Monthly Archives: February 2007

Murder having replaced sex in the popular arts

Lobby card to Edgar G. Ulmer’s 1946 adaptation of The Strange Woman (1941), about a beautiful woman (Hedy Lamarr) who destroys the lives of the men around her.

Building my last post I came across a curious book called The Strange Woman, reviewed and analyzed by Gershon Legman:

In [Neurotica number 4 Gershon Legman] published “Institutionalized Lynch: The anatomy of a murder-mystery.” In three separate columns, he listed the instances of “Sadism,” “Sadism and Sex,” and “Sex,” as they occurred in the action of a best-selling novel, The Strange Woman, (1941) by Ben Ames Williams. Legman worked on the principle that, as the law tolerated no general description of sex, the result was the “mundane substitute for sex”–i.e., sadism:

Murder having replaced sex in the popular arts, the glorification of one requires the degradation of the other … so that we are faced in our culture by the insurmountable schizophrenic contradiction that sex, which is legal in fact, is a crime on paper, while murder–a crime, in fact–is, on paper, the best-seller of all time.

Taking a fifty-page sample of The Strange Woman, Legman found ten examples of “Sadism” (“Woman listens ‘with pent breath’ to details of whipping a man … Did he bleed,” etc.), ten examples of “Sadism and Sex” (“her knotted fists beat at him in passionate ecstasies”), and a single evocation of “Sex,” with that being a “nebulous description of a coitus.” — source

P. S. Ben Ames Williams’s The Strange Woman is also mentioned in this PDF file, a transcript of the book The Mask of Sanity (1941) by H ervey Cleckley which extensively cites Mario Praz’s Romantic Agony in the chapter on genius and the psychopath. The relationship between creativity and ‘perversion’ on the one hand and the representation of psychopathology and paraphilia is of interest to me .

I quote:

Anyone concerned at all with psychiatry is likely to find in Jenny Hagar Poster Evered of The Strange Woman (Ben Ames Williams) detail and concreteness familiar in the direct study of patients but hard to put into medical histories. In that she does not respect the rights of others and particularly in that she reacts in anything but a normal way in the deepest personal relations, Jenny might be proclaimed a psychopath whose deviation is extraordinarily complete. Sharply distinguishing points emerge when we consider the persistent purposiveness, the strong and sustained malice with which this woman works to destroy all happiness for children, husbands, and paramours. A conscious brutality prevails. Destructive impulses are directed consistently by open hate.

Related to my searches on psychopaths is this nice write-up by Gordon Banks: Don Juan as Psychopath. See also one of my earlier posts on Don Juan.

From the introduction:

“What kind of man is this Don Juan Tenorio?”, asks Leo Weinstein in his monograph on the Don Juan legend, “Why does he bend all his efforts to deceive women?. . . To the modern, Freud-oriented reader, Tirso’s hero is likely to remain enigmatic. . . .” Rather than permit the thought that the enigma is due to the lack of psychological depth and subtlety in the creation of a 17th century priest, I intend to demonstrate that the opposite is the case, and that nowhere earlier in literature is a description of the psychopath found more sharply delineated than in this brilliant play of a Spanish friar named Gabriel Téllez, who wrote El Burlador de Sevilla y Convidado de Piedra, under the pseudonym Tirso de Molina in the first part of the seventeenth century.

While it was not until the nineteenth century that physicians began to elucidate the nature of that disturbing category of human beings that we now call psychopaths, history and literature show that they have always been with us. Although psychopathic behavior was displayed by literary characters as early as Ulysses of The Iliad, (that same psychopathic Ulysses was later revisited by Dante in Inferno Canto 26), this Burlador (trickster), Don Juan Tenorio, has come to occupy a place in western literature alongside the other great legends of Don Quixote, Faust, and Hamlet. Later, under the successive ministrations of Molière, Hoffmann, Mozart, Da Ponte (Mozart’s librettist), and Byron, the character of Don Juan lost much of the vicious edge given him by his creator, and was gradually transmuted into the character we identify with the name of Don Juan today: the profligate lover and often, a romantic seeker for ideal womanhood.

Lastly, by the same Gordon Banks: Kubrick’s Psychopaths.

To the creator of films as well as other forms of literature, the dark side of human nature has often proved more rich and interesting than the bright. Films and books on the lives of saints have not been as popular as murder mysteries and works of horror. While we may have no desire to experience them in our own lives, terrible deeds and evil people exert their perverse attraction on our psyches. We who consider ourselves moral and upright are often fascinated by the behavior of the pitiless, merciless, and guiltless psychopath. Like a magnificent black panther: powerful, dangerous, and alien, the psychopathic character can have a dark, perfect beauty that simultaneously attracts and repels us. We will explore the use of such characters in the films of Stanley Kubrick, the 20th century film auteur as it relates to his view of the nature of both individuals and human institutions. But first, we will review the clinical view of psychopathy as assembled by students of brain and behavior over the centuries.

Eros, Neurotica, Gershon Legman and Scott McLemee

I am always glad to see writers and critics I respect make the leap from analog to digital ink and it is with great pleasure that I introduce Scott McLemee’s blog Quick Study. I first happened upon Scott McLemee’s writing about 5 years ago via Safety Pin as Signifier, a review of Bernard Gendron’s book Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club (2002). As you may know I am an obsessive Googler and I was probably searching for “high culture” and “low culture” to research my favourite textual category: the nobrow.

That Scott sits squarely in this category of the nobrow is firstly corroborated by the fact that he is often called — in his own words — “a “public intellectual,” which is probably a euphemism — a polite way around the fact that I have no degrees, no institutionally recognizable field of specialization, and, indeed, no credentials of any kind”.

The second ‘proof’ that Scott’s work belongs to this category is that one of his first posts is about one of the most intriguing figures I encountered when I was compiling the history of erotica at Jahsonic.com: Gershon Legman (1917 – 1999).

Scott writes:

Gershon Legman and the now mostly forgotten journal Neurotica have long been interests of mine — so it was probably a matter of time before they ended up, as they did today, in my column. Actually I hope to return to both subjects again in the future.

The column Scott refers to is one published in insidehighered in which he states that Gershon Legman coined the phrase “Make love, not war.”:

Valentine’s Day seems an appropriate occasion to honor the late Gershon Legman, who is said to have coined the slogan “Make love, not war.” Odd to think that saying had a particular author, rather than being spontaneously generated by the countercultural Zeitgeist in the 1960s. But I’ve seen the line attributed to Legman a few times over the years; and the new Yale Book of Quotations (discussed in an earlier column) is even more specific, indicates that he first said it during a speech at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, sometime in November 1963.

Thank you Scott, I hope you will be able to fill us in on the contents of Neurotica. Wikipedia has this:

During this period Gershon Legman also published a little magazine (actually so informally it was rather like a fanzine), Neurotica, which featured notable contributions and had some influence disproportionate to its circulation. Neurotica was published as a collection in a book and had some influence on Marshall Mcluhan.

Some Googling brings up this article: Behind the Beat; Remembering “Neurotica,” the short-lived journal of the Beats by James Campbell.

I quote:

The closest there was to a beat magazine (thought it could only be seen that way in retrospect) in the late 1940s and early ’50s was a slim, eccentric journal whose contributors moved among the bases of art, sex, and neuroticism. Neurotica was owned and edited by a young gallery owner from St. Louis, like Burroughs, called Jay Landesman. In the first issue, Spring 1948, he set out the magazine’s aims:

Neurotica is a literary exposition, defense, and correlation of the problems and personalities that in our culture are defined as “neurotic.”

It is said that if you tie a piece of red cloth to a gull’s leg its fellow-gulls will peck it to pieces: and Neurotica wishes to draw an analog to this observation and the plight of today’s creative “anxious” man.

We are interested in exploring the creativeness of this man who has been forced to live underground.

The magazine’s most prolific contributor was a maverick psychologist called Gershon Legman, described by John Clellon Holmes, who was a friend of Landesman and provided the conduit for beatness, as a “small belligerent facsimile of Balzac.” The general theme of Legman’s articles for Neurotica was that the American public’s increasing appetite for violence and sadism in fiction (Legman did not condescend to study film) stemmed directly from the puritanical suppression of the libido in everyday life.

Neurotica was owned and edited by called Jay Landesman who also contributed to Dutch Suck (magazine) and British Oz (magazine).

Destricted (2006) – Various

Destricted (2006) – Various

If you live in the vicinity of Antwerp, don’t miss your only chance to see Destricted on the big screen this year. It played today (I missed it) but also tomorrow and on Sunday. More info here.

Destricted is a series of seven short fiction films addressing each director’s views on the intimate connections between sex, contemporary art and pornography. Directors include Marina Abramoviæ, Matthew Barney, Larry Clark and Gaspar Noé.

Update Feb 18, 2006: what a total waste of time, a collection of films about modernist alienation, boring except for the Matthew Barney excerpt, which was quite beautiful and intriguing, the rise of the ‘male member’ was precious.

Happy Valentine

My internet crush Eva Deadbeat has reached a Youtube milestone and celebrates it by posting her own videos, a lovely picture of herself, and a superb punk song: “Oh Bondage, Up Yours!” by X-Ray Spex —source

All the censored kisses

Cinema Paradiso (1989) – Giuseppe Tornatore [FR] [DE] [UK]

Six, five, four, the numbers wind down. And there, on the reel, are all the expurgated scenes from the movies of his childhood: All the censored kisses. All the censored passion. All the censored life. —[1]

Al haar vleesch wilde hem

Lodewijk van Deyssel (1864-1952)

Excuse us for this Dutch post on Dutch naturalist writer Lodewijk van Deyssel. The excerpt below is from a first ongekuiste (unexpurgated) version of Een Liefde (A Love) (1887).

Fragment uit “Een liefde” (Uit de ongekuiste eerste versie)

pag. 188:
“Zij zag weer Jozefs twee bruine oogen, twee lichtpunten die naar haar toe schitterden, maar oogen van vroeger, de oogen van den doode, die niet óok waren in dien man hier in huis.
Zij ging weer op bed liggen, met haar bonzende hoofd, in haar koorts van wild begeeren. Haar beenen lagen wijd van elkaâr, met opgetrokken knieën. Haar oogen hingen zwaar en heet. Nu zou hij komen, nu zou hij komen, de zachte groote man, al haar vleesch wilde hem, haar heete mond, haar levende geslachtsdeel. Zij was hier, met haar armen, met haar beenen, om hem te ontvangen en hem aan haar vast te klemmen. Waarom kwam hij niet? Zij voelde hem niet in haar bed, zij voelde hem niet in haar lichaam komen. Zij richtte zich op en luisterde, als moest zij hem van ver hooren naderen. Maar alles bleef stil, totdat zij éens Jozef hoorde bewegen en hoesten, die achter den wand in zijn bed lag. Was hij dat, was hij daar? Neen, dat was de andere, het namaaksel van haar man. Dien moest zij niet hebben. En de heelen nacht eilde zij door, in een half-wakenden, half-slapenden toestand, in verschrikkingen, die het bede deden kantelen en de kamer instorten over haar hoofd, in droomen van zware blokken, die over haar lijf vielen, en van een God den Vader, een grijsaard met een langen baard en een kroon op zijn hoofd, die zachtjes tot haar afdaalde, maar dan onvoelbaar werd als een geest en in rook verwolkte om haar heen.”

Commentaar:

Een fragment als dit kan naturalistisch genoemd worden door de overmaat aan uiterst precieze beschrijvingen van alle gevoelsnuances, het impressionistische taalgebruik vol neologismen en bijvoeglijke naamwoorden; maar ook door de ongekuiste (voor die tijd dus schokkende) beschrijving van het lichamelijke.

Lodewijk van Deyssel heeft in de tweede uitgaven van zijn boek passages als deze vrijwillig gekuist, omdat er een storm van protest losbarstte. —source

Yet it is precisely this morning mood that is intolerable

German cover of Marcellus Emants novel Posthumous Confessions. [1]

I am currently teaching romanticism, realism and naturalism in literature. I’ve been studying literature for the last 2 years, but mainly from an anglocentric point of view so I was glad to find somewhat transgressive literature in my mother tongue. Marcellus Emants’s novel, Een Nagelaten Bekentenis (1894) is categorized in Belgium as naturalistic literature, but as is evident from the German translation shown above (Bekenntnisse Eines Dekadenten) it is categorized in Germany as decadent literature. The novel was translated by J. M. Coetzee in 1976. Another transgressive Dutch-language work of fiction to check out is L. P. Boon’s De paradijsvogel (1958), for a good article on Boon, see here.

From the opening:

My wife is dead and buried.

I am alone in the house, alone with the two maids. So I am free again. Yet what good is it to me, this freedom? I am within reach of what I have wanted for the last twenty years (I am thirty-five), but I have not the courage to grasp it, and, besides that, would anyhow no longer enjoy it very much.

I am too frightened of anything that excites me, too frightened of a glass of wine, too frightened of music, too frightened of women; for only in my matter-of-fact morning mood I am in control of myself, sure that I will keep silent about my act.

Yet it is precisely this morning mood that is intolerable. To feel no interest – no interest in any person, any work, even any book – to roam without aim or will through an empty house in which only the indifferent guarded whispering of two maids drifts about like the far-off talk of warders around the cell of a sequestered madman, to be able to think, with the last snatch of desire in an extinct nervous life, about only one thing, and to tremble before that one thing like a squirrel in the hypnotic gaze of a snake – how can I persevere to the end, day in, day out, in such an abominable existence?

Whenever I look in the mirror – still a habit of mine – I am astounded that such a pale, delicate, insignificant little man with dull gaze and weak, slack mouth (a nasty piece of work, some people would say) was able to murder his wife, a wife whom, after all, in his own way, he had loved. —source

Introducing Jules Michelet (1798 – 1874)

This is an updated version of a 2007 post. Hardly anything remains of the original post.

I first came across Jules Michelet by way of Georges Bataille’s Literature and Evil (1957), where Michelet is one of the subjects. This was in the early 2000s, the early days of the internet, when there were still interesting sites and blogs.

In my original post on Michelet, I gave one of the illustrations by Martin van Maële, some of which can be found here[1]. Van Maele, I wrote, is a student from Felicien Rops.

In that post, I also mentioned Jack Stevenson’s book on Häxan which confirms that the director Christensen was influenced by Jules Michelet’s book.

In that post, I mentioned Georges Bataille who said about Michelet was “one of those who spoke most humanely about evil”, a citation that comes from Literature and Evil.

But did I really?

Is it not equally possible that I discovered Michelet via Häxan (1922), said to be the first exploitation film and both based on Malleus Maleficarum (1487) and La sorcière (1862) by Jules Michelet.

Upon researching this in 2021, 14 years after my original post, it has come to my attention that Jules Michelet’s La sorcière, known in English as Satanism and Witchcraft, a Study in Medieval Superstition, is a work of proto-feminism and anti-clericalism.

I know it when I see it

“In a tantalizing and increasing tempo, the sex appetite is whetted and lascivious thoughts and lustful desires are intensely stimulated.”

Opening credits to Louis Malle’s 1958 film about adultery: Les Amants. Notice the ‘dangerous river’ (rivière dangereuse) and the ‘indifferent lake’ (lac d’indifférence).

Jeanne Moreau to the left, pictures sourced here.

Les Amants (The Lovers) is a 1958 French film directed by Louis Malle and starring Jeanne Moreau. It was Malle’s second feature film, made when he was 25 years old.

A showing of the film in Cleveland, Ohio resulted in a series of court battles that led to a Supreme Court decision on obscenity issues and judge Potter Stewart’s famous “I know it when I see it” opinion about what the definition of obscenity is. Usually dropped from the quote is the remainder of that sentence, “and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.”

A daringly frank novel

I’ve updated my page on adultery, and especially adultery in literature and happened upon this picture of a 1956 Signet edition of Alberto Moravia’s novel Conjugal Love, which I’ve sort of reviewed here. Signet is an imprint of the American paperback publisher New American Library.

Some comments on the wording on the jacket by antydiluvian:

Note the puffery from 1956: “A daringly frank novel.” This meant that if there was an adulteress in it, she didn’t die at the end. Or if she did it was from something not directly related to sex. What the woman did with her lover(s) was left to the imagination, of course — no “frankness” there. Any book that was translated from the French, Swedish, or (as in this case) Italian might be called “daringly frank” simply because anything written in those languages was automatically regarded as racy. And “complete and unabridged” meant that any scenes of actual European “frankness” in the novel were left intact for its American readers — which wasn’t always the case in those days.

I don’t know if any of you have checked IMDb keyword tool, but for Moravia you get this, which explains why Moravia’s work is classified as naturalistic, and also why I have come to like his work over the years.

Bill Marx writes in Alberto Moravia’s kinky, subversive realism is back in print:

“In the 1940s and ’50s, Italian novelist Alberto Moravia achieved international acclaim as a kinky realist whose Marxist-inspired moralism detailed the paralysis of the middle-class ego in the face of cultural and political collapse. Before and just after World War II, Moravia analyzed the blight of fascism; during the Cold War era he explored the spiritual costs of capitalism. What distinguishes Moravia from most other writers of politically inspired fiction, however, is that he was a popular novelist, his wide appeal rooted in his frank depictions of love and sexuality. Like Ignazio Silone, Moravia bore historical witness to the century’s horrors, but his fiction’s sleek dovetailing of Marx and Freud exposed the West’s inertia through the tortured curbs and caprices of the libido. The marketability of sex made the subversiveness of his critique palatable: Moravia’s books sold more than one million copies in the United States during the buttoned-up 1940s and ’50s.” —source

Incidentally Moravia’s work came to my attention in the early 2000s via Cédric Kahn’s excellent film L’ Ennui (1998). If you read more of Moravia — he is often considered the most popular Italian novelist outside Italy and his novels have been filmed lots of times in cinematic modernism — , you get the impression that there is nothing as exciting as an unfaithful wife, I tend to agree. It reminds me of a quote I read in one of the early issues of Mondo 2000 magazine. It went: “when you come to realize that safe sex is boring sex.”