Carbon Footprints and Diamond Geezers: On the Allotropic Love Affair Between Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich

Alan Bates as Rupert Birkin and Oliver Reed as Gerald Crich 

getting all allotropic in Ken Russell's Women in Love (1969)

In a famous letter, Lawrence advised that, when it came to understanding the characters in his fiction, readers shouldn't look for the old stable ego or concern themselves with personal traits.

Instead, they should attune themselves to "another ego, according to whose action the individual is unrecognisable, and passes through, as it were, allotropic states which [...] are states of the same single radically-unchanged element".*

It's a nice - rather Futurist-sounding - notion and one that Lawrence scholars have often referred to over the years. But I don't know if anyone loves the word allotrope and its derivatives more than Thalia Trigoni, who theorises Lawrence's radical dualism on the basis of a concept first conceived by the Swedish chemist Jöns Jakob Berzelius, in 1841.

She also offers an interesting reading of the gladitorial scene in Women in Love fought between Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich, in which the former is equated with a lump of coal who is proud of his carbon footprint, whilst the latter is characterised as a real diamond geezer - all sparkle and no soot.** 

Whilst the essential point is that both are men of carbon, we all know which of these two characters the miner’s son and former schoolteacher privileges and with whom his sympathies lie - and it isn't the playboy industrialist. By refusing to acknowledge his own carbon nature, Gerald the diamond empties himself of real being. He dazzles, but he's ontologically void; lacking any inner life, any soul.
 

Birkin, on the other hand, is keen to immerse himself in the darkness of his own carbon-self:

"He is the primary representative of the unconscious and the instinctual […] the advocate of ‘the great dark knowledge you can’t have in your head - the dark involuntary being’ (WL, 43)." [143].

But again, it's crucial to remember that Birkin and Gerald "represent two forms of the same mode of being" [143], each seeing himself reflected in the other. The naked wrestling scene is as close as they ever get to merging in a peculiar oneness and establishing an intimate and instinctive form of Blutsbrüderschaft.

It is, therefore, so much more than merely an episode of disguised homoeroticism, as many commentators have suggested: "The 'Gladiatorial' is an externalised psychomachia wherein the constituent elements of human nature merge into oneness at the same time that they are striving to break free." [145]

Of course, as we know, it doesn’t quite work out and things end badly for poor Gerald:

"Gerald experiences a death of the body, he becomes a mental machine-like being driven purely by mental reason. His physical intelligence freezes in a state that triggers a process of disintegration that will finally lead to his death in the Alps. […] A stubborn intellectualist who embodies the spirit of mechanical industrialization and rationalization, Gerald is unable to introduce his experience with Birkin into the symbolic order of understanding." [145]

That might be true. But, arguably, over-heated attempts to become-carbon and seek out dark gods also lead to self-destruction and acts of atrocity. And besides, isn’t it better to be a diamond with a fatal flaw than a lump of coal without?

Notes

* D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Volume II, ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1981), letter number 732, to Edward Garnet, 5 June 1914, pp. 182-84. Lines quoted are on p. 183. 

** Thalia Trigoni, 'Lawrence’s Allotropic “Gladiatorial”: Resisting the Mechanization of the Human in Women in Love', in D. H. Lawrence, Technology, and Modernity, ed. Indrek Männiste, (Bloomsbury, 2019), pp. 137-47. See also her essay 'Lawrence's Radical Dualism: The Bodily Unconscious', English Studies, 95: 3 (2014), 302-21.  

This post is a revised extract from a longer review of D. H. Lawrence, Technology, and Modernity that will appear in The Lawrentian, ed. David Brock, (Autumn Edition, 2020).  

Lose This Skin: Thoughts on Theodore Roethke's Epidermal Macabre

Juan de Valverde de Hamusco: 

La anatomia del corpo humano (1556)

According to D. H. Lawrence, Whitman was the great American poet-pioneer; the first to smash the old moral conception of man in which the body is conceived as but a shoddy and temporary container for some kind of ghostly essence; the first to seize the soul by the scruff of the neck and insist on her corporeal nature.   

This, for Lawrence, is crucial because he believes that the key to achieving what the Greeks termed εὐδαιμονία is "remaining inside your own skin, and living inside your own skin, and not pretending you're any bigger than you are."

Nietzsche also insists that man's self-overcoming does not correspond to the rapturous possibility of transcendence. The overman is not more spiritual, but more animal; complete with teeth, guts and genitals and all those things which idealists are embarrassed by and hope to see shrivel away. 

So, what's a reader of Lawrence and Nietzsche to make of the following poem by Theodore Roethke:


Epidermal Macabre

Indelicate is he who loathes
The aspect of his fleshy clothes -
The flying fabric stitched on bone,
The vesture of the skeleton,
The garment neither fur nor hair,
The cloak of evil and despair,
The veil long violated by
Caresses of the hand and eye.
Yet such is my unseemliness:
I hate my epidermal dress,
The savage blood's obscenity,
The rags of my anatomy,
And willingly would I dispense
With false accouterments of sense,
To sleep immodestly, a most
Incarnadine and carnal ghost.

Initially, one is triggered - as people now like to say - by the narrator's physical self-loathing and his desire to make an ecstatic break from his own biology, conceived in terms of clothing that conceals true being in all its naked immateriality and innocence.

However, even the narrator - and, for convenience's sake, let's call him Roethke - recognises that such mad metaphysical exhibitionism in which one strips oneself of flesh and bone until one effectively becomes untouchable, invisible, and non-existent, is indelicate; i.e. not only insensitive, but also slightly indecent.

Further, whilst Roethke's hatred for his epidermal dress and the rags of his own anatomy is so profound that he considers willingly dispensing not only with his modesty but all vital feeling, he's honest enough to acknowledge that in death there's no liberation of the soul. All that remains is a decomposing corpse; that incarnadine and carnal ghost that refuses to disappear into thin air.

Noble spirit, Roethke concedes, is entirely dependent upon - is an epiphenomenal effect of - base matter. And just as truth needs to be concealed behind lies and illusions in order to remain true, spirit needs to be wrapped in flesh.

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'Whitman', in Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003).

D. H. Lawrence, 'Education of the People', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 161. 

Theodore Roethke, 'Epidermal Macabre', from the debut collection Open House (1941). See The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke, (Anchor Books, 1975).

Musical bonus: The Clash, 'Lose This Skin', from the album Sandinista! (CBS, 1980); written and with vocals by Tymon Dogg: click here. 


Thanks to Simon Solomon for suggesting a post on this poem.