Coco Mellors: a twenty-first century anti-anti-mimetic approach to life as art

From our sentimental bookworm

In his 1889 essay The Decay of Lying, Irish poet and playwright Oscar Wilde opined an anti-mimetic view upon the relationship between art and life that cornerstoned a turn-of-the-century, proto-modernist belief in the ability of the aesthetic to create, and indeed idealise reality. Challenging the ancient Aristotelian concept of ‘mimesis’ - essentially the idea that art is imitative of life – he argued that art provides the framework through which life takes on meaning:

Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life... [Anti- mimesis] results not merely from Life's imitative instinct, but from the fact that the self-conscious aim of Life is to find expression, and that Art offers it certain beautiful forms through which it may realise that energy.

He personifies ‘Art’ as a beautiful woman with ‘wonderful eyes’: an erotic vessel that romanticises entities, concepts, objects that would otherwise be arbitrary. ‘That white quivering sunlight that one sees now in France, with its strange blotches of mauve, and its restless violet shadows, is her [Art’s] latest fancy’, he suggests, with this ekphrastic description highlighting the way that it is ‘poets and painters’ who have ‘taught us the mysterious loveliness’ and luster of such landscapes. Art frames the associations we make with the world – like that we make between sunny French scenery and aesthetic ‘loveliness’. ‘Art’ as a seductress with only rose-tinted eyes to note, however, implies an emptiness in her substance that suggests she is vacant, inhabited freely by those who manipulate her to produce certain romanticised consciousnesses. Coco Mellors, in her 2022 debut novel Cleopatra and Frankenstein, seems to challenge the anti-mimetic literary ethos that developed over the twentieth century, pioneered by Wilde. It is not necessarily a feminist unpicking of Wilde’s vacant, rosily idealist seductress but a humanist discourse upon the imperfect human experience and its inability to ‘be’, or attain the premonitions of, art.

The iconograph of the novel’s cover – a pair of painted green eyes – is an aesthetic ideal in itself. Upon the face of a woman who is otherwise lacking in identity but who we assume to be Cleo, an aspiring artist whose archetypally beautiful met-in-elevator relationship leads to her attempted suicide, it is perhaps even a nod towards Wilde and the psychotic and dangerous implications of art having the ability to control reality, particularly in modern situ.

She transforms Wilde’s ‘Art’, which I will describe as a ‘femme esse’ figure whose female sexual beauty poetically encrypts a sense of beauty and ‘loveliness’ within wider reality, into ‘femme fatale’ Cleo, whose personification of beauty and art corrodes into a depersonalised detachment from reality when embarking on what seems at first to be the poetically perfect romance. The darker implications that lay beneath the opening pages of the book’s idealised boy-meets-girl romantic tension creates double entendre that prefigures Mellors’ deconstruction of modern anti-mimesis:

“Where is it?” She asked. “I could use some more cigarettes.”

“About two blocks that way.” He pointed east. “How old are you?”

“Twenty-four. Old enough to smoke, if you were thinking of telling me not to.”

“You are the perfect age to smoke,” he said. “Time stored up to solve and satisfy. Is that how the Larkin poem goes?”

“Oh, don’t quote poetry. You might accidentally undo me.”

Alluding to American Frank’s flirtatious claim that Cleo’s English accent ‘undoes him’, Cleo here, in suggesting that Frank’s recital of Larkin may similarly ‘undo’ her, seems poised to foreshadow the whirlwind, and artistically esteemed romance the two quickly embark upon. Yet the idea of Cleo being undone holds a darker foreshadowing effect in light of the suicide attempt that sees her quite literally undone, cut open by the romance with Frank that here seems poetically ideal. It is this perfectly mirrored sexual tension, and Cleo’s rose-tinted reflection of all that 40-something advertising executive Frank may desire in the world – youth, beauty, excitement, artistic ambition – that prefigures their mutual collapse into depression.

Human imperfection inevitably tarnishes all romanticised expectation, illuminated by Mellors’ allusion to Larkin’s ‘Love Songs in Age’, which sees a woman look back on the ‘spring-woken tree’ of the ‘songs’ of her ‘youth’ now that they and she are old and have deteriorated:

One bleached from lying in a sunny place,

One marked in circles by a vase of water,

One mended, when a tidy fit had seized her,

And coloured, by her daughter -

Larkin seems to suggest that it is the stamps of human imperfection, rather than the tune of a whimsical youth eternalised within cassette tapes, that are the true ‘love songs’ of the world. ‘Chord[s]’ that had once ‘ushered in...That feeling of time laid up in store’ - the premise of limitless artistic ‘freshness’ - now sound ‘frank’, unadorned and ‘submissive’ to the ushering force of redundant romanticised expectation. Submissive perhaps in the same way as Cleo is to Frank’s, and undoubtedly the reader’s, expectation of what a young, beautiful, trophy wife should be. Redundant in the same way as Cleo when this romantic expectation counterintuitively extinguishes her artistic potential, trapping her within a ‘Frank’ - perhaps a cratylic name – and unadorable misery. True ‘love’ and meaning in the human experience ‘breaks out’ of and ‘sails above’, as Larkin describes, ushering expectation. ‘Art’ is found not in romanticised expectation but in individualised moments of imperfection; those listed anaphorically by Larkin emphasise that it is ordinary, everyday moments, the blemishes upon the love song cassettes, that capture his central female’s depth of experience.

In Cleopatra and Frankenstein, it is Frank’s relationship with Eleanor, a temp copywriter at his agency, and her candid concluding narrative that repairs the novel’s psychotic imbalances. Her self-deprecating, gritty realism, and the attention she pays to life’s sobering imperfections is striking yet conjures a more earnest version of ‘Frank’ who understands that while he cares for Cleo, they are best apart; thus restoring both his own happiness and Cleo’s artistic ability. When dressing for a date with Frank, the obtuse and ‘unpoetical’ way in which she self-presents – she is constructed by Mellors to detail the way she is careful to not ‘ladder’ her expensive and elegant tights with her ‘hobgoblin toenails’, and the way that she looks like ‘a Jewish man in drag’ with ‘soft belly, coarse hair, thin lips and thick waist’ - highlights that, in line with traditional Aristotelian ideas of mimesis, life, in all its coarseness, gives art meaning rather than vice versa. It is Eleanor’s unwavering connection with the ‘real’ and the unfiltered that gives her relationship with Frank the sense of poetic idealism that his relationship with Cleo, preconditioned by romanticised notions of ‘art’, can never attain.

At the novel’s close, it is Cleo’s artistic reclamation of her life’s imperfections in restaging her own suicide that sees her evolve from Wilde’s anti-mimetic, empty yet rose-tinted vessel fading into ideas of what others perceive beauty to be, to a stable human with a verisimilitude feltness:

She led him [Frank] to a small shed behind the studio building. Cleo opened the door to reveal a square white room with a projector set up in the center facing the ceiling. Dark soil covered the floor...Their whole marriage she had submitted to other people’s versions of her, retreating into the shape of their desires. She thought of Frank’s vows on their wedding day. When the darkest part of you meets the darkest part of me, it creates light. Now she had completed that process on her own. She had met the darkest version of herself and created this.

Mellors makes it clear that while ‘art’ as a preconceived concept is not an attainable state of being as Wilde would suggest, art is what becomes of our acceptance of imperfect reality. Life does not take its meaning from art, but art takes its very essence from life and its perversely unromantic romanticism.

Alice Edwards

our sentimental bookworm