That City of Dreadful Night: D. H. Lawrence's Letters from Paris

Paris est toujours une bonne idée

 

 

I. 

 

I'm currently reading a big fat book of essays, short stories, and poems by over seventy authors, edited by Andrew Gallix [1], exploring the fascination that writers from the English-speaking world have for the French capital - although, as becomes clear, they are mostly enchanted by a myth of their own invention, rather than by Paris as a place that can be located on a map.       

 

Of course, not all English writers have been enamoured with the City of Lights. D. H. Lawrence, for example, famously wrote in 1919: "Paris is a nasty city, and the French are not sympathetic to me." [2] 

 

Five years later, however, Lawrence had changed his tune: "Paris isn't so bad - to me much nicer than London - so agreeably soulless" [3]. 

 

Indeed, in almost every letter and postcard sent to friends at the beginning of 1924 from Le Grand Hotel de Versailles (on the Boulevard Montparnasse), Lawrence was saying much the same thing: "Paris looking rather lovely in sunshine and frost - rather quiet, but really a beautiful city" [4]. He even cheerfully informed his mother-in-law that the Parisians were very friendly [5]. 

But of course, Lawrence being Lawrence, there were sudden (and frequent) mood changes during his short stay in Paris, as this letter written to Catherine Carswell illustrates:

 

"Today it is dark and raining, and very like London. There really isn't much point in coming here. It's the same thing with a small difference. And not really worth taking the journey. Don't you come just now: it would only disappoint you. Myself, I'm just going to sleep a good bit, and let the days go by [...] Paris has great beauty - but all like a museum. And when one looks out of the Louvre windows, one wonders whether the museum is more inside or outside - whether all Paris, with its rue de la Paix and its Champs Elysée isn't also all just a sort of museum." [6]   

Several days later, and Lawrence is still lying low in Paris (whilst Frieda buys some new clothes), but feeling a little more positive about the city and its residents:

 

"Paris is rather nice - the French aren't at all villain, as far as I see them. I must say I like them. They are simpatico. I feel much better since I am here and away from London." [7]

 

And so, despite informing one correspondent that the city was far from gay, Lawrence mostly enjoyed his short stay: "Paris has been quite entertaining for the two weeks: good food and wine, and everything very cheap." [8]  

 

II.

 

In 1929, Lawrence returned to Paris where he oversaw publication of a new (inexpensive) edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover to try and stop the pirated editions then in circulation. If, five years earlier, he had been mostly positive in his response to the city, now he was as hostile to it as he was to most (if not all) large cities:

 

"I don't a bit like Paris. It is nowadays incredibly crowded, incredibly noisy, the air is dirty and simply stinks of petrol, and all the life has gone out of the people. They seem so tired." [9]   

 

Sadly, of course, it was Lawrence himself that the life had almost entirely gone out of; he was to die eleven months after writing this, aged 44, in Vence (428 miles south of Paris, as the crow flies).           

 

 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Andrew Gallix (ed.), We'll Never Have Paris, (Repeater Books, 2019). If I ever manage to work my way through the book's 560+ pages, then I'll doubtless post some kind of review of the work here on Torpedo the Ark.  

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Lady Cynthia Asquith, 18 November 1919, in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. III, ed. James T. Boulton and Andrew Robertson, (Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 417. It should be noted that Lawrence hadn't at the time of writing this letter actually been to Paris and wasn't to make his first trip there until January 1924.

[3] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Mark Gertler, [2 February 1924], in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. IV, ed. Warren Roberts, James T. Boulton and Elzabeth Mansfield, (Cambridge University Press 1987), p. 567. 

[4] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Catherine Carswell, [24 January 1924], in Letters IV, p. 561. 

[5] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Baroness Anna von Richthofen, 24 January 1924, in Letters IV, p. 561. In the original German, Lawrence wrote: "Paris ist doch netter wie London, nicht so dunkel-grau. Die Leute sind ganz freundlich."

[6] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Catherine Carswell, [25 January 1924], in Letters IV, p. 563. 

      This letter has parallels with a short essay written at the same time in which Lawrence asserts that whilst Paris is still monumental and handsome, it has lost its true splendour, and become "like an old, weary peacock that sports a bunch of dirty twigs at its rump, where it used to have a tail". He blames this sorry state of affairs on: (i) modern democracy; (ii) too much bare flesh on display in French works of art;  (iii) an overly rich diet; and (iv) the dead weight of history and its architecture.

      See: 'Paris Letter', in Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays, ed. Virginia Crosswhite Hyde, (Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 141-146. The line quoted is on p. 143.

      As for the idea of Paris disappointing: 

      "Disappointment, according to Stuart Walton, is actually a 'constitutive factor' in English speakers' experience of France, and its capital in particular: 'It is at least as important to the British, for example, that Paris should fall short of what they expect of it as it is to the Parisians that les Anglais have never really understood it' (p. 332)." 

      See Andrew Gallix's Introduction to We'll Never Have Paris, p. 29. And see also the TTA post 'On Disappointment' (24 May 2020) in which I discuss (amongst other things) le Syndrome de Paris: click here.  

        

[7] D. H. Lawrence, letter to S. S. Koteliansky, [31 January 1924], in Letters IV, p. 565. 

[8] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Hon. Dorothy Brett, [4 February 1924], in Letters, IV, p. 568. The fact that Paris was, at one time, cheap to live in, was absolutely crucial:

      "Hemingway described Paris in the 1920s as a place 'where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were', adding that this was 'like having a great treasure given to you'. That treasured lifestyle was swept away by the onset of the Depression in the 1930s. As Will Ashon remarks, artists thrive where there is 'affordable, preferably semi-derelict, real estate. Which is to say, you can't be an artist in Paris, anymore, or in London either' (p. 301)." 

      See Andrew Gallix, Introduction to We'll Never Have Paris, p. 24.   

 

[9] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell, 3 April 1929, in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VII, ed. Keith Sagar and James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 234. 

Those interested in knowing more about Lawrence's 1929 visit to Paris - and how his stay at 66, Boulevard de Montparnasse has now been officially commememorated with a plaque - might like to read Catherine Brown's blog post of 29 May 2019, available on her website: click here.     

 

And those interested in Lawrence's wider relationship with French culture, might like to read the following essay by Ginette Katz-Roy: 'D. H. Lawrence and "That Beastly France"', in The D. H. Lawrence Review, Vol. 23, No. 2/3, (1991), pp. 143-156. This essay is available to download or read online via JSTOR: click here.   

 

 

Musical bonus: the debut single from Adam and the Ants, Young Parisians (Decca, 1978): click here. 

 

 

Lord, Open Thou My Lips ...

Andreea Anghel: 

Le Noir's Jesus Wound as a Vagina (2017)

saatchiart.com

 

I. Lord Jesus Crucified, I adore the Sacred Wound in thy most holy side ...

 

It's always amusing - and important - to be reminded that Christianity is not only a form of moral fanaticism but sexual perversion; that Jesus was not only full of his own righteousness (to the extent that he believed himself the Son of God), but gloried in his own suffering as a form of passion, only finding his consummation when nailed naked to a cross wearing a crown of thorns. 

 

The faithful to this day still delight in masochism and martydom and have a fetishistic fascination with the Five Holy Wounds left upon the body of their Lord [1]. Such loving devotion to the physical signs of cruelty inflicted upon the body of Christ - or what we might term stigmatophilia - has recently attracted the attention of scholars working within the area of queer studies and it's to their research that I turn here ...         

 

 

II. Domine labia mea aperies ut cunnum meum laude ut cantem

 

For those historians and theologians who choose to examine the life of Jesus through a queer lens, the question of his gender identity - and its representation in medieval art - is of significant interest. 

 

They are particularly fascinated by the gash in his side which undeniably appears to resemble a vulva, thus implying that the resurrected Christ - risen in his wholeness - possessed both male and female sex organs. This intersex (and gender-fluid) Christ figure radically challenges the more conventional ideas of him as purely male and, indeed, as a divine embodiment of the masculine ideal.                

 

In other words, long before J. G. Ballard and David Cronenberg fantasised about the new flesh and the flowering of wounds into sex organs that promised the possibility of perverse new pleasures, medieval Christians were opening their prayer books and touching and kissing images of Christ's wounds, to which they assigned miraculous properties.

 

Obviously, this was performed as an act of religious veneration. But to deny the kinky aspect would be absurd; believers were surely aware, for example, of the linguistic associations in Latin between the word for wound and the word for womb (vulna / vulva) and dismbodied wound images were often explicitly - not just symbolically - connected with the female sex organ from which blood seeps and new life is born [2]. 

 

  

III. Ostentatio Vulnerum

 

I'd like to close this post with another astonishing artwork ... Believed to be by Giovanni Antonio Galli and painted c. 1630,  it is usually known in English as Christ Displaying His Wounds, but could just as fittingly be called I'll show you mine, if you show me yours.

 

I think most people would agree that it's an obscene and profoundly disturbing work; for the Christ figure appears to not only invite us to inspect his wound - which he draws open for this purpose - but to touch it and penetrate it, just as he challenged his apostle Thomas to do (John 20: 19-29). 

 

Again, one can't help thinking of Crash [3], in which that nightmare angel of the expressways Vaughan assumes the Christ role and flaunts his injuries and scars to his disciple Ballard whilst unfolding his perverse teachings centred on the mysterious eroticism of wounds. 

 

Indeed, I think that just as Vaughan imagined the whole world ending in one apocalyptic car crash, Christ secretly desired the flagellation and crucifixion of all mankind ... But that's a post for another day ...  

  

 

Source of image: 

Wikimedia Commons

  

 

Notes

 

[1] Jesus received numerous injuries in the course of his Passion, but medieval piety liked to particularly focus upon the five wounds associated directly with his crucifixion, i.e., the nail wounds on his hands and feet, as well as the wound made by the lance which pierced his side. Many prayers from this period, as well as later poems, paintings, and pieces of music inspired by the Sacred Wounds of Christ, have been preserved. The Rosary also helped to remind the faithful of Christ's suffering; for whilst the fifty small beads refer to Mary, the five large beads represent the Five Wounds of Christ. 

 

[2] Some medieval artists carried this idea to its logical end point and showed a human body - either that of a baby or a fully-grown adult - being birthed from the side wound and cleansed in the life-giving blood of Christ. This body is often said to symbolise the Church. 

 

[3] J. G. Ballard, Crash, (Jonathan Cape, 1973). 

 

 

To read a related post to this one on stigmatophilia and sexual healing, click here. 

 

 

The Scar is the Eye of the Violet: On Stigmatophilia and Sexual Healing

Illustration attributed to Jean Le Noir from 

The Prayer Book of Bonne de Luxembourg (c. 1345)

showing Christ's side wound in detail

 

 

I. Long Live the New Flesh

 

In his beautiful erotico-blasphemous short novel The Escaped Cock [a], D. H. Lawrence has an almost fetishistic interest in the wounds and scars left on the body of the man who died, following his crucifixion and resurrection [b]. 

 

The climax of the tale sees the man stripping naked before a priestess of Isis and submitting to her touch, in order that he may be healed and released from past pain and old suffering:

"'Let me annoint you!' the woman said to him softly, 'let me annoint the scars! Show me, and let me annoint them!'

      He forgot his nakedness in the re-evoked old pain. He sat on the edge of the couch, and she poured a little ointment into the palm of his hand. And as she chafed his hand, it all came back, the nails, the holes, the cruelty, the unjust cruelty against him who had offered only kindness. The agony of injustice and cruelty came over him again, as in his death-hour. But she chafed the palm, murmuring: 'What was torn becomes a new flesh, what was a wound is full of fresh life, the scar is the eye of the violet.'" [157]

 

This is an astonishing piece of writing - particularly the last line, which is one that David Cronenberg would have been proud of. 

 

Next, the woman of Isis chafes the man's feet with oil and tender healing, before directing him towards her goddess: "And as he stood there dazed and naked as an unborn thing" [158], the woman stooped in order to examine the scar "in the soft flesh of the socket of his side" [158]; a scar which resembled  "an eye sore with endless weeping" [158]. 

 

It was from this deep wound just above his hip, that the man who died had lost his life ...

 

"The woman, silent now, but quivering, laid oil in her hand and put her palm over over the wound in his right side. He winced, and the wound absorbed his life again [...] And in the dark, wild pain and panic of consciousness rang only one cry: Oh, how can she take this death out of me? [...]

      In silence she softly, rhythmically chafed the scar with oil [...] while the vitals of the man howled in panic. But as she gradually gathered power [...] gradually warmth began to take the place of cold terror, and he felt: I am going to be flushed warm again, I am going to be whole!" [158] 

 

Lawrence continues:

 

"Having chafed all his lower body with oil, his belly, his buttocks, even the slain penis and the sad stones, having worked with her slow intensity of a priestess, so that the sound of his wounds grew dimmer and dimmer, suddenly she put her breast against the wound in his left side, and her arms round him, folding over the wound in his right side, and she pressed him to her, in a power of living warmth [...] And the wailing died out altogether, and there was stillness and darkness in his soul, unbroken dark stilless, wholeness." [159] 

 

At the same time, the man who died experiences a new sun dawning within the perfect inner darkness of his body. Not only that, but he feels the blaze of his manhood rise up. So he unfastens the woman's linen tunic and slips the garment down, exposing her white-gold breasts. Pulling her to him "with a passion of tenderness and consuming desire" [160], they fuck - not once but twice.

 

"Afterwards, with a dim wonder, she touched the great scars in his side with her finger-tips, and said:

      'But they no longer hurt?'

      'They are suns!' he said. 'They shine from your touch. They are my atonement with you.'" [160] 

 

 

II. The World Was Beginning to Flower into Wounds 

 

Of course, Lawrence isn't the only author to explore the eroticism of wounds as sites of perverse bliss and to imagine what Foucault would later term a new economy of bodies and their pleasures ... 

 

In his novel Crash J. G. Ballard provides the following tender (but disquieting) scene between the narrator of the tale - also named Ballard - and a severely crippled young woman, Gabrielle, in the back of her small, specially adapted car: 

 

"As I explored her body, feeling my way among the braces and straps of her underwear, the unfamiliar planes of her hips and legs steered me into unique culs-de-sac, strange declensions of skin and musculature. Each of her deformities became a potent metaphor for the excitements of a new violence. Her body, with its angular contours, its unexpected junctions of mucous membrane and hairline, detrusor muscle and erectile tissue, was a ripening anthology of perverse possibilities. [...] Our sexual acts were exploratory ordeals." [c] 

 

Ballard continues, in the uniquely erotico-clinical language that characterises the novel and which, almost impossible to paraphrase, can only be quoted at length:

 

"In the inner surface of her thigh the straps formed marked depressions, troughs of reddened skin hollowed out in the forms of buckles and clasps. As I unshackled the left leg brace and ran my fingers along the deep buckle groove, the corrugated skin felt hot and tender, more exciting than the membrane of a vagina. This depraved orifice, the imagination of a sexual organ still in the embryonic stages of its evolution, reminded me of the small wounds on my own body [...] I felt this depression on her thigh, the groove worn below her breast under her right armpit by the spinal brace, the red marking on the inside of her right upper arm - these were the templates for new genital organs, the moulds of sexual possibilities yet to be created [...] As she sat passively in my arms [...] I realised this bored and crippled young woman found that the nominal junction points of the sexual act - breast and penis, anus and vulva, nipple and clitoris - failed to provide any excitement for us."

 

"Gabrielle placed a drop of spit on my right nipple and stroked it mechanically, keeping up the small pretence of this nominal sexual link. In return, I stroked her pubis, feeling for the inert nub of her clitoris. [...] Gabrielle's hand moved across my chest. Her fingers found the small scars below my left collar bone [...] As she began to explore this circular crevice with her lips I for the first time felt my penis thickening. She took it from my trousers, then began to explore the other wound-scars on my chest and abdomen, running the tip of her tongue into each one. In turn, one by one, she endorsed each of these signatures [...]  As she stroked my penis I moved my hand from her pubis to the scars on her thighs, feeling the tender causeways driven through her flesh by the handbrake of the car in which she had crashed. My right arm held her shoulders, feeling the impress of the contoured leather, the meeting points of hemispherical and rectilinear geometries. I explored the scars on her thighs and arms, feeling for the wound areas under her left breast, as she in turn explored mine, deciphering together these codes of a sexuality made possible by our two car-crashes.

      My first orgasm, within the deep wound on her thigh, jolted my semen along this channel, irrigating its corrugated ditch. Holding the semen in her hand, she wiped it against the silver controls of the clutch treadle. 

      My mouth was fastened on the scar below her left breast, exploring its sickle-shaped trough. Gabrielle turned in her seat, revolving her body around me, so that I could explore the wounds of her right hip. For the first time I felt no trace of pity for this crippled woman, but celebrated with her the excitements of these abstract vents let into her body by sections of her own automobile. 

      During the next few days my orgasms took place within the scars below her breast and within her left armpit, in the wounds on her neck and shoulder, in these sexual apertures formed by fragmenting windshield louvres and dashboard dials in a high-speed impact, marrying through my own penis the car in which I had crashed and the car in which Gabrielle had met her near-death."

 

Like the man who died and the priestess of Isis, it might be argued that Ballard and Gabrielle were implicated with each other in sacred mysteries - albeit within an age shaped by technology - though whether inseminating wounds with sperm might trigger the evolution of new sex organs, is, I suspect, rather fanciful ...  

   

 

Notes

 

[a] Lawrence's The Escaped Cock was originally published by the Black Sun Press (Paris, 1929). I am referring to the version of the tale published in The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories, ed. Michael Herbert, Bethan Jones and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 123-163.    

[b] I'm aware that this same fetishistic adoration of holy wounds was a significant aspect of medieval Christian worship (as the illustration to this post shows) and I also know that this has since become of great interest to those wishing to queer the gospels and feminise the body of Christ. I will develop this theme at length in a post to be published shortly entitled Lord, Open Thou My Lips ...

 

[c] J. G. Ballard, Crash, (Jonathan Cape, 1973). Unfortunately, I can't give page references as don't have my copy of the novel to hand. I'm relying here on a pdf made available on booksvooks.com: click here. All the material quoted is found in chapter 19. 

 

For an earlier post on Ballard's novel Crash, please click here.

 

    

Rabbit: On the Obscene Beyond and Other Abhorrent Mysteries

Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit 

Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit ...

 

 

One of the most astonishing and disturbing chapters in D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love (1920) is entitled Rabbit. 

 

And although there is a large lagomorph at the centre of the chapter, our main concern here is with what Lawrence terms the obscene beyond and the manner in which Gudrun and Gerald conduct their love affair in relation to this material reality which threatens to disrupt life as it is lived ideally beneath the Great Umbrella that mankind has erected between itself and the inhuman chaos of actuality which is neither Good, True, nor Beautiful.   

 

Gudrun is acting as art mistress to Gerald's young sister, Winifred, and it is decided they will draw the latter's pet rabbit, Bismarck. Gerald is hanging around watching - disconcerted by Gudrun's pale-yellow stockings, but in love with her all the same. He can't help admiring her body and imagining the silky softness of her flesh; "she was the all-desirable, the all-beautiful" [a] and he wanted only to give himself to her.

 

(Be careful what you wish for ...)

 

Bismarck, it turns out, is not only big, he's also strong - and he doesn't like to be handled:

 

"They unlocked the door of the hutch. Gudrun thrust in her arm and seized the great, lusty rabbit as it crouched still, she grasped its long ears. It set its four feet flat, and thrust back. There was a long scraping sound as it was hauled forward, and in another instant it was in mid-air, lunging wildly, its body flying like a spring coiled and released, as it lashed out, suspended from the ears. Gudrun held the black-and-white tempest at arms' length, averting her face. But the rabbit was magically strong, it was all she could do to keep her grasp. She almost lost her presence of mind." [240]

 

Lawrence continues:

 

"Gudrun stood for a moment astounded by the thunder-storm that had sprung into being in her grip. Then her colour came up, a heavy rage came over her like a cloud. She stood shaken as a house in a storm, and utterly overcome. Her heart was arrested with fury at the midlessness and the bestial stupidity of this struggle, her wrists were badly scored by the claws of the beast, a heavy cruelty welled up in her." [240]    

 

At this point Gerald steps forward to offer his assistance and, after a further struggle, the demonic bunny is eventually subdued. But this incident has brought him and Gudrun into a fateful relation of some kind and there was a mutual hellish recognition: "They were implicated with each other in abhorrent mysteries." [242]  

 

Ignoring his own scratches, Gerald is perversely fascinated by the deep red gash on the silken white arm of Gudrun: 

 

"It was as if he had knowledge of her in the long red rent of her forearm [...] The long, shallow red rip seemed torn across his own brain, tearing the surface of his ultimate consciousness, letting through the forever unconscious, unthinkable red ether of the beyond, the obscene beyond. [...] 

      There was a queer, faint, obscene smile over his face. She looked at him and saw him, and knew that he was initiate as she was initiate. [...]

      Slowly her face relaxed into a smile of obscene recognition." [242-43]  

 

These lines tell us something crucial about Gudrun and Gerald's relationship and indeed about the violent metaphysics of obscenity underlying Lawrence's thinking. 

 

He, Lawrence, obviously uses the term knowledge here in the biblical (i.e., carnal) sense, which implies that the gaping wound on Gudrun's arm has a sexual (as well as deathly) aspect, although Gerald doesn't merely equate it with her vagina, but sees within it a ripening anthology of perverse possibilities [b]. 

 

And Gudrun knows it: they both delight in recognition of this fact and that soul-destructive obscenity is at the heart of their passion.

 

 

Notes

 

[a] D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 239. Future references to this edition of the novel will be given directly in the text. [b] 

 

This phrase - which I hope I recall correctly - is from J. G. Ballard's brilliant novel Crash (Jonathan Cape, 1973).    

 

 

The Obscene Beyond: It is So Lovely Within the Crack

I love you delicious rottenness ...

 

I. 

 

As might be imagined, the concept of the obscene within philosophy is rather more complex than that found within the moral and legal debates surrounding pornography and censorship which simply define the obscene as that which offends or outrages public decency, often involving the graphic representation of sexual acts or bodily organs.   

 

For me, the obscene is more interestingly thought of as the violent intrusion of the material world into an ideal culture which likes to keep hidden or deny all that it cannot assimilate into its all too human system of transcendental meaning based upon the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. 

 

This might include what is commonly thought of as inappropriate content, but, ultimately, I would suggest, there is nothing more obscene than death and it's knowledge of death - not sex - that makes moralists and idealists of all stripes turn away in horror and disgust, even if - as in Sade and Bataille, for example - death is eroticised (and love morbidified). 

 

This notion of the obscene as that which is sooner or later exposed like the inside of a bursten fig, is magnificently illustrated in the poetry of D. H. Lawrence ...

 

 

II.

 

In the first of his fruit series - 'Pomegranate' - Lawrence insists on the importance of the fissure. 

 

For it is via the painful looking split in the skin of the pomegranate that we catch a glimpse of what he terms the obscene beyond - a troubling ontological notion underlying his philosophy which shapes his ideas about the reality of love, life, death, and how we might know and represent these things. 

 

Of course, many people prefer to look at the smooth unbroken skin of the fruit and are disturbed by the fissure and all that lies rosy and glittering within: 

 

Do you mean to tell me there should be no fissure?

No glittering, compact drops of dawn? 

Do you mean it is wrong, the gold-filmed skin, integument, shown ruptured?

For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken.

It is so lovely, dawn-kaeidoscope within the crack. [1]

 

 

In the poem 'Fig', meanwhile, the narrator explicitly - some would say obscenely - relates this scarlet fissure in the skin of a ripe piece of fruit to the female sex organ, to which one might put their mouth and enjoy the moistness and strange smelling sap that curdles milk.    

But what might start out as an ode to cunnilingus, quickly becomes a warning:

That's how the fig dies, showing her crimson through the purple slit

Like a wound, the exposure of her secret, on the open day.

Like a prostitute, the bursten fig, making a show of her secret.

That's how women die too. [2]

In other words, the ideal fantasy of womanhood is dispelled once their obscenity or delicious rottenness bursts forth and we realise - as Bataille wrote - that the vagina is synonymous with a freshly dug grave. 

 

That's a hellish thing to recognise. But it's also a liberating thought, providing one can find the courage to think it through and accept that "wonderful are the hellish experiences" [3]. 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'Pomegranate', in The Poems, Vol. I., ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 231. 

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'Fig', in The Poems, Vol. I., pp. 232-35. Lines quoted are on p. 234.

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'Medlars and Sorb-Apples', in The Poems, Vol. I., pp. 235-37. Line quoted is on p. 234.      

With Wings Spread Silent Over Roofs: In Defence of the Urban Gull

 

Image: Gary Hershorn / Getty Images

Apparently, whilst the number of coastal birds continues to decline, the number of seagulls making a home in our towns and cities is booming and this makes me happy. 

 

For whilst gulls can certainly be noisy and messy - and may even steal your chips - they are also beautiful and intelligent birds which, I like to believe, act as messengers of the ancient sea goddess Leukothéa; she upon whom all men look with misty eyes, such is her loveliness.

 

Despite this, there are people who react to urban gulls with the same irrational hatred that they do to other creatures that have made their home amongst us, such as foxes and grey squirrels. Personally, I'd like to see those who call openly for extermination or speak euphemistically of pest control subject to a reduction in numbers. 

 

For to paraphrase Lawrence writing of a mountain lion [1]:

 

I think in this lonely city there is room for me and a seagull.

And I think in the world beyond, how easily we might spare a million or two humans

And never miss them. 

Yet what a gap in the world, the missing white-surf face of that long-legged bird!

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Mountain Lion', in The Poems, Vol. I., ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 351-52. 

 

To read another defence of seagulls, see Stephen Moss's article in The Guardian (19 Aug 2009): click here.   

 

 

Soured Through the Ages Like Piss Lemonade: Notes on Punk Is Dead (2017)

(Zero Books, 2017)

 

 

I.

 

Pressed between the 300 or so pages of this book are a series of memories from various contributors who still like to filter their experiences and thinking through the prism of punk in order to explore the past and indicate their own role within it: I was there is the running refrain throughout the work: And bliss it was in that Summer of Hate to be alive (and to be a young punk was very heaven) [a]. 

 

There is, of course, a certain irony in this: if punk prided itself on anything, it was the refusal to be nostalgic or to acknowledge that it owed anything to the past: No Elvis, Beatles, or the Rolling Stones in 1977 ... [b]

 

Similarly, punk was not sentimental. As Tony Drayton reminds us, the phrase Kill Your Pet Puppy meant breaking all ties, committments, and responsibilities; "reject domesticity, keep on moving [...] never look back, leave your family behind" [195] [c].

 

And so there's a further irony in the fact that the book opens with the two editors - Richard Cabut and Andrew Gallix - thanking their partners, parents and children and thereby placing punk within the Oedipal triangle.
 

Still, never mind the bollocks - let's move on ...

 

 

II. 

 

First up, there's a Foreword by Judy Nylon; a colourful figure who, by her own admission, is "often left out of punk histories" [1], despite being - like her friend and compatriot Chrissie Hynde - on the London scene from the very beginning. 

 

I suspect the reason for this is that Nylon is bigger and more complex than any scene or subcultural identity, which makes her - like many of the singular individuals in this period - too punk for punk. The fact that her "very existence would eventually come into conflict with Malcolm and Vivienne's version of punk" [2] probably also helps to explain her exclusion from many (official) accounts of the period.  

 

Next comes a two part Introduction by the editors ...

 

Richard Cabut makes the perfectly valid point that punk in the early days - "before the Clash essentialy" [8] - had no fixed essence or political allegiance, but was, rather, a defiant and stylish response to the boredom of everyday life. 

 

Where he and I differ, is that he understands this in terms of a "quest for truth and significance" [9], whilst I see it more as the playful deconstruction of these and related ideals as part of what D. H. Lawrence terms a sane revolution:

 

If you make a revolution, make it for fun, 

don’t make it in ghastly seriousness, 

don’t do it in deadly earnest, do it for fun. 

 

Don’t do it because you hate people, 

do it just to spit in their eye. [d]           

 

This resentment-free gobbing - and not the search for meaning - is surely what defines punk, is it not?

 

Andrew Gallix, meanwhile, muses on the passing of time and the fact that even punk rockers - unless they live fast enough to die young like Sid and Nancy - get old ... 

 

I suspect, however, as a reader of Deleuze, Gallix is perfectly aware of the fact that one can, in fact, age stylishly - that is to say, like Malcolm (but unlike Rotten) - not by attempting to remain young, but by extracting the molecular elements, the forces and flows, that constitute the youth of whatever age one happens to be. 

 

Gallix also warns of the dangers of retrospective reinterpretation; "of the way in which the past is subtly rewritten, every nuance gradually airbrushed out of the picture" [11]. For this is not just a way of negating certain inconvenient elements in the past, but of creating a sanitised present. This whitewashing of history and murder of reality is what Baudrillard terms the perfect crime.    

 

Ultimately, however, the cultural importance of punk must be remembered, even if, as a selective process, remembering always involves a degree of forgetting. 

 

Indeed, Gallix argues that punk must not just be remembered, but commemorated in museums and art galleries; both as "the last great youth subculture" [12] and a "summation of all avant-garde movements of the 20th-century" [12] [e].  

 

 

III. 

 

In his essay 'The Boy Looked at Eurydice', Gallix continues to reflect upon the punk obsession with youth: "All we can say for sure is that, more than any other subculture before or since, punk was afflicted with Peter Pan syndrome." [17] 

 

That's probably true: I remember one of the first things I ever wrote was entitled Never Trust Anyone Over Twenty and I always (like Sid) used the term grown-up perjoratively. Again, this came from Malcolm who encouraged his spiky-haired charges to be childish, irresponsible and disrespectful of adult authority [f].   

 

More importantly, however, was the fact that punk was a thinking against itself - "internal dissent was its identity" [26]. Real punks, as Gallix rightly says, always hated the term: "Being a true punk was something that could only go without saying, it implied never describing oneself as such" [26-27] [g].   

 

 

IV.  

 

For me, one of the most interesting pieces in Punk Is Dead is by Tom Vague who retraces the semi-mythical origin of punk rock to the Situationist International and the Gordon Riots of 1780; a connection first made by Fred Vermorel. 

 

The fact is, whilst you can analyse the Sex Pistols from various perspectives, to talk exclusively about the music or the fashion whilst ignoring the politics which inspired McLaren and Jamie Reid is to profoundly miss the point. 

 

Crucial aspects of the project - particularly in the glorious last days of The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, when the band essentially no longer existed - will simply not make sense unless you first understand the political context in which things evolved and I would advise everyone to read Chris Gray's Leaving the Twentieth Century (1974), which, as Vague reminds us, is a kind of blueprint for the punk revolution [h].    

 

V.

 

Sadly, of course, for the majority of punk rockers it was all about the music (not the chaos); all about forming (or following) bands, making (or buying) records, playing (or going to) gigs, etc. These were the kind of people who read the NME (not Guy Debord) and failed to see that the most exciting thing about Never Mind the Bollocks was the sleeve (just as the only interesting thing about Johnny Rotten was his public image).    

Unfortunately, these music lovers abound within the pages of Punk Is Dead - still talking reverently about rock history and referring to the Sex Pistols as the Pistols thereby turning them into just another boring band rather than the embodiment of an attitude and an approach to art, politics, and life that bubbled up at 430 Kings Road. 

 

To his credit, Paul Gorman understands the importance of the above address as an immersive art environment and recognises that the music was simply an expression of SEX and Seditionaries (and arguably of far less importance than McLaren and Westwood's clothes designs) [i]. Not everyone could join the band - but anyone could be a SEX Pistol if they had the right look, the right attitude. 

 

Punk was perhaps not all and always about Talcy Malcy, but, as Gorman says, without McLaren and his odd little shop at 430 Kings Road, punk "wouldn't have taken the form it did" [77] [j].       

 

    

VI.

I would normally at this point in a review indicate which are the pieces (and who are the authors) contained in this collection that I really hate - and there are several (not to mention one or two essays that simply don't belong in this book, interesting as they may be). 

 

But, in the spirit of Richard Cabut's positive punk, let me end with a wonderful line taken from Dorothy Max Prior's 'SEX in the City', an amusing account of her days working as a stripper in the pubs of punk London, full of dodgy-geezers and brassy-birds: 

 

"Modernity killed not only every night, but every lunchtime over a pint of Double Diamond in a City Road boozer." [118]

 

 

   

Notes

 

[a] This line from Wordsworth - paraphrased here - is also paraphrased by Andrew Gallix in 'The Boy Looked at Eurydice', in Punk Is Dead, (Zero Books, 2017), pp. 17-18. Note that future page references to this book will be given directly in the text. 

      To his credit, punk-turned philosopher Simon Critchley says he consciously tries not to lecture young people about "how great it was to be alive in the 1970s". Of course, as he admits, he often fails in this. See 'Rummaging in the Ashes: An Interview with Simon Critchley', Punk Is Dead, p. 39. 

[b] As the Clash sang on the B-side of their first single White Riot (CBS, 1977): click here. 

      Andrew Gallix, however, persuasively argues that without nostalgia we would have no Homer or Proust. See his Introduction to Punk Is Dead, p. 12. 

      See also 'Rummaging in the Ashes: An Interview with Simon Critchley', in which the latter says that although he hates nostalgia, "it is unavoidable and I get whimsical when I think back to the punk years and how everything suddeny became possible". Punk Is Dead, p. 37. 

 

[c] Tony Drayton (in conversation with Richard Cabut), 'Learning to Fight', Punk Is Dead. Drayton was the founder of the punk fanzines Ripped & Torn (1976) and Kill Your Pet Puppy (1980). 

 

[d] D. H. Lawrence, 'A sane revolution', The Poems Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 449.

[e] Interestingly, Simon Critchley takes an entirely opposite view: "I must say that I find the idea of the commemoration of punk particularly distasteful, and that punk can be archived and celebrated in museums pretty awful." See 'Rummaging in the Ashes: An Interview with Simon Critchley', in Punk Is Dead, p. 38.

[f] Ted Polhemus picks up on the deliberate and determined childishness of punk in his essay 'Boom!', describing it as "the opposite of the beard-stroking, educated, technically-accomplished, grown-up world where the Boring Old Farts had reduced the anything-goes spirit of rock 'n' roll to a limp, ageing shadow of its former self". See Punk Is Dead, p. 98.

[g] As Paul Gorman writes in 'The Flyaway-Collared Shirt': "Everyone I knew, and/or admired, moved on from punk as soon as it was given a name. [...] The richness of [the] scene had been traduced to the saleable gob 'n' pogo archetype: spiky hair, permanent sneer, brotel creepers, Lewis leathers." See Punk Is Dead, p. 105. 

       

[h] For example, Chris Gray's idea of forming a totally unpleasant pop group "designed to subvert show business from within would obviously be a major influence on the [Sex] Pistols project". See Andrew Gallix, 'Unheard Melodies', Punk Is Dead, p. 213.   

 

[i] As Richard Cabut says in 'A Letter to Jordan', in terms of cultural influence upon style, SEX (later to become Seditionaries and World's End) is "the most influential shop/meeting place ever". See Punk Is Dead, p. 120. Cabut is also right to recognise - like Adam Ant before him - that the perfect embodiment of SEX was Jordan, rather than Rotten. 

 

[j] Ted Polhemus challenges the view that punk was primarily and most significantly shaped by Malcolm: 

      "Not only is this view a reductionist distortion of how history happens - and actually did happen in 1976 - but it also fails to give credit were credit is surely due to the startling, unprecedented creativity of hundreds and then thousands of teenagers like John Lydon [...] and so very many others whose contribution was great but whose names were never known to us [...]." 

      See his essay 'Boom!' in Punk Is Dead, p. 99. The fact that Polhemus refers to Rotten as John Lydon perhaps indicates where his sympathies lie and why he might wish to down play McLaren's role.    

  

Final Reflections on Hölderlin's Poltergeists (A Drama for Voices by Síomón Solomon)

(Peter Lang, 2020)

 

 

I. 

 

Astute readers may have noticed that whilst I published a quintet of posts last month on the supplementary writings contained within Síomón Solomon's study Hölderlin's Poltergeists,* I didn't actually comment on the highly original adaptation of the radio play which is at its heart. 

 

This was due to the fact that although Nietzsche may figure prominently in my intellectual background, I simply do not feel qualified to do so: I am not a German literature scholar and not only have I never studied Hölderlin, but I hadn't even heard of Stephan Hermlin or his 1970 audio drama, Scardanelli, before reading Solomon's book. 

 

Further, whilst I've read a lot of novels and seen a lot of films, my knowledge and appreciation of plays is shamefully underdeveloped. I don't know why, but watching plays unfold on stage, or listening to them on the radio, has always filled me with a kind of performance anxiety. I even find reading plays troubling. 

And so, I'm perfectly happy to accept Dan Farrelly's estimation of Solomon's work as a "beautiful, free and creative translation" which "opens access to an extraordinarily creative poet who is superbly served by the playwright and his translator" [1]. 

 

Happy also to reproduce below remarks made by Solomon in his introduction, which give a fascinating insight into his thinking and working method ...    

 

 

II. 

 

According to Solomon, although his adaptation is rooted in "an exhaustive attentiveness to the minutiae" [2] of Hermlin's original German text, he has nevertheless seen fit to take a transmorphic approach in accordance with which he has made "a host of minor and major infidelities to the mother script, from compensations (moved text), borrowings (untranslated language items), tweaked directions, insertions and elisions to new dramatis personae and whole scenic re/writings" [3]. 

 

Solomon continues:

 

"As a result, the source text - already, of course, a seething intertext implicating a range of semiotic fields (Classical/Romantic poetics, early European psychiatry, Franco-German revolutionary politics, epistolary erotics, etc.) - has been both critically trimmed and lavishly enhanced. Our clamorous ark of thirty-five speakers [...] through twenty-eight scenes - roughly doubling Hermlin's quantities in each case and all doing their many varieties of violence to Hölderlin's voice - has been accordingly relaunched as a keening vessel of ventriloquized voices, in which ill-starred poets, idealist philosophers, literary editors, hamstrung employers, pious relatives, mortified lovers, political tyrants, ghoulish voyeurs and anonymous critics collide and collude." [4] 

 

In consequence: Solomon calls his work a 'remix', "aiming as it does to offer a musical variation on a pre-existent artistic matrix" [5]. 

 

And in sum: "Hermlin's play has been treated playfully, with a passionate recklessness or irreverent love" [6] that some might term abusive fidelity. 

 

Notes

 

[1] Dan Farrelly, Senior Lecturer in German (retired), University College Dublin. I am quoting from the blurb provided by Farrelly for the back cover of Hölderlin's Poltergeists.

 

[2] Síomón Solomon, 'Translator's Introduction', Hölderlin's Poltergeists, (Peter Lang, 2020), p. 13. 

[3] - [5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., p. 14.

 

* The quintet of earlier posts inspired by Hölderlin's Poltergeists are: 

How Fascism Makes Killers Of Us All (With Reference to the Case of Stephan Hermlin)

 

There is No Tongue That is Not Forked: Notes On Síomón Solomon's Fantasia of Translation 

 

A Brief Note on the Life and Work of Stephan Hermlin 

 

What's in a Name? Quite a Lot When That Name is Scardanelli 

 

We Are Transmitters: Reflections on Síomón Solomon's Audiopoetics 

 

 

From the Archives ... A Brief Style Guide for the Nietzschean Woman

"We are the smart set, a world apart set 

We are the neatest, ergo elitist." [1] 

 

As Derrida pointed out, the question of style and the question of woman almost become one and the same question within Nietzsche's philosophy - particularly when thought in relation to the question of Truth [2].   

Perhaps that's what I was thinking of when, in 2004, I wrote this brief style guide for the Nietzschean woman - anticipating my Philosophy on the Catwalk project ...

 

1. Burn all soft-cotton frocks as these invariably suggest Laura Ashley and her ersatz brand of pseudo-traditional fashion. The key point for the Nietzschean woman of today is to look smart and well-groomed; to demonstrate she has both discipline and breeding. 

2. Always wear a hat and gloves when out of doors. It does not matter if you are wearing the most beautiful Chanel outfit, if you lack these things you will look like a member of the herd. 

3. Stockings should also always be worn. Even during the hottest summer days, the Nietzschean woman does not parade around with bare legs; nor on the coldest of cold winter nights does she ever think of pulling on woolly socks. Tights, of course, are utterly infra dig - a sordid remnant of the 1960s. 

 

4. Make-up is a necessity and should be worn with pride and defiance so that one looks striking and dramatic; clearly defined lips, eyes luxuriantly shadowed, brows pencilled with firm, think curves; cheekbones emphasised with rouge. A face without make up looks offensively bare and contrary to what our idealists believe, Truth does not love to go naked. 

 

There is, of course, much more to Nietzschean style than this. But any woman who sticks to the above will already have gone a long way towards a revaluation of values and protecting herself from viral infections: For has a woman who knows herself to be well dressed ever caught a cold? [3] 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I'm quoting here from an English version of a Berlin cabaret song - Das Gesellschaftlied (1931) - written by Mischa Spoliansky (music) and Marcellus Schiffer (lyrics) and performed by Ute Lemper (Decca, 1996): click here.   

 

[2] See Jacques Derrida, Spurs, trans. Barbara Harlow, (The University of Chicago Press, 1979). And to read my take on this work, click here.  

 

[3] Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 'Maxims and Arrows', 25.

 

 

Put on a Little Makeup and Make Sure They Get Your Good Side: A Brief Note on Positive Punk

The Class of '83 ... Photo by Mike Laye

 

"Consigned to a foul demise by the forces of cash and chaos, punk broods alone in its dark tomb. 

Its evolution away from the light has been a cruel and twisted one, from guerilla assault on the media 

to ghost dancing on the bones of Red Indian mysticism, from glue to Gothick. 

Naturally, unattended for so long, its hair has grown. So have its aspirations." [1]

                                                                                                                                      

  

What is so-called positive punk? 

 

I'm not sure I knew back in 1983 when the movement was first identified by Richard North writing in the NME [2] and I'm still not sure I know even now, although, if North is to be believed, it seems primarily to involve the internalisation of punk's energy in order to produce a new gothic sensibility. 

 

In other words, it was punk - but this time with feeling - as reimagined by the art school crowd and drama students who looked on in (Rocky) horror at the antics of those for whom the word Oi! was invented (by yet another music journalist, this time working for Sounds; the loathsome Garry Bushell).  

 

And, in a sense, that was my crowd; the crowd who danced the night away at Le Phonographique to the sounds of the Southern Death Cult and the Sex Gang Children [3]. And yet, at the same time, it was never quite my crowd and I never quite followed them into the night. 

 

I don't know why: perhaps it was because the gloomier-than-thou fanaticism of Killing Joke meant more to me at the time than any form of positivity. Also, I quite liked a lot of the three-chord rubbish that North dismisses, if ultimately conceding that this can become a bit boring after a while and that a soft-centre is often more seductive than a hard core.          

        

 

Notes

 

[1] Marek Kohn, 'Punk's New Clothes', in The Face (Feb 1983): click here to read on punkrocker.org.uk

 

[2] Under the pen-name Richard North, the interesting figure of Richard Cabut - bass player with Brigandage - wrote his positive punk manifesto in a piece entitled 'Punk Warriors' for the NME (19 Feb 1983): click here to read on punkrocker.org.uk

 

[3] Musical bonus: Southern Death Cult, Fat Man (1982): click here / Sex Gang Children, Sebastiane (1983): click here.