In Praise of Fighters: At the Gym and on the Battlefield with D. H. Lawrence

George Rodger's famous photo taken in Southern Sudan (1949) 

of a Nuba wrestling champion being carried victorious upon 

the shoulders of a friend - just the kind of young fighters 

D. H. Lawrence (and Leni Riefenstahl) swooned over  

georgerodgerphotographs.com

 

I. 

 

D. H. Lawrence has a rather romantic understanding of combat in the heroic age before it became an affair entirely of machines and abstraction; when men still fought up close and personal with their enemy and didn't kill from a distance by simply pulling a trigger or pressing a button, devoid of all emotion; when men still had "all the old natural courage" [a] and were individual fighters, not mechanical-units.

In his essay 'Education of the People', for example, he riffs on what he terms the "profound motive of battle" [b], recalling its Latin etymology, battualia, meaning the physical exercise undertaken by those training to be soldiers or gladiators. You shouldn't go to the gym simply to keep fit - Lawrence regards this as a semi-pathological form of masturbation - but to reawaken the centres of volition located in the spine and prepare for battle:

 

"Not Mons or Ypres of course. Ah, the horror of machine explosions! But living, naked battle, flesh to flesh contest. Fierce, tense struggle of man with man, struggle to the death. That is the spirit of the gymnasium. " [158] 

 

That might sound terribly appealing to some people, but it's hard to imagine modern gyms promoting fierce, unrelenting, honourable contest, when they pride themselves on offering fun, community and fitness in a safe and friendly environment. And it's even more difficult to imagine modern parents sending their sons off to the gym so that they can be set against one another like young bantam cocks:

"Let them fight. Let them hurt one another. Teach them again to fight with gloves and fists, egg them on, spur them on, let it be fine balanced contest in skill and fierce pride. Egg them on, and look on the black eye and the bloody nose as insignia of honour [...]

      Bring out the foils and teach fencing. Teach fencing, teach wrestling, teach jiu-jitsu, every form of fierce hand to hand contest. And praise the wounds. And praise the valour that will be killed rather than yield. Better fierce and unyielding death than our degraded creeping life." [158-59]  

 

And the purpose of this rousing of the old male spirit in the young is, of course, to produce men who are superb and godlike fighters who, in their willingness to strip naked and fight to the death, can experience a great crisis of being. To quote Lawrence at length once more:

 

"What does death matter, if a man die in a flame of passionate conflict. He goes to heaven as the ancients said: somehow, somewhere his soul is at rest, for death is to him a passional consummation. But to be blown to smithereens while you are eating a sardine: horrible and monstrous abnormality. The soul should leap fiery into death, a consummation. Then nothing is lost." [159]

 

For Lawrence, then, war can be justified - and, indeed, glorified - providing it's an actual fight and not a mechanical slaughter or virtual game; "a sheer immediate conflict of physical men" [159]. That is to say, so long as it's a primal form of passion, rather than idealism or a sordid commercial-industrial consideration. What we should do - being master of our own inventions - is "blow all guns and explosives and poison gases sky-high" [160].     

But such a radical form of disarmament isn't tied to pacifism, obviously: Lawrence doesn't pretend you can (or should wish to) abolish war; he's still happy to send young men off to fight "armed with swords and shields" so that they may enjoy "a rare old lively scrap, such as the heart can rejoice in" [161]. 

 

And Lawrence is convinced that if the British set a lead here, the rest of the world will follow; that they too will destroy all their mechanical weapons in an act of reckless defiant sanity and agree to meet their enemy face to face and in their own skin. The whole world would at once give a great sigh of relief, says Lawrence; for there's "nothing which every man would be so glad to think had vanished out of the world as guns, explosives, and poison gases" [160].

II. 

If Lawrence's essay received very little serious consideration in 1920 (in fact, it wasn't even published until 1936), it's now inconceivable that our politicians and military commanders would give his work any thought whatsoever. 

 

For the fact is, casualties in war have become increasingly unacceptable to the Western powers and the aim today is to exterminate the enemy as quickly, cleanly, and as clinically as possible without suffering any undue losses from amongst one's own forces. War is now conceived as not only a non-contact sport, but a bloodless one as well, to be fought with the most sophisticated and smartest of technology. It's become, essentially, a computerised form of pest control.      

And whilst Saddam Hussein was right to taunt the Americans on the eve of the 1991 Gulf War that they were a people unable to bear the loss of 10,000 soldiers in one battle, there's a practical reason for this beyond squeamishness, cowardice, or an inability to cope with loss, and it's to do with bio-politics. As Peter Sloterdijk notes, the contemporary method of waging war "suits societies with low biological reproductivity because on our side nowadays we have no sons to squander" [c].   

Thus, whilst Lawrence likes to blame moral idealism for the fact that we in the West have lost our desire to fight in the old sense of the word and turned into madmen and monsters who, in the name of Love, drop bombs on an unseen enemy "hoping to scatter a million bits of indiscriminate flesh" [162], it probably has as much to do with a sharply declining fertility rate.       

Notes

[a] D. H. Lawrence, 'With the Guns', Twilight in Italy and Other Essays, ed. Paul Eggert, (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 83.

[b] D. H. Lawrence, 'Education of the People', Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 158. Future page references to this book will be given directly in the text. 

[c] Peter Sloterdijk, 'Thus Spoke Sloterdijk', interview with Res Strehle, in Selected Exaggerations, ed. Bernhard Klein, trans. Karen Marglois, (Polity Press, 2016), p. 196.

For a related post to this one, click here. 

War Post

Statue of Ares, God of War 

(Roman Copy of a Greek original at Hadrian's Villa) 

Today, in Parliament, a government motion to extend the British military campaign against the Islamic State - to bomb targets in Syria as well as Iraq - is very likely to be passed with a majority assembled from both sides of the House. For some MPs, in the wake of Paris and other recent atrocities, there clearly exists a strong argument for doing so. For others, including the leader of the Opposition, a convincing case for further military intervention in the Middle East hasn’t been made. In fact, for Jeremy Corbyn, British bombs dropped over Syria would only serve to make a grave and ghastly situation far worse.

If I’m honest, I have no idea who’s right and who’s wrong. But I do know that Lawrence vehemently opposed modern warfare and regarded murderous weapons of mass destruction, which bring death to anonymous victims, as refinements of evil. Not that Lawrence was a pacifist or opposed to violence. In fact, he fetishized the male as essentially a fighter and tied his own philosophy of power to notions of conflict and combat. But he also hated the idea of turning a primary physical activity, such as war, into an abstract and ideal process.

Real war, writes Lawrence, is a type of passionate relationship between men and to die in battle is a type of blissful consummation or great crisis of being. Unfortunately, it's become "a ghastly and blasphemous translation of ideas into engines" [159] and men have been turned into cannon-fodder. To be blown to smithereens by a bomb from the blue, dropped by an invisible enemy while you are eating your supper or sitting on the toilet, is a horrible and monstrous state of affairs.

So, on the one hand, Lawrence celebrates mortal combat and wants to see fierce naked men fighting face-to-face; able to exercise what he terms the choice of war. But, on the other hand, they must not be given the chance to use automatic rifles, grenades and poison gases - the deadly fruits of our own moral idealism and will to universal love.

In a manner far more radical than anything advocated by the CND crowd, Lawrence calls on the British people to make a unilateral destruction of all guns, explosives and chemical weapons - as well as the means of their production. Were we to do this, he says, we’d be able to breathe a collective sigh of relief and come to our senses once more as a nation. It would constitute an act of "reckless defiant sanity" [162].

Then, when all the mechanical weapons were destroyed, we could arm our soldiers with swords once more and "introduce a proper system of martial training in the schools" [161], ensuring every boy is turned into a fighter; as swift as a greyhound, as tough as leather, and as hard as Krupp’s steel as another lover of struggle and fearless youth once put it.

Of course, for ardent supporters of Lawrence, the use of this famous line from a speech made by Hitler, might be seen as something of a cheap shot, or a low blow aimed at their hero. They would angrily object to the implication that Lawrence was a fascist. And, to be fair, they’d be right to do so. For, in historical terms, Lawrence certainly wasn’t a fascist, or a fascist sympathizer.

Nevertheless, there are clearly what might be termed molecular elements of fascism within his thinking which allow for the construction of a highly dubious cratology and a rather less-than-liberal education policy. And the job of a critic who cares is to counter these elements; to refuse to become enamoured of power and resist the urge to glorify war, heroism, strong leadership and all the other militant-militaristic bullshit that - post-Serpent - Lawrence himself decisively rejected in favour of tenderness.

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'Education of the People', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 85-166.