Pansies: Brief Notes on D. H. Lawrence's Excremental Aesthetic

Georgia O'Keeffe: Detail from  

Black Pansy and Forget-Me-Nots (1926)

brooklynmuseum.org

'The fairest thing in nature, a flower, still has its roots in earth and manure; and in the perfume there hovers still the faint strange scent of earth, the under-earth in all its heavy humidity and darkness. Certainly it is so in pansy-scent, and in violet-scent; mingled with the blue of the morning the black of corrosive humus. Else the scent would be just sickly sweet.'

- D. H. Lawrence

Pansies were one of Lawrence's favourite flowers and I can understand why; they're lovely little things, that turn their faces to the sun and backs to the wind.

And their name, of course, is the anglicised version of the French term pensées, meaning thoughts; particularly gay little thoughts, that bloom and fade without care or system.

An excellent name then, as Lawrence realised, for a collection of poems that fill the page "like so many separate creatures, each with a small head and a tail of its own, trotting its own little way".

But thoughts, like flowers, only stay fresh, if they keep their roots "in good moist humus and the dung that roots love". This is true also of objects made by hand, such as a Greek vase:

"If you can smell the dung of earthly sensual life from the potter who made [it], you can still see the vase as a dark, pansily-winking pansy, very much alive. But if you can only see an 'urn' or a 'still unravished bride of quietness', you are just assisting at the beautiful funeral [...] of all pansies."

Alas, many modern people want cut and dried forms of beauty. But a pansy that has been carefully plucked and pressed, which has no faint scent of shit and can no longer make you sneeze, is but a corpse-blossom.

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'Draft Introduction to Pansies', The Poems, Vol. 1, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Appendix 4, pp. 657-58. The opening quotation below the image is from Appendix 6, 'Introduction to Pansies', pp. 663-64.

In using the title Pansies for his 1929 collection of verse, Lawrence was, of course, displaying his own Romantic roots as a poet; Wordsworth references them in his work, for example, and Nathaniel Hawthorne's last published work was an unfinished piece entitled Pansie, a Fragment (1864). 

Schlegel's Hedgehog

German poet, literary critic and philosopher, Friedrich Schlegel, was, like other romantics, a big fan of the fragment.

In an oft-cited section of his Athenäums-fragmente (1798), he asserts that, if it is to be distinctive in form and purpose like a tiny work of art, then the fragment "has to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world and be complete in itself like a hedgehog" [206].

Further, it must maintain itself in prickly opposition even to those fragments in close vicinity to which it might otherwise seem in some kind of relation, thereby reflecting Schlegel's view that the world is made up of isolated objects within a chaotic universality of infinite possibilities and perspectives.  

As someone who is also passionate about fragmentary writing - more due to my background in modernism and postmodernism, rather than romanticism - I feel obliged to say something about this; particularly as I feel there's something fundamentally false about Schlegel's view.

Firstly, whilst hedgehogs might lead relatively solitary lives and can, of course, roll into a tight spiky ball for defensive purposes, they are no more isolated from the surrounding world than any other creature; if they were, they'd die. So, if nothing else, the above Igel analogy doesn't hold water as far as any self-respecting naturalist would be concerned.

Secondly, whilst I concede that objects are always at some level withdrawn and don't exist purely in terms of their external relations, for me the beauty of the fragment is that it (potentially) contains all things within it on the one hand, whilst being forever open ended on the other. Indeed, I would say the perfect fragment always inconclusively concludes in an elliptic manner with a set of three dots and that they only really sparkle, like stars in a constellation, by becoming part of a new (intertextual) practice of some kind. 

Ultimately, the fragment is that which allows language to discover its own ephemeral destiny. They appear, but before we can hardly even begin to make sense of them they shoot lines of flight towards the horizon of their own disappearance, showing a beautiful indifference towards their own origin, their own end, or their own Schlegelian self-perfection as an enclosed work of art.

Each thing - be it fragment or hedgehog - streams in what D. H. Lawrence terms an intertwining flux of relations and the business of art is reveal and expand these relations, not isolate itself from the circumambient universe. The only way we might discover some kind of salvation (or belonging) is to accomplish a pure (or quick) relationship between ourselves and other objects of all description and for me it's fragmented or aphoristic writing which, as a literary genre, best facilitates this. 

Note: I am grateful to Thomas Bonneville for encouraging me to read Schlegel and write this post.