Celia Shits: on Jonathan Swift's "The Lady's Dressing Room"

Swift’s notorious poem in which he describes a lover who is utterly disillusioned by the discovery of his beloved’s basic humanity and flesh-and-blood physicality is often read and understood as some kind of misogynistic diatribe against female presumptions of nobility. A woman’s beauty and refinement is in truth but a thin veneer that covers her true nature, which consists in filth of various sorts, in dirt, sweat, snot and earwax, in obnoxious smells, and worse. If you venture a look behind the scenes, then the apparent Goddess is quickly revealed as what she really is: not a mere woman - which would be disappointing, but bearable -, but in fact nothing but an artfully disguised pile of excrement. Thus our hero’s educational journey is completed with the discovery of his beloved’s full chamber pot, culminating in the horrified cry: “Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits!” - Who would have thought?

D.H. Lawrence, in a postscript to Lady Chatterley’s Lover, gives the proper response to the panic that befalls Swift’s comic hero when he finds undeniable evidence that Celia is, contrary to his expectations, not a Goddess at all: “The mind’s terror of the body has probably driven more men mad than ever could be counted. The insanity of a great mind like Swift’s is at least partly traceable to this cause. In the poem to his mistress Celia, which has the maddened refrain: ‘But – Celia, Celia, Celia shits!’ we see what can happen to a great mind, when it falls into panic. A great wit like Swift could not see how ridiculous he made himself. Of course Celia shits! who doesn’t? And how much worse if she didn’t. It is hopeless. And then think of poor Celia, made to feel iniquitous about her proper natural function, by her ‘lover.’” Indeed.

However, I do not think that expressing his disgust of women, or humankind in general, is at all what Swift was doing in this poem. Lawrence is right, but he misunderstands Swift. If we take the last quarter of the poem into account, which is usually ignored, then a very different and not at all misogynistic or misanthropic reading suggests itself. It seems to me that Swift is much closer to Lawrence’s own view than Lawrence realised. After the lover runs away from his discredited lover’s chamber, the reader is reminded how foolish both his actions and his reaction to his discovery of Celia’s bodily functions were. He may have discovered the truth about Celia (or a truth about her, which is of course also a truth about each one of us, male or female), but it is the kind of truth that can easily ruin your life if it is all that you can see. If life’s a piece of shit when you look at it too closely, then you had better keep a healthy distance. Swift suggests that Celia’s lover is being severely (and rightly) punished for his hubristic attempt to lift the veil from a mystery that had better be left alone, not unlike the youth, “impelled by a burning thirst for knowledge”, in the German poet Friedrich Schiller’s “The Veiled Statue at Sais” (written some 60 years after Swift’s “The Lady’s Dressing Room”), who is warned not to lift the truth-concealing veil from a statue of the goddess Isis. It is forbidden by the gods, for the truth is dangerous, perhaps even deadly. But the youth doesn’t listen and won’t be deterred. He “lifts up the veil./ Would you inquire what form there met his eye?/ I know not, - but, when day appeared, the priests/ Found him extended senseless, pale as death,/ Before the pedestal of Isis’ statue./ What had been seen and heard by him when there/ He never would disclose, but from that hour/ His happiness in life had fled forever,/ And his deep sorrow soon conducted him/ To an untimely grave.” Who knows, perhaps he saw a chamber pot.

Swift’s hero does not die, but he is, like Schiller’s youth, lost to the world: blinded by what he has come to see as the truth about women, and incapable of perceiving anything but foulness, he is destined to live a miserable, joyless life. But he is mistaken: it is not the world that is foul; it is his imagination. Because beauty is just as real as the messy physicality that lies underneath, and what is truly astonishing is that the one can arise from the other, that “such order from confusion sprung,/ Such gaudy Tulips rais’d from Dung”. It’s like the transmutation of base metal into gold that the alchemists tried in vain to accomplish. And it is utter foolishness to refuse to see and appreciate the gold just because it has been created from nickel. The crucial couplet in the poem is this one: “Should I the Queen of Love refuse,/ Because she rose from stinking Ooze?” The answer that Swift suggests is no, because the Queen of Love is still the Queen of Love. No goddess perhaps, but still a beautiful woman, and none the worse for it.

This healthy attitude, with which the poem concludes, is very different from the one that, we may assume, characterised the curious young man before he makes his seemingly gruesome discoveries. What we have here is not simply, as some interpreters have suggested, a return to false idealisations, a desperate (and laughable) attempt to retain the illusion and hide the truth, and to hang on to a distorted view of female (and human) perfection and elevation. It is, instead, the synthesis that has resulted from a dialectical process of thesis and antithesis, a more mature attitude born out of the realisation that the two opposing views are equally untenable, both the view that a human being can be an angel (an ethereal, pure and essentially bodiless being) and the view that all humans are animals (that is, essentially bodies). The fact that we are bodily (and that means messy, dependent, vulnerable and ultimately mortal) beings doesn’t detract from our beauty and dignity. On the contrary.    

Michel Houllebecq on Posthumanity

I have long avoided reading anything by Michel Houellebecq. Although I had come across Houllebecq’s name occasionally in the context of transhumanism, the nature of what I heard somehow led me to believe that I wouldn’t care very much about his books. Now I’ve finally got around to reading his 2005 novel The Possibility of an Island, which at the time of its publication raised the hackles of many critics (I remember one scathing, astonishingly vitriolic review by Michael Worton in The Guardian). To my surprise, I discovered that I liked the book well enough. I found the story engaging and his analysis of the human condition and his reflections on the transhumanist endeavour to transcend it and to help us evolve into something better and less dependent spot on and actually quite perceptive.

The book is of course deeply immersed in Schopenhauer’s philosophy: life is suffering as long as you have desires, and once you stop desiring you glide into boredom, which is equally unbearable. The series of Daniels from today to the distant future represents the endless cycle of rebirths or rather, to be more precise, our various phenomenal existences that do not allow a real escape from this life of suffering. But there is also the sense – which reminded me of D.H. Lawrence - that all dignity and worth of human existence is inseparably connected to the human body: the body that desires, that longs for a unity with the other that it can never have, or at least never hold on to, the dependent, vulnerable, suffering body, which is also the body that loves and laughs. The very tragedy of our bodily existence is also its one redeeming quality. That is why Stoic indifference and the shallowness of a life that only seeks pleasure and is constitutionally unable to feel anything else is, despite its appeal, in fact not a desirable goal and prospect at all.

When Daniel1, the main narrator and our contemporary, falls in love with Isabelle, the editor-in-chief of a magazine called Lolita, she tells him: “You know the magazine I work for: all we’re trying to do is create an artificial mankind, a frivolous one that will no longer be open to seriousness or to humour, which, until it dies, will engage in an increasingly desperate quest for fun and sex; a generation of definite kids.” So this new artificial mankind, the kind of posthuman that we are already turning into, is not post-human due to some bioenhancement procedure, but due to a change in attitude. They have learnt to look at life differently. Their advancement consists in having lost something essential to humanity: seriousness and humour, none of which can exist without the other.

“The centuries-old male project, perfectly expressed nowadays by pornographic films, that consisted of ridding sexuality of any emotional connotation in order to bring it back into the realm of pure entertainment, had finally, in this generation, been accomplished. (...) They had succeeded, after decades of conditioning and effort, they had finally succeeded in tearing from their hearts one of the oldest human feelings, and now it was done, what had been destroyed could no longer be put back together, no more than the pieces of a broken cup can be reassembled, they had reached their goal: at no moment in their lives would they ever know love. They were free.”

From this perspective, love is a destructive force. It prevents us from enjoying all the pleasure that we could enjoy. It entraps us, binds us to another human being, makes us dependent on them, and wreaks havoc with our emotions. For the sake of individual liberty and autonomy, we should try to control it, suppress it, and, if we can, get rid of it entirely. Love is just as much an obstacle to complete autonomy and the maximisation of pleasure as the ageing of the body. Houllebecq describes an increasingly common fixation, where certain natural impulses reign supreme, unchecked: “It’s understandable that people are afraid of getting old, especially women, that’s always been true, but in this case ... It’s gone beyond anything you could imagine, I think women have gone completely mad.” All taboos have been given up, except one: the taboo of being, or getting, old.

The new religion that, in the novel, gets the ball of posthumanity rolling, Elohimism, is in its goals and general worldview a close relative to real-life transhumanism, and Houllebecq describes quite plausibly how much it owes to the cultural shifts that have already taken place in our time. “As for Elohimism, it was adapted perfectly to the leisure civilisation in which it had been born. Imposing no moral constraints, reducing human existence to categories of interest and of pleasure, it did not hesitate, for all that, to make its own fundamental promise at the core of all monotheistic religions: victory over death. Eradicating any spiritual or confusing dimension, it simply limited the scope of this victory, and the nature of the promise associated with it, to the unlimited prolongation of material life, that is to say the unlimited satisfaction of physical desires.”

The one overarching goal is the elimination of all natural bonds and boundaries, which also means that when the body becomes more disabling than enabling, when it loses the (limited) use that it had as long as we are (relatively) young, it has to be discarded. A member of the church would commit suicide (naturally in anticipation of resurrection) “when he felt that his physical body was no longer in a state to give him the joys he could legitimately expect from it.”

But the determination to get the most out of life, to let nothing hinder the pursuit of happiness, ironically leads to a state where all the fun has drained out of life. One thousand years in the future, Daniel24, Daniel’s autotrophic, but otherwise not radically enhanced clone (directly born into the adult body of an 18-year old) no longer has any strong feelings about anything. The so-called neo-humans don’t laugh or cry. There’s no bodily contact between the few neo-humans who live alone, in “a condition of absolute solitude”, and only communicate with each other rarely and via electronic media, which leaves no room for cruelty or compassion. They aspire to end the “suffering of being that makes us seek out the other” and thus “reach the freedom of indifference, the condition for the possibility of perfect serenity”. His immediate successor, Daniel25 reflects: “Our existence, devoid of passions, had been that of the elderly; we looked on the world with a gaze characterised by lucidity without benevolence.” There are also advantages, of course, but those advantages are those of a well-functioning machine: “Compared with a human, I benefited from a suppleness, endurance and functional autonomy that were greatly enhanced. My psychology, of course, was also different; it did not comprehend fear, and whilst I was able to suffer, I felt none of the dimensions of what human called regret (...). Consciousness of a total determinism was without doubt what differentiated us most clearly from our human predecessors. Like them, we were only conscious machines; but, unlike them, we were aware of only being machines.” The machine works well indeed, but sadly there is no longer a purpose to what it does. The future just repeats the past. It is the past that still lies before us. “I had perhaps sixty years left to live; more than twenty thousand days that would be identical.” The neo-human’s survival, his very existence, has itself become a matter of indifference. “I saw my body as a vehicle, but it was a vehicle for nothing.” Fatalism is linked to immortality (that is, here, the infinite reproduction of one’s genes). The neo-human is only an “improved monkey”.

In that remote future, humanity still exists, side by side with neo-humanity, but has degenerated a long time ago, nobody really knows why. Curiously, though, it all started with the invention of android robots, “equipped with a versatile artificial vagina. A high-tech system analysed in real time the configuration of male sexual organs, arranged temperatures and pressures; a radiometric sensor allowed the prediction of ejaculation, the consequent modification of stimulation, and the prolonging of intercourse for so long as was wished.” That went on for a few weeks, but then sales collapsed, not because people realised that the old ways were ultimately more rewarding, but simply because humanity was finally, as Houllebecq puts it, about to give up the ghost.

And yet, sex is important, in fact essential to a human life worth living, but just as for D.H. Lawrence, there are different kinds of sex, those that connect and those that disconnect, those that are basically a form of masturbation where the partner functions as a mere tool to generate sexual pleasure, and those that seek a kind of communion, which again is essentially a communion of bodies, not of detached minds. Thus David1 reflects: “Sexual pleasure was not only superior, in refinement and violence, to all the other pleasures life had to offer, (...) it was in truth the sole pleasure, the sole objective of human existence, and all other pleasures (...) were only derisory and desperate compensations”. “When sexuality disappears, it’s the body of the other that appears, as a vaguely hostile presence; the sounds, movements and smells; even the presence of this body that you can no longer touch, nor sanctify through touch, becomes gradually oppressive; all this, unfortunately, is well known. The disappearance of tenderness always closely follows that of eroticism. There is no refined relationship, no higher union of souls, nor anything that might resemble it, or even evoke it allusively. When physical love disappears; a dreary, depthless irritation fills the passing days.”

The reason for this irritation is that without the communion of the bodies, the mental communion is also lost, and one finds oneself alone: “it seemed unsurprising to me that the exchange of ideas with someone who doesn’t know your body, is not in a position to secure its unhappiness or on the other hand to bring it joy, was a false and ultimately impossible exercise, for we are bodies, we are, above all, principally and almost uniquely bodies, and the state of our bodies constitutes the true explanation of the majority of our intellectual and moral conceptions.”

We truly live only through our sexual bodies: “When the sexual instinct is dead, writes Schopenhauer, the true core of life is consumed; thus, he notes in a metaphor of terrifying violence, ‘human existence resembles a theatre performance which, begun by living actors, is ended by automatons dressed in the same costumes’. I didn’t want to become an automaton, and it was this, that real presence, that taste for living life (...) that Esther had given back to me. What is the point of maintaining a body that no one touches?” What is indeed!

Real love is physical love, love of the body and through the body. Real love is also, for beings such as us, possessive, because “non-possessive love only seemed conceivable if you yourself lived in an atmosphere saturated with delights, from which all fear was absent, particularly fear of abandonment and death”.

Yes paradoxically it is also fear that often ends our love: “It’s not weariness that puts an end to love, or rather it’s a weariness that is born of impatience, of the impatience of bodies who know they are condemned and want to live, who want, in the lapse of time granted them, to not pass up any chance, to miss no possibility, who want to use to the utmost that limited, declining and mediocre lifetime that is theirs, and who consequently cannot love anyone, as all others appear limited, declining and mediocre to them.”

D.H. Lawrence on Tender-Hearted Fucking

We all want to be loved for who we are. We don’t want to be seen and loved as a nice piece of ass, as just another cock or cunt, as essentially replaceable. We ask our beloved: do you love me or just my body (or even worse, only the pleasure that it can give you or that you can get out of it)? But who exactly are we? Who is this “me” that we want them to love, or that we want to be loved for? Well, it seems that what we are referring to can best be described as a particular set of thoughts and feelings, memories and experiences, values and interests, or perhaps that elusive substance that all of these things or processes are expressions or articulations of, some kind of underlying unifying principle, a unique essence. Whatever it is, we are largely convinced that our body is not part of it, so that the love that we wish for is one that, as it were, sees right through the body and connects directly to our personality. This wish is of course tied to the fear that once our body changes and loses its sexual or aesthetic appeal, we will no longer be loved. For bodies change quickly, personalities less so (or so we think), and even though we may not mind so much being identified with our body while we are young and our flesh is still fresh, we find it increasingly difficult to do so once we get older. Being loved for what we are insures us against the potentially love-destroying effects of our ageing bodies.

In D.H. Lawrence’s notorious novel about the dying world of an industrialised England between the wars and the liberating and invigorating power of uninhibited sex, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which I have just read for the first time, the unhappily married and sexually unfulfilled Constance Chatterley slides into a passionate love affair with her husband’s gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors. After their first sexual encounter, Constance reflects on what happened, and she realises that she hardly knows her new lover and wonders what kind of man he actually is. She finds their encounter strangely impersonal, even doubts that he likes her very much. She thinks that he is kind and passionate, but then again, for all she knows he might be kind and passionate with any woman. “It wasn’t really personal. She was only a female to him.” Too bad. But then, rather surprisingly, this seemingly devaluating assessment is turned on its head. After concluding that there was nothing personal about her affair with Mellors, she continues: “But perhaps that was better. And after all, he was kind to the female in her, which no man had ever been. Men were very kind to the person she was, but rather cruel to the female, despising her or ignoring her altogether. Men were awfully kind to Constance Reid or to Lady Chatterley: but not to her womb they weren’t kind. And he took no notice of Constance or Lady Chatterley: he just softly stroked her loins or her breasts.”

I think this is more than just male wishful thinking (expressing the male author’s desire for a woman who actually doesn’t mind being treated as a sexual object and who doesn’t expect any interest in her as a person). For Lawrence the sex act leads us, or should be leading us, or has the potential of leading us, beyond the existential separation that characterises our individual personalities. The individual person is defined by its apartness, by detachment. And when we love each other as individuals we maintain and reaffirm this detachment. “All that weary self-consciousness between a man and a woman! – a disease!” What the sex act should be is the union between not a female and a male, but between the female and the male. Who we are as individuals is no longer relevant then. I am no longer I, and you are no longer you, which not only means that the difference between you and me is obliterated, but also the difference between you and others that I might love in your stead. In loving you I in fact love all the women in the world, whose representative or ambassador you are.

What Lawrence reminds us of is that we exist in and through our bodies, and that it is through our bodies, and not through our minds that we are connected to the natural world to which the body belongs just as much as it belongs to us. The mind sets us apart, the body makes us a part. Our individual personalities have only a fleeting existence. They are a surface phenomenon. Dig a little deeper and what you find is a living, sexual body, and it is the loving acknowledgment of this bodily existence that we secretly long for, though also, fearing for our treasured autonomy, shy away from: “Sex is really only touch, the closest of all touch. And it’s touch we’re afraid of. We’re only half-conscious, and half alive.”

To become fully alive, we need to stop being ashamed of our bodily existence. For Lawrence, the body is the really real, and sex - the kind that makes us forget, or forget to care, who we are, the kind that Lawrence calls “tender-hearted fucking” – is one way, perhaps the most profound, truthful and blissful way, of exploring it.