Further Reflections on Frances Wilson's 'Burning Man'

(Bloomsbury, 2021)

 

 

I.

 

What does it mean when a biographer of D. H. Lawrence declares that she is "unable to distinguish between Lawrence's art and Lawrence's life"?*

 

It means that she fails to understand that literature is more than merely the expression of lived experience and that the artist is engaged in a creative enterprise of thought; not merely recalling past events and providing (sometimes amusing, often malicious) portraits of persons known to them, but playing with percepts  and affects.** 

 

And so (once more) to the case of Frances Wilson ...

 

 

II.

 

The problem with failing to understand how and in what way writing exceeds life, is that once a biographer has successfully mapped the fiction on to a reality that is external to the text and checked for accuracy of representation, there's not much more for them to do or say. The vol-au-vent is stuffed and it's stuffed with chicken.

 

This partly explains why, in a study of over 400 pages, Wilson has very little to tell us about several of the major works produced by Lawrence in the period that is her main focus of interest (1915-1925). What it doesn't explain, however, is why a self-professed Lawrence loyalist is so dismissive of his novels.

 

Women in Love (1920), for example, is described by Wilson as a work lacking in the atmospheric grandeur of The Rainbow and judged to be a failed literary experiment when compared to Virginia Woolf's The Waves. It can only be considered the prophetic masterpiece that Lawrence believed it to be, she says, if readers are prepared to agree with the views of Rupert Birkin: "and the only people who agree with Birkin are teenagers" [113].***

 

The Lost Girl (1920), meanwhile, is described by Wilson as a book that is both mad and bad: "Its badness is because Lawrence had lost interest in human psychology [...] And its madness is the result of his tearing along like a dustball without having the faintest idea of what's coming next." [223] 

 

Aaron's Rod (1922), on the other hand, "is not a mad book in the sense of engagingly bonkers" like The Lost Girl, but is neverthess barely sane and yet another good book gone bad: "Lawrence allowed his anger to spoil his beautiful story [...] shouting and yelling and ranting about love and power and how women must submit to men ..." [256-257]  

 

As for The Plumed Serpent (1926), well this is simply a sour-flavoured version of the superior Quetzalcoatl: "Writing with his usual rapidity, he doubled its length and spoiled its beauty" [398], says Wilson. She goes on to add: "The Plumed Serpent is alien and alienating, hard to forgive and hard to forget. It is also boring, at times brutally so." [399]    

 

One can only conclude that with friends like Frances, Lawrence hardly needs enemies ...

 

 

Notes

 

* Frances Wilson Burning Man: The Ascent of D. H. Lawrence, (Bloomsbury, 2021), p. 3. Future page references will be given directly in the text.   

** These terms, used by Deleuze and Guattari to discuss literary practice as distinct from philosophy, have a very precise and important meaning. Percepts are not merely perceptions; they are independent of the subject who experiences them. Similarly, affects are not merely feelings or affections; they pass beyond those who undergo them. Together, percepts and affects form a bloc of sensations, or what is usually referred to as a work of art existing in itself and not forever tied to a dead author. If one must talk about literature as life, then it's important to conceive the latter in a complex onto-ethical manner as a non-organic power (i.e., as something singular, impersonal, and beyond good and evil). The task of literature is to free life from what imprisons it - not capture it in words.  

      See Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchill, (Verso, 1994), Part. 2, Chapter 7.  

      See also Daniel W. Smith's excellent Introduction to Deleuze's Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, (Verso, 1996), pp. xi-liii. As Smith crucially notes: "For Deleuze, writing is never a personal matter. It is never simply a matter of our lived experiences [...] Novels are not created with our dreams and fantasies, nor our sufferings and griefs, our opinions and ideas, our memories and travels, nor 'with the interesting characters we have met [...]'" [xv].

      Unfortunately, Wilson doesn't appear to be much interested in any of this; she just wants to talk about autofiction in the most personal sense. She writes on literature not as a philosopher or even a serious critic, but as a biographer concerned with human lives, telling tales, and passing the word along.

 

*** To read my original reflections on Frances Wilson's Burning Man, click here. And to read my response to this attack on Women in Love and the teenage mentality, click here. 

On Travel/Writing (with a Deleuzian Punchline)

 Have monogrammed trunk will travel 

 

To consider travel writing is one thing: but to conceive of literature as travel is something else; something a bit more philosophically interesting, a bit more Deleuzean ...

 

For Deleuze understood that penser c'est voyager and that the true nomad doesn't need to traipse around the world or migrate here and there; that they move even when standing still and that the most vital trips are in intensity, not space. 

 

Deleuze hinged his theory of travel upon observations from several writers, including: 

 

(i) Fitzgerald, who insisted that travelling - even to remote islands or the darkest jungles - never amounts to a real break if one takes along one's old beliefs, memories, and habits of thought ... 

 

(ii) Beckett, who described it as dumb to travel simply for the pleasure of travelling itself; there had to be a destination of some kind ...

 

(iii) Proust, who said that upon waking the true dreamer has to go and check things out in the world; i.e., what motivates their desire to travel is not to discover new lands, but to confirm the reality of their own nightmares and visions. [1]     

 

Deleuze was also a serious reader of D. H. Lawrence - and Lawrence was both a great traveller and a great writer, frequently overtaken by the necessity to move, although, amusingly, his own savage pilgrimage ultimately brought him to the conclusion that travel is a splendid lesson in disillusion. [2]

 

Of course, that hasn't stopped Lawrence scholars packing their suitcases and floating from international conference to conference, in order to endlessly discuss Lawrence's world tour and talk about his uncanny ability to connect with the so-called spirit of place. 

 

For as Deleuze once joked, that's how academics travel - by generating a lot of hot air ...   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Gilles Deleuze: 'Letter to Serge Daney: Optimism, Pessimism, and Travel', Negotiations 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 77-78.  

 

[2] Readers interested in knowing more about Lawrence's thoughts on travel can click here for a related post to this one.  

This post is for Adam Peter Lang.

 

 

On Myth and Literary Criticism

Northrop Frye (1912-1991) 

Photo by Andrew Danson 
The Canadian Encyclopedia

I.

Many (anti-modernist) writers continue to exploit ancient myths as a literary resource, even when they have ceased to be meaningful in any vital sense. And many critics still like to delve into what Philip Larkin referred to dismissively as the myth-kitty in order to interpret what they might otherwise find impossible to comprehend. 

As Deleuze and Guattari point out, there's nothing easier than to read in this way; "you can always do it, you can't lose, it works every time, even if you understand nothing" [1] and even if the mythological (and related psychological) approach to literature is ultimately reductive; i.e., one that degrades the object of its study.   

II.

I suppose if there is one name above all others associated with myth-crit, it is that of Northrop Frye, author of Anatomy of Criticism (1957), a work whose very title betrays a certain morbidity of thinking and the fact that Frye ultimately regards literary criticism as a mortuary enterprise. 

Frye posits the idea that all literature is founded upon myth - particularly myths concerning the cycle of the seasons and different phases of the agricultural year. Even the most sophisticated fiction can thus be read as archetypal - i.e., full of archetypal characters, archetypal events, and archetypal themes. 

For me, this is a form of monomania: or, at the very least, it is shaped by myopia. For in order to view things in this manner he has to turn a half-blind eye to the huge differences between modern literature and ancient myth, forcing everything individual into what Nietzsche calls a universal mould, so that all sharp corners and distinct outlines are blunted and blurred in the interest of uniformity.       

An archetypal approach will never have much time for precision; it will always deal in approximations and generalities. It is a distorted and deceitful understanding of literature that integrates and coordinates difference into a network of correspondences and similarities so as to "render consistent with one another categories that are no longer compatible in the modern understanding of the world" [2].

Ultimately, Frye and his followers use myth to reinforce the reign of the Stereotype and crush production of the New, thereby preserving the old order or what D. H. Lawrence refers to as the Great Umbrella.

Any contemporary text - even the most avant-garde in character - is immediately coordinated within the archetypal framework and even the most transgressive authors are passed off as myth-makers who are concerned with universal truths and eternal patterns of meaning, rather than singular events and unique individuals.   

Frye effectively covers everything and everyone in a thick layer of maple syrup (or what Barthes terms doxa). Supporters may pretend to locate within his criticism all kinds of potentially liberating elements, but it best serves to support a model of bourgeois realism based on the essential facts of human experience; i.e., those things that go without saying and thus need no further explanation. Far from opening up the future, he uses the past to reaffirm the present.


III.

Like Frye, the German philosopher Ernst Cassirer is another idealist who fantasises about a mythic unconscious and treats myth as a primordial symbolic form; i.e., a kind of non-discursive language that is not only more archaic than logic, but also more vital.

For Cassirer, modern writers who explore the recesses of mythic consciousness should be valued above all others; for they keep us in touch with the very springs of our humanity. But as one critic asks, how can Cassirer and his admirers possibly know this:

"As we have no way of demonstrating that the mythopoeic ability of a modern writer is an archaic residue [...] there is not much point in saying it unless one happens to thrill at the very suggestion that primitive vestiges are present in modern man." [3]

This sounds a little flippant, perhaps, but I think a crucial point is being made here. For despite the "dreary earnestness of so much myth-critical writing", there is little doubt that many readers find the language used strangely seductive, resounding as it does with "awe-inspiring words [...] which promise to [...] put us directly in touch with the eternal and the infinite and the Wholly Other" [4].

In short, the language used by myth-critics is basically a rhetorical trick for soliciting approval from the faithful.

But like Deleuze and Guattari, I'm more interested in critics who suggest experimental methods of reading, rather than simply interpret a text; who ask how a book works, rather than what it means; who concern themselves with surfaces and lines of flight, rather than origins and depths.

For like Deleuze and Guattari, I think the aim of criticism is not to rediscover the eternal or universal, but to locate the conditions under which something new might be produced. Great books are never really concerned with the recounting of past experiences and memories - nor are they a place in which one merely confesses one's dreams and fantasies. They are, rather, sites of becoming and, as such, concerned with multiplicities, not myths.

Notes

[1] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (The Athlone Press, 1996), p. 41. 

[2] Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence, (Polity Press, 1994), p. 114.

[3] K. K. Ruthven, Myth, (Methuen, 1976), p. 74.

[4] Ibid., p. 78. 

This post is a revised extract from 'On the Abuses and Disadvantages of Mythology for Life: A Timely Meditation', in Stephen Alexander, Visions of Excess and Other Essays, (Blind Cupid Press, 2010), pp. 219-253. For a related post - also extracted from this essay - on Nietzsche, Voltaire, and myth, click here.

Three Great Liars 3: Oscar Wilde

Portrait photo of Oscar Wilde 

by W. and D. Downey (1889)

I.

Ultimately, all studies of lying and great liars lead to Wilde and his observational essay published in Intentions (1891): 'The Decay of Lying' - a work many years ahead of its time ...

The essay is structured in the form of a Socratic dialogue between Vivian and Cyril and serves to promote Wilde's view that Aestheticism is superior to Realism. Vivian informs Cyril of an article he is writing which defends the former and blames the decline of modern literature upon the triumph of the latter, with the subsequent decay of lying as an art, a science, and a social pleasure.

According to Vivian, if the monstrous worship of facts is allowed to continue unabated, then all art is done for - and without art, life will have nothing to imitate. It is vital, therefore, that lying - defined as the telling of beautiful untrue things (and the proper aim of art) - be revived as soon as possible.   



II.

The dialogue opens with Cyril attempting to convince Vivian to leave his library and sit outside in order to enjoy the lovely afternoon. The latter is less than enthusiastic however and reveals himself to be the very opposite of a nature lover. For not only is nature imperfect in its design - "her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition" - but it's also uncomfortable: "Grass is hard and dumpy and damp, and full of dreadful black insects."  

That's amusing, but the merits and disadvantages of nature are not my concern here: I'm interested, rather, in the fine lie as spoken by the true liar; i.e., a statement that requires no proof of any kind but is its own evidence. Such lies transcend the level of misrepresentation and are more than the base falsehoods and half-truths offered by politicians, lawyers, and journalists. Such lies belong to art - particularly to poetry, which, as Plato recognised, is not unconnected to lying:     

"'As one knows the poet by his fine music, so one can recognize the liar by his rich rhythmic utterance, and in neither case will the casual inspiration of the moment suffice. Here, as elsewhere, practice must precede perfection. But in modern days while the fashion of writing poetry has become far too common, and should, if possible, be discouraged, the fashion of lying has almost fallen into disrepute."

Today, continues Vivian, the young man who would have once developed into a gifted liar (and perhaps a magnificent novelist), now often falls into careless habits of accuracy or develops "a morbid and unhealthy faculty of truthtelling". Literature requires distinction, charm, beauty, and imaginative power; in other words, it rests upon the ability to tell stories; in a word, to lie.

The modern novel - realistic in form and subject matter - is all too horribly true; true to life and true to nature - but false to art and ultimately such works become not only vulgar, but boring. It was not always thus. But, today, facts are not merely dominant within history, but are "usurping the domain of Fancy, and have invaded the kingdom of Romance".

Fortunately, says Vivian, poets - with the exception of Wordsworth - have remained faithful to their high mission and are still "universally recognized as being absolutely unreliable". But, in every other domain and genre, the obsession with truth is dominant. If things are bad enough within European life and letters, they are even worse in the United States:

"The crude commercialism of America, its materialising spirit, its indifference to the poetical side of things, and its lack of imagination and of high unattainable ideals, are entirely due to that country having adopted for its national hero a man, who according to his own confession, was incapable of telling a lie, and it is not too much to say that the story of George Washington and the cherry tree has done more harm, and in a shorter space of time, than any other moral tale in the whole of literature."

Vivian, however, is far from despondent. In fact, he is extremely hopeful for the future and, in a crucial passage that ends with a profoundly Nietzschean remark (that I have italicised for emphasis), he says:

"That some change will take place before this century has drawn to its close we have no doubt whatsoever. Bored by the tedious and improving conversation of those who have neither the wit to exaggerate nor the genius to romance, tired of the intelligent person whose reminiscences are always based upon memory, whose statements are invariably limited by probability, and who is at any time liable to be corroborated by the merest Philistine who happens to be present, Society sooner or later must return to its lost leader, the cultured and fascinating liar. [...] Whatever was his name or race, he certainly was the true founder of social intercourse. For the aim of the liar is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure. He is the very basis of civilized society, and without him a dinner party [...] is as dull as a lecture at the Royal Society [...] Nor will he be welcomed by society alone. Art, breaking from the prisonhouse of realism, will run to greet him, and will kiss his false, beautiful lips, knowing that he alone is in possession of the great secret of all her manifestations, the secret that Truth is entirely and absolutely a matter of style [...]" 

Notes

Oscar Wilde, 'The Decay of Lying', Intentions, (1891). Click here to read online, courtesy of Project Gutenberg. This essay was a much revised version of an article that first appeared in a literary periodical in January 1889.

To read the first entry in this series of posts - on Nietzsche - click here.

To read the second entry, on Mark Twain, click here.

D. H. Lawrence: In Sickness and in Health

D. H. Lawrence: self-portrait (June 1929) 

It was Nietzsche, of course, who first put forward the idea that artists and philosophers are physicians of culture for whom phenomena are symptoms that reveal a certain state of forces. Without explicitly saying so, I think that D. H. Lawrence also recognised that the critical (in the literary sense) and the clinical (in the medical sense) are destined to enter into what Deleuze describes as a new relationship of mutual learning.

In other words, as a writer, Lawrence is essentially interested in the relation literature has to life, with the latter conceived as an ethical principle that is both impersonal and singular.

Arguably, because he had such a frail physical constitution and was so often ill, Lawrence was always vitally concerned with the possibility of a greater health; something over and above the bourgeois model of wellbeing tied to keeping fit and staying safe; something which must be attained or activated within the self via a struggle with sickness. And perhaps because - like Gethin Day or the man who died - he so often came close to death, he was always fascinated by life as a phenomenon of pure immanence that is lived beyond good and evil and which has had done with judgement.

Like Nietzsche, Lawrence is of the belief that there are some ideas one cannot possibly think except on the condition of being a decadent and harbouring deep resentment against life (even whilst concealing oneself behind the highest idealism). On the other hand, there are also feelings one cannot possibly experience or express unless one is a strong and healthy individual who affirms life (even if committing deeds that the herd regard as immoral).  

In sum:

(i) Bad life, as Lawrence understands it, is an exhausted and degenerating mode of existence that judges life from the perspective of its own sickness; the good life, by contrast, is a rich and ascending form of existence that is able to transform itself and open up strange new possibilities or becomings.

(ii) In so far as every great work of literature provides a model of living, then they must be evaluated not only critically, but clinically. Thus it is that the question that links literature and life (in both its ontological and ethical aspects) is the question of health.

Torpedo the Ark: A Disclaimer

I've already indicated elsewhere on this blog that the contents should all be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel. I had hoped that this borrowing from Barthes would serve not only as a kind of key to what I'm attempting to do here, but also as an effective disclaimer.

Unfortunately, for some readers this is clearly insufficient and I have been asked to be a little clearer. So, for these readers, let me now say this:

Torpedo the Ark is first and foremost the opening up of a literary space and the posts should be read as fragments of theory fiction. Where and when they seemingly refer to real people, real places, or extratextual events, it needs to be kept in mind that these things have been creatively transposed into an aesthetic virtual environment.

Thus, any similarity is - if not quite coincidental - nevertheless residual and irrelevant; all names, characters, and incidents are in a very real sense fabricated and no identification with actual persons, places, products, or events should be inferred or naively insisted upon. This equally applies to the author and/or narrator of the blog, who is also a simulated effect and function of the text and not its origin or limitation.  

Those who imagine they see themselves negatively portrayed in this or in any work of literature are profoundly mistaken; for art has no interest in damaging (or, for that matter, enhancing) reputations, any more than it wants merely to imitate or represent the real. Libel, one is almost tempted to say, exists only in the mind of the humourless, thin-skinned reader who takes everything too personally and too seriously.    

A Deleuzean Approach to Literature

Portrait of Deleuze by Nicolas Cours-Barracq
www.behance.net

According to Deleuze, literature is not as an attempt to express the inexpressible, or impose a coherent and conventional linguistic form on lived experience. 

Rather, to write in a literary manner - be it poetry or prose - is to move in the direction of the ill-formed or incomplete; to learn how to unexpress the expressible and to problematize everyday language which all-too-easily and all-too-often becomes sticky with familiar usage.  

Above all, Deleuze wishes to stress that literature should not become a form of personal overcoding; it is not an opportunity for an author to give the world a white face that somehow resembles their own. This is why any form of writing that is reliant upon the recounting of childhood memories, foreign holidays, lost loves, or sexual fantasies, is not only frequently bad writing - but dead writing; for literature dies from an excess of emotion, imagination, and autobiography, just as it does from an overdose of reality.

Literature, at its best - which is to say most inhuman - transports us from Oedipal structures and instigates a process of becoming; helping us locate zones of indiscernibility wherein we can lose ourselves and become-Other (think of Ahab's becoming-whale in Melville's Moby Dick, for example; or Gregor's becoming-insect in Kafka's Metamorphosis). 

And just as crucially, as I have indicated above, literature carries language away from itself and opens up a kind of foreign language within the writer's native tongue. It does this not by simply inventing neologisms, but by forcing a dominant and well-known language out of its usual syntactic conventions and thereby making it  stutter or scream and travel to its own external limits (limits which are not outside language, but are the outside of language).

And when a language is so unsettled and pushed to its limit, then ultimately it is obliged to confront a profound silence that doesn't signify there is nothing left to say, but, on the contrary, that there is still everything left to say.