THE WIDOW’S DEATH MASQUE

The media line is that she was “divisive”, and that seems to remain the case, as folk disagree about whether to respect her or to celebrate her death, or even whether to respect the rights of those who want to respect her or the rights of those who want to celebrate her death. Greater agreement is to be found among politicians, who recognise the politically numinous and, by-and-large, respect that, if nothing else. The irony is that one of the few distinct classes left after Thatcher – apart from the ‘underclass’ of her direct creation – is the political class, an isolated cadre of intellectually lithe control-freaks, ego-maniacs and affect-engineers.

Marcus Harvey, Maggie, 2009, from Ann Jones’s http://imageobjecttext.com/

The most interesting piece I’ve read came from Russell Brand, of all people, someone I’m not accustomed to much enjoying. Describing a sighting of the late Thatcher in her late-period dotage and loneliness tending the plants in Temple, he comes across as some deviant, near-future naturalist, a spotter of almost-extinct species. His story reminded me of Gordon Burn’s encounter with Thatcher in Battersea Park at the beginning of Born Yesterday (if I leant my copy to anyone reading this I’d love it back!):

Where does she go in between all the times she is not being ‘Margaret Thatcher’? The answer, sometimes, it seems, is here, where the short, purposeful steps of her performance self are allowed to dwindle into the short, tentative steps of pensionerdom and widowhood and she is allowed time away from the big emphatic colours she uses to identify herself for the cameras – her blazons. (Faber and Faber (2008) pp. 17-18)

Burn, in his fiction and hybrid writing, was something of a geologist of morbidity, digging down into the cultural weirdness surrounding death through the strata of celebrity. His nearly-dead Thatcher was a suspended premonition of what we now have. He recognised Thatcher as exerting a powerful pull in the imaginary realm, the social unconscious that finds coprolalic vent in the tabloid press. So too did Iain Sinclair, whose portrayal of the Widow in Downriver routes into fever-dream to find appropriate voice:

One morning … the newspapers loud with her praise, the Sun in its heaven, banked television monitors floating a cerulean image-wash, soothing and silent, streamlets of broken Wedgwood crockery, satellite bin lids flinging back some small reflection of the blue virtue she had copyrighted, filmy underwear of sky goddesses, clouds of unknowing … the Widow rose from her stiff pillows – bald as Mussolini – and felt the twitch start in her left eyelid. She ordained the immediate extermination of this muscular anarchy, this palace revolt: but without success. She buzzed for the valet of the bedchamber, a smiler in hornrims. He entered the presence with a deferential smirk, hands behind back (like a defeated Argie conscript), bowing from the hip: he was half a stone overweight, creaking with starch and greedy for preferment. He disconnected the ‘sleep-learning’ gizmo, the tapes that fed the Widow her Japanese humour, taught the finer points of cheating atstud poker, and provided an adequate form forecast to the current camel-racing season. She was a brand leader, she did not sleep. ‘A’ brand leader? The leader, the longest-serving politico-spiritual Papa Boss not yet given the wax treatment, and planted in a glass box to receive the mercifully filtered kisses of a grateful populace. (Penguin (2004) p. 285; Paladin (1991))

Wax treatment, yes: but there’s to be no glass box. Sinclair’s vision has the feel of detournement, the blighted writer reclaiming his psychic territory and wreaking satiric revenge: he, too, has her defined by death; steeped in sleep; producer of skies. Thatcher summons this visionary mode, her powerful psychic pull requiring something far more lucid than realism. A response of this order closes David Peace’s GB84, a single-page prose poem equal parts Blake and Marx:

Here where she stands at the gates at the head of her tribe and waits – Triumphant on the mountains of our skulls. Up to her hems in the rivers of our blood – A wreath in one hand. The other between her legs – Her two little princes dancing by their necks from her apron strings, and she looks down at the long march of labour halted here before her and says, Awake! Awake! This is England, Your England – and the Year is Zero. (Faber and Faber (2004) p. 462)

Note that hand between the legs. There have been any number of quotes remembering Thatcher’s sexual power, and doubtless this is astonishing to the young and repulsive to those who self-identify as left-wing. John Snow recalled her rustling tights, a particularly fetishistic response; all and sundry have quote Francois Mitterand’s remark that she had the mouth of Marilyn Monroe and the eyes of Caligula; Ian McEwan trotted out some Christopher Hitchens anecdote, which is all the McEwan crowd are good for these days.

There’s a stand-out source to turn to for the good juice on Thatcher’s powerful sexual allure: as Iain Sinclair remarked in interview to Tim Chapman, “When in doubt, quote Ballard.”

‘What I Believe’, first published in French in Science Fiction #1 in January 1984 (French readers, famously, got Crash-era Ballard rather more readily than we Brits), and later republished in Interzone that summer, places her firmly in the Ballard pantheon, posing her in various frames and snapshots, as if a character in The Atrocity Exhibition:

I believe in the mysterious beauty of Margaret Thatcher, in the arch of her nostrils and the sheen on her lower lip; in the melancholy of wounded Argentine conscripts; in the haunted smiles of filling station personnel, in my dream of Margaret Thatcher caressed by that young Argentine soldier in a forgotten motel, watched by a tubercular filling station attendant.

(If you’re unsure about the confusion the sexuality of Thatcher causes among younger readers, check out this piece on Dazed Digital that reads ‘What I Believe’ as tongue-in-cheek and lists it as an ‘anti-Thatcher moment’)

Ballard has been asked to expand on this in interview a number of times. Survival Research’s Mark Pauline procured a particularly rich response in 1986:

JGB: I’ve always admired her enormously. I always found her extremely mysterious and attractive at the same time. I think she exerts a powerful sexual spell, and I’m not alone. I think there are a lot of men who find themselves driven to distraction by the mystery of Margaret Thatcher. She’s remarkable. I think she taps all sorts of extreme responses on the part of, certainly, men in the population at large.

MP: How do you think she fits in with the whole English historical tendency to have female rulers?

JGB: I think she exemplifies that. She taps very deep levels of response. There are elements of La Belle Dame Sans Merci–the merciless muse, in her. Also the archetype of the–

MP: Medusa.

JGB: Yes, the Medusa. She taps a large number of deep responses which people express in present-day terms. She’s the nanny, she’s the headmistress, and she’s school-marmy as well. I think her appeal goes far beyond . . . it’s a very ambiguous appeal. She represents all these sort of half-stages–half-conscious, primordial forces . . . that she certainly tapped.

As ever, Ballard is an expert analyst of the cultural condition. He is listening carefully to what the analysand has to say, and what’s coming through is that they want to be fucked by Thatcher.

The excellent Extreme Metaphors interviews book, edited by Simon Sellars and Dan O’Hara, reveals the extent of Ballard’s infatuation/interest and its maturation (go straight to the index, something we might have picked up from Jim himself). Thatcher is discussed on several pages from the 80s through to his final years (Ballard’s a fan of cruise missiles, a proponent of the Falklands action, and a supporter of her economic policies – this, despite being anti-monarchist, anti-Lords, anti-public school. Libertarians would like to claim him, but we might be more secure identifying him as a denier of political binaries. Certainly, he’s more interested in how politics works in the psychological register than in the ideological.)

From Ann Jones’s http://imageobjecttext.com/. Artists got the potent sexuality of Thatcher from the get-go. Marcus Harvey’s piece makes visible the macabre fetishism of contemporary iconography. It reveals itself in two stages – at a distance and up close, when it yields (literally) new dimensions. Those dildos look a bit like cruise missiles, right? This piece is a fucking machine, on all sorts of levels, but primarily on the dream level. It’s a freaky totem of surreal libidinal power.

For those whose livelihoods and communities were devastated by her political decisions, she might be the embodiment of evil, a single individual on whom to heap blame for destruction. If we join Ballard and analyse from a different perspective we might note that she embodied something that has remained more culturally potent than ideology: the adman’s understanding of the libidinal forces that really drive us. She had a domineering sexual hook. She fucked us and a great number of us asked her to do it again. And again.

Her most quoted phrase – her epitaph – is a piece of sexual advice, a coital warning. This lady’s not for turning. Quite. You’ll have to look into those eyes if you want congress. There’ll be no beast of two backs with Thatcher. In fact, perhaps you should be the one to turn.

Red Wapping

The redhead wants the copy but she doesn’t want to know. Ian says the redhead doesn’t know. She doesn’t need to know. Ian says do the copy. ‘It’s yesterday’s story’, says Ian.

Yesterday’s news. Yesterday’s drink in my belly. Yesterday’s pain in my gut.

‘Just make the call’, says Ian.

The redhead’s in her office. She’s looking out through the glass walls, looking out over the newsroom, over all she surveys. It’s her fiefdom. We’re her serfs. She doesn’t know what’s going on. There’s what the redhead knows and what she wants to know. Ian says: ‘Make the fucking call’.

There’s pain in my hands, RSI.

Ian looks at me as I shake my arms.

‘You’ve done it hundreds of times before, no use getting cold feet now. Come on you cowardly sack of shit. Do you want that fuck on The Star to get there first? Make the call.’

Ian walks to the redhead’s office. I see them through the glass. The redhead looks at me, surveys me.

I walk over to Foreign. I ask Sarah to dial the number. She looks pissy.

‘Who is it this time?’ she asks.

‘You don’t want to know,’ I say.

‘I do want to know,’ says Sarah, ‘if you want me to do it.’

‘That girl,’ I say.

‘Which girl?’ asks Sarah.

‘The one that’s missing,’ I say.

‘No way,’ says Sarah. ‘No fucking way. Unh, unh, not me girlfriend.’

‘I can’t do it on me Todd,’ I plead.

‘Well you’ll have to find someone else,’ says Sarah. ‘Find another patsy.’

I call John on internal. ‘Need a favour, mate.’

‘Out again tonight?’ asks John. ‘More bloody showbiz? Three in a row, Dave. Getting to be a habit.’

‘No mate,’ I say. ‘Something else. Need you to make a call.’

‘One of Ian’s calls?’ asks John.

‘Might be,’ I say.

‘Yeah, why not? What’s the number?’

I read him the number. ‘Ask no questions, right?’ says John.

‘Right,’ I say. ‘Quietly, quietly, catchy fucking monkey. I’ll give you a minute to get through, so do it right now, alright?’

‘Alright,’ says John.

Thirty seconds later my phone rings. ‘What the fuck?’ says John. ‘That’s a sick joke, right? Because it’s a fucking good one. Who’d you get to record that message? You’re a sicko, Dave. Fucking good one.’

We’re all sick, I think. We’re all sick. Sick to our stomachs. Sick to our souls.

The RSI tingles. The RSI burns. My hand goes numb. I still haven’t got the copy. The redhead knows. I know she knows.