Sijia Yao's Cosmopolitan Love and Utopian Vision: Or How to Have D. H. Lawrence Spinning in His Grave (Part 2: Sections VI-X)

Sijia Yao: Cosmopolitan Love: 

Utopian Vision in D. H. Lawrence and Eileen Chang 

(University of Michigan Press, 2023)

 

 

This is a continuation of a post the first part of which (sections I-V) can be accessed by clicking here.  

 

 

VI. 

 

Nineteen-year-old Yvette Saywell may have had a sexual relationship with a married gipsy named Joe Boswell, but for Lawrence's most notorious tale of adultery we have to turn to the case of Lady Chatterley and her lover ... 

 

The seemingly modern - and yet actually anti-modern [e] - relationship between Connie and Mellors, says Yao, is not merely a crossing of the boundaries of "class, convention, and ideology" (69), it's a "transgressive love that institutionally challenges the local and global norms of modernization" (69). 

 

Again, whilst I have in the past argued something very similar, over the years (and in light of work by Foucault) I've become increasingly sceptical about the politics of desire [f] put forward by figures such as Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse, and, indeed, Lawrence. 

 

So, whilst I agree that warmhearted fucking and phallic tenderness are all well and good, I'm not sure these things are enough to bring about a revaluation of values or help us "breathe the air of freedom" (71) by overthrowing Western modernity. 

 

And whether the union of Connie and Mellors furthers the deconstruction of capitalist society and constitutes "an organic new life" (76), is also highly debatable; they might just become the kind of self-involved and self-contained couple that Rawdon Lilly so despises; "'stuck together like two jujube lozenges'" [g].          

 

 

VII.

 

And so we arrive at chapter 4 and the utopia of transcendental love ... The chapter which I suspect will really get my goat. But let's see. It opens thus:

 

"After defying both local and global discourses to reach a cosmopolitan freedom, Lawrence [...] discovered that freedom lies not necessarily somewhere outside but inside a heart that longs for an alternative utopian existence. The longing for utopia develops into an increasingly stronger theme in [his] later writings, displaying [his] redemptive attempts to create a new language of God's love." (95)

 

Lawrence, argues Yao, believes in projecting love into another mysterious dimension; one which is "intimately connected to the depth of time and the cosmos" (95). His ultimate goal, as a priest of love, is to "replace the eroded religious tradition" (95) of his own culture.

 

Sex is the means not only to human wholeness, but to a mystical union with the mysterious cosmos and the vast universe: "The intimate interrelation between [...] two lovers forms the bridge between humanity and the Absolute" (100), writes Yao (approvingly). Continuing:

 

"The more completely and profoundly the lovers are sexually connected, the more sacred and transcendental their passionate love becomes. Through sexual union, lovers achieve the ultimate, mystical marriage in order to fulfill their unknown desire." (102)

 

I mention Foucault in passing above, I now think we must quote him in an attempt to counter some of this sex mysticism ...

 

Referring directly to Lawrence's work at several points, Foucault discusses how the concept of sex as an omnipresent meaning, a metaphysical form of agency, and a universal signified, "made it possible to group together, in an artificial unity, anatomical elements, biological functions, conducts, sensations, pleasures" [h], becoming in the process "the most speculative, most ideal, and most internal element in a deployment of sexuality organised by power in its grip on bodies and their materiality" [i].  

 

In the imaginary element that is sex, we mistakenly believe we see our deepest and most primal selves reflected. One day, Foucault muses, "people will smile perhaps when they recall that here were men - meaning ourselves - who believed that therein resided a truth every bit as precious as the one they had already demanded from the earth, the stars, and the pure forms of their thought" [j]. 

 

The irony is that in subjecting ourselves to the austere monarchy of sex, we think we have somehow liberated ourselves.  

 

 

VIII. 

 

And so we come to The Escaped Cock ... (which was actually Lawrence's preferred title - showing his ability to laugh even at his own phallic philosophy - not The Man Who Died, as Yao informs readers).

 

This final great work of fiction represents Lawrence's attempt to "replace Christianity with a secular practice of healing and rebirth" (103), says Yao, though I think it would be better (and more accurate) to say Lawrence attempts to place Christianity back within a wider (pagan) religious context via a libidinally material - but nevertheless sacred - practice of healing and rebirth.  

 

But hey, I'm not her editor ... 

 

 

IX.

 

Moving toward the end of her fourth and final chapter, Yao repeats the claim that Lawrence attempts to "cross boundaries of human domain in time and space through the lived experience of love" (111) and whilst that's  not a sentence I could ever imagine writing personally, I suppose for those who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they like (although I have no idea what it means to "explore the transcendental dimension of utopia" (111-112)). 

 

Perhaps a Lawrence scholar can enlighten me on this point. And perhaps they can also confirm or deny the truth of this claim made by Yao: "Lawrence optimistically believes that utopia can ultimately be achieved triumphantly, and he consequently always concludes his stories with consummation and revelation." (112)  

 

I see that with The Rainbow - but not with his other novels. In fact, I had always thought that Lawrence was known (and often criticised) for leaving his works with open-ended, ambiguous, or inconclusive endings, thereby avoiding the conventional, neat resolutions typical of Victorian literature. Even Lady C. ends a little droopingly with the lovers separated and who's to say they will ever be reunited or that Mellor's will ever regain potency? 

 

 

X.    

 

In conclusion ...

 

For Sijia Yao, Lawrence is to be highly esteemed as a writer for developing an aesthetico-political project "in which love as an ethical feeling plays a crucial role in creating cosmopolitan connections" (117) and sharing with his readers a "vision of peace and freedom that can resist violent nationalism and hegemonic discourse" (117). 

 

She continues: Lawrence adopts love as his "mode of engagement with the multidimensional world" (117), because love, for Lawrence, "is a primal living force in its dynamic and undefinable state, which is tightly interconnected with utopia" (117) and it is the concept of utopia that "fulfills the possibility of a jump from personal love to cosmopolitan engagement" (117).   

 

Ultimately, I suppose whether one chooses to see Lawrence as a utopian or not depends on how one imagines his democracy of touch and how one interprets his injunction to climb down Pisgah. I agree with Yao that Lawrence's work has socio-political significance and philosophical import. But, unfortunately, she and I completely disagree as to the nature of this. 

 

Although, having said that, Yao nicely surprised me with the final paragraph in her book, in which she writes:

 

"While utopia itself would be a fixed state, the longing for utopia defines a particular relationship that leaves abundant space for possibilities. This mode of cosmopolitan love does not try to offer a solution but rather an attitude that welcomes a plasticity of the utopian vision." (122)

 

Now why didn't she say that at the beginning ...! 

 

 

Notes

 

[e] When it comes to the question of whether adultery is très moderne or actually anti-modern, Yao is very good: 

      "One can easily argue that adultery can be understood as a modern relationship because it dissolves traditional bonds. [...] However, adultery in Lawrence [...] is an antimodern relationship because the traditional bonds are themselves now modern forms of relationship that exclude love. The structure of modernity is still built upon the preexisting traditional norms [...] thereby breeding alienation and disconnection. Hence, the prevailing forms of relationship are so suffused with modern alienation that only adultery can be a pure form of love that opposes this alienation. Adulterous love surpasses, undermines, and destroys the existing order to set up an alternative basis for modern society." (69)  

 

[f] See, for example, my post titled 'Lady Chatterley's Postmodern Lover' (9 Sept 2023): click here.   

 

[g] This humorous remark made by Rawdon Lilly can be found in D. H. Lawrence's novel Aaron's Rod, ed. Mara Kalnins (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 91.

      Even the narrator of Lady Chatterley's Lover is aware of the danger that Connie and Mellors will end up in a world of their own; see p. 213 of the Cambridge edition ed. Michael Squires (1993).  

 

[h] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality 1: The Will to Knowledge, trans. Robert Hurley (Penguin Books, 1998), p.154.  

 

[i] Ibid., p. 155. 

 

[j] Ibid., pp. 157-158.

 

 

The Man Who Slept: Notes on an Autobiographical Fantasy by D. H. Lawrence

I. Opening Remarks

We are extremely grateful to Professor Hiroshi Muto of Keio University for providing us with a new and more accurate version of Lawrence's unfinished and untitled 'Autobiographical Fragment' - a queer mix of fiction and essay often known as 'A Dream of Life' - in which he corrects the multiple errors of transcription that had crept into the (supposedly authoritative) Cambridge Edition of the text published in Late Essays and Articles and edited - somewhat carelessly it would seem - by James T. Boulton.    

Admittedly, some of these fifty errors are minor. But even minor errors can result in ungrammatical sentences, or, indeed, sentences which are both grammatically and semantically compromised. Thus, as Lawrence's eagle-eyed Japanese translator says, a new version of the work - using the holograph manuscript (i.e. Lawrence's notebook) as the base text - was necessary.   

The 'Autobiographical Fragment' was written by Lawrence in October 1927. What begins as an essay about returning home to the East Midlands, mutates halfway through into a bizarre and at times ludicrous tale set a thousand years in the future, in which the narrator-protagonist discovers the coal-mining village of Newthorpe has become a kind of heaven on earth or New Jerusalem.

Whilst I admire most of Lawrence's writing, I have always disliked this piece - and still dislike it now, even after the many corrections made by Hiroshi Muto. I've no problem with the autobiographical material, it's what follows that irritates and nothing depresses me more than Lawrence in full utopian mode ... 

II. A Dream of Life: Synopsis

Having fallen asleep in a quarry cave, or, more precisely, "a little crystalline cavity in the rock [...] a little pocket or womb of quartz, among the common stone", the narrator is disturbed from his (almost deathly) deep sleep by a strange motion and reborn into the world in a manner reminiscent of the man who died. Like the latter, he has to fight his way back into consciousness, into life:       

"There were some dizzy moments, when my I, my consciousness wheeled and swooped like an eagle that is going to wheel away into the sky and be gone. Yet I felt her, my I, my life, wheeling closer, closer, my consciousness. And suddenly she closed with me, and I knew, I came awake."

The man who slept is acutely aware of his own physicality; of the fact that he has a face, a throat, and "a body that ended abruptly in feet and hands" and wasn't merely a disembodied, free-floating consciousness. He can hear the words of a stranger speaking to him and feel the warm hands of men, who laugh, as they bathe his flesh:  

"So as they washed me, I came to myself. I even sat up. And I saw earth and rock, and a sky I knew was afternoon. And I was stark naked, and there were two men washing me, and they too were stark naked."

He is helped up and dressed by these strangers with their healing hands, soft voices and "formal, peaceful faces and trimmed beards, like old Egyptians". They accompany him to the town and he notices that all signs of industrial civilization - the colliery, the railway, the enclosed fields - had all gone. A cart, drawn by oxen, slowly passes in the distance, led by a man who is also entirely naked.

The town itself - now called Nethrupp - had "something at once soft and majestical about it, with its soft yet powerful curves, and no sharp angles or edges, the whole substance seeming soft and golden [...] as in the hymns we sang in the Congregational Chapel". 

Then three men on horseback canter up from behind:

"They were men in soft, yellow sleeveless tunics, with the same still, formal Egyptian faces and trimmed beards [...] Their arms and legs were bare, and they rode without stirrups. But they had curious hats of beech-leaves on their heads. They glanced at us sharply, and my companions saluted respectfully." 

As the man who slept and his companions approach the town, more and more people are to be seen; mostly men "wearing the sleeveless woolen shirt of grey and red", but there are women too, "in blue or lilac smocks", although some of the younger ones "were quite naked, save for a little girdle of white and green and purple cord-fringe that hung round their hips and swung as they walked".

He can't help admiring their "slender, rosy-tanned bodies" and the fact they were as "comely as berries on a bush". In fact, that was the quality of both sexes: "an inner stillness and ease, like plants that come to flower and fruit". 

The man who slept is introduced to a figure of authority, reclining on a dark-yellow couch and guarded by men in green. He had the beauty of a flower rather than a berry. This chieftain of some kind gives him permission to stay in the town and he is supplied with clothes of his own: "a blue-and-white striped tunic, and white stockings, and blue cloth shoes" and housed in a small, sparsely furnished room, containing a bed, a lamp, and a cupboard - but no chairs.

At sunset, the town square erupts to the "queer squeal of bagpipes". The men start to stamp their feet, like bulls, while the women "were softly swaying, and softly clapping their hands" and making a series of strange sounds. Everyone dances "with the most extraordinary incalculable unison", but according to the man who slept, there was no external choreography:

"The thing happened by instinct, like the wheeling and flashing of a shoal of fish or of a flock of birds dipping and spreading in the sky.  [...] It was as once terrifying and magnificent, I wanted to die, so as not to see it, and I wanted to rush down, to be one of them. To be a drop in that wave of life."

Almost as quickly as it started, the dance ends: the townspeople disperse in silence. Even the man who slept recognises that this is odd and disconcerting behaviour: "I was afraid: afraid for myself. These people, it seemed to me, were not people, not human beings in my sense of the word. They had the stillness and the completeness of plants."  

Next, the man who slept is shown a communal washing area and toilets. Then taken to the communal dining room, where the men sat naked on the floor round a blazing wood fire, enjoying an evening meal of porridge and milk "with liquid butter, fresh lettuce, and apples". Everyone helps themselves to what they want and everyone washes their own utensils, each hanging his own spoon and plate in his own little rack. This greatly impresses the man who slept: "There was an instinctive cleanliness and decency everywhere, in every movement, in every act."

Deciding to join in, the man who slept takes some porridge and watches as more men arrive, slipping out of their clothes at the first opportunity, softly talking and laughing, and playing board games. Then he's taken to meet the supreme spiritual leader, who wears a deep red-coloured tunic: 

"He had brown hair and a stiff, reddish-brown beard, and an extraordinary glimmering kind of beauty. Instead of the Egyptian calmness and fruited impassivity of the ordinary people, or the steady, flower-like radiance of the chieftain in yellow [...] this man had a quavering glimmer like light coming through water."

He informs the man who slept that he fell asleep in "one of the earth's little chrysalis wombs" and after a thousand years woke up "like a butterfly". That whilst he may not live for much longer, he shouldn't be afraid; just take off his clothes and let the firelight fall on him.


III. A Dream of Life: Analysis

I know that many readers of Lawrence - including Hiroshi Muto - find this tale beautiful; a poignant attempt by Lawrence late on in his life to provide a glimpse of the kind of society that he dreamed of. But when one examines this utopia of touch it reveals a number of troubling aspects. Here are ten points of concern:

1. It's a phallocratic order based on an eroticised fantasy of male homosociality. And ultimately, that's just another way of perpetuating traditional gender stereotypes and reaffirming patriarchal authority. Mellors might find himself very much at home, but I wonder what Connie would think ... 

2. Life in this utopia seems to involve an awful amount of stripping off - so much so, that one could imagine such a fantasy going down well with militant naturists who insist that truth loves to go naked and that it's more healthy and vital to go around without clothes: only it doesn't and it isn't. Rather oddly, if there's one thing that Lawrence fetishises more than nudity, it's clothing (as will be clear to readers of this and other works).    

3. If militant nudity is simply crackpot, then the utopian politics of post-industrial agrarianism is all a bit Pol Pot: I really don't fancy returning to Year Zero and nor do I desire to see naked peasants working the fields with oxen in order to earn a bowl of rice a day. There are times when reading this work that one imagines heads skewered on stakes.

4. Lawrence may write of a democracy of touch, but that doesn't mean there are no class divisions in his New Jerusalem. We note, for example, there are men on horseback whom ordinary citizens must salute respectfully. And just like the gender divisions, these class divisions are colour-coded and sartorially inscribed. For someone who was so sensitive to the issue of class, it's surprising that Lawrence doesn't seem to appreciate how his own perfect society would invariably be prone to tensions and conflict arising from its hierarchical structure.      

5. I'm quite happy living in a room that is sparsely furnished. But Lawrence takes his ascetic idealism too far when he doesn't even allow people to have a chair to sit on. Just as I don't want to salute some prick on a horse or walk around the streets naked, nor do I wish to sit on the floor like a dog, thank you very much.

6. The people play bagpipes. 

7. Communal dancing: despite what the man who slept says, this is obviously compulsory and strictly choreographed in a manner that would make even Kim Jong-un smile. As for pagan sun-worship, that's all very lovely until it goes a bit Aztec or Wicker Man and ends with human sacrifice. Many readers of Lawrence like to believe he put such fantasies behind him after The Plumed Serpent but, as a matter of fact, that's not quite the case as this text shows (though, to be fair, even the narrator of the tale is disconcerted by the inhuman nature of individuals dissolved in a mass).

8. Communal showers and toilets: again, no thanks. It looks like it could be fun in Carry on Camping, but surely no one really wants to have a cold shower with strangers, or shit in a field.

9. Communal dining areas: and on the menu - let us remind ourselves - porridge and milk, with liquid butter, fresh lettuce, and apples. I would quite literally prefer to starve to death than have to comply with this invalid's diet. 

10. Not only is Nethrupp a totalitarian society, it's a theocracy - ruled over by a Lord Summerisle figure with a red-beard, a bit like Lawrence's own. All in all, it's very disappointing. Lawrence repeatedly claims to value men and women, but surely then he should acknowledge that they are not plants, or birds, or fish. Or even butterflies. That their beauty and unique potential as a species lies in the very complexity that he would strip them of.     

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, ['Autobiographical Fragment'], Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 49-68.

Hiroshi Muto, 'A New Edition of D. H. Lawrence's [Autobiographical Fragment (A Dream of Life)], Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies, ed. Susan Reid, Vol. 5, Number 1 (2018), pp. 11-57. All lines quoted above are from this new and corrected version of the text. 

Hiroshi Muto, 'D. H. Lawrence's Forgotten Dream: The Significance of "A Dream of Life" in His Late Works', The English Society of Japan (July 1990): click here to read online courtesy of the National Diet Library, Japan.

In this essay Professor Muto shows how 'A Dream of Life' closely relates not only to The Escaped Cock, but also to Lawrence's Etruscan writings and Lady Chatterley's Lover, providing a unique insight into these works. Thus I agree with him that it deserves serious critical attention within the world of Lawrence studies.

The Bluebird

A bird came down the walk - he did not know I saw - 

he bit a little worm in half and ate the fellow, raw.

I like the colour blue: apart from navy blue, obviously. I also like most birds and yet I've woken up today with an intense dislike for the bluebird. 

Not the actual creature, but the symbol of hope and happiness who flies over rainbows and white cliffs, optimistically promising peace and freedom; a bird whose wings are so laden with schmaltz I'm surprised it can even get off the ground.

As Christopher Hitchens rightly said, any vision of Utopia is not only founded upon spurious moral sentiment, but is futile and dangerous in the long term. Idealistic ornithologists and songwriters might do well to remember that even the bluebird preys on spiders, grubs and other insects.