Showing papers on "Lust published in 1975"

The Genius Figure in Antiquity and the Middle Ages

Abstract: Nitzsche's survey of the Genius figure touches on Gower as the last link in a chain of medieval adaptations. After reviewing the Geniuses of Bernardus Silvestris, Alanus de Insulis (Alain of Lille) and Jean de Meun, Nitzsche turns to the CA. Gower's Genius "appears to be an Orpheus figure who wishes to rescue Euridice (concupiscence, or Amans) from the underworld of demonic and disruptive love fantasy" (128). Gower's poem is original in having Amans, not Natura, complain to Venus. It also "offers the most optimistic view of the problem of sin and its solution" (133). Amans is able to move from the Venus of courtly love or lust to the Venus of "caritas" (132). By doing so he becomes a poet, an artificer, a role frequently associated with Genius. [CvD]

Love, the Word, and Mercury: A Reading of John Gower's Confessio Amantis

Abstract: Gallacher argues that the CA provides a sustained reflection on the importance of the Word (Logos, Verbum) and that Gower's amorous and confessional themes are thus grounded in a broader philosophical and theological context. Gallacher mines the mythographical tradition for allegorical commentary on such recurring motifs as the figure of Mercury, who represents eloquence among other things. His central thesis is that the CA moves Amans from amorous persuasion and lust to a broader cosmic charity which has its fulfillment in prayer and in union with the divine Word. While Gallacher practices a kind of exegetical criticism, he does acknowledge that Gower does not ignore human love or the necessity for human action and politics. In chapter 1, "The Rhetoric of the Word," Gallacher notes that our use of language involves a paradox: "there is a natural progress towards perfection in the use of words motivated by an awareness of the inexpressible" (2). This tension is found from Boethius to Kenneth Burke. Burke, for instance, describes how words are used most thoroughly when they come to describe the transcendent concept of God. An example would be the word "grace," which means both God's forgiveness and can stand for the grace of a literary style or a hostess. This movement from the temporal to the divine goes both ways: "an awareness of the inexpressible leads inevitably to the Word and … this process is reversible and synecdochic. That is, the redemptive power of the Word traverses the way down, descending easily into such cognate spiritual actions as confession and prayer, but assuming flesh even in the amorous conversation itself" (4). The rest of the chapter shows how Andreas Capellanus reflects on the courtly love motif of speechlessness; how Gower's MO shows that confession is about finding truth through words; how prayer brings us closer to the divine Word, even though God already knows our thoughts; and how the CA's theme of "division" suggests both that our multitude of words proves our disunity and reminds us that the one Word is the solution. Chapter 2 deals with the annunciation motif present in a number of stories in the CA. Gallacher argues that medieval writers acknowledged the potentially seductive overtones of the annunciation. The annunciation was also said to teach Christians to accept the Word as Mary did. In the story of Mundus and Paulina, the Egyptian god Anubis equates to Mercury in the Latin tradition. The result is a kind of subversion of the annunciation, as Mundus plays the roles of both Gabriel and God. Book 1 ends with the story of Peronelle. She mentions the incarnation through Mary as an example of humility (1.3275ff.). Her father also trusts her council (her word) and allows her to speak for him. Finally, it is significant that Peronelle holds the king to his "word": "Peronelle's invocation of the solemnly binding and magically efficacious power of the king's word clearly evokes the connotations of the Verbum" (40). The third major annunciation story is the tale of Nectanabus at the end of Book 6. Though this is a false annunciation, the outcome (the birth of Alexander) is positive. The third chapter describes how the CA chronicles "a rejection of amorous persuasion in favor of Christian prayer, but the journey to this goal is by no means narrowly moralistic" (44). Gallacher argues that Gower praises open and honest speech. For instance, while "Cheste" (contentiousness) is a vice, it can also be "a means of overcoming ironia, an excessive self-dispraisal" (53). In particular, prayer is the kind of free speech in which you can say what is really on your mind. Something similar is true for counsel in a lord-subject relationship, as we see in Book 7, where flattery is opposed to a stinging honesty. Chapter 3 covers a range of stories (some allegorically) before focusing on tales from Book 4 that deal with the power of prayer. Some (Pygmalion, Iphis) are rather erotic and others (Cephalus) don't seem to fit Amans's predicament, but the overall point is that prayer brings us closer to the Word. In chapter 4, Gallacher uses the example of Dante's Beatrice to argue for the importance of the lady's speech: "The Speech of God on the way down to the lover manifests itself in the speech of the lady. Since the lover perceives that she is somehow ineffable, that his love is correspondingly inexpressible, and that some kind of prayer must characterize his conversation with her, the lady’s verbal responses in turn appropriately demonstrate reversibility, the descent of God’s words to the lover" (78). The song of the Sirens is an inversion of this process, whereas women like Constance, Alcestis, and even the hag in the Tale of Florent lead their lovers away from simple desire or from detraction and to a higher truth and wisdom. Chapter 5 describes how the counsel of Genius, the confessional mode, and the amorous discourse result in a double recognition scene in Book 8. First Apollonius becomes more dependent on the will of God, both through Fortune and through the effective speech of his wife and daughter. Secondly, Amans's solipsism is "transformed, through the penitent’s verbal acknowledgment guided by the confessor's counsel, into a prayer for charity which will result in spiritual, social, economic, and political justice" (143). Stories that lead up to these final recognition scenes include Perseus and Medusa, Lycurgus, Constantine and Sylvester, and the tales on flattery in Book 7. Chapter 6 has two main sections. In the first, Gallacher describes Gower’s sense of cosmic unity. For instance, in Book 7 the relationships between the elements, the stars, fortune, free will, speech, and truth remind us of the power of the word and especially of prayer. The second section examines how autobiographical or confessional writing fits within this cosmic setting. On the one hand, the speech of praise culminates in prayer, whereas the negative response is complaint. The CA, compared to Gower’s other works, shows a softening of complaint. Gower uses the discussion of Avarice in Book 5 to show that "complaint, as a form of avarice, is unnatural. Opposed to this is an attitude of gratefulness to the generosity of nature" (152). The epilogue sums up the many faces of Mercury in the poem and in the tradition. Gallacher also returns to the importance of the “word” and ends with a reflection on formalist criticism’s interpretation of poetic words. The words of a poem create internal unity in the poem. Together they form meaning. Northrop Frye refers to the poetic word as a “connector” – each word tends to link to all the other words and to a symbolic center. In the same way all works of literature refer to a kind of symbolic center. This formalist criticism is ultimately dependent on the theology of the Word that goes back to the Middle Ages and to writers like Gower. [CvD]

Lust, latency and love: Simian secrets of successful sex∗

Abstract: I am pleased and honored to present a brief paper to the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex. To return the honor to this illustrious four-s society, I will speak on a four-s theme, "Simian Secrets of Successful Sex." An alternate title could be, "From Lust to Latency to Love." I would like to dedicate this presentation to Sigmund Freud, in spite of the fact that he believed love developed from sex whenS actually, all of our work, and probably all the work of others, shows that successful sex develops from love, or rather from multiple forms of antecedent love. Returning to Freud, I have long insisted that he was the greatest social scientist of the twentieth century. Furthermore, in view of the present pace of the progress of psychiatric research, Freud will undoubtedly also go down in history as the greatest psychiatric scientist in the twenty-first century. One of Freud's many contributions was that of his developmental stages. Other scientists have contributed other developmental stages not nearly as earthy, but, much as I may disagree with Freud on many basic facts, I still feel that it is a shame he never observed monkeys. For instance, consider monkeys and Freud's first developmental stage the oral. Infant monkeys are mighty, mobile, mouthing machines. Neonatal monkeys suck with incestuous ingenuity and aphrodisiacal propensity. All available engulfable structures are tested and tasted not only to the fullest, but even to the fulsome. IncidentallyS my personal research discloses that only one out of every 50 persons accurately defines the word fulsome. I do not know whether the real meaning was forgotten or repressed. Orality, or at least oral opportunity, is illustrated clearly in Figures 1 and 2, and I need not name the engulfable structures. Honest, honorable onanism is more masculine than feminine, but this may be an anatomical accident. Penile pride is omni-evident, whereas clitoral culmination is more cleverly concealed and does not lend itself as easily to accidental acceleration. However, the marvels of masturbation are not denied to either sex.

The Golden Lotus

Abstract: "The greatest novel of physical love which China has produced." -Pearl S. Buck A saga of ruthless ambition, murder, and lust, The Golden Lotus (Jin Ping Mei) has been called the fifth Great Classical Novel in Chinese literature and one of the Four Masterworks of the Ming novel. Admired in its own time for its literary qualities and biting indictment of the immorality and cruelty of its age, it has also been denigrated as a "dirty" book for its sexual frankness. It centers on Ximen Qing, a wealthy, young, dissolute, and politically connected merchant, and his marriage to a fifth wife, Pan Jinlian, literally "Golden Lotus." In her desire to influence her husband and, through him, control the other wives, concubines, and entire household, she uses sex as her main weapon. The Golden Lotus lays bare the rivalries within this wealthy family while chronicling its rise and fall. It fields a host of vivid characters, each seeking advantage in a corrupt world. The author of The Golden Lotus is Lanling Xiaoxiaosheng, whose name, a pseudonym, means "Scoffing Scholar of Lanling." His great work, written in the late Ming but set in the Song Dynasty, is a virtuoso collection of voices and vices, mixing in poetry and song and sampling different social registers, from popular ballads to the language of bureaucrats, in order to recreate and comment mordantly on the society of the time. This edition features a new introduction by Robert Hegel of Washington University, who situates the novel for contemporary readers and explains its greatness as the first single-authored novel in the Chinese tradition. This translation contains the complete, unexpurgated text as translated by Clement Egerton with the assistance of Shu Qingchun, later known as Lao She, one of the most prominent Chinese writers of the twentieth century. The translation has been pinyinized and corrected.

Southwestern Humor, Erskine Caldwell, and the Comedy of Frustration

Abstract: Erskine Caldwell enjoys what is, perhaps, one of the most dubious distinctions possible for a writer: he is popular--one of the most, if not the most, popular of all modern Southern writers This has brought him money, security, even fame (who, after all, hasn't heard of him?), but also a great deal of obloquy It is usual, for example, to claim that Caldwell is a sensationalist posing as a journalist: a historian, of a kind, who tends to forget facts and concentrate instead upon bizarre, intriguing details The assumption, somehow, is that Caldwell is really after verisimilitude, and that only another, more important ambition--namely, his wish to be successful in the accepted meaning of that term--has prevented him from ever properly fulfilling his desire Few things could, I think, be further from the truth Certainly, there is a journalistic aim implicit in most of Caldwell's work, in a sense that he was in a way trying to tell us what it is like to live in the South now But with him this aim assumes new dimensions because (as he himself has more than once suggested) he is not so much interested in verisimilitude as in special pleading: the kind of report that tends to emphasize certain chosen aspects of its subject He has a number of observations, important observations as he sees it, to make about the South and he makes them to the exclusion of almost everything else The result is something which is perhaps closer to the art of the caricaturist than to the comparatively objective account of the reporter; particular aspects of the described situation are continually being exaggerated in the interests of theme What is Caldwell's theme? Stated simply, it is one of degeneracy--the reduction of the human being to the lowest possible levels of his experience In appearance, at least, his rural characters bear no resemblance at all to Jefferson's idea of the noble tillers of the earth Grotesques responding only to a basic physical urge, they represent an abstraction not merely from the human to the animal but from the complete animal to a single instinct: "Ellie May got down from the pine stump and sat on the ground She moved closer and closer to Lov, sliding herself over the hard white sand `Ellie May's acting like your old hound used to when she got the itch,' Dude said to Jeeter `Look at her scrape her bottom on the sand That old hound used to make the same kind of sound Ellie May's making too It sounds just like a little pig squealing, don't it?'" (1) The difference of perspective, when we compare this description of Ellie May in Tobacco Road, with, say, most of William Faulkner's portraits of poor whites, is a radical one Faulkner tends, usually, to take us inside the consciousness of his "peasants," to share the wealth of their inner life as well as the poverty of their condition Caldwell, however, nearly always insists--as he does here--on keeping his readers at a distance; in other words, on presenting his characters entirely in terms of externals and, in the process, dehumanizing them This distancing, dehumanizing approach is responsible among other things, I think, for the nature of Caldwell's comedy Nearly all of his country folk operate between the poles of greed and sexual desire, they are the slaves of appetite, and such humor as his novels possess is generally the result of the violence which these appetites provoke In fact, the comic note is at its wildest in his fiction when the two appetites actually clash, throwing the victim of the subsequent crossfire into confusion The description of Ellie May quoted above, for instance, is part of a much longer sequence in which Ellie's father, Jeeter Lester, uses Ellie to distract his son-in-law Lov while he steals a bag of turnips from him To summarize the complicated interplay of hunger and lust which follows is hardly to do justice to the Grand Guignol effects of the situation As soon as Jeeter does grab the bag of turnips Lov turns to recover it, but he is immediately pulled to the ground by his would-be seducer …

A Psychronology of Lust in the Menippean Tradition: Giles Goat-Boy

Abstract: In a "cover letter" near the beginning of Giles Goat-Boy the book's agent and editor, J. B., himself an author, tells of his difficulty in trying to write a novel that was to be entitled The Seeker: "To move folks about, to give them locales and dispositions, past histories and crossed paths-it bored me, I hadn't taste or gumption for it" (p. xxiv).1 J. B.'s creative energies were, in short, "disengaged" as he desperately awaited a "windfall from orchards of the spirit." Fortunately that visitation occurred in the person of one, Stoker Giles, a somewhat goatish young man who appeared in J. B.'s office without warning to show him the Way to the Answer that would relieve the dubieties clogging his spirit. Stoker brought with him a manuscript which he claimed had been assembled, collated, and edited, then "read out" by a remarkable computer named WESCAC. The manuscript, Stoker explained, is a firstperson chronicle of the life and teachings of his own father, George Giles, a Grand Tutor whose life-mission had been to "commence" all of studentdom

Surviving Elements of Christian Gnosis

Abstract: In Chapter I we observed how Christian gnosis described the original sin as a sexual transgression, and how Augustine came to redefine it as one of pride. Because of the overwhelming influence of his thought the concept of a sexual fall was well on the wane by the close of the twelfth century, but occasional allusions to it remain. The attitude toward normal sexuality in Hali Meidenhad, for instance, is grossly encratistic, rather more reminiscent of Tatian than even Jerome. The author counsels the bride of Christ to forℨet ec þi fader hus as dauið read þrafter. Đi fader he cleopeð þat unþeaw þat streonede þe of þi moder. þat ilke unhende flesches brune. þat bearninde ℨecðe of þat licomliche lust. bifore þat wlatefulle werc. þat beasteliche gederinge. þat schomelese somnunge. þat fulþe of fulþe stinkende 7 untohe dede. (p. 9)1 (forget also thy father’s house as David afterward counsels. Thy “father” he calls the impure deed that begot thee of thy mother; that same low burning of the flesh, that fiery itch of bodily lust before that hateful work, that bestial coming together, that shameless union, that filth of a deed stinking of filth and depravity.)