Cover (detail) of the 1961 Penguin edition
The latest news from the Lawrence world is of a new adaptation of Lady C. made by the BBC and to be broadcast this autumn. Do we really need such? I don't know: it's debatable. What was once a vital and necessary book no longer seems so today. Nevertheless, the news has made me want to rethink the novel and, here, look again at Lawrence's surprising defence of it in the opening pages of his posthumously published essay A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover'.
After briefly detailing the various pirated editions, Lawrence claims that he wrote and published his most notorious novel in good faith as an honest, healthy book containing an obscene litany of four-letter words that shock at first, but "don't shock at all after a while". Is this because we as readers are rapidly depraved by familiarity? No, says Lawrence, it's because such words only ever troubled the eye and ear and never really disturbed the mind which has evolved far beyond the body and its overly-sensitive organs prone to "violent and indiscriminate physical reactions" that threaten culture and society.
This, it has to be said, is a rather astonishing argument coming from Lawrence of all people. For it implies our sensory organs work independently of consciousness and that their perceptions are superficial, dim-witted, and dangerous. Lawrence thereby not only reinforces a damaging mind/body division, but unexpectedly opts to come down squarely on the side of the former. Indeed, he says quite openly in this astonishing essay that individuals without minds don't interest him and don't matter.
Modern men and women, he continues, are superior to the people of the past precisely because they are capable of a more sophisticated and relaxed relationship with language; they can assign to words "only those mental and imaginative reactions which belong to the mind" and thus not respond like crude savages to every provocation and stimulus without thinking.
Thus, whilst Lawrence wants us to act, "the great necessity is that we should act according to our thoughts" and not allow ourselves to be so feeble-minded that we are incapable of contemplating our own bodies (and the words that relate to bodily functions) without "getting all messed up" and carried away. In particular, Lawrence wants us to be able to think sex.
This, he writes, is the real point of Lady Chatterley's Lover. It's neither a manifesto for sexual liberation nor an apology for adultery. Rather, it's a bold - and puritanical - attempt to realise sex in the head; "fully, completely, honestly, and cleanly". Lawrence knowingly aims at an explicit literary representation of desire; that is to say, he wants to transform the intensity of physical experience and erotic sensation into a pure piece of knowledge.
Indeed, it's his conviction that a large number of people are happiest "when they abstain and stay sexually apart, quite clean: and at the same time, when they understand and realize sex more fully". He continues, in a startling passage that anticipates Baudrillard's thinking on the world that exists after the orgy:
"Ours is the day of realization rather than action. There has been so much action in the past, especially sexual action, a weary repetition over and over, without a corresponding thought, a corresponding realization. Now our business is to realize sex. Today the full conscious realization of sex is even more important than the act itself. After centuries of obfuscation, the mind demands to know and know fully. The body is a good deal in abeyance, really. When people act in sex, nowadays, they are half the time acting up. They do it because they think it is expected of them. Whereas as a matter of fact it is the mind which is interested, and the body has to be provoked. The reason being that our ancestors have so assiduously acted sex without ever thinking it or realizing it, that now the act tends to be mechanical, dull, and disappointing, and only fresh mental realization will freshen up the experience."
Lawrence, we might conclude, ultimately encourages us to spend less time in the bedroom and more time in the library. Lady C. is a book for thinking, nothing else: a call for a new form of chastity, it belongs to those thought-adventurers for whom the pleasure of the text is the greatest pleasure of all.
I'll be extremely impressed if Jed Mercurio's new BBC adaptation manages to get this point across and isn't merely another lame and ludicrous work of pretentious soft-porn. We'll see ...
Notes
A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' can be found in the Cambridge Edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (CUP, 1993), pp. 303-35. The lines quoted from this essay here can be found on pp. 307-08.
Readers might be interested and amused to know that later in the same essay, Lawrence flagrantly contradicts what he says here by arguing the complete opposite and indulging in a far more familiar anti-mind, pro-body rant; calling for greater harmony between the two, whilst still keeping them separate within a system of metaphysical dualism. As with Nietzsche, you can find textual support in Lawrence for almost any position; the challenge is not to determine the author's genuine view, but to critically examine all perspectives and realise that truth can never be fixed or given absolute moral-logical consistency.
"Ours is the day of realization rather than action. There has been so much action in the past, especially sexual action, a weary repetition over and over, without a corresponding thought, a corresponding realization. Now our business is to realize sex. Today the full conscious realization of sex is even more important than the act itself. After centuries of obfuscation, the mind demands to know and know fully. The body is a good deal in abeyance, really. When people act in sex, nowadays, they are half the time acting up. They do it because they think it is expected of them. Whereas as a matter of fact it is the mind which is interested, and the body has to be provoked. The reason being that our ancestors have so assiduously acted sex without ever thinking it or realizing it, that now the act tends to be mechanical, dull, and disappointing, and only fresh mental realization will freshen up the experience."
Lawrence, we might conclude, ultimately encourages us to spend less time in the bedroom and more time in the library. Lady C. is a book for thinking, nothing else: a call for a new form of chastity, it belongs to those thought-adventurers for whom the pleasure of the text is the greatest pleasure of all.
I'll be extremely impressed if Jed Mercurio's new BBC adaptation manages to get this point across and isn't merely another lame and ludicrous work of pretentious soft-porn. We'll see ...
Notes
A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' can be found in the Cambridge Edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (CUP, 1993), pp. 303-35. The lines quoted from this essay here can be found on pp. 307-08.
Readers might be interested and amused to know that later in the same essay, Lawrence flagrantly contradicts what he says here by arguing the complete opposite and indulging in a far more familiar anti-mind, pro-body rant; calling for greater harmony between the two, whilst still keeping them separate within a system of metaphysical dualism. As with Nietzsche, you can find textual support in Lawrence for almost any position; the challenge is not to determine the author's genuine view, but to critically examine all perspectives and realise that truth can never be fixed or given absolute moral-logical consistency.
