Alan Bates as Rupert Birkin and Oliver Reed as Gerald Crich
getting all allotropic in Ken Russell's Women in Love (1969)
In a famous letter, Lawrence advised that, when it came to understanding the characters in his fiction, readers shouldn't look for the old stable ego or concern themselves with personal traits.
Instead, they should attune themselves to "another ego, according to whose action the individual is unrecognisable, and passes through, as it were, allotropic states which [...] are states of the same single radically-unchanged element".*
It's a nice - rather Futurist-sounding - notion and one that Lawrence scholars have often referred to over the years. But I don't know if anyone loves the word allotrope and its derivatives more than Thalia Trigoni, who theorises Lawrence's radical dualism on the basis of a concept first conceived by the Swedish chemist Jöns Jakob Berzelius, in 1841.
She also offers an interesting reading of the gladitorial scene in Women in Love fought between Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich, in which the former is equated with a lump of coal who is proud of his carbon footprint, whilst the latter is characterised as a real diamond geezer - all sparkle and no soot.**
Whilst the essential point is that both are men of carbon, we all know which of these two characters the miner’s son and former schoolteacher privileges and with whom his sympathies lie - and it isn't the playboy industrialist. By refusing to acknowledge his own carbon nature, Gerald the diamond empties himself of real being. He dazzles, but he's ontologically void; lacking any inner life, any soul.
Birkin, on the other hand, is keen to immerse himself in the darkness of his own carbon-self:
"He is the primary representative of the unconscious and the instinctual […] the advocate of ‘the great dark knowledge you can’t have in your head - the dark involuntary being’ (WL, 43)." [143].
"He is the primary representative of the unconscious and the instinctual […] the advocate of ‘the great dark knowledge you can’t have in your head - the dark involuntary being’ (WL, 43)." [143].
But again, it's crucial to remember that Birkin and Gerald "represent two forms of the same mode of being" [143], each seeing himself reflected in the other. The naked wrestling scene is as close as they ever get to merging in a peculiar oneness and establishing an intimate and instinctive form of Blutsbrüderschaft.
It is, therefore, so much more than merely an episode of disguised homoeroticism, as many commentators have suggested: "The 'Gladiatorial' is an externalised psychomachia wherein the constituent elements of human nature merge into oneness at the same time that they are striving to break free." [145]
Of course, as we know, it doesn’t quite work out and things end badly for poor Gerald:
"Gerald experiences a death of the body, he becomes a mental machine-like being driven purely by mental reason. His physical intelligence freezes in a state that triggers a process of disintegration that will finally lead to his death in the Alps. […] A stubborn intellectualist who embodies the spirit of mechanical industrialization and rationalization, Gerald is unable to introduce his experience with Birkin into the symbolic order of understanding." [145]
That might be true. But, arguably, over-heated attempts to become-carbon and seek out dark gods also lead to self-destruction and acts of atrocity. And besides, isn’t it better to be a diamond with a fatal flaw than a lump of coal without?
That might be true. But, arguably, over-heated attempts to become-carbon and seek out dark gods also lead to self-destruction and acts of atrocity. And besides, isn’t it better to be a diamond with a fatal flaw than a lump of coal without?
Notes
* D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Volume II, ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1981), letter number 732, to Edward Garnet, 5 June 1914, pp. 182-84. Lines quoted are on p. 183.
** Thalia Trigoni, 'Lawrence’s Allotropic “Gladiatorial”: Resisting the Mechanization of the Human in Women in Love', in D. H. Lawrence, Technology, and Modernity, ed. Indrek Männiste, (Bloomsbury, 2019), pp. 137-47. See also her essay 'Lawrence's Radical Dualism: The Bodily Unconscious', English Studies, 95: 3 (2014), 302-21.
This post is a revised extract from a longer review of D. H. Lawrence, Technology, and Modernity that will appear in The Lawrentian, ed. David Brock, (Autumn Edition, 2020).
