Pan and Jesus in the Art of Dorothy Brett

Fig 1. Dorothy Brett: Portrait of D. H. Lawrence as Pan and Christ (1963)

Fig. 2. Dorothy Brett: Pan and Christ (date unknown)

 

I would like, if I may, to develop a point added as a note to a recent post discussing an essay by Catherine Brown [1] which mentions a painting by the Anglo-American artist Dorothy Brett entitled Portrait of D. H. Lawrence as Pan and Christ (fig. 1); a work which nicely illustrates Lawrence's dual nature whilst, crucially, making no attempt to reconcile his twin selves.

 

As suggested in the note, the work maintains what Deleuze and Guattari describe as a relation of non-relation. In other words, Brett's very lovely picture illustrates a disjunctive synthesis between divergent forces that somehow manage to communicate by virtue of a difference that passes between them like a spark (or what Lawrence would probably term the Holy Ghost) [2]. 

 

As I also say in the note, if only she'd been thinking with her Nietzsche head on Brett might have called the painting Pan versus the Crucified. But I'm now doubtful she would understand what is meant by this, or why such a twist on the German thinker's original formula provides as useful a key for unlocking Lawrence's philosophical project as Dionysus versus the Crucified does for Nietzsche's own [3]. 

 

For if we are to judge by another painting she produced of Pan and Christ (fig. 2) - in which there is clearly a reconciliation between them (to the extent that they are shown holding hands) - then Brett seems not to grasp the crucial fact that the two gods each have their own flowers, as Brown nicely puts it, and by which she acknowledges that Pan and Christ are antagonists forever separated by a pathos of distance.     

The fact is you can't have horns on your head and wear a crown of thorns - despite the desire of many New Age hippies to create a kind of syncretic religious mishmash. As Lawrence shows in The Escaped Cock, in order for the man who died to resurrect into pagan vitality he has to renounce his mission and his Christhood and accept that the earth doesn't need salvation, it needs tillage and that mankind is better off being watched over by an all-tolerant Pan than a judgemental Jehovah.   

 

Like Elsa in 'The Overtone', you can certainly experience both Jesus and Pan, but not at one and the same time, or in the same way; the former belongs always to the pale light and the latter to the darkness: "'And night shall never be day, and day shall never be night.'" [4]     

 

To imagine them hand-in-hand, as Brett does, is a form of nihilism in that it annihilates the nature of each. As Lawrence notes of another two forces forever divided and at odds - the lion and the unicorn - each exists only by virtue of their inter-opposition: "Remove the opposition and there is a collapse, a sudden crumbling into universal nothingness." [5] 

 

It is the fight of opposites which is holy and there is no reconciliation save in this negation which, for Lawrence, is the unforgivable sin. And Brett has either forgotten this idea, chosen to ignore it, or perhaps never really understood the huge importance it has for Lawrence ... 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The post in question - Iconography is Never Innocent - can be read by clicking here. See note 4.

[2] In a post on his blog - Larval Subjects - Levi R. Bryant uses non-technical terms to help readers understand what Deleuze and Guattari mean: "Consider the relationship between me and my cat. My cat and I share entirely different worlds even though we inhabit one and the same earth or heteroverse. There is no point where our worlds converge, yet nonetheless certain differential events flash across our distinct and divergent worlds, creating a relation in this non-relation. Somehow our worlds come to be imbricated and entangled with one another, even though they don’t converge on any sort of sameness." To read Bryant's post in full, click here.   

 

[3] See Nietzsche, 'Why I Am a Destiny', in Ecce Homo, where this line appears; or see section 1052 in Book IV of The Will to Power, where Nietzsche explains the distinction between Dionysus and the Crucified as he understands it.   

 

[4] See D. H. Lawrence, 'The Overtone', in St Mawr and Other Stories, ed. Brian Finney, (Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 3-17. The line quoted is on p. 16.

[5] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Crown', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 256. 

Iconography is Never Innocent

Dorothy Brett (1883-1977): 

Portratit of D. H. Lawrence with Halo (1925)

Oil on canvas (78 x 48 cm)

 

'The narrowed, slightly stylised eyes ... gaze with pain ... at the state of the world and at his own fate. 

His halo is formed by a moon in near-total eclipse; soon he will be left in darkness, 

save for the star that burns ...'   

 

 

I. 

 

The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts (2020) is a big, heavy hardback book - over 440 pages divided between 28 essays, written by 27 different authors - so pretty much impossible to read from start to finish. 

 

Thus, once having read the Introduction, one begins to cruise the text, searching out those authors and those essays most likely to give pleasure ... Authors such as Catherine Brown, for example, and her essay: 'D. H. Lawrence: Icon' [1] ...

 

 

II.

 

As the title of the essay indicates, Brown is interested in the manner in which the English poet, novelist, and painter, Mr D. H. Lawrence, has been subordinated to an image [2].   

 

This public image was partly of Lawrence's own making and partly due to the (loving) characterisations and (sometimes spiteful) caricatures produced by friends, followers, critics, and opponents [3]; some of whom portray him as a visionary Christ-like figure, some of whom depict him as a smiling Pan-like figure with devilish horns and hooves, and some of whom - like the Hon. Dorothy Brett - can't quite decide or imagine Lawrence as a combination of both; part-saint, part-satyr [4].

 

Either way, this iconisation of Lawrence as Christ or Pan is not only a bit lame, but, as Brown points out, all too bleeding obvious, as numerous Lawrentian features - not least of all the beard - "suggested contemporary understandings of each or both gods" [5] to many of his circle and, indeed, many of his most ardent (but unimaginative) readers even today. 

 

Brown spends some considerable time discussing Lawrence as Christ and Lawrence as Pan with reference to some of the more famous photographs of Lawrence and I pretty much agree with her analysis; except for her remarks on the 1915 studio portrait of Lawrence in a hat - an image used in 2017 for the 14th International D. H. Lawrence Conference [click here] - which I don't think should be read in religious terms at all. 

 

The image - certainly as featured on the Conference poster - is more punk than Pan and invites viewers to consider Lawrence as a figure within popular culture, rather than Romantic paganism or Ancient Greek mythology. I think you really have to stretch things to insist on Pan as a revolutionary (and/or déclassé) outsider, as Brown does (not once, but twice) - just as you have to subscribe to a false etymology to think that the god Pan lends his name to pantheism [6].          

 

Moving on, we come to the subject of iconoclasm ... As Brown notes: 

 

"One consequence of Lawrence's deification has been that many of the attacks on him have addressed deified versions of him. [...] Such attacks tend to fall into two categories - those which accuse him of resembling Christ or Pan, and those which accuse him of failing to resemble them, thus respectively condemning him by negative association with, and critiquing his alleged pretensions in relation to, these gods." [7]

I have to say, this seems fair enough: those who live by the image, die by the image - and Lawrence lived by the image at least as much as other modernist writers. He may have satirised the desire for literary fame and personal recognition, but, as Brown points out, he certainly contributed to his own celebrity (or notoriety) and was acutely conscious of his public persona. 

 

Thus, whilst most would struggle to remember what James Joyce or Ezra Pound looked like, there are probably still quite a few people who would recognise red-bearded D. H. Lawrence (if only as drawn by Hunt Emerson, comic book style [8]), even though his popularity and iconic status has been waning for the past forty or fifty years.      

 

 

III. 

In conclusion ... Whilst Catherine ends on a relatively upbeat note, calling for "passionate and joyful admiration" of Lawrence, rather than "misdirected deification, or irrelevant iconoclasm" [9], I think I'd like to emphasise the following: Iconography is never innocent ...

 

That is to say, it plays a complicit role in what Baudrillard terms the perfect crime and by which he refers to the extermination of singular being via technological and social processes bent on replacing real things and real people with a series of images and empty signs [10]. 

 

When this happens, we pass beyond representation (or, in the case of the dead, commemoration) towards obscenity; a state wherein everything and everyone is made visible and the image no longer reflects, masks, or perverts a basic reality, but bears no relation to any reality whatsoever (i.e., it becomes a simulacrum).

 

Whilst I don't subscribe to aniconism, I do think that all image making is ideally and idealistically reductive and that we - Lawrence scholars included - need to theorise the play and proliferation of images carefully and critically. For it's arguable that philosophical questions of representation and reality, truth and appearance, have never been as crucial as today in an age of social media and deepfake software; a world in which everyone comes to presence on a myriad screens (close-up, in high-definition, and full transparency).     

 

 

Notes 

 

[1] A pre-edited version of this essay can be read on Catherine Brown's website: click here. 

 

[2] As readers will doubtless know, the word icon, from the Ancient Greek εἰκών, simply means image or likeness. As Catherine Brown reminds us, however: "'Icon' expanded its meaning from a visual depiction (especially of a divinity) to 'A person or thing regarded as a representative symbol' or one 'considered worthy of admiration or respect' in the early 1950s (OED draft addition 2001)." See 'D. H. Lawrence: Icon', in The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts, ed. Catherine Brown and Susan Reid, (Edinburgh University Press, 2020),p. 428. 

 

[3] For details of how Lawrence has been seen by other artists, see the fascinating essay by Lee M. Jenkins, 'Lawrence in Biofiction', in The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts, pp. 385-397. 

 

[4] To be fair, Brett produced a very lovely work which reveals Lawrence's dual nature. Entitled Portrait of D. H. Lawrence as Pan and Christ, the picture (produced in 1926 and re-painted in 1963 after she destroyed the original canvas due to the mockery and unfair criticism it received), crucially doesn't try to reconcile the twin selves. Rather, it maintains what Deleuze and Guattari describe as a relation of non-relation. In other words, Brett's picture illustrates a disjunctive synthesis between divergent forces that somehow manage to communicate by virtue of a difference that passes between them like a spark (or what Lawrence would probably term the Holy Ghost). If she'd only been thinking with her Nietzsche head on Brett might have called it Pan versus the Crucified. 

      Whilst Catherine Brown doesn't use the above philosophical terminology, she clearly understands that Pan and Christ are (as she says) mutually antagonistic, despite certain similarities between them, and that "each god has his own, separate validity; each has his own flowers", although she clearly longs for a more balanced (less hostile) relationship between the two. See her essay 'D. H. Lawrence: Icon', in The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts, pp. 427 and 428. Brett's painting is reproduced in this book as Plate 36, on p. 302.      

 

[5] Catherine Brown, ibid., p. 427.  

[6] It's a mistaken piece of folk etymology to equate Pan's name (Πάν) with the Greek word for 'all' (πᾶν). The former is probably contracted from the earlier term Παων, which is in turn derived from a root word meaning to guard (it wil be recalled that Pan is a pastoral deity who looks over shepherds). Lawrence cheerfully exploits this false etymology; thus his talk of the Pan mystery and being "within the allness of Pan". See 'Pan in America', in Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays, ed. Virginia Crosswhite Hyde, (Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 158. The line is quoted by Catherine Brown in 'D. H. Lawrence: Icon', The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts, on p. 434.   

[7] Catherine Brown, ibid.

[8] See 'D. H. Lawrence - Zombie Hunter', by Hunt Emerson and Kevin Jackson, in Dawn of the Unread (Issue #7, 2016): click here. Or see Plate 38 in The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts, p. 304.  

[9] Catherine Brown, op. cit., p. 439.

 

[10] See Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, trans. Chris Turner, (Verso, 1996). 

 

 

For a follow up post to this on the figures of Pan and and Christ in the art of Dorothy Brett, click here.