Gilles Deleuze on D. H. Lawrence's Three Manners of Relating to the Sun

Enculage (A Portrait of Deleuze and D. H. Lawrence) 

(SA/2025) [1]

  

'Men should group themselves into a new order of sun-men ... 

walking each in his own sun glory, with bright legs and uncringing buttocks' [2]

 

 

I.

 

The first thing to say is that Deleuze's writing is not always easy to understand. 

 

Even the Google AI assistant admits that his work is difficult due to its density and the fact that he employs highly specialised language, makes numerous obscure references to other philosophers and disciplines, and rarely bothers to explain himself to the reader who is left to think through his esoteric concepts as best they can (filling in gaps and making vital connections as they go).   

 

However, as with other French thinkers of his generation, I think one is rewarded if one only makes the effort and puts the time in to read Deleuze, carefully, and with a certain generosity of spirit. Of course there will be times when he'll make you roll your eyes or sigh with exasperation, but so too will there be moments of joy and revelation.  

 

 

II. 

 

From November 1980 to March 1981, Deleuze gave a lecture-seminar series entitled Spinoza: The Velocities of Thought. 

 

In the 14th of these seminars (there were fifteen in total), he discusses the two definitions of the body given us by Spinoza: one concerned with the relation of movement (i.e., the kinetic understanding of the body) and one concerned with the power of being affected (i.e., the dynamic understanding of the body) [3]. 

 

Half way through the seminar, however, Deleuze digresses in order to consider writers and artists who share an obsession with the sun and asks how their solar-infused thinking might connect to the work of Spinoza. 

 

One of these writers is D. H. Lawrence and it's Deleuze's remarks on Lawrence - someone he names along with Nietzsche, Kafka, and Artaud as a true heir to Spinoza (whether he knows it or not) - that most interest me here ...

 

 

III. 

 

According to Deleuze, the body is composed not so much of organs, but of an infinity of extensive parts: 

 

"These extensive parts belong to me according to a certain relation, but these extensive parts are perpetually subject to the influence of other parts which act upon them, and which don't belong to me."

 

So, to give a rudimentary example, skin is something Deleuze considers his and which forms an important part of his body. But the solar energetic particles that act as heat upon his skin are external forces. Skin cells might act "according to a certain relation that is precisely characteristic" of his body, but SEPs "have no other law than the law of external determinations". 

 

Whenever one exclaims 'I'm hot!' one is admitting that an external body (the sun) acts on one's own body. To perceive that one's skin is beginning to burn is to become conscious of the fact that one inhabits a universe that is not mind dependent or under human control (and that one really should've applied some additional sunscreen).   

 

Okay: so far, so straightforward; but also, so what? 

 

Well, according to Deleuze, this example allows us to gain a concrete understanding of what is meant by pantheism - a concept found not just in the work of Spinoza, but also in the writings of D. H. Lawrence; an author who "constituted for himself a kind of English pantheism" and promoted his own form of sun-worship [4]. 

 

Deleuze wants to know how sun-loving pantheists like Lawrence live and feel and he posits that there are, "generally speaking, three ways of being in relation to the sun" ... 

 

 

IV.

 

Firstly, there's the wrong way: the way of the majority of modern holidaymakers. Those whom Lawrence thinks vulgar and contemptible; those who lie naked like pigs on fashionable beaches: 

 

"He finds that these people live poorly. There you have his idea. It was also Spinoza's idea that people live poorly, and if they are wicked, it's because they live poorly; fine. They live poorly, they dump themselves onto the beach, and they understand nothing about the sun. If they were to understand something about the sun, after all, says Lawrence, they would come out of it more intelligent and improved." 

 

As soon as they put their clothes back on, they are as grey and as filled with bitterness as before; "they lose nothing of their virtues and vices". Essentially, they remain at the most basic and naive level of knowledge and think of the sun as no more than some kind of tanning machine in the sky; or something that "makes the thermometer rise!" [5].      

 

 

V.

 

The second manner of relating to the sun is one that is a bit more knowledgeable, though not merely in a theoretical or abstract sense; these people have a "practical comprehension of the sun" and, at the same time, they know how to compose the relations of their body in greater relation to the sun.   

 

Such a person might be a 19th-century still life painter who goes out into nature:

 

"He has his easel; this is a certain relation. He has his canvas on the easel; this is another relation. There is the sun, and the sun does not remain immobile. Fine, so what is he going to do? What is it that I’m calling this knowledge of the second kind? He will completely change the position of his easel; that is, he is not going to have the same relation to his canvas depending on whether the sun is high, or the sun is about to set." 

 

Van Gogh is a good example of such (even if he was eventually driven a little crazy by the sun) [6]. 

 

It was by being out in the elements and by lying on the ground in order to get just the right angle to paint the setting sun that Vincent learnt how to compose relations and raise himself to "a certain comprehension of causes". And it was only at that point that he could begin to describe himself as a sun-lover (i.e., one posessing a genuine affinity with the sun, even if it leads to madness). 

 

This is the second kind of knowledge; a completely different state from the one in which the holidaymaker tans his hide in the sun:

 

"Here, at the second level, there is already a kind of communion with the sun. Peruse Van Gogh's letters; it's obvious that when he is painting these huge red suns, it's obvious that this is what he is. Not that the sun is brought down to him; it's he who begins to enter into a kind of communication with the sun."

 

 

VI. 

 

And what about the third manner of relating to the sun and the third kind of solar knowledge?

 

It's here that Deleuze turns to Lawrence's poetry and fiction in which the sun plays a central role and there is what might be called in abstract terms "a mystical union" between man and sun.  

 

For Deleuze, this union with the sun is not a religious metaphor and nor is it a question of identification, even if it allows one to affirm the sun as God and to become a sun-man or sun-woman, opening like a flower before the sun and able to announce: 

 

I am that I am

from the sun,

and people are not my measure. [7]  

 

Deleuze notes that only when one attains this third kind of knowledge, does one arrive at this mode of intrinsic distinction. And as a result of this: "the rays by which the sun affects me are the rays by which I affect myself, and the rays by which I affect myself are the rays of the sun that affect me". 

 

In other words, it's a game of solar auto-affection - not identification; "the internal distinction between his own singular essence, the singular essence of the sun, and the essence of the world" is maintained in Lawrence's work. 

 

Reading Lawrence's late texts on the sun, Deleuze informs his students, "can trigger an understanding of Spinoza that you would never have had if you had stayed solely with Spinoza". Which is why, of course, in order to understand any philosopher - not just Spinoza - one needs to read literature and study art and "accumulate a thousand other things as well that have value by themselves".      

 

VII.

 

And so, in sum ...

 

Van Gogh has unique experience with the sun, as proved by his paintings; and from Lawrence's writings we learn that he too had "a special involvement with the sun" (one that we might describe as  libidinal paganism).     

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Deleuze uses the term enculage to describe his preferred method of engaging with other authors. This is usually translated into English as buggery, though I think I would use the more contemporary-sounding (if more vulgar) assfucking:  

      "I saw myself as taking an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous. It was really important to me to be his own child, because the author had to actually say all I had him saying. But the child was bound to be monstrous too, because it resulted from all sorts of shifting, slipping, dislocations, and hidden emissions that I really enjoyed." 

      Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, trans, Martin Joughin (Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 6. 

 

[2] Lines from Lawrence's poem 'Sun-Men', in Pansies (Alfred A. Knopf Inc., 1929), pp. 149-150. 

      I thought they not only anticipated the text to follow, but also related to the sun-drenched portrait of Deleuze and Lawrence above, bearing in mind the title (explained in note 1 above) and Lawrence's use of the phrase uncringing buttocks.

 

[3] Gilles Deleuze, 'Spinoza: The Velocities of Thought' (Session 14, 24 March 1981), transcribed by Sandra Tomassi and Madeleine Manifacier, augmented by Charles J. Stivale, English translation by Timothy S. Murphy (for Web Deleuze); augmented by Charles J. Stivale. 

      All quotations from Deleuze in this post are from this work as it appears online. Click here to read courtesy of The Deleuze Seminars project, which aims to translate into English Deleuze's seminar-lectures given at the University of Paris 8 at Vincennes/St. Denis, between 1971 and 1987, and to make them freely available.     

 

[4] See my essay 'Sun-Fucked', which is available to read on James Walker's Digital Pilgrimage website under the title 'Sun-Struck: On the Question of Solar Sexuality and Speculative Realism in D. H. Lawrence' (14 Jan 2019): click here. 

      For those who don't fancy such a long read may prefer to see the two short posts published on Torpedo the Ark extracted from the above essay: click here and here.

 

[5] D. H. Lawrence, 'Oh wonderful machine!', in The Poems, Vol. I., ed. Christopher Pollnitz (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 554. 

 

[6] See the post written on Van Gogh's ear and the dangers of sun-gazing (25 Jan 2014): click here.  

[7] See the poem 'Aristocracy of the Sun', by D. H. lawrence, in Pansies (1929), p. 152. 

 

 

D. H. Lawrence and a Tale of Two Parliamentarians

D. H. Lawrence - Sir W. Joynson-Hicks - Lee Anderson

 

 

I have to confess, I was surprised to hear Lee Anderson mention the name of D. H. Lawrence in his speech to the Reform UK National Conference at the NEC in Birmingham yesterday ...

 

I know the MP for Ashfield is from the same neck of the woods and has a similar working-class coal mining background as Lawrence, but, even so, I was not expecting to hear England's most controversial author of the early twentieth-century namechecked by someone once described by the Daily Mirror as the worst man in Britain. 

 

Celebrating English culture, Anderson arguably revealed his Romantic nature by referring not only to Lawrence, but also to Wordsworth, Keats, and Byron [1]. Just how familiar he is with these writers I don't know; although in his maiden speech to parliament in January 2020 Anderson did claim to have read Lady Chatterley's Lover several times [2]. 

 

It might also be noted that, the following year, Anderson stood up in the Commons to thank the Government for the extra funding they had given to the D. H. Lawrence Centre in Eastwood and to ask whether the Secretary of State would support his bid to get a Lawrence statue erected in Eastwood in order to celebrate the author's life and works [3].     

 

Times have certainly changed: a 100 years ago Tory members of parliament such as Sir William Joynson-Hicks were openly calling for the censorship and destruction of Lawrence's work ...

 

 

II. 

 

Best known as a long-serving and controversial Home Secretary in Stanley Baldwin's Second Government (1924-29), Joynson-Hicks (or Jix, as he was called) gained a reputation for moral authoritarianism. Not only did he clamp down on nightlife, but he vigorously opposed what he regarded as indecent literature. This included, for example, Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness and Lady Chatterley's Lover. 

 

Postal workers - acting under instruction from Scotland Yard and the Home Office - intercepted copies of the latter being sent into Britain from Florence (where the book had been privately printed). Even more outrageously, the Postmaster General also opened another parcel which Lawrence had sent (by registered post) to the London office of his literary agent, containing two typescripts of a collection of poems entitled Pansies. 

 

The typescripts, confiscated (and eventually destroyed) on the grounds of indecency, gave Joynson-Hicks another chance to attack Lawrence in parliament as part of a relentless secret war waged by the authorities against Lawrence since 1915 and publication of arguably his greatest novel The Rainbow [4]. 

 

Lawrence was understandably enraged by this. However, despite being mortally ill in late 1929, he summoned the strength to go on the attack: "the Pansies seizure inspired him to keep up his campaign against hypocrisy and censorship" [5], memorably describing Jix as a censor-moron and a "miserable mongrel" [6].

 

One can't help wondering what he'd think of Lee Anderson and whether or not he too deserves to be thrown down a well of loneliness ...

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Anderson's list of a dozen British literary greats seemed somewhat random and lacked chronological consistency. It ran in full: D. H. Lawrence, Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, Shakespeare, Dickens, Tolkien, Orwell, Jane Austen, Ian Fleming, C. S. Lewis, and George Eliot. 

[2] For those who are interested, the text of Anderson's maiden speech in the House of Commons (27 Jan 2020) can be read by clicking here. 

      Anderson is mistaken to say that Lawrence wrote Lady Chatterley's Lover in his home region - he wrote it in Italy - although it is based in and around the village of Teversal. Lawrence had made his final visit to what he called the country of [his] heart shortly before he began work on the first version of his novel in the autumn of 1926, so he was certainly in the process of assembling ideas.  

[3] Anderson's contribution to parliamentary debate on 16 September 2021 can be found in Hansard: click here. According to Nigel Huddleston - the then Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, who responded to Anderson's request - there were "many D. H. Lawrence fans" in the House - which, if true, is another great surprise to me.  

 

[4] Readers who think this sounds overly-dramatic might like to see Alan Travis, 'The hounding of DH Lawrence', in The Guardian (10 April 1999): click here. 

      The key point is Joynson-Hicks misled his fellow MPs when he informed the House of Commons that the package containing Lawrence's typescripts had been sent via the 'open book post' and had been subject to a random search to ensure the contents had been charged at the correct rate, when, in fact, it had been registered and Lawrence's mail was routinely checked as part of a long-running police surveillance operation. 

 

[5] John Worthen, D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider (Allen Lane, 2005), p. 389.

    

[6] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Juliette Huxley [12 January 1929], The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VII, ed. Keith Sagar and James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 132. 

 

 

Shrinking Violets

Field pansy (Viola arvensis) 

Photograph by Samson Acoca-Pidolle

 

I. 

 

Born in February, I've always been very attached to that colourful garden flower known as the pansy and which belongs to the wider family of violets.   

 

The fact that the English name is derived from the French word pensée - meaning thought - also appeals to me as a philosopher, as it did to D. H. Lawrence, who famously called his late series of little pieces written in 1928-29 Pansies [1].   

 

And so it saddened me to read the latest news out of France that wild pansies are evolving into self-pollinating plants and so producing ever-smaller flowers ...

II.

 

In a recent report in The Guardian, Phoebe Weston explains how rapidly declining insect numbers [2] have obliged pansies to find an alternative method of reproduction and effectively abandon the mutually beneficial relationship formed over millions of years with their six-legged friends [3].

 

Unfortunately, this traps both pansies and their pollinators in a vicious cycle; for when plants make less effort to attract insects and produce less food for them to feed on, this accelerates their decline, which in turn ... well, you get the idea.  

 

A scientific study conducted outside Paris [4], found that the flowers of field pansies are 10% smaller and producing 20% less nectar than thirty years ago and previous work indicated that the number of plants relying on self-pollination has increased by a quarter over the past two decades. 

 

The speed of this real time evolution has, apparently, surprised researchers - just as it has disheartened me, for I don't want to live in a world of shrinking violets in which insects no longer gaily buzz ...

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See the post entitled 'Pansies: Brief Notes on D. H. Lawrence's Excremental Aesthetic' (5 Oct 2019): click here.

 

[2]  Falling insect numbers have been reported by studies across Europe. One German study (conducted on a nature reserve) found that there were 75% fewer insects in 2016 compared to 1989. See the post entitled 'Insecticide and the Eco-Apocalypse' (21 Oct 2017): click here. 

[3] Phoebe Weston, 'Flowers "giving up" on scarce insects and evolving to self-pollinate, say scientists', The Guardian (20 Dec 2023): click here. 

[4] See Samson Acoca-Pidolle, Perrine Gauthier, Louis Devresse, Antoine Deverge Merdrignac, Virginie Pons, and Pierre-Olivier Cheptou, 'Ongoing convergent evolution of a selfing syndrome threatens plant–pollinator interactions', New Phytologist (Dec 2023): click here.

 

 

D. H. Lawrence and the Cashless Society

gbnews.com

 

 

I. 

 

As is well-known, D. H. Lawrence regarded mankind's money-mania as a collective form of insanity: "Money is our madness, our vast collective madness." [1]

 

And his proposed solution to this madness (which he elsewhere describes as a perverted instinct which rots the brain and corrupts the soul) is to terminate the present financial system: "Kill money, put money out of existence." [2]

 

Society, he says, must establish itself upon a different (revolutionary) basis from the one we have now; for endlessly chasing a fistful of dollars results in vicious competition and turns us all into fiends [3].    

 

Whilst these tiny snippets, taken from Lawrence's 1929 poetry collection Pansies, might not constitute a comprehensive political critique of capital - might, in fact, simply be the musings of a romantic poet dreaming of a socialist utopia in which food, housing, and heating would be free for everyone [4] - they do at least make it clear that Lawrence hated having to earn, save, and spend money. 

 

 

II. 

 

The question that arises, however, is this: would Lawrence have welcomed a cashless society of the type presently evolving and being promoted by many politicians and bankers? 

 

I doubt it: for clearly the so-called cashless society only allows those who govern us and run the financial system to exercise still more power and control; to strangle us ever-tighter in their octopus arms [5]. It's not a return to the a world prior to notes and coins, where barter was the system of exchange, but a slide into a (dystopian) future where money has been digitalised (i.e., turned into a form of electronic information or data).    

 

I know all the arguments made in favour of a cashless society - it's quick and convenient, it's safe and secure, it prevents crime, lowers business costs, and even reduces the transmission of disease [6] - but I'm also aware of the dangers that threaten from a society founded upon total surveillance of the individual and the complete control over their money (their savings and financial transactions).   

 

It's not just a loss of privacy that concerns - but a loss of freedom. There's also the question of what happens to those who don't have (or might not want) bank accounts; will millions of people effectively become non-citizens and be despised and discriminated against as such? 

 

In sum, I don't want to belong to a cashless economy and certainly don't welcome the idea of a central bank digital currency, allowing that coldest of all cold monsters, the State, to monopolise the cashless payment system. Thus, whilst I'm sympathetic with Lawrence's call to kill money, I'm (paradoxically) supportive of those, such as Nigel Farage, who are working to ensure the survival of cash [7].   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'Money-madness', The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 421. 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'Kill money', The Poems, Vol. I, p. 422. 

[3] See the poem 'Wages' in the above volume, p. 452. 

[4] See the poems 'Money-madness' and 'Kill money' once more. In the latter, Lawrence writes: "We must have the courage of mutual trust. / We must have the modesty of simple living. / And the individual must have his house, food and fire all free like a bird." 

[5] See the poem 'Why?' in The Poems, Vol. I, pp. 391-92.  

[6] We should, I think, interrogate all of these alleged advantages of going cashless. Just to take the last of these claims, for example, whilst it's true that dirty old banknotes and grubby coins can carry disease-causing organisms (such as Salmonella, E. coli, and Covid-19), cash has been found to be less likely to transmit disease than commonly touched items such as card terminals and PIN pads. 

 

[7] Readers who also wish to protest the move towards a cashless society in the UK may like to support the GB News campaign - 'Don't Kill Cash' - which Farage is spearheading: click here. 

 

 

This post was inspired by a remark made by David Brock in a recent email, for which I am grateful.

 

 

On D. H. Lawrence and Circus Elephants

The people watched and wondered, 

and seemed to resent the mystery that lies in beasts. [1]

 

 

I.

 

Put two men in a ring and there's a fight on. Add some performing animals to the mix and you have a very different type of spectacle: circus. 

 

Circus is a form of popuar entertainment involving men and beasts that, in its modern form, developed in England in the mid-18th century. Although there were travelling zoological exhibitions and clowns and acrobats before this time, it was the combination of these elements within the confines of a circular arena that was unique, and for this we can thank Philip Astley [2]. 

   

For some people, the star of the circus is the ringmaster; for others, it's the trapeze artists, or the showgirls on horseback wearing their sparkling costumes and feathers. But for D. H. Lawrence, the figures which seemed to best capture his imagination were the elephants. 

 

 

II. 

 

As far as I know, Lawrence never saw elephants in the wild; only captive beasts at London Zoo in 1911 [3]; ceremonial creatures taking part in a Buddhist festival in Ceylon in 1922 [4]; and trained elephants at a circus in Toulon (France), where he went with Frieda in December 1928. 

 

Whilst the magnificent tusker elephants in Kandy certainly left their impression on Lawrence (and his poetry), it's the much shorter series of verses - or pansies - that he wrote about the circus elephants that I wish to discuss here. 

 

These verses are:

 

 

Elephants in the circus [5]

 

Elephants in the circus

have aeons of weariness round their eyes

Yet they sit up

and show vast bellies to the children.

 

 

Elephants plodding [6]

 

Plod! Plod!

And what ages of time

the worn arches of their spines support!

 

 

On the drum [7]

 

The huge old female on the drum

shuffles gingerly round

and smiles; the vastness of her elephant antiquity

is amused.

 

 

Two performing elephants [8]

 

He stands with his forefeet on the drum

and the other, the old one, the pallid hoary female

must creep her great bulk beneath the bridge of him.

 

On her knees, in utmost caution

all agog, and curling up her trunk

she edges through without upsetting him.

Triumph! the ancient pig-tailed monster!

 

When her trick is to climb over him

with what shadow-like slow carefulness

she skims him, sensitive

as shadows from the ages gone and perished

in touching him, and planting her round feet.

 

While the wispy, modern children, half-afraid

watch silent. The looming of the hoary, far-gone ages

is too much for them. 

 

 

III. 

 

What these verses suggest is that elephants not only look old and worn out - their saggy, wrinkled skin doesn't help with this - but belong to a prehistoric world or time gone by, as if they were relics or living fossils, who have nothing more to offer than entertainment value (and ivory). 

 

It's often assumed by stupid people that animals that predate man and haven't physically changed much for thousands (if not millions) of years are somehow less evolved than us, or have reached an evolutionary dead end and are thus deserving of no place in the modern world. 

 

But whilst it's true that most species of proboscidean are extinct - and the future's not looking hopeful for the remaining elephants that do roam the Earth in ever-dwindling numbers - this mistaken line of thought is simply an example of anthropocentric conceit. Elephants are as evolved as us and belong as much to the world today as we do.    

 

I'm surprised Lawrence doesn't see this. And disappointed that he suggests performing elephants are having fun. For whilst I'm not an expert in elephant psychology and welfare, I very much doubt they enjoy exposing their vast bellies or find it amusing to balance on a ball or drum. Nor - I imagine - do they want to plod or shuffle around a ring, or crawl on their knees in utmost caution.  

 

Does anyone really imagine that the strange postures and poses they are forced to take up - "showing the pink soles of their feet / and curling their precious live trunks" [9] - come naturally? Or that training doesn't involve cruelty and the brutal use of bull-hooks, whips, and electric prods?  

 

And let's not even mention the physical and emotional abuse these poor creatures are subjected to when they are not in the spotlight; confined and chained for hours on end, or transported from town to town in the back of trucks and boxcars. 

 

Obviously Lawrence was writing a hundred years ago and so can't be expected to share a contemporary view of zoos and circuses in terms of so-called animal rights. But it is strange that a writer who was acutely sensitive to animals in all their wild otherness or mystery - and who hated the attempt by mankind to impose its will over the natural world - should have not been angered or outraged by the indecent sight of an elephant performing on command. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'When I went to the circus', The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 386. Click here to read in full online.

 

[2] Philip Astley (1742-1814) staged a show at an ampitheatre in London in 1768, featuring trick horseback riding and music. He later added other acts which quickly became associated with the circus, a term coined by Astley's rival, Charles Dibdin, who opened The Royal Circus in London in 1772.

      Readers who are interested, can find more details and a brief history of circus on the website of the National Fairground and Circus Archive (part of the Special Collections and Archive Division of the University of Sheffield Library): click here. 

 

[3] In a letter written to his girlfriend at the time, Louie Burrows, on 9 May 1911, Lawrence is excited by the prospect of her visiting at the weekend (if only for a day) and he proposes taking her to London Zoo, where, he says, he has never been (but presumably wanted to go). See The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. I, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 266. 

      Whether they did go, is uncertain. But if they did visit, they surely called in at the Elephant-House, to see one of the Zoo's main attractions. Readers who are interested to know what other creatures were on display in 1911 might like to consult the illustrated official guide to the London Zoological Society's gardens in Regent's Park, by P. Chalmers Mitchell, published in that year: click here.   

[4] In the Spring of 1922, the Lawrence's spent six weeks in Ceylon. On arrival, they witnessed the Pera-hera (or Festival of the Tooth); a night-time procession involving savage music and devil dancers, as well as huge tusker elephants dressed in gorgeous apparel. Lawrence was impressed, particularly by the latter stepping forth to the beat of a tom-tom and illuminated by torch-light, and he wrote a powerful poem entitled 'Elephant' shortly afterwards which was published in the English Review (April 1923).

      See D. H. Lawrence, The Poems, Vol. I, pp. 338-43. Alternatively, to read 'Elephant' online, click here. 

      My recent post on Lawrence's time in Ceylon can be read by clicking here.  

[5] D. H. Lawrence, The Poems I. 369.

[6] D. H. Lawrence, The Poems, I. 370.

[7] D. H. Lawrence, The Poems, I. 370.

[8] D. H. Lawrence, The Poems, I. 370. 

[9] D. H. Lawrence, 'When I went to the circus', The Poems, I. 386.

 

For a sister post to this one in which I discuss Lawrence's poem 'The elephant is slow to mate', click here.

D. H. Lawrence and the Myth of Maternal Impression

Der det er kvinne er det svane

 

 

I. 

 

Perhaps my favourite sequence of poems by D. H. Lawrence is inspired by the Leda myth and playfully imagines the queer idea of a modern woman giving birth to a baby that is part-human, part-bird:

Won't it be strange, when the nurse brings the new-born infant 

to the proud father, and shows its little, webbed greenish feet

made to smite the waters behind it? [1]

 

That certainly would be strange: one might even think it ludicrous and quite impossible. 

 

The poet insists, however, that, far-off, at the core of space and the quick of time, swims a wild swan upon the waters of chaos. A great white bird who will one day return amongst men with a hiss of wings and a sea-touch tip of a beak in order to frighten featherless women and stamp his black marsh-feet on their white and marshy flesh [2]:

 

And in the dark unscientific I feel the drum-winds of his wings

and the drip of his cold, webbed-feet, mud-black

brush over my face as he goes

to seek the women in the dark, our women, our weird women whom he treads

with dreams and thrusts that make them cry in their sleep. [3]  

 

 

II.

 

Normally one would regard this purely as poetic fantasy. But I strongly suspect that Lawrence intends us to take his vision seriously and that he passionately believes in an occult theory of maternal impression - i.e., the belief that a powerful psycho-physiological force exerted on a pregnant woman may influence the development of the unborn baby.  

 

As a medical theory of inheritance seeking to explain the existence of birth defects and congenital disorders, maternal impression has long been discredited and should not be confused with the empirically validated genetic phenomenon of maternal effect. 

 

To be absolutely clear: the mother of Joseph Merrick was not frightened by an elephant during her pregnancy! Or, if she was, this did not leave a monstrous imprint on the gestating foetus. And just because a mother-to-be is feeling blue, this will not result in her child being marked with depressive tendencies.   

 

The fact that Lawrence believed in this sort of thing is made clear in a letter written to Bertrand Russell, in December 1915, whilst engaged in reading Sir James Frazer whom, he reported, confirmed his already established belief in blood-consciousness as something not only independent of mental consciousness, but superior to it. 

 

Via sexual intercourse, says Lawrence, he can establish a blood contact with a woman: "There is a transmission, I don't know of what, between her blood and mine, in the act of connection." And then he adds the following paragraph which is crucial to our discussion here: 

 

"Similarly in the transmission from the blood of the mother to the embryo in the womb, there goes the whole blood consciousness. And when they say a mental image is sometimes transmitted from the mother to the embryo, this is not the mental image, but the blood-image. All living things, even plants, have a blood-being. If a lizard falls on the breast of a pregnant woman, then the blood-being of the lizard passes with a shock into the blood-being of the woman, and is transferred to the foetus, probably without intervention either of nerve or brain consciousness." 

 

"And this", concludes Lawrence, "is the origin of totem: and for this reason some tribes no doubt really were kangaroos: they contained the blood-knowledge of the kangaroo" [4].

 

As one commentator notes:

 

"It is difficult of course to take such ideas any more seriously than Lawrence’s solemn pronouncements upon the importance of the solar plexus and the lumbar ganglion to the health of human blood-knowledge, or his earnest belief that tuberculosis is caused by love. Yet we must at least pay attention when Lawrence himself indicates that an idea or principle is of vital significance to him." [5]

 

That's a true and fair thing to say. It's also important: for by paying attention to what Lawrence says about maternal impression we find a new way of reading numerous scenes in his work; one wonders, for example, if Ursula might have given birth to a centaur if she hadn't miscarried ...

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'Won't it be strange -?', Poems, Vol. I., ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 380.  

[2] I'm paraphrasing here from several of the poems in the Leda sequence found in Pansies, including 'Swan', 'Leda', and 'Give us gods'. See Poems, ibid., pp. 378-80. 

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'Give us gods', Poems, ibid., p. 380. 

 

[4] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Bertrand Russell (8 December 1915), in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence Vol. II, ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 469-71. I wish there was someway of knowing Russell's reaction when he first read this letter, or how he replied to it (if he ever did). 

[5] Chris Baldick, 'D. H. Lawrence as Noah: Redemptions of the Inhuman and «Non-Human»,' essay in L'inhumain, ed. André Topia, Carle Bonafous-Murat, and Marie-Christine Lemardeley (Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2004), pp. 47-55. Click here to read online.  

 

For a sequel to this post, on swan maidens, click here.

 

 

Pansies: Brief Notes on D. H. Lawrence's Excremental Aesthetic

Georgia O'Keeffe: Detail from  

Black Pansy and Forget-Me-Nots (1926)

brooklynmuseum.org

'The fairest thing in nature, a flower, still has its roots in earth and manure; and in the perfume there hovers still the faint strange scent of earth, the under-earth in all its heavy humidity and darkness. Certainly it is so in pansy-scent, and in violet-scent; mingled with the blue of the morning the black of corrosive humus. Else the scent would be just sickly sweet.'

- D. H. Lawrence

Pansies were one of Lawrence's favourite flowers and I can understand why; they're lovely little things, that turn their faces to the sun and backs to the wind.

And their name, of course, is the anglicised version of the French term pensées, meaning thoughts; particularly gay little thoughts, that bloom and fade without care or system.

An excellent name then, as Lawrence realised, for a collection of poems that fill the page "like so many separate creatures, each with a small head and a tail of its own, trotting its own little way".

But thoughts, like flowers, only stay fresh, if they keep their roots "in good moist humus and the dung that roots love". This is true also of objects made by hand, such as a Greek vase:

"If you can smell the dung of earthly sensual life from the potter who made [it], you can still see the vase as a dark, pansily-winking pansy, very much alive. But if you can only see an 'urn' or a 'still unravished bride of quietness', you are just assisting at the beautiful funeral [...] of all pansies."

Alas, many modern people want cut and dried forms of beauty. But a pansy that has been carefully plucked and pressed, which has no faint scent of shit and can no longer make you sneeze, is but a corpse-blossom.

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'Draft Introduction to Pansies', The Poems, Vol. 1, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Appendix 4, pp. 657-58. The opening quotation below the image is from Appendix 6, 'Introduction to Pansies', pp. 663-64.

In using the title Pansies for his 1929 collection of verse, Lawrence was, of course, displaying his own Romantic roots as a poet; Wordsworth references them in his work, for example, and Nathaniel Hawthorne's last published work was an unfinished piece entitled Pansie, a Fragment (1864).