Vestments of the Glacial Epoch

Louis Agassiz proposed the existence of an Ice Age in 1837, and the nineteenth century absorbed the discovery with the appetite of a culture that had been waiting for it unawares. Geology now licensed a whole literature of speculative pre-history in which the warm origins of European civilisation could be imagined as having been violently terminated by a planetary freezing, the climatic catastrophe standing in for any number of cultural ones. Johann Jakob Bachofen, writing his Mutterrecht in 1861, drew on the new geology to construct a three-stage scheme of pre-historical womanhood that ran from the hetaeric swamp through the Demetrian gynocracy to the Apollonian patriarchy, with the Ice Age as the engine of the transition between the first two stages. The swamp goddess of the hetaeric stage, that chthonic Aphrodite of unfixed waters and undifferentiated sensuality, ruled a vegetal humid world in which no line was drawn between bodies, between fathers, between properties, a warm and promiscuous and uncountable domain that the ice eventually came to terminate, freezing the swamps and crystallising the undifferentiated humidity into form. From the newly hardened ground Demeter rose, instating marriage, drawing the furrow, fixing paternity to the field and maternity to the household, and the world acquired the gynocratic sentimentality that would sublime itself into the law-bound patriarchy in which Bachofen and his contemporaries believed themselves to live.

The fantasy held the imagination of serious readers for decades, exerting a hidden pull on Nietzsche, Engels, Jung, Klages, and a constellation of less visible writers who read Bachofen with the seriousness one might bring to the Phenomenology of Spirit. By the early twentieth century the Mutterrecht had become a kind of sealed underground reservoir from which various thinkers drew without acknowledgement, and into which Bachofen himself had largely subsided as an unread classic.

Sacher-Masoch had read him. He grew up in Galicia, in Lemberg, his father the police chief of a polyglot Habsburg city in which Slavic peasant cultures still preserved, as he believed, traces of an older feminine power that the western European bourgeoisie had long since legislated out of existence. The Slavic peasant women of his childhood became, in his adult imagination, a kind of living evidence of the suppressed Demetrian stage, the matriarchal severity still readable under the patriarchal surface of the Empire. When he came to write his erotic fiction he constructed it on a deliberately Bachofenian armature, and his Wanda, in Venus in Furs, comes to us as a carefully imagined apparition of the Demetrian goddess, the southern Aphrodite forced northward, dressed in animal pelt, recruited into the role of cold legislatrix. The whole novel reads as a re-enactment, on the scale of a single doomed liaison, of the catastrophe that Bachofen had said took millennia to unfold.

The Greek ideal that the masochistic imagination inherits is already a frozen object by the time anyone in the nineteenth century reaches for it. Winckelmann had been at work since the 1750s converting Mediterranean antiquity into cold marble, edle Einfalt und stille Größe, noble simplicity and quiet grandeur, a Greece of white statuary in still museums. The Greeks themselves had painted their statues in garish polychrome, and yet the Germans preferred the plaster casts, and the plaster casts taught two centuries of European aesthetes that the warm south of antiquity had been cold and pale and silent. Hölderlin spent his sanity trying to reverse the operation. Goethe went to Italy in 1786 and tried to import warmth back into the German body through the Roman Elegies, succeeding only in flashes before the climate of his own culture reasserted itself. Mignon's song in Wilhelm Meister, asking whether you know the land where the lemons bloom, becomes the elegy of the impossible return, the longing for a southern warmth from inside a northern climate that has come to constitute longing itself. The Greece the masochist receives has already been marbleised, already cooled, already half-prepared for the fur to be laid across its shoulders.

There is an older split underneath the German one. Bruce Chatwin in The Songlines circles obsessively around the same wound, casting it back to Cain and Abel, the herdsman murdered by the tiller, the nomad terminated by the settler. The patriarchy that ascends to legislate the world arises out of the furrow, out of the surveyor's rod, out of the fence around the granary. The agriculturalist invents inheritance because he has something to inherit, invents paternity because the field demands a son, invents law because the seed must be protected from the goat. Whatever wandered before that, with its songs and its long looping seasonal kinships, gets killed and salted under. Graeber and Wengrow in The Dawn of Everything spend a great deal of energy complicating this picture, showing that hunter-gatherers and proto-agriculturalists did not march in a single direction, that some Neolithic societies seem to have toggled between modes seasonally, that the great patriarchal lockdown is younger and more contingent than Engels or Chatwin assumed. The complication is welcome and probably correct, and yet the older myth retains a stubborn psychic accuracy that the revised history does not dissolve, because the myth is not really about what happened, but about what we feel happened, what the European body still suspects happened to it some long time ago, when something warm and roaming was put behind a wall.

Jung saw this and made an entire metapsychology out of it. The anima, that southern figure who shows up in northern dreams to drag the dreamer toward whatever he has refused to feel, is a Bachofenian construct dressed up in clinical Swiss German. The masculine principle locked in its Apollonian severity must, under pain of psychic atrophy, recover relation to the feminine principle it has buried. The Tao reaches the same intuition by a quieter road, yin not as woman but as the receptive, the dark, the valley, the river, all of which the masculine yang must learn to honour or else become brittle, ossified, the warrior who cannot bend, the magistrate who cannot weep. The masochistic scene, considered through this lens, performs a private and rather literal correction. The patriarchal self deposits itself at the feet of the buried feminine, hands her the whip, and asks her to administer the recall.

Sacher-Masoch's stagecraft recognises the cold already in the marble and seeks out its erotic temperature. He does not try to thaw Aphrodite, he admits the freezing, ceremonialises it, gives her furs and a whip and a contract, and finds that an entire mode of desire becomes available once one stops protesting against the glaciation. The cold room. The beloved wrapped in fur. The throne of dark wood. The contract drawn up, with terms and signatures and durations. The whip laid across her lap. The whole apparatus reproduces, on the scale of a bedroom, the cosmic event that Bachofen had needed to explain the rise of severity, and through that small reproduction performs the recovery the patriarchal soul cannot perform in daylight.

The Prussian backdrop deepens the picture. By the time Sacher-Masoch is writing, the German-speaking world has been undergoing its own private freezing for a century and a half, the Prussian state perfecting itself as the most disciplined organism in Europe, the Pflicht of Kant lifted into the Generalstab of Moltke, every gesture drilled, every uniform pressed, every body straightened against the slouching south. Sacher-Masoch wrote in the Habsburg fringe of this world, looking east into Slavic peasant warmth and west into Prussian rectitude, and he understood the masochistic transaction partly as a kind of homeopathy administered to the Prussianised body. To restore feeling to a soul drilled into severity, more severity must be administered, but now sensualised, eroticised, conducted under the sign of the feminine. The whip in Wanda's hand is the parade-ground whip turned around, returned to the warm hand that drilling had tried to abolish.

Severity rises into the space sensuality has vacated, and the older Roman vocabulary of severitas becomes useful. Severity has little to do with cruelty in the punitive sense, the word reaching closer to gravity, to the moral weight of form, to the Stoic capacity to hold a position without slackening into either tenderness or rage. Severity offers sensuality a place to be repressed into, an architecture of suppression, and from this architecture the erotic charge of the masochistic situation emanates. The repressed sensuality does not disappear, it sits sealed beneath the contract and the ceremony and the fur, generating heat under pressure. If sensuality had been simply killed there would be no charge. The charge comes from knowing that under the ice the swamp goddess remains alive, waiting, generating warmth against the cold weight that holds her down, and the masochist is in love with the contract as much as with the woman, because the contract is the visible apparatus of the catastrophe. Sacher-Masoch was a lawyer's son, and the masochistic imagination has a juridical quality, an eros found in the binding clause, in the signed and witnessed paper that converts feeling into form. The notary becomes a kind of officiating priest in the Demetrian liturgy.

The mother figure is structurally required. The patriarchal father has absorbed severity into himself without remainder, having become law without residue, dry and overhead, with the original heat banked elsewhere or forgotten, so that little glacial drama remains in him. He stands as the Apollonian terminus of the long process, a figure in whom the catastrophe has been digested and rendered nearly invisible. The Demetrian mother is the figure in whom the catastrophe remains legible, carrying the swamp inside her, frozen but readable through the ice, severe and remembering being warm, the remembering visible on her surface. The masochist seeks her because she is the figure of the catastrophe still active in the present, the trace of hetaerism still visible on the surface of gynocratic law, and the whole scene becomes an archaeological dig conducted in real time on the body of the beloved. He kneels not before law as such, which would be the sadist's mistake or the patriarch's, but before law as still bearing the imprint of what it abolished.

Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy, published in 1908 in the same Bachofen-saturated atmosphere, offers an angle. The abstract crystalline art of certain peoples, Egyptian geometry, Byzantine pattern, Northern interlace, arose from a hostile cosmos in which the world refused empathy, and the spirit took refuge in the perfect cold of form, while the empathy-art of the Greeks and Italian Renaissance arose where the world was hospitable enough to be loved on its own terms. The masochistic ideal stands as the erotic correlate of the abstract impulse, the art of a person whose Aphrodite has become inhospitable, who can no longer love her warmly, and who therefore takes refuge in the perfect cold of her form, in her marble pose, in the geometry of contract and ceremony. The crystalline interlace of the Lindisfarne Gospels and the dense ceremonial geometry of Wanda's contract issue from a kindred pressure, a kindred climate of soul.

One can read the whole nineteenth century as preparing this scene without quite knowing what it was preparing. Goethe went to Italy in search of warmth, Heine sneered at the failure, Nietzsche fled to the Engadine to find a colder cold, the high cold of intellectual altitude, the air so thin that thought itself crystallises. Thomas Mann, decades later, wrote Death in Venice as the catastrophe in reverse, the Northern aesthete melting in the Southern plague city, killed by a return of the warm hetaeric humidity that Bachofen had said was frozen out of European life. Aschenbach functions as the masochist's photographic negative, the cold form melting back into swamp, the marble dissolving under the equatorial heat that the masochistic imagination had spent decades trying to seal beneath ice, so that Wanda in fur and Aschenbach with his hair dyed black come to look like inverse images of the same impossible traffic between the climates of the soul. Mann had read his Bachofen and his Nietzsche, and the late nineteenth-century imagination supplied him with the climatic vocabulary required to stage the reverse catastrophe and let his aesthete die of it.

Gynocratic sentimentality reads strangely now. Sentimentality has declined into a synonym for cheap emotion, for the manipulative tear in the bad novel, for everything a serious modern wishes to disown. The older sense, the sense in which Bachofen and his readers used the word, carried the meaning of feeling legislated, feeling possessing form, feeling under the rule of the matriarchal goddess, the affect proper to the gynocratic stage and answering neither to the chaotic affect of hetaerism nor to the dry juridical reasoning of the patriarchy that comes after. The masochistic ideal preserves this peculiar middle feeling, this severe sentimentality, this maternal cold tenderness, and finds in it much of the erotic possibility of the scene. The lover wants the Demetrian goddess to feel, and to feel according to the rules she has herself drawn. The contract is the visible form of her feeling, the whip the trace of her tenderness, and when she strikes she must be moved, and moved along the lines her own severity has prescribed. Anything spontaneous would damage the scene, and anything performed without internal feeling would damage it equally, the required state being feeling-as-form, ice with a slow warm core, snow with the body of the bee inside it still humming.

The longer one sits with this material the more one suspects that the masochistic imagination amounts to a clear-eyed inhabitation of a structural condition that European modernity imposes on its inheritors. Anyone raised inside a culture that has frozen its own warmth into marble must eventually find a way of loving the marble, and the masochist offers one such way, ceremonious, explicit, archaeologically aware. The repression of sensuality and the triumphant rise of severity name the climatic condition of the modern European soul, and the masochistic scene stands as one of the more honest acknowledgements that culture has produced of the freezing it has undergone, while much else falls into denial, or into nostalgia, or into the various failed attempts to thaw an ice that has become structural, an ice that wears its own pelts and signs its own contracts and would not, even if it could, return to the warm swamp from which it once crystallised. Somewhere in the Carpathians or the Tatras or the steppe beyond, in a dream or a memory or a forgery of memory, the Slavic peasant grandmother still walks at dusk through the long grass, untouched by Kant, untouched by Moltke, untouched by the surveyor.