The Tiger's Bride

Rachel M. Esposito: The Tiger's Bride

rachelmesposito.com

 

 

"Like the tiger in the night, I devour all flesh, I drink all blood, until ... in sensual ecstasy, 

having drunk all blood and devoured all flesh, I am become again the eternal Fire ..." [a] 

 

 

I. 

 

I love the above lines from D. H. Lawrence. 

 

But Lawrence wasn't the only English writer to evoke the feline spirit and dream of becoming-tiger. Angela Carter also fantasised about entering into unholy matrimony with a tiger and losing her all too human skin, and it's Carter's short story 'The Tiger's Bride' that I'd like to look at here ... [b]

  

II.

Essentially, 'The Tiger's Bride' was Carter's reimagining of Beauty and the Beast [c]: 

 

A beautiful young girl moves in with a mysterious masked figure, known as the Beast, after her father loses her to him in a game of cards. The Beast is eventually revealed to be a tiger masquerading as a man. Having fallen in love with him, the young girl agrees to become his mate and transforms into a beautiful tigress; the suggestion given that this is as much her true nature as it is his [d].  

 

Usually, this tale is discussed in the familiar terms of power, identity, and otherness; often from a feminist, psychoanalytic, or postmodern perspective [e]. There's nothing wrong with that, but neither is there much point in simply offering another analysis in and on the same terms and seen through the same critical lens.

 

And so, here, I'll at least try to say something vaguely novel, whilst, at the same time referring to work first presented at Treadwell's back in 2006 [f]. 

 

 

III.

 

Carter's perversely sensual fantasy of animal transformation raises one key question: is there a fundamental and non-negotiable human nature, or a fixed type of being that is uniquely human and therefore not open either to evolutionary change or magical metamorphosis? 

 

For essentialists of all kinds, the answer to this onto-theological question concerning being and becoming will be a very definite Yes. But for those who reject all such idealism and happily affirm shape-shifting and parahuman hybrids, preferring as they do to conduct their thinking in terms of constant mutation and change, the answer has to be No. 

 

Personally, my sympathies are with the latter; i.e. those who believe in the the dynamic and interchangeable nature of forms. I'm also sympathetic to those who, like Carter, put forward the shocking idea that even virgins born on Chistmas day might prove to be as amoral and as savage as any beast. 

 

Having been handed over by her father to the Beast, Beauty can't help wondering what the exact nature of his beastliness might entail and, prior to her first meeting with her husband-to-be, she recalls the stories her English nanny used to tell her when she was young in order to frighten her. She remembers too how she first discovered the secret of the sexual mystery from watching farmyard animals copulate. 

 

When Beauty first sets eyes on La Bestia she is struck by his size and crude clumsiness, as well as his odd air of self-imposed restraint; "as if fighting a battle with himself to remain upright when he would rather drop on all fours" [155-56]. For all that, he is not much different from any other man, although wearing a mask "with a man's face most beautifully painted on it [… and] a wig, too […] of the kind you see in old-fashioned portraits" [156]. 

 

The Beast has but a single demand to make of Beauty when she is brought before him; "to see the pretty young lady unclothed nude without her dress" [160]. Shocked and insulted, Beauty laughs scornfully at the request and tells him that if she is to be treated like a common whore then she expects not only to be fucked, but also given "the same amount of money that you would give to any other woman in such circumstances" [161]. 

 

This hurts the Beast and he sheds a tear, which, Beauty hopes, is one of shame. However, this doesn’t stop him from making the same request for a second time - with the same results: "Take off my clothes for you, like a ballet girl? Is that all you want of me?" [163], cries Beauty, and again the Beast is forced to shed a tear. 

 

Eventually, when one day out riding, the Beast decides that since she will not reveal herself naked to him then she must be prepared to see him undressed. As he starts to remove his human disguise and finery, Beauty's composure deserts her and she finds herself on the brink of panic as the Beast reveals himself to be: "A great, feline […] whose pelt was barred with a savage geometry of bars the colour of burned wood” [166]. 

 

Beauty can't help noticing the subtlety of his muscles, the profundity of his tread and the "annihilating vehemence of his eyes, like twin suns" [166]. She feels her breast ripped apart as if she had suffered a marvellous wound and she realises that since the tiger will never lie down with the lamb, then she, Miss Lamb, must learn how to run with tigers. 

Having come to this fateful conclusion, Beauty finally decides to strip: 

 

"I therefore, shivering, now unfastened my jacket, to show him I would do him no harm. Yet I was clumsy and blushed a little, for no man had seen me naked and I was a proud girl. Pride it was, not shame, that thwarted my fingers so; and a certain trepidation lest this frail little article of human upholstery before him might not be, in itself, grand enough to satisfy his expectations […]" [166]

 

Continuing with the narration of her tale, Beauty says: "I showed his grave silence my white skin, my red nipples, and the horses turned their heads to watch me, also, as if they, too, were courteously curious as to the fleshy nature of women." [166] 

 

Having finally conceded to his original request of her, the Beast informs Beauty that she is free to return to her father. But, of course, she now finds herself so taken with the Beast's inhuman nobility that she doesn't want to leave him. Rather, she wants to stay and learn how to feel happy in her own nakedness; for the idea of living without clothes still left her troubled and she rightly connected it to a loss of her humanity: 

 

"I was unaccustomed to nakedness. I was so unused to my own skin that to take off all my clothes involved a kind of flaying. I thought the Beast had wanted a little thing compared with what I was prepared to give him; but it is not natural for humankind to go naked, not since first we hid our loins with fig leaves. He had demanded the abominable. I felt as much atrocious pain as if I was stripping off my own underpelt […]" [168]

 

Still, despite the cost, Beauty gives herself to the Beast of her own accord. He, in turn, abandons his human disguise and no longer wore strong perfumes to mask his own distinctive animal scent. Beauty is still concerned about his ferocity and the fact that he might yet gobble her up, but perhaps, she reasons, his appetite need not mean her death. 

 

The story concludes with a very lovely and highly erotic scene that any zoophile or therianthrope must surely treasure; a scene typical of Angela Carter in that it profoundly disrupts "both our expectations […] and our customary moral and aesthetic response" [g]: 

 

"I squatted on the wet straw and stretched out my hand. I was now within the field of force of his golden eyes. He growled at the back of his throat, lowered his head, sank on to his forepaws, snarled, showed me his red gullet, his yellow teeth. I never moved. He snuffled the air, as if to smell my fear; he could not. 

      Slowly, slowly he began to drag his heavy, gleaming weight across the floor towards me. 

      A tremendous throbbing […] filled the room; he had begun to purr. […] The reverberations of his purring rocked the foundations of the house […] I thought: 'It will all fall, everything will disintegrate'. He dragged himself closer and closer to me, until I felt the harsh velvet of his head against my hand, then a tongue, abrasive as sandpaper. 'He will lick the skin off me!' 

      And each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after successive skin, all the skins of a life in the world, and left behind a nascent patina of shiny hairs. My earrings turned […] to water and trickled down my shoulders; I shrugged the drops off my beautiful fur." [169] 

 

 

IV.

 

What, then, are we to make of this zoosexual fantasy of transformation? 

 

Clearly, it challenges traditional moral understandings of the human, the animal, and the relationship that exists between them. Of course, some might dismiss it on the grounds that in being a magical as well as a sexual fantasy, it has nothing to tell us about the so-called real world. And Carter herself concedes that the tale, unlike the more respectable short story, makes no attempt to imitate life or faithfully record everyday experience. 

 

But for Carter, this is precisely the strength and importance of the tale; in transfiguring the mundane via the extraordinary, the tale challenges our usual assumptions and beliefs about the world and doesn't betray its readers into false certainty and common sense. Tales are always of the unexpected and set in a world wherein the rules governing the boundaries between the true and the false, or concerning identity, are not entirely suspended, but made far more fluid than in ours. 

 

As a matter of fact, Carter's reimagining of La Belle et la Bête is not actually all that radical. It's violence, amorality, and sexual content is found in many of the earliest folk versions that pre-date the more sanitized fairy tales written in the 18th and 19th centuries. Essentially, Carter is reviving an oral tradition in which girls and women are far from helpless or submissive; in which they are, on the contrary, shrewd, quick-witted, and highly skilled. 

 

But as significant as this aspect of the tale is, for me, what really fascinates is that it belongs to a tradition concerning metamorphosis or animal transformation fantasy. Carter too is clearly intrigued by the dialectic of continuity and change and to what extent our humanity is simply skin-deep; if not merely a matter of clothing. 

 

We are obliged to ask the following questions: In stripping naked, and in then stepping out of her very skin, has Beauty realised or lost an essential self? Has she been effectively raped and devoured, or sexually fulfilled via a becoming-animal? It's because such questions make many people uncomfortable - particularly as they are raised within a zoosexual context - that, strangely enough, the overtly bestial content of this and other such tales is often entirely overlooked. 

 

Indeed, it almost makes one wonder if the idea of sex between young girls and beasts isn't something inconceivable to them. But, probably, it simply shows fear; either the fear that our humanity is not so essential and determined after all, or the older, more irrational fear that bestiality will result in the birth of monsters ... [h]

 

 

Illustration by Aleksandra Waliszewska [i]

  

Notes

 

[a] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Lemon Gardens', Twilight in Italy, in Twilight in Italy and Other Essays, ed. Paul Eggert, (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 117.

 

[b] 'The Tiger's Bride' can be found in Angela Carter's astonishing collection of short fiction published as The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, (Golancz, 1979). 

      In this work, Carter doesn't so-much offer us her own versions of traditional fairytales, as reactivate the latent violence and sexual politics at the heart of such well-known stories as 'Little Red Riding Hood' and 'Beauty and the Beast'. Some have described Carter's writing style as a form of queer gothic feminism, although more usually it is considered to be magical realism. Concerns with female identity and female empowerment are pretty much present throughout, as are supernatural elements often involving metamorphosis. 

      The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories remains one of my favourite books by any author and I would encourage torpedophiles to read (or re-read) it. It can be found on the Internet Archive: click here. However, please note that page numbers given here refer to Angela Carter's collected short stories, published as Burning Your Boats, (Vintage, 1996). 

 

[c] La Belle et la Bête is a fairy tale written by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve and published in 1740. It was rewritten and published in the form most people now know it by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont in 1756. Scholars have traced the origin of the story back over 4000 years, although, ultimately, it's impossible to know where or when a story was first told.   

 

[d] I will offer a closer reading of the text in Part III of this post.

 

[e] See for example a series of online articles by Ana Isabel Bugeda Díaz under the heading 'Postmodern Retellings 101', which includes a discussion of Angela Carter's 'The Tiger's Bride': click here. 

      The author cheerfully condemns Western dualism, anthropocentrism, rationalism, patriarchal society, the denial or exclusion of Otherness, etc. whilst speaking positively of desire, animality, emotional intelligence, and the need to subvert traditional narratives. Again, I've no problem with this, it's just that it now strikes me as formulaic and a bit old-fashioned.     

 

[f] I'm referring to the six-part series of essays Zoophilia (published as Vol. III of The Treadwell's Papers, Blind Cupid Press, 2010). In particular, I will be referring to the fifth of these essays, on animal transformation fantasy.  

 

[g] Caroline Walker Bynum, 'Shape and Story: Metamorphosis in the Western Tradition' (Jefferson Lecture, 1999): click here to read online.

 

[h] As a matter of biological fact, human-animal hybrids, or parahumans, cannot be bred sexually; attempts to mate a human and a chimpanzee have been made, but they inevitably failed. However, synthetic biology and genetic engineering does potentially open the way for a world in which such inter-species hybrids become possible.

     

[i] To find out more about this Polish artist visit Marta Lucy Summer's blog Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: click here.  

You'll Never Turn the Vinegar Into Jam: On the Figure of the Tiger in the Philosophy of D. H. Lawrence

Most of their time, tigers pad and slouch in burning peace.

Yet they also drink blood. [1]

 

 

I. 

 

Although I wouldn't name it as one of Lawrence's totemic animals, nevertheless the tiger often appears within his work and held an important place in his philosophical imagination as one of the great realities of reality; i.e., a living thing that has come into its own fullness of being: 

 

"The tiger blazed transcendent into immortal darkness." [2]

 

"The tiger is the supreme manifestation of the senses made absolute." [3]

 

For Lawrence, in other words, the tiger is physical perfection and counters the bodiless idealism of those who, like Shelley, sought pure spiritual consummation: 

 

"The tiger was a terrible problem to Shelley, who wanted life in terms of the lamb." [4]  

 

 

II. 

 

In the the first essay of the Genealogy, Niezsche argues that it's perfectly natural for lambs to hate and fear tigers, wolves, and eagles. But mistaken to believe that they are morally superior to those animals that prey on them; the latter are not evil and act out of instinctive necessity, not cruelty.    

 

To expect fierce and powerful carnivores to lie down with meek and mild herbivores is as absurd as thinking you can turn the vinegar into jam; "a tiger is a tiger not a lamb, mein herr" [5] and cannot behave otherwise (and nor can the lamb - a creature which acts from weakness, not goodness).   

 

What's more, Lawrence argues that just as the tiger requires the lamb for sustenance, the lamb needs the tiger; for only the juxtaposition of the tiger "keeps the lamb a quivering, vivid, beautiful fleet thing"  [6]. 

 

Take away or exterminate the tiger, and all you're left with is a flock of letzte Schafe; happy, but little more than woolly clods of meat. Fear and suffering are vital principles; they help concentrate the soul, in man as well as lamb. 

 

Thank God, says Lawrence, for the tigers who liberate us from the "abominable tyranny of these greedy, negative sheep" [7]. And not only does he affirm the spirit of the tiger, he dreams of becoming-tiger and of making the tiger's way his own:

 

"Like the tiger in the night, I devour all flesh, I drink all blood, until [...] in the sensual ecstasy, having drunk all blood and devoured all flesh, I am become again the eternal Fire ..." [8]   

 

 

III.

 

Lawrence being Lawrence, however, he soon starts to oscillate from one pole of delirium to another and concede that the tiger's way - the way of the flesh and becoming "transfigured into magnificent brindled flame" [9] - is not the only form of ecstasy. 

 

Man can also become-deer, become-lamb, or, indeed, become-Christian, and move beyond the tiger, finding consummation not in the devouring of those who are weaker, or even in the negative ecstasy of offering non-resistance and being eaten oneself, but in acknowledging otherness:

 

"The Word of the tiger is: my senses are supremely Me, and my senses are God in me. But Christ said: God is in the others, who are not-me. In all the multitude of others is God, and this is the great God, greater than the God which is Me. God is that which is not-me. 

      And this is the Christian truth, a truth complementary to the pagan affirmation: 'God is that which is Me.'

      God is that which is Not-Me. In realising the Not-Me I am consummated, I become infinite. In turning the other cheek I submit to God who is greater than I am, other than I am, who is in that which is not me. This is the supreme consummation. To achieve this consummation I love my neighbour as myself." [10]

 

But then, having said that, Lawrence warns of the danger of pushing this ideal too far; of becoming too selfless whilst, somewhat paradoxically, identifying oneself with all that is other, like Walt Whitman, who aches with amorous love and insists with false exuberance on grasping everyone and everthing to his bosom, believing as he does in One Identity as the great desideratum [11]. 

 

For this path ends in nihilism and the triumph of the Machine and it's a "horrible thing to see tigers caught up and entangled in machinery [...] a chaos beyond chaos, an unthinkable hell" [12].   

  

IV. 

 

Ultimately, Lawrence's sharp-clawed feline philosophy can probably be best construed as tragic in the Nietzschean sense; one which understands according to the desire of death as well as according to the desire of life and is true for all things that emerge from the matrix of chaos, including "the tiger and the fragile dappled doe" [13].  

 

The former is a blossom of pure significance, born of the sun. But the tiger, like the leopard, needs to quench herself with the blood (or soft fire) of Bambi, so that she too might know tenderness when nursing her young and dreaming her dreams in stillness:

 

"For even the mother-tiger is quenched with insuperable tenderness when the milk is in her udder; she lies still, and her dreams are frail like fawns." [14]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] A misremembered couple of lines from 'Glory', by D. H. Lawrence; The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University press, 2013), p. 430.   

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Crown', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 270. 

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Lemon Gardens', Twilight in Italy, in Twilight in Italy and Other Essays, ed. Paul Eggert, (Cambridge Univrrsity Press, 1994), p. 117. 

[4] D. H. Lawrence, 'Fenimore Cooper's Anglo-American Novels', in Studies in Classic American Literature (First Version: 1918-19), ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen , (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 214.

 

[5] I'm quoting here from the brilliant Kander and Ebb song 'Mein Herr', from the musical Cabaret (1966). 

      To expect a tiger or leopard or lion to lie down with its prey is, says Lawrence, as vain as hoping "for the earth to cast no shadow, or for burning fire to give no heat". See 'The Reality of Peace', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays ... p. 49. 

[6] D. H. Lawrence, 'Fenimore Cooper's Anglo-American Novels', in Studies in Classic American Literature ... p. 214. 

 

[7] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Reality of Peace', Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays ... p. 42.

 

[8] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Lemon Gardens', Twilight in Italy, in Twilight in Italy and Other Essays ... p. 117.

 

[9] Ibid.

 

[10] Ibid., pp. 119-120. 

 

[11] I have discussed Walt Whitman and his fatal idealism elsewhere on Torpedo the Ark: click here.

 

[12] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Lemon Gardens', Twilight in Italy, in Twilight in Italy and Other Essays ... p. 121.

 

[13] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Reality of Peace', Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays ... p. 38. 

 

[14] Ibid., p. 48. 

 

 

For a related post which anticipates this one and in which I evoke the spirit of the Champawat Tiger, click here.  

 

 

Evoking the Spirit of the Champawat Tiger

Head of the Champawat Tiger

 

Tyger Tyger, burning bright, / In the forests of the night; 

What immortal hand or eye, / Could frame thy fearful symmetry? [1]

You might think that due to the enormous size of Russia, China, and India there would still be plenty of room for the tiger in this world. But you'd be wrong. Over the last century, tigers have lost more than 93% of their historic range and have been eradicated from Western and Central Asia, the islands of Java and Bali, and large areas of Southeast Asia and China. 

 

What remains of their range is cramped and fragmented and, thanks to habitat destruction and human encroachment - not to mention poaching - the global wild tiger population is now estimated to number a pitiful 5,500 individuals, with most populations living in small isolated pockets [2].

 

So, good news then, that in the Buddhist Kingdom of Bhutan native tiger populations are currently thriving due to a concerted effort to safeguard their habitat and create so-called wildlife corridors allowing them to roam about with a degree of freedom. From subtropical jungles to subalpine forests, tigers in Bhutan seem to have been given a fighting chance. 

 

However, despite this, their long-term survival is by no means guaranteed and one must keep things in statistical context. Thus, whilst celebrating a 27% increase in Bhutan's tiger population since 2015, it's important to recall that the starting figure was only 103 adult animals, meaning there are now still only 131 tigers in Bhutan. 

 

And - surprise, surprise - local farmers worried about their precious fucking livestock are not happy even with this tiny number. 

 

And whilst our friends in China continue to believe that various tiger parts have magico-medicinal properties, the illegal killing of tigers will continue. Snared, shot, and butchered by poachers for their bones, skins, and other body parts, tigers remain big business. 

 

Just as depressing is the fact that there are now more captive-bred tigers than wild creatures; living in zoos for our entertainment and on factory farms where they are reared for slaughter and human consumption as if they were cattle rather than majestic beasts of prey. 

 

If I could, I would summon the spirit of the Champawat Tiger to come and strike fresh terror into the heart of Man and gobble up his children [3]. Shelley, for whom the tiger was a terrible problem, wouldn't like it, but, as D. H. Lawrence pointed out, we can't live life exclusively in terms of the lamb [4].

 

 

 'A tiger knows no consummation unless 

they kill a violated and struggling prey.'

 

Notes

[1] William Blake, 'The Tyger', Songs of Experience (1794): click here. 

      According to D. H. Lawrence, the spirit of the tiger, burning bright in the forests of the Blakean night, is "the supreme manifestation of the senses made absolute". See 'The Lemon Gardens', in Twilight in Italy and Other Essays, ed. Paul Eggert, (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 117.

 

[2] A century ago, that number was probably closer to 100,000. Thus, not suprisingly, the tiger is officially listed as endangered on the IUCN Red List.

 

[3] The Champawat Tiger was a beautiful Bengal tigress responsible for an estimated 436 human deaths in Nepal and the Kumaon district of India, during the late 19th century and early 20th century. Famed for her bloodlust, she is credited in the Guinness Book of World Records with preying upon more people than any other single animal. 

      Sadly, she was shot and killed in 1907 by the great white hunter Jim Corbett. However, before damning him to eternal torments in some hell ruled by felines, let us remember that Corbett eventually put down his rifle and picked up a camera, becoming an outspoken naturalist who advocated for the protection of India's wildlife, particularly its endangered big cats. In 1968, one of the five remaining subspecies of tigers was named after him: Panthera tigris corbetti. 

 

[4] D. H. Lawrence, 'Fenimore Cooper's Anglo-American Novels', in Studies in Classic American Literature (First Version 1918-19), ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 214.  

      Lawrence goes on to say: "We must admit that only the juxtaposition of the tiger keeps the lamb a quivering, vivid, beautiful fleet thing. Take away the tiger and we get the sheep of our pasture, just clods of meat."  

 

 

 For a follow up post to this one in which I expand upon Lawrence's tiger philosophy, click here. 

On Solastalgia in Man and Animal

No more homes in the wood

The trees have all been cut down [1]

 

 

Solastalgia is a neologism that seems to be everywhere these days. It describes a form of anxiety triggered by negatively perceived environmental change; particularly the loss of things belonging to the natural world which provided us with stability and a sense of continuity.

 

Things, for example, like the huge old oak tree at the end of the road, loved since childhood, but which has now been cut down by the council; or the hedgehogs that used to snuffle around long vanished gardens.

 

The word was coined by the environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht in 2005 [2], when he was attempting to conceptualise the feeling experienced of no longer being at home in the world even when one is still at home, due to rapid change on both a local and a global scale.

 

Although Albrecht was primarily concerned with human health and identity, he has also published in the area of animal studies, including the ethics of relocating endangered species whose natural habitat is threatened, so I'm sure he would agree that solastalgia is experienced too by polar bears watching the Arctic sea ice shrink all around them, or great apes witnessing their forest homes disappear. 

 

Indeed, I should imagine their sense of loss and confusion and powerlessness over the massive environmental change going on all around them is even more intense than ours, although their suffering certainly adds to our own; is their anything more heartbreaking than the above image of an orangutan fighting a mechanical digger in a desperate attempt to defend its jungle home?    

 

 

Notes

 

[1] This distressing scene of an orangutan defending its forest home in Borneo from being demolished by loggers was reportedly filmed in 2013 by International Animal Rescue.* Posted on their Facebook page in 2018, it caused a huge public outcry. However, the orangutan population remains critically endangered, having halved in the past 60 years, thanks to hunting, poaching, logging, mining, road building, and the conversion of vast areas of tropical forest to palm oil plantations; 55% of what remained of their natural habitat has already been destroyed this century.

      For those who can bear to watch the film on YouTube, click here.  

      The lines beneath the photo are paraphrased from a song by the Eagles - 'No More Walks in the Wood', which can be found on their seventh and final studio album, Long Road Out of Eden (Lost Highway Records, 2005): click here.

 

[2] Glenn Albrecht, 'Solastalgia: a new concept in human health and identity', Philosophy, Activism, Nature no. 3, (2005), pp. 44-59. A free pdf can be downloaded on academia.edu: click here.

 

 

* IAR is an animal protection and conservation charity which returns rehabilitated animals to the wild whilst also providing permanent sanctuary for those that cannot fend for themselves. Its work includes freeing and caring for captive bears in India and Armenia, rescuing and rehabilitating orangutans and other primates in Indonesia, and treating injured and orphaned howler monkeys in Costa Rica. For more information or to lend support, please visit their website by clicking here. 

On the Case of Russell Brand and Mark Fisher

Messrs. Fisher & Brand

 

 

I. 

 

One of the more unexpected consequences of the media storm surrounding the allegations of rape, sexual assault, and emotional abuse levelled at the comic revolutionary-cum-spiritual wellness guru Russell Brand is that it has reignited an online controversy surrounding a ten-year-old essay by political philosopher-cum-cultural commentator Mark Fisher, in which he openly expresses his admiration for the former ...  

 

Published in 2013, 'Exiting the Vampire Castle' [1] is probably my favourite piece by Fisher, despite the fact - or, if I'm being honest, it's probably due to the fact - that at the time it pissed a lot of people off.

 

Here, I'd like to revisit the essay, particularly those sections that refer to Brand - whose case increasingly fascinates me - and then discuss a retrospective defence of Fisher and his text, written by one of his closest allies, Matt Colquhoun, in response to the present hoo-ha.

 

 

II.

 

Fisher himself concedes that his essay was born out of depression and exhaustion. But that doesn't, of course, lessen its brilliance or weaken its arguments. Tired, fed-up, and bored is often a great combination when it comes to producing work that has a vitriolic edge; happy souls don't always create the best art or have the most interesting ideas. 

 

The trick is to weaponise and affirm negative thoughts and feelings and not wallow in them or allow them to coalesce into bad conscience and ressentiment; i.e., one must learn to hate with a certain gaiety, like Nietzsche, who is very much present in 'Exiting the Vampire Castle'.          

 

Like Fisher, I don't care so much about what an individual has said or done - no matter how objectionable - I worry more about the manner in which they are "personally vilified and hounded" afterwards. It's this that leaves behind the stench of witch-hunting moralism. 

 

This wasn't said by Fisher at the time with Russell Brand in mind, but I repeat it here and now thinking very much of the latter.

 

I'm sure that Brand's behaviour in the past was appalling at times; though whether it was also criminal is another matter. But the behaviour of his critics - many of whom were former friends and colleagues - as they rush to disassociate themselves from him is just as shocking and just as vile.

 

Fisher crossed paths with Brand at a so-called People's Assembly, held in Ipswich. Recalling the encounter, he confesses that he'd "long been an admirer of Brand - one of the few big-name comedians on the current scene to come from a working class background."

 

Then, in an astonishing series of paragraphs, Fisher couples a passionate endoresement of Brand to an excoriating critique of those po-faced puritans on the left of the political spectrum who sneer and wag fingers at him. For Fisher, Brand is not only cool, sexy, and intelligent, but queer "in the way that popular culture used to be". 

 

If, as those on the moralising left claim, Brand is prone to making inappropriate and offensive remarks, thereby breaching "the bland conventions of mainstream media 'debate'", Fisher is prepared to cut him some slack - and I respect him for that. 

 

Yes, Brand should apologise for some of his behaviour and sexist language; but any such apology should be accepted, says Fisher, in a spirit of comradeship and solidarity. And above all Brand should be admired for daring to bring up the taboo topic of class - one that so embarrasses many on the left with their public school backgrounds and ultra-posh accents [2].            

 

Admired too, for standing up to smug and condescending TV interviewers, like Jeremy Paxman, who seem to think celebrities shouldn't express political views and that "working class people should remain in poverty, obscurity and impotence lest they lose their 'authenticity'" [3]. 

 

Fisher writes:

 

"For some of us, Brand's forensic take-down of Paxman was intensely moving, miraculous; I couldn't remember the last time a person from a working class background had been given the space to so consummately destroy a class 'superior' using intelligence and reason. This wasn't Johnny Rotten swearing at Bill Grundy - an act of antagonism which confirmed rather than challenged class stereotypes. Brand had outwitted Paxman - and the use of humour was what separated Brand from the dourness of so much 'leftism'."

Brand, concludes Fisher, is an inspirational figure. That is to say, one who "makes people feel good about themselves; whereas the moralising left specialises in making people feed bad, and is not happy until their heads are bent in guilt and self-loathing" [4].  

 

III.

What then, you might ask, is wrong with anything said here by Fisher in 2013?

 

The answer - as far as I can see - is nothing. The claim that this essay caused lasting damage to his reputation is exaggerated and overlooks the fact that there are some readers, like me, who think highly of Fisher mostly on the basis of this text. Nevertheless, Fisher's essay caused a big fuss then and it's causing a big fuss once again.

 

And this is due to the controversy surrounding the (undeniably charismatic if slightly unhinged) figure of Russell Brand, who, let us remind ourselves is innocent under the law, having not been found guilty of - or even charged with - any crime of a sexual nature and who completely refutes the accusations made against him in the media by several women relating to the period between 2006 and 2013, when he was at the height of his fame.

 

Despite this, Fisher is once again being painted by some not only as an early (and aggressive) opponent of woke politics and cancel culture, but as an anti-feminist who, in celebrating Brand back in 2013, wilfully turned a blind eye to the latter's already apparent sexism, misogyny, and abuse of power. 

Matt Colquhoun - a writer and photographer known for their work on Fisher's writings and their relationship with the latter [5] - is having none of this, however, and says that such a grotesque caricature makes Fisher "wholly unrecognisable to those who knew him or who are more familiar with his work" [6]. 

 

Colquhoun goes on to argue that post-Vampire Castle and following his death in 2017, Fisher has "too often been reduced to a pawn in an online discourse that obscures the ways in which he moved on from this polemic to build a far more positive project ..." [7]  

 

Fisher's celebration of Brand was, writes Colquhoun, due to his life-long fascination with "people who, at one time or another [...] bridged the gap between the mainstream and the underground" [8] and believed in the revolutionary potential of a (chaotic and often comic) popular modernism, that someone such as Brand seems to personify.  

 

So far, so good: Colquhoun hasn't said anything that I find problematic, although, if I'm being completely honest, the claim that Fisher moved on in order to construct a far more positive project is one that makes me slightly concerned. 

 

But the following paragraph from Colquhoun really rankles, however: 

 

"Then and now, the inclusion of Brand in Fisher's argument stains it overall. The allegations now facing Brand, who was already mistrusted by many for his sexual politics [...] are all the more damning and serious. For some, they also vindicate the ire first directed at Fisher over a decade ago. But whereas Brand is accused of very real crimes, Fisher was only guilty of an intellectual misstep - one that he would spend the next few years trying to remedy." [9]

 

That, I think, is an outrageous statement and I'm almost certain that Fisher would not approve of the language of moral pollution; as if the very mention of Brand's name is tainting. 

 

And what, pray, would Fisher think of the claim that unproven allegations are damning? Or the idea of vindication - a term also drawn from a moral vocabulary? Or that he was guilty of an intellectual misstep - as if a philosopher should always walk carefully along a well-beaten and carefully sign-posted path.

 

I don't doubt that Colquhoun's motives in writing their piece for the New Statesman were well-intentioned and honourable. But I really don't think Fisher needs to have anyone apologise on his behalf, or attempt to justify his work. 

 

And to be reminded once more of the claim made by some of Fisher's online supporters that his "defiant support of Brand, against advice to the contrary, was a product of mental ill-health" [10], is, I think, shameful.    

 

If he has a grave, then I fear that poor Mark Fisher will be turning in it ...

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Mark Fisher, 'Exiting the Vampire Castle', Open Democracy (24 Nov 2013): click here. 

 

[2] Writing about the fragile and fleeting nature of class consciousness, Fisher says:

      "The petit bourgeoisie which dominates the academy and the culture industry has all kinds of subtle deflections and pre-emptions which prevent the topic even coming up, and then, if it does come up, they make one think it is a terrible impertinence, a breach of etiquette, to raise it."

 

[3] Jeremy Paxman did his best to make Russell Brand look a fool on BBC's Newsnight on 23 October 2013, but, arguably, it was the latter who exposed the former for what he was. The full interview can be watched by clicking here. 

[4] The latter, says Fisher, are driven by "a priest's desire to excommunicate and condemn, an academic-pedant's desire to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake, and a hipster's desire to be one of the in-crowd" and they inhabit the Vampires' Castle - an institution which "feeds on the energy and anxieties and vulnerabilities" of the young and lives by "converting the suffering of particular groups - the more 'marginal' the better - into academic capital". This is a hugely important idea and one which I hope to return to and discuss in a future post.

 

[5] Matt Colquhoun is the author of Egress: On Mourning, Melancholy and Mark Fisher (Repeater Books, 2020). Colquhoun also edited Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire lectures (Repeater Books, 2021). They blog at xenogothic.com: click here.

 

[6-10] Matt Colquhoun, 'Mark Fisher was not Russell Brand', in the New Statesman, (18 Sept 2023): click here. 

      Readers who are not subscribers to this publication and don't wish to register in order to be able to access three free articles a month online, will sadly come up against a paywall. I'm grateful to Colquhoun for kindly emailing me a copy of their text, so that I could read it at my convenience.     

Notes on Hauntology and Ghost Modernism

Artcodex: Venn Diagram (2013) [1] 

artcodex.org

 

 

It was Derrida who coined the neologism hauntology in a 1993 lecture on Marx, to refer to the manner in which old ideas, hopes, memories, and dead authors come back to haunt us like ghosts; opening up an uncanny space for thought in which socio-cultural elements from the past, present, and future collapse into an atemporal zone [2].   

 

The term has since been invoked by thinkers in many different fields; not just philosophy, but also the visual arts, music, anthropology, politics, and literary criticism [3]. Indeed, I recall that when I was researching a paper on spectrophilia some years back, I also spoke of hauntology in relation to another Derridean term - différance (i.e., the difference and deferral of meaning, origin, and presence) [4].

 

Arguably, however, it was the English cultural commentator Mark Fisher [5] who popularised Derrida's term and, in the process, made it very much part of his own critical vocabulary. 

 

For Fisher, the key idea is one of lost futures and he argues that postmodernism and neoliberalism between them cancelled the revolutionary promise of modernism and Marxism; gradually (but systematically) depriving artists, activists, and theorists of the resources necessary to produce the New. 

 

In other words, Fisher bemoaned cultural and political stagnation; the endless repetition and recycling of old ideas that were given, at best, a novel form of repackaging. In contrast to the nostalgia and retro-aesthetics of postmodern culture, Fisher promoted hauntology as a means of overcoming the impasse of the perpetual present and he refused to abandon the desire for a better future (or to remain forever pining for a future that failed to arrive). 

 

Discussing the political relevance of the concept, Fisher wrote:

 

"At a time of political reaction and restoration, when cultural innovation has stalled and even gone backwards [...] one function of hauntology is to keep insisting that there are futures beyond postmodernity's terminal time. When the present has given up on the future, we must listen for the relics of the future in the unactivated potentials of the past." [6]

 

To be honest, I have certain reservations about this ... 

 

And when I see members of Artcodex drawing Ven diagram wall installations in order to manifest collective hopes and fears and organise their thoughts to do with modernism, postmodernism, and what they playfully term ghost modernism, it intensifies these reservations. For I simply don't share their longing to revisit the grand narratives of modernity and see how ideals of utopia and universality might be made relevant to the 21st-century [7].         

 

For me, incredulity remains the key and postmodern irony the melody ...

 

 

Notes

 

[1] This wall installation with three intersecting circles representing Modernism, Postmodernism, and Ghost Modernism was developed by the art collective Artcodex whilst in residency at Transparent Studio (Brooklyn, NY) in Feb-Mar 2013. 

      Painted directly on the wall with blackboard paint, people were invited to use the chalk and erasers made available to list the things they associated with modernity, postmodernity, and ghost modernity, whilst rubbing out any earlier entries with which they disagreed. Then, in April of that year, they created a larger version of the Venn diagram for exhibition, alongside other works exploring the theme of ghost modernism (see note 7 below). 

 

[2] See Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf, (Routledge 1994). 

      The work was first presented as a series of lectures during a conference on the future of Marxism held at the University of California, Riverside, in 1993. Despite being an important concept in the book, the word hauntology appears only three times. For Derrida, the words hauntology and ontology are homophonous when spoken in French. If the latter is the philosophical study of being, then, in Derrida's mind, hauntology is a state of non-being that forever shadows ontology. I mentioned Derrida's text in a post published on Torpedo the Ark earlier this month in response to a 6/20 paper by John Holroyd: click here.

 

[3] As might be imagined, there is little agreement about what the concept of hauntology means exactly and different writers, working in different fields, have used it in different ways. Here, I will argue that it was the English cultural theorist Mark Fisher who popularised Derrida's term and made it very much part of his own critical vocabulary.   

 

[4] A Treadwell's paper entitled 'Spectrophilia' and due for presentation on 7 October 2014 was, unfortunately, cancelled at the last moment. Although I was more interested in notions of the queer gothic, perverse materialism, and the role played by ghosts in fictional works such as Wuthering Heights, I touched on hauntology as a philosophical concept and discussed Freud's notion of the uncanny. Some of my introductory remarks to this paper were recently published on TTA: click here.

 

[5] Mark Fisher - also known under his blogging alias k-punk - was an interesting figure; a writer, critic, theorist, etc., who cared passionately about politics, music and popular culture. Arguably we had this and quite a few other things in common; for example, we both belonged to that haunted generation born in the 1960s and both studied for a Ph.D in modern European philosophy at Warwick in the 1990s. 

      However, for one reason or another, he and I never crossed paths, nor even exchanged a single email. Someone did once jokingly suggest I was a poor man's Mark Fisher, but, even if that were true, the fact remains, dear reader, that he's dead and I'm alive (although, considering our topic in this post, such a distinction is meaningless and Fisher might now be said to haunt TTA).

 

[6] Mark Fisher, 'The Metaphysics of Crackle: Afrofuturism and Hauntology', in Dancecult, Vol. 5, No. 2, (2013), p. 53. Click here to read as a pdf online. Readers who are interested might like to also see Fisher's article 'What Is Hauntology?' in Film Quarterly Vol. 66, No. 1 (Fall 2012), pp. 16-24 (click here to read on JSTOR) and his book Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, (Zero Books, 2014). 

 

[7] I'm referring here to Artcodex; the name used by Vandana Jain and Mike Estabrook for their work produced in collaboration with many other artists. Via a number of different projects, the aim is to create spontaneous communities that are able to explore issues within contemporary culture. Click here to visit the Artcodex website. 

      As for ghost modernism, Artcodex claim this started off as simply a pun or funny term of phrase "that came in the middle of the night" and which was then adopted for the title of a 2013 exhibition at the Quartair Gallery in The Hague (NL): click here. 

      However, as we have seen, the concept of hauntology has been around since 1993 and Mark Fisher was already using the term ghost modernism in a blog post published in July 2008: click here. Indeed, Fisher readily admits that Marshall Berman anticipates the idea in his classic 1982 work All That Is Solid Melts Into Air. I'm sure members of Artcodex are aware of this, but, as far as I can see no acknowledgment of such a genealogy is given on their website and that seems something of an oversight to me; credit where credit is due, and all that ...

   

In Memory of a Man from U.N.C.L.E.

David McCallum (1933-2023) as Illya Kuryakin 

The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964-68)

 

 

Thanks to Tom Cruise's big-screen reboot, many people believe that Mission: Impossible was the greatest secret agent series of the sixties. 

 

But it wasn't.

 

At any rate, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. was far more fun and whilst I remember pretending to be Napoleon Solo as a child - and obsessively wearing a Man from U.N.C.L.E. flicker ring until it eventually cut into my finger [1] - I don't recall wanting to be Jim Phelps or a member of the IMF. 

 

Obviously, the two shows share certain similarities; both, for example, have implausible (some would say ridiculous) storylines and both have fantastic opening theme tunes [2]. But I preferred The Man from U.N.C.L.E. to Mission: Impossible because it was more lighthearted - or more camp, as Susan Sontag would say [3].

In other words, it didn't seem to take itself too seriously - and that's something I loved as a child and still like today. It's why, for example, I prefer the Monkees to the Beatles; Adam West's Batman to the brooding figure of the Dark Knight as played by Christian Bale; and Roger Moore's Bond over Daniel Craig's 007. 

 

The Man from U.N.C.L.E. also had the advantage of having David McCallum as Illya Kuryakin playing alongside Robert Vaughn as Napoleon Solo. And that was a big advantage, as the Scottish actor proved to be hugely popular with the viewing public; particularly the younger audience who loved his Beatle-style haircut in contrast to Vaughn's clean-cut appearance and who inundated the actor with adoring fan mail [4].

 

But McCallum wasn't just eye-candy for pre-teen girls; he was an excellent actor and received two Emmy Award nominations in the course of the show's four-year run (1964–'68), for his role as the enigmatic and intelligent Russian-born agent.

 

Sadly, McCallum died yesterday, at a hospital in New York, one week after his 90th birthday. Like a lot of other people - particularly of my generation - I will remember him fondly as someone who, partnered with Robert Vaughn, captured my imagination as a child.  

 

 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I also had a die-cast toy car made by Corgi with figures of Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin which popped in and out of the car windows firing guns when you pressed on a button protruding through the car roof (see the image above at the end of the post).

 

[2] The main theme for Mission: Impossible was composed by Lalo Schifrin and is noted for unusually being in 5/4 time. Click here to play the Season 1 opening titles.

      The theme music for The Man from U.N.C.L.E. was originally written by Jerry Goldsmith, although other scores were produced by other composers and the changing musical style reflected the show's different seasons; some, using brass instruments and martial rhythms, were intended to be dramatic; others, using flutes and bongos, were deliberately more jazzy. Click here for the opening title sequence to the Season 1 episode 'The Giuoco Piano Affair' (Nov 1964), featuring Goldsmith's original theme.

 

[3] See Sontag's famous essay of 1964, 'Notes on Camp', which can be found in her first collection of essays, Against Interpretation (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1966). 

 

[4] Originally, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. was conceived as a vehicle for Vaughn and McCallum's role was intended to be peripheral. McCallum, however, managed to turn the character of Kuryakin into a pop cultural phenomenon and, recognising his on-screen chemistry with Vaughn, McCallum was given co-star status by the show's producers. Incredibly, while playing Kuryakin, McCallum received more fan mail than any other actor in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's history - including such popular stars as Clark Gable and Elvis Presley.

 

 

A Brief Note on the Queer Gothic, etc.

Margarita Dadykina: Cathy's Ghost (2019) 

Sculpted figure (58 x 20 cm)

I. 

 

Sometimes, a literary genre and a theoretical framework can become so inextricably entwined that it is difficult to discuss the one without reference to the other. Thus it is, for example, that next month sees the publication of a new collection of essays exploring the gothic from a queer perspective [1].   

 

This notion of the queer gothic was one that I dipped in-and-out of over ten years ago, producing three papers presented at Treadwell's Bookshop; the first on Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891); the second on Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850); and the third on Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847) [2]. 

 

Anyway, in anticipation of the Edinburgh Companion, here are some remarks I made back in 2014 in an attempt to (loosely) define what I understood by gothic queerness (as well as related terms, including the uncanny and the perverse) ... 

 

II. 

 

My concern with the gothic relates to a form of fiction that emerges during the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. I'm not concerned with Germanic tribes migrating about early Europe causing trouble for the Romans, or spiky-forms of medieval architecture (even if the ruins of the latter often provide a setting for many a gothic tale). 

 

Primarily, then, it's to a bizarre, yet, in some ways, rather conventional literary genre I refer when I use the term gothic, whilst happily acknowledging that elements of this have infected many other cultural forms and fields of inquiry, including queer studies. Indeed, such is the level of intimacy between queer studies and gothic studies that many scholars promiscuously drift back and forth from discussing the politics of desire, gender and sexual nonconformity to issues within hauntology and demonology. 

 

Obviously, this is facilitated by the fact that not only do gothic fictions and queer theories have common obsessions, but they often rely on a shared language of transgression to explore ideas. It has even been suggested that the gothic imaginatively enables queer and provides an important historical model of queer politics and thinking [3].

 

We can certainly never overestimate the role that gothic fiction played in the unfolding history of sexuality. For not only does it anticipate the later codification and deployment of sexualities, but it also participates in what Foucault terms the perverse implantation of these new forms of subjectivity [4]. 

 

If it is generally accepted that Horace Walpole's Castle of Ortanto is the first gothic novel - published in 1764 - it is also usually agreed that by the publication of Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer in 1820, the popular craze for gothic fiction had already peaked. 

 

Nevertheless, the genre continued to flourish and mutate at the margins of more respectable literature in the decades that followed. Indeed, many of the works now most commonly associated with it were written in the late-Victorian period: this includes Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). 

 

However, whilst slowly changing in form, content, and setting over the years, many things remained the same within the gothic text to the point of cliché; not least of all the continued narrative fascination for perverse sexual practices and abnormal individuals. In this, it is similar to pornography. Both types of writing share a compulsive and "seemingly inexhaustible ability to return again and again to common tropes and similar situations" [5]. 

 

Indeed, some critics argue that, like pornography, gothic fiction might ultimately serve a conservative function in that it perpetuates stereotypes and thus ultimately re-inscribes the status quo. And it's true that gothic tales often conclude with the moral order restored and reason triumphant (though rarely with a happy ending). However, at the same time, gothic horror seems to possess an uncanny ability to pass "beyond the limits of its own structural 'meaning'" and in this manner transform "the structure of meaning itself" [6]. 

 

And so, whilst gothic literature might often be predictable, it's never boring. It constantly opens up new worlds of knowledge and provides an opportunity to explore the pleasures of socio-erotic transgression; incest, rape, and same-sex desire are all familiar themes within the genre, not to mention paedophilia, necrophilia, and spectrophilia. 

 

Arguably, Sade takes things furthest in his One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom (written in 1785, but not published until 1904), his masterpiece of torture-porn often described as a gothic novel, even though the Divine Marquis himself rejected the term on the grounds that there was nothing supernatural about the horror and sexual violence in his books [7]. 

 

So, to conclude this briefest of brief introductions to the gothic, let me make clear that what excites about the genre is not that it simply causes gender trouble or allows for things to go bump in the night. More than this, it challenges (and in some cases overturns) many of our ideas about what it is to be human - and, indeed, of how to be human. This gives it broader philosophical importance than those who sneer at ghosts and ghouls might appreciate. 

 

And if, at times, gothic fiction fails as art due to its overreliance on sensational and supernatural elements, it nevertheless more often than not succeeds as a form of resistance to conventional thinking and the heteronormative status quo. And it is this, as indicated, which qualifies it as queer [8]. 

 

And what do I mean by queer?  

 

Well, let me stress that I'm certainly not using the term queer or the concept of queerness as synonymous with either homosexuality or gayness [9]. Indeed, I vigorously object to those who conflate ideas in this manner and use queer as an overarching and unifying label for what are distinct forms of practice, behaviour and identity (often with nothing queer about them). 

 

For me, the appeal of queerness is twofold: 

 

Firstly, it is not a positivity or subject position. It's a transpositional negativity - i.e., a mobile and ambiguous concept that resists any fixed categorical definition and remains permanently at odds with all forms of legitimacy and identity. Queer, ultimately, doesn't refer to anyone or anything; it's a form of non-being "utterly inimical to [...] authentic existence, ontological or natural" [10]. 

 

Secondly, it subsumes and dissolves all forms of dualism; not only sexual and gender oppositions, but also that model of thinking which would keep life and death as absolutely distinct and separate categories. Ultimately, it's this thanatological project that I most wish to further, even if that involves unfolding it within a spooky sexual context. This project, which is both morbid and material, picks up on Nietzsche's contention that life isn't categorically different from or opposed to death; that being alive is, in fact, simply a rare and unusually complex way of being dead [11].

 

Death, we might say, is the material kingdom of the actual and vital signs, although real, are but an epiphenomenal effect of matter. Or, to put it another way, life is a momentary stabilization of solar energy that upon death is released from its molar entrapment back into unformed chaos and an infinite process of molecular disintegration [12]. This becomes important when arguing that there can't really be any serious philosophical objections to romancing corpses or getting it on with ghosts - even whilst there may well be legitimate moral, social, and cultural reservations. 

 

Moving on, we must of course mention the perverse ... 

 

The perverse might be thought of as a more aggressive and transgressive form of queerness; one that takes us to the very heart of a game involving desire, deviation, and damnation. Historically, perversion is tied to political insurrection and involves straying or being diverted from a path, destiny, or objective which is understood as natural or right. To those who live their whole lives on the straight and narrow it is obviously an abhorrent concept. But, personally, I think it’s a good thing to stray off the path; just as it's preferable to fall into sin, rather than fall into line [13]. 

 

Figures like Heathcliff or Dorian Gray are irresistibly drawn towards the perverse. Which is to say they are intellectually predisposed towards evil and that which is unnatural or anti-natural. The former, for example, knowingly engages in practices such as necrophilia and spectrophilia. And there's the rub; Heathcliff is fully aware of what he's doing and what he wants to do. It's the perversion of free will that leads to transgression, says Augustine. And it is transgression that brings death into the world. 

 

But it is also that which brings understanding and gives pleasure and we should never forget or underestimate the pleasure of perversion. As Freud was led to conclude, it's the perversions alone that ultimately make happy [14].

 

Finally, there's one more term which we simply must mention; one made famous by Freud in his 1919 essay Das Unheimliche ...

 

The uncanny is, arguably, also a form of queerness. But in designating the sinister, gruesome, and lugubrious it moves beyond sexual strangeness and gender troubling. The uncanny is more likely to give us the creeps than excite our desire. Wuthering Heights is, for me at least, the greatest of all uncanny novels; familiar, yet alien, seductive, yet repulsive; a book in which even the mortal status of the lovers is never fixed.  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Queer Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, ed. Ardel Haefele-Thomas, (Edinburgh University Press, 2023). 

      There seems to be some interesting material in this 368 page book divided into three main sections - Queer Times, Queer Monsters, and Queer Forms - although, having said that, it does seem slightly old hat (though maybe I'm just miffed that I wasn't invited to contribute to the book). 

 

[2] 'Elements of Gothic Queerness in The Picture of Dorian Gray' was presented at Treadwell's on 18 May, 2011. This was followed by 'The Scarlet Letter: An Earthly Story with a Hellish Meaning' on 4 July, 2013 (advertised as 'A Slice of American Gothic for American Independence Day'). 

      As for the paper entitled 'Spectrophilia and Other Queer Goings On in the Tale of Wuthering Heights', this was due to be presented at Treadwell's on 7 October, 2014, but unfortunately had to be cancelled due to unforeseen (and unrecalled) circumstances. 

      Together, these essays formed part of a wider project to do with perverse materialism.

 

[3] See George E. Haggerty, Queer Gothic, (University of Illinois Press, 2006).

 

[4] See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: 1: The Will to Knowledge, trans. Robert Hurley, (Penguin Books, 1998). 

 

[5] George E. Haggerty, Queer Gothic, p. 9. 

 

[6] Ibid., p. 10. 

 

[7] Sade did admire at least one gothic novel, namely Matthew Gregory’s The Monk: A Romance (1796), a work in which every attempt was made to outrage readers in as many explicit, violent, and perverse ways as possible. 

 

[8] I don't want to overstate the case or make too wide a claim here. Haggerty is right to carefully resist the temptation to uncritically celebrate the gothic and its literary-cultural significance. As he points out, the genre was always somewhat marginal and semi-legitimate and never succeeded in challenging the dominant mainstream fiction of the age, which remained rigidly straight and heteronormative. 

      Also, if it provided alternative (queerer) ways to think through the politics of desire, it was ultimately powerless to prevent the "imposition of sexological thinking at the end of the nineteenth century". At best, the gothic continued to cast a shadow across the bright new world of scientia sexualis. See Queer Gothic, p. 19. 

 

[9] Elisa Glick is a Marxist critic guilty of this; see p. 11 of her book Materializing Queer Desire (SUNY Press, 2009), where she rather weakly explains her reasons for wanting to employ (and I would say misuse) the term queer synonymously with gay, lesbian, and homosexual. 

 

[10] Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence, (Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 140. 

      I’m tempted, in fact, to drop the term queer altogether here and use instead a notion of the uncanny, which is closely related but without the sexual overtones. 

 

[11] See Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, (Vintage Books, 1974), III. 109, p. 168. 

 

[12] Those who attended Treadwell's regularly in 2006 will perhaps remember my six week course on thanatology in which these ideas were discussed in detail and at length. The work can be found in The Treadwell’s Papers, Vol. II, (Blind Cupid Press, 2010). 

 

[13] Even such a trite and common expression as the straight and narrow - thought of as the one true path into the future - reveals something crucial about Western metaphysical thinking; note the linkage of truth with linearity and teleology. People think they are strolling along this path naturally or by choice, but in fact they march along it by arrangement and coercion. 

 

[14] Freud made the attainment of (non-functional, non-reproductive) pleasure central to his theory of perversion and stressed that it is the perversions that make happy; their repression which causes suffering and neuroses. Freud also understands that this is why many normal individuals strongly dislike queers who dare to manifest and flaunt their perversity; not only do they find them monstrous and threatening, but also seductive and this places them in the uncomfortable position of having to overcome a secret envy of those who enjoy illicit pleasures. 

      Note too how Freud compares the perversions to the grotesque demons used to illustrate the temptation of the saints. This is precisely how such images and descriptions continue to function within gothic literature; i.e. as uncanny manifestations and queer embodiments of the perverse; a threatening excess of difference and deformity. See his Three Essays on the Theory of Human Sexuality, (1905).