University of Colour: he was addressing a class of old, old men on the
principle of greenishness. ‘For example,’ he said, ‘there are many
modern artists who will not use green at all in their pictures: it is
a foreign colour, an outside colour, an extra colour--the colour of
conclusion. Therefore the colour of haughty youth, which is final, and
of weird old age, which is beyond finality. The modern painter who
banishes green does so from ambition: he means to show that he can
give his pictures an effect of conclusion without making use of the
wittiness of green. Primitive people make use of green with religious
brutality to clinch any argument in colour. Flowers, on the other
hand, never use green, nor the sky; unless unwholesome--an eccentric
avoidance of a banal they-know-not-what. Earth-green is the symbol of
time overcoming time. Green is a colour of sophisticated crudeness
and of crude sophistication. A brute thing is in its heart of hearts
green, and a casuistical mind is in its heart of hearts green. The
grave mathematical most is green, and the silly poetical least is
green. The new-born baby is green and the newly-dead person is green.
And the extreme of tragedy is green, and the extreme of comedy is
green.’
At this moment the oldest of the old, old men got up and shrieked,
smilingly through his three teeth, saying: ‘I spent my whole fortune
in one night in music and food on a girl whose mother was a singer and
whose father was a chef. “Trrup,” she said, snapping her fingers, “you
are an old man, and I love a boy who blacks my boots.”’ ‘Trrup,’ he
shrieked, smiling through his three teeth, ‘I am green, I am green, and
this is my life’s story.’ And ‘Trrup,’ shrieked all the old men, ‘we
are green, we are green.’ Until He could not bear the noise and stopped
his ears with his fingers, and closed his eyes.
When He removed his fingers from his ears and opened his eyes, he was
sitting by his own fireside, and his cat was on the hearth-rug and She
was near him, knitting him a green jacket. ‘Trrup,’ said the cat’s
eyes, ‘what a fool you are to dream such sense,’ and ‘Trrup,’ said She,
‘what a dear silly you shall be napping in my green jacket.’
‘I,’ said He to himself, ‘must tell this story to my mother, it will
amuse her.’
And it was told, and it did, and she believed it of He, and everything
else that was told of him, and put another lump of sugar in her tea,
near the bottom of the cup, saying to herself: ‘Is it not so? Sometimes
I like Mrs. History, and sometimes I do not. Sometimes I pity her, and
sometimes I wish her worse trouble. And what does it matter, since she
is all this, and I am all that, and each of us always, no matter what
happens, a bit of herself? When I am angriest I am nearest to kindness,
and when I am clearest in my head I am nearest to confusion. Is it not
so? I am sure I never know what I am going to do next. For instance,
there are those wicked loves who follow a certain red flag: I am sure
I should forget myself and join them if it were a green one.’ For she,
taking after her own son, was also a liar.
§5
The most curiously integrated of the groups of stories which may be
classified as a single dramatic (or philosophical) unit of the book
is the queen-group. Indeed it is possible to discuss this group as
if it were but one story, the episodic variations seeming no more
than caprices of style--the same story told in different degrees of
earnestness and so in different personalities, as it were. The one
fixed personality of the group is the Queen herself; the others are
all stylistic personalities. The Queen began as a photograph used by a
newspaper at discreet intervals to represent the female bandit of the
moment or the murder-victim or the fire-heroine or the missionary’s
bride. By experience and variety she became a personality, and a fixed
personality. It is quite remarkable in fact how under our very eyes
this anonymous author should be able to transform a fiction into a
fact: for the Queen is as true for always as the photograph is each
time false. Indeed, the whole transformation is merely a matter of
style. To illustrate: ‘As Maxine, the world’s sleeplessness champion,
the photograph had great momentary importance but did not know it
because it was part of a newspaper dynamic in which everything happened
with equal fatalistic effect, everything was accident, in the moment
succeeding accident it was always clear that nothing had happened. As
photograph therefore the photograph saw all this; it was permanently
unimportant but it knew this. And as it had a knowledge of its
unimportance, it also had a knowledge of the importance of accident;
and as the first knowledge made it insignificant so the second
knowledge made it Queen. The Queen, the photograph without identity,
this anonymous particularity, did in fact dwell in a world in which
she was the only one and in which the world of many was only what she
called “the chaotic conversation of events.” So she resolved to put
her queendom in order, not by interrupting the conversation, which
would only have increased the chaos, but by having minutely recorded
whatever “happened,” whatever “was.” Nothing then in her queendom
contradicted anything else, neither the argument nor its answer,
neither the burglar-proof lock nor the burglar against whom it was not
proof: everything was so, everything was statistical, everything was
falsification, everything was conversation, and she was an anonymous
particularity conversing with herself about her own nothingness, so she
was outside the chaotic conversation of events, she was Queen.’
Her three chief statisticians (we learn) were publishers. They were
all pleasant fellows, each with a touch of the universal in him, and
came and went without suspicion everywhere in the queendom because of
their peoplishness: they too, like all the rest, were statistical,
so statistical indeed that they were statisticians. They went about
preaching the gospel of the communal ownership of events. They said:
‘Primitive man believed in things as events. As civilized man it is
your duty to believe in events as things.’ And the people did. And they
permitted the statisticians (or publishers) to know what happened to
them and what they did with what happened to them as faithfully as they
reported their possessions each year in the great Common Book. In this
queendom there was no loss and no mystery and no suffering, because
everything was reported as conversation and nothing therefore thought
about. All was automatic spontaneity, even their love for their Queen.
As for the Queen, she would walk (we are told) through the dark rooms
of her palace at night, having each room lit only upon her leaving
it, until she reached her own small chamber, which remained unlit all
night while the others shone; until morning, when in her own small
chamber the curtains were drawn, the lamps lit, while in all the other
rooms of the palace there was daylight. The meaning of this is plain:
that in the anonymousness of the Queen lay her non-statistical, her
non-falsificatory individuality. She is the author, the queendom is
her book. She is darkness and mystery, the plain, banal though chaotic
daylight is her unravelling. By making the unravelling more methodic
and so more plainly banal she separates in people the statistical from
the non-statistical part, the known from the anonymous. She shows
herself to be a dualist of the most dangerous kind.
For a long time the authorities from the internal evidence of the
queen-stories suspected the anonymous author of being a woman.
They said that it was not improbable that the book was the Bible
of an underground sect devoted to educating female children to be
statistical queens. But this view had to be abandoned as unscholarly,
even ungentlemanly, because in nothing that the Queen said or did was
there any accent of disorder or ambition: she merely, with miraculous
patience and tact, saw to it that records were kept of everything.
The authorities eventually concluded that she was a Character of
Fiction, and so stainless, and could not help them. For some time
their suspicion was fixed on a character in one of the stories with
whom the Queen fell in love. But as he was Minister of Pastimes to
the Queen it was thought that it might prove generally disrespectful
to State officials to pursue the matter further (as when, in the
story _Understanding_, suspicion was fixed on the character who
bribed the magistrates to convict him, the inquiry was stopped by
the authorities--the detectives even put on the wrong scent--as too
metaphysical and cynical).
It must now be clear that the strain of my task is beginning to tell on
me. I have become very nervous. In the beginning my emotions were all
scholarly, my task was a pleasure, I had the manner of calmness with
an antiquity. Toward the end fear has crept upon me. I must speak, and
after that go on till I can go on no longer: till I am prevented. I say
_prevented_. For I am haunted by the obsession that the authorities
are still watching. They do not suspect the Queen. She was or is a
fixed personality, so anonymous as to be irreproachably a Character of
Fiction. The others vary in earnestness; in anonymity; they are, as I
have suggested, personalities of style; they point to the probability
that the author was not or is not a Character of Fiction. I dare go no
further. I have become very nervous. I shall nevertheless attempt to
continue my task until--I am prevented.
One of the three publishers was a Jew. He was tall, his ears
outstanding, his grin long, his voice loose in his mouth. He had
been financial adviser to a charitable organization and had had much
general statistical though humane experience. He was gross but kind
and therefore in charge of all sentimental records: his grossness
assured accuracy, his kindness, delicacy. He had the historical genius,
and several specimens of his work are given--though with a touch of
dryness in the author himself which makes it impossible to enjoy
them as we might have were the book without an author. Indeed, they
were not meant to be read at all, but merely written to satisfy the
political instincts of the Queen, who never read them herself. I find
it difficult to pass over them myself, for aside from their part in the
book they are very interesting. There are several small extracts that
might be used here with complete propriety and even in a scholarly
way. And after all, the author wrote them down himself, did he not? But
he was writing and not reading. But am I not writing and not reading?
My position becomes more and more uncertain. I shall hurry on.
I shall give one of the Queen’s monologues, to tide us over this
difficult period. The monologue does not appear in the book itself: it
would have been a piece of naturalism contrary to the theory on which
the book was built. Therefore I give it here, as reading. No questions
must be asked of me, for as a scholar I should feel obliged to answer
them; and the passage would then become writing; and I should have
produced a piece of naturalism. Here then is, shall I say, a variety:
which is not the anonymous author’s writing but we might almost say his
reading, and after that my writing but of his reading, which remains
reading for all my writing. My conscience is in your hands: the burden
of curiosity and falsification falls upon you. With you rest also
the rights of anonymity, the reputation of style, the fortunes of
publication, the future of philosophy and scholarship and the little
children, for whom these contrive sense. Sense, I say, not satire.
And now for the Queen’s monologue, which the anonymous author did not
write and which for this very reason requires, as the reader’s part,
sense, I say, not satire, even more immediately than what he did
write. Furthermore, you will have to discover for yourself where it
begins and where it ends: were I to mark it off it would become writing
and so a piece of naturalism and so bely sense and give encouragement
to satire. I mean: restraint, statistics, falsification, is more
accurate than courage, reality, truth, and so truer. For the Queen’s
monologue, since the anonymous author did not write it down, is true;
had he not statistically, falsificatorily, restrained himself from
writing it down it would have become a piece of naturalism and so a
subject of satire. To tide us over a difficult period I set myself the
difficult task of writing down the Queen’s monologue without turning
it into writing, and so defying satire (if I succeed, which depends on
you). The important thing is to defy satire. Satire is lying: falsity
as opposed to truth and falsity as opposed to falsification. It is
betwixt and between; against sense, which, whatever it is, is one thing
or the other--generally the other, it being for practical purposes
impossible for it to be perpetually one thing. By practical purposes
I mean of course the question of boredom, as truth finding truth
monotonous. Therefore things happen. Sense, I say, not satire. Imagine
a woman has her heart broken and imagine a man breaking it, then her
heart heals and he ceases to be a villain, and then they meet again
and her heart is whole and he is not a villain. Does she weep because
her heart was once broken and does he blush because he once broke it?
This would be satire. No, they both smile, and she gives him her heart
to break again, and he breaks it. This is sense. Or they both smile
and turn away from each other, and this, too, is sense, but sense too
academic to survive the strain of academically enforcing itself. The
One Thing must be saved from itself, it must not be allowed to overwork
itself or go stale. That is why sense is one thing or the other and
generally the other: falsification to relieve truth, broken hearts to
protect whole hearts, weakness to spare strength. Fact is fancy and
fancy is desire and desire is puff! puff! everything that satisfies
it and which must be carefully recorded in spite of contradictions
and lengthiness. Desire is the other things, in great number. And
what is satisfaction? Not the other things, that satisfy, but the one
thing, that cannot satisfy or be satisfied, and so, though but one
thing, equal to desire, and so to all the other things. Fact is _it_
not _me_; fact is fancy and fancy is desire and desire is the other
things. Satisfaction is _me_, which _it_ calls Queen. _It_ is a lot
of him’s, _it_ is a queendom, _it_ is desire speaking the language of
satisfaction, _it_ is a great looseness and restlessness of fact and
confusion of eyesight and costume, into which the Queen brings sense
through order. And what is order? Order is observation. Her first
publisher (or statistician) is a gross, kind Jew. Her second is a
subtle, cruel Turk, who brutally forced events: he has the political
genius. But the people do not mind, since the events happen anyhow:
they shrug their shoulders good-naturedly and say ‘Old Hassan Bey
smiling with Turkish teeth,’ and call on the first publisher to take
notice how smilingly they wince back. Her third is a Christian, and
he does nothing: he has the philosophical genius. His idleness and
talkativeness exasperate the other two into efficiency. His favourite
harangue is: ‘Let the people create their own order.’
‘But how, their own order?’
‘Let them think.’
‘But if they think, they will all think differently, and not only
differently--some will think more powerfully than others.’
‘Exactly: those who think more powerfully than others will create
order.’
‘But this would not be real order, rather the disorder of a false order
created by the most powerfully thinking individual or individuals of
the moment. This would be anarchism, and anarchism is not enough.’
‘I have heard that said before, but how is the order created by the
Queen not anarchism?’
‘The Queen does not create order, she observes methodically, she
creates _her_ order. That is why _it_ is _her_ queendom.’
‘But is this not merely a refined form of anarchism?’
‘No, it is more than anarchism. The Queen is not the chief individual
of her queendom; she is the _me_ of the _it_; she is the one thing,
her queendom is the other things; she is satisfaction, her queendom is
desire, a lot of _him’s_. The more _me_ she is, the more _it_ it is,
and the more anonymous she is, and the more she and her queendom are
diplomatically indistinguishable. The domestic situation is of course
another affair. But to carry the distinction beyond the boundaries of
the book is to fall betwixt and between, into satire.’
§6
Therefore the time has come to close. I am discovered, or rather I
have discovered myself, for the authorities lost interest in me when
they saw that I would discover myself before I could be officially
discovered, that I would in fact break through the pages and destroy
the strongest evidence that might be held against me, that is, that
‘An anonymous book----’ etc. I understand now that what they desired
to prevent was just what has happened. You must forgive me and believe
that I was not trying to deceive, but that I became confused. I
over-distinguished and so fell into satire and so discovered myself
and so could not go on, to maintain a satiric distinction between
authorship and scholarship.
And what of the woman who loved an engine? I cannot say. And the woman
who was bewitched by a parallel? I cannot say. They come after the
place where I left off.
THE DAMNED THING
§1
‘Sex’ is crude sex, resembling other crude appetites which similarly
lose significance as soon as satisfied; and it is translated sex--sex
surviving the satisfaction of the appetite. As the first it applies to
the mechanics, as the second to the sentiment of sex.
The child begins with crude sex alone. It innocently indulges itself in
sensual pleasures. It loves kissing and to be kissed, stroking and to
be stroked, fondly contemplating its excretions. The civilized society
into which it is born magnifies the importance of these insignificant
local sensations, gives them intellectual depth. It creates a handsome
receptacle, love, to contain the humours of this unnaturally enlarged
instinct.
So much at any rate for the male child: parental care nurtures
masturbation into love and marriage. Sex may stop short of love at
lust. It may be anything it pleases, so long as it satisfies the
standard measurements for social impressiveness.
The female child has a different history. She shares a short period
of sexual casualness with the male child, at the end of which she
immediately becomes a candidate for the recipience of masculine love;
while the sexual training of the male child is intensified at this
point. This difference accounts for the so-called early maturity of
the female child. For at the time when her male contemporary is only a
first-year man she is already a graduate without benefit of education;
and her proper mate is therefore a graduate.
Although intelligent people are generally aware of the equivocal
background of love and marriage, they nevertheless go on marrying for
the relaxation and social ease that comes of doing what every one
else is doing. Any other course would be socially unintelligible; and
explanations are indecent. Imagine a man and a woman both undeformed by
sex tradition and that an intimacy exists between them. The intelligent
major part of their intimacy incorporates sex without sentimental
enlargement: it is an effect rather than a cause. And it is eventually
absorbed, it undergoes a diffusion, it is the use of an amenable
physical consciousness for the benefit of mental consciousness.
But traditionally sex would be the cause not the effect of such an
intimacy. The conventional language of love could scarcely express
it otherwise; the only diffusion recognized would be the verbal
substitution of commendable emotions for gross passions. When the
lover said ‘I love you’ it would be socially impossible for him to
mean: ‘Our personalities have an intense and irresistible sympathy. I
am so conscious of you and myself together that sometimes my sexual
glands are stimulated by the very thought of you.’ It would be
impossible for him not to mean: ‘My sexual glands, by the ingrowing
enlargement of my sex instinct since childhood and its insidious,
civilized traffic with every part of my mental and physical being,
are unfortunately in a state of continual excitement. I have very
good control of myself, but my awareness of your sexual physique and
its radiations was so acute that I could not resist the temptation to
desire to lie with you. Please do not think this ignoble of me, for I
shall perform this act, if you permit it, with the greatest respect
and tenderness and attempt to make up for the indignity it of course
fundamentally will be to you (however pleasurable) by serving you in
every possible way and by sexually flattering manifestations of your
personality which are not strictly sexual.’
The diffusion which modern society calls love is the colouring of sex
with sentiments which have no connection with sex, sentiments which
are not served by sex but serve sex, by making attractive to the
finical civilized mind an instinct naturally repulsive to it. They are
literary. Sex, in the imagery of Stendhal, is the naked branch which,
when introduced into the salt mine, comes out covered with crystal
formations: love is the imaginative crystallization of naked instinct.
The naked instinct is the monstrous male instinct. The crystallization
is an aphrodisiac for the female, in whom sex is comparatively casual:
the sparkling branch creates in her an appetite for love equal to the
male’s tremendous sexual offering, which she would otherwise shrink
from accepting. By this stratagem the male himself does not seem to
the female to be touching her; in love virginity remains spiritually
undamaged. It is like the doll in a recent Oxford smoker. Whenever the
doll was touched, the young person of the piece, who had a psychic
connection with the doll, was affected, though untouched herself,
so the nun conceals carnality from herself by washing herself in
dollish instalments. Love is Masoch’s stately and marble-like Demon of
Virginity (‘the deeply rooted fear of existence every creature feels’),
a lewd and prudish Shepherdess.
The only courses possible in sex then are love and marriage, misconduct
and perversion. Misconduct is masculine brutality, the male’s refusal
to dress up the overgrown branch; and feminine indelicacy, the female’s
willingness to accept the overgrown branch in spite of its unromantic
nakedness. Perversion varies in character. It may be mere animal-like
sexual levity. Or the biological cynicism of the species. Or it may
occur in the male when love and marriage or ordinary misconduct seem
insufficient to his exaggerated sex instinct, which can only be
satisfied by an instinct as exaggerated as his own. Or it may occur in
the female as a feministic improvement on man-made sex, nevertheless
imitating it in its mechanism from an irrepressible sexual nostalgia.
Or it may occur, as also in the male, through deprivation of normal
sex life--though more rarely than in the male, since her sex instinct
is less demanding. Active Lesbianism is a form of sexual derangement
resulting from the female’s mistaken effort to become sexually
equivalent to the male: passive Lesbianism is a romantic substitution
of the feminine branch for the masculine branch in the forced absence
of the latter, the crystallization remaining the same.
There is an intellectual side to masculine homosexuality that is never
very strong in Lesbian alliances. Homosexuality in men indeed is more
often intellectually induced than in women: it is ascetic, whereas
women are not sexually fanatic enough for sexual asceticism. The
disgust of homosexual men with civilized heterosexual love becomes a
disgust with the crystalline aggressiveness of the female body. If a
woman is attractive to a homosexually minded man it is because she
seems what he calls ‘pure and virginal’--aloof, that is, from her
sexual uses. The disgust is really with the aggressive male sexuality
which is responsible for the crystallization. Wherever there is great
cynicism about sex, in Islam, say, or in France, homosexuality is
connived at as an intellectual supplement to heterosexual life. The
classical type of homosexuality was far less exclusive and severe than
the modern type: it was sophistication rather than specialization.