Reflections on a Green Carnation

 

"When Oscar Wilde said that it is nonsense to assert that art imitates nature, because nature always imitates art, that is absolutely true of human nature."  [1] 

 

It might surprise some readers to discover that this is D. H. Lawrence writing in agreement with Wilde and his anti-mimetic philosophy. It might further surprise them to discover that in the same text he goes on to dismiss the notion of spontaneous human nature and attack the idea that our feelings arise from deep within of their own accord:

 

"The thing called 'spontaneous human nature' does not exist, and never did. Human nature is always made to some pattern or other. The wild Australian aborigines are absolutely bound up tight, tighter than a China-girl's foot, in their few savage conventions. They are bound up tighter than we are. [...]

      And this we must finally recognise. No man has 'feelings of his own.' The feelings of all men in the civilised world today are practicaly all alike. Men can only feel the feelings they know how to feel. The feelings they don't know how to feel, they don't feel. This is true of all men, and all women, and all children." [2]

 

And this, concludes Lawrence, is central to the agony of our human existence: "that we can only feel things in conventional feeling-patterns", rather than directly express the strange howlings of the yeasty soul [3].    

 

To do that, we must either give birth to a new humanity - perhaps what might even be described as a posthuman humanity - or we must find a way to become-animal, become-demon ... [4]    

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction (version I) to The Memors of The Duc de Lauzan', in Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 89. 

      Lawrence is referring to Wilde's essay 'The Decay of Lying', in Intentions (1891) in which he writes: "Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life [...] It follows, as a corollary from this, that external Nature also imitates Art." Of course, Wilde is by no means the first to advance such a thesis; Ovid, for example, anticipates the idea in Book III of Metapmorphoses. 

      

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction (version I) to The Memors of The Duc de Lauzan', in Introductions and Reviews, p. 89. 

    It might be argued that Lawrence is here reaffirming La Rochefoucauld's famous maxim: "Il y a des gens qui n'auraient jamais été amoureux s'ils n'avaint jamais entendu parler de l'amour." 

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction (version I) to The Memors of The Duc de Lauzan', in Introductions and Reviews, p. 90. 

 

[4] See Deleuze and Guattari on the idea of becoming in A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 

      In brief, becoming is an opening up to alien forces, but not so these can be filtered through the ego or experienced imaginatively. Becoming is not a fantasy; it is rather a real process involving events at the molecular level of forces. Deleuze and Guattari admire Lawrence as a writer precisely because he was able to tie his work "to real and unheard of becomings" [p. 244]. Becoming is diabolical in the sense that it fundamentally opposes the ontotheological belief in the immortal soul of Man as something fixed and essential. 

 

For an earlier post on Lawrence and Wilde, click here.       

 

 

The Bats Have Left the Bell Tower: Reflections on Graveyard Poetry and Post-Punk Goth

Love Among the Gravestones (1981) 

Photo by Kirk Field

 

 

La Rochefoucauld famously suggested that people never would have fallen in love if they hadn’t first learnt about it in works of art. And one wonders if something similar might also be said of the morbid and sometimes macabre fascination that many young lovers have for skulls, coffins, epitaphs and worms, i.e., all the trappings and paraphernalia of death. 

 

Would, for example, the two teens pictured above have spent so much time smooching in cemeteries were it not for the influence of the Graveyard Poets upon the erotic imagination?

 

It's doubtful. 

 

For whilst their post-punk queer gothic sensibility was primarily shaped by Bauhaus, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and the Sex Gang Children - along with numerous other bands from this period (early-1980s) - we can trace their love of the uncanny and the occult all the way back to these 18th-century poets, whose mournful meditations on mortality and the love that tears us apart foreshadowed the work of songwriters like Ian Curtis and Nick Cave.   

 

There is - perhaps not surprisingly - much debate within critical circles about what constitutes a graveyard poem and about which authors should be classified as belonging to the Graveyard school (and it might be noted that the term itself was not used to refer to a style of writer and their work until coined by a literary scholar in 1893). 

 

What we can say, however, is that the following four poems remain crucial to our understanding of it:

 

Night Piece on Death (1722) - Thomas Parnell

Night-Thoughts (1742-45) - Edward Young

The Grave (1743) - Robert Blair

Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard  (1751) - Thomas Gray

Obviously, none of these works have the pop brilliance of songs by the above bands and artists, but readers who are interested in melancholic 18th-century poetry to do with life, death, ghosts and graveyards should certainly check them out. 

 

Be prepared, however, for a tedious amount of Christian moralising; for it's an unfortunate fact that didacticism and piety often detract from the delicious decadence and horror of these works.    

 

 

Musical bonus: Public Image Ltd., 'Graveyard', from the album Metal Box, (Virgin, 1979): click here.