'A' Level Greek (with Reference to the Case of Lady Chatterley)

Constance Chatterley (2012) 

An image created by the digital artist Brian J. Davis 

using commercially available composite sketch software 

based on Lawrence's descriptions of the character. 

For this and other images by Davis go to thecomposites.tumblr.com

In order to reach what is termed her ultimate nakedness - a state of innocence and becoming - Connie is willing to be stripped of her clothes, her social status, and her personal self. She is also willing to be sodomised by her lover in order to free herself of all bad conscience concerning the body.

For it’s not enough within the Lawrentian universe for a woman to be vaginally penetrated by the phallus of the male in order to enter the realm of bliss. She might even be the best bit o' cunt left on earth, but if she wants to learn how to make “weird, wordless cries, like the animals”, then, apparently, she’s going to have to take it up the arse.

This might not quite be Lawrence’s answer to everything, but he certainly privileges it as an act within his sexual metaphysics and for Connie anal penetration serves much like a prince’s kiss, awakening her back into life and out of the semi-conscious, dreamlike state in which she drifted through the days without meaning, without substance, and with no gleam or sparkle in the flesh.

Not that she’s entirely comfortable with the act. Indeed, Lawrence writes that Connie is a little startled, and almost unwilling as Mellor’s enters her with no small degree of force, like a devil. But, with what Germaine Greer describes as a rapist’s mindset, Lawrence assures his readers that as the sharp, searing mixture of pain and pleasure forces its way through her bowels and burns her soul to tinder, it’s this phallic hunting out she really desired and needed after all – not love and the lies of poets and philosophers.

Indeed, as she tells Clifford one evening, intellectual pleasures and the life of the spirit mean nothing to a woman in love who has shamelessly experienced the greater reality of the body and discovered that she is not merely a creature of light and virtue, but also alive in corruption. Why read Plato or pray to Jesus when you can quiver like plasm and dance naked in the rain?

The only sin - suggests Lawrence - lies not in the knowledge of evil, or the experience of carnal delight, but in “turning away from the world, from chance, from the truth of bodies”.


See: D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1983). 

Note, however, that the line quoted on the ‘weird, wordless cries’ of animals is from Lawrence’s Kangaroo, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 333, and the line quoted about the ‘truth of bodies’ is from Georges Bataille, On Nietzsche, trans. Bruce Boone, (The Athlone Press, 1992), p. 73.

Storming the Angel-Guarded Gates

There has been such a long and intimate relation between philosophy and anal sex that one might almost wonder if there isn't some level of causality involved; does the perverse love of wisdom result of necessity in a desire for the apples of Sodom?

What even those who shy away from such a conclusion cannot deny is that the history of the former might easily be conceived in terms of the latter, as happily confessed by Deleuze, who tells us that his own early method of doing philosophy involved the taking of an author from behind and in this way producing monstrous offspring.
 

D. H. Lawrence also values the anus as a site of libidinal and philosophical experimentation. Indeed, he boldly suggests that it might provide a gateway to paradise and several of his novels contain scenes in which buggery is promoted as a way of overcoming organic shame and rediscovering a kind of bestial innocence.  

It requires a cock in the arse, decides Connie, even to purify and quicken the mind.

Towards a Queer Democracy

Thomas Eakins: The Swimming Hole (1884-85)

If the great American poet Walt Whitman set out to chronicle one subject above all others, it was the flowering of democracy within the United States. But his vision of democracy passes far beyond conventional models of liberalism and is curiously eroticized.

The inherent queerness within Whitman's political thinking is now generally accepted by critics. But many still choose to quickly pass over this with a mixture of embarrassment and homophobic distaste. They tell us, for example, that Eros is to function as the glue within Whitman's democracy to come, but fail to specify the particular nature of this adhesive love. Whether they like it or not, however, physical tenderness between men remained crucial for Whitman and his thinking was not based on a purely abstract ideal of comradeship and solidarity. 

This flooding of the political sphere with manly love is something that Lawrence finds irresistible, although he is troubled by the exclusion of women from such a world. Thus, in his own model of democracy, Lawrence is keen to include both sexes and reinstate the male-female relationship as primary. That said, he continues to insist that vaginal intercourse isn't the great be-all and end-all that many people believe it to be:

"The vagina, as we know, is the orifice of the hypogastric plexus ... It is the advent to the great source of being ... But beyond all this is the cocygeal centre. ... Here, at the root of the spine, is the last clue to the lower body and being ... Here is the dark node which relates us to the centre of the earth, the plumb-centre of substantial being. Here is our last and extremest reality." 

- D. H. Lawrence, 'Whitman' (Intermediate Version, 1919), Studies in Classic American Literature, (CUP, 2003), 365-66.

Thus it is that anal sex assumes vital importance within Lawrence's philosophy and throughout his fiction. If this is invariably heterosexual in character, the opportunity to discuss Whitman's work allows Lawrence to concede that homosexual coition is an equally valid form of interchange and establishes "the same perfection in fulfilled consciousness and being" [ibid., 366], as an act of heterosexual intercourse.

To conclude, then, both Whitman and Lawrence encourage us on an open road towards a queer model of democracy founded upon many forms of touch, including sodomy and the interpenetration of passionate love. That is to say, a democracy born from a new economy of bodies and their pleasures and not merely the inhuman flow of capital.