“God it would be great to be a fake somebody, rather than a real nobody.”
(Mike Tyson)
Some differences between English and French seafaring – as a national myth or seafaring culture – are spontaneously evoked when I compare Walter Benjamin’s tribute to Paul Valéry upon his 60th birthday and the case of the amateur yachtsman Donald Crowhurst who died from his own faked voyage. Tacita Dean made two films ‘about’ him – one 14 minutes, the other 7 minutes in length. In one film a lighthouse looks out at an empty sea – the other later film shows Crowhurst’s boat “Teignmouth Electron” where it was finally beached and still lies rotting on Cayman Brac - part of the Cayman Islands, a tax haven and the one of the last ‘crown colonies’. The first film is called Disappearance at Sea. There are so many disappearances in English life and lore – it is a beloved plot but does not quite do justice to the complexity of the Crowhurst affair. The other national trope is the grand deception – the monumental breathtaking fake. Crowhurst’s fate combines both – making his story canonical (almost immortal) in the eyes of a British audience. Dean concludes: maybe I’m a fake and everyone else has his inner Crowhurst too.
For Valéry the sea was mathematics – like his young wish to be a naval officer. The sea’s image is captured in precise charts over which the mariner bends – or bows – to that mathematical sea. Benjamin writes: “Valéry once wanted to be a naval officer. In what he became – the features of this youthful dream are still recognizable. First in his poetry, in the restrained fullness of forms, that language claims from thinking like the sea from calm/calmed winds; and second, this thinking is mathematical through and through, that bends over situations as if over a sea chart and without preening in the mirror of ‘depths’ is already content to steer a dangerless course. The sea and mathematics (…)” (Walter Benjamin, “Paul Valéry for his 60th Birthday”) And yet – even Valéry’s mathematical poetics would wither without his ‘bad thoughts’.
Crowhurst uses his navigation instruments and radio log to record and chart a fake course. On the fake course he is winning the Sunday Times solo race to circumnavigate the globe in a sailing boat – on the real one he is fatally lost. Somewhere on the real journey (although one will never know for sure) - he jumps overboard with his chronometer and his fake log. (Why the chronometer?) Now once again his slight pissant drama has been heroicized, this time in a proper movie starring the profusely decorated actor Colin Firth who already played the last king George the Sixth.
The urge to compare the two roles is irresistible – is there something of the king in the fake and of the fake in the king? And does the story of Crowhurst like the king ‘never die’?
The “King’s Two Bodies” is the fantastical juridical device (mystic fiction) invented by English jurists of the Tudor period to legally amalgamate the mortal and immortal monarch. Although mystical the portmanteau of kingly bodies was grounded in the solid legal precedence of the two sexes of the hermaphrodite.
Alongside the ‘original’ King’s two bodies enters a third body – that of the actor who plays the king – just as for the Norman Anonymous clergy in 1100 A.D. the Christian kings are imitators, impersonators or actors of Christ – “christomimetes”. (E. H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, Princeton University Press, 2016, p. 47) The actors of kings are thus impersonators of the impersonators or ‘christomimetai’ once removed.
The nous of central casting, that absolute spirit which mates actors and their roles – the cinematic eye of God – designs/establishes a historical topology in which the doomed mendacious amateur sailor and the ex-naval officer king reside in the same actor body. The counterfeit yachtsman Crowhurst and the stutterer ex-sailor king George the Sixth are hybridized in the history of one concrete instance of actor flesh – in the body of Colin Firth. Rather than just the king housing two bodies in his one, the actor swells to metahistorical proportions. Of the many sorts of double or multi bodied kings he is the primary vehicle.
In the actor Firth the King (commander in chief of the Ship of State) and the dubious Yachtsman become each other’s double. It is somehow befitting – that some scenes of the George the Sixth film (The King’s Speech) were shot at the London residence of the convicted society conman and aristo impersonator ‘Lord’ Eddie Davenport.
Ironically each time an actor doubles for the king in one of those eternally recurring historical re-enactments, it is the actor’s body or his effigy, which stands in for the king’s immortal self. As such the actor impersonating the king in film mimics the custom of ritual effigies in ancient roman funeral rites for the emperor – a source for the doubling of the corpse with effigies in the funerary ceremonies of French and English kings. After the emperor’s or king’s unadorned decaying corpse is cremated or buried and removed from the scene his effigy wrapped in the full regalia of ‘Dignitas which never dies’ (Dignitas non moritur) prolongs the symbolic life and agony of the ruler. The paradox of the king’s two bodies in death is that the ‘real’ funeral with triumph and regal effects is that of the ‘immortal’ perpetual effigy – which can’t die – whereas the royal corpse has become a negligible sort of ‘homo sacer’ to be buried with a minimum of ceremony.
To redress this imbalance the actor king like a royal zombie or repeating effigy dies over and over again – assuring the spectator subject that the ‘King never dies’.
⎨ℵ This paradox though hides another more pernicious dilemma for the Tudor casuists – without the physical corpse – the desired parallels between the Christian king and the ‘God-man’ Christ are greatly diminished: without a body – no Crucifixion, no Resurrection. The new political theology of absolutism undermines the medieval Christian mystagogy of the King and its corresponding ‘Christ-centred Kingship” (Kantorowicz) – from which though it still draws its legitimisation. By discounting the monarch’s natural mortal body, it forfeits any imitation of the physicality of divine resurrection – such as anticipated when Christ hands his disciples bread at the Last Supper with the liturgical words of the Eucharist ‘hoc est enim corpus meum’. The refrain “the King never dies” implies perpetuity in the eternal time zone of aevum – but not the nunc stans of “this is my body” of the Eucharist – symbolizing the physical temporal resurrection of a crucified ‘God-man’ corpse. The ‘Christ centred Kingship’ alluding to the divine King as a stand in/double for Christ, a ‘christomimetes’ and the ‘secular’ state doctrine of Dignitas non moritur are mutually exclusive. A sign of their profound difference is the appearance of an alternative ‘pagan’ symbol of resurrection in regal iconography: the mythical ‘phoenix’ born of its own ashes.
The Christology submerged under the erasure of the crucified body in early modern monarchical state jurisprudence and in the ‘glory’ of self-deifying Christian monarchs resurfaces in the economy. Marx reflects a species of “gemina persona” or the medieval device of the twinned persons of the king’s mortal body and his immortal divine Christ-King-Body in “The Fetish Character of the Commodity and Its Secret”, Capital, Volume I. He speaks of the “mystical character of the commodity”: When the labour product makes its appearance in the commodity form in capitalism, it ‘naturally’ assumes a mystical, metaphysical character/existence – becoming a double-bodied ‘sinnlich übersinnliches Ding’ (material immaterial thing). Underlying this ‘real analogy/allegory’ is Marx’s discovery of the religious nature of capitalism – or political economy as the prolongation of the Christian economy of salvation. As Kojin Karatani observes – for Marx the critique of political economy is a direct continuation of his earlier critique of religion – both are rooted in the “religio-genic-process that continues to create and expand the phantasmic domain of value.” (Transcritique On Kant and Marx, MIT Press, 2005, p. 221) Of course, the religion/theology of capital, its religious oikonomia is not limited to the commodity form any more than Christianity is to the Eucharist - the credit system and ultimately finance capital are the economic forms of Christian aevum (perpetuity) whilst at the same time offering/guaranteeing the indefinite deferral of payment alias salvation.
Baroque drama adds another anatomical twist to this play of natural and supernatural bodies as Benjamin notes in his Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels – the royal corpse is emblematic/heraldic, the prism of the drama – the “production of the corpse” is the main action of the play. The awesome holiness of sovereignty in such drama requires that the king’s mortal body be kept in view – rather than hidden/removed from sight as in the doctrine of King’s Two Bodies.⎬
The actor is a crucible for what is and is not and that multiplied times all his diverse roles. He is something of a ‘floating signifier’ or ‘empty throne’ or a symbolic void – assuming any and all meaning or none, as the occasion requires. The ‘floating signifier’ or what Agamben calls a ‘signature’ is never chemically pure – it like the ‘pores’ of the actor retains particles of every signification it has ever performed.
It is only natural that these roles/meanings/significations begin to communicate promiscuously with one another. Some roles one can safely overlook or discard – but others are symptomatic of a national/collective or historical unconscious such as Crowhurst the amateur globe circumnavigator fake navigating himself to perdition and George the sixth – the king who presided over the waning power of the British Empire, its shrinking and devolution to the amorphous quotidian humdrum Commonwealth.
The fake enters as if by chance into the imago of the King via an actor’s casting as both - inadvertently revealing the ultimate inoperativity of any kingship – its essential ‘brokenness’ sub specie aeternitatis.
Many commentators seem to think the Crowhurst story has something to do with the British Empire or lack of it (and its vicissitudes). Didn’t he grow up for a while in ‘British’ India? Somehow Crowhurst has crossed the frontier of doom to enter that pantheon of ill-fated holy-grail explorers – up with the likes of Scott, Franklin and Shackleton and other ‘fatal Englishmen’ who set out to claim remote parts of the globe for the crown and never came back.
The distributors of the latest film The Mercy have even expunged mention of Crowhurst’s great work of fiction, his faked positions, from their film propaganda – the newcomer to the story would expect just heroic failure on a ‘shoestring budget’. Reality was even more prosaic. He entered the race as a partner in an awkward sort of joint business venture not as a soloist in pursuit of adventure. The maiden voyage of his hastily built and untried trimaran “Teignmouth Electron” was to have been a flashy start-up, a grandiose publicity stunt – like participating in the great British bake-off. Yet the key dramatic hinge of the story is Crowhurst’s signing of a Faustian contract with his backer. Mephistopheles appears in the guise of the ‘hard nosed caravan businessman’ Stanley Best who stipulates - should Crowhurst quit the race he would forfeit the backing.
The wreck of Crowhurst’s ‘Teignmouth Electron’ castaway on a melancholic Caribbean shore (one of the few still in British possession), its white hulk lying like blanched whale bones under the tropical sky – recalls another startling white appearance – the alabaster like skeletal torso of George Mallory mummified by decades of snow and ice, discovered by an American team many years after his disappearance in a ravine on the slope of Mount Everest. Both these relics of ‘great adventures’ magically transmute into the signs of a dying lost empire.
Simon Rumley, the director of another Crowhurst film called simply Crowhurst said: “During the British Empire we were well - dominant – you could just decide to do something and generally you were successful (…)”. But this conception of the BE is itself quite contemporary – nostalgic. In the heyday of the BE one was aware that disasters and not just at sea can and did frequently happen. Not just solo ones. One classic example is the massacre of General Gordon and thousands of Egyptian colonial troops by the forces of the Mahdi ending the siege of Khartoum. In those days catastrophic imperial failures may have been seen as par for the course. They inspired a febrile mentality of glorious failure instilled in generations of public school boys, so as to prepare them for future martyrdom in other infallible imperial projects.
In the trenches of World War One or in the massive naval and army defeat at Gallipoli or even the ‘victories’ of Somme and Passchendaele etc – the imperial troops would have been drilled from boyhood despite everything to “play up! Play up! and play the game!”
The French mariner poet Bernard Moitessier, who also competed in that first Sunday Times global solo race in 1968-9, ignored the prize but he played the game. Almost the antithesis of Crowhurst - Moitessier could have won, he was gaining on the front-runner Knox Johnston in the final stretch but decided not to return to the finishing line – instead he continued sailing around the world a second time. In some of Moitessier’s comments, which he recorded whilst in the Southern Ocean around Cape Horn, the most dangerous waters of the circumnavigation, – one hears the same calm mathematical French sea voice Walter Benjamin attended/detected in Valéry’s writings. Most likely he would have agreed with Valéry that “the essence of the species is adventure”.
“One forgets everything, seeing only the play of the boat and the sea, the play of sea around the boat, leaving aside everything not essential to that game, one has to be careful not to go further than necessary to the depth of the game, but that’s the hardest part, not going too far.” (in Deep Water, 2006 directed by Jerry Rothwell and Louise Osmond)
Did Crowhurst go too deep, too far into the game?
Out of Crowhurst’s stock-in-trade of Crown and Empire an implacable spectre of boys’ own hara-kiri seizes hold of his soul. His ‘last words’ are about the game. He writes in the ‘true’ log: “It has been a good game that must be ended at the // I will play this game when I choose I will resign this game // It is the end of my game, the truth has been revealed //”
The old siren Davy Jones compels him to ‘end the game’ – while still oddly reassuring him “there is no reason for harmful”. So that verses such as that late Victorian ode to an end with honour, Vitaï Lampada by Sir Henry Newbolt might have haunted Crowhurst’s final hours:
“(…) The Gatling’s jammed and the Colonel dead
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke,
The river of death has brimmed its banks,
And England’s far, and Honour a name,
But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks:
‘Play up! play up!
and play the game!”
Substitute leaky boat and fake log for jammed Gatling (an early mounted rapid fire machine gun) and blind regiment – and England and honour are just as far away for Crowhurst in the Argentine sea as they were for an imperial trooper in the Sudan desert in the good old days of ‘easy’ Empire.
Postface
the former London address of
the High Commissioner of Sierra Leone
became under rather dubious
circumstances a
‘petrified forest’
still etched
for money and fame
this dredged up world
(made at the behest of the BBC)
dehydrated psychic revenants
easy conquest
for strictly come dancing
atavistic joint ventures
antiscorbutic
free from harm
specially designed
psyche
atavistic spectre/
as described by Herodian
An old ghoulish avatar
plays dead for England.
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