Discussion: DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterly's Lover

This text is being read in the section called Politics & The Body, along with The Communist Manifesto, Freud, Thoreau and Frankenstein.  Professor Thomas Grieve led the class this time, a specialist in literature from the modern period (1910-1930)

Grieve listed some of the themes in the book:

• Loss of pastoral world
• Class system
• War

He quoted from Wordsworth

"THE WORLD IS TOO MUCH WITH US; LATE AND SOON"

          The world is too much with us; late and soon,

          Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:

          Little we see in Nature that is ours;

          We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

          The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

          The winds that will be howling at all hours,

          And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

          For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

          It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be

          A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

          So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

          Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

          Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

          Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

Mellors represented the world that is being lost.  He is scornful of upper classes so he retreats to dialect, Lady Chatterly has to meet Mellors on his terms, in his world: in the woods (nature), having him speak in dialect to her though he can speak the same "King's English" that she speaks.  His virility is linked to nature and in many ways he is portrayed as the "Noble Savage".

We discussed why Connie chose or connected with Mellors.  It began with compassion, when Mellors saw her as vulnerable and as compassionate.  They each saw each other as distinct human beings - he saw the "woman" in her, not just the person.

Lady Chatterly's Lover is emphatically a post WWI war novel.  They had just experienced a horrendous war; one which made civilization realize that it had not advanced as far as they had been thinking.  This aspect of a damaged generation comes up several times.  At Mellors and Connie's 1st sex encounter, she is crying with all the anguish of her generation's forlornness pg 125
Going back to the 1st lines of the book, Lawrence begins with the "tragic age"

Ours is essentially a tragic age..We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.

We discussed how Mellors is an early "angry young man", a manifestation we are not one with yet, though the youth are getting angrier and the abilities to demonstrate or act on their anger are much more global.  The situation in many European countries such as Greece, Portugal, Italy and Spain, with 60-70% unemployment for men in their 20s, as well as the lack of possibilities for many immigrants in countries such as France, are leading to a build up of rage and despair.

Grieve provided us with some background to the writing of the novel.  How does this match DHL's life? He came from lower classes in mining town; ran off with married woman, an aristocrat; at the time he was writing LCL he was impotent because of his TB, his wife Frieda was sexually voracious and taking lovers, and making sure he knew it.  For Lawrence, depressed because of the state of the world, tender-hearted fucking is what will save us.  His hero, Mellors holds the power.  Lawrence has been accused of being misogynistic and we found this hard to assess just from one novel.  He writes ostensibly from a woman's point of view yet his writing is very much a man's perspective with its emphasis on the phallus.  It's the man who liberates the woman.  He educates her, guides her, he is the teacher, the wise experienced one, who frees and awakens her sexually.  For me it was quite paternalistic.  I don't know if I would call Lawrence misogynistic or whether he is just, unavoidably, male in outlook and focus.

Lawrence sees sex as a preventative or as protection against the decay of the world: against mechanization, industrialization, the weakening of men.  Some of his concerns are right on the money: the blight of industrialization, the lure and destruction of both Mammon and the bitch-goddess (much as I don't buy into the female characterization of this) of Success.

Lawrence: Lady Chatterly's Lover

Lawrence, D.H.: Lady Chatterly's Lover; Bantam Classics, New York, 2007

This edition is a Bantam re-issue of the "Original Unexpurgated 1928 Orioli Edition" with a 1968 preface by Lawrence Durrell and a newer introduction by Ronald Friedland.  The backstory and explanations about this book were almost as fascinating as the book itself.  Because of the language and the subject matter, Lawrence knew it would have trouble getting it published in England so it was published in Italy.  I remember reading this book in either my late teens or early 20's.  I don't remember finding the book to be anything special at the time - though I was probably equal parts titillated and made anxious by the language and sex scenes, having been an obedient and overtly conforming child.

Reading this book now, from the vantage point of well-established adulthood, I found the descriptive language enthralling and the perspective on the industrial age fascinating.  The use of dialect - and I'm more tolerant of the use of words like fuck and cunt now - not because I'm more tolerant to crude language (I still think it's lazy, limiting and monotonous) but because I'm open to the idea that Lawrence needed to use these words to communicate the point he was trying to make.  This changed viewpoint no doubt owes something to the years I've accumulated but also something to the course texts I've been reading and discussing since September.  I also think it reflects how the world has changed in the last few decades, that is, even within my lifetime.

The book starts out with Sir Clifford and Lady Chatterly [Constance] married; and though they feel during their one month's honeymoon that they are intimate, it's not a physical intimacy.

this intimacy which was beyond sex, and beyond a man's "satisfaction. ... No, the intimacy was deeper, more personal than that. And the sex was merely an accident, or an adjunct: one of the curious obsolete, organic processes which persisted in its own clumsiness, but was not really necessary. pg 9

 After the honeymoon in 1917 Clifford ships off to war.  He is shipped back home in 1918, "smashed", paralyzed and with no interest in any physical intimacy with Connie.  Their life is one of her supporting him in his efforts to achieve fame and fortune as a writer.  His dependence and her subservience as 'helpmeet' create a life they both initially deem intimacy.  Connie eventually looks for something more and begins a sexual love affair with Sir Clifford's gamekeeper, Mellors.  Mellors is a Tevershall man, born into a collier family but raised above his 'station' during his service during the war, in India.  He comes back, somewhat physically damaged by the war, emotionally damaged by his unhappy marriage to a local woman, and determined to live a quiet life in the woods, alone.

Lawrence expounds upon 2 main themes in his novel: the evils of industrialization and the redeeming power of sexual connection.  His descriptions of the Nottinghamshire countryside, where he grew up, are evocative of the blight that descended upon the green countryside of England.

but alas, one could see in the near distance the chimney of Tevershall pit, with its clouds of steam and smoke, and on the damp, hazy distance of the hill the raw straggle of Tevershall village, a village which began almost at the park gates, and trailed in utter hopeless ugliness for long and gruesome mile: houses, rows of wretched, small, begrimed, brick houses, with black slate roofs for lids, sharp angles and wilful, blank dreariness.  pg 10

The people were as haggard, shapeless, and dreary as the countryside, and as unfriendly. pg 11

...up a dark, damp drive, burrowing through gloomy trees, out to the slope of the park where grey damp sheep were feeding... pg 11 

Sir Clifford's friends are all a bit effete, snobs with various character gaps and hangups, prejudices and damage.  The most appealing of these for me was Tommy Dukes, his bachelor friend who, when asked whether he believes in anything, replies:

"Me? Oh, intellectually I believe in having a good heart, a chirpy penis, a lively intelligence, and the courage to say 'shit!' in front of a lady."  [pg 40]

Lawrence writes well about the class system and its inflexibility.   He describes the gulf between Wragby Hall, seat of the Chatterly's, and the village people of Tevershall, writing on page 12

Gulf impassable, breach indescribable, such as is perhaps non-existent south of the Trent.  But in the Midlands and the industrial North gulf impassable, across which no communication could take place.  You stick to your side, I'll stick to mine! A strange denial of the common pulse of humanity.

The character of Michaelis, Lady Chatterly's 'upstart' Irish lover gives Lawrence a chance to show the relentless class system in England, in Clifford's contempt for his presumption and for being, despite all his success and his polish, the "wrong sort", an arriviste and a "Dublin mongrel."  Connie feels some sympathy for him, the outsider - "and when her sympathy was awakened she was quite devoid of class feeling."  [pg 23]  Michaelis doesn't reach her as a woman though, despite the sex - he doesn't love her.  For Lawrence, achieving orgasm at the same time is a key feature of true union between a man and a woman.  While I admired his attempts to describe love, sex etc through a woman's viewpoint, the main perspective in the book seemed very much male, with this being just one example.

Clifford is an unsympathetic character.  I initially felt sorry for him, gone to war to do his duty and returned home broken and empty.  However he is very self-absorbed, and becomes increasingly selfish - with a child's selfishness - as the years passed.  He is a snob and a man who, even without the excuse of injury and paralysis, would have self-restricted himself to a shallow, cold life empty of human connection.  Though sexual intromission is not possible for him, he has no desire for any physical intimacy with his wife, no physical connection.  His sense of entitlement due to his class, heritage and position are accepted by him to be his god-given birthright.

"No wonder the men hate you," she said.

"They don't!" he replied. "And don't fall into errors: in your sense of the word, they are not men. They are animals you don't understand, and never could.  Don't thrust your illusions on other people.  The masses were always the same, and will always be the same.  Nero's slaves were extremely little different from our collier or the Ford motorcar workmen...It is the masses: they are the unchangeable.  It is one of the most momentous facts of social science.  Panem et circenses! Only today education is one of the bad substitutes for a circus.  What is wrong today, is that we've made a profound hash of the circuses part of the programme, and posioned our masses with a little education."

[...] "And what we need to take up now," he said, "is whips, nor swords.  The masses have been ruled since time began, and till time ends, ruled they will have to be.  It is sheer hypocrisy and farce to say they can rule themselves." [pg 200]

Despite Sir Clifford's opinion that the masses and the class system are immutable, and not only should not be changed but cannot be changed, he is just as fully convinced that, give him a son fathered by anyone, and he can bring him up a proper Chatterly, ready and able to assume his rightful position.

"I don't care who his father might be, so long as he is a healthy man not below normal intelligence.  Give me the child of any healthy, normally intelligent man, and I will make a perfectly competent Chatterly of him.  It is not who begets us, that matters, but where fate places us.  Place any child among the ruling classes, and he will grow up, to his own extent, a ruler.  Put kings' and dukes' children among the masses, and they'll be little plebeians, mass products.  It is the overwhelming pressure of environment."

"Then the common people aren't a race, and the aristocrats aren't blood," she said. 

"No, my child! A; that is romantic illusion.  Aristocracy is a function, a part of fate.  And the masses are a functioning of another part of fate.  The individual hardly matters.  It is a question of which function you are brought up to and adapted to. It is not the individuals that make an aristocracy: it is the functioning of the aristocratic whole.  And it is the functioning of the whole mass that makes the common man what he is."

"Then there is no common humanity between us all!"

"Just as you like.  We all need to fill our bellies.  But when it comes to expressive or executive functioning, I believe there  is a gulf and an absolute one, between the ruling and the serving classes.  The two functions are opposed.  And the function determines the individual." [pg 201]

Lawrence also speaks insightfully about the emotional trauma or damage to the psyche that can persist or which can take years to manifest (he likens it to a slowly developing bruise).  This must have been something seen in returning soldiers after WW1 but it also makes me think of Freud's research and that of other psychoanalysts of the previous 50 years.  This slow persistent trauma crops up in both Sir Clifford and in Mellors, both damaged in the war.  He has a great passage about decay and time marching on:

all the brilliant words seemed like dead leaves, crumpling up and turning to powder, meaning really nothing, blown away on any gust of wind.  They were not the leafy words of an effective life, young with energy and belonging to the tree.  They were the hosts of fallen leaves of a life that is ineffectual.  [pg 52]

Lawrence wrote many passages celebrating nature and "Olde England" and decrying industrialization and the pace of change of modernity.  While this mainly manifests itself in Mellors, the gamekeeper, Clifford too longs to preserve the old ways:

Clifford loved the wood; he loved the old oak trees [of the wood around Wragby Hall].  He felt they were his own through generations.  He wanted to protect them. He wanted this place inviolate, shut off from the world.  [pg 43]

The air was soft and dead, as if all the world were slowly dying.  Grey and clammy and silent, even from the shuffling of the collieries, for the pits were working short time, and today they were stopped altogether. The end of all things!

In the wood all was utterly inert and motionless, only great drops fell from the bare boughs, with a hollow little crash.  For the rest, among the old trees was depth within depth of grey, hopeless, inertia, silence, nothingness.

Connie walked dimly on.  From the old wood came an ancient melancholy, somehow soothing to her, better than the harsh insentience of the outer world.  She liked the inwardness of the remnant of forest, the unspeaking reticence of the old trees.  They seemed a very power of silence, and yet a vital presence...  [pg 69]

There is also much phallic imagery in the book, Sex, potency and especially male sexuality are used as the barometer of a healthy life, a true life, of humanity.  Some examples of Lawrence's powers of imagery [pg 92]:

Constance sat down with her back to a young pine tree, that swayed against her with curious life, elastic, and powerful, rising up.  The erect, alive thing, with its top in the sun!  

Today she could almost feel it in her own body, the huge heave of sap in the massive trees, upwards, up, up to the bud-tips, there to push into little flakey oak leaves, bronze as blood. It was like a tide running turgid upward, and spreading on the sky. [pg 132]

I found it interesting that Lawrence chose to write the book from a woman's point of view.  Some of his  passages seem awkward and like what a man would think a woman might feel.  Some seemed more discerning, such as when Michaelis the Irish lover is half-heartedly trying to convince Connie to leave Clifford and live with him.

Connie looked at him amazed: and yet she felt nothing.  These men, they were all alike, they left everything out.  They just went off from the top of their heads as if they were squibs, and expected you to be carried heavenwards along with their own thin sticks.     [pg 54-55]

Nature is used as the antithesis of the industrialization, the civilization, the modernity of the world.  Lawrence sees that movement away from the natural to be the main cause and symptom of man's decay and eventually his destruction.  Mellors is his voice in this.

When the last real man is killed, and they're all tame: white, black, yellow, all colours of tame ones: then they'll all be insane.  Because the root of sanity is in the balls. Then they'll all be insane...they'll make their own grand little act of faith. They'll offer one another up."

"You mean they'll kill one another?"

"I do...! If we go on at our present rate then in a hundred year's time there won't be ten thousand people in this island: there may not be ten.  They'll have lovingly wiped each other out. [...]  To contemplate the extermination of the human species and the long pause that follows before some other species crops up, it calms you more than anything else.  And if we go on in this way, with everybody, intellectuals, artists, government, industrialists and workers all frantically killing off the last human feeling, the last bit of their intuition, the last healthy instinct; if it goes on in algebraical progression, as it is going on: then ta-tah! to the human species... "[pg 239]

"...when I feel the human world is doomed, has doomed itself by its own mingy beastliness, then I feel ... the moon wouldn't be far enough, because even there you could look back and see the earth, dirty, beastly, unsavoury among all the stars: made foul by men. [...] [I]t's a shame, what's been done to people these last hundred years: men turned into nothing but labour-insects, and all their manhood taken away, and all their real life.  I'd wipe machines off the face of the earth again, and end the industrial epoch absolutely, like a black mistake. [pg 242]

Lawrence also makes frequent mention of Mammon and the bitch-goddess of success.  Mellors the gamekeeper is a damaged man who has decided that retreat into solitude and nature are all he wants out of life.  When he connects with Lady Chatterly he is dragged back into the world of feeling, connection, relationship.

But he knew that the seclusion of the wood was illusory.  The industrial noises broke the solitude, the sharp lights, though unseen, mocked it.  A man could no longer be private and withdrawn.  The world allows no hermits.  And now he had taken the woman, and brought on himself a new cycle of pain and doom.  For he knew by experience what it meant.

It was not the woman's fault, not even love's fault, nor the fault of sex.  The fault lay there, out there, in those evil electric lights and diabolical rattlings of engines.  There, in the world of the mechanical greedy, greedy mechanism and mechanised greed, sparkling with lights and gushing hot metal and roaring with traffic, there lay the vast evil thing, ready to destroy whatever did not conform...

He thought with infinite tenderness of the woman. Poor forlorn thing.... And they would do her in!  As sure as life, they would do her in, as they do in all naturally tender life.... But he would protect her with his heart for a little while.  For a little while, before the insentient iron world and the Mammon of mechanized greed did them both in, her as well as him.  [pg 129-130] 

Lawrence is equally pessimistic about society: "...conscience was chiefly fear of society, or fear of oneself. [...] He was quite consciously afraid of society, which he knew by instinct to be a malevolent, partly-insane beast."  [pg 130] and about civilization:

The young ones get mad because they've no money to spend.  Their whole life depends on spending money, and now they've got none to spend.  That's our civilization and our education: bring up the masses to depend entirely on spending money, and then the money gives out...The women are the maddest of all.  But then they're the maddest for spending, nowadays. [...]  [pg 220]

 If you could only tell them that living and spending are not the same thing!

Money poisons you when you've got it, and starves you when you haven't. [...] I feel great grasping white hands in the air, wanting to get hold of the throat of anybody who tries to live, to live beyond money, and squeeze the life out.  [pg 331]

Some of his writing and themes reminded me of Hemingway and trying to get back to basic pleasures, lives of action and simple motivations.  It fit in well with what we've been reading of Darwin and of Freud as well as the class concerns and angst of Dostoyesvsky.  I'm finding all the books we're reading swirling around in my brain and it's hard to pick out one thread or trail that I want to explore.  I wish I had unlimited time to explore all these thoughts and questions.

Discussion: Barthes & Smart

Yesterday we discussed two very different books about love.  One was the Canadian writer Elizabeth Smart's prose-poetry book, By Grand Central Station I sat down and Wept.  The second was French intellectual Roland Barthes' treatise on love, A Lover's Discourse.

For Smart's book, the discussion ranged through many areas:

• Is your reading or enjoyment of a text affected by the character/morals of the author ?  Some people felt that Smart's affair with a married man did tarnish the brightness of her prose.  Stephen proposed that Smart wanted to be a poet and realized that to write stirring poetry she needed life experiences much removed from her conventional upbringing and remote location in pre-War Ottawa.  He felt this could have been an impetus for her actions in bringing George Barker to North America and in carrying on the affair.

• Someone asked whether we would think differently had Elizabeth Smart been a man.  Laura mentioned than she read this book right after reading Werther and initially thought that the author WAS a man until quite far along in the book, when Smart returns to Ottawa.

There were so many unknown quantities in this book - from Smart's deliberate style which is not based on a chronology of facts to the 1st person style which tells us nothing about George Barker nor about his wife.  We see it all from Smart's perspective.  We had much the same situation in Werther where everyone was seen through his lens.

Most of the class liked Smart's poetic style.

We discussed the fact that, though Smart's book took place during WWII, she barely mentions the war and is only concerned with her love affair.  Apparently she was criticized for this when the book came out.  I didn't agree with this criticism.  I thought she referred to the war in a way that showed she had strong feelings about the reality and the horrors of war.  Much of the book takes place in North America and especially in California.  I would imagine at the time (early 40s) that the war did not resonate to the same degree as it would have in Great Britain or Europe.  I would guess from her comments that Smart was anti-war and as such, could not be expected to be all rah-rah-rah about it.  She was also young and in love.

Stephen mentioned some elements I hadn't picked up on: her use of water or fluid imagery.  Her references to nature and her social commentary were some of my favourite parts.  Her comments on youth and aging were also very pithy - though being middle-aged, somewhat hard to receive.

The 2nd book was Barthes' discourse on love.  Most of the class enjoyed the book.  Joni put together a couple of pages of quotations from the text and posed some questions arising from these, which we discussed.  The majority of the class enjoyed the structure.

We spoke about whether Barthes or Smart were gendered.  I felt that both novels were somewhat gendered - Smart's possibly less than Barthes to me.  I did find Barthes very gendered.  Some of his observations were applicable to both make and female but several of them were from a perspective I could not relate to.

It has been a good experience to read Werther, Smart and Barthes within 1-2 weeks of each other.  Now on to the terror of the French Revolution and Anatole France.

Barthes: A Lover's Discourse

Barthes, Roland: A Lover's Discourse - Fragments, tr. Richard Howard; Hill and Wang, New York, 2010

A telling instance of the narrowness of a North American science-based education is that I'd never heard of Roland Barthes before receiving the reading list for LS801, the 2013 edition.  I found this a challenging book to get through.  It took me quite a few chapters to get into the format, the structure of the book.  Though Barthes is dissecting love into its various manifestations, I still found that I wanted to argue against many of his declarations and conclusions - or at least ask for more exposition.  I really wanted to be sitting around a long dinner table, discussing his ideas and hearing him expound on his views.  I needed more, to really understand what he was trying to say.  I also didn't really feel that I had a good sense of Barthes as a man, what he would have been like in conversation with friends.

I've never had to look up so many words/jargon as while reading this book.  Barthes is writing his discourse from a lengthy background of study, discussion and theorizing.  I found the book was too referential for someone who has not been a student of philosophy.  I very much liked the structure of the book because I am a person who likes collecting bits and pieces and later trying to make a whole of them.  It's probably best a book to be dipped into in small doses with much time to ponder in between, not read straight through like a narrative.  I felt I needed to read Barthes' source material (of which I have really only read Werther, and Plato's Symposium & Phaedrus so far) - and then go back and reread Barthes' discourse again.

Sentences such as the following gave me much grief in trying to understand what Barthes was trying to say:
On pg 103 THE GHOST SHIP,

"errantry does not align - it produces iridescence: what results is the nuance. Thus I move on, to the end of the tapestry, from one nuance to the next (the nuance is the last state of a colour which can be named; the nuance is the Intractable)."

or when speaking about amorous exuberance, on pg 86 about EXUBERANCE which

"can be interlaced with melancholy, with depressions and suicidal impulses, for the lover's discourse is not an average of states; but such a disequilibrium belongs to that black economy which marks me with its aberration and, so to speak, with its intolerable luxury."

Barthes provides several introductory pages about how the book is structured.  Regarding the meaning of the "Lover's Discourse" on pg 94 NOVEL/DRAMA, Barthes writes:

"Enamoration is a drama, if we restore to this word the archaic meaning Nietzsche gives it: 'Ancient drama envisioned great declamatory scenes, which excluded action [...] 'Amorous seduction (a pure hypnotic moment) takes place before discourse and behind the proscenium of consciousness: the amorous "event" is of a hieratic order: it is my own local legend, my little sacred history that I declaim to myself, and this declamation of a fait accompli (frozen, embalmed, removed from any praxis) is the lover's discourse." 

Barthes goes to numerous sources, from the written realm but also from conversations with friends and acquaintances - and his marginalia is interesting.

Some random bits that I enjoyed or puzzled over:
Under JEALOUSY pg 145 he quotes Djeddi in La poesie amoureuse des Arabes Joseph yielded 'to the extent of a mosquito's wing.'  He writes that his references are "not authoritative but amical".
After Baudelaire and Ruysbroek "the gentleness of the abyss"
He writes that a sigh is "an expression of the emotion of absence."



In WHAT IS TO BE DONE, pg 62, Barthes speaks of

"Ethics, the unpersuadable science of behaviour."

And on pg 71 THE OTHER'S BODY

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tips of my words.  My language trembles with desire.

On pg 129  in IDENTIFICATIONS:

Identification [with other lost lovers] is not a psychological process; it is a pure structural operation: I am the one who has the same place I have.

In the section ATOPOS pg 34, defined as "unclassifiable, of a ceaselessly unforeseen originality,"
Barthes describes the beloved in one of the most succinct and beautiful ways I have ever come across:

"the other is, precisely, Unique, the singular Image which has miraculously come to correspond to the specialty of my desire."  

 He goes on to say that:

"The other is the figure of my truth, and cannot be imprisoned in any stereotype (which is the truth of others).

This agrees with my perception that there is not "One" person, there are many possible people that may be potential lovers but it all depends on timing, circumstance, the many external as well as internal factors.
A potential lover's desirability is also affected by mass culture.  In SHOW ME WHOM TO DESIRE
on pg 136, Barthes describes love as an "affective contagion,"

this induction, proceeds from others, from the language, from books, from friends: no love is original.  (Mass culture is a machine for showing desire: here is what must interest you, it says, as if it guessed that men are incapable of finding what to desire by themselves.

If this was true in the 70s, I can only begin to imagine how much more this applies to the 21st century.

This is unlike the Ancient Greeks' conception of love, the androgyne.  Barthes refers several times to the idea of the androgyne as propounded by Plato/Socrates and Aristophanes.  This is an image and a concept that has stuck with me ever since we read The Symposium.  It's appealing to think that there is another out there who fills the missing bits in oneself - there's a inevitability and durability to that concept that can be reassuring when in the torment of the love gone wrong or faded away.  In I WANT TO UNDERSTAND pg 60, he reprises Zeus' command to Apollo to 

"turn the faces of the divided Androgynes...toward the place where they had been cut apart...'so that the sight of their division might render them less insolent'."

 - like Adam & Eve and the citizens with the Tower of Babel in Genesis, we mortals sometimes presume.

In UNION pg 226

"En sa moytie, ma moytie je recolle - to her half, I rejoin my own half...desire is to lack what one has - and to give what one does not have: a matter of supplements, not complements."

Barthe spends an afternoon trying to draw Aristophanes' conception of the original hermaphrodites (androgyne figure) and concludes it is a "farce figure" and "out of the mad couple is born the obscenity of the household (one cooks, for life, for the other)."

He was very perceptive in describing all the odd little facets of love relationships.  On pg 92  THE WORLD THUNDERSTRUCK he is speaking of writing about one's own love (in journals, correspondence etc) and notes

"the events of an amorous life are so trivial that they gain access to writing only by an immense effort: one grows discouraged writing what, by being written, exposes its own platitude.

He was also effective describing love relationship other than the romantic or sexual ones.  In NO ANSWER pg 167 

"The perfect [...] friend, is he not the one who constructs around you the greatest possible resonance? Cannot friendship be defined as a space with total sonority?"

I had a hard time with much of Barthes mention of his mother and mothers and sons.  He portrays his mother is such a 2-dimensional, childish way.  She is discussed only in relation to her effect on her child, not as a person, a lover in her own right.  I'm not sure if this is a mother-son thing or a gender thing (Barthes is less interested in women as individuals, especially insofar as love is concerned).  In discussing Werther, Barthes refers to the famous blue coat which he was wearing when he met Lotte.  On pg 128  in BLUE COAT AND YELLOW VEST, Barthes writes:

"This blue garment imprisons him so effectively that the world around him vanishes: nothing but the two of us: by this garment Werther forms for himself a child's body in which phallus and mother are united, with nothing left over.  This perverse outfit was worn across Europe by the novel's enthusiasts, and it was known as a "costume a la Werther."

This isn't an analysis that resonates with me.  Nor can I identify or agree with his statement on pg 133 in IMAGES

"I project myself there [into a romantic painting of a cold scene] as a tiny figure, seated on a block of ice, abandoned forever.  "I'm cold." the lover says, "let's go back"; but there is no road, no way, the boat is wrecked.  There is a coldness particular to the lover, the chilliness of the child (or of any young animal) that needs maternal warmth.

To me, a woman, Barthes seems to be condescending when he mentions women.  He doesn't mention women often but when he does, it often has a negative cast.  In DOMNEI pg 82

"I shall exasperate myself with the chatter of women in the drugstore who are delaying my return to the instrument to which I am subjugated"and in THE DEDICATION pg 76

"I have this fear: that the given object may not function properly because of some insidious defect...for example, the latch [of a box] doesn't work (the shop being run by society women)"

In GRADIVA pg 126

"I want to possess fiercely, but I also know how to give actively.  Then who can manage this dialectic successfully? Who, if not the woman, the one who does not make for any object but only for . . . giving? So if a lover manages to 'love', it is precisely insofar as he feminizes himself, joins the class of Grandes Amoureuses, of Woman Who Love Enough to Be Kind."

The section which really resonated with me was THE UNKNOWABLE, on pg 134:

"I can't get to know you" means "I shall never know what you really think of me." I cannot decipher you because I do not know how you decipher me.

"To expend oneself, to bestir oneself for an impenetrable object is pure religion."
"To make the other into an insoluble riddle on which my life depends is to consecrate the other as a god."

This made me think of Elizabeth Smart who seems to have consecrated her life to orbiting around Barker.  Someone in our discussion noted that one of her sons said that all her life she regarded George Barker as a Jesus-figure.

Barthes goes on to write, in this section, that

"all the action of love obtains from me is merely this wisdom: that the other is not to be known." "I am then seized with that exaltation of loving someone unknown, someone who will remain so forever: a mystic impulse: I know what I do not know."

In THIS CAN'T GO ON, pg 141, Barthes describes suffering in love as pleasurable.
"Ever the 'artist', I make form itself into content" (echoes of McLuhan's 'the medium is the message').  It's not about what is causing the suffering, it's about the suffering itself.
Once the exaltation of suffering has dissipated, Barthes says he is "reduced to the simplest philosophy: that of endurance."  He quotes a folk poem that accompanies Japanese Daruma dolls:

Such is life Falling over seven times And getting up eight.

In JEALOUSY, pg 144

"As a jealous man, I suffer four times over: because I am jealous, because I blame myself for being so, because I fear my jealousy will wound the other, because I allow myself to be subject to a banality: I suffer from being excluded, from being aggressive, from being crazy, and from being common."

Barthes includes the etymology of the word jaloux which interestingly is borrowed from the troubadours.

He very accurately describes many of the progressions and devastating aspects of love, the events that wear away at the foundations.  In NO ANSWER pg 167 he writes:

"When you were talking to him, discussing any subject at all, X frequently seemed to be looking away, listening to something else: you broke off, discouraged; after a long silence, X would say: 'Go on, I'm listening to you'; then you resumed as best you could the thread of a story in which you no longer believed."

Also in GRADIVA, pg 125 he describes much of the game-playing which drives me crazy within a relationship and which is supremely irritating to have to observe in other people's relationships.  If only we could keep the resolve and clear-sightedness we can have when outside of our relationships, for when we are in the throes of relationships' dark sides.

I found less agreement with his statement in THE HEART pg 53, that "only the lover and the child have a heavy heart" but as with many of the areas where I initially found I disagreed with Barthes or even felt really irritated by something he wrote, when I thought about it more and tried to dissect or even refute it, eventually I could distill my ideas and examples down into his truth.  The examples I could think of of non-love related angst and pain often could be reduced to a sense of isolation, of aloneness, of abandonment.  Perhaps this is where he gets his repeated return to comparisons with mother-son bonds.

In one section, GOSSIP, he unexpectedly (for me) compares passion and reason, and writes on pg 184,

the gossip is light, cold, it thereby assumes the status of a kind of objectivity; its voice...seems to double the voice of knowledge (scientia)...When knowledge, when science speaks, I sometimes come to the point of hearing its discourse as the sound of a gossip which describes and disparages lightly, coldly, and objectively what I love: which speaks of what I love according to the truth.

In an echo of Neil Young "It's better to burn out than to fade away"in THE INTRACTABLE on pg 23 Barthes affirms love as a value regardless of how it all works out in the end; that he can be happy and wretched at the same time.  When told "this kind of love is not viable" he asks: 

"Why is the viable a "Good Thing?  Why is it better to last than to burn?"and states that he has "withdrawn from all finality."

SOBRIA EBRIETAS

Barthes ends his discourse with this section and defines this as abandoning the "will-to-possess".  He quotes a zen saying:

"As I sit calmly, without doing anything, spring comes and the grass grows of its own accord."

On pg 8 in HOW THIS BOOK IS CONSTRUCTED Barthes specifies that he is not trying to set down a philosophy of love but merely to affirm it.  Such a philosophy would be a perversion of its elements, a monster, and he quotes from a mathematician that "we must not underestimate the power of chance to engender monsters," warning the reader not to draw conclusions from the order of the various sections.  It's not a book to be read as a narrative and it's a book I will come back to, to read a section here and there and think about it, then come back to it again after I've done further reading and studying.  I'll put it on the bookshelf near my bed with some of the other bits I want to re-read.

Goethe: The Sorrows of Young Werther

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe: The Sorrows of Young Werther; Tr. Michael Hulse; Penguin Classic; London, 1989

This is one of Goethe's earliest works.  He wrote it after a period of time when he fell in love with a woman engaged to another man he was friendly with; and also after he learned of the suicide of a young man over a failed love.  It's written in the form of letters to an old friend but it seems quite dated. Having a man write another male friend bemoaning and sighing over his forbidden love seems very unlikely in this time.

His passion does ring true though Goethe didn't bring Lotte to life for me - she seems colourless and not very present.

Werther has a discussion with Albert (Lotte's fiancé) about love and passion.
[...] a man wholly under the influence of his passions has lost his ability to think rationally, and is regarded as intoxicated or insane.

Werther replies: Ah you sensible people! [...] Passions! Intoxication! Insanity! You are so calm and collected, so indifferent, you respectable people, tut-tutting about drunkenness and holding unreasonable behaviour in contempt, passing by like the priest and thanking God like the Pharisee that you are not as other men.  I have been intoxicated more than once, my passions have never been far off insanity, and I have no regrets [...]

As Werther becomes more depressed about the futility of his love for Lotte (the lack of any future togetherness) he speaks about the transitory nature of much love and the relative unimportance of individuals. [26 October]

Your friends value you! You often make them happy, and your heart in turn feels it could not do without them; and yet - if you were to go, if you were to depart from this intimate circle, would they feel the void, how long would they feel the void that your loss tore open in their fate? - how long? - Oh Man is so transient a being that even where his existence is most secure, even where his presence makes its sole true impression felt, he must fade and disappear from the memories and souls of his loved ones, soon, oh so soon!

[27 October]
I could often tear my heart open and beat my poor head on seeing how little people can mean to each other.  if I do not offer love and joy, happiness and warmth, ah! the other will not bring them to me either; nor will my heart, overflowing with rapture, move him at all if he is cold and listless.

Werther continues to love and pine after Lotte but after she marries Albert, he finds that he can't bear the idea, can't keep himself away from her and so he borrows Albert's pistols (such a passive-aggressive move though maybe it wasn't at that time) and shoots himself.  Like the real model (Jerusalem), Werther doesn't die right away but lingers for a day or so before dying.

Goethe has some lovely descriptive phrases about the countryside where Werther spent most of his time, in the mountains.  He speaks about sitting many hours at a table outside an inn, under the linden-trees.

The language is very over-wrought: beset hearts, floods of tears, tear my heart asunder, awesome majesty, torment, ardent pleasures, anguished spirit etc.  High Romance.

It seems very different from the man who wrote Faust.  Werther is very intolerant about reason, maturity and age.  In Faust, the older Goethe is more sympathetic to aging, writing: "Old age doesn't make us childish, as they say, It finds the true surviving child in us."  Though I didn't end up feeling connected to any of the characters or their problems, Werther's passion did seem strong and all-consuming and I felt this was a good introduction to an early Romantic novel.  Exposing my lingering prejudices, I would probably have found Werther's emoting more bearable if he were a female - but then again, maybe not...he did go on and on.

Love is a Stranger by Rumi

Rumi, Live Is a Stranger, Transl. by Kabir Helminski, Shambhala Publications, Boston & London 2000



Rumi was also a 13th century writer (30 September 1207 – 17 December 1273).  He was a Sufi mystic, born in Persia but in what is now Tajikistan, Afganistan.

I’d read a few of Rumi’s poems before but didn’t know anything about him.  Like everything else I’m reading this term, there is so much more I want to know about that time period: what was going on everywhere else at the time, more about sufiism, more about Persia and Afganistan at the time, more about Islam.  Rumi’s poetry reminded me of Sappho – maybe because both wrote so passionately about love and the beloved.  It’s hard for me to analyze and dissect these poems – their strength for me lies in the emotions I feel when reading them, in the power of the words - and so I want to save certain pieces I loved, so I can come back and savour them later.  I can see this being a book I’ll want to come back to and read in the future.

Rumi speaks often of love as being as a unifying force, of two souls combining. 

In I AM NOT (on page 56) he says:

I have put duality away

And seen the two worlds as one.

THE RUINS OF MY HEART (page 49)

[…]

My soul spills into yours and is blended

Because my soul has absorbed your fragrance,

I cherish it.

Every drop of blood I spill

informs the earth,

“I merge with my Beloved when I participate in love.”

[…]

He often includes imagery of wine and drunkenness, perhaps to show how love intoxicates the lover, how love infuses you and affects your thoughts, body and reason.  Many of his poems mention his beloved, Shamsi Tabriz.  At the end of  SWEEP THE DUST OFF THE SEA, on page 34

The Sun of Tabriz keeps me

drunk and languishing in this state

THE INNER GARMENT OF LOVE (pg 69)

[…]

Be drunk with love,

for love is all that exists.

Where is intimacy found

If not in the give and take of love.

Love for Rumi seems to be his way through the world, to spirituality, to fulfillment.  It’s not all sweetness & light and angels singing.  Many of his poems mention fire, burning, conflict, suffering, piercing.

DIDN’T I SAY? (Pg 22)

[…]

Didn’t I say, “They will waylay you and make you cold,

I am the fire and your warm desire.”

[…]

EXPANSION AND CONTRACTION (pg 41)

[…]

Those glances of love were arrows,

piercing and killing all reason

[…]

Hundreds of thousands of full moons

Are dedicated to the all night fever of His love

[…]

All perceptions are riding on lame donkeys,

While He is an arrow travelling through space.

[…]

In SONG OF THE REED (pg 50)

[…]

I want a heart torn open with longing

to share the pain of this love.

[…]

It is the fire of love that inspires the flute.

It is the ferment of love that completes the wine.

[…]

THE INNER GARMENT OF LOVE (pg 69)

[…]

If they ask what Love is,

Say: the sacrifice of will.

If you have not left your will behind,

You have no will at all.

[…]

Between the mirror and the heart

Is this single difference:

The heart conceals secrets,

While the mirror does not.

Rumi contrasts love and reason in some of his poems with reason proving the lesser faculty.

THE PULL OF LOVE (pg 31)

 […]

Though reason is learned and has its honours,

It pawned its cap and robe for a cup of love.

[…]

He describes reason as something very black and white, cold, demanding - not as a quality that brings purpose, depth and joy to life.

LOVE IS RECKLESS (pg 53)

Love is reckless; not reason.

Reason seeks a profit.

Love comes on strong, consuming herself, unabashed.

Yet, in the midst of suffering,

Love proceeds like a millstone

Hard surfaced and straightforward.

Having died to self-interest,

She risks everything and asks for nothing.

Love gambles away every gift God bestows.

[…]

Religion seeks grace and favour,

But those who gamble these away are God’s favourites,

For they neither put God to the test

Nor knock at the door of gain and loss.

LOVE IS A STRANGER (pg 18)

[…]

Reason, do not envy my mouth.

[…]

 whether you have raised a flag or a pen,

the night is gone and day has arrived,

and the sleeper shall see what he has dreamed.

He seems to suggest that reason tries to control love, to control the body and the person.  I’m not sure where Rumi thinks reason lives.  One of his line talks about covering “my reason, my head and my feet” suggesting Rumi doesn’t associate reason with the brain, certainly not with the heart as Mencius did.

WHAT A MAN CAN SAY (pg 28)

In the name of friendship

Don’t repeat to my Beloved

All that I said last night,

Out of my mind;

But if, by God, she hears it,

She’ll understand what a man can say

In the dark, loud or quiet, rough or soft,

When reason is not at home.

[…]

THE HOUSE OF LOVE (pg 67)

[…]

But you build up thought

like a massive wooden door.

Set fire to the wood.

Silence the noise of the heart.

Hold your harmful tongue.

While Rumi seems to fully support Love, this doesn’t apply to all passions (greed, envy etc).

EXPANSION AND CONTRACTION (pg 42)

[…]

If night never came, people would waste themselves

Pursuing all that they desire.

They would give their own bodies to be consumed

For the sake of their desires and greed,

But night appears, a treasure of Mercy,

To save them from desires for a short while.

[…]

When it comes to love though, moderation does not seem to be what Rumi recommends.

EMPTY THE GLASS OF YOUR DESIRE (pg 74)

Join yourself to friends

And know the joy of the soul.

Enter the neighbourhood of ruin

With those who drink to the dregs.

Empty the glass of your desire

So that you won’t be disgraced.

Stop looking for something out there

And begin seeing within.

[…]

When the earth is this wide,

Why are you asleep in a prison?

Think of nothing but the source of thought.

Feed the soul; let the body fast.

Love is not without its suffering but for Rumi even this has purpose. Love and spirituality are joined together in Rumi’s poetry.  For Rumi, Love seems to be transcendent and his words make you feel that even if it hurts and changes and doesn’t give you a “fairytale” ending, Love is a path worth pursuing because of its transcendent power:

THE GUEST HOUSE (pg 44)

[…]

Whatever sorrow takes away or causes the heart to shed,

it puts something better in its place –

especially for one who is certain

that sorrow is the servant of the intuitive.

[…]

WHEN A MAN AND WOMAN BECOME ONE (pg 55)

[…]

The garden of love is green without limit

and yields many fruits other than sorrow or joy.

TO TAKE A STEP WITHOUT FEET (pg 59)

This is love: to fly towards  a secret sky,

To cause a hundred veils to fall each moment.

[…]

LOVE IS A STRANGER (pg 18)

[…]

Love is a stranger with a strange language

[…]

ON THE DEATHBED (pg 23)

[…]

On this path, Love is the emerald,

the beautiful green that wards off dragons.

 […]

A WORLD WITH NO BOUNDARIES (pg 61)

With every breath the sound

Of love surrounds us,

And we are bound for the depths

Of space, without distraction.

We’ve been in orbit before

And know the angels there.

Let’s go there again, Master,

For that is our land.

[…]

out beyond duality

we have a home, and it is Majesty

[…]

These following lines don’t really demonstrate anything related to reason or passion but they are just phrases that I liked and wanted to remember.

ELEGY FOR SANA’I (pg 68)

[…]

he valued the whole world at a single barleycorn.

[…]

WORDS OF ALI WHEN HE REFUSED TO KILL AN OPPONENT WHO SPAT IN HIS FACE (pg 82)

[…]

I am not chaff but a mountain of patience.

[…]

EXPANSION AND CONTRACTION (pg 43)

[…] the eyes of the wise see to the end […]