Becoming-Other (Part 2): Alien Sympathy and the Poetic Imagination (With Reference to the Work of D. H. Lawrence)

Marc-Édouard Nabe: Lawrence sauvage (2009)

marcedouardnabe.com

In an essay entitled 'On Being a Man', Lawrence argues that it's very easy to know and to understand the other person as a person, but not so easy to know and to understand them as an impersonal Other who exists as a force of pure alterity and as an actual being in the world, independently of one's self.

For this requires what he calls a thought-adventure - an instinctive-intuitive process that starts in the blood and not in the mind and involves the taking of a double risk: "First, [one] must go forth and meet life in the body. Then [one] must face the result in [one's] mind."

To illustrate what he means, Lawrence asks us to imagine him sitting on a train. A stranger enters the compartment and is instantly recognizable as a white, middle-class, middle-aged, Englishman. With just a quick glance, says Lawrence, he can tell a great deal. The strangeness of the stranger - and thus the adventure of knowing him - is therefore strictly limited.

But what if the stranger is none of the above; what if, for example, they belong to a different race? Then, says Lawrence, he is unable to proceed quite so confidently with his characterization of the stranger:

"It is not enough for me to glance at a black face and say: He is a negro. As he sits next to me, there is a faint uneasy movement in my blood. A strange vibration comes from him, which causes a slight disturbance in my own vibration. There is a slight odour in my nostrils. And above all, even if I shut my eyes, there is a strange presence in contact with me.

      I now can no longer proceed from what I am and what I know I am, to what I know him to be. I am not a nigger and so I can't quite know a nigger, and I can never fully 'understand' him. 

      What then? It's an impasse.
      Then, I have three courses open. I can just plank down the word Nigger, and having labelled him, finished with him! Or I can try to track him down in terms of my own knowledge. That is, understand him as I understand any other individual. 

      Or I can do a third thing. I can admit that my blood is disturbed, that something comes from him and interferes with my normal vibration. Admitting so much, I can either put up a resistance, and insulate myself. Or I can allow the disturbance to continue, because, after all, there is some peculiar alien sympathy between us."

When it comes to the question of race relations, this, I think, is an absolutely crucial passage. If we wish to overcome common prejudice and the urge to stereotype, then, like Lawrence, we must allow our sense of self to be disrupted by the otherness of the Other and admit the peculiar alien sympathy between us.

This doesn't mean cultural appropriation, wearing black face, and pretending we are all one and the same under the skin, as idealists such as Boglarka Balogh pretend when they posit an ahistorical model of Humanity. It means, rather, exercising our poetic sensibility - as Lawrence exercises in an extraordinary verse found in Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923), in which he effects a becoming-negroid beneath the radiation of a dark, tropical sun:


Behold my hair twisting and going black.
Behold my eyes turn tawny yellow
Negroid;
See the milk of northern spume
Coagulating in my veins
Aromatic as frankincense.


The mistake that Balogh makes is that instead of peculiar alien sympathy, she substitutes an ideal form of moral sympathy that is rooted in her own ego. In other words, whilst she genuinely feels very sorry for people who are less privileged than herself, she lacks the ability to feel with them or be radically altered by the otherness of others. She can only see her own smiling face reflected in everyone and everything.

Ultimately, black people don't want white people to love them; for it's not a question of eros. And they don't care if white people fail to understand them; for neither is it a question of logos. They simply want a little respect and to be accorded what's proper to them as men and women; in other words, racial ethics is a question of thymos. 

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'On Being a Man', Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 214-15. 

D. H. Lawrence, 'Tropic', Birds, Beasts and Flowers, (1923). This poem can be read in full online by clicking here.

Those interested in Lawrence's important concept of sympathy might like to see the essay on Walt Whitman in Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), in which he critiques the idea of merging into One Identity and exposes the danger of confusing sympathy with the Christian ideals of love and charity. The passage concerning the right conduct of a white poet with regard to a negro slave, obviously has particular relevance to our discussion above. Click here to read online.

To read part one of this post on the case of Boglarka Balogh, click here.

Becoming-Other (Part 1): The Case of Boglarka Balogh

Seven types of digital blackface produced by Boglarka Balogh 

(with the assistance of graphic artist Csaba Szábó)

boredpanda.com

I'm sure that some readers will recall the amusing case of Boglarka Balogh, the blonde, blue-eyed Hungarian idealist, who naively published a series of self-portraits in which she had digitally transposed her own facial features on to those of seven African tribal women, instantly provoking a furious online reaction. 

The project was intended to raise awareness of the difficulties faced by such women and to celebrate their unique beauty and cultural diversity. But Balogh, a human rights lawyer and journalist, was swiftly - often brutally - informed that, despite her good intentions, the images were offensive, degrading, and narcissistic.

It seems no matter how woke you may be - and no matter how skilled you are with the latest photo editing software - blackface is never acceptable and white people should stay in their own lane.

Not wanting to add insult to injury, Balogh made no reply to her critics and removed her work from the Bored Panda blog on which she'd posted it (though not before it had already received over 130,000 views), advising everyone to keep calm and love all humanity.

Obviously, such advice is inadequate as well as nauseating. But how then should one respond to this case and the issues raised? The answer, I think, has to do with a queer form of alien sympathy and the poetic imagination. And we can discover why by turning to the work of D. H. Lawrence ...

Click here to read part 2 of this post.

Jews of the Wrong Sort: Notes on D. H. Lawrence and Anti-Semitism

Honor Blackman as Mrs Fawcett in The Virgin and the Gypsy 
dir. Christopher Miles (1970)

An angry email arrives in my inbox (not for the first time):

"Dear Stephen Alexander,

I was extremely disappointed to find the expression 'Jews of the wrong sort' appearing in one of your recent posts (Orophobia, 16 Nov 2017), without any word of commentary or any condemnation of this racist phrase borrowed from D. H. Lawrence, a well-known antisemite. This kind of indiscretion brings shame on you and what is, in many respects, an excellent blog."*    

There are several things I'd like to say in response to this ...

Firstly, like Sylvia Plath, I'm someone who writes and identifies as a bit of a Jew, as I make clear in an early post where I reveal that key influences on my thinking include Jacques Derrida, Malcolm McLaren, and Larry David: click here. I'm certain that, for some, these three figures would also represent Jews of the wrong sort, i.e. provocateurs who gaily deconstruct the metaphysical illusions and sentimental ideals by which the majority choose to live.

Secondly, Lawrence - if it is in fact Lawrence speaking in The Captain's Doll and not an anonymous narrator offering either an indirect rendering of the thoughts of the protagonist or their own (ironic) commentary - is, like me, clearly in favour of sardonic individuals who seek to curb the enthusiasm of Bergheil romantics, such as Hannele, and encourage the difficult descent into the what Heidegger terms the nearness of the nearest (even if this risks a fall into gross materialism).

Thus Lawrence's attitude with reference to this question, as to many others concerning race, is ultimately complex and ambiguous (sometimes outrageously inconsistent) and The Captain's Doll is a text that remains highly resistant to any final interpretation.

Personally, I would argue that, for Lawrence, Jews of the wrong sort are people very much of the right sort. That is to say, very much his sort (just as they are my sort). And this is so because his status as an outsider obliged him to identify with groups and individuals whom society often holds in contempt; not just Jews, but also Gypsies, for example.

Thus, in The Virgin and the Gipsy (1930), it's clear where Lawrence's sympathies lie; with a 36-year-old Jewish woman, Mrs Fawcett, who has abandoned her husband and two young children in order to be with a much younger man; and a good-looking traveller, called Joe Boswell, who takes a shine to the 19-year-old daughter of an Anglican vicar.

It's the narrow domesticity and mean-spirited authority of the familial regime that imposes moral restrictions on life in the name of propriety, which Lawrence despises and mercilessly lampoons throughout the novel. He instinctively sides with all those who are, due to their marginalization and difference, implicitly opposed to such. This makes him a far more radical figure than many of his critics wish to concede ...            

See:

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Captain's Doll', in The Fox, The Captain's Doll, The Ladybird, ed. Dieter Mehl, (Cambridge University Press, 2002).

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Virgin and the Gipsy', in The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories, ed. Michael Herbert, Bethan Jones, and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Ronald Granofsky, '"Jews of the Wrong Sort": D. H. Lawrence and Race', Journal of Modern Literature (Indiana University Press), Vol. 23, No. 2 (Winter, 1999-2000), pp. 209-23. 

Judith Ruderman, Race and Identity in D. H. Lawrence: Indians, Gypsies, and Jews (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
 
*Note: The author kindly gave me permission to quote from her email, but asked that she remain anonymous.

Peter Sloterdijk and the Question of Anthropotechnics

Polity Press (2013)

Anthropotechnics is a term widely used today across numerous fields of study and with many different meanings. For some, it simply concerns the close interaction of man and machine. For others, however, with more of a background in Nietzschean philosophy, it refers to the manner in which bios (i.e. the raw material of the flesh) is given shape by a combination of culture and cruelty, or what Peter Sloterdijk likes to think of as existential acrobatics.

That is to say, learning how best not only to live, but to achieve a level of physical and mental agility via extensive training techniques that enable one to perform extraordinary feats as a human being (to dance, to tumble, and to walk on tiptoe). 

If this poetics of being can be furthered via a little genetic tinkering here and there or some form of selective breeding, then Sloterdijk seems fairly relaxed about this. In Rules for the Human Zoo, for example, he suggests that in a transhuman era in which traditional methods of enhancing the self - such as reading the right books - are losing their power, then biomedical engineering might be embraced as an exciting new opportunity: Vorsprung durch Technik ...

Unfortunately, Sloterdijk's eugenic speculation was regarded by some - including the grand old man of German critical theory Jürgen Habermas - as politically and philosophically pernicious and Sloterdijk was accused of wilful provocation and crypto-fascism (the fact that the above text was written in response to Heidegger didn't help matters).

To his credit, however, Sloterdijk stuck to his anthropotechnical guns and a decade later published a book translated into English as You Must Change Your Life - a work in which he again takes up the idea of human being not as something one is born, or as a fixed essence, but as something one becomes; an ever-changing work-in-progress subject to individual and collective techniques of transformation.    

Ultimately, says Sloterdijk, human beings are self-creating, self-disciplining animals and the history of human evolution is a vertical history of anthropotechnics. Again, it's impossible not to hear echoes of Nietzsche and those who have written in his shadow, such as Michel Foucault, in all of this; indeed, one might ask why read Sloterdijk when one can read Nietzsche and Foucault, both of whom write more beautifully in my view. 

Perhaps Keith Ansell-Pearson provides an answer to this in the effusive opening paragraph of his review of Sloterdijk's work:

"Peter Sloterdijk must be the most erudite man currently dwelling on the planet. He has fresh and novel insights into whatever he’s discussing at any particular moment. His recently translated book You Must Change Your Life is a tour de force that engages the history of philosophy, religion, and thought, both Western and Eastern, in ways that make you think deeply about the evolution of the human being these past few thousand years. As if this weren’t already enough, Sloterdijk is also concerned with the future, and on a planetary scale. [...] Sloterdijk thinks there is a new global ecological and economic imperative facing us today, and to this we need to respond with a new sublime."

And so, if you want an ambitious, complex, rather sprawling but at times amusing 21st-century spin on the care of the self in terms of aesthetics, asceticism and athleticism, inspired by Nietzsche, but which also takes in the work of Rilke, Kafka, Wittgenstein, and L. Ron Hubbard along the way, then this may very well be the book for you.    

Personally, however, I continue to have reservations; not least with the text's grandness of narrative and Sloterdijk's authorial grandiosity. For me, a little modesty would have been nice - and, for the record, I really don't like to see the word mußt in a book title (even if it is a borrowing from a poet).   

See:

Peter Sloterdijk, 'Rules for the Human Zoo: a response to the Letter on Humanism', trans. Mary Varney Rorty, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 27 (2009), pp. 12-28. Click here to read as a pdf online.

Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life: On Anthropotechnics, trans. Wieland Hoban (Polity Press, 2013).

Keith Ansell-Pearson, 'Philosophy of the Acrobat: On Peter Sloterdijk', Los Angeles Review of Books, (July 8, 2013): click here to read the online version from which I quote. 

Orophobia (With Reference to the Case of Alexander Hepburn)

Casper David Friedrich: 

Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (1818)

[Oder typischer romantischer Bullshit]

I don't like mountains and can never decide whether it's more depressing to be stuck at the foot of one, or atop the highest peak; the crushing claustrophobia of steep rock looming naked and inhuman, contra the radiant spiritual uplift of ice and snow - which is worse?

Either way, I suffer from a form of acute mountain sickness which has more to do with a philo-pathological disposition than with a lack of oxygen or trouble adjusting to altitude. I don't like being made to feel small and insignificant before what is ultimately just an elevation of the earth's surface, pushed up by tectonic activity (i.e., a large bump when all's said and done); but neither do I like submitting to Alpine ecstasy and being whooshed away into another world and another (higher) life and the promise of icy immortality.   

This is why I'm very sympathetic to the sceptical - some would say orophobic - reaction of Alexander Hepburn when he is taken by his German mistress, Hannele, to the popular Tyrolean resort of Kaprun, in order to experience the majesty of God's mountains.

Despite her strident insistence that the latter are wonderful and empowering, Hepburn soon expresses his disillusion and distaste. For, in his heart of hearts, he loathed the mountains, which seemed to him almost obscene in their unimaginably huge weight and size. As he tells Hannele, he is no mountain-topper or snow-bird, preferring to live as close as possible to sea-level at all times.

Lawrence writes:

"A dark flame suddenly went over his face.
     'Yes,' he said, 'I hate them, I hate them. I hate their snow and their affectation.'
     'Affectation!' she laughed. 'Oh! Even the mountains are affected for you, are they?'

     'Yes,' he said. 'Their loftiness and their uplift. I hate their uplift. I hate people prancing on mountain-tops and feeling exalted. I’d like to make them all stop up there, on their mountain-tops, and chew ice to fill their stomachs. I wouldn't let them down again, I wouldn't. I hate it all, I tell you; I hate it.'"

 Perhaps not surprisingly, Hannele is a little taken aback by this outburst:

"'You must be a little mad' she said superbly 'to talk like that about the mountains. They are so much bigger than you.'
     'No', he said. 'No! They are not.'

   'What!' she laughed aloud. 'The mountains are not bigger than you? But you are extraordinary.'

     'They are not bigger than me' he cried. 'Any more than you are bigger than me if you stand on a ladder. They are not bigger than me. They are less than me.'
      'Oh! Oh!' she cried in wonder and ridicule. 'The mountains are less than you.' 
      'Yes,' he cried, 'they are less.'"

Hannele mistakes this for megalomania, but, actually, it isn't that. It is, rather, a noble refusal to be intimidated by grandeur, be it divine or natural in origin, and a rejection of romantic idealism founded upon notions of transcendence and the sublime. In other words, Hepburn is attempting to curb his - and Hannele's - enthusiasm; something which I think a (pretty) good thing.

Indeed, for me, Lawrence is at his best not when indulging his penchant for theo-poetic speculation (sorry Catherine), but, rather, being sardonic and stubbornly down-to-earth; like one of those Jews of the wrong sort whom Hepburn encounters at his hotel; imparting a "wholesome breath of sanity, disillusion, unsentimentality to the excited Bergheil atmosphere".

Ultimately, as much as Lawrence wishes to make life seem glamorous and rich with cosmic significance, he doesn't want men and women to sprout wings of the spirit too often; nor pose as solitary superhuman beings on mountain summits, as if belonging to a glacial world sufficient unto itself and devoid of cabbages.

His great teaching, rather, is to climb down Pisgah and for man to affirm the horizontal limitations of his own flesh and mortality.  

Notes

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'The Captain's Doll' in The Fox, The Captain's Doll, The Ladybird, edited by Dieter Mehl, (Cambridge University Press, 2002), chapters XIV-XVIII. 

Note: The Captain's Doll (1923) can be read online as an eBook thanks to Project Gutenberg of Australia: click here.

See also the fascinating article by Catherine Brown, 'Climbing Down the Alpine Pisgah: Lawrence and the Alps', which explores Lawrence's relationship to the mountains in much more detail: click here. 

Torpedo the Ark Means: Everything's Funny (5th Anniversary Reflections on the Death of a Parakeet)

Sorry about your bird ...

The phrase torpedo the ark - borrowed from Ibsen - is polysemic. That is to say, it has multiple meanings within a semantic field and thus invites fluid interpretation, rather than fixed definition.

Having said that, when originally conceiving the blog, I wanted a title that would first and foremost sloganise the idea of having done with the judgement of God. This, for me at least, remains the core meaning of the phrase that underlies all others. Understand this, and you understand that torpedo the ark is opposed to all forms of coordinating authority and does not mean destroy all species of life.

Those who like to read it in the latter sense are welcome to do so, but it's mistaken to describe this blog as ecocidal, even if it is often anti-vitalist in its nihilism and ultimately regards the epiphenomenal occurrence of life as a very rare and unusual way of being dead. What's being negated here isn't bios in all its evolutionary variety, but the lie of salvation.

Crucially, torpedo the ark also means having the freedom to criticise everything under the sun - even if this risks offending others. Nothing is sacrosanct or off limits; everything can be targeted and everything can be ridiculed, mocked, or scorned because, as Larry David rightly informs his friend Richard Lewis, everything's funny - even the death of a beloved parakeet ...  

Note: I am referring to a scene in the first episode of the ninth season of Curb Your Enthusiasm entitled 'Foisted!', dir. Jeff Schaffer, written by Larry David and Jeff Schaffer (2017): click here to watch on YouTube.  

Anger is an Energy: On the Politics of Thymos

Thymos 2 (from a series of 50 mixed media images) 

Alejandro Tarantino

Most people are familiar with the ancient Greek terms for love (eros) and for reason (logos).

But many are unfamiliar with another crucial component of the psyche that the Greeks termed thymos and by which they referred to the desire of the male subject not merely to be found sexually attractive and in full possession of his senses, but acknowledged as one who is worthy of respect.

It is this need to be shown due regard that often leads to anger and violent confrontation within patriarchal and phallocratic society. For example, one might recall the powerful scene from A Few Good Men (dir. Rob Reiner, 1992), in which Jack Nicholson as Col. Jessep addresses Tom Cruise as US Navy lawyer Lt. Daniel Kaffee:

"You see, Danny, I can deal with the bullets and the bombs and the blood. I don't want money and I don't want medals. What I do want is for you to stand there in that faggoty white uniform and with your Harvard mouth extend me some fucking courtesy!"

Staying in the cinematic universe if I may, I would suggest that it's this same (irrational) aspect of the male soul we are obliged to consider in Joel Schumacher's 1993 thriller Falling Down, starring Michael Douglas as alt-right poster boy William Foster (D-FENS).

The movie suggests that, ultimately, even an average man can be pushed too far and that nobody likes to feel they've been lied to, or made a fool of. And nobody likes to feel they're invisible and thus able to be totally ignored. It makes the blood boil. One seeks justice; or some form of revenge.

Deleuzeans might dream of becoming-imperceptible. But they are a very rare and very unusual type. Most people - particularly most men - want to be seen and want to be listened to; want the world to recognise that they too have rights, including the right to freely express their views and affirm their values, whether these coincide with the views and values of a gender-neutral liberal elite or not.      

Idealists who subscribe to a philosophical fantasy of universal love and reason, will never really grasp what motivates men like Jessep and Bill Foster. If this makes them poor film critics on the one hand, so too does it make them poor political commentators on the other; people, we might say, who can't handle the truth.

And so, whilst they might write for The Guardian or appear on Dateline London, not one of them seems able or willing to conceive of why it is that reactionary and/or fascist ideas to do with cultural identity and national greatness that tap into white male rage not only persist, but have renewed appeal amongst sections of even the most prosperous and peaceful democratic societies.  


To watch the scene referred to above between Nicholson and Cruise in A Few Good Men, click here. 

To watch the official trailer to Falling Down, click here.

All Dolled Up with Lulu Hashimoto

Lulu Hashimoto: tumblr.com

Japanese beauty, Lulu Hashimoto, is a girl who has really taken the expression all dolled up to heart.

Or, more precisely, Lulu Hashimoto is a doll-like character performed by an anonymous model who has really taken the idea of self-objectification to an uncanny level.  

In other words, Lulu is actually a full-body doll suit, consisting of a wig, a mask and stockings patterned with doll-like joints, created by Hitomi Komaki, a 23-year-old fashion designer who has a thing for dolls and their unique attraction (a disturbing combination of cuteness and creepiness).

Despite Komaki's rather puzzling and somewhat disingenuous denials, there's obviously something fetishistic about this game of dress up and disguise born of the world of BDSM; of becoming-object through a process of dollification - a process of physically and mentally transforming oneself into a living doll and seeking out an Owner to whom one must be subservient at all times.  

Lulu has not only turned heads on the streets of Tokyo, but has built up a substantial following on social media, with fans all over the world. She is, in addition, among the finalists of the annual Miss iD (alternative) beauty pageant this year; a contest open to all kinds of beings, human and non-human, actual and virtual, including holographic characters generated by artificial intelligence.

To broaden our understanding of the real in this manner - and to redefine notions not only of aesthetics, but humanity - is, I think, a good thing; it's certainly an interesting project from a queer philosophical perspective.    

And the possibility of donning a doll-suit, whatever one's age, race, or gender and (if only momentarily and imaginatively) becoming a beautiful young Japanese girl like Lulu, certainly has its appeal ...  

Notes 

Those interested in seeing more photos of Lulu and becoming one of her 31.3k followers on Instagram, click here.

Those interested in dollification as practiced within the kinky community might like to visit dollification.com

Chinese Beauty Tips with Reference to the Case of Kina Shen

Kina Shen / Instagram (16 Dec 2016) 

The Chinese still like to think they are a people apart, with their own unique aesthetic ideals - including ideals of what constitutes female beauty. But, actually, when one examines these ideals, be they Taoist or Confucian in origin, one finds they don't greatly differ from those that have been cherished amongst other peoples, in other times and other parts of the world.

For example, they think that girls with large eyes are very beautiful; particularly if the eyes have a double-fold lid (often achieved by cosmetic surgery), similar to the eyes of Westerners. The Chinese also value porcelain white skin and fine, delicate features, believing as they do that these physical traits reflect an inner moral dimension or natural nobility. Finally, when it comes to hair, the Chinese like it to be long, shiny, dark, and soft.

Those big-bodied blondes, with their fake tans and fake tits that so many Western men seem attracted to, are regarded as ugly and vulgar within the erotico-aesthetic that determines the Sino-pornographic imagination. And so it's not surprising to find that one of the most popular models in China today is 25-year-old Kina Shen, who prides herself on her hyperreal doll-like appearance, with eyes that are bigger-than-big, skin that is paler-than-pale, a body that is slimmer-than-slim, and hair that is sleeker-than-sleek.

Even though I don't view the world through Chinese eyes, she's certainly extraordinary looking and clearly a very talented make-up artist which, I suppose, makes her fully deserving of her huge following on social media, including 634k followers on Instagram [click here if interested in becoming one of them].

And even though I'm not a smoking fetishist, I admire the fact that Kina Shen often poses with a cigarette - something that now seems exotic and transgressive here in the West, where people have become so obsessed about their health that they've sacrificed style and forgotten the importance of living dangerously. I also like her attempts at philosophizing about the gothic nature of her being, as in this astonishing remark posted online:

"All this time I thought I was dark, but maybe I was wrong. I cannot stay away from darkness, because it needs me. Because I am the light it craves ... So maybe I am not cursed, but blessed with a dark kind of light."


To watch Kina Shen giving a YouTube make-up tutorial on how to achieve her big eye look, click here. 

Dollification: The Cases of Bastian Schweinsteiger and Alexander Hepburn

Cover of the first US edition (1923) 

by Knud Merrild 

I: The Case of Bastian Schweinsteiger

There was an amusing story in the press a couple of years ago concerning the German footballer Bastian Schweinsteiger and his lawsuit against a Chinese toy company that had manufactured an action figure that bore an uncanny resemblance to him.

The fact that the doll also came dressed as a Nazi soldier and was named Bastian, pretty much obliged the midfielder to take legal action, even though a spokesman for the company brazenly attempted to deny the undeniable by insisting that any likeness was purely coincidental. He further explained that, to Chinese eyes, all Germans look alike ...!

I've no idea if the case went ahead, or if there was some kind of out-of-court settlement; one assumes the doll has been withdrawn from sale, but even that I don't know for certain. At the time, most people simply smiled at the story and then quickly forgot about it. But it always stuck with me. And that's because, as a reader of Lawrence, it reminds me of the case of Alexander Hepburn ... 


II: The Case of Alexander Hepburn

Written in 1921 and published two years later, The Captain's Doll is a short novel by D. H. Lawrence that tells the tale of an illicit love affair between an aristocratic German woman, Johanna zu Rassentlow (known as Hannele), and a Scottish army officer, Capt. Hepburn.

Thanks to the War, she has fallen on hard times and so has to work for a living making puppets and beautiful cushions of embroidered coloured wool. He, arguably, has been damaged in other ways by the years of bloody conflict and evolved his own idiosyncratic philosophy based on his love of the moon that he's keen to enact in his own life, without any further compromise and at whatever cost.

If the existence of a wife, Evangeline, is problematic to his future happiness and his relationship with Hannele, so too is the existence of a doll that the latter makes of him, complete with tight-fitting tartan trews. A doll which not only accurately captures his physical likeness, but seems to insult the integrity of his being; objectifying him and belittling him at the same time:

"It was a perfect portrait of an officer of a Scottish regiment, slender, delicately made, with a slight, elegant stoop of the shoulders and close-fitting tartan trousers. The face was beautifully modelled, and a wonderful portrait, dark-skinned, with a little, close-cut, dark moustache, and wide-open dark eyes, and that air of aloofness and perfect diffidence which marks an officer and a gentleman."

Personally, I'd love to be dollified and wouldn't find it in any way unseemly or humiliating, whoever made it and however it was costumed. But Hepburn reacts very differently, when he one day sees the toy version of himself standing in a shop window. He stood and stared at it, as if spellbound; so disgusted that he wouldn't enter the little art shop:

"Then, every day for a week did he walk down that little street and look at himself in the shop window. Yes, there he stood, with one hand in his pocket. And the figure had one hand in its pocket. There he stood, with his cap pulled rather low over his brow. And the figure had its cap pulled low over its brow. But, thank goodness, his own cap now was a civilian tweed. But there he stood, his head rather forward, gazing with fixed dark eyes. And himself in little, that wretched figure, stood there with its head rather forward, staring with fixed dark eyes. It was such a real little man that it fairly staggered him. The oftener he saw it, the more it staggered him. And the more he hated it. Yet it fascinated him, and he came again to look.
      And it was always there. A lonely little individual lounging there with one hand in its pocket, and nothing to do, among the bric-à-brac and the bibelots. Poor devil, stuck so incongruously in the world. And yet losing none of his masculinity.
      A male little devil, for all his forlornness. But such an air of isolation, or not-belonging. Yet taut and male, in his tartan trews. And what a situation to be in! - lounging with his back against a little Japanese lacquer cabinet, with a few old pots on his right hand and a tiresome brass ink-tray on his left, while pieces of not-very-nice filet lace hung their length up and down the background. Poor little devil: it was like a deliberate satire."

One wonders if Schweinsteiger also felt this way when seeing his doll for sale: disgusted, but fascinated; staggered, but spellbound ...? If so, then, as one commentator has noted, we can hardly begrudge him taking legal action.

Towards the end of the novella, Hepburn confronts Hannele on the issue of the doll when hiking in the mountains (which she loves, but which he hates for their snow and affectations). He suggests that she might marry him - but he doesn't want her love, for it was love from which the doll was born. She is understandably full of perplexed rage at the things he says to her; including his claim that the handcrafted effigy does him the greatest possible damage - even if he can't quite explain why:

"'I don't know. But there it is. It wasn't malicious. It was flattering, if you like. But it just sticks in me like a thorn: like a thorn. ... And you can say what you like, but any woman, today, no matter how much she loves her man - she could start any minute and make a doll of him. And the doll would be her hero: and her hero would be no more than her doll. ... If a woman loves you, she'll make a doll out of you. She'll never be satisfied till she's made your doll. And when she's got your doll, that's all she wants. And that's what love means. And so, I won't be loved. And I won't love. I won't have anybody loving me. It is an insult. I feel I've been insulted for forty years: by love, and the women who've loved me. I won't be loved. And I won't love. I'll be honoured and I'll be obeyed: or nothing.'"

Appalled by this line of thinking, Hannele dismisses Hepburn as a madman of conceit and impudence. Nevertheless, she agrees to accompany him to Africa, where he plans to help establish a farm and, when he's made a few more observations and established all the necessary facts, write a book on the moon. 

And so Hepburn promises to call for her in the morning, before pulling back quickly into the darkness ...

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'The Captain's Doll' in The Fox, The Captain's Doll, The Ladybird, edited by Dieter Mehl, (Cambridge University Press, 2002). 

Note: The Captain's Doll (1923) can be read online as an eBook thanks to Project Gutenberg of Australia: click here.