In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

288 CODES
case with the cronicas of the Brazilian journalist Antonio de Alcantara
Machado, there is always a note of myth and eccentricity in the description
of technological innovations: "The obsession of today is the radio.
Not long ago, people were passionate about the gramophone. It actually
became one of the tortures of mankind. The radio replaced it. Nobody
can resist the temptation to listen at least once to a sound coming from
unknown, exotic countries" (Alcantara Machado, 140). It is no wonder
that Fritz Lang's hyperallegorical film Metropolis portrays machines acting
as deities: "Then, from their glittering thrones, Baal and Moloch,
Huitzilopochtli and Durgha, arose. All the god-machines got up, stretching
their limbs in fearful liberty. Hungry fires flared up from the bellies
of Baal and Moloch, flicking out of their maws" (Lang, 106; also 38).
If the prevailing intellectual ambition of the moment is to absorb
Transcendence into Immanence, and if this aim-paradoxically and for
a number of different reasons-ends up multiplying the references to
transcendent worlds, an equally marked reaction to the absorption of
Transcendence consists in the belief that the time is ripe for inventing
new mythologies or for reviving traditional forms of religious discourse.
A particularly extreme example of such a new mythology is found in
D. H. Lawrence's novel The Plumed Serpent. Lawrence shares Fritz
Lang's fondness for Aztec deities. But whereas in Metropolis the transcendent
aspects of the plot develop out of problems caused by social
injustice, Lawrence's fictional religion is based on aggressively phallocentric
sex. "The sacredness of sex," to use the phrase of a female character,
is by no means a metaphor: "How wonderful sex can be, when men keep
it powerful and sacred, and it fills the world! Like sunshine through and
through one" (Lawrence, 467). Likewise, the metaphysical discourse in
which Lawrence solemnly describes erotic experience, as well as his
reference to a male lover as a "god-demon," are to be taken seriously:
"She could conceive now her marriage with Cipriano; the supreme passivity,
like the earth below the twilight, consummate in living lifelessness,
the sheer solid mystery of an abandon ... She had only known his face,
the face of the supreme god-demon; with the arching brows and slightly
slanting eyes, and the loose, light tuft of a goat-beard. The Master. The
everlasting Pan" (467). Henri de Montherlant is, if possible, equally
solemn about the religion he extracts from the death-mystique of
bullfighting. His novel Les Bestiaires ends with a strangely utopian epilogue
that celebrates a return to the rituals of a pre-Christian bull relig-