It's Failure to Live That Makes Us Sick (D. H. Lawrence in the Age of Coronavirus)

Alan Bates as Birkin and Jennie Linden as Ursula

Women in Love (dir. Ken Russell, 1969)

In Chapter XI of Women in Love, there's a brief but interesting discussion between Ursula Brangwen and Rupert Birkin on the subject of illness which I thought might be interesting to examine as we all sit cooped up at home trying not to touch our faces and hoping not to manifest symptoms of coronavirus (the disease that is not only pandemic but also emblematic of this new socio-cultural era of confinement and isolation in which we suddenly find ourselves).  

"Ursula looked at him closely. He was very thin and hollow, with a ghastly look in his face.

      'You have been ill, haven't you?' she asked, rather repulsed. 

      'Yes,' he replied coldly. 

      'Has it made you frightened?' she asked.

      'What of?' he asked, turning his eyes to look at her. Something in him, inhuman and unmitigated, disturbed her, and shook her out of her ordinary self.

      'It is frightening to be very ill, isn't it? she said.

      'It isn't pleasant,' he said. 'Whether one is really afraid of death, or not, I have never decided. In one mood, not a bit, in another, very much.'

      'But doesn't it make you feel ashamed? I think it makes one so ashamed, to be ill - illness is so terribly humiliating, don't you think?'

      He considered for some minutes. 

      'Maybe,' he said. 'Though one knows all the time one's life isn't really right, at the source. That's the humiliation. I don't see that the illness counts so much, after that. One is ill because one doesn't live properly - can't. It's the failure to live that makes one ill, and humiliates one.'" [124-25]

The precise nature of Birkin's illness isn't, I believe, made clear in the novel. But the fact is he's often sick and laid up in bed, for his sins (and his sensitivity) - a bit like Lawrence himself, who had pneumonia at least twice and was dogged by both pulmonary tuberculosis and chronic bronchitis during his last years.

His description - very thin and hollow, with a ghastly look in his face - makes one think of the man who died after having left the tomb, filled with the sickness of unspeakable disillusion and with a deathly pallor. No wonder Ursula finds Birkin - or, rather, the ravages of disease upon him - repulsive.

For whilst decadents may see beauty in physical decay and find signs of mortal corruption terribly romantic, Ursula is Nietzschean enough to appreciate that the weak and diseased present a terrible danger to the strong and healthy; not because they might pass on their medical condition, but because they invariably make miserable and undermine the natural gaiety that's in life. Repulsion is thus a noble defensive reaction; a vital somatic response to the threat of contamination.     

Having said that, Nietzsche also acknowledged that whilst strength preserves, it is only sickness which ultimately advances man. And so Birkin "liked sometimes to be ill enough to take to his bed", for then, during a period of convalescence, "he got better very quickly, and things came to him clear and sure" [201].    

Arguably, it's this convalescent conviction sparkling in his eyes that Ursula finds disturbing. Ordinarily, human beings always have a little fear and uncertainty in their eyes and Ursula seeks reassurance that Birkin, does, in fact, still know what it is to be frightened; of illness and of the possibility of dying.

However, whilst Birkin concedes that being critically ill and brought to death's door isn't very pleasant, he remains ambivalent about whether he is really afraid of death or not; sometimes no, sometimes yes. As for Lawrence, he was much clearer on this point: one must ultimately lose the fear and learn to affirm death in the same manner (and for the same reason) that one affirms life; for without the song of death, the song of life becomes pointless and absurd.  

Finally, we come to the question of illness and humiliation ...

Ursula finds sickness terribly humiliating and even the thought of being ill shameful. Birkin doesn't deny this, but seems to regard it as missing the real issue. For Birkin, it's not being ill that prevents us from living, but being unable to live - which for Lawrence means blossoming into full being like a flower - that makes us ill. It's this ontological failure - exacerbated by the conditions of modern existence - that, for Birkin, brings shame upon us.*

I don't know if that's true, but it's certainly something worth thinking about in the present time ...

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen (Cambridge University Press, 1987). Note that I have slightly edited the discussion between Ursula and Birkin, removing a couple of lines.

* Lawrence reaffirms this idea in a poem found in his Nettles Notebook called 'Healing', which opens with the following lines:

I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections.
And it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly, that I am ill.
I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self ..."

See The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 534.

Readers who liked this post might also find the following essay by Judith Ruderman of interest: 'D. H. Lawrence's Dis-Ease: Examining the Symptoms of "Illness as Metaphor''', D. H. Lawrence Review, Vol. 36, No. 2, (Autumn, 2011).