sentenced to five years in Landsberg Prison (where he dictated his autobiography-cum-political manifesto, Mein Kampf). 

 

After serving only nine months in jail, Hitler was released on Christmas Eve, 1924. Having learned from his mistaken attempt to seize power through revolutionary force, he immediately set about transforming the NSDAP from a paramilitary organisation into a modern political party that could garner popular support and secure him victory at the ballot box.

 

In 1933, the Nazi Party won 44 per cent of the vote, which gave them 288 seats in the Reichstag. Hitler, as Chancellor, passed the Enabling Act in March of this year, which gave him the plenary powers to make laws without the Reichstag's approval. This also allowed him to destroy all opposition to his rule and by the autumn of 1934 - following the death of President Hindenburg in August of that year - Hitler was now in complete control as Führer of the German Reich.  

 

In 1939, Hitler declared that November 9th would henceforth be an official public holiday, on which to commemorate the martyrs of the Nazi movement who were killed during the Munich Putsch.

 

 

III.

 

There is, of course, another reason to remember this date: Kristallnacht - or the Night of Broken Glass - a planned and coordinated pogrom against the German Jews carried out by members of the Nazi Party's paramilitary forces (the SA and SS), in 1938.

 

Shamefully, a number of German citizens also actively participated in the orgy of violence and destruction, although most, like members of the civil authorities, simply stood by looking on (some with horror some with glee) as Jewish stores, houses, schools, and synagogues were ransacked and smashed. Even Jewish graves were violated.  

 

In all, 267 synagogues were destroyed throughout Greater Germany; over 7,000 Jewish businesses were damaged, and 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and incarcerated in concentration camps. Estimates of fatalities caused by the attacks have varied. Early reports claimed that 91 Jews had been murdered, but more recent analysis of German sources puts the figure much higher and when deaths from post-arrest maltreatment and subsequent suicides are included, the death toll reaches well into the hundreds. 

 

The world was shocked at this widely reported event; The Times declared - rightly - that it had disgraced the entire German nation. The Daily Telegraph correspondent spoke of a nauseating mix of racism and hysteria. But no one really did anything other than voice their outrage at what was, we now know, a prelude to or foreshadowing of the Final Solution and the murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust.   

 

 

IV.

 

When people today wonder why they should be concerned with the surge in antisemitism and anti-Israeli hate speech following the events of October 7th and the subsequent war in Gaza, this is why. 

 

To be perfectly honest, as much as one may feel sympathy for the Palestinians, I really don't want to hear calls for Jihad and/or intifada on the streets of London; nor chants of from the river to the sea. 

 

And nor, come to that, do I think it anything other than outrageous that the Anne Frank day care center for pre-school children in the small German town of Tangerhütte - which has operated under that name since the 1970s - may be renamed after a number of migrant parents complained.

 

Apparently, these parents find the name (and story of) Anne Frank problematic - presumably in much the same way that posters featuring the faces of Jewish children kidnapped and held hostage by Hamas are said to be problematic and provocative.  

 

For officials, including the mayor, in Tangerhütte to agree to this act of historical erasure is profoundly depressing. Didn't Germany promise to never forget what had happened in the twentieth-century and never allow such things to happen again ...?

 

Predictably, however, they justify the name change on the (woke) grounds that it is important to celebrate the diversity of the children attending and not oblige them (or their parents) to have to deal with complex political issues arising from a past about which they know nothing and care even less.

 

If these officials get their way - although following a huge backlash this now seems very unlikely - Kita Anne Frank will soon become known as the World Explorer [Weltendecker] day care centre; a name that is as vacuous as the people who came up with it.   

 

 

From Beatlemania to Dyschronia: Some Thoughts on 'Now and Then'

Screenshot from the official video (dir. Peter Jackson) 

for 'Now and Then', by The Beatles

 

 

I. 

 

As a young child, I was never a Beatles fan: they were my teenaged sister's favourites, but meant nothing to me. To quote Sid Vicious: "I didn't even know the Summer of Love was happening. I was too busy playing with my Action Man." [1]

 

And later, as a young punk, I despised the Beatles: I was happy, like Joe Strummer, to affirm 1977 as a kind of Year Zero in which the Fab Four along with Elvis and the Rolling Stones were deemed irrelevant and the past effectively abolished. 

 

(I was happy also when - according to Malcolm - Glen Matlock was thrown out of the Sex Pistols on the grounds that he was secretly a Beatles fan.) 

 

And, in the years since, I haven't been persuaded to change my view or reconsider my relationship to John, Paul, George, and Ringo. But I have been enchanted (and disturbed) by their new single ...

 

II. 

 

Released a few days ago - and billed as the Beatles' final song - 'Now and Then' [2] appears to bring poignant closure to the story of a band who formed in 1962 and broke up in 1970. 

 

But, as I'll suggest below, it also seems to mark the end of something more than that, which is why such a simple ballad has resonated so profoundly with so many people - including those who, like me, have never been subject to (or infected by) Beatlemania [3].     

 

Originally written and recorded as a demo tape by Lennon in 1977, 'Now and Then' was considered as a Beatles reunion single for their 1995–1996 retrospective project The Beatles Anthology, but this idea was quickly abandoned due to technical issues at the time (namely, Lennon's vocals could not be separated out and cleaned up).

 

However, thanks to AI-backed audio restoration technology, the track has now been reimagined and reworked and the result is pretty astonishing - as is the music video directed by Peter Jackson. So well done to Paul and Ringo and all those who contributed to the project, including the ghosts of John and George [4] and producer Giles Martin [5]. 

 

Fans and critics are almost universally happy with the result, although, paradoxically, the song and video make many people upset at the same time; even some of those who were not born in the 20th-century have been moved to tears. 

Obviously, most people have experienced individual loss and can feel nostalgic for their own past. But it seems to be more than that; people seem to be mourning something collectively, not so much as a generation, but as a people, as a culture.

 

So, how has Beatlemania - which began with hysterical joy  - terminated in mournful melancholia? 

 

 

III. 

 

You don't need to be Mark Fisher to understand what's going on here (although reading Fisher's work is certainly advantageous): we are being invited to join Paul and Ringo (and the ghosts of John and George) in a temporal loop (or time trap) where sounds and images from earlier periods get promiscuously mixed up.

 

The classic Beatles sound, "its elements now serenely liberated from  the pressures of historical becoming" [6], has been recreated via a machine. At first, we are astonished and amused; the montaging of discreet time periods is so perfect that we no longer quite know when or where we are. 

 

But then the sadness and unease creeps in, until, eventually, it all becomes a bit hellish and one realises with despair that such indiscretion ultimately leads to stasis and cultural inertia.

 

The Beatles were once genuinely something New: and they promised us the future. But with this final song the Fab Four imprison us in a perpetual present haunted by the past (and enhanced with AI-backed technology). 

 

What seems like an act of poignant closure, is actually anything but and, ironically, despite its title, this song belongs neither to Now nor Then, but to a timeless (and nihilistic) zone that some term dyschronia. 

 

This is what No Future looks like ...         

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Sid Vicious speaking in an interview with John Ingham, Sounds (Oct 1976). 

[2] The Beatles, 'Now and Then', (Apple Records, 2023). To watch the official music video dir. Peter Jackson, click here. The video features never-before-seen film of the Beatles, including scenes filmed during the 1995 recording sessions for Anthology, home movie footage of Harrison, and new footage of McCartney and Starr performing.

[3] Dismissed by The Clash in their 1979 single 'London Calling' as phoney, Beatlemania is actually a genuine, well-researched and well-documented cultural phenomenon. 

      The term was coined by the British press in 1963 to describe the scenes of hysterical adulation accorded to the group - particularly by adolescent girls - whenever (and wherever) they performed or appeared in public. Commentators rightly compared this to religious fervour with a very obvious sexual component. As an international phenomenon, Beatlemania surpassed in intensity and scope any previous examples of fan worship - even Elvis didn't make the girls scream (and literally wet their knickers) like John, Paul, George and Ringo. The Daily Telegraph published a disapproving article in which the scenes of mass worship were likened to Hitler's Nuremberg Rallies. Questions were asked in Parliament - Beatlemania was becoming a police and public safety issue. Lennon wasn't wrong to claim that the Beatles had become by 1966 more popular than Jesus amongst the young.    

      Eventually, disenchanted by their own fame, the Beatles quit touring and as they mutated from a pop group into a progressive, psychedelic rock band, so their fan base changed and Beatlemania in its most frenzied and delirious form passed as quickly as it had arisen. Now, Beatlemaniacs were looked down upon by the group's more mature, more sophisticated audience interested in serious matters, serious music, and facial hair (man). 

      The last mass display of fan adulation took place at the world premiere of the Beatles' animated film Yellow Submarine (dir. George Dunning) held at the London Pavilion in Piccadilly Circus, on 17 July 1968. There was very little screaming, but traffic was brought to a standstill.

 

[4] John Lennon was murdered in December 1980; George Harrison died of cancer in 2001.   

[5] Readers who are interested in knowing the full-story of how the song came to be can click here to view a 12-minute documentary film, Now and Then - The Last Beatles Song (written and directed by Oliver Murray, 2023) on YouTube.

 

[6] Mark Fisher, 'The Slow Cancellation of the Future', in Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, (Zero Books, 2014). 

It Was Beauty Killed the Beast

"It wasn't the airplanes. It was beauty killed the beast."  

 

 

I. 

 

One of the greatest movies ever made opened in New York City ninety years ago, on 2 March 1933. 

 

Directed and produced by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, it starred Fay Wray as out-of-work actress Ann Darrow on the lookout for love and excitement; Robert Armstrong as wildlife filmmaker Carl Denham; and Bruce Cabot as rugged first mate on board the SS Venture Jack Driscoll. 

 

The film also featured astonishing special effects by the stop-motion animation pioneer Obie O'Brien. 

 

I'm referring, of course, to King Kong ...

 

 

II.

There are many, many reasons to fondly recall this film, in which a giant ape - captured on Skull Island and brought back in chains to America, so as to be exhibited on stage as the Eighth Wonder of the World - runs rampage in New York, climbing the iconic Empire State Building whilst carrying a lovely young woman in his huge paw.

 

But the reason I'm reminded of it now is because I have just returned from a 6/20 meeting at the London home of Christian Michel [1], in which a guest speaker presented her thoughts on the subject of beauty, seemingly oblivious to (or unconcerned with) what we might term the politics of the subject - even though, as the French philosopher Jacques Rancière puts it, aesthetics is that which ties together art, thought, and issues to do with how we choose to live together as a culture and a people. 

 

I'm not criticising the fact that Miss Hasan [2] chose to mount a conservative defence of beauty (informed by the work of Roger Scruton) against what she regards as the disenchanted utility of our modern world. But I do think she might, in future, consider how beauty itself can turn very ugly - and even murderous - when, for example, it is written with a capital 'B' and conflated with other ideal notions of Goodness and Truth.

 

Plato famously made this mistake. And failed artist Adolf Hitler also acted not in the name of hate, but in the name of Love informed by Classical ideals of what constitutes Beauty; harmony, wholeness, purity, etc. 

 

Indeed, one is almost tempted to say that just as it wasn't the airplanes that killed Kong - It was beauty killed the beast - neither was it the military-industrial complex of the Third Reich that resulted in genocide; it was, rather, the Nazi aesthetic and their totalitarian desire to eradicate all they deemed ugly, monstrous, degenerate, alien (i.e., all forms of otherness) [3].           

       

Notes

 

[1] Christian Michel is a French polymath who has graciously hosted the twice-monthly 6/20 Club at his west London home for almost twenty years, during which time an impressive assortment of speakers have presented papers on a huge number of topics.

 

[2] Born on the southern coast of Pakistan, Mariam Hasan is a London-based writer who runs discussion groups in pubs and parks. Her academic background is multidisciplinary, stretching from Frankfurt-style critical theory to explorations of collective memory. 

 

[3] As the Swedish film director Peter Cohen says: 

      "Defining Nazism in traditional political terms is difficult. Mainly because its dynamic was fuelled by something quite different from what we usually call politics. This driving force was aesthetic. Its ambition was to beautify the world through violence." 

      Quoted by Matthew Gault in the online artcle 'The Nazis Obsessed Over Beauty', on medium.com: click here. 

      Readers who are interested in this might like to watch Cohen's 1989 documentary The Architecture of Doom (originally released in Swedish as Undergångens arkitektur). The film explores Hitler's obsession with his own neo-Classical (and yet paradoxically Romantic) vision of what was and was not aesthetically acceptable. The Nazis didn't just eliminate enemies of the State, they killed anyone whose very existence conflicted with their ideal of what they deemed Good, True, and Beautiful.

 

 

For those who can bear to watch, click here for the final tragic scene from King Kong (1933). 

 

 

Jagger is a Punk (2)

Mick Jagger punking it up whilst performing on set during the making 

of the video for 'Respectable' (dir. Michael Lindsay-Hogg, 1978) 

 

 

Some readers may recall the post dated 2 Sept 2018 in which I argued that, at heart, Mick Jagger is clearly a bit of a punk rocker: click here.

 

Mostly I based this on the fact that the Stones' 1966 single 'Paint It Black' [1] is one of the great nihilistic pop anthems and that whilst on tour of the US in the summer of 1978 Jagger (somewhat ironically and provocatively) wore a Seditionaries Destroy shirt on stage.

 

Anyway, I'm pleased to say that I'm confirmed in my view thanks to a recent interview with Keith Richards, in which he describes his bandmate of sixty-odd years as a punk (and occasionally an asshole). 

 

Speaking to a journalist from The Sun, Richards says (somewhat disapprovingly): "The punk side of Jagger has always been there and we'll never get rid of it." [2] 

 

It's there, for sure, in 'Paint It Black', and it's also there, for example, in the 1978 single 'Respectable' [3] and in the expletive-laden new track 'Bite My Head Off' [4].   

Whilst it still slightly pains me to admit it, I think Joe Taysom is right to say of the Rolling Stones that "few bands have embodied the spirit of punk more" [5] and that Jagger is, at eighty, a far better - certainly far fitter - frontman than sixty-seven year old Johnny Rotten. 

 

Indeed, it might even be the case that the former has always been the more interesting figure ...  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I have written about this song in a post published on 29 Oct 2017: click here.

 

[2] Keith Richards speaking to Simon Cosyns in an interview in The Sun (13 Oct 2023): click here.  

[3] 'Respectable', by the Rolling Stones, is a single release from the album Some Girls (Rolling Stones Records, 1978): click here.

      Jagger would later admit that the fast and aggressive nature of the track was due to the influence of punk on the band at that time, describing the loud three-chord rock song as punk meets Chuck Berry. See note [5] below for more about the influence of punk on the Rolling Stones. 

 

[4] 'Bite My Head Off', by the Rolling Stones (feat. Paul McCartney), is a track on the album Hackney Diamonds (Polydor, 2023): click here.

      Jagger explained of the song: "'I was kind of surprised Paul wanted to play on that track, actually. I wrote so many punk songs for the Stones, and I could never get away with them, but Paul is a very open-minded person - musically speaking.'" Quoted by Joe Taysom; see note [5] below.

 

[5] Joe Taysom, 'The Rolling Stones song Mick Jagger called "punk"', Far Out Magazine, (28 October 2023): click here. In this interesting article, Taysom goes on to write: 

 

"When the punk phenomena took off in the late 1970s, Jagger was intrigued by the prospect, even if The Rolling Stones weren't involved in the scene. While the group have never made a fully-throttle punk record, they did introduce elements of the genre into their sound on the 1978 album Some Girls. Jagger told Rolling Stone that the album's main inspiration was New York City, which injected the LP with 'an extra spur and hardness'. [...] However, despite Some Girls taking influence from New York, Jagger preferred the British version of punk to the American incarnation."

Education for Death

The original poster for Walt Disney's 

Education for Death (1943)

 

I.

 

Education for Death (1943) is an animated short film produced by Walt Disney, which illustrates how to make a Nazi out of a child. Directed by Clyde Geronimi, it was based on a non-fiction book of the same title by Gregor Ziemer, published two years previously [1]. 

 

The film tells the story of Hans, a boy born and raised in Nazi Germany and enrolled (with his parents blessing) into the Hitlerjugend. 

 

The audience is told that Hans is fed a constant diet of lies and taught how to hate any non-Aryan peoples - particularly the Jews. His sacred duty is to serve his Führer and Fatherland, even if this meant sacrificing his life.    

 

In one scene, Hans and his fellow pupils watch as their teacher draws a cartoon on the blackboard of a rabbit being eaten by a fox, prompting Hans to express his sympathy for the former. The teacher, furious by this display of feeling, orders Hans to sit in the corner wearing a dunce-cap, to the amusement of his classmates. 

 

Hans thus learns an important lesson; namely, that it is right for the strong to prey on the weak and that he must show no mercy for his natural inferiors.

 

Later, Hans takes part in a book-burning, where works by Spinoza, Voltaire, and Einstein are consigned to the flames and the Bible is replaced with a copy of Hitler's Mein Kampf. 

 

After years endlessly marching and sieg heiling dressed in his Hitler Youth uniform, Hans is finally deemed a good Nazi and old enough to join the Wehrmacht so that he can fight (and if need be die) for his country. 

 

Years of indoctrination into National Socialist ideology have ensured he only sees, thinks, and does what the Party want him to see, think, and do. Hans has effectively become a hate-filled automaton, blind to the irony of the fact that in order to view Jews as subhuman, he has himself been dehumanised.

 

Ultimately, Hans and his young comrades meet the violent end they were educated for and the film ends with a row of swastika-stamped graves ...  

 

 

II.

Unfortunately, Nazis are not the only ones who educate their children for death, or martyrdom, as some would have it ... 

 

The textbooks used in the Palestinian Authority school system are full of deadly ideas and images. Expressions of hatred towards Israel - including the denial of its right to exist and praise for the armed struggle against it, as well as crude antisemitic propaganda targeting Jews in general - are so commonplace that even the UN and the EU have voiced their concern [2]. 

 

But whether some members of these organisations like it or not - and whether flag-waving supporters of Palestine care to admit it or not - youngsters in Gaza and the West Bank are educated from birth in an atmosphere of religious and political fervour, which results in (and perpetuates) a profoundly depressing cycle of violence and terrorism disguised as holy war or jihad. 

 

 

Images found in Palestinian schoolbooks showing a youth firing stones 

at Israeli soldiers and a girl laughing as the infidels burn. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Gregor Ziemer, an American author and teacher who lived in Germany from 1928 to 1939, wrote the book Education for Death after fleeing Germany on the eve of World War II. His work highlights how the Nazi Party controlled every aspect of children's education. As well as the Disney short, the book also inspired the black-and-white live action film Hitler's Children (dir. Edward Dmytryk, 1943), starring Tim Holt, Bonita Granville, and Kent Smith. It's brutal portrayal of life in the Hitler Youth was among the most financially successful films produced by RKO Studios. 

 

[2] As recently as May of this year - just five months before the present conflict in Gaza began (thanks to Hamas) - the European Parliament passed a resolution condemning hateful Palestinian textbooks and threatening to freeze funding for education, unless all antisemitic content was removed.

      Whether they'll actually do anything, however, is doubtful; the EU remains the Palestinian Authority's largest financial benefactor and this is the fourth consecutive year that the European Parliament has passed a resolution criticizing the Palestinian Authority for its school material. Nevertheless, this is the first time that an EU resolution has directly linked the deplorable stuff found in some textbooks with the role played by adolescents in terrorism.  

      For their part, the PA defends much of the material as an important part of their own cultural narrative.

      As for the United Nations, in 2019 a panel of independent experts submitted a report containing unprecedented criticism of the Palestinian Authority, finding that they had failed to implement UN treaties on racism. 

      The committee also reported the existence of hate speech in media outlets (particularly those controlled by Hamas), in statements made by public officials, and in school curricula and textbooks. It called on the PA to combat such hate speech and to remove derogatory comments and stereotypical images from school textbooks that perpetuate racial prejudice.

 

Commemoratio omnium fidelium defunctorum: A Post for All Souls' Day in Memory of My Mother

Traditionally, candles are used on All Souls' Day to provide 

light for the poor souls languishing in purgatorial darkness.

 

 

All Soul's Day is a day of prayer and remembrance for those who have departed this world but failed to make it straight into heaven; i.e., those poor souls who find themselves hanging about in that afterlife destination known as purgatory [1].

 

To be clear, these people are men and women of faith; they are not evil-doers who are ultimately bound for hell. Nevertheless, due perhaps to the taint of venial sin, or having failed to fully atone for past transgressions, they require some form of spiritual cleansing before they can ascend unto that place inhabited by angels and saints. 

 

The Church - and when I say the Church I mean the Catholic Church - teaches that this purification of souls in purgatory can be assisted by the actions of the living (thus the call to commemoration) and I like the idea that just as the dead can look on and help us, so too can we help them and, indeed, have a duty to be kind and generous to the departed. 

 

It's wrong for the dead to haunt the living and to resent their happiness; but it's also wrong of the living to curse the dead and deny them their entry into the highest place where they will know the gladness of death (which some believe to be oneness with God and others think of as oblivion). 

 

D. H. Lawrence was often respectful and tender towards the dead in his late poetry. He asks us, for example, to show pity towards the dead that were ousted out of life, but are not yet ready to make the final journey and so linger in the shadows like outcast dogs on the margins of heaven [2].            

 

In a very beautiful poem entitled 'All Souls Day', Lawrence writes:

 

 

Be kind, oh be kind to your dead

and give them a little encouragement

and help them to build their little ship of death.

For the soul has a long, long journey after death

to the sweet home of pure oblivion.

Each needs a little ship, a little ship

and the proper store of meal for the longest journey

Oh, from your heart

provide for your dead once more, equip them

like departing mariners, lovingly. [3]

Ultimately, it is our love and warm memories which purify the souls of the dead; the compassion of still-living hearts that helps them on "to the fathomless deeps ahead, far, far from the grey shores of marginal existence" [4].   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Although many people confuse and conflate the terms, purgatory is not limbo and whilst the former is Church doctrine, the latter isn't - despite the fact that many Catholics believed in it and wrote about it, including Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. 

      Whilst purgatory is reserved for souls ultimately bound for heaven, limbo was believed to be the final destination for the souls of babies that had died without being baptised. In other words, a kind of posthumous neonatal unit either on the edge of hell or the lip of heaven. In 2007, Pope Benedict XVI requested that Church theologians reconsider this idea and argued that the truly Christian thing to do was to pray that God's mercy be shown to all deceased babies.     

      As for purgatory, it's probably best to think of it as a state of being or condition of the soul, rather than a place. That way, one can avoid having to try and give coordinates as to its location. This seems to be the line that is presently taken by the Church.  

      Readers who are interested in this subject may like to see Diana Walsh Pasulka's book Heaven Can Wait: Purgatory in Catholic Devotional and Popular Culture, (Oxford University Press, 2014). 

 

[2] See Lawrence's poem 'The Houseless Dead' in The Poems, Vol. I., ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 635-36. 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'All Souls Day', in The Poems, Vol. I, p. 635. 

      I read this poem in full at my mother's funeral service in February of this year: click here.

 

[4] D. H. Lawrence, 'After All Saints Day', in The Poems, Vol. I, p. 637. 

 

This post is also in memory of Felisa Martinez and Angeliki Thanassa.   

Of Glad Ghosts and Spooky Love Affairs: Halloween With D. H. Lawrence (2023)

 

 

I.

 

The dead don't die, wrote D. H. Lawrence [a], and it's a line that has long haunted my imagination.

 

Sometimes they look on and help (the kindly ghost); sometimes they prevent us from living (the malevolent spirit); and sometimes they engage in non-consensual sexual activity, ranging from the nocturnal masturbation of sleepers to violent spectral rape (the pervy poltergeist).

 

It really depends, I suppose, on how the dead adjust to their posthumous status - some find peace easier than others - and the nature also of the relationship established by the living with those who inhabit the other side; is it respectful and loving, for example, or is there an element of secret resentment for those who have passed and a refusal to let them go? 

 

Lawrence addresses these and other questions in a (longer-than-average) short story written in 1925, entitled 'Glad Ghosts', and published (in two parts) in The Dial the following summer [b].   

 

 

II. 

 

According to one commentator, 'Glad Ghosts' is often misread or simply dismissed as a confused and confusing work [c]. For those of us with a passion for spectrophilia, however, it holds significant interest and makes for an amusing halloween study ...

Having said that, it's not really a supernatural sex story; it is rather the tale of kinky but perfectly mundane goings on between a group of unhappy and unfulfilled - some might say repressed or hysterical - poshos happy to indulge in extramarital shenanigans so as to feel better about themselves (and in the case of both women involved, conceive a child).

 

In other words, this is a perversely material tale about the flesh, disguised by Lawrence as a ghost story. Readers are invited to play along with the idea that there might possibly be strange things going bump in the night (and not merely those caught up in a polyamorous love pentangle), but we know that's not really the case.   

 

Anyhoo, let's take a look at the tale a bit more closely ...

 

 

III.

 

Mark Morier is the (Lawrentian) narrator. He's indifferent to his own poverty, but vitally concerned with his own passionate vision which, he felt, "lay embedded in the half-dead body of this life" [174]. 

 

Mark is friendly - but never flirtatious - with a fellow former art student called Carlotta Fell. She's a beautiful young woman with an aristocratic background and a penchant for painting still lifes. 

 

Mark feels that, despite their differences, he and Carlotta "had a curious understanding in common: an inkling, perhaps, of the unborn body of life hidden within the body of this half-death which we call life [...] a curious abstract intimacy, that went very deep, yet showed no obvious contact" [175].

 

In other words, he wants to fuck her but feels she's out of his league. His suspicion is Carlotta wants to "marry into her own surroundings" [175] rather than take a chance with him. She hates her own class, but is pot-bound within it like a house plant. Perhaps that's what makes her sad: an unconventional soul forced to lead a conventional life. 

 

At twenty-one, Carlotta marries Lord Lathkill (or Luke to his friends): a handsome army officer with dark hair and dark eyes. This is usually a good sign in Lawrence's work, but I'm not sure about that in this case. Later he is described as being "like a tortoise in a glittering, polished tortoiseshell that mirrors eternity" [176]; not conceited, but secure in his knowledge of things. 

 

Having said that, however, there was a sort of fear in his dark eyes and an emptiness: "He was so sure of circumstances, and not by any means sure of the man in the middle of the circumstances. Himself! Himself! That was already a ghost." [177]

 

The problem is he thinks himself and his family unlucky - almost cursed. And sure enough, all three children born to him and his wife die; their twin boys are killed in a car accident and their baby girl perishes from a fatal illness. Following this, they retreat into a life of seclusion, with his elderly mother at the family home in Derbyshire. It's here - at this haunted mansion - that Morier reluctantly goes to visit them ...

 

When he arrives, there's already another couple present; bald-headed, ruddy-faced Colonel Hale and his swarthy young wife, who had "the hint of a black moustache" [183] and hairy limbs. Later, at dinner, Morier will admire her slim, swarthy arms which had "an indiscernible down on them" [185].

 

When Morier is introduced to the dowager Lady Lathkill and this rather odd couple it makes for an awkward encounter. He feels as if he "interrupted them at a séance" [183], which, given the old woman's "leanings towards the uncanny - spiritualism, and that kind of thing" [181] is perfectly possible.       

 

Morier is shown to his room - the so-called ghost room. Apparently the lovely female ghost isn't ghoulish or ghastly in the least and brings good luck. Morier is put in the room to tempt her into appearing, so that the family fortune might be restored. Our narrator doesn't seem to take the idea of a ghost very seriously. In fact, he's thinking more about Carlotta than the latter:

 

"Poor Carlotta! She looked worn now. [...] It was as if some bitterness had soaked all the life out of her, and she was [...] drained of her feelings. It grieved me, and the thought passed through my mind that a man should take her in his arms and cherish her body, and start her flame again. [...] Her courage was fallen, in her body; only her spirit fought on. She would have to restore the body of her life, and only a living body could do it." [183-184]      

 

I think, as readers, we all know what this means and what's going to happen ...

 

It turns out that Carlotta isn't the only one dead in life; her husband and the Colonel too are zombiefied. The latter, for example, is not quite sixty yet has blank staring eyes with "deathly yellow stains underneath" [189] and he seemed to smell. 

 

For some reason, he decides to confide in Morier and tells him of his marriage to his first wife, Lucy, who has haunted him ever since her death, and now prevents him from loving his new young bride; wed for almost a year, they have yet to consummate their relationship. Apparently, she doesn't mind, believing as she does that pleasing the dead is a higher form of duty than pleasuring the living.       

 

Morier - and, indeed, Lord Lathkill - is shocked and disturbed by this. Both think it wrong and the former says he'd simply tell the ghost-wife to go to Blazes! For why love a ghost when you can love a black she-fox - as he thinks the Colonel's wife.

 

Later, over coffee, Morier is aroused by the thought of dark hairs growing on the inside of her "strong-skinned, dusky thighs" [193]; he admires the mysterious fire he detects beneath her resistant passivity. However, it's not just the narrator of our tale who is attracted to Mrs Hale - Lord Lathkill is also keen to dance with her ...  

 

Not that Morier is unhappy having to dance with Carlotta: 

 

"She was very still, and remote, and she hardly looked at me. Yet the touch of her was wonderful, like a flower that yields itself to the morning. Her warm, silken shoulder was soft and grateful under my hand [...] 

      She [...] let the strain and the tension of all her life depart [...] leaving her nakedly still, within my arm. And I only wanted to be with her, to have her in my touch." [194]

 

Having said that, it doesn't stop him from enjoying the next dance with Mrs Hale:

 

"I looked down at her dusky, dirt-looking neck - she wisely avoided powder. The duskiness of her mesmerised body made me see the faint dark sheen of her thighs, with intermittant black hairs. It was as if they shone through the silk of her mauve dress, like the limbs of a half-wild animal [...] [194]

 

Unfortunately for Morier, Mrs Hale only has eyes for Lord Lathkill ... and he's keen to try his luck with the dark young woman. But then the temperature suddenly drops and the spirit of the Colonel's first wife puts in an invisible appearance. Only Lord Lathkill is determined she won't spoil their fun - and he puts on the gramophone, insisting they keep dancing so as to resist the "cold weight of an unliving spirit [that] was slowly crushing all warmth and vitality out of everything"  [197].

It's the triumph of warm flesh and blood over death - something which comes as a moment of revelation for Lord Lathkill: 

 

"'I've only realised how very extraordinary it is to be a man of flesh and blood, alive. It seems so ordinary, in comparison, to be dead, and merely a spirit. That seems so commonplace. But fancy having a living face, and arms, and thighs. Oh my God, I'm glad I've realised in time!'" [200]

 

Pressing the arm of Mrs Hale against his chest, he addresses his wife, who is silently weeping by this stage:

 

"'Don't cry, Carlotta! [...] We haven't killed one another. We're too decent after all. We've almost become two spirits side by side. We've almost become two ghosts to one another [...] Oh, but I want you to get back your body, even if I can't give it you. I want my flesh and blood, Carlotta, and I want you to have yours. We've suffered too much the other way.'" [201]  

 

With this, whilst still holding hands with the Colonel's dark young wife, he hands Carlotta over to Morier, who agrees to help her (again, we all know what this means). But before Morier can fuck Carlotta and Lord Lathkill can bang Mrs Hale who sat in silent remote mystery throughout the above speech, they must first help the Colonel, who reappears in his dressing gown desperate for assistance.

 

Lord Lathkill - like a man with "one foot in life and one in death" [202] knew just what to say: the Colonel should open up his heart and provide a home for poor dead Lucy. He accuses the Colonel of never having worshipped the body of his wife with his body - no matter how awfully good he may have been to her. 

 

In an amusing passage, Lawrence writes: 

 

"The queerest of all accusing angels did Lord Lathkill make, as he sat there with the hand of the other man's wife clasped against his thigh. His face was fresh and naïve, and the dark eyes were bright with a clairvoyant candour, that was like madness, and was, perhaps, supreme sanity." [203] 

 

Lord Lathkill - or shall we call him Luke, a strange, uncanny figure was, in truth, like a man reborn - tells the Colonel that Lucy haunts him and wails in the afterlife because he despised her living body and the only way to end her torment (and his) is to "'take her to your warm heart, even now, and comfort her [...] be kind to her poor ghost, bodily'" [204].  

 

And this he does - to miraculous effect! "The passionate, compassionate soul stirred in him and was pure [...] [205]. 

 

Luke and Dorothy - for that, it turns out, is the living Mrs Hale's name - retire for a night of passion. And Morier goes to his room in the hope and expectation of a visitor in the night ... And it's at this point that the story becomes a little unclear as to what actually happens: is it the ghost of silence, or is it Carlotta who comes under cover of darkness ...? 

 

Even the narrator seems uncertain. But see what you think, dear reader, on the basis of the following passages:

"And softly, in silence, I took off my things. I was thinking of Carlotta: and a litte sadly, perhaps [...] I could have worshipped her with my body, and she, perhaps, was stripped in the body to be worshipped. But it was not for me [...] to fight against circumstances.

      [...] Desire is a sacred thing, and should not be violated. 

      'Hush!' I said to myself. 'I will sleep, and the ghost of my silence can go forth, in the subtle body of desire, to meet that which is coming to meet it. Let my ghost go forth, and let me not interfere. There are many intangible meetings, and unknown fulfilments of desire.'

      So I went softly to sleep, as I wished to, without interfering with the warm, crocus-like ghost of my body. 

      And I must have gone far, far down the intricate galleries of sleep, to the very heart of the world. For I know I passed on beyond the strata of images and words, beyond the iron veins of memory, and even the jewels of rest, to sink in the final dark like a fish, dumb, soundless, and imageless, yet alive and swimming. 

      And at the very middle of the deep night, the ghost came to me, at the heart of the ocean of oblivion, which is also the heart of life. Beyond hearing, or even knowledge of contact, I met her and knew her. How I know it I don't know. Yet I know it with eyeless, wingless knowledge. 

      For man in the body is formed through countless ages, and at the centre is the speck, or spark, upon which all his formation has taken place. It is even not himself, deep beyond his many depths. Deep from him calls to deep. And according as deep answers deep, man glistens and surpasses himself.             

      Beyond all the pearly mufflings of consciousness, of age upon age of consciousness, deep calls yet to deep, and sometimes is answered. It is calling and answering, new-wakened God calling within the deep of a man, and new God calling answer from the other deep. And sometimes the other deep is a woman, as it was with me, when my ghost came. 

      Women were not unknown to me. But never before had woman come, in the depths of night, to answer my deep with her deep. As the ghost came, came as a ghost of silence, still in the depth of sleep.       

      I know she came. I know she came even as a woman, to my man. But the knowledge is darkly naked as the event. I only know, it was so. In the deep of sleep a call was called from the deeps of me, and answered in the deeps, by a woman among women. Breasts or thighs or face, I remember not a touch, no, nor a movement of my own. It is all complete in the profundity of darkness. Yet I know it was so. 

      I awoke towards dawn, from far, far away. I was vaguely conscious of drawing nearer and nearer, as the sun must have been drawing towards the horizon, from the complete beyond. Till at last the faint pallor of mental consciousness coloured my waking. 

      And then I was aware of a pervading scent, as of plum-blossom, and a sense of extraordinary silkiness - though where, and in what contact, I could not say. It was as the first blemish of dawn. 

      And even with so slight a conscious registering, it seemed to disappear. Like a whale that has sounded to the bottomless seas. That knowledge of it, which was the marriage of the ghost and me, disappeared from me, in its rich weight of certainty, as the scent of the plum-blossom moved down the lanes of my consciousness, and my limbs stirred in a silkiness for which I have no comparison. 

      As I became aware, I also became uncertain. I wanted to be certain of it, to have definite evidence. And as I sought for evidence, it disappeared, my perfect knowledge was gone. I no longer knew in full. 

      Now, as the daylight slowly amassed, in the windows from which I had put back the shutters, I sought in myself for evidence, and in the room. 

      But I shall never know. I shall never know if it was a ghost, some sweet spirit from the innermost of the ever-deepening cosmos; or a woman, a very woman, as the silkiness of my limbs seems to attest; or a dream, a hallucination! I shall never know." [208-209]

      

Only, I think we can know: because when Morier leaves that morning Carlotta says goodbye and whispers: "'At last it was perfect!'" [209] - and I don't think she's referring to their efforts on the dance floor.

 

The tale finishes with (the miraculous) news revealed in a slightly nudge-nudge, wink-wink manner from Lord Lathkill that Carlotta has given birth to a blonde-haired son (Gabriel); and that Dorothy Hale is also a new mother, to a "'black lamb of a daughter, called Gabrielle'" [210]. 

 

As for the Colonel, he became a pig farmer - as well as a father to another man's child. Not that the latter fact seems to bother him, Lord Lathkill assuring Morier that the former is a good sport (i.e., a cheerful cuckold) and that whenever they meet they look one another in the eye with understanding.   

 

 

Notes

 

[a] D. H. Lawrence, letter to John Middleton Murry (2 Feb 1923), in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. IV, ed. Warren Roberts, James T. Boulton and Elizabeth Mansfield, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 375. 

      The deceased in question was Katherine Mansfield, Murry's wife, who had died on 9 January 1923, aged 34. 

 

[b] The Dial, vol. lxxxvi (July-August 1926), pp. 1-21 and 123-141. Here, I am referring to the story as published in The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, (Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 174-210.   

[c] See Ben Stoltzfus, 'Lacan's Knot, Freud's Narrative, and the Tangle of "Glad Ghosts"', in The D. H. Lawrence Review, Vol. 32/33 (2003-2004), pp. 102-114. To read on JSTOR, please click here. 

      For Stoltzfus, the ghosts are "metaphorical knots of dysfunction", not actual presences from beyond the grave, and the tale is best understood in psychoanalytic terms. Lawrence uses poetic language, he argues, to "unveil unconscious states of mind" [105]. 

 

 

For an earlier post on the theme of spectrophilia - written with reference to Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights - click here.

 

 

My Debt to Jewish-American Humour

Danny Kaye, Jerry Lewis, and Phil Silvers (as Sgt. Bilko)

 

 

I.

 

Humour, said Freud, is a means of obtaining pleasure from life, no matter what. 

 

In other words, laughter is a way of overcoming suffering as well as an antidote to that all-too-human tendency to take ourselves seriously. 

  

That's why the most profound comedy is often rooted in misery and self-mockery (even self-hatred). And that's why the best humour in the world is Jewish in origin ...

 

 

II.

 

I'm certain that the tradition of humour in Judaism can be traced way back, but I'm a late 20th-century boy and so I'm mostly interested in the humour that developed amongst the Jewish community of the United States and shaped the worlds of film and television in the last seventy years, rather than the subtle theological satire expressed in the Talmud, for example.

 

Antisemitic conspiracy theorists often claim that the Jews are overrepresented in the world of banking and maybe that's true, maybe not [1]. But what cannot be denied is that a disproportionately high percentage of American comedians and comic actors have been Jewish [2].

Of course, Jews have significantly influenced and contributed to the development of the modern world in many fields - art, philosophy, science, politics, business, etc. But I'm particularly grateful for their role within the world of entertainment. 

 

For my childhood was made happier by Danny Kaye, Jerry Lewis, and Phil Silvers as Sgt. Bilko. And today, the comic genius of Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld continues to exert a huge influence over my understanding not only of what constitutes funny, but of how I view the world (ironically and with curbed enthusiasm).

 

 

 

Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David

 

  

 

Notes

 

[1] The idea that Jews are good with (and greedy for) money is one of the oldest antisemitic stereotypes. It's undeniable, however, that Jews are well-represented in finance and business. See the article on Jews and Finance on myjewishlearning.com which nicely puts things into historical and cultural context, explaining why this is so. 

 

[2] In 1978, Time magazine claimed that 80 per cent of professional comedians in America were Jewish, even though Jews only made up 3 per cent of the U.S. population at that time. Click here to read the article 'Behaviour: Analyzing Jewish Comics' (2 Oct 1978).