You'll Never Turn the Vinegar Into Jam: On the Figure of the Tiger in the Philosophy of D. H. Lawrence

Most of their time, tigers pad and slouch in burning peace.

Yet they also drink blood. [1]

 

 

I. 

 

Although I wouldn't name it as one of Lawrence's totemic animals, nevertheless the tiger often appears within his work and held an important place in his philosophical imagination as one of the great realities of reality; i.e., a living thing that has come into its own fullness of being: 

 

"The tiger blazed transcendent into immortal darkness." [2]

 

"The tiger is the supreme manifestation of the senses made absolute." [3]

 

For Lawrence, in other words, the tiger is physical perfection and counters the bodiless idealism of those who, like Shelley, sought pure spiritual consummation: 

 

"The tiger was a terrible problem to Shelley, who wanted life in terms of the lamb." [4]  

 

 

II. 

 

In the the first essay of the Genealogy, Niezsche argues that it's perfectly natural for lambs to hate and fear tigers, wolves, and eagles. But mistaken to believe that they are morally superior to those animals that prey on them; the latter are not evil and act out of instinctive necessity, not cruelty.    

 

To expect fierce and powerful carnivores to lie down with meek and mild herbivores is as absurd as thinking you can turn the vinegar into jam; "a tiger is a tiger not a lamb, mein herr" [5] and cannot behave otherwise (and nor can the lamb - a creature which acts from weakness, not goodness).   

 

What's more, Lawrence argues that just as the tiger requires the lamb for sustenance, the lamb needs the tiger; for only the juxtaposition of the tiger "keeps the lamb a quivering, vivid, beautiful fleet thing"  [6]. 

 

Take away or exterminate the tiger, and all you're left with is a flock of letzte Schafe; happy, but little more than woolly clods of meat. Fear and suffering are vital principles; they help concentrate the soul, in man as well as lamb. 

 

Thank God, says Lawrence, for the tigers who liberate us from the "abominable tyranny of these greedy, negative sheep" [7]. And not only does he affirm the spirit of the tiger, he dreams of becoming-tiger and of making the tiger's way his own:

 

"Like the tiger in the night, I devour all flesh, I drink all blood, until [...] in the sensual ecstasy, having drunk all blood and devoured all flesh, I am become again the eternal Fire ..." [8]   

 

 

III.

 

Lawrence being Lawrence, however, he soon starts to oscillate from one pole of delirium to another and concede that the tiger's way - the way of the flesh and becoming "transfigured into magnificent brindled flame" [9] - is not the only form of ecstasy. 

 

Man can also become-deer, become-lamb, or, indeed, become-Christian, and move beyond the tiger, finding consummation not in the devouring of those who are weaker, or even in the negative ecstasy of offering non-resistance and being eaten oneself, but in acknowledging otherness:

 

"The Word of the tiger is: my senses are supremely Me, and my senses are God in me. But Christ said: God is in the others, who are not-me. In all the multitude of others is God, and this is the great God, greater than the God which is Me. God is that which is not-me. 

      And this is the Christian truth, a truth complementary to the pagan affirmation: 'God is that which is Me.'

      God is that which is Not-Me. In realising the Not-Me I am consummated, I become infinite. In turning the other cheek I submit to God who is greater than I am, other than I am, who is in that which is not me. This is the supreme consummation. To achieve this consummation I love my neighbour as myself." [10]

 

But then, having said that, Lawrence warns of the danger of pushing this ideal too far; of becoming too selfless whilst, somewhat paradoxically, identifying oneself with all that is other, like Walt Whitman, who aches with amorous love and insists with false exuberance on grasping everyone and everthing to his bosom, believing as he does in One Identity as the great desideratum [11]. 

 

For this path ends in nihilism and the triumph of the Machine and it's a "horrible thing to see tigers caught up and entangled in machinery [...] a chaos beyond chaos, an unthinkable hell" [12].   

  

IV. 

 

Ultimately, Lawrence's sharp-clawed feline philosophy can probably be best construed as tragic in the Nietzschean sense; one which understands according to the desire of death as well as according to the desire of life and is true for all things that emerge from the matrix of chaos, including "the tiger and the fragile dappled doe" [13].  

 

The former is a blossom of pure significance, born of the sun. But the tiger, like the leopard, needs to quench herself with the blood (or soft fire) of Bambi, so that she too might know tenderness when nursing her young and dreaming her dreams in stillness:

 

"For even the mother-tiger is quenched with insuperable tenderness when the milk is in her udder; she lies still, and her dreams are frail like fawns." [14]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] A misremembered couple of lines from 'Glory', by D. H. Lawrence; The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University press, 2013), p. 430.   

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Crown', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 270. 

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Lemon Gardens', Twilight in Italy, in Twilight in Italy and Other Essays, ed. Paul Eggert, (Cambridge Univrrsity Press, 1994), p. 117. 

[4] D. H. Lawrence, 'Fenimore Cooper's Anglo-American Novels', in Studies in Classic American Literature (First Version: 1918-19), ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen , (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 214.

 

[5] I'm quoting here from the brilliant Kander and Ebb song 'Mein Herr', from the musical Cabaret (1966). 

      To expect a tiger or leopard or lion to lie down with its prey is, says Lawrence, as vain as hoping "for the earth to cast no shadow, or for burning fire to give no heat". See 'The Reality of Peace', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays ... p. 49. 

[6] D. H. Lawrence, 'Fenimore Cooper's Anglo-American Novels', in Studies in Classic American Literature ... p. 214. 

 

[7] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Reality of Peace', Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays ... p. 42.

 

[8] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Lemon Gardens', Twilight in Italy, in Twilight in Italy and Other Essays ... p. 117.

 

[9] Ibid.

 

[10] Ibid., pp. 119-120. 

 

[11] I have discussed Walt Whitman and his fatal idealism elsewhere on Torpedo the Ark: click here.

 

[12] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Lemon Gardens', Twilight in Italy, in Twilight in Italy and Other Essays ... p. 121.

 

[13] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Reality of Peace', Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays ... p. 38. 

 

[14] Ibid., p. 48. 

 

 

For a related post which anticipates this one and in which I evoke the spirit of the Champawat Tiger, click here.  

 

 

Strange Fruit: an All-American Festival of Cruelty

Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, lynched in Marion, Indiana, on August 7, 1930 

Photo by Lawrence H. Beitler

According to Nietzsche, cruelty is one of the great festive joys of mankind. Put simply, we delight in the suffering of others and in witnessing the public exercise of power in all its spectacular brutality.

Not only is human history written in blood, but even human culture is ultimately no more than a refined form of torture; a method of inscribing the body with certain spiritual values on which we ironically pride ourselves as signs of our moral superiority as a race or species.  

In addition, displays of cruelty are also ways of keeping those who are despised as inferior and feared as other in their place.

This is perfectly demonstrated by the lynching of African-Americans in the United States during the 19th and 20th centuries; a targeted practice of violence and terrorism, largely tolerated by officialdom, designed to enforce and encode white superiority and traumatize the emancipated black population.              

Between 1870 and 1950 - i.e. the great age of modernity - an estimated 4,000 people were lynched in the (mostly) Southern states. And these murders were not committed secretly or in private, but openly before excited spectators who delighted in seeing strange fruit dangling from the trees.

The sociologists Tolnay and Beck, authors of A Festival of Violence (1995), describe how public these events were:

"Large crowds of white people, often numbering in the thousands and including elected officials and prominent citizens, gathered to witness pre-planned, heinous killings that featured prolonged torture, mutilation, dismemberment, and/or burning of the victim. White press justified and promoted these carnival like events, with vendors selling food, printers producing postcards featuring photographs of the lynching and corpse, and the victim’s body parts collected as souvenirs."

Thus, more than merely an effective mechanism of socio-economic control or a method of killing uppity niggers, lynching has to be seen also as a celebratory act of self-affirmation on behalf of clean-living, hard-working, law-abiding, God-fearing white folk; as American as apple pie.


Notes

The above photo by Lawrence Beitler inspired the poem Bitter Fruit (1937) by Abel Meeropol, which became better known as the song Strange Fruit after being set to music and recorded by Billie Holiday in 1939. Click here to watch her performing it.  

For Nietzsche's thoughts on culture and cruelty, see On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, (Cambridge University Press, 1994).

See also: Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck, A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882-1930 (University of Illinois Press, 1995). 

Nietzsche and the Question of Race

Unpersuaded by the determining influence of environmental factors, such as sunlight, upon the production of melanin and ignorant of genetics, Nietzsche has a rather outlandish explanation for variations in human skin colour: starting from the assumption that the primal colour of man "would probably have been a brownish-grey", he suggests that blackness is the evolutionary result of anger and whiteness the result of fear.

Nietzsche thus speculates that racial difference is psychological in origin. "Could it perhaps not be", he muses, that blackness is the "ultimate effect of frequent attacks of rage (and undercurrents of blood beneath the skin) accumulated over thousands of years", whilst, on the other hand, "an equally frequent terror and growing pallid has finally resulted in white skin?" 

Section 241 of Daybreak would be embarrassing enough for readers and admirers of Nietzsche if this was all that he said. But, unfortunately, there's more - and idiosyncratic philosophizing on human biodiversity seems to betray (as is so often the case) an inherent racism. For Nietzsche goes on to explicitly link fearful white timidity to intelligence and violent black fury to animality. 

However, before Nietzsche is once more vilified as a fascist and critical opprobrium again directed towards his writing, it should be recalled that, for Nietzsche, cleverness is a trait he often associates with slave morality and men of ressentiment. Nobility, in contrast, is distinctly bestial in character and frenzied fits of passion are to be admired as a sign of underlying health and vitality.  

Thus, if Nietzsche seems to reinforce the classical ideal that equates what is good with fairness of complexion and what is bad with darkness of hair and skin, his notorious concept of the blond beast doesn't merely refer us to blue-eyed Europeans, but equally to those non-white peoples who also "enjoy freedom from every social constraint" and the good conscience of the wild animal.

In sum: when it comes to the question of race (as with the question of woman), Nietzsche is a complex, challenging, and controversial thinker whose work continues to disturb because it so aggressively refuses to conform with the moral and political standards and expectations of liberal humanism. Ultimately, he doesn't seek to enlighten, but to provoke.     

See: Nietzsche, Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), IV. 241 and On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe, (Cambridge University Press, 1994), I. 11.