Pan and Jesus in the Art of Dorothy Brett

Fig 1. Dorothy Brett: Portrait of D. H. Lawrence as Pan and Christ (1963)

Fig. 2. Dorothy Brett: Pan and Christ (date unknown)

 

I would like, if I may, to develop a point added as a note to a recent post discussing an essay by Catherine Brown [1] which mentions a painting by the Anglo-American artist Dorothy Brett entitled Portrait of D. H. Lawrence as Pan and Christ (fig. 1); a work which nicely illustrates Lawrence's dual nature whilst, crucially, making no attempt to reconcile his twin selves.

 

As suggested in the note, the work maintains what Deleuze and Guattari describe as a relation of non-relation. In other words, Brett's very lovely picture illustrates a disjunctive synthesis between divergent forces that somehow manage to communicate by virtue of a difference that passes between them like a spark (or what Lawrence would probably term the Holy Ghost) [2]. 

 

As I also say in the note, if only she'd been thinking with her Nietzsche head on Brett might have called the painting Pan versus the Crucified. But I'm now doubtful she would understand what is meant by this, or why such a twist on the German thinker's original formula provides as useful a key for unlocking Lawrence's philosophical project as Dionysus versus the Crucified does for Nietzsche's own [3]. 

 

For if we are to judge by another painting she produced of Pan and Christ (fig. 2) - in which there is clearly a reconciliation between them (to the extent that they are shown holding hands) - then Brett seems not to grasp the crucial fact that the two gods each have their own flowers, as Brown nicely puts it, and by which she acknowledges that Pan and Christ are antagonists forever separated by a pathos of distance.     

The fact is you can't have horns on your head and wear a crown of thorns - despite the desire of many New Age hippies to create a kind of syncretic religious mishmash. As Lawrence shows in The Escaped Cock, in order for the man who died to resurrect into pagan vitality he has to renounce his mission and his Christhood and accept that the earth doesn't need salvation, it needs tillage and that mankind is better off being watched over by an all-tolerant Pan than a judgemental Jehovah.   

 

Like Elsa in 'The Overtone', you can certainly experience both Jesus and Pan, but not at one and the same time, or in the same way; the former belongs always to the pale light and the latter to the darkness: "'And night shall never be day, and day shall never be night.'" [4]     

 

To imagine them hand-in-hand, as Brett does, is a form of nihilism in that it annihilates the nature of each. As Lawrence notes of another two forces forever divided and at odds - the lion and the unicorn - each exists only by virtue of their inter-opposition: "Remove the opposition and there is a collapse, a sudden crumbling into universal nothingness." [5] 

 

It is the fight of opposites which is holy and there is no reconciliation save in this negation which, for Lawrence, is the unforgivable sin. And Brett has either forgotten this idea, chosen to ignore it, or perhaps never really understood the huge importance it has for Lawrence ... 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The post in question - Iconography is Never Innocent - can be read by clicking here. See note 4.

[2] In a post on his blog - Larval Subjects - Levi R. Bryant uses non-technical terms to help readers understand what Deleuze and Guattari mean: "Consider the relationship between me and my cat. My cat and I share entirely different worlds even though we inhabit one and the same earth or heteroverse. There is no point where our worlds converge, yet nonetheless certain differential events flash across our distinct and divergent worlds, creating a relation in this non-relation. Somehow our worlds come to be imbricated and entangled with one another, even though they don’t converge on any sort of sameness." To read Bryant's post in full, click here.   

 

[3] See Nietzsche, 'Why I Am a Destiny', in Ecce Homo, where this line appears; or see section 1052 in Book IV of The Will to Power, where Nietzsche explains the distinction between Dionysus and the Crucified as he understands it.   

 

[4] See D. H. Lawrence, 'The Overtone', in St Mawr and Other Stories, ed. Brian Finney, (Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 3-17. The line quoted is on p. 16.

[5] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Crown', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 256.