Contempt

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 163 of 253 · 20 per page

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Perhaps what is most distressing about The Lost Sex is its pervasive odor of commercialization. Psychoanalysis is presented here as a business enterprise built on the grave of feminism and professing to be the only cure for the recalcitrant and “unhappy” woman the authors see everywhere about them, undergoing conflict between a new life style and traditional or constitutional needs. “Inner Space” Recently, two new statements on sexual differences have appeared. Both argue from “nature” by presupposing congenital temperaments for the two sexes. Lionel Tiger has defined patriarchy and male dominance as the function of a “bonding” instinct inherent in the male. This is patently a case of endorsement through rationalization, the “instinct” a method of converting history to biology. Erik Erikson’s formulation that a relation to inner and outer space differentiates the sexes is more benign and probably more influential. Retaining a Freudian or psychoanalytic theory of female personality and the notion that this is innate, Erikson adds something new in suggesting “femininity” is socially and politically useful. Erikson begins his famous essay “Womanhood and the Inner Space”176 by deprecating that part of male achievement which has brought the race to the brink of destruction, appealing to women to save it: Maybe if women could only gain the determination to represent publicly what they have always stood for privately in evolution and in history (realism of upbringing, resourcefulness in peace-keeping and devotion to healing), they might well add an ethically restraining, because truly supranational, power to politics in the widest sense.177

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Armand, for all his turpitude, is at once both more primitive and more logical than a “gentleman,” and more honest and direct than the respectable bourgeois whose real convictions he has simply put into practice, and who, by no accident, enjoys reading such passages for the vicarious illusion of mastery which he fancies is offered therein. The Balcony is Genet’s theory of revolution and counterrevolution. The play is set in a brothel and concerns a revolution which ends in failure, as the patrons and proprietors of a whorehouse are persuaded to assume the roles of the former government. Having studied human relationships in the world of pimp and faggot, Genet has come to understand how sexual caste supersedes all other forms of inegalitarianism: racial, political, or economic. The Balcony demonstrates the futility of all forms of revolution which preserve intact the basic unit of exploitation and oppression, that between the sexes, male and female, or any of the substitutes for them. Taking the fundamental human connection, that of sexuality, to be the nuclear model of all the more elaborate social constructs growing out of it, Genet perceives that it is in itself not only hopelessly tainted but the very prototype of institutionalized inequality. He is convinced that by dividing humanity into two groups and appointing one to rule over the other by virtue of birthright, the social order has already established and ratified a system of oppression which will underlie and corrupt all other human relationships as well as every area of thought and experience. The first scene, which takes place between a prostitute and a bishop, epitomizes the play much as it does the society it describes. The cleric holds power only through the myth of religion, itself dependent on the fallacy of sin, in turn conditional on the lie that the female is sexuality itself and therefore an evil worthy of the bishop’s condign punishment. By such devious routes does power circle round and round the hopeless mess we have made of sexuality. Partly through money: for it is with money that the woman is purchased, and economic dependency is but another sign of her bondage to a system whose coercive agents are actual as well as mythical. Delusions about sex foster delusions of power, and both depend on the reification of woman. That the Bishop is actually a gasman visiting the bordello’s “chambers of illusions” so that he can vicariously share in the power of the church only clarifies the satire on the sexual class system. Those males relegated to reading gas meters may still participate in the joys of mastery through the one human being any male can buy—a female as whore. And the whore, one wonders, what profits her? Nothing. Her “role” in the ritual theater where sexual, political, and social institutions are so felicitously combined is merely to accommodate the ruling passion of each of her rentiers.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  The hero then caters to the reader’s appetite in telling how he fed upon his object, biting “…the nape of her neck, the lobes of her ears, the sensitive spot on her shoulder, and as I pulled away I left the mark of my teeth on her beautiful white ass.” The last bite is almost a mark of patent to denote possession and use, but further still, to indicate attitude. Val had previously informed us that Bill Woodruff was so absurd and doting a groveler that he had demeaned himself to kiss this part of his wife’s anatomy. Our hero readjusts the relation of the sexes by what he believes is a more normative gesture. Without question the most telling statement in the narrative is its last sentence: “Not a word spoken.” Like the folk hero who never condescended to take off his hat, Val has accomplished the entire campaign, including its coup de grace, without stooping to one word of human communication. The recollection of the affair continues for several more pages of diversified stimulation by which the hero now moves to consolidate his position of power through a series of physical and emotional gestures of contempt. In answer to her question” ‘You don’t really like me, do you?’” he replies with studied insolence, “‘I like this,’ said I, giving her a stiff jab.”6 His penis is now an instrument of chastisement, whereas Ida’s genitalia are but the means of her humiliation: “I like your cunt, Ida…it’s the best thing about you.”7 All further representations conspire to convince the reader of Val’s superior intelligence and control, while demonstrating the female’s moronic complaisance and helpless carnality; each moment exalts him further and degrades her lower: a dazzling instance of the sexual double standard: “You never wear any undies do you? You’re a slut, do you know it?” I pulled her dress up and made her sit that way while I finished my coffee. “Play with it a bit while I finish this.” “You’re filthy,” she cried, but she did as I told her. “Take your two fingers and open it up. I like the color of it.” …With this I reached for a candle on the dresser at my side and I handed it to her. “Let’s see if you can get it in all the way…” “You can make me do anything, you dirty devil.” “You like it, don’t you?”8 Val’s imperious attitude sets the tone for the dramatic events which follow, and the writing soars off into that species of fantasy which Steven Marcus calls “pornotopic,” a shower of orgasms: I laid her on a small table and when she was on the verge of exploding I picked her up and walked around the room with her; then I took it out and made her walk on her hands holding her by the thighs, letting it slip out now and then to excite her still more.9

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  The function of class or ethnic mores in patriarchy is largely a matter of how overtly displayed or how loudly enunciated the general ethic of masculine supremacy allows itself to become. Here one is confronted by what appears to be a paradox: while in the lower social strata, the male is more likely to claim authority on the strength of his sex rank alone, he is actually obliged more often to share power with the women of his class who are economically productive; whereas in the middle and upper classes, there is less tendency to assert a blunt patriarchal dominance, as men who enjoy such status have more power in any case.34 It is generally accepted that Western patriarchy has been much softened by the concepts of courtly and romantic love. While this is certainly true, such influence has also been vastly overestimated. In comparison with the candor of “machismo” or oriental behavior, one realizes how much of a concession traditional chivalrous behavior represents—a sporting kind of reparation to allow the subordinate female certain means of saving face. While a palliative to the injustice of woman’s social position, chivalry is also a technique for disguising it. One must acknowledge that the chivalrous stance is a game the master group plays in elevating its subject to pedestal level. Historians of courtly love stress the fact that the raptures of the poets had no effect upon the legal or economic standing of women, and very little upon their social status.35 As the sociologist Hugo Beigel has observed, both the courtly and the romantic versions of love are “grants” which the male concedes out of his total powers.36 Both have had the effect of obscuring the patriarchal character of Western culture and in their general tendency to attribute impossible virtues to women, have ended by confining them in a narrow and often remarkably conscribing sphere of behavior. It was a Victorian habit, for example, to insist the female assume the function of serving as the male’s conscience and living the life of goodness he found tedious but felt someone ought to do anyway. The concept of romantic love affords a means of emotional manipulation which the male is free to exploit, since love is the only circumstance in which the female is (ideologically) pardoned for sexual activity. And convictions of romantic love are convenient to both parties since this is often the only condition in which the female can overcome the far more powerful conditioning she has received toward sexual inhibition. Romantic love also obscures the realities of female status and the burden of economic dependency. As to “chivalry,” such gallant gesture as still resides in the middle classes has degenerated to a tired ritualism, which scarcely serves to mask the status situation of the present.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  As a result, the sexual attitudes of the “undisputed monarch” of the “Land of Fuck,”43 as Miller chooses to call himself, are those of an arrested adolescence where sex is clandestine, difficult to come by,44 each experience constituting a victory of masculine diligence and wit over females either stupidly compliant or sagely uncooperative. There’s one girl on the block who will take on the whole boy’s club, but most are mean numbers who require working over; “good girls” whom parents and religion have corrupted into tough lays. The first afford the easy exultation of superiority, a feeling of utter and absolute contempt, the second, harder to make, provoke the animosity always reserved for the intransigent. The more difficult the assault the greater the glory, but any victory is pointless if it cannot be boasted of and sniggered over. Just as Kronsky is said to hover behind the door, the reader is given the impression that sex is no good unless duly observed and applauded by an ubiquitous peer-group jury. And so Miller’s prose has always the flavor of speech, the inflection of telling the boys: “And then I had to get over her again and shove it in, up to the hilt. She squirmed around like an eel, so help me God.”45 His strenuous heterosexuality depends, to a considerable degree, on a homosexual sharing. Not without reason, his love story, The Rosy Crucifixion, is one long exegesis of the simple admission “I had lost the power to love.”46 All the sentiment of his being, meanly withheld from “cunt,” is lavished on the unattractive souls who make up the gang Miller never outgrew or deserted. What we observe in his work is a compulsive heterosexual activity in sharp distinction (but not opposed to) the kind of cultural homosexuality which has ruled that love, friendship, affection—all forms of companionship, emotional or intellectual—are restricted exclusively to males. Miller’s sexual humor is the humor of the men’s house, more specifically, the men’s room. Like the humor of any in-group, it depends on a whole series of shared assumptions, attitudes and responses, which constitute bonds in themselves. Here sex is a game whose pleasures lie in a demanding strategic deception and manipulation of a dupe. Its object is less the satisfaction of libido than ego, for the joys of sense are largely forgotten in the fun of making a fool of the victim. But unless sex is hard to get, comic, secretive, and “cunt” transparently stupid and contemptible, the joke disappears in air. As with racist humor or bigot fun in general, failure to agree upon the presumed fundamentals turns the comedy into puerile tedium. The point of Miller’s game is to get as much as you can while giving nothing. The “much” in question is not sexual experience, for that might imply depth of feeling: the answer appears to be as much “cunt” or as many “cunts” as possible. In standard English the approximate phrase is probably Kinsey’s uninviting “number of sexual outlets.”

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Meredith’s heroine, Clara Middleton, has no money of her own and is prevented from earning any. She is therefore to be sold into security. It is Meredith’s conviction that many of the evils of society are due to an unconscious and conditioned falseness, a sickness so thoroughly “socialized” that it lies below the level of even political remedy. In other words, he has discovered that sexual politics is a mental habit buried deep in our culture which transcends the politics of class, however deeply intertwined the two may be. Perhaps Meredith’s most important contribution is his indictment of chivalry as a selfish custom of complacency which property and power have engendered in the male. The entire novel might have been based upon Mill’s observations on the vicious effects that the superior status awarded to men must necessarily have upon their characters. For the book’s real subject is its painstaking investigation of the egoist of its title; it is a veritable anatomy of masculine vanity in the person of Sir Willoughby Patterne. Here, for example, one is privileged to see the man in love: Clara was young, healthy, handsome; she was therefore fitted to be his wife, the mother of his children, his companion picture. Certainly they looked well side by side. In walking with her, in drooping to her, the whole man was made conscious of the female image of himself by her exquisite unlikeness. She completed him, added the softer lines wanting to his portrait before the world. He had wooed her ragingly; he courted her becomingly; with the manly self-possession enlivened by watchful tact which is pleasing to girls. He never seemed to undervalue himself in valuing her.168 Meredith knows his subject. One might call it the case of a man who looked into his heart—and those of his fellows—and wrote. This is the manner in which Robert Louis Stevenson responded: Here is a book to send the blood into men’s faces…It is yourself that is hunted down; these are your faults that are dragged into the day and numbered, with lingering relish, with cruel cunning and precision. A young friend of Mr. Meredith’s (as I have the story) came to him in an agony. “This is too bad of you,” he cried, ‘Willoughby is me!” “No, my dear fellow,” said the author, “he is all of us.”…I am like the young friend of the anecdote-I think Willoughby an unmanly but a very serviceable exposure of myself.169

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Yet it is not enough to find feminism evil—it must be diagnosed as an illness, a pathology, a “complex,” a mass delusion and an enemy of the hearth: “The cohesive integrated home has been destroyed and women are adrift.”155 The authors gently deplore the status of women in the previous century, blaming it on the industrial revolution and even expressing a tempered approval of feminist goals which they see as “an attempt to restore earlier rights and privileges.”156 Yet whatever slender validity their objectives might have had, both feminism and the feminists were “an expresson of emotional sickness, of neurosis…at its core, a deep illness.”157 Taking off from the thesis that if the sexes were equal they should be identical (a biological impossibility) the authors label equality a “fetish,” and go on to inform us that the feminists wanted to be males, and suffered from penis envy. Lundberg and Farnham unhesitatingly equate status and social position with male genitals in curious equations such as “male power-maleness,”158 and “this is what equality means: identity.”159 Wollstonecraft and the rest were “making a plea for the admission of women to the company of men on the factually erroneous premise that they were identical to men.”160 “It should be apparent that, far from being a movement for the greater self-realization of women…feminism was the very negation of femaleness…It bade women commit suicide as women, and attempt to live as men.”161 In demanding equal rights the feminists were asking to be men, a psychic derangement as lamentable as that of a man trying to achieve femininity. When one perceives that any ambition beyond motherhood is an ambition after the “impossible”—an ambition to be a man-then “everything falls into place.”162 It does indeed. The Lost Sex is explicit about what it takes to be the real feminist threat, an end to home, family and motherhood. Following the bromide that “marriage is an institution evolved…to protect women”163 comes the admission that feminism had not attacked marriage and the family per se, and then the charge that in “simply denying they were women…asserting they needed no male protection,” “clamoring” for economic independence, the revolutionaries were removing the beneficial “economic drives pushing women into marriage.”164 It is this which is most bitterly resented, this could make it possible to “avoid being women,”165 which the authors unappetizingly define as the process of forming a “sentimental bond” with an “economic overlord.”166 Through divorce, through abortion, through contraception, the sexual revolution had undermined marriage. Feminists had even attacked the double standard, with one clear motive—“their own deep desire to engage in lecherous and sensual activities.”167 This tragic error was, like all the rest, motivated by a futile desire to “emulate the male.”168 In advocating a single nonascetic standard, feminists were actually scheming for a “condition of sexual promiscuity.” Our authors endorse premarital chastity, but only for females as they find the double standard “not only inevitable but desirable” and a single standard “inwardly psychopathological” and “outwardly farcical.”169

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Engels is refreshingly frank about prostitution, a subject as obscured in his own time, through chivalrous tergiversation as, in ours, it is confused through a thoughtless equation of sexual freedom with sexual exploitation.144 Prostitution is, as Engels demonstrates, the natural product of traditional monogamous marriage. This assertion is capable of proof on a number of grounds, the simplest being numerical. When chastity is prescribed and adultery severely punished in women, marriage becomes monogamous for women rather than men, yet there should not be sufficient females to satisfy masculine demand unless a sector of women, usually from among the poor, are bred or reserved for sexual exploitation. This group, who among us, are largely enlisted from the socially and economically exploited racial minorities, were in Engels’ industrial England that group of poor below the working class. Smaller numbers are often set apart for additional services, such as conversation or entertainment: hetaera, geisha, courtesan, and call girl. Whatever society’s official attitude may be, the demand for prostitution continues within male-supremacist culture,145 and as Engels describes it, prostitution is as much a social institution as all others. It continues the old sexual freedom—for the benefit of the men. In reality not only permitted, but also assiduously practiced by the ruling class, it is denounced only nominally. Still in practice, this denunciation strikes by no means the men who indulge in it, but only the women. These are ostracised and cast out of society, in order to proclaim once more the fundamental law of unconditional male supremacy over the female sex.146

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  What such a skeptic will do instead is outlined fairly succinctly in Freud’s, “The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life,” he will make a rigid separation of sex from sensibility, body from soul; he will also develop a rationale to help him through this trying schizophrenic experience. The Victorians employed the lily-rose dichotomy; Lawrence appeared to have invented something new in blaming it on his mother. But the lily/rose division, which Lawrence is so harsh in excoriating in Hardy,56 is also a prominent feature of Sons and Lovers. Miriam is Paul’s spiritual mistress, Clara his sexual one—the whole arrangement is carefully planned so that neither is strong enough to offset his mother’s ultimate control. Yet the mother too is finally dispensable, not so that Paul may be free to find a complete relationship with either young woman, but simply because he wishes to be rid of the whole pack of his female supporters so that he may venture forth and inherit the great masculine world which awaits him. Therefore the last words of the book are directed, not at the self-sorrowing of Paul’s “nuit blanche,” his “dereliction” and “drift towards death,” but at the lights of the city, the brave new world which awaits the conqueror. When Paul wonders incoherently aloud—“I think there’s something the matter with me that I can’t…to give myself to them in marriage, I couldn’t,…something in me shrinks from her like hell”—just as when Miriam reproaches him, “It has always been you fighting me off,” the reader is expected to follow the précis and the critics and understand that this is all part of the young man’s unfortunate Oedipal plight. Lawrence himself attempts to provide a better clue to Paul’s type of fixation: …the nicest men he knew…were so sensitive to their women that they would go without them forever rather than do them a hurt. Being the sons of women whose husbands had blundered rather brutally through their feminine sanctities, they themselves were too diffident and shy. They could easier deny themselves than incur any reproach from a woman; for a woman was like their mother, and they were full of the sense of their mother…57

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  So far none of them has found 1& solution to this pressing need to subjugate the female, and all admit that in the interim they find a pis aller in homosexuality, frigidity, etc. The Italian’s pis aller is little girls and prostitutes. But he admits that even this is no adequate alternative; prostitutes submit out of greed, which is not submission at all, and even girl children are “modern women.” “Terrible thing, the modern woman,”135 Argyle sums up. Lilly had been playing the devil’s advocate throughout by recommending his official doctrine of “two fighting eagles” and the stellar polarity which was Birkin’s formula, but at the end, he “admits” that the others are right, and one realizes his disagreement might well have been no more than an ingenious tactic to spur on his comrades. There is really only one modem woman in the hook—the Marchesa. But the real villain is said to be Lottie, Aaron’s wife. She is anything but a feminist or new woman; she is simply poor, without hope, abandoned with three children. While Aaron’s fantastic adventures bring him the admiration of ladies whom he is pleased to reject, his real enemy is the working-class wife. Lawrence’s picture of her has that surprising disdain and malice that is typical of his treatment of women from the class he escaped. When Aaron decides that to stay in the cramped and sordid world of the poor would only mean to drown, he cheerfully leaves Lottie and his little girls to sink or swim, embarking on the more exciting career of following patronage and wandering about Europe. He explains that deserting them was merely “a natural event,”136 which needn’t even be excused with a reason. “So far man had yielded the mastery to women. Now he was fighting for it back again. And too late, for the woman would never yield. “137 Aaron is never ashamed to admit that he first beat his wife, then experimented with being systematically unfaithful, and finally resorted to utterly ignoring her presence. Lottie is said to deserve all this because of her detestable “female will”—a terrible magical force which is “Hat and inflexible as a sheet of iron,” yet “cunning as a snake that could sing treacherous songs.”138 Among its other crimes it has enabled Lottie to retain enough dignity to oppose her inhuman treatment and even insist Aaron admit he has treated her unfairly.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  The Victorians, or some of them, revealed themselves in their slang expression for the orgasm—“to spend”—a term freighted with economic insecurity and limited resources, perhaps a reflection of capitalist thrift implying that if semen is money (or time or energy) it should be preciously hoarded.13 Miller is no such cheapskate, but in his mind, too, sex is linked in a curious way with money. By the ethos of American financial morality, Miller was a downright “failure” until the age of forty; a writer unable to produce, living a seedy outcast existence, jobless and dependent on handouts. Before exile in Paris granted him reprieve, Miller felt himself the captive of circumstances in a philistine milieu where artistic or intellectual work was despised, and the only approved avenues of masculine achievement were confined to money or sex. Of course, Miller is a maverick and a rebel, but much as he hates the money mentality, it is so ingrained in him that he is capable only of replacing it with sex—a transference of acquisitive impulse. By converting the female to commodity, he too can enjoy the esteem of “success.” If he can’t make money, he can make women—if need be on borrowed cash, pulling the biggest coup of all by getting something for nothing. And while his better “adjusted” contemporaries swindle in commerce, Miller preserves his “masculinity” by swindling in cunt. By shining in a parallel system of pointless avarice whose real rewards are also tangential to actual needs and likewise surpassed by the greater gains run up for powerful egotism, his manly reputation is still assured with his friends. When reporting on the civilized superiority of French sex, his best proof is its better business method. The whore’s client is “permitted to examine and handle merchandise before buying,” a practice he congratulates as “fair and square.”14 Not only is the patron spared any argument from the “owner of the commodity,” overseas trade is so benevolent that there is nothing “to hinder you should you decide to take a half-dozen women with you to a hotel room, provided you made no fuss about the extra charge for soap and towels.”15 As long as you can pay, he explains, full of the complacency of dollar culture, no other human considerations exist. “At the hotel I rang for women like you would ring for whiskey and soda,”16 he boasts once in a pipe-dream of riches, inebriated with the omnipotence of money and the yanqui Playboy’s conviction that the foreigners do these things better.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  During the Hipster period of “The White Negro” and Advertisements for Myself Mailer seems to have thrown all hesitation aside, and while still harboring reservations about the virtues of violence on a collective scale, appears to have fallen in love with it as a personal and sexual style. A rapist is a rapist only to the “square”: to the superior perceptions of Hip, rape is “part of life,” and should be assessed by a subtle critical method based on whether the act possesses “artistry” or “real desire.”22 Confusing the simply antisocial with the revolutionary, Mailer develops an aesthetic of Hip whose chief temperamental characteristic is a malign machismo, still dear to those in the New Left who have fallen under Mailer’s spell in adolescence or continue to confuse Che Guevara with the brassy cliché of the Westerns. As the rampant individualism (domesticated Nietzsche) of Hip proliferates, it is interesting to observe the character Marion Faye change from the “homosexual villain” of The Deer Park into a banal movie satan in “Advertisements for Myself On the Way Out,” achieving a final apotheosis in the theatrical production of The Deer Park in which Mailer travestied his novel. Faye is at first only a sadistic pimp who goes about procuring “the kind of girl you could wipe your hands on.”23 But as the author’s own admiring preoccupation with Faye’s mastery of sex as manipulative power continues to grow, he invests this latter-day demon with an ambitious theological rigamarole, outfitting him with the glittery attributes of a cinema Faust and urban cowboy-Croft gone slick. The Deer Park began as a sympathetic and middling-good study of how a corrupt commercial artist, the director Charles Francis Eitel, picks up, exploits, then breaks and discards a woman who his snobbery fancies is his inferior. The structure, the moral logic and the aesthetic unity of the novel properly require that it end in Elena Esposito’s suicide, the final achievement of Faye’s sadistic powers of suggestion working upon the promising material of her own self-destructive descent into prostitution. The anticlimactic resolution Mailer chose to give the novel instead in the defeat of her empty marriage to Eitel has its own pathos. But the drastically different denouement imposed upon the stage version, with Eitel’s sad, self-regarding death, devalues the work even more outrageously as Faye is transformed from a sleazy hood with demented notions of Sin, to a sexual Faust of Hip, and Eitel is promoted from a plausible Hollywood heel to a hero of love.24

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  “The Time of Her Time” is ethnic sexual politics. It is interesting to compare Mailer with Roth in this respect.74 Portnoy’s long kvetch is hilarious demonstration of how elaborate cultural penis-worship may produce, in a man of intelligence or sensitivity, a monumental infantilism whose only satisfactions are a contradictory blend of onanistic self-deprecation and the cheap glory of settling old minority scores in the sexual exploitation of women.75 But Sergius the blond beast can scarcely be charged with sensitivity, and Mailer’s sympathy appears to pander without unembarrassment before such goyish virility, a Mick brutality glamorized into Hip. And SO Denise Gondelman is laid low, masculine pride so desperate a cause it can welcome alliance with anti-Semitism. “If Harry Golden is the gentile’s Jew, can I become the Golden Goy”76 Mailer wonders in a wistful verse, brooding over his romance with Aryan manliness, one of the most puzzling and ubiquitous of his paradoxical qualities. Since Mailer himself is inordinately fond of playing the would-be-lrish-buffoon,77 it is pertinent to remember that O’Shaugnessy is an adopted name and Sergius an orphan, presumed to be Slavic by birth. As the anomaly himself acknowledges, gracefully disingenuous, “There’s nothing in the world like being a fake lrishman.”78 While his heroes are invariably studies in sexual vanity, Mailer’s attitude toward their posturing tends to vacillate between mild irony and gratified participation. His considerable insights into the practice of sexuality as a power game never seem to affect his vivid personal enthusiasm for the fight, nor his sturdy conviction (curiously reminiscent of, among other things, two decades of arms race policy) that it’s kill or be killed.79 At times he is gallant enough to render homage to the enemy as a worthy opponent, a good swinging bitch, but like any soldier hardened by his own side’s agitprop, he can also fall into the jingoism of the sexual patriot: “Most men who understand women at all feel hostility toward them. At their worst, women are low sloppy beasts.”80 Mailer’s verses are bits of Avenger propaganda, whimsical pubic narcissism, always offered to the reader as “short hairs.” One titled “Ode to a Lady” consists of a playful dialogue between male and female. The “lady” speaks with a becoming humility, conscious of her dependence and inferiority: “Create me/ dear singing loin of some manly harp/ create me for I stifle where I stand.” Of course the poet is far too canny to be taken in by this sort of stuff, and he replies in stern recognition of feminine evil—“snake and foulest bitch, swine of a hundred feet.” His suspicions are splendidly vindicated in her reply, “sweet lord you’re kind/ Yes come to me honeybee/ and I will kill you.”81

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Since “whores are whores,” Miller is also capable of reviling them as “vultures,” “buzzards,” “rapacious devils,” and “bitches”—his righteous scorn as trite as his sentimentality. He is anxious, however, to elevate their function to an “idea”—the Life Force. As with electrical conductors, to plug into them gives a fellow “that circuit which makes one feel the earth under his legs again.”41 Prostitutes themselves speak of their work as “servicing,” and Miller’s gratified egotism would not only seek to surround the recharge with mystification, but convert the whore into a curious vessel of intermasculine communication-rhapsodizing: “All the men she’s been with and now you…the whole damned current of life Bowing through you, through her, through all the guys behind you and after you.”42 What is striking here is not only the total abstraction Miller makes of sexuality (what could be less solid, less plastic than electricity?) but also the peculiar (yet hardly uncommon) thought of hunting other men’s semen in the vagina of a whore, the random conduit of this brotherly vitality. There is a men’s-house atmosphere in Miller’s work. His boyhood chums remain the friends of his youth, his maturity, even his old age. Johnny Paul and the street-gang heroes of adolescence continue as the idols of adulthood, strange companions for Miller’s literary gods: Spengler, Nietzsche, Dostoievski. The six volumes of autobiography, and even the essays, are one endless, frequently self-pitying threnody for the lost paradise of his youth.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  In both the foregoing selections the most operative verbal phrases are: “I laid her on a small table” (itself a pun), “made her walk on her hands,” “she did as I told her,” and “I pulled her dress up and made her sit that way.” Ida is putty, even less substantial than common clay, and like a bullied child, is continually taking orders for activity which in the hero’s view degrades her while it aggrandizes him. Meanwhile, the hero’s potency is so superb and overwhelming that he is lost in admiration: “It went on like this until I had such an erection that even after I shot a wad into her it stayed up like a hammer. That excited her terribly.”10 And emerging from his efforts covered with so much credit and satisfaction, he takes account of his assets: “My cock looked like a bruised rubber hose; it hung between my legs, extended an inch or two beyond its normal length and swollen beyond recognition.”11 Ida, who has never demanded much of his attention, nor of ours, is quickly forgotten as the hero goes off to feast in his inimitable fashion: “I went to the drug store and swallowed a couple of malted milks.”12 His final pronouncement on his adventure also redounds to his credit: “A royal bit of fucking, thought I to myself, wondering how I’d act when I met Woodruff again.”13 Royal indeed. During the course of the episode, Val obliges the reader with intelligence of the Woodruffs’ marital incompatibility, a misalliance of a curiously physical character. Mr. Woodruff possesses a genital organ of extraordinary proportions, “a veritable horse cock.” “I remember the first time I saw it—I could scarcely believe my eyes”14 whereas Mrs. Woodruff’s dimensions have already been referred to under the rubric “small juicy cunt.” But lest this irreconcilable misfortune in any way excuse her in seeking out other satisfaction, it is repeatedly underlined, throughout the section of the novel where she figures that she is an uppity woman. Therefore the hero’s exemplary behavior in reducing her to the status of a mere female. Moreover, we are given to understand that she is an insatiable nymphomaniac-thus his wit and prosperity in discovering and exploiting her. The figure of Ida Verlaine appears to have haunted Miller’s imagination. It is not enough that his hero should discover her “whorish” nature and bring her to paroxysms of sensual capitulation while congratulating himself on cuckolding her adulating husband. In an earlier work, Black Spring, she appears as a woman discovered at prostitution and properly chastised. Here Miller’s didactic nature obtrudes itself and one is made to perceive the validity of his claim that his is a deeply moral imagination. Bill Woodruff’s brilliant reaction when the news is passed along to him by another buddy is narrated at length and with obvious relish. The narrator, again a version of Miller, regards the anecdote as “cute”:

• From The New Testament (Great Courses) (1997)

  69 repent in preparation. It explains why he “cleansed” the Temple. He was demonstrating that the coming judge would overthrow all the institutions of power—even the Temple and its sacri ¿ cial cult; only those who adhered to Jesus’ forewarning would be safe. It also explains why Jesus was seen to be such a nuisance that he had to be destroyed. Jesus must have attracted crowds during this tumultuous time in Jerusalem. According to the Gospels, he spent a week in the city before the feast, preaching to those who came to worship in the Temple. He offended powerful leaders by his actions in the Temple and his dire predictions against it. The leaders were naturally concerned about riots among the people. We know from Josephus of other disastrous riots occurring during Passover during the 1 st century. We also know from Josephus of other prophets who were predicting the end of the age and were arrested as troublemakers. Jesus, then, was arrested as a troublemaker and handed over to the Roman governor, Pilate. Pilate was concerned with keeping the peace during the incendiary time of the Passover Feast. After a very brief trial, Pilate decided to solve the potential problems caused by Jesus, whom he must have seen as a fanatical religious doomsday preacher, quickly and ef¿ ciently. And so, he did to Jesus what he did to two other troublemakers that same morning—and may have done to several others during the course of that week. He ordered Jesus to be cruci¿ ed at once. In this case, though, there was a major difference that neither the Jewish leaders nor Pilate could have anticipated. In this case, three days after his death, the cruci ¿ ed man was believed to have been restored to life. And that is the beginning of Christianity. Ŷ [Pilate] did to Jesus what he did to two other troublemakers that same morning. He ordered Jesus to be cruci¿ ed at once. In this case, though, there was a major difference that neither the Jewish leaders nor Pilate could have anticipated. 70 Lecture 12: Jesus the Apocalyptic Prophet Ehrman, Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet, chaps. 9–13. ———, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction, chap. 15. Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus. Meier, A Marginal Jew, vol. 2. Schweitzer, Quest of the Historical Jesus. Vermes, Jesus the Jew. 1. What evidence strikes you as most convincing that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet, anticipating the end of society as we know it through an intervention of God? How does this view differ from what you’ve previously understood about Jesus? 2. Does understanding Jesus as an apocalypticist have any bearing on the relevance of Christianity in the modern world? Essential Reading Supplemental Reading Questions to Consider

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  It is little wonder The Screens incited a storm both in France and in Algeria. Presented in government-subsidized theatre in a superb production by Jean-Louis Barrault’s company, The Screens, as Philip Thody has remarked, satirizes the French army as a body of “incompetent and attitudinizing [latent] homosexuals, and the one hundred and thirty years of French presence in Algeria as a totally ludicrous experience.”94 Broad, and often vulgar farce from start to finish, the play erupted into a riot when Genet’s legionnaires patriotically farted “French air” in sober tribute over their lieutenant’s corpse. In Algeria, The Screens is equally unpopular, for it accuses the revolution of becoming the very pattern of its colonial predecessor, leaving the masses, Said and the women, as wretched as before. The last scenes are a duel between a group of prophetic matriarchs, grand in their poetic rage and their visions of an ongoing revolution, and the pale and automated males of the new order, carbon copies of their French enemy, bursting with narcissism and military discipline, la gloire, and the organized slaughter called valor. Obviously under Fanon’s influence (probably via Sartre),95 Genet is remarkably indulgent toward the violence the insurgents, both men and women, perpetrate in the terrorist stages of the uprising. One of the most impressive and frightening scenes in the play is the depiction, through drawings after drawing upon the screens, of the atrocities the guerrillas commit. As screen after screen fills with blood and fire, Kadidja, the first martyr and presiding figure of the insurrection, pronounces her unrelenting hatred and satisfaction at the human sacrifice. Genet’s justification would doubtless be that oppression rightly seeks revenge, a stupid argument however fashionable. Violence of itself accomplishes nothing that revolutions are created to accomplish: in fact, it is likely to be the leading counterrevolutionary symptom, as Genet himself demonstrated in The Balcony. As means to the end of social justice, revolutionary crime is self defeating since it merely replaces older oppression and inequity with new. But Genet’s contempt for military murder is quite a different affair. In the lieutenant of the French legionnaires, he has created a splendid caricature career officer, an idiotic martial narcissist (“Let every man be a mirror to every other man”)96 a Maileresque case of repressed homosexuality finding its only outlet in cruelly eroticized violence, where love is hate, death is life, and war is sex. Here is the “brick and mortar,” spit and polish maniac giving orders to his troops: I want the army to send your families wristwatches and medals caked with blood and even with jissom…Preston!…my revolver…. Warfare, screwing…I want pictures of naked babies and holy virgins sewn into your linings…on your hair brilliantine, ribbons in the hair on your ass…And your eyes like the bayonet. And screwing. Get me: war’s a rip-roaring orgy. Triumphal awakening! My boots more brilliant Preston! I want war and screwing in the sun! And guts oozing in the sun! Get it? The Sergeant: Got it.97

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Medievalism and the securely remote flavor of courtly love seemed the best setting for this sort of discussion. Actually, it was Keats who started it all with that fatal woman in La Belle Dame Sans Merci who kept her knight hanging about disconsolate and “palely loitering.”189 Such a posture of lassitude was attractive to Tennyson, and he adopted it becomingly in Tithonus and The Lotus Eaters. It is probably more natural to him than the bootstrap determination of Ulysses. Throughout his poetic career, Tennyson appears to be tom between a vivid appreciation of the good woman of chivalrous sentiment (the buxom matron or virginal adolescent), and the fatal woman. They are neatly categorized under the era’s elaborate conventional Horal imagery of Lily and Rose. Tennyson’s early lyrics describe the fortunes of Shalott and Mariana, imprisoned high-born maidens full of sensibility and melting with sexual frustration-Lilies. Though it has a lily maid upon the scene as well, his major poem, The Idylls of the King, introduced the Rose element in two different manifestations of that temptation: Guinevere and Vivian. The subversive sexuality of the first brings down the entire Utopian dream of the Round Table. Tennyson’s ideal kingdom based on ideal marriage, the union of soul and sense, male and female, a Victorian synthesis of opposites, is a resounding failure. Arthur is all soul, a pure disembodied spirit, a Christ figure. Guinevere appears to be irredeemably human and is therefore classed as pure sensuality. Yet for all that, she has some dignity and is probably Tennyson’s best female character. Vivian, who renders Merlin helpless and so hastens the ruin of Arthur’s kingdom and Tennyson’s ideal state, is another matter. She is carnality unrelieved by a single sympathetic trait; a vaginal trap, a vagina dentata, a snakelike presence whose every cell is another bit of guile. In Tennyson’s adherence to the separate spheres’ dogma, the male is given over to intellect, rule, warfare and other altruistic projects calculated to serve mankind and promote civilization, but the female, as Vivian obligingly confesses, knows only the animal level of sexuality: “Man dreams of fame while woman wakes to love.” Yea! love, tho’ love were of the grossest, carves A portion from the solid present, eats And uses, careless of the rest; but fame The fame that follows death is nothing to us;190 At times this insatiable female appetite may be decorated with motherhood and called the “rose of womanhood” as in The Two Voices, a very early poem, but in the Idylls, his most mature production, Tennyson has occasion to see below this into the chasm of chaotic, uninhibited copulation which Vivian the Abstract Female presages; a world where if such as she takes any equal part can only roll “back into the beast.”

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  (Hence, our tendency to say, It ain’t the heat, it’s the stupidity.) It was the biggest bed I ever saw, and filled their whole bedroom wall-to-wall. She had to stitch up special sheets for it, and even the chest of drawers had to be put out in the hall. The only pieces of furniture that still fit next to the bed were a standing brass ashtray shaped like a Viking ship on Daddy’s side and a tall black reading lamp next to a wobbly tower of hardback books on Mother’s. Anyway, the four of us tended to eat our family meals sitting cross-legged on the edges of that bed. We faced opposite walls, our backs together, looking like some four-headed totem, our plates balanced on the spot of quilt between our legs. Mother called it picnic-style, but since I’ve been grown, I recall it as just plain odd. I’ve often longed to take out an ad in a major metropolitan paper and ask whether anybody else’s family ate back-to-back in the parents’ bed, and what such a habit might signify. With Grandma there, we used not just the table but table linens. Mother hired a black woman named Mae Brown to wash and iron the tablecloth and napkins when they got greased up. And we couldn’t just come in out of the heat at midday and pull off our clothes anymore with Grandma there. We’d had this habit of stripping down to underwear or putting on pajamas in the house, no matter what the time. In the serious heat, we’d lie for hours half-naked on the wooden floor in front of the black blade-fan sucking chipped ice out of wadded-up dish towels. Now Grandma even tried to get us to keep shoes and socks on. Plus we had to take baths every night. One of these first baths ended with the old woman holding me in a rough towel on her lap while she scrubbed at my neck with fingernail-polish remover. (It had supposedly accumulated quite a crust.) She undertook to supervise our religious training, which had until then consisted of sporadic visits to Christian Science Sunday school alternating with the exercises from a book Mother had on yoga postures. (I could sustain a full-lotus position at five.) Grandma bought Lecia and me each white leather Bibles that zipped shut. “If you read three chapters a day and five on Sunday, you can read the Holy Bible in one year,” she said. I don’t remember ever unzipping mine once after unwrapping it, for Grandma was prone to abandoning any project that came to seem too daunting, as making us into Christians must have seemed. Much later, when Mother could be brought to talk about her own childhood, she told stories about how peculiar her mother’s habits had been. Grandma Moore didn’t sound like such a religious fanatic back then. She just seemed like a fanatic in general.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Kangaroo pursues the same theme somewhat further, but its hero, Richard Lovat Somers, is so transparently David Herbert Lawrence, the famous writer, visiting Australia with his wife, that a measure of circumspection is necessary, and thankfully, a bit of humor, to prevent the novel’s still more pretentious fantasies from being utterly ridiculous. They follow the same patterns as those of Aaron’s Rod—a rejection of woman and the pursuit of power in erotic relations with other men which might lead to largerscale power relations over masses of men and the glory of being proclaimed a great leader and hero, a dictator in fact—a patriarch in the patriarchy. Here it is perhaps not out of place to review Lawrence’s progress, via his well-documented Oedipus complex, to this eminence. In Women in Love he graduated from being a son to a lover, while switching his allegiance from heterosexual to homosexual alliance, having already eluded the matronly eternal feminine Freud claimed to be the lifetime object of men who loved their mothers. Lawrence had achieved adult male status in patriarchal society in becoming a husband, if not a father. He had in fact, inherited the social privileges which are one facet of Oedipal concern. It may even be that the sexual content of the Oedipus complex has been exaggerated, the sexual-political ignored, and it is the latter certainly which commands our attention with regard to Lawrence’s later work. By the time of Aaron’s Rod, the Lawrentian protagonist has tired of being a husband, ceased to be a lover of women altogether, and has elected instead to follow power and those who possess it—males. In Kangaroo, Lawrence plods on as a bored husband, still childless, still yearning after the power of patriarchal kingship which both Laius and Oedipus enjoyed. Both mother and wife are tedious to him now; he desires what he takes to be his by right—a man’s power in a man’s world. An artist, a bohemian and a wanderer, Lawrence found it hard to come by these things. Married to a stubborn woman, who though she did devote her life to his service, steadily refused to relinquish her dignity to him, he must have found the tasks of mastery exhausting. While none of the events outlined above are unusual-they are the ordinary progress of masculine experience in our culture-Lawrence is remarkable in having felt them so keenly and recorded them so memorably. He has stressed what concerned him, but in recording his rejection of the father Sgure in Sons and Lovers, and in his passionate early identification with the mother, he appears to have left many readers unprepared for his later rejection of the mother Sgure, followed by a greedy arrogance for masculine privilege, which at last grew so overweening that it veered toward extremity and invented a religion whose totem was the penis—his own penis at that.