Showing posts with label touch. Show all posts
Showing posts with label touch. Show all posts

10 Feb 2024

Notes on 'The Crisis of Narration' by Byung-Chul Han (Part 3)

Byung-Chul Han pictured with the Spanish language
edition of Die Krise der Narration (2023) [a]



I. 
 
Byung-Chul Han is very good at coming up with memorable phrases and titles for his books. Arguably, indeed, that's his greatest talent and I understand why a friend of mine characterised (and dismissed) his work as merely a mix of soundbite and slogan distilled from the work of other much greater thinkers. 

That's a bit harsh, but I know what she means (even if I wouldn't wish to criticise Han for this). 
 
Anyway, on we move to section six of The Crisis of Narration [b] - 'From Shocks to Likes' ...
 
Reading Benjamin (who is in turn reading Baudelaire and Freud), Han argues that external reality impacts upon the subject as a form of shock and that consciouness is a way of registering and protecting us from stimuli that would otherwise be too much to handle: "The more readily consciousness registers these shocks, the less likely they are to have a traumatic effect." [44]  
 
Having dreams and forming memories are thus delayed ways of coming to terms with things that might otherwise overwhelm us. And the modern world is profoundly shocking; "the shock aspect of individual impressions has become so intensified that our consciousness is forced to be permanently active as a shield against stimuli" [45].  
 
But that isn't good; for it means we register less and less reality and have weaker and weaker experiences (our dreams become less disturbing and our memories less vivid). We need some degree of shock in order to feel and to think and to create. 
 
Unfortunately, we don't just now act as living organisms to protect ourselves from stimuli - we employ digital technology to (literally) screen off reality. Han writes:
 
"Etymologically, a screen [Schirm] is a protective barrier. A screen bans reality, which becomes an image, thus screening us from it. We perceive reality almost exclusively via digital screens. [...] On a smartphone screen, reality is so attenuated that it can no longer create any shock experiences. Shocks give way to likes." [46] 
 
That's what we want today: a non-threatening, non-disturbing, non-shocking world that we can like. Not a world of otherness that we can gaze at and which gazes into us, but a familiar, friendly, flat, sealed-off and smoothed-off world that is pleasing to the eye and satisfies our need for safety and smartness. 
 
Nietzsche would not approve. Lawrence would not approve. Heidegger would not approve. Baudrillard would not approve. In fact, anyone who loves objects and otherness and wishes to live dangerously in a world in which dreams, memories, and disturbing artworks are still possible would not approve.  
 
For Han, this world cowardly new world is typified by Netflix and Jeff Koons:
 
"In the age of Netflix, no one speaks of having shock experiences in connection with films. A Netflix series is nothing like a piece of art that corresponds to a pronounced danger to life and limb. Rather, it typically leads to binge watching. Viewers are fattened like consumer cattle. Binge watching is a paradigm for the general mode of perception in digital late modernity." [47] 
 
"The type of artist represented by Baudelaire, someone who inadvertently causes fright, would today  seem not only antiquated but almost grotesque. The artist who typifies our age is Jeff Koons. He appears smart. His works reflect the smooth consumer world that is the opposite of the world of shocks. [...] His art is intentionally relaxed and disarming. What he wants above all is to be liked." [48][c]
 
 
II. 
 
I do agree with Han: big data does not explain anything and the numbers never speak for themselves. 
 
Having said that, if we know the how, what, where and when, perhaps it becomes a bit easier to answer the metaphysical question of why and I don't see why theory shouldn't be based upon data. 
 
Similarly, I agree that whilst AI can compute and count it doesn't really think, but that doesn't mean it can't help us conceptualise and comprehend and continue to produce narratives (be they philosophical, psychoanalytic, or artistic in character) if that's our wont. 
 
Because Han tends to think in quite stark (and oppositional) terms - narrative community contra information society, for example - his work can unfortunately become trapped in its own binaries.         

 
III.
 
I have to admit, I'm a bit dubious about the healing power of narrative, even if I quite like the idea of the philosopher as cultural physician practicing the art of critique et clinique, and even if I have in the past promoted an idea of rescripting the self

Obviously, Han sees himself very much as one who has come to heal (even save) mankind by helping us to come to terms with the many ills and woes of contemporary culture by embedding them in a meaningful context; if not, indeed, in what comes close to being a religious narrative that "provides consolation or hope and thus carries us through the crisis" [57]
 
Jesus! This reminds me of that pompous egg-headed philosopher Alain de Botton, who, thankfully, seems to be keeping a lower media profile of late. He also treated his readers like small children in need of the consoling voice or gentle touch of a loving parent when they felt bad. 

At best, it's patronising and at worst, it's philosophical mollycoddling. 
 
 
IV.
  
As a Lawrentian, I often refer to the inspiration of touch and/or the democracy of touch: click here or here, for example. 
 
Touch is one of the key terms in Lawrence's phallic vocabulary [d] and so I'm pleased that Byung-Chul Han also recognises the importance of touch: "Like storytelling, touching also creates closeness and primordial trust." [58] 
 
That's true, but I suppose it depends on who's doing the touching and in what context.        

Han goes on to suggest that we now live in a society "in which there is no touching" [59] and that this has negative consequences:
 
"The retreat of touch is making us ill. Lacking touch, we remain hopelessly entrapped in our ego. Touch in the proper sense pulls us out of our ego. Poverty in touch ultimately means poverty in world. It makes us depressive, lonely and fearful." [59-60]   

And, paradoxically, the rise of digital connectivity and social media only makes things worse. 

Again, I think that's probably true, but I understand why some would dismiss this as a series of groundless assertions, made as they are without any supporting evidence. In the end, when you read an author like Han, you simply have to take a lot on trust (those who love his work will believe every word; those who don't will adopt a more sceptical position).  
 

V. 

I mentioned above Han's notion of a narrative community. But other than being something in contradistinction to the information society, what is a narrative community? 
 
It seems to refer to a small village (with or without an ancient tree at its centre), where the villagers sit around and swap stories that reinforce values and norms and thereby ensure unity (i.e., produce a we). There's no competitive individualism in the narrative community; just solidarity and empathy.
 
But Han doesn't want his readers to mistake the narrative community for some kind of Volksgemeinschaft as conceived by the Nazis and rooted in ethno-nationalism (or blood and soil). 
 
He wants, rather, that we conceive of the narrative community as a dynamic society allowing for change and otherness and do not "cling to a particular identity" [63], embracing instead a model of universal humanism informed by Kantian philosophy [e] and the poetry of Novalis [f].  
     
Well, I'm sorry, but where Han leads I will not follow ...
 
Push comes to shove, I think I prefer even the hell of the present to a future utopia promised by Idealist philosophers and Romantic poets! And Han's optimistic political vision, based on his concept of a narrative community which "provides meaning and orientation" [68] and opens up a new order, is not one I share.      


Notes
 
[a] This image is borrowed from a review of Byung-Chul Han's La crisis de la narración, by Marco Nicolini entitled 'El regreso del storytelling' (20 Oct 2023) and published on the Arzeta website: click here (or here for the English translation).
 
[b] Byung-Chul Han, The Crisis of Narration, trans. Daniel Steuer, (Polity Press, 2024). The work was originally published as Die Krise der Narration, (Matthes & Seitz Berlin, 2023). Page numbers given in the above post refer to the English edition. 
 
[c] Han really hates Jeff Koons. I have written on this (and in defence of the latter and his artwork) previously on TTA. See for example the post dated 16 Feb 2022: click here.  

[d] I explore this phallic vocabulary on James Walker's Memory Theatre (a digital pilgrimage based on the works of D. H. Lawrence): click here.

[e] Han refers to and quotes from Kant's 'Perpetual Peace', a philosophical sketch from 1795 in which the latter dreams of a global community in which all human beings are united and there can be no refugees: "Every human being enjoys unlimited hospitalty. Everyone is a cosmopolitan." [Han, The Crisis of Narration, p. 63.]
      Kant's essay can be found in Political Writings, ed. H. S. Reiss, (Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 93-130.  
 
[f] Han writes: "Novalis is another thinker who argues for radical universalism. He imagines a 'world family' beyond nation or identity. He takes poetry to be the medium of reconciliation and love. Poetry unites people and things in the most intimate community." [63] 
      That Han should simply take us back to moral idealism and Romantic fantasy is disappointing to say the least. However, those readers who wish to know what Novalis has to say about the world family all living as one in a beautiful society, should see his Philosophical Writings, trans. and ed. Margaret Mahony Stoljar, (State University of New York Press, 1997).   
 
 
Part 1 of this post can be read by clicking here
 
Part 2 of this post can be read by clicking here.  


17 Dec 2021

Don't Touch Me!

Angry weasel by zee1975
 
Noli me tangere, touch me not! / O you creatures of mind, don't touch me!
O you with human fingers, O never put your hand on me!
O you with your human bodies, stay a little distance from me! [1]


Whilst it's true that the term touch, along with tenderness, has a privileged role to play within D. H. Lawrence's phallic vocabulary [2], that doesn't mean that he was always comfortable with people putting their paws on him, particularly in an intimate manner that violates his animal integrity.

Thus, in an amusing verse probably written in 1916 [3], the male protagonist is not best pleased when he is told by his lover, a married woman, that he shouldn't be shy or ashamed of his nakedness; that he should allow her to see and touch and enjoy his body:
 
She said to me: What an instrument, your body!
single and perfectly distinct from everything else!
What a tool in the hands of the Lord!  
 
Just as she once handled her father's riding-whip as a child, and his pens - feeling something surge through her when she touched them - now she wished to grab hold of him and possess his male beauty:

I wish I could grip you like the fist of the Lord,
and have you -
 
This, however, places a constraint upon his heart, leaving him feeling trammelled and hurt. He replies:
 
No tool, no instrument, no God!
Don't touch me and appreciate me.
It is an infamy.
 
And then, somewhat astonishingly, he compares himself to an adder lying in the sun, a young bull in a field, and a weasel on a fence:
 
You would think twice before you touched a weasel on a fence
as it lifts its straight white throat.
Your hand would not be so flig and easy. 
 
What he wants is that she not only recognise his singular beauty, but respect it by hesitating somewhat before reaching forward to caress him. For as Lawrence writes in a later cycle of poems, touch comes slowly, if at all, as a form of trust developing not out of desire, but chastity [4].
 
That's an important point I think (particularly if one wishes to understand Lawrence's complex notion of touch). 
 
But, arguably, it's even more important to acknowledge what Lawrence is telling us here about wild animals; that they hate to be stroked, cuddled, picked up, or petted by humans and so we should refrain from trying to touch them in an inappropriately familiar manner if and when we are fortunate enough to encounter them. 
 
If you want to show how much you admire and care for a wild creature, let it be; respect it in its otherness and acknowledge the pathos of distance that exists between you.     
 
 
Notes
 
[1] I've slightly altered the opening lines from D. H. Lawrence's poem 'Noli me tangere', The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 406-07. Italics added.
 
[2] See Annabel Banks, 'Voli Me Tangere: Touch and Tenderness in the Lady Chatterley Novels', Postgraduate English - a Journal and Forum for Postgraduates in English hosted by Durham University - No. 32 (2016). Readers who wish to dowload the full text as a pdf should click here.
 
[3] The poem, 'She Said As Well to Me', is part of the collection Look! We Have Come Through! and can be found in D. H. Lawrence, The Poems, Vol. I, pp. 208-09. It can also be found online: click here.
 
[4] See the Pansies 'Chastity', 'Let us talk, let us laugh', and 'Touch comes', in The Poems, Vol. I, pp. 407-09. And for a follow on post to this one in which I discuss the idea of chastity in Lawrence (and Nietzsche), click here.  
 
 
This post is for animal rights activist and Lawrentian David Brock. 


7 Jan 2021

On Initiating Youth into the Democracy of Touch

Some youths playing football as imagined by D. H. Lawrence 
in a water colour entitled Spring (1929)
 
 
When D. H. Lawrence writes of the inspiration of touch, he is clearly thinking of how desire invests the lives of adult men and women, involving as it does, amongst other things, "the touch of hands and breasts, the touch of the whole body to body, and the interpenetration of passionate love" [1].
 
Nevertheless, this former school teacher was vitally interested in the education of the young and would doubtless have wanted to see children and adolescents initiated (or groomed) into his phallic-utopian new order, so that from an early age they too might learn to substantiate the mystery of touch and form a direct relationship with all things. 
 
The fact that children and adolescents are often denied intimacy with one another is something that also concerned the French author Michel Tournier. Like Lawrence, he argued that youngsters should be allowed (and, indeed, encouraged to experience) physical contact with the bodies of others and that our primary human need is for touch. 
 
Before eyebrows could be raised, however, and accusations begin to fly, Tournier quickly added:
 
"When I speak of physical contact, I mean of course something far more vast and more primitive than erotic games and sexual relations, which are merely a special case." [2]
 
Tournier was also keen to counter those who think that by giving children toys or pet animals to play with we can conveniently sublimate their desire for the forming of close physical and emotional bonds:
 
"Everyone likes to say that young children like to play with dolls and teddy bears, and sometimes they are permitted to play with small animals. It is also commonly said, however, that dogs like bones. The truth is that dogs gnaw on bones when they have nothing else, but you can take my word for it, they would prefer a good cut of steak or a nice veal cutlet. As for children, it is quite simply a dreadful thing that we toss them dolls and animals in order to assuage their need for a warm, living body. Of course sailors on long voyages sometimes avail themselves of inflatable rubber females, and lonely shepherds in the mountains have been known to mount a lamb or goat. But children are neither sailors nor shepherds and do not lack for human company. Their distress is the invention of a fiercely anti-physical society, of a mutilating, castrating culture, and there is no question that many character disorders, violent outbursts, and cases of juvenile drug addiction are consequences of the physical desert into which the child and adolescent are customarily banished in our society." [3]
 
 
Notes
 
[1] D. H. Lawrence, Version 2 of Lady Chatterley's Lover, in The First and Second Lady Chatterley Novels, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, (Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 323. 
 
[2] Michel Tournier, The Wind Spirit, trans. Albert Goldhammer, (Collins, 1989), p. 15.

[3] Ibid., pp. 16-17. 
 
 

17 Mar 2019

Uterine Philosophy: Notes on the Woman of Isis

Victoria Vives as a Priestess of Isis
 Photo by Robert Domondon (2017) 


I.

As readers of Lawrence, we are intimately familiar with Ursula Brangwen and Constance Chatterley. Indeed, we know the latter not only from top to bottom, but inside and out in pornographic detail.

Arguably, however, the most intriguing woman in the Lawrentian universe is the unnamed and rarely discussed priestess of Isis, who performs such a crucial role in Part II of The Escaped Cock (1929). And so I thought it important to say something of her here ...


II.

The woman of Isis is twenty-seven years of age. Educated and intelligent, she's also very beautiful, with wondering blue eyes, dusky-blonde hair, and white-gold breasts. But she remains a virgin, however, for the "bud of her womb had never stirred" [145].

This is despite the fact that she grew up in a world of powerful and fascinating men. The only child of a Roman commander who served with Mark Anthony, the latter had "sat with her many a half-hour, in the splendour of his great limbs and glowing manhood". His attempts to seduce her were in vain, however, for whilst she had felt "the lovely glow of his male beauty and amorousness bathe all her limbs and her body [...] the very flower of her womb was cool, was almost cold, like a bud in shadow of frost" [144].

The woman of Isis had also known Julius Caesar, but, again, had "shrunk from his eagle-like rapacity" and much preferred older men who were happy just to talk with her and had no expectation that she would "open like a flower to the sun of their maleness" [144].

Remote, dreamy, and sexually unresponsive, the woman of Isis awaits a special type of man; one who has died and risen and is full of that other kind of beauty; "the sheer stillness of the deeper life"; a man who could touch her "on the yearning quick of her womb" [147].

Thus, retiring with her widowed mother to Sidon - an ancient city on the Mediterrranean coast of Lebanon - the woman of Isis built a pink and white temple dedicated to the goddess at her own expense. Here she has served as a priestess for seven years, dressed in a saffron-yellow mantle worn over a white linen tunic, with a pair of gilded sandals upon her ivory-white feet.

Her mother, meanwhile, took care of the day-to-day business of the small estate on which the temple and a villa, set amongst the olive trees, was built. She also oversaw the slaves, which is just as well, as the woman of Isis professes no interest in their activities, finding them invariably repellent as a class: "They were so imbedded in the lesser life, and their appetites and their small consciousness were a little disgusting" [148] to her. 

On one occasion, she watches with noble indifference as one of her young male slaves beats and rapes a half-naked slave girl. Nevertheless, despite her coldness, her cruelty and contempt for inferiors, she can give an excellent (erotic) massage, as the man who died discovers to his great joy:

"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 [...] suddenly she put her breast against the wound in his left side, and her arms round him [...] and she pressed him to her, in a power of living warmth, like the folds of a river." [159]


II.

In an early manuscript version of Part II of The Escaped Cock, Lawrence provides a few more details about the woman of Isis, some of which contradict the final published version, though not in any significant manner (for example, her age is given here as twenty-six, not twenty-seven). 

What is emphasised above all, is the extent of her learning: she was tutored as a child and young woman by a Greek philosopher, and whilst she often spoke Syrian or Latin, she always thought in Greek:

"Her Greek had taught her logic and history, and also poetry, and since she was small, she had liked to speak with men" about these things. But she found these men too worldly for her tastes and they "cared little for the gods" [216]. Thus she did not wish to be touched by any of them (much to her father's irritation). Indeed, the girl who would become the woman of Isis was not keen on any physical contact:

"True, her slave women bathed and annointed her. But their touch was dumb and voiceless, like the touch of linen, or the touch of polished wood. It came no further than the skin. But the touch of men would go much deeper, and would soil her subtlest privacy." [217]

She is defiantly chaste and even at twenty-six has the "same delicate virgin belly" [217] as the goddess whom she serves. And she knows herself - not in a philosophical sense, so much as in a gynaecological manner; she's womb-conscious in the same way that male protagonists in Lawrence's fiction are often said to be phallically conscious:

"She never confused an outside thrill or a suffusion of surface excitement with the other, the soft expanding joy of the womb [...] She was a woman of the old world, skilled in her own sensations. [...]
      The woman, skilled in Isis and the lore of Isis, knew her womb in lotus-bud, knew it deep, deep under the waters, knew its mystery, its curved, down-bent head, its uncoloured virgin petals, its thick, strong, softly-massive heart of golden adhesive fecundity. Dark-green like a water-snake, submerged like a root, obscure and even fearsome, the deep lotus-bud of the shadowy womb." [219]

I don't quite know what to make of a passage like this - and it seems that Lawrence doesn't expect most (if any) of his readers to understand it either: "This is Isis lore, which Isis women forever will understand, and only they." [220]


See: D. H. Lawrence, 'The Escaped Cock', in The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories, ed. Michael Herbert, Bethan Jones and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), Part II, pp, 141-63. See also Appendix I (c) Part II: early manuscript version, pp. 216-30. 

Readers interested in an earlier post inspired by the woman of Isis should click here


15 Mar 2019

Are You Pervin on Me? (Notes on The Blind Man, by D. H. Lawrence)

I.

There's something creepy and disturbing about Maurice Pervin. As his name suggests, he's a man born beneath a black star and full of the potential for violence; "like an ominous thunder-cloud".

So at home is Maurice within the invisible world of touch, that whilst his loss of sight during the war is something of an inconvenience, it doesn't profoundly affect him: "Life was still very full and strangely serene for the blind man, peaceful with the almost incomprehensible peace of immediate contact in darkness."

Indeed, so content is Maurice to live in connubial intimacy with his wife Isabel and perform menial farm work - milking the cows, attending to the pigs and horses - that he "did not even regret the loss of his sight".

His fits of depression and dark moods were rooted, therefore, in something else; in his hypersensitivity, perhaps; or his resentment of those individuals such as his wife's old friend Bertie Reid, who were less passionate but more quick-witted than he; "a resentment which deepened sometimes into stupid hatred".


II.

Bertie was a barrister and a man of letters; "a Scotchman of the intellectual type" - ironical, sentimental, and - one suspects - a repressed homosexual. For whilst he is extremely fond of his close female companions, he has no desire to marry any of them:

"He was a bachelor, three or four years older than Isabel. He lived in beautiful rooms overlooking the river, guarded by a faithful Scottish man-servant. And he had his friends among the fair sex - not lovers, friends. So long as he could avoid any danger of courtship or marriage, he adored a few good women with constant and unfailing homage, and he was chivalrously fond of quite a number. But if they seemed to encroach on him, he withdrew and detested them. 
      Isabel knew him very well, knew his beautiful constancy, and kindness, also his incurable weakness, which made him unable to ever enter into close contact of any sort. He was ashamed of himself, because he could not marry, could not approach women physically. He wanted to do so. But he could not. At the centre of him he was afraid, helplessly and even brutally afraid. He had given up hope, had ceased to expect any more that he could escape his own weakness." 

As noted, Maurice hates him: hates his Scottish accent; hates the other man's complacency. But perhaps his hatred wasn't born of homophobia, but, rather, his own homosexual desire: "He hated Bertie Reid, and at the same time he knew the hatred was [...] the outcome of his own weakness."


III.

To cut a short story even shorter, Bertie has come to visit the Pervins ...

After an uncomfortable meal and some small talk by the fire over drinks, Maurice excuses himself, taking his leave of Isabel and her friend in order to attend to some farm business. Several hours pass and, worried that it was getting late, Isabel asks Bertie to go find her absent husband:

"Bertie put on an old overcoat and took a lantern. [...] He shrank from the wet and roaring night. Such weather had a nervous effect on him [...] He peered in all the buildings. At last, as he opened the upper door of a sort of intermediate barn, he heard a grinding noise, and looking in, holding up his lantern, saw Maurice, in his shirt-sleeves [...] holding the handle of a turnip-pulper. He had been pulping sweet roots, a pile of which lay dimly heaped in a corner behind him."

The blind man is stroking a sinister-looking half-wild grey cat, as if it were some kind of familiar. He asks Bertie about the nature of the scar upon his face: "'Sometimes I feel I am horrible,' said Maurice, in a low voice, talking as if to himself. And Bertie actually felt a quiver of horror."

What happens after this isn't quite clear: one suspects that Lawrence wants us to read between the lines. Maurice asks Bertie if he might touch him and the latter, although a man who instinctively shrinks from physical contact, gives consent in a small, submissive voice: "But he suffered as the blind man stretched out a strong, naked hand to him."

Maurice lays his hands on Bertie's head:

"closing the dome of the skull in a soft, firm grasp [...] then, shifting his grasp and softly closing again, with a fine, close pressure, till he had covered the skull and the face of the smaller man, tracing the brows, and touching the full, closed eyes, touching the small nose and the nostrils, the rough, short moustache, the mouth, the rather strong chin."

Maurice also allows his hands to wander south; he grasps the shoulders, the arms, the hands of the other man - and who knows what else? "He seemed to take him, in the soft, travelling grasp." Lawrence could have chosen to stop here, but, instead, he intensifies this scene of queer eroticism; Maurice asking Bertie to touch his eyes, with his young and tender hands:

"Now Bertie quivered with revulsion. Yet he was under the power of the blind man [...] He lifted his hand, and laid the fingers on the [...] scarred eyes. Maurice suddenly covered them with his own hand, pressed the fingers of the other man upon his disfigured eye-sockets, trembling in every fibre, and rocking slightly, slowly, from side to side. He remained thus for a minute or more, whilst Bertie stood as if in a swoon, unconscious, imprisoned."

The scene culminates thusly:

"Maurice  removed the hand of the other man from his brow, and stood holding it in his own.
      'Oh my God,' he said, 'we shall know each other now, shan't we?  We shall know each other now.'
      Bertie could not answer. He gazed mute and terror-struck, overcome by his own weakness. He knew he could not answer. He had an unreasonable fear, lest the other man should suddenly destroy him. Whereas Maurice was actually filled with hot, poignant love [...] Perhaps it was this very passion [...] which Bertie shrank from most."


IV.

Whether the knowledge that fills Maurice with delicate fulfilment is carnal in nature is debatable, making the question of whether this is or is not a scene of sexual abuse impossible to answer with certainty. But it's certainly a traumatic and shattering experience for poor Bertie who is desperate to escape throughout, and who returns to the house in silence looking haggard and with eyes that were glazed over with misery:

"He could not bear it that he had been touched by the blind man, his insane reserve broken in. He was like a mollusc whose shell is broken."
  
Maurice, meanwhile, is elated - and, curiously, so is Isabel who takes her husband's hand in both hers and whispers to him "'You'll be happier now, dear.'"

One almost wonders if she hasn't set the whole thing up; knowing the cause of her husband's depression to be frustrated homosexual desire; inviting her vulnerable friend to visit - a man whom she secretly despised and felt contemptuous of; sending Bertie out to the barn in the dark of night like a lamb to the slaughter, so that her husband might find some degree of (momentary) satisfaction.    

What this tale illustrates is that Lawrence's notion of touch or phallic tenderness isn't always loving and consensual; it can involve submission, it can involve violence, it can involve all manner of perversity and fetishistic behaviour, and it can even include rape (be it of middle-aged women by Mexican bullfighters, or physically reserved young men by powerful figures like Maurice Pervin who exist as towers of darkness upon the face of the earth).


Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Blind Man', in England, My England and Other Stories, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 46-63. All lines quoted here are from this edition, but note that an online version of the story can be read by clicking here. Readers who are interested can also find an earlier version of the tale, from 1918, in The Vicar's Garden and Other Stories, ed. N. H. Reeve, (Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 175-91. 

For an alternative reading of the story see Abbie Garrington, 'D. H. Lawrence: Blind Touch in a Visual Culture', Ch. 5 of Haptic Modernism, (Edinburgh University Press, 2013). Dr. Garrington argues that Maurice Pervin's disability gives him 'access to other modes of seeing - the potential for spiritual insight, and an ability to attune himself to the tides of his own blood'. She also considers the character in his phallic aspect and as a kind of living sculpture.

Finally, readers might also be interested in a short film adaptation of 'The Blind Man' (dir. Travis Mills, 2011) made by Michael Coleman, Jason Cowan, McKenzie Goodwin, Travis Mills and Jess Weaver (Running Wild Films): click here.


28 Jan 2018

On the Inspiration of Touch: An Afterword on the Question of Delicacy in a Molecular Age

The beautifully delicate structure of graphene
Image by AlexanderAIUS on Wikipedia


Someone wrote to say how much they enjoyed the recent post on the Lawrentian notions of touch and tenderness and to agree on the need for delicacy and lightness of hand. But I fear that they have a rather more utopian understanding of these things than I do and thus misconstrue my position. 

To be clear: I'm attempting to problematise Lawrence's work and would agree with Steven Connor that delicacy isn't the ideal binary opposite of grasping or rough-handling. In other words, it's not an entirely innocent form of contact, nor is it completely free from the exercise of power within the world. Further - and this might rather offend some Lawrentians - the term delicacy might even be said to refer to a form of touch that is more mental (more abstract) than other heavier, less refined forms of tactile sensation; a form of touch-in-the-head.

Conner notes:

"Delicacy involves work on a scale that makes it a matter of mind, work that approaches the condition of weightlessness [...] work that seems untouched by human hand [...] work that refines the idea of work."

If weightlessness is one of the defining features of delicacy, so too does it involve "the apprehension of altered scale". To touch something delicate in a delicate manner, is ultimately to draw closer to the invisible world of the tiny object which can be viewed only through a microscope. This has become increasingly true in an age of molecular science, quantum mechanics and nanotechnology. For what is more delicate, for example, than a sheet of graphene; a carbon allotrope consisting of but a single layer of atoms prettily arranged in a hexagonal lattice?

The fact is, power is not simply "mitigated in delicacy" and we are obliged - like it or not - to recognise that "our world is one in which delicacy itself has become a modality of power." In a crucial passage, Connor writes:

"Sensitivity used to be at the opposite end of the scale from power, which needed to make itself blunt and insensible to maintain its power. The rise of biopower means that power involves, no longer the brute manipulation of life, but insinuation into it, infiltration and manipulation of the miniscule balances that maintain systems.
      Power used to be applied. That is to say, it needed to be brought up against its object, which would either resist, buckle, or be displaced by the pressure. Such meetings, impressions or collisions take place on the outside of things [...] Now, it is not that there are no comings together, no bearings down, no adversity any more. It is that it is no longer quite clear where the outside of things is to be found. In the age of interface which is now upon us [...] everything is at once inside and outside everything else."      

In other words, there is now a promiscuous and paradoxical intermingling of all bodies, all objects, large and small. And delicacy is just a more subtle form of violation; a method of overcoming the natural reticence and resistance of the Other. For serious readers of Lawrence, this means they must perform a radical reappraisal of the ethics and erotics of (phallic) tenderness. Simply put, the world of Lady Chatterley is long lost and the lightness of her lover's touch can no longer be so clearly distinguished from the hand that wields power.


See: Steven Connor, The Book of Skin, (Cornell University Press, 2004). Lines quoted are on pp. 267, 268, 280 and 281.

Note: those interested in reading the post to which this forms an afterword can click here.


30 May 2014

Suna no Onna (Sand Woman)

The Woman in the Dunes (1964), dir. Hiroshi Teshigahara


I've always been fascinated by the thought of desert sands and the radical indifference of shifting dunes to any form of moist life, including human life; an unceasing flow of countless particles overwhelming everything in their path.

Baudrillard has provided some lovely descriptions of the desert as an ecstatic form of disappearance and pure geometry. He speaks of their grandeur deriving from negative aridity; places where all high hopes evaporate and the artificial scruples of culture are rendered null and void, leaving only silence.   
 
For other writers, the desert is intrinsically feminine and to be fatally lost in the sand is like being sexually enveloped and suffocated by the love of a good woman. The Japanese author Kobo Abe, for example, explores this erotic-fetishistic theme in his short novel The Woman in the Dunes (1962).

This strangely beautiful and disturbing book tells the tale of an amateur entomologist, Niki Jumpei, who goes on a brief holiday to collect insects that live among the sand dunes, but ends up quite literally trapped in a deep hole alongside a woman whose only task in life is to dig sand. His attempts to escape end in failure and so he learns how to love the woman and accept his fate as a type of human sand-bug. In other words, he learns how to go with the flow and transform a hole into a home.

Abe provides some nice descriptions of the woman, a young widow, the surface of whose skin "was covered with a coat of fine sand, which hid the details and brought out the feminine lines; she seemed a statue gilded with sand ... attractive to look at but hardly to touch."

That said, of course the man does eventually touch her; sometimes with savage violence and at other times with tenderness, as he helps brush or wash the sand from her naked body, from under her breasts, from her buttocks and thighs, and from the dark lips of her vulva. The sex between them is mostly impersonal and as crushing, shapeless and merciless as the desert. As Andrea Dworkin notes:

"The sand, because it is relentless and inescapable, forces an abandonment of the abstract mental thinking and self-involvement that pass for feeling, especially sexual feeling, in men in civilization. It forces the person to live wholly in the body, in the present, without mental evasion or self-preoccupied introspection or free-floating anxiety. ... What [Niki Jumpei] feels, he feels physically. The sand is so extreme, so intense, so much itself, so absolute, that it determines the quality and boundaries of his consciousness ..."

It even gives him an erection, as it trickles in a little stream over the base of his penis and flows along his thighs.  

Towards the end of the novel, the man attempts to rape the woman whilst the villagers who have imprisoned and enslaved them both in the pit watch from above. But just like his attempts to escape, his attempt to publicly violate the woman (and thereby secure a promise of freedom made by his captors) fails. She physically not only fends him off, but, like the sand, she overpowers him and obliges him to make a final capitulation:

"The man, beaten and covered with sand ... abandoned himself to her hands ... It seemed that what remained of him had turned into a liquid and melted into her body." 
  
Dworkin again provides the best (somewhat romantic and profoundly Lawrentian) reading of this scene:

"In this vision of sex, while the man is by contemporary standards emasculated by the failed rape, in fact rape is supposed to fail. Men are not supposed to accomplish it. They are supposed to give in, to capitulate, to surrender: to the sand - to life moving without regard for their specialness or individuality, their fiefdoms of personality and power; to the necessities of the woman's life in the dunes - work, sex, a home, the common goal of keeping the community from being destroyed by the sand. The sex is not cynical or contaminated by voyeurism; but it is only realizable in a world of dangerously unsentimental physicality. Touch, then, becomes what is distinctly, irreducibly human; the meaning of being human. This essential human need is met by an equal human capacity to touch, but that capacity is lost in a false physical world of man-made artifacts and a false psychological world of man-made abstractions. The superiority of the woman, like the superiority of the sand, is in her simplicity of means, her quiet and patient endurance, the unselfconsciousness of her touch, its ruthless simplicity. She is not abstract, not a silhouette. She lives in her body, not in his imagination."

  
See The Woman in the Dunes, by Kobo Abe, trans. E. Dale Saunders, (Vintage Books, 1964), pp. 44-6 and 232. And see Intercourse, by Andrea Dworkin, (Basic Books, 2007), pp. 33-4 and 36.