I am crabby and dyspeptic

THIS. post. Dismissing my darling Zelda! Notice my long ranty comment. Oh and go read my long post on hookers! But I had to write about this. I'm incensed. I'm sitting in my bed sick with heartburn popping gross cherry Gaviscon tablets. Incensed.

UPDATE: well, he apologized and said my comment was "legitimate" (which still kind of irked me, but whatever).

SECOND UPDATE: We are still going at it in comments. I love Ross Brighton! He quotes Guy Debord: "Every speech act is a political act."

Tis Pity She's A Whore: The Prostitute in Henry Miller & Sade + Best Cinematic Hookers

So, in my last thorough post dealing with the Surrealists, I tried to locate Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer and (to a lesser extent) Bataille's Blue of Noon as hysterical texts (in a good way) taking the Molly Bloom monologue or Jean Rhys' Good Morning, Midnight as the models for hysteric texts. But then that opened up a host of other questions, such as, what does it mean for a text to be hysteric? Does it mean privileging the verbal? (yes) Privileging the emotional? (yes) Privileging the bodily? (yes) But then why do we call this feminine writing, isn't this inherently problematic, etc. etc. I'm having an identity crisis lately, in a good way, regarding my concepts of feminine writing, although don't know if I'm finding Kristeva's concept of the pre-Oedipal or the semiotic as the mode of revolutionary writing any less problematic or binary (I've begun teaching my intro to gender studies tooth-pulling sessions again, and so I'm now obsessed with the binary).

Another separate sticky issue this conversation opened up for me (a sort of faultline in my argument) is how many modernist texts by male authors colonize or vampirize the feminine voice, much in the mode of the medieval (male) confessor and (female) mystic, or old man Freud with his hysterics or with Schreber (love). Texts that take the unstable, mad voice, and ventriloquize it for one's "masterwork." So is Henry Miller really a hysteric, like a Schreber, in Tropic of Cancer, or is he appropriating the hysteric? Perhaps this is a question of authenticity. Is "The Waste Land" aping psychosis, reappropriating or thieving the female voice or performing the fractured psyche of modernity? Is Joyce channeling his dora-daughter's supposed "psychosis"? And the notion to claim someone as a hysteric is to objectify them, to take away their authorship, subjectivity, etc.  I see this as happening in Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night, which to me takes on the structure of a case study, quite literally in fact, as Dick/Nicole Diver are analyst/analysand as well as husband/wife (and the name Dick Diver so suggests the phallic + unconscious, calling to mind Carl Jung's quote about James vs. Lucia Joyce, his poor cross-eyed daughter that maybe he sexed up and maybe he did not, that both of them were sinking to the bottom of a river, one was falling in and the other was diving. And that makes me think of the devastating story of poor Lucia, sent to the asylum upon throwing a chair, declaring "I am the artist!"

Hmm. Now I am going off topic and thinking about the title of my post, which has led me back, eternally, to Artaud, who is bubbling underneath the surface of this discussion of Henry Miller & Sade. Artaud was fascinated by Tis Pity She's A Whore, a Jacobean play dealing with the incestuous love between a brother and sister. He found incest to be like the plague in his concept of the theater of cruelty, a necessary destructive force. And in his chapter on the mise-en-scene he goes in raptures over the Dutch painter van Leyden's work on Lot & His Daughters, probably the main myth I'm drawing on in my work Under the Shadow of My Roof (the title is from the Lot story in the Bible).

Everyone knows this story, right? That after Sodom & Gomorrah went to shit and Lot's Wife got curious and so got turned into the pillar of salt, Lot and his two daughters made their way into a cave and the daughters decided to get daddy drunk and fuck him? so as to make, you know, civilization keep on going? Best story ever, really. Artaud was really inspired by both 'Tis Pity She's A Whore and the story of Lot and his daughters for his play The Cenci, which I'm reading now, basically about a father who rapes his daughter, another important source text for Under the Shadow. What can I say. I'm really into the transgressive in literature.The repetitive and chilling monotony of Urs Allemann's Babyfucker. The harikiri and abortion ideation in the collection Killing Kanoko, a hot pink text from Action Books I'm so madly in love with right now I want to fuck it and have its abortion (this was a censored line from the film Fight Club, spoken by the glorious Helena Bonham Carter, just after she fucks Brad Pitt, a film also dealing with the concept of the double as well as cruelty).

You know when Artaud was this abject, suffering body in his series of asylums he was diagnosed with graphorrhea?  which means continual and incoherent writing? I feel my own personal diagnosis coming on.

Anyway. I hope in this post to explore the concept of the "whore" or prostitute (and are they synonymous?) in Henry Miller and Sade and maybe Jean Rhys, a topic I am quite interested in, as Under the Shadow of My Roof features a teenage libertine named Monkey who is locked in her basement and who used to work as a child prostitute (and in fact dissassociates into many different prostitutes and "whores" in literature and history, like the child prostitute in Catcher in the Rye, a fictional child prostitute of Roman Polanski's, Sade's, etc.) I am hoping perhaps to resituate Henry Miller's use of the word "whore" and "cunt" in Tropic of Cancer, and to perhaps rescue Miller from the charges of sexism. Can I reclaim Miller like Angela Carter attempts to reclaim Sade in The Sadeian Woman as not being entirely anti-woman? This remains to be seen. I'm not entirely convinced Carter did it either. But I will muse and ramble about this for some time.

Anyway, I'm supposed to be writing about "whores" (let's sequester that in quotation marks.) So the only possible transition from Artaud and incest is to gesture towards that Italian-American minstrel show on MTV, Jersey Shore. Yes! Not that I've watched it. I can stomach the grotesque and the cruel and a man hanging with tetherhooks attached to his body but not that.  It's like a minstrel show and a menstrual show rolled into one. But anyway, I guess on the show, a young woman who calls herself "Sookie" or "Snookie"? gets punched in the face, and the two men, her housemates, are very upset, because this young woman they classify as a "normal girl" and not a "whore".  Let me transcribe to you this fellow Vinny's take on it so you don't actually have to watch it (but if you want to here is the Jezebel link):

Vinny: There are some girls who are just going to come here, strip off their clothes and jump in the jacuzzi. Then there are some girls that are respectful, that you have to actually treat like girls, human beings.

This leads us to an discussion of Henry Miller's use of the term "whore" in Tropic of Cancer, which is both like and unlike Vinny's. And Sade has similar perspectives about a hierarchy of violence depending on a system of classifying women. So this is perhaps an interesting jumping off point, like into the group jacuzzi which I'm sure is festering with diseases.

There is a dialectic in Sade's fiction in his treatment of women, and Juliette and Justine, as characters, are quite in tension with each other. (The two main ones I've read are Juliette and Justine besides his Philosophy of the Bedroom.) A bit of a run-down for those who haven't read Sade. Justine is subtitled "The Misfortunes of Virtue" and is really Sade's attack on the notions of virtue and reason in the Enlightenment, specifically Rousseau's Emile, or Education. (Rousseau who wrote of Sade, "any young girl who reads this will be lost," something like that.) Anyway, Justine is the complete doormat/victim. She like her sister Juliette is forced into an orphanage (I'm paraphrasing, and might get some plot elements incorrect) and is basically raped and pillaged at every turn. She refuses to be a "whore," however, choosing to remain, spiritually a virgin, and it's very important to her that she's kept her virtue, even when she's enslaved, jailed, made a prisoner, tortured, etc. Angela Carter writes in The Sadeian Woman (a must-read) that Justine really symbolizes a sort of grotesque version of passive, victimized femininity, the little Red Riding Hood character (again, I'm paraphrasing). So Justine is Vinny's "normal girl" and Sade has absolutely no respect for her, and submits her to flogging, repeated rape, forcing her to eat shit (Sade LOVES scopophilia), etc.

Now Juliette is a libertine, and Angela Carter argues that the most powerful people (and victimizers) in Sade's texts are usually women (women who are whores, but high-class whores, we're talking about whore-as-pleasure and whore-as-profession). Juliette decides to get out of the orphanage (after being schooled in the arts of the erotics by one of the nuns) and decides to be trained at a brothel, and becomes like the best high-class hooker of all time (like belle de jour who's really excited at whatever the fuck's in that box). And throughout the very long text Juliette is having the time of her life, murdering and fucking whatever is in her wake, and watching people get murdered, and not possessing any bourgeois virtues like love or guilt or shame. She even fucks her own father and has his abortion. There are other women in the book, fellow femme fatales, and yes, they are the ones who have power.

So a libertine in Sade is one who experiences freedom by making others their victims. This applies to both women and men but Sade's most notable libertine, Justine, is a woman. She is also a whore, and, really, all the libertines in Sade are whores. But what is a whore? The OED's first definition of a whore is "a woman who prostitutes herself for hire, a prostitute." One of its literary roots, "whoremistress," is from Joyce's Ulysses, the Sirens section of the book (I think? yes? I have the Marilyn Monroe method of reading Ulysses, picking it up and reading idifferent sections). The brothelmistress is an allusion to Circe, the eternal mistress-whore. 

Anyway. So Justine is a whore, by that we mean she has sex for money, and she amasses a fortune at it, and has her own brothel. She is also a "whore," in the Sadean sense,  in that she fornicates wildly and with pleasure (this is the second definition in the OED, an "unchaste or lewd woman"). This is the good way of being a Sadean whore. "Whore" was a commonly used phrase to describe women who worked in brothels, as prostitutes. But, of course, we know that historically there has existed the cultural dialectic/double bind (aren't i teacherly?) of the whore/madonna, brought about to punish female sexuality and silence women. Vedrana Rudan (whose Dalkey novel Night I hope to speak to in my post on writing that privileges the verbal, she's like a Croatian Bernhard) has an excellent polemic up at CONTEXT about this very point. Let me quote:

One of my husbands once told me: all women are whores, you’ve just been controlling yourself lately. From a purely medical point of view, when is a woman a whore?

A woman is a whore when she gets her first period; until then, is she just a future whore?

Not at all, a woman is a whore even when she screams no, no, no, when her daddy thrusts his huge prick into her five-year-old pussy.

She’s a whore at fourteen, when she leaves the house in a miniskirt, tights, and a low-cut T-shirt . . . It’s her own fault if someone grabs her in the park at five in the afternoon and rapes her.

A woman is a whore when she doesn’t tell her fourteen-year-old daughter that all little girls in mini-skirts, tights, and low-cut T-shirts are whores.

A woman is a whore when she goes into a bar alone in the evening, when she goes into a restaurant alone at two in the afternoon, when she goes into a café alone in the morning. If she weren’t a whore she wouldn’t go into these male spaces unaccompanied, her body is itself a clear message: I need a dick.

Sade, however, has no problem with unchaste or lewd women, fornicators or adultresses. He celebrates them for their ability to be victimizers, i.e. libertines, the ones freed from bourgeois binds. Although one could argue that the femme fatale as represented in literature/art/film is as objectifying as the hysteric (along with the hysterical female voice in "The Waste Land" are the women of the dark arts, like Madame Sosostris). Mary Ann Doane in her book on femme fatales argues that  the representation of the femme fatale reveals an anxiety and horror of the feminine. So, less bad-ass woman and more castrating female.

Angela Carter argues, that Sade celebrates female sexuality by insisting that it should be nonreproductive (i.e. anal, oral, or hardcore woman-on-woman action.) This is what Carter writes about Justine (the one who clings to her "virtue" if not her virginity):

In a world where women are commodities, a woman who refuses to sell herself will have the thing she refuses to sell taken away from her by force. The piety, the gentleness, the honesty, the sensitivity, all the qualities she has learned to admire in herself, are invitations to violence; all her life, she has been groomed for the slaughterhouse.

This is interesting to me, especially in light of Sade's biography (yes, we have to go there, especially with the hooker issue). Sade might have respected high-class hookers, ye olde equivalent of the call-girls, but he treated women at the bottom of the brothel like trash. Especially if they were poor. There was the old woman Rose Keller, whom he lured to his chateau and cut marks into with his knife and poured hot wax into her cuts (something I'm really interested in is, what is the link between Abu Ghraib and the Sadean chateau? is there a connection there? is glorifying libertinism glorifying torture and cruelty? I attended an excellent lecture on sade by Paul Chan when he had his show at the renaissance society.). Then there were the Marseilles hookers he poisoned with Spanish fly when he made them eat lots of anise candy so they would fart in his mouth. And in truth the only woman he was ever arguably in love with was his wife's sister, who was a fucking nun. How's that for the madonna/magdalene dialectic (and we can link it to the Lazare/Dirty triangle in Bataille's Blue of Noon, or shall we say Simone Weil/Laure). OK, I think I write "dialectic" too much, I have to remove that from my vocab and come up with more interesting words. Anyway, Bataille, who was one of Sade's biggest defenders, has written that Sade actually writes with the language of the victim, because the torturer reverts to an authoritarian silence. Although Elaine Scarry writes in The Body in Pain that one is silenced when one is tortured, so, yeah, I think torture in general is pretty silent. Except a script for S&M (which reminds me, again, of Chris Kraus' Aliens & Anorexia).

Deleuze&Guattari (or as Whitney Trettien calls them, Dolce & Gabbana), suggest that Sadean sexuality is about the desire to push one's limit-experience, either by being a masochist or a sadist (and Sade was both, although he was always in control of his own masochism, carving out notches in his bedpost when he would pay a prostitute to whip him. Rousseau was also totally into the whip as well.) So can we read the sexuality in Miller and Bataille as less colonialist, and more this desire to reach transcendence, to be Artaud's body-without-organs? Or does libertinism always have to do with overpowering the Other as well as the Self? (Although for Artaud the body-without-organs was accomplished not through sexuality, he had a disgust of the body, but through theater and cruelty and schizophrenia.)

Bataille suggests that if one is a libertine then one must make the other as well as oneself an object in order to be free. And Miller is made as much of an object through fucking; fucking for Miller is a mystical experience. There is that scene at the end of Tropic where he "looks down into this fucked-out cunt of a whore" and the cunt opens up like a crater and the world opens up beneath him and he is devoured up with ecstasy and has all these crazy apocalyptic visions. Now. I know that "fucked-out cunt of a whore" sounds really really female-bashing (although a LOT of the female-bashing in this novel is actually through the friends of the narrators, not the narrator himself). Hmm. But I don't think it's that simple. In some ways there is this sense of making another an object, making oneself an object as well.

But...one of the things I love the most about starting these ramblings on this blogs are that the people who read and comment on this blog sounds much more lucid than I do. This is Angela Simione commenting on my last post dealing with Tropic of Cancer:

I definitely agree that in tropic of cancer miller's persona is not sadistic. misogynist? yeah. but then, as i think about struggling with social expectations of masculinity in that era, and about modernism itself- about mass production and the assembly line, i begin to wonder if his sexuality in this work is a means of countering the mass production of ethics and moralities and refuting the command to fall in step with these things... a return to the "primal" (pre-christian morality) in an attempt to find the pure core of humanity... modernism's charge to find a pure expression of self. is violence a pure expression? is there a place within where emotion is still untainted by expectation? is this hysteria? there is a definite calling toward transcendence in his book... a hope for it... and maybe by any means necessary.

Yeah, I think Angela has a big point here. The modernists were really interested in returning to the primal myths, and for Miller in some way this sort of sexuality, reducing a woman's body to a cunt, is returning back to the primal. This sense of "violence as a pure expression," Bataille's ideas of cruelty and transgression as the key to sovereignty, etc. And Bataille writes that in the process of dissolution the female is passive, the one dissolved as an entity, the male partner dissolves into the female, which is heteronormative, totally problematic, but there's no denying in sex there is the power relationship between fucker/fuckee. Bataille again: "Along with our tormenting desire that this evanescent thing should last, there stands our obsession with a primal continuity linking us with everything that is." But. I think in Miller, specifically, we dismiss Miller for being a misogynist, and carefully reading Miller I think it's more complex than that.

Bataille doesn't actually help matters. He writes "Not every woman is a potential prostitute, but prostitution is a logical consequence of the feminine attitude." Ouch. Okay. Well, how about this - Henry Miller takes on the feminine attitude in Tropic of Cancer. Miller is as big of a whore as the women he fucks, who are for the most part, whores-by-trade. And so much about Tropic of Cancer is about being a slave to the dictates of capitalism. The Miller character is terribly desperate, constantly, and spends the entire book scrounging for money, for hotel rooms, for drinks, etc. He identifies with the whores. He IS a whore in Tropic of Cancer.  Henry Miller IS a commodity object in this world of the demimonde, he is regularly bought and sold in the course of the novel, and in the work I think he's saying something really interesting about linking capitalist exploitation with prostitute, much like Jean Rhys does in Good Morning, Midnight, in the flashback to the scene where she's fired from the atelier.

To bring in Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project (why not?) there is a difference between Tropic of Cancer and Good Morning, Midnight, which I see as two complementary texts dealing with being at the absolute bottom (the position of the whore, or is the whore prey AND predator?). In Benjamin's section on the flaneur, he really situates the flaneur as being specifically masculine, the gazer, not the object of the gaze. The flaneur is never the commodity, he searches for these commodities, whether in shop windows or in the female body (although the flaneur is usually looking but not buying, the flaneur has no aim or object to his explorations). Haven't read Janet Wolff's essay on "The Flaneuse" in a while, but I think she's saying that in modernity a woman alone on the streets is usually seen as a commodity object, ripe for exploitation. And, in fact, a woman in the 1920s alone on the city streets was always seen as a whore, unless she was accompanied or pursuing a domestic errand. (Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself - yeah, she just wanted to get outside!) This is reminding me of Agnes Varda's excellent film Vagabonde (or in French, "Sans toit ni loi," "without roof or law") as well as its companion work (to me), Barbara Loden's transcendent "Wanda", both about drifting women who are forced to rely on others and land in a series of beds in order to survive, who become whores by necessity. And Henry Miller is that sort of whore, he is always looking for a scrap of bread to be tossed his way, he is a beggar, like Violette Leduc's old beggar lady in The Lady and the Little Fox Fur.

Okay. Follow me here. I think I have a point to make. By the time of Jean Rhys' oldest character Sasha Jensen in Good Morning Midnight, the Rhys figure has become not easy prey anymore in regards to her body, but she is still seen as easy prey because she is viewed as a rich woman, because of her fur coat. However, the irony of this is that she is still penniless and dependent on the kindness of others, to be all Blanche DuBois about it, although she has lost her value as a commodity object, so she is not on the market anymore, selling herself in cafes, so to speak. The Russian artist who wants her to buy a painting. The gigolo who tries to prey on her emotions (and she becomes predator as well, wanting to be in control of the situation, a sort of revenge for her past of being by necessity dependent on men and her beauty to survive, living without roof or law). She is flaneuse though, I think, in GMM, by the virtue of her age and that she has money, she is able to stroll, sit in cafes without being seen as a prostitute, she can try on hats and get her hair died. I mirror Sasha Jensen's affair with the gigolo in GMM with Mrs. Copperfield's slumming in Jane Bowles' awesome Two Serious Ladies, her affair with the prostitute Pacifica.

But Henry Miller is not slumming in Tropic of Cancer, he is a part of that whole demimonde, the world of the half-light, dependent on his friends and even on prostitutes to support him. One of his "cunt portraits" is the prostitute Germaine, who in the beginning of their relationship preyed on him for money, but by the end she was loaning Miller the money.

As I say, she was different, Germaine. Later, when she discovered my true circumstances, she treated me nobly - blew me drinks, gave me credit, pawned my things, introduced me to her friends, and so on. 

Miller sees in Germaine a Sadean Juliette, a "whore from the cradle" who unabashedly enjoyed her (heterosexist) sexuality. He sees her as all body, not hampered by the mind. Okay, this quote doesn't help my point about Miller not being misogynist:

And while it's very nice to know that a woman has a mind, literature coming from the cold corpse of a whore is the last thing to be served in bed.

Although, we have to realized that Miller was enthralled & very supportive of Anais Nin's literary talents. But anyway, in Tropic of Cancer, even the prostitutes have pity on him, and he has to whore himself out. He writes from the point of view of the whore, even though he's the fucker and not the fucked. He's dependent on his wife to send him money, on his friends to feed him, even strangers, he has to work a string of humiliating servile positions (such as being a manservant for an Indian man, this post is not about whether Miller was racist or not, answer would be: yes). The Holy Grail is to find a rich woman to take care of him (or "rich cunt" as his misogynist friend Van Norden says). He even lets a guy take naked pictures of him if he'd buy him dinner. And when he gets a job as a proofreader, he views it as whoring himself out.

Okay, don't think I made any revolutionary points. I don't think I'm doing anything so gross as trying to reclaim the terms "whore" and "cunt". And I realize the blatant hypocrisy of "whore" being a term reserved for women. But I'm interested in how libertinism is bound up in the traps of gender.

Perhaps I can end with a list of my favorite cinematic prostitutes (no particular order)

Catherine Deneuve in Belle de Jour

Who doesn't dream of being whipped by Michel Piccoli? Also: What was in that box?

Louise Brooks in Pandora's Box

 It was the genius! Louise Brooks who wrote of the ending scene where Lulu is murdered by Jack the Ripper:  "It is Christmas Eve, and she is about to receive the gift that has been her dream since childhood. Death by a sexual maniac."

Jane Fonda in Klute

"You're all obviously too lazy and too warped to do anything meaningful with your life so you pray on the sexual fantasies of others. That's your stock and trade isn't it, a man's weakness and I was never fully aware of mine until you brought them out."

Elizabeth Taylor in Butterfield 8

Delphine Seyrig in Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quay du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

Mirroring the thankless monotony of domestic work with the monotony of fucking a guy a day for money. That kind of reminds me of the exchange between the fictional prostitute and Mania Akbari in Kiarostami's Ten: "You're wholesale, we're retail." Both Jeanne Dielman and Pandora's Box end with a knife, a moment of violence mingled with ecstasy. 

Charlotte Rampling in The Night Porter

She was, in essence, a camp prostitute, who wore black triangles mirroring their pubic beards (which reminds me of those Degas brothel monotypes). I know there's something wrong with me, but I find this film unbearably erotic, I write about it in Under Shadow of My Roof, as the father/Bluebeard figure begins to stage pornos with his daughter in the dungeon, who he calls his Eva Braun, and they're of the S/M variety, and my libertine realizes she's really a masochist. Kind of an homage to the "erotic"  sadistic photographs in Jelinek's Wonderful, Wonderful Times, kind of based on the porn star Sasha Grey, kind of based on Night Porter, kind of based on the real-life Fritzl case. In my unpublished novel Green Girl one of the characters also wears a version of the above costume to a club. 

Jean Harlow in Red Dust

This is a terrible picture from this film! I wanted to embed the youtube link when Jean Harlow is trying to talk to Clark Gable about different types of cheeses, and he pulls her on his lap, and she has that look on her face like "hey, wait a minute" and then she realizes she likes it. Harlow was priceless with such reactions. Her films under the Hays Code. "The fallen woman must reform by fade-out." Harlow was obsessed with Gone w/ the Wind, but didn't want to play the prostitute Belle Watkins. I've written about some of these ideas, S/M,  along with Clark Gable, an obsession with Gone with the Wind, in an essay called "Slapping Clark Gable," to be published soon I think by Make magazine.