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Posted by Steven Mendoza 16/03/09
George Lamming was one of the economic immigrants to Britain in 1951 where he worked initially in a factory. Although he graduated within the year as a broadcaster for the BBC he retains an active concern with slavery and colonial oppression and cultural destruction. He interprets Miranda’s accusation of Caliban of attempting to rape her as a dream she mistook for reality. His denial of Caliban’s attempted rape is reminiscent of Freud’s notorious denial of the father’s seduction of the daughter as not an external reality but as the daughter’s fantasy. Feminism repudiates this denial as a denial of the incestuous abuse of women by their fathers. Sadly it is true that there are fathers who do abuse their daughters. Actually it may be that there are more fathers who abuse their daughters emotionally and physically as an expression of their fear of their incestuous desires than there are fathers who express them directly.
But fatherhood does not make a man an abuser any more than being black makes a man a rapist. Of course the attribution of blacks as rapacious, brutal, unintelligent, cannibalistic and possessed of a sense of rhythm is a rationalisation of the white man’s enslavement of them and their exploitation to invade and invest a whole continent. As whites have had to rationalise their abuse of other races so we have all had to deny the abuse of children. In 2009 it is still difficult to assert that women are disturbed by incestuous desires as we all are and that some of them may fantasise what another may actually suffer from her father.
But it is easy to suggest that she might fantasise the rape not by her father but by a black man. It is shocking to hear promulgated an idea which has, in a neighbouring field of thought, been so vehemently repudiated. What shocks is not simply the double standard but the ease with which it is embraced by those who consider themselves to be champions of the rights of those who cannot defend themselves. It is this double standard which has turned political correctness from a term of approval to one of abuse. By political correctness now we take it for granted that we mean the uncritical deployment of received ideas and the reductive application of principles to occasions which do not merit them.
Typical of this is the attribution of the prince’s search for a foot fine enough to enter Cinderella’s slipper as the sexual deviation of foot fetishism. To a foot fetishist the big smelly feet of her big sisters might be much more exciting. To the prince the significance of her fitting the slipper is that she is the slender nubile creature of his sexual fantasies. We are told that men desire girlish women because the fashion industry prescribes them or we may be told that men cannot cope with real curvy women and need the refuge of a boyish androgyne. But it may be that the physical standard of conventional desirability is an evolutionary inheritance determined by the signals of fertility. A young girl has only to sit on a chair that has been warmed by a gentleman’s bottom to fall pregnant.
Cinderella herself came up in my last analysis and she was interpreted as having, in my case, the meaning of being an envious, sibling rivalrous, little bitch slagging off her full grown sisters and usurping an adult role. This, in its denial of external reality and devolution of responsibility upon the individual, is so typical of Kleinian thought. But when I found my analyst, in what seemed to me an unkleinian way, interpreting the external reality of a transference figure she protested that reconstruction is an important part of psychoanalysis. Here too principles cannot be applied reductively. So jealous are we now of the privacy of the individual that the only case an analyst can give as an example is his own.
SLAVERY AND INCEST
COMMENTS BEFORE AND AFTER THE OPENING SYMPOSIUM 26/02/2009
In the South Bank Show of the eighth of February this year, devoted to Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, George Lamming, the novelist born in Barbados in 1927, treats of Miranda’s accusation of Caliban of rape as a dream she had and mistook for reality. The show interprets the ‘Brave New World’ Miranda discovers as anticipating the ‘The New World’. Actually her brave new world is a world of unscrupulous courtiers new only to her. Prospero’s treatment of Caliban and Ariel as slaves is interpreted as an anticipation of the slavery upon which the wealth of the New World was founded. George Lamming was one of the economic immigrants to Britain in 1951 where he worked initially in a factory. Although he graduated within the year as a broadcaster for the BBC he retains an active concern with slavery and colonial oppression and cultural destruction. He interprets Miranda’s accusation of Caliban of attempting to rape her as a dream she mistook for reality. His denial of Caliban’s attempted rape is reminiscent of Freud’s notorious denial of the father’s seduction of the daughter as not an external reality but as the daughter’s fantasy. Feminism repudiates this denial as a denial of the incestuous abuse of women by their fathers. Sadly it is true that there are fathers who do abuse their daughters. Actually it may be that there are more fathers who abuse their daughters emotionally and physically as an expression of their fear of their incestuous desires than there are fathers who express them directly.
But fatherhood does not make a man an abuser any more than being black makes a man a rapist. Of course the attribution of blacks as rapacious, brutal, unintelligent, cannibalistic and possessed of a sense of rhythm is a rationalisation of the white man’s enslavement of them and their exploitation to invade and invest a whole continent. As whites have had to rationalise their abuse of other races so we have all had to deny the abuse of children. In 2009 it is still difficult to assert that women are disturbed by incestuous desires as we all are and that some of them may fantasise what another may actually suffer from her father.
But it is easy to suggest that she might fantasise the rape not by her father but by a black man. It is shocking to hear promulgated an idea which has, in a neighbouring field of thought, been so vehemently repudiated. What shocks is not simply the double standard but the ease with which it is embraced by those who consider themselves to be champions of the rights of those who cannot defend themselves. It is this double standard which has turned political correctness from a term of approval to one of abuse. By political correctness now we take it for granted that we mean the uncritical deployment of received ideas and the reductive application of principles to occasions which do not merit them.
Typical of this is the attribution of the prince’s search for a foot fine enough to enter Cinderella’s slipper as the sexual deviation of foot fetishism. To a foot fetishist the big smelly feet of her big sisters might be much more exciting. To the prince the significance of her fitting the slipper is that she is the slender nubile creature of his sexual fantasies. We are told that men desire girlish women because the fashion industry prescribes them or we may be told that men cannot cope with real curvy women and need the refuge of a boyish androgyne. But it may be that the physical standard of conventional desirability is an evolutionary inheritance determined by the signals of fertility. A young girl has only to sit on a chair that has been warmed by a gentleman’s bottom to fall pregnant.
Cinderella herself came up in my last analysis and she was interpreted as having, in my case, the meaning of being an envious, sibling rivalrous, little bitch slagging off her full grown sisters and usurping an adult role. This, in its denial of external reality and devolution of responsibility upon the individual, is so typical of Kleinian thought. But when I found my analyst, in what seemed to me an unkleinian way, interpreting the external reality of a transference figure she protested that reconstruction is an important part of psychoanalysis. Here too principles cannot be applied reductively. So jealous are we now of the privacy of the individual that the only case an analyst can give as an example is his own.
11/03/2009 06:30 AM 755 words
