French Knickers

Grammatically speaking, I'm not sure if the word French, as used within English, is a modifier, qualifier, or both. Either way, it often also serves as an erotic intensifier, as illustrated by the term French knickers, for example ...

Until the end of the 18th century, women didn't usually wear knickers - which is why the young man hiding in the bushes and spying on an elegant young woman on a swing in Fragonard's famous painting of 1767, gets more of an eyeful as he peeps up her skirt than a modern audience might appreciate.

Now, of course, knickers - or panties as Americans and pornographers like to call them - are a universal item of female undergarment and come in a wide variety of styles, colours, and fabrics.

However, in my view, the loveliest of all are French knickers, preferably ivory-coloured silk and with buttons at the side, but sans lace trimming or any other decorative element; the sort of knickers that Lady Chatterley might have worn in the 1920s and which her lover, Mellors, is keen to remove so that he might penetrate her quiescent body:

"She quivered as she felt his hand groping softly, yet with queer thwarted clumsiness, among her clothing [...] He drew down the thin silk [knickers], slowly, carefully, right down and over her feet."       
Although French knickers have never quite disappeared - and enjoyed something of a fashion revival in the 1970s and '80s, thanks to the designs of Janet Reger - most women today seem to prefer wearing snug-fitting cotton briefs, or hideous thongs.

This is unfortunate, because less material means more explosed flesh and more exposed flesh means diminished sexual excitement. In other words, Bernard Shaw was right - clothes arouse desire and lack of clothes tends to be fatal to our ardour. Passion not only ends in fashion, it begins with it too, as any philosopher on the catwalk can tell you, or as any young woman who wears vintage lingerie will also vouch.   

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover and A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 116. Attentive readers might recall that in his introductory essay to the novel written some months later, Lawrence condemns "brilliant young people" to whom sex means "lady's underclothing, and the fumbling therewith" [314-15]. This, he says, is a perverse form of savagery. But it's clearly one that Mellors isn't unacquainted with and later in the novel he will ask to keep Connie's flimsy silk nightie as an object with which to masturbate: "'I can put it atween my legs at night, for company.'" [249].  

There are two sister posts to this one that readers might find of interest: one on French kissing [click here] and one on French maids [click here]. 

French Maid

F. H. Clough: The French Maid (1950s)

Grammatically speaking, I'm not sure if the word French, as used within English, is a modifier, qualifier, or both. Either way, it often also serves as an erotic intensifier, as illustrated by the term French maid, for example ...

I.

Maids - including comely barmaids - have a long-established position within the pornographic imagination for complex reasons involving power and pleasure on the one hand, fantasy and fetish on the other. Indeed, I've written on the psychosexual aspects of this topic in an earlier post and readers who are interested can click here.

In this post, however, I'm specifically interested in the figure of the French maid as trope, stereotype, and soubrette; i.e., as an attractive young woman wearing a skimpy stylised outfit based on the typical uniforms worn in 19th century France. 

This costume - which is instantly recognisable - usually consists of a black dress with white trim and a full skirt cut well above the knee; a frilly white half-apron; a white lace headpiece; sheer black or fishnet stockings (preferably seamed); and high-heeled shoes. Optional accessories include a garter, a choker necklace, and a feather duster.   

Of course, maids - even in France - have never attempted to keep house dressed like this, but that's so beside the point that anyone who stops to raise this as an issue is an idiot. The pornographic imagination is not overly concerned with historical accuracy and the coquettish French maid ooh-la-la-ing her way through life belongs more to the world of burlesque and Benny Hill than domestic service. 

II.

Having said that, the French maid is not simply found in comedy and can sometimes move from sauciness to sadomasochism - as in Jean Genet's play Les Bonnes (1947), loosely based on the shocking story of sisters Christine and Léa Papin, who brutally murdered their employer and her daughter in Le Mans, in 1933.*

In the play, the two French maids - Solange et Claire - construct elaborate sadomasochistic rituals when their mistress (Madame) is away. Their dark role-playing games always involve the murder of the latter. However, their concern with process rather than goal, means they always fail to ceremoniously kill Madame, thereby forever postponing the climax of their fantasy and delaying their own ultimate pleasure. 

The play was performed in London at the Greenwich Theatre in 1973, with Vivien Merchant as Madame, Glenda Jackson as Solange and Susannah York as Claire. This production was filmed in 1974, directed by Christopher Miles, who implemented many of Genet's theatrical devices for the movie.**

Promo photo of Susannah York and 

Glenda Jackson in The Maids (1975)

Notes

* This murder exerted a strange fascination over French intellectuals - including Genet, Sartre and Lacan - many of whom sought to analyse it as a symbolic form of class struggle. The case has since inspired many artworks and further critical studies. 

** The film, made for the American Film Theatre, was released in the US in April 1975, and shown at Cannes the following month (although not entered in the main competition). To watch the trailer, click here.

For a sister post to this one on French kissing, click here. 

For a sister post on French knickers, click here. 

French Kiss

Grammatically speaking, I'm not sure if the word French, as used within English, is a modifier, qualifier, or both. Either way, it often also serves as an erotic intensifier, as illustrated by the term French kiss, for example ...

A kiss, as lovers of Casablanca will know, is just a kiss.

But a French kiss, of course, is something else entirely. And whilst some may protest that sticking your tongue into a young woman's mouth isn't the same as sticking your tongue into the holiest of holies, a French kiss is nevertheless in the same ballpark; i.e., it's an act of oral sex, albeit one that doesn't involve direct genital stimulation.

That's why Freud was right to identify amorous kissing as a form of perversion; one that is practiced by even those who would regard themselves as normal, healthy individuals. Put simply, there's nothing natural about oral erotogenic activity in which the the lips, tongue and teeth are diverted from their usual function and turned into secondary sex organs.

And although it may be pleasurable to exchange saliva and play tonsil tennis with a loved one, there's a good reason why the English term this French kissing and that's because they're secretly aware of just how queer it is to use your mouth in such an abberant fashion.       

Note: it's ironic that, until recently, the French didn't have a specific term for un baiser amoureux; they described it (rather unromantically) as un baiser avec la langue. It was only in 2014 that the slang term se galocher was accorded official dictionary status.

Surprise musical bonus: click here. 

To read a sister post to this one on French maids, click here.

For a sister post on French knickers, click here.

On the Politics of Resistance and Refusal

Picking up on a footnote to a recent post in which I indicated that I'm more attracted to a strategy of refusal than offering a form of resistance, someone writes suggesting I'm being a bit pedantic:

"Whether D. H. Lawrence adopted various literary devices in order to refuse or resist the tragic reception of the times in which he wrote, doesn't really matter. The important fact is that he was not a tragedean in the conventional sense of the term. And besides, the difference between these two verbs is often fuzzy; a refusal of something often involves resisting its effects."   

I suppose that's true: though I'm not sure expressing a concern for semantic precision necessarily makes one a pedant. And, even if it does, there are worse things to be. So let me try to explain the distinction between resistance and refusal in a bit more detail ... 

Baudrillard has shown how the idea of resistance in a transpolitical era characterised by the techno-social immersion of the individual rather than their alienation, has become problematic and even a little passé. Absorbed within a global network, from where might one find a point of resistance? Or, to put it another way, in a virtual world, where all that is solid has been dissolved, how does one stand one's ground?  

We might, perhaps, internalise resistance and thus retain it as a kind of ethical component in our own lives (resisting, for example, the temptation to surrender to the molecular forms of fascism that haunt our dreams and fool us into thinking we might find easy or final solutions to complex problems).

Alternatively, we are obliged to do one of two things: either accelerate the process we might otherwise have resisted, pushing it beyond its own internal limits to the point of completion and collapse; or we can become like Bartleby and turn away from the things we find distasteful, refusing the game we are invited to play (a game in which the illusion of resistance is merely a complementary form of opposition).

The latter is the strategy of he or she who refuses to take tragically an essentially tragic age; who reacts with irony, indifference, or insouciance in the face of falling skies etc. Such a strategy may lack the optimistic possibility of political coherence, but, on the other hand, it might trigger a chain reaction of (rapid, violent, unexpected) events (destructive of what Lawrence terms the Umbrella).   

Refusal, then, is a form of nihilism and what Baudrillard terms abreaction, rather than a progressive politics of resistance and reaction:

"We have to make a clear distinction between reacting, which is to arm oneself against - and try to destabilize - the system, and abreacting. Abreaction consists merely in expelling something: you just don't accept it, but you don't fight it either, and you harbour no illusions about possibility of overcoming it. It’s simply unacceptable."

Arguably, Lawrence anticipated this line of thought in his late work, realising that even a desperate fictional analysis of the times written among the ruins and which ends a little droopingly, is preferable to writing another novel like The Plumed Serpent which fantasises about armed resistance and revolution.

Mellors would love to "'wipe the machines off the face of the earth [...] and end the industrial epoch absolutely, like a black mistake.'" But he knows that's impossible. So, all he can do is hold his peace and try to live his own life as far as possible without compromising his manhood, as a kind of outlaw and refusenik.

Notes

Jean Baudrillard, Fragments, trans. Chris Turner, (Routledge, 2004), p. 72. In this same interview with François L'Yvonnet, Baudrillard says:

"I'm a bit resistant to the idea of resistance, since it belongs to the world of critical, rebellious, subversive thought, and that is all rather outdated. If you have a conception of integral reality, of a reality that's absorbed all negativity, the idea of resisting it, of disputing its validity, of setting one value against another and countering one system with another, seems pious and illusory. So there doesn't seen to be anything that can come into play except a singularity, which doesn't resist, but constitutes itself as another universe with another set of rules, which may conceivably get exterminated, but which, at a particular moment, represents an insuperable obstacle for the system itself. But this isn't head-on resistance. That doesn't seem possible any more." [71]

This nicely summarises his position, which is also pretty much my position. Readers who are interested should see my essay 'Jean Baudrillard: Thinking the Transpolitical', in Visions of Excess and Other Essays, (Blind Cupid Press, 2009), pp. 147-68.

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 220.

Ours Is Essentially a Tragic Age: Notes on the Opening of a Novel

Two female readers of the Penguin edition of 
D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover (1960)

showing little interest in the opening lines

Lady Chatterley's Lover opens with the following paragraph:

"Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen."

I think it's an opening that deserves to be looked at a little more closely ...


One immediately notes the use by Lawrence of an omniscient third person narrator; one who sees and knows all things in a god-like manner, even the private thoughts and feelings of the characters. As one Nietzschean little girl informed her mother, there's something indecent about this.

One suspects that Lawrence would seek to justify his narrative technique in terms of perfect empathy rather than epistemological transparency, but I still find it questionable that although in this opening paragraph the narrator describes Connie's position in a rather matter-of-fact manner, thereby ironically distancing himself from her, he will later describe things from Connie's perspective in a far more lyrical fashion, as if even her most intimate experiences were also his own and ours as readers.

Thus, whilst we get to see the workings of Clifford's mind, we get to share Connie's orgasm and made fully complicit in her sexual shenanigans. That's what happens when free indirect discourse meets the pornographic imagination - interiority is taken to a perversely material conclusion.   

What I'd like to suggest is that whenever a narrator says ours is we should be on our guard; we certainly shouldn't be lulled into false consensus or made an accessory after the fact. His - and maybe Connie's - may be an essentially tragic age, but it's not compulsory for any reader to subscribe to this belief.

And what does this claim mean anyway, for those of us living in an essentially inessential age that lacks any intrinsic character or indispensable quality? Lawrence would doubtless say that's the nature of our (postmodern) tragedy; that we have no soul or substance and live accidental lives of random contingency. But Lawrence is more of a metaphysician than he often pretends and still clings to the verb to be in all seriousness. 

Essential or otherwise, it seems that the narrator employs the idea of tragedy in a conventional sense; i.e. this is a post-cataclysmic period of great suffering, destruction, downfall etc. But it's important to note that Lawrence is not a tragic writer and, in fact, hates tragedy as usually conceived; thus his refusal to take it tragically.

This saying no to the tragic reception of tragedy is part of Lawrence's admirable attempt to take a great kick at misery and his refusal to wallow in his or anyone else's misfortune. Lawrence despises those who, in his words, are in love with their own defeat; he would be the last person on earth to subscribe to the contemporary cult of victimhood. 

But what is the terrible deluge that is supposed to have happened? Obviously, it's a reference to the Great War. But, as a Nietzschean, I also conceive of this cataclysmic event as the death of God - a tragic but also joyous event that changes everything and creates opportunities to build new little habitats and opens new spaces for thought in which we might also allow ourselves to dream again and form new little hopes.  

Nietzsche famously (and cheerfully) writes of this event in The Gay Science and the rejuvinating effect it has upon free spirits who feel themselves "irradiated as by a new dawn" by the news that God is dead:

"Our hearts overflow with gratitude, astonishment, presentiment and expectation. At last the horizon seems open once more, granting even that it is not bright; our ships can at last put out to sea in face of every danger; every hazard is again permitted to the discerner; the sea, our sea, again lies open before us; perhaps never before did such an 'open sea' exist."

Thus, to be among the ruins needn't be thought negatively; needn't oblige one to give in before one starts. Indeed, whilst Lawrence doesn't quite go so far as the Situationists and believe in the ruins, I think he understands their appeal and the fun to be had with fragments - or bits as he calls them in Kangaroo. Indeed, one could read the cataclysm as the collapse of grand narratives and understand the building of new little habitats as the attempt to find more localised, more provisional, more relative truths that aren't coordinated by an ideal of Wholeness or swept up into an Absolute.

Almost one is tempted to suggest that in the following paragraph from Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari are rewriting Lawrence's opening to Lady C. and theoretically expanding upon his thinking on plurality and multiplicities: 

"We live today in the age of partial objects, bricks that have been shattered to bits, and leftovers. We no longer believe in the myth of the existence of fragments that, like pieces of an antique statue, are merely waiting for the last one to be turned up, so that they may all be glued back together to create a unity that is precisely the same as the original unity. We no longer believe in a primordial totality that once existed, or in a final totality that awaits us at some future date. We no longer believe in the dull gray outlines of a dreary, colorless dialectic of evolution, aimed at forming a harmonious whole out of heterogeneous bits by rounding off their rough edges. We believe only in totalities that are peripheral. And if we discover such a totality alongside various separate parts, it is a whole of these particular parts but does not totalize them; it is a unity of all of these particular parts but does not unify them; rather, it is added to them as a new part fabricated separately." 

Finally, we come to the last line: We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen. I suppose that's true - even if it's factually not the case. For we could, of course, choose to die; as Gerald chooses to die at the end of Women in Love, rather than accept being broken open once more like Mellors, or voluntarily leave the tomb like the man who died.

And learning how and when to die at the right time is as much an art, requiring just as much courage, as living on regardless of the circumstances and becoming one of those unhappy souls; individuals like Clifford who are afraid to die and fall silent, determined to continue asserting themselves even when they have fallen out of touch with others. 

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 5.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane, (University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 42.

Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, (Vintage Press, 1974), V. 343, p. 280. 

See also: Catherine Brown, 'Resisting Tragedy: A Report on the International D. H. Lawrence Conference, Paris, 2018', in the D. H. Lawrence Society Newsletter (Winter 2018/19), or click here to read in a pre-edited version on her website.

Interestingly, Dr. Brown argues that Lawrence adopts various literary means and devices in order to resist tragedy, whereas the narrator calls for a refusal - something that those researching this topic might like to consider. As a nihilist, I'm more attracted to a strategy of active negation (refusal) than offering a dialectical form of (often complementary) opposition (resistance): click here for an explanation why.  

Sheena: From Jungle Queen to Punk Rocker

Irish McCalla as Sheena (1955)

Just like Joey Ramone, I have a penchant for jungle girls in general with their animal skin bikinis, running barefoot through the forest or swinging through the trees. There's surely no disputing, however, that Sheena is queen of them all ...

Created by the American duo Jerry Iger and Will Eisner, Sheena strangely enough made her debut in a British magazine in January 1937, before starring in a US comic book the following year, inspiring a host of imitators during the period that followed, such as the raven-haired Princess Pantha, who made her debut in 1946.   

Like Tarzan, Sheena was an orphan who grew up in the jungle; albeit under the guardianship of a native witch doctor. Possessing an uncanny ability to communicate with wild animals, Sheena was also highly proficient in fighting with all manner of weapons. Her adventures often involved violent encounters with savage tribes, slave traders, and great white hunters. 

In the mid-1950s, a 26-episode TV series aired with the pin-up Irish McCalla portraying Sheena. Others, including Tanya Roberts and, more recently, Gena Lee Nolin, have also taken on the role of jungle queen, but none have surpassed the performance given by the girl from Nebraska. For even though, by her own admission, she couldn't really act, Miss McCalla had an Amazonian physique, a wild look in her eye, and she was prepared to do her own stunts.    

I don't know for sure, but I suspect it was Irish McCalla whom Joey Ramone was thinking of when he wrote the classic 1977 track Sheena is a Punk Rocker - a song which, according to the man himself, combined the primal sound of punk with surf music and a contemporary vision of the Queen of the Jungle, into (just over) two-and-a-half minutes of pop cultural genius.   

Play: The Ramones, Sheena is a Punk Rocker, released as a UK single in May 1977, (Sire Records): click here to view the official video. 

Watch: Ramones Cartoon No. 7: Sheena is a Punk Rocker, by Neil Williams Media (May 2017), stelosanimation: click here.  

And to watch the TV trailer for Sheena, Queen of the Jungle (1955-56): click here.

 

Reflections on Jenny from the Block

Jennifer Lopez: screenshot from the video (dir. Francis Lawrence) 

for the single Jenny from the Block ft. Jadakiss and Styles, (Epic, 2002)

I.

This morning, I heard for the first time in years a song regarded by some as a pop classic from the early part of this century; a statement of intent by Jennifer Lopez to stay real and remain true to her humble (Hispanic) origins in The Bronx, despite the phenomenal levels of fame and fortune earned as an actress, singer, dancer, designer, etc.

As Miss Lopez puts it herself:

Don't be fooled by the rocks that I got 
I'm still, I'm still Jenny from the block
Used to have a little, now I have a lot 
No matter where I go, I know where I came from

This question of not selling out or being changed by success - of staying grounded and not becoming a fraud or phoney - is always an interesting one; both as a political question of class and as a moral question concerned with authenticity and integrity.  

II.

One of the (many) advantages of coming from a liberal, middle class background is that one is encouraged to grow and develop as an individual (if within certain parameters).

It's a culture, above all else, of ambition and aspiration; one hopes to succeed and expects to do well and there's no stigma attached to this. You're free to get ahead and you can become who you are without forever having to express love and loyalty to your past, your neighbourhood, or to people one no longer has anything in common with. In fact, you can learn to hate your friends in all good conscience (Nietzsche was mistaken to think this noble, it's very much a bourgeois characteristic).

This might make you a complete cunt in the eyes of those who do value loyalty and understand their own identity in fixed and permanent relation to others of their kind, but that probably won't be something you'll lose too much sleep over.

For only those who don't come from a middle-class background are obliged to apologise for being successful or endlessly justify a new or alternative lifestyle; only they are peer-pressured into keeping it real and never allowed to change, even when they look, think, and feel very differently and move in radically wider circles than those into which they were born.

I understand why J. Lo recorded this track. But Jenny from the block is, actually, a deeply depressing song that reinforces the pernicious saying: You can take the X out of the Y but you can't take the Y out of the X.    

Notes

'Jenny from the Block' was released as a single in September 2002, from the studio album This is Me ... Then (Epic, 2002). The song was written by Jennifer Lopez, Troy Oliver, Mr. Deyo, Samuel Barnes, Jean-Claude Olivier and Cory Rooney. Lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Universal Music Publishing Group. 

Paradise is in the Palm of Your Hand: Notes on Wank Clubs

Illustration by Simon Abranowicz 
 GQ (Feb 26, 2019)

I wrote - jokingly - in a recent post that if they ever open an academy of masturbation then the following line from D. H. Lawrence (in Latin) would make an excellent motto above the main entrance and on the school crest: Paradise is in the palm of your hand.

Now someone writes to tell me that whilst they don't know of any such academies, there are, in fact, a growing number of wank clubs springing up in cities here in the UK and in the US. And to provide textual support for his claim, he has kindly provided the following link to a recent article in GQ magazine on why heterosexual males are increasingly forming and/or joining circle jerk societies or masturbation networks: click here. 

Unsurprisingly, the article is framed within all the usual touchy-feely language; group wanking is said to be powerfully liberating; transforming a traditionally solitary and shameful vice into an affirmative expression of masculinity and a communal bonding experience that allows men to explore their sexual orientation and identity in a safe and supportive space. 

Maybe it is: maybe it does. Or maybe that's over-egging the pudding somewhat and the simple fact is that perversions give pleasure. Whatever the case, one wonders why the individuals who join such clubs can't simply take up some other hobby, sport, or pastime in the company of other men - like fishing, for example (and no, that's not a typing error).

For homosociality needn't involve getting your cock out and masturbating, watching others masturbate, or engaging in mutual masturbation with strangers - although, note, I'm not saying it shouldn't and nor am I judging anyone who likes to engage in sexual games involving exhibitionism, voyeurism, onanistic fantasy, and/or bi-curiosity.

If you like that kind of thing - or even enjoy giving brojobs - then that's fine with me; but please, cut the crap surrounding such activities; wanking doesn't empower, set free, or provide a transgressive and healing form of transcendental fulfilment. These are as much myths as the stories that Victorians liked to tell themselves about masturbation causing madness, blindness, or hairy palms.      

That said, wank clubs do, I suppose, accelerate the queering of culture, counter homophobia, and increase the sale of lube ...

On D. H. Lawrence's Objection to Pirated Books and Counterfeit Emotions

I. 

As Michael Squires reminds us, A Propos of "Lady Chatterley's Lover" originally consisted of a brief expository essay in which Lawrence takes on the pirates who had moved quickly to produce various counterfeit editions of his controversial novel, which had been published privately, in July 1928.   

Later, Lawrence radically expanded the essay in order to defend the work from critics and censors - whom he despised more than the pirates - and offer a "final, eloquent statement of his belief" [1] in an authentic model of sexuality and the importance of what he termed phallic marriage.

I'll comment on these ideas shortly, but I'd like to begin by discussing Lawrence's skirmish with Jolly Roger ... 

II. 

Towards the end of 1928, Lawrence became aware that Lady C. had been pirated, as unauthorised versions of the work began appearing in New York, London, and Paris, much to his irritation. 

He decided the best thing to do as a countermeasure would be to bring out a new, inexpensive paperbound edition of his own. This French edition, which came with the original short introduction mentioned above ('My Skirmish with Jolly Roger') - appeared in May 1929 and quickly sold out. 

But what, we might ask - apart from the loss of royalties (and Lawrence wasn't indifferent to this issue) - was his problem with the pirate books? 

 

In A Propos, he objects at first purely on aesthetic grounds; they are either cheap and inferior or gloomy and depressing looking. But that's rather unconvincing coming from someone who, just five years earlier, had written of his contempt for the "actual corpus and substance" of the book as an actual object; i.e., as a published volume that is marketed and put on sale:

"Books to me are incorporate things [...] What do I care for first or last editions? I have never read one of my own published works. To me, no book has a date, no book has a binding.

      What do I care if 'e' is somewhere upside down, or 'g' comes from the wrong fount? I really don't." [2]  

So there's obviously something else going on ... And that something else is to do with the question of authenticity: In brief, Lawrence hates the pirate books because they're forgeries and facsimiles. In other words, they're not the real deal as authorised (and signed) by him; they're counterfeit copies, or replicas as he calls them. 

And that's what troubles him: just as, later in A Propos, it becomes clear what troubles him most of all about modern expressions of sexuality and human emotion is that they are, in his view, fake and fraudulent. Lawrence contrasts emotions as (false) mental representations with real feelings that belong to the body: 

"Today, many people live and die without having had any real feelings - though they have had a 'rich emotional life' apparently, having showed strong mental feeling. But it is all counterfeit." [3]

Above all else, it's love that is a counterfeit feeling today and reduced to a stereotyped set of behaviours. Which means, says Lawrence, that there is no real sex - it's been killed, or, at the very least, perverted into a thing that is cold and bloodless. And that's a catastrophe because, for Lawrence, sex is an impersonal, cosmic principle that not only keeps men and women in balance, but holds the very heavens in place.    

III.

What, as readers in 2019, are we to make of this?

Personally, I can only echo Michel Foucault who ends the first volume of his History of Sexuality with a quotation from Lawrence's A Propos calling for the "full conscious realisation of sex" (i.e. sex thought completely, honestly and cleanly). [3]

Foucault responds to this passage, in which Lawrence would have us believe our ontological future is at stake, with amused irony:

"Perhaps one day people will wonder at this. They will not be able to understand how a civilization [...] found the time and the infinite patience to inquire so anxiously concerning the actual state of sex; people will smile perhaps when they recall that here were men - meaning ourselves - who believed that therein resided a truth every bit as precious as the one they had already demanded from the earth, the stars, and the pure forms of their thought ..." [4]

Notes

[1] Michael Squires, Introduction to A Propos of "Lady Chatterley's Lover", in Lady Chatterley's Lover and A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press,1993), p. lv.

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Bad Side of Books', Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 75-6.

[3] D. H. Lawrence, A Propos of "Lady Chatterley's Lover", in Lady Chatterley's Lover and A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 311 and 308.

[4] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley, (Pantheon Books, 1978), pp. 157-58. 

Readers interested in this topic might like to read an earlier post on Lady Chatterley's postmodern lover: click here.

See also: Chris Forster, 'Skirmishing with Jolly Roger: D. H. Lawrence, Obscenity, and Book Piracy', Ch. 3 of Filthy Material: Modernism and the Media of Obscenity, (Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 61-88. Forster cleverly - and, in my view, rightly - argues that Lawrence "frames his critique of piracy as one more expression of the corrupt state of [inauthentic] modernity" [71]

Musical bonus: Adam and the Ants, 'Jolly Roger', from the album Kings of the Wild Frontier (CBS, 1980): click here.  

1885 (The D. H. Lawrence Birthday Post 2019)

DHL: Born 11/09/1885

As many readers will know, D. H. Lawrence was born on this day in 1885. 

To mark the occasion, I thought it might be interesting to examine a few of the other events that unfolded during this year, so as to have a better understanding of the world into which baby Bert was born, giving special emphasis to those things that Lawrence would himself later comment upon ...

20 January

On this date, an American, LaMarcus Adna Thompson, patents his design for an amusement ride known as a roller coaster which had opened at Coney Island a year earlier. I don't know if Lawrence and Frieda ever went on one, but I very much doubt it. We know, for example, what Lawrence thought of even an innocent merry-go-round and its "violent mechanical rotation", as depicted by the artist Mark Gertler. [1]

In brief, Lawrence didn't approve of sensational fun in which the body is worked by a machine.  

26 January

The year opens with British imperial forces fighting Islamic insurgents in foreign fields: the Sudanese campaign famously costing General Gordon his life after the siege - and subsequent fall - of Khartoum. In a letter to Dorothy Yorke, written in August 1928, Lawrence fantasises about yet another exotic adventure: "Let's go to Egypt [...] and go up the Nile and look at the desert and perhaps get shot in Khartoum like General Gordon". [2]


23 February

Convicted murderer John Babbacombe Lee was due to be hanged at Exeter Prison. However, after three failed attempts due to a faulty trapdoor stubbornly refusing to open, the medical officer in attendance declined to play any further part in the proceedings and the execution was called off. Lee's sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment.

Again, whilst I cannot say for sure what Lawrence's view of this would have been, he was a proponent of capital punishment, writing in an essay: "I know we must look after the quality of life, not the quantity. Hopeless life should be put to sleep, the idiots and the hopeless sick and the true criminal." [3] 

14 March

Gilbert and Sullivan's popular comic opera The Mikado opens at the Savoy Theatre, London, where it ran for over 670 performances. Lawrence makes a reference to one of the songs, 'Tit Willow', which describes the suicide of a rejected lover, in his first novel, The White Peacock (1911). [4]

17 June

The Statue of Liberty arrives in New York Harbour; a gift of friendship from the people of France and a sign of welcome to visitors to the United States. Lawrence first encountered this colossal neoclassical sculpture in person in July 1923. But, in an epilogue to Fantasia of the Unconscious written in 1921, he has already described Lady Liberty as brawny and suggested that the torch she holds aloft with which to enlighten the world, resembles a giant carrot:

"How many nice little asses and poets trot over the Atlantic and catch sight of Liberty holding up this carrot of desire at arms length, and fairly hear her say, as one does to one's pug dog, with a lump of sugar: 'Beg! Beg!' - and then 'Jump! Jump then!' And each little ass and poodle begins to beg and to jump, and there's a rare game round about Liberty, yap, yap, yapperty-yap!" [5]


15 September

Four days after Lawrence was born, the world-famous elephant Jumbo was killed by a freight train, in Ontario, Canada, as he crossed railroad tracks on the way to his box car.

Born in 1860, Jumbo was a large African bush elephant who was transferred to London Zoo from the Jardin des Plantes (Paris), in 1865. Despite huge public protest, he was eventually sold to P. T. Barnum, who took him to the US for exhibition at Madison Square Garden (NYC), in March 1882.

Lawrence would later write several poems about elephants - perhaps most famously 'Elephant' and 'The elephant is slow to mate', though mention should also be made of the series of Pansies that begins with 'Elephants in the circus' and ends with 'Two performing elephants'.

Although they don't mention Jumbo, they could easily have been written about him or any other elephant with "aeons of weariness round their eyes" and obliged to sit up "and show vast bellies to the children" who watch in half-frightened silence: "The looming of the hoary, far-gone ages / is too much for them." [6]

30 October

Seven weeks after Lawrence entered the world, American poet and Mr. Modernism himself, Ezra Pound, was born. During his early years in London, working as a teacher and attempting to forge a literary career, Lawrence met Pound on several occasions and formed a favourable impression:

"He is jolly nice: took me to supper at Pagnani's, and afterwards we went down to his room at Kensington. He lives in an attic, like a traditional poet - but the attic is a comfortable well furnished one. [...] He is rather remarkable - a good bit of a genius, and with not the least self-consciousness." [7]
     
And, for his part, Pound was supportive of Lawrence as a poet and full of praise for the latter's first book of verse, Love Poems and Others (1913). But, of course, the two men were as different as chalk and cheese, both in character and as artists, and initial friendship soon led to mutual disenchantment and hostility (Pound eventually describing Lawrence as detestable). 

The problem, as Helen Sword notes, is that whilst, formally, as a poet, Lawrence was very much a modernist and "an iconoclastic practitioner of Pound's famous dictum, 'Make it new'", he was, at the same time, "a modernist poet who cultivated [...] a distinctly anti-modernist stance". Unfortunately for Lawrence, his "oracular tone, visionary pretensions, lyrical cadences, overt sentimentality, highly personal subject matter, and lack of irony [...] earned him the antipathy of many members of his modernist cohort". [8]

And, indeed, it continues to lose him many readers today ...

Notes

[1] D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. II, ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1981), letter 1291, p. 660.

[2] D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VI, ed. James T. Boulton and Margaret H. Boulton with Gerald Lacy, (Cambridge University Press, 1991), letter 4603, p. 513.  

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'Return to Bestwood', Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 24. 

[4] D. H. Lawrence, The White Peacock, ed. Andrew Robertson, (Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 15. 

[5] D. H. Lawrence, 'Epilogue', Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 201-204. Lines quoted are on p. 203.

[6] D. H. Lawrence, 'Elephants in the circus' and 'Two performing elephants', The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 369 and 370. The other two poems mentioned - 'Elephant' and 'The elephant is slow to mate' - can be found in the above on pp. 338-343 and 403-04 respectively.

[7] D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. I, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1979), letter 132, pp. 144-45. This letter was written to Louie Burrows on 20 November, 1909. Comparing himself to Pound, Lawrence also wrote in this letter: "He is 24, like me, but his god is beauty, mine, life."  

[8] Helen Sword, 'Lawrence's Poetry', The Cambridge Companion to D. H. Lawrence, ed. Anne Fernihough, (Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 119-135. Lines quoted are on p. 120. See also Michael Bell's essay in the above work, 'Lawrence and Modernism' (pp. 179-196), in which he argues that Lawrence's complex and critically important relation to modernist writers "is most clearly illustrated by the case of his coeval Ezra Pound" [179].