Lately the English scholar Susie Kneedler wrote, "Obscenity is great when it's just a fantasy. –Austen herself loved
Richardson; she just invented something better than self-destruction as
a way to live.–But when it's transformed into a nation's way of life,
rule, and myth-making, it's Hell forever. The flip side is that any
people who define themselves as "Victims forever," become "eternal
Tyrants." That's Blake.
And then Kneedler offered the following essay on Samuel Richardson's novel Clarissa, and its application to the Palestinian situation:
The Pornography of Slaughter: Taunted Deception
Clarissa (by Samuel Richardson) and its villain Robert Lovelace give us the prototype for the Israeli government and President Shimon Peres’s latest machinations. What could an [in]famously enormous eighteenth-century epistolary novel, whose full title is Clarissa, or, the History of a Young Lady, teach us about the horror in Palestine/Israel today? Simply that it’s a parable of a sadist determined to test whether he can turn the celestial heroine–Clarissa Harlowe, a coveted possession— into a masochist by interminable violation. The history of Israel has been an experiment in whether the Jewish state can turn Palestine–which it covets as a possession it calls “the Promised Land”—and its people into “a defeated people," with their abnegation “sear[ed] deeply into the[ir] consciousness”(as General Moshe Ya'alon said) by unrelenting punishment.
Clarissa amounts to a sort of “canonical” drawing-room porn. Precisely because the novel’s fascination lies in its tremendous influence over the warped history of desire in Western culture, this story can point out the peculiar crimes of Israel and its leaders, as well their American supporters.
The so-called “guilty pleasures” offered by the narrative of Clarissa Harlowe’s resistance to the devious intrigues of the anti-hero Lovelace’s plot to rape her. Masses of eighteenth-century readers (established a whole new genre: the novel of rape) salivated over Robert Lovelace's sardonic rhetorical questions and smirking deceptions as he describes trapping and trying to rape Clarissa Harlowe. Everything Lovelace does and says means the opposite of what he claims: he terrifies Clarissa with a manufactured fire, sweeps her up into his arms as she starts to faint, "lift[s] her to her bed, and s[its] down by her upon the side of it, endeavouring with the utmost tenderness, as well as action as expression, to dissipate her terrors".
Ha-ha!, as Snidely Whiplash would leer, twirling his mustache: Lovelace is diabolically lying, counting on his reader, Jack Belford–as Richardson counts on us–to snigger at the joke, while Lovelace pretends that Clarissa’s resuscitation rather than rape is his goal. Readers are supposed to chuckle–and pant libidinously–as we guess what "actions" [disgusting smooches] Lovelace inflicts on the panicking Clarissa.
The grotesque recent pronouncements by Peres at Davos mimic Lovelace’s mock-innocent queries and coy lies: “We didn’t occupy. There was never a day of starvation in Gaza. By the way, Israel is the supplier of water daily to Gaza. Israel is the supplier of fuel to Gaza."
Peres's sneering facade of injured innocence is as transparent to his Israeli audience as Lovelace's. Peres knows that his partisans will play “make-believe” about the supposedly generous supplies of food, water, and fuel in Gaza, while nevertheless gloating at the hideous joke. ("Wink-Wink, Nudge-Nudge!" as Eric Idle famously chortles in "Monty Python." Conscience-challenged Zionists are intended to fill in the blanks of Peres's canard–as Richardson's devotees do–with a satisfying picture of its opposite: mass near-starvation [“put Gazans on a diet”; scarce, filthy water; and hardly any fuel ["As far as I am concerned, all of Gaza's residents can walk and have no fuel for their cars"]. “There is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza,”Livni averred. The IDF systematically bull-dozed the orange groves of Gaza. The government has squirreled away deeds and evidence of its secret conspiracy with Zionist fundamentalists to steal Palestinians’ land.
The episode is a "rape-novel" cliche: readers pretend to be seduced–though Clarissa is not–by two simultaneous desires: a knowing skepticism of Lovelace's winking stage-lies and sympathy with his rapacious lechery. The audience excitedly feigns belief in Lovelace's falsehoods ("Wink-nudge!").
The sexual prurience "arises" [pun intended] from the "intertwining" of the falsehood, the humor, and the calculated blank that the comically-twisted reader must fill with lustful images of imminent sexual violation–i.e., dominance, torture, and violence. Both "perps" purposely provoke by asking questions they know listeners will recognize as false:
Lovelace, "But what did I get by this my generous care of her, and by my SUCCESSFUL endeavour to bring her to herself? Nothing (ungrateful as she was!)…: I never saw a bitterer, or more moving, grief.”
Peres: "Why did they fire at us? What did they want?”
But the victims rightly hear the lies as taunts, the double-speak as deception, and taunting deception produces the deepest rage.
The parallels between the two sagas extend to other images. “Lovelace” is pronounced "Love-less" because
the heart-less manipulator’s only aphrodisiac is torturing another soul. Lovelace embodies narcissism: alienated from human
connection, from the Other, from sex itself.The Israeli government exemplifies a Warrior state: alienated from human connection, from the Other, from love itself.
Both put their targets in a “double bind.” When Clarissa repulses her attacker by calling him what he already knows he is, a “villain,” Lovelace retaliates: “If I am a villain, madam,”—And then my grasping, but trembling hand—I hope I did not hurt the tenderest and loveliest of her beauties—“If I am a villain, madam’—She…shrunk from my happy hand with amazing force and agility,” as Lovelace ups the stakes by mauling her bosom and then clasping her into a closer embrace.
When Lovelace repeats the threat, asking Clarissa whether she will repeat the fact that he is a villain, she is driven to exclaim, “Oh, no—and yet you are!” Both “No” and “Yes” give this most licentious cretin the license to rape. “No” means she consents to sex; “Yes” that she is the aggressor and deserves to be vanquished. Israel and AIPAC both attack when anyone–whether Palestinian, Jew, American, South African—merely names the facts of its dispossession of Arabs. Both “No” and “Yes” give this most expansive of countries which refuses to agree upon firm boundaries, justification for refusing to negotiate and attacking instead. If the Palestinians say “No,” they are a threat; if “Yes,” they do not deserve concessions.
Both victims liberate themselves temporarily and both suffer the torture of renewed bondage. Clarissa escapes, but the indefatigable Lovelace shortly re-captures her by duping a gullible. Palestinians have been offered tantalizing prospects of peace and statehood, all revoked whenever Israel could find an excuse to feel threatened. The chronicle of both is of sado-masochism personified, but the oppressed ones refuse to play their part of cringing masochist.
Both tales are "pornography" about human relations turned into battle.
Lovelace does eventually rape Clarissa, but she is so sublime in her purity and perfect in her self-defense, that he must doubly cheat her by first drugging and then asking four women to restrain her and witness her abasement. Israel has conquered Palestine, but the people have so valiantly remained, that the IDF had to imprison and starve them, then use U.S. weapons in order to bomb them to smithereens. The only difference between the Lovelace and the Zionists is that the latter foe inflicted debilitation through deprivation, rather than by any draught, and the bondage came second.
Both tales lead inexorably to destruction. Lovelace’s depredation causes his own death (through revenge wreaked on him by Clarissa’s cousin), as well as hers. Israel’s ravages annihilate Palestinians, but also traditional Jewish values, and therefore its identity as well.
While Lovelace, the sadistic predator, masquerades as a lover; readers fantasize as masochistic voyeurs till we are asked to imagine what Lovelace means when he announces hauntingly, “The affair is over. Clarissa lives.” Brevity from the formerly loquacious libertine chills here.
Clarissa survives temporarily, in spite of having suffered the notorioius “fate worse than death,” but ultimately pines away to some sort of afterlife.
In Palestine, Peres's performance is "obscenity" about human relations turned into butchery, or, in Orwell's phrase, "a boot stamping on a human face–forever." A sadistic conqueror impersonates a kindly caretaker, cueing followers to salivate over Arab annihilation, as some Israeli camp followers even picnic as they watch the carnage of exploding bombs. They fill in the gory blanks of what they cannot see through binoculars with glee. But the Palestinian people do not give in to the horror and loss of Israeli “education”; Palestinians resist and not all will die.
The epic clash of unimaginable virtue with incalculable vice imagined in Clarissa–and played out in Palestine with endless rounds of injury, death, and revenge–were re-imagined a few years after Richardson’s remarkable tour-de-force. Artists like William Blake and Jane Austen collapsed the dominant opposition between perfect angels and the deformed demons, thereby moving beyond Manichean dualisms about heaven and earth. That progress enable these next writers to prophesy futures of forgiveness, based on an acceptance of a shared mortality on earth of rather than some eternal heavenliness. Blake and Austen celebrate neither deity nor fiend, but a shared, perfectly imperfect, humanity–liberated to find sympathy, identity, with others.
