"Man's being is made of such strange stuff as to be partly akin to nature and partly not,
at once natural and extranatural, a kind of ontological centaur,
half immersed in nature, half transcending it." - Ortega y Gasset
On viewing an (unidentified) artistic representation of Hercules slaying Nessus [1], Lawrence writes:
"I had so much rather the Centaur had slain Hercules, and men had never developed souls. Seems to me they're the greatest ailment humanity ever had." [2]
Whilst we might ponder what the link is between the killing of Nessus and the development of the human soul, I love these two short lines in which Lawrence recognises that the soul is a type of affliction and that mankind might have been happier and more beautiful - like flowers - had we never experimented with the internalisation of cruelty and subjected the flesh to psychology.
One could quote Wilde at this point - or Nietzsche - but let's remind ourselves of Foucault's fascinating take on this question in Discipline and Punish which ends with a killer twist:
"It would be wrong to say that the
soul is an illusion, or an ideological effect. On the contrary, it exists,
it has a reality, it is produced permanently around, on, within the
body by the functioning of a power that is exercised [...] This is the historical reality of [the] soul,
which, unlike the soul represented by Christian theology, is not
born in sin and subject to punishment, but is born rather out of
methods of punishment, supervision and constraint. This real, non-corporal soul is not a substance; it is the element in which are
articulated the effects of a certain type of power and the reference
of a certain type of knowledge, the machinery by which the power
relations give rise to a possible corpus of knowledge, and knowledge
extends and reinforces the effects of this power. On this reality-reference, various concepts have been constructed and domains of
analysis carved out: psyche, subjectivity, personality, consciousness, etc.; on it have been built scientific techniques and discourses,
and the moral claims of humanism. But let there be no misunderstanding: it is not that a real man, the object of knowledge, philosophical reflection or technical intervention, has been substituted
for the soul, the illusion of the theologians. The man described for
us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a
subjection much more profound than himself. A 'soul' inhabits him
and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery
that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and
instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body." [3]
In conclusion - and returning to Lawrence - it's obvious that he reads the slaying of the centaur as a triumph of human idealism over instinctive animality and, like Lou Carrington in St Mawr, he dreams of a time to come when men might untame themselves, regain their animal mystery and become-centaur ...
Notes
[1] In Greek mythology, Nessus, son of Centauros, was killed by Heracles with a poisoned arrow, after the latter saw the former attempt to rape his wife, Deianeira, having carried her across the river Evinos.
[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'Paris Letter', in Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays, ed. Virginia Crosswhite Hyde, (Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 143.
[3] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan, (Vintage Books, 1995), pp. 29-30.
