Rabbit: On the Obscene Beyond and Other Abhorrent Mysteries

Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit 

Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit ...

 

 

One of the most astonishing and disturbing chapters in D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love (1920) is entitled Rabbit. 

 

And although there is a large lagomorph at the centre of the chapter, our main concern here is with what Lawrence terms the obscene beyond and the manner in which Gudrun and Gerald conduct their love affair in relation to this material reality which threatens to disrupt life as it is lived ideally beneath the Great Umbrella that mankind has erected between itself and the inhuman chaos of actuality which is neither Good, True, nor Beautiful.   

 

Gudrun is acting as art mistress to Gerald's young sister, Winifred, and it is decided they will draw the latter's pet rabbit, Bismarck. Gerald is hanging around watching - disconcerted by Gudrun's pale-yellow stockings, but in love with her all the same. He can't help admiring her body and imagining the silky softness of her flesh; "she was the all-desirable, the all-beautiful" [a] and he wanted only to give himself to her.

 

(Be careful what you wish for ...)

 

Bismarck, it turns out, is not only big, he's also strong - and he doesn't like to be handled:

 

"They unlocked the door of the hutch. Gudrun thrust in her arm and seized the great, lusty rabbit as it crouched still, she grasped its long ears. It set its four feet flat, and thrust back. There was a long scraping sound as it was hauled forward, and in another instant it was in mid-air, lunging wildly, its body flying like a spring coiled and released, as it lashed out, suspended from the ears. Gudrun held the black-and-white tempest at arms' length, averting her face. But the rabbit was magically strong, it was all she could do to keep her grasp. She almost lost her presence of mind." [240]

 

Lawrence continues:

 

"Gudrun stood for a moment astounded by the thunder-storm that had sprung into being in her grip. Then her colour came up, a heavy rage came over her like a cloud. She stood shaken as a house in a storm, and utterly overcome. Her heart was arrested with fury at the midlessness and the bestial stupidity of this struggle, her wrists were badly scored by the claws of the beast, a heavy cruelty welled up in her." [240]    

 

At this point Gerald steps forward to offer his assistance and, after a further struggle, the demonic bunny is eventually subdued. But this incident has brought him and Gudrun into a fateful relation of some kind and there was a mutual hellish recognition: "They were implicated with each other in abhorrent mysteries." [242]  

 

Ignoring his own scratches, Gerald is perversely fascinated by the deep red gash on the silken white arm of Gudrun: 

 

"It was as if he had knowledge of her in the long red rent of her forearm [...] The long, shallow red rip seemed torn across his own brain, tearing the surface of his ultimate consciousness, letting through the forever unconscious, unthinkable red ether of the beyond, the obscene beyond. [...] 

      There was a queer, faint, obscene smile over his face. She looked at him and saw him, and knew that he was initiate as she was initiate. [...]

      Slowly her face relaxed into a smile of obscene recognition." [242-43]  

 

These lines tell us something crucial about Gudrun and Gerald's relationship and indeed about the violent metaphysics of obscenity underlying Lawrence's thinking. 

 

He, Lawrence, obviously uses the term knowledge here in the biblical (i.e., carnal) sense, which implies that the gaping wound on Gudrun's arm has a sexual (as well as deathly) aspect, although Gerald doesn't merely equate it with her vagina, but sees within it a ripening anthology of perverse possibilities [b]. 

 

And Gudrun knows it: they both delight in recognition of this fact and that soul-destructive obscenity is at the heart of their passion.

 

 

Notes

 

[a] D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 239. Future references to this edition of the novel will be given directly in the text. [b] 

 

This phrase - which I hope I recall correctly - is from J. G. Ballard's brilliant novel Crash (Jonathan Cape, 1973).    

 

 

The Obscene Beyond: It is So Lovely Within the Crack

I love you delicious rottenness ...

 

I. 

 

As might be imagined, the concept of the obscene within philosophy is rather more complex than that found within the moral and legal debates surrounding pornography and censorship which simply define the obscene as that which offends or outrages public decency, often involving the graphic representation of sexual acts or bodily organs.   

 

For me, the obscene is more interestingly thought of as the violent intrusion of the material world into an ideal culture which likes to keep hidden or deny all that it cannot assimilate into its all too human system of transcendental meaning based upon the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. 

 

This might include what is commonly thought of as inappropriate content, but, ultimately, I would suggest, there is nothing more obscene than death and it's knowledge of death - not sex - that makes moralists and idealists of all stripes turn away in horror and disgust, even if - as in Sade and Bataille, for example - death is eroticised (and love morbidified). 

 

This notion of the obscene as that which is sooner or later exposed like the inside of a bursten fig, is magnificently illustrated in the poetry of D. H. Lawrence ...

 

 

II.

 

In the first of his fruit series - 'Pomegranate' - Lawrence insists on the importance of the fissure. 

 

For it is via the painful looking split in the skin of the pomegranate that we catch a glimpse of what he terms the obscene beyond - a troubling ontological notion underlying his philosophy which shapes his ideas about the reality of love, life, death, and how we might know and represent these things. 

 

Of course, many people prefer to look at the smooth unbroken skin of the fruit and are disturbed by the fissure and all that lies rosy and glittering within: 

 

Do you mean to tell me there should be no fissure?

No glittering, compact drops of dawn? 

Do you mean it is wrong, the gold-filmed skin, integument, shown ruptured?

For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken.

It is so lovely, dawn-kaeidoscope within the crack. [1]

 

 

In the poem 'Fig', meanwhile, the narrator explicitly - some would say obscenely - relates this scarlet fissure in the skin of a ripe piece of fruit to the female sex organ, to which one might put their mouth and enjoy the moistness and strange smelling sap that curdles milk.    

But what might start out as an ode to cunnilingus, quickly becomes a warning:

That's how the fig dies, showing her crimson through the purple slit

Like a wound, the exposure of her secret, on the open day.

Like a prostitute, the bursten fig, making a show of her secret.

That's how women die too. [2]

In other words, the ideal fantasy of womanhood is dispelled once their obscenity or delicious rottenness bursts forth and we realise - as Bataille wrote - that the vagina is synonymous with a freshly dug grave. 

 

That's a hellish thing to recognise. But it's also a liberating thought, providing one can find the courage to think it through and accept that "wonderful are the hellish experiences" [3]. 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'Pomegranate', in The Poems, Vol. I., ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 231. 

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'Fig', in The Poems, Vol. I., pp. 232-35. Lines quoted are on p. 234.

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'Medlars and Sorb-Apples', in The Poems, Vol. I., pp. 235-37. Line quoted is on p. 234.