Can a Writer Ever Overshare? On Maggie Nelson's Self-Exposure

Author Maggie Nelson: skilled in the art of making 

the personal and the private public and political

 

 

I. 

 

Someone recently asked me the following question: Can a writer ever overshare?   

 

Well, having graduated from the Deleuzian school of literary theory, I'm certainly uncomfortable with the idea that the writer's main (or only) task is to give expression to the feelings, or impose a coherent and conventional model of language on lived experience.

In other words, literature should not become merely a form of personal overcoding and writing a novel, a poem, or a play is more than an opportunity for an author to confess and tell all. 

 

Like Deleuze, I'm of the view that any genre of writing reliant upon the recounting of childhood memories, foreign holidays, lost loves, or sexual fantasies, is not only frequently bad writing, but dead writing; for literature dies from an excess of emotion, imagination, and autobiography, just as it does from an overdose of reality [1].

 

I don't think it makes me a philosophical prude to say that just as it's advisable to exercise a degree of caution [2] as an artist, so too do terms such as modesty, reservation, and self-restraint have crucial importance. Oversharing and trauma dumping is not the only way - or even the best way - to produce genuinely transgressive work.     

 

 

II.

 

Although she sometimes refers to Deleuze's work - particularly the books written in collaboration with Félix Guattari - Maggie Nelson doesn't seem to be overly concerned with the danger of giving herself away via the giving of a little too much personal information. 

 

In fact, she's a little defensive and prickly on the subject having, I suspect, been accused of oversharing by numerous critics on multiple occasions. So it is that when in conversation with the Canadian artist Moyra Davey in 2017, Nelson responds thusly to the idea that tell-all memoirs can sometimes be a bit much and leave the reader uncomfortable:

 

"Besides mainstream celebrity memoirs or other genres in which artistry need not apply, I don't know where all these narcissistic tell-alls are, not to mention the fact that there can literally be no such thing as a 'tell-all'." [3]

She continues: 

 

"Personally, I never think to myself while reading, 'Why would you want to tell me this?' That question seems to me to speak volumes about the reader/critic more than about the writer. What I hear in that question is the baseline assumption that the writer should not be telling you all this [...] that there's shame in the telling, and the critic's job is to wake the artist or writer up to the shame she/he may have missed." [4]

Nelson concludes:

"At the far end of this logic lies the virulent idea that we're better off with less speech, less telling, less expression; nearly every nasty review of a work of autobiography I've read contains this latent or manifest wish that the writer/artist would just shut up [...] it bugs the hell out of me." [5]

 

 

III. 

 

Whilst one can certainly sense Nelson's irritation - and whilst I don't doubt the genuineness of such for a moment - I don't share her conclusion. 

 

For one thing, I'm of the view that confronting (and achieving) silence is the ultimate aim of literature; that it should push language to its own external limits (which are not outside language but are the outside of language). 

 

In other words, the writer does have to learn how to shut the fuck up due to the fact that, once spoken, speech immediately and directly "enters the service of power" [6] - even if that speech is born of the writer's ultimate nakedness, wherein we like to believe ourselves to be essentially free and shameless.

 

In sum: there's nothing radical, liberating, or progressive about self-exposure and articulating one's seceret desires. On the other hand, there's a good deal to be said for those who know how to remain the soul of discretion and have the ability to withhold certain details [7].

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See Gilles Deleuze, 'Literature and Life', in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael E. Greco (Verso, 1998), pp. 1-6.   

      Of course, all writers can be guilty of self-obsessed dead writing (necro-narcissism) at times; of being a little too personal. But this is something to try and keep to a minimum and an author should always aim to become-imperceptible as far as possible. Or, as Wilde says in the Preface to Dorian Gray: "To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim."

 

[2] See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (The Athlone Press, 1988), pp. 160-61, where they advocate caution and the Nietzschean art of small doses, since overdosing - like oversharing - is a very real danger when it comes to dismantling the organism, following a line of flight, or effecting a strange becoming via literature. 

 

[3] Maggie Nelson, 'A Life, A Face, A Gaze', in Like Love: Essays and Conversations (Fern Press, 2024), p. 137.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] See Roland Barthes's 'Inaugural Lecture, Collège de France', in Selected Writings, ed. with an introduction by Susan Sontag (Fontana Press, 1989), p. 461. 

[7] For an alternative view, see Lucretia Rose McCarthy's essay 'Radical Exposures: Crip and Queer in Maggie Nelson's Autotheory', in C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings, Vol. 1, Issue 1 (Spring 2023): click here. In a nut-shell, McCarthy argues that through her autotheoretical writings: 

      "Nelson familiarizes crip and queer experience, embracing difference through detail whilst challenging stigma and otherness common to the categories. She rejects the mundane and pathological associations of 'oversharing' and shows the way self-exposure can deepen understanding of marginalized lives." 

 

My Naked Nakedness is Positive Atrociousness: Notes on The Deadman (1989)

 Jennifer Montgomery as Marie in The Deadman 

(dir. Peggy Ahwesh and Keith Sanborn, 1989)

 

"When Edouard fell back dead an emptiness opened inside her,

a prolonged shudder went through her, and bore her upward like an angel." [1] 

 

 

I. 

 

D. H. Lawrence insisted that there was "no real battle" between himself and Christianity [2] and that's certainly true when it comes to the question of nudity in art and the importance of retaining the essential beauty and dignity of the human form.

 

For like any devout Catholic, Lawrence believes that the human body is sacred - not least in its sexual aspect - and that whilst art affirms this fact and manifests being, pornography attempts to deny it; to reduce the human form to base matter and to do dirt on sex.  

 

Pornography, says Lawrence, is an insult to the flesh and to a vital human relationship: ugly and cheap it makes human nudity; ugly and degraded it makes the sexual act; "trivial and cheap and nasty" [3]. 

 

And that's nothing to be proud of ...    

 

 

II.

 

I was reminded of Lawrence's vital opposition to pornography - defined as the "grey disease of sex-hatred, coupled with the yellow-disease of dirt-lust" [4] - when reading Maggie Nelson's favourable review of the short film The Deadman (1989), by Peggy Ahwesh and Keith Sanborn. 

 

Based on Bataille's story Le Mort - written sometime during the period 1942-44, but first published posthumously in 1964 - The Deadman is summarised on IMDb as a "strange tale of a woman who sets off on a wild adventure before returning home to die" [5]. 

 

Somehow, that doesn't quite prepare the viewer for the 40 minutes of black-and-white depravity that follow; a symbolic free play of bodies and images that many queer feminist commentators - including Nelson - find liberating.     

 

According to the latter, what's great - and important - about The Deadman is that by giving back full and uncompromising sexual agency to a nearly naked female protagonist (played by Jennifer Montgomery), it reclaims the pornographic imagination from its confinement within a certain (male) cinematic history and genre for a female audience:

 

"It's a funny, radical, stand-alone reclamation of realms in which so many of us have too often had to hold our noses and practice a robust disidentification in order to play." [6] 

 

And that's a good thing, I suppose ...

 

 

III. 

 

Although Keith Sanborn - who had read Bataille in the 1970s and produced his own translation of Le Mort - is co-credited as a director, Nelson seems to think that Peggy Ahwesh - who "comes out of the anti-art sensibility of punk, out of feminism, and out of lowbrow horror" [7] -  is the real driving force behind the film, responsible for getting the actors to do "real sexual things to each other, with all the mess and stakes" [8].  

 

When, says Nelson, you combine Bataille's transgressive philosophy with Ahwesh's anarcho-feminist sensibility, you get "an exploration of perversity that nods to misogynistic tradition and feminist corrective while also devoting itself to nongendered erotics - the erotics of chaos, of self-abandon, of wrestling, of scatology, of necrophilia, of ugliness, of aggression, of suicidality, and so on" [9].

 

And you also get a film that is, says Nelson, "laugh-out-loud funny" and "crackling with distubance and pleasure" [10].

 

Though Lawrence wouldn't like it - and, to be honest, I'm not sure I do either ... [11] 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Georges Bataille, The Dead Man, in My Mother / Madame Edwarda / The Dead Man, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (Marion Boyars, 1995), p. 168.

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'There is no real battle ...', Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge University Press,1988), Appendix I: Fragmentary writings, p. 385. 

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'Pornograpy and Obscenity', Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 241. 

 

[4] Ibid., p. 242. 

 

[5] See the entry on The Deadman (1987) on IMDb: click here.  

[6] Maggie Nelson, 'A Girl Walks Into a Bar ... On Peggy Ahwesh and Keith Sanborn's The Deadman', in Like Love: Essays and Conversations (Fern Press, 2024), p. 70. 

[7] Ibid., p. 71. 

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid., p. 72.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Readers who wish to judge for themselves can watch an eight minute excerpt from The Deadman on Vimeo: click here.  

Heathen, Hedonistic, and Horny: Notes on Maggie Nelson's Bluets (2009) - Part 2: Propositions 121-240

Joan Mitchell: Les Bluets (1973) 

Oil on canvas (281 x 580 cm) [f]

 

 

NB: part one of this post (reflecting on selected propositions from 1-120) can be read by clicking here.  

 

 

131 

 

This makes smile: 

 

"'I just don't feel like you're trying hard enough,' one friend says to me. How can I tell her that not trying has become the whole point, the whole plan?" 

 

 

134 

 

Once, I began assembling a book of fragments to do with the practice of joy before death - suicide notes, if you like. This proposition would've made a welcome addition: 

 

"If you are in love with red then you slit or shoot. If you are in love with blue you fill your pouch with stones [...] and head down to the river." 

 

Philosophers, however, from Empedocoles to Deleuze, usually like to leap to their death like iridescent jumping spiders. 

 

 

150 

 

"For Plato, colour was as dangerous a narcotic as poetry." 

 

And, many centuries later, the Puritans also hated colours and "smashed the stained-glass windows of churches, thinking them idolatrous, degenerate". 

 

I knew both these things. 

 

But I didn't know that, before becoming a holy colour - one particularly associated with the Blessed Virgin - blue "often symbolized the Antichrist" (i.e., he who comes out of the blue to deceive mankind and deny the Father and Son).

 

 

156 - 161

 

According to Lawrence, it's a terrible thing to educate children into abstract knowledge, so that they may understand the world. For adults to solemnly explain to three-year-olds why grass is green is, he says, inexcusable stupidity and will arrest their dynamic development [g]. 

 

As there is always something a bit childlike about poets, it didn't surprise me to learn that although she had been told the answer several times to the question 'Why is the sky blue?', Nelson can never quite recall the explanation. 

 

The only part she does remember is that "the blue of the sky depends on the darkness of empty space behind it". 

 

Never mind the scattering of sunlight and the length of waves, etc., for Nelson the blueness of the sky "is something of an ecstatic accdent produced by void and fire".        

 

I love this thought: as I do the idea of divine darkness and agnosia - the latter being a form of unknowing that one discovers (or accomplishes) within the former: 'Explanations', as Wittgenstein once said, 'come to an end somewhere' [h].

 

 

164

 

I agree with Lawrence that the proverbial ideas of beauty as something sinful and shallow are all of them false [i]. 

 

And because I agree with this, I also very much like Maggie Nelson's proposition that, "despite what the poets and philosophers and theologians have said", beauty "neither obscures truth nor reveals it". 

 

And that blue - the colour of sex [j] - is perhaps the most beautful of all colours. 

 

 

167 - 168

 

When - like Cézanne, Artaud, and the American artist Mike Kelley - you've had enough of psychology and the narcissistic pleasure of seeing your own reflection (on film screens, for example), then it's time to attend to colour:

 

"Perhaps this is why I have turned my gaze so insistently to blue: it does not purport to be me, or anyone else for that matter."

 

 

171

 

Philosophically, this is at the heart of my project to do with the Ruins: gathering fragments of blue has nothing to do with paying tribute to (or wishing to recreate) some ideal model of blue wholeness; "a bouquet is no homage to the bush". 

 

 

183 / 185

 

Readers might recall that in proposition 20 Nelson stated: Fucking leaves everything as it is. 

 

Here, she echoes this by writing: "For better or worse, I do not think that writing changes things very much, if at all. For the most part, I think it leaves everything as it is."

 

That's an unusual thing for a writer to say: usually, like Goethe, they are anxious about the possibly destructive nature of language; the fact that words can kill the essential quality of a thing. 

 

If for Warhol sex was just another (occasionally quite satisfying) way to pass the time, then that's pretty much what writing is for Nelson [k]. 

 

 

204

 

And now, finally, thanks to Nelson, I have an answer when someone asks why I can never be bothered to have things repaired (even when this will cause significant damage and expense in the long term): I have little to no instinct for protection ...

 

"Out  of laziness, curiosity, or cruelty - if one can be cruel to objects - I have given them up to their diminishment."   

 

Notes

 

[f] Maggie Nelson names this as her favourite painting in proposition 145 of Bluets (Jonathan Cape, 2017), p. 57. She later admires Mitchell for her chromophilic recklessness, that is to say, for choosing her pigments "for their intensity rather than their durability". See proposition 154, p. 61.     

[g] See D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 123. 

[h] Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Blackwell Publishers, 1953), §1. Nelson quotes this line in proposition 161 (p. 64).

[i] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to These Paintings', in Late Essays and Artcles, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 182 - 217. Lawrence writes: "Beauty is not a snare, nor is it skin-deep, since it always involves a certain loveliness of modelling [...]" (p. 192). 

[j] Again, see Lawrence; 'Sex Appeal', in Late Essays and Articles, pp. 143 - 148, where he asserts that "sex and beauty are one thing, like fire and flame" (p. 145). 

[k] Later, "upon considering the matter further", Nelson admits in proposition 193 that writing does in fact do something; namely, it replaces the memories it aimed to preserve.   

Heathen, Hedonistic, and Horny: Notes on Maggie Nelson's Bluets (2009) - Part 1: Propositions 1-120

 Jonathan Cape (2017)

 

 

I. 

 

As long-time readers of Torpedo the Ark will know, whilst, as a nihilist, my default position is always paint it black, I do also have a philosophical fascination with a colour much loved by painters and poets and which Christian Dior identified as the only one which can possibly compete with black: blue. 

 

This includes, for example, the lyrical blue celebrated by Rilke and Trakl; the deep blue invented by Yves Klein; the blue of the Greater Day that D. H. Lawrence writes of; and my fascination with this colour extends to blue angels, blue boys, blue lenses, and blue lagoons.  

 

Thus, no surprise then that I should eventually get around to reading Maggie Nelson's wonderful little book Bluets ...

 

 

II. 

 

First published by Wave Books in 2009, Bluets consists of 240 numbered propositions arranged not so much randomly, but with what we might term considered whimsicality to create the illusion of logical precision and continuity à la Wittgenstein. Each proposition is either a sentence or a short paragraph; none exceeds two hundred words in length.

 

The book documents not only the author's bowerbird-like obsession with the colour blue, referencing many famous figures along the way associated with the colour, but also provides an insight into Nelson's understanding of love and mental health and examines what role - if any - beauty plays in times of heartache or depression.

 

In 2016, she won a MacArthur Fellowship - known to many as the genius grant - and, on the basis of this one book alone I think that Nelson is indeed one of those very rare individuals who probably deserves the title of genius; an original and insightful writer who produces work that is both lyrical and philosophical.  

 

The title doesn't refer us simply to those small and delicate blue flowers belonging to the genus Houstonia, but also to a triptyque by the American abstract artist Joan Mitchell, Les Bluets (1973), which Nelson describes as perhaps her "favourite painting of all time" [a]

 

Here, I would like to provide a commentary on the book, picking up on some of the things that particularly resonate with me or pique my curiosity to know more. Hopefully, in the course of doing so I can demonstrate why the author and critic Hilton Als was spot on to praise Bluets as a "new kind of classicism" that, whilst queer in content, remains elegant in form [b].     

 

 

III.

5

 

Are we to understand that when, like Mallarmé, one replaces le ceil with l'Azur - "in an effort to rinse references to the sky of religious connotations" - one ceases to be a crypto-theologian and becomes a poet-philosopher? 

 

Is it true to say: whereof one can perceive blueness, thereof one cannot imagine God ...     

 

 

18

 

"A warm afternoon in early spring, New York City. We went to the Chelsea Hotel to fuck."

 

For a moment I thought I was reading Young Kim's A Year on Earth with Mr Hell (2020). 

 

But then I read the three sentences following: 

 

"Afterward, from the window of our room, I watched a blue tarp on a roof across the way flap in the wind. You slept, so it was my seceret. It was a smear of the quotidian, a bright blue flake amidst all the dank providence."  

And realised I wasn't.  

 

20 

 

"Fucking leaves everything as it is." 

 

This is a very un-Lawrentian sentence; perhaps the most un-Lawrentian sentence you could imagine. 

 

For Lawrence insists that, on the contrary, fucking is transformational of the individual - changing the very constitution of the blood - and that a politics of desire, founded upon the act of coition, has revolutionary potential. 

 

Like Nietzsche, Lawrence believes that the lover is richer and stronger than those who do not fuck; that lovers grow wings and possess new capabilities. And there arises, he says, a post-coital "craving for polarized communion with others" [c] - not just for cigarettes. 

 

 

26 / 31

 

Nelson says that she's heard that "a diminishment of color vision often accompanies depression" and I couldn't help wondering if that's true; if feeling blue ironically makes the world seem greyer ...?

 

Well, apparently, it is: depression lowers the production of dopamine and this can impair neurotransmitters in the retina, making the world appear less vibrant and colourful. 

 

But then Nelson reminds us of the case of Mr Sidney Bradford, who had his vision restored in his fifties (having lost his sight as a baby) and saw the world at last in full-colour:  he died of unhappiness due to disappointment soon afterwards [d].      

 

35

 

"Does the world look bluer from blue eyes?", asks Nelson, before concluding that's probably not the case. 

 

But, like her, I like to imagine it does.

 

 

56

 

When reminded of Saint Lucy - patron saint of the blind, who was tortured and put to death by the Romans in 304 CE - I can't help thinking of Simone, the teenage erotomaniac at the heart of Bataille's notorious short novel L'histoire de l'œil (1928). 

 

For whilst Lucy didn't - as far as I know - insert the eye of a murdered priest into her vagina, she is often depicted in "Gothic and Renaissance paintings holding a golden dish with her blue eyes staring weirdly out from it".   

 

Depending on what sources one refers to, Lucy's eyes were either gouged out by her captors, or she removed them herself in order to avoid male attention and prove her religious devotion. For as Nelson writes, there are numerous stories of women "blinding themselves in order to maintain their chastity" and to demonstrate their fidelity to God (i.e., the fact that they 'only have eyes' for Christ).   

 

 

62

 

Nelson's definition of puritanism: the exchanging of corporeal reality for ideal representation. Not something that appeals to her: 

 

"I have no interest in catching a glimpse of or offering you an unblemished ass or airbrushed cunt. I am interested in having three orifices stuffed full of thick, veiny cock in the most unforgiving of poses ..."  

 

Fair enough: but this is still an image conjured up with words, is it not? And as Merleau-Ponty pointed out: Words do not look like the things they designate [e].  

 

 

71 / 72 

 

Hard to find dignity in loneliness; easier to find it in solitude. A pair of propostions of such high truth value that we may for all intents and purposes declare them true.  

 

 

101

 

When Nelson's friends were asked "how much time they would grant between 'a blinding, bad time' and a life that has simply become a depressive waste", the consensus was "around seven years". 

 

I suspect - based on my own experience between April 2016 and February 2023 - that that's probably about right; that the seven year mark is the limit. Perhaps that's why when a person goes missing there is a presumption of death after seven years. 

 

(As for how long it takes to fully recover having reached one's limit, that's a question to which neither Nelson nor her friends provide an answer and I suspect it might take longer to retreat from the edge of the abyss than it does to get there.)

Notes

 

[a] Maggie Nelson, Bluets (Jonathan Cape, 2017), Prop. 145, p. 57. Note that I will henceforth only give proposition numbers (in bold) in the post.      

 

[b] Hilton Als, 'Immediate Family', The New Yorker (11 April, 2016): click here. 

 

[c] D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 135. 

      Later, in proposition 201, Nelson does acknowledge the truth of change, newness, and becoming-other: "I believe n the possibility - the inevitability, even - of a fresh self stepping into ever-fresh waters [...]" (p. 80).

[d] This is a real case, although Nelson is taking artistic license with her conclusion. For whilst Bradford did admit to finding the world visually disappointing following corneal grafts - and did die two years afterwards - he also had chronic health issues and no specific cause of death was entered on his death certificate. 

[e] Nelson quotes this line herself in proposition 70. It can be found in the essay 'Cézanne's Doubt', in Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Basic Writings, ed. Thomas Baldwyn (Routledge, 2003). 

 

This post continues in part two (selected propositions from 121-240): click here. 

Fuck Everyone and Be a Disgrace! In Memory of the Dada Baroness: Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven

Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven 

(1874 -1927)

 

"Every artist is crazy with respect to ordinary life ..."

 

I. 

 

The relationship between dada and punk has long been acknowledged; Greil Marcus, for example, famously traces out a secret history of twentieth-century art in which he discerns a direct lineage from the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916 to the Sex Pistols in 1976 [1].

 

And it's arguable that the German-born artist and poet Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven who, via her radical performance of self during the years 1913 to 1923 came to embody dada, might also be described as a proto-punk.

 

For not only did she look and act the part, but she even coined the term phalluspistol in her profane and playfully obscene poetry [2], anticipating the name Malcolm McLaren would come up with for the group operating out of 430 King's Road. 

 

I'm not suggesting that McLaren stole Elsa's idea in the same way as Marcel Duchamp allegedly stole credit for his most notorious readymade from her (see below), but it's an interesting coincidence.

 

II.

Apart from her writings, Baroness Elsa was famous for two things: (i) her numerous love affairs and (ii) her utilisation of found objects - including actual rubbish picked up from the streets - into her work and wardrobe (she once wore a bra, for example, made from old tins cans). 

 

Her aim, she declared, was to sleep with everyone and become a living collage, thereby dissolving the boundary between life and art whilst, at the same time, challenging bourgeois notions of femininity and cultural value. If this made her an embarrassment to her friends and family and a disgrace in the eyes of society, well, she didn't care (again, her attitude and behaviour is now what some would term punk).

 

Her colourful and unconventional life took her to New York in 1913 and it was here that she made a name for herself as a model, artist, and poet [3]. To help make ends meet, Elsa also worked in a cigarette factory like Bizet's Carmen. 

 

Whilst Man Ray once filmed Elsa shaving her pubic hair, it was Marcel Duchamp for whom she had the hots and, in a public performance c. 1915, she recited a love poem whilst rubbing a newspaper article about the latter over her naked body, making her romantic interest explicit. Several years later she would make an assemblage entitled Portrait of Marcel Duchamp (1920-22), which was only rediscovered in 1966. 

It was her connection with Duchamp that would lead to a more recent controversy. For there is now speculation that several artworks attributed to other artists of the period can either be partially attributed to Elsa, or that she should in fact be acknowledged as their sole creator - and this includes one of the most famous and important artworks of the twentieth-century ...

 

 

III. 

 

In April 1917, a porcelain urinal signed with the name R. Mutt was submitted by Duchamp for the inaugural exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York. Duchamp entitled this readymade work Fountain - and the rest, as they say, is avant-garde art history [4].
      

But some have suggested that the work was, in fact, the idea of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven who had submitted it to her friend Duchamp and there is, to be fair, circumstantial evidence to support this claim. Most art historians, however, maintain that Duchamp was solely responsible for this landmark work in twentieth-century art and he remains credited for it [5].   

   

Ultimately, we'll probably never know the truth of this for sure. 

 

 

IV.  

In 1923, the Baroness returned to Berlin, where she lived in poverty and suffered mental health problems.

 

Things improved after she moved to Paris, but, sadly, she died on 14 December 1927 from gas inhalation (whether this was or was not intentional is unclear). 

 

She's buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris, so in good company.

 

There have since been several biographies published and every now and then there's an attempt to bring the name Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven to wider public attention [6], though one suspects that she'll always remain a marginal figure of interest only to those in the know.

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Harvard University Press, 1989). 

 

[2] See the poem 'Cosmic Chemistry' in Body Sweats: The Uncensored Writings of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, ed. Irene Gammel and Suzanne Zelazo (The MIT Press, 2016). Click here to read on allpoetry.com.

 

[3] Although most of her poems remained unpublished in her lifetime, some were featured in The Little Review alongside extracts from Joyce's Ulysses.

 

[4] The original piece is now lost, but, along with numerous replicas made with Duchamp's permission in the 1950s and '60s, we still have the famous photograph of it taken at Alfred Stieglitz's sudio and published in The Blind Man (a two-issue journal featuring work by dada artists and edited by Duchamp in 1917).

 

[5] See, for example, the letter from Dawn Adès (Professor emerita of art history and theory, University of Essex) addressing this controversy in The Guardian (15 June 2022): click here.  

[6] See for example Irene Gammel's biography, Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada and Everyday Modernity (The MIT Press, 2003). Gammel makes a strong case for Elsa's artistic brilliance and punk spirit. 

 

 

Bad Penny

Penny Slinger: Exorcism: Inside Out

Richard Saltoun Gallery (London)

 

I. 

 

Sometimes, we need an artist to turn up like the proverbial bad penny in order to reintroduce a little magic, a little eroticism, and even a little horror into our otherwise safe, sexless, and disenchanted world. 

 

And so, step forward out of the shadows of the past Penny Slinger; a provocative London-born artist whose combination of surrealism and feminism into a queer gothic practice no longer shocks as it once did, but which nevertheless still excites, often amuses, and occasionally gives one the creeps. 

 

 

II. 

 

Her solo exhibition at the Richard Saltoun Gallery (London) - Exorcism: Inside Out - is composed of a number of photographic collages set against the backdrop of a spooky mansion house. The dark fairy tale elements remind one of Angela Carter, with a touch of Daphne du Maurier thrown in (all those birds and animal-headed people) [1]. 

 

We are informed that Slinger is attempting to integrate her own body into an archetypal landscape and  'engaging in a cultural exorcism that explores themes of fetishism and sexploitation from a feminist perspective'. 

 

And that's far enough, although, ideas of empowerment, self-actualisation, and sexual liberation now seem a little naive and old-fashioned and the art itself creaks with more clichés - or what her supporters would call timeless and universal symbols - than you can shake a broomstick at. 

 

Some might believe Slinger's images to be just as daring and challenging now as when they were first conceived, but, unfortunately, that's not the case. And, ultimately, what we are left with here are memories of exhilarating sixties radicalism inspired by Max Ernst; a sincere attempt to transform the outer world through inner dream and the politics of desire ... [2]

 

Notes

 

[1] The exhibition coincides with publication of Slinger's book An Exorcism: A Photo Romance (Fulgur Press, 2024); an extended version of her 1977 book An Exorcism, which has been withheld from UK publication for all these years after another work, Mountain Ecstasy (1978), was seized and destroyed by the British customs having been deemed to be pornographic.  

[2] For an alternative take on Slinger's exhibition, see Young Kim's review in A Rabbit's Foot (30 August 2024): click here.    

Reflections on a Broken Vase

Ai Weiwei: According to What? (2014)

Photo: Daniel Azoulay / Pérez Art Museum Miami

 

 

I. 

 

There was an amusing story in the news a few days ago about a four-year-old boy accidently breaking a 3,500 year-old vase at a museum in Israel. Apparently, he had been attempting to look inside the large jar, which would have once been used to store and transport either wine or olive oil [1].

 

Apart from demonstrating that curiosity isn't merely fatal to cats, it reminded me of Ai Weiwei's controversial decision to deliberately drop and shatter a Han Dynasty [2] Urn back in 1995 in an attempt to tell us something about the construction of economic and cultural value ... [3]

II.

 

This act by a globally famous Chinese artist - and a hero to many for his activism - was clearly intended as a political provocation. 

 

And that was precisely how it was received by the powers that be in Beijing, leaving Ai Weiwei to remind members of the CCP that Chairman Mao had actively encouraged the widespread destruction of antiquities during the Cultural Revolution, on the grounds that in order to build a new world one must first let go of the past and smash old objects, values, beliefs, ideas, and customs.   

 

However, Ai Weiwei failed to see the irony when a Dominican artist called Maximo Caminero decided to attack his installation at the Pérez Museum in Miami in 2014, smashing another 2000 year-old Han dynasty urn that the former had appropriated - along with others - by painting them with cheerful colours. 

 

Caminero was, apparently, protesting the fact that the museum wasn't showing enough work by local artists, but, he had, as Jonathan Jones says, "accidentally punched a massive hole in the logic of contemporary art" [4] and, arguably, exposed Ai Weiwei's own hypocrisy; his condemation of Caminero's act as nothing more than vandalism, leaving him at the very least on conceptually fragile ground. 

 

As for Caminero, unlike the young boy at the Hecht Museum who escaped any punishment, he was found guilty of criminal mischief and given a suspended sentence of eighteen months, plus a hundred hours of community service. He was also obliged to pay $10,000 compensation [5].   

   

Notes

 

[1] The vase is to be expertly repaired and placed back on display shortly. For more on this story as reported on artnet.com, click here.

[2] The Han era in China was contemporary with the Roman Empire in the West, lasting from 206 BCE until 220 CE.

 

[3] The work is entitled Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995) and is captured in a series of three black and white photographs. Ai Weiwei described the urn as a 'cultural readymade'. 

 

[4] Jonathan Jones 'Who's the vandal: Ai Weiwei or the man who smashed his Han urn?' The Guardian (18 Feb 2014): click here to read online. 

 

[5] It might also be noted that two years prior to the incident in Miama, a Swiss art collector by the name of Uli Sigg, who happened to own one of Ai Weiwei's urns - painted with the Coca-Cola logo - decided to drop it on the floor in the same manner as his hero. This was captured in a photographic triptych called Fragments of History. It's interesting how one act of destruction can trigger others in a chain reaction. 

 

Lady Chatterley's Lover Vs the Tin Man

 

Oliver Mellors portrayed by Jack O'Connell in Lady Chatterley's Lover (2022)

The Tin Man portrayed by Jack Haley in The Wizard of Oz (1939) 

 

 

 I. 

 

According to Oliver Mellors, the whole of mankind is not only becoming increasingly tame and sexless, but slowly transforming into what he calls tin people and what we might term today cyborgs (i.e. human beings who have been augmented and enhanced via the integration of artificial components or technology; the sort of bio-mechanical beings that Donna Haraway once encouraged us to embrace with open arms). 

 

One evening, before they both strip off their clothes and fuck like animals in the rain, Mellors informs his lover, Lady Chatterley, that there's no hope to be found in either the ruling class or the working class, nor in any of the coloured races - that all men have been dehumanised by industrialisation:  

 

"'Their spunk's gone dead - motor-cars and cinemas and aeroplanes suck the last bit out of them. I tell you, every generation breeds a more rabbity generation, with indiarubber tubing for guts and tin legs and tin faces. Tin people!" [1]

 

 

II. 

 

I know for sure that Lawrence didn't see The Wizard of Oz (dir. Victor Fleming, 1939), as it was released nine years after his death. 

 

However, he might have read - and almost certainly would have been aware of - the children's novel by L. Frank Baum upon which the film is based, first published in 1900 (with illustrations by W. W. Denslow). And so it's quite possible that when he writes of tin people he was thinking not only of Rossum's Universal Robots [2] but also of Nick Chopper, the Tin Woodman.

 

Of course, even Baum wasn't writing in a vacuum; in late 19th-century America, men made out of various tin pieces often featured in advertising and political cartoons and Baum was said to have been inspired by a figure built out of metal parts he had seen displayed in a shop window [3].     

 

 

III. 

 

In Baum's book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Dorothy befriends the Tin Woodman after she finds him rusted in the rain; using his oil can to help free up his movements [4]. 

 

Axe in hand, he joins Dorothy on the Yellow Brick Road, accompanied by the Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion, headed for the Emerald City, where he hopes to be given a heart - although, funny enough, he already possesses the capacity for feeling and the display of various emotions (even for accidently crushed insects). 

This is explained by the fact that, unlike Tik-Tok the wind-up mechanical man that Dorothy meets in a later story, the Tin Woodman is still essentially human and alive. For Nick Chopper was not a robot, but rather a man who had his organic body replaced with artificial parts bit by bit [5], after self-mutilating with an accursed axe (don't ask). And, far from regretting his becoming-cyborg, he often delighted in his enhanced status. 

 

Unfortunately, the Wizard can only provide him with an artificial heart made of silk and filled with sawdust, although the Tin Woodman seems happy enough with this. And, after Dorothy returns home to Kansas, he becomes the ruler of Winkie Country and has his subjects construct a palace made entirely of tin. Even - and this would horrify Lawrence/Mellors still further - the flowers in the garden are made of metal. 

 

 

The Tin Woodman 

by W. W. Denslow (1900)

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 217.

 

[2] In 1920 Czech writer Karel Čapek published a science fiction play with the title R.U.R., an initialism standing for Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti. The play - which premiered on 2 January of the following year - was both popular and influential; by 1923 it had been translated into thirty languages and had introduced the word robot (from the Czech robota, meaning forced labour) into English.

      Lawrence used the word in his late poetry on the subject of evil, declaring: "The Robot is the unit of evil. / And the symbol of the Robot is the wheel revolving." See 'The Evil World-Soul', The Poems Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 626.

 

[3] The mechanical man was a common feature in political cartoons and advertisements in the 1890s and various scholars have argued that the work of Baum and Denslow is derivative. That seems a little unfair to me; like most writers and artists, they were atuned to their times and happy to exploit whatever ideas and materials were available to them.

 

[4] The threat of rusting when exposed to rain, tears, or other forms of moisture was a constant concern for the Tin Woodman and so, in The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904) - the first of thirteen full-length sequels written by Baum to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz - the character has himself nickel-plated. The Tin Woodman remains a central figure throughout the whole series of books; unfortunately, I do not have time here to explore his entire history, fascinating as it is.

 

[5] As the author of The Generalist Academy points out in a post entitled 'The Tin Woodman of Theseus' (5 Dec 2020), L. Frank Baum's character took a classic philosophical thought experiment in a novel direction: click here.

 

 

On Board the Ship of Theseus With Melissa Mesku

Melissa Mesku and the 

Ship of Theseus

 

 

I. 

 

A correspondent who knows her Greek mythology (and her French literary theory) writes:

 

In a recent post [1] you refer to Roland Barthes's reference to a ship that has each of its parts replaced over time until it has been entirely rebuilt and how this reinforces one of the key principles of structuralism; namely, that an object is not necessarily born of a mysterious act of creation, but can be produced via the substitution of parts and nomination (i.e., the giving of a fixed name that is not tied to the stability of parts). 

      Barthes, however, mistakenly refers to this ship as the Argo, on which Theseus was said to have sailed with Jason. In fact, it was a different vessel (of unknown name) on which the former sailed from Crete that has given rise to the question that has so intrigued philosophers. Probably you know this, but I think a note for general readers might have been useful so as to avoid confusion and the spreading of misinformation.    

 

I'm extremely grateful for this email which arrived overnight and my correspondent is quite right in what she says; both about Barthes's error and my oversight in not fact checking what he wrote and supplying a brief note of correction.    

 

II.

 

Of course, my correspondent is not the first person to have pointed out that this famous French theorist misremembered his Plutarch; Melissa Mesku, for example, also mentioned this in a brilliant piece in Lapham's Quarterly a few years back [2].

 

Founding editor of ➰➰➰ - a website that delights in recursion and weirdness [3] - Melissa Mesku is someone I greatly admire for daring to celebrate divergence rather than diversity and I thought it might be fun to examine her ideas in the above essay on Theseus's Paradox ...

 

 

III.

 

As Mesku reminds us, Theseus was the mythical hero who famously slayed the minotaur and returned victorious from Crete on a ship that the good people of Athens decided to preserve for posterity; removing old timber as it decayed and replacing it with new wood. 

 

Perhaps inevitably, this soon attracted the attention of the philosophers, who wanted to know if, after many years of such maintenance, the vessel that remained was essentially still the same ship. Some thought it was; others that it wasn't - and philosophers have been arguing over the Ship of Theseus ever since, inspiring many modern ideas to do with the persistence of identity and the return of the same. 

 

Thus, whether this tale has any historical basis or is simply an invention of Plutarch's doesn't really matter, although Mesku is keen to point out that Plutarch "is known for taking liberties as a biographer, and most of his source texts have been lost to time". Further, she adds, the veracity of Plutarch's story "seems especially dubious when we consider that Theseus himself likely never existed". 

 

Leaving the question of whether he was or was not an actual figure, Mesku rightly points out that "the conundrum of how things change and stay the same has been with us a lot longer than Plutarch". Plato, for example, certainly addressed the problem; as did pre-Socratic thinkers such as Heraclitus, to whom it was clear that you can never step in the same river twice. 

 

Two-and-a-half thousand years later, and philosophers are still puzzling their brains over this, although folksy American thinkers often prefer to articulate the question with reference to an axe belonging either to George Washington or Abraham Lincoln depending on who you ask. Followers of John Locke, meanwhile, prefer to think things in relation to an old sock [4] ...!

 

 

IV.

Moving on, Mesku returns us to Maggie Nelson's reference in The Argonauts (2015) to Roland Barthes's discussion of love and language. For Nelson, the Argo functions as a foundational metaphor - retaining what Barthes imparted to it, but also expanding as "a metaphor for the paradox of selfhood, of the 'I' which is immutable yet undergoes constant change". 

 

Since this is where my interest mostly lies - rather than with the work of the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei or the ancient Japanese method of pottery repair using gold lacquer - I think I'll close this post here if I may. 

 

Like Mesku, I'm amused at how changes to Theseus's Paradox have only "augmented its paradoxical nature", whilst leaving us still faced with the question of "just how much change something can withstand without it changing into something else".

 

As a Nietzschean, however, i.e., someone who has stamped becoming with the character of being [5], it's not particularly concerning to realise that the eternal return of the same is an illusion and that what actually returns is difference.

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The post referred to was entitled 'Argonauts' and published on 27 August 2024: click here.  

 

[2] Melissa Mesku, 'Restoring the Ship of Theseus: Is a paradox still the same after its parts have been replaced?', Lapham's Quarterly (21 Oct 2019): click here to read online. Lines quoted in this post are from this digital version of the work.  

[3] ➰➰➰ (spoken as 'many loops') is a website launched in 2019 that publishes prose, fiction, poetry, photo essays, and artwork alongside various hybrid forms and is preoccupied with the concept of recursion - something which Mesku explains far better than I can here.   

 

[4] Mesku suggests that Locke's version of Thesus's Paradox holds up as a metaphor and might even be preferable with a contemporary audience: "Except for one small problem. Scholars are unable to locate any references to socks in Locke's work." Despite this, it has become, according to Mesku, "the current identity paradox par excellence". 

      Personally, I think Hobbes rather than Locke provides us with a far more interesting development of Theseus's Paradox in De Corpore (1655), where, he asks: What if the discarded parts of the original ship were not destroyed, but collected and used to create a second ship? Mesku notes: "As a thought experiment, Hobbes' version solicits different philosophical proofs and can float on its own like the second ship it posits. Yet it is considered to be a mere addition, a twist - just another plank on Theseus' ship."

 

[5] See Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (Vintage Books, 1968), III. 617, p. 330. Nietzsche opens the section with the following line: "To impose upon becoming the character of being - that is the supreme will to power."

Readers interested in reading the 'Life of Theseus' should see Vol. 1 of Plutarch's Lives, trans. Aubrey Stewart and George Long (George Bell & Sons, 1894). Click here to access it as a Project Gutenberg eBook (2004) based on this edition. Section XXIII is the key section for those interested in the fate of his thirty-oared ship once it reached Athens.

 

 

Argonauts

Lorenzo Costa: The Argo

(detail of a panel painting c. 1480–90) 

Civic Museum, Padua, Italy

 

 

I. 

 

As everybody knows, the Ἀργοναῦται were the heroic crew aboard the good ship Argo who, sometime before the Trojan War kicked off, accompanied Jason on his quest to find the Golden Fleece, protected by the goddess Hera.  

 

Whether there is any historical basis to this ancient Greek myth - or whether it was pure fiction - is debatable, but hardly important. It remains, factual or not, central within the Western cultural imagination and, in the modern world, the term argonaut refers to anyone engaged in any kind of quest of discovery ...

 

 

II.       

 

For Nietzsche, a philosophical argonaut was one who continually sought out what he terms die große Gesundheit - that is to say, a form of well-being way beyond the bourgeois model of good health we've been given and endlessly told we have to protect; a form of well-being that doesn't make us superhuman, but, on the contrary, allows us to conceive of that which lies overman. 

 

In The Gay Science, Nietzsche describes this new and greater type of health as "more seasoned, tougher, more audacious, and gayer than any previous health" [1] and he argues that anyone who wishes like an artist-philosopher to experience every desire and sail round the dangerous coastal regions of the soul, needs this great health above all else.    

Argonauts of the spirit, who stand divinely apart from others and who "with more daring than is prudent" risk disastrous shipwrecks, will eventually come upon "an as yet undiscovered country whose boundaries nobody has surveyed [...] a world so overrich in what is beautiful, strange, questionable, terrible, and divine" that to return home no longer holds the slightest attraction.

 

 

III.

 

In 2015, the genre-defying American writer Maggie Nelson published her award-winning and best-selling book The Argonauts; a series of autotheoretical reflections on desire, identity, family, etc.

 

For Nelson, the term refers to one who sets out to explore (in a quasi-Barthesian manner [2]) the possibilities (and limitations) of love and language and she discusses in detail her relationship with the transgender artist Harry Dodge, with whom she lives in Los Angeles. 

 

This queering of the term Argonaut is certainly an interesting development and one wonders what Apollonius would have made of it ...? 

 

Of course, as almost nothing is known about this ancient Greek author who composed the epic poem about Jason and his quest to locate the Golden Fleece in the 3rd century BC - the Argonautika - it's impossible to answer this question. 

 

However, as Apollonius was clearly interested in the pathology of love, I'm fairly confident he'd approve of Nelson's "always questioning, sometimes wonderfully lyrical" [3] attempt to document the series of bodily experiments she and Harry engage in in order to construct a happy and rewarding life [4]. He might even recognise Nelson's book as belonging to a classical genre of literature that deals with queer phenomena: paradoxography. 

 

The literary critic and cultural historian Lara Feigel rightly identifies the question that haunts Nelson's book; namely, can a love that claims to be radically-other or queer unfold within a conventional domestic setting? Or, to put it another way: can one be a sexually and socially transgressive Argonaut and also a regular mom?

 

Although she attempts to get round this by insisting that "queerness can hold together forms of strangeness that have nothing to do with sexual orientation" [5], Nelson remains "conscious of the dangers of 'homonormativity' [...] and aware that the more the state opens its institutions to the LGBTQ world, the less that world will "'be able to represent or deliver on subversion, the subcultural, the underground, the fringe'" [6].

 

Perhaps that's the ultimate sign of the Argonaut: someone who wants the best of both worlds; someone who thinks it reasonable to demand the impossible ...

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Nietzsche, Die Fröliche Wissenschaft (1887), V. 382. I am using the English translation by Walter Kaufmann published as The Gay Science (Vintage Books, 1974). See pp. 346-347. Lines quoted here are on p. 346. 

[2] According to Nelson, the title is a reference to Barthes's idea that two people in a long-term love affair have to continually renew things without changing the form of their relationship - i.e., a bit like the Argonauts had to gradually replace each piece of their ship. Nelson expresses her surprise and joy at the manner in which love can be forever renewed. 

      See the sections Le vaisseau Argo and Le travail du mot in Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (Papermac, 1995), pp. 46 and 114. 

 

[3] Lara Feigel ...'The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson review - a radical approach to genre and gender' The Guardian (27 March 2016): click here. 

 

[4] Whilst Maggie busies herself becoming pregnant with a sperm donor, Harry undergoes a bilateral mastectomy and begins taking testosterone. 

 

[5-6]  Lara Feigel ... op. cit. 

 

 

Fot a follow up post to this one - on board the Ship of Theseus with Melissa Mesku - click here. 

 

I am grateful to Maria Karouso whose blog post on the Greek poet Seferis and mythic history inspired this one: click here.