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.

On Operational Whitewash

Mark Tansey 

Robbe-Grillet Cleansing Every Object in Sight (1981)

Oil on canvas with crayon

(182.9 x 183.4 cm)

Like many of his pictures, Mark Tansey's Robbe-Grillet Cleansing Every Object in Sight (1981), is a lot more interesting than it first appears and certainly shouldn't be mistaken for a work of banal realism or straightforward representation, even if it utilizes certain conventions and structures of figurative painting. To fully appreciate its philosophical importance requires an awareness of how art is essentially a symbolic medium; i.e., a space in which different meanings interact.

The first thing one notices upon closer inspection of the canvas is that the human figure is not simply a madman scrubbing any old objects lying about randomly in the desert. They are, rather, the ruins of the Sphinx and Stonehenge; the remains of formerly great civilizations and long-dead peoples, the spirits of whom still haunt the present.    

Robbe-Grillet isn't attempting to remove the dust and the dirt from these fragments of the past in the naive and vain hope of one day reassembling them, driven by ideals of Unity and Wholeness. He is, rather, trying to cleanse them of significance, of their markings and metaphors, to remove every trace of meaning from them.

It's the ultimate act of iconoclasm and forms part of what Jean Baudrillard referred to as the operational whitewashing of human history. Everything is cleansed of evil until nothing remains that might possibly upset or offend or trouble anyone of a liberal-snowflake disposition; it's political correctness gone retroviral - guaranteeing a more inclusive tomorrow by destroying the past and all memory of the past and its divisions.

Baudrillard also described this form of self-inflicted social leukemia as the perfect crime; the murder not only of the real, but also of the imaginary until all that remains is a kind of aseptic whiteness (free of all shadow and every dark glimmer of fate and negativity).

I thought of all this - of Baudrillard's operational whitewash and of Mark Tansey's 1981 painting - when reading about those activists, anti-fascists, and assorted social justice warriors in America intent on smashing statues, tearing down monuments, burning books, and censoring images that don't correspond with how they want the world to be and to have been.

Not that this is limited to the US: the writer, broadcaster and Oxford graduate, Afua Hirsch, has recently called for Nelson's column to be pulled down on the grounds that Nelson was "what you would now call, without hesitation, a white supremacist", who used his power and influence to vigorously defend slavery and thus "perpetuate the tyranny, serial rape and exploitation" of black people.  

Ms Hirsch continues:

"It is figures like Nelson who immediately spring to mind when I hear the latest news of confederate statues being pulled down in the US. These memorials - more than 700 of which still stand in states including Virginia, Georgia and Texas - have always been the subject of offence and trauma for many African Americans, who rightly see them as glorifying the slavery and then segregation of their not so distant past."

Just to be clear: (i) I'm not entirely unsympathetic to those who advance this line of argument; (ii) I really don't give a shit about those historical figures who are immortalised as the great and the good; (iii) I think a lot of the vile abuse directed at Ms Hirsch for simply expressing her view is absolutely shameful.

However, the concern remains - as Heine recognised almost 200 years ago - that where cultural and historical artefacts are destroyed one day, human beings will be murdered the next ... For if you really want to wipe out all trace of European colonialism and the Atlantic slave trade, then it follows with a certain genocidal logic that you have to get rid of the descendants of the slave owners too; every white face becomes a provocation.

Indeed, even that might not do the trick. Because the descendants of the peoples who were enslaved also carry this history within them; they are, if you like, in their rage and resentment and inability to forget, living monuments to a terrible past. Thus they would ultimately have to abolish themselves.

And this is why peace on earth isn't accomplished until the last man kills the last but one and then tops himself, leaving behind a smiling corpse ...  


Notes 

Jean Baudrillard, 'Operational Whitewash', The Transparency of Evil, trans. James Benedict, (Verso, 1993), pp. 44-50. 

Afua Hirsch, 'Toppling statues? Here's why Nelson's column should be next', The Guardian (22 Aug 2017): click here. 

This post is for Thomas Bonneville.