As for Lawrence ... A Reply to James Walker

James Walker: Senior Lecturer School of Arts and Humanities

Nottingham Trent University: full profile click here. 

 

 

I. 

 

As torpedophiles will be aware, digital storyteller James Walker is someone I have a fair degree of time for, even if his political views often strike me as all-too-predictably prim and proper. 

 

His graphic novel (co-produced with Paul Fillingham), Dawn of the Unread (2014-16), which celebrates Nottingham's literary heritage, was amusing and his current transmedia project which aims to build an online Memory Theatre inspired by D. H. Lawrence's global wanderings, also promises to be of interest.    

 

A member of the D. H. Lawrence Society Council, Walker assembles and edits a monthly bulletin that is emailed to members of the Society, thereby demonstrating his commitment to circulating all the latest news of Lawrence, but without becoming an uncritical follower of the latter. 

 

Indeed, Walker often seems to regard Lawrence primarily as a figure of fun, rather than as a novelist and poet who might actually have something important to teach us. This helps explain his remark left in a comment to a recent post published here on Torpedo the Ark:          

 

"As for Lawrence, he's a mass of contradictions who needs to be read in context. I wouldn't take quotes from Fantasia too seriously, although at least he was honest enough to call it what it was: this 'pseudo-philosophy of mine'."

 

It's a remark I thought we might examine a little more closely ...

 

 

II. 

 

Firstly, it's true that Lawrence is a mass of contradictions and that there is little point in searching for a coherent or consistent philosophy in his work. Like Nietzsche, Lawrence makes no attempt to systematise his ideas - something which betrays a lack of integrity according to the former. However, he does offer a very distinctive style which is characterised by plurality, difference, and insouciance.

 

In other words, it's a style that enrages the puritan who not only expects but demands logical seriousness and dependability. 

 

Arguably, Lawrence anticipates the figure imagined by Roland Barthes who "abolishes within himself all barriers, all classes, all exclusions, not by syncretism but by simple disregard of that old spectre: logical contradiction" [1]; that anti-Socratic hero who mixes every language and endures the mockery of moral-rational society without shame. 

 

For me, this is one of Lawrence's strengths and at the heart of his appeal; but do I sense a trace of disappointment and/or irritation in Walker's As for Lawrence remark? Does he secretly hope that by reading Lawrence in context - something he says needs to be done, although he doesn't specify what constitutes this context - his work might not only be better understood but, as it were, coordinated within a wider framework of meaning which is clear, coherent, and woven into Truth?

 

Secondly, one might wonder just how seriously Walker would have us take Lawrence's work in Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922). Not too seriously, he says, but what exactly does that mean; who determines what is and is not a serious piece of writing and what is and is not an appropriate reader response? 

 

Again, I might be mistaken, but I get the impression that Walker secretly thinks Lawrence a clown and his work ludicrous. I also suspect he thinks Lawrence something of a fraud. This is why he is quick to remind us of Lawrence's own use of the phrase pseudo-philosophy to describe his thinking in Fantasia. And why he commends Lawrence for his honesty here, as if elsewhere in the book he is flagrantly dishonest and peddling falsehoods.

 

The ironic thing is that Lawrence's pseudo-philosophy remark is one that is usefully read within a wider context; namely, the Foreword to Fantasia in which Lawence amusingly answers his critics, including Mr. John V. A. Weaver of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, who reviewed Psychoanalysis of the Unconscious and coined the term Pollyanalystic which Lawrence then rewrote as pollyanalytics in order to describe his own philosophy.

 

Read within this context, it becomes clear that Lawrence neither regards his own thinking as a pseudo-philosophy nor a "wordy mass of revolting nonsense" [2]. He is using this phrase - as he's using pollyanalytics - in an ironic (rather weary) manner in the face of past criticism and anticipated future criticism. 

 

It also becomes clear that Lawrence takes his philosophical inferences - deduced from the novels and poems -  seriously and he challenges his readers to do so also if they wish to fully understand his work. For Lawrence, underlying all art is a philosophy upon which it is utterly dependent:

 

"The metaphysic or philosophy may not be anywhere very accurately stated" [3] - it may contain a mass of contradictions or be wearing woefully thin - but it is of primary importance and not to be scornfully dismissed as something unworthy of serious consideration.    

 

 

Notes

  

[1] Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller, (Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 3. 

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 62.  

[3] Ibid., p. 65. 

 

For a follow-up post to this one - in which it seems James Walker might have a point after all and we examine Lawrence's moral conservativism - click here.

Suffer the Little Children: D. H. Lawrence on Child Sexuality, Puberty, and Savage Initiation Rites

Portrait of Lawrence as a young boy

 

 

D. H. Lawrence despised false notions of childhood purity and innocence, as if children were entirely ignorant of their own bodies and pleasures; "even in a child of three, rudimentary sex throws strange shadows on the wall".*

 

Having said that, he insists that the sexuality of pre-pubescent children is distinct from that of adults and that if the latter should intervene at all in the sexual behaviour of the former it is only as guarantors of this specificity. 

 

Thus, in an interesting passage in Fantasia whilst he writes in favour of allowing children to witness the passions of adult life (and animals fucking), he strongly opposes formal sex education: 

 

"It is ten times criminal to tell young children facts about sex, or to implicate them in adult relationships. A child has a strong evanescent sex consciousness. It instinctively writes impossible words on back walls. But this is not a fully conscious mental act. It is a kind of dream act - quite natural. The child's curious, shadowy, indecent sex-knowledge is quite in the course of nature. And does nobody any harm at all. Adults had far better not notice it. But if a child sees a cockerel tread a hen, or two dogs coupling, well and good. It should see these things. Only, without comment. Let nothing be exaggeratedly hidden. By instinct, let us preserve the decent privacies. But if a child occasionally sees its parent nude, taking a bath, all the better. Or even sitting in the W. C. Exaggerated secrecy is bad. But indecent exposure is also very bad. But worst of all is dragging in the mental consciousness of these shadowy dynamic realities." [125-26] 

 

For Lawrence, puberty - which he explains in pollyanalytic terms of dynamic consciousness and the biological psyche - is an absolute and crucial dividing line: before it, sex is "submerged, nascent, incipient only" [134]; after it, sex is not quite the be-all and end-all, but a hugely important factor nevertheless and "an element of sex enters into all human activity" [66]. 

 

So vital is puberty for Lawrence, that he strongly advocates that it is marked by some form of initiation, for both sexes, although his primary interest seems to be the process of turning boys into men: 

 

"Boys should be taken away from their mother and sisters [...] at adolescence. They should be given into some real manly charge. And there should be some actual initiation into sex life. Perhaps like the savages, who make the boy [...] suffer and endure terrible hardships, to make a great dynamic effect on the consciousness, a terrible dynamic sense of change in the very being. In short, a long, violent initiation, from which the lad emerges [...] cut off forever from childhood [...] [139] 

 

I don't quite know what Lawrence has in mind here, or to whom he is referring when he speaks of savages. I do know, however, that he read various anthropological accounts of initiation ceremonies, so perhaps he was thinking of those tribal peoples who practice circumcision on adolescent boys, or engage in acts of ritualised homosexuality, including semen ingestion via the fellating of elders.  

 

For the cruel truth is that in societies which do practice such rites, the transtion from the biological state of childhood into the socio-sexual status of adulthood is never completed without tears and bloodshed ...

 

 

Notes

 

* D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 138. Future page references to this work will be given directly in the post.

 

Who's a Pretty Boy Then?

Mexican red-headed parrot 

For some reason, I have developed a sudden affection for parrots; or psittacines, as some people (irritatingly) insist on calling them. 

I don't know why, but it probably has as much to do with their intelligence as with their vivid colours, for I'm also fond of birds that belong to the crow family and they mostly like to rock an all black plumage (at least here in the temperate zone that I inhabit).

The fact that parrots sometimes not only imitate but mock human beings further increases my fondness for them. It's as if they want to remind us that we are, after all, only an unusual type of ape that has, as Nietzsche says, lost its healthy animal reason along with its body hair.  

D. H. Lawrence was also amused with the manner with which these super-smart birds use their language skills to make fun of people - and their pets. In the essay 'Corasmin and the Parrots', he describes how "two tame parrots in the trees" near his house in Mexico are ever-ready to ridicule those who pass below "with that strange penetrating, antediluvian malevolence" and a squawking sound that belongs to an earlier evolutionary period (or sun).

He writes: 

"The parrots, even when I don't listen to them, have an extraordinary effect on me. They make my diaphragm convulse with little laughs, almost mechanically. They are a quite commonplace pair of green birds, with bits of bluey red, and round, disillusioned eyes, and heavy, overhanging noses."

First they mimic the sound of a servant, Rosalino, whistling, as he sweeps the patio with a twig broom: "The parrots whistle exactly like Rosalino, only a little more so. And this little-more-so is extremely sardonically funny. With their sad old long-jowled faces and their flat disillusioned eyes, they reproduce Rosalino and a little-more-so without moving a muscle."

And then they "break off into a cackling chatter, and one knows they are shifting their clumsy legs, perhaps hanging on with their beaks and clutching with their cold, slow claws, to climb to a higher bough, like rather raggedy green buds climbing to the sun", before suddenly imitating the sound of someone calling the dog with "penetrating, demonish mocking voices". 

That a bird - or any creature - should be able to pour such acidic sarcasm over the voice of a human being calling a dog, strikes Lawrence as truly incredible. It makes him chuckle and it makes him ask himself: "Is it possible that we are so absolutely, so innocently, so ab ovo ridiculous?"

And of course, he's honest enough to acknowledge the answer that comes back from an older dimension of being: "not only is it possible, it is patent". Ultimately, man is the joke of all creation who should cover his head in shame. 

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'Corasmin and the Parrots', Mornings in Mexico, ed. Virginia Crosswhite Hyde, (Cambridge University Press), 2009. 

Note that the original 1927 version of Mornings in Mexico can be read online thanks to Project Gutenberg Australia: click here.  

On Masturbation as Sex in the Head

I: Opening Remarks

Whilst archetypal psychologists such as James Hillman and pagan feminists such as Starhawk may pleasure themselves and fantasise about invoking Pan or calling up doubles, D. H. Lawrence rages against masturbation as a fatal form of idealism, or what he terms sex in the head.

In fact, for Lawrence, almost nothing is as evil as jerking off. Not only, he writes, does it harm the individual, but so too is it socially destructive; perhaps the deepest and most dangerous sexual vice that society can be afflicted with in the long run.           

Ironically, Lawrence's views are ultimately rooted in the same metaphysical beliefs as those of Hillman and Starhawk - which obviously makes them just as untenable and just as fallacious - but nevertheless it's interesting to see how and where he differs from the above and why he ends up in such stark opposition ...

II: It's All That Lady of Shalott Business

There's an extraordinary scene in Women in Love between Rupert Birkin and his then girlfriend, Hermione, in which he savagely condemns the latter for her pornographic desire to see all and to know all regarding her naked animal self.

Hermione suggests that children shouldn’t be stimulated into consciousness; that to do so leaves them emotionally crippled and incapable of spontaneity. It sounds like a perfectly respectable Lawrentian viewpoint, but it infuriates Birkin who rages:

"'Knowledge means everything to you. Even your animalism, you want it in your head. You don’t want to be an animal, you want to observe your own animal functions, to get a mental thrill out of them. It is all purely secondary - and more decadent than the most hide-bound intellectualism … Passion and instincts - you want them hard enough, but through your head, in your consciousness.'"

Birkin continues - tellingly in relation to the practices advocated by Starhawk: 

"'It’s all that Lady of Shalott business … You’ve got that mirror, your own fixed will, your immortal understanding, your own tight conscious world, and there is nothing beyond it. There, in the mirror, you must have everything.'"

Like Starhawk, Hermione thinks of herself as a woman of great sensitivity and passion, but she has exchanged real substance for shadows and falsehood:

"'Your passion is a lie … It isn’t passion at all, it is your will. It’s your bullying will. You want to clutch things and have them in your power. And why? Because you haven’t got any real body, any dark body of sensual life. You have no sensuality. You have only your will and your conceit of consciousness, and your lust for power, to know.'"

Birkin then goes on to dismiss the spontaneity claimed by Hermione and her kind:

"'You and spontaneity! You, the most deliberate thing that ever walked or crawled! You’d be very deliberately spontaneous … Because you want to have everything in your own volition, your deliberate voluntary consciousness … If one cracked your skull perhaps one might get a spontaneous, passionate woman out of you, with real sensuality. As it is, what you want is pornography - looking at yourself in mirrors, watching your naked animal actions in mirrors, so that you can have it all in your consciousness, make it all mental.'"

For Birkin, then, as for Lawrence, it is clear that genuine sensuality is an affair of the blood and belongs to the darkness; something that marks the death of our voluntary, day-time selves. Masturbation is the antithesis of this; idealistic and head-bound. A distinction can be drawn between sensual reality and being and mere sensuousness or sensationalism: the former involves letting go of what we are and what we think we are; the latter is an affair of wilful narcissism and acute self-awareness.

Sensationalists, like Hermione and Starhawk, are so conceited that "'rather than release themselves and live in another world, from another centre'", they prefer to masturbate before mirrors and fool themselves that they are working magic.


III: The Great Danger of Masturbation: Our Vice, Our Dirt, Our Disease

For Lawrence, modern man has fallen into collective insanity and a crucial aspect of this is the tendency of the individual to see himself as a little absolute. This has resulted in sexuality (whatever the mode) becoming a form of self-seeking, rather than an attempt to experience otherness:

"Heterosexual, homosexual, narcissistic … or incestuous, it is all the same thing … Every man, every woman just seeks his own self, her own self, in the sexual experience."

Lawrence encourages us to shatter the great mirror before which we all wank entranced and form new relations with the outside world and with one another. This clearly has particular pertinence to those practitioners of solo sex-magick and Lawrence cleverly reminds his readers of a famous occult image which shows a man standing, before a flat table mirror, which reflects him from waist to head. "Whatever it may mean in magic," writes Lawrence, "it means what we are today; creatures whose active emotional self has no real existence, but is all reflected downwards from the mind."

This introversion of the modern individual, in which the lower centres of psycho-sexual energy and being are aroused and dynamically polarized by the spiritual upper-voluntary centres of consciousness and will, seems to be precisely what Starhawk advocates. But the result of diverting the deeper sensual life of the body upwards is, first and foremost, acute self-consciousness.

"Then", writes Lawrence, "you get the upper body exploiting the lower body. You get the hands exploiting the sensual body, in feeling, fingering, and in masturbation. You get a pornographic longing with regard to the self … eyes and ears want to gather sexual activity and knowledge. The mind becomes full of sex …"

He continues:

"The thought of actual sex connection is usually repulsive. There is an aversion from the normal act of coition. But the craving to feel, to see, to taste, to know, mentally in the head, this is insatiable. Anything, so that the sensation and experience shall come through the upper channels. This is the secret of our introversion and our perversion today. Anything rather than spontaneous direct action from the sensual self. Anything rather than merely normal passion. Introduce any trick, any idea, any mental element you can into sex, but make it an affair of the upper consciousness, the mind and eyes and mouth and fingers. This is our vice, our dirt, our disease."

As much as Lawrence may loathe the phenomenon of sex-in-the-head, we should be clear, however, that he is not arguing for sexual ignorance; nor a return of what he terms the dirty little secret. He wants men and woman to be able to think sex "fully, completely, honestly, and cleanly" - even if it is impossible for them to act sexually to their complete satisfaction. Only when we learn how to both think and act our sex in harmony, neither interfering with the other, will we, says Lawrence, get to where we want to be; a state of accomplished bliss.

For Lawrence, this is a state of grace wherein we learn how to have "a proper reverence for sex, and a proper awe of the body’s strange experience"; neither fearing the body, nor going to the other extreme and treating it "as a sort of toy to be played with".

Lawrence, then, rejects the popular liberal line that posits masturbation as harmless, or positively a good thing for the health and well being of the individual. He writes that whilst in the young a certain amount of auto-erotic activity is inevitable, it becomes a destructive habit once formed and induces in the adult practitioner only a "secret feeling of futility and humiliation". In a particularly important passage, Lawrence argues:

"The great danger of masturbation lies in its merely exhaustive nature. In sexual intercourse, there is a give and take. A new stimulus enters as the native stimulus departs … And this is so in all sexual intercourse where two creatures are concerned, even in the homosexual intercourse. But in masturbation there is nothing but loss. There is no reciprocity. There is merely the spending away of a certain force, and no return. The body remains, in a sense, a corpse, after the act of self-abuse. There is no change, only a deadening. Two people may destroy one another in sex. But they cannot just produce the null effect of masturbation."

Lawrence also refutes the claim made by James Hillman and Starhawk that masturbation is a means of raising psychic energy which can then be put to creative usage:

"The only positive effect of masturbation is that it seems to release a certain mental energy, in some people. But it is mental energy which manifests itself always in the same way, in a vicious circle of analysis and impotent criticism, or else a vicious circle of false and easy sympathy ...”

We might conclude that the thing that characterizes the work of both Hillman and Starhawk is this mixture of conceit and egoism. As authors, they seem incapable of escaping from the lie of themselves and their writing is nothing more at last than an exercise in self-promotion.

Of course, some might say the same of Lawrence ...


Notes

The lines quoted from D. H. Lawrence were taken from the following works:

Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987).
'Review of The Social Basis of Consciousness, by Trigant Burrow', in Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
'A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover' in Lady Chatterley's Lover and A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1983).
Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004).
'Pornography and Obscenity', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004). 

Readers interested in James Hillman on masturbation and the invocation of Pan should click here.
Readers interested in Starhawk on the role of masturbation within the practice of sex-magick should click here.   

This post is a revised and edited extract from an essay on masturbation in The Treadwell's Papers 1: Sex/Magic (Blind Cupid Press, 2010).